Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

Apple only the FBI really worried about the precise nature of someone’s political commitment, for by the time I got there it was a city in which even the billionaires were, as likely as not, to be Democrats. Curiously enough jazz did not much appeal to the full-time American Marxists, whose instinctive taste seemed to be for classical music and political folksong. (I still recall the disastrous evening when I took Paul Baran to hear Miles Davis at the Black Hawk in San Francisco.)

Most of my jazz contacts were men, with a few exceptions such as the tough showbiz pro who devoted her life to furthering the career of the wonderful pianist Erroll Garner, and who tried to do me a massive favour by getting me on the Johnny Carson Show with Garner on the assumption that I would publicize the book I had recently published on jazz. (My remoteness from the realities of American publishing in 1960, thirty years ahead of the British scene, was such that I went through the entire four minutes of my interview slot without so much as mentioning the title of my book.) Most of them were in some ways refugees from the conventional American male life of the 1950s, decade of ‘the man in the grey flannel suit’, except the greatest talent-scout and promoter in the history of jazz, John Hammond Jr. No out-of-town visitor, seeing him outside, say, the Village Vanguard, would ever have asked him, as I was asked, standing with a friend outside a place in North Beach, San Francisco: ‘Excuse me, but are you two gentlemen beatniks?’ Of course, nobody needed to ask who he was outside the place to which he took me first, Small’s Paradise in Harlem. John Hammond Jr was almost a caricature of the Ivy League White Anglo-Saxon Protestant upper class: tall, crewcut, talking in the sort of accent in which one imagines they talked in Edith Wharton novels – he was a Vanderbilt himself – and sporting an unwavering grin. As so often in the USA, this did not indicate a great sense of humour. He was not a man for informality or casual laughs, any more than his one-time brother-in-law Benny Goodman, who had the reputation of freezing his sidemen with a basilisk stare. John remained an unreconstructed and militant 1930s leftwinger to the end, even though the FBI could never tie him down as a card-carrying communist. The history of jazz in the USA before the Second World War and, since he was probably the most important single influence in launching the ‘swing music’ vogue of the 1930s, the history of the USA, cannot be understood without him. I asked him on his death-bed, what he was proudest of in his life. He said it was to have discovered Billie Holiday.

By the time I knew him, he was no longer at the musical centre, though no man who was about to launch Bob Dylan into the big time could be regarded entirely as yesterday’s man. Another former New York jazz-lover who became my best American friend, not merely made it his business as a journalist to keep in touch with all generations within reach, old and young, but did so with a natural, good-tempered, surreal spontaneity that captured them all. This was the man who, among other things, had just discovered Lenny Bruce, and made himself election agent for the great bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s campaign for the American presidency, which neither of them regarded entirely as a joke, namely Ralph Gleason. New York Irish, he had left the city to become showbusiness and popular music columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, a paper that prided itself on not belonging to William Randolph Hearst, and on columnists who were not surprised at anything they came across in a wealthy, cool and courteously dissident city. He lived in a modest house on the upper hillside in Berkeley, full of collections of records, tapes, musical projects, print in various formats and (generally young) visitors, all kept in working order by his tough and protective wife Jeanie. I treated it as a refuge from Palo Alto, driving there in the first car I ever owned, a 1948 Kaiser, which I had bought for $100 and sold at the end of the summer quarter to a mathematical logician of world distinction for $50.

For music and showbusiness the Bay Area of San Francisco in 1960 was a hip place, a good market but on the margins. Everyone played the town, but nothing much had come out of there, except the first self-conscious wave of white Dixieland music. It was the sort of place where elderly masters such as the great jazz pianist Earl Hines settled down, secure in a good, solid club public. Even Duke Ellington accepted a club date rather than a concert there, thus providing me with the unforgettable occasion, the first since 1933, of hearing the band in the milieu for which it had been designed, namely a space with social drinkers where the real measure of a band’s impact was not applause, but the sudden silence as conversations ceased at the tables.

