Outside on the porch, Robert angrily hurled our metal milk box through the front window, smashing it to pieces. In retaliation Mom, wearing her most stylish pointy shoes, dropkicked Robert’s new puppy through the shattered window. Amid the screaming and cursing, my sister and I hid beneath the covers in my bedroom, petrified with fear. We had heard their fighting before, but never this loud and intense. Next we heard the sirens of an ambulance, and then the police arrived. As Robert was taken to the hospital, I surveyed the damage to our tiny home, which was littered with busted furniture, broken glass, and trails of blood on the floor. Miraculously my mother wasn’t carted off to jail that night.
When Nicky, my aunt’s husband, left for work on the railroad, a guy named Banks, used to sneak in through the back door to secietly visit my Aunt Mae. Banks turned out to be a pretty pleasant guy. We would go out walking whenever he came over.
But as I watched Robert passively submitting to my mother’s fierce temper, I also watched him forgo his musical dreams. That had a lasting and profound effect on me. Unlike my sax-playing stepdad, I vowed that one day I would realize my own musical dreams, and before long I would seek success as a professional musician with the ultimate aspiration of becoming a shining star.
2
“BAILEY, GET OFF THE FIELD!”
There were childhood incidents and memories that made a huge impression on me in my quest to become a musician. At the age of six I wanted to play saxophone, like my stepfather, but my mother was afraid that blowing a horn would aggravate my respiratory issues.
During the summer my mother would send me to Kansas City to visit Aunt Alice in nearby Leavenworth, Kansas. One day my auntie took me to a parade near the town square of Leavenworth. I was so small at the time that I couldn’t see anything from the sidewalk. I was this tiny kid stuck in a sea of legs and humanity, looking out from among a forest of people twice my size.
But I could hear and feel a tremendous thundering force of rhythmic sound.
When I ran out of the crowd to get a better look, I saw a glittering marching band strutting down the avenue in flawless formation, wearing brightly colored matching uniforms. It was a full band and drum corps, and the awesome power of its beat put the zap on my head. I could feel the full range of percussive impact—particularly the bass drum and the snares—in my chest. My whole body reverberated. I felt as if my heart were going to thump out of my body.
Back home in Denver my mother had a small area of the front yard cordoned off with chicken wire to keep the hens that laid our eggs from running off. The perimeter of the chicken wire was held up by small wooden poles that were a little fatter than regular drumsticks. I pulled a couple of the sticks out of the ground, grabbed a trash can, turned it over, and made my first attempt at playing the drums. I banged nonstop so hard and heavy on my makeshift drum that eventually my mother surrendered and bought me a real drum.
During that time my mother took Beverly and me down to the dog races with her. Toward one end of the grounds was an orchestra that performed as the dogs raced around and around the track. My mother would sit us kids up in front of the band to keep us occupied and out of trouble while she and her friends gambled and drank. She could place me in one spot and didn’t have to worry about my straying, because I was going nowhere! It must have been a thirty-piece orchestra, and I was transfixed watching the conductor.
My mother had a friend named Erlene Love whose young daughter, Phyllis, was about the same age as me. Erlene’s live-in boyfriend played upright bass in a jazz quartet. When we visited them we found loads of jazz records lying on the living room floor. Whenever the adults would play those records, I would lie quietly on the floor, absorbing the sounds of classic jazz and bebop. I found out later that most of the LPs in the collection were from the Blue Note Records catalog, so I was able to listen to topflight artists like the young Tony Williams, Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone, and Philly Joe Jones on drums. Listening to jazz made me feel like I was flying.
Because it was the 1950s, the jazz that was popular with my mother and her friends included the music of Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, Morgana King, Nancy Wilson, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan. Whenever they were in party mode, the women would listen to the more popular R&B sounds like Little Richard’s as well as the blues. After I became acquainted with jazz, my mother married my stepfather, Robert, the ex-saxophone player, who had his own jazz record collection that he also played around the house.
My mother would occasionally take me out to a club in Colorado Springs where her nephew was gigging. He played the alto sax, and there was another horn in that ensemble, a tenor sax. I remember their slick routines up on the bandstand. One night when he opened up the case, I got to see his horn up close. It was this gleaming, shiny instrument lying in a smooth bed of purple velvet. How regal it looked! That night I went home, bent a curtain rod into the shape of a saxophone, and took a broken clothespin and stuck it into the end of the curtain rod for my reed and mouthpiece. I found one of my mom’s suitcases and put padding inside for my “horn.” Then I walked around the house playing “professional musician” going to a gig with his horn case.
Soon the performing bug bit me. There was something called a “show wagon” that came around to different parts of the city in Denver every summer. It was a traveling stage, and they would audition young people, and if you were good enough, you could perform at different shows at parks, recreation halls, and other venues. One year I got up the nerve to audition. I was in the fourth grade. I rehearsed the song I had to learn, but when I got up to sing it, my voice wouldn’t work—not a sound came out of my mouth. It was a humiliating experience. About a year later, after we moved to East Denver, I auditioned again with a friend of mine named Philip Buckman. This time “the two Philips” passed the audition, entered the talent contest, and actually won a prize. That was the beginning of my winning talent competitions; I discovered that I was a pretty good vocalist.
