Time Travel Omnibus, page 607
I’m starting to ramble again. Walk and concentrate, that’s all I must do right now.
My cancer cure was on thread, tucked away at the bottom of my suitcase, but this one was on schedule, I knew it. My reasons for compiling it and bringing it along had been simple enough, or so I’d thought at the time. By putting the absolute cream on one spool, the very best of the music that had ever been issued commercially, I felt that I was taking along the equivalent of a favorite book, one that you can pick up and reread any time you feel the need for something familiar in an alien place. But now I knew the real reason, and I almost laughed out loud at the sheer contrary poetry of it.
The visit of the hotel manager had shaken him quite a bit. There’d been no one at the desk when we’d come in; so I’d helped myself to my key, and although I’d instinctively had the sense to hold the conversation in the doorway so that he hadn’t been seen, the simple fact of his being there at all, a Negro in a white man’s hotel room late at night, the setting for a disturbance even as minor as the one we’d made, had stirred him to a kind of fear that only people of his time and circumstance could really understand.
Thanks to my prolonged silence, he was on his feet and muttering that he had to go by the time I’d more or less sorted out my own confusion. I poured him another drink and said there was just one more thing I wanted him to hear, get his opinion on. I kept the conversation going while I dug out the spool, saying that I’d picked it up on a K.C. waveband on a recent trip and thought it pretty fine, but didn’t have any idea who it could be. Maybe he’d know. He fidgeted and sneaked glances at his watch and the door, but he obviously didn’t want to cause offense by beating it out of here in too much of a hurry. I reset the spool, taking the tone control right back so that the sound would be a little muddy and, I hoped, more authentic, put the recorder on the dresser this time, turned the volume down a little, and switched on.
It got him, almost from the first bar; not hooking him completely, but enough to stop his dithering around, as though he’d had most of his motor reflexes switched off. It’s a track that I’ve probably played more than any other and it’s never failed to electrify me, but the circumstances then were magnifying its power to a pitch that it had never reached before. Lacey’s opening solo, the simplest and probably the most effective one he ever recorded, with that filigree of single notes in the fifth and sixth bars and the final bump he gives to the chord in the tenth; in a way, it was hitting me as hard as it was hitting him. And when the tenor came in with that sublime descending figure, laying it across the twelfth bar and then pushing into the second chorus, it was as though he’d suddenly been kicked in the solar plexus.
He bent at the knees and sank back onto his chair again, leaning forward the whole time. He looked almost sick, jaw hanging, sweat showing around his nose and mouth. His feet stayed still to start with, but then they began to move; gently, barely lifting off the floor, but he could no more have kept them still than he could have flown. It was the moment of revelation, all right; a kind of aural surgery that was showing him his own piece of genius underneath all the muck that had accumulated around it and stifled it to near-extinction.
My own feelings at this juncture were pretty mixed, and they still are. “Willie’s Blues” was the finest thing he ever committed to record, but I couldn’t help remembering that it had been his last recording, too, made when he must have been a pretty sick man. To be his savior, that was fine. But what would have happened if I hadn’t been? Would he have lived longer? Would he have ever gotten started on his notorious overindulgence in just about every single thing that it doesn’t pay to overindulge in, after diving straight into the deep end of the pool that he’d been scared to even dip his toe in all those years? He might have married, raised a family, got out of the music business altogether; found a less demanding slot for himself somewhere, a life where he might even have been happy in the low-keyed way that most people are at least a part of the time.
I’m just being maudlin about this, I guess. He could just as easily have been knocked down by a car or got himself killed in the war, anything at all, really. No, I didn’t exactly do him a complete disservice, and it’s on the record that he’ll live the time he has left right up to the hilt, something that only happens to the handful who find themselves deified in that special way.
The music finished, and he sat there like a statue for maybe ten, fifteen seconds without speaking. Then he asked me who it was, in a gritty kind of whisper, like someone struggling to surface from a deep trance. I said I didn’t know. Static, I improbably lied, had cut in just as it had finished, and in fiddling around with the station dial I’d lost it for good.
He believed me, I suppose, because he had no real choice. He got up and began pacing around, not speaking, his face still dull with shock. I said I guessed that Kansas City was throwing up a lot of good new people just then and that it must have been a tough job keeping up with everything that was happening there and elsewhere. He said he guessed so, but he hadn’t really heard me. He was still listening to the music inside his head, struggling to accept the fact of something that even in his wildest dreams he’d never believed could really exist outside his own imagination.
