Straight Life - Art Pepper [260]
In '76, I'd made another album for Contemporary. The Trip. The '75 album, Living Legend, was excellent, and I thought, after that, the next album couldn't possibly be as good. It was even better. It got a lot of praise. It's one of my favorite albums of all time, and it pushed me into the limelight a little bit. I got an offer to tour the east coast. I'd never toured before as an individual. Here I was in my fifties, and I'd finally made it. I was invited to perform at the Newport Festival. I was scared, so I didn't carry any coke with me. I played in Toronto for a week, then New York. On the last day of my appearance at the Village Vanguard, a friend, to my surprise, offered me a taste of coke. I had the money, so I decided I'd use a little bit during the tour.
Pretty soon I was staying up all night long, writing music in the toilets of our hotel rooms, sitting on the tile floor, sniffing coke.
By the time I got to Chicago, I was really strung out on coke. I asked around at the methadone program there if anyone knew a connection. We had rented a car, so I drove all over the city looking for some way to score. I wound up in an industrial area near a methadone clinic, and I saw a black guy and his old lady in an old, beat car. They were stalled or something. I drove over and introduced myself. I asked them if I could help them out. I said, "You wouldn't know where I could get any coke?" The guy said, "Yeah." They took me to an old boarded-up building in the black ghetto of Chicago. It was filthy, no running water. We shot the coke instead of sniffing it. I got an outfit.
We went to Boston and Dayton and back to New York. Les Koenig came out from L.A. to record me, three nights, live, at the Village Vanguard. On the third night I had a fight with Laurie. On top of the coke I'd been buying huge quantities of extra methadone from another friend in New York. Laurie had stolen some of my money to pay the hotel bill, and I hit her, and she left the room. I knelt down to snort some coke off the little bedside table. It had a glass top. I hadn't slept in days so I passed out with my head on this table and the glass cut my cheek and made an indentation in my face. Laurie came back and woke me up. I looked in the mirror. My eyes were all puffy and I had this mark across my face. I'd had no sleep in days, hadn't been eating. I'd lost about twenty pounds on this trip. None of my clothes fit me. I shot the rest of my coke, and they practically carried me to the Village Vanguard for the final night of recording.
(Hersh Hamel) Art got out of Synanon, and he came around to my house while I was out on the road. He was working at a bakery or something. He had just broken up with Laurie and he was really moanin' the blues to my old lady. My old lady said that he stayed there that night and after the second day it was just too much for her. She started to get real depressed. It was just too heavy for her, because he was moanin' the blues so bad.
Laurie is the most positive woman that he's had. The most able to help, to really help. The others tried with very little success. She's the firmest and also she doesn't mess around with any dope which is good for him: He's got to have somebody that's removed from that. And also she's been able to make him look at himself as no one else has been able to do. That's good for him. Sometimes, I feel, you know, I've thought she seemed a little overprotective.