Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [28]
I was accused of romancing everyone in the band and this was leading to dissension. This was a damn lie and I said so. I wasn’t doing anything with anybody in the band except one cat—and not very often with him at that.
The truth was, I was scared of the cats in the band because they were messing with too many chicks on the road.
Living on the road with a band, nobody had time to sleep alone, let alone with somebody. At night, as Lester used to say, we’d pull into a town, pay two to four bucks for a room, shave and take a long look at the bed, go play the gig, come back and look at the bed again, and then get on the bus. We got so fed up with it one time, Lester and me, we threatened to resign and ended up getting a raise. I got raised to fifteen a day and Lester got boosted to eighteen-fifty. I thought this was just too marvelous for words.
For my money Lester was the world’s greatest. I loved his music, and some of my favorite recordings are the ones with Lester’s pretty solos.
I remember how the late Herschel Evans used to hate me. Whenever Basie had an arranger work out something for me, I’d tell him I wanted Lester to solo behind me. That always made Herschel salty. It wasn’t that I didn’t love his playing. It was just that I liked Lester’s more.
Lester sings with his horn; you listen to him and can almost hear the words. People think he’s so cocky and secure, but you can hurt his feelings in two seconds. I know, because I found out once that I had. We’ve been hungry together, and I’ll always love him and his horn.
I often think about how we used to record in those days. We’d get off a bus after a five-hundred-mile trip, go into the studio with no music, nothing to eat but coffee and sandwiches. Me and Lester would drink what we called top and bottom, half gin and half port wine.
I’d say, “What’ll we do, two-bar or four-bar intro?”
Somebody’d say make it four and a chorus—one, one and a half.
Then I’d say, “You play behind me the first eight, Lester,” and then Harry Edison would come in or Buck Clayton and take the next eight bars. “Jo, you just brush and don’t hit the cymbals too much.”
Now with all their damn preparation, complicated arrangements, you’ve got to kiss everybody’s behind to get ten minutes to do eight sides in.
When I did “Night and Day” I had never seen that song before in my life. I don’t read music, either. I just walked in, Teddy Wilson played it for me, and I did it.
With artists like Lester, Don Byas, Benny Carter, and Coleman Hawkins, something was always happening. No amount of preparation today is any match for them.
In the old days, if we were one side short on a date, someone would say, “Try the blues in A flat,” and tell me, “Go as far as you can go, honey.” I’d stand up there and make up my words as I went along.
Nowadays you have all this talk and bull and nothing’s happening. On a recent date I tried to do it like the old days. I’d never seen the band or the arrangements, and I didn’t know the songs they had picked for me, and they wanted me to do eight sides in three hours. We were doing all standards, but nobody could read the stuff; the drummer did nothing but sit there grinning; the music had wrong chords; everybody was squawking. We pushed out about nine sides like they wanted. But not a damn one of them was any good.
You can say what you want about the South, and I’ve said plenty. But when I’ve forgotten all the crummy things that happened down there in my days on the road, I’ll still remember Fox Theatre in Detroit, Michigan. What Radio City is to New York, the Fox was to Detroit then. A booking there was a big deal. My salary went up automatically to three hundred dollars a week for the run of the show. Everybody was happy.
The show opened and closed with a line of chorus girls doing their bare-legged kicks like the Rockettes. In the middle the girls did a big pretty number, with lots of parading around, fancy costumes, lights, and what not.
But Detroit was between race riots then, and after three performances the first day, the