Herbie Hancock

by Herbie Hancock

  Wayne was a brilliant musician, but he was also just a lot of fun. He didn’t talk a whole lot—as he puts it, “If you’re the one doing all the talking, you can’t learn anything”—but when he did talk, he would crack us up. He’s a great mimic, and like a lot of jazz musicians, he loves playing with words. Getting in a car, he’d pipe up, “You get in the front, and the rest of you get in the black.” Or instead of going to the “restroom,” he’d say primly, “I’m going to the rest of the room.” With Wayne, nothing was predictable in either his speech or his playing.

  Wayne is kind of like Yoda. He speaks in this whimsical way, but he’s also very wise. He’s like a Jedi knight! And he loves superheroes—he’s totally into fantasy and comics, and he loves to wear Superman T-shirts. Wayne always saw the quintet as a band of superheroes: Miles Davis and the Justice League. There was a standard of behavior we tried to uphold in the band, dressing sharp, playing well, behaving like professionals. In Wayne’s whimsical mind, playing by these rules wasn’t restrictive or boring; it was merely evidence of our collective superhero qualities.

  Wayne is observant about everything, and from that very first rehearsal, or really brainstorming session, with Miles, he liked what he saw:

  We rehearsed that one day, and I was noticing the intelligence level of everyone. I saw the high conversational level, the humor that was going on. It was almost like a club; if you didn’t understand what was funny, then you weren’t in the club.

  Ron Carter would speak very quickly, and Herbie would laugh at something he’d said—but it would just be one word. These guys were always talking and laughing, and they were very proud of what they were doing. The level of playing was so high, it didn’t feel like work. It looked like they were in heaven.

  Miles loved Wayne, because he’d compose these perfect pieces and then just walk up, hand Miles a sheet of paper, and say, “I wrote something.” And Miles never had to touch Wayne’s songs, because they were invariably brilliant platforms for our style of playing.

  Miles was also intrigued by Wayne. “What does Wayne do in the daytime?” he would say. “How does he spend his time?” Then again, Miles was kind of nosy about all of us. He always wanted to know what I had in my pockets, because I was always carrying gadgets around. “Where is Herrrrbie going with all that stuff? What is he doing with it?” he’d ask Wayne.

  I had never outgrown my boyhood love of electronics and mechanical things; if anything, it kept growing the older I got. In high school I had built an amplifier using a Dynaco kit, and from then on I was always curious about how to use new electronic equipment to enhance music. During my time with the quintet, the latest equipment was the German-made UHER portable reel-to-reel tape recorder, so I became obsessed with using it to record our performances, a habit that sometimes drove Miles crazy.

  It wasn’t that Miles didn’t want me to record the music, because he didn’t mind that. In fact, whenever we were in the studio making a record, he always insisted that the machines be rolling all the time, because you never knew when we were going to hit on something interesting. He’d get really annoyed if we played something great and it wasn’t caught on tape.

  What drove Miles crazy was that I always needed a few extra minutes at the beginning of each performance to set up my microphones and recorder. And because I was usually late to shows to begin with, I often wasn’t ready when it was time to play. Everybody else would be up onstage prepared to go, and I’d blow in at the last minute and then crawl under the piano to set up my equipment while Miles glared at me.

  Once we were starting a set with a song that opened on piano, and I could hear Miles counting off as I was still fumbling around with the recorder. He looked over at the piano, and when my head finally popped up from below, he just said, “Ahhh, shit.” Miles used to say that none of our recordings had piano in the beginning, because I was too busy fiddling with my gear. I’m not sure about that, but it’s fair to say I was pushing the boundaries not only of music but sometimes of Miles’s patience, too.

  One night we were all in the dressing room after a performance at the Village Vanguard. Miles knew a lot of Hollywood people, so it wasn’t unusual to have movie stars come see us perform, and that night the actress Mitzi Gaynor was in the audience. Usually the stars would come to the dressing room after the show, but Mitzi hadn’t shown up yet.

