Inside the Music: the Life of Idris Muhammad: The Life of Idris Muhammad

INSIDE THE MUSIC

The Life Of Idris Muhammad

IDRIS MUHAMMAD

Copyright © 2012 by Idris Muhammad.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012905772

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4691-9217-8

Softcover 978-1-4691-9216-1

Ebook 978-1-4691-9218-5

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Contents

Living Near the Mississippi River

Dr. Wilson’s Yard

Behind the Mask

Levi’s

Fishing Poles

Catholic Church and Catholic School

Shoeshine on Magazine Street

Streetcars, Graveyards

and Football Practice

Candy Store

Railroad Tracks and Shotgun Houses

1220 Lyons Street

Peeing on Ms. Booze’s Roses

McDonald #6

Beer in a Bathtub

The French Market

Two Tribes

Spy Boy, Flag Boy, Big Chief

First Job—Mardi Gras Parade

Mardi Gras Parade—Part Two

Mardi Gras Parade—Part Three

Shelled Streets

Monkey Bars

Ms. Nermy Calls the Cops

Basket Full of Crabs

Valence Street: Cats with Knives

Trouble

Trouble—The Aftermath

Thirteenth Birthday Present:

12-Inch Reels

My Rhythms

Steam Pressure Machines

First Set of Drums

Gunsmoke and The Ninth Ward

High Noon

Mardi Gras Mambo

Ham for Pop

1957: Larry Williams

and the Hawkettes on the Road

On the Road: Part Two

On The Road: Part Three

French Ancestral Influence

Don’t Play the Backbeat

The Music Business

Drum Lesson from Paul Barbarin

Press Roll

You Talk Too Much

Sam Cooke and the Dooky Chase Diner

On The Bus

Pinstripes and Chain Gangs

Stranded in D.C.

Maxine Brown

1961: Dee Clark and Jerry Butler—Energy vs. Ice

Traveling with Jerry Butler

Chain Reaction

Larry Frazier

Drummer and Director

Thunder

The Portable Record Player

Curtis Mayfield: Keep on Pushing

Driving Lessons

People Get Ready

Goodbye to Curtis

and the Chicago Hawk

LaLa Brooks

Basket Weave of Light

Hot Plate

Wizard in the Kitchen

Credit

House Drummer at the Apollo

Natural Blonde Maple Drums

Incident in Harlem: Scorpion

The Five Spot

Checkered Cabs

Art Blakey’s Cymbals

Lou Donaldson

The Catch in the Net

Rudy Van Gelder’s Studio

Cutting a Record

Capturing My Sound

Lou’s Jazz Lesson

The Guitar Period

The Saxophone Period

Touring vs. Recording

West Indian Dances

Hair

Hair: Part Two

The Economics of Hair

Four Room Apartment

New Volvo Wagon

Sundance

Becoming Idris Muhammad

Kissing the Blackstone

The Contractor

Ancient Drums

Roberta Flack

Special Tuning Process

India: 1975

Rosebud Studios

Philosophy of People

Creed Taylor and the Origin

of CTI Records

Homeless Person’s Bass Drum

Inner City Blues

The Lamb on the Lamb

Bob James’ Groove

Making Hit Records

Power of Soul

On Being a Star

Pharoah Sanders

Fantasy Records and Theresa Records

Paris Reunion Band:

Red Vibe and Max Roach

Groove Elation

Black Jeans

Piano Black

Istanbul Agop Cymbals

Joe Lovano

The First Chief of the Congo Nation

A Conduit for Music

Section One

The Neighborhood

Living Near the Mississippi River

As kids in New Orleans we didn’t wear no shoes. Summertime was hot. When a hurricane come through it would blow the river and the water overflows its banks—it would flood—and that’s when we’d go out there. Fishing poles, nets and baskets.

In order to get to the water you had to step in the mud. And that mud would be all over your feet. The river water was muddy. My mother didn’t allow us in the river because it was too dangerous.

Nice big frogs, crab, crawfish, shrimp, get a sack of that stuff. We’d go get a whole basketful and bring that back home. People would see you with that basket of big old fish. Sell some of that on the way back home! You’d eat good that night. That’s what we used to do.

And if you swam in the river, then as you walked back from the river to where we lived, the sun dried your ass off—all you had to do was take your nails and scratch your skin—wasn’t nothing but mud.

Your mama says, You been out in that river?

No ma’am.

So your mother knew you was in the river and she’d beat the tar out of you because cats drowned out there. Playing all day without a shirt on and no shoes, trousers rolled up at the knee, that night I might get an asthma attack. We were told we couldn’t go near the river.

Barefoot at the waterfront, the river looks like a solid piece of earth moving in reverse. Catch the water in a certain way and it looks like you can walk right out over surface of it. The waves come in, and then the waves retreat because the water has to go out. The river has a mysterious way of moving yet not moving. And it was muddy, muddy waters, man.