He paced some more, and then he wandered to the door, saying that he had to go, that they had a long haul the next day and he’d better snatch some sleep before getting back on the road. I don’t recall him saying anything while I drove him back to his rooming house, just thanks and so long when we got there, and then he went inside without looking back.
And that’s about it. God, I’m beat. As far as he’s concerned it’s been like opening the door to another world, his personal vision of Paradise. For me, it’s different, and simply knowing the finish while I went through all those incredible preliminaries hasn’t made it the kind of experience that I’m in any hurry to go through again.
And how about the sixty-four billion dollar paradox? Without me, would it have happened at all? Any of it, or any of the things that developed from it? Or would he have stayed right where he was, fouling up his tone until the sounds and shapes were buried for good and all, turning him into a walking graveyard for some of the most sublime music to grace a part of history that wasn’t exactly notable for either sublimity or grace?
Go to bed, Palmer. Even if I had a clear head I wouldn’t be able to dent that one, and right now I couldn’t think my way through the alphabet.
Good night, Willie baby. The shadows aren’t going to be around again for quite a while now, and you’ve got songs to sing. Sweet dreams, and I’ll be seeing you.
Saturday, February 6th, 1937
Room 31, Brooks Hotel,
Kansas City
It turns out that the great night was cold and misty, and I mean cold. This room has a radiator that makes a hell of a lot of noise but works well enough in its own way; so I’m getting this down while I thaw out.
It was a great night, and not just because of its historical significance. The thread I made has done it even less than justice, I’m sure, but I guess that was inevitable. The place was jammed to the doors; great atmosphere, but it meant that the music suffered, and I was only able to pick them up from one side of the room, right next to a particularly vocal bunch of customers who’ll have come over loud and clear, I imagine.
But what a band it is now! It could be argued that they’re still rough—collectively, that is—but that would be finicking for its own sake. It was incredible, like the pulse of the universe. And Willie—
I’m going to be hearing him under better conditions than this, of course, but even through all that damned extraneous racket there was something special there tonight. It was the sheer poise of the man and what he could produce in a hectic setup like that which impressed me so much. Smoke and noise all around him, people yelling in his face, and it was as if he really was off in a world of his own. He had to be, I guess, or else it just wouldn’t have been possible to create that kind of subtly intricate and beautifully controlled line. I don’t know whether or not he was high, or even if he’s really on anything much yet, but I suppose it was likely, with Clay there and so much hinging on the way he reacted.
But how he swing?! Across the beat, behind it, juggling it like a man with six hands and all the time in the world; the most beautiful natural of them all, now that he’s found his way. It makes me sweat, just thinking about it. A touch of parental pride, no doubt.
The Blackjack hasn’t changed since my first visit, despite the increase in business. It’s the usual kind of trap; longish and thin, and with a crowd in there you can’t really hear much of what’s happening if you’re at the back of the room. The band was still jammed up in the top left-hand comer, and if there’d been more than nine of them the management would have had to chop a piece out of the bar, something I don’t imagine they’d have seriously considered doing.
I got as close as I could, up against the side wall about four or five yards away, and with just enough clearance to get some kind of fix on them. It was an exhausting business, though, and I’ve got a pretty good idea now what it must feel like to be a sardine caught up in an earthquake, if such a thing is conceivable. I didn’t actually see Clay until I was leaving, but the bunch hovering around the table nearest to the band and laughing too much and too loud gave me a pretty good idea of where he was.
Most of the time, of course, I kept my eye on Willie. It’s hard to believe that this poker-faced, totally assured man is only five months older than he was at the time of our first meeting; difficult, in fact, to believe that he’s the same person at all. The telescoping of the two occasions has underlined it, of course, but even so it’s an almost ludicrous transformation. He generates the kind of detached arrogance that only a few people ever really achieve; complete and utter self-confidence, the kind that’s impregnable because its foundations are built on a virtually unshakable belief in what they can do. In actual physique he’s hardly altered at all, but I have the impression of someone twice the size he was. It’s Lacey’s band, and in a deceptively self-effacing way he has the aura of a leader about him, but the spotlight is almost exclusively reserved for Willie, and already he’s pretty close to being infallible, the personification of all that’s good and right in the music.
