The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (39 page)

A couple times people from Newark came over to see me, but they generally did not dig the horrible little cold-ass apartment with no furniture. I'd “built” a desk from a tabletop hooked by belts to one wall so it could be let down to sit on some milk crates that I had books put into. The bed was never made, the sheets a stomach-turning grey, and shit thrown around everywhere. When Mitchum came in he also brought his darkroom equipment and turned one of the rooms into a darkroom and another room into his bedroom, which left me a bedroom and the kitchen. When Mitchum had women over, the shit really got complicated. But it beat being out in the street and at this point Jim was paying the rent until I got straight.

Two of my old flames came over. Betty, who I'd gone with in high school, was so horrified by the apartment she vowed never to come again. In fact she thought the place was so bad that she wouldn't let me sleep with her, saying the sheets made her sick. And given Betty and my previous hookup with nonstop teenage copulation all over the place, this was a rude awakening, not to mention a deadly drag!

Later Joanie Johnson, the singer I'd been going with most recently just before I'd left home, also came over. We had never made it and I thought that now that I had an “apartment” she would let me make love to her. But when she got over there, she froze and pushed my panting face away and unpeeled my hot fingers, shaking her head. I thought, “this prudish bitch” and said to her only “Why? Come on.” But she shook her head and looked away. I was crushed.

But one thing positive happened. Looking in
The Village Voice
, I spied an ad that said “Clerk wanted, jazz magazine, inquire
The Record Trader
, 271 Sullivan St.” I shot over there bright and early. The guy I talked to was the proprietor, Dick Hallock, a youngish, though five or six years older than I, blond guy with one lock of hair falling constantly over his eye. He wore glasses and kept a gentle warming smile that really made you know the guy was all right, whatever else he might be.

The Record Trader
was in a narrow grey storefront. All over the front of the store and in the back were records, mostly 78 rpm's, stacked every which way. I came in bullshitting, but not really. I told Dick I knew about the music but not much before Louis Armstrong. Dick told me not many people knew about the music before Louie Armstrong. But aside from my own tastes and what I'd learned formally from Sterling Brown and casually
from dudes like Yodo, I didn't know much about the formal history of the music.

We talked, Dick relaxed, a small dog jumping up into his lap which he petted for a while, then the dog jumped down to wander around between the myriad boxes stacked all over. Dick sat wheeled sideways from an old rolltop desk. A tweed cap sat, bill straight up, barely on the back of his head. The desk was the resting place of papers, record albums, opened and unopened letters, and a whole lot of other stuff that would otherwise have been lost from the world. Dick was a collector, it turned out, not only of old records but of old (and new) everything else. A few old cylinders from antique cylinder machines were on the desk, Rolls-Royce fixtures, a clarinet case with the clarinet lying across it, the dog's (Noel's) leash, and thousands of other objects all lay relating to each other on top of, around, or near to that sprawling desk. And the desk itself was very large, the room very small. The records, boxes, walls of shelves with more records, an oil heater, Dick and I and Noel, all made the small storefront even smaller.

The Record Trader
was a magazine for “moldy figs,” i.e., those diggers of the old jazz. Actually “figs” were mostly white worshipers of pre-swing, pre-big band jazz. The diggers of the “original,” “New Orleans” stuff, the music before it got newfangled and weird. What delicious irony that young whites would be the upholders of the old jazz when most times they would have little use for contemporary, deeming it an expression of the savage woogies. But once the expression was not contemporary, once the bloods had moved to a newer expression, then the old jazz could be appreciated. Because, as one critic turkey said, “It brings back the old days, when things and people were simpler.” Then the new jazz, the contemporary expression, could be put down (as the old once had) as “noise” and “savage ruckus.” Ah, well.

Dick and company had a little of that to 'em, I discovered, and I got to meet many of the Ivy-trained slick young white critics who were just coming into the open (some of the older ones as well) and got a chance to peep close-up on the development of the species. Though, to be wholesided, I must say I learned a great deal not only from Dick but from the many types who wandered through the
Trader
, as we called it.

