Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales From Childhood

by A. J. Albany

  “Only the slyest and boldest writing about music, and families, comes to mind as you read Low Down: James Baldwin’s ‘Sonny’s Blues,’ or David Goodis’s Down There. Yet A. J. Albany’s spirit and voice are fully her own—fierce, funny, troubling, sad, rueful, joyous.”

  —ROBERT POLITO

  A. J. Albany’s recollection of life with her father, the great jazz pianist Joe Albany, is the story of one girl’s unsentimental education. Joe played with the likes of Charles Mingus, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker, but between gigs he slipped into drug-induced obscurity. It was during these times that his daughter knew him best. After her mother disappeared, six-year-old Amy Jo and her charming, troubled father set up housekeeping in a seamy Hollywood hotel. While Joe finished a set in some red-boothed dive, chances were you’d find Amy curled up to sleep on someone’s fur coat, clutching a 78 of Louis Armstrong’s “Sugar Blues” or, later, a photograph of the man himself, inscribed, “To little Amy-Jo, always in love with you—Pops.”

  Wise beyond her years and hip to the unpredictability of life at all too early an age, A. J. Albany guides us through the dope and deviance of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Hollywood’s shadowy underbelly and beyond. What emerges is a raw, gripping, and surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a young girl trying to survive among the outcasts, misfits, and artists who surrounded her.

  LOW DOWN

  TIN HOUSE BOOKS / Portland, Oregon & Brooklyn, New York

  Copyright © 2003 A. J. Albany

  First published by Bloomsbury/Tin House Books in 2003

  Published by Tin House Books in 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

  Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York

  Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth St., Berkeley, CA 94710, www.pgw.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Albany, A. J.

  Low down : junk, jazz, and other fairy tales from childhood / A.J. Albany.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-935639-77-0 (ebook)

  1. Albany, Joe, 1924-1988. 2. Jazz musicians—United States—Biography. 3. Pianists—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  ML417.A58A43 2013

  786.2'165092--dc23

  [B]

  2013024037

  First U.S. edition 2003

  Interior design by Jakob Vala

  www.tinhouse.com

  Contents

  Foreword

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Part Two

  Chapter 2

  Part Three

  Chapter 3

  For Groucho, Lou Reed, Dovey beloved, my children, and all children

  Special thanks to Jeff Preiss and Jeanne McCulloch

  For each of them has his Preacher to hound him down the dark river of fear and tonguelessness and never-a-door. Each one is mute and alone because there is no word for a child’s fear and no ear to heed it if there were a word and no one to understand it if it heard. Lord save little children! They abide and they endure.

  —DAVIS GRUBB

  And you my father, there on the sad height,

  Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

  —DYLAN THOMAS

  foreword

  Joe Albany was a great jazz pianist. That was the opinion of Charlie Parker, Lester Young, and scores of others who played with him. In the early forties, he was one of the first musicians instrumental in pushing jazz beyond the confines of swing, helping to create what would come to be known as bebop.

  I too was in awe of my father’s talent, but I loved him all out of proportion, as only a daughter can. He was born in Atlantic City in 1924 and died in New York City in 1988, his body destroyed by half a century of addictions and sadness. In one of his last letters to me he warned, “Watch out for Old Lady Life—she can be an evil bitch.”

  There has always been an absence of information regarding my father’s whereabouts during the sixties. It wasn’t a musically productive period for him, but it’s when I knew him best. If he wasn’t in jail or rehab, we were together. This book is an account of my life with him during that time: a series of fragmented moments seen through the prism of my childhood. It’s also a story about growing up and surviving in Hollywood, a rough journey in a unique city that was taking a turn for the worse.

