Authors: Gil Scott-Heron
I had never been sure who arranged for Fieldston to play against Collegiate, one of our conference rivals, in the earliest of three games that started at about five o’clock. There was an
NBA doubleheader afterward, with Detroit against somebody in the first game and the New York Knickerbockers playing against somebody else in the second game. I would be there late.
I think we lost the game. I know I had one of my worst games, fumbling and juggling my way up and down in near arctic cold; trying to dribble around a few dozen dead spots hiding among the loose
floorboards like spiders in the corners of an old house. The cold seemed to wrap around my legs and ankles like a frozen blanket, compliments of the ice beneath the boards that the New York Rangers
skated across during hockey games. That experience raised my level of respect for professional basketball players. And hockey players, since I figured the skating surface was probably in no better
shape than the basketball court.
Madison Square Garden was not a great concert venue, either. I used to say as part of my evaluation of the Garden that when you played there you sounded like the Knicks. That wisecrack ignored
the fact that New York had some of the best sound technicians and concert producers in the world. And not only were they the most proficient, they were almost always that way in a New York minute,
because that’s how long it took them to change sets between acts and get your sound in house order. A New York minute.
For some reason that Clive Davis kept to himself, I was back with the jazz artists and put on during the afternoon slate of the Arista celebration. To tell the truth, since Clive had come to see
us after hearing “The Bottle” and shown interest in “Ain’t No Such Thing as Superman,” I had not known where we would play. But I had anticipated it would be whenever
Clive expected people who had danced to “The Bottle” would be in attendance. That was the song we’d been asked to play on a TV special a few months before, which had also been a
celebration of Arista artists. But Brian and I had also played with Ron Carter and Hubert Laws at Flying Dutchman, and, in spite of split airplay, that made us jazz in certain industry circles. So
we were lined up to play on the program with Anthony Braxton and Oliver Lake and other innovative Arista artists. No problem.
There had been no real question that I was being presented for my literary background when
Small Talk at 125th and Lenox
was released. The fact that I was back in classes at Lincoln and
had written a novel and a book of poetry was emphasized. The
Small Talk
liner notes were taken from a conversation I had with Nat Hentoff, a sensitive man with both literary and music
credentials. And the first media appearances I made were with Father O’Connor, the “jazz priest” on WRVR-FM and on a radio show hosted by Mr. Ossie Davis and Miss Ruby Dee,
featuring a conversation about writing novels with John A. Williams and John Oliver Killens.
The small success of the poetry album and the larger audience of the album of songs,
Pieces of a Man
, brought critics and largely critical journalists back to me with “who are
you?” type questions: “How do you see yourself?” for instance, or “Are you jazz or poet or singer or . . . ?”
I had started looking for them to ask, “Vegetable or mineral?”
Every answer that I tried to supply inspired more questions. My problem was that I had thought when I finished the album it would be their job to say what it was and, if necessary, what I
was.
As I started doing more press as a result of working with Arista, it became obvious that I hadn’t taken a long view of how I would handle these types of questions. They started coming with
an attitude: “Who do you think you are?”
And they weren’t going for, “Just a piano player from Tennessee.” But I admired Langston Hughes, a man who set no limits on himself. And I didn’t want to get stuck doing
one thing, either. One of the things that was evident to me way back when I’d gotten into John Coltrane’s music was that you had to keep reaching. I think when you stop reaching, you
die. It’s like Earl Weaver, the longtime manager of the Baltimore Orioles, once said: “It’s what you learn after you know it all that really counts.” After you think you
have accomplished something, there’s a tendency to relax. There’s always a need for you to feel there’s something else you need to do, something else you need to grasp.
The night of the Arista celebration at the Garden we played again, this time with the more pop program. I could claim that Clive thought the Midnight Band was like New York, New York, so nice he
had to let us play twice. But that wouldn’t be quite accurate. After the first show, with the jazz artists, Clive’s right-hand man caught up with us in front of the venue and told us
that Eric Carmen’s truck had turned over on the New Jersey Turnpike and that Clive needed us to play again.
