by Jim Miller
We finished our beer and paid for dinner. It was time to head over to the stage area to see Pharaoh Sanders.
Luckily, Scott found a booth right in front as the quartet took the stage, Pharaoh in a white caftan-like shirt and crisply pressed black pants was sporting a silvery beard with no moustache. The others, sharply dressed as well, elegantly took their places behind the drums, bass, and piano. They opened up with a song I couldn’t recognize and, as I watched the master play his first solo, I remembered the way John Krich described Sanders: “At last, he plants like a football tackle, knees locked before the mike. Adjusts clip, adjusts mouthpiece, and is gone.” As I followed the journey of the saxophone, my mind’s eye wandered back and forth from Pharaoh’s stately visage on stage to the image of a Buddhist temple we drove by on Foothill, the grand old abandoned train station to the west of us, the vacant lots out the window of the BART train, and the sunlight dancing on the water of the bay next to Jack London Square. After the first number, they moved into “My Favorite Things” and were joined by a singer who lent the piece an unexpectedly transcendent passion. “No other night like a Saturday night, what a beautiful night, can you feel it?” he sang, as if he were somehow inside the words themselves. His uncontainable exuberance stood in stark contrast to Pharaoh’s stern regal presence.4
Outside, a train went by as the saxophone seemed to tear through the ceiling and I imagined Oakland during the days when 7th Street was a music mecca and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was a proud union. When the band headed into “Nightingale in Berkeley Square,” Pharaoh actually cracked a smile and danced a little. “The streets of the town were paved with stars,” the vocalist sang. As they finished up, Pharaoh introduced everyone as “the great.” “The great” John Farnsworth “from New York City to Oakland” was on drums. “The great” Alex Blake, “from Panama to Oakland” on bass. “The great” Willie Young Henderson, “from Texas to L.A. to Oakland.” “The great” Mike Trebel on vocals “from Cincinnati to Oakland.” As we walked Scott and Megan to their car after the show, I looked at the train tracks headed west into the lonely night and nursed the sound of Pharaoh’s sax still ringing in my ears.
Six
Crying Won’t Help
You say you love me, baby
If that’s love, I’d rather be a thug.
Lowell Fulson, “Thug”
It was dark in the alley and the evening sun was going down
When I found my little darlin’ she was lying on the ground.
Jimmy Wilson, “Blues in the Alley”
“Oakland is Blues City,” Ishmael Reed writes in his 2003 book of the same name, “Oakland Blues singers sang, preached, and shouted out the blues.” His book takes the reader on a tour of the troubled yet resilient city ending up at Esther’s Orbit Room, “the last of the old-time blues clubs located on the legendary Seventh Street.” It was in “West Oakland honky-tonks—all a short cab ride from the Southern Pacific train station,” Lee Hildebrand explains in Bay Area Blues, “where the first generation of Oakland Blues people had disembarked during World War II.” Searching for work in the shipyards and other wartime industries, southern migrants brought the blues and created a rich West Oakland music scene. Players like Jimmy McCracklin, Johnny Fuller, Jimmy Wilson, Big Mama Thornton, Juke Boy Bonner, Sugar Pie De Santo, and Lowell Fulson rocked the juke joints. While some like Lowell Fulson made it, others such as the little-known Lafayette Thomas came to tragic ends. As Albert Vetere Lannon documents, “Thomas faded from the scene, racked by alcohol and working when he could. He died in the 1970s working on a production line at a Brisbane hose manufacturing plant under ILWU Local 6 jurisdiction; the supervisor threw a blanket over Lafayette Thomas’s body and took his place coiling hose—the line never stopped.”1
The whole West Oakland blues scene took a beating, as Gary Rivlin explains: “The final insult was the razing of Seventh Street, a bustling strip that was once home to the likes of Slim Jenkins’s place and the Creole Club. A forbidding and uninviting high-rise housing project took its place.” In Bay Area Blues, Michelle Vignes’s beautiful, stark black-and-white photographs of dead blues spots like the Deluxe Inn, the Shalimar, and the Cozy Den give the viewer the sense of a nearly vanished world. If the music is endangered, the blues themselves are still alive and well.
