I rented a piano and we started rehearsing in earnest at the loft in preparation for an album of songs that would include “Loving You” by Stevie Wonder, the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” Paul Simon’s “Sounds of Silence,” and Tom Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual.” I walked into Tom Wilson’s office for an appointment to finalize our recording schedule and found Paul Simon playing selections from his new album for Tom—this was the first time I met Paul. He kept playing “Scarborough Fair,” which struck me as a brilliant piece of work.
My band went into the studio for one week, in which time we finished the whole album, including the overdubs, the liner notes, and the cover shot, which was done early one Sunday morning in the middle of Broadway and 44th Street by Chuck Stewart, the famous jazz photographer.
Ooga Booga was climbing the charts, but I still hadn’t received any royalties, nor had Oo-Bwana Productions generated any income yet from the acts we produced. Peter and I began experiencing some serious cash-flow problems. He was receiving a small allowance from his parents, and the little money I had saved from gigs before I broke up with Miriam was about gone. New York was an expensive place to live, then as now. Dizzy Gillespie called one day and invited me to come and catch his performance at the Metropole Café on Broadway. “Bring your horn,” he said. I sat in with him during one set. When I was leaving, he gave me a big hug and slipped an envelope into my jacket pocket. He said, “I know it’s kinda uphill these days. Here’s something from Lorraine and me to tide you over. Oooweee! Be strong and take care.” On the subway I opened the envelope. It was a check for a thousand dollars. My ancestors had intervened once again, and through the kindness of Dizzy and Lorraine, Peter and I were able to pay a few bills and buy some groceries. A few days later, MGM advanced me five thousand dollars. Now Peter and I bought a few threads and started to party.
With Ooga Booga doing well out West, I became concerned that months had gone by and there was no radio airplay on the East Coast. Tom Wilson advised me to go to Mort Nasatir, who was the president of MGM, and pressure him to get the company’s sales department to promote my album. I didn’t want another “fuck you” confrontation like I’d had with Mercury Records. I was cool and relaxed, but Nasatir was brittle and unpleasant. He said, “Your music will never sell, Hugh. It’s pointless wasting funds to push it. People just cannot get with your type of music.” I left his office pissed off and determined that if MGM wouldn’t push the product, I would do it myself. I had connections, so I had Tom arrange to send me a box of twenty-five albums that I would take to radio stations and try to hustle some airplay.
The next morning I stopped by the apartment of Richie Druz, a drummer I knew who also dealt a little smoke on the side. I gave him an album and picked up an ounce of grass. He and his roommate were in a strange, giggly, bubbly mood, imitating everything I said. Richie pulled out a little vial and asked me to sniff the white powder off a miniature spoon. It was cocaine. I had seen the stuff before, but hadn’t tried it.
Richie gently pushed the spoon up to my nose. I asked, “Richie, is this shit gonna fuck with me like those junkies I always see nodding on the sidewalks of Harlem?” Richie and his roommate started laughing at me. “Come on, Hughie,” Richie said, “just take a little bitty in each nostril. You’ll love it.” I sniffed the coke up each of my nostrils, paid for my grass, and left them giggling. The cocaine hit me when I came out of the elevator into the street. Boom! Suddenly I was all energy and enthusiasm, totally invincible. It was a sunny spring afternoon in late April of 1966, and I was ready to take on the world.
I went to the nearest telephone booth, called Del Shields, the managing director of radio station WLIB, which was in Harlem, not far from the Apollo Theater, and asked if I could bring my album by. “Come on up, Hughie,” he said. I did on-air interviews with Shields and later on with Billy Taylor on his own show. That evening I was with Eddie O’Jay at WWRL in Queens. After that, I went back to the loft and collected more albums. I laid records on whoever I thought could help me get the word out about my music. With the cocaine still in my system, I thought I could shake up the whole world. I came home around midnight totally exhausted, but exhilarated from the blow. I knew I was gonna love the stuff.
