“Man, you have to flatter motherfuckers like Charles Stone.”
For a second I thought about tearing across the street and calling the Beard Scratchers one by one. Pretending that I was more excited than I was.
“Dude, you’ll never guess who I’m looking at right now . . . the Schwa, man . . . I shit you not.”
But that would’ve been like Christopher Columbus returning to Queen Isabella with nothing to show for his voyage save a drippy case of syphilis. No, the Beard Scratchers would be notified when the mission for the Perfect Beat was complete.
The Schwa was serious about his work. After examining his pile of stones, he’d carefully select the rock he felt would best fit into the open crevice. If a block had to be shaved or cut down, he filed it by scraping it over the blacktop or dashing it against the curb. For mortar he used a boundless optimism that was constantly being tested by the rumbling vibrations of the passing trucks.
A motorcycle cop with thin cold eyes stepped off a brand-new BMW K100, and though he knew full well what the Schwa was up to, he asked the gathering what was going on.
“He’s rebuilding the Berlin Wall,” someone announced.
“Looks more like the Berlin Partition,” the officer said, and though it wasn’t very funny, the crowd, me included, laughed.
The cop snapped his fingers and Stone handed over a tattered but important-looking piece of paper, which the officer glanced at and quickly handed back. The cop waved a leather-gloved finger at a huge billboard that hung overhead. We all peered up at the advert for West brand cigarettes. Two crude-oil-black “homeboys,” dressed in black from sneaker to wool cap, stood against a white background, gangster posing and brandishing smokeless cigarettes over the caption TEST IT.
“Do you remember the watchtower that once stood there?” Heads nodded. The Schwa added a stone, oblivious to the socialist nostalgia. The officer stuffed his cap under his armpit and said something in Russian, which broke everybody up.
Then a haphazardly built section of the wall avalanched onto the street, blocking traffic. A man on the east side of the wall playfully leapt through the opening to freedom. A woman closed one eye and squeezed off a couple of finger shots at his back. A few others grabbed the fallen bricks and set to repairing the breach.
Slowly walking over to his bike, the cop removed two small orange safety cones from the saddlebags and set them down in front of the wall. A sharp whistle blast and a stern look sent the halted traffic around the wall in an orderly fashion.
“Mr. Stone?”
The Schwa clucked his tongue and pouted like a kid who’d been found in a decadelong game of hide-and-seek. He tapped a brick into place with the butt end of his trowel, a trowel that had never seen an ounce of cement and gleamed in the sun. I didn’t waver. Fuck the salutations. The ass kissing. I told him a joke.
“What do you call a jazz musician without a white girlfriend?”
I paused for effect, and he, pissed that I’d managed to pique the curiosity of a man who’d thought he’d heard and seen it all, idled for the briefest of moments, readjusting a brick that didn’t need readjusting, and asked, “So what do you call a jazz musician without a white woman?”
“Homeless.”
CHAPTER 5
I DIDN’T KNOW IT THEN, but the afternoon Charles Stone spoke to Doris, he’d broken a vow of silence that was more than twenty years old. It was a sacred pact he’d taken with his larynx and his instrument the day trumpeter Lee Morgan died, shot to death by his fed-up woman, in some long-forgotten New York jazz café. When he entered the Slumberland and heard something in my music that invoked Lee Morgan’s hard-bop verve, it gave him hope. Though after I’d gotten to know him it was a vow that I often wished he’d kept.
I wanted to subtly reintroduce the Schwa to the music industry and felt that a “listening session” for the latest album of the apple-bottomed pop star La Crème (italics music company’s) would be the perfect time.
Lars and a few other journalists (referred to by the company as “music partners”), the sales staff, and a few marketing executives sat in the record company’s grandest conference room. Doris was there to cater the drinks. I was there to DJ. La Crème’s father entered the room to boisterous applause trying its best to sound spontaneous and genuine. A tall, black American, he looked like the best man at a motorcycle gang leader’s wedding.