Fifteen years after penning “Living at Ground Zero,” a lament about Oakland’s crack plague, Reed is once again singing the blues about the killing coming to his neighborhood and the fact that since “many of [Oakland mayor Jerry] Brown’s policies have failed . . . [e]viction rates have tripled” because rents have “increased 20 to 30 percent in the last three years.” The news leading up to our return trip to Oakland continued to be grim: the homicide rate was rising, the unemployment rate was at 11 percent, and beleaguered city teachers were forced to take a 4 percent pay cut.2
Kelly and I drove up on Thursday before the second home preseason game and decided that since Ishmael Reed had covered Esther’s Orbit Room we’d go to the newly resurrected Eli’s Mile High Club in West Oakland. Earlier in the day we explored West Oakland, driving to the abandoned train station and parking in front of the fading yellow New Bea’s Hotel to stop in Sant Sweets and Catering where none of the Indian proprietors spoke English but were friendly enough to let Joe snap a few photographs of them working nonetheless. The neighbor-hood was full of boarded-up buildings, crab grass, and young people hanging out on the desolate corners. Stray dogs roamed the streets. There were “found art” sculptures here and there amid active and abandoned industrial sites. The streets were edgy in West Oakland and, as we cruised past Sweet Jimmie’s and a row of apartments before crossing under the freeway on the way to Eli’s, I thought of the mournful tale of lost lives that Rivlin tells in Drive By, his heartbreaking story of child killers and their child victims whose families had fled the dangers of the West side only to find more tragedy in the East side of town.
Slackenloader rocks the House of Thrills
Eli’s itself is a warm, welcoming space with a low ceiling and red walls covered with old blues posters of Mississippi Johnny Waters, Sonny Rhodes, Cool Papa, and many more. Originally opened by Eli and Alberta Thornton in 1974, the club was “the Home of the West Coast Blues” throughout the seventies until Eli was shot and killed by a jealous lover as he tended bar in 1979. Since then the club has changed ownership a number of times, struggling to stay afloat in a neighborhood where most of the population lives at or near the poverty line. Eli’s was shut down and almost razed by developers who wanted to build pricey new loft spaces in 2002 before Frank Klein bought and saved it in 2003. The crowd was thin and after we paid at the door and toured the room, we sat down and ordered jambalaya and hot links. By the time the food came a few more people had filtered in and Alberta Adams, a Detroit blueswoman, took the stage. She was a stout, elderly woman in a bright red dress who sang while sitting on a chair in front of the stage. She belted out “I Paid My Dues to Play the Blues,” “Detroit,” and “Come and See Me about It” and did a cover of Koko Taylor’s “I’d Rather Go Blind.” In between songs she chatted with the crowd, “How many of you ladies ever been in love with a married man? We got some dogs in the house?”
In between sets, Kelly walked over to buy a CD and get it autographed by Alberta and struck up a conversation with the saxophone player, Bernard Anderson, who, it turns out, was not from Detroit but lived right here in Oakland and was a big Raiders fan. I joined them and we strolled outside together to get some fresh air and interview Bernard as he stood there smoking a cigarette in his cherry red suit and matching fedora. He told us he was born in Chicago “but moved to Oakland when I was five, so I was raised here. I’ve played with all sorts of greats: Sonny Rhodes, Maxine Howard, and others. Since 1988, I’ve played with Queen Ida, who I’ve made some albums with.” Kelly admired what he was wearing, and he replied:You like this suit? I used to dress Queen Ida’s band. One time, when we were in New Orleans, for the first time, I forgot
to bring a suit. Queen Ida said, “Bernard, we’re going to be filmed!” I felt so bad. On the way to the studio, I saw this suit in a store window and yelled, “Stop!” I bought this cherry red suit right there. I call it my “New Orleans Suit.” I play gigs in clubs around here before going to my second job as a security guard. I start at 1 and finish at 6 a.m.
We told him more about our book on Raiders fans and his eyes lit up: “I’ve been a Raiders fan since the sixties.” He continued enthusiastically:When I was a little kid, I played street ball, and I was either Tatum or Upshaw. I always liked Jack Tatum and Jim Otto, but I loved all the greats. Since the Raiders have been back, I’ve had season tickets and hang with the Road Trip Crew off of 66th Avenue. You always know where we are in the parking lot because we’ve got a giant blow-up Pink Panther doll. We have an incredible spread: fried chicken, spaghetti, a leg of lamb every now and then, and lots of drinks. The ladies bring the food for us. It’s a great time.”
