Читать книгу Stan Levey - Frank R. Hayde - Страница 8
ОглавлениеNo toys in young Stan Levey’s room—only a bed, a closet, a little bureau, and a big, lonely boy. The only sound was his clock: the wind-up kind with crisp precision time, loud and percussive.
I could hear it all the way from the bathroom.
Sometimes he’d save a picture of a toy from a newspaper or magazine—Lincoln Logs or an erector set. The pictures were a sad substitute, and when their novelty wore off, it was back to the clock.
Stan’s father was a boxing manager and part owner of a used car lot. As a fight manager in 1930s and ’40s Philadelphia, he occupied a low-level position in the national crime syndicate. Stan’s mother Esther, known to all as Essie, was a comely and intelligent woman with domestic skills, style, and musical talent, but she was an alcoholic.
It didn’t take much to affect her. A drink or two and pow! I She was slurring her words and staggering.
Though he was born Adolph Stan Levey, Stan’s parents always called him by his middle name. He didn’t have any brothers or sisters. When his parents fought and screamed and drank, he’d focus on the rhythm of the clock.
I’d take a couple of pencils and improvise beats between the clock’s ticking: One-two-three, one-two-three, FOUR!
I was obsessed with rhythm. I’d tap my spoon and fork on a glass of milk or a dinner plate or the edge of the table. That would push Dave over the top. I never called him “dad” or “pop,” or even “father.” It was “Dave” as far back as I can remember.
“Stop your goddamn drumming on the table!”
My mother took my side when Dave was home.
“Well, Dave Levey, if you’d buy him a drum set, he wouldn’t take it out on the table!”
“You know how much a drum set costs?”
Their fighting was frequent and intense and usually ended the same way, with Dave withdrawing into his angry, silent self, and Stan’s mother secretly taking another drink.
For eight or nine years, they lived on Lindley Avenue off Broad Street, a lower-middle-class neighborhood in North Philadelphia. Their apartment building looked like all the others on the quiet, tree-lined street. In good weather, Stan would play a little stickball or half-ball with three or four of the neighborhood boys.
Cockroaches plagued every house on the block, but the Leveys’ small apartment was always clean. Essie was a diligent housekeeper. She was also a tasty cook, specializing in the stew recipes her mother brought with her from Lithuania. The linoleum-floored kitchen had a small, early model refrigerator with the coil on top. Every Sunday, Essie would dress up the dining area with a white tablecloth and serve homemade fried chicken.
The living room offered a touch of elegance in the form of a baby grand piano that Stan’s musically endowed mother could play by ear, if only in one key. Her tastes bordered on the sophisticated, with a wide-eyed admiration for Art Tatum. Nearby stood the radio, an old Majestic model that Stan loved to listen to when his parents weren’t using the room to argue. His favorite band was the Clicquot Club Eskimos from The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
I wait for that every Sunday, boy, my hands, wrists, arms moving to the swing beats. Traditional 4/4s, ratta-tatta, ratta-tatta.
Ever encouraging of Stan’s musical instincts, Essie brought home a used record player and a new record by trumpeter Erskine Hawkins. Stan’s father was not impressed.
“My old man used to call him ‘Irksome’ Hawkins,” said Stan.
At Essie’s urging, Stan’s father took his ten-year-old son to see Chick Webb at the Earle Theater. It was an electrifying event for the little boy, one he would remember vividly for the rest of his life.
Chick Webb was a hunchback who stood less than five feet tall. But the smallest man in jazz was a monster on the drums and the undisputed champion of the legendary big band battles, where competing orchestras set up on opposite ends of the bandstand and traded sets like counterpunches. The events were marketed like boxing matches and the stakes were just as high. A victory was as valuable to a bandleader’s career as a main event was to a boxer’s. The winner was generally the band that whipped the dancers into the most ecstatic frenzy of the night.
