Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  ●

  Well, the Chicago School no sooner got its name than school was over; all the star pupils scrambled out of the classroom and went truant. Our break-up was in the cards. Influences from the outside kept slamming at the Austin High boys every whichaway and knocked them off the track. Tesch was a prize example: while he was working up a style that sometimes came kind of close to the Armstrong-Noone school, he was huddled up more and more at his phonograph at home, listening to all kinds of symphonic razzmatazz like Hoist’s The Planets and Stravinsky and Ravel. That poor guy was so confused about where he was going, he’d play his own records over a few times and then grab hold of them and slam them down over his knee like a madman, breaking them into a thousand pieces. And don’t forget that Bix, who was a bitch-on-wheels to Tesch and all kinds of a virtuoso, was tugging hard at these kids too, needling some of them with his skullbusting classical jive. New Orleans had put her grabbers on them like a powerful magnet; but there were plenty of other magnets yanking at them too. Half the time they didn’t know whether they were coming on or going tangent. Confusion had the day.

  When I first met the Austin High Gang, they’d damn near splintered their toupees over the way I kept trying to stick to a straight Negro style. But it wasn’t all a honeymoon kick for us; after a while some of them started to get a little lecture-shy and bit-chomping when I kept yapping at them every time they drifted off one inch from the pure style. The way they dug me, I was dogmatic as a preacher-man at a revival meeting, narrow-minded as a Georgia cracker; I kept sounding off like I had a real fixation or obsession, saying Yeah, you played that real good, it sounded just Louis or Baby Dodds, or No, you ain’t got that just right, Jimmy Noone wouldn’t of played it that way. They had a comeback: So what? And I didn’t have enough wig-trigs to explain why you had to sound like Louis and Jimmy Noone. The trouble was, I was still fumbling around some in the dark myself. I had plenty of instincts and a powerful feeling about the music. But I didn’t have any worked-out philosophy or musical theory to back them up. Half the time I wasn’t clear on what I was getting at myself, although I sure worked up plenty of steam on the way. I was long on criticism, short on ideas. They couldn’t help but bristle up sometimes at my spiels.

  Besides, the pure hot man was beginning to run into a gang of cold shoulders; the big name-bands were going places and not coming back, but we were finding it plenty tough to get our vittles unless we catered to the tastes of the unhip general public and watered our music down to a thin, sad gravy with no more body to it than some tired dishwater. When Red McKenzie showed up with his hard-headed practical slant and gave the boys a peep at how much big money was to be made, they figured they already had the secret of the music and were gone with it. It wasn’t just the fancy dough that set their minds to buzzing, although that was a part of it. What Red was offering them was a short cut out of their musical dilemma too. Red didn’t mean no wrong. He just wasn’t steeped in the real colored man’s idiom, like some of us had started out to be.

  Finally, one motherferyer day, all the guys decided to cut out of Chicago, under Red’s and Eddie’s leadership, and head for the bright lights of New York. And there wasn’t any place for me in the set-up. They had a practical reason for not taking me along, the same reason I was left off of the first records: Tesch played clarinet and Bud tenor sax, so there wasn’t any opening for me unless the band was made bigger. But there was another reason too. In Chicago, at least you had a real Basin Street tradition built up, and some of the great colored jazzmen, the founders of our school, were still around playing their wonderful music. But New York was Tin Pan Alley, flooded with commercialism. They’d hardly even heard any jazz up there; the best they got all through the early Twenties was the barnyard imitations of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, plus sticky-sweet show music played by groggy pit orchestras during musical comedies. The guys didn’t want a monomaniac tagging along on this trip. They’d always kidded me about how I ran with the colored boys so much, till I was talking like them as well as trying to play like them. And I didn’t give much promise of changing any. I wasn’t budging much more than a hincty mule in those days, though I couldn’t give a good reason why. A guy like me wouldn’t be very good company in New York.