Tom Wilson was disappointed with Mort Nasatir’s reaction to the album. He figured that the best plan of action should be focused on Los Angeles, where Ooga-Booga was having an impact. He knew an agent at the William Morris Agency who was booking most of the Motown groups out there. His name was Wally Amos, and he later became “famous” for his “Famous Amos” cookies. Wally was well connected with promoters and club owners. The rhythm-and-blues and jazz circuits were his specialty. Two weeks later Wally came back with great news. We would be playing the first Watts Jazz Festival in Compton, outside Los Angeles, near where the 1965 riots had taken place. The idea behind the jazz festival was to help cool tempers and spread goodwill throughout the community.
We arrived in Los Angeles on August 4, rehearsed for a few days, and on Saturday, August 9, 1966, we went to play at Jordan High School in Compton. More than ten thousand people showed up for the last night of the festival. We played most of the songs from Ooga Booga and Hugh Masekela’s Next Album. The crowd loved us so much they wouldn’t let us off the stage. They sang along on most of our songs. No group had ever played in South Central Los Angeles that could bring together ordinary people of all colors from every part of the county to a neighborhood that had just endured a massive civil disturbance. After the show, I called Peter Davidson and told him I doubted we would be returning to New York anytime soon. I also called Stewart Levine and told him that if Oo-Bwana was ever going to take off, it would most likely happen in Los Angeles, where the people had taken a serious liking to our music. New York was still not biting, and it was obvious we would have to conquer it from the West. Once the East Coast realized it was being upstaged by California, a state it considered musically inferior, the radio people back in New York would want to catch up. I was not prepared to wait for slick New York to let me in when we had already garnered such a large following in Los Angeles. Radio station KBCA played Ooga Booga and Next Album around the clock. Three of their top DJs—Tommy Bee, Les Carter, and Rick Holmes—had been the masters of ceremonies during the Watts Jazz Festival. Wolfman Jack of XERB radio, which had the largest listenership on the West Coast, was another DJ playing the albums on regular rotation.
Our success at the festival got us an engagement at the Living Room, a club on Sunset Strip, a hangout spot for hustlers, stars from the film world, and rock-’n’-roll royalty. Before we left for Los Angeles, Dizzy had given me some fatherly advice about the seedy side of club life in La-La Land. He had warned me about the waitresses. “Hughie, if they gonna give you some pussy, you’d better figure they been fuckin’ cats from other bands, too. When Miles first went to L.A., he was about your age. I gave him the same advice. He didn’t listen and ended up with a mean case of de claps. Ooowee.” Of course I forgot all about Dizzy’s advice. When we opened at the Living Room, I spotted a stunning waitress. She not only found some grass for me, but one thing led to another, and by the next afternoon I had a screaming dose of de claps. During the Living Room gig, our drummer Henry Jenkins told me that he needed to get back to New York, because he just could not get with L.A., it was too strange for him. Trombonist Wayne Henderson of the Jazz Crusaders introduced us to Chuck Carter, who replaced Henry.
Dave Nelson, our local agent and Wally’s man on the West Coast, booked us into the Montecito Hotel, where many of the “blaxploitation” movie actors of that era like Yaphet Kotto, Louis Gossett Jr., Max Julien, and Raymond St. Jacques stayed. I had already met Lou through my sister Barbara in New York, when she was roped in by director Dore Schary to be his language coach when he played a leading role in the Broadway play The Zulu and the Zayda. Lou introduced me to his fellow actor friends when we were sitting around the hotel’s swimming pool. They claimed to have been regulars at my shows at the Village Gate and
seemed genuinely excited that I was breaking out in Los Angeles. I became longtime friends with many of them. Charlie Weaver, who was Bill Cosby’s stand-in on the set of the I Spy series, took me to the set early one morning because he and St. Jacques felt I had acting potential. Bill Cosby remembered me from his Basin Street engagement with Miriam Makeba, and promised to get in touch with me. I knew then that I could never be in films because the working hours started too early, around the time when I was coming home to sleep, usually pumped up from booze, blow, and pot.
