“Wow, what happened, Stewie?” I asked in disbelief.
Stewart explained in detail how he went looking for his friend’s house at the top of Lookout Mountain Drive, but couldn’t find it in the pouring rain. He tried to make a U-turn and lost control of the car. He jumped out of the rear door and it went spinning over a cliff. The car slid down the muddy hillside and ended up in a swimming pool. The homeowners wanted forty thousand dollars in damages to their pool and hillside garden. We settled the mess out of court for about half that amount. My uninsured Jaguar was destroyed. I was upset, but never had a confrontation with Stewart about it because throughout the years we had both put each other in badly compromising situations on several occasions. Our friendship was strong enough to survive these outrageous incidents. We always ended up shaking our heads in disbelief, grateful to have escaped another life-threatening episode and finding humor in our madness. We were both quite insane.
Shortly afterwards, Caiphus, Jonas, and I went into the studio to record our self-titled debut album, Union of South Africa. Wayne Henderson, the Crusaders’ trombonist, played drums; the group’s saxophonist, Wilton Felder, played bass; and pianist Joe Sample and guitarist Arthur Adams rounded out the group. After the recording, Wayne introduced us to what would become our road rhythm section: Lannie Johnson, a gifted pianist, bassist Kent Brinkley, and a seventeen-year-old drummer, Ndugu Chancler, who was later replaced by Thabo because his mother felt he was too young to go on the road with us. Union of South Africa was completed over two weeks, mainly because we had rehearsed so intensely for at least three weeks. The results were a masterpiece. Caiphus wrote most of the songs for the album. The outstanding selections were “Johannesburg Hi Lite Jive,” an adaptation of Christopher Sonxaka’s hit mbhaqanga instrumental we picked up off a tape a friend had brought us from home; “Hush,” an old Negro spiritual, which had been popularized by Miriam Makeba and the Manhattan Brothers back home; “Caution,” a brisk instrumental in six-eight time, which Caiphus based on traditional Pedi and Tsonga rhythms and harmonies from northern South Africa. When we were rehearsing this song, its complexity drove pianist Joe Sample to wonder where the first beat of the song was. “If someone can just tell me where one falls in this song, I’m gonna play the fucking shit out of it.”
The songs were based on South African urban or traditional jazz adaptations, with us playing and singing complex three-part harmonies. Jonas and I played all the solos, and Caiphus played alto saxophone and sang the vocal improvisations. Jonas’s mbhaqanga “Shebeen,” a traditional Xhosa folksong groove, was the highlight of the album.
Not long after the album’s release, tour bookings started pouring in. We were playing one night at the Whisky à Go Go, where author-poet Quincy Troupe came to see the Union. He was knocked out by our performance. Troupe, an English literature professor at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, was also an outstanding member of the Watts Writers’ Workshop. At a meeting he had requested with us, he told us about how he and some other members of the workshop were planning to stage a free festival for the Watts community. He asked if we would be willing to headline such an event. We agreed, and the hugely successful festival, which also featured the Crusaders and Letta Mbulu (both of whom offered their free participation after we asked them), marked the beginning of a lifetime friendship for Quincy and me. Around this time, Troupe and my sister Barbara became good friends, and he was instrumental in helping her continue her studies at his campus.
After the Zambian incident, Barbara still needed time to be comfortable on her own, and establish a foothold in Ohio before taking on the responsibility of parenting. Mabusha could have stayed on with us until she was ready, but I was only thinking of myself. The day Barbara and Mabusha left for Athens was a tearful one for Jessie, my sister, and my nephew, a day that conjures deep guilt and remorse in me. I was at my ugliest then.
I didn’t know that Jessie was pregnant. She had been afraid to tell me, and it was only when she turned down snorting some cocaine with me that she told me the reason why. Jessie could not stand marijuana and refused to drink, but under pressure from me she had finally succumbed to doing a little coke with me from time to time. This was another one of my ugly creations. Ironically, when I heard the news, I got very excited about being a father. Jessie and I drew even closer, and for a while I began spending more time at home. Our house in San Fernando Valley was inside a large square with a sports ground and running track. I began an intensive exercise regime coupled with a daily barefoot run of three miles around the track. Although I became fit, I continued my romance with cocaine and booze, albeit to a much lesser extent. Our bliss was short-lived because a few weeks prior to Jessie’s delivery date, she had a miscarriage. We cried all the way home from the hospital, and for the next few days we occasionally broke down in tears. It seemed as if life had become just one big downhill slalom ever since Jessie and I met. It wasn’t long after this misfortune that I suggested to Jessie that we should break up and that she should return home to her mother in New York.