  On their last night in town, when they already had their train-tickets bought and their luggage packed up, we all got together for a farewell party at the Nest. That had become our hangout, when we weren’t jamming at The Deuces, because Jimmy Noone had his band there and we couldn’t get enough of that guy. The management had set aside a special table just for us, in a corner alongside the bandstand, and night after night we’d been hugging that spot, lamping the band and shaking our heads because it was too much. Jimmy usually started out early in the evening by playing arrangements of popular tunes of the day, and how he played them; but when we eased in and began shooting our requests at him, he’d always shift over to the blues for us, beaming down at our table and asking what we wanted next, so it was real lowdown New Orleans gutbucket all night long for us. Jimmy was our boy.

  That night the guys were a little embarrassed and red-in-the face, and they sat around kind of stiff and awkward. Gene Krupa was going along with them on their treasure-hunt in The Big Apple, and they all knew that Gene was my protégé, that I’d wised him up to everything I knew about the colored man’s drum technique, including things I’d got from Zutty Singleton and Baby Dodds that I’d promised Dave Tough I’d never show to anybody else on this earth. And I’d spent a lot of time coaching Joe Sullivan too, giving him little hints I’d picked up from Tony Jackson, Earl Hines and all the other great Negroes who had ever grabbed a handful of keys. I sure don’t want to give the impression that I was Poppa Jazz, surrounded by a flock of know-nothing disciples who were rising up in revolt against the master. No, that’s not the story. It was just that I was a few years older than most of these kids, and I’d enrolled in the New Orleans school earlier than any of them did. I still had a long and wearisome way to go myself, no mistake about that. But I’d had more schooling than them, and I shared whatever I knew with them all.

  This evil dim, as we sat around our table at the Nest, I was still as a hoot-owl, sad and sick at heart. We’d come up a long, painful road together, the gang of us, and now we were going off in opposite directions. Maybe we’d never meet again. Maybe, if we did join up in later years, we’d be strangers to each other. The future was a study in midnight black. Buddy, I had the sulks’ whole family.

  All night long we kept asking Jimmy Noone to play the blues for us, and he kept saying sure, glad to, but all night he played only some arrangements of show tunes that were in his repertoire. It began to dawn on us that we hadn’t heard not one of the blues, in spite of all our requests. Now that was bothersome, because Jimmy and the boys liked us, knew we were crazy about their music, and they usually turned the place over to us whenever we showed up. And this was a special occasion, with all the guys leaving—you’d think this time, for sure, Jimmy would be extra nice to them all. But the blues kept on not being played. It made us kind of uneasy to be politely igged this way, and that put still another wet blanket on the party, which was sopping already. Weep City was just around the turn, and we were traveling on the express.

  Finally it got late. The wake began to break up. We stood up, shaking hands all around mumbling our good-byes, trying to smile at each other but looking like a bunch of professional mourners who didn’t get paid. I was froze in my tracks—it hit me all of a sudden that when those guys walked through the door it would be for the last time. From now on this table was going to be reserved in my name alone. Weight was really on me. I’m not too proud to admit that there were more tears in my eyes than I could see through.

  The boys threaded their way through the joint, and then they pulled up at the exit and turned around for one last look. Just at that moment, with split-second timing, the band struck up a gut-clenching blues that was like one big sob breaking over the room, a terrible moan
ful “preachin’ blues.”

  For hours the band had steered clear of every blues number we asked for, lightly and politely. Now, when everybody was leaving, here it came, a carload of moans and wails. I began to realize that there was some point to this. It didn’t just happen like that. The boys knew something was up too, because they stopped dead, their faces all wrinkled up with questions, and stood facing the band.

  In a minute the second chorus came on. Goddamn if old Doc Poston, who played alto sax and clarinet in the band, didn’t raise up from his seat and begin to preach. I couldn’t believe it was happening. To dig the issue, you got to know that in all the time we’d been haunting the Nest, not one preaching blues did the band ever play. Preaching blues was strictly race music, played by colored musicians for their own kind. It was private between-us stuff, made for private consumption. Of all the different kinds of blues, it was about the only one us white musicians never got to take over at all. And now here it came at us. While the band played a stop time behind him, Doc Poston stood and in his husky moanful voice he started to preach. He was the preachinest man I ever did hear. And what he was preaching that night was a homemade hard-cutting psychoanalysis of every man standing up there in the doorway.

