Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  One day we were stretched out all together, wrapped in a dreamy fog, floating through the driftsmoke. All of a sudden there was a terrific booming explosion that made the whole house do a shimmy. Nobody said anything for a long while. Then Mike spoke up in heavy measured accents, like a judge, talking in slow motion. “I done tole you,” he said to Mackey, “not to rent them goddamned rooms on the top floor to them Kong-cookin’ hootchhead son-of-a-bitches. They done blew the roof off the building, and I don’t need that much air.”

  We fell into silence again, huddled up with our weighty thoughts. An hour later it gradually penetrated my skull that he was talking about the guys up on the fifth floor who were always cooking King Kong in their still. What he meant was that the guy on duty had dozed off and the whole mess of corn mash had exploded. I gave it some serious thought, examining the idea from all angles. We laid there real philosophical, thinking it over. It wasn’t something you accepted just like that. There were implications.

  Pretty soon there was a hell of a clang-clang outside, like the whole New York fire department was tearing up. Mike kept cooking his hop, rolling the pill round and round, very slow and meditative.

  Mackey stirred. He examined the ceiling for a long time, and finally he said, “Man, we oughta git up off our daniels and dig what’s goin’ on.”

  A deep silence again. “Juicy, lay down,” Mike came back, after he had pondered it for a while. “That fire is way up on the fifth floor, see, and it’ll be a long time ’fore it works its way down here to the basement, if it ever does. Can’t ever tell about them things. Sometimes a house burns up, and sometimes it burns down, and could be this one’s gonna burn up so the fire won’t ever get near us. It ain’t no hurry.”

  We passed the pipe around again. Bam! Clunk! Five-gallon tin cans full of flaming corn mash began crashing down the airshaft just outside The Bunk, and then the firemen on the roof turned their hoses down the shaft and it sounded like Niagara Falls outside the window. Plop! Boff! Sssswish! We passed the pipe around once more. Ka-plunk!

  “The Giants are playin’ tomorrow,” Mackey said thoughtfully. Wham! “I been thinkin’ if it’s a nice sunny day we might go out there and see the game.” Crash! Pow!

  “It should be a good game,” Mike said. Clump!

  “Ain’t nothin’ I likes like a good baseball game,” Mackey said.

  Wallop! Fzzzz!

  Nobody looked out the window. We didn’t get off that pad till way late next morning. We were feeling too good to let little things like fires, floods and earthquakes worry us any.

  ●

  All that Winter I was lost in oblivion, stretched out in an opium stupor in The Bunk. Then, late in the Spring of ’32, Louis played Philly, and I got the idea of going down there with Zutty. It was very important to me to try and bring those two guys together again. Maybe I couldn’t help myself just then; maybe I was all washed up as a musician and a human being. But at least I could try to do something for the guys who stuck with it, who could make wonderful music and kept on making it. Louis had Tubby Hall beating drums for him now, and Tubby was in there too, but Zutty had some little extra touch that really sent Louis soaring on his horn.

  Zutty wasn’t doing so good after he left Louis, and me, I just wasn’t doing, period. It was great to see Pops again. As soon as he went on, we ran down under the stage so we could listen to Louis just by ourselves.

  After the opening, Louis began playing Rockin’ Chair, his specialty. The great big wailing notes came shuddering down to us through the floor, each one a-tremble with strength and mastery. All those unbelievable little runs, strung out like diamond pendants by Louis’ terrific artistry, full of sobs and bellylaughs, trickled down into our ears. Louis knew we were there, and he was adding his most magnificent touches just for us.

  We listened, and the tears came to our eyes. Zutty leaned over to me and I leaned over towards him, his head on my shoulder and mine on his chest, and while we stood there hugging each other we just cried and cried. Our tears wouldn’t stop coming. They were made up about fifty-fifty of pride and guilt.

  ●

  Mike’s wife used to turn on the radio in her apartment real loud, so we could hear it down the airshaft. One night the Mills Brothers came on, just before the Amos-and-Andy program that all Harlem listened to.