The Savoy Ballroom in Harlem was the Madison Square Garden of big band “boxing,” and Chick Webb defended his title from there, welcoming all challengers. The Amsterdam News described one of Chick Webb’s battles with Count Basie in this way:
Throughout the fight, which never let down in its intensity during the whole fray, Chick took the aggressive, with Count playing along easily and . . . more musically, scientifically. Undismayed by Chick’s forceful drum beating, which sent the audience into shouts of encouragement and appreciation and caused beads of perspiration to drop from Chick’s brow onto the brass cymbals, the Count maintained an attitude of poise and self-assurance. He . . . parried Chick’s thundering haymakers with tantalizing runs and arpeggios which teased more and more force from his adversary.
Webb’s epic battle with Benny Goodman required mounted police to manage the thousands who couldn’t get inside the overflowing ballroom. Chick gave Benny a beating that night. Goodman’s drummer, Gene Krupa, said that Chick had “cut me to ribbons.”
Stan didn’t know that Webb was a hunchback and was initially confused and astonished at what he was seeing, let alone what he was hearing. Webb’s drumming was a complete departure from anything he’d heard before. Stan was mesmerized, but not too much to notice the singer, a teenage Ella Fitzgerald. Little did Stan know that thirty years later she’d have him in her band—one of the most coveted and best-paying jobs in jazz.
But Stan’s life after seeing Chick Webb went right back to the alternating screams and silences of his family’s small apartment, which was penetrated only by Stan’s extended family.
I guess I’m Jewish, though religion sure isn’t a big deal in our house. Dave’s parents are Russian. Bessie and Herman. Herman is five feet tall and five feet wide with a big cigar—a character. My grandmother Bessie won’t let me call her Grandma. I have to call her “Aunt Bess.” They live close to us. And I meet my grandfather’s parents—they’ve just come over from Russia. I don’t know their names. They look like two little birds and their eyes are watering. I’ve never seen anybody that old and frail and it actually scares me. They die soon after.
Herman’s always tapped out for money. He owns the used car lot with my old man and he’s an inventor. Of course nothing ever works out for him, like this thing he comes up with to keep the beer moving. It has coils, so the beer would come up—keep it from getting flat. It doesn’t work.
Aunt Bess is big, strong, very blustering, very outgoing. Herman is beat down. She beats him up mentally. My father has two sisters who kind of disappeared. My mother has a sister and her husband. He’s in the automobile business and they’re struggling like us—just working people. They live right above us. Their son is Lenny, my first cousin, two years younger. He isn’t athletic, and we just do stuff like the string on the can, talking to each other. He tries to play the clarinet, but nothing comes of it.
Also on my mom’s side is Grandma Hoffman, a wonderful woman. Hates the fact that her daughter drinks, loves me and Lenny. Wonderful cook. Always cheerful. Lithuanian—speaks with an accent. She has her own hotel in Atlantic City, the Baronet, and she always gives my father money ’cause he’s always short. She’s the one person I can really relate to. She cooks for the whole hotel, about twenty rooms. Whatever she makes is good. She has an icebox, with the ice delivered. She makes everything, all the Jewish cooking—goulash, chicken. She cooks three meals a day for that whole hotel, maybe thirty, thirty-five people. And she makes cinnamon buns, man—best you ever ate. Heavy, very angelic face, good teeth, but she’s worn out from taking care of this hotel, cooking three meals a day. Her husband had died. Never met him. In the summertime she has me and my mother down. My father comes on the weekend. Lay on the beach. It’s great.
My mother’s a pretty woman, intelligent, tall, elegant, well-spoken. I’d show her off anywhere, if it wasn’t for the liquor. There’s those times she’s loud or belligerent or sloppy—shoes come off, hair mussed up, yells at Dave, swings at me, throws things, breaking, swearing—that’s when I know I love her but she’ll never do anything outside the house but embarrass me.
She has a friend he doesn’t like, Edna, and her husband, his name is Abe, he has money. And she’s a drinker, comes over at three in the afternoon and starts whacking it down and they get swacked. Funny thing is, I never see her take a drink, not a drop. I don’t know how much she goes through in a day.
Then he comes home. He’s always very tired. My old man was very quiet and did a lot of grunting. Cigar, you know. Comes home from selling used cars and she’s drunk, passed out on the sofa, and he starts screaming, “Why I gotta come home to this crap!” I go into my room. I don’t want to hear it. Screaming, things breaking.