  Red McKenzie was first in line; Eddie Condon stood next to him, Joe Sullivan next, and Gene Krupa brought up the rear. Doc took them in the same order, reading from left to right. He sang:

  There stands Red McKenzie right over there,

  He’s goin’ to New York with his mop of red hair,

  He’ll be back pretty soon I do declare,

  Cause the stuff he’s puttin’ down really ain’t nowhere.

  Condon’s standin’ side him and he’s all red in the face,

  Leavin’ Mezz behind him, thinks he’s really goin’ some place,

  But if he knew like I do he would make a change of pace

  Cause he ain’t goin’ nowhere but on a wild goose chase.

  Sullivan’s goin’ with them an’ I don’t understan’

  Why he’d travel with that runt an’ that red-headed man,

  He’ll be writin’ home for help but he won’t have the stamps,

  The only thing he’ll have will be the miss-meal cramps.

  Gene was next on the list, but before Doc could take up his case he came tearing across the floor and sat down again with me. The other guys stood still as icicles, trying to smile but looking like they’d been chewing on some alum. Then they all turned and bolted for the lobby. They couldn’t get out of the place fast enough. Gene sat with me the rest of the night, till he had to cut out to catch the train for New York.

  I can’t tell you how I felt. What Jimmy Noone and Doc Poston did that night was just about the most powerful experience I have ever had in my whole life. It was like I was going down for the third time and all of a sudden somebody I didn’t even know was a close friend to me threw out a life-saver. Jack, I was saved that night, and in the nick of time. There was still no word spoken between the band and me, but now they struck up the blues and stayed with them right until closing, playing every number they knew was a favorite of mine. I didn’t try to put my feeling into words, and they didn’t expect me to. If I’d opened my mouth then, I would have turned on the weeps.

  Right there is a trait of the race that always hits me more than any other in this world. They hardly ever discuss anything, chew up a topic until it’s as limp and tore-up as an old dishrag. Hell, there’s no time for discussion; besides, gumbeating is just a waste of energy, because words were mostly invented to lock up the truth and sneak it out of sight, not to get it across. Those guys understand what goes on, and expect everybody else to understand, through looks and unspoken attitudes, little gestures and subtle hints and the things swimming deep in a man’s eyes, just out of the whole atmosphere, by a kind of mental telepathy. They dug what the score was with us that night. I never spoke to them about the other guys leaving, but they’d heard about this gravy-train excursion to New York and they knew what was behind it. What they’d been saying all evening long—first by not playing their real music when the guys asked for it, then by blasting them with the preaching blues—was that in their eyes I was trying to be true to the spirit of their music, no matter how I fumbled and fussed, and the other cats weren’t saying good-bye to me as much as to the good, solid, honest and a-romping jazz world, where your emotions are clean and straight and you pour them out in a right and heartfelt way.

  Doc’s words didn’t mean that Red and the others were mean or anything like that. No, as a matter of fact they were all good guys, and Doc knew it. But if they went tangent to the real jazz music and kept kidding themselves that they were still steering straight, they wouldn’t be nowhere, and at the end of their rainbow in New York they’d find a can of mouldy beans instead of that pot of gold. Doc was saying to hell with the money and the fame, just fly right, hew to the line, stick with it. We got us a fine new music here, he was saying, and let’s keep on making it as honest and good as we know how, and, if we don’t hit the headlines and cop the gold, the hell with it, we’ll know we always did our best and we’ll be straight with ourselves. That’s what Doc was preaching. And to emphasize it still more, the band refused to give their music to these guys, then hit them with the real race music when they all went to leave.

