Memoir Excerpt 2. The East Coast Tour Part One

Before the Decision Was Made: a Honeymoon

Laurie and Art in NY in 1977

Village Vanguard in the background (photo in a Japanese publication)

THE EAST COAST TOUR

John Snyder, Seducer:  Early in ’77 Art had heard that Les Koenig, owner of Contemporary Records, was going to sell his contract to a bigger label, A&M.  Art was both frightened and thrilled.  He called Les, who laughed. "I'm not going to sell you! What do you think you are, a baseball player?" Art always did see himself as a sort of sports figure, and he was thinking he might finally get to play in the big leagues.  Les told Art that he would introduce him to John Snyder, who was then Creative Director of Horizon Records, A&M's jazz label. 

         John was a fan. He was a lawyer, and he had a way of making his statements, which were usually phrased as questions, sound like self-evident facts. He was a blond, boyish Southerner in dancing shoes (he always wore soft, thin-soled so-called "jazz dancing" shoes), and he was, to us, a visionary when he emphatically wondered in that sincere North Carolina drawl why Art wasn't touring. And it wasn't just talk. John made it happen.

         My cousin Eve used to say that people are either seducers or seducees. John Snyder was definitely a seducer, and he persuaded a bunch of club owners including Max Gordon at the Village Vanguard to book Art Pepper whose reputation as a lunatic junkie had, till then, scared off promoters and booking agents.  And John persuaded a truly terrified Art Pepper to go to New York, assuring him that he could make it there, could make it anywhere. New York, New York.

         Where did John get the front money? At that time I believed he stole it from A&M. He seemed passionate enough about the whole thing to have done it; he had that Robin Hood mentality. Now I realize he probably just used credit cards.  At any rate, he fronted the tour, hired a publicist, booked the clubs, hired sidemen in Toronto, New York, Boston, Chicago, and Dayton, Ohio, bought plane and train tickets, and booked hotel rooms. The tour was scheduled to coincide with the '77 Newport Festival. Art had never been asked to play a festival. John got George Wein to schedule an Art Pepper concert at Alice Tully Hall.

         Art began with a great week in Toronto and followed that with a spectacular week in New York at the Vanguard. These gigs were played with pickup bands.  At that point, John Snyder asked Les Koenig to permit him to record Art at the Vanguard with an all-star band. Les agreed it was a good idea but said he would record him. So plans were made. Art was to continue to the other cities and then return to the Vanguard at the end of the tour to record for two or three nights. When I later asked John Koenig how his father was even able to afford such a project, he said that Contemporary's Japanese licensee, at that time King Records, was subsidizing it.

         It was when the decision was made to record that Art started going crazy.  I was then––as I had been, and would continue to be so often––just oblivious.  I had no idea what Art’s real feelings were.  Yes, he talked about his worries, but he always over-dramatized.  I’d worked with him on the book, but I still didn’t know what he was like when under pressure.  I didn’t even realize that the pressure was on.  The trip so far had been a breeze, a honeymoon.

Is there a Pianist in the House?  Art started acting odd in Dayton, Ohio.  Unbeknownst to me, he’d picked up some coke along the way and, though Dayton seemed to me the deadest, dullest town I’d ever seen, Art was uncharacteristically lively and cheerful.  There was a jewelers' convention in the bleak hotel where we were staying, and Art gleefully crashed it.  He swiped an official badge and wrote a fake number on it in imitation of the numbers on the other badges, and he came back from the big bazaar rooms with some hideous cheap jewelry he'd bought for next to nothing: a ten carat gold pinky ring with an little opal in it, a larger, squarish ring set with a brown, lumpy, polished stone, and an odd copper-wire bracelet he wore for the rest of the tour.  He'd somehow obtained an "outfit" (a syringe) and was shooting the coke into the back of his hand and his wrist.  This is something I discovered  later. The bracelet hid the marks.  I just thought Art was more energetic because he was on the road.  I borrowed the badge and, for fifty bucks, bought a stunning necklace of carved amethyst for my mother.

         Gilly's, the club in Dayton, was big and barn-like, and the house band John obtained for us included a young pianist, who arrived at the afternoon rehearsal in a white hearse.  He was dressed in white from head to toe and entered flanked by four or five young girls in wafting gypsy clothes.  He was unwilling to rehearse very much but said the charts looked easy, and he'd play them fine that night.  Art told him he'd better, and they traded angry looks.  The guy departed with his consort like a ship with sails.