Brought my buddy David over. Everybody knows about that family. He’s a lunatic; abuses his parents, pushes them around. That’s what I like—a rebel. He’s in charge. They’re the children, he’s the parent. Nine years old, David’s already nuts, really crazy. Abuses his parents, knocks his parents around, rearranges the furniture in his house. I like him. Does all the decorating; puffs the pillows up, moves the furniture into the middle of the room. Father’s a little insurance guy that goes around with his book and takes a dollar here, a quarter here, and plays the violin. A nutcake, too. And the mother’s nutty. But he’s my friend. The decorator of his house and they just stand there. They try to do something—he goes into a rage. I’m forbidden to play with him cause my parents know right away he’s crazy. My only friend: Gone.
Dave never says a word to me, even our Sunday fried chicken dinners with the tablecloth are silent. Until she utters something, and he tells her, “You’re drunk!” Dave doesn’t drink. The man can eat though. He can eat, I tell ya. Nice, little napkins at that table, but no talking. He just eats.
Dave’s dream is to get rich. He has a stable of sixteen fighters, some rough, some mean, some just good, hardworking men, but all of them look like dollar signs to Dave. He buys or sells them at the drop of a hat. Whatever will put more cash in his pocket. You don’t want to buy a car from him.
As the son of a manager, Stan had opportunities to hang around the gym and step into the ring, but it was his size and strength that allowed him to break into professional boxing while he was still a teenager. Six-foot-two Levey qualified as a heavyweight in the 1940s. Though he weighed only a hundred and seventy-eight pounds, Stan’s leanness was deceiving. He had hands like catcher’s mitts and a heavy jaw anchored by a brick of a chin, which looked specifically designed to take a punch. Throughout his life, the hulking drummer gave off an impression of hugeness that was universally intimidating. Stan’s wife Angela recalled an inside joke that Stan was from the ape family. “He’d see an orangutan on television and say, ‘Oh, look, it’s my uncle Abe,’” said Angela, “‘and there’s my brother the chimp.’”
But young Stan also had another pugilistic attribute. Like so many other boxers, he had learned to take a beating early, at home.
Like every other kid in Philly and the world, I always pretend to be sick to stay away from school, but this one morning, she’s got half a load on already, and she says, “Get the hell out of here,” and bam—a belt with a big buckle. Whacks me. Opens my head up big time. I’m maybe seven, so she calls the doctor. Two-dollar doctor, comes to the house for two bucks. She gets nervous. “Tell him . . . tell him you fell down.”
He says, “What happened?”
She says, “Oh, he fell, he fell,” and I say, “Yeah, I fell.” It’s a good whack.
The old man, he’s like a gorilla. That’s where I got these long arms, these shoulders. He’s bald and hairy. Big arms. Takes me down to the basement and says, “You’re gonna learn to box!”
Now, I’m really young—nine, ten. I’m saying, “This is great, man, I’m getting attention.” We start pummeling. He starts laying right into me. He hurts me, but I enjoy it. Stomach, face . . . beats the hell out of me, but I enjoy it. Then I start to lay back into him and he doesn’t like that. He hits harder. We have a coal chute down there. The truck puts that chute down through the window and the coal comes down for the furnace. Big empty place, coal dust in the air. Breathing it. He’s beating the shit out of me. Says, “Come here, I want to show you a couple things.” I say, “Yeah, great, he’s talkin’ to me!”
He drops it like a bomb at dinner one night: “We’re going to the fights!” First time, very exciting. Thursday night fights. I’m maybe nine. Down on Broad—the Olympic Fight Club—South Broad Street, at night. School doesn’t matter at all. My mom maybe worries about my grades a couple of times, but it passes. Him? Never.
Takes me right back to the dressing room. They’re taping up and he introduces me to a couple of his guys. It’s a thrill to be there. I’m saying, “Wow, look at these guys, they’re gonna go in and fight!”