  part one

  melody man

  I often thought my father was born of music—some wayward melody that took the form of a man. He heard music everywhere, in the squeaking of rusted bedsprings and the buzzing of flies. Dripping faucets were filled with rhythms to him, as was the irregular flashing of the busted neon outside our window. Some shook their heads and thought he was a nut, but I never believed that. He’d play recordings of Art Tatum, Arthur Rubenstein, and others, and exclaim with flashing eyes, “What a gas—beauteous!” Sometimes we’d listen to records all night. When legit gigs weren’t available, Dad did short stints in hotel bars, where his exquisite playing was often underappreciated, to say the least. It was always the same type who caused trouble—an out-of-town drunk with a tin ear, usually in the company of some flabby lounge whore. They’d stumble over to the piano, leaning on the keys, and say something like, “How about using that soft pedal, pal?” or “Do you know this one?” and proceed to whistle some corny number, spitting smelly off-tune whistles in Dad’s ear. He’d take it on the chin every time, never uttering a word, but I, who knew him, would see his spirit wilt just behind the eyes. When I sensed his hurt, I’d imagine that

  I was the Abominable Dr. Phibes, devising fiendish deaths for these bar stool critics, or I’d transform into Rodan, grabbing my victims by their fat red necks with razor talons. I’d fly them to an underground vault where I, now the masked executioner, waited, ready to end the lives of fools and hecklers everywhere who didn’t know beauty when they heard it.

  soft downy dreams

  The day that Gram gave birth to her eleven-pound, colicky son Joe, January 24, 1924, was the beginning of a sad voyage for them both. At the age of seventeen, Gram was a lover of life. She loved dancing and was a founder of the As You Like It club, a group of South Philly girls who shared a passion for literature. Unlike today’s book clubs, where women get together and usually read a lot of slop, Gram and her friends got together and read truly great books: Dostoyevsky, Balzac, the Brontës, all the Romantic poets.

  At the age of eighteen, she met August Albani. So flattered was she by the overtures of “Gus” the traveling citrus salesman that she ran off and married him, much to the dismay of her parents. Being a virgin of the purest order, she was shocked to discover that a man’s member was not covered in soft downy fur, as she had thought. Though sex is usually a letdown when compared to the fantasies available to one’s imagination, Gram was devastated to find the experience so utterly unpleasurable.

  I have no kind words for my grandfather, though it could be argued that his fierce determination served to help his children excel musically, producing two fine pianists and an opera singer. Himself a frustrated tenor of limited ability, Grandpop would settle for nothing short of perfection from his kids, driving them to practice their instruments for hours on end.

  As a young man, he allowed a local wealthy pervert to shit in his mouth, for a price. Perhaps this incident was why a lot of foul things came out of hi
s mouth. He would beat Gram, and my father too, whenever he dared to intervene. Dad contended that Grandpop had uprooted the family from their New Jersey home and moved to L.A. in 1941 for the sole purpose of separating Dad from his high school sweetheart, Joyce. Joyce was a Jewish girl, which was more than my grandpop’s bigoted heart could bear. One day, a few years later, when Dad brought Charlie Parker home for supper, Grandpop turned to Dad and said, “Get this nigger out of my house.” After such woeful beginnings, life offered my father talent as a consolation prize, but it was like giving tap shoes to an amputee. He had immense talent but lacked the ability to enjoy it.

  After arriving in L.A., Dad attended Hollywood High School for six months before growing sick of it and dropping out. He’d already decided on a career in music, and in the summer of ’42 he headed back to Atlantic City to begin pursuing it. While there, he played for a while at a place called the Paddock Club, where the headlining act was a female snake charmer named Zorita. Hearing that L.A.’s Central Avenue had blossomed into a hotbed of jazz, he bused back to Hollywood in 1944. It was then that he met his first wife, B.J., who Grandpop referred to only as “that painted she-devil.” Their brief marriage was a casualty of impetuous youth. In 1945 two pivotal events happened to Dad that would dictate the course of his life. The first was his meeting and playing with Charlie Parker, and the second was his introduction to heroin. From that point on, his music and his addictions would battle endlessly to see which would prevail.

  escaping camarillo

  At the age of twenty-two, Dad underwent a psychiatric evaluation while serving time on drug charges. He was diagnosed with hebephrenia, a form of schizophrenia that manifests itself in puberty and is characterized by unprovoked laughter, foolish mannerisms, and delusions. Grandpop signed the commitment papers, and Dad was sent to Camarillo State Hospital.

