by Mezz Mezzrow
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Guess I had a real talent for being at the wrong place at the right time. This particular day I was climbing up the back stairs of a house in the Italian section, going to see a friend of mine, when I heard shots coming from the yard. Some guy was trying to hop the fence and a cop was chasing him, firing in the air. When the policeman saw me up on the porch he covered me with his gun and yelled, “Come on down here!” The other guy and me were marched down to the station house and thrown into the county jail. It seemed that a case of stolen silks had turned up under the stairs of that building, and I was held on suspicion for a couple weeks.
When we were let out of our cells to exercise in the bull pen, I got together a quartet and we sang Down Among the Sheltering Palms and Back Home Again in Indiana. We had something better than a metronome to keep time for us—the hammering in a corner of the bull pen, where a gang of carpenters were throwing up a scaffold to hang Smiling Jack O’Brien, I think it was, for some famous murder. At night after we were locked in our cells they kept testing the trap door with sandbags. Every time the slap of that door echoed through the cell block, I felt my neck jerk and my breathing went bad. It was very quiet in the cells. Nobody even cleared his throat, for fear of disturbing the peace.
One night they moved us to the other side of the cell block and locked us in early. A little later Smiling Jack came through the door between the blocks, walking that last long mile like he was taking a stroll in the park. With a mirror I rigged up so I could see the door and the scaffold, I had a ringside seat for the whole show. There was a priest at Jack’s side when he passed through, but Jack didn’t pay him no mind—he kept singing Dear Old Girl in a high falsetto tenor, and when he got close to the scaffold he lit a cigarette and stuck it between his lips. He never stopped smiling.
After the priest mumbled a prayer the black hood was slipped over Jack’s head and he was led to the trap door. Then the trap was sprung, with a bang I felt down to my toenails, and Jack dangled there. Hell broke loose in the block then; cups were rattled between the bars, keepers ran up and down the gallery threatening to turn the fire hoses on us.
They didn’t have anything on me, so after a few days my case was nolle prossed and I was sprung. But that scene stuck with me. I’ve never played Dear Old Girl since then without thinking of Smiling Jack O’Brien and the sound of that trap door cracking open, and of the way his legs looked as he hung there, kind of squirming and snaking around at first, then quiet all of a sudden, with his shoes swinging easy in space like a couple of tired crows.
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Most of the famous and up-and-coming performers of the day—Ted Lewis, Sophie Tucker, Benny Davis, Eddie Cantor, Dolly Kaye, Al Jolson (they even gave him the title of “The Jazz Singer”)—were heebs, and the boys had the feeling that we should all stick together and not knock the big names of “our” race. I didn’t go for that jive at all; being a Jew didn’t mean a thing to me. Around the poolroom I defended the guys I felt were my real brothers, the colored musicians who made music that sent me, not a lot of beat-up old hamfats who sang and played a commercial excuse for the real thing. I never could dig the phony idea of a race—if we were a “race”—sticking together all the way, even when it meant turning your back on what was good or bad.
Joe Oliver and Freddie Keppard made me love the trumpet, but that wasn’t my instrument. The notes that kept singing in my head were the notes that came weaving out of Sidney Bechet’s curved soprano and clarinet, and the clarinets of Jimmy Noone and Johnny Dodds. But all of a sudden Murph Steinberg blew into town again, after his barnstorming tour, and knocked me off the beam. Murph was a professional musician now, and he knew the score, so when he told me I couldn’t get a job with the curved sax I traded it in for a tenor. I blew on that horn until my lungs yelled ouch, and I felt I was getting close to the blues and the jazz idiom. My old man came home from work one night when I felt I was coming on, and I grabbed the horn to show off while he was eating his supper, but he screamed “Stop blowing so loud—you sound like a fog-horn!” He was suffering from a migraine headache that day, and the notes must have beat on his eardrums like a triphammer. That killed my ardor for the tenor sax, because Pops knew so much about music I figured I must be wrong. I sold the horn before I could even play Come to Jesus on it.
