-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- an excerpt from: Waiting for the Man Harry Shapiro©1999 Helter Skelter Publishing London ISBN 1-900924-08-0 252 pps. -- 2nd Edition – In-print First Published 1988 by Quartet Books ----- --In New York there were 1,300 licensed clubs and speakeasies, while Chicago boasted 24,000 night spots in 1926. Trumpeter Rex Stewart said musicians never had it so good in the twenties: 'You could get fired at I I p.m. and by midnight be sitting on another bandstand blowing.'[9] As most of the gangsters were immigrants, they felt an affinity both with the struggling white musicians from their own cultural groups and with the black musicians from the South. They were largely intolerant of racism and more than one offensive patron found his tyres slashed when he got back to his car. There was also an age affiliation; in 1925 Legs Diamond, Lucky Luciano, Louis Lepke, Vito Genovese, At Capone, Carlo Gambino and Meyer Lansky were all under thirty.-- Om K ---- 3 LIGHT UP AND BE SOMEBODY — MEZZ AND MARIJUANA I's gwina save all my nickels and dimes/To buy me a Mary Jane --'High Sheriff Blues' For the cats and kittens of the Jazz Age, marijuana was kicks, climbs, jollies and high times jumpin' to the beat of a hot horn or a mean licorice stick. --Albert Goldman My ... memories will always be lots of beauty and warmth from gage. Well, that was my life and I don't feel ashamed at all. Mary Warner, honey, you sure was good ... --Louis Armstrong Once the war in Europe was over and the boys were home. America experienced a period of spiritual emptiness. The new religion was materialism, accumulation, the worship of everything new and big. And as in the 1960s, the affluence and conspicuous consumption of the 1920s brought a reaction among a section of the younger generation who could afford the luxury of being unorthodox. They sought escape in anti-establishment music, sexual pleasure, alternative lifestyles and 'other worldliness'. For the flappers 'other worldliness' meant a craze for ouija boards, rather than Eastern mysticism. And instead of 'back-to-nature' communes, the adolescents of sixty years ago turned to the 'loose passion' and vitality of black culture. The idealism of an earlier age gave way to realism: all the straight world had to offer was disillusionment and stagnation; the past had been blown up in the trenches and the future held nothing but the dubious promise of 'progress'. Black culture seemed to offer honesty, spontaneity and even a new spiritual meaning to two groups in particular: affluent people looking for excitement where the rules and pretensions of polite society did not apply; and Jewish immigrant groups sympathetic to the problems of minority status. Contrary to the expectations of-the temperance movement, Prohibition encouraged the well-to-do to 'take a walk on the wild side'. Cafe, cabarets and restaurants had been a feature of urban nightlife for decades, but the speakeasies and basement dives selling illicit booze to the strains of jazz added a new dimension to the thrill of 'steppin' out down market'. Milton Mezzrow, jazz clarinet player and focal point of this chapter, summed up this situation in his autobiography Really the Blues, published in 1946: 'It struck me as funny how the top and bottom crusts in society were always getting together during the Prohibition era. In this swanky club which was run by members of the notorious Purple Gang, Detroit's bluebloods used to congregate — the Grosse Point mob on the slumming kick, rubbing elbows with Louis the Wop's mob. That Purple Gang was a hard lot of guys ... and Detroit's snooty set used to feel it was really living to talk to them hoodlums.[1] Among the young whites (often Jewish or Italian) in revolt against traditional values, the most rebellious were jazz musicians. Jazz had emerged as the urban voice of black culture, essentially a protest music in which blacks played out their daily experiences. This found favour with white kids seeking a vehicle for their own thrash against society, a music guaranteed to shock the squares, as rock 'n' roll did in the mid-fifties. One musician in particular epitomised the religious zeal that alienated whites felt for black lifestyles. He was white, he was Jewish, and he became the archetypal hip musician of the Jazz Age, the first White Negro. Milton 'Mezz' Mezzrow was born 'on a wintery night' in 1899 to a respectable middle-class Jewish family on Chicago's Northwest Side. As a kid, he spent much of his time on the streets, getting into trouble, fighting, petty thieving and hanging around poolrooms. Throughout his early life he had an unfortunate knack of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. At sixteen, he was caught riding in a stolen car and sent to Pontiac Reformatory. 