The evening ended a little differently to what I’d expected. It certainly hadn’t been part of my plans to actually meet up with him again, not at this stage, but that’s what happened. The session had finished, and Clay, all smiles, was buttonholing Willie as I squeezed my way out; so it came as something of a surprise when I found him grabbing my arm, fifty yards or so away from the club.
He told me he’d spotted me in the crowd just before the close, and asked what I was doing in K.C. I said hello, and told him I’d been passing through on my way from Baltimore and had made a point of looking in at the Blackjack because I’d heard from a local acquaintance that he was playing there with Lacey, news, I said, that had come as something of a surprise after what he’d said at our first meeting.
It didn’t rattle him one bit. He just gave me an appraising kind of look, and then he told me about Leonard Clay showing up from New York that evening and how he was back there at the club talking business with Lacey at that moment; so I’d been right there on the spot when the big break had come. I congratulated him, saying that it had obviously been a smart move whichever way you looked at it, his leaving Curry, and that in that case I’d certainly be seeing him again soon as the company I worked for had just opened a New York office, and I hoped to fix things so that I spent a fair amount of my time there.
He said that would be fine, and then he asked the question that had been his sole reason for following me outside and which had kept him standing there in a thin band-jacket in a temperature that couldn’t have been too many degrees above zero, the way it felt to me. He asked if I’d ever got a lead on the tenor player on that last thing I’d played him, the one that I said I’d picked up on a Kansas City station.
I said I hadn’t, acted surprised, and asked him if he’d drawn a blank, too. He stared at me for a moment before answering, the only outward trace of uncertainty that he showed, and then he said, no, he hadn’t been able to locate him, either. But what he couldn’t understand, he said, was that nobody else in the region had even heard of anyone who was playing along remotely similar lines to his own, let alone the caliber of musician that he’d described to knowledgeable locals. Was I sure it had been a K.C. station, or could it have been coming from somewhere else?
I felt I had to let him off the hook a little at this point. I could see that the situation had reached a stage where its plausibility was rubbing a little thin, and some sort of explanation, at least a possibility, was needed to bolster it up again. He’d already given me a suitable opening, but I didn’t want to appear too eager to go along with the first suggestion that was made; so I said I was pretty sure it had been local, although it had been too long ago to swear with absolute certainty. Maybe, I suggested, it had been some kid who’d managed to get himself a little air time before he got knocked down by a truck, something like that.
He wouldn’t buy that one at all. He said, no, that kind of playing was too mature for any kid to have produced, and besides, if anything like that had happened it would have been talked about. What we’d heard, he said, had been music with a lot of years and experience behind it; adult music, that consisted of a lot more than just technical virtuosity and an individual sound. I said that in that case it must have come from somewhere else, that I must have misread the dial setting at the time, which in turn had probably been the reason why I hadn’t been able to relocate the station. In all probability, I said, he’d be turning up in New York one of these days if he hadn’t already; so they’d be almost bound to meet eventually.
He said he supposed so. He was shivering quite a lot by then; so I said I had to go, that I’d look him up in New York when I was there and maybe we could have a drink sometime. He said OK, we shook hands, and I came back here, not too sorry that the conversation was over. Quite apart from finding myself in a situation where I’d had to come up with some convincing lies at extremely short notice, something that I’m not normally too good at, this whole business is beginning to make me uneasy, almost squeamish in a sense. The effect of that business in Florence, when he was virtually shown his own soul—how did it really hit him? It must have been a pretty cataclysmic encounter, stirring up echoes of a very special kind; from the future instead of the past, showing him not just what might have been, but what in fact could be.
It’s a relief to know that he’s at least going to hang onto his sanity, because no crazy man could have cut “Willie’s Blues.” But although this whole thing is out of my hands and I’m only going through motions that have been delegated to me, I’m still having trouble with my conscience. Stupid, really.
Every time I start thinking like this I get a headache, and it isn’t to be wondered at. At least it can’t be as bad as the one they’re suffering from at the transfer center, ever since I turned in my report on my first trip. I must say they took it quite well, considering that it came from a layman, but it’s obviously given them a lot of rethinking to do.
