by Mezz Mezzrow
He started to blow his chorus, tearing his heart out, and the tones that came vibrating out of those poor agonized lips of his sounded like a weary soul plodding down the lonesome road, the weight of the world’s woe on his bent shoulders, crying for relief to all his people. He was fighting all the way, aiming to see it through and be understood by all, right down to the last heartrending wail of his plea. All the lament and heartache of life, of the colored man’s life, came throbbing out through that horn. That wasn’t any horn blowing this night. It was the conscience of the whole aching world, shouting damnation at the sins and evil. There were tears in all the eyes around me, tears for what Louis was preaching on that horn, tears for wonderful, overworked, sick and suffering Louis himself, the hero of his race. Everybody knew that each time that horn touched his lips, it was like a red-hot poker to him. Nobody said a word. The usual excited cries of “Yeah Louis” or “Play it poppa” weren’t heard tonight. It would have been sacrilege to break the spell this night. Pops had the floor and he was holding it all alone. Out of that horn poured all the world’s misery, torrents and torrents of it, flooding all through the theater and lapping at all of us. Then came the climax.
Louis was playing his last chorus and it seemed like he would never make it. He was using all the showmanship and great technique that only he had at his fingertips. The audience thought he was superb, sensing that some terrific drama was going on before their eyes, and they were all froze to the edges of their seats, their mouths open and eyes glued on him. Every time Louis slid slowly, oh so slowly up into one of those high-gliding wails, moaning his way along, all of us backstage shook with fear. Each time it sounded like he wasn’t going to get up there. This time for sure he would fall, and break, and collapse with the strain. We heard the torture vibrating behind each searing note. The whole theater was petrified.
Suddenly Charlie “Big” Green, the trombone player, busted out in tears and ran off the stand in the middle of the chorus. I saw that the whole band was crying. All the performers and all the chorus girls had wet eyes. Big Green came and stood beside me and we cried like babies, holding each other’s hand while we waited for those unbearable last few bars where Louis had to scramble up to the high F.
Chick Webb used all the masterful tactics he knew on the drums, trying to roll and punch out his feelings for Louis, giving him all the foundation he could, while the tears streamed down his face. The lights came down to red and blue, because the manager didn’t want the audience to see how everybody was sobbing.
Then it happened. Louis began that torturous climb up to high F, the notes all agonized and strangled, each one dripping blood. He was like the prodigal son who finally sights his home, sick and weary of a lifetime of roaming, determined to get back there before his heart stops beating. He was fighting and sweating blood all the way, and what came out of his horn sounded less like music than like the terrible wild shrieking of the lost and damned. The band rode along up with him, trying to push him, giving him a crutch to lean on and telling him, Poppa we’re with you, don’t tear your heart out, we’ll get you up there ’cause we all love you so.
And then, with the last breath of life left in him, like a man in death convulsions, heaving with his heart and soul and lacerated guts for the last time, Louis clutched and crawled and made that high F on his hands and knees, just barely made it, at the last nerve-slashing second.
A shock and a shiver ran through the theater. The whole house shuddered, then rocked with applause. Louis stood there holding his horn and panting, his mangled lip oozing blood that he licked away, and he managed to smile and bow and smile again, making pretty for the people.
I ran to his dressing room, and found him wiping the perspiration from his face. All his clothes were soaked through, wringing wet. Like some gallant warrior of old he grinned and said “Tough scuffle Mezzie, but that’s all in life. Ha ha!” Then I slipped some yen pox into my mouth and we went out to enjoy New Year’s Eve.
15. CRAWL ‘FORE YOU CAN WALK
MANICURING SOME RIBS AT THE BARBEQUE. UP JUMPS A STOCKY white man with football shoulders, togged in gabardine slacks, rubber-soled shoes, and a plaid jacket two shades louder than a checkerboard, looking like he just hopped out of the Brooks Brothers window. “Mezz!” he yells, grabbing my hand and crunching all the bones in it. “Why man, I’ve been wanting to meet you for the longest time! Say, you’re really the king up here, aren’t you? I want you to promise me one thing—drop around to my office real soon. I’m going to show you something that’ll make your eyes pop out.” I gave him the double-o after I lamped the engraved card he handed me. His name was Gerald X., one of the biggest radio booking agents in the business, who managed a lot of headliners and originated a gang of big network shows. My heart jumped.
