Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  I grabbed the phone and told the doc about it. Laying back in the bed, all I could see was the opium layout dancing in front of my eyes. I thought of Louis waiting for some arrangements from me, and I started to sweat. Then I remembered Thomas De Quincey. Once before, when I went to break my habit, I’d bought a copy of Confessions of an Opium Eater, but that guy’s experiences sounded so different from mine that I never bothered to finish it. Now I remembered that he spoke about all the pains and body troubles he had when he broke the habit, so I sent Bonnie downstairs to get the book, and this time I read it from top to bottom. The doc came in while I was studying it, and smiled when he saw what I was reading.

  He sat down at the foot of the bed and said, “Milton, I know just what’s on your mind, but don’t worry. Why, just last night at a meeting we doctors hold once a month to discuss different cases of interest, I told them about your case and they would hardly believe it was true. So you can’t let me down now. You see, you have to start life all over again—learn to walk, talk, write and everything else right from scratch, like a kid. You know it says in the Bible, ‘and a little child shall lead them.’ Well, think those words over, and when you’re able to, you go out in the street and play with the little kids, those around seven or eight, get in their ball games and see through their eyes, and gradually everything will come back to you. The weather is nice now, and you can start to take little walks soon, after you’ve eaten for a while and gained some strength back. Then, pretty soon, all will be well again. You’ll even start to play your clarinet, but not right away. First you’ve got to serve your apprenticeship out on the sandlot, and let those little children show you the way.”

  I couldn’t understand everything he said, but it made me think of what Alex Hill once told me: You got to crawl before you can walk. Just then I couldn’t even crawl; my legs were about as much use to me as a couple of India-rubber stilts, and I had so much trouble sleeping nights that the doc told Bonnie to massage my aching muscles with cocoa butter. I went back to De Quincey, but the best he could tell me was to drink some ammoniated tincture of valerian, which he took because he had such awful pains in his stomach. That cat had got himself a belly habit, which didn’t apply to me. I thanked my lucky stars then that Mike and Mackey had warned me about the different habits, because while discussing opium in The Bunk one day they hipped me. “Gate,” Mike said, “be sure you take a bottle of magnesia at least twice a week, ’cause if you don’t you’ll get a belly habit and that’s the worst kind there is. Man, you double up with such cramps when your yen comes on, you can hardly draw on a pill.” I was smart, for once. Instead of taking two bottles a week I took one every single night, before going to bed.

  My spirits were jumpy, going into nosedives one minute, soaring high and hopeful the next. Sometimes I was afraid, and just huddled up in bed with the shakes, not daring to think ahead. Other times I was all rosy and glowing, sure of the future, confident I would make it. . . . I began to eat up a breeze, so I could get out of bed and into the street. Finally, one beautiful sunny afternoon in May, after thirty solid days in bed, I decided to take a walk.

  When I went to put on my clothes I stared at them in amazement: the colors were dazzling and the textures were weird and exciting when I ran my hands over them, my socks felt funny, the shoes weighed a ton. I felt like a clown got up in polka-dot motley, with all the colors of the rainbow. It all hit me like a brand-new experience, and I was so tickled I wanted to shout for joy. The bathroom was some kind of fairyland, full of wonderful smooth snow-white playthings and crazy gleaming pipes that wound in and out—it was the sort of feeling you get when you’re on the road a long, long time and then you wind up in some hotel room you never were in before, and it makes you a little dizzy. The water sounded so funny coming out of the faucet, when I heard it gurgling and splashing I thought it was laughing and I felt so good I wanted to laugh too. I could hardly wait to get out of doors, I was so sure the world out there, under the friendly bright sun, was jammed with wonders. I wouldn’t have been surprised, just then, if I walked out into a land of peppermint-stick trees and roads paved with chocolate fudge.

  When I got to the stairs I stopped, puzzled; I couldn’t make up my mind which foot to use first. Finally I got out into the open air and took one deep breath and where did I do that before, I thought. The air was full of marvelous perfumes, it made my head swim. It was a new world, fresh out of its cellophane wrappings, all shiny and untarnished. The trees and houses were all mysterious, fantastic; I gaped around like I’d never seen such things in my life. I walked down to the corner, strolling on air, cushioned with love and joy, and I could hardly make it back upstairs again, I was so weak and overcome by all the sights and sounds and smells. I asked my wife to bring me my clarinet, and I put it together and wet the reed. When I tried to blow, the tone that came out was all wheezy and out of tune, and I could hardly hold enough air in it to produce a whole note. I put it away again, and fell into a coma.