My headache isn’t going to improve if I stick by this radiator. It sounds as though there’s somebody inside the damned thing, trying to break out with a hammer. Home, James, and I hope the climate there is the same as it was when I left, 70° in the shade.
Wednesday, May 12th, 1937
Room 104, Spicer’s Hotel,
New York
One more for the books, and this one qualified for the battle of the century, all five solid hours of it. Just watching and listening is exhausting enough, but that’s the amazing thing. They thrive on it; not exactly unaided in a lot of cases, admittedly, but the level of coherence rarely seems to suffer.
Pitman got back from France today, and it was obvious from the way he walked into the place—Cummings’ Playhouse—that he was out to get Willie. The word must have got around, because the crowd was a little different; quite allot of older faces, and some familiar ones that hadn’t been seen too much lately, I gathered; Petey Small, Jay Collins, Edgar Brown, all the people that Willie’s blown down during the last month or so.
I have to hand it to Pitman, though, it was hardly a no-contest. Like a lot of other people there, I imagined that his European trip would have slowed him down a little, especially after playing with some of those rhythm sections, but he’s a genuine giant, no question about it. The stuff comes steaming out in a torrent, and his control is really quite superlative, but the sheer power that he puts into it was what undid him tonight. It was bull versus panther; direct energy spending itself against subtlety and fantastically judged pacing, and I guess the result was inevitable. Five hours of blowing the way Pitman did would have decimated a mastodon, and to be fair he hasn’t had any real competition to speak of for the past year or so.
But even if he’d been physically up to it, I doubt that it would have ended any other way. The ragged edges were really beginning to show towards the finish—“Blue Lou” especially—and there’s an element of frustration about his last few choruses. He played the last hour with his coat off and his shirt open right down to his trousers, and it was like a wet rag. Even his pants were soaked. By the time he quit, he was drained, blown out.
I can’t find words for Willie right now. I’ve never really believed that it was possible for any of these people to actually produce the kind of sustained virtuoso performances that they were credited with, but at this particular point in time I have to accept that, on occasions at least, it did happen. He genuinely does seem to have no limits; not only that, his sense of form and continuity is absolutely incredible at this stage. One thing is becoming very obvious: “Willie’s Blues” might have been the greatest thing he ever put on a commercial recording, but in fact he matched it time and again, and at far greater length.
My cancer cure was on thread, tucked away at the bottom of my suitcase, but this one was on schedule, I knew it. My reasons for compiling it and bringing it along had been simple enough, or so I’d thought at the time. By putting the absolute cream on one spool, the very best of the music that had ever been issued commercially, I felt that I was taking along the equivalent of a favorite book, one that you can pick up and reread any time you feel the need for something familiar in an alien place. But now I knew the real reason, and I almost laughed out loud at the sheer contrary poetry of it.
The visit of the hotel manager had shaken him quite a bit. There’d been no one at the desk when we’d come in; so I’d helped myself to my key, and although I’d instinctively had the sense to hold the conversation in the doorway so that he hadn’t been seen, the simple fact of his being there at all, a Negro in a white man’s hotel room late at night, the setting for a disturbance even as minor as the one we’d made, had stirred him to a kind of fear that only people of his time and circumstance could really understand.
Thanks to my prolonged silence, he was on his feet and muttering that he had to go by the time I’d more or less sorted out my own confusion. I poured him another drink and said there was just one more thing I wanted him to hear, get his opinion on. I kept the conversation going while I dug out the spool, saying that I’d picked it up on a K.C. waveband on a recent trip and thought it pretty fine, but didn’t have any idea who it could be. Maybe he’d know. He fidgeted and sneaked glances at his watch and the door, but he obviously didn’t want to cause offense by beating it out of here in too much of a hurry. I reset the spool, taking the tone control right back so that the sound would be a little muddy and, I hoped, more authentic, put the recorder on the dresser this time, turned the volume down a little, and switched on.
It got him, almost from the first bar; not hooking him completely, but enough to stop his dithering around, as though he’d had most of his motor reflexes switched off. It’s a track that I’ve probably played more than any other and it’s never failed to electrify me, but the circumstances then were magnifying its power to a pitch that it had never reached before. Lacey’s opening solo, the simplest and probably the most effective one he ever recorded, with that filigree of single notes in the fifth and sixth bars and the final bump he gives to the chord in the tenth; in a way, it was hitting me as hard as it was hitting him. And when the tenor came in with that sublime descending figure, laying it across the twelfth bar and then pushing into the second chorus, it was as though he’d suddenly been kicked in the solar plexus.
