Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  About that time Sid Barry blew in from New York and went into partnership with Emil Glick. That cat was a born gambler and get-rich-quick operator—he could locate gold like a good hustling chick. He got himself a wholesale drug license, because wholesale druggists were the only ones allowed to handle liquor. The best bonded bourbon whisky sold for $23 a case to the druggist, but the price was jumped to $123 for a bootlegger or saloonkeeper. Nobody argued about price then because any case of booze could be run up to a barrel by mixing in alcohol and distilled water, plus a little burnt sugar.

  Once Sid got a shipment of a hundred cases of booze on the legit, and that’s when he showed up as nervous as some jello-pudding. There was a government record of those cases, but Sid would sooner have his throat cut than push them at legit prices to the drugstores. He came running into the poolroom one night and said, “Come on, you guys, I want you to beat me up, make a cripple out of me, tear my clothes off and make my nose bleed.” The gang took him at his word: they took turns trying to crack his jaw, laid black eyes on him, and put knots in his head with a billiard cue. Then Sid shimmied to his feet, thanked his friends, and wobbled down to the police station to squawk about how some hoodlums gave him the works and hijacked all his whisky. After that he sold the stuff at bootleg prices. For a busted smeller, a couple of shiners, and a few creases in the knowledge-box he made himself ten grand.

  I got my kicks out of rubbing elbows with all those bigtime gamblers and muscle men, and the easy money didn’t run me away. But I didn’t want to go too far tangent—I kept looking for my kind of music in all the joints we hit in our cruising around. That’s just where I finally found it.

  ●

  Almost every night after the poolroom closed we’d load up a cab and head for the Roamer Inn on 119th near Western, a famous whore-house that belonged to Al Capone’s syndicate. We were always sharp, with our expensive Hannan or Johnson-&-Murphy shoes and our “pussywillow” silk shirts from Capper-&-Capper—one-inch candy stripes were all the go then, and those shirts made us look like a gang of barber poles topped with slickum. Even before I was in the money I togged like a fashion plate, so I could run with the hip cats who hung around the poolroom. I was always as ready as they were, although sometimes I never had a blip in my poke.

  The Roamer Inn was like a model of all the canhouses I ever saw around Chicago, the granddaddy of them all. There was a big front room with a long bar on one side and quarter slot machines lined up along the wall. In back there was a larger room, with benches running all around the walls but no tables. The girls sat there while the johns (customers) moped around giving them the once-over. Those girls were always competing with each other: one would come up to you, switching her hips like a young duck, and whisper in your ear, “Want to go to bed, dear, I’ll show you a good time, honey, I’m French,” and a minute later another one would ease along and say coyly, “Baby, don’t you want a straight girl for a change?” They were like two rival sororities; they hung out in separate cliques and threw dirty looks at each other.

  The girls we knew were all on the dogwatch, from four to twelve in the morning. It used to tickle me to see how they dolled themselves up for the trade. They paraded around in teddies or gingham baby rompers with big bows in the back, high-heel shoes, pretty silk hair ribbons twice as big as their heads, and rouge an inch thick all over their kissers. When a john had eyeballed the parade and made his choice he would follow her upstairs, where the landlady sat at a little desk in the hall. This landlady would hand out a metal check and a towel to the girl, while the customer forked over two bucks. Then the girl was assigned a room number. All night long you could hear the landlady calling out in a bored voice, like a combination straw-boss and timekeeper, “All right, Number Eight, all right, Number Ten—somebody’s waiting, don’t take all night.” She ran that joint with a stopwatch.

  The girls explained to me that they got eighty cents a trick, one payment for each metal check—“turning a trick” was how they described one session with a john. Twenty cents went for protection, and the other dollar belonged to the house. But the girls didn’t keep their eighty cents. That fee went to the pimps, or macs, who kept wandering around downstairs. The girls used to fight over their macs. “That coffee-an’ mac you got,” a French girl would crack to a straight one, and then it was on—hair came out by the handful, some bleached and some unbleached.

