Detroit Life

Bill Heid

ARLINGTON, VA. – Recently, I made a four day trip to New York City which was highlighted by an organ trio gig with guitarist Peter Bernstein in Hell’s Kitchen.  The jaunt also featured doing my Ruppert Pupkin thing (“I dont mind waiting”) with record companies, consulting with local musical allied forces seeking light at the end of the tunnel in their eternal struggles, and enjoying extra moosurelli on pizza slices at Sal’s Famous where sadly, there still are no photo’s of brothers on the wall of fame.  For all the rehtoric of Mayor Giuliani’s crackdown on hentai (pervert) sex shops in Times Square and reductions in crime and new tourist-friendly Disney-like vibe in mid-town Manhattan, it felt and looked the same to me:  congested, dirty, claustrophobic, yet as always, soulful.

I made my New York debut in 1949, likely as the Giants played the Dodgers at either Ebbets Field or the Polo Grounds and Diz and Bird played “Lester Leaps In” at unknown speeds somewhere on 125th street, but as a mere one year old, was too young to savor the now-archeologicalness of it all.  My uncle had a two story wooden house built on stilts on Jamaica Bay in Broad Channel, Queens where family pilgrimages were made every summer in my fathers Buick Roadmaster through the 1950′s which now seems like a million years ago.  My first of a hundred or more hitch- hiking trips to New York began in 1966 and into the early 70′s, can recall thumbing through Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx to attend ball games in the old Yankee Stadium.  I lived there for a few month’s in 1973, working mostly organ gigs in Newark at the last chitlin clubs and played and hung with Eddie Gladden, Grachan Monchur III, Grant Green, and Larry Young, quite a musical education.  Other than a brief trip in 1977, I hadn’t returned to New York until 1992 when a heroic hitch-hike effort was made to see the new (and ugly) Yankee Stadium, then head to Harlem for an enjoyable organ gig with saxophonist Don Braden.  At that time, having spent about two years living in the massiveness of Osaka, Nippon, when I got the first panoramic view of mid-town from the New Jersey Turnpike, I remember the scene not overwhelming me as it did in the early days.  With more Nippon trips, a year and a half in Los Angeles, another trip to Singapore and Nippon again last year, last week’s visit was my first in over six years.

Linking up with my brother George and meeting with musicians from all over the U.S struggling to survive in that theatre of war made for what the Honeymooner’s Grand High Exalted Mystic Ruler would call “a great night in the history of the Racoons.”  Yet when it was over and I crossed back into New Jersey, I felt like I had made bail and was released from prison.  Many “stay behinds” as they call them at CIA in nearby Langley, urged me to join the fight, claiming I could work every night.  But no longer a nice fresh young spring chicken, at this point, it would be easier to stay in the friendly confines of Detroit, which compared to New York, feels like being on a fishing trip with Ted Williams in British Columbia.  Beyond the filth, claustrophobia, financial helicoptics, and constant aggravation in just finding a parking space, the main reason why I can’t muster up the spirit to live in that lunacy is what might be termed the “musicalizationalistical factor” itself.  That, simply put, is this: Although New York is the only game in town for finding an abundance of great musicians unsurpassed anywhere and making hopeful “contacts”, in order for the best musicians to survice, many need day jobs (something I’ve resisted all my life), or a “Rooskie-Cuba” subsidy (wife or girlfriend working or support from wealthy parents), or worse, biting off the chicken head like a circus geek.  That could mean playing society gigs (club dates), corny weddings, or backing come corny alleged female singer who concludes “The Lady Is a Tramp” sounding like an L.A.P.D. Code 3 (lights and siren) police unit chasing a suspect in 77th Division.  And all that just to pay outrageous rent on a crib that makes Travis Bickle’s “Taxi Driver” apartment feel like a mansion in Grosse Pointe Farms.

I admire those noble grunts who can stick it out, but for my gosh-darn self, i can’t envision all that agony just to say I’m part of the Big Apply music scene, though I must confess, it’s tempting to join the musical refugee column coming from everywhere to squat in the bush with Charlie and make a go of it.  Rather, for now, after my share of suffering 33 years in this degrading business and my troops quite weary, I choose to join Richard E. Nixon in seeking “peace at the center.”  Now we’ll have more blues stories, but first let’s tune in on these words.

This story was previously published in the Blues Notes, a periodical produced and published by the Detroit Blues Society.