We live right down the street from the Mississippi River.

Dr. Wilson’s Yard

Dr. Wilson was the black doctor in our neighborhood. He had a beautiful house set inside a white picket fence. Inside this great big yard he had a whole orchard of different fruits. His family would never eat them so we’d go down to Dr. Wilson’s house, jump over the picket fence and we’d steal his fruits from his trees. All different kinds of fruit trees. Then go jump back over the fence and eat them on the way down to the Neville’s house. Every day my mother would say, Don’t go into Dr. Wilson’s yard.

Getting over that picket fence was a big problem. Because I was short, it would come way up over the top of my head. Trying to climb over it, I always got my pants caught in the pickets. It would tear my pants. And then, after you get into the yard, then you got to get back over the fence to get out. Man, it looked like that fence was ten feet tall. You don’t want to go out through the front door.

Now you got figs and you got apples, peaches, pears—all this fruit in your pockets. And as you’re trying to get over the fence, some of this fruit is bustin’ open in your pockets.

We’d get to Arthur Neville’s house and his dad would say, What you all been doin’?

And we’d say, Well, we ain’t be doin’ nothin’, Mr. Neville . . . we ain’t be doin’ nothin’.

And he’d say, What’s the matter with your hands then?

We’d be like, What hands . . . there’s nothin’.

That color. Where is that color from?

And it was from the pomegranate. The dye from the pomegranate. It was all in your hands—in between your fingers—and you got the seeds from the figs, they’re smashed in between your fingers and he’d say but what is that? And he knew we’d been in Dr. Wilson’s yard. And we ain’t supposed to go in there. And your mama, she’d wash your clothes and she sees the figs, sees the pears and the skins and beats your ass. Get an ass whippin’.

Your mama says, You been over to Dr. Wilson’s yard?

No ma’am. I’d tell my mama it was the flavoring from an Italian Ice. It was a Sno-ball, I’d say.

And then she washed my pants and she sees the skins in my pockets, juice down my shirt, pants torn where it catch on the picket fence. Now I got to figure out how to tell my mama how I torn my pants.

But Dr. Wilson, he didn’t mind us taking his fruits because his family wasn’t eating all of that stuff. But our family was stealing. And they didn’t want us to steal. Dr. Wilson didn’t really care that we were taking it because it would just fall on the ground and rot anyhow.

Behind the Mask

The only horses we had was a broomstick. We would go to the place where they killed the chickens in the market and we would get the feathers from the chickens. Some would be Indians. Some would be cowboys. We put the chicken tail feathers on the Indians.

The Indians would shoot at the cowboys, the cowboys would shoot at the Indians, lasso the bad guys, round them up and put them in jail. There were boxcars by the railroad tracks. We weren’t allowed to go near the rail yard because it was too dangerous. So we’d drag the guys who would be captured down to the railroad tracks and put them in the boxcars.

Or we would put them in a certain area of someone’s yard and wrap a chain-link fence around them. We built a jail out of chain-link fence and put the prisoners inside of it. That was the jail. After the jail would be full we’d let all the cats out or we wouldn’t have nobody to play with.

Tom Mix—who was the famous cowboy at that time—he was my idol. I had some jeans and a cowboy shirt and a cowboy hat and a cowboy mask so I’d be a cowboy on Mardi Gras Day. Ever since I was a small kid I always wanted to be the cowboy.

The mask is to disguise people who want to have a good time, drink a lot, maybe they’d go grab somebody’s backside. If somebody did something to you during that year, you weren’t able to get them back, and then you’d try to catch them on Mardi Gras Day. Do something to them where they don’t know who did it. A guy would beat up a guy and have a clown suit on. Or he might be dressed like the Lone Ranger.

And when they’d say, Who did it?

The guy who had the Lone Ranger mask on.

So they used to go down to the corner, take off the mask, and put another one on. It was kind of like that. I used to put on the mask.

But my mother had a saying, I know who you are, Mardi Gras.

So, in other words, she’d say to the person behind the mask, I know who you are with that mask on. I know who you are, Mardi Gras.

Levi’s

Jeans was a thing that you wore around Mardi Gras time. Western cats wore them in Texas and Arizona. It was working-people trousers and low-life trousers. It wasn’t had no class to it. We only wore them at Mardi Gras time because only jeans could stand the Mardi Gras day wear and tear. You’d be on your knees trying to get the beads or climbing up the trees and only Levi’s could take that wear.

When you bought a new pair of Levi’s them boys was so stiff you would get cuts in your ankle and it hurt. So then my mama used to buy them long so we rolled ’em up above the ankle. But then you’d have welts in the crease of your knee—where they’d rub up against your skin—that’d be all raw right down in that crease.