He bent at the knees and sank back onto his chair again, leaning forward the whole time. He looked almost sick, jaw hanging, sweat showing around his nose and mouth. His feet stayed still to start with, but then they began to move; gently, barely lifting off the floor, but he could no more have kept them still than he could have flown. It was the moment of revelation, all right; a kind of aural surgery that was showing him his own piece of genius underneath all the muck that had accumulated around it and stifled it to near-extinction.
My own feelings at this juncture were pretty mixed, and they still are. “Willie’s Blues” was the finest thing he ever committed to record, but I couldn’t help remembering that it had been his last recording, too, made when he must have been a pretty sick man. To be his savior, that was fine. But what would have happened if I hadn’t been? Would he have lived longer? Would he have ever gotten started on his notorious overindulgence in just about every single thing that it doesn’t pay to overindulge in, after diving straight into the deep end of the pool that he’d been scared to even dip his toe in all those years? He might have married, raised a family, got out of the music business altogether; found a less demanding slot for himself somewhere, a life where he might even have been happy in the low-keyed way that most people are at least a part of the time.
I’m just being maudlin about this, I guess. He could just as easily have been knocked down by a car or got himself killed in the war, anything at all, really. No, I didn’t exactly do him a complete disservice, and it’s on the record that he’ll live the time he has left right up to the hilt, something that only happens to the handful who find themselves deified in that special way.
The music finished, and he sat there like a statue for maybe ten, fifteen seconds without speaking. Then he asked me who it was, in a gritty kind of whisper, like someone struggling to surface from a deep trance. I said I didn’t know. Static, I improbably lied, had cut in just as it had finished, and in fiddling around with the station dial I’d lost it for good.
He believed me, I suppose, because he had no real choice. He got up and began pacing around, not speaking, his face still dull with shock. I said I guessed that Kansas City was throwing up a lot of good new people just then and that it must have been a tough job keeping up with everything that was happening there and elsewhere. He said he guessed so, but he hadn’t really heard me. He was still listening to the music inside his head, struggling to accept the fact of something that even in his wildest dreams he’d never believed could really exist outside his own imagination.
He paced some more, and then he wandered to the door, saying that he had to go, that they had a long haul the next day and he’d better snatch some sleep before getting back on the road. I don’t recall him saying anything while I drove him back to his rooming house, just thanks and so long when we got there, and then he went inside without looking back.
And that’s about it. God, I’m beat. As far as he’s concerned it’s been like opening the door to another world, his personal vision of Paradise. For me, it’s different, and simply knowing the finish while I went through all those incredible preliminaries hasn’t made it the kind of experience that I’m in any hurry to go through again.
And how about the sixty-four billion dollar paradox? Without me, would it have happened at all? Any of it, or any of the things that developed from it? Or would he have stayed right where he was, fouling up his tone until the sounds and shapes were buried for good and all, turning him into a walking graveyard for some of the most sublime music to grace a part of history that wasn’t exactly notable for either sublimity or grace?
Go to bed, Palmer. Even if I had a clear head I wouldn’t be able to dent that one, and right now I couldn’t think my way through the alphabet.
Good night, Willie baby. The shadows aren’t going to be around again for quite a while now, and you’ve got songs to sing. Sweet dreams, and I’ll be seeing you.
Saturday, February 6th, 1937
Room 31, Brooks Hotel,
Kansas City
It turns out that the great night was cold and misty, and I mean cold. This room has a radiator that makes a hell of a lot of noise but works well enough in its own way; so I’m getting this down while I thaw out.
It was a great night, and not just because of its historical significance. The thread I made has done it even less than justice, I’m sure, but I guess that was inevitable. The place was jammed to the doors; great atmosphere, but it meant that the music suffered, and I was only able to pick them up from one side of the room, right next to a particularly vocal bunch of customers who’ll have come over loud and clear, I imagine.
