The Last Holiday (19 page)

I simply could not move for about two hours. I think it must have been hash oil. When we smoked it we were laughing and having a great time, but I should have never laid down
on the One.

Dan passed on some phone numbers because he knew some people who wanted to get in touch with me about gigs; I immediately thought he was a good guy at that first meeting. Not long afterward, he
became our manager.

Bob Thiele at Flying Dutchman was anxious to follow up
Pieces of a Man
because it had been another success. For
Free Will
, the next album, we did the songs that we had left and the
poems that we hadn’t had room for on
Small Talk
. We knew that we were leaving the label; that was the end of my contract. I had signed a three record deal and that’s all I had
planned to do.

By that time I had a pretty good idea of Bob’s focus and what kind of a man he was. Despite our age difference and different lifestyles, we had one major thing in common that made it cool
to hang out with him: we both really loved music. He was probably the biggest jazz fan on the planet; he was out there in the middle of things almost every night, doing a session, out at a club
catching a set. Still, the single most impressive thing about Bob was how he was able to be comfortable as a celebrity. I don’t know how valuable that sounds, but to be honest it was an
incredibly important thing to learn, because it became “how to be a celebrity and still be yourself.” It was an area of the world I knew little about and looked at with most
trepidation. Bob did not allow what people believed his fame deserved. Somehow he stayed within an orbit where he could continue to be himself: a calm, comfortable person who enjoyed himself and
enjoyed music. His vibrations defied disruption. I never saw his ego lead him around or elbow his family or friends out of the way.

After Esther Phillips’s cover of “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” made the charts, other artists covered more of our songs: Penny Goodwin did “Lady Day and John
Coltrane,” the Intruders did “Save the Children,” LaBelle did “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Brian wanted to be a recording artist, make a career of it. But I
still wanted to be a novelist. Until the stuff got produced, it hadn’t even been important to define myself as this or that. I had a job washing dishes once, but nobody asked me if I was a
dishwasher-poet. Until the lyrics were published as songs, nobody ever asked me anything about it. It was just something I liked to do. That hadn’t changed. I wanted to continue to write
songs, but I didn’t see myself as a recording artist.

By the time I received my masters from Hopkins in 1972, my plans as far as where I would go with that MA were sketchy. I knew I wanted to teach, and on the college level. I didn’t see
myself as a successful or happy person teaching at a lesser level; I had neither the patience nor the disciplinary training to work in classrooms full of high school or junior high students. And I
had enjoyed the composition course I ran for undergraduates at Hopkins.

Then one morning I got onto a crowded Amtrak train in Baltimore, bound for New York City to have a conference with Grace Shaw, the lovely woman I had worked with at World Publications on
The
Vulture
and at Dial Press on
The Nigger Factory
. I appreciated Grace a great deal as an editor. She had scolded me about the original way I attempted to resolve things in the second
novel and I went back to what I had projected as the conclusion in the first place.

It was a midmorning express, and it was too full, oversold with standing room only. I found a spot next to a neatly dressed, well-groomed brother whose face looked familiar. His profile was
distinct and, though it took me a second or three, I realized I knew it from the cover of a book called
The Rise and Fall of a Proper Negro: An Autobiography
, that had been published the
year before. I was standing next to Leslie Lacy.

He had gotten on in D.C., and was going to New York to visit his publisher. Leslie was Assistant Professor Lacy at Washington’s Federal City College. What he described to me as we rode on
was close to an ideal situation. Federal City College had been started in 1968 and was still building toward accreditation. There was a clear need in the English department for instructors and
particularly instructors with letters, papers, and books that had been published. He was confident that I would be approved for the FCC English department. I agreed to submit a job application.

Once I got the position at Federal City College, Brian and I got a house together in northern Virginia. Leslie and I became good friends and working associates at “the shoe box,” the
building shaped just that way at E Street and Second Avenue, Northwest. Over the next three years, Brian and I were regular guests at Leslie’s apartment on Sixteenth Street. Leslie ended up
moving to the Bay Area around the same time I requested a leave of absence from FCC to pursue music full time, which happened when Brian and I were signed by Arista Records.