'During those months I got me a good solid dose of the coloured man's gift for keeping the life and spirit in him while he tells his troubles in music.' [2] Inside Pontiac, Mezzrow met his first black musicians: Yellow, a cornet player, and an alto saxophonist called King. Race riots inside the prison (and later Chicago's fourday city-wide race riot in 1919), gave him a taste of Jim Crow, although on the streets of Chicago he'd bloodied himself often enough against shouts of 'Kike'. By the time he was released, Mezzrow had his life plan sorted out: 'I knew that I was to spend all my time from then on sticking close to Negroes. They were my kind of people. And I was going to learn their music and play it for the rest of my days.'[3] The Great Migration of blacks from the South to the North saw Chicago's black population increase by 150% in the years 19 10 to 1920, the largest influx coming after 1916, with the promise of high post-war wages. Blacks settled on the South Side of Chicago in such numbers that it became a city within a city, independent of the mainstream of Chicago life. Along with tens of thousands of blacks looking for routine day jobs came musicians from New Orleans. 'Cook's Tour' histories of jazz set out an-over-simplified itinerary for the spread of jazz through America. The linear journey from New Orleans to Kansas City, Chicago and New York, prompted by the closing down in 1917 of black Storyville, New Orleans' red light district, ignores in Kenneth Allsop's words all the 'jazz, semi-jazz, near jazz and tributary jazz' heard throughout the South and Middle West. Brass-band music, ragtime, tent-show music, vaudeville, church music and a host of related localized musical idioms fed into the genre. Nevertheless New Orleans represented the best the new music had to offer and gave to jazz its sleazy reputation. The New Orleans spirit was one of permissiveness and non- interference, very much a musician's creed. From its earliest days a city of low life, thieving, gambling and above all prostitution, New Orleans 'tolerated with impartiality small-time hustlers and high crimes, self-serving royal governors and fifty-cent whores'.[4] In a town of corruption and easy money, the establishments that thrived were bordellos, gambling joints, saloons, cabarets and dance halls. The customers needed entertaining, so music was a growth industry, although there were few professional musicians. In fact music was a subsidiary of the gambling business: 'The hustlers gamblers and racetrack followers were often hard-working musicians in their off-season or when their luck boned down and they needed a little ready cash.'[5] They also used drugs in a big way and naturally, before 1914, everything was there for the asking. But by the time war came, drugs were illegal and the Navy, worried about the moral well-being of young sailors, had Storyville closed down. In fact the exodus of jazz musicians from New Orleans began much earlier. Mezz Mezzrow's cars were first turned by the Original Creole Jazz Band, who had been drawing in the crowds at Chicago's Big Grand Theatre and the North American Restaurant since 1913. Their star players included Sidney Bechet, Freddie Keppard, drummer Tubby Hall and pianist Lil Hardin, who later married Louis Armstrong. Initially, the Chicago Musicians' Union had made it hard for Southern jazzmen like Jelly Roll Morton, Keppard, Bechet, Jimmy Moore and Nick La Rocca to find regular work, but resistance crumbled in the face of an avalanche of public demand. Chicago jazz really started cooking when Joe 'King' Oliver, a superstar cornettist from New Orleans, arrived in 1918. He formed his own band in 1920, sent for Louis Armstrong, and drew a crowd of open-mouthed white kids like Mezzrow, Eddie Condon, Bix Beiderbecke, Dave Tough, Pee Wee Russell, Jimmy McPartland and Frank Teschemacher, who together pioneered the Chicago style. Mezzrow was hooked by Bechet's soprano sax. sound, rushed out and bought one, together with some sheet music, and declared himself to be a musician, spending every spare minute learning or listening to jazz.[6] On his twenty-second birthday, 11 December 1923, he became a fully paid-up member of the Local Tenth of the Chicago Federation of Musicians. I got to be part of the fixtures at the Pekin and a lot of other South Side spots. Making friends with Jimmie Noone, Sidney Bechet, Joe Oliver and Clarence Williams, I began to feel like I owned the South Side ... Anytime I breezed down the street, cats would flash me friendly grins and hands would wave at me from all sides ... I was really living then.