But what a band it is now! It could be argued that they’re still rough—collectively, that is—but that would be finicking for its own sake. It was incredible, like the pulse of the universe. And Willie—
I’m going to be hearing him under better conditions than this, of course, but even through all that damned extraneous racket there was something special there tonight. It was the sheer poise of the man and what he could produce in a hectic setup like that which impressed me so much. Smoke and noise all around him, people yelling in his face, and it was as if he really was off in a world of his own. He had to be, I guess, or else it just wouldn’t have been possible to create that kind of subtly intricate and beautifully controlled line. I don’t know whether or not he was high, or even if he’s really on anything much yet, but I suppose it was likely, with Clay there and so much hinging on the way he reacted.
But how he swing?! Across the beat, behind it, juggling it like a man with six hands and all the time in the world; the most beautiful natural of them all, now that he’s found his way. It makes me sweat, just thinking about it. A touch of parental pride, no doubt.
The Blackjack hasn’t changed since my first visit, despite the increase in business. It’s the usual kind of trap; longish and thin, and with a crowd in there you can’t really hear much of what’s happening if you’re at the back of the room. The band was still jammed up in the top left-hand comer, and if there’d been more than nine of them the management would have had to chop a piece out of the bar, something I don’t imagine they’d have seriously considered doing.
I got as close as I could, up against the side wall about four or five yards away, and with just enough clearance to get some kind of fix on them. It was an exhausting business, though, and I’ve got a pretty good idea now what it must feel like to be a sardine caught up in an earthquake, if such a thing is conceivable. I didn’t actually see Clay until I was leaving, but the bunch hovering around the table nearest to the band and laughing too much and too loud gave me a pretty good idea of where he was.
Most of the time, of course, I kept my eye on Willie. It’s hard to believe that this poker-faced, totally assured man is only five months older than he was at the time of our first meeting; difficult, in fact, to believe that he’s the same person at all. The telescoping of the two occasions has underlined it, of course, but even so it’s an almost ludicrous transformation. He generates the kind of detached arrogance that only a few people ever really achieve; complete and utter self-confidence, the kind that’s impregnable because its foundations are built on a virtually unshakable belief in what they can do. In actual physique he’s hardly altered at all, but I have the impression of someone twice the size he was. It’s Lacey’s band, and in a deceptively self-effacing way he has the aura of a leader about him, but the spotlight is almost exclusively reserved for Willie, and already he’s pretty close to being infallible, the personification of all that’s good and right in the music.
The evening ended a little differently to what I’d expected. It certainly hadn’t been part of my plans to actually meet up with him again, not at this stage, but that’s what happened. The session had finished, and Clay, all smiles, was buttonholing Willie as I squeezed my way out; so it came as something of a surprise when I found him grabbing my arm, fifty yards or so away from the club.
He told me he’d spotted me in the crowd just before the close, and asked what I was doing in K.C. I said hello, and told him I’d been passing through on my way from Baltimore and had made a point of looking in at the Blackjack because I’d heard from a local acquaintance that he was playing there with Lacey, news, I said, that had come as something of a surprise after what he’d said at our first meeting.
It didn’t rattle him one bit. He just gave me an appraising kind of look, and then he told me about Leonard Clay showing up from New York that evening and how he was back there at the club talking business with Lacey at that moment; so I’d been right there on the spot when the big break had come. I congratulated him, saying that it had obviously been a smart move whichever way you looked at it, his leaving Curry, and that in that case I’d certainly be seeing him again soon as the company I worked for had just opened a New York office, and I hoped to fix things so that I spent a fair amount of my time there.
He said that would be fine, and then he asked the question that had been his sole reason for following me outside and which had kept him standing there in a thin band-jacket in a temperature that couldn’t have been too many degrees above zero, the way it felt to me. He asked if I’d ever got a lead on the tenor player on that last thing I’d played him, the one that I said I’d picked up on a Kansas City station.
I said I hadn’t, acted surprised, and asked him if he’d drawn a blank, too. He stared at me for a moment before answering, the only outward trace of uncertainty that he showed, and then he said, no, he hadn’t been able to locate him, either. But what he couldn’t understand, he said, was that nobody else in the region had even heard of anyone who was playing along remotely similar lines to his own, let alone the caliber of musician that he’d described to knowledgeable locals. Was I sure it had been a K.C. station, or could it have been coming from somewhere else?