From the time I was in grade school, everywhere I went, you didn’t see me without a pair of drumsticks in my hand. I’d walk down Columbine Street, twirling my sticks. I first joined the school band in the fourth grade, where, by the time I was ten, I had learned to read music properly. Later I played the drums in the junior high school band, and I made it to the All-State Band.
Luckily I’d come up through one of the best school systems in the country. Denver was an ideal place for music education! We were taught about the entire family of instruments—brass, woodwinds, strings, percussion—and how they sounded (I could tell the difference between a tuba and a sousaphone, a tenor and a baritone saxophone, a glockenspiel and a xylophone) and harmonized together, like an oboe with a clarinet or French horns with trombones. We also learned about different styles of music, including Native American, and they even brought in the Air Force Band to play for the schoolchildren.
As a preteen, I played the snare drum, but once I joined the high school orchestra I began to play other percussion instruments like the bells, tympani, glockenspiel, and marimba. I took part in various musical ensembles, including vocal madrigals and brass, string, and woodwind groups. I had the chance to see and hear music on a firsthand basis and got a deep education. The funny thing was, at the time, it didn’t feel like I was getting educated.
I had developed a sixth sense when it came to learning how to play a new musical instrument. In junior high school I walked into stage band and noticed they didn’t have a bass player. So I picked up the bass fiddle and joined in. The teacher, Mr. Richards, asked me, “Philip, do you play bass?” He was amazed when I told him I had never played before. I was simply goofing around, but somehow it fit, and playing it made perfect sense to me. It turned out that Mr. Richards, sent me to a bass teacher who was a principal bassist in the Denver Symphony Orchestra. After calling my mother, he arranged for me to receive private lessons. The school loaned me a bass to keep in my house! To get to my lessons I would
climb onto the bus carrying my gigantic bull fiddle.
My aspiration in high school was to play in the symphony and become a professional percussionist. I was a huge fan of drummer Harvey Mason when he was a young session man. I gazed in awe at the magnificent CTI Records four-color gatefold albums that he’d drummed on. (CTI, short for Creed Taylor Incorporated, was the mastermind of jazz producer Creed Taylor, who had also helmed Impulse! Records in 1960.) I studied the pictures and credits of his recording dates. I knew when Harvey played marimba on this record or tympani on that one.
I’d march to school playing my drums as loud as I could. I played constantly through middle school and high school. I was in the concert band, stage band, marching band, and drum corps, and also joined the choir. Plus I had my garage bands on the side where I played drums, sang, or did both.
After years of winning talent contests and putting bands together, I bought my first drum set for fifty dollars. It had that customary glittering silver metalflake finish. It came with a cymbal, snare, tom, and bass drum. We lived on Madison Street at the time, so I must have been in junior high or middle school. Getting my own set of drums was quite a major deal. I could either form or join bands. The drums were also a way that my mother disciplined me as I got older. When I grew too big for her to whip me, or if I didn’t do what I was told, she’d say I couldn’t play at such-and-such a gig on a Friday night. If she told me I’d have to miss the gig, I’d break down crying, explaining that she was hurting everybody else in the band. But she didn’t care; it was her only effective form of discipline.
I was not a great athlete in school. In fact, I was hopeless. I had one unlucky incident on the baseball team, which I’d joined only because I liked the way their uniforms looked. But the first time I tried to field a ground ball, the ball shot up my arm and hit me right in the throat. I couldn’t breathe for a while, and that was the end of my baseball career, over and done with.
Another time I decided that since I could run pretty fast with the football, I would try out for tight end. I lined up on the end and ran out for a pass. I was quickly tackled and got the wind knocked out of me. As I lay there stretched out on the grass, the coach yelled, “Bailey! Get off the field!”
Finally, I tried out for basketball at Denver’s Red Shield Center. I was so scared they were going to put me in the game that I nearly peed my pants. I was sitting on the bench and the coach looked over at me and shouted, “Okay, Bailey, you’re in!”
I was so nervous that when someone passed me the ball, I dribbled as fast as I could until I noticed that nobody was guarding me. Turns out I had dribbled toward the wrong basket!
I held a lot of jobs as a kid. Coming from a single mom’s household, if I wanted extra money, I had to work. My days started early—cutting grass, delivering papers, doing odd jobs. At fourteen I washed dishes at a Walgreen’s café. Then I worked at the Denver airport. Those jobs helped me to see only what I did not want to pursue as a career. Going to work with my mom and watching her toil away as a domestic inspired me to do whatever was necessary in order to become a proficient professional musician. As a result, I practiced hard and worked my butt off, the final reward being that I could do something creative with my life.
Every week I sang in the church choir with my longtime friend Steve Dyson. Dyson and I had both gone to Columbine Elementary School and later held jobs together at the high school. “Dice” and I would show up in the morning and again in the evening to clean up around the school. One day Dyson noticed a milk truck parked with its doors open, revealing bottles and bottles of chocolate milk.
“Go get the milk,” Dyson ordered me.