He wore a black leather suit that had Indian frills running down the sleeves and pant seams. His presentation was war room slick. There were charts and projections, battle plans and objectives. On command I played four songs from the album and during each one he’d say, “Crank it up, this is the jam.” Between “jams” he explained the concept of the album. There was the crossover club song, the R&B ballad—but La Crème hadn’t forgotten “her core audience,” he insisted, and to prove it he played one last cut, “Soldier,” the album’s title track. Supposedly, “Soldier” had what he referred to as a “street vibe.” When the song ended he pressed his fists into the shiny mahogany conference table and exhorted his minions. “We need, no, we demand a number-one album, and I expect all of us in this room to do our jobs: salespeople, media partners, everybody!” He cut his bloodshot eyes at us and asked, “Are you all soldiers for black music? Warriors for neo-soul?” After the meeting ended he grabbed Lars by the elbow.
“Do you know, my man, how many number-one singles La Crème has had to date?”
Lars nodded and said, “Sixteen.”
Impressed, Daddy La Crème smiled, ran his tongue over a twenty-four-karat-gold incisor, and squeezed Lars’s elbow even harder.
“But do you know what they all have in common?”
Lars shook his head.
“The hook is repeated exactly forty times in every song.”
He released my pale friend gently, like a considerate fisherman throwing his catch back into the water. While everybody mingled over drinks and hors d’oeuvres, half listening to the rest of the album, I announced the Schwa’s existence to the world by interrupting a tune called “Shaking My Light-Skinneded Ass Like a Dark-Skinneded Bitch” with the chicken-fucking song.
An angry Daddy La Crème rushed the turntables, demanding that I put his daughter’s “shit” back on. He reached maddeningly for the record and I flung it past his outstretched hands to Lars, who taunted him monkey-in-the-middle style before smashing it to pieces on the punch bowl. The husky European correspondent for Rolling Stone tackled the apoplectic stage father and sat on his chest. The others took seats at the boardroom table or stared out the window, quietly noshing on flammeküche and fighting back tears. Doris hugged me from behind, kissed my neck, and in French, a language she thought I didn’t understand, asked me to marry her.
The tune did what it do, and when it ended two salespeople immediately handed in their resignations and left to pursue their dreams. One by one the music critics filed past the prostrated Daddy La Crème, and as he reached out to clutch at their ankles they freed themselves with swift kicks to his rib cage and spittle-punctuated admonishments.
“How dare you pimp your own daughter?”
“Neo-soul? Don’t you mean sans-soul music?”
“For the past five years you people, and I mean ‘you people,’ have ruined my life. Turned me into a musically unrequited necrophiliac who’s been making love to a dead art form that won’t love me back.”
When the man from Rolling Stone released Daddy La Crème there was an unexpected look of contriteness on the impresario’s face. He shook out his crushed-velvet cowboy hat and looked at me with an “Et tu, brotherman?” expression. I opened the door for him. “Frankly, dude, I think even her ass is overrated.”
Rolling Stone made me a hefty offer for the rights to an exclusive puff piece on this “new resurgent jazz” and I pointed toward Lars, who lit a cigarette and simply said, “I want Hunter S. Thompson money and the name of his drug connection.”
“Done.”
The Schwa proved to be a truculent subject.
His musings were snotty, vainglorious, and in a new grammatical person called “first-person Jesus.” Every answer started with the phrase, “Jesus told me to tell you...,” and if Jesus was indeed using the Schwa as a medium, believe me, Jesus has some growing up to do.
The interview’s greatest contribution was its revelation of Charles Stone’s whereabouts those past twenty-some-odd years. Turns out that in the late fifties, the Schwa was a member of Buddy Rich’s big band. Buddy Rich billed himself as “the world’s greatest drummer,” and whether that appellation was true or not, there can be no doubt that he was the world’s greatest insulter. On those long transcontinental bus rides Stone, who at the time bore all the typical attributes of the fifties jazzman—talent, smarts, disillusionment, a lightweight drug habit, and a beard—bore the brunt of the drummer’s abuse.
Those tour-bus tantrums were more than manic outbursts. They were poems. Found American vitriol from a man who had nothing against talented, bright, heroin-using black musicians, but hated beards. Maybe you’ve got connections and you’ve heard Buddy Rich’s tirade. It circulates in major league dressing rooms and rock-band tour buses. If you’ve heard those tapes and wondered, Who’s Buddy Rich yelling at like that?—he’s yelling at the Schwa.