One night Murph came tearing into the poolroom as winded as Paul Revere’s horse. “Boy,” he said, “get yourself together and come with me. We’re gonna meet a guy who really plays the clarinet.” We hopped into Harry Shapiro’s cab and took off for the LaSalle Street Station to hand Leon Rappolo the twisters to the city.
Rapp was a little hyped-up Italian guy, with pop-eyes and a bullet-shaped head perched on top of his puny frame. Dig this outfit: a shepherd-plaid suit with strides that hit him about an inch above his shoe-tops, so tight he must have worked his way into them with a shoehorn; black patent-leather shoes with high cloth tops and pearl buttons; white silk socks, a black derby hat, and a yellow walking stick. He was so sharp he would have made Lucius Beebe look like he was togged in a barrel.
Harry Shapiro was crazy about musicians so we headed straight for his dommy. We woke his folks up about 1:30 in the morning, but they were a very congenial lot and loved music so they got up and joined the party. What a jam session we put on that night. Murph dragged out his trumpet, Rapp put his clarinet together, Frank Snyder set up his drums, I worked up enough guts to sit down at the piano—and look out, sister, Royal Garden began to romp. Rapp was sort of in there, the first oscar I ever heard who sounded a little like Bechet on the clarinet. He bent over almost double when he played, with his horn practically on the floor, so he could hear himself better. We must have beat out about thirty choruses before the neighbors were on our necks and the cops broke it up.
The famous New Orleans Rhythm Kings were just getting their band together, including Rapp, and Elmer Schobel on the piano, and I followed them all around town, listening to them rehearse and play one-nighters. I’d never heard any white band come so close to the New Orleans style before—they stole Joe Oliver’s riffs and they stole them good, like Robin Hood. Over in the Friars Inn, at Wabash and Jackson, where they later opened, they’d rehearse one chorus all afternoon till they got it just right, and it would knock me out when they showed up on the bandstand that night and forgot every note. Not a living ass in that band could read a note except Elmer Schobel. Elmer would give them their notes from the piano, and what a scramble there would be when one guy stole another guy’s notes. Rapp and I got to be good friends, and my job at the poolroom was interfering with my hanging around with him, so I quit working. Potatoes without gravy don’t mash good.
One night during intermission at the Friars Inn Rapp took me into his dressing room, where he felt around on the molding and came up with a cigarette made out of brown wheatstraw paper. When he lit it up a funny odor came out that reminded me of the cubebs I smoked when I was a kid. He sounded more like he was sighing than smoking, sucking air in with the smoke and making a noise like an old Russian sipping tea from a saucer. After he got a lungful he closed his lips tight and held it in till he about choked and had to cough. “Ever smoke any muggles?” he asked me. “Man, this is some golden-leaf I brought up from New Orleans, it’ll make you feel good, take a puff.” The minute he said that, dope hit my mind and I got scared—working in my uncle’s drugstore had made me know that messing with dope was a one-way ticket to the graveyard. I told him I didn’t smoke and let it go at that, because I looked up to him so much as a musician.
Rapp used to carry me to his apartment and we’d come on like gangbusters playing together. He’d light up and get real high, and when he was groovy as a ten-cent movie he’d begin to play the blues on a beat-up guitar. I would wrap my comb in toilet paper and sing through it while he backed me up. It used to tickle Rapp right down to his toes to hear a Yankee really come on with the blues. Many a time he’d say to me, “Boy, you mean to tell me you ain’t never been down South and blow t
hat way? Why don’t you get yourself a horn and quit foolin’ with that comb?”
His birthday happened around this time, and I felt so warm towards him that I decided to buy him a new guitar. Down to the Jewish ghetto on Maxwell Street I went, to look around in the second-hand stores. I came to one store where an old Jewish man with a long beard and a little yomelkeh stood in the doorway, and I heard something there that knocked me out. An old-fashioned victrola setting out on the curb was playing a record, Blind Lemon Jefferson’s Black Snake Moan, and the old Jewish man kept shaking his head sadly, like he knew that evil black snake personally:
Oh-oh, some black snake’s been
suckin’ my rider’s tongue.
