The Last Holiday (28 page)

I was a late-afternoon arrival in Boston, having gone with the wife and daughter back to Virginia between dates. Which was why I didn’t know anything at all about the
conflict, confrontation, and, finally, conflagration at the hotel the night before.

It was just as well, because I must admit my first thought when I was asked whether I’d heard about it was,
No, but I damn well should have!
I had naturally thought of Keg Leg and
my brother Denis. (That was a helluva thing, wasn’t it? Keg Leg having been named Dennis at birth made him even more pleased about finding that nickname when he was working with Denis
Heron.)

“It was a bitch!” I was told, but I moved on to my dressing room to check my Rhodes. And then I saw Grayer. Big Jim had two black eyes.

Not having been there, I could not say what took place. And not having spoken to Grayer personally about the incident, I could not say what an eye witness reported. And though I heard in detail
what at times seemed to exceed what an eye witness could have eye witnessed with only two eyes, I could only say there seemed to have been a difference of opinions over the two days, and it
appeared that one of those differing points of view had been defended by James Grayer, the manager of stage, time on stage, and, based on the veracity of his tenacity against a quoted number of
simultaneous opponents, kicking ass.

The opposing points of view were said to have been held by an erratically shifting number of hotel security guards and a gentleman whose evening was looking like it might be written up as if his
job had been to escort a young lady to the bar for Mr. Grayer.

Whatever the ultimate number of participants holding the perspective counter to Grayer’s, Stevie Wonder was unhappy. And he made his dissatisfaction about Boston’s image as a
cultural phenomenon, a legend in its own mind, a leading battleground against busing, a place of prejudice and bigotry only Jim Rice of the Red Sox could truly describe day by frustrating day.

In the middle of his two hours, when he was left on the stage alone to do “Lately” and “Ribbon in the Sky,” Stevie started talking. And if there was ever any doubt about
how perceptive he was, about how well a man could piece together his feelings from pictures drawn for him, how completely he was able to read the tenor of a time, the climate of an area, the
tension-soaked atmosphere of a city, those doubts would have been erased in six or seven heart-stopping, pin-dropping minutes when the Boston Garden was like the sound of fifteen thousand people
who had just inhaled: there wasn’t even the sound of anyone breathing as the brother spoke. You would remember not the words, but how Boston felt. Like it had been read from stones dotted
with Braille.

By 1980, I was an old hand at playing Madison Square Garden. If I had still been living in New York, I could have gone through a yawn or two on my second night there with
Stevie. New Yorkers had a shield of cool oblivion and paid little attention to the Garden, the Empire State Building, and even the Statue of Liberty.

Indeed there were millions of New Yorkers who had never visited any of those landmarks and knew only that the Garden was down near Times Square and that you played ball there.

Only the most literate music fans would mention that Madison Square Garden was also a concert venue. And even they would have to say
also
a concert venue, indicating that was not its
primary function. Sort of like why there were so few hockey games at Carnegie Hall.

I might have been losing my arenaphobic attitude by that point. I had now done seven shows without an “airplane hangar effect,” echoes that never died. I was deciding that arenas
that weren’t auditoriums could be modified like cafeterias that weren’t gymnasiums that I played basketball in while at Fieldston. I had already decided that my prejudice against arenas
was selective, that I didn’t necessarily dislike playing in front of a lot of people. In fact, the more the merrier. I was starting to compare the experience to playing on television, which I
had initially hated. The idea of having my songs and my band all squeezed through a midrange mono speaker the size of an ash tray had depressed me as much as the thought of doing a lip-sync on
American Bandstand
or
Soul Train
. It had almost broken my heart to see the Temptations stumbling their way through “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.”

There was one thing undeniably advantageous about playing in a venue like Madison Square Garden. There would be, on certain occasions, an energy generated that turned a concert into an event,
that gave an indoor performance an air of a festival, an aura of celebration. That was the special buzz, an inaudible hum of excitement and energy that vibrated through everyone in the place. It
was running all through the Garden; in the darkened tunnels that led to the dressing rooms and the storage spaces crammed with sports equipment and other event paraphernalia. Hell, everyone from
Jumbo to Tom Thumb or whoever P.T. Barnum had promoted had plodded or pranced through these shadowy passages. I felt it.

