Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  We finished at the Deauville in the late Spring of 1925 and Irving landed us a summer job at the North Shore Pavilion in South Haven, a resort across the lake from Chicago. Eddie Condon had another vacation job lined up and couldn’t make it so I took along his brother Pat on the banjo. Trouble was waiting for us at South Haven—as soon as we hit the place we run smack into that phony race issue. The Pavilion catered mostly to Gentiles, and when the manager found out that three of us musicians were Broadway arabs from the tribe of Israel he wouldn’t even leave us blow note one.

  This made us hotter than tabasco sauce but Irving wasn’t stumped. “If we’re smart,” he said to us, “we can put that Pavilion guy right out of business. There’s a big summer house for rent here, with a porch that’s bigger than a regular dance floor, so why don’t we take it over and run our own café? I always wanted to be a nightclub impresario anyhow.” The idea of squatting there for the summer suited us fine, because we all wanted to shake the café sunburn we got in the Deauville. The whole gang of us went to work with hammers and saws, screening in the porch, fixing the leaks in the roof, painting and polishing all over the place. We got hold of a piano somewheres, put up some tables on the porch, and inside of two weeks we had the joint jumping.

  That place never did have a name—we forgot to think one up ahead of time, and after our gala opening we never had time to hang a handle on it. We gave the customers a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a bottle of pop for a dollar, and they had the right to hang around all night to cut some rug or dig the band. Irving never got to touch his fiddle all summer long because he had to play host and waiter. If you’d of seen him juggling those plates and bottles around you would have thought that he schooled Frank Libuse, only his act wasn’t on purpose. His valet, a little East Side Jewish boy called Dinky, doubled as Chef Cook-’Em-Up. Soon as we got going in the evening, folks down at the beach would hear our horns and up they’d come boogity-boogity, like we were a bunch of Pied Pipers. We never did any advertising—we didn’t even have a menu—but the standing-room-only sign would have been out every night, if anybody ever got around to painting a sign. All us nightclub owners lived upstairs with our families and we had ourselves a ball all summer.

  We hung out on the beach all day long, jamming our heads off while the people gathered around us like sandflies. The mermaids would come up out of the water, drawn by the music, and in no time at all every pebble on that beach that wasn’t dancing the Charleston was doing the Black Bottom. The manager of the Pavilion couldn’t see us for looking that summer, especially after he counted up his season’s take. Little Dinky did better than any of us at South Haven. He was always playing the horses, and one time he caught a couple of long shots and run his small bankroll up to a couple grand. Right quick he pulled a fade-out on us, and a couple days later, when we already had the cops out looking for him, he showed up again togged like Esquire and driving a big limousine. Bull Durham was his sidekick before, but he couldn’t see nothing but corona-coronas now. He gave Irving a fit posing all over the place, then cut out for Florida, where he became a bigtime bookmaker. I hear that he’s sitting pretty now, with a big string of horses and a valet of his own. From rags to racehorses, that was Dinky’s story.

  ●

  My struggle-buggy was getting to look like a rinky-dink old tin can on wheels, so when I got back to Chicago that Fall I traded it in for a Willys Knight brougham sedan. One night I got the urge to dig the cats at The Corner and show them how good I was doing, so I pulled up in front of the poolroom and leaned my car against the curb. They sure gave me the glad-hand when they laid their peepers on my new car. “Some car, Milton, where’d you steal it? You won’t go to Pontiac this time,” one guy said. “Hell no, he’ll make the Big House with this one,” said another. Then they all got a bright idea. “Hey Milton, what do you say we pile in and make the canhouses.” You would have thought I’d left them that morning, the way their minds kept running down that same old alley. You can’t teach a dotey cat new tricks.

  We made the rounds that night just like it was old times, and at the Four Deuces, one of the big syndicate houses, I met a cute little chick named Jane who had a sad story to lay on me. Jack, I swear, I’m no sky-pilot, but a creep pad turns into a confession booth as soon as I squat in it—the chicks really run their mouths some spieling their life histories in my face. My ears are bent in half from the tales of woe I’ve listened to in Lulu’s parlors on both sides of the Atlantic. “Well, it’s a long story,” Jane said, taking a deep breath, and then she shot it at me right from Year One, and it was long. Tune out if you’ve heard this one before. . . .