  Those girls worked hard—some of them didn’t even knock off for a single night, hiding their condition with tricks I won’t go into now. One girl I met, the daughter of a Baptist minister from Valparaiso, Indiana, had been working for three solid months. I asked her how come and she said in a quiet way, “My man borrowed a thousand bucks from the syndicate and I’m gonna stay here until I work it out.” When you were in the red with them people it wasn’t healthy to think about vacations, with or without pay.

  I couldn’t see going upstairs until I met Marcelle. She was a tall redhead, with a shape that would make you jump for joy and a reputation as the best French girl in the place. Maybe I better explain about something here—I was really kind of timid and ashamed on my first visits to the Inn, but I never showed it. In fact, the smooth, know-it-all act I put on was so strong that a lot of the girls took me for a bigtime pimp. Marcelle must have figured me for a fly cat too, and her curiosity was aroused.

  The johns lined up for Marcelle like it was payday. I didn’t go upstairs with her much, but we used to smile at each other and there was a real close feeling between us. The way we hit it off began to be noticed. One night the bartender (he must have took me for a mac too) called me over and whispered, “I’d lay off if I was you, bud—that’s Al Capone’s girl.” I used to see Scarface around there and jawblock with him sometimes. He was sharp, young and ready in those days, with a couple of trigger men always trailing along at his elbows. He was friendly enough, and that was how I wanted him to keep on feeling.

  My answer to that bartender was simple and straight. I didn’t like to see a nice guy like that so upset. I stopped going there.

  But Marcelle wouldn’t give up just like that. It didn’t take her long to dig where I hung out. One night a yellow cab pulled up in front of the poolroom and word was sent in to me that a lady was waiting outside. That made my vanity jump, but when I hit the curb and saw it was Marcelle my nerves didn’t feel like they were taking any rest cure either. “Hey look, baby,” I said, “I know you’re Capone’s old lady—uh, uh, I ain’t coming on this tab.” She pouted, kind of brought down because I didn’t rush off and shoot Scarface full of holes so I could move in.

  It wasn’t all fear or bashfulness that kept me from really going after Marcelle. As much as I liked her, I couldn’t often bring myself to follow her upstairs. Everything was too mechanical that way, like playing a two-dollar shot machine—you invest heavy but you come out light. Maybe I was too sensitive, I don’t know. Anyhow, I always felt that it was just like chewing a steak in tempo with a metronome. I didn’t like to do my loving on schedule, with one eye closed and the other on the clock. I like both my eyes closed.

  There was another reason I stopped going to the Roamer Inn: they didn’t have any music there. But pretty soon I caught up with another syndicate house at 119th and Wood, where I found what I was looking for. They had a Creole jazz band there, straight from the bayou, and I used to sit by the piano all night long, listening to them knock out the blues. I never went upstairs once in that place. Women were a dime a dozen, but where could you find a good New Orleans jazz band?

  ●

  It was George Turner, the gambler, who steered me to the South Side and my millennium. One night, when we were drinking in a saloon after a crap game, George buzzed the bartender and asked for the key to the piano in the back room. I didn’t pay him much mind when he disappeared. In those days every beer joint had a player piano with that mandolin effect, sometimes with drums and cymbals that played automatically as the roll wound around. I thought George was going to knock out some o
f the usual corn.

  But a minute later I was sprinting for the back room. George had unlocked the piano and was playing the blues as though he was born in the gallion. Where did he ever learn this music? He must have been in jail, I thought. There didn’t seem to be any other place where a man could latch on to that kind of music.

  I stood by that beat-up old tinklebox in a hypnotic state, like a bird charmed by a snake. This music gave me a mental orgasm—I couldn’t have felt closer to this man if he’d been my own father. When he was finished I asked him did he know the Sweet Baby Blues. He was so tickled to find that I went for the blues, he almost fell off the piano stool. “No kidding, Milton, do you like this music?” he said. “Come on, I’m going to take you where you’ll really hear a lot of it.” Five of us piled into a cab and cut out for the colored district on the South Side.

