Memphis Rent Party

by Robert Gordon

  “We didn’t have no babysitter, we didn’t have money hardly to pay the rent. We would have to carry Junior with us. I’d stay in the ladies’ room until time for the music to start because I nursed by breast and didn’t have no Pampers. When I’d get him dry, their daddy would take him and put him over behind the drums. He’d have to play or keep up some music, or else Junior would start to cry. Count [Basie] looked at Junior and said, ‘Hey bright eyes!’ ”

  Calvin was born a year behind Junior, and as their father got deeper into music, the kids kept up. They never knew otherwise. Finas turned down touring offers from Jimmie Lunceford and Lionel Hampton, opting instead to help raise his family. Calvin remembers, “I was about five years old and Junior was six, and we walked from Orange Mound to Beale Street for the first time. We had heard about the Midnight Rambles from my dad, he used to play those shows. So we followed the railroad tracks all the way to Beale Street, and we went in the theater and saw the shoot-’em-ups, cartoons, and all that stuff until midnight when the lights came on and everybody was supposed to leave. We ducked down under the seats, and when the lights went back out and the stage show started, two heads popped up with eyes big as teacups. But we saw the stage show, and it was exciting. That was the beginning. After that I knew that I was supposed to be in show business.” Their proximity to Satan’s music was confirmed when they were walking home from Beale and Calvin’s foot got caught in a root across the path; he stumbled and hollered to his brother, “Help me, the devil’s got my leg!”

  Calvin and Junior were different kinds of players, different kinds of people. Calvin identifies himself as an extrovert and Junior an introvert. At the age of four, Calvin suffered a severe burn on his back, resulting in six months on his stomach beneath an infrared lamp. “The doctor told my mother I wasn’t going to be as strong as other boys my age, but I refused to be weak. I played with the biggest boys, I did the dangerous things, I refused to be pampered. My brother was just the opposite. He practiced more or less eight hours a day. I concentrated on being more of a showman, and he concentrated on playing.”

  “Calvin would throw papers, shine shoes, chop cotton,” Mama Rose remembers. “Junior would be sitting up on that piano, ding dong bong bong bing! And Calvin would come home, Junior still practicing, not loud, just practicing. He’d say, ‘You need to come and go with us. Essie Mae—’ Calvin named the girls ‘—and all them were on the bus and we had our sodies and ice and wet our handkerchiefs and put them on our heads. You should come go, man, we’ll have a lot of fun.’ Junior would say, ‘No, I’ll take your word.’ Bing bong ding dong ding. So Junior didn’t do nothing but play music. He went into the army and his job was to get that trumpet and wake the soldiers. And after that, he’d go to the marching band. After that, to the officer’s club. So Junior never done no kinda work but play music.”

  The extent to which this applies to Junior is illustrated by an anecdote told by his acquaintance, Memphis musician and producer Jim Dickinson. “One of Phineas’s wives wanted him to pick up the laundry that was on the bed, get it out of the way. He said, ‘My name is Phineas Newborn, piano player. Not Phineas Newborn, laundry mover.’ ”

  In the collection of photos through which Mama Rose seems to be constantly browsing, she finds one of a young Junior in a bathing suit at the swimming pool. Phineas looks awkward, like maybe the sunlight and the outdoors are foreign to him. “Yeah,” she says, “they stole his clothes that day. He came home with some pants on big enough for that dresser. I said, ‘Whaaat,’ and he said, ‘Well I went swimming and I come out and I didn’t have no clothes and I just went in the junk room at the swimming pool and put on something.’ I said, ‘Oh man!’ ”

  Finas had been playing drums with the prominent Memphis band Tuff Green and the Rocketeers. As his kids grew older, he made them professional musicians as well. “When Junior and Calvin were in high school, they started playing with the old man,” says Mama Rose. “They was at the Plantation Inn when they were children and going to Booker Washington High School in the daytime.”

  The Plantation Inn was across the river in West Memphis, Arkansas, and it featured black bands playing for a white crowd. Across the bridge, outside the city limits, all the rules were looser. “I started to high school in ’48,” says Calvin. “My brother had been there a year, and it was pretty tough going to school every day and playing from nine until two at night—even for teenagers. On weekends, we used to come from the Plantation Inn and stop sometimes at Mitchell’s on Beale Street, where they jammed ’til daybreak.