The magazine's function was to provide commentary and analysis of the music (as I said, in the main, the older, more traditional styles) and at the same time to hold auctions of various people's collections so that people could get hold of some of the old records they wanted for their own collections. A typical issue of the
Trader
would have a couple of feature articles,
maybe on Bunk Johnson or Jack Teagarden or Kid Ory or the white hopes, Bix Beiderbecke, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, etc., plus several auction listings. In those listings you'd see some things like “Armstrong, Louis OK 8447 N[ew] $12.50” or “Keppard, Freddie Para 12399 N $11.00.” There'd be records that featured a brief Beiderbecke solo amidst Whiteman's or Goldkette's cacophony, or even early Bing Crosby singing with Whiteman would fetch a pretty penny. The collectors, mostly middle-class white people — “figs.”

My gig at the
Trader
was to consist of being the shipping clerk. I would get the letters after they'd been opened and the money taken out, find the records among the stacks, then package them and mail them out. I needed a job, any job, but the
Trader
job seemed to me something heavier, something maybe I could dig, who knew?

After talking to Dick a few minutes and getting some indication of what the job entailed, and with some measuring going on by Dick and myself of what the prospects looked like, I was told I could have the job if I wanted it. It was paying $40 for a part-time slave, which wasn't bad, 12 noon till 4. Hey, in those relaxed (albeit chaotic) circumstances, and with only Dick and Noel to bug me, it looked great to me. I was going to start the next day.

Before I got out of the narrow storefront, a stocky little white woman with big owlish glasses came in grinning, huffing and puffing from hurrying back (I couldn't understand why) from her lunch. I was introduced to Nellie Kohn, the
Trader's
secretary, who laughingly made a funny little curtsy and slid between the record shelf in the middle of the floor and the wall where there was a typing table and a pile of letters. In a couple of minutes, Dick and I still exchanging parting small talk, a tall slender light-brown-haired woman came rushing in, also out of breath, but from shopping. Her hands were filled with bags. This was Barbara Weiss, Dick's roomie and fiancée. Dick and Barbara had been going together about five years, living together about three, and shortly before I was gone from the
Trader
or it was gone from me, they were married.

Barbara's father was a famous anthropologist who had done important studies of South America, particularly Brazil. He taught at NYU and Barbara's family lived in a sprawling eight- or nine-room apartment overlooking Washington Square. One of the old-time luxury apartments. It was Barbara's father who first translated the Brazilian genius Machado de Assis.

The funniest thing in the world was witnessing Barbara and Dick have a conversation. It consisted of Barbara talking nonstop about any number of
things, sometimes at the same time, and Dick nodding, saying a few words, petting the dog, or noodling on his clarinet, while Barbara went on jetting out language faster than sound. But she was a nice, well-meaning woman and shared all of Dick's interests, but in a lighter, more airy, more casual way. Dick dug traditional jazz, playing the clarinet (which he did with several Dixieland groups, including one called the Red Onion Jazz Band), Noel, antique cars (he had a 1922 Rolls-Royce), writing, and, as he put it, “facing” around the Village. Barbara was stashed in that hierarchy, fairly high up.

In a few minutes, a black dude named Will Ribbon (he of the searching Beretta) came in. Will was one of the only young black men I knew to play traditional jazz. He was a trumpet player and sounded then like a slightly younger version of Bunk Johnson. Only slightly younger. Will came in talking and laughing as he crossed the threshold. He and Dick were old friends. He pecked Barbara on the cheek and called over to Nellie, “How's your crotch?” Not knowing the exact meaning of that greeting, I blanked on it, though I could hear Nellie's distinct embarrassment in their exchange.

