Bert Lahr, thinking.
On the first day of The Playboy Jazz Festival….
Dude, hey dude, hey you, wait a minute dude, stop! Stop! I stopped. You were great, man! You were awesome! Star struck. You play like Jaco Pastorius, man! Just like Jaco Pastorius. They all shook my hand, not believing they were shaking my hand.
Uhhhhh…Thanks a lot, man, but I ain’t a bass player. Say what? You’re not a bass player? No, I was a drummer, though. Ohhhhh…yeah, that’s right, a drummer. You were the drummer. He was the drummer! You were?
I left wondering who I was. No idea, I’d been in the press room drinking ice cold beer and listening to Hugh Hefner speak and George Lopez joke. Playmates dashed about in matching pink outfits, cute as bugs. That’s where I’d been, not up on stage playing like Jaco Pastorius and being awesome. Besides, the real Jaco Pastorius had a melt down on the very same Hollywood Bowl stage. An ugly melt down, a bad scene. The beginning of the end. Was this an omen? I mean I wasn’t even an awesome drummer. Not even a non-lousy drummer.
It’s more fun when they think I’m a movie star. This dead bass player shit is creepy.
Years ago a beloved cell phone of mine made a sudden, unannounced and very graceful dive into a cup of coffee. It really was a perfect dive too. Alas, it was suicidal, and the poor thing lingered for days beeping fitfully and emitting little vibrating death rattles. At last the phone gods put it out of its misery. Sad. Sadder still that all the phone numbers that were on it disappeared as well. Some of those numbers I never did get back. Some of those friends I never did get back. Friendships died with the phone.
The good thing was that my replacement cell phone was given the prefix 420. It didn’t occur to me at the time. 420 was 4-2-0. That’s how I thought about it, 4-2-0. Not my card carrying friends, though. 4-2-0 was 420. Dude! 420! They asked me how I got that number. I said I had no idea, which they all found awesome and hysterically funny until they went off to find something to eat.
I got a wrong number on the new phone once. He thought I was a pot clinic. I can’t remember the name, something vaguely medical. I said I wasn’t it. But is this 420-xxxx? I said yes, it is. Oh. A long uncomfortable pause. Perhaps you have the wrong number, I said. Oh, sorry, he said, and hung up. I thought there would be a mess of those calls but that was it, just that one bewildered, disappointed and slightly weirded out caller. Stoners can weird themselves calling wrong numbers, like they’d just called the police who are coming over to arrest them right now. A siren freezes them like a deer in headlights. It fades in the night and they fire up another bowl. Whew.
I had a number in college that spelled y-o-u s-u-c-k. Kids would smoke marijuana and call me. Your number spells out you suck. I know it does. You do? Yeah, that’s why I picked it. You picked you suck? Yes. Wow. They giggled, bewildered. Once I tried picking up one of the girls. She was so stoned she thought I’d called her. Hi, she thought I’d said, my number spells you suck. Your number spells you suck? I could hear her girlfriends giggling. I asked her her name. My name? Her girlfriends told her to hang up. Click. It might have been the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
Years later a friend of mine got a wrong number. The caller was a lady. She apologized and was about to hang up but he was slick, this guy, and two hours later he’s at her place. A long running not exactly healthy affair ensued. This was the days before cell phones, before email, before texting. I can only imagine his success rate texting.
iPhones. I’ve yet to get an iPhone. I was just about to except a friend of mine has taken to wiki-ing every subject I am ever talking about, then showing me the screen so I can read it too. Apparently this is considered conversation.
Once I was at a jazz club. I’d accidentally sat down next to a couple who knew me, though I couldn’t remember them. The lady was so excited to be sitting next to me she pulled up my L.A. Weekly column on her iPhone. Look! It’s your column! She handed me the iPhone. I wasn’t exactly sure how one reacts in this situation, so I read a couple lines. Yup, that’s me. I handed her phone back to her. She beamed. She showed the virtual me to the real me. There was a big stack of Weekly‘s right behind me which contained the analog version of my column. But it wasn’t the same, I guess, as having the analog me, big as life, and the digital me in electrons there on her little iPhone screen. What a trip, she said. She sat there, furiously typing on the tiny keypad, tweeting. She took my picture and then typed again. Now you’re on my Facebook page! I said thank you and excused myself to find another seat.
