Still Grazing

by Hugh Masikela

  The summer of 1968 had started with a number-one record for me. “Grazing in the Grass” helped to catapult my name into international fame, but I was not equipped to handle success. The constant drugging, endless drinking, and pussy-chasing warped me. I became obsessed with pleasures of the flesh, which only led to lonely sleepless nights, mind-boggling immorality, dishonesty, broken hearts, and hung-over mornings.

  In 1965 I met Johnny Nash and his partner, Danny Sims, through singer-actor Adam Wade, who was a regular at my Village Gate performances. Johnny and Danny had a luxury apartment at Lincoln Towers on West End Avenue at 68th Street. It was always bubbling with beautiful women. I recruited quite a few scorchers from there over the years. Now that I was living in the penthouse, it was only a five-minute drive to Johnny and Danny’s flat.

  Johnny and Danny also owned a studio in Kingston, Jamaica, where they had a mansion in the Blue Mountains. One day I flew down to Jamaica with Danny and spent a glorious week at the Blue Mountains house, which was always full of stunning women and Rasta dudes who kept ganja pipes “full and fired up” during every waking hour. Johnny Nash was then working on his hits “Stir It Up” and “I Can See Clearly,” ushering in his reggae phase. Working closely with Johnny and Danny’s company was a young artist named Bob Marley, whose compositions they were publishing. On several occasions I played the trumpet on Marley’s tracks. During the very first Marley session, I was sitting with Johnny Nash’s co-producer, Reggie, who was from the Bronx, and Danny in the control booth, and I noticed that when Bob was singing at the recording microphone, he would do his fancy jump-up dance steps and often get out of range for the mike to pick up his voice. I finally said, “Bob, the mike don’t pick up the dancing, mon. Try to stand in one place.” Later, I asked Danny and Reggie why they hadn’t told Bob to stand in one place, and they told me that it had never entered their minds; besides, they hadn’t felt like disturbing an artist at work.

  Back at the house we never stopped smoking the ganja, which made me cough deliriously. It amazed me to watch Bob and the other Rastas take huge puffs out of the pipe. When they blew the smoke out, they would disappear behind the cloud that formed in the room. I just couldn’t get the knack of it. Anyway, we would get so high that we would be speechless and just sit there watching or listening to the rain. I didn’t see Bob Marley again until a few months before he passed away. He was sitting in his manager’s office in New York, looking weak and sad. We shook hands and said a heartbreaking hello.

  Back in Los Angeles, I was renting an apartment in the complex where Philemon Hou was living, at the bottom of Laurel Canyon. Mabusha was now living with Big Black and his wife, Ginger, and their four kids. UNI Records wanted me to record a new album to follow up Promise of a Future, so we went into the studio at the end of 1968 and recorded Masekela. Because of my drug bust, I had developed a very deep anger toward America’s collaboration with the South African government and their concerted methods to punish everyone who criticized their anticommunist and racist campaigns. The songs in Masekela all addressed their evil partnership and condemned it because I felt that the apartheid administration was painstakingly working with U.S. intelligence agencies to make my life a living hell. I laid the blame for all my troubles and madness at their doorstep. During a three-week, standing-room-only engagement at the Village Gate in the spring of 1968, the chief international public relations officer for the apartheid regime came backstage to greet me. He said, “Hugh, you are condemning us very unfairly on television and radio, and in print, and consequently turning many people against us. We want you to come home as our guest and live at the Carlton Hotel so that you can witness all the marvelous changes taking place at home.”

  I countered, “Why should I stay in a hotel and be your guest in my own country? My father has a beautiful home where I can sleep.”

  “Oh no, you will be surrounded by the fans, and this would be a security risk. Besides, you should enjoy the country like Percy Sledge, who is there as an honorary white and having the time of his life,” the white Afrikaner replied.

  “You have the nerve to come into my dressing room and ask me to visit my country as an ‘honorary white’ while you persecute, jail, banish, and murder my people in the name of white supremacy? You must think I am stupid. Get the fuck out of my dressing room. Get out!” I had Peter Davidson call security, who ushered him out of the club while he continued to explain, “You really don’t understand, Hugh. You must come and see for yourself.”