Nobody ever thought of washing them before you wear them. You just put them on new. They was like boards. You had to wear them boys awhile. Didn’t nobody think they got softer after you washed them. But brand new? Man, oh man. Didn’t nobody think. We just put them on new. We used to play cowboys and Indians in the French Market. And Levi’s was for cowboys.

Fishing Poles

Can you see that streetcar coming down the tracks? That’s the St. Charles Line, man. New Orleans is known for its streetcars. I used to ride the St. Charles line with my mother to go uptown. But I preferred to travel that same line downtown with my father with our fishing poles and our bags. It was a twenty minute ride on the St. Charles Line to the lake where we would fish.

My dad would explain to me on the ride how we was surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.

You got ocean, lake and river. So there’s three beds of water. That’s why the fishing is so good.

We made our own nets, bags and fishing poles. My dad showed me how to do this. Cut through the bamboo pole and take it apart at the joints; brush shellac over the pieces and let them dry. Now you can slide one piece down inside the other. Then wrap this peculiar-looking fishing wire around it and you’ve got a bamboo fishing pole. My dad would build fishing poles like this out of a single piece of bamboo.

Then my dad made a bag for it which kind of looked like a pool bag—you know how the cats would carry their pool stick in a bag—so we had the fishing poles in this special-made cloth bag. To top it off, my daddy even made the container to hold the fish. To make it waterproof, he would sew together a bag made out of a raincoat. Sew the liner into the inside so that it wouldn’t drip when you had wet fish down in there.

When we come to the lake we take the poles out of the bag, put them together, put the line on it, put the weight, bait it with the hook, throw it in the water. Splash!

That particular streetcar, the St. Charles Line, runs next to the graveyard and across the street from the field where we used to run around, play baseball and all kinds of sports. We had neighborhood football games on that field in the fall and winter when it got cooler. Surrounded by water, it would get cold outside and the water would get cold and make the dampness. But it never would freeze.

We played football in the cold dampness on that field. You be hit so very nice; hit you good, man. Talk about hitting you, man—ooh wee—guys would knock teeth out. Guys used to get their ass busted. I loved to play football. Knock the bejesus out of you.

Catholic Church and Catholic School

There is a Catholic church off Magazine Street where we used to go with my mother. Come out of the house Sunday morning and take her hand and walk to church. Down the block, these bony black dogs would lurch at us; they would rush the black wrought iron gates and chicken-wire fences.

We’d get to the church and the pastor would be standing there, holding open the huge carved and paneled double doors. Inside, the mass was kind of quiet. It was peaceful. There was a life-size crucifix up front that I used to stare at.

How long has he been up there like that? I asked.

A long time.

He’s God? He can do anything? Can He turn His head to the other side?

My mama pinched the shit out of me because you can’t hit them in church you know. She used to have a way where she’ll grab your skin and twist it into a knot. She grabbed me and she pinched me with that twist.

I’m a kid so I don’t know that it was made out of plastic, mud and clay. Since He’s God, I thought, can He do anything? Can He turn his head to the other side? I got scolded by that. But I was inquisitive about God even then.

I was originally enrolled in the Catholic school. But the nuns used to beat us so bad that I knew there wasn’t no God in their hearts. They beat your ass so bad, man. I’m doing something I’m not supposed to be doing. So they’d make you put your hand out. They’d take the ruler and they’d hit you in the hand.

Once I did something and when the nun raised up to hit me I moved my hand out of the way. The nun hit her own leg because I had moved my hand so fast. Because my hand was hurting so bad I couldn’t take it no more. She starts coming down—I moved my hand out—and whap! She hit her own leg.

She whipped my ass so bad I had welts on me. Beat the shit out of me. In those days the nuns used to have their heads shaved. Or they’d cut if off real close to the scalp.

I told her if she hit me again, I’ll take that hat,—you know, they used to wear that wimple hat, which is part of their habit—and I’ll snatch it right off your bald head.

She beat my ass real good. Beat the shit out of me. Beat my ass good.

Shoeshine on Magazine Street

I had a shoebox that my dad made for me and I had shoe polish and the rags and the brushes. I used to go down to Magazine Street because they had quite a few bars there—mostly white bars—and I would go in these bars and ask the guys:

Anybody want a shoeshine?

They’d say, Yeah, come on in.

I’d shine one guy’s shoes and the guys would say, Your shoes look good. Shine mine. And I’d end up with about four or five shoeshines. Four or five shoeshines at a crack!

My mother used to be angry. Don’t you ever go in that bar again. I don’t want you on Magazine Street anymore. I don’t like that.

I’d tell her what went down and there were certain things she didn’t like. Because the white guys used to tell me when I was down on my knees shining their shoes, "I’ll give you fifty cents if you let me rub