  The next few days caught me out on the street again, playing with kids who were all eight or nine years old. I coached them a little on big-league pitching form, and taught one promising youngster how to throw a curve. The sound of their excited high-pitched voices brought tears to my eyes. I was back on the sandlot on the Northwest Side, back in Humboldt Park, standing up at the plate all poised and tense while good old Sullivan smacked his big catcher’s mitt behind me and Emil Burbacher jumped around at first and Bow Gistensohn was winding up in the pitcher’s box, ready to heave a tricky curve at me. . . . Along about suppertime I began to listen to all the kid programs on the air, Jack Armstrong, Dick Tracy and all the rest. I got all wrought up when the get-away car skidded over the cliff and the desperadoes dug their tunnel right under the warden’s office and the secret agent’s plane ran out of fuel right over the highest range of the Andes, far above the weird lost city of the Incas that no white man had ever set eyes on before. Everything that happened was wonderful, full of mystery, telling me it was good to be alive in this strange world where all things were possible, your daydreams were acted out right before your eyes.

  One night I was sitting there listening, and then I got up and took my clarinet and locked myself in my room. I put the horn together and looked at it for a long, long time. Then I raised it to my lips and blew. A beautiful, full, round and true note came vibrating out, a note with guts in it, with life and pounding strength. And then I started to cry.

  I had cried plenty the last four years, but this time my tears were tears of pure joy. I was human. I was awake. I was ’live again.

  Book Four: 1935–?

  BASIN STREET IS THE STREET

  Oh, Basin Street is the street

  Where black and white always meet,

  In New Orleans, land of dreams,

  You’ll never know how sweet it seems

  Or just how much it really means. . . .

  OLD VERSION OF Basin Street Blues

  16. GOD SURE DON’T LIKE UGLY

  BUDDY, DON’T EVER TROT BACK FROM THE GRAVE—IT ONLY UPSETS people. After I opened my eyes, blinked a few times, and paddled frantically back across the River Styx, it took me five years and more to convince the world I was alive and kicking again. Seems like folks get right insulted that you won’t stay properly dead and buried. The way some of them glared, I felt like I ought to scram back into my hole and zip the lawn shut above me. . . . Then there was my home life to get straight. Soon as I was back on my pins, I began running up to Harlem again, the only place where I felt I belonged at all. That was too much for Bonnie to take, and one day she upped and told me, “Milton, I stuck by you all through your sickness because I couldn’t leave you alone then, but now we’ve got to face it—it just wasn’t meant to work out between us two. You live in one world and I live in another, and we can’t shut our eyes to it any longer.” She was right, too. She’d taken plenty, sticking with me for so long, and I couldn’t ask her to string along any more, especially when I didn’t know wh
ere I was heading myself. We shook hands and parted the best of friends. . . . Then, to top it off, Louis Armstrong and I drifted apart for many a long year. As soon as I had strength enough to push the brake pedal down, I got in my car and rushed over to Washington in the hopes of getting with Pops finally, like he had said. The first words he spoke to me, sort of hurt and abrupt, were, “Where in the hell are those arrangements you promised me?” I had some with me, Dissonance and a few others, but I was so brought down I couldn’t find words to explain. To make things worse, Louis had never received my special-delivery answer to the last letter he’d sent me, so he thought I just never bothered to reply. In the end I had to ask him for some money to get back home, and he dug into his pocket and gave me half of what he found, three bucks. I managed to get across the George Washington Bridge all right, by coasting most of the way back; my car ran out of gas and stalled just as I hit 125th Street. Miss Lil was right: God sure don’t like ugly. . . .