  In our recording, we paid tribute to Robert Sobukwe, the leader of the Pan-African Congress. He had made it very clear that his organization did not recognize the government of South Africa and had led the pass-burning demonstrations shortly after the Sharpeville massacre. Sobukwe was rotting on Robben Island’s prison, where he was incarcerated without trial. The song “Sobukwe” was a haunting instrumental very much in the style of John Coltrane and Miles Davis’s late 1950s stylings, inspired by the modal, dark melodies featured on their Favorite Things and Kind of Blue albums. “Mace and Grenades” lamented the fact that at the time, if you disagreed with the U.S. administration’s policies or those of the South African regime, you were in prison even if you were walking free in the streets, fighting in Vietnam, demonstrating for civil rights, or working for the establishment. The lyrics screamed, “I’m in jail in here. I’m in jail out there. I got the warden to protect me, feels like it’s safer to be in jail.” The song had me screaming the melody over the tom-toms, a recurring booming bass line, thumping piano, and blaring brass ensemble, reminiscent of Coltrane’s loudest passages on My Favorite Things. “Gold” was about the exploitation of African cheap labor to dig tons of the mineral for export when none of the wealth it brought reached the homes and families of the laborers. “Riot” was very much in the groove and sound of “Grazing in the Grass,” but not as joyful in color and sound. It was much darker and more ominous, with the bass line doubled on the acoustic piano. The dark texture, thumping piano chords, blaring horns, and scathing, anti-racist, antiwar lyrics gave the album a very radical and militant texture. It certainly did not endear me to the distributors, radio stations, and concert promoters, even though “Riot” went to the Top 20 on the Billboard charts.

  Russ Regan begged us to change the title of “Riot,” assuring us that if we agreed, the song would shoot through the roof. He felt it would do better than “Grazing in the Grass” because of the audience we had amassed. He might have been better off trying to suck water from a desert stone. I was not only adamantly opposed to changing the title, but I was high out of my mind all the time. I thought Russ was crazy even to suggest such a thing. Ray Lofaro went ballistic. “You motherfuckers are seriously bent on self-destructing. You have really fucking lost it.”

  Eric Clapton walked in the studio with Alan Pariser, who, as usual, was holding some prime coke. I was standing in front of the microphone, exhausted from lack of sleep and hung over from the previous night’s partying. My voice was hoarse from the all-night pot-smoking and coke-snorting. I was overdubbing my vocal solo for “Is There Anybody Out There Who Can Hear Me?” This was a lament about police brutality, racism, and unfair imprisonment of black males, the suffering of the Vietnamese, and the conscription of innocent young men into the army to fight and kill people who had done nothing to harm them. I was just barely managing to sing. During the playback Eric suddenly said to Stewart, “Shit, I wish I could get my voice to sound like that.” We all looked at him in amazement.

  Around this time, Al Abreu became seriously addicted to heroin. We suggested that he go to his parents’ home in Puerto Rico to clean up. We were getting ready to go out and play a series of year-end, holiday-season concerts, and Al wasn’t showing up for rehearsals. Worried, I called his brother in Boston. He told me Al had been driving with his girlfriend and another couple in his new car down in Puerto Rico, when he fell asleep at the wheel from an overdose of heroin. The car went over a cliff. All four of them died. We were shattered by the
news. This was the beginning of the disintegration of our stellar group. I had lost a dear friend, colleague, and music teacher. As a replacement, we brought Big Black back into the group, but it wasn’t quite the same.

  On New Year’s Eve in 1968, Big Black and his wife, Ginger, invited Stewart, Peter, and me over to his house for a party. I knocked on the door and when it opened, standing there was the most beautiful smiling face I had ever seen, surrounded by ginger hair. She was slightly taller than me, green-eyed and light-skinned, bubbling with a sweet, gentle charm. Jessie La Pierre and I liked each other immediately, and danced together for the rest of the night and into the early morning, unable to tear ourselves apart. Jessie was a friend of Ginger’s niece Terry. The two of them had graduated from high school in New York and come to check out career opportunities in Los Angeles. Jessie was from a Haitian immigrant family but, now about to turn twenty, was looking to establish an independent life away from her New York beginnings.

  She found work as a saleswoman at Robinson’s in the Beverly Hills Mall, and I was there every day when she finished work to drive her back home. I was now living with Peter Davidson at Stewart’s old Malibu beach house. Jessie was spending a lot of time with me, and not too long after we met, perhaps three months later, I persuaded her to resign from Robinson’s and move in with me at the beach house. When I went to the penthouse in New York, Jessie came with me. I began to establish a quieter lifestyle because of her—although I was still reckless on the concert tours.