[7] One of the earliest white bands to copy Joe Oliver's style was the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. The clarinet player was 'a little hyped-up Italian guy with pop eyes' named Leon Rappolo: One night during intermission at the Friars Inn, Rapp took me into his dressing room, where he felt around on the moulding and came up with a cigarette made out of brown wheatstraw paper ... He sounded more like he was sighing than smoking ... After a lungful he closed his lips tight and held it until he was about choked and had to cough ... 'Ever smoke any muggles?' he asked me. Man. this is some golden leaf I brought up from New Orleans. It'll make you feel good. Take a puff.' The minute he said that, dope hit my mind and I got scared — working in my uncle's drugstore had made me know that messing with dope was a one-way ticket to the graveyard. I told him I didn't smoke and let it go at that, because I looked up to him so much as a musician.[8] In the early twenties, marijuana, muggles, muta, gage, tea, reefer, grifa, Mary Warner, Mary Jane or rosa maria was known almost exclusively to musicians. Hemp had been grown in the States since the oldest days of white settlement, as a valuable cash crop for clothes and rope making — so valuable, that the state of Virginia fined farmers for owning it. The plant grew wild in many regions, including along the banks of the Mississippi, but apart from the odd literary figure who picked up on the hashish experiences of French artists like Baudelaire, Gautier and Rimbaud. nobody knew of marijuana's other properties until the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Marijuana smoking was commonplace in Mexico. The revolution sent thousands of Mexicans streaming over the border with the weed stashed in their packs. Smoking among Americans was initially confined to black soldiers living in garrison border towns like El Paso. Almost inevitably, marijuana found its way along the coast to New Orleans, a bustling sea port where sailors coming from the West Indies and Africa were the other major importers of the drug into America. The story of marijuana in America was a rerun of Chinese opium smoking and the alleged over-use of cocaine by blacks. Marijuana was branded as an 'alien' drug (nobody made the connection with hemp) taken by a naturally excitable, volatile minority group (Mexicans), who turned nasty under its influence. Wherever Mexicans lived in any number, there were local ordinances against marijuana smoking. By 1933 seventeen states had banned the drug, but it was not regarded as a sufficient national problem to warrant its inclusion in the legislation of 1914 nor had the press latched on to it yet. Organised crime was not a product of the Prohibition years between 1919 and 1933, nor was it always synonymous with the Mafia. Irish and American gangs had been operating in New York, Chicago and San Francisco for most of the nineteenth century. Southern Italian immigrants came to America after the civil war, but only in the 1890s did Sicilian gangsters begin to make their presence known on the New York waterfront. Jewish gangsters were also well represented in the underworld and the likes of Arnold Rothstein and Meyer Lansky ranked in notoriety with the top Mafia personalities. Nevertheless Prohibition did secure the ascendancy of the Mafia in the underground hierarchy and allowed the organisation of an enormously profitable service industry, providing the nation with limitless quantities of illegal booze. The mob raked in millions of dollars during Prohibition and used the proceeds to fund every conceivable type of 'personal service': prostitution, gambling, loan-sharking, protection rackets and the supply of illegal drugs on a scale never before known, aided and abetted by corrupt politicians and policemen. It was Arnold Rothstein who during these years developed a new angle to mob operations: the 'laundering' and investment of money earned from the proceeds of crime into legitimate business. The Mafia made a major incursion into the entertainment business and, ironically much to the benefit of jazz, gangsters dominated the clubs, cabarets, dives and bars in many American cities. Indeed, if black musicians had needed to rely on legitimate ballrooms, theatres and restaurants for work, the story of jazz would have been very different. The gangsters provided endless opportunities for musicians to play. John Hammond of CBS reckoned that three quarters of all the jazz clubs and cabarets were mobcontrolled. In New York there were 1,300 licensed clubs and speakeasies, while Chicago boasted 24,000 night spots in 1926. Trumpeter Rex Stewart said musicians never had it so good in the twenties: 'You could get fired at I I p.m. and by midnight be sitting on another bandstand blowing.'