I told myself that maybe I wouldn’t get an iPhone just yet. Not until these cultural issues worked themselves out. In a bar I’m still strictly analog. At a party I try to avoid the virtual reality for real reality. But those problems won’t iron themselves out. I’ll just start wiki-ing as people talk to me, and handing them my iPhone to look. They’ll glance and shake their heads like I do now. I’ll take their picture. Now you’re on my Facebook page. They’ll get up and find another seat.
Tweet.
(2010)
Tony Curtis died a couple days ago.. And Tony Curtis was just so freaking cool that everybody in this town needs somehow to make a personal connection with him. When so much coolness up and disappears from the planet all the hipsters feel an odd bit of desperation; they just have to, somehow, reach out and touch that coolness while it still lives. For coolness lasts beyond the grave, but not for long. It fades in an eerie way, still alive, before becoming history. Once history all the coolness is gone, that kind of tactile coolness you can get high with, or drink coffee with, or fuck or fight or just run into on the way to the elevator. The real, corporeal coolness. History renders the living cool dead, stone dead…turns it over to academics and poseurs and biographers who, let’s face it, someone as cool as Tony Curtis wouldn’t be caught dead with. But to actually have a story based on something real life, where you and Tony were in the same space together, interacting or even not interacting but conceivably could have in a way that a historian never ever can…well that kind of coolness is addictive. It is the power of the story. The time that you and Tony Curtis were together. When your universe and Tony’s came together, briefly, and somehow a tiny bit of his coolness rubbed off on you. Just because.
I have one of those stories. And to be honest, a lot of people have those kind of stories. They just don’t write them down, like this:
Sometime back in the mid eighties we had a friend, Jeanne Lynn, this crazy cool chick, older than us, a red head with one of the big Southern gal personalities. Jeanne Lynn was really hip. She worked on films, knew gallery people, actors, directors, jazz musicians, artists, beatniks, hippies, and punks, she was a fine bassist and great partier. She snagged one of Dolph Lundgren’s training jacket from wardrobe which I wore for years without ever knowing who Dolph Lundgren was. Jeanne Lynn loved to laugh and tell crazy stories and dirty jokes and smoke weed and we were all great friends. She was the first person we knew I think that was able to exist in that world without losing any of her hip, cool edge. Anyway, she took us to a gallery opening….no, a store opening, some kind of pricey, big boutique on what had been a dull little nothing street called Melrose Place. This was just before Melrose Place became Melrose Place, and Melrose itself was still a new concept, not yet overrun and tacky. This was that long ago. The party was packed with people, all these Beverly Hills types slumming it on Melrose Place. There were a lot less rich people back then in the city, and fewer rich neighborhoods, so that end of town below West Hollywood (WeHo hadn’t been coined yet) was thoroughly middle of the middle class with a smattering of struggling bohos and wanna be show biz types. I remember my wife and I and the others with us, whoever they were, were decidedly out of place at this bash, but enjoying it nonetheless. The food was great., a long long table full of food.. The open bar was even better. Their was a fine band, too, subdued but all killer players…everyone said that guy there was Sinatra’s guitar player (which meant, I know now, that he was Ron Anthony), and the harmonica player was the guy who did the theme from Midnight Cowboy (though I doubt that now). I watched them for a long time, saying hey to the people who said hey to me, and checking out the westside babes—jeans were still very tight at the time. Yowza. I was just digging it all and polished off a drink–I was drinking greyhounds back then–and went back for another. Jeanne Lynn, stoned, pulled me close, quietly squealing with excitement. Did you see who you were standing next to? I hadn’t. You didn’t see who you were standing next to all that time? Honestly, I hadn’t. She rolled her eyes. Obviously I’d blown it somehow. I said sorry, but I hadn’t noticed. Jesus, Brick, that was Tony Curtis! Really? Standing next to me? Aghast, she blurted out Yes! You were looking right at each other! How did you not see him? I shrugged, helplessly. Damn, Brick, he’s a real movie star! We didn’t say icon back then, but saying somebody was a real movie star meant something back then. Jeanne said she had wanted me to talk to him so that she could come up and introduce herself. Tony Curtis had been her idol. And I was right there next to him, utterly oblivious.
