The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [32]
Music was a meek living for a long time, too.
Yeah, it was really crawlin’. I became very ill a couple times. I suffered from malnutrition, you know. I was really messed up because I wasn’t eatin’ nothin’, and I wouldn’t beg. Two things you don’t do, you don’t beg and you don’t steal. That’s right.
What kind of music education did you have in Florida?
They taught you how to read the music, and I had to play Chopin, Beethoven, you know, the normal thing. Just music lessons. Not really theory. I don’t know what that is. It’s just, they taught me how to read music, and naturally how to use correct fingerin’, and once you’ve learned that you go from the exercises into little compositions into things like Chopin. That’s the way it went, although I was tryin’ to play boogie-woogie, man, ’cause I could always just about play anything I heard. My ear was always pretty good, but I did have a few music teachers, and so I do know music quite well, if you don’t mind my saying so. I was never taught to write music, but when I was twelve years old I was writing arrangements for a big band. Hell, if you can read music, you can write it, and I think certainly what helped me is that I’m a piano player, so I know chords. Naturally, I can hear chords, and I could always play just about anything I could hear. It was just a question of learning how to put it down on paper. I just studied how to write for horns on my own. Like, understanding that the saxophone is in different keys, and also, when I was goin’ to school I took up clarinet. See, I was a great fan of Artie Shaw. I used to think, “Man, ooh, he had the prettiest sound,” and he had so much feelin’ in his playin’, I always felt that, still feel it today.
Where were you hearing this boogie-woogie?
We lived next door for some years to a little general store in Greensville, Florida, where the kids could come in and buy soda pop and candy and the people could buy kerosene for their lamps, you know. And they had a jukebox in there. And the guy who owned it also had a piano. Wylie Pittman is the guy. Even when I was three and four years old, if I was out in the yard playin’, and if he started playin’ that piano, I would stop playin’ and run in there and jump on the stool. Normally, you figure a kid run in there like that and jump on the stool and start bangin’ on the piano, the guy would throw him off. “Say, get away from here, don’t you see me” . . . but he didn’t do that, I always loved that man for that. I was about five years old, and on my birthday he had some people there. He said, “RC”—this is what they called me then—“look, I want you to get up on the stool, and I want you to play for these people.” Now, let’s face it. I was five years old. They know damn well I wasn’t playin’. I’m just bangin’ on the keys, you understand. But that was encouragement that got me like that, and I think that the man felt that anytime a child is willin’ to stop playin’, you know, out in the yard and havin’ fun, to come in and hear somebody play the piano, evidently this child has music in his bones, you know. And he didn’t discourage me, which he could have, you know what I mean? Maybe I wouldn’t have been a musician at all, because I didn’t have a musical family, now remember that.
You were also able to hear ‘The Grand Ole Opry’ when you were a kid?
Yep, yeah, I always—every Saturday night, I never did miss it. I don’t know why I liked the music. I really thought that it was somethin’ about country music, even as a youngster—I couldn’t figure out what it was then, but I know what it is now. But then I don’t know why I liked it and I used to just love to hear Minnie Pearl, because I thought she was so funny.
How old were you then?
Oh, I guess I was about seven, eight, and I remember Roy Acuff and Gene Austin. Although I was bred in and around the blues, I always did