The Tragedy and Triump of Charlie Parker

BOOKS

BIRD LIVES!

The Life and Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker by Ross Russell (Charterhouse)

Ross Russell has written the definitive biography of Charles Parker. It is a well-researched, inspired and ultimately unpleasant book. It is a modern tragedy, the story of the destruction of an innovative artist, and implicitly, the destruction of those artists who emulated his life style as well as his art.

This is almost as much a book about heroin as it is about jazz and what it means to be a black musical genius in a country which has no use for such a thing. It tells the true Bird story: addicted to heroin for 19 years, creating a new music out of an older one, praised, damned, lionized, worshiped (as well as, on occasion, appreciated). And finally, young, gifted and dead at 34.

Eighteen years later, we have the comprehensive biography. But Russell�s fine talent isn�t just a gift for organization. It�s also his ability to describe Bird�s music with a minimum of technical references and to convey its elusive passions and subtleties through mere words. Russell has obviously been moved and his musical descriptions are exciting — a rarity in jazz writing. I kept putting the book down, and going back to the records, satisfying myself with their beauty, avoiding the return to the sad story with the unhappy ending.

When Bird first began to make himself heard in New York, few people knew anything about him, except that he was from Kansas City. Russell lays out the beginnings.

Parker was born August 29, 1920, lived with his mother during his early years and at age 14 began his jazz apprenticeship by listening to the musicians who made up the lively, creative K. C. scene. That scene thrived, ironically, only as long as the government was corrupt. Infamous �boss� Tom Pendergast, the local dictator during the depression, allowed the black K. C. clubs to run all night. His profit motive resulted in an atmosphere of musical experimentation and development — the endless hours led to endless jam sessions, out of which the finer talents grew and dominated. A �Kansas City Sound� developed, the most famous practitioners of which were the Count Basie Band and Lester Young. Russell loves this early K. C. music scene so much that the habits and musical habitats of the black musicians residing in and passing through the K. C. of the �30s fill up the first quarter of the book.

Bird arrived in the Apple (stoneage slang for New York) ready to make his mark. Already, at 18, he was exploring harmonies and developing a rhythmic sense that was unprecedented in jazz, or which was at least a radical extension of existing precedents. He also brought with him a three year old drug habit.

The high life and hard times unravel from here like an ordinary hard-luck success story — a few breaks, a few bummers, constant woodshedding, and finally, beginning in the mid-�40s, recognition. But Bird (I�ve read at least three explanations of the origin of this nickname and Bird, sometimes Yardbird, gave more than one account himself; Russell says it�s from Bird�s early liking for chicken sandwiches) was extraordinary, indulging his outrageous appetites for food and sex, functioning like a demon even though he had enough heroin in him to leave the average man nodding.

Bird was an addict not only because of his environment (oppressed black sub-culture) or his personality structure (impulsive, infantile) but also because he was an innovator, alienated from the people around him almost as much as they were alienated from the society that surrounded them. He needed his reality buffer to survive the hard times — but by the time the high life arrived, it was impossible for him to drop his habit. He could only keep it steady. Keep it cool.

When the bop revolution opened and spread, Bird was 25. His final nine years were a series of tragedies, with a few triumphs, all a result of the pattern evolved in those first 25 years. The destruction is so inevitable that even if you know the end it seems a miracle that Bird survived for so many nightmarish years.

The revolution he inspired passed him by as less controversial figures reaped what financial rewards were to be had from the new music. His popularity waned within his unpopular field, mainly because of a series of grotesque and pathetic incidents, both personal and painfully public. Some of these incidents have previously been related as anecdotes falling into the �hip, weird dude� category or imbued with an aura of almost mystic significance. Russell ties them all together and we see Bird frustrated, going down slow, so very, very slowly that his death, in 1955, is a welcome finale.

In the book�s final section, Russell practically apologizes for his white, middle class background, questioning his own credentials for writing about Bird. That shit should be stomped into the ground. He�s written a comprehensive and compassionate book that will make you want to hear the music. And the music, as they say, will speak for itself.

Richard C. Walls

FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (Straight Arrow)

This is a tough, ugly book, embellished With abuse and the violence of Thompson�s mind. �Hubert Humphrey is a treacherous, gutless old ward healer who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current.�

It�s unfortunate that the public is likely to be as indifferent to books on the �72 presidential campaign as they were to the election itself. Thompson�s atmospheric account of the campaign, culled from his bi-weekly Rolling Stone reports, may lack focus, and his opinions may have changed, but Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail does achieve a novelistic strength of characters, mood and momentum, particularly toward the end.

