Straight Life - Art Pepper [265]
Af to rwo rd
THIS BOOK was begun in April, 1972, completed early in 1979, and first published in November of that year. Art died in June, 1982, but during the two and a half years between its publication and Art's death, STRAIGHT LIFE changed everything for him. It and the publicity around it revived and created interest in Art's career; there were television and radio interviews and articles in major newspapers and magazines worldwide. As a result, Art spent those last years performing almost continuously, all over the world, for the biggest and most receptive audiences he'd ever seen, and recording more albums (with more major jazz names) than he had during the whole rest of his life. All of that finally got him the critical and popular recognition he'd craved, and put him, finally, jazz-historically speaking, on the map. He confidently predicted that after he died he would at last be elected to the down beat Hall of Fame, and he was-beating out Sonny Stitt who died the same year. It would be easy to say, therefore, that Art died happy. But that isn't the whole story. Not the way Art would have told it.
STRAIGHT LIFE shows that Art valued honesty above fame, even above art. In the book, people refer to him as an "honest" musician. He believed that truth was beauty and vice versa, and, when he played, he felt he was expressing the beauty of his honest emotion-which he shaped into powerful music with his skill. He had to know-and say-what was really going on. He was obsessed with knowing and with being known and believed that a failure of honesty in his life would contaminate his soul and his music. I don't want to contami nate his story, so I'm going to try to finish telling it as truthfully as he would have. At least this is what the truth looks like to me-now.
Because the book played such a major role at the end, I'll say something first about how it was made.
When Art and I first became lovers and he began telling me his adventures, I thought, as did many other people who had heard them, that they should be in a book. I'd done some writing, but I knew I couldn't write this story. And I thought it would lose too much, it would lose Art, if it were written at all. One of my favorite books is Oscar Lewis's The Children of Sanchez. It's an oral history of a poor Mexican family. Lewis was a sociologist and the book was classified as sociology, but the statistical and political information it included were, it seemed to me, just a pretext for offering the true work-the most poetic, personal, revealing, and touching autobiography I'd ever read. I re-read it in Synanon. I thought Art and I might do a book with that kind of format and told him so. He liked the idea. After he left Synanon and then wrote to me, asking me to join him, I started thinking about it again. I'd studied cultural anthropology and folklore. Art could certainly talk. I was enamored of him, but I could be objective.
I left Synanon in 1972 in response to Art's letter-he was clean, he was working, and he loved me-though I didn't necessarily believe what he said. (Art could always lie, domestically, briefly and badly about whether or not he was using, but then he invariably eventually blurted out the truth, no matter what it cost him.) I told myself that I was joining him in order to do this book. I also suggested to myself that that was a rationalization; I loved him and wanted to be with him.
We got together in February. He wasn't clean, and I was far from sure we had a future, but I still wanted to try to do the book.
Art said he was willing to tell me his story, but he kept putting me off. He was awfully gloomy at that time. I finally cornered him one afternoon in April, turned on the tape recorder, and began by asking him if he believed he had genius. In answer to my question, he told me the story of his bandstand battle with Sonny Stitt