  The first place we dug was the De Luxe Café at 35th and State, above the saloon and billiard parlor of the same name. We had to wait outside in line because there was standing room only, but finally the headwaiter at the top of the stairs snapped his fingers and the doorman let us in. As we took our seats near the bandstand, a light-skinned red-headed girl was circling around the dance floor wrapping up a song that went like this: “It takes a long, tall, brown-skin gal to make a preacher lay his Bible down.” The way she explained it, I could see exactly what bothered that preacher. Every time she shouted the word lo-ong, the gal she was singing about stretched another foot. Right after that she sang another lowdown blues:

  Leave me be your side track, poppa,

  Till your main line comes,

  Leave me be your side track, poppa,

  Till your main line comes,

  I can do better switchin’

  Than your main line ever done.

  After listening to one chorus of that number I decided that girl could run my locomotive down her side track any old time.

  The next blues she went to work on had the same kind of down-to-earth, simple story in it that always excited me so much. Even then the popular songs of the day were so full of sentimental foolishness, they made you feel the whole goddamned world was turned into a mess of love-sick calves. And when you tried to cut loose from this fog of romantic trash by running to the white cafés, you found vocalists there who acted like they were on leave from a whorehouse. The way the white singers tried to deliver their message of sex was tough and brutal and called for two bucks on the line. Twinkle didn’t come on with that jive. She sang:

  Baby, see that spider climbin’ on that wall,

  Baby, see that spider climbin’ on that wall,

  He’s goin’ up there for to get his ashes hauled.

  How many whites would ever think of making sex as downright simple and hygienic as getting your ashbin cleaned out?

  The crowd went wild over Twinkle and she had to keep on giving encores, but when Alberta Hunter hit the floor singing “He may be your man but he comes to see me sometime,” the house came down. Alberta kept working her way around the floor, stopping to sing a chorus at each table, so that by the time she was through she’d gone over the one song ten or fifteen times, giving it a new twist every time. “Sing it, you sweet cow!” some fellow shouted from the table next to ours. The chick that was with him capped this with “Yeah baby, he can’t help it, it’s the way you do it.” Across the floor a stout brown-skinned woman yelled, “Aaawww, sing it baby,” throwing her hands over her head and snapping her fingers on the offbeat. Alberta really sent that audience singing Some Sweet Day. Finally, for the last chorus, she got up on a small platform in front of the bandstand and did “her number.” Every entertainer would wind up that way, doing a becoming little time step and break all her own.

  What hit me about Twinkle, Alberta, and another fine singer in the place named Florence Mills, was their grace and their dignified, relaxed attitude. Florence, petite and demure, just stood at ease and sang like a humming bird. A lot of white vocalists, even some with the big name bands today, are either as stiff as a stuffed owl or else they go through more wringing and twisting than a shake dancer, doing grinds and bumps all over the place, throwing it around the way it should be thrown around in only one place, which isn’t a public dancehall.

  A good colored singer doesn’t have to wrap her sex in a package and peddle it to the customers like a cootch dancer in a sideshow. She seldom goes in for the nympho kick—she can take it easy and be more genuine, because she isn’t doing any high-pressure selling. The music really moves her, and she passes it on to the audience with the lazy way she handles her body. To me there’s more natural suggestion in the snap of a colored singer’s fingers than you get from all the acrobatic routines of these so-called “hot” singers.

  The most action a solid Negro singer will give you is a subdued touch of the boogie, hardly moving anything closer to home than her index fingers. Most of the time she’ll just stand still and concentrate on putting real meaning and feeling into the song itself. A woman who really knows how to sing and means it can make your love come down even if she’s buried in a block of cement up to her neck—all she needs are healthy vocal cords and a soul, not a chassis with the seven-years’-itch. Most white singers made me feel their message was full of larceny, but when I heard these songbirds at the De Luxe I almost blew my top. Sex was all clean and simple and good, the way it came out of them.