  Doctors, being somewhat in the dark back then about the treatment of drug addicts, prescribed endless mugs of hot chocolate and warm baths, which did little to soothe his troubled psyche. Not considered dangerous, he was placed with patients suffering from epilepsy and was expected to help out hospital staff in the event of any seizures that might occur.

  By odd coincidence, Charlie Parker had been committed to Camarillo a short time earlier, after being found wandering around naked in a Los Angeles hotel corridor. Parker spotted Dad standing in an upper window as he walked in the yard below. He waved to him and sent a guy up with some chocolate Sucrets, cigarettes, and a note saying, “Joe—see you when you get into population—Bird.” Dad, however, had already determined not to hang around. He had a girlfriend on the outside, and figured in his usual paranoid manner that she was up to no good. While standing naked in line for a medical exam that was required before one could be released into “population,” he made his move. He broke out of line, headed straight out the door with his clothes in his hands, and jumped over the barbed-wire fence. Unfortunately, Camarillo would not be his last visit to a nuthouse, and future visits would see his treatments graduate from hot cocoa to shock therapy.

  Aside from being eccentric and supersensitive, I don’t think there was anything wrong with Dad. Society was of the mind that one “had to be crazy” if they chose to take drugs, and doctors were probably under a certain amount of pressure to back this sentiment up with medical evidence, readily labeling addicts as mental cases. The diagnosis of hebephrenia would always haunt my father. Known for doodling on everything in sight, he would write hebephrenic over and over on scraps of paper, sheet music, and matchbook covers for the rest of his life.

  belle of salt lake city

  It was said by those who knew her that my mother, Sheila, was “the Belle of Salt Lake City,” where she was born on St. Patrick’s Day, 1932. She was afforded such niceties as dance classes and piano lessons, and her IQ was said to be 165. Her great-great-great-uncle, I’ve been told, was the poet John Keats.

  Our time together was brief. Most of what I know of her is what I’ve read and what my dad told me. A lot of that information concerned her relationship with the late poet Allen Ginsberg. They had met around ’56 or ’57, and Ginsberg was struck by what he called her “classy good looks” and vast knowledge of music and books, especially for a twenty-two-year-old gal from Utah. Mom was working at an advertising firm in San Francisco, writing copy, and hooked Ginsberg up with a job there doing the same. They shared an apartment on Russian Hill and for some brief period of time maintained a life together, with Mom riding the hills of San Francisco on the back of Ginsberg’s motorcycle. At one point, they announced that they were engaged, which went over badly with William Burroughs, who was appalled at the very idea of Ginsberg being involved with a woman. Occasionally, they’d show up at the home of my mother’s sister, where Ginsberg enjoyed raiding the well-stocked liquor cabinet. When Mom’s brother-in-law returned home from work one day and found Ginsberg finishing off a bottle of his best Irish whiskey, he flipped. “Get the hell out of here, you good-for-nothing bum.” Mom burst into tears, saying, “How can you talk to him like that? Don’t you know he’s a genius?” It seemed she was crazy about him, and a letter that he wrote to Jack Kerouac indicated likewise: “I met a great girl who digs me, I dig—twenty-two, young, hip (ex-singer, big buddy of Brubeck, knows all the colored cats, ex-hipster girl) pretty in a real chic classy way—she has a wild mind, finer than any girl I met . . .—young life in her and real sharp. What a doll . . . Not a stupid square in any way, but not a flip. Instant digging each other—how wild and great.” Ginsberg wrote an unpublished poem for her entitled “In Vesuvio’s Waiting for Sheila.”

  However, Ginsberg soon grew disenchanted and wrote Kerouac another letter complaining that Mom was “Younger and more prey to psychological semi-dramatizations. Sheila says I’m an abstractionist and not a Dostoievskian lover.” The first time I heard a recording of Kerouac reading On the Road, I thought it was my father. Though Dad’s accent was New Jersey and Kerouac’s Massachusetts, they had the same reedy, rambling voice, with the same slightly nervous cadence. I always thought Dad’s dentures had something to do with his not always clear speaking. Not knowing Kerouac’s dental history, I couldn’t say whether my theory could be applied to him.