  Then Irving Mills, manager for Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, started some kind of “Cavalcade of Music” and he was sold on the idea of me having a band in it, so I signed contracts with him for a fourteen-piece orchestra. He blew up my picture and hung it between Cab’s and the Duke’s in his reception room, but the months stumbled by and no bookings did we see, and no recording dates, so finally I took my contract back and tore it up. . . . One night I was sitting in Big John’s café up in Harlem when in walked a colored girl, tall and slender and with a warm smile on her face that had an aggravating question-mark in it, and when I looked at her I felt funny all over. Her name was Johnnie Mae, and she smiled when we were introduced and looked me straight in the eye and that was that. I wound up divorcing Bonnie, and in July of 1935 Johnnie Mae and I took that big step. Bonnie was as understanding about it as she was about most other things; her whole life was wrapped up in her fine son, and she’d always been satisfied because I looked out for him and treated him like my own, and the youngster and I were always great buddies. Bonnie came around to see Mae, and when our son Milton, Jr. was born, in May of 1936, she came up to see him too, and acted like a wonderful friend to us all. I moved up to Harlem with Johnnie Mae, and haven’t left since.

  Well, I really had to scuffle for a while, trying to make it in the music business and selling a little gauge on the side, because now I had two women to support, and pretty soon two kids too, and believe me the weight was dragging me. On June 6, 1936, good old Eli Oberstein (“O.B.”) at Victor gave me a date to make some records under the Bluebird label, and when we showed up (the band was called “Mezz Mezzrow and His Swing Band”) we didn’t even know what tunes we were going to play until Eli came in the studio and handed them to me. They were mostly pop songs from moving pictures: Lost, Melody from the Sky, Mutiny in the Parlor, The Panic Is On, and Stuff Smith’s I’se A-Muggin’ (Parts One and Two). Originally I brought Henry “Red” Allen and Dave Nelson (trumpets), Sidney Bechet (soprano sax and clarinet), Willie The Lion Smith (piano), Albert Casey (guitar), Wellman Braud (bass), and George Stafford (drums). But while we were getting set I spotted Eli in the control room with John Hammond the jazz critic, and when they signalled for me to come inside I could see something was up. First off they told me I couldn’t use Red Allen because he was under contract to some other company, and then Hammond sprang something else. “Mezz,” he said earnestly, “you shouldn’t have brought Bechet on this date, the two of you play so much alike that there won’t be any contrast. Why don’t you get somebody like Bud Freeman?” The remark about Bechet made me dummy up—here I’d been walking around with my head in the clouds because at last I was going to have a chance to get together with the one guy who, more than anybody else, spoke my language, the exact same idiom, so we’d be able to tear loose and romp around each other without friction. But I had to cancel the date that day on Hammond’s say-so, and when we returned the next afternoon I had Frankie Newton on trumpet and Bud Freeman on sax. It was to be a long time yet before the critics and recording directors would let me get together with Bechet the way all my musical instincts yearned to.

  I was practically locked out of the musical world for a whole year after that, except for occasional gigs and jam sessions, until on May 7th of 1937 I got another date from O.B., this time on the Victor label. We made four sides that day: Blues in Disguise, That Is How I Feel Today, Hot Club Stomp, and The Swing Session’s Called to Order. The first three were arranged by Edgar Sampson and myself (Edgar was the guy who wrote the popular Stompin’ at the Savoy), and the last one was an arrangement by Larry Clinton, whom O.B. was just beginning to build up as an orchestra leader. Here’s the personnel on that date, under the title of the “Mezz Mezzrow Orchestra”: Sy Oliver on trumpet (now Tommy Dorsey’s ace arranger, who was then playing and arranging with Jimmy Lunceford’s band), J. C. Higginbotham on trombone, Happy Cauldwell on tenor sax, Sonny White on piano, Bernard Addison on guitar, wonderful old Pops Foster on the bass, James Crawford on drums, and myself on clarinet.

  And that was how it went, mostly coffee-an’ stuff—until suddenly I woke up to find myself leading an all-star mixed band right on Broadway, the first one ever to hit Times Square, and bringing the house down every night too. The color line along the Great White Way wasn’t broken, exactly, but it sure got dented some, during the weeks we blew our lumps down there.