Consistent radio play of our records made it easy for Nelson to book us at more concerts and clubs, while back in New York, Stewart Levine was making plans to move Oo-Bwana to the West Coast. Before I left New York, Tom Elius, a top agent and a friend of Stewart’s, had hooked Stewart and me up with Henri Gene, a friendly, very well-connected old wheeler-dealer and real estate mogul. Gene and Frank Sinatra were on a first-name basis, and Gene was very tight with top people at Sinatra’s Reprise Records on the West Coast. Gene called Mo Ostin, the president of Reprise, and recommended they sign our production company. Gene gave Stewart a few thousand dollars to come to L.A., and by early fall, Stewart arrived in Los Angeles. A few days later he went to meet Jimmy Bowen, the artist and repertoire boss at Reprise. Stewart had copies of our Oo-Bwana recordings that he wanted them to sample, but Bowen was not interested in listening to our music—he just wanted to sign us on because Henri Gene had said he should. Stewart stormed out of the meeting, offended. There was no deal.
Stewart had previously made some major contacts in Los Angeles, one of whom introduced us to Larry Spector, a very successful young businessman who at that time was managing the affairs of the Byrds, Dennis Hopper, and Peter Fonda. Larry advised us to start our own independent record company. He registered Chisa Records, the label through which we would be releasing our recordings. He then introduced us to Danny Davis, who was running Phil Spector’s record company. For a fee of five hundred bucks, Davis promised to teach us the ropes of the record industry.
Dave Nelson booked us into the Tropicana, a very popular club in Compton that my band would pack to the rafters every weekend for many months to come. It was from here that we established our California base. Musicians and celebrities like David Crosby and Peter Fonda came out to see us. We slowly became the toast of Hollywood. Through Crosby we met Alan Pariser, who dealt the best grass in California. He was supplier to all the smoking stars of the movies and rock ’n’ roll, many of whom we met at his house in the Hollywood hills. Of course, Alan became a very close friend of ours. Pariser was the heir of the Solo Cup fortune in Detroit. He had moved to Los Angeles out of his love for the music business. Realizing that pot lovers in the industry did not have a decent source of good grass, he made it his business to fill this void. Pariser’s “ice pack” grass was amazing, specially grown in Mexico under the supervision of agronomists that he brought in to train the Mexican farmers he was in business with. This distinction endeared him to all of Hollywood’s elite smoking community.
All our new acquaintances became very crucial in popularizing Chisa in the Los Angeles entertainment community. David Nelson booked us into the Both And, a jazz club in San Francisco, where we quickly established ourselves as strongly as we had in Los Angeles. One night Big Black, the percussionist who played at the African Room behind Barbara Alston’s dance troupe, walked into the club with his congas, set up on stage, and started playing with us. From then on, he became the fifth member of the band. Our group stayed in a couple of houseboats across the Golden Gate Bridge at the heliport in Mill Valley. In this neighborhood were a couple of warehouses where Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead rehearsed. Through David Crosby, we became friends with them, as well as Jefferson Airplane and other Bay Area groups. They all regularly dropped in at the Both And.
I was really fascinated by San Francisco. The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood was teeming with young and old druggies walking the streets like mummies, flying high on acid, along with an assortment of eccentrics, drifters, and crazies. It was no different than the mayhem in Sodom and Gomorrah. I was intrigued.
Sausalito, where we stayed, was the very beehive of the psychedelic philosophical movement, and marathon debates on “the meaning of life” took place on the sidewalks, in restaurants, on college campuses, and in the homes of all the wealthy people who had come there to “drop out.” The No Name Bar on the main street was where I learned to throw down multiple Irish whiskies, philosophizing while tripping on acid with total strangers who were transfixed by anyone who had mastered the art of verbal diarrhea. It was a time when panties were seldom worn, bras were out, and high women wondered scornfully why men talked so much instead of fucking the hell out of them.
Just about everybody around us was getting high. Charlie Smalls, John Cartwright, our new drummer Chuck Carter, Stewart Levine, Big Black, and I were already seasoned admirers of good marijuana. Between gigs and on days when we were not performing, I would pop an LSD tab with my friend Luigi Alfano and go sit atop Mount Tamalpais, up above the redwood forests of Marin County, and trip on being American Indians or medieval sages. Giggling uncontrollably, we traveled through all kinds of hallucinogenic euphoria and out-of-body turbulence; we moved the mountains and juggled the forests, the ground rumbled under our feet, and the plants spoke to us in tongues.
