Straight Life - Art Pepper [126]
The fifties, that was really a stormin' time for recording jazz. And that was great music. Today you have to be really strung out just to sit down and listen to a lot of this stuff. It's like background music. I'll be in the car and turn on the jazz station and they'll be playing some fusion thing, and ten minutes later I'll realize that they're still playing the same thing and I haven't even been hearing it. That stuff Art does, did, does, that's just guys playin' themselves, makin' music. He went through a period where he was playing all that ugly crap. You know, I figure that was just a time when he was trying to explore another direction, see what that was all about. I didn't run into anybody who liked Art during that period. But I'm sure the reason he's playing like he is now is because he allowed himself to go through that period. A lot of guys would say, "Wow, I can't play like that. Nobody's gonna hire me." But that's why there's a book. That's why he's doin' what he's doin'. Because he's always been true to whatever's been going on inside of him.
13
Stealing
1960
I'VE OFTEN THOUGHT that maybe I was in the wrong thing being a musician. The people I met, the musicians I met playing in clubs or at recording sessions, seemed very unreal to me, insincere, two-faced. I never knew where I stood with them, and I never felt at home with them, and the only way I could relax with them was to be loaded. I'm that way to this day. They're gossips, real politicians. They come on, "Oh, hi!" but behind your back they'll rank you and if they get busted they'll rat on you. And I found when I'd come out of jail they were always looking at my eyes and looking at my arms to see if there were any marks while they were smiling at me and saying, "Oh, how good it is to have you back!"
When I'd started using drugs I ran into a different kind of person. In jail I found people who had honor. They were real. They said what they thought. If someone bad-rapped you to a friend of yours he'd say, "Hey, man, don't talk about him like that! The cat's my friend!" The dopefiends were warm to me and open with me, I felt. And so, on the way home, as I say, I made the turn; I went to East L.A. and scored and saw the people and I had some idea that here were people I could communicate with.
I started using, and for a while I was able to do it. I had so much money. Diane had a fur coat. For a while I was able to buy dope and continue living the way I had 11: -:en. And the heroin was actually better for me than the Cosanyl. I felt healthier. But that wasn't what I wanted. I had to get really far out and have everything change, and in order to do that I started using just a ridiculous amount of heroin. And so I put myself in a position where I was no longer able to function, really, where it became obvious to everyone what was happening.
I started coming in a little late, nodding out at the sessions. Little by little people started saying, "Uh-oh, there he goes." Some people tried to talk to me, "Is everything alright?" You know, the few who really cared about me. But I wouldn't accept any help. I didn't want any help. They thought this was something that was happening to me, that I had no control over. But I was doing it. Purposely. Purposely doing it for some end that I'm not really sure what it was except that I knew I wasn't happy in this false paradise I had carved out for myself in Studio City.
I guess in order to really make things difficult, I burglarized a doctors' office-I didn't have to-in close proximity to where we were living, to put pressure on myself. I couldn't find any money but I got a whole bunch of dope, millions of pills. Diane was really getting messed up. She had decided to go wherever I went and however I went, and I felt bad because what I was doing to myself I didn't want to do to her. I thought,