  “But I enjoyed it because my pockets stayed full and I was able to buy nice clothes at Lansky Brothers on Beale Street and Julius Lewis even [the high-end store for whites]. And I wore the best shoes. I would stop on the way to school and get my stumps shined every morning. There was a shoe shop right on the corner of Alston and Lauderdale, going toward the railroad track. My shoes stayed clean every day. They stayed clean.”

  Both Mama Rose and Calvin remember the diversity of the Finas Newborn Orchestra. “They played what y’all call blues, jazz, folk music,” says Mama Rose. “They played all kind of music. That’s the difference in music now and music then. My husband’s band, they could read that music and they played any kind. At the Plantation Inn, they played ‘Tennessee Waltz,’ just like on the Grand Ole Opry, every night, and the owner and his wife would dance to it. My husband would teach them kids that you’re supposed to satisfy the customers. That’s the reason Calvin gets on his knees and all that. His daddy would tell him to play to the crowd. He’d keep guitar strings in his drum case, because when Calvin get through stomping and carrying on, he’d probably broke a string. His daddy was a drum beater, boy, and he taught ’em to play what the audience wants.”

  “My dad had a way with playing drums where he would lock you in,” says Calvin, “and you couldn’t go nowhere—you had to play right! And he had the foresight to see that television was going to be the thing. He had us play good music and give the people something to see at the same time. There was usually ten of us: four horns, four rhythms, a vocalist, and a dancer. You think James Brown is bad, you should have seen Baby Ray dance. He would line up chairs on the dance floor as long as a truck and turn somersaults over them.

  “My dad also insisted that we stay abreast of everything new. Bebop was pretty hot on the East Coast, Charlie Parker and Dizzy and Miles. ‘Moody’s Mood for Love’ was one of the first songs that lyrics were put to a jazz solo, and it was taboo, really. They were doing it on the East Coast, but people here weren’t accepting it. I sang it with Wanda Jones, and we only did it when my dad knew he wouldn’t make the audience angry by playing bebop.

  “And we had a family quartet within the band. Wanda, whom I married, was the vocalist. She also played trombone and piano. I arranged the music, my brother arranged, and my father arranged. We had quite a show.

  “A lot of people think that there is no such thing as wrong notes. Dissonance can be beautiful—Monk proved that—but there is a certain way to play dissonance. And silence is beautiful. But if you’re looking for it to be silent and all of a sudden”— he makes sounds like a pantry emptying—“it’s a little much. Something too abrupt aggravates me. My brother was such a genius with putting music together so I guess I got spoiled. We did a lot of improvising; it was like spontaneous combustion. To create spontaneously is the highest art form on the face of the earth. And creative intelligence is very spiritual. I think that’s as close to God as you can get.”

  Upon Junior’s 1955 release from the army, he returned to Memphis. His father had opened the Newborn Music Shop on Beale Street at a time when gods would meander through the door. “What was that boy’s name?” says Mama Rose. “Howling Wolf! He came in the shop and Finas had his head on that little desk in the back. Howling Wolf came in talking, called me some sweet name. He said, ‘You know what? You just would fit around—’ Finas raised up, picked up his pistol, and said, ‘Your head will just fit this thirty-eight too!�
� Howling Wolf said—” and here eighty-year-old Mama Rose Newborn howls like the Wolf in “Smokestack Lightnin’.”

  With Junior home, Senior was anxious to restart the family band. But Junior’s designs were on broader horizons; Count Basie had promised him an introduction to his New York City booking agent. Calvin states, “When we shattered our dad’s dream of having a family band by going to New York and forming the Phineas Newborn Jr. Quartet, we also broke his heart.”