  Gene and I were their guests for the rest of the night. When they had a break they all came off the stand and walked over to our table with real friendly, paternal smiles, patting me on the shoulder and acting so nice and warm I couldn’t hardly speak. They understood about things, those guys did. It was just another case of the smile that speaks volumes and the real deep sympathy that I have got from the race every time I felt lonely and forgotten and the misery was heavy on me. If I managed to live through that sorrowful night at all, I have Jimmy Noone and his band to thank for it. Gene didn’t say a word about what happened, and I didn’t either. I don’t think we’ve spoken of it to this day. But he sure must have gotten the point, and so did I.

  ●

  As soon as all our buddies broomed off to Tin-Pan-Alleyland, Chicago turned from a frolic-pad into a mortician’s icebox. A fraughty issue, Jim, really sad. Now that our brotherhood of music studs was bust up and scattered to the four footloose winds, Josh Billings and I moped all around town like a pair of alleycats, poking our noses in creepy cellars and the quiet ones off the main drag to find some sign of life. No luck.

  “This old burg just laid down and died on us,” Josh moaned, “only it refuses to close its eyes. Some killjoy bastard with a big rubber hose sneaked in here and syphoned all the goddamned life out of it, every last drop. We’re lost in a morgue, surrounded by two million corpses.”

  He wasn’t telling no lie either. That town was sad as a map and twice as flat to us. King Jazz had packed his trunk and made his getaway, taking all his monkey-glands and hypodermic needles with him. There wasn’t a shot of adrenalin left to make this droopy town sit up and take notice again.

  Josh really went to Beef City. “The hell with it Josh,” I sighed, singing the blues for real. “The hell with everything. Let’s you and me go over to Pasquale’s and light up for a while.”

  That was how we always wound up. At the Mexican’s we could at least get loaded on good hay and forget our misery for a couple of chimes. The nights were coming to be long shimmying chains of muggles for us, reaching from nowhere all the way to nothing-doing, each one longer and knottier than the last. The weed was the only thing that kept us going, no jive.

  Pasquale lived in a tired-looking excuse for a house over in a gloomy industrial section of the West Side, a lopsided cubby of tarpaper and slats held together with a string and a prayer. Inside, the scene was always the same: around the only real hunk of furniture in the room, a big hollowed-out tree stump that squatted in the middle of the slanting floor, sat Pasquale and his friends, rocking on their heels, so high they were about to fly, with wide-brimmed hats big as beach umbrellas stuck way back on their heads. It
was a weird picture, lifted straight out of some jungle in the Sierra Madres, lit up by nervous gas-lights that threw snaky India-rubber shadows over the room and across the dark oily faces of Pasquale and his compañeros. In one corner was a wooden box, over which they’d shake the muta on a newspaper until all the seeds dropped out and rolled down. Then this seeded muta—real golden-leaf, smuggled across from south of the Rio Grande—was dumped into the carved-out tree stump, and these guys would crouch around their pile of shredded joy and roll muggles on a twenty-four-hour shift, jabbering away in spic and smoking up all the profits. A couple of them always took time out to strum their guitars and wail songs like La Cucaracha. Pasquale, a swarthy matchstick of a squirt with hollow cheeks, no bigger than a blink, always gay and full of laughs, was bossman of this dive; while he waggled his fingers, rolling with a more expert touch than any piecework slave on the assembly line, he kept chuckling, cursing, yelling crazy Mexican songs and sucking on a stick of gauge like it was a hunk of peppermint candy. “Chingando cabrones!” he’d shout. “Sonumabitch, make quick, oiga! Meelton is here, verdad, roll ’em cabrones, roll ’em fat, amigos mios!” Little Pasquale used to sell his muggles six for a dollar but he gave us a cut-rate price, a tobacco tin full-up with muta for two dollars, or a Diamond matchbox full for four or five. It was real mellow too, purer than Ivory Soap and guaranteed to keep you afloat twice as long.

  This night they were beating up their chops like mad, popping at each other like their lungs were filled with soda water, and they looked like they had just seen a whole battalion of ghosts, they were so scared. Their eyes were rounder than cannonballs, and exclamation marks hopped off their tongues like fidgety frogs. Seemed like they were having some kind of hot argument, passing a Mexican newspaper around the circle while they slung high-speed peon jive at each other.