Good Things Happen Slowly

by Fred Hersch

  CHAPTER 5

  ROLLERENA’S WORLD

  The first time I came to New York without my parents, at age eighteen, I drove up in the summer with my Cincinnati roommate Eric Wolfley to go to the Newport in New York jazz festival. We walked along Sheridan Square, a slice of a public space at the three-street intersection of Seventh Avenue, Christopher Street, and West Fourth Street, a few blocks south of the Village Vanguard. I vaguely knew about the area’s significance in gay culture but had not yet had any personal experience in the city’s mythic gay underground and hadn’t yet been to a gay bar. We walked past the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, the site of the historic uprising of 1969, when gay men and drag queens (and women, as well as some who rejected either category) fought back against a police raid and lit the torch of gay consciousness in America. When we reached the edge of the square on Seventh Avenue, we found a horde of people gathered on the sidewalk, and I wormed my way to the front of the crowd. In the center of the street was a tall, stalk-thin drag queen dressed in a poofy, faded white taffeta wedding gown. She was wearing a grand dame’s hat, sparkling cat’s-eye glasses, a wig studded with artificial fruit on one side and a golden tuille veil draped over her face. She was roller-skating in athletic pirouettes and spins, waving a fairy-godmother wand at the crowd, as if she were casting a magic spell—and not just figuratively.

  People oohed and aahed, and some called out to her: “Rollerena!” “We love you, darling!”

  I flashed on the show boys at Kings Island, lip-synching to Bette Midler records, dressing up as Sandra Dee and Rita Hayworth, and I thought, Now, this is really gay.

  When I moved to New York a few years later, I didn’t do it for the gay culture, though after my experiences in Boston I was eager to check it out. I came to the city for its musical culture, to carve out my place in the jazz capital of the world. It was of secondary importance that Greenwich Village in the 1970s was also the co-capital of gay America along with San Francisco. I was a gay man, after all, and moving to New York helped me come fully to terms with what that meant. As I watched Rollerena, who I later heard was rumored to work daytimes on Wall Street, it hit home to me that anyone could be anything. I just needed to resolve some issues about what it was that I wanted to be.

  I knew I was a jazz musician and wanted to become fully established as a successful one. And I was a gay man and wanted to succeed at that, too, though I wasn’t entirely sure what that involved. So I plowed ahead at fulfilling both sides of my identity—but separately, toggling between the two. That was the only way I could conceive of satisfying either part of me. I saw the two as mutually exclusive and elementally incompatible. I had no role models for an integrated life and was aware of how difficult reconciling the jazz cat Fred and the gay man Fred would be. When I first came onto the jazz scene in Cincinnati, I felt like a member of a below-the-radar secret club, accepted as a young, talented, and ambitious player. I was not sure what it would be like to be out on that scene—but I sensed that if I moved to New York, where I knew I would end up, it would have to happen eventually.

  It didn’t take me long to learn how to make my way around the city’s gay scene. There had probably never been a more exciting time and place to be gay than in New York in the late seventies. Over the decade after Stonewall, the long-hidden society of homosexual and sexually fluid men and women had steadily, visibly begun escaping the shadows. The proposition that nontraditional approaches to gender and sexual identity need not be sources of shame was starting to take hold through the bubbling-up gay-pride movement. In Greenwich Village there were gay men, lesbians, and trans-everything people everywhere. There were gay shops, gay restaurants, and gay investment firms. There was an ephemeral but unmistakable gay feeling in the air—an energetic sensation of joy in the wonders of difference. It was liberating just to walk down Christopher Street, past the leather stores and the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, filled with groundbreaking books from the early renaissance of gay literature: Manual Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, and the inescapable Joy of Gay Sex, cowritten by Edmund White.

