The Last Holiday

by Gil Scott-Heron

  Keg Leg was headed straight for him. He started up with what for him was a scream.

  “Listen you big . . .” I didn’t catch the last word.

  “First I’m kickin’ your ass and the rest a y’all get on line!”

  He couldn’t have brought much more shock to that stage if he had started speaking the Gettysburg Address. With the conclusion of the announcement, Keg stepped directly to the giant road boss, placed his huge head into the center of the man’s chest, and started to back him across the stage.

  “Yo, yo!” the big brother called out, taking another quick step back. “What the hell . . .”

  Keg was adamant.

  “I told you when them humpers started packin’ they stuff! I told you when you made them put my stuff back down on the floor! That’s what the hell they in here for. I had everything onstage and you made ’em take it down. Screw you! I ain’t liftin’ that shit back up here. I’m kickin’ yo’ ass, you sumbitch, and then everybody who don’t like it!”

  “Wait up. Hold it!”

  It was all the big man could do to look around Keg at the rest of his men.

  “A.J.,” he called to one. “I want you guys to put their stuff back up here. Just put us in the corner there and then put their things up here for him.”

  Keg looked back at the rest of the crew. Without enthusiasm, they were nodding and looking over the edge of the rear of the stage where all of our drums and keyboards and cables sat in a pile where they’d been set after Big Man made the humpers take them down.

  Keg was still fuming as he stepped away, but his anger had melted away. It was like watching air let out of a scaled down brown bulldozer. His anger had filled his chest and made him seem larger and fiercer.

  Soon, as we all stood and watched the Rose Royce crew working our stuff over the edge and up the stairs to the work space, Keg was himself again, joking and speculating on what had happened to Lakeside. The Dayton, Ohio, group had been scheduled to open the show and word had it we might have to play first because they were running well late.

  “Them snakes and gators out there in the swamp got ’em,” Keg told us. “They know when it’s city folks an’ don’t know where the hell they going. They put up detour signs and lead ’em right down to their dinner table.”

  I don’t remember anybody ever speaking again about Keg’s challenge to that man-and-a-half at the Centroplex. Hell, in Starkville, Mississippi, he reached out of the bus window with a pipe in his hand and smacked hell out of a gas station attendant who insisted on filling our bus with a cigarette in his mouth. Keg was the type of Aries they write about in the astrology books, the kind who will come across a problem and start working on it. Rams rarely came down from the mountain tops just to start trouble. But there’s nothing in the neighborhood up there among those impossible footholds, so if you’re up there they’ll ram the hell out of you.

  I’d realized that about Keg since the day I met him. There were a dozen of us waiting in front of the Charisma office on Georgia Avenue in Northwest Washington. I had purchased a new Cary Van for our equipment and my road manager, Tom Abney, sent Keg Leg to pick it up. At nearly closing time, we stood out front waiting to see the truck with its sun roof and burglar-discouraging metal grille across the back.

  It didn’t take long before we spotted it rolling toward us. The driver, still in shadows, pulled past us and put himself in position to parallel park. Not so fast, Brother Man. Before he could back into the spot a nearly new Mercedes-Benz turned out of traffic and pulled into the parking space head-on. We could all see the triumphant driver, a hurrying African dressed for business in a white shirt, striped tie, and suit jacket. The Benz driver opened his door a crack and began fumbling with his keys and an attaché case in the shotgun seat. Then the door slammed shut again on the driver side of the Benz, the street side.

  That was when I got my first look at my new road man, Dennis Little, the nephew of the Charisma boss, Norris Little, who had asked me to hire him. It struck me immediately. The brother, about five-foot-seven, looked like nothing so much as a huge barrel set solidly on plow-pulling thighs. He now planted himself against the Benz driver’s door.

  “I am here first,” the driver responded, rolling down his window to protest. “I have this space, man. I have this space. I am here first.”

  “Yeah, you got that space,” said Dennis casually, “but you can’t get out of the car.”

  I don’t know what I expected to hear the brother say, but whatever it was that wasn’t it. If I had been reviewing a list of possible lines with only that line on it, I would’ve had trouble picking it. Of course, it was perfect. But the African hadn’t picked it, either. He rolled the window up with the quickness. He looked at the imposing bulk that blocked his exit to the left and then stared out at us through the passenger window. We all stood there motionless, speechless.

  He rolled the window down again. “I am here first.”

  Then he realized that this was ground that had been covered. With a shrug of dejection, he put his key back into the ignition and started to back up. Dennis, without a further word, backed off and let the Mercedes pull out. With that he backed the van in perfectly, hopped out, pushed the door closed, and flipped the keys to me as he passed the sidewalk cluster.

  “Nice ride, boss. I really like the sun roof.”

  And from that day on he had been Keg Leg.

  29

  The next time