Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

by William Kennedy

  Murphy gave me Louis’s room number and I went up in the elevator to the fifth floor. When I emerged into the hallway I heard the lone wail of a horn. I didn’t know the tune, but Louis would tell me later it was “Nevada,” a tune he played often to warm up his chops. It was a magical sound, plaintive, out of place in this deserted hallway, a prelude to a meeting with the maestro.

  I’d been listening to jazz all my life, and I knew Satchmo and Kid Ory and the Hot Five and Satch’s big-band tunes before and during the war, and I dug it all from a distance. Good stuff. Indeed. But then I saw the man in concert in the early 1950s, when he was presumably over the hill, no longer the great innovator, and never before had I been roused to such feverish excitement by a jazz musician. Also, in recent months, I had been obsessed by his new album, Ambassador Satch, especially a tune called “The Faithful Hussar,” or “Huzzah Kuzzah” as Louis rendered it. For reasons that would be explicable only after prolonged musical psychoanalysis, this song gave me spasms of pleasure, frenzy, jubilation, ascendancy, solidarity with the human race, and revelation of internal percussions not previously manifested by my tympanic consciousness.

  A pal of mine from the army, Frank Trippett, a Satchmo freak long before I was, had sat next to the man for hours when Satch and his big band played for a dance in a black honky-tonk in the Mississippi Delta in maybe 1943. Trippett was playing trumpet himself in a youthful white jazz band in those years, and he raved about Satchmo often when he and I were beer-drinking regulars at an enlisted men’s club in Frankfurt, Germany, listening to Satch sing “Blueberry Hill,” and trying to figure out why such a dumb song could sound so great; and the answer, of course, was, that Satchmo was not only the greatest horn player who ever lived, he was also the greatest jazz singer, a genius who could turn sludge into sunshine. “There are no bad songs,” he once said.

  I knocked at Louis’s door and announced myself and he said, “Wait a minute till I get some clothes on,” and in a while he opened the door, wearing a handkerchief on his head, a plaid shirt, a pair of boxer shorts, and white socks. His horn was on a chair and he picked it up and finished his warm-up, and then lubricated his chops with vaseline. I sat down and we talked for an hour and a half, the room becoming a thoroughfare at times when his wife, Lucille, came in (“Put your slippers on, Pops,” she told him) with friends, and when his valet arrived to unpack his grips and arrange assorted bottles, jars, and tubes on a dresser top—his artifacts of endurance: vitamins, gargles, eye drops, chest rubs.

  “They keep me alive,” he said. “I paint my chest and it keeps the cold out.”

  Louis (pronounced “Louis,” not “Louie”; his preference) in these days, was a roving ambassador for Rexall drugstores, hustling, in particular, two items that had brought him down from 268 pounds a year ago, to his 173 of the moment. One item was Swiss Kriss, a herbal laxative, and the other was Bisma Rex, liquid or tablets. Bisma Rex, “it cuts gas,” Satch advised in the three-page document, “Lose Weight the ‘Satchmo’ Way,” that he handed out to people like me.

  “Gas can take you like that,” he told me. “One time the doctor’s thinking I had ulcers and it wasn’t nothin’ but gas.” A druggist put him on to Bisma Rex and soon he was fine. “So I nix out this doctor and go to Bisma Rex,” said Louis. “I sent some [tablets] to Eisenhower when he had that stroke. I said to him, ‘Man, you wouldn’t of had that stroke you had one of these.’”

  Even after a night of drinking booze, Bisma Rex and Swiss Kriss were the answer. Satchmo told me he’d given up on beer (“You drink a whole lot of that and nothin’ happens”) but when he drank the other stuff and something did happen, his view was, “If you can crawl to that cab and get to your Swiss Kriss, you gonna be all right in the mornin’.”

  Satchmo’s diet also called for orange juice in abundance—“so delicious … you should never get tired of drinking it.” He told me that orange juice, “when it’s got vitamins in it, is just the same as two pork chops.” In sum, said the Satch diet, “orange juice softens it, Bisma Rex cuts it, Swiss Kriss swishes it … tee hee.”

