The Harder They Fall (49 page)

I come from probably one of the most addicted societies in the world, South Africa. Africans have been battered, much like the Native Americans were.

Africans who didn’t want to work for white people started whatever enterprises they could, which they were allowed to. Africans weren’t allowed to enterprise in many things except those that kept the native population functioning. Grocery stores, small trading, and things like that.

In my youth, children stayed with their grandparents until they were old enough to function on their own. Now they call them latchkey kids. The parents went to the big city to work. My grandmother ran a speakeasy. It’s called a
shabeen
. Africans were not allowed to drink. It was illegal. So prohibition became a business. It became part of the culture.

Drinking was also a sign of defiance, especially if you owned a shabeen. If a guy was drunk they would say, “That guy can really drink.” He was idolized. They’d say, “That motherfucker can really drink. You won’t be able to drink with that guy.” People respected a person for that.

You never knew what was going on around the shabeens. Outside of them people most likely were fucking, you know. So you would always see the effects of liquor. You’d see the drunks arguing and fighting a lot. Some of them were very funny. So, for some people, drinking became the world. Just like in the Ozark Mountains, the Appalachians, like for the poor black folks that live there, the sharecroppers—drinking becomes a way of life.

We were facing major oppression and racial discrimination. We were suffering like people did in the American South. We were lucky, though, because in South Africa there was no lynching. Of course black people were killed, run over by buses, buried alive by cave-ins at mines, and so forth. Because they were mostly laborers, some died from violence and booze-related diseases. There were lots of widows, like in
Zorba the Greek
: very sad women.

The friends of my parents would come over at Christmas and Easter. There would be a lot of food and drinking, and the men would get into fights. My mother’s family all died from booze. All except for my grandmother and my mother. So I really detested booze. I couldn’t even stand the smell of it. My aunts would try to kiss me, and I hated their smell. My
sister Barbara and I used to work in the shabeen. We would serve people on the weekends. We’d go together to buy the malt and yeast to make beer.

So we grew up in that culture. Our family made sorghum beer that was concocted up to other levels. Drinking it would make your face all scrunched up. From drinking too much liquor some of the people had feet in so much pain that they couldn’t walk. A glass of one of the other kinds of drink from our still,
kumbamba
, could kill you. And the smell …

When I was in high school, I sang soprano solo. This was in the boys’ choir at boarding school. My friends and I were beginning to look at girls around this time. My friends would say, “Man, you’re singing soprano! That’s a setback for us. You’re singing the girls’ part. You should be singing solo, man. You got a good voice. The teacher likes it. The girls like it. How are you going to get chicks if you are singing like a girl? You can’t hang with us if you are singing soprano.”

“Well, what should I do?

“Smoke! Smoke some cigarettes. And then you must drink. Fuck up your voice.”

So after six months of smoking and drinking my voice breaks. But the chicks didn’t give a shit! They’d say, “Why are you singing bass? You used to sound so nice.”

My choral teacher was disappointed. “What happened? Can you undo it?”

So then we moved on to other things. Some guys were smoking pot, but I wasn’t interested in pot.

During those days there were lots of murders in South Africa. Most people didn’t even have electric lights and there were gangs everywhere. You’d wake up some mornings and there would be a body at your front door. Someone was killed on your porch. Every weekend there would be people who were dead. They were mugged at night. It was a way of life …

Enough of that, I have a funny story … One of my aunts, her face had turned to charcoal because of the booze, from bad booze. But she really loved me. But she didn’t have an ass. When you were growing up, the women would put you on their backs. It was sort of like a jump seat. Most of my aunts, and my mother, they all had these beautiful behinds, but this
aunt … She loved me so much. She would come in drunk to my grandmother’s and shout, “Where is he?” She’d be all fucked up and I’d be trying to hide. My grandmother and my aunts would say, “She loves you so much, and she wants to put you on her back.”

Now, when a woman has a nice ass, you have a comfortable place to sit. Sometimes you don’t even need the blanket. But with this woman, she’d put me on her back and tie me to her and I’d be crying, “I don’t want to.” But she’d take me to her drinking place and I’d be on her back. And by the time she’d bring me home, the blanket would be around my neck and I’d be choking to death. She’d be singing, and I’d be hanging on crying.

Years later my drug counselor asked me one day, “Of all the traumatic things that have happened to you, what do you think fucked you up the most?” And I told him this story and he said, “Yes, that sounds like major trauma, and you were so young.” He said, “How old were you?” And I said, “I was two or three years old.” He told me, “What really hurt you was that when you were hiding everyone was looking for you. That they pulled you from under the bed and handed you over to this woman every weekend really messed you up.”

So anyway, my school was eventually closed. Apartheid closed one of the greatest British schools in South Africa. Bishop Trevor Huddleston, the head of the school, actually bought me my first trumpet. He was the Queen of England’s first cousin. That’s how British the school was. But they decided to discontinue education for Africans. You know, apartheid started in 1948 when I was nine. We grew up knowing we would eventually end it, but we didn’t know when. Our generation didn’t think it would be during our lifetime. We grew up with great police violence. There was a law that required us to carry IDs. Violations were called “failure to produce.” So that if they caught you outdoors, and your passbook was in your room across the street, they wouldn’t give you a chance to go and get it. There were also massacres of people by the police. We grew up in a very bitter atmosphere.