[9] As most of the gangsters were immigrants, they felt an affinity both with the struggling white musicians from their own cultural groups and with the black musicians from the South. They were largely intolerant of racism and more than one offensive patron found his tyres slashed when he got back to his car. There was also an age affiliation; in 1925 Legs Diamond, Lucky Luciano, Louis Lepke, Vito Genovese, At Capone, Carlo Gambino and Meyer Lansky were all under thirty. To musicians they liked they were generous. Earl Hines recalled 'Scarface (Capone) got along well with musicians. He liked to come into a club with his henchmen and have the band play his requests. He was very free with his $100 tips."[10] When the mob moved in, no expense was spared. Louis Armstrong had a long residency in Chicago's Sunset Cafe; long residencies enabled bands to develop a style and make progress. When the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra from New York were booked to appear in 1927, the Sunset Cafe was redesigned to accommodate them. The mob owned the Lincoln Gardens, home of King Oliver, and Charlie's, whose main attraction was the Bud Freeman/Dave Tough Quintet. Like many establishments during Prohibition, Charlie's looked like a bomb ruin from the outside, so as not to attract roving Federal agents looking for booze, but inside was a sumptuously furnished, highly exclusive restaurant. The biggest nightspot owner in New York was Owney 'The Killer' Madden and the jewel in his crown was the Cotton Club. Sonny Greer, the house drummer, was given $3,000 worth of drums. Rival club owners fared less well. The owners of the Plantation Club, set up in Harlem in competition with the Cotton Club, were found dead and the club smashed to bits, two days after it opened — retribution for enticing away Cab Calloway and his Orchestra. Musicians were allowed loans without crippling interest rates, given investment advice, access to drugs and a free rein for their own sidelines. Jelly Roll Morton sold drugs and ran prostitutes, while Duke Ellington was offered a piece of major bootlegging action in New York. So what were the rules of the game? Basically, you kept quiet, kept playing, kept straight, did what you were told and didn't ask questions. The environment was tough, nerves were stretched to breaking point, physical injury was not uncommon. Muggsy Spanier saw two men shot dead in front of him, but had to carry on playing. Comedian Joe Lewis survived having his throat cut when he transferred from one gangcontrolled North Side club to another. Pianist Pinetop Smith was shot dead on the stand and Bix Beiderbecke, the first of many music superstars to live fast and die young, died from pneumonia brought on by excess of bootleg gin. Even the famous had to watch their backs: when Louis Armstrong changed managers, he had day-and-night bodyguards for months. It has been suggested that the careers of Fletcher Henderson and Joe Oliver went into steep decline after they fell out of favour with the mob. Oliver finished up as a janitor in a Savannah poolroom. Mezz Mezzrow once took his life in his hands with At Capone. Told by Capone to sack his singer at the Capone-owned Arrowhead, Mezz screamed back, 'Can't sing? ... Why, you couldn't even tell good whisky if you smelled it and that's your racket, so how do you figure to tell me about music?' Luckily Capone just burst out laughing. 'Listen to the Professor! The kid's got plenty of guts.'[11] Mezzrow established himself running his own band, first at Capone's Arrowhead, then the Roadhouse and then the Martinique Inn, Indiana Harbour, all in the Chicago area. The Martinique was run by Monkey Pollack, a Jewish club owner who spoke Yiddish with a Texan drawl and fancied himself as a gunslinger. It was here that Mezz, albeit reluctantly, first smoked some New Orleans sweet leaf: After I finished the weed, I went back to the bandstand. Everything seemed normal and I began to play as usual. I passed a stick of gage around for the other boys to smoke and we started a set. The first thing I noticed was that I began to hear my saxophone as though it was inside my head, but I couldn't hear much of the band in back of me, although I knew they were there. All the other instruments sounded like they were way off in the distance; I got the same sensation you'd get if you stuffed your ears with cotton and talked out loud. Then I began to feel the vibrations of the reed much more pronounced against my lips and my head buzzed like a loudspeaker I found I was slurring much better and putting just the right feeling into my phrases. I was really coming on. All the notes came easing out of my horn like they'd already been made up, greased and stuffed into the bell, so all I had to do was blow a little and send them on their way, one right after the other, never missing, never behind time, all without an ounce of effort. The phrases seemed to have more continuity to them and I was sticking to the theme without ever going tangent. I felt I could go on playing for years without running out of ideas and energy. There wasn't any struggle; it was all made to order and suddenly there wasn't