A few days later, soon as I waded through a corps of secretaries and got to his movie-set hide-away, he reached into a drawer and came up with a funny contraption. “Now this is a petrographic microscope, Mezz,” he explained. “You can examine rocks and other solid objects through it without slicing them up on slides, see? You look down into their pores and see them in three dimensions.” Then he fished out a pile of little cardboard boxes and said, “You know what I’ve got here? I’ve collected about a dozen different species of marihuana, including yours, and now I’m going to prove to you scientifically that yours is the best on the market. . . .” I just barely made it to a chair before my legs gave out.
He planted me at the microscope. “Now here’s one brand that I got from a Mexican in Chicago,” he said. “Look how dark and musty it is, ugh. Then here’s another kind I got from some Spanish boy—it’s lighter in color but still it looks musty.” He went through all his samples, groaning and shuddering over what was being put over on the unsuspecting public, and then he put some of my stuff under the scope, and the difference knocked me out. “The mezz” had all the colors of the rainbow, bright and sparkling, and each piece stood out separate and clean-looking, like some sculptor had carved it grain by grain. “Man, isn’t that pretty!” Gerald said with real enthusiasm. “Why, it’s like a beautiful sunset, just feast your eyes on it! You could frame that picture and hang it in the Metropolitan.”
Then I found out what his story was. He was just showing me why everybody was so crazy about my stuff, was all. Hell, I had a million dollars right in the palm of my hand and didn’t know it. He was going to show me how to get rich. All we do is, we get some smart attorney, form a corporation and push the stuff on a national scale, see, with branch offices from coast to coast, see. It’s not illegal, and just suppose we sold a hundred pounds a week in each city of 25,000 or over, which is a cinch because there are way over a million vipers in the country this very minute. Why, with a national sales campaign, some smart promotion, in no time at all, etc. I’d have an income in seven figures. Gerald would put up the cash to back me. What did I say?
I was almost speechless. I began to shake all over. “Gerald,” I finally managed to say, “I came up here to beg you to sponsor me with a mixed band, and here you want me to go deeper into something that I’m trying to break away from. I don’t think your reefer syndicate would go because there’s all this talk about the government clamping down sooner or later, habit-forming or no habit-forming. And don’t forget they threw some musicians in the jug out in California for ten days, no matter what the federal law says. If they do brand this stuff as a narcotic, you’ll be in organized crime, and that never pays off—look at this Dixie Davis-Jimmy Hines case that’s been hitting the front pages lately. Besides, I couldn’t get enough of the muta for a big deal like that. . . . I’m afraid it’s no go. If you want to go into a new business, let me tell you I know some of the greatest musicians alive and they’re out of work and I could get them for a band just by lifting the phone. Just think, Gerald, the first mixed band in history, the top colored and white boys playing together. With your radio and advertising connections you could launch us off to a career in no tune. How about that, instea
d of the reefer?” I was pleading with him.
“Mezz,” Gerald said, “you sure are a character, but maybe you’ve got something there. Let me have a day or two to think it over. I’ll give you a ring.”
Two days later I was back in his office, trying to steady my hand so I could sign a contract that mentioned net earnings over $40,000 a year and some other fantastic jive I couldn’t even read, I was so excited. That was August 18, 1933. The scheme was to whip my band into shape, then get a big network to okay us for sustaining. The radio people didn’t go for the mixed-band idea, but they at least agreed to let me have Alex Hill, a fine colored arranger, front the band, and also I could use a great colored act, the Five Spirits of Rhythm. It was an opening wedge, anyhow. Gerald said that later, if we went over, we could maybe write our own ticket about the personnel. Man, we were in. It had started with muta and ended with music.