  I’d never heard the Mills Brothers before. When that deep throbbing husky bass came vibrating into The Bunk, it electrified me. It sounded so much like the oldtime New Orleans blues guitar players, ones like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Johnny St. Cyr and them. All of a sudden I jerked upright on the bunk and began to shake all over. It roused me out of my stupor like a shot in the arm.

  Mike and Mackey were tickled too. I’d been trying to explain to them just what New Orleans music was all about, so now I shouted “Goddamn, that’s the bass I’m talkin’ ’bout, it lifts you up and gives you wings, it sends you off like a rocket.” I guess I got incoherent, babbling with excitement. The other guys agreed that it was solid, and we began to jabber back and forth. Pretty soon I was spieling some about what a wonderful piano player Earl Hines was, the greatest in the world. My mind was reeling back through the South Side, recapturing ten years of great music, and my tongue leapfrogged along after it, stumbling and tripping all the way. Mike came back with “Yeah, Earl Hines may be great, but what you gonna do ’bout Fats Waller,” and I said he was great too but he wasn’t like Tony Jackson and Teddy Weatherford and Earl Hines, he was more in the Eastern style and that wasn’t up to New Orleans. Then Mike spoke up again: “Man, we got some records back there by a guy from the Jungles called James P. Johnson that’ll make them all look sick.” He jumped up and went into another bin, where he dragged out an old winding phonograph and a real old Victor piano recording of James P.’s, with Bleedin’ Hearted Blues on one side and You Can’t Do What My Last Man Did on the other. I started to quiver something awful when I heard that piano jump. James P. really did play something like Tony Jackson on those numbers, with a little Eastern inflection but still he had two fists full of piano and he was knocking out the real blues too. Every chord was a hammer-blow on my skull. My lips wouldn’t stay put. I was on the verge of tears.

  The Mills Brothers’ bass, and then that record that was loaded with nostalgia in every groove, did something to me; my heart was jittering around inside my ribs like a blowtop frog. I couldn’t sit still. For the first time in many months, jazz had jumped up in my face, and it was like a one-two punch that nearly floored me. I was hearing echoes from out of the South Side, all buzzing into my ear with a special message. The music was talking to me, taunting me, and I heard every word it was saying. I almost had a fit.

  Down to Western Union I flew, to send Louis an SOS in California, telling him I needed a hundred and fifty dollars right away, my life depended on it. The money came by return wire, although Pops didn’t know what it was for and to this day hasn’t found out. Then I shot to a music store and bought me a brand-new clarinet (my old one had been stolen while I was at Minsky’s). And then I went home and put myself to bed with my clarinet, and called the doctor and told him I was going to break my habit once and for all, any way and every way he said. He just laughed at me, real cynical, like he’d heard that story before. All he could give me was some nembutal tablets so I wouldn’t blow my lid completely when the agony got too great.

  I was frightened: after a few days without hop, when I picked up my clarinet I couldn’t even blow into it, I was so weak, and my hands trembled so much that the horn just slipped from my nerveless fingers. It was like a death-sentence to me, when I looked at the clarinet lying on the floor. . . . I laid around in bed for a week, while somebody slashed at every nerve in my body with a razor, and I just couldn’t make it. Well, I figured, this is it, this is what you read about in the books—I’m hooked for life, you just can’t get off the stuff.

  I called up Mike and pleaded with him to bring me the joint (the layout) and put me out of my misery. Instead he came up w
ith some medicine, a patent product called Wampoole’s Mixture that was supposed to help you taper off the stuff. What you did was, you took a toy (a tin) of hop and shook it up with this medicine in a bottle and kept taking it every day. As the bottle got empty you kept filling it up again with more of the medicine, so the amount of hop kept going down and finally you were taking practically straight medicine. The second day I almost drank the whole bottle, I felt so bad. It pepped me up enough so’s I could get out of bed and then I made a beeline for The Bunk again, and that was the end of my cure.