a sour note or a discord in the world that could bother me. [12] Given Mezz's initial reluctance to smoke marijuana, it would have been no surprise if his first experience had been a bad one: expectations of a drug experience play a large part in how the experience actually evolves. But even allowing for Mezzrow's tendency to exaggerate (a further two pages of purple prose follow), his first taste of marijuana was obviously intensely pleasurable and convinced him that he played better for it. Mezzrow's experience wasn't unique; it was widely felt among the jazz community that marijuana helped the creation of jazz by removing inhibitions and providing stimulation and confidence. Hoagy Carmichael described the influence of marijuana and gin while listening to another aficionado of the Holy Smoke, Louis Armstrong: 'Then the muggles took effect and my body got light. Every note Louis hit was perfection. I ran to the piano and took the place of Louis' wife. They swung into "Royal Garden Blues". I had never heard the tune before, but somehow I couldn't miss. I was floating in a strange deep blue whirlpool of jazz.'[13] Mezz was an instant convert and quickly established a reputation for having the best weed around. In 1925, now based in Detroit, he found the local stuff decidedly second-class. 'A couple of times I had to make a trip back to Chi [cago] to pick up a fresh supply from my connection. a little Mexican named Pasquale. Chicago was home for high-class dope because thousands of Mexicans arrived in the twenties looking for work and traded it to supplement their meagre incomes. In those days we used to get a Prince Albert tobacco can full of marijuana ... for two dollars. The grefa they pushed around Detroit was like the scrapings off old wooden bridges compared with the golden leaf being peddled in Chicago.'[14] The marijuana musicians soon formed a clique, sharing the experiences of the drug, writing songs about it, looking down on musicians who drank and the music they made (excepting Bix Beiderbecke, whom they worshipped): 'Their tones became hard and evil, not natural, soft and soulful, and anything that messed up the music instead of sending it on its way, was out with us.'[15] Not everyone agreed with Mezzrow's view of the role of the marijuana in producing good music. John Hammond maintained that dope 'played hell with time' and Artie Shaw's view was that during the twenties and thirties, a lot of good jazz went down in spite of marijuana rather than because of it. The validity of either viewpoint is questionable; certainly nobody has proved that anyone actually plays better when stoned — the relaxation of inhibitions might push musicians to go for things they might not otherwise try, but if they are too stoned they won't make it and everything will collapse. On the other hand many musicians resent being linked with drugs and like Artie Shaw might play down or deny any possible advantages that might accrue from them. While the musicians in Detroit used marijuana, the gangsters and (according to Mezzrow) most of the rest of the city had a yen for something more oriental. Despite the general legality of marijuana, as opposed to the total prohibition of opiate drugs, jazzmen got drawn into the illegal camp primarily because they relied on the largesse of the gangsters for continued employment. When a psychotic throwback who is paying your wages laughs at your joint and suggests you try something stronger, how can you 'just say no?' Mezz said 'yes' and from that first time, he liked it. Moving back to Chicago in 1926, Mezzrow met a bunch of talented white musicians who first played together as a high-school jazz outfit called the Austin Blue Friars, eventually becoming Chicago's star white musicians — Jimmy McPartland (cornet and alto sax), Bud Freeman (tenor sax), Charlie Watts' hero Dave Tough (drums) and Frank Teschemacher (alto sax and clarinet), whom Mezz saved from alcoholism by turning him on to marijuana. Playing up a storm and getting high with the renamed Austin High School Gang, the years 1926 to 1929 were good for Mezzrow. Then Depression signalled the end of an era on which the curtain finally dropped when Prohibition collapsed in 1933. The love affair with New Orleans jazz and the heyday of Chicago jazz were over; many musicians, including the Austin High Gang, headed for New York, the new jazz town. Mezz however stayed in Chicago vainly trying to keep the purist jazz flame alight, scuffling around the town to make a living for himself, his wife Bonnie (whom he married in 1925) and his stepson. Eventually the pull of New York was too strong. One night, on impulse and wired up on cocaine to stay awake he drove there with a friend. On arrival he phoned the hotel where he knew the gang were staying. 