Lie Five

Number five: that beboppers used and abused drugs and alcohol is not completely a lie either. They used to tell jokes about it. One bebopper walked up to another and said, “Are you gonna flat your fifths tonight?” The other one answered, “No, I’m going to drink mine.” That’s a typical joke about beboppers.

When I came to New York, in 1937, I didn’t drink or smoke marijuana. “You gonna be a square, muthafucka!” Charlie Shavers said and turned me on to smoking pot, but I wouldn’t call that drug abuse.

The first guy I knew to “take off” was Steve, a trumpet player with Jimmie Lunceford, a young college kid who came to New York and got hung up on dope. Everybody talked about him and said, “That guy’s a dope addict! Stay away from him because he uses shit.” Boy, to say that was really stupid, because how else could you help that kinda guy?

Dope, heroin abuse, really got to be a major problem during the bebop era, especially in the late forties, and a lotta guys died from it. Cats were always getting “busted” with drugs by the police, and they had a saying, “To get the best band, go to KY.” That meant the “best band” was in Lexington, Kentucky, at the federal narcotics hospital. Why did it happen? The style of life moved so fast, and cats were struggling to keep up. It was wartime, everybody was uptight. They probably wanted something to take their minds of all the killing and dying and the cares of this world. The war in Vietnam most likely excited the recent upsurge in heroin abuse, together with federal narcotics control policies which, strangely, at certain points in history, encouraged narcotics abuse, especially among young blacks.

Everybody at one time or another smoked marijuana, and then coke became popular. I did that one too; but I never had any desire to use hard drugs, a drug that would make you a slave. I always shied away from anything powerful enough to make me dependent, because realizing that everything here comes and goes, why be dependent on any one thing? I never even tried hard drugs. One time on Fifty-second Street a guy gave me something I took for coke and it turned out to be horse. I snorted it and puked up in the street. If I had found him, he would have suffered bodily harm, but I never saw him again.

With drugs like benzedrine, we played practical jokes. One record date for Continental, with Rubberlegs Williams, a blues singer, I especially remember. Somebody had this date ? Clyde Hart, I believe. He got Charlie Parker, me, Oscar Pettiford, Don Byas, Trummy Young, and Specs Powell. The music didn’t work up quite right at first. Now, at that time, we used to break open inhalers and put the stuff into coffee or Coca-Cola; it was a kick then. During a break at this record date, Charlie dropped some into Rubberleg’s coffee. Rubberlegs didn’t drink or smoke or anything. He couldn’t taste it. So we went on with the record date. Rubberlegs began moaning and crying as he was singing. You should hear those records? But I wouldn’t condone doing that now; Rubberlegs might’ve gotten sick or something. The whole point is that, like most Americans, we were really ignorant about the helpful or deleterious effects of drugs on human beings, and before we concluded anything about drugs or used them and got snagged, we should have understood what we were doing. That holds true for the individual or the society, I believe.

The drug scourge of the forties victimized black musicians first, before hitting any other large segment of the black community. But if a cat had his head together, nothing like that. I knew several guys that were real hip, musically, and hip about life who never got high. Getting high wasn’t one of the prerequisites for being hip, and to say it was would be inaccurate.