  There were gay bars outside of which people hung around on the sidewalk, instead of hiding inside behind painted-over windows, as they would have done a decade earlier. The city was teeming with gay men, or at least that’s the way it seemed to me as a young gay man with my eye out for other gay men. People were cruising everywhere. They cruised in the aisles of the supermarket and the lines at the bank and the post office. They cruised on the buses and the subways. I remember trudging through the snow in the West Village on a winter afternoon when I got hit on the shoulder by a snowball. A cute guy down the block had tossed it at me. We came up to each other, chatted a bit, got some hot chocolate at a Greek coffee shop, and went to his place together. One night I found myself seated in the Vanguard at the same table with an attractive man, and he started playing footsie with me. At the end of the show I went to his home, then at the infamous Chelsea Hotel.

  The seventies were a time of sexual liberation for people of every sexual orientation, of course. Gay men were going to places like the Anvil, where go-go boys danced on the bar upstairs and men had anonymous sex in the dark downstairs. Meanwhile, on the Upper West Side, straight men and women were going to Plato’s Retreat, having orgies with a few dozen strangers. It was a time of intoxicating recklessness, of opulent hedonism with few apparent consequences. So you had sex with somebody you had just met in the elevator and would never see again? Why not? What could happen? You might get crabs—or, worst case, God forbid, VD. But there were antibiotics to take care of that. A few pops of penicillin—all better!

  I had a good time as a young gay man discovering my sexuality in the late seventies. Yet I was never entirely comfortable with some aspects of the gay male scene in New York. A lot of it was pretty rudimentary. The scene was mostly about sex, and people were largely defined by their physical appeal according to a fairly narrow set of standards, their perceived sexual prowess, or their money. The money came into play mainly as a means to facilitate sex by furnishing booze and drugs. Ultimately, everything boiled down to how hot you looked, how nice your ass was, what you liked to do in bed, and how big you were below the belt. It could hardly have been more basic.

  I felt a little alienated in the gay scene much of the time, because I wasn’t a he-man, I was a little unusual-looking, and I’ve never been rich. I was in the midst of figuring out my own way of being gay, just as I was working out my own approach to making music. I wasn’t a queen, and I wasn’t the Marlboro Man. I was Fred. I had nothing against effeminate men or super-macho men, though I did tend to resist clichés of all sorts, because I’m not interested in clichés—personally or musically. Also, like a lot of gay men in my generation, I had to overcome a degree of internalized homophobia that came with growing up when we did—I wasn’t particularly comfortable with obviously effeminate men. I was somewhat resistant to extreme expressions of gay identity, even as I admired those guys—such as Rollerena—for being so brave.

  In the summer the entire population of Greenwich Village seemed to migrate to Fire Island, the sliver of rental cottages and beaches off the southern coast of Long Island, where the communities of the Pines and Cherry Grove were de facto gay resorts. As we entered the eighties, I took a quarter share in a house in the Fire Island Pines—I occupied a bedroom with another renter every other weekend—and I was miserable. I felt insecure physically, even though I went to the gym often enough and was in good shape. I just wasn’t a big beefy hunk from the cover of Mandate magazine. I wasn’t a boy toy. I was outside the circle of impossibly good-looking men whom I referred to as “A-gays,” though, as I had in high school, I was perversely aching to be “in” with this same crowd who couldn’t have seen me as me. I was desperate to have an actual conversation about something real with someone, instead of just being all flirty and fucking—though I did some of that too. I was looking for something that was virtually impossible to f
ind there—love. In my experience, Fire Island was like a concentrated version of the bars: a well-constructed, high-functioning marketplace for sex. All the human interaction there was commodified and transactional.

  I was ready for something more. I was looking for someone I could talk to about music and books. I wanted to be with someone I found interesting and I respected, and who found me interesting and respected me. By luck, the out-of-control cruising scene of the time worked to my benefit one morning. It was August 1979, and I had just returned from a two-month gig in Tokyo leading a trio with Red Mitchell and drummer Eliot Zigmund. I was standing dazed and jet-lagged on Seventh Avenue South in front of St. Vincent’s Hospital, waiting for the light to change. I saw a hot-looking guy getting hassled by a street person. Our eyes locked and we took in each other’s looks intensely. I helped free him from the guy harassing him, and we began to talk. His name was Eric Weinmann, and he told me he was visiting from Sacramento, seeing friends and exploring gay life on the East Coast. We went for breakfast and then hooked up. More significant, we connected as people and not mere assemblages of body parts.