“Two fucking weeks to make up your mind, do you want a beard or do you want a job? This is not the goddamn House of David fucking baseball team. This is the Buddy Rich band, young people with faces. No more fucking beards, that’s OUT! If you decide to do it, you’re through, RIGHT NOW! This is the last time I’m going to make this announcement, no more fucking beards. I don’t want to see it. This is the way I want my band to look, if you don’t like it, get OUT! You got two weeks to make up your mind. This is no idle request, I’m telling you how my band is gonna look. You’re not telling me how you’re gonna look, I’m telling YOU. You got two weeks to make up your fucking mind, if you have a mind.”
Two weeks later a bearded Schwa, having been kicked off the tour, found himself standing on an Alpine mountainside outside Salzburg. Still dressed in his Buddy Rich Big Band tuxedo, a tailcoated burgundy-and-camel ensemble complete with top hat and white gloves. Against the glacial backdrop he looked like a lost minstrel who’d taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque. The monkey suit was a perfect metaphor for jazz: old-fashioned, worn-out, pressed and starched to within an inch of its life. Six days a week. Same tux. Same arrangements. Same ranting of an ebullient madman. He stripped off his clothes and walked back into town butt naked, playing “Lover Man” with both his dick and his music swinging in the wind.
After that he gigged his way through Europe, playing the new music for whoever’d listen. When he got to Eastern Europe, he was surprised to find an especially receptive audience. What he loved most was that the kids danced to a music even his staunchest admirers deemed eminently listenable but irrevocably undanceable. In Prague, Art Farmer and Ray Brown sat in and the kids shimmied around their white linen-covered dinner tables for three hours straight. And the more out he played, the louder the applause, the harder they got down.
In time his name began to ring out. In Krakow he was a proverbial Ornette Coleman. Antwerp welcomed him as Cecil Taylor incarnate despite the nearsighted pianist being very much alive and well. “The personification of cultural independence” was how he was introduced to Tito before playing at the dictator’s fourth presidential inauguration. In East Berlin, however, he was nobody’s free-jazz allegory or the embodiment of a musician too famous to play for socialist factory workers and peat farmers. He was just Charles Stone. Black genius. Billed around town as “Der sensationelle amerikanische Original-Mulatte.” Yet that adoration wasn’t what kept him in Berlin; it was the conversation. How he enjoyed running into Klaus, the fungi-obsessed horticulturalist who, despite the lack of any demand, had devoted his life to cultivating the first shiitake mushrooms grown outside the Far East. The complicated growing process involved a series of sonorous and captivating gerunds. There was the plunging, the spawning, the pinning, the shading, the incubating, and, of course, what should’ve been the fruiting, but Klaus had trouble growing the prized mushrooms, too many spoiling nouns: the contamination, the moisture, the decay, the strain, the mycelium, the money, the time, the missus, the kids, and the fucking Japanese.
On Tuesdays he’d meet his small circle of friends at the Prater biergarten. Gabi the voice actor, Ernst the math teacher, and Felix the architect were eager to have an American musician join their English Stammtisch, or English-language discussion group. Theirs was an algorithmic roundtable that, with the addition of the Schwa’s urbane skepticism and superbad speech pattern, took the Kaffeeklatsch to such conversational heights they eventually found general discussion too easy and had to make a pact to limit their discussion to only subjects that started with the letter p. And still there was no shortage of insights and snide witticisms about panthers, plutonium, Palestine, phrenology, the piccolo, and the pimento. Folks, even those who couldn’t understand English, often stopped by the Prater just to listen to them talk, sometimes shouting out topics as if shouting out sketch ideas to an improvisational comedy troupe: “Paleontology! Plankton! Puppies! Pupae! Paraguay! Placentas!”
On a bright August day in 1962, Klaus shyly offered his musician friend an oily wedge of steamed shiitake sautéed in garlic butter. Other than the gizzards his grandmother used to make on Easter Sunday, the mushrooms were the only delicacy the Schwa had ever tasted. The Schwa looked into his friend’s eyes, expecting to see satisfaction, and found rheumy, hazel-colored apprehension blinking uncontrollably back at him.
