Authors: Gil Scott-Heron
I never had officially determined the exact spelling for the name I’d given the head of my road crew. I suppose it was two words—Keg Leg—rather than Kegleg. It might have
become moot after everyone, including his mother and his wife, cut it down to Keg. Whatever the spelling, he was my man.
One of my unofficial titles with the Midnight Band might have been Dispenser of Nicknames. It was a labor of love, something I did automatically at times, primarily for the humor. It was a habit
I’d picked up at Lincoln, where almost everyone was known by a nickname, so much so that when the person’s real name was needed a lot of folks drew a blank. As a freshman, when
I’d run for class president and the names of those elected were posted, several upperclassmen wondered what happened to Spiderman when they read that Gil Heron had been elected. On my floor
in the dormitory I had a Hawk, a Taboo, a Butterball, and a Bird, and I had established a number of handles for members of the Midnight Band as well. Barnett Williams was the Doctor, Charlie
Saunders was Cosmic Charlie, and Brian Jackson was Stickman; along with Keg Leg those were my most successful as they extended beyond their associations with the group.
At the Centroplex that afternoon, I forget what occupied my thoughts for that first hour or so, but I do remember looking up and seeing Keg making his way toward me.
“Boss,” he whispered in his own hoarse way, “how bad do we need this gig?”
It was so direct and off the wall that I didn’t speak right away.
I am not easy to surprise. I admit that I am no Uncle Buddy with a nod and a polite “thank you” with a bee stinger in my eye, but I am not one to give you a frozen-faced grimace and
silent scream if the unexpected shows up either. I had seen one of our percussionists come out of a darkened bathroom after starting to brush his teeth with Preparation H. I had seen the expression
on a D.C. executive’s face after he mistook a solid piece of Colombian cocaine for a throat lozenge and popped it into his mouth. In fact, speaking of cocaine, I had been in a living room in
Southeast D.C. when a brother in too much of a hurry tried to pour a half ounce of powder through a wet strainer.
Keg Leg, with his barrel-shape body set solidly on legs that were as sturdy looking as rolling logs, constantly left me with a smile or a head shaking with disbelief. He was one of the most
definite Aries I had ever met, but I am positive that the spontaneous way he responded to circumstances had never been predetermined by the proclivities of his astrological placement. The things he
said and the moves he made automatically prepared me, but I was not ready for “How bad do we need this gig?”
“Well, uh, we need ’em all,” I managed quietly. “But not if it’s a situation we can’t handle,” I continued vaguely.
“Thank you, boss.”
Whatever response he was looking for must have been hidden in what I had answered. Because without further syllables he turned his hat around backward and headed back out the door with all of us
trailing in a ragged line behind him.
His destination was definite and direct. Striding with as much speed as his short legs would manage, he left the dressing room and headed straight down the center aisle toward the stage.
Standing in the center of the stage, directing the four-man Rose Royce road crew, was one of the largest brothers I had ever seen outside of a wrestling ring. He was a good half a foot over six
feet, and had left three hundred and fifty pounds far behind.
Keg Leg was headed straight for him. He started up with what for him was a scream.
“Listen you big . . .” I didn’t catch the last word.
“First I’m kickin’ your ass and the rest a y’all get on line!”
He couldn’t have brought much more shock to that stage if he had started speaking the Gettysburg Address. With the conclusion of the announcement, Keg stepped directly to the giant road
boss, placed his huge head into the center of the man’s chest, and started to back him across the stage.
“Yo, yo!” the big brother called out, taking another quick step back. “What the hell . . .”
Keg was adamant.
“I told you when them humpers started packin’ they stuff! I told you when you made them put my stuff back down on the floor! That’s what the hell they in here for. I had
everything onstage and you made ’em take it down. Screw you! I ain’t liftin’ that shit back up here. I’m kickin’ yo’ ass, you sumbitch, and then everybody who
don’t like it!”
“Wait up. Hold it!”
It was all the big man could do to look around Keg at the rest of his men.