  Born: Des Moines. Married at seventeen, had a baby girl. Husband drinking man, walked out on her. Tough going. Worked as waitress in beanery to keep body and soul together. In walks traveling salesman, promises job in Chicago, stakes her to railroad ticket. Big hopes, going to make fresh start, send for kid. In the big town, no job, has to deal ’em off the arm in hashhouse again, sad. Homesick, tired, bored. Another snake shows up, smooth talker, feeds her line about good job. Final step: he places her in Four Deuces, girls show her the ropes. Humiliation, despair; trapped, no way out. Pimp’s a hard man, threatens her, she’s scared to leave. Oh, life isn’t worth living, what’s she to do? She’s so miserable, misses the baby. Oh, Milton. . . .

  Corny? Sure, the husks are still on it—the oldest profession in the world is jammed up with the oldest stories in the world. What brings you down in a tale like that is not that it’s phony but that it’s so true. That’s just the way it does happen in the U.S.A., nine times out of ten, starting right there in Des Moines, or Butte, or Valparaiso, Indiana. Our national anthem should be The Curse of an Aching Heart, played on the G-string.

  Could be I’m soft but I always fall for that kind of jive, especially when it rings true, and this time it sure did. The routine was so unhip that she couldn’t have made it up. She was a very delicate little thing, sweet and refined, and she seemed so out of place around all those simple whores that my heart went out to her. I began to think fast. That damsel-in-distress sob-story had me buckling on my shining armor and manicuring my white charger, making ready to stage a Keystone-comedy rescue scene in the red-light district.

  I was feeling a little restless myself; greener pastures were in my face. Stories from other musicians who’d been off to Detroit and New York kept drifting back to Chicago, making us know that King Jazz was romping up and down the land, and the wanderlust began to get me. The stampede of the Chicagoans, which was to make jazz an international phenomenon ten years later, was just getting under way; a lot of Windy City musicians were packing up their instruments and toothbrushes and setting out to bring the gospel of riff to the citizens of Main Street. Detroit was one place in particular I wanted to dig because the office for all the Gene Goldkette bands was there, Ray Miller’s band was at the Addison Hotel, McKinney’s Cotton Pickers were jumping at the Arcadia, and Fletcher Henderson was barnstorming around the neighborhood too. My wife Bonnie was putting up with some relatives and I knew she was O.K., so I made up my mind to travel gay—that was the play, all the way.

  “Look baby,” I said, “if you want to cut out of this joint so bad, I’ll take you to Detroit. I had it in my mind to drive over there anyway, so you meet me tomorrow and we’ll go places.” The halo that started to shape up around my conk was so big and bright, I felt like an overgrown glow-worm. Guys get promoted to the holy-man class for good deeds like that, I figured—I could see the great day coming when Milton Mezzrow would be a legend in all the whorehouses across the country, the patron saint of every women’s pen and every home for wayward girls in the U.S.A.

  “Oh Milton,” Jane said, her face lit up like Old Sol in July, “will you really take me? Really?” She was all set to do a cartwheel and a double flip, and my halo began to eat up more voltage.

  In the morning she snuck out of the Four Deuces, leaving all her togs, and I picked her up in front of the LaSalle Street station.
Off we drove, zigzagging all around town to make sure we weren’t being tailed, and on the way we began to cook up our plans—we were both going to work like hell in Detroit and run up big bank accounts, then Jane would make a beeline for Des Moines and her bouncing baby girl. I got feeling so good that I started to sing some riffs, knocking out a tricky Baby Dodds beat on the steering wheel with my palms: bib-bop, bip-bop, bip-a-di-dee, bip-bam. Pretty soon Jane caught the spirit and began to drum on the dashboard with her knuckles. She latched on to that South Side rhythm real good, catching all the breaks and never messing up the time; when we hit Detroit that night her beat was so solid she was ready to join the union. That little girl had cadence in her cuticles and tempo in her toes.