'The first voice on the line was Eddie Condon. "Hey, Roll, where are you?" The next voice was Frank Teschemacher, "Hey Milton, did you bring any mula?" Then I knew I was home again, back among my own people. Solid...’[16] All accounts of Milton Mezzrow give the impression of a life centred around joyful jazz and marijuana highs. But although he was never specific about them, he had a number of psychological and emotional problems. New York let him down (he couldn't find regular work) and in 1929 he fled to Paris to stay with Dave Tough, who found French audiences more appreciative and enthusiastic. He was trying to buy time, recovering from what appears to have been a nervous breakdown. But things were no better when he got back: the only work he could get was in dismal strip joints, watching leering white businessmen ogle at bored women. Depression got to him again and he resolved to move as close as he could persuade his wife to Harlem, for him the Promised Land. 'My education was completed on The Stroll (a famous Harlem street) and I became a Negro.' [17] Mezzrow did not actually introduce marijuana into Harlem but the local stuff was poor quality and he still had access to the best Mexican grass. This was to be Mezz's calling card, his way into a community where he desperately wanted to be accepted. As a musician he was limited and could not hope to compete with black musicians, but as a marijuana dealer, he earned respect. Very soon the word got around and everyone wanted Mezz to light them up. He became a local hero. an overnight sensation. Like Biro or Hoover, 'Mezzrow' became a ubiquitous name, in this case for a quality reefer, fat and well-packed. Two dictionaries of jive defined the word Mezz as 'genuine', 'sincere' and 'anything supreme'. Jive was a secret black language, a code with its roots in the plantation life of the South, allowing criticism or ridicule of master or mistress without fear of retribution. The word 'jive' itself appears to have African origins. A variety of African tribes and cultures were herded together on the plantations, 'but the Wolof seem to have played a particularly important and perhaps culturally dominant role in the early slave culture of the Southern United States'. [18] The linguist David Dalby has made some interesting comparisons between Wolof language and American slang closely associated with music: Wolof Slang Jev — to talk disparagingly Jive Hipi — a person who has opened his eyes Hip Degga — to understand Dig The linguistic connection between Hipi and Hip was later extended to hippy whose lifestyle is often characterised by the psychedelic search for the inner self, using drugs as a means to achieve self-awareness. The language of drug subculture also fed into black jazz culture; 'hip' has been associated with the opium smoker's habit of lying on his hip in the opium den. Jive talking among Harlem blacks was impenetrable to those not in the know. Two blacks might have been discussing how to kill the President, and a posse of policeman standing by would have been none the wiser. Whereas Southern plantation code was born out of fear, Northern city jive talk came from a sense of hope and spirit. Dan Burley, editor of Harlem's Amsterdam News, calle d it 'the poetry of the proletariat' and Mezzrow described it as 'jammed with a fine sense of ridiculous that had behind it some solid social criticism ... a whole new attitude to life.' Except for the honoured few, blacks kept whites out with jive. And as if the language itself wasn't obscure enough, prices and times were often doubled to add confusion. Mezz provides an example of jive and thoughtfully a translation to go with it: I'm standing under the Tree of Hope, pushing my gage. The vipers come up, one by one. First Cat: Hey there Poppa Mezz, is you anywhere? Me: Man I'm down with it, stickin' like a honky. First Cat: Lay a trey on me, ole man. Me: Got to do it, slot. [Pointing to a man standing in front of Big John ~ ginmill]: Gun the snatcher on your left raise — the head mixer laid a bundle his ways he's posin' back like crime sure pays. First Cat: Father grab him, I ain't payin' him no rabbit, Jim, this jive you got is a gassed. I'm goin' up to my dommy and dig that new mess Pops laid down for Okeh. I hear he rifted back on Zackly. Pick you up at The Track when the kitchen mechanics romp... [19] Translation: I'm standing under the Tree of Hope, selling my marijuana. The customers come up, one by one. First Cat: Hello Mezz, have you got any marijuana? Me: Plenty, old man my pockets are full as a factory hand's on payday. First Cat: Let me have three cigarettes [fifty cents' worth]. Me: Sure will, slotmouth (a private inner-racial joke, suggesting a mouth as big and as avaricious as the coin slot in a vending machine). Look at the detective on your left — the head bartender slipped him some hush money, and now he's swaggering around as if crime