“A.J.,” he called to one. “I want you guys to put their stuff back up here. Just put us in the corner there and then put their things up here for him.”
Keg looked back at the rest of the crew. Without enthusiasm, they were nodding and looking over the edge of the rear of the stage where all of our drums and keyboards and cables sat in a pile
where they’d been set after Big Man made the humpers take them down.
Keg was still fuming as he stepped away, but his anger had melted away. It was like watching air let out of a scaled down brown bulldozer. His anger had filled his chest and made him seem larger
and fiercer.
Soon, as we all stood and watched the Rose Royce crew working our stuff over the edge and up the stairs to the work space, Keg was himself again, joking and speculating on what had happened to
Lakeside. The Dayton, Ohio, group had been scheduled to open the show and word had it we might have to play first because they were running well late.
“Them snakes and gators out there in the swamp got ’em,” Keg told us. “They know when it’s city folks an’ don’t know where the hell they going. They put
up detour signs and lead ’em right down to their dinner table.”
I don’t remember anybody ever speaking again about Keg’s challenge to that man-and-a-half at the Centroplex. Hell, in Starkville, Mississippi, he reached out of the bus window with a
pipe in his hand and smacked hell out of a gas station attendant who insisted on filling our bus with a cigarette in his mouth. Keg was the type of Aries they write about in the astrology books,
the kind who will come across a problem and start working on it. Rams rarely came down from the mountain tops just to start trouble. But there’s nothing in the neighborhood up there among
those impossible footholds, so if you’re up there they’ll ram the hell out of you.
I’d realized that about Keg since the day I met him. There were a dozen of us waiting in front of the Charisma office on Georgia Avenue in Northwest Washington. I had purchased a new Cary
Van for our equipment and my road manager, Tom Abney, sent Keg Leg to pick it up. At nearly closing time, we stood out front waiting to see the truck with its sun roof and burglar-discouraging
metal grille across the back.
It didn’t take long before we spotted it rolling toward us. The driver, still in shadows, pulled past us and put himself in position to parallel park. Not so fast, Brother Man. Before he
could back into the spot a nearly new Mercedes-Benz turned out of traffic and pulled into the parking space head-on. We could all see the triumphant driver, a hurrying African dressed for business
in a white shirt, striped tie, and suit jacket. The Benz driver opened his door a crack and began fumbling with his keys and an attaché case in the shotgun seat. Then the door slammed shut
again on the driver side of the Benz, the street side.
That was when I got my first look at my new road man, Dennis Little, the nephew of the Charisma boss, Norris Little, who had asked me to hire him. It struck me immediately. The brother, about
five-foot-seven, looked like nothing so much as a huge barrel set solidly on plow-pulling thighs. He now planted himself against the Benz driver’s door.
“I am here first,” the driver responded, rolling down his window to protest. “I have this space, man. I have this space. I am here first.”
“Yeah, you got that space,” said Dennis casually, “but you can’t get out of the car.”
I don’t know what I expected to hear the brother say, but whatever it was that wasn’t it. If I had been reviewing a list of possible lines with only that line on it, I would’ve
had trouble picking it. Of course, it was perfect. But the African hadn’t picked it, either. He rolled the window up with the quickness. He looked at the imposing bulk that blocked his exit
to the left and then stared out at us through the passenger window. We all stood there motionless, speechless.
He rolled the window down again. “I am here first.”
Then he realized that this was ground that had been covered. With a shrug of dejection, he put his key back into the ignition and started to back up. Dennis, without a further word, backed off
and let the Mercedes pull out. With that he backed the van in perfectly, hopped out, pushed the door closed, and flipped the keys to me as he passed the sidewalk cluster.
“Nice ride, boss. I really like the sun roof.”
And from that day on he had been Keg Leg.
The next time I played Madison Square Garden was in September 1979, four years after the Arista celebration. I was working with a quintet of Carl Cornwell, Ed Brady, Rob
Gordon, and Tony Green. There was a weeklong series of concerts being held by “M.U.S.E.,” the Musicians United for Safe Energy, a group formed by Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, James
Taylor, Jesse Colin Young, and some others after the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in March of that year. I hadn’t had a lot of time to get myself together for that one
because we had only been invited about two weeks in advance of the event.