  Louis was coming under attack in these years as a throwback, a man whose music was passé, who was playing an Uncle Tom role for the white folks, who was finding his thrill on Blueberry Hill, but not with anything that was modern or progressive in jazz anymore. There’s no doubt his popularity with whites, and with people who loved music but knew nothing about jazz, was on the rise. In another nine years he’d record “Hello, Dolly!” and knock the Beatles off the top of the charts.

  How did the man himself react to such musical criticism?

  “What is modern stuff?” he said. “If it’s good, I listen. To me there ain’t no such thing as modern stuff. Just a style the agents picked up and spread around. Dizzy [Gillespie] and Charlie Parker were foolin’ around, playin’ it themselves, and the agents see there’s a pretty good style there and they pick it up.… You take [Stan] Kenton, standin’ there with a baton. He doesn’t instill anything in youngsters but bustin’ their lips. In the old days musicians were taught to preserve lips or nothin’. Anybody can blow a horn and pray to God they’ll hit a note. In the old days we trained. Half these cats don’t warm up. They’re followin’ the wrong people.… One of my solos would fracture them. The oldest record I played, they can’t play it.…

  “Jam sessions these days they just blow. I was in a joint in Pittsburgh for forty-five minutes before I realized these cats were playin’ ‘Lover Come Back to Me.’ … You got to explain to the people what you’re doin’, whether it’s ‘Tiger Rag’ or ‘La Vie en Rose.’ … Take ‘Mack the Knife’ [Satch’s recording of it was, at this moment, a hit, and would spur a revival of Kurt Weill’s music], a good old song that’s goin’ great.”

  Louis then analyzed Mack for me: “He was a little part of everybody livin’.… He was a ladies’ man … he did everything wrong. He steals, a man draws money out of the bank and disappears and he’s spendin’ money. Who did it but him? Sunday mornin’ [dead] on the sidewalk. I seen them there like that. I was a boy seventeen years old and I see it … fightin’ and shootin’.… I never got hurt. I’m still playin’ and blowin’ the blues.”

  Any thought of retiring?

  “Whatya gonna do? You goin’ in a room and bite your nails? You gonna quit just because you’re straight with money? Money is just somethin’ you need. What good is a roomful when you got nothin’ to do with it? Lotsa cats have quit and put that horn down, but they don’t come back. You can live that horn.… I go to Chicago and New York and there’s nothin’ but fans in the house.… I didn’t know there was a time you’re supposed to stop. What for, as long as you can still hit them on the nose? … Music don’t know no age. I feel the same as when I was twenty-eight … All my days are the same.”

  The interview was winding down, and it was getting on to show time at the Palace, where Satch and the All-Stars would play, among other tunes, “The Faithful Hussar,” renewing my ascendancy glands. Satch would go on from Albany to keep playing for another fifteen years, growing ill from clogged arteries, kidney trouble, and ulcers; he would undergo a tracheotomy after a heart attack and die of a subsequent attack on July 6, 1971, in his home in the New York City borough of Queens, 34–56 107th Street, Corona (now an official city landmark), his age either seventy or seventy-one, depending on which of his birthdates you accept.

  He was a giant in his youth, the first major soloist in jazz, the man to whom every jazz, swing, modern jazz, and rock musician after him has been and is indebted, some via the grand larceny route. Music has changed radically since the seminal days of jazz, but Satchmo’s achievement has not been diminished. No one has superseded him in jazz eminence the way Crosby superseded Jolson, and Sinatra superseded Crosby, and the Beatles superseded Elvis, and I will never know who or what really superseded the Beatles.

  Everything I loved about Louis’s music was present in the Kenmore Hotel room that day in 1956: the fundamental humanity of the man, his wit, his certai
nty about his talent—as evident in his words as in his solos; and the memories of it all endured in me to this day in February 1992 when I write this. Even the Swiss Kriss endured. Trippett ran into Trummy Young in Hawaii in 1970 and told him the story of how Satch signed his diet for me, and Trummy gave Trippett a photo that Trippett sent on to me—of Satch seen through a keyhole, sitting on the toilet, smiling at the camera. An overcaption reads: “Swiss Krissly,” and the undercaption is a Satchmo slogan: “Leave it all behind ya.”