The Olympic holds maybe three hundred. Smoky, man—the whole place stinks just awful. All the beat-up ex-fighters selling peanuts. We get peanuts. Ring announcer’s a little guy—shirt and bow tie, high voice, no microphone—introduces the fighters, kind of nasal, high-toned, piercing voice so it projects, cuts through. They bet the white corner or the black corner. Bet on the round, the knockout. The lights dim and these two guys come out. Our guys are later.
I’ll do anything to gain his attention, my old man. That’s why I become a boxer. He takes me down to the gym, where all his boxers are. Right away they like me and I start working out with them. I’m a big kid. First time I must’ve been twelve or thirteen. Eventually, I’m working out with Bob Montgomery and Ike Williams—world champions—not really realizing how important they are at that particular time. But that’s to get my old man’s attention when I go in and start boxing. He doesn’t even come around, just takes me and shows me off.
“That’s my boy. Look how big he is.”
“Yeah, he’s a big kid, Dave. Big, strong kid.”
But once we leave, it’s not a word. Zip.
Stan got his first drum set a couple of years before he started working out at the gym. He was walking past Ted Burke’s Music Store with his mother, and they saw it in the window. Stan’s reaction was so passionate that it moved Essie to sober up long enough to speak to Dave.
Somehow, my mother gathers herself.
“Dave. Dave, are you listening to me?”
“What the hell? You been drinking?”
“Dave, the boy’s got nothing. Nothing.”
“Whattayamean nothing? A roof over his head? Three squares? A freaking radio for Christ’s sake! What do you want from me? Leave me alone.”
“David.”
“Oh, now it’s David! What the hell, I know you’ve been drinking.”
“No, I haven’t. Not this time. He’s got nothing. Listen to me. Be a father. Buy him drums. He’s got a beat, Dave, he’s got rhythm.”
“What? I don’t have that kind of money. What are you talking about?”
“There’s a little set. We saw it at Ted Burke’s, a kid set, cheap. A man does this, Dave. Your son has nothing. You’ve never given him anything. Give him this. Be a man. Be a man, huh?”
The one Christmas this Jewish boy ever gets. Put up my little tiny gorgeous set right in front of the Majestic and let those Eskimos guide me into the music. Play along, feel my way, carried along . . .
One time! One time, I catch my folks sitting, arms around each other behind me on the old sofa, just watching me play, holding each other. Never again, but that’s all it takes. I know I have something, man—something special to make them do that. That tiny bass drum, snare, cymbal, those brushes, my folks watching me like that . . . Nothing else to say. Nothing else to do.
When Stan was thirteen, his family moved into a two-story row house in West Philadelphia. On the surface, the move indicated an improvement in the family’s fortune. They were still renters, but their new house was more spacious, with three bedrooms, two baths, and an outdoor patio. While their old apartment had been coal-fired and sooty, their new dwelling was powered by natural gas. Stan became friendly with the gas man, a fellow jazz lover and aspiring trombonist named Bill Harris.
But for Stan, the new house represented the end of his parents’ marriage. Essie’s drinking worsened and the animosity between her and Dave climaxed on the staircase one evening with Essie wielding a thirteen-inch butcher knife in a drunken rage. Dave walked out and divorce followed.
Stan started cutting school so he could study the drummers at the Earle Theater’s live music matinees. Sometimes it was just the pit band, other times it was a headliner like Gene Krupa or Buddy Rich playing with Artie Shaw. Stan absorbed ideas, memorized licks, and ogled the mother-of-pearl drum kits that made his little practice set seem like a mere toy.
Stan also came to realize he’d been playing backwards, as if he were left-handed, but he made a conscious decision not to change what “felt right.” For the rest of his career, Stan’s southpaw stance was a distinguishing quirk and a source of curiosity for young drummers who studied him, just as he’d studied the drummers at the Earle. Rumors floated that it was a crafty offshoot of his boxing strategy, but Stan always admitted that it was simply the badge of a self-taught kid who didn’t know any better.
When Dave moved out, Stan tried to stay connected to him through boxing. He started training in earnest and became a gofer and sometime corner man for his father’s fighters.