I bought that record right away, then picked up a sharp guitar for Rapp for only eight bucks. The next day Rapp and I went out to Lincoln Park and got into a rowboat. Rapp smoked his muta while he played the new guitar, and I blew on my kazoo. We really had a ball that day, paddling around in the sun playing Black Snake Moan and a gang of other blues. Muggles make you hungry as a chinch in a storage house, and Rapp gobbled up about ten boxes of crackerjacks, shoveling so fast he even ate the prizes in a couple of them.
What happened to Rapp is a sad story. Two or three years later paresis caught up with him, and all the salvarsan shots in the world couldn’t get him straight. It finally went to his head and they had to bug him. All the time he was in the asylum he kept waiting for a big train to pull in with a carload of muta just for him, and when they let him out in the yard he would go down to the railroad tracks and begin flagging all the trains that passed, looking for a package of joy that never showed up. Poor Rapp. He was a musician from the heart, a solid viper. I hope he finally caught that Muggles Special and rode it straight on to glory, high as a Georgia pine, feasting on a ton of cracker jacks and picking the blues on his guitar.
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Knocking around with Rapp and the Rhythm Kings put the finishing touches on me and straightened me out. To be with those guys made me know that any white man, if he thought straight and studied hard, could sing and dance and play with the Negro. You didn’t have to take the finest and most original and honest music in America and mess it up because you were a white man; you could dig the colored man’s real message and get in there with him, like Rapp. I felt good all over after a session with the Rhythm Kings, and I began to miss that tenor sax.
Man, I was gone with it—inspiration’s mammy was with me. And to top it all, I walked down Madison Street one day and what I heard made me think my ears were lying. Bessie Smith was shouting the Downhearted Blues from a record in a music shop. I flew in and bought up every record they had by the mother of the blues—Cemetery Blues, Bleedin’ Hearted, and Midnight Blues—then I ran home and listened to them for hours on the victrola. I was put in a trance by Bessie’s moanful stories and the patterns of true harmony in the piano background, full of little runs that crawled up and down my spine like mice. Every note that woman wailed vibrated on the tight strings of my nervous system; every word she sang answered a question I was asking. You couldn’t drag me away from that victrola, not even to eat.
What knocked me out most on those records was the slurring and division of words to fit the musical pattern, the way the words were put to work for the music. I tried to write them down because I figured the only way to dig Bessie’s unique phrasing was to get the words down exactly as she sang them. It was something I had to do; there was a great secret buried in that woman’s genius that I had to get. After every few words I’d stop the record to write the lyrics down, so my dad made a suggestion. Why didn’t I ask my sister Helen to take down the words in shorthand? She was doing secretarial work and he figured it would be a cinch for her.
If my sister had made a table-pad out of my best record or used my old horn for a garbage can she couldn’t have made me hotter than she did that day. I’ve never been so steamed up, before or since. She was in a very proper and dicty mood, so she kept “correcting” Bessie’s grammar, straightening out her words and putting them in “good” English until they sounded like some stuck-up jive from McGuffy’s Reader instead of the real down-to-earth language of the blues. That girl was schooled so good, she wouldn’t admit there was such a word as “ain’t” in the English language, even if a hundred million Americans yelled it in her face every hour of the day. I’ve never felt friendly towards her to this day, on account of how she laid her fancy high-school airs on the immortal Bessie Smith.
Inspiration’s old lady gave birth to a new brainchild one afternoon at a Rhythm Kings rehearsal, when I took a few choruses on Jack Pettis’ C-melody sax while he was out humoring his bladder. My head began to buzz while I played. I had to cut loose some way, to turn my back once and for all on that hincty, killjoy world of my sister’s and move over to Bessie Smith’s world body and soul. My fingers itched for a horn, so I could sit around and blow with my real friends for the rest of my life. I was so hyped-up I couldn’t sit still; every nerve in my body had St. Vitus’ Dance and sweat popped out all over my face. Now-or-never was the play.
Finally, without knowing for sure what I was going to do, I ran home. I sneaked into the house and stole my sister’s Hudson-seal fur coat out of the closet, then I beat it down to a whorehouse and sold it to the madam for $150. With the dough I made for the Conn Music Company and bought an alto sax for cash. Then I began to breathe easier—my sister had paid for her fine-lady act and put me in a business where they said “ain’t” all the day long and far into the night. Great deal.