  In Detroit I found lodging for her with a nice respectable elderly couple (I camped solo on a studio couch in the parlor, just me and my halo). Next day I dropped around to the Goldkette office and got the kind of welcome an escaped con does from the warden—they’d heard about me through the grapevine and it looked like I was in. That same night they sent me on a club date with Tommy Dorsey in a pick-up band, where we played opposite McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, one of the best-known big colored bands of the day. The corny stocks and jumbled-up special arrangements we had to read at sight must have sounded pretty cute to those colored boys, whose numbers were all fixed by solid arrangers like Don Redman. Outside of Fletcher Henderson’s band, the Cotton Pickers were about the first big jazz unit to tour the East, and they came on with a steady rock that was really groovy.

  In ’26 Detroit was as wide open as a politician’s pocket on election day; the town was having itself a ball all around the clock. Even if you had your collar on backwards you weren’t safe walking down Bobian, Elizabeth and Adams Streets, where the whorehouses jumped and capered. The girls would sit themselves at the windows in come-on poses and tap on the glass with Chinese chopsticks, to catch your eye—I guess it was what you might call drumming up trade. In the summertime they’d reach out and snatch the straw hat right off your head, and if you were fool enough to go after it your poke was bound to be lighter when you came out. On Saturday nights there were lines a block long outside some of these houses, way before the era of the double feature, and squads of cops turned out to keep the customers in order. The hot-dog man had to make five or six trips home every night to get a fresh supply of franks for these pleasure-seekers.

  The real aristocrats of the sporting world in Detroit were the madams—there were so many of them trucking around town with thousand-dollar bills tucked in their stockings, having struck it rich in this new gold rush, that some of the nightclubs had to set aside a special night just for their entertainment. The Club Alabam, on Adams Street in the colored district, used to send a horse-and-wagon touring around town once a week, sporting a big sign that shouted, “LANDLADIES’ NIGHT AT THE CLUB ALABAM!—FUN AND FROLIC!—COME ONE AND ALL!” They came by the dozens, loaded down with ice like it was rock candy, leaving their houses operating at full capacity. The only thing that could close down those houses was a quarantine for smallpox.

  The Club Alabam was really brawling one night when I dropped around. The landladies were having a field day in that cellar; I could hardly fight my way inside, there were so many buxom madams of both races jammed in there, sporting big sparklers and fancy corsages, each one surrounded by a gang of her chicks and swilling champagne like it came from the kitchen sink. The beef trust was out in full force—these landladies were all shaped up like barrels, wherever there wasn’t a crease in their meat there was a dimple. Some fly cat chased a girl right up the stairs, trying to sweettalk her until one of the fellows from the Cotton Pickers hit him in his jaw and knocked him right down again. People coming and going kept stepping over his body like he was a doormat. If a corpse was dropped on the dance floor at the Club Alabam that night, nobody would have even sent for the garbage wagon.

  A few musicians I knew were on the stand when I came in, Tommy Dorsey among them, and some of the Cotton Pickers joined them for a light session. That was an eye-opener to me. I began to know what a difference there was between the New Orleans style that I was so hopped-up about and the so-called Eastern style of jazz—the Eastern musicians had a pretentious, flashy, mechanical way of taking a chorus, but very little of their playing had any color or distinction at all; it was only a good tonal quality with slick technique that kept these cats in the limelight, as far as I could see. To this day there hasn’t been one of them able to set a pace or establish a definite style in either the jazz or the swing idiom. The real jazz, like the real marihuana, comes from the bayou country.

  Before long the Goldkette office steered me to a steady job, playing with a small hot band in a ritzy joint called Luigi’s Café. It struck me funny how the top and bottom crusts of society were always getting together during the prohibition era. In this swanky club, which was run by the head of the notorious Purple Gang, Detroit’s blue-bloods used to congregate—the Grosse Pointe mob on the slumming kick, rubbing elbows with Louie the Wop’s mob. That Purple Gang was a hard lot of guys, so tough they made Capone’s playmates look like a kindergarten class, and Detroit’s snooty set used to feel it was really living to talk to them hoodlums without getting their ounce-brains blown out.

  Just by a freak it turned out that the man I rented a room from, a wholesale kosher chicken dealer, was Louie the Wop’s father-in-law. It’s a small underworld.

  A lot of the hot men around Detroit began to drop in at Luigi’s, so that the band was usually twice the size our contract called for. Tommy Dorsey was playing at the Book-Cadillac, while his brother Jimmy was at the Greystone, and both of them were regular visitors; so were Bob Chester and Gene Prendegast of the Goldkette Orange Blossom Band (directed by Glen Gray, who later got famous with his Casa Loma orchestra). I don’t know if those upper-crust Grosse Pointers ever appreciated it or not, but under Louie the Wop’s auspices they were treated to jam sessions night after night by practically all the top-notch musicians who later made jazz history in this country. A list of the guys who played gratis for the customers at Luigi’s would make the Music Corporation of America look like its total assets were one small-size shoestring.

  I was not without my muta at the time, and some of the boys (I won’t mention any names) used to drop by to sit in and get high with me, because I always had the best stuff that could be found. We would have jam-up sessions, playing until we all fractured our toupees, the music getting more frantic and freakish all the time, and then we’d go and stuff ourselves with fine vittles. A couple of times I had to make a trip back to Chi to pick up a fresh supply from my connection, a little Mexican named Pasquale. In those days we used to get a Prince Albert tobacco-can full of marihuana, clean and without any sticks or seeds in it, for two dollars. The grefa they pushed around Detroit was like the scrapings off old wooden bridges, compared with the golden-leaf being peddled in Chicago, and tasted twice as bad.

  Every one of us that smoked the stuff came to the conclusion that it wasn’t habit-forming and couldn’t be called a narcotic. We found out that at one time the government had discussed it as a drug and tried to include it in the Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act but never could dig up any scientific reason for it. There being no law against muta then, we used to roll our cigarettes right out in the open and light up like you would on a Camel or a Chesterfield. To us a muggle wasn’t any more dangerous or habit-forming than those other great American vices, the five-cent Coke and the ice-cream cone, only it gave you more kicks for your money.

  Us vipers began to know that we had a gang of things in common: we ate like starved cannibals who finally latch on to a missionary, and we laughed a whole lot and lazed around in an easygoing way, and we all decided that the muta had some aphrodisiac qualities too, which didn’t run us away from it. All the puffed-up strutting little people we saw around, jogging their self-important way along so chesty and chumpy, plotting and scheming and getting more wrinkled and jumpy all the time, made us all howl, they stru
ck us so weird. Not that we got rowdy and rough about it. We were on another plane in another sphere compared to the musicians who were bottle babies, always hitting the jug and then coming up brawling after they got loaded. We liked things to be easy and relaxed, mellow and mild, not loud or loutish, and the scowling chin-out tension of the lushhounds with their false courage didn’t appeal to us.

  Besides, the lushies didn’t even play good music—their tones became hard and evil, not natural, soft and soulful—and anything that messed up the music instead of sending it on its way was out with us. We members of the viper school were for making music that was real foxy, all lit up with inspiration and her mammy. The juice guzzlers went sour fast on their instruments, then turned grimy because it preyed on their minds.

  ●

  When you run into hop, Jim, skip and jump. Hop is strictly for hamfats.

  Detroit must have been built in a poppy field, there was so much opium going up in smoke in that town. I kept hearing stories from friends about all the hopdogs that lived in Detroit. A musician friend of mine named Mike who kipped in one of these hotels had to mugg with a lot of hophead gangsters who roomed near him, especially with a tough oscar named Frankie Riccardi. This Frankie, a sociable guy with a yen for company, used to drop in on Mike to beat up his chops a while. Mike would have felt happier playing host to a head-hunter with his toolkit under his arm.

  Frankie Riccardi was always shooting his mouth off to Mike about how great his hop was and how it made our muta look about as strong as ladies’ cigars. One day while he was spieling about his dope, Mike called me over to straighten this gunman out with some golden-leaf and lowrate him once and for all. We tipped Frankie off on the routine and he burned up two sticks of gauge real fast, putting on a Samson act, sneering all the time. “These things got as much kick as some corn silk,” he said. “Ain’t you guys got something real strong, like a malted milk or maybe some farina? Strunz!”