San Francisco, though not yet established as the Gay Republic or the hinterland of Silicon Valley, had a national profile and a recognized presence on the American scene, quite apart from the sensational beauty of its bay. It was a liberal city, though less politically radical than its neighbour Berkeley became in the 1960s, proud of its dissidents (not least Harry Bridges). Even then it was relaxed about drugs. By California standards it had freightcar-loads of history, the (then) most famous Chinatown, the memory of the Maltese Falcon, and a reputation as the most prominent centre of avant-garde literature in the 1950s, the ‘beat’ movement, fashionable enough for Ken Tynan to congratulate me on going there. ‘There’ was the area around Broadway, North Beach, a sort of Pacific St-Germain- des-Pres, where I would meet Ralph at the local Flore, and Enrico’s, facing the City Lights Bookstore, greeting and being greeted by the personalities of the city as they strolled past. Unlike the New York Broadway, on this Broadway people strolled. And across the Bay Bridge there was Berkeley. In the middle sixties ‘the white sons of middle class America’ briefly made it the quintessential scene of hippy youth and ‘flower power’, incidentally generating (as Gleason noted) ‘the first American musicians, aside from the country and western players, who are not trying to sound black’. ⁵ Ralph made himself the mouthpiece for the Haight-Ashbury music, groups such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, although he did not by temperament belong on the drug scene. Indeed, he gave up smoking grass. He belonged to the generation of intellectuals who smoked pipes, as I then did also. Never in good health, he died in 1975 aged fifty-eight.

For three reasons he became my window on America. Living in the world of jazz, an outsider music, he caught the vibrations of coming events which escaped others – the changing tone of the sounds that came from the black ghetto, the white kids’ avant-garde which discovered the force of the black city blues beat, the anticipations of the Berkeley student revolt which became national after 1964, global in 1968. These were not things noticed elsewhere in the summer of 1960. Nobody I knew on the faculties of Berkeley, still less the distinguished but stuffy Stanford, suggested I might be interested in going to the political camping weekend which the Berkeley leftwingers were organizing that summer, because none knew it was happening. Ralph did, who had no academic or recognizable political connections, but to whom students talked. Not that Ralph was much into organized political radicalism or moved in the circles of Bay Area leftism. The Symbionese Liberation Army was much more his style, a bizarre reductioad absurdum of Bay Area millennialism, remembered (if at all) for first kidnapping and then converting the daughter of William Randolph Hearst Jr. He applauded and entertained the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech rebels, admired the mass oratory as well as the disorganized sincerity of their leader, the somewhat farouche physics student Mario Savio, and, after his expulsion, sent him and his wife/partner to me at Birkbeck where he hoped we might find something for him. (J. D. Bernal’s physics department obliged, but academic life and scientific research were clearly not his bag, and he returned to life among the cafes and head-shops on Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, within reach of his old triumphs.)

The second reason why Ralph was a marvellous introduction to post-sixties America was that, an immigrant into the most culturally utopian corner of California himself, he could understand the aspirations of its young and their cultural revolution. Besides, though the least infantile of men, he was not himself a character to grow old. He could draw on an inexhaustible reservoir of enthusiasm, which I could not share, even for rock groups. Once again, this made him wonderfully sensitive to the vibes of coming times. It was he who helped one of his young followers to start a rock magazine, he who found the title for it from a record of the Chicago blues-singer Muddy Waters, Rolling Stone, he, the least commercial of men, who thanks to it and to what had been a small jazz and fringe satire label Fantasy Records found himself with more money than he had been used to and in a position to send whisky and cigars to old friends.

Last, but not least, by style and temperament Ralph, himself inconceivable anywhere except the USA, made his country easier to understand, even though its civilization was in some respects stranger to Europeans than any other except the Japanese. He had what seems to outsiders the characteristic American combination of sudden loves and hates, sentimentality in feeling (but not in the spoken word). Nevertheless, he appeared to be immune to the three built-in hazards of American cultural life: self-absorption, the tendency to ponder what it means to be