“The end is near, my friend.”
“What?”
“The end is nigh.”
He could see that Klaus was serious, so he grabbed one more piece of the tasty mushroom cap before asking, “How near is nigh?”
“Tomorrow,” he said.
A confused Schwa chalked up his friend’s apocalyptic mind-set to the rigors of an overwrought empirical methodology, and watched him walk west, disappearing into the afternoon glare. The next morning when he decided to go to the city’s American zone to pick up some of the bananas that, along with nylon stockings and political satire, were becoming increasingly harder and harder to find in the east, he found that he couldn’t leave. The Berlin Wall had been erected. The border guards who once begged him to tell stories about Bud Powell and Chick Webb now pointed guns at his chest.
Tuesday. In a panic he ran to the Prater thinking about the p’s he’d never see again: Pittsburgh, Patti Page, Satchel Paige’s palm ball, Bob Petit’s pump fake, PayDay candy bars, pizza, the Pacific, Pontiac cars. Gabi sat alone at the table. She had garlic-buttered shiitake on her breath.
Perpetuity, she said, sliding a pen and exclusive lifetime recording contract with the German Democratic Republic toward him. The Schwa quickly signed and left it on the table. Gabi thanked him and went to her grave never mentioning that other p-word, pregnancy. Stone liked to think that he had sacrificed his freedom for hers, but in truth he signed because the Wall inspired him like the Skinner box inspires the rat. He spent the next thirty years as an operant-conditioned jazz musician circumnavigating the boundaries of his box, pressing psychic levers and retrieving his retrieving rewards.
Sometimes he explored the sections of the walled border that divided East and West Germany, a barrier fifteen feet high and nearly nine hundred miles long that ran from the northwest tip of Czechoslovakia to the Baltic Sea. The Wessies euphemistically referred to it as the Innerdeutsche Grenze, or Inner German border. The paranoid Ossies didn’t have time for such Cold War genteelism. The Antifaschistischer Schutzwall was what it was, the Anti-Fascist Protective Wall, a rampart against bullshit. It felt good to be trapped.
Legend has it that Sonny Rollins honed his chops on the Brooklyn Bridge; well, Charles Stone found his voice while seated at the base of a moss-covered tree stump, moved by the absurdity of a metal wall bisecting scenic Lake Schaal.
It never dawned on me that Charles Stone was
the only artist on Kill the Czar Records, a small self-distributing label supposedly based out of that bastion of ultraleftism, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Maybe the East Germans saw the Schwa as a jazz earwig who’d crawl down the American ear canal and lay eggs of indoctrination in our brains, turning us into mindless Manchurian Candidates. I’m told Charles Manson, Squeaky Fromme, Big Bird, Huey Newton, and Henry Kissinger were all big fans.
Maybe the East Germans viewed him as a sort of socialist van Gogh, an undiscovered iconoclast whose transformative genius, though destined to be unappreciated in his lifetime, would one day come to define their great society. As Rome had been to the Renaissance, Paris to the Age of Enlightenment, Greenwich Village to postmodernism, so would East Berlin be to the glorious Age of Unpopular Antipop Populism.
To everyone’s (except the Schwa’s) disappointment, Lars’s interview didn’t result in the expected tsunami of adulation. There was some talk of selling the movie rights to his life to Oprah Winfrey.* But in the end, the only places where the article caused a serious stir were among the jazz cognoscenti and in the avant-garde and arrière-garde† communities.
In order to meet the needs of his faithful, we installed the Schwa in a corner booth at the Slumberland. And for two months every free-jazz musician, alternative rapper, filmmaker who’d never made a film, and disgruntled downtown poet whose epigraphs were better than his poems and whose poems were better than nothing made the hajj to the Slumberland to pay tribute. The list of pilgrims was like a who’s who of unknowns who among the counterculture homeless are household names: Steve Lacy, Billy Bang, Bern Nix, Milford Graves, Anthony Braxton, William Parker, Cecil Taylor, David S. Ware, Peter Brötzmann, Jameel Moondoc, Butch Morris, Henry Threadgill, and many others.