When we walked back in later that night, this time without a stage diagram or a sound check, the union sound man pulled me over and said, “Hey, Gil, have we got the same stage set
up?”
When I nodded, he walked away. And when we came out to play after one of those ten-minute set changes, the lights were correct, the equipment was on spot, and the house sound and monitors were
in sync from the first note. A New York piece of business.
I have never been very fond of doing interviews. I suppose that has been apparent to some of the people who have interviewed me. The only reason I’m using qualifying
words like “very” is because there were some interviews that were actually fun to do and I did enjoy them. I have always enjoyed talking to Brother Imhotep, aka Gary Byrd, no matter
what radio station or TV show he was working for. Why? Because it was always live and not fake. What do I mean by fake? Easy. Sheets of paper and notebooks full of questions that always make me
feel like this person isn’t really familiar with my music, doesn’t put my records on the box, doesn’t read my books, and couldn’t pick me out of a lineup without a cheat
photo they looked at before they looked through the one-way mirror. I was not comfortable when the questions were prepared. If the questions were coming from a list and there was nothing live going
on, the interviewer might as well mail me the list of questions and let me mail it back.
When the interviewer had a tape recorder I felt like I needed to have one, too. Just because there had been so many little things that I read back in magazines that were just flat-out wrong. I
hadn’t gotten any ugly vibes from the guy or the woman during the interview; a lot of the time what I said just got “lost in transcription.” It was not enough for the transcribers
to have ears like an eagle. They needed ears like a Heron, and a sense of humor like a Heron, too, because that’s where most of the distortions and missed portions took place. Not only do I
have a voice with a low end that rumbles along like a subway car with a flat wheel, the way I combine English with American with street and slang and all them whatevers disoriented transcribers and
I guess they were tilted so often they just settled for what it sounded like.
It’s not like I was deliberately throwing the transcribers off track. Hell, I wasn’t talking to them. I didn’t know them. I didn’t even know they were listening. The only
person I was talking to, or thought I was talking to, were the people doing the interviews. If they didn’t say “What?” or “What did you say?” I had to believe
I’d been understood. For somebody in the recording business, I had very little faith in some of those little cute-ass tape recorders sitting on a table. I’ll tell you something else.
Here’s a word to remember, especially about cassettes: calibration. I had another show at the Beacon Theater with Grover Washington and my regular bass player couldn’t make it. But he
was rooming with a friend of his in D.C. who also played bass. That friend told me he knew my songs, said he’d been listening to my stuff for two weeks, practicing. So I said okay, great. He
meets us in New York and every tune is a fucking disaster. Every tune! He was playing everything about a note and a half higher than we were. It was because of calibration. Cassettes played higher.
In fact, they played even faster when plugged into the wall than when played with batteries.
The truth about interviews? Unless they’re done live, it’s just damn hard to trust them. Plus, when you were on the radio with Imhotep you got to talk to people who called in with
questions. That was always fun. I swear, that’s how it was with me; I started to want my records to be live, too. I had some good things from the studio, but looking back I love things like
It’s Your World,
recorded in Boston on July 4, 1976, and
Tales of the Amnesia Express,
recorded live in Europe.
I did interviews live on foreign TV shows, too. The first was a French show. It was like roller skating through a minefield with a blindfold on. I wore a hearing aid and took my seat at a table
with the other guests after we played our song. The host asked me a question in French. The interpreter told me the question in English through the hearing aid. I answered the question in English
and a French translation of the answer was broadcast to the studio audience. It was a strange experience.
Shows were very different in different countries. The shows we did in England were on the BBC without commercials. I performed in front of a studio audience in a room that felt like a warehouse
or an airplane hangar. In Germany we performed on a show called
Ohne Filter,
which means “without a filter,” live. All the groups that were going to be on the show set up in this
large studio on separate stages, four or five groups, and the cameras and crew went around from band to band.
