Once I got the position at Federal City College, Brian and I got a house together in northern Virginia. Leslie and I became good friends and working associates at “the shoe box,” the building shaped just that way at E Street and Second Avenue, Northwest. Over the next three years, Brian and I were regular guests at Leslie’s apartment on Sixteenth Street. Leslie ended up moving to the Bay Area around the same time I requested a leave of absence from FCC to pursue music full time, which happened when Brian and I were signed by Arista Records.
I was recognized in certain music scenes in D.C., like at Blues Alley or the Cellar Door in Georgetown. But I was more comfortable and more frequently seen near the Georgia Avenue offices of Charisma, the company that became our booking agents. Brian and I became fast friends with Ed Murphy, a great name among the nightlife folks in the District, who owned a supper club between Howard University and the Charisma office.
Ed Murphy was known affectionately among the hustlers as “Eight Ball,” and his club was well-serviced and clean. Its location, next to a junkyard, was compensated for by the sheer attraction of the owner to the late-night club folks. In time, Ed began to feature entertainment on the weekends and did a lot of business with Charisma. Freddie Cole, Hugh Masekela, Roy Ayers, Terry Callier, and Norman Connors played either at the supper club or, later, across the street at the Harambee House. Ed’s club was also one of the few venues where piano genius and soulful vocalist Donny Hathaway seemed comfortable and projected the power and sensitivity of his talent.
The people who knew me, either from D.C. performances or as an FCC professor, were familiar faces at Ed’s. I could generally count on seeing someone from the English department there, and I could blend in with the folks at the back bar without fanfare.
I think I was a better songwriter when I was teaching writing. When you work on songs, you have to tell stories in a limited number of words, just a few lines. You have to be economical. And when most people talk about good writing, they talk about economy.
Songs began taking shape in D.C. The lyrics to the song “The Bottle” were inspired by a group of alcoholics who gathered each morning outside a liquor store behind the house where Brian and I lived just outside D.C. I went out and met those folks. I found out that none of them had hoped to become alcoholics when they grew up. Things had arrived along the way and turned them in that direction. I discovered one of them was an ex-physician who’d been busted for performing abortions on young girls. There was a military air-traffic controller who’d sent two jets crashing into a mountain one day. He left work that day and never went back. In the song I was saying, Look, here’s a drunk and this is why he is an alcoholic, instead of just glossing over the problem. I generally used an individual or an individual circumstance as an example of a larger thing. Alcoholism and drug addiction were both illnesses, but people really only saw the condition and not the illness, so that’s why I wrote the lyric from a stark point of reality. I always liked to give a very personal and constructive viewpoint to whatever it was I was writing about.
Dan Henderson, who was still our manager, and his wife, Wilma, eventually moved into the house with me and Brian, too, and in the fall of 1973 we went into D&B Sound in Silver Spring, Maryland, and began recording the album Winter in America. D&B was small, but it had a comfortable feeling—and it had Jose Williams as the engineer. The main room was so small that when Brian and I did tunes together, one of us had to go out in the hallway where the water cooler was located. I did vocals for “Song for Bobby Smith” and “A Very Precious Time” from there, and Brian played flute on “The Bottle” and “Your Daddy Loves You” right next to that cooler. A lot of people wanted to know who it was playing flute on “The Bottle,” because it wasn’t specifically credited on the Winter in America album. It was Brian. He also played flute on “Back Home.” Those are all his arrangements. By the time we did Winter in America, Brian had become a very good flute player. He also played Fender Rhodes on the album. We’d first encountered the instrument five years earlier on Miles Davis’s Miles in the Sky, but when Brian and I first started we couldn’t afford a Fender Rhodes. We’d had a Farfisa, a Wurlitzer, we just put together whatever we could. Now, though, he was hooked on it.