does pay. First Cat: I hope he croaks. I'm not paying him even a tiny bit of attention. [Literally, father grab him' means Lord snatch the man and haul him away; and when you 'don't pay a man no rabbit, you're not paying him any more attention than you would a rabbit ~ butt as it disappears over a fence.] Friend, this marijuana of yours is. terrific. I'm going home to listen to that new record Louis Armstrong made for the Okeh company. I hear he did some wonderful playing and singing on the number 'Exactly Like You'. See you at the Savoy Ballroom on Thursday ... [That is, the maids' night off when all the domestic workers will be dancing there.][20] Although always a marijuana enthusiast, Mezzrow never tried to push it on people. He dealt mainly to friends and acquaintances; it was a family affair rather than a hardnosed business deal. Ironically, when he was eventually busted in 1940 after the drug had been banned nationwide, he was caught giving it away. Mezz was almost an underground national celebrity; visitors to New York sought him out to turn them on and no tea pad or rent party was complete without its stash of best-quality Mezz. Yet something was missing in all this adulation: the music. He was better known as a reefer man than as a musician. Mezzrow saw his marijuana-dealing as virtually a community service. Now, in the early thirties, the white mobsters (who owned many clubs in Harlem) were trying to turn it into a racket albeit on a small scale compared with the post-war years. Being dragged down to the level of white gangster scum enhanced the sense of inferiority Mezzrow already felt towards blacks. In this state of rock-bottom self-esteem, Mezz met a drummer named Frankie Ward who reintroduced him to opium. His only previous experience of the drug had been with the mobsters back in Detroit: now he was more than ready to have all his fears and anxieties blotted out. From 1931 until 1935, Mezz spent a large part of his time in a cleaned-out six-foot-square coal bin which served as an opium pad. It had been set up by a dealer called Mike, in the basement of a tenement — where he was caretaker. Mezz was in trouble. Even the guys whom he smoked with regularly begged him to give it up and not waste his talent as a musician. Like everyone who gets into opiates Mezz believed he could break the habit whenever he wanted to. Some can, and are able to use drugs like opium, morphine and heroin on a 'recreational' basis without ever becoming dependent. Mezzrow was not one of these. He tried hard to give it up and get his music together again. He made an appointment with a big-time radio booking agent to see if it was possible to fulfil his dreams of organising a racially mixed band. The agent greeted Mezz warmly, but all he wanted to talk about was setting up a marijuana distribution operation. When Mezz did get a contract he was allowed just one black singer. He had a black arranger as well though and everything looked fine until another bandleader poached his musicians: then it was back to the bunker for consolation. In 1934 he tried again to come off and failed. Louis Armstrong, a long-time friend, offered him the chance of becoming his musical director. He gave Mezz $1,000 to clear his debts and meet his living expenses, but Mezz could not bring himself to tell Armstrong of his addiction. This time Mezzrow knew it was make or break. It is often the way that when there are more reasons for coming off drugs than staying on, a user will go for broke, however unpleasant the experience. And judged by his own description, Mezzrow had a tough time withdrawing from opium over several weeks. But he did it. One night I was sitting there listening and then I got up and took my docket 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 the 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 alive again. [21] Busted for marijuana dealing in 1940, Mezz did a three-year stretch on Riker's Island. His dealing days were over. Once outside, he carried on as musician and record producer, and married a black girl. Eventually he moved to Paris, where so many musicians, black and white, have gone into exile and seen their careers reborn among appreciative and receptive audiences. He died there in 1972 at the age of seventy-three. pps. 26-36 --[notes]— Chapter Three 1. Mezzrow, p. 98 2. ibid., p. 4 3. ibid., p. 18 4. Ostransky, p. 2 5. Sidran, p 44 6. Before he switched to clarinet, Mezzrow wanted to be a saxophonist 7. Mezzrow, p. 55 8. ibid., p. 59 9. Morris, p. 22 10. ibid. , p. 25 11. Mezzrow s p . 72 12. ibid., pp. 79-80 13. Leonard, pp. 60-1 14. Mezzrow, p. 99 15. ibid., p. 101 16. ibid., p. 115 17. ibid., p. 2 10 18. Robert Palmer. Deep Blues London: Macmillan, 1982, p. 31 19. Mezzrow, p. 216 20. ibid., pp. 345-6 21. ibid., p. 275 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