  Over a year after my bust, my new lawyer, Larry Cohen, found a precedent to my case in another case he’d had dismissed a few years earlier, and was confident that he could repeat the feat. On the morning that we were due in court, Larry’s wife telephoned Stewart at 7:00 A.M. Weeping and distraught, she told him that Larry had died suddenly that morning from a heart attack. I was shocked, and getting suspicious that all the calamities my lawyers were experiencing were not a coincidence. Paranoia set in.

  My next lawyer, Harry Ransom, found the right judge and made a deal for me to plead guilty to a minor charge of misdemeanor possession of a non-prescribed Seconol barbiturate tablet. We rehearsed the entire proposed court scenario in the judge’s chambers. The key was that after the prosecution and defense had rested, I was to say, “I’m sorry, Your Honor, and I ask for forgiveness.” We went to lunch and came back to the court. All went according to plan until it came time for me to make my one-sentence statement. I completely blew it.

  Having just smoked some strong ganja and snorted a little coke, I fell into a state of amnesia after returning from a great lunch of seafood on the Santa Monica Pier with Jessie and Stewart. I had become infuriated over the prosecutor’s opening remarks, and had totally forgotten the earlier agreement we had reached in the judge’s chambers.

  “Your Honor,” I said, “this unfair trial has caused me to lose many engagements. It has cost me a very large amount of money in legal fees and wasted a lot of my time.” The judge’s face had turned scarlet red. Harry Ransom ran over to me and put his one hand over my mouth while the judge screamed at me, “You ungrateful little slob. I sentence you to two years’ probation. Court dismissed.” He stormed out of the courtroom in furious disbelief while Ransom attempted to explain what he thought I was trying to say.

  Jessie and Stewart were looking at me in openmouthed disbelief. “What happened here, man?” Stewart asked.

  I answered, “I just don’t know, man. I felt so angry about all this shit, I just couldn’t get myself to apologize.”

  We had paid Harry a hefty amount in advance. He walked away dazed.

  I spent the next two years signing weekly letters for my probation officer, a Mexican-American office clerk who was also a trumpet player. I could not leave the state of California without his written permission. However, he was very lenient with me and let me send the letters to him from wherever I was. Still, it was a very unpleasant two years during which I was not allowed to leave America.

  Without Al Albreu, the group just wasn’t the same anymore. After a concert in Miami, Big Black had a major showdown with me over my drugging and drinking. He cussed out Stewart and me at the top of his voice and threatened us with physical violence, then quit on the spot. The other band members, drummer Chuck Carter, bassist Henry Franklin, and pianist Billy Henderson, had also come to the end of their tether with our madness. The Miami date was the last engagement with that wonderful band. Though we were constantly working, my funds ran low again because of the legal fees I had amassed over the previous two years. Stewart’s Malibu house went up for sale, and we all had to move out. Peter Davidson soon left for South Africa because his father was very ill.

  Jessie and I moved into a large house at the top of Coldwater Canyon situated inside a large cul-de-sac where Gloria Foster and her husband, Clarence Williams III, were our neighbors. I didn’t know the couple; I’d only seen them on film and television. Gloria was very sweet and neighborly, but Clarence was very distant and aloof. He hardly ever spoke to us except for the occasional nod. Many conservative artists kept me at arm’s length after my drug bust. We fetched Mabusha from Big Black’s to come and live with us.

  Not long after we moved in, I received a letter from my sister Barbara, who was back living in Zambia. She had been in a car accident, and was traumatized by the crash. My immigration lawyer, Albert Geduldig, helped me obtain a visitor’s visa for her, and until she finally came to live with us a month later, I was terribly worried about my sister’s well-being and safety. We were relieved when she landed in Los Angeles. Except for a small scar on her forehead, she was her usual self. Nothing else was wrong with her.

  Since my arrival in Los Angeles, Wayne Henderson and Wilton Felder of the Jazz Crusaders had played on quite a few of Chisa Records studio sessions, and I came to be dear friends with Wayne. They later introduced us to pianist Joe Sample, another Crusader. We persuaded the three of them to reunite and begin recording for Chisa Records. They contacted their drummer, Stix Hooper, who was winding down his tour with George Shearing. When Stix came back to Los Angeles, the four of them signed a deal with Chisa and went straight into the studio to record their first album as simply the Crusaders, without the “Jazz.”