  You could see most of the celebrities of the day, colored and white, hanging around the De Luxe. Bill Robinson, the burlesque comedian Harry Steppe, comedian Benny Davis, Joe Frisco, Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, Blossom Seeley, a lot of Ziegfeld Follies actors, famous colored teams like Moss and Fry and Williams and Walker, Eva Tanguay, Eddie Cantor, who was then Bert Williams’ protegé—all kinds of showpeople used to head for this place whenever they were in town. Word had spread through the Orpheum Circuit that a real New Orleans jazz band was playing there, and you had to fight your way in every night in the week.

  That band really put me in a trance. It was the Original New Orleans Creole Jazz Band, led by clarinet-playing Lawrence Dewey (Duhé). With him were Sugar Johnnie and Freddie Keppard on cornet; Roy Palmer, trombone; Sidney Bechet, clarinet and curved soprano sax; Lil Hardin, piano; Tubby Hall, drums (substituting for his brother Minor, who had just been drafted); Jimmy Palao, violin; Bab Frank, piccolo; Wellman Braud, bass fiddle. This band really upset the town and paved the way for the rest of the New Orleans jazzmen in good old Chi.

  The duets that Bechet and Dewey played on their clarinets left me breathless, and so did Bab Frank’s exciting piccolo trills and improvised arpeggios that could be heard above all the rest of the band like little white mice scampering over the tops of the notes. Freddie Keppard fanned his horn with a battered old derby in a way that would astound the trumpeters of today. That was the first time I ever saw that done, and before he was through Freddie really broke it up. Before Harmon wah-wah mutes were even thought of, he was getting his glissandos and quarter-tones with a water glass and a beer bottle too. Lil Hardin always had a grin a mile wide as she bent over the keyboard—the way she came on with a steady four-four rhythm and the right inversions of chords helped rock the band. Braud was a showman with the bass, picking a tone round as a bell and slapping rhythm all the way through.

  But it was Freddie’s horn and Bechet’s clarinet that really floored me. Freddie’s cornet was powerful and to the point; the way he led the ensemble, breathing at the right breaks and carrying the lead all the time, there never was any letdown. He kept the band paced better than a jockey does a racehorse. Bechet’s slurs and moans and his true conception of counterpoint harmony were wonderful. Later on he explained to me that his tonal inflections were suggested by the moo-cow and the barnyard.

  Once in a while I noticed the couples who were jammed on the dance floor, all doing the bunny hug. Sweet nothings hit my ears like sounds from another world: “Perculate you filthy bitch,” some sweet man yelled to his partner while the band played a slow drag, and a little later another
cat called out to some chick on the other side of the hall, “Hey baby, where you been keepin’ your beefsteak at?” (These phrases stuck with me so hard that when I got together my first band I named it “Milton Mezzrow and His Perculatin’ Fools.”) My mind kept telling me that this was where I really belonged. I had found my Utopia and I began scheming to come back every night, including Sundays and holidays.

  Pretty soon one o’clock rolled around, closing time. George Turner went over to the bandstand, with me trotting along at his heels. I began to talk with Bab Frank about piccolos, and found out he played the Albert system while I played the Boehm. Bechet showed me his curved soprano, which I handled like it was the Kohinoor diamond. I almost fell out when he invited me to come along with the musicians to the Royal Garden (later the Lincoln Garden), where they had their after-hours sessions.

  I sat through that whole night listening to them playing music from Scott Joplin’s Red Book, a collection of instrumental arrangements that revolutionized the whole jazz world. For the first time I heard all those great numbers that were spreading a spirit you never found in ragtime and regular band music, the real spirit of the colored musician—pieces like Gold Dust, Skeleton Jangle, Sassafras, Apple Sass Rag, and Ole Miss.

  That was my big night, the night I really began to live. On my first visit to the South Side I managed to hit the two spots that were making history in the jazz world and I met some of the musicians who were already legends. I figured I had found something bigger and better than all the chicks and bankrolls in the world.