  “Herbie,” said Miles, “go find Mitzi. Tell her I said to bring her white ass back here.”

  “What?” I said. “I can’t tell her that!”

  Miles shook his head as if I were a misbehaving child. “Tell her those are my words. Say it exactly like that,” he said. “Go on!”

  I walked reluctantly out to the front of the club, and she was standing right there, talking to a couple of people. I went up and introduced myself.

  “Hello, Miss Gaynor. I’m Herbie Hancock,” I said. “Miles wanted me to say something to you, but I’m embarrassed to say it.”

  Mitzi smiled her thousand-watt smile. “Really? What did he say?”

  “He said to tell you, ‘Get your white ass back here to the dressing room.’”

  And Mitzi just smiled and said, “Okay,” and then she turned and walked toward the dressing room like this was the most normal invitation she’d ever gotten. It rolled right off her, as Miles must have known it would.

  Another time, also at the Village Vanguard, we saw Ava Gardner sitting right up in the front row as we started playing. She was wearing dark glasses, a skirt, and tennis shoes, and Wayne sidled over to me onstage and said, “Hey, Herbie, check out the luggage”—which was what Wayne called a woman’s legs. He liked to be able to talk about them without the woman noticing. “Nice luggage,” he’d say, and we all knew to look around for a woman in a skirt or shorts.

  This happened a lot, because there were beautiful women around Miles Davis all the time. Once when we landed at Los Angeles International Airport, we walked to the curb outside arrivals to find a purple Jaguar XKE waiting. The driver stepped out, and it was this gorgeous blond woman, an actress named Laura Devon. And Miles said, “Ah, my chauffeur is here!” He kissed her, and they got into the car and zoomed off. You can bet the rest of us had checked out her luggage—she was so perfect, she looked like somebody had drawn her.

  Another time Liz Taylor and Richard Burton came to Birdland, in New York. They were the hottest couple in Hollywood, and they’d come by before going to another event, so they were both dressed to the nines—but Miles didn’t show up that night. That happened occasionally, and it was always a little embarrassing for us, because we knew Miles was the main attraction.

  Miles had been struggling with health problems for a while, but that wasn’t necessarily why he didn’t show up for some gigs. My take was, if Miles didn’t feel he could deliver his best on a given night, he just wouldn’t turn up, because he’d rather not play at all than play below his standards. He didn’t usually miss one-night concert venues, but if we had a weeklong gig at a club somewhere, he’d sometimes skip a night.

  Miles had well-known problems with drugs, but as far as I knew, he never missed any of our shows due to that. He had kicked his heroin habit by the time I played with him, and he never went back to it. But Miles was doing cocaine, like pretty much everybody else at that time, including me. In New York in the sixties, finding a musician who wasn’t snorting coke was like finding a needle in a haystack. Coke was as easy to get as alcohol; so many people did it socially, it was just around and available. And most people, or at least the ones I knew, didn’t overdo it.

  Musicians had to be careful about drugs for more than just the obvious reasons. Up until 1967 New York City required anyone who worked in nightclubs to have a “cabaret card,” which could be revoked if you got arrested. Many people saw this as a subtly racist policy, as many black musicians were addicts. There were rumors that some of the labels even gave their artists extra cash, perhaps fearing that o
therwise they might turn to theft, or hock their horns, to get drug money. So even if a musician did drugs, he took extra care to protect his cabaret card, because losing that meant you’d lose your livelihood, too.

  I’d tried smoking weed soon after arriving in New York and didn’t like it so much. But the first time I tried cocaine I did like that. While pot made me feel slow and foggy, cocaine gave me energy and sharpened my senses, or so I thought. A lot of musicians felt that coke helped them explore music more deeply, loosen up, not hold anything back, get to the nitty-gritty. I felt that way sometimes, too, but mostly I would do it because it felt good. You couldn’t really do any drugs and play onstage with Miles anyway, because the level of musicianship was so high, you had to be on your game to keep up with what the band was doing. You had to be your pure, unaltered self.