But Jessie stayed, found a job as a store manager at Carrie and Richard’s hair salon, and moved into an apartment in Beverly Hills. By this time I had moved into a house at the top of Lookout Mountain in Laurel Canyon with Stewart. It turned out that at the time Jessie and I parted, she was already pregnant again, which was one of the reasons that she did not return to her mother in New York. She still wanted to be near me, especially now that she was carrying our child—she was also not that keen to go back home. I moved in with her and restored an old bicycle I found in the storeroom. I was riding it every day to Caiphus’s house for our Union rehearsals. Everyone who knew me and saw me riding thought I was on a health kick. I was riding my bike down Sunset Boulevard one day when I ran into Charlie Weaver, Bill Cosby’s perennial stand-in. He was driving with actor Rupert Crosse, who was now married to Chris Calloway. We pulled into a parking lot and smoked some grass and had some laughs. Rupert died not too long after that from cancer. Weaver was impressed with my fitness. “Shit, Hugh, I’m really knocked out that you’re getting your health together.” I quickly changed the subject because I didn’t want him to discover that my bike was my only means of transportation at that time.
Our Lincoln Center show with the Crusaders was sold out. The Union had become a hard-hitting, tight-knit group. The reviews were great. I thought we were going places. But financially the situation was not good. Still, the Union’s momentum continued, and we played a series of gigs, including the first “Operation Push” festival that Jesse Jackson put on in Chicago, where we played with Quincy Jones, Cannonball Adderley, Nancy Wilson, and Shaft composer Isaac Hayes, who was riding high on his Black Moses success. That same night Stewart called me from Los Angeles to say that he had taken Jessie to the hospital. We were the parents of a boy, whom we named Selema.
After the Lincoln Center concert, the band worked many gigs using New York as our main base. At the time, Amiri Baraka was the “Imamu” of a spiritual black organization headquartered in Newark, New Jersey. This group set up a series of concerts for us around the East Coast, headlined by Miriam Makeba. A day before we were to go on this tour, Jonas was hit by a car while crossing the street in the Bronx. He was very badly injured and wouldn’t be able to perform for several months. We went on the tour without him, but the group wasn’t nearly as tight. After playing the concerts with Miriam in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh, we were obliged to break up the Union and return to Los Angeles. Playing opposite Miriam’s group was especially difficult because they were very well rehearsed and had been together for years. Without Jonas, our efforts paled against her sizzling performances. Baraka’s organization was especially disappointed in our lame sets, because the organization’s primary focus was to bring African cultural education to the African-American communities they were working with.
When we returned to Los Angeles, we terminated our Motown agreement and signed our Chisa music operation to Bob Krasnow�
�s Blue Thumb Records. Krasnow loved the Union of South Africa format and wanted a new album right away, so he suggested that we fill the space left vacant by Jonas with other South African musicians. We went to London so we could record with famed South African saxophonist Dudu Pukwana. We brought in Larry Willis from New York, Makhaya Ntshoko from Zurich, and bassist Eddie Gomez, who was playing with Bill Evans at Ronnie Scott’s in Soho. Based mostly on instrumental compositions by Caiphus, the double album, Home Is Where the Music Is, had such outstanding performances by my fellow musicians that to this day it is in very heavy demand by jazz lovers all over Africa, Europe, and America. But at the time of its release, it didn’t sell much. My career had come to a dead end.
When Jonas came out of the hospital, we tried to go back to the studio to record a new Union of South Africa album, but the harmony among us was gone. We couldn’t even get one song done. That was the end of the Union of South Africa.
I was now drifting around without a band and hanging out at jazz clubs in the hope of finding the right musicians to play with. One night I dropped into Shelley’s Manhole, where my old friend trumpeter Freddie Hubbard was holding fort. In the audience were a few of my acquaintances from New York. Among them was the great jazz singer Abbey Lincoln, whom I had first met when she and her ex-husband Max Roach hosted a party for Maya Angelou and her husband Vusi Make. Abbey was now single, and she gave me her business card, held my hand tenderly, and insisted that I should give her a call. She invited me to dinner, and thus began a torrid relationship. She and I spoke a lot about Africa. Like a lot of African-Americans of her generation at that time, she was looking for Africa and passionate about finding it.
I tried to form a group with Ronnie Laws on saxophone and the old rhythm section from the Union. We played some dates around the West Coast, but I was just too out of it, hanging a lot with Sly and some of my many other friends who were also cocaine fiends. Sometimes Sly would fall by the way after midnight in his luxury tour bus. He would be with a bevy of coked-out young ladies and a couple of male friends. We would stay up sometimes until the following afternoon. Sly had a small violin case in which he carried a variety of prime blow, along with designer barbiturates to help him come down if he got too wired. Many times he would bring his guitar and sing some of his new compositions for us. He would sing parts of songs, two times here, three times there, a bridge here and an introduction there, a hook here, a chorus there, laughing and joking in between. Sly was a very funny man who improvised funny lines off anything most people around him said. He kept his life extremely private, with a very small circle of friends, mostly people he was raised with. He was crazy about his family, his sister Rose and brother Freddie who played in his group, his mother, and the other members of his band. Outside of these, his whole life was centered around his music, regular horseback riding, and walking his killer pit bull around his estate.
