We'll Be Here For the Rest of Our Lives (14 page)

“James, I must tell you something about Steve,” I said.

“What is it, Paul?”

“It’ll kill him if he doesn’t get to play. This kid stayed in school because of you.”

There was a long pause before James came back with “Tell him he can play behind me. I’ll bring my own drummer and we’ll use both cats.”

“That’s great, James, Steve will be thrilled.”

Steve was thrilled, until, during rehearsal, it became clear that James was dancing only to the beat of his own drummer. Steve gallantly laid out.

Then James had an idea for a musical ending. It was complicated, but pure JB. However, try as he might, James could not communicate it successfully to his drummer. Rehearsal time was running out. I had to do something.

“Godfather,” I said, “with all due respect, it’s one rim shot, followed by two, then three.” My explanation enabled the drummer to execute James’s notion. “Mr. Please Please” was pleased.

After the show, James had his man summon me to his dressing room. Mr. Dynamite was sitting under the hair dryer, his hair in curlers. As he spoke in his funky patois, I had to get on my knees—as would a subject to his royal liege—and get under the dryer with him in order to make out his words. “You gotta have a reserve drummer, Paul,” said James, “because you never know what your regular drummer might do. In my band I got two drummers. Plus, my bass player can play drums, and I play drums if I have to. Get yourself a backup drummer.

“By the way, Paul,” James added, “I have to give you credit, man.”

“Why is that, James?”

“Because you have the
pressure of the time
. You got to do what you do in a flash. You got to turn on a dime. The
pressure of the time
is a bitch, and you handle it well, my brother.”

No compliment has ever meant more to me.

Happily, the James Brown/Steve Jordan relationship was resolved in a sweetly satisfying way. A few months later, when the Godfather was asked by a magazine to name his favorite drummer, James mentioned the great Steve Jordan.

I mentioned the cape. The cape—and the routine where James throws off the cape—has a spiritual background. There is, of course, the famous Sam Cooke song, “Touch the Hem of His Garment,” in which a sickly woman is healed by touching the garment of Jesus. Preachers used capelike garments in the churches that James visited early in his life. And when the sermons got good, and the preacher got to hollering, the clergyman would throw off the cloth, only to have it put back in place by an associate. Ironically, though, James told me he got the idea from watching the caped wrestler Gorgeous George.

Either way, the cape is more than a material object. It carries the spirit of James Brown who, in turn, carries the spirit of the Groove. Wearing the cape is like holding the Torah. Here’s how I got called to the altar:

Blood, Sweat and Tears were great. Their first album—
Child Is Father to the Man
—came out in 1968, and I loved it extravagantly. The combination of big-band horns with funked-up rhythms and brassy vocals was original. The song that haunted me most from that first Blood, Sweat and Tears LP was Al Kooper’s “I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know,” a blues ballad of the highest order. Al sang it on the record. (The definitive version, though, would be cut in 1973 by the immortal Donny Hathaway.) Somehow I wound up with Al’s original arrangement and started using it on Letterman after
we moved to CBS. Once when I sang it during a commercial break, Dave commented, “Paul, that sounds like a James Brown kind of thing. I feel like I should put the cape on you when you sing it.”

That’s all I needed—dispensation from my rabbi—so I sang it and then, right in the middle of the song, went to center stage and dropped to my knees. Dave came out with the cape, draped it over me, and we performed the James Brown ritual.

The audience liked it and it became an ongoing bit. Every Friday night another celeb would put the cape on me. Cape handlers included Donald Trump, Heidi Klum, Nathan Lane, Bill Murray, Tina Fey, James Lipton, Jack Black, Governor George Pataki, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Whoopie Goldberg, and Ted Koppel.

The highlight, of course, was when the man himself, JB, came back to cloak me and show the world what the cape ritual was all about. He infused the drama with an intensity that rivaled Pagliacci.

After a couple of years, though, the cape had lost its glitter, and I searched for a way to retire it with grace. Around this time I had seen Paul Anka on
American Idol
, where he performed special lyrics to his “My Way” relating to the show’s finale. And because I can never get enough special lyrics to “My Way,” I asked Paul if he’d write a set for the cape’s finale, and he readily agreed. So Paul Anka was the last to cover me with the cape after he sang:

While Anka sang, the cape, attached to pulleys, flew to the top of the set, as if ascending to the heavens.

Despite that final flight, though, the cape kept me grounded because James Brown kept me grounded—even decades before at college, when everything in me wanted to leave the ground.

College in the sixties.

The Rock Pile, a new club, opened in Toronto and booked world-class acts, including Procol Harum, the Chambers Brothers, Iron Butterfly, Brian Auger and the Trinity, featuring Julie Driscoll, and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Certain songs—like “Whiter Shade of Pale”—expressed the poetry of my own uncertainty.

The summer after freshman year, I convinced my parents to let me stay in Toronto by signing up for a course in musical arranging. It’s a good thing I did because, besides piano lessons, that’s the full extent of my formal training.