The other people who appeared on the album showed up on the last day. Bob Adams played drums and Danny Bowens bass, and they added one more thing, too. Bob said he was disappointed that the poem I had been doing as an opening monologue in concerts, “The H2Ogate Blues,” wasn’t on the album. The song was my way of explaining to people outside the Beltway what Watergate was really about. I got a lot of political insight from being in Washington. But the reason I’d left it off the record, I told him, was because nobody outside D.C. seemed to know what the hell I was talking about. He replied that even if people didn’t understand the politics, it was still funny as hell. So we set up to do one take, a “live ad-lib” to a blues backing. My description of the colors, the three thousand shades, was off the top of my head, and the poem was done with a few index cards with notes to be sure I got the references straight without stumbling. I still stumbled. After we got through it, we listened to it play back with an open studio mike and became the audience. There were some great comments in the back, particularly during the intro. The poem worked well; it felt like what the album had been missing. Not just the political aspect, but, as Bob had said, for the laughs. The Watergate incident itself was not funny, and neither were its broader implications. But as a release, a relief of tension on Winter in America, it provided a perfect landing.
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Winter in America came out in 1974 and the single, “The Bottle,” became a hit for us. The impression people seemed to get of me from my songs was of some wild-haired, wild-eyed motherfucker. Once again, I felt people who wrote about me and Brian should have looked at all that we did. It was pretty obvious that there was an entire Black experience and that it didn’t relate only to protest. We dealt with all the streets that went through the Black community, and not all of those streets were protesting.
By the mid-1970s, the middle-class people who were just in the movement for the adventure of the moment had gone on to do whatever it was that middle-class people did. There were still a whole lot of programs in the community that could be effective, but a lot of the people who were aiming their heads toward that when they were in college weren’t there anymore. They’d been kidnapped by Exxon. Surviving became the ideal after a while. A whole lot of people got killed, betrayed, or put in jail for talking about helping the community.
Most of the times when people pulled me off to the side at concerts, the songs they wanted to discuss didn’t have anything to do with politics—even though those songs were the ones that were most explicit. People wanted to say something about “Your Daddy Loves You,” because it seemed to them that we’d written it about them. The songs that people wanted to talk about were the ones that were more personal than political, more private than public, more of an emotion than an issue.
Still, there shouldn’t have been any confusion in people’s minds about whether or not they were in a fight—all they had to do was to look in their pocketbooks. Somebody done took their motherfucking money. When we got into things that related to politics, a lot of the time people would say, “Man, I’m just interested in cash.” And I had to hip people to the fact that if they were interested in money, that was the best reason to get into politics. There was a war going on in this country and you tried to find your best weapon.
I’ve always looked at myself as a piano player from Tennessee; I play some piano and write some songs. The fact that I’ve had some political influence is all well and good, but I never considered myself a politician. I never joined any of the political organizations because once you joined one, it made you enemies in another. Various groups argued back and forth and wasted energy that could have been used to try to do something for the community. Which is why I stayed out of most organizations. I wanted to be available to all of them. I play
ed for Shirley Chisholm. I played for Ken Gibson. I played the Nation of Islam’s Saviours’ Day celebration. I played for anybody who was trying to do something positive for Black people. Just count me in and I’d be there.
One special performance at Ed Murphy’s supper club came up in February 1975. For half a year, WHUR, Howard University’s radio station, had been broadcasting updates about the case of Joan Little, a sister who in August 1974 had stabbed a prison guard who had tried to rape her in a North Carolina jail. Practically the whole Black population of D.C. was tuned in to WHUR, and its news department kept its finger on the pulse of the community. The Little case was a focus of national attention in Black papers and magazines.
One night I happened to be sitting at a friend’s place with Chris Williams, who had closed his club, the Coral Reef, and was looking for a better location for a new one, and Petey Green, one of the true legends of the Washington street, and who had been released from jail and was telling it like it was with his own radio talk show. An update on the Little case came over the radio and Chris said that if he still had his club, he would throw a party and donate the money for the sister’s defense fund. Petey agreed. The idea hit us to talk to Ed, and I said I’d have my group play the date if Ed got involved.