  As the interview ended, Louis asked Lucille to find a photo of himself and he signed it to me. He looks a few years younger than fifty-six in the photo, and he’s blowing the horn. He also signed my copy of his “Lose Weight” diet and he added a line of his wisdom. With my ebony pencil he dedicated the diet on page 1, “For Bill Kennedy,” and then on the bottom of page 3 wrote: “P.S. My slogan. The more you shit the thiner you’ll Git. No shit.” And he signed it, Louis Armstrong.

  There is one other memory, which happened at the beginning of our meeting when I interrupted his warm-up. Louis got dressed after I knocked, I went in and sat down, and he picked up his horn, feeling unfinished, and he said, “Wait till I hit the high note,” and he then played a little while I listened—the end of “Nevada.” He blew some low notes, then a few higher ones, and finally he hit the high one and held it for about a week and turned it like a corkscrew and flattened it out two or three ways and sharpened it up and blew it out the window.

  Then he put down the horn and smiled.

  “Solid,” he said.

  Oh yeaaaahhhh.

  1992

  Paul McCartney:

  The Major Possum Game

  By now most of the literate Western world knows that Paul McCartney is, or isn’t, dead. Illiterates eventually will get the news via television specials.

  But what perhaps isn’t so generally known is the density of public commitment to discover how, when, where Paul died and was buried and will be resurrected when the revolution comes to sit at the right hand of John Lennon. Equally dense is the public pursuit of the location of Pepperland, and how to get the Beatles to take you there.

  It has become a time-consuming pastime of American youth to probe the lyrics, the photographs and the jacket covers of Beatle albums to unearth clues that will solve the riddle of Paul and Pepperland—that mythical paradise from The Yellow Submarine film—and the pastime now seems en route to a complexity comparable to the deciphering, by Joycean scholars, of the multiple meanings of the portmanteau words in Finnegans Wake; or the quest to prove through clues in Shakespeare’s plays that Sir Francis Bacon wrote them; or the pursuit of clues in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories to prove that Holmes lived.

  This is so because of a certain willfulness that has made verbal ambiguity and picture puzzles essential ingredients of Beatlism. A Beatle song (or album cover) about which you’ve never asked the question “What do they mean by that?” is probably a Beatle product you don’t rate very high. Their work is full of what Christopher Morley described, in speaking of the Sherlock Holmes stories, as “endless delicious minutiae to consider.”

  Probably the Beatles didn’t intend for their games to take such a bizarre turn, but nevertheless the McCartney death theory is a byproduct. Various origins of the notion are being claimed. Tim Harper, a Drake University sophomore from Peoria, wrote about it in his student paper on September 17. John Summer, an Ohio Wesleyan student, developed a complex thesis on the topic. The Michigan University paper printed a story on it, and voice prints of McCartney were made by an associate professor of audiology at Michigan State, proving that McCartney is alive. Disc jockeys at WKNR—FM, Detroit, have been credited with unifying the clues.

  Over at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s campus radio station, WRPI—FM, in Troy, three student disk jockeys got together last month and talked from 10:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M. on the subject, with a small studio audience of friends to feed the conversation. Their two phones stayed constantly busy for the three hours with callers who had either propounded theories of their own, or wanted to add to or correct theories given on the show.

  The host for the show was Marek Lewanda, nineteen, of Albany, a chemistry major. Also on were Ralph Pascucci, twenty-two, of Manhasset, who uses the radio name of Pat Pending (and, sometimes Regus Pat Off), a mechanical-engineering student; and Jim Nagy, nineteen, whose air name is Freddy Garbo, nineteen, a Fairfield, Connecticut, engineering student who claims to have started the Beatle mystery wagon rolling here last march by citing many clues on his record show. This is the earliest claim we’ve encountered to date.

  What have all these people discovered? News reports have given some but by no means all of the current clues. Herewith old and new:

  Starting with the album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatleologists found:

  1.Paul sitting down with knees showing, George, Ringo and John with knees concealed;

  2.Paul wearing a uniform bearing an arm label with “O.P.D.” on it, translated by clue sniffers as “Officially Pronounced Dead”;

  3.A hand, presumably a traditional death symbol, raised above Paul’s head on the cover. The hand over Paul’s head is a recurrent item in pictures and cartoons throughout the Magical Mystery Tour album’s picture book also. On the Sergeant Pepper cover the hand belongs to Stephen Crane, one of many of the noted figures whose likenesses are on the cover.

  4.Beside the grave (shown on the cover), which all are watching, is a bass guitar made of flowers. Paul plays bass guitar.

