Straight Life - Art Pepper [51]
Some nights we'd play at a place called the Samoan in East L.A., right in the Barrio, off Whittier and Atlantic. We knew the owner there; he was very mellow, and he liked us to come in. He knew Freddy. Al Leon had a place for us to play in El Cerrito. And the Mexicans loved Art. I think they thought that Art was part Mexican; he has that Latin look. I don't think they realized he's more Italian than anything else. He was just a hero to them. They'd come in and take us outside and get us high.
At that point Art was just drinking and smoking pot, maybe a diet pill from time to time. And he could always drink me under the table. I remember one night we were at the opening of a record store in East L.A. It was about ten at night, the grand opening, and we played, like, a jam session. The owner asked us to. They closed up the store at about one and we played until four in the morning, and Art, while I was standing up playing my big bass fiddle, Art was pouring this gin down my throat and it was running down my neck. Well, I got so drunk! Art drank more than I did, and I got terribly sick. Art didn't really even show the effect. He was drunk but he wasn't drunk drunk, like I was. He took me home, and my clothes were all screwed up, and Patti washed my clothes and cleaned me up. I was a mess. It was a lot of fun. It really was. The point was, Art was able to consume a lot of stuff, no matter what it was, and show very little effect from it.
About that period, Art went back on the road with Kenton, and the way I heard it from Art was that he was initiated to heroin while he was on that tour. I remember he came back and he was involved with heroin. It seemed like he got involved pretty fast and pretty deep. When Art wasn't on the road with Kenton, he would do some things by himself, and I remember he was down at a place on Sixth and Western called the Surf Club. Hampton Hawes was down there with him, and I remember how loaded Art was on the gig, really zonked. I remember going down to see him and being disturbed about him being so stoned while he was working. His playing was fine, but it seemed like Art began to feel like he couldn't play good enough unless he was on heroin.
Art's really a gifted and talented player. He's given his great talent to jazz, his style. And he did retain himself through all the Charlie Parker years, some pretty rough times. I remember there was a club near Hollywood Boulevard where we used to go play sessions after hours. This must have been 1960, something like that. I was standing outside the club and Art was going in and Joe Maini was going in and somehow there were words between Joe and Art. Joe said something: "Hey, faggot!" About the way Art played. He didn't mean Art's demeanor as a person. And they got into a fistfight and were rolling around on the concrete hitting each other over the style of Art's playing. Art was defending his playing by engaging in fisticuffs with Joe.
You know, there are Charlie Parker influences in Art's playing but Art was able to retain himself; whereas most of the alto players emulated Charlie Parker and therefore they didn't have as much of themselves to give as Art did. I think that's a great thing.
(Freddy Rivera) At that time, I was completely lost. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I wasn't even close to having an idea of what I was doing. In reality I was doing nothing. Getting drunk. Running around the streets. Screaming. At times it was enormous fun, but much of the other time it was frightening, really, not knowing what the hell's going on. Art was frightened, too. He was frightened of life. At one time, we went into a shopping center and people were going in and