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By Root 1245 0

it in your arm, and you go out and sit down for another twenty minutes before they call you back, and the doctor does the same routine again with the green light. If your pupil hasn't gotten smaller than it was the first time, you get an "equivocal," which is enough to hold you for. If your pupil gets larger, you're dirty, you've been using heroin; they immediately put you in a cage and then they take you down to the county jail. You go three times a week, and when you go you meet all the people you've been in prison with. Everybody that's there is junkies. When you get the shot of Nalline, if you're clean, you get loaded: you get a little buzz as if you've shot some stuff, and when you walk outside the little buzz goes, and then you get a headache, and you get depressed, and you start thinking of that little taste that you just had, and you want to get loaded.

You start using again, and through the grapevine you find out that if you take steam baths just before you go, and drink wine, and take bennies, you can pass the Nalline test. So that's what I used to do then, when I was chippying, and later when I was using. I had a friend, Hersh Hamel, who played bass, and he had a membership card for the Beverly Hills Health Club. He'd take me as his guest, and I'd go into the steam bath and stay there until I was almost dead, my skin hanging off my body, the sweat pouring out of me. Then I'd go get a couple of fifths of port wine or muscatel and drink it down and take five or six Dexamyl Spansules, or if I had some crystal (speed) I'd shoot it, or if I had some bottles-bombidos they call them in New York, here they call it methadrine-I would shoot that. I'd pass the test, but it destroys your body.*

At any rate, I went to San Francisco and took my tests up there at the San Francisco police department, and I played at the jazz Workshop, one of the greatest clubs going. It was almost an all-black club, run by black people, and I went in there with an all-white band. They had all-black bands all the time. But people were making these'little remarks about whites and honkies. People would come in and say, "What do we got here? Where's the brothers and sisters at?" And they'd tell the guy that was running the place, "Say, blood, what is this up theah? What is these guys tryin' to do? That's ouahhh music. Black music." And we had to put up with all that shit. And they say white people can't play jazz, but I disproved that, you know, because I played jazz, and all my white people played jazz. I had -Bill Goodwin on drums, a great young drummer; I had Frank Strazzeri, an Italian, on piano; and I had a Jew, Hersh Himmelstein-he'd changed his name to Hamel-on bass. (I'd call out his introduction, "Hoishie Himmelshtiiiiine!" I used to wig out announcing him.)

(Hersh Hamel) Art was at Quentin or someplace, and I had bumped into Diane. She told me Art was going to be out in about a month and asked if I could help, come by, drive him around, get some clothes for him. They didn't have a car, and she knew that I really dug Art and I'd help.

Art got out, and I took him around to get some shoes, some clothes. I took him to his Nalline tests downtown, and if it looked like he wasn't going to pass the test, he was messing around a little, I'd take him over to the Beverly Hills Health Club, get him in the sweat bath, stay in there for a couple hours to try to sweat it out of him.

At that time, we decided to form a group. I was running around with a drummer, Bill Goodwin, who's a great drummer, and we got Frank Strazzeri, myself, and Art, and we went up to my brother's house, who I was living with in Laurel Canyon, and we rehearsed and got some music together. Art had written some tunes in Quentin which were very interesting, "D Section," "The Trip," "Groupin'," nice tunes, and I wrote a couple tunes, so we had a little library of original things. When Art first came out, he wasn't using much at all; we played a gig at Shelly's Manne Hole and Art had a tremendous lot of fire.

Art was very influenced by Coltrane at that time because he was in jail