After being up all night with Ginny, laughing and loving and listening to music, I left her apartment sometime around 5 a.m. The sky was still dark, the streets deserted. The only sound was the whoosh of the street cleaner’s brush. Walking through Yorkville, Toronto’s Greenwich Village, I passed by the folk
clubs and jazz spots. The customers were long gone. I was heading home when I noticed someone playing acoustic guitar on the stoop of the Grab Bag, an all-night deli. He was a Latin-looking cat. His sound startled me, but I kept on walking. After taking five or six steps, though, I had to stop. I turned around and walked toward him. He smiled and kept playing. I knew a little something about jazz, but this guy was way beyond jazz. He was improvising to a rhythmic pulse. He sent melodies soaring into space. He was playing scales and modes I had never heard before. They were mind-boggling. He went on for nearly a half hour.

“How do you do that?” I asked as soon as he was through.

“I let it go,” he said. “I submit. Wanna try?”

Sure I did. Just as a beautiful Canadian sunrise gave light to the city, he and I made our way to a music room at the university that housed an upright piano. The guitarist introduced himself as Tisziji Munoz. His original first name was Michael. His lineage was Spanish and Puerto Rican, and he had grown up on the streets of Brooklyn. As a kid, he had been in gangs, and as a young man he’d joined the army, where he had played in a military band that, oddly enough, was filled with Coltrane freaks. Here he switched from his original instrument—congas—to guitar.

As Tisziji led me through his improvisational maze, he never offered a technical lexicon or, God forbid, a handbook. It was always “submit”—submit to the feeling, submit to the moment, submit to the power greater than thyself. He told me that my spirit was already free. It was just a matter of getting in touch with that freedom. When he spoke of seeking a Christ consciousness through the music, I couldn’t help but be taken aback. Once a bar mitzvah boy, always a bar mitzvah boy.

“I don’t mean crucifixion and resurrection,” Tisziji said. “I mean responding to a source of love that is pure and eternal and without judgment or limits. You tap into that source, and the spirit shows you where to go.”

That morning, my fatigue turned to excitement. We jammed together for well over three hours. I was fascinated. I couldn’t have risen farther from my Motown/Phil Spector/James Brown foundation. My orientation was girl group pop, R&B, precise horn punches, and in-the-pocket blues grooves. My orientation was the earth. Munoz’s orientation was the sky. “You gotta walk before you can fly, Paul,” he told me. That’s why he grounded me in standards. He taught me how to properly voice the tunes of my parents’ generation, “A Foggy Day in London Town,” “Body and Soul,” “All the Things You Are.” I knew them but could never realize them on piano until that morning. Tisziji taught me jazz from the inside out. And then, out we went, eventually leaving the standards and venturing into the unchartered territories of free jazz.

For reasons I still can’t quite fathom, I was able to hang. I was able to follow his lead, or the flow of the spirit, and allow myself a freedom I had never known before. I liked it. Hell, I
loved
it. It wasn’t precise. It wasn’t a three-and-a-half-minute Top Ten tune. It was imprecise and it went on and on. Even the traditional chord changes employed by jazz musicians were abandoned. But somehow I could cope with that abandonment and, with Tisziji’s guidance, float freely in his universe. I trusted the guy because I realized he heard things I didn’t. His ears were open; his heart was open. When I followed his lead and abandoned my notions of song structure, I heard new sounds. I made new sounds. Improbably enough, I found myself inside the avant-garde jazz world of Toronto.

Munoz was my musical guru. Others, in turn, called Sonny Greenwich, another far-out guitarist, their guru. In fact, Sonny had a cult. Tisziji loved Sonny’s musical mind. I became a member of Munoz’s band, but I also learned a great deal from listening to Sonny, who was more of a melodist than Tisziji. Sonny played a version of “When the World Was Young” that made the world weep. Sonny knew the standards, and he strongly urged all respectable jazz musicians, avant-garde or straight-ahead, to develop a large repertoire of songs. I dug Sonny, but Munoz was my mentor.

Being inside this bohemian enclave was certainly stimulating, but I was also a college boy with college requirements. My major was sociology because I thought music would be too hard. I was also interested in how people related to each other. When I was told that fieldwork and a long paper were required for my deviant sociology course, I decided to step back from my role as a jazz avant-garde insider and take an outside look. I saw how I could use my time with Munoz for a dual purpose: I’d continue to learn from him musically and, at the same time, use that firsthand experience as research. That’s how I came to write the term paper I called “A Sociological Analysis of the Subculture of Avant-Garde Jazz Musicians in Toronto, Canada, circa 1970.”

My thesis soon became clear: just as I had learned earlier in my life that the later the hour, the hipper the humor, now I saw that for the avant-garde jazzman, the poorer his finances, the more respect he earned. For example, local jazz flautist Moe Kaufman, who in 1958 had enjoyed huge success with a single entitled “Swinging Shepherd Blues,” was looked down on, precisely
because
of his hit. He was seen as a sellout. The academics called it inverse social stratification. All this intrigued me,
and I was able to write my thesis, giving real-life examples and actual quotes from musicians with whom I played.

I was deep into the culture and, for a while, thought it would be my musical future.

I remember one night after a gig the cats and I were talking. Dave Decker, Munoz’s drummer, was asking trumpeter Mike Malone a question.

“Hey, man, would you ever think about moving to New York and trying to play there?”