Transcript
Jake Brennan (0:04)
Double Elvis.
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Jake Brennan (1:08)
Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. Heads up guys. In this episode there's a lot of talk of the mid century concept of cool as well as about heroin. It should go without saying that there is nothing in this episode that is an endorsement of that drug. Or any drug for that matter. But you're smart enough to know that already. All right, let's get into it. The stories about jazz musician Chet Baker are truly insane. He was a natural gifted musician with a mile long rap sheet. He was worshiped by beautiful movie stars and both loved and loathed by serious jazz contemporaries. He was heavily addicted to heroin and made heavily addictive music. Chet Baker, with his overtly romantic style of playing and singing, coupled with his matinee idol good looks, was called the James Dean of Jazz. He was also called many other things. Gifted junkie, angel, scammer, cool, stupid, charming, abusive, beautiful, and a rat. He was indeed all of these things. And he did of course make great music. That music I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my melotron called second story swing mk1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to Wishing well by Terence Trent Darby. And why would I play you that specific slice of hardline cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on May 13, 1988. And that was the day Chet Baker lost his life creating one of the most Enduring Mysteries in Music. The cause of his death. On this episode, Hard Bop Heroin, Hardline Cheese, the James Dean of Jazz, and Getting Lost with Chet Baker. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgrace. The smack to the mouth stung, but he said nothing. His mother looked on in horror, but she said nothing. His father, who gave him the crack, said said nothing as well. Nobody said anything. They were too busy trying to keep their cool. The house was a powder keg of suppressed tension. The tension was always there, just like those Oklahoma clouds. They never seemed to pass, even when the sun fought its way through. The clouds hung around, ensuring that the sky would never be more than just almost blue. The humiliation would never fully pass either. Even as an adult, even in success, even with the adoration of jazz lovers up and down the west coast, whenever anything good would happen to him, there was that familiar pull in the back of his mind. It blasted into his conscience like hard bop, demanding to be heard. It said, remember me, pretty boy? I'm here to remind you that you ain't shit. You ain't cool. You ain't ever been cool, and you ain't ever gonna be cool. You're gonna be just like your daddy. Some jive ass half a musician who can't find work, who nobody ever heard of. When Downbeat magazine, the paper of record for jazz aficionados, named him Chet Baker, Trumpeter of the year two years running back in 1954 and 55, there was no joy he beat out Miles Davis. He knew what that meant. Resentment and anger for something he couldn't control. The color of his skin, White. So very unhip. When he met Miles, he told him straight up that he wanted to write him a letter apologizing for winning the award because he knew he wasn't better than Miles. Miles said, you got about 15 other letters to write before you get to me. The sting of the rejection from the hippest musician on the planet was the same, if not worse, than the sting of the beatings he took from his old man. Like Miles, the old man was not short on resentment and anger. The drugs helped. Heroin, grass, whatever pills he could get, but mainly heroin. The drug, shooting it, scoring it, occupied every waking moment. He wasn't on stage, and in 1966, the stage wasn't bringing in the bread like it was back in the mid-50s in Los Angeles. In New York, his reputation as a serious jazz man was eclipsed by his reputation as a dangerous drug addict. And so road work was necessary. Scoring depended entirely on what city you were. In this city, wherever the Fuck USA was not hip. He needed to come up with a new plan. To catch a thief with Cary Grant, the Hitchcock movie. Grant, clad head to toe in black night, crawling throughout the Italian Riviera, in and out of unsuspecting socialites windows, robbing them of their jewelry and cash. Chet thought he could have been cast as the thief over Grant. He knew Italy like the back of his hand and he would have been able to do his own stunts. He was a righteous second story man. Next to blowing trumpet and crooning, scamming people was one of his greatest talents. Particularly breaking and entering above the ground floor. The crime spree he and his bassist Bob Whitlock had embarked upon was necessary. Without junk, they would be rendered useless, bedridden with violent withdrawals and unable to perform. Which was the whole point of being on the road in the first place. Put in work, make the bread. Except all the bread went toward heroin and when it ran out, there were no options. Chet's habit was extreme, to say the least. He'd have to improvise. Whitlock looked on in amazement as the great Chet Baker scaled the fire escape. He then hemmed his body tight to the side of the opulent