  For that same reason I never really drank, either, when I played with Miles, even though I did drink socially. And I was able to drink a lot. In New York in the sixties and into the seventies people consumed cocktails like water, and I got to the point where I could mix all kinds of drinks and not get sick—which I thought was great. I built up enough tolerance that I could drink people under the table, and sometimes I’d have a little fun by proving it.

  Once, on a tour of Europe in the seventies, a roadie for the band kept bragging to everyone how he could really hold his liquor. He was going on and on, so I finally challenged him to a drinking contest. We got a bottle of Portuguese grappa, a strong grape brandy, and this roadie and I started doing shots. The first five, he was doing all right. But then we got up to about ten . . . and then we kept going . . . and by thirteen or so, this kid just slid off his chair to the floor. They had to carry him out, but I somehow managed to walk out on my own, so I won! I was really drunk, but not too drunk to remember that victory.

  The amazing thing was, Wayne had the ability to play music while being ripped. He drank a lot in those days, mostly cognac. We’d call him Cognac Man, which he twisted into Corny Act Man. Unlike the rest of us, he’d drink leading up to a show. He had a system: He’d drink, then sweat it out playing, then drink some more. I never understood how he could play so brilliantly while being stone drunk.

  Talking about all this now makes it seem like we drank and did drugs all the time. We didn’t, but it’s fair to say that a certain level of drug use was pretty much expected among musicians. While I liked coke, I never felt that I was a slave to it. Some guys, if they had a gram at home, they couldn’t get through a day without it. I didn’t do it every day—I got enough of a high playing with Miles and the guys. Doing coke was something I enjoyed rather than craved.

  And occasionally I tried things out of pure curiosity. Like the time I first dropped acid, in 1965.

  At the Village Vanguard one night I met a Swedish guy named Björn. Björn had spent a lot of time in Millbrook, New York, which was the town where Timothy Leary had been doing his LSD experiments for a few years. At the time there was a lot of curiosity about acid, which was a legal drug used in psychotherapy and for treating alcoholism. But Leary was also a big proponent of using the drug as a spiritual and mystical tool for raising consciousness.

  For months after I met him, Björn kept urging me to try LSD. He was convinced it would open up my creativity as a musician, and he offered to help me with my first trip, to make sure it was done right. I put him off for a while, but eventually I decided to see what the fuss was about. I had a weekend coming up with no gigs, so I told Björn I was ready.

  Gigi didn’t want me to do it. She wasn’t anti-drug, but the idea of my dropping acid scared her. It was a longer high, more unpredictable, and everybody had heard about “bad trips” that caused hallucinations and paranoia. I was a little nervous, too, but how could I pass up the chance to have such a mind-bending experience? Especially since I’d have Björn there to look after me for the ten or so hours I’d be tripping? I told Gigi I was going to do it, and she stayed out of the apartment for the weekend.

  Björn came over, and he set everything up as if he were some kind of psychedelic tour guide. “What records would you like to listen to?” he asked me. “You’re going to be very high, so I will take care of everything.” I picked out about twenty albums, but Björn vetoed a couple of them, including one really far-out record by John Coltrane, who at the time was deep into free jazz. “I think this might be too much for your first trip,” Björn told me. Then he pulled out some records of his own that he’d brought: Indian flute music, which he felt might be more appropriate for this journey.

  Björn lined up all the records along the living room wall, and then he went into the kitchen to prepare. The LSD was in liquid form, which was the only way it came in those early psychedelic days, and he mixed the right amount into a glass of orange juice. I took a deep breath, said, “Okay, here we go,” and drank it.

  LSD doesn’t hit you right away. It takes a while to get going, but then at some point you realize, “Oh, wait—I’m high!” A couple of hours after drinking the juice, I was really high, much more altered than when I did weed or coke. “Björn,” I said, “I’m pretty high. This is as high as I’ve ever been.”

  And Björn said, “Oh, you’re gonna be much higher than this.”