All the time that I used to hang out with Sly either at the studio, his house, or mine, I never saw him around other musicians. Although I was also high most of the time, it nevertheless saddened me how many great opportunities Sly missed because he wouldn’t show up for performances or appointments on account of the blow. Just before I was to leave for Africa, I tried to encourage him to come with me so he could take a break. He wanted to, but could never get his passport and visa requirements together. We slowly drifted away from each other. After I left for Africa that first time, I never saw Sly again until we were on Broadway with Sarafina in 1989 and the great musician and producer James Mtume came backstage to tell me Sly was staying with him. They were working on an album, and I went out to visit them at Mtume’s studio in Orange, New Jersey, just outside Newark. Sly was happy to see me, but he couldn’t finish a sentence or a music phrase. The nonstop partying had taken its toll. It saddened and terrified me.
Jessie had had enough by this time. I had bankrupted the little remaining compassion and friendship she had invested in me. Jessie found solace in the doctrines of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. She joined the church and soon moved out with Selema to go and stay with some fellow Witnesses.
Barbara had graduated from Ohio University and was now an English literature professor at Staten Island University, living in an apartment near the campus. After hearing about the turn my life had taken, she brought Jessie out to live with her. Shortly after that, Barbara transferred to a post at Rutgers University in nearby New Brunswick. She moved to Manhattan and left Selema and Jessie with the Staten Island apartment. This was the closing chapter for the hectic and unpredictable life I had subjected Jessie to. Without any acrimonious feelings for me, she began to carve out a spiritual path for herself and build a new life. She soon met Manny Gonzalez, a fellow Witness. They were married, and Manny forged a terrific bond with Selema, encouraging him to take up gymnastics and pointing him toward an athletic life in which he would subsequently become very successful. Manny is a gentle, loving soul. Selema and Jessie were truly blessed the day he came into their lives. At this time, even though I was happy that Jessie had chosen a new life, I felt like a total failure. I had destroyed my life with drugs and alcohol, and could not get a gig or a band together. No recording company was interested in me, and I had gone full circle from major success to the point where my life was worse than when I had left South Africa eleven years earlier to seek a music education and a professional career in America. I had lost a treasure, an irreplaceable companion, and a wonderful human being. Jessie’s mother, the sweetest soul ever to take a breath, had asked me many times, “Hugh, why don’t you marry Jessie? She loves you so much.” My answer was always, “I don’t think I’m ready for marriage, Mama.” It was true. I was such a drug and alcoholic addict. Selfish, immoral, reckless, and insensitive, I would have made a terrible husband. I felt like shit.
Back in New York, we had long since forfeited the beautiful penthouse on Riverside Drive because of our financial disasters with Chisa and the crazy life Stewart and I had brought into our business dealings. Ray Lofaro, on the other hand, was doing extremely well with his advertising film company. Ray, whose ex-wife and their three children had a home in Woodstock, always rented a house there from the end of the summer until the beginning of the following year. Ray had become a big brother to me and Stewart, always trying his best to lead us gently back to the way we were before we became such psychopaths. Sometimes we would join him in the rental house and split the expenses. We spent the fall and winter of 1971 as Ray Lofaro’s housemates in a house that was a six-bedroom architectural masterpiece.
Over the years, our favorite Woodstock hangout was the Joyous Lake, a restaurant-nightclub that was owned by Dr. Ron Merians and his beautiful wife, Valma, fun-loving friends of Ray’s whose joint was always packed with artists, musicians, young New York business sharks, filmmakers, Big Apple beauties, famous beatniks, bikers, and bohemians. There was also a hot group playing there over the weekends, led by Paul Butterfield, the harmonica virtuoso and blues shouter from Chicago, or other groups from the blues, folk, and rock worlds. The Joyous Lake was a good place to meet beautiful, independent young women who were almost always very keen to round off the night at our place before heading home. One night we were playing some of our favorite records by Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Jobim, Bird, Sarah, Billy, Miles, and Monk, talking as though we knew everything, when out of nowhere this song began to ring in my ears. Suddenly I ran to the piano and began to sing a song about a train that brought migrant laborers to work in the coalmines of Witbank, my birthplace. Ray and Stewart followed me to the piano and stood transfixed as I sang. Ray said, “That’s a mean song. When did you write it?” I said between phrases, “I didn’t write it. It’s coming in now.” The song was “Stimela/The Coal Train.” I sang it from beginning to end as if I had known it for a long time. By now, everybody was standing around me. None of them believed that the song had just come to me. It still remains the most requested song when I’m performing. For me, songs come in like a tidal wave, and if I don’t get to a pia
no there and then, they’re lost forever. At this low point, for some reason, the tidal wave that whooshed in on me came all the way from the other side of the Atlantic, from Africa, from home.
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