Sure enough, things quickly got organized. Ed agreed to donate the venue and we got in contact with WHUR to spread the word. But late January and early February is when Washington gets its harshest weather. The night before the benefit, a snowstorm hit the District and continued through the next morning, forcing us to delay the show until the next night. I had to hastily reorganize things for various members of the Midnight Band whose flights in from New York and Boston had been cancelled.
The next night the crowd came tiptoeing carefully through lanes cleared through the accumulated snow plowed to the sides of Georgia Avenue. The supper club was not a huge place, but some of my favorite places to play were smaller, more intimate venues, like Ed’s or Blues Alley in D.C., Al Williams’s Birdland West in Long Beach, S.O.B.’s on Varick Street in New York, and First Avenue, the Minneapolis club Prince later made famous. We played two sets, and at the end of a successful evening we stood in small clusters of five and six while Ed and the hosts shuffled through the cash, deducting the expenses for the service staff and cleanup crew. They finally emerged reporting a clear profit of $2,300 for the defense of Miss Little.
Something real good happened then. Two hustlers, street brothers who will remain nameless, though they were recognized and answered to fairly descriptive nicknames, came out of their huddle briefly. Each of them had a hundred dollar bill in his hand.
“Make it a straight up twenty-five hundred,” one of them growled as though raising the bet at a poker table.
Ed took the bills they offered and called for the bartender to pour them another as they put their heads together again in their corner.
There were a lot of things that a lot of diverse people had in common in those days. Russell Means, who was head of the American Indian movement, had a lot in common with Joan Little, who had a lot in common with Inez Garcia, who had a lot in common with the San Quentin Six; all of them were symbols of how America needed to change but had not.
The reality, of course, was that the people were not helpless or defenseless or without the means to effect change. It was just that nobody was going do everything; we were trying to say to brothers and sisters, Let’s pool our energies and talents and try to get all of this here, instead of the little bit you might be able to get on the corner.
I was trying to get people who listened to me to realize that they were not alone and that certain things were possible.
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I had continued teaching through the end of 1974. But Brian and I had started working on a new album to follow up Winter in America. And we played a lot of live shows.
Dan Henderson invited Clive Davis to come to a show at the Beacon Theater in New York City. We’d heard that Clive was starting a new company called Arista. What we didn’t know was that Clive was already scouting us for the label—turned out he really dug “The Bottle.” I had never met the man until he walked into the Beacon.
Dan was just salivating—and nervous. He was like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, and the guys in the band were all talking about it before Clive’s arrival. You had to know Dan to know how unusual it was for him to be excited or nervous—anything except extremely fucking cool.
Clive showed up at the Beacon and saw what we did and how we did it. Physically, he was not imposing. But there was definitely a power there, a magnetic shimmer. He was an Aries, and maybe it was nothing more than an extra luster to the aura of the fire at his core. In reality, I don’t know what it was; maybe he only seemed to have that something to me because his history preceded him and caused the curious—like me—to look for it. But it was there when he mixed with other people and the world.
He looked different from Bob Thiele, whose wardrobe was casual without looking hippie or bohemian—jacket but no tie, cords not jeans. Clive Davis was always dressed and pressed: tailor made, expensive materials, understated but obvious at the same time, and even after hours he dressed nine-to-five. Also, unlike Bob Thiele, whom everyone called Bob, Clive was always Mr. Davis.
I think Clive had already made up his mind, because talks progressed quickly after the show. The music trade papers made a big deal of the fact that we were the first act signed to Arista, because they were all waiting to see what Clive would do when he got back into the business. But I don’t think it was too significant. We were available and we had been working on new material.
Graduating from Flying Dutchman to Arista meant an elevation to another level of visibility. I went to a couple of concerts with Clive during the next few months. Very early on in our relationship he took me to see Elton John at Madison Square Garden. I think he was trying to show me what he saw me doing without making that speech.