The shows started at 7:30 each night because there were a bunch of different artists playing. We were scheduled to play second, behind Peter Tosh. Not. Because when “hit time”
arrived, Peter refused to go on and somebody from the group of musicians who were running things was standing halfway down the twisting ramp under the arena waving frantically at our limo driver as
we pulled up. If the first act wouldn’t or couldn’t go on, everybody moved up. The organizer asked whether we could go on first. Hell, we could play at four in the afternoon.
A documentary film about the event called
No Nukes
came out later, and we appeared in it doing something from our set. If we looked a little disheveled (and I managed to do that pretty
often), that time it was because we went from the limo to the stage. No problem. Well, there was one problem. The night before, when Chaka Khan came out to play, the youngsters from New Jersey were
hollering for their man: “Brooooooose!” They started the call every time the house lights went down. But Ms. Khan didn’t know about that traditional call. She thought they were
booing and left the stage.
I was introduced to the house by Browne, and before I could remark to myself on his being another Jackson, I was hearing the same calls for Bruce that had sent my Chicago sister back behind the
curtains. Those yells came rolling down over me from the darkness of the upper section of the stands like giant waves as the five of us, not Springsteen, emerged from the shadows behind a truckload
of instruments and equipment. At the time I wasn’t aware of what had happened the night before, but I heard what they were saying and I knew who was backstage. So I gave them a “good
evening,” and told them that Bruce would be with them later and that I’d appreciate it if they’d let me do my little bit since I was already out there and had a band with me.
No problem. They either figured “what the hell” or were too drunk to know I wasn’t Bruce, because they calmed down and let me do my three songs. We opened with “South
Carolina,” slowed it down a touch with “We Almost Lost Detroit,” and closed with “The Bottle.” I guess I noticed all of the film and recording equipment all over the
apron, but I honestly hadn’t given much thought about making the cut that would give me space on the vinyl or in the film. That was a bonus.
I was working at T.O.N.T.O. studio in those days, Malcolm Cecil’s Santa Monica facility near the beach, and when I got a call from California about being mixed for the release M.U.S.E. was
producing, I told them to go to Malcolm. I was in New York at my mother’s house when I got another call, this time saying Jackson Browne was catching a Friday night red-eye flight from L.A.
and would need my signature on a paper when he landed. I gave him my mother’s address—she was up on 106th Street at that point—and said I’d see him there.
It was raining and gray in Manhattan that Saturday morning. My mother was standing near the window cleaning up some breakfast dishes when she spotted a limousine cruising to a stop in front of
her building. Odds were it was Jackson, based on how many limos we used to see at Franklin Plaza. I joined her at the window and sure enough, a tall, thin dude with dark hair hopped out of the back
seat and trotted through the sprinkles to our front door and we buzzed him in.
He looked like he had been forced to stand up all the way from L.A., but he’d landed in a New York frame of mind: one step behind the world. Didn’t matter. My mother wouldn’t
let him leave.
You start to feel New York on the pilot’s approach to your runway, when the plane straightens out after that final wide turn and you plunge through the clouds and find yourself eye level
with the skyscrapers across the river. There’s an immediate jolt of adrenaline that brings your body up to city time. With apologies to San Francisco and the beautiful skyline that causes
folks from there to call their town “the city,” I have never felt my arms and legs energized and my pulse rate rise in the Bay Area the way it does when I’m in NYC.
And people always remind themselves not to be “city slicked” by fast-talking New Yorkers who give you five minutes worth of information in thirty seconds and charge you for an hour
every fifteen minutes. It is so much of a lifestyle that it has broken down to life without style. Even well-meaning folks can be misunderstood by visitors stunned and mystified by a life speed the
locals clearly consider “the usual.” Sometimes the visitors are determined not to let New York interfere with their visit, to let nothing deter them from their business.