Beneath bright Broadway and traffic-choked avenues, there were other worlds that existed; worlds of magic and music and miracles. And tonight this was to be the world of Michael Jackson.

Another Jackson. Just what I needed.

Thousands of fans who fantasized about being like Mike, or simply liked Mike, would get a special spectacle this evening because the Prince of Pop was already in the house and rumored to be
loosening up his nearly liquid limbs in some private pocket along the passageways by the time I finished my set. He was to be a very special delivery and join me and Stevie when we closed the
evening. I got to see different performers join us onstage from Houston to Hollywood. You couldn’t predict the next surprise Stevie would spring on his audience as we crossed the U.S.A. and
Canada. It had become so routine for rockers and high rollers to finagle their faces into the finale that there was hardly a double take from the regulars or roadies, but the Michael Jackson rumor
sent some shivers through both the rulers and the riffraff.

I was pleased that everyone else was pleased. From the road representatives of Dick Griffey’s Concerts West to certain venue venerables of the Madison Square Garden hierarchy, there was a
noticeable neurosis and noise in the arena that evening.

I had met Michael and a couple of his brothers before, but I couldn’t say that I knew him or that he would have remembered me. I admired him, of course, since there was no way not to
appreciate an artist who had sold as many records as McDonald’s had sold burgers. I had been a guest of Greg Phillinganes on one sunshine-splashed afternoon at a studio in L.A. where the
Jacksons were regrouping to do an album. Michael was one of the few phenoms remaining when I arrived and Greg organized a brief introduction to folks. I was cool with that, even pleased to meet
them in person. It had not been as electric as meeting Quincy Jones or Miles Davis, but I wouldn’t forget that it had happened. But what did I know? Only that this youngster, with the hair
falling over one eye and a voice so soft and quiet that your ears had to reach for it, was record royalty.

Maybe all performers are schizophrenic, with a broader distance between their jobs and their homes and with more space between their fame and their families. The bigger their marquee, the
greater the gap.

But I had never noticed that as a certainty. There was a separation, to be sure, between personalities in public and when they were relaxing offstage. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was always recognized
and greeted everywhere he went. He was obviously outsized and outstanding, even while seated. In public the brother was always serious. But there was a private person, cringing and covering up with
the rest of us when the alien burst from some astronaut’s chest or collapsing and holding his sides while watching an Amos ’n’ Andy video.

Thanks to my access to folks who were no strangers to success, I had met a thousand names more recognizable than those who owned them. I had met Muhammad Ali on several occasions, always a bit
awed by his size and agility, but relaxed by his natural warmth and humor. He kept a smile at the ready, at the corners of his mouth and in his eyes as they searched out his surroundings.

But these casual encounters with artists off duty gave me no warning about how the electricity would elevate, how the excitement level would rise in the arena when Michael Jackson joined us
onstage as the band went into the reggae rhythm of “Master Blaster.” He would raise the voltage.

I often try to tell people how special Michael Jackson was, as though they don’t know. Because I myself didn’t know. I thought I did—until he came out for “Master
Blaster” at Madison Square Garden.

Stevie called for the monitor man to pull the rhythm track up and with a wide grin beckoned for his “special guest,” someone who needed no introduction. I looked behind me as he took
three steps, paused a beat, and stood straighter and taller, turning solid then as from mist to man. I don’t see that well. Sometimes.

He didn’t just walk onto the stage. He turned solid as he came. A trick of the light. He glided past me into the spotlight. There was a surge of energy from the crowd that lifted the sound
in the arena from stereo to quadraphonic and even the temperature seemed to rise when he touched the perimeter of the spotlight. And as the crowd’s suspicions were confirmed by recognition,
the buzz turned into an active roar. The monitor volume was overcome and Stevie’s smile got wider and he clapped his hands close to his chest and waited for the turn, caught the opening when
it swung around again and the house roar slid down to thunder again.