Driving along on embittered energy, one can feel Thompson�s contempt and exhiliration as he smells more than stale cigars around the likes of Humphrey, Muskie and �our president.�

If there is a gentler side to the book,. it�s reserved for the McGovern people, for whom the author�s affection and impatience is evident as they try to rise to something like a new politics, while attempting to use the Democratic machine. They fail miserably, of course.

Although it�s not as powerful as Norman Mailer�s complete account of the conventions St. George and the Godfather, Thompson�s book is a valuable and gritty document of what was a torturous year for many of us.

Donald Jennings

AN ASSASSIN'S DIARY Arthur H. Bremer (Harper's Magazine Press)

I fully agree with those who say that Bremer�s diary of madness should never have been published, but that doesn�t seem to make very much difference now. Of course this book will help to create even more assassins, but what is done is done.

What interests me is that Bremer seems to have been the first hippie — better, punk — assassin. Oh, I know, punks aren�t retard dishwashers, or at least no one has ever admitted that such people listen to the same records and radio stations, smoke the same dope, wear the same clothes and look at the same (gulp) magazines that you and I do. But anyone with an ounce of honesty must know by now that the idea that the typical �counter-culture� vulture is a suave, well-read, articulate child-of-the-universe is a bag of bullshit.

Bremer talks almost obsessively about cutting his hair in this diary. �To be a rebel today you have to keep a job, wear a suit & stay apolitical. Now THAT�S REBELLION!� When he walks into the Waldorf Astoria, one of his key impressions is that he �never got looked at by ANYONE.�

All of this doesn�t just indicate that Bremer had been a long-hair, as anyone could have figured out from the newspaper reports. It indicates something deeper — something about the way that retards are dealt with in straight and �counter� society as well. Well, what would you do if Arthur Bremer showed up at your party?

And then again, what would Arthur Bremer feel like doing if you did that?

The point is, I think, that punkitude is not all peace and enlightenment. There are just as many retards sharing your lifestyle as there are retards in any other spectrum of society, and now�s not the time to dummy up about it.

Finally, Arthur Bremer is just a different symptom of the same old Mansonoid disease. (I�m not suggesting a �Free Arthur Bremer� movement. Would YOU want him out of jail?)

But, unlike most people who�ve approached this book as though Bremer�s lack of intellect, not Wallace�s shooting, were the crime, it seems to me that Bremer is a fairly pathetic figure, maybe the first of a new _ wave of cretinmutants.

Which is an interesting thought, because if we, as everyone from Ed Sanders to Frank Zappa to Bob Dylan at least implied, during the �60s, are somehow American mutants, what a -bout the double-mutants like Bremer? Where do they fit in? Or do they at all?

Even if Arthur Bremer was scrubbing plates while the college-level freaks were interpreting Dylan songs, he still must have felt a part of some amorphous �movement,� even if he saw it only as a movement to fame. Why else did he cut his hair, and get his gun, if not because he was somehow crippled the way the rest of the �movement� was, once the Beatle-dream was over.

And let�s drink to the lowly of birth.

Dave Marsh

OFF THE WALL

REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE by Huey P. Newton (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich): This is Huey�s autobiography, but it is not at all blood-thirsty, in case you hadn�t noticed Bobby Seale�s mayoral campaign in Oakland. Revolutionary Suicide seems to be a semi-religious, semi-political point of view, developed by Newton in response to the incredibly high black suicide rate. Huey is the most interesting figure in the black movement and his autobiography is surprisingly lucid. The absence of arty discussion of Jonathan Jackson here is strange, though it may have to do with the Panther�s deemphasis of violence. George Jackson is also given very little space, and the Eldridge Cleaver question was discussed much more thoroughly by Huey in interviews in Esquire and Playboy, only recently. Still, a fine book.

THE GREAT MOVIE STARS - THE INTERNATIONAL YEARS by David Shipman (St. Martin�s Press): Cinema�s mythology on parade inside a glittery silver cover. 220 actors from AnnMargaret to Jon Voight, profiled with complete filmography. The descriptions are perceptive and witty, The analysis complete: personality, ability, successes, failures. The plethora of stills is great, too. Elvis is �a junior Victor Mature,� Jane Fonda �so very very good� but the omissions are glaring: Bette Davis and Roddy McDowall come to mind. Hopefully, they were discussed in the preceding volume, The Golden Years. If you�re an addict, like me, this comprehensive venture is a hit on the bookshelf or the coffee table.

BAD MOON RISING Edited by Thomas M. Disch (Harper & Row): This one is subtitled �An Anthology of Political Forebodirigs,� but what it really is is a collection of turgid science-fiction musings about the usual. Yawn.