Finally, I got out of there, but the next day, getting acquainted with my tasks, maybe ten or twelve people came through the
Trader
offices. Most of them old friends, school friends, Village friends, musician friends of Dick's. I was introduced to all of them. There was Martin Williams and Larry Gushee, who were writers. Martin and I became pretty good friends, though we had our differences about the music. But Martin was not a fig, he did have a scholar's regard for the traditional but at the same time he was very much into the contemporary music. He dug Monk, which brought us closer, since Monk was my main man. Martin was also one of the first persons I knew who dug and hipped me to Ornette Coleman when he blew into town a little while later. And one of the best magazines about the music, the short-lived
Jazz Review
, which was edited by Martin, remains one of the hippest magazines ever to appear. It was in the
Jazz Review
as well that I published my first full-length article, a piece on saxophonist Buddy Tate.

I also got to meet guys like Dan Morgenstern, who thought the music ended with the big bands, though later he was willing to admit certain latecomers into the pantheon. Williams, now is the jazz person at the Smithsonian; Morgenstern, the chief scholar, etc., at Newark's Institute of Jazz Studies. At the time, Morgenstern was a
Downbeat
regular. Bob Parent, the jazz photographer, was a
Trader
regular. Bob lived in a loft right around the corner, when SoHo was just a bunch of industrial buildings
and factories. He came into the
Trader
every other day to shoot the shit, walking his own dog. Sometimes he and Dick would go down the street, each strangling a little dog as they half flew up the block, talking about who was playing where.

What made an impression on me was that there was a whole group of young university-trained, fairly well-to-do white dudes who had come up with the music in their youth, listening and playing or hanging out in the clubs. And, generally, these were the critics, and the ones I met, the most
advanced
critics of the music. Nat Hentoff used to come around from time to time and he and I got to know each other fairly well. I always respected Nat because he was and remains serious about his concerns. In fact, Williams, Hentoff, Gushee, and Ross Russell remain some of the most astute critics of Afro-American music, though they are all white. But it began to dawn on me that there were not many black voices focusing (or at least being published) on black music. I'd written Leonard Feather (or was it Norman Grantz?) a letter when I was in the service, attacking him for patronizing Charlie Parker by saying on the liner notes of
Bird and Strings
that “Charlie Parker had to be on his best musical behavior” because he was playing with the likes of Mitch Miller and the strings. I knew that shit was racism, young and twisted up as I was, and shot Grantz-Feather a note telling him that “one day I will be a jazz critic” and that I would waste his ass for such bullshit ignorance and racism. That was an assertion that came from somewhere deep inside me. As I wrote it, I wondered at its reality, but whatever emotion prompted it was real enough for me to send it.

Being around these people now made my desire to know and write more about the music bloom. Every day I came to the
Trader
I had to go through stacks of records looking for the ones ordered in the auction. I studied bands and players from different periods, labels, and trends. I got to know the key personalities in the different periods of jazz and began to understand when and how the music changed. Later I would do my own deeper research to find out
why
it changed, which remains to me the most important question. (Later, I got a job with a guy called not-so-lovingly “Jake the Snake,” a big record trader. Jake had literally thousands of records in his cellar which he sold to collectors by mail order all over the world. It was my job to put those records in alphabetical order. These jobs were like graduate school, though for the Snake I was in semidarkness in a dank cellar, thumbing for hours through the records. From both jobs I gained not only a great deal of knowledge but also a respectable collection of traditional jazz and swing and blues. My job with the Snake ended when
someone rushed by him as he was about to enter his car one evening, closing the door on his hand and cutting off his thumb. A lot of the people around the
Trader
suggested that this happened to the Snake because he was so evil.)

I would see Nellie Kohn at work each day and we would trade a few light sentences but that was all. She had been in the Village a year or so after graduating from Mary Washington College of the University of Virginia. UVA was the Yale or Harvard of the Confederacy and Mary Washington its Radcliffe. Nellie was a Jewish girl from Long Island trying to make it in the Village. She was interested in the theater and literature (her major), but being in the Village, it seemed at this point, was her major focus. She was going with a guy who came by the
Trader
on a motor scooter and took her motor-facing around the Village.