  Right after that Buck found out about my being hooked, but he never said a word to me. He was working Loew’s State on Broadway just then, and he invited me to come down to see him. When I got to his dressing room, there was Ruby Zwerling, the leader of the pit band, in there with him, and Buck introduced us, saying “Ruby, this is Mezzrow, the guy I was telling you about. I want you to put him in the band on the saxophone ’cause he’s doin’ something I don’t want him to do.” I lasted there for two weeks. The music was so corny that I couldn’t even look at it, and it flew by me so fast that I was on one act while they were all turning the pages for the next one. I was in a fog all the time. That music, plus the dull acts, made me eat up more hop than ever. The final touch was the movie they had on at the time, Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. That’s one picture they should never show to a hophead.

  When I was on a get-off chorus, able to improvise a little, all the other guys got happy, but when we stuck to arrangements I tried to phrase my own way, to make it halfway bearable, and so I had to go. One day they politely asked me to leave. Back I went to Mike’s cellar. From one pit to another. I still don’t know which was worse.

  ●

  December 19, 1932. Wire from Louis’ manager: LOUIS RECORDING TOMORROW NIGHT CAMDEN AFTER SHOW BE THERE REGARDS JOHNNY COLLINS. (The show, a road edition of “Hot Chocolates,” was playing at the Lincoln Theater in Philly, using Chick Webb’s band.) I drove off right away, and found Louis getting ready to make some of the first recordings under his new contract with Victor. He had a terrible sore lip, in addition to being dogtired, and that day he had played five shows and made two broadcasts. We started off for the Camden recording studios at 1:30 in the morning. I didn’t see how poor old Pops was going to blow note one.

  In the dead of night we drove up to a large red brick church. I wondered if we were going to have a special prayer service to make sure Louis got through this grind, but when we went through the chapel door I saw it was a recording studio. “This is funny, ain’t it, Mezza,” Louis said, “jammin’ in a ole church.” I came back with “Where else should Gabriel blow?” and it tickled him.

  Eli Oberstein, RCA-Victor’s recording manager, took us on a guided tour, down through the chapel and into some gloomy rooms full of echoes, spookier than a mystery thriller, everything vague and the shadows running like molasses. Finally he switched on the lights in one room and we saw hundreds of gleaming pipes lined up there, ranging from five to fifteen or twenty feet in height, standing like so many soldiers all straight and erect in their gilt coats. “Man,” Louis said, “can you beat this? Looks like the calliope on them Mississippi riverboats.” These pipes belonged to one of the largest organs ever built in a church, and many an organ recording was made on it by Fats Waller and Jesse Crawford.

  They wouldn’t let Chick Webb use his bass drum on this date, mainly because Louis’ lip was in such bad shape and without the bass he wouldn’t be pushed so hard. The first number he recorded was That’s My Home, and when the band played it through I noticed some bad notes in the tuba part and the piano bass. The wheels started to creak and wheeze way back in my head somewhere, but pretty soon they were humming, and ideas started to pop up. Without hardly realizing what I was doing, I began to advocate, knowing that Louis had called me down here to help out any way I could. I went into a huddle with some of the musicians, singing a few bars of a bass part for them to play that I figured would make Louis’ lead stand out more and add a climax to the theme.

  The atmosphere got tense. All the cats began looking our way with questions in their eyes, all sort of nervous because this was the first time they’d ever heard me sounding off about any arrangement, and while they were all in my corner they didn’t know could I do anything with the music. Even Louis had never seen me put to any trial musically, because up to then we’d only talked about the music. But if he was worried he sure didn’t show it—his easygoing grin never once left his face.

  Soon as we finished our conference and got our head arrangement straight, Louis stomped off and started the band, this time for a test record. Not a word was spoken all through that studio. Nobody even looked at me, but I had a kind of telepathic feeling that all thoughts were centered on me. This really was a test record—a test for me. I was plenty shaky. What a thrill I got when that revised bass part came thumping out loud and forceful. The moment Louis finished playing his lead passage, he tore his horn away from his lips, came running over to me bubbling with joy, and exclaimed “From now on Mezz is my musical director!” The tension in that room snapped like an overstretched elastic band. Everybody was laughing and smiling approval at me. My blood rushed to my cheeks and I felt warm all over. I couldn’t say a word. Don’t forget, I’d been away from the music for a long time, and this proved I still had some grip on the one important thing in my life. Maybe I could get back to it somehow, if I tried hard enough. There was a little hope.