When the hook arrived it was like a huge transport landing on foam: “Didn’t know you would be jammin’ until the break of dawn . . .” Michael and I began on the beat and
on the same harmony note, but as smoothly as he had floated from the shadows to my side, his voice climbed to the next harmony note where he seemed to cancel our collision and make himself at home
again, two notes further up the scale.

After another chorus with me holding the mike for Mike I realized how prepared he was to do this and how unprepared I was to do it with him.

He knew the song. All of it. The lyrics, the changes, and all of the harmony parts. Hell, I hadn’t got my part right until we got to Hartford. Tonight I felt like a six-foot mannequin
clutching the base of the wireless like a giant gray ice-cream cone, frozen into a position of extending my arm between us, trying to collect both of our voices. It felt like reaching for water
with a butterfly net. I was committed to remaining stationary and holding the sound stick steady. Michael might have been, but even while standing still he seemed to flow in every direction.
Without a further thought I handed him the microphone and strolled to the shadows on our side of the stage.

In essence I got to watch two wonders at once. Up close: a smiling Stevie at center stage behind his keyboard bank with his head slightly tilted in what had been my direction; and sliding in and
out of the circle of soft light that usually told me where to stand I saw this youngster, bending with impossible balance, twisting the tempo around him like a thread that spins a top. And then he
reversed it, twirling like a boneless ice skater. The symmetry was perfect because he was as still as a statue when the foundation of the verse appeared and Stevie came in again. I was looking
ahead and saying I had thirty more shows to try that, to get it like Mike. Probably not.

I suppose that as long as we live, Stevie Wonder will call me Air-reez. But only when it’s appropriate. Like at night, after a show, at a group gathering in
somebody’s hotel space.

There was a game the members of Wonderlove seemed to set up with Stevie. The door to a back room was closed. Stevie would have a seat beyond the room’s double beds and the group members
would sit along the walls and on the beds. Quietly. Holding conversations with the people near them. Waiting. To near silence I opened the door, an unsuspecting party seeker, and threw a freezing
rope that fell on the shoulders of the occupants. I saw Stevie in a straight-backed chair leaning toward me with a half smile. There was an empty second in a room full of expectation and then
Stevie pulled himself erect and shouted, “Air-reez!” and everybody laughed and clapped and looked at me like a pickpocket with his hand caught in a mousetrap.

I never knew how he did that, and I never asked him because I always thought I would figure it out. And it wasn’t as though I gave up there, threw my hands up in disgust and vowed to
change my aftershave. I was not born on April 1st thirty years before this get-together for the future amusement of Wonderlove. I got caught because somebody whispered my name and I knew Stevie
could hear a fly pissing on a piece of cotton down the block.
Just wait until next time
, I thought.

The next time was less than two weeks later. A similar situation. It was after a concert and all the band and crew rooms were in the one hotel. I wasn’t sure that things were arranged
until I was directed toward the back of a suite by a grinning Calvin. I nodded my understanding and, taking no chances at all, I tiptoed with rubber soles on carpet up to a door that I inspected
with suspicion. I had a plan.

With a quick wrist flick I twisted my way in and put a finger against my lips to the group as I shut the door behind me. My expression said, “Nobody breathe!”

Stevie was stunned. He’d been quicked and he knew it. He was sitting up straight and his head was rotating slowly like a gyroscope. I was watching for breathers, but then with his face to
the ceiling, he grinned my way and shouted, “Air-reez!”

I don’t know what to tell you about that. It was probably the time I should have asked him how he knew it was me. After a while, however, I started to feel like a guy waiting backstage for
a magician to ask him about his performance. They were not telling and I shouldn’t be asking.

I took a glass of punch somebody offered and a seat on the bed next to Stevie, clapping him on the shoulder. The room had resumed a party’s volume. Music. Teasing. Guys and girls who had
become close friends on the road or maintained relationships over the hundreds of highways were telling each other secrets. Stevie was humming something and tapping the table in front of him like a
keyboard.