At the gym, I’m like a little mascot, a little white mascot. All the guys are black where I train. Spring Garden Gym—Sixth and Gerard. There might be a hundred fighters training there, some in the morning, some in the afternoon, some at night. It’s staggered.
Dave has this fighter, Georgie Miller—one of those great guys—outgoing, funny, good guy. I’m fourteen, fifteen. He’s a middleweight, about one hundred and fifty-six pounds, tall, about six feet, pretty tall for a middleweight, very dark skin, so black it was almost purple. Great teeth, great smile, and he has two cauliflower ears and very proud of it. He’s twenty-four, twenty-five. My old man wants to have them slice the ears and fix them. No, no, he won’t have it. Who wants to walk around with that? But that’s his badge of battle, so he leaves it. Dave wants the procedure—then it won’t get hit again and infected, whatever. Usually they cut it and it all collapses in. But no, not Georgie.
Georgie takes to me. We just like each other. I’m training and he says, “Come on, man, step it up, faster on the rope!” Then he shows me tricks in the ring, how to duck and dodge, stuff like that. He’d say he’d like to go a couple of rounds with me and teach me which is the superior race of men. Then he’d lean down and whisper in my ear, “Hey man, we fighters got to stick together, don’t we?” One time he calls me over and whispers, “Hey man, you want something real good?” I say, “Yeah, what?” He whispers, “I can get you some high-grade barbecue sauce.”
He’s almost like a father to me in a way. That’s the feeling I get from him. I’m the boss’s son, but he goes past that. He likes me for what I am. He has a protective feeling toward me, and I really like this guy. In the gym, or he comes around the used car lot. He’s an older guy, he pats my shoulder. I wished I owned a set of teeth like he had. They sparkled when he smiled. He was always smiling, even when he climbed into the ring.
One night, he’s the third fight on the ticket. Unless you were one of the top-liners of the night, the fighters shared a common dressing room. His opponent was a mean-looking Polish guy. He had hair all over his body. I don’t remember his name. “Hey, man,” Georgie says, “Catch that hairy-lookin’ dude.” The guy never cracked a smile or said anything. He just turned his back. Georgie’s grin kind of froze. I think he realized his joking had gone too far.
The old man doesn’t show up that night. I’m working the corner, buckets and all that. He can’t handle the Polish guy. Just too strong for him. The referee doesn’t seem to care when he butts Georgie with his head in the clinch. I think in the third round he goes down. Bleeding from everywhere. He’s shot. Loses a front tooth, right in the middle of that great smile. He’s beat up. Beat. In those days, they would do that, you know—a mismatch. Put one guy in with a sure winner so they knew how to bet. Never mind how bad the patsy gets beaten up.
I get all peed off at my old man.
“Man, your fighter was there! Where were you? Georgie got hurt bad. You should’ve been there. You should’ve stopped the goddamn fight. Was he set up?”
He don’t talk. Who knows? All he says is, “Don’t ask too many questions.”
I sparred with other fighters and learned a lot dodging their fists. When I got hit it made me madder than hell, so I trained hard and was in top condition. Dave came around the gym and watched but he never gave me encouragement or even a smile.
Surprisingly, I’m bar mitzvahed. They get me a rabbi, he teaches me the words, I study hard because Dave promises me a party with money and presents. Says I’ll become a man. The day comes and, ah-ha! The old man takes all the checks. I never see the money. He says, “I’m holding it for you.” Well, I’m still looking for it. My mother dresses up that day. Everything was good. That’s it. I’m a man.
By then, I had some friends. Met my friend Stuffy. He plays the piano, and so do I, a little from my mother. We play drums and piano for hours. Good hand-eye coordination. He has a good solid family. Mother, father who’s a taskmaster. We play poker down in the basement for pennies, big win, a quarter. Stuffy’s father says “Henry”—that’s Stuffy’s real name—“Henry, it’s time to come up and study.”
There’s also a clarinet player, Marv Goodman, around where I live and he has a little band. Somehow we meet and he gets this little gig at the Temple Youth Club, three nights a week from five to seven, something like that. I’m a kid, about thirteen. Piano, drums, and clarinet: just a trio, three guys. We play tunes—tunes of the day. I just lock into what I’m doing. I don’t see anyone out there.