         Art’s music wasn't easy and that night in performance the fellow fucked up the first chart.  Art said something nasty, the guy stood up at the piano and said something nasty back, his ladies started screeching, and it looked as if there’d be an onstage fight, when a voice from way in back boomed out at this pianist, "Bill, get outta here right now.  I'm tellin' ya, get out!"  The big bartender stomped out from behind the bar, baseball bat in hand.  The kid responded quick to this, jumped off the stage and, followed by his girlfriends shrieking oaths, he split.

         "Is there a pianist in the house?" the bartender asked. A curly, red-haired boy jumped up.  "I go to Juilliard," he exclaimed.  This is how I remember it.  Maybe he just leapt to the stage, and the Juilliard information came later.  In any case, he read music like a studio pro and played okay.  Art played great as he always did when he got mad. How was I to know he was already starting to unravel?  And what could I have done?

The Rock Island Line:  Our next stop was Chicago.  It was June, moving toward hot summer.  It'd been raining a lot in Dayton.  Chicago was just muggy but with a thrill in the air and Art seemed to sense it as we rolled in from the airport in our rental car, me driving.  Suddenly, he sat up straight and staring out the window at the skyline, in a sort of murmur, he fervently began to chant, "You're gonna love this city.  You're gonna love this city."

         As I’ve said before in these pages, I have a kind of myopia of the mind.  I rarely think about what's coming next.  It was this lack of foresight that enabled me to become a mother.   There are people who travel consciously, with forethought.  They plan each trip with books and videos.  They buy tickets and imagine every detail eight, ten months before they go.  They never get exactly what they expected, but that's not the point.  They love knowledge and the sense of control it can give.  And they want the adventure to begin now, too.

         Me, I look out the window and discover that I'm in an unfamiliar place, and I’m surprised by all that means, amazed, then, and in ensuing days, by the particulars: the smells, the colors, the different texture and scent of the air, the style and stride of its specific people, its history, some of it maybe buried in my brain from half-remembered books and movies, its myths, its famous men and women, art and stories.

         I realized as Art twitched there in his seat that Chicago had been the scene of what he thought of as the big thing of his life, the turning point.  In Straight Life the narrative turns operatic here.

         In the Croyden Hotel in Chicago, in 1950, he sniffed heroin for the first time and began his tragic (in the good, dramatic, mythic sense of the word) second career as a poetic junkie, jailbird, standup guy.  At that moment he became the Art Pepper he and his fans have created.  As an alcoholic he never would have seemed so glamorous.  It was the conflict between the sublimely good—his music—and the sensationally evil—heroin, that gave the part he got to play in life its punch.  In the documentary Don McGlynn made about him ("Notes From a Jazz Surviver"),  Art says that what he thought on that occasion in Chicago at the age of 25 was, "If this is what the devil's got, it's what I want."

         We were re-visiting the crossroads of Art's history.

         On this tour, the two gigs in New York and this one in Chicago were the most important.  Art was playing at a legendary club, the Jazz Showcase in the Loop.  John Snyder had gotten a room for us at a Holiday Inn or Howard Johnson's on some bombed out edge of the town.  From our window, we looked out on gray, grass-patched, dirt acres showing the exposed, chewed-down foundations of old buildings and their lopped-off concrete stairways.  John had put us near the methadone clinic where Art could get his daily dose.

         On the first or second day while Art rested or, unbeknownst to me, went out in search of drugs, I took a walk from the hotel hiking toward what seemed to be the city.  Eventually, I reached a dilapidated old building that had been a railroad station.  I climbed its splintered stairs, walked through its opened doors, and saw an old hand-lettered sign.  It said, "Rock Island Line."  Stunned and silly and covered with goosebumps, I stood there in my backpack all alone in this big echoing place and sang Leadbelly’s song, like a hymn to the sign.

Oh, the Rock Island Line

is a mighty good road.

Oh, the Rock Island Line

is the road to ride.

Oh, the Rock Island Line

is a mighty good road.

If you want to ride it,

got to ride it like you find it.

Get  your ticket at the station

on the Rock Island Line.

         I woke up and found myself in America, floored to discover I was in the "City of the Big Shoulders," "Hog Butcher for the World."   My surprised eyes filled with tears.  I was amazed.