In those days all schools were missionary schools. I was in my last year at St. Peter’s, which was like the Eaton School of South Africa. One hell of a school. A great many activists went to school there. At this time, though,
I was getting into music. We all had gramophones. We all sang. My parents saw that I was really fascinated by music. They would send me to the store to get milk, and if I passed a club that was playing a record, I would stop in. I would ask them to play it again. By then I would have forgotten what my parents sent me to the store for, so I’d go home and get my ass kicked!

Around this time I saw the movie
Young Man with a Horn
, which changed my life. I was in a lot of trouble with the authorities so I went to see Bishop Huddleston. He asked me what I wanted to do and I told him, “If you give me a trumpet, I won’t bother anybody anymore.” So he got me a trumpet, and I entered the music world.

This turned out to be a mixed blessing, though. But let me put it this way: Everybody that I learned music from died from booze or drugs. All of them, including the chicks. The list starts with people like Lester Young, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Parker, and goes on and on.

By the time I came to the States, I was this other guy, a major alcoholic. I was twenty-one. I had just turned twenty-one when I left South Africa. I’d drunk booze before then, but not that much. Back in South Africa I’d hang out with the older guys, and I was the designated driver. We’d be driving around with the bass and drums on top of the car. I drove them everywhere.

Later I became that guy that would be praised walking down the street: “That kid can drink. You can’t drink like that kid can.” All the chicks liked me because when everyone else was passed out, I was often the last man standing!

I was on a tour with Miriam Makeba, who later became my wife. She left and was living in New York City and became a star in the U.S. while I was continuing with my band The Jazz Epistles in Capetown and then Johannesburg. All over the country there were demonstrations and rallies against apartheid. Miriam was sending me gifts and albums, and with the help of Harry Belafonte and others, I got accepted at the Manhattan School of Music. My parents pulled every string they could to get me a passport. I arrived in London in May of 1960—after drinking all the free liquor on the plane—and went on to America a few months later.

When I came to L.A. in 1966, there were all these drugs. Coke, LSD,
psiloycbin, uppers, downers—even the doctors I met were using. The people I ran into were all “high guys.” This was the time I had my first acid trip, with my friends Stewart Levine and David Crosby, who had gotten me to play at the “Stop the War” concerts in L.A. and San Francisco. When the acid hit me, I remember that the branches of the trees were speaking to me, the plants were speaking to me. Stewart and David served me spaghetti, and the spaghetti was talking to me! I started thinking I was a Native American, and I started screaming, “Give us back our land!”

I think I started losing it around this time. My career was still going well, but I wasn’t taking care of myself. It was all excess, to a point where in 1971 I decided to return to South Africa, but I wasn’t allowed back. So in 1972 I went to Africa. Went to many places, Guinea, the Congo, and a whole new life started for me.

Then I traveled and performed in Ghana and Nigeria. After a while there I came back to the States with a band. Hedzoleh Sounds, it was called. It was a wild time. We recorded an album. We even posed with naked chicks for the album cover. Our single came out around this time, “Grazing in the Grass,” which became a huge hit.

The music I was making caught on at the height of flower power. For me the anti-establishmentarianism never went away. Even though I was having great success in the States, what was foremost in my mind was what was happening in South Africa. I was alone, while there was a whole international movement going on. I think that God also got in my way then. Here in Los Angeles my friend Stewart and I were spending lots of time in police stations. We had no respect for any authority. We were bad!

And it didn’t get any better as the years went on. It never improved, it just got worse. Variations on a theme.

Then, in 1990, I was finally able to go back to South Africa, legally allowed in. Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990 and then went around the world speaking. My sister Barbara worked with him, managing a staff in his office at this period, and Miriam went back at this time. I thought they were kidding when they called and said I should return to my native country. After thirty years. It had really changed. The country was so modern and contemporary. People from all over the world
were there, and so were new crime syndicates. But it was a place of hope. People flocked there from everywhere. From Nigeria, from all over Africa as well.

As a consequence, I never had to buy drugs, to buy coke. I was a “home boy,” an African, so everybody wanted to entertain me. What I did in the States was nothing compared to what I did there. We all thought this was the way it was supposed to be, but in the process, I got moshed. I ended up with my friends very sad. They could see I was going to die if I didn’t stop doing drugs. All friends, including my sister Barbara, decided they were going to cut me off. It was like an intervention. They wouldn’t answer my calls—they just stopped talking to me.

Barbara said to me, “I want my brother back. Don’t call me, don’t speak to me until you are ready to quit.” Everybody I knew had been saying for about three years, “You should do something about this shit.” So that became the last straw. In 1997, I went to England and spent Christmas and New Year’s at a rehab. I stayed there for two months, and when I came out, I was scared because I started to understand how lost I was. After the first three days in rehab I realized that this was the first time in forty-four years that I’d been sober. The last time that I felt like that I was thirteen. It was a feeling so magical it was nothing I ever wanted to lose again.

I felt too good to go to those recovery meetings. I went to my first two meetings and then the third time I went I said, “I can’t return here, man, because I’m so fucking happy to be sober, I’m enjoying it so much, I’m never going to get high again. I’m not going to be evangelical, but I’m not going to feel sorry for myself. I’m going to break all the rules and go to the clubs and bars and hang out.”

So I went to all the after-hours joints and all I said to people was, “I’m never going to do this again.” My friends said, “What are we going to do now? We used to like hanging out with you and the band and doing these delicious things.” But I didn’t want that life anymore. I didn’t ever want to be that person again. There was nothing in it for me anymore … I’d be talking to somebody and I’d be really nasty. I hurt so many people. I ended up writing sixty letters of apology.