Straight Life - Art Pepper [60]
(Coop) But you were the envy of most of the girl singers around at that time. The band was very popular, and singing jazz . . . To quote the late Irene Kral, she said that when she was in high school she could hardly wait for the band with June to get to town so she could watch June and hear her sing: "That was the hippest shit in town."
(Christy) That was one of the nicest compliments I've ever received.
(Coop) Of course, the itineraries, they just went month after month, sometimes with no days, no nights off. And if we did get a night off, it might be traveling on the bus all night long. After a few years it got very tiring. Especially after we got married. Then it was even more of a chore because we were looking forward to settling down and having a home and so forth. It was tough, no doubt about it.
(Christy) And if we hadn't liked what we did so much, there was no way we could have done it.
(Coop) The particular bus I enjoyed the most was the first Innovations tour. We had two buses.
(Christy) That was when we had the strings and so on. Stan was really out to prove something.
(Coop) Our driver was Lee Bowman, and we had such a good time on his bus, at the end of the tour we bought him a watch for tolerating our drinking and stopping in the middle of the night to go into a bar and get more beer or whatever. It was called "The Balling Bus."
(Christy) And the other bus was called "The Intellectual Bus." And we, as a matter of fact, were quite sure that we were far more intellectual than they, or else why would we be on the right bus?
Whoever booked that particular tour was out of his mind, though, because he should have realized that you can't get that many people into a hotel all at once. We usually arrived all at the same time, and people got very mean and fiendish. We have a picture of some of the guys actually leaping over the registration desk in order to get there first so they could get to their rooms first. I learned a great lesson from that. I used to just sit in a corner because I figured I was a little too short to fight all of them. I did a tour a while after that with the Ted Heath band, and that tour was a rough one also, but when the bus stopped at the hotel the gentlemen of the band stood by and said, "Oh, Miss Christy, you must go first." That's when I first learned that it's awfully nice to be a lady and to be treated like a lady. I don't mean to imply that the guys in the Kenton band were not nice to me, because they certainly were, and by the same token I respected their privacy. If I felt that it was dirty joke time or something like that, I would go and stand by the bus driver and allow them to have whatever privacy you can have on a bus.
To tell you the truth, the band was kinda, like, clannish. That's the best word I can come up with, and I think Art was a little reluctant to join the clans for some reason or other. I think he was a bit withdrawn. Art was-I haven't seen him for so long, that's the reason I'm saying "was"-he was a very attractive young man, and I'm sure everyone else felt the same way. Art was a very good-looking guy, but some of his illness began to show up at certain times. And, as we all know, when you're ill, you don't look quite as good. It didn't show too much in his playing, but it did in his attitude. He became even more withdrawn.
I think Art is one of the greatest jazz musicians alive today. I say that because I believe it. I haven't heard him play for a long time. I haven't seen him. But with the Kenton band ... My experiences listening to him ... I honestly feel that way about him. Art didn't have a chance to be exposed with the band as much as he might have been, which is a tendency of Stan's. He likes the full, big-band sound, and he's reluctant, really, to let anyone be the star, so to speak. The musicians appreciated Art's abilities,