We thanked Bernard and left him to finish his cigarette before he had to go back in for the second set. Inside we stopped to talk with Trinity Klein, the owner’s wife, who, when we told her about our project, gleefully told us a joke she’d heard at a comedy club in San Francisco: “Raiders fans will buy everything—hats, shirts, jerseys, jackets, helmets, makeup, costumes, and any other silver-and-black thing they can get their hands on. They’ll paint their house black, build a Raiders shrine in the living room, get a Raiders tattoo, and go back and buy out the rest of the store. They’re complete maniacs. They’ll do just about anything except buy a ticket.” We laughed and sat back down for the second set. Alberta was making her way back on stage, slowly, gingerly, but with style.3
Greetings from the Black Hole
I’m in a Strange, Strange Land
I am streets you drive down drunk and crying.
John Krich, Bump City
The next day on the train on the way to the Coliseum, I flipped through the East Bay Express and found an interesting Raiders item in the “Take Out” section. It was a list of “what Al Davis could do with all that dough” once he won his “nearly $1 billion” from Oakland:• Buy a white Raiders jump suit for every California resident.
• Put 7,575 new cops on the Oakland streets.
• Build two football stadiums in downtown Oakland.
• Purchase the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
• Give an Xbox, PS2, and Game Boy to each of the estimated 1.8 million California kids living in poverty.
• Finance at least ten more gubernatorial recall elections.
• Provide lap dances for every NFL player and coach (except Gruden).
• Subscribe to the Chronicle for the next four billion days (Sundays not included).
• Spring for a single jumbo dog, fries, and souvenir cup at the Coliseum.4
In the parking lot we passed by a few of the same people we interviewed at the last game and waved hello before spotting the 66th Mob tailgate. Here they were, the most famous of all the all-night tailgaters. It was a big, boisterous group of guys, some very big ones indeed. The first guy we spoke with was a friendly mountain of a man, Tony Pizza (his Mob name), who told us that “the whole thing started in 1996 as a kind of spur-of-the-moment thing.” As we were speaking to Tony, his friend Griz (the fan who had been the victim of the hit-and-run accident after the Super Bowl) walked up and we shook hands. Tony got back to manning his grill and Griz hung around for an interview. I asked him how he was, and after telling us that he was much better, he confessed, “The game was more hurtful than the accident. The people, though, the Raiders fans, were just great. A lot of people offered me help and sent me stuff. I work for State Farm, but I’m unemployed now because of the accident.” It was clear that Griz was still moved by the generosity of his fellow fans and felt a deep connection to his tailgate family. As for his history as a fan he said:I was born into a Raiders family in San Leandro. When they moved back from L.A. I started going to games and camping out with these guys. The 66th Mob is where it all starts. During the Super Bowl I met the ESPN guy, John Anderson, and I asked him, “Do you know of any other fan base in America that tailgates for a day or two before games?” His answer, of course, was, “No.” There’s nowhere else like this. No better fans.
We asked if we could take a picture of Griz and Tony in front of the 66th Mob sign and they happily agreed. As we walked on, I found myself pondering Griz’s sincerity. He didn’t have a lot of philosophy to spout about it, but it was clear that the 66th Mob really was a family of sorts to him. All the political intrigue that comes with the Raiders aside, this was something that struck me as incorruptible.
After Griz and the 66th Mob we came upon Chains and Lady Chains. This happy couple was decked out from head to toe in silver chain mail. When I asked Lady Chains what she did for a living, her response was “Raiders.” When I said, “No, really,” her response was “Raiders.” Chains, on the other hand, told me that he had worked for Ghirardelli Chocolate Company for twenty years. Lady Chains stayed home, handcrafted and fixed their chains, and worked on their bookings: they had apparently been on a Coors commercial and a Japanese television show. The entrepreneurial fan was beginning to emerge as a theme. There seemed to be a minor industry at work. How much of a market could there be? Had Raiders fans replaced clowns and magicians at children’s birthday parties? After we had been chatting awhile, Chains and Lady Chains caught sight of legendary Raiders center Jim Otto, who had stopped to chat with some fans before heading into the stadium. They made a beeline for Otto and got their picture taken with him. We took one of them ourselves. It was all about the pictures.