I did precisely what Dice told me and put the milk in my car. But instead of just grabbing two or three bottles, I nabbed a whole crate. When I got home and pulled into the driveway, my mother spotted both me and my illicit cargo.
“Philip, where did this milk come from?”
“Dyson and I found it. It must have just fallen off the milk truck.”
“Philip James, did you steal this milk?”
“Dyson told me to grab it.”
“Take that milk back!” my mom screamed at me, and I did. It only proved one thing: that I was more frightened of my mother’s wrath than I was of getting caught stealing.
Otherwise, I was a well-behaved adolescent. My sister’s first husband was what you might call a gangbanger, though on a much less serious level. He was put in reform school and later on was sent to jail. His kind of lawless behavior scared the bejesus out of me. Getting in trouble with the cops wasn’t anything I needed to pursue. I remember a fourth-grade teacher at Gilpin Elementary School named Mr. Davis, who told me that I was not going to amount to a hill of beans. Now I wonder, why would someone tell a kid that? Yet for some reason, those memories stick in your mind as you grow older, waiting for the day when you can prove them wrong.
Music gave me self-esteem, a way to live and a destiny that sheltered me from being fatherless and having to move all the time and deal with family instability. Unfortunately, my sister didn’t develop the same safeguards and ambitions to help her out as she grew up.
While I wasn’t rebellious, I did have a cocky attitude, which drove my mother crazy. By the ninth grade, when the music teachers at school saw that I had musical promise, I thought I was pretty hotdog. One day I sassed a teacher. We had a night rehearsal for a big year-end concert recital, and I lived about twelve blocks from the school. The teacher had warned everyone in the band to be on time at six-thirty. When he caught me arriving a few minutes late, he locked the door on me. I was so angry that I picked up a rock and shattered the window. That little stunt ended up getting me expelled. After my mom went down to the school to see the principal, she was far from sympathetic to my side.
“You know what?” she told the principal in her typically stern, colorful way, “If he thinks his shit don’t stink, then don’t let him play in the recital either.”
Because of my mom and my attitude, I missed the recital. In retrospect it was the best lesson I could have learned . . . and one I never had to learn again. It was the lesson of arrogance. Boy, did I get set straight. The band had worked so hard, and here I was, one of the primary performers in both the band and the choir, missing the biggest gig of the year. It was crushing; I was devastated. But I learned.
Interestingly, Beverly and I have developed entirely different outlooks about being raised by a single parent. I never pined to have a dad around or felt sorry that I was a fatherless child. Nor did I feel a void or that there was something radically missing in my life, like male companionship. Maybe it was because I was a confident young man. Later on, after I gained more life experience, I saw that there was something missing in my own life, pieces which, had they been in place, could possibly have enabled me to make some wiser choices and do some things a little better and smarter. (I’ll elaborate on that later.) All in all, though, I wasn’t too shook up about it.
That was not the case with my poor sister. She harbored a lot of regret and carries baggage about our early life to this day. She not only suffered from not having a father around, but she often took the brunt of my mother’s brokenness, too. Even today, she’s working through it.
That’s why I emphasize that the circumstances of your birth must never determine who you are or rule your destiny: what you are to become. Nor should they determine the significance of what you’re striving to accomplish in life or how you plan to contribute to the world . . . to become that shining star!
That’s why I send tiny messages out to my Twitter and Facebook fans. I call them “Shining Stars”—they contain little, positive messages about what’s on my mind or in my heart. I started out in life as a “miracle baby.” First, I could have been aborted. Second, I could have died from early illnesses. Third, based on the circumstances of my upbringing, I could have become a nonachiever—not to be confused with being a lazy underachiev
er. A nonachiever is a detriment to society instead of a credit to the world.
Fortunately my mother had that “mother wit” of common sense to help me through. She possessed a good barometer for reading people, a talent that I picked up from her. I consider myself a quick judge of good and bad character. From around the corner, I can sense people who are trouble. If we’re lucky, we can inherit positive attributes from our parents that can set us in the right direction. Conversely, we can pick up their negative traits, which can put us on the wrong path. And believe me, I’ve had my fair share of situations where I found myself traveling down that particular path.
3
SOMEBODY SAY AMEN!
Between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, I sang in a large gospel choir called the Echoes of Youth. It was composed of fifty or sixty voices and was an impressive and powerful vocal entity. We traveled from Denver to Los Angeles to perform during the Watts riots in August 1965. Echoes of Youth was a fantastic experience for a young singer like me, an opportunity to hang around a congregation of amazing vocalists and musicians. Some were more talented than I was, and some were accomplished bandleaders and multi-instrumentalists. Their virtuosity gave me something to strive for and compete against. I found that what I lacked in ability, compared with some, I made up for in initiative.
As a budding high school musician, I practiced and practiced to get my shot at becoming a professional. Soon, instead of washing dishes and doing yardwork, I began playing the drums at casuals with various Top 40 cover bands. The first time I was paid a few dollars for playing a gig, I was blown away.
“You can get paid for playing music?”
Shining Star: Braving the Elements of Earth, Wind & Fire Page 3