I think we’d even exchanged pleasantries, me and Tony. Just a word or two. But I didn’t put the face with the legend. I was too stoned, probably, or maybe just listening to the music, or distracted by coked out westside babes. Jeanne just shook her head. My wife, laughing, said he doesn’t know anything about actors. I didn’t. Still don’t. I’ve lived in Hollywood most of my life and never see any movie stars.
Tony was gone by the time I turned around. Apparently he’d only been at the party ten or fifteen minutes. He would have been flying on blow back then. Everyone knew he’d gone all to hell. But still, he was Tony Curtis. And we could, maybe, have had a nice little chat. But I never recognized the guy. I always regretted that, I mean, Tony Cutis was so cool. Oh well.
That’s it. That is my Tony Curtis story.
It’s not much. In fact it’s not even a story at all, just a seeing but not seeing Tony Curtis story. Probably the worst Tony Curtis story ever. But he’s dead now and I wanted to tell it one last time. I wanted to tell it while his memory still glowed, and that feeling that he’s not really dead still hung about. It takes a little while to get used to the dead thing. You can’t quite let go till the body is stone cold and buried, and even afterward he hangs about, a living memory, a marathon on Turner Classic Movies.
But yeah, Tony’s gone. I can never tell him this inane story. And he can never show me one of his goddamn paintings.
Sigh….
Another sigh even.
Ya know, I began this story trying to be funny. But it’s not funny at all. Maybe I left my sense of humor in my other suit.
So I found an old item on my blog, an article I’d written about Tigran Hamasyan years ago, added some post-script paragraphs, and then re-posted it. Well, tried to re-post it. I hit the “publish” button and it vanished. Poof. Like it had never been.
So I wrote this, hit publish, and this one doesn’t diasppear. Which is ironic, because this is just stupid while the other was one of the best things I’d ever written.
Aint life funny that way.
(This is a long piece never published or posted and that I believe was written in 2012. It reads like a couple pieces turned into one. I suspect that’s why I never posted or submitted it. I’ve left it as is rather than update it to 2014.)
You ever been watching an old movie and wondered just how much the prices then compare to now? Drove me nuts. So I looked around and found this site. So when Bogie asks for a dime to make a phone call in 1941, that’s a buck and a half today. A small chunk. When John Huston drops a silver dollar into Bogie’s palm in 1948, that’s a ten spot today. Not bad. It’s a fun toy to play with, this site.
Inevitably, though, you start applying it to your own life. Turns out I paid nearly $40 to be deafened by Deep Purple in 1974. and that beat up Buick Opel I bought for $350 would be $1800 today. $1800 seems a bit much for that heap now. There’s a gnawing sense that maybe the concept of $350 then wouldn’t match the concept of $1800 now. Did I really think of it the same way. Did $350 then seem like $1800 does now? I have no idea, and it’s me I’m talking about. Me thirty nine years apart. I can’t tell. I was making nearly $12 an hour in 2012 dollars at that silly-assed little job in 1979. I quit that job to be in my first punk rock band. Lifestyle issues. Work started at 8 am. I was partying till 4 am. Either the band or the job had to go. You guess which.