The first time I went to his office, it was still down at 1776 Broadway and posters of Tony Orlando and Al Wilson—remaining traces of his previous label—were still on the wall. He had his feet up on the desk, talking freely about the future of his new company. By the next time I visited him, he was up at 6 West 57th Street, a street as closely associated with the music business as Madison Avenue was with advertising. Clive’s new offices occupied an entire building as far as I could tell, and they were also fully staffed, with all the clamor of a big city newsroom, bright as daylight with fluorescent tubes running the length of the pathways between cubicles. Clive was still at ease.
I was the de facto leader of the Midnight Band, but that was a longer way than anyone seemed to understand from 57th Street. The band members felt I had talked my way into publishing houses with my manuscript; I had talked my way into Flying Dutchman and a record deal and I had talked on my first record; I had talked my way into Johns Hopkins and a masters degree. As far as they were concerned, all I needed was someone’s attention for a few minutes and I would talk them into anything. While I appreciated their confidence, I felt it was misplaced. My most outstanding liability was that I was naïve. In my life, I was appreciated for my honesty. However, in the record business I was finding that honesty was a missing component.
On 57th Street, which was supposed to be the new launching pad for my career and for the Midnight Band, I came to see how most artists were viewed: expendable, easily replaced by others. At the Arista office I could hear and feel that I was around music people; they liked music and gave you a feeling about what their homes and lives were like. At other places, like the Copyright Services Bureau, an office full of entertainment lawyers Clive approved of, the atmosphere was totally different, with the click-clack of typewriters and the hum of copier machines. All those lawyers and managers and accountants were as thoroughly plugged into the music business as the aorta is to the heart, but with a cynicism and disdain that made me think at times that they didn’t care for either singers or music.
On 57th Street, they could see money coming. See it the way a trainer can see a colt’s time for one and a quarter miles when it first puts its weight on legs as wobbly as wet straws. Smell it the way farmers can smell rain that’s still two days in the distance. Feel it the way a grandma can feel that same rain from an equal distance in the marrow of her bones. And even taste it the way standing outside a bakery makes your mouth water. If you were part of a record company on 57th Street, you were on the money, part of the bedrock of the biz. Or at least you were eligible. This was the inside of the inside.
I didn’t feel like a part of a profession—not one that mattered to the busy folks with briefcases banging their knees and thighs as they half-walked, half-trotted everywhere they went. It wasn’t just that I was Black, though that was never far from my consciousness; I felt like an undercover man who had shown up without his cover. Even anesthetized by good Colombian weed, I felt tense and out of place, and it was because I really was. I wasn’t unfamiliar with New York—just this part of New York, midtown. I had a house in Virginia, roughly three hundred miles south of 57th Street. In Virginia I could think. I could sit in the yard with a glass of tea and a book in the afternoon. In Virginia I could continue to write the songs and poems that people enjoyed and made me happy.
But whether I liked it or not, I began to have to spend more time on West 57th Street. More than a certainty that I had the business expertise to direct our group, the band members figured I was the only one who really had the time. After all was said and done, I was the one who essentially had no life. The New York guys, Adenola, Bilal Sunni-Ali, and “Cosmic” Charlie, all had families and other vocations. There had never been any commitment on their part to full-time pursuit of positions in the record business. They all loved to play music. They made as many concessions as they could to band rehearsals, making the gigs, and teaching us all what the rhythms meant and how they could be used to help us say things. Victor Brown lived and worked in Boston. Brian, Doc, Danny, and Bob Adams lived and maintained their lives in and around D.C. They were all intelligent, with degrees and other professional expertise where college degrees would not benefit you, but none of them had either the interest, the expertise, or the independent image separate from their contribution to the group to be recognized as a spokesperson for all of us. Especially to speak for me.
The Last Holiday Page 15