  Before departing, Junior bought his parents the home on Alston. “I asked whose name should I put on this house,” Mama Rose remembers, “and Junior said, ‘Put Phineas Newborn Senior and Rosie Murphy Newborn, because as long as you and daddy got a floor and a door, I believe I got a place to live.’ ”

  Junior and Calvin set out and latched their dreams onto Manhattan. Their playing was tight. Since they’d been kids, the Newborn brothers “could feel one another’s emotions from afar, like mental telepathy,” writes Calvin in As Quiet As It’s Kept! “I stepped on a nail in the backyard and though he was inside the house, Junior said he felt it too. And when a window slammed down on his arm inside the house, though I was outside, I felt it.” The tight synchronicity got them gigs. Promptly, they were booked to open Count Basie’s run at Birdland. They sent for Memphis bassist George Joyner (later known as Jamil Nasser). “The toughest thing we had was keeping a drummer,” says Calvin, “because my brother played so fast and had such intricate arrangements. We changed drummers very often.”

  Rosie Murphy Newborn and Calvin Newborn. (Courtesy of Calvin Newborn)

  When the quartet played the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, Phineas Sr. was introduced in the audience. “Our dad stood up while the audience applauded, and as I stood on stage holding my guitar ready to play, I could feel his sadness,” writes Calvin. “I knew he wanted more than anything to be playing drums with us.” Sadness and disappointment would shadow Finas for the rest of his days.

  The Phineas Newborn Jr. Quartet was included on the 1957 Birdland tour, along with Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Lester Young, and others. Calvin was asked to keep his eye on pianist Bud Powell, who was not well. “Our quartet came on before the Bud Powell Trio at the concert hall in Toronto, Canada. We finished our set, and on the way to our dressing room backstage I noticed that Bud was butting his head against the wall and stopped him. I went into the dressing room and put down my guitar and when I came back out, Bud was on stage playing his opener, ‘Un Poco Loco.’ After that he played the most prolific interpretation of the standard ‘Like Someone in Love’ I’d ever heard. It was supernatural! I knew how Junior loved Bud’s piano playing, and though my heart was bleeding when chaperoning Bud, I’d missed something. Suddenly I knew why Junior dug Bud so. Though I had no way of knowing it then, some years later my heart would bleed for Junior just as it had for Bud.”

  Though the prominent critic Leonard Feather would soon proclaim him “the greatest living jazz pianist,” Junior’s talent provoked a heated debate among jazz fans. He was always praised for his technique, though some critics said his skill overpowered his emotion; they said the opposite about Calvin. “When I got to New York, I realized what I had been missing by not practicing. On the first record, they wouldn’t give me a solo. We were with Atlantic, and they said when Junior got through playing there was nothing left to play. Someone suggested that I take some lessons from a CBS staff guitarist, Barry Galbraith, and I learned a lot from him. I learned how to relax mostly, because it was hard for me to stay still and play. I was used to doing like Magic Johnson—flying.” The showman and the perfectionist; the extrovert and the introvert.

  There is a picture of Calvin as a young man, his face contorted and intent on his playing; it is clear that this man is deep into what he’s doing. And upon closer inspection, one sees that he is airborne, his legs pulled up higher than the nearby tabletops. “I was about six feet in the air,” he says, “playing the guitar.”

  He pauses, then reveals, “As a matter of fact, I used to think I could fly.”

  He lets that image sink in, then continues: “I felt like I could make myself as light as I wanted to. I have jumped off a two-story building and never really hurt myself. I saw a lot of movies and I thought I was a stuntman. Even today, sometimes I dream that I’m just walking down the street and spread my arms and just take off and fly.”

  His father must have felt the same as that trolley pulled him through the streets of Memphis. And his brother’s music reflects the same sense of freedom: Junior untethered the left hand, making it as integral to the melody as the right. It’s clear in his arrangement of “Dahoud” from his first album, Here is Phineas, and it’s clear in later original compositions, such as “Blues Theme for Left Hand Only.” “Junior wrote a lot of contrapuntal stuff,” says Calvin. “He had a lot of parts with me playing contrary to him, and it took a lot of practice to play together. Harmonically, he did a lot of things. Even before the Modern Jazz Quartet, he was doing that swing. He always believed in swinging hard.”

  Phineas Newborn Jr. performs at the University of Memphis for a class taught by visiting writer Robert Palmer. Randall Lyon, right, on Porta Pak for Televista Productions, circa 1976. (Courtesy of Pat Rainer)

  Junior’s little brother was right at his side, citing his own swinging influences. “Charlie Christian was a big inspiration to me,” he says, “but my main inspiration was Wes Montgomery. The first guitarist who really impressed me as a kid was Nat King Cole’s guitarist, Oscar Moore. Dad had some records of Nat; I used to hear his trio all the time and it just impressed me. Nat was in Memphis with Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic when we were little, and our dad played with Nat. Nat Cole’s feel influenced me and my brother. Junior said that the reason he and Oscar Peterson sound so much alike is because they were influenced by the same people—Nat Cole and Art Tatum.”