Now it gets less fun. I took the going rate for what I do now and see what that would have been in 2003. Turns out my pay today would be a little over half of what I made ten years ago. Of course, there was all kinds of overtime then. There’s none now, or it’s unpaid (if you work in an office, you know how that works.) So when you figure in my weekly take home then versus now in 2012 dollars, I am making half or what I made then. That’s right, 50% less. If I go back to 1993, when I first began in my chosen profession, I am making the same as I was twenty years ago. It’s like the last twenty years never happened. Of course gas is higher now (even accounting for inflation), and medical insurance is much, much higher. So I am actually earning less now than when I started out twenty years ago. A lot less.That is not only depressing, it’s astonishing. Part of that whole growing income disparity we’ve been hearing about.
Of course, I’m not the only one. This applies to the American middle class across the board. Not everyone, of course. In fact a segment has done very well. That top 20% of the US, the ones who have 85% percent of the property and over 90% of the liquid cash (i.e., real money), they’re doing terrific. There are many, many more wealthy than there ever were before, if you drive around southern California you’ll pass though vast swathes of suburbia that are devoted to them. Their big beautiful houses and expensive eateries and stores selling ridiculous things. The problem is that the other two thirds or so of the middle class have been losing ground. Their wages have plunged up to 50% historically, compared with ten or twenty years ago, and they pay much more medical costs, much more for a lot of essentials. Many of the have mortgages set bubble high, and that housing bubble burst a long time ago. You keep hearing about the disappearing middle class, you can see it when you use a little inflation calculator like this. Seeing how much you make now would have been a decade or two ago. In most of your cases, it is very depressing.
Now let’s get to my point, which is jazz, and where it’s gone, or really where the fans have gone. Well jazz was a middle class music. Some rich people, sure, but not so many…they were much more into putting on the tux and listening to classical music. That’s rich people music. They keep symphonies going. Jazz clubs were filled with people making a good living working hard for decent money, all the middle management people or civil servants or academic types. They weren’t rich, they weren’t poor, they were what was once thought of as the backbone of the country. Now the wealthy are the backbone, the job creators, the ones to whom we all look to hire and pay us and keep us off the dole. Sometimes they’re jazz fans. We in the middle class don’t make much money, and more often than not a lot less money, but we get by. We just cut out the extras. The new car, the overseas vacation, the nice restaurants. The jazz. We have to cut out jazz. Most middle class people cannot afford to go to clubs anymore. We stay home, listen to CDs and the radio and remember all those nights hearing some of the greatest music in the whole world.
It’s not the first time economics has throttled the music. The Depression wiped out the music of the 1920’s, all that hot and wild stuff. Record sales crashed by 1931, rock bottom, clubs and music halls closed, musicians nearly starved. The end of Prohibition, closing all those easy money speakeasy’s, just piled it on. Jazz recovered, but it emerged a different thing, big bad swing, selling to kids with a little change jingling in their pockets. That thrived until the economic and social dislocation that followed World War II when the crowds dried and the big bands had to bust up, a virtual mass extinction. It was all crooners and R&B, and be bop changing everything from the inside. Jazz recovered again, but was much smaller…smaller bands, smaller clubs. Still, there was money in it. Labels thrived, and musicians made a living. This lasted a whole generation, during rich the music reached its creative apogee. Virtually every one of the major figures in jazz was from this time. Even the big bands that had lasting influence — Basie and Ellington and the rest — worked during this period, no matter how far back in history they went. And this was a period of fairly steady economic growth, rising wages and am expanding middle class. Your average Joe could afford to buy lots of jazz records, and there were lots of jazz records to buy. Your average Joe could afford to go to jazz clubs. Basically your average Joe could afford to be a jazz fan.
The economy went into a steep dive in the seventies and the middle class took a beating. Jazz hit the skids too, the fans disappeared, record sales dropped, there were less clubs. Fusion thrived at first, but it too lost steam by the end of the decade. The decline has always been marked up as a generational thing, rock music taking over, which was certainly true. But I wonder if the miserable economy that went on a good ten years had anything to do with it. I’m inclined to see it that way.