         At the Jazz Showcase every night I sold albums at the door (John had helped me persuade Les Koenig at Contemporary Records to ship them to me for cost.  They were unavailable in the record stores, and somebody had to take care of actual business, even if it was me who can't add, subtract, divide or multiply), and I cheered Art on.

         The house band was excellent and cooperative, and the club's owner, Joe Siegel, was a personage with a sense of his own importance based on his tenacity as a serious jazz impresario.  

         Anyone who runs a viable jazz club for any length of time is a hero.  Anyone who deals with jazz musicians, drunken fans, the chaos that comes out at night, not to mention liquor licenses, payoffs, hiring-and-firing, and placating cops and neighbors, acquires a world-weary dignity I've never seen anywhere else in the music business.  Joe tolerated my record selling but upbraided me for my racket, the yells of "Yeah," and shrieks of approval with which I encouraged Art in his solos.  It was okay if the audience did it spontaneously, but when I did, it looked fake to him, improper. I yelled out of enthusiasm and Art loved to hear it.  So I didn't agree but contained myself because I respected Joe.  He hushed customers who talked during the music, even threatened to eject them.  I've never known another club-owner who’d do that.

         Musically, Art was in top form.  He dazzled me, and the reviewers raved.  The Chicago Sun Times called him "An architect of emotion."  Of all the descriptions of him I've ever read that one's my favorite.

         Speaking of architecture.... I got into a conversation with somebody at the club about the buildings of Chicago.  I was curious.  He told me there were two great things to see, a slum, decayed and very beautiful, and then there was Oak Park, a suburb filled with Frank Lloyd Wright private homes.

         I took the car and brought my camera to the slum, and it was gorgeous. I know it sounds stupid to say that. But it's how James Baldwin put it. He writes that he exited the headquarters of Elijah Muhammad and stepped out into the "vivid, violent, so problematical streets" of black Chicago, thinking about Allah's vengeance on the whites and the brave, clean world of the reawakened Muslim Negro.  And he wondered,  "What will happen to all that beauty, then?"  All that beauty: A Chicago ghetto with its storefront funeral parlors and churches and the poetry of their painted signs and the dark, aged buildings' gothic gingerbread fragility-in-decay…  I won't go on. I'm the child of Trotskyists. I know how I sound. I won't dig myself a deeper hole.

         And then I drove out to Oak Park.  The houses were built early on in Wright's career and were boring compared to the ones I'd seen in books or in L.A.  I liked the slum much better.   I'm not talking architecture, though, and certainly not sociology.  But like Baldwin, like I tend to do, I'm talking aesthetics. And this isn't some dried out cerebral thing. It's what sustains the soul. At least it sustains mine.

         While I was perambulating about with a metaphorical lily in my hand like Oscar Wilde,  Art was exploring, too.  I don't remember how we handled it with the single car, I guess alternate days, but Art drove around the neighborhood of the methadone center, through those devastated streets, until he encountered a black couple wandering through the rubble: A tall, youngish man and his ragged, dusty  girlfriend––who must have been about 15 years old.  I know this because, later, Art brought them to our hotel room where they were monosyllabic, nervous, terrifying.  Art just chattered on at them and me.  Getting the money to pay them.  He explained to me later that he'd asked them if they knew where he could buy cocaine. (These adventures pre-date the crack and AIDS epidemics and so lacked their forgone conclusions.)  The couple told him that they had some coke, and he gave them a ride to their pad, a basement in an abandoned building on Chicago's South Side.  Probably one of the very ones I'd been admiring.  He described to me, with murky adjectives and lots of detail, the place they took him to, where all three fixed cocaine using water dripping from a rusting, leaky pipe.  He'd loved the neighborhood.  Like me, he relished squalor; he just liked to get a whole lot closer to it than I did.   I told Art  I never wanted him to bring people like that around again.  They scared me.  Art was normally a very paranoid guy.  He said these people were okay, just down and out.

         So for me Chicago was a kind of crossroads, too.  There I began to see for the first time what Art would be like as a serious musician. And I began to see, though not to understand, what he had learned to do to deal with chronic paralyzing fear.  Art had realized or decided (it comes to the same thing) that this upcoming recording session was the most important thing he’d ever had to do, and he was building toward the level of insanity he felt he’d need to pull it off.  His drug use and his escalating madness was his armor or distraction, a protection from the terror of the biggest challenge of his life so far.  This session would confer on him at last, a California boy, the mantle of a world-class artist.  He’d prove himself by making an earth-shaking album at the Village Vanguard in New York.