When I hit the ninth grade, I dropped out. I couldn’t stand the place, the teachers, the kids. I didn’t make a lot of friends like some kids do. I didn’t join clubs and that type of thing. Still, some voice inside kept warning me, “Don’t do it, Stan. Don’t quit. You’ll be sorry.” What the hell? I did it anyway. Well, later in life you regret it, yeah. I would’ve liked to have an education. I learned mine on the street, which a lot of people did in those days, you know.
That went for music, too. There was no information anywhere. No books or videos. No records, hardly. You had to wait for a band to come in maybe twice a year, try to get a look at the drummer, see what he’s doing. There’s no information about how to hold sticks, or how to set up and put a drum kit together. Now every kid has a garage with a drum set. I was completely self-taught because we couldn’t afford a teacher, and that’s why I play left-handed although I am right-handed.
Stan went to work with his father and grandfather, washing and simonizing jalopies at the used car lot, located at Broad and Huntingdon Streets, where Dave Levey was not above putting sawdust in a crankcase—an old trick used to silence worn-out parts and keep a bad engine from smoking.
In 1942, Dave was arrested and jailed in a gambling raid. His charges were later “dismissed for lack of evidence.” Working with partner Jack Hofberg and trainer Jimmy Collins, Stan’s father also continued to manage a stable of fighters, including knockout specialist Johnny Walker; promising lightweights Dorsey Lay and Bob Jennings; welterweights Pedro Tomez and Leo Peterson; heavyweights Willie Thomas, Gus Jones, and Jackie Saunders; and middleweights John Finney and Newton Smith, who died tragically from blunt trauma while fighting Sam Bouradi for Dave in 1947 (eerily, Bouradi died under similar circumstances only six months later at the hands of Ezzard Charles). Dave lost another fighter the following year when Johnny Walker drowned in a YMCA swimming pool in Ohio.
For Stan, the pieces fell into place for the typical deadend life of a dropout, but the young man waited less than a year before setting himself on the path that would lead him out of the used car lot and on to bigger things in life. Stan would modestly attribute it to luck with a qualifier of ability, but American-style ambition and some considerable chutzpa also helped when he hitched his wagon to the fastest rising star in the music business.
John Birks Gillespie earned the nickname “Dizzy” for his mischievous ways and onstage antics. In the early 1940s, he was back home in Philadelphia after a stint in New York and a coast-to-coast tour with Cab Calloway’s band, one of the top grossing acts in show business. Dizzy Gillespie was only twenty-five years old and not yet well-known, but he was about to become the vanguard of a new movement and a new paradigm of virtuosity. Stan couldn’t have found a more auspicious musician if he’d tried. One afternoon, he was walking down the street when he chanced upon Gillespie’s music wafting down from a rehearsal on the second story of the Downbeat Club.
I’m walking down Eleventh Street in Philly and I hear this trumpet coming through the window, in the daytime. I don’t even know they have any music in there. I hear this trumpet and I say, “Man, it sounds like Roy Eldridge but with a left-hand turn.” The changes!
I’m hearing this guy and I think, “Wow, I gotta go up and see what’s going on up there!” And I go up these steps to this bar, daytime, and they’re rehearsing, and I just sit around the bar, listening, listening, listening. And then Dizzy comes down after they take a break and he says, “How you doin’, man?” I say, “I’m a drummer too, you know.” I was a little pissant.
“You’re a drummer? Well, come on up and sit in.”
Oh, now I’ve done it! So just as a gag they let me play, and I play pretty good. So I say, “I’d love to come down some night and hear you guys.” He says, “Come on in, don’t worry about the owner, just come on up and sit next to me.”
And I do that. Go in and listen to the band, and once in a while sit in a little bit. Sometimes he shows me something, he says, “Do this, try this.” Diz is a marvelous teacher. I never saw anybody that open and willing to give his knowledge to people. So encouraging—freely gives of himself to young musicians. He was loved all over the world for that.