Economic growth picked up in the early 80’s but so did a rise in wage disparity…the middle class receiving less, the upper class more. This trend continued through the early 90’s, a little more each year. It leveled off somewhat during the rest of the 90’s, then renewed again in the 2000’s, until by the time Wall Street and the housing markets caved in 2008, the middle class was already shrinking, battered by the inexorable decline in their wages and benefits, outsourcing, jobs going abroad and corporate consolidations. Going out to clubs once or twice a week–which is what jazz needs to maintain an audience–became a financial risk. You spend too much money. Audiences were already dropping in 2007, even though here in L.A. there was a sudden increase in venues. Then came the crash. The stock market crashed. The housing market crashed. Jazz crashed. Audiences dwindled. Clubs folded (or stopped booking jazz) at an incredible rate. The middle class had been on the ropes for nearly thirty years and in 2008 caved in completely. Venues–and businesses in general–that catered to a middle class clientele struggled to survive. Those that drew the upper class mostly held their own. And that trend included almost all jazz clubs in Los Angeles. The high money places tended to survive, the smaller joints like Charlie O’s or the Cafe 322 went under. I can count the surviving full-time jazz venues on the fingers on one hand, and not even bother with the thumb. And CD sales? You van make the top ten in the national sale charts by selling hundreds of compact discs. Hundreds.
I wouldn’t take this analysis too seriously. It’s just opinion. I’m not an economist, or even a businessman. I was just a jazz critic. And I know there are all sorts of reasons I haven’t even touched on, mainly generational. And maybe the music is stuck in a stylistic rut. All the various things you hear people say. But I’ve just had a nagging suspicion that maybe economics had a lot to do with it. This came to me as I wrote my jazz column in the LA Weekly. When I began in 2004 there were a lot of jazz joints out there. And often a lot of people in them. The number of people began to drop off in 2007, something I could tell both from personal observation and from the complaints of the club owners I dealt with. Then in 2008 the numbers plummeted. Scary. It picked up a bit as people got used to the new economic reality, but those people weren’t buying dinners anymore, and were buying less drinks. Some weren’t spending any money at all. But even that audience began to disappear. There were bright spots–the Blue Whale, Vitello’s, the occasional Jazz Bakery shows scattered around town. Vibrato kept at it, Catalina still booked jazz gigs, maybe an occasional few others. But they’re wasn’t much else.. Gigs disappeared, and fans were few and far between. That hasn’t changed much since. (I think this was 2012).
The middle class is barely hanging on in this country. We hear that time and time again. Jazz isn’t hanging on at all. When they gutted the middle class, they buried jazz. If it weren’t for rich people donating to museums and institutes, I don’t know if it’d be there at all. But then I go to the Blue Whale and think maybe it’s being born again. It’s not the sort of jazz I grew up with, but then it never is.
The old fashioned jazz joint..tables, burgers, drinks, fans and a killer band. That’s Chuck Manning on tenor and the Charlie O’s house trio of bassist John Heard, drummer Roy McCurdy and pianist Andy Langham. Three sets (or was it four?), no cover, two drink minimum.
(Photo from Hot August Jazz at the invaluable AllAboutJazz.com. Charlie O’s closed that month.)
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Yet another article on astronomical CEO salaries. Executive pay just seems to go up and up and payroll goes down and down. The average CEO makes 354 times as much as the average worker does now. Thirty years ago they made 42 times as much. CEO pay soars at a faster and faster rate while your pay stagnates well below the rate of inflation. Wages are so low now, benefits so slashed, even little perks cut back. The company can no longer afford free bagels on Friday.
I was surprised to learn that Arianna Huffington makes $4 million a year as head of Huffington Post. That site was only profitable for a couple years, and has lost money since becoming part of AOL, but Arianna reels in that salary still. And that’s without paying her writers, all but a chosen few, a business model that most CEO’s can only dream about. This CEO salary inflation is so pervasive that it infects even the progressive media that rails against it. Doesn’t seem to bother its readers a bit, though. No one even recognizes irony anymore. I wonder if Arianna does. I’m sure she does. A sucker, they say, is born every minute.