I felt I had to let him off the hook a little at this point. I could see that the situation had reached a stage where its plausibility was rubbing a little thin, and some sort of explanation, at least a possibility, was needed to bolster it up again. He’d already given me a suitable opening, but I didn’t want to appear too eager to go along with the first suggestion that was made; so I said I was pretty sure it had been local, although it had been too long ago to swear with absolute certainty. Maybe, I suggested, it had been some kid who’d managed to get himself a little air time before he got knocked down by a truck, something like that.
He wouldn’t buy that one at all. He said, no, that kind of playing was too mature for any kid to have produced, and besides, if anything like that had happened it would have been talked about. What we’d heard, he said, had been music with a lot of years and experience behind it; adult music, that consisted of a lot more than just technical virtuosity and an individual sound. I said that in that case it must have come from somewhere else, that I must have misread the dial setting at the time, which in turn had probably been the reason why I hadn’t been able to relocate the station. In all probability, I said, he’d be turning up in New York one of these days if he hadn’t already; so they’d be almost bound to meet eventually.
He said he supposed so. He was shivering quite a lot by then; so I said I had to go, that I’d look him up in New York when I was there and maybe we could have a drink sometime. He said OK, we shook hands, and I came back here, not too sorry that the conversation was over. Quite apart from finding myself in a situation where I’d had to come up with some convincing lies at extremely short notice, something that I’m not normally too good at, this whole business is beginning to make me uneasy, almost squeamish in a sense. The effect of that business in Florence, when he was virtually shown his own soul—how did it really hit him? It must have been a pretty cataclysmic encounter, stirring up echoes of a very special kind; from the future instead of the past, showing him not just what might have been, but what in fact could be.
It’s a relief to know that he’s at least going to hang onto his sanity, because no crazy man could have cut “Willie’s Blues.” But although this whole thing is out of my hands and I’m only going through motions that have been delegated to me, I’m still having trouble with my conscience. Stupid, really.
Every time I start thinking like this I get a headache, and it isn’t to be wondered at. At least it can’t be as bad as the one they’re suffering from at the transfer center, ever since I turned in my report on my first trip. I must say they took it quite well, considering that it came from a layman, but it’s obviously given them a lot of rethinking to do.
My headache isn’t going to improve if I stick by this radiator. It sounds as though there’s somebody inside the damned thing, trying to break out with a hammer. Home, James, and I hope the climate there is the same as it was when I left, 70° in the shade.
Wednesday, May 12th, 1937
Room 104, Spicer’s Hotel,
New York
One more for the books, and this one qualified for the battle of the century, all five solid hours of it. Just watching and listening is exhausting enough, but that’s the amazing thing. They thrive on it; not exactly unaided in a lot of cases, admittedly, but the level of coherence rarely seems to suffer.
Pitman got back from France today, and it was obvious from the way he walked into the place—Cummings’ Playhouse—that he was out to get Willie. The word must have got around, because the crowd was a little different; quite allot of older faces, and some familiar ones that hadn’t been seen too much lately, I gathered; Petey Small, Jay Collins, Edgar Brown, all the people that Willie’s blown down during the last month or so.
I have to hand it to Pitman, though, it was hardly a no-contest. Like a lot of other people there, I imagined that his European trip would have slowed him down a little, especially after playing with some of those rhythm sections, but he’s a genuine giant, no question about it. The stuff comes steaming out in a torrent, and his control is really quite superlative, but the sheer power that he puts into it was what undid him tonight. It was bull versus panther; direct energy spending itself against subtlety and fantastically judged pacing, and I guess the result was inevitable. Five hours of blowing the way Pitman did would have decimated a mastodon, and to be fair he hasn’t had any real competition to speak of for the past year or so.
But even if he’d been physically up to it, I doubt that it would have ended any other way. The ragged edges were really beginning to show towards the finish—“Blue Lou” especially—and there’s an element of frustration about his last few choruses. He played the last hour with his coat off and his shirt open right down to his trousers, and it was like a wet rag. Even his pants were soaked. By the time he quit, he was drained, blown out.
I can’t find words for Willie right now. I’ve never really believed that it was possible for any of these people to actually produce the kind of sustained virtuoso performances that they were credited with, but at this particular point in time I have to accept that, on occasions at least, it did happen. He genuinely does seem to have no limits; not only that, his sense of form and continuity is absolutely incredible at this stage. One thing is becoming very obvious: “Willie’s Blues” might have been the greatest thing he ever put on a commercial recording, but in fact he matched it time and again, and at far greater length.