  With his kids grown and gone, Finas finally accepted an offer to tour. This time he was not with the greats he’d known in his younger days. “When the children went on,” says Mama Rose about her husband, “he started working for Paul A. Miller’s Circus. My husband would be on the drums with that brush, and that lion tamer would be saying, ‘Go on, Annie,’ and the lion would get near that hoop. The old man knew when she got close enough, he’d hit that cymbal—POW—pow pow! Annie would jump through that hoop over that fire.” When he quit the circus, just before he died, Mama Rose says they had to hire two drummers to take his place.

  He never got over the idea of the family reunion, his pride in his children always tinged with an unfulfilled yearning. Junior left New York for Los Angeles in 1960 and his father came out to visit. “One night our dad sat in with Junior at John T. McClain’s It Club,” Calvin says. “When he finished playing, he had to be helped off the drum stool. The next day, with a firm grip on the monkey wrench he was using to repair the kitchen sink in his apartment, Phineas Newborn Sr. suffered his seventh heart attack. It was fatal.”

  Junior’s health was also fragile. He’d endured the pressure of skyrocketing fame in his youth, then suffered through two failed marriages. In the early 1960s, he had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized in California. Upon returning to Memphis, his diagnosis and medication were changed, resulting in another lengthy hospital stay. Ultimately, under the care of his family and close friends, like Memphis saxophonist Fred Ford, he achieved some stability.

  His fondness for the ladies never changed. His standard pickup line for total strangers was “Do you like music? Give me a kiss.” Mama Rose remembers how people would take advantage of him. “All these pictures setting up there on the piano, I came home one day and all the pictures was gone, frames and all. Junior was sitting in here alone, and there was a pile of stuff on the floor where this woman had emptied a box out. I said, ‘Junior, what?’ He said, ‘I was around the corner there and they was playing the jukebox and somebody said, “This is one of the greatest piano players in the world, got all kinds of records.” This woman said, “Can I go around there and p
lay some?”’ She got around here and she wanted a drink. He goes to the whiskey store, left her in here and when he come back she done took pictures, frames and all. He was just that kind of person, he didn’t think. But I won’t complain, because he’s the one that fought the battle. I knew his condition and I just rolled with his conditions. But he didn’t think. He just trusted.”

  Junior’s love of the ladies nearly cost him his life. “Somebody beat him up once,” Mama Rose says, and her countenance darkens during this story, as if she bears responsibility, as if his mugging is a tear in her matriarchal fabric because it was preceded by a fight with her. “They had him—well I had him really—put away. He’d drank this liquor, I guess it went to his brain quick. I cut the light out or something and he had nerve enough to get up and he slapped me. Honey, I hit him with this left and he hit that chair. I went next door and called the folks and they put him in the VA. He was already taking medicine. They told me, ‘Don’t tell him about it now.’ After he got pretty settled, they told him. He said, ‘Well if I done that to my mama, find me a new place.’

  “They found him one, near some of them ofay brothers. Them white gals would be meddling with him and doing him. It had snowed and he had went down to one of them joints. And on his way back, a gang of them got him. They broke his fingers and messed him all up. Broke his fingers.”

  Mama Rose visited him in the hospital. “I told Junior, ‘Work your fingers. Play CDEFG.’ Junior worked C, D, E, F, G. I said, ‘Junior, them fingers’ gonna be all right.’ ” During his recuperation, Fred Ford arranged for him to be released evenings, and they recorded his Grammy-nominated album, Solo Piano.

  Junior was better, but not well. Jim Dickinson recalls picking him up for a gig in the late 1970s, around five thirty in the afternoon. “He was asleep with his overcoat on. He gets up and puts his hat on, sits down at the kitchen table. Mama Rose is cooking him a fish for breakfast. She’s had to deal with three generations of crazy musicians, Junior ain’t nothing to her. She says, ‘What do you want for your birthday?’