Near the site of the Jim Otto sighting we ran into Ed from Sacramento, an assistant manager for a meat company (a good job for a Raiders fan, I thought) who had been following the team since the beginning. His Raidered-out PT Cruiser was an impressive display of silver flames elaborately spreading out across his black car adorned with several skulls, helmets, and Raiders shields. After Ed, we met Jeff. Jeff, it turned out, was on the NFL Hall of Fame fan video. There was a shot of him in the beginning, cruising into the stadium parking lot on his Raiders Harley. We wandered on past the band area and a few other celebrity fans. I saw Howie walking into the stadium and looked around for Darth Raider and the Violator. They were not in the immediate vicinity. No TV cameras, no action.
Down one of the rows of tailgaters we ran into Patty and Pedro, a very sweet couple from Suisun—the Indian name for “windy city.” After Kelly admired Patty’s “Raiders Girl” hat, she gave it to her, right off her head. After that, they handed me a beer and shared some barbeque. Patty was a dental assistant and Pedro worked construction. Of the Raiders scene Patty said, “Everyone’s great, like a family. A lot of my co-workers wish they could come to more games like me. We have two kids, so we come as a family.” They were with Tony, from Vacaville, whom they had just met. Tony was a landscaper who had designed his own Raiders tattoo. Pedro told me that he marinates his tri-tip in a pot for two to three days before games. As for the Raiders, “I think the reason why people hate the Raiders and Raiders fans is that these guys are the outcasts, the outlaws, the people who everybody looks down upon and now they’re doing good. Now they are getting something for themselves, and people don’t like it.” We thanked them for the hat, the beer, and the food, and kept strolling through the lot until we came upon a suckling pig roaster, Herbert, who informed us as he sat in a lawn chair turning the pig that he had been pig roasting at games for two years. He let me turn the pig for a moment while Kelly took a picture. It was a hot day and turning the pig over coals laid on metal sheeting on asphalt came perilously close to volunteering to be roasted yourself, but Herbert didn’t seem to mind.
In the stall next to the roasting pig we met Nicole Joyner, whose silverand-blackattack. com website we liked. She was a little tentative about talking to us since she felt that reporters had taken her words out of context. We talked a bit about the legal stuff going on with the city, and sh
e said, “I’d like to think it was all about the fans, because the fans are special. Unfortunately, though, business is business. It’s all about new stadiums, and the Raiders are one of the few teams that don’t have one.” Despite all of the legal hassles, “They still have a fan base of 40,000 regulars regardless. If the seats were just $20 they would probably sell out without a problem.” I asked her what she thought about the riots after the Super Bowl, and she said, “Were there really riots in Oakland after the Super Bowl? No, just a few kids on the street. Thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds.” Nicole wasn’t happy with the treatment that Raiders fans got in San Diego: “People got their tires slashed and were treated badly in San Diego.” As for her website, “I’ve had over 200,000 hits on my website. The NFL noticed it, and I had to totally redesign parts of it. I had to take out the Raiders image and remove the part about how to smuggle alcohol into the stadium.” With that, we thanked Nicole for her time and headed into the stadium.
In the hallways of the Coliseum on the way toward our seats, the “Ray-duz!” chant drowned out the national anthem. It’s a shame it didn’t wipe out the game as well. A week after blowing a close one to the 49ers in San Francisco, the Raiders were thoroughly dominated by the Vikings in a 21–6 game whose sole highlight was a 62-yard punt by Shane Lechler. The Black Hole seemed more lackluster than it had the previous game, and people started clearing out in the third quarter. People were sarcastically cheering for the third-string quarterback, Rick Mirer. One notable highlight was the woman in a Raiders nightie. “I love your dress,” must have been uttered more than she could remember that forgettable evening. Even though the game was a meaningless exercise, the fans seemed edgy. I was edgy. If this game was any indication, the 2003 Raiders sucked. As we left, we saw a woman in a Flashdance outfit smoking a cigarette, pounding on the door of the security office. They opened the door, smiled at her, and shut it again in her face. A little farther along, some women asked a pair of cops for their phone numbers and laughed. It was a weird omen.