by Mezz Mezzrow
Josh, a talented young artist who shaped up like a young spruce and never wore a hat on his sandy head, didn’t play music but always hung out with us. His parents were both doctors, and he was brought up in a very free-and-easy atmosphere, so he was with us all the way; wherever we went he tagged along and danced on all settings. A natural-born Bohemian, he was always trying to capture the rhythm of the Negro in his drawings.
Everything seemed to be going wrong for me and Bud—the whole town jumped stink on us. We weren’t working much because the only bands with openings in them concentrated on sugar-coated ballads and pop tunes. To make it worse, the notes on my chariot were way overdue, and I figured I needed it more than the dealer because he had a lot more cars than I did. It looked like the road I had to hit, to keep from being slapped with a replevin writ.
Inspiration’s old lady finally conked me with a one-two. Bud always used to strut around for us, doing a Ronald Colman or an Adolph Menjou while his younger brother Arnie played the straightman opposite him, feeding him cues. (Arnie, who was stagestruck even worse than his brother, really made the grade later on, when he turned out to be a Shakespearean actor.) “Hey, what do you guys think of this?” I said while I watched them do their stuff one evening. “How about jumping in my car and let’s take off for Hollywood? Bud’s the matinee-idol type and he’s a cinch to become a big actor in the movies, and he’ll clean up and look out for us. A friend of mine is an actor out there and he could really set us in.” If the rest of us couldn’t make it as great lovers on the silver screen, I figured we could always connect with some band out there.
They all ate up the idea. Bud was already counting up his box-office receipts, and he promised that as soon as he took over Rudy Valentino’s place he would never forget his old pals—we wouldn’t have to worry about a thing. We all began to dream about that special swimming pool a hundred yards long, filled with imported champagne, that he was going to set up on his estate just for us. A squad of butlers would be assigned to do nothing but roll muggles all day long, each one five foot long, just for Josh and me. The whole Ziegfeld chorus, from the ponies to the showgirls, would be hired to fan us with palm leaves as we lounged around in the sun, reading H. L. Mencken and playing Louis Armstrong records over a P.A. system. Bud intended that we shouldn’t want for nothing. Later on he would bring the whole Austin High Gang out to Hollywood and set them up, each one with a hand-picked harem of bathing beauties to manicure his toenails and shampoo his moss. Life was going to be one long clambake, out there in Uncle Sam’s dream factory.
California look out, here we come—with more tricks in our pate than grandma had at eighty-eight! We were all set to bust open that Golden Gate, as we started out with twenty-five bucks between us, plus a couple of clean shirts, our horns, and a tube of toothpaste. All day and night we had a ball, singing Louis’ Heebie Jeebies and Muskrat Ramble while Bud played on his tenor and the other guys beat time on the side of the car. At Kansas City, Kansas, to us just a milk-stop on the road to our sun-kissed Utopia, we piled into the best hotel in town real chesty, as though we had passports to paradise in our hip pockets, and took over the best suite in the joint.
Next morning, when the house dick began to gun us, we went into a huddle about our change. I had a check for a double sawbuck coming from a booking office in Chi, so I wired for it while Bud and Billings wired home for some loot too. All day long we haunted the Western Union office, looking over our shoulders to see if that flat-foot was trailing us, but no gold showed up. We kept signing those dining-room checks, but our handwriting was getting a little shaky.
Good old Western Union. Next morning my twenty flew in out of the ozone, plus twenty-five more from Bud’s father. We were in gravy once more, and we looked that gumshoe square in the eye again. When we checked out of the hotel and started for the garage, we could already feel those soft Pacific breezes tiptoeing across our maps. More trouble: no car. “Sorry,” the bossman said, not even bothering to get up off his rooster. “The sheriff dropped over and took your car and left this replevin writ for you. Sorry. Can’t do a thing about it.”
I got the whole picture—my booking agent, who was friends with the guy that sold me the car, must have put the skids right under me as soon as he got my wire.
That was a solid drag, and to top it off, when we drooped back to the hotel I found that my last can of muta was empty. You should have seen me scraping together the sticks and seeds, then choking on the oily taste when I lit up on that mess. What a bringdown. It began to look like we were going to pull into paradise riding the rods, with me smoking grefa that a raggedy peon would have thrown in the garbage can.