  5.On the front of the bass drum on the cover, the words “Lonely Hearts” are printed horizontally. Hold up a mirror to the word “Hearts,” bisecting letters lengthwise with the mirror, and it reads: He Die.

  6.On the back cover, three Beatles face the camera; Paul’s back is to the camera.

  7.George Harrison, on the back cover, has his right hand at belt level, probably holding on to a button. But his first finger points upward.

  Now: all the lyrics of the album’s songs are printed on the back of this album. Should you follow a line emanating from George’s finger you will pass through various lyrics with times and numbers, beginning with Wednesday morning at five o’clock (the presumed time of Paul’s death); passing upward through the words “ten to six” which is translated as October 6, the date of the car crash in which he was fatally injured—the crash being arrived at through the crashlike sound in the song “Revolution Nine,” from the white Beatle album. The upward pointing continues on to “sixty-four” and “quarter to three” which the Troy puzzle solvers feel are meaningful, but haven’t yet translated.

  Paul was presumably buried on Saturday, October 8, and on October 9, a new Beatle organization was formed with a McCartney impersonator. No reason is given for this date, but the impersonator may have been the winner of a Paul McCartney look-alike contest held in New Jersey—on a date unspecified—and who, after being chosen winner, never showed up to take the prize and was never heard of again. (Ah ha!)

  Saturday was chosen as the burial date because of two items: first, the words of the song “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” (from Sergeant Pepper), in which “the celebrated Mr. K performs his feat on Saturday at Bishopsgate.” This is considered to be a reference to John Lennon, whose middle initial is thought to be K. The second item is that the Mr. H of the same song is said to be George Harrison, and the lyric says “ten summersets he’ll undertake on solid ground.”

  Now “undertake” is the key to understanding both that reference and also the related cover of the new Beatle album, Abbey Road. The cover picture shows, left to right, George, Paul, Ringo and John walking across Abbey Road (where they have offices in London). To the left is a cemetery (maybe), to the right is a police hearse (maybe), or at least a police van.

  Paul is wearing a business suit and no shoes, reportedly the burial costume for certain people in Italy. (Why Italy? Because.) Paul also has a cigarette (a coffin nail?) in his hand. Harrison wea
rs jeans, like a gravedigger, they say; Ringo wears black like a clergyman, and Lennon wears white, like an undertaker (?). The clincher in the photo is a Volkswagen parked to the left of the street, part of the license reading “28 IF.” The translation: Paul would be twenty-eight if he lived. Some argumentative people say only twenty-seven.

  There are other clues: Paul wearing a black flower in his lapel and the other three Beatles wearing red roses (Magical Mystery album); also, on “I Am the Walrus,” as the music fades, faint words are spoken which—reportedly—come from King Lear and are said to be: “Bury my body … O untimely death … Is he dead?”

  Now. Take the cover of Magical Mystery Tour. “The Beatles” is printed by using star clusters to form each letter. Put this up to a mirror and it reads: 23 JYA 38. Apparently “23” doesn’t mean much. Yet. But “JYA” in Chinese Mandarin dialect reportedly means “final resting place,” and as to “38”—3 is a mystical ascending number and 8 is infinity turned sideways.

  And don’t forget the sound of the banshee—an Irish death wailing figure—on “Goodnight” (white Beatle album); and the bus in the sky (Magical Mystery picture book) which isn’t much different from the symbolic Irish death coach that traditionally rides in the black sky (so they say). McCartney is an Irish name, isn’t it?

  So now, at last, we come to Freddy Garbo’s masterwork: the discovery of the location of the island which may be Pepperland (where the Beatles will take you if you call the right number in London and say: “Turn me on, dead man,” and can prove you know all the clues).

  First, get a copy of the Rolling Stones album Their Satanic Majesties, which has all of the Beatles’ faces hidden in the flowers on the 3D cover photo. (This is obviously a come-on clue to another Beatle clue, right?) Turn to page 2 of this four-page album and find the center of the printed maze where it says “It’s Here.” Put a pin through the center of that maze. Close the cover, reverse the pin so that it now enters the pinhole from the cover side instead of from page 2, and let it stick into page 3. It will touch, precisely, a fragment of a map which Freddy found to be part of Brazil.