  “O.B.,” I said, “I’ve got to start a mixed band, I’ve got to. You’re the one guy in this business who understands what it’s all about, and you’ve got to get me some backing.” I was sitting in Eli Oberstein’s office, pleading with him. The words weren’t out of my mouth good before he was on the phone, making the wires hum, and a few hours later we were both sitting in a Broadway nightclub called the Harlem Uproar House (on 52nd Street, just off Broadway), huddled over a steak with the owner of the joint, Jay Faggin.

  “Here’s the idea,” Eli said. “Mezz organizes a fifteen-piece all-star mixed band. We open it here at the Uproar House on November 20th. That’s the same night we’re inaugurating the RCA-Magic Key program on the air, so we spot the band on our radio show for a build-up. Recordings to follow. Promotion. My attorney will draw up corporation papers and we’ll all be in business.”

  “Set,” said Jay Faggin.

  “!” I said in a low whisper. I choked on my drink.

  When I came to, Jay and I discussed a new entertainment policy for the Uproar House. The joint wasn’t doing so well right then, being in receivership and all, with Jay as the trustee appointed by his creditors, but we figured we had some drawing-cards that would pull the place out of the red. Instead of just killing time with the usual line of chorus girls, we’d get five teams of lindyhoppers from the Savoy Ballroom. Then for some acts: Hazel Scott was singing and playing at the little bar in the lobby, and we’d spot her in the floor show; Willie The Lion Smith would be hired for piano specialties; Lovey Lane, a very pretty soubrette, would do dance specialties; Flash Riley, an interpretive dancer, would be teamed up with Lovey Lane in a spectacular African dance routine; Dolly Armendra, a sensational colored female trumpeter from the old days of the South Side, would be featured with the band; Eli would get hold of the Casseras Brothers Trio to play between our sets. So far, so good. It was really shaping up.

  I tore up to Zutty Singleton’s place. “Zoot, I got it this time,” I started to babble. “We’re in the money, Jim, sit down and let me lay this jive on you poppa. My dream has finally come true.”

  Zutty thought I was feverish and tried to calm me down. “Take it easy Mezz,” he said, “take it easy, what’s this mess all about?”

  “Man, I don’t know where to start. Dig this, I went down to see Eli Oberstein today. . . .” I finally got the story out.

  “Wow!” Zutty yelled. “This is it, ain’t it gate! Man, we got to have a drink on that.” As we were skipping down the avenue, he asked did I have a library, and I remembered all the old Alex Hill arrangements, but then we dropped over to see Count Basie at the Apollo, and he said “Great deal,
man,” as soon as we laid our racket on him, and slipped us some wonderful arrangements from his own library.

  Now to get us a hunk of personnel. Eugene Cedric, clarinetist and tenor saxophonist, was with Fats Waller, but Fats was doing a single then and his band was laying off, so Cedric was tickled to come with us. Frankie Newton was playing trumpet with John Kirby on 52nd Street, but he gave his notice and joined. Sidney De Paris, the trumpet player, left Charlie Johnson to join. George Lugg the trombone player, whom I’d known in Chicago, joined. Vernon Brown, also on trombone (one of the St. Louis group of musicians from the old days), also joined. I sent Max Kaminsky train fare and he came down from Boston and joined. So there was my brass section. Then I hired Bernard Addison on guitar, Elmer James on bass and tuba, John Niccollini on piano, and three good guys on sax. With Zutty and me, that made fourteen—seven white, seven colored; and Dolly Armendra made fifteen. I found some more fine arrangements. There was a real excitement jumping in the air; it was a revolutionary thing, and all of us connected with it were so dazed we could hardly believe it was happening. But into rehearsal we went, and in a few days the band began to have a rock to it and it was solid. Musicians in other rooms at the rehearsal studios would bunch up outside our door listening—this was something new on old Broadway, and it started tongues wagging and ears to cocking up all over. Agents began to inquire if I wanted bookings, and guys stopped us in the corridors to compliment us on how terrific the band sounded through the closed doors. The millennium was on all of us. O.B. came through with some gold so Zutty could get some new drums and pay his back rent; arrangers worked for us on the cuff, Manny’s supply house on West 48th Street furnished all the mutes, mute racks, metal hats and drum sticks, and wasn’t in any hurry about the dough. Cy Devore togged us all in tuxedos. Oh, everything was greased for us.