He takes me aside and executes what he feels should accompany his music. “Did you ever hear of Shadow Wilson?” Of course, I hadn’t. I’ve never heard of anybody. He sits down and plays something from Shadow. Diz’s drum technique isn’t great, but he can illustrate exactly how to do things and he’s an excellent sight reader. I’m only sixteen and thrilled with our relationship. He almost forces my talent out into the open. He has so many terrific rhythmic ideas. “Salt Peanuts”—the tempo is almost impossible. Diz works out the patterns and spoon-feeds the whole thing to his drummers. After you play it for a while, it doesn’t seem difficult at all.
One night Dizzy’s drummer, Jerry Gilgore, says, “I’ve got this gig, I’ve got to go.” And Dizzy says to Jerry, “Go ahead, man, make some money and good luck.”
I don’t think I’m up to it, but Dizzy says, “Well, Stan, want to try it?”
“Yeah.”
Nervous, but I get through it and he likes it. He always encourages me, all through my life.
So I get the job! Eighteen dollars a week! Join the union. We play six nights a week. Oscar Smith, the bass player, is a schoolteacher, and the pianist is Johnny Acea. The owner is Nat Siegel, a clarinet player who plays in the pit band at the Earle Theater. He’s a good guy. He likes Dizzy. Once in a while he plays a little clarinet—not too good, but he owns the place. Short, bad leg, dark hair, very scattered type of talk. He’s okay.
Diz would keep giving me advice: “Get up in the front line. Make a statement. Play against the horns. Improvise a little. Play in a musical way.” He wanted the drummer to be freer, more creative, to listen and do things to help the other players. He showed me the old ways wouldn’t work with the new music. Four clops to the bar were out. Dizzy wanted the drums to punctuate, as in a paragraph, to punctuate what he was doing musically. This music was flying. It had wings.
One night she comes in—my mother—sits at the end of the bar, has a blast then splits. Of course, I’m worried about her behavior. But she leaves early. She knows I’m playing and comes in, just shows up.
Oscar Smith, Dizzy’s bassist schoolteacher, remembered Stan as “a white guy who played well and sort of passed for black.” Stan’s time in the Spring Garden Gym had apparently acculturated him well for his entry into the African-American art form of jazz. His job with Dizzy boosted his confidence and gave him a taste of his own earning power.
When he turned seventeen, Stan lied about his age to the boxing commission and started casting about for his first paying fight.
But even before that, another seemingly impossible musical opportunity opened up for young Stan. Shortly after joining up with Dizzy, the teenager was invited to play an engagement with the number-one band in the nation.
So now I’m working at the Downbeat with Dizzy when one night this guy comes in. He says he’s Benny Goodman’s manager and they’re over at the Earle Theater and Benny needs a drummer. Zoot Sims is in Benny’s band and he’s been coming to the Downbeat every night and Zoot, who’s not much older than me, loves the way I play.
The King of Swing needs a drummer. The manager hears me and he likes me and he wants to introduce me to Benny. I say, “Sure, let’s go!”
They take me backstage at the Earle. I’ve never been to any backstage in my life. The lights, the curtains, Benny Goodman. I’m gonna meet him! They take me to his dressing room, with a star on the door. Benny looks like a tailor, medium size. He has his back to me. I walk in, and . . . he’s urinating in the sink! You see, the King don’t walk to the bathroom! He turns around and he puts out his hand.
What do I do? I want the job—I gotta shake his hand.
I shook.
I go home and I’m all excited and I say, “Ma! I’m gonna be playing with Benny Goodman tomorrow morning, nine o’clock!” You see, he was so popular he could play these engagements of five shows every day for one or two weeks, and the first show started at nine o’clock in the morning.
She says, “Shut up and go to sleep.”
She doesn’t believe me. How could she believe me?
So I go in the next day and I play the first show. The lights come on, the curtain goes up. I’m sixteen years old, I’ve never played with a big band, I’ve never read music, I don’t have my own drums and I’ve never even been on a real stage before. I was an unguided missile, but here I am playing with Benny Goodman, the number-one band in the country!