Well, going back was out anyhow—you don’t detour off the glory road just because some stinchy simp repossesses your buggy. “I got an idea,” I said. “Let’s hock our instruments and buy us a Ford and go on from here. I sure as hell want to get a look at that old Pacific Ocean before I die.” Five minutes later we were lined up at uncle’s, beefing about the measly ninety bucks he shoved across the counter for the whole lot of horns. Later, in the used-car lot, the only thing the man had for our short money was a rinky-dink old Ford. Yet and still, it was a five-passenger touring car, and that was all we wanted to know. “You boys are getting a bargain,” the dealer told us. “This Lizzie may not look good but she’ll run over the top of them mountains like a mountain goat.” He forgot to tell us he was talking about a dead mountain goat.
Popping with the old pioneer spirit and ready for anything, we set out once more for the land of orange groves and quick money. By the time we wound up in Menlo, Kansas, we were traveling on four rims, minus the top to our chassis, and the engine coughed so bad on its one good lung that Billings beat us into town on foot and hiked halfway back to greet us. Poor Lizzie. We pushed her rear end into the only garage for miles around, a blacksmith’s shop, and parked her next to a broken-down old horse as swaybacked as she was.
No Hotel Ritz for us this time; our stash was over some kind of feed store, where the nice old landlady took pity on us and gave us the best room in the place, one that almost had four walls. Acting big, I tipped her off as to how we were bigtime musicians from Chicago, headed for Hollywood to make our fortunes. In nothing flat, while we were brushing an inch of dust off the furniture (it was harvest time and the chaff blew in from the wheat fields by the bushel), the local sheriff showed up in our mouse-trap leading a posse of the town’s first citizens, most of them with necks so full of moss they looked like buffaloes.
“Stranger,” the sheriff drawled, “how come you claim to be from Chicago when your license plates have got Kansas writ all over them big as daylight?” I flashed my bill-of-sale but they still looked sceptical, eyeing us like we were a bunch of outlaws fresh in from the hills and fixing to make the local bank. When I explained that we were temporarily without funds, just by accident, understand, nothing that a few million bucks wouldn’t take care of, kyaw-kyaw, they all got excited and spoke up at once: “Say, did any of you fellers ever harvest wheat? There’s a mighty big crop out there and we sure as blazes could use a couple of extry hands.”
I had my mouth open, ready to explain that we were all recuperating from yellow fever and the bubonic plague and couldn’t do any physical labor by doctor’s orders, but the ham actor in Bud got the best of him. “Oh,” he sang out, “how interesting. Why, I’d love to do that, I’m sure, and without a doubt my friends would fancy the idea too. If you don’t mind my asking, hm, perhaps I could inquire, how much would it pay?”
A guy could make a slow-motion killing around here—they were willing to fork over all of five dollars a day for our blood, sweat and tears. “You can start tomorrow most any time,” one of the farmers said. “You probably will be needing to catch up on your sleep, so don’t rush to get there early—say about five o’clock.” I asked did he mean P.M. He said he meant A.M.
When we got Bud alone we almost jumped down his throat. “You’re crazy, Milton,” he said. “Just thin
k, we’ll be getting all that fine sunshine and exercise and they’ll pay us for it besides.” He began to do a strongman act for us, flexing his biceps like Charles Atlas. Bud was vain about his figure and always kept his belly button glued to his spine when he stood up.
Next morning he was gay as a jay, and so anxious to get out in the fields that he rolled us out of our pads and practically carried us outside. The thermometer read 120 in the shade that day, so we stripped down to the waist. Billings, always quick on the draw, beat us to the driver’s seat of the horse-and-wagon behind the threshing machine and grabbed the reins, so the rest of us went to work with the pitchforks. I wrastled plenty with my first load, but I haven’t thrown it up yet—every time I heaved the fork it twisted round in my hands and the wheat flew every place but in the wagon. Bud wouldn’t wear any of the straw hats they gave us; he was a he-man and thought the farmers were sissies to worry about sunstroke. We carried him home and he came to in about an hour or so.