  After a few days he went back to Sacramento, and we started to talk on the phone almost every day. And in a few weeks, he wrote me a touching letter saying, in part, “I’ve never felt this way before—I think this must be love.” I was ecstatic. A few weeks later, I visited him in Sacramento, and we spent time together exploring the San Francisco gay scene. Less than two months after we met, he had sold his pickup truck and his upright piano and moved across the country to live with me. I wasn’t even sure if gay men could have what I had with Eric. With Eric, I had my first real adult love relationship, as well as my first mature sexual relationship. And I had my first great gay friend.

  He had studied classical piano and had an undergraduate degree in music from Sacramento State University. We could talk meaningfully about the great pianists, and he was hot. He had the perfect clone look of the era—the mustache, the naturally great build, blue-green eyes, and dark coloring. Other gay men threw themselves at him. A friend of mine once described Eric as the boy next door with a hint of evil underneath, which is a potent combination. I couldn’t believe he was with me. Every day I’d ask myself, What did I do to deserve this smart, sweet, great-looking guy? It was enough to make me think that maybe my arms were long enough, after all.

  Eric found work as a waiter at the Village Green, a two-level restaurant on Hudson Street in the West Village with fancy French dining downstairs and a piano bar at the street level. Murray Grand, a veteran songwriter who had composed the beloved standard of infidelity payback, “Guess Who I Saw Today,” in the 1950s, had the piano bar gig, playing show tunes and taking requests. The place was a date destination for upscale gay men and the occasional celebrity who liked the low-key atmosphere there. Eric made good money there. We called it the Village Queen.

  A gifted people person, Eric loved to socialize. Wherever we went, he knew somebody. People lit up when they saw him. Bartenders loved him, because when Eric was there people would gather around him, order more drinks, and have a great time. When I was with Eric, I never had to worry about a thing. I wasn’t going out to a bar and standing alone in the corner; I was part of the scene, and I became more relaxed as a result. I felt content and better about myself. I know this is elemental stuff, the way people feel when they’re in healthy relationships. But it was new to me. I was twenty-four years old and had never been in love before, and I don’t think I was unique among gay men at the time. Sex had been easy. Love came harder.

  By the time we were together for a year, Eric and I had started wearing rings, simple white gold bands, as a symbol of our commitment. I was half expecting someone at Bradley’s to ask me about my ring, but nobody did. I hadn’t thought through what I would say if I was asked about it. I was still living two lives—the life of Fred the gay man who went to see Dreamgirls on Broadway with his hunky boyfriend, and the life of Fred the jazz pianist who hung around the piano with Tommy Flanagan at Bradley’s.

  Most nights, when Eric finished his shift at the Village Green, he would go out for drinks and maybe some dancing with some of his pals from the restaurant. Sometimes he would come to Bradley’s late at night with his restaurant buddies. They would sit at the bar and just be very gay, dishing and laughing and carrying on. I was horrified. They didn’t understand what Bradley’s was, and that the regulars—and that always included musicians—didn’t understand why these guys were treating the music so disrespectfully. My two worlds were colliding in a way that was out of my control. I gave Eric a good talking-to. I told him that if he wanted to bring his friends to the club, fine. But they couldn’t be so obvious when they were there. It was a symptom of my internalized homophobia—treating other gay men as I had been treated. I was trying to control my image as one of the jazz elite, but the cracks in that façade were slowly beginning to show.

  CHAPTER 6

  SIDEMAN

  Giants of jazz were still among us in the 1980s, and they weren’t all dinosaurs. You could go to the Village Vanguard and see Bobby Hutcherson or Joe Henderson, to Fat Tuesday’s and see Stan Getz or Chet Baker, to Sweet Basil and see Art Blakey, Art Farmer, or Gil Evans. All of these musicians had been prominent figures on the scene since the fifties or sixties, and they were all still playing at a superb level. For jazz fans, it was an extraordinary time to experience the music as it was created on the bandstand by many of its seminal innovators. For musicians, it was the last time a young person like me would be able to learn directly from this group of masters.