I fake it all the way through. What the heck am I doing up here? The lights, the Pearl drums. The Earle is one of those big palaces. Big facade, owned by one of the studios in Hollywood—they owned the movie theaters at that time. It’s beautiful. Beautiful box office. Big marquee with the lights: “Earle Theater” in big bulbs. The foyer is beautifully carpeted. Open seating. Big stage, real big stage. Good lighting, theater lighting, very ornate, rococo, big balcony, big theater, fifteen hundred seats maybe, the balcony curved around. And they have a pit band, too, a sixteen-piece pit band that plays during the intermissions and during the newsreel. The pit band plays three or four numbers, then after ten minutes of that, Benny Goodman starts his theme and everybody says, “Hey Benny!” Then the curtain slowly opens and you start your show. Guaranteed sold out.
After that first show, I call up my mother again and I say, “Ma! Come down, I’m playing with Benny!”
“Will you stop?”
So, finally the second show goes on. And there in the front row is my mother, and her mouth is open three feet. “Benny Goodman! You? What!” Usually, every time I see her, my heart stops, I want to crawl inside the bass drum. But this one time, her mouth never shuts, and I keep looking at her. Benny turns to the band and introduces each of the players, except me. Then I hear my mother pipe up, “Hey Benny! Who’s the drummer?”
Benny kept me on through the engagement but he never once looked at me. Not once did he announce my name to the audience. After we were introduced in his dressing room, he did not say one word to me. I found out later he didn’t really like drummers.
Later he had a guy with him in New York by the name of Jumbo Brown—never to be heard from again—but they’re playing in front of twelve or thirteen thousand people at the Paramount Theater. Benny goes into his trance. The drums are up on a riser, and he walked around and unscrewed the beater ball from the bass drum, takes it out, looks at it, and puts it in his pocket. That’s the kind of stuff he did. Weird guy. He couldn’t remember the names of his own family. He called everybody “Pops.” He calls his kid: “Hey Pops, come over here.” Calls his wife: “Come here, Pops!”
After the engagement, Benny’s brother Irving issued train tickets to all the band members except me. He comes to me and says, “Benny says you should go home.”
But at sixteen—even if only for a week—I played with the King.
Without more than a few scattered drum lessons, Stan was playing with the nation’s most popular orchestra and its most innovative trumpet player. If he was hurt at being ignored by Goodman, Stan was buoyed by his growing relationship with Dizzy, who was a strong role model even beyond music.
“He was a master teacher,” said Stan, “and he was voracious in his desire to succeed. He was a musician and a businessman.”
Nickname notwithstanding, Dizzy was focused, responsible, and in a committed marriage. For a teenager like Stan who came from a fractured family, Dizzy Gillespie was someone he trusted and admired like an older brother.
Other young musicians—many of Philly’s finest—came to the Downbeat to listen and sit in. As Dizzy’s drummer, Stan either met or played with John Coltrane, Philly Joe Jones, the Heath Brothers, Buddy DeFranco, Red Rodney, and Herb Ellis. Playing with Goodman was a fleeting thrill, but Dizzy and the Downbeat offered security, a sense of family, and a social life. Stan was devastated when it ended.
Dizzy said he was moving to New York. That was it. The gig was finished. I felt terrible. I felt abandoned.
Then something new and terrible comes into my life. Nick Travis is a good trumpet player. He’s kind of a hip, hangin’ out kind of a guy. Basically a nice guy. We get to know each other. He’s not too much older than me, but he comes with the best bands to the Earle Theater, and one time he says, “Man, I’m tired. You want some bennies?”
Who? I don’t know what he’s talking about—bennies. So he says, “Yeah, you put that in a Coke and you drink it.” Okay. So I do that and I jump up and down for three days. So that’s how it starts, and the next time he comes by he says, “Hey, we’re gonna smoke some pot.” And then we do that. I want to be part of that life. ’Cause I have no direction, no foundation, nothing. I’m hanging out there on a cliff. That’s the start. I’m ripe for the drug scene. Ripe.
Family, school, and the Downbeat were all finished. The one thing Stan still had was boxing.