I was recognized in certain music scenes in D.C., like at Blues Alley or the Cellar Door in Georgetown. But I was more comfortable and more frequently seen near the Georgia Avenue offices of
Charisma, the company that became our booking agents. Brian and I became fast friends with Ed Murphy, a great name among the nightlife folks in the District, who owned a supper club between Howard
University and the Charisma office.

Ed Murphy was known affectionately among the hustlers as “Eight Ball,” and his club was well-serviced and clean. Its location, next to a junkyard, was compensated for by the sheer
attraction of the owner to the late-night club folks. In time, Ed began to feature entertainment on the weekends and did a lot of business with Charisma. Freddie Cole, Hugh Masekela, Roy Ayers,
Terry Callier, and Norman Connors played either at the supper club or, later, across the street at the Harambee House. Ed’s club was also one of the few venues where piano genius and soulful
vocalist Donny Hathaway seemed comfortable and projected the power and sensitivity of his talent.

The people who knew me, either from D.C. performances or as an FCC professor, were familiar faces at Ed’s. I could generally count on seeing someone from the English department there, and
I could blend in with the folks at the back bar without fanfare.

I think I was a better songwriter when I was teaching writing. When you work on songs, you have to tell stories in a limited number of words, just a few lines. You have to be economical. And
when most people talk about good writing, they talk about economy.

Songs began taking shape in D.C. The lyrics to the song “The Bottle” were inspired by a group of alcoholics who gathered each morning outside a liquor store behind the house where
Brian and I lived just outside D.C. I went out and met those folks. I found out that none of them had hoped to become alcoholics when they grew up. Things had arrived along the way and turned them
in that direction. I discovered one of them was an ex-physician who’d been busted for performing abortions on young girls. There was a military air-traffic controller who’d sent two
jets crashing into a mountain one day. He left work that day and never went back. In the song I was saying,
Look, here’s a drunk and this is why he is an alcoholic
, instead of just
glossing over the problem. I generally used an individual or an individual circumstance as an example of a larger thing. Alcoholism and drug addiction were both illnesses, but people really only
saw the condition and not the illness, so that’s why I wrote the lyric from a stark point of reality. I always liked to give a very personal and constructive viewpoint to whatever it was I
was writing about.

Dan Henderson, who was still our manager, and his wife, Wilma, eventually moved into the house with me and Brian, too, and in the fall of 1973 we went into D&B Sound in Silver Spring,
Maryland, and began recording the album
Winter in America
. D&B was small, but it had a comfortable feeling—and it had Jose Williams as the engineer. The main room was so small that
when Brian and I did tunes together, one of us had to go out in the hallway where the water cooler was located. I did vocals for “Song for Bobby Smith” and “A Very Precious
Time” from there, and Brian played flute on “The Bottle” and “Your Daddy Loves You” right next to that cooler. A lot of people wanted to know who it was playing flute
on “The Bottle,” because it wasn’t specifically credited on the
Winter in America
album. It was Brian. He also played flute on “Back Home.” Those are all his
arrangements. By the time we did
Winter in America
, Brian had become a very good flute player. He also played Fender Rhodes on the album. We’d first encountered the instrument five
years earlier on Miles Davis’s
Miles in the Sky,
but when Brian and I first started we couldn’t afford a Fender Rhodes. We’d had a Farfisa, a Wurlitzer, we just put
together whatever we could. Now, though, he was hooked on it.