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I went right to work on the personnel, phoning like mad all over the country—to Joe Sullivan in Little Rock, Arkansas, Bud Freeman and Floyd O’Brien in Chicago, Max Kaminsky and Gene Krupa in Boston. They all agreed to come just for carfare. Eddie Condon and Pee Wee Russell were in New York, and they jumped at the idea. I rounded out the brass section with some good guys I picked up downtown, around Broadway and 4801 Street, and we were set.
Now for arrangements. I cornered Fats Waller in Irving Berlin’s one day, and when he heard my story he yelled for some manuscript paper and pencils, sat down at a piano and wrote two tunes out for me, Walkin’ the Floor and John Henry. Alex Hill was all for me too. “Mezz,” he told me, “just make sure you got enough money to keep me in gin and I’ll knock out some of the finest arrangements that ever was put down on paper with you.” With such good friends behind me, I felt I couldn’t miss. I explained to Alex how I was fighting for a mixed band, but the man said to wait till I got some power, then I could do what I wanted. Why wait, I wanted to know. That’s been going down for years, everybody waiting and nothing happening. “Mezz,” Alex said, “I can appreciate how you feel, but everybody don’t feel like you do and I think the man is right, whether we like it or not. You got to crawl ’fore you can walk, so take it easy, Jim, and we’ll see what we can do.”
By the time all the guys showed up (except Gene; he never did come), Alex and I had about fifteen arrangements finished; we sat up all night at my piano, turning them out at the rate of one a day. All the solos were spotted to keep the boys happy, and we hardly wrote in any first-alto solos for me at all, to keep peace in the family. . . . Well, the very first day we went into rehearsal, good old businessman Red McKenzie showed up and went wild about the Five Spirits of Rhythm. Next afternoon he went down and sold this act to the Famous Door on 52nd Street, and they went to work for this café, the first downtown swing club, and stayed there a long time. They were the first colored group on 52nd Street, and they practically made that block the swing center it’s been ever since. I didn’t mind losing them. There was loads of talent to be had from the race, and I was glad to see them working steady.
All the Chicago boys were tickled over Alex’s arrangements—they were simple, in the best New Orleans tradition, yet they packed the punch needed to swing a big band. The music was written with saxophone figures behind the brass that helped keep the beat going instead of fighting it, and made rich organ backgrounds behind the solos. The last chorus usually came on with a heavy ensemble, the brass voiced in open harmony that gave a big round effect to the music and still kept us more in the New Orleans idiom than any big-band arrangers do nowadays. Flares were always in the right places, to help build up the pulse, and we always saw to it that the chords we called “bellychords” came in where they belonged. (You’ll find some good examples of this effect in the record I made a little later, Swingin’ with Mezz, where in one place an A seventh appears in the key of B-flat, making an abrupt change that hits you in the belly like a shot of good brandy.) In bands today you have the rhythm section fighting the brass and the brass fighting the saxophones; the piano and the bass and the drums all vie with each other to be heard, doing freakish and sensational things to attract attention instead of melting all together to build up a big beat so the guys out in front can blow better. Today’s orchestrations are all overloaded, or over-arranged, and you’ll find Shostakovitch and Delius and Ravel and Debussy sticking their noses out of every other bar—which may make them interesting to the streamlined concert-goer, but it sure isn’t jazz. Alex Hill wrote arrangements that were jazz.
I was walking on clouds, and it wasn’t just the hop that sent me. The music was so good, the boys were playing so fine, all my old friends were back with me, playing the music we loved, and the future looked plenty bright. And then we were breaking the ice so far as the race issue was concerned. We couldn’t miss. . . . Then came our audition. For one half hour we sat in the studio, without any audience or commentator, just playing music that was piped into a conference room for the network board to hear. Alex Hill directed, and when we finished he came up to me wiping his forehead. “Mezz,” he said, “whatever happens you know you broke down a barrier here today. I think I can truthfully say that I am the first Negro to direct an all-white band in these studios.” Some of my dreams were beginning to come true at last. We were okayed for a sustaining program, and the network even gave us a letter of credit so we could get some uniforms for the band! We needed those uniforms because we already had our first job, substituting for Guy Lombardo in a Long Island café. Things were breaking all around, and not only precedents. I was even readying myself to break my habit—the hard way, without any Wampoole’s Mixture.