  In the late seventies, Ginsberg ran into my dad walking down Bleecker Street in New York, and upon recognizing him, grabbed his arm, exclaiming, “It’s the great Joe Albany!” Jazz musicians were always flattered and somewhat mystified over the lofty status lent them by the Beat writers, who viewed bebop musicians as inspirational gurus and made them the subject of much poetry and prose. In the course of conversation, Ginsberg asked Dad, “Did I ever tell you how Sheila and I parted ways? I came home one day and told her I was in love with someone else, and when she asked who, I said it was Neal Cassady. She kicked me out.” I gather Mom was Ginsberg’s last heterosexual liaison. It figures that Ginsberg would cite Cassady as the catalyst in their breakup. The three of them had apparently slept together on several occasions. Ginsberg also confessed to my dad that “Sheila helped write some of the best lines in Howl.”

  Sometime after the breakup, Mom, drunk and despondent, went to the apartment that Ginsberg was sharing with Peter Orlovsky and pelted the window with bottles and rocks, yelling, “You can fuck me in the ass, if that’s what it’s all about!” It was also rumored that Mom lived with Henry Miller for a spell, but that’s never been verified. I always assumed that there wasn’t much truth in what she said, though the factuality of her tales never seemed that important. The only truth that mattered, to me, was that there was the potential for all of it to be true, and then some. It was her sterling potential that inspired my admiration. She had all the makings of someone truly great.

  meeting

  My parents met in 1959 at one of pianist Erroll Garner’s parties in L.A. Dad and Erroll were pretty close, and when I was born, he asked to be my godfather, but some Italian guy named Frank Perry was already in place for that position. I had a favorite picture of myself on top of Mr. Garner’s shoul
ders. He was a kind and gentle man.

  My mother walked into the party, and someone let her know that Joe Albany was at the piano, which set her bohemian heart a-flutter, since her favorite album at that time was The Right Combination, Dad’s collaboration with saxophonist Warne Marsh, which had been released in 1957—the only record Dad made before the 1970s. Funny to think of jazz musicians generating that sort of rock-star excitement among women. She made her way over to the piano and introduced herself as an aspiring jazz singer. He asked her if she knew “Our Love Is Here to Stay”—naturally, she did. At some point, as she was singing, she looked at him and his head was down on the keyboard, and he was shaking, she assumed, with laughter. She told him, “Look, I know I’m no Billie Holiday, but it can’t be that bad.” Then she realized that he was sobbing. He explained that “Our Love Is Here to Stay” was his and his second wife Aileen’s song, and that she had recently committed suicide. Aileen was tragic. Unbalanced, and always threatening to kill herself, one night she said to Dad, “I’m really going to do it this time, I’m going to run in front of the next car I see.”

  He replied, “Sure you are—why don’t you stop torturing me?” It was the last thing he’d say to her—a second later, before he knew what was happening, she bolted in front of an oncoming truck. He tried to grab her, but it was too late. She died in his arms.

  Mom and Dad soon embarked on their ill-advised love affair. Sheila dumped the young drummer that she’d been shacked up with and pregnant by, had the baby, and gave her up for adoption to a childless couple in the Bay Area. One week later, on St. Patrick’s Day, 1960, my mother’s twenty-eighth birthday, she and Dad were married in San Francisco. They rented a small apartment in Hollywood and fixed it up with the money Mom made from the adoption. I came along in February of 1962—I’d like to think it was a happy occasion, though all the track marks on her arms in pictures where she’s holding me make me wonder. I know that Dad had wanted a girl, and I looked just like him, so I guess he was pleased. My mother named me after two of the sisters in Little Women, Amy, the feminine one, and Jo, the bookish tomboy, hoping I’d possess the qualities of both sisters. Dad described the night I was conceived as a “particularly passionate moment” in a relationship full of great passion and greater sorrow. When together, they seemed to bring out the worst in each other, always competing to see who could fall the fastest and the furthest down the ladder to hell.