  He was right. Soon the walls started moving, and creatures started appearing on the ceiling. Some of them looked like human beings, but then they’d change, and they were colorful and strange, and I wasn’t sure what anything was. And then the apartment somehow became a train, and all the rooms off the hallway were the compartments. But then, when I started walking down the hallway, it suddenly became a jungle. I walked down the hall, cutting my way through the underbrush, and I kept thinking, Wow, how did all this appear in my apartment? Because I somehow still knew I was in my apartment, even though I was apparently in a jungle.

  I made my way to the piano in the living room, because I thought it might be a cool, creative thing to play while I was tripping. But the keys were twisted into a U shape, so I couldn’t figure out how to do it. And then I realized I didn’t feel like playing anyway—I just wanted to look around at all the weird creatures and scenes that were morphing on the walls and ceiling.

  Björn stayed with me the whole time, just spinning records and sitting quietly for the ten hours or so I was tripping. When it was over, I was glad I’d done it, but it wasn’t like I was desperate to do it again. I’d had the experience, and that felt like enough. But then, about six months later, Björn invited me to come up to Millbrook to drop acid there. And I thought, Well, why not go to the source?

  The Millbrook research was taking place in a big, sprawling compound with various barns and houses. As Björn was leading me across the property, we happened to walk by Dr. Leary, so I got to meet him briefly. But he went off to do something else, and Björn took me into a house where three other musicians I knew were already waiting. We were all going to do it together.

  This experience was very different from the first one. In my apartment I had been mesmerized by the shapes and colors on the walls. But this time, as the acid kicked in, I looked at my arm and realized to my horror that it was covered with insects. It was as if the hair had morphed into these black, crawling bugs, and I couldn’t wipe them off.

  I’d been warned about bad trips, and I knew I had to keep myself from freaking out. There was no stopping a trip once it started, so if I allowed my fear to take over, there would be hours of misery and terror ahead. So I did what I’d done ever since that day back in high school when my parents wouldn’t let me go to a party. Even tripping on acid, I started to take apart my feelings, to mechanically dissect why I felt the way I did.

  I know these aren’t really insects, I thought. So why am I seeing them? Why insects? My whole life I’d always been afraid of bees, so I decided this must be connected. I wasn’t allergic to their stings, but for some reason I got really scared when they would buzz around me. I thought, Maybe I need to face that. Maybe t
hat’s what seeing these insects is about.

  “Björn,” I said, “I want to go to a place that has a lot of bees.” In my altered state I began getting excited about bonding with the bees. They are creatures of the earth, part of the domain of living species on earth, just like me! I thought. They are my brothers! I shouldn’t fear them!

  Björn took me outside and sat me on a patch of grass. And sure enough, a few bees drifted by, but I forced myself not to get up and walk away. This was a real breakthrough, because normally if a bee flew anywhere near me, I’d be off like a shot. I couldn’t be in the same room with one without my heart starting to beat like crazy.

  But somehow, in the middle of what could have been a very bad trip, I decided I was being victimized by my fear—just as years earlier, in high school, I’d felt victimized by my anger over missing that party. And I was determined not to be victimized ever again. Even tripping on LSD, I decided to turn my fear from something harmful into something valuable. And strangely enough, from that day at Millbrook on, I’ve never been scared of bees. I still don’t exactly like being near them, but I can sit calmly if one comes buzzing around. It was just another way I learned to control my emotions.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Of all the songs I’ve written, the best one, or at least my favorite, came in 1965. And it almost never even got written, because I lost the airplane napkin where I’d jotted it down.

  The quintet was heading to California in January to play some gigs and make a new record. Wayne and I sat next to each other on the flight, and as we were talking, I heard a rhythm in my head. I hurried to write it down on a napkin, then stuck it in my pocket, but when we arrived in Los Angeles, I couldn’t find that napkin anywhere. Neither Wayne nor I could remember how the rhythm went, so I figured it was lost forever.