Slumberland (19 page)

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.

Those men of my father's generation, especially the black men, were a different breed. Fiercely independent, brilliant, and slightly touched, they were the type who'd represent themselves in court—and win. Children of the civil rights movement, they were the first generation of African-Americans with the freedom to fail without having to suffer serious consequences. They're the Negronauts the black race sent off into the unexplored vastness of manumission.

Race, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the mother ship Free Enterprise. Its five-hundred-year mission: to explore strange,
new, previously segregated worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no niggers had gone before
.

And like the first men to walk on the moon, to have gone where no man has gone before, these men, if they come back at all, come back changed. They come back humbled. Discouraged that they'd seen all there was to see and that it didn't amount to much. Yet finding out the Schwa was still alive had restored their optimism, and many of them, after they'd left the bar, would go on to do some of their best work. The Schwa had touched all these men just as he'd touched me and Philip Glass.

 

Lars tells a story. In 1971, Philip Glass goes to see the Schwa in Antwerp, and during the hour-and-forty-five-minute set the band plays a total of four notes, one chord change, an accidental cough, and a chorus of room-tone nothingness interrupted only by the drummer accidentally dropping his sticks and the bassist tapping his toe twice out of habit. Afterward Glass, then in his mid-thirties, still in search of his minimalist musical voice, and thinking of giving up the keyboards for sheep farming, approaches the Schwa backstage to offer his heartfelt congratulations. To his surprise, Stone is sulking in the corner, quietly cursing himself and his instrument. Glass asks the Schwa why he's so disappointed after such a wonderful, groundbreaking performance.
A little too rock ‘n' roll
, the Schwa says,
a little too rock ‘n' roll
. Glass nods and complains how his synthetic nothingness felt forced, scripted. That his music was neither improvised nor natural but was what was on his mind and not what was in his mind. Glass and Stone go out to the piano, the bouncer is trying to empty the club of stragglers, but Belgians are as stout as their beers and they aren't leaving. Glass sits down to play, and thirty-two bars of that pounding serialism crap does the bouncer's job for him. The place empties. Glass looks sickly. Van-Gogh-self-portrait-with-the-bandaged-ear sickly. Billie Holiday sickly.

 

Kurt Cobain “It's better to burn out than fade away” sickly. The Schwa takes out pen and paper and writes out a prescription. “Beckett.” That's all the paper says. “Beckett.” First thing the next morning, Glass runs out to Standaard Boekhandel on Huidevettersstraat off the Meir. When he enters, the ring of the bell above the door is nothing; he barely hears it. When he exits,
Godot, The Collected Poems in English, Rough for Theater, Krapp's Last Tape
in hand, the ring of the bell above the door is nothing happening twice, and Philip Glass understands minimalism.

 

Without fail at the end of the night the visiting musicians would take out their instruments and tell the Schwa they'd be honored if he would play with them. I always hoped he'd say yes. If he said yes to Charles Gayle or Peter Kowald, then maybe, if I begged him long enough and promised him the world, he'd say yes to me and agree to bless my beat. But he'd always turn them down.