The Rhythm Kings were rehearsing all afternoon, and Rapp made me break out my brand-new horn and sit in with them. Every note I blew that day was a blast at my sister and her book-learning. I couldn’t go home after that, naturally, so the same day I moved into a room across from the poolroom. Come to think of it, I ain’t been home since.
I didn’t want to work in the poolroom again because I needed my evenings free to practise and run with Rapp. Then one day I ran into Mottel Rovech, an old friend of the family’s, and he asked me would I like to work for him in his phonograph factory, the Liner-phone Talking Machine Company on Union Street. I told him sure, and the next day I was made superintendent of the whole plant. Mottel was a walking ledger—he ran a million-dollar business out of his pockets, keeping all his records in Yiddish on little cards and scraps of paper that he carried around with him. I straightened out his bookkeeping system and paid some attention to the business at first, but the music finally got the better of me and I started to clown around the place. I brought my sax to work and practised the blues all day in the office, while all the workers left their benches and stood around listening. I guess that was the first time in history that an audience ever got paid union wages for listening to a jazz concert. Mottel and I both decided that it would be better if I stayed home to do my practising, so the job came to an end.
That was the last job I ever took that went tangent to the music, except for the stretches when I peddled marihuana. Seeing me on the loose, Murph gave me the idea of dropping around to see a booking agent, and when I wandered out of that office in a daze I was a professional musician with my own band. My job was to get together a four-piece outfit under my own name (“Milton Mezzrow and His Perculatin’ Fools,” it was called) to play a stage-show date in a burlesque house. Our program was made up of three numbers, Royal Garden, Jelly Roll, and Panama, which we took over from the Rhythm Kings. That date lasted for two weeks and my feet never came near the ground in all that time.
Then a banjo player named Fuzzy Greenfield made me an offer to play in a roadhouse band with him for thirty-five bucks a week, “good tips,” and room and board. But there was a catch: I had to join the union first, and that took gold. I went to see my gambler friends at The Corner and told them my story, and right away they dug up the initiation fee and sent me to a pal of theirs on the union’s board of examiners. I answered some questions and signed some papers and man, what you know, I was in.
I was sure one
perculatin’ fool that day. There in black and white on the card it said Milton Mezzrow was now a member in good standing of Local 10 of the Chicago Federation of Musicians of the American Federation of Labor. The date was December 11, 1923. That’s my birthday, buddy; that’s the day I was born with a silver sax in my yap, after being bounced around in Lady Luck’s belly for twenty-four long years.
Yes sir, I came into the world that day with a stamped and sealed birth certificate in my hand, by courtesy of the A. F. of L. Jack, I finally made it, I was a musician. If you’ll pardon my beat-up English—Ain’t that a bitch!
Book Two: 1923–1928
CHICAGO, CHICAGO
Chicago, Chicago,
That toddlin’ town, toddlin’ town,
Chicago, Chicago,
I’ll show you around. . . .
CHICAGO
5. THEY FOUND THE BODY IN A DITCH
BURNHAM WAS A SMALL TOWN ON THE ILLINOIS BOUNDARY LINE, not far from Hammond, Indiana, a hop and a skip from Chicago. If the census man ever counted up all the dishwater hair and Timkin rear ends that swung around that place, he would have found more whores per square foot than in any town in the good old U.S.A. The houses they worked in never played shut-eye, and they did more business than a free-lunch counter on the Bowery, with about two hundred girls who worked eight-hour shifts on weekdays and twelve hours straight on Saturdays and legal holidays. The town was better known to tourists than Niagara Falls—it was a kind of Niagara Falls, strictly the one-night-stand type—and important visitors from every state in the Union dropped around to snag a honeymoon between trains. Pimps and simps would fall in from here and there and everywhere, grabbing thousand-dollar advances from the madames and leaving their lady friends in pawn. The girls stayed put until they ground out the thousand or got a slap from Mr. Clap.