  Since the earliest days of jazz, and until jazz performance programs became entrenched in higher education, the music had been taught and carried forward by means of apprenticeship on the job, in the same way artisans or painters had learned their crafts during the Renaissance. Formal music programs like the one I attended at the New England Conservatory started to replace real-world training under the tutelage of working masters, beginning in the early 1980s. But I came up right at the cusp of the two eras and benefited from both a formal musical education and an informal but invaluable one with some of the best musicians in the history of jazz.

  Once I established myself as a working pianist in New York, I made it my mission to play with the greatest musicians alive—for the unique opportunity to learn from them, obviously, and also for the status that association with them conferred. I wanted to be thought of as someone who deserved to be working with the best. In other words, I wanted to be perceived as one of the greatest, too. I was essentially willing myself to overcome my own insecurities, proving to the world—and to myself—that I was worthwhile.

  I wheedled and cajoled my way into the circle of A-list jazz soloists, asserting myself as a contender to be an A-list sideman. This was the strategy that my slightly older pianist friends had been employing—getting a steady gig with a “name” jazz star. If I was a freshman on the scene, I looked up to these guys as seniors who had hit New York three or four years before me. Being in the band of one of the heavies could lead to sideman work for half the year or more, and there was a decent possibility that a small record label would take a chance on you to record your own project as a bandleader if you had appeared on recordings with the star you were playing with on a regular basis.

  There used to be a jazz club called Boomers on Bleecker Street, near Christopher Street, and I was there one night to hear pianist Cedar Walton playing in a trio with Sam Jones and Billy Higgins. Scouting out the bar, I spotted Charlie Haden, one of the most important bassists in the history of jazz. Charlie, like many jazz musicians, had been a junkie on and off, and though he seemed quietly intense and looked bookish and respectable, during this period his drug use was out of control. I went up to him and introduced myself. I said, “Mr. Haden, I love your music, and I know we’re going to play together.” He looked me over like I was crazy, but I truly believed that it would happen. And not that many years after that, I hired Charlie as my bassist at Bradley’s,
and a couple of years later, he played on my second trio album. Our musical relationship was a long and important one, if intermittent.

  A conservatory alum asked me to sub for him at a Brazilian nightspot called Cachaça, named after the wickedly strong liquor distilled from sugarcane that is the main ingredient in the Brazilian national cocktail, the caipirinha. It was an upscale joint on the second floor of a building in the East Sixties. I was part of a quartet that played Brazilian music for cocktails and dancing, and I began to work there fairly often. I knew something of Brazilian music from my friend Kenny Poole in Cincinnati, and I had subsequently gotten to know more about it from the younger Brazilian musicians who were around New York when I first arrived. They generously turned me on to the seminal recordings of all the Brazilian greats. The drummer and bandleader at Cachaça was Edison Machado. I didn’t know it at the time, but Edison was the inventor of the samba o prato style that transferred samba rhythms to the modern drum set. Many describe him as the Papa Jo Jones of Brazilian drummers. He was patient and modest, taught me the repertoire, and helped me feel and play the Brazilian rhythms. I learned there, for the first time, some of the lovely choros that were popular in the twenties and thirties. With their multiple repeated sections, they are akin to American ragtime, and their melodies are infectious. Here I was again, lucky to be learning the music from one of the people who invented it—in the right place at the right time—and I include some Brazilian music in almost every solo concert I play today.

  In the early eighties only a few megastars had a major-label record contract. Although there were a handful of new, scrappy independent record companies recording musicians on the New York scene, most of the great old jazz labels were out of business. Verve was a dead label. So was Blue Note. CD reissues of their classic albums were not yet part of the picture. The jazz world was loose, and things happened more informally, person to person, by word of mouth. Most business took place in the clubs, where musicians saw and heard and talked to one another. It was the rare artist who had a manager—there were only a few dedicated jazz booking agents—and nobody had a publicist. I watched the way this informal but casually rigorous system worked, and I took advantage of it.