  Running short of money, we went to UNI Records to demand our royalties. Russ Regan gave us a story about how they needed to show end-of-the-year profits as a corporation, and asked if we could give them another three months, at which time all our money would be paid to us. Instead of remaining calm, we lost our cool. High out of our minds, we demanded to be paid on the spot or given a release. It was not a pleasant scene. Ned Tannen, who had introduced Stewart and me to Joe Glaser at ABC, and a number of the company’s top executives were present. In hindsight, they had nothing to lose. We were no longer any use to them. We had turned into arrogant, radical alcoholics and drug addicts. Russ looked at me with disgust. “You ungrateful little shit. I worked so hard to get you where you are today. I’ve been your booster, motherfucker, and you thank me like this.”

  “Fuck you, Russ,” I shouted back. “We boosted you. We made UNI Records. This fucking building is here because of us. You had no fucking record company before you had us. Give us our fucking release now.”

  This screaming opera went on for a while and then, to our shock, the company gave us our release. We walked out of the Universal Building feeling victorious, oblivious of the reality that we had just given away everything. In the end, all our lawyer could get for us was a release without any money. Suddenly we were not living so high on the hog anymore.

  Barbara’s arrival came at a time when my star was on the decline, and I was slowly mutating into an ugly little asshole. My group had finally disintegrated and I was playing all of my concert bookings with my old friend Larry Willis on piano, bassist John Williams, and drummer Al Foster. Life was getting progressively grimmer. Chisa had managed to get a distribution agreement with Motown Records. We had just completed an album by the Crusaders and another one with Letta Mbulu. I
was also in the studio, completing an album titled Reconstruction. We went down to San Francisco for Motown’s tenth-anniversary celebration. The Motown artists were all present, including their sensational new group, the Jackson Five. The Crusaders, Letta, and I, along with the Jacksons, the Four Tops, and Gladys Knight and the Pips, performed at the gala dinner. Then one day I got a call from Caiphus Semenya that Jonas had come to Los Angeles and was staying with him. The three of us formed a group called The Union of South Africa. We went right into an intense rehearsal schedule every day at Caiphus’s apartment in the Pico neighborhood.

  Barbara found it difficult to stay with us because of my behavior. She was fond of Jessie, and it saddened her to see how I was mistreating her. She went to stay with Philemon in his Laurel Canyon apartment. Not long after Barbara moved out, Jessie, Mabusha, and I moved from Coldwater Canyon because we couldn’t afford the high rent anymore. We found a house in the San Fernando Valley, around the corner from the Universal Studios offices where I had so brilliantly ruined my career at the screamfest with Russ Regan. Our coffers at Chisa had dwindled down to a trickle. This led to Stewart turning a section of our Sunset Strip office into an apartment for him to live in, since he couldn’t afford the rent on his Malibu apartment. Wayne Henderson found a small office building out on Western Avenue near Compton, where we held all of our rehearsals and pre-production sessions.

  One day I was visiting hair salon owners Richard Alcala and Carrie White at their Benedict Canyon hilltop house, when a musician from the South, Jimmy Ford, told us he was working in the studio with Sly Stone at Wally Heider’s on Cahuenga Boulevard, the place where we were making our records. I told Jimmy how much I would love to see Sly. Stewart and I had met him in Oakland back in 1967 when he was a DJ on a Sunday-morning program on the town’s largest black music radio station. At the time we were promoting Chisa’s first album, The Emancipation of Hugh Masekela, and Sly had spent his entire show playing music from my album and talking to us on air. After the interview, Sly took us to lunch with the station owner. We had a great day with him, and he told us about his group, which was just then getting off the ground. We promised to keep in touch. Little did we know that Sly would become an icon. I drove Jimmy Ford to the studio where Sly was overdubbing a bass part for a song called “Family Affair.” He had a saucer full of cocaine on top of the console. It began to rain, and every time I tried to leave, Sly would insist I stay. We were snorting coke with Jimmy and a group of Sly’s friends for hours while he kept playing the bass over the same eight bars of music on the track between large snorts of blow. Just before midnight, Stewart burst into the studio, high out of his mind. He asked to borrow the keys to my green Jaguar so he could go up to Laurel Canyon to pick up this girlfriend. He promised to bring my car back. Stewart never came back. I kept calling Jessie to tell her I was with Sly and would be home as soon as Stewart returned with my car. We snorted ourselves silly. Around ten o’clock the next morning, one of Sly’s friends dropped me off at my place. After coming down from the cocaine, I finally went to sleep. Still no word from Stewart. He called the next morning and asked me to meet him at the garage across from the Whisky à Go Go. My Jaguar was parked on the far side of the workshop, festooned with branches and hedges and covered with mud. Most of the windows were broken and its once-beautiful exterior was peppered with dents. I spent over ten thousand dollars remodeling the car.