There was a live TV show in Barcelona, Spain, that was really wild. It was a combination of talk and performances, and it was broadcast live. We had a dress rehearsal during the day and I was
damn sure the show wasn’t going to work. The whole thing was like a dyslexic fire drill. We went through all three of the tunes we were going to play, and I saw cameras swinging past on
cranes and other cameramen with handhelds walk through, never stopping, and leave. When we finished the rehearsal, the director said, “Thank you, Gil, that was great.”
I said, “
De nada, amigo
.” To myself I was thinking,
This is crazy
.
But they weren’t crazy and I hadn’t seen nothing yet. They were professionals who did the show every week and knew exactly what they were doing. They also knew something about this
evening’s show that I didn’t know. They were presenting another group on that night’s slate, a dance group whose leading dancer and spokesperson was a transsexual. The group came
on right before us and we watched her numbers from a balcony box. Their most interesting piece was a choreographed number where each verse ended with a double bump and the leader’s breasts
hopped out of her outfit on the last beat. Every time. And the studio audience roared. Every time. Obviously there was nothing we could do to compete with that.
At Arista, the company’s publicity was supplemented by a Black firm from Los Angeles. A good brother named Bob Brock, who I really came to appreciate, took every opportunity I gave him to
put me somewhere that Black folks would see my picture and connect it to my records. It was Brock who set up a tour of the new Johnson Publishing building in downtown Chicago in 1976. He promised a
lot of painless publicity. He probably would have been right if my touring partner had not had a big hit called “Love to Love You, Baby,” as redundant a lyric to hit the public since
“Amen.”
A woman led us through the corridors to the small squares cut out of the walls where we would shake hands with mystified employees. She was not impressed. She dutifully tried on a smile that
stretched as tight as a drum skin across the bottom of her face. By the fifth or sixth cubicle, she had organized our introductions into a kind of rhythmic mantra she could recite on automatic
pilot: “Donna-Summer-love-to-love-you-baby-Gil-Scott-Heron-Johannesburg.” I didn’t think she was going to make it. I didn’t think I would.
What I got was a whirlwind of revolving doors with thin brown arms attached to dozens of weak handshakes. Sometimes there was a glimpsed almost-a-smile on someone’s face but by noon
everybody’s handshakes were limp and loose and every smile was mechanical. Occasionally, once or twice on each floor, one of the two photographers on duty would eel his way through a cluster
of rubbernecking assistants and jam folks together like flowers in a bouquet and request—or demand—a “smile!” then blind us and disappear.
This would eventually provide the payoff as a “photo of the month” in
Jet
magazine a couple of pages after some secretary in a swimsuit. It also paid off in another story in
another Johnson publication about the “Miracle on Michigan Avenue,” the Johnson Building itself, which I must admit was a beautiful, solid piece of architecture that upgraded the
downtown area and provided many jobs for young Black media aspirants.
The building tour was over at half past noon, and I got off the elevator on the floor that was marked cafeteria and walked into a thoroughly different aspect of Johnson Publishing.
It would be too simple to say it was “different from upstairs.” I expected the lighter, brighter atmosphere and a hum of conversation between diners. What I could never have
anticipated were the two ladies in charge. They ran the line of diners along the rails with personal, down-home good humor and an efficiency that would have stood them in good stead with Chrysler
or Boeing. They knew who I was and what I’d just been through and added their own “special” iced tea for “loosenin’ up jaws that been smilin’ too much.” I
found a small table for one between the main section of tables and the food line, feeling better and more comfortable by the second. Those ladies had no idea that they had just saved Bob Brock a
tremendous cussin’ out.
That was when I saw one of my real heroes. The owner and publisher and one-time sole representative of soul magazines, Mr. John Johnson. Here, for me, was a real Chicago celebrity.