Never a dull moment in Hicksville; that night, while we were unraveling the kinks in our weary bones, a delegation of about ten yokels suddenly showed up in our room and I’ll be goddamned if their spokesman didn’t shove a real, honest-to-God soprano sax right in our faces. “Play,” he said, and what he meant was, play or else. We latched on to that horn like it was a bottle of Sloane’s Liniment, fighting among ourselves for the chance to blow it first. It sure knocked those rubes out when they heard us play the blues, and before we knew it we were signed up to entertain at a party they decided to give in our honor.
The following night the whole town declared a holiday and every man, woman and child turned up in the hall, a long shed with some wobbly wooden benches here and there for chairs. They moved an old piano in from Zeb’s parlor, pitched about three tones below 440, and after I made a speech about how the artists entertaining tonight were famous on five continents, we went into our act. Bud did a comedy pantomime on how to kill yourself with no other props but a pitchfork and a stack of wheat, and then we played Royal Garden and a gang of other blues, with me spanking the piano while Bud blew the soprano and Josh and Art banged on the benches to make up the rhythm section. There never was an act went over half as big at the Palace. The farmers got so excited that at one point they even tried to do a square dance to our music, but the blues tempo messed up their geometry and they had to quit.
Back to the Western Union I went, this time to send a frantic SOS to Joe Tuckman, the gambler, explaining how I needed fifteen bucks to get my band out of hock and buy some more tires, so how about it? I hadn’t seen Joe for about four years, but he came through all the same. When we pulled out of Menlo, after a gala send-off from the townsfolk, we had a tankful of gas but mighty few blips left in our pockets.
Somewhere on our travels, after Josh had given up and gone back home, I remembered a cat named Stew Miller, good old Stew Miller, who lived in Trinidad, Colorado, where his old man owned some big copper mines or something. Young Stew, a real jazz fan who went to school around Chicago and haunted the South Side when I was making the rounds, knew Bix and the Wolverines and he sure would be happy to see us again. “Boys,” I announced, “grab your hats, here we go again. Mush! We’re off to Trinidad, Colorado, and all points west!” Through Western Union the Freemans had lucked up on a sawbuck from home, so we were in the chips again.
In Pueblo, Colorado, Lizzie got car-sick. This was one trip where you never could figure out who was carrying who; we staggered into town pushing Lady Lizz again. Bud thought her attitude was downright inconsiderate, and this time it got him so hot that he said we might as well sell the damned thing, because we had all we could do to carry ourselves. As soon as we managed to get rid of the buggy for forty bucks (we used that mountain-goat line on some sucker and it worked fine), I bought a can of tea from some Mexicans and we grabbed a bus and started off for Trinidad. By the time the bus creaked into town I was so high on the weed I couldn’t tell which Trinidad we were in, the Colorado one or the one in the West Indies; I half expected all those lean hombres in miners’ caps to break into a hot rhumba and begin chanting calypso songs at us. Finally, though, I remembered Stew Miller’s name, and when we tracked him down what a welcome we got from the kid. It was old-home week for us.
Stew’s folks were over in Denver and he put us up in his house that night. “You couldn’t have showed up at a better time,” he told us gleefully. “Boy, tomorrow night it’s really going to jump around here—we’re having a jamboree at Ratoon Pass, way up in the mountains, and it’s going to be some party.” He wasn’t lying. This festival was supposed to celebrate the good old days of the wild and woolly West; all the men had let their beards and hair grow long, to show how the West looked at its woolliest, and they dressed up in the clothes of their forefathers, with mean-looking shooting irons buckled around their hips. I lit up for this big deal, and was higher than those mountains before we even got up there.
Man, what a shindig that was. Give me a barrelhouse joint on the South Side any day, where it’s quiet as a church-mouse outing compared to the social life in the Rockies. Talk about the wild West; this was ferocious. When they started shooting it up in the big barn, setting fire to one corner of the building, we told Stew we had had enough. “Aw, stick around,” he said. “These guys haven’t even started yet. There’s going to be some fighting going on in a minute—each one of the fellows takes the part of some historical figure and they re-enact some scene from the past, so it gets pretty lively.”