I’m watching the hockey game and a commercial comes on with this pretty lady with long hair and she’s dancing and drinking a Pepsi and I ask who she is and discover that I don’t know what Beyoncé looks like and I can’t tell if that is cool or just kinda out of it.
Posted this on Facebook a few weeks ago and decided it’s so pretty I’d save it for posterity:
Just read that our local Ralphs–once a local Hughes–will be turning into a Whole Foods. Which means we will have a Whole Foods and a Gelsons to shop at now. That’s the new Silverlake for you. To think this used to be a real neighborhood, full of real people making real people wages. I swear, having your neighborhood gentrified under your feet is so sad. All the soul and feel is sucked dry and you’re left with nothing but rich white people buying organic food and complaining about the Mexicans in the parking lot.
I love where I live, but I’m not so nuts about a lot of the people living here. If I’d wanted to live on the Westside i”d have moved there. Watch out Echo Park, you’re next. The tide of money flowing in from the westside is inexorable. Head east, young man, head east. There’s life across the river.
I wondered later how a Whole Foods and a Gelson’s compete in a gentrifying neighborhood. Price wars? Gelson’s raises its prices, Whole Foods raises their’s more. Then Gelson’s raises their’s again. It’s already weird to go to Gelson’s and see produce triple the cost of Ralphs, and proud of it. Same stuff, vegetables, fruits, berries, but fantastically, fabulously priced. And shiny. They glitter and gleam in the light. You step into Gelson’s and slip pass the oranges and lemons and pomegranates like you’ve entered an antique porcelain boutique, afraid the slightest mistake will send that great stack of perfect oranges crashing to the floor. You break it you buy it. Turn over the rent money or they’ll seize your car. You’d be left in the parking lot, crying, with a big box of scuffed oranges and the security guard shooing you away.
It’s a rough town, Silver Lake.
My wife read me a gentle but firm riot act for arguing politics at a party tonight. I got the reading on the ride home. The Pasadena Freeway was a tangle on the oncoming side, three lanes funneling into one, lights stacked up the entire northbound length. We zipped along southbound, which would have been perfect but for the scolding sotto voce. Not that I didn’t have it coming. I apologized, made a joke, talked about the traffic. Ahem. That low grade shame, like getting caught chatting up somebody’s wife, pretending I hadn’t been, changing the subject. Man, look at all those cars going nowhere. Meaning we were going somewhere, moving, and ain’t that a good thing? She admitted it was a good thing. I imagined being stuck on the other side, going nowhere, and getting read the riot act. It wouldn’t have been so gentle then, not there in the middle of a freeway going nowhere. My ego would take a helluva beating, and I could say nothing, certainly not argue. There are times in a husband’s life that he knows not to argue, That would be one of them. I thought about that and sped along and sighed quietly in relief. We’d be home soon, and my behavior would be forgotten for the night. It’ll come up again. Wives always do that, bring up some ancient infraction just to prove some unrelated point. It works. A husband has no idea what to say then, blindsided by ancient memories of a political argument at a party, or hitting on some long forgotten somebody else’s wife. Which is why I never argue politics at a party.
Except for tonight. I certainly argued politics tonite. But let’s not start that again. I just found my way out of that paragraph.
I used to work with a very likeable Tea Party sort. I never argued politics, tho’ he would, solo. Fulminating like a fool over something or other. Once he began ranting about Cesar Chavez. I can’t remember why. He just really hated Cesar Chavez. Hated him so much he stomped up and down, hating him. Stomped and stomped. I looked up from my desk and said, simply, I used to work for Cesar Chavez. Which I did, actually. The effect was immediate. He stopped, mid-stomp, turned red and returned to his cubicle without uttering a sound. Last I heard about Cesar Chavez.
I didn’t stomp today. I bellowed, though. I was one of those. Ah well. Won’t happen again, I tell myself. My wife says sure, that’s it, just sure. Point taken.
p.s.: I was right though. Really, I was. Take my word for it.
Brick Wahl 