  The next number was called Hobo You Can’t Ride This Train, and it really taxed all of Louis’ genius. Here he was handed a corny lyric he’d never heard nor seen and told to ad-lib it on a record. While the band played through the arrangement, Louis stood there trying to match the simpy words to the music. “Mezz, come here,” he said. “Now what am I gonna do with this? I don’t know nothin’ ’bout no hoboes, any more’n this song-wroter did.” That was where my hoboing stood me in good stead. I started to buzz fast in Louis’ ear, telling him that A-Number-One was the greatest hobo who ever lived, hoboes ride the rods, blinds and tops of trains, it’s the brakeman who throws freebie passengers off, and stuff like that. Then one of the musicians scraped a curtain rod across a wash-board, imitating a steam engine starting up, and I rang a train bell, and Louis was off:

  Man, what he did with those lyrics. With nothing but the phrases I breathed in his ear to go on, he let his inventive genius run wild and this is how he started off:

  My my my my, listen at that rhythm train boy,

  Boys I’ll bet all them hoboes are all set under them rods,

  Even A-Number-One and all them cats, ha ha, yeah man. . . .

  All aboard for Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, oh all the burgs,

  Hobo, oh hobo, you can’t ride this train,

  Now hobo, oh hobo, hobo you can’t ride this train,

  Now boy I’m the brakeman and I’m a tough man,

  I ain’t jokin’, you can’t ride this train. . . .

  And on the last chorus he finished up with

  Now listen here boy, you, you, you ain’t so bad after all,

  You all right with me son, I think I will let you ride, heh, heh, heh.

  After five shows, two broadcasts, and a couple of hours of recording, Louis was still going strong. You just couldn’t down old Pops.

  The show moved on to Baltimore, and there I saw one of the most dramatic and pathetic scenes of Louis’ career. His lip had been plenty sore when he played Philly; now it was so bad, all raw and swole up, that he just sat and looked at it all day in a mirror, all the time applying some lip salve for trumpet players that Vincent Bach had put on the market, so it wouldn’t be agony for him every time he blew into his horn. To make things worse, he kept picking at the great sore with a needle. I couldn’t stand to see it, every prick went all through me, I was so afraid he might infect himself and have to stop playing altogether. But when I told him to stop he just chuckled at me. “Oh, that’s all right Mezz, I been doin’ this for a long time you know, got to get th
em little pieces of dead skin out ’cause they plug up my mouthpiece. Now you just sit down and don’t worry ’bout nothin’. That’s my job. You let me do the worryin’ ’round here. You supposed to be happy and have a good time, see, you my boy, so just leave all the worryin’ to me, I know how to handle that, ha ha!” His lip looked like he had a big overgrown strawberry setting on it.

  That night was New Year’s Eve. When Louis went onstage to play his specialty number the wings were filled up with chorus girls and performers, who always gathered backstage all hushed and reverent to hear him play. Some of the performers had friends visiting them too, and the house out front was all sold out. It was a tense moment. I was standing in the opposite wing from where Louis made his entrance, so I could see him come on and he could see me and do some mugging at me. I always stood in the opposite wing because he would march onstage singing “Mezzeerola” or some phrase like that while going up to the microphone, in tune with the music the band was playing. It made us both feel good.

  Well, that night he came on singing “Happy New Year Mezzeerola,” and flashing a big grin at me, and I sang back “The sa-ame to you-ou” to finish the intro. Then Louis raised his horn to start blowing, while the band played the background for Them There Eyes, and it was so quiet backstage you could have heard a chinch sneeze. Everybody knew Louis’ lip was worse than it had ever been, and they all thought sure he wasn’t going to make this performance. This was the real drama of Louis’ life, taking place before all those people who thought they were just seeing another good show.