We went over fine at that café. All the guys seemed happier than they’d been in years, playing the kind of music that meant something to them. Then, one day after rehearsal, I noticed all the boys were packing up in a great hurry, and I sensed something in the air. Finally Alex came up to me and said, “Mezz, I tried to keep from telling you this but I guess you might as well know what’s going down right now as later. The boys are going to another rehearsal that Red McKenzie arranged with some politician’s son named Cass Hagan who wants to be a band leader. Eddie Condon and Red asked me to make the arrangements for them but I stalled them off and they got Benny Carter instead.”
I was ready to quit right there; I had no aim in life any more but to get up to The Bunk fast and fill myself full of hop. But Alex said no, we would fight it out and see who stayed. Next day the boys started out again for their private rehearsal. Max and Bud came back to me and said, “Milton, we’ve been rehearsing behind your back with Cass Hagan, but you needn’t worry. The band stinks. They got Benny Carter to make the arrangements, and we’ve been rehearsing three days on the first eight bars of the first number, and we can’t get it out yet. Benny sure is a friend of yours—he must have written it that way on purpose.” That’s the way with the race. Your friends give you a boost, and trip up the ones who aren’t in your corner, and not a peep do you get out of them about it. Their actions tell the story.
Double trouble. Now comes a telephone call from Miss Lil, old Mike’s wife. “Boy, you better come on down here right away,” she said. “Don’t ask me no questions, just meet me at 134th Street and Eighth Avenue at my sister’s house. I got some talk for you.” All I could think of was that the law had nailed Mike and Mackey in The Bunk. Well, I flew into my car and tore down Eighth Avenue, and when I got near 135th Street it looked like all the law in the country was holding a convention out in front of Mike’s tenement; police cars were parked all over the street, stopping traffic on both sides, and I didn’t hardly know whether to risk stopping or go on to rehearsal. But I pulled up to see Lil.
She came running down the stoop. “You know that juice joint up on the second floor?” she said. She was talking about the King-Kong pad in Mike’s building. “Well, that new bouncer that they just brought up here from Carolina and Mackey had it last night, on account of that chick that’s tendin’ bar up there. You know Mackey and her were goi
n’ together, and this bouncer man was kind of sweet on her too. Well, early this mornin’ they was keepin’ a lot of rumpus up there, and Mackey went up to keep them quiet. They double-banked him and knocked him out with a piece of pipe, and Mackey came back in with his head bleedin’ like a stuck pig. About an hour later the law came knockin’ at our door and said he had to take Mike and Mackey to the station, ’cause the bouncer upstairs had been murdered. Somebody fired a shot right through the door, the one that’s covered with a sheet of steel, and it hit him right square in the heart, many people as there was in there. God sure don’t like ugly. They let Mike out but they held Mackey ’cause he had the fight with this guy before.”
When Miss Lil finished her story I was no more good, and I went to rehearsal with my spirit dragging the floor. At rehearsal I found out Eddie Condon had gone to the Brunswick people and arranged for a recording date with the band, all on his own. Alex asked would I be angry if he made the arrangements—they were paying good money and he needed some then. I told him O.K. I knew he was solid for me and it wasn’t his fault. Then I decided to throw in the sponge. Chalk up another victory for the entrepreneurs.
Mike and I hired a good lawyer for Mackey, and went down to see him in the Tombs. The poor old guy was scared to death, and we told him we were going to do everything we could for him. I asked him in front if he did it. He swore he didn’t. “Mike can tell you that,” he said. “After they hit me on the head with that pipe and a free-for-all got goin’ on the joint, I crawled downstairs and Mike bathed my head for the longest time and I laid down to sleep. Now gate, you know you ain’t never seen no pistol round the house and I don’t know how to use one, but I’m goin’ to plead guilty and take that time. You don’t know what it feels like, waitin’ in your cell to find out if you goin’ to fry or not, and you know I ain’t pink and I got two strikes against me now.”