When you came down from an LSD trip, you were so exhausted that you needed a few days to return to earth. Like the Dead Heads, however, some of us became so accustomed to the drug that we didn’t need the rest anymore. We could trip every day. I was forgetting New York and Miriam, and even home.
Letta, Caiphus, Philemon Hou, Ernest Mohlomi, John Sithebe, and Mamsie Gwangwa, Jonas’s new wife, arrived in Los Angeles, and it wasn’t long before Larry Spector organized the launch of Chisa Records at the sprawling estate of one of his movie-mogul associates. It was a star-studded night, with Henry Fonda, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jimmy Stewart, Hoagy Carmichael, and many other luminaries in attendance. Luigi Alfano, my tripping partner from Sausalito, arrived dressed in regal Pueblo finery. That night our African sounds and rhythms had their coming-out party, and we would soon become an integral part of the fabric of the tradionally lily-white Hollywood scene.
In 1966 Los Angeles was by far one of the most affordable big cities to live in. Everyone seemed laid back, with a have-a-nice-day disposition. Everyone, that was, except Stewart and me. We were two cocky, rambunctious, fearless motherfuckers who drank like pirates and smoked pot like Rastas. We stuck out like sore thumbs in Ronald Reagan country, and began to attract the attention of the Los Angeles Police Department. Fonda, Crosby, Hopper, and Alan Pariser, the godfather of gourmet mind-altering substances, liked Stewart and me for our maverick spirits and the laughter we brought to their otherwise tight-assed lives. But we rubbed many people the wrong way, especially the police, who delighted in pulling us over for bullshit reasons. We came to be known to the entire Los Angeles system, from the highway patrol and the sheriff’s department to the notorious LAPD. Larry Spector was always bailing us out of jail.
Through David Crosby, who was a dedicated antiwar organizer, we got to play many free “Stop the War” concerts in Los Angeles and San Francisco parks and arenas, alongside Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Pacific Gas and Electric, Jim Morrison and the Doors, Steven Stills and Buffalo Springfield, Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, Eric Burdon and the Animals, the Hollies, the Byrds, and many other “love groups” around California. We were part of the sound and the fury of the Flower Power era.
Susie, Stewart, and I rented a house up on Queens Road off the Sunset Strip, where I slept in a back cottage. We were now getting so seriously high, the only time that we were straight was when we were sleeping. One night I got so bombed, I fell asleep with a cigarette in my hand. When I awoke, everything around me was on fire except for the spot where I was sleeping. I jumped up in a drunken stupor and ran back and forth from
the bathroom several times with a glass of water, trying to put out the flames. Realizing the futility of my drunken efforts, I rushed out of the cottage stark naked to awaken Stewart and Susie. They came out with large buckets of water to help extinguish the flames. It took us the better part of thirty minutes to contain the fire. We had to repaint and refurbish the cottage. With so much pot in the main house, we dared not call the fire department. We were having so much fun, we didn’t even notice our stupidity.
Wally Amos landed my group a week-long engagement with Bill Cosby at the West Covina Theatre-in-the-Round. We were the opening act. One Saturday I arrived ten minutes late for our backstage call, which is traditionally thirty minutes before showtime. Our old Thunderbird had a flat and the spare tire had a puncture, too. Roy Silver, Cosby’s manager at that time, was sympathetic, but Cosby decided we would not play that afternoon. I overheard Cosby telling Silver, “He’s not playing, and that’s final. Let this be a lesson for Hugh Masekela. This is a business. You cannot succeed if you don’t have discipline. He won’t be playing the matinee. And that’s final.” Cosby let us play the evening show, but canceled us for the rest of his tour. It was a shattering blow that I never forgot. Stewart and I felt that Cosby was overly conservative, acting like a square white boy, and being unfair. I felt bad about losing the opportunity of getting exposure to the enormous following he commanded, and I was certain he never wanted to see me again. To my surprise, a few years later Cosby called and asked me to join him and Sarah Vaughan at Redd Foxx’s Club. He was trying to help keep Redd’s club from closing. We played there for a week, during which time neither of us mentioned the past incident. Redd kept us in stitches the entire time. He was so appreciative of our efforts to help save his club that he always talked about it when we were together in the company of his friends. I became very good friends with Redd till he passed away.
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