home on the second story and carefully placed each foot on the ledge of the home's massive window nearest the fire. Fire escape. He popped the lock, lifted the glass, pushed his wiry body through and was in and out with the valuables in no time. They'd cool their jets at an all night diner and wait for the pawn shop to open. When second story work wasn't an option, I. E. They couldn't wait on the sun to come up in the pawn shops to open and the dealers to wake up. They'd work their drugstore scam. Chet had it down pat. All that acting over in Italy had paid off. First he'd prick his finger and draw blood into a tiny vial. And then he'd hit the local pharmacist's up with his plate. Gee doc, I don't know. Hurts when I move and my gut hurts when I pee too. Maybe it's a kidney stone, I don't know. And the pharmacist would have Chet give a urine sample. Chet would drop a couple specks of his own blood from the vial into the urine and voila. A dilated prescription and a passable substitute for heroin. The scam didn't end there. While Chet was performing his little one act on the good doctor, Whitlock would sidle up to the counter all nonchalant and Work his charm on the nurse. And if she was easily flattered, which was usually the case, he would manage to get his sweaty paw on the doc's prescription pad. And from there it was off to the races. But it wasn't always about the drugs. In the beginning, it was about the music. Chet Baker was a lot of things, and stupid might have been one of them. It was little thought that went into his playing. When people who knew him as a man and as a musician speak of him, they almost always reference his natural talent. The music seemed to flow right through him, often at lightning speed and in tight, perfectly natural, impeccably timed phrases. It was a style that other jazz trumpeters practice rigorously to achieve. But none of them ever saw Chet practice. He'd just show up and blow. He cared, but not enough to rehearse, or so it seemed. And this detachment, along with his natural talent and striking good looks, lent an air of cool to Chet Baker's Persona that wasn't previously seen or heard in any musician anywhere, in any genre. In the 1940s and 50s, for jazz musicians and fans, particularly those being swept up in the thrill of a new type of jazz called bebop, being vanguarded by the great jazz musicians Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, in the aforementioned Miles Davis, the concept of cool meant you were different, you were apart from the rest of society. Cool was a way of life. Cool, it was said, meant that you get done in a sentence what somebody else would get done in a paragraph. Cool was an economy of effort in life and in one's playing. Miles Davis was cool. Cool was ice, Cool was intellectual. Cool was black. But Chet Baker was warm. Those soft eyes and romantic melodies. Chet was a lot of things, and intellectual was not one of them. And Chet was white. Yet Chet was still somehow cool. Charlie Parker said so. And Charlie Parker knew from cool. He, along with Dizzy Miles, drummer Max Roach and pianist Bud Powell, were among a handful of musicians on the east coast who were literally revolutionizing music, taking swing music and pop single standards and ripping them inside out. Preserving little of the original compositions. These players would demolish the song's melodies, using only the chord progressions as the road forward upon which they would blaze. Manic, furious, improvisational melodies and solos. And bebop horn players blew hard. The great Louis Armstrong, the father of jazz, had no idea what he was listening to when he first heard it. Few others did either. Only those who were cool got was a badge of honor, a sign that you were cool. If you were into bebop, shooting heroin further cemented your status. Bebop musicians, Charlie Parker especially, were largely hardcore savage junkies. Heroin took one's disaffected attitude toward life, toward society, toward everything, and rooted it into something real and dangerous. Nothing signaled to the straight world you, your hipness, your otherness more than your heroin habit. It blocked out the harshness of white conformist, post World War II America and heightened the only part of the day that mattered, the only part of the day that you weren't high on narcotics when you were on stage tearing apart tradition on the icy, cool wings of improvisation. In the early 50s, the only thing cooler than being into bebop and being on heroin was being black. Chet Baker did not play bebop. He played straight. Chet Baker was not on heroin. His drug at the time was reefer, and he was again, obviously not black. He wasn't even from the East Coast. He was from the not very bebop West Coast. Yet that didn't stop Charlie Parker from hiring Chet Baker on a West coast stint in 1952. Such was Chet's immense natural talent and disaffected cool charisma. After Parker's engagement at point one run its course, during which Chet further proved himself to his hero by personally scoring dope for him on a regular basis, Parker called Dizzy Gillespie back in New York. His message was short and to the point. You better look out. There's a little white cat out here who's going to eat you up.