The other people who appeared on the album showed up on the last day. Bob Adams played drums and Danny Bowens bass, and they added one more thing, too. Bob said he was disappointed that the poem
I had been doing as an opening monologue in concerts, “The H2Ogate Blues,” wasn’t on the album. The song was my way of explaining to people outside the Beltway what Watergate was
really about. I got a lot of political insight from being in Washington. But the reason I’d left it off the record, I told him, was because nobody outside D.C. seemed to know what the hell I
was talking about. He replied that even if people didn’t understand the politics, it was still funny as hell. So we set up to do one take, a “live ad-lib” to a blues backing. My
description of the colors, the three thousand shades, was off the top of my head, and the poem was done with a few index cards with notes to be sure I got the references straight without stumbling.
I still stumbled. After we got through it, we listened to it play back with an open studio mike and became the audience. There were some great comments in the back, particularly during the intro.
The poem worked well; it felt like what the album had been missing. Not just the political aspect, but, as Bob had said, for the laughs. The Watergate incident itself was not funny, and neither
were its broader implications. But as a release, a relief of tension on
Winter in America,
it provided a perfect landing.

Winter in America
came out in 1974 and the single, “The Bottle,” became a hit for us. The impression people seemed to get of me from my songs was of some
wild-haired, wild-eyed motherfucker. Once again, I felt people who wrote about me and Brian should have looked at all that we did. It was pretty obvious that there was an entire Black experience
and that it didn’t relate only to protest. We dealt with all the streets that went through the Black community, and not all of those streets were protesting.

By the mid-1970s, the middle-class people who were just in the movement for the adventure of the moment had gone on to do whatever it was that middle-class people did. There were still a whole
lot of programs in the community that could be effective, but a lot of the people who were aiming their heads toward that when they were in college weren’t there anymore. They’d been
kidnapped by Exxon. Surviving became the ideal after a while. A whole lot of people got killed, betrayed, or put in jail for talking about helping the community.

Most of the times when people pulled me off to the side at concerts, the songs they wanted to discuss didn’t have anything to do with politics—even though those songs were the ones
that were most explicit. People wanted to say something about “Your Daddy Loves You,” because it seemed to them that we’d written it about them. The songs that people wanted to
talk about were the ones that were more personal than political, more private than public, more of an emotion than an issue.

Still, there shouldn’t have been any confusion in people’s minds about whether or not they were in a fight—all they had to do was to look in their pocketbooks. Somebody done
took their motherfucking money. When we got into things that related to politics, a lot of the time people would say, “Man, I’m just interested in cash.” And I had to hip people
to the fact that if they were interested in money, that was the best reason to get into politics. There was a war going on in this country and you tried to find your best weapon.

I’ve always looked at myself as a piano player from Tennessee; I play some piano and write some songs. The fact that I’ve had some political influence is all well and good, but I
never considered myself a politician. I never joined any of the political organizations because once you joined one, it made you enemies in another. Various groups argued back and forth and wasted
energy that could have been used to try to do something for the community. Which is why I stayed out of most organizations. I wanted to be available to all of them. I played for Shirley Chisholm. I
played for Ken Gibson. I played the Nation of Islam’s Saviours’ Day celebration. I played for anybody who was trying to do something positive for Black people. Just count me in and
I’d be there.

One special performance at Ed Murphy’s supper club came up in February 1975. For half a year, WHUR, Howard University’s radio station, had been broadcasting updates about the case of
Joan Little, a sister who in August 1974 had stabbed a prison guard who had tried to rape her in a North Carolina jail. Practically the whole Black population of D.C. was tuned in to WHUR, and its
news department kept its finger on the pulse of the community. The Little case was a focus of national attention in Black papers and magazines.

One night I happened to be sitting at a friend’s place with Chris Williams, who had closed his club, the Coral Reef, and was looking for a better location for a new one, and Petey Green,
one of the true legends of the Washington street, and who had been released from jail and was telling it like it was with his own radio talk show. An update on the Little case came over the radio
and Chris said that if he still had his club, he would throw a party and donate the money for the sister’s defense fund. Petey agreed. The idea hit us to talk to Ed, and I said I’d have
my group play the date if Ed got involved.