Lively nothing; it was lethal. Before we could crawl out of that homicidal little clam-bake, half of the barn was on fire and the gun-smoke was so thick it almost blinded us. They sure wasted a lot of valuable ammunition at those festivals of theirs: it would have been more economical to line up the whole population of the town and mow them down with a machine gun. If the wild West needs any labor-saving device, it sure as hell is a firing squad.
That night Bud and Art wired home for fare, and next day they cut out for Chicago. I almost cried when I saw them pull out of the station. All of a sudden I didn’t want to be out in the wide open spaces any more, where men are men if only they live that long. I had a hankering to be back on home territory, rubbing elbows with gentle people like Capone’s sissy-boys and the Purple Gang goody-goodies. It wasn’t healthy in these parts—they pulled jamborees on you when you weren’t looking.
Western Union, I love you. As soon as my wife got my wire she sold all the furniture and sent me a ticket to come home. I rode all the way back on The Chief, the crack train on the Santa Fe, ducking in my seat like a psychoneurotic rabbit every time I saw a ten-gallon hat meandering down the aisle.
9. FORGOTTENEST MAN IN TOWN
FEASTING-TIME WAS OVER AND JOE FAMINE, A NO-TOOTH SCANT-singer with a breadbasket full of mites and scrimps, took to dogging us round. While we were busy looking the other way, the Jazz Era’s heyday had been here and gone. History was laying some trickeration on us.
By 1927–28 we were getting our last earful of real Storyville jazz; that was the tail-end of New Orleans’ golden age. It was just about the last time that hot musicians, still jumping with that oldtime Basin Street spirit and Storyville romp, had much chance to come on with their inspired, free-and-easy collective improvisation. Storyville was fast becoming just another chapter in the jazzman’s storybook, a fable about some mythical land-of-dreams. Tin Pan Alley was soon to be the main stem in the music world, and Basin Street just a one-way road to the poorhouse.
Of all the great delta-bred music-makers, it wasn’t but a few outside of Jimmy Noone, Sidney Bechet, Zutty Singleton, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Tubby Hall, Baby Dodds, Johnny St. Cyr and such who were still beating it out around Chicago, and not all of them were playing their original ad-lib style with small musical units. The wind was being sucked out of the Windy City. Before long the founding fathers of jazz weren’t to be found no-way. The day of the big name-bands was coming up. Louis Armstrong now had an eleven-piece band behind him, and King Oliver
had augmented his Plantation orchestra with three saxes (in place of the one clarinet), and the real big orchestras of Fletcher Henderson and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers were going places, building up a national reputation for themselves, while the small romping combinations were getting lost in the scuffle. All the white bands making the grade swole up so big they could hardly fit on a regular cabaret bandstand any more: Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, and Ben Pollack’s and Gene Goldkette’s too, looked and sounded like symphony groups to us, because five-piece and six-piece bands had always spelled jazz in our language. Jazz meant one thing to us, New Orleans. No matter how many pieces and whole sections the big commercial dance bands were sprouting, they didn’t have anything to do with our kind of music and we just laughed them off. We were the keepers of the faith, the purists, the cats who stayed with it. The others were out to make money, not music. But chances go around, and we figured our time was sure to come.
If we’d a had a second-hand crystal ball to look into, we’d have seen the lean and gripy times ready to smack us in our chops by the year the depression rolled around, when the big commercial outfits got complete control of the popular-music business. We should have spotted the warning signals, telling us how music was slated to become a dull production-line grind, cutting everything to the same standard pattern, turning out notes like a meat packer turns out pork sausages, making the musicians dribble out stock and special arrangements of sweet pop tunes and corny show numbers, mixed in with some hammy clowning up on the bandstand to tickle the simpy customers. But maybe it’s just as well we jazzmen didn’t creep up on Father Time and take a peek around the bend in the calendar. What was waiting for us up ahead, if we’d got a preview, would have given us the creeps. Maybe it was better that we kept marching towards that poorhouse like it was a dicty country club built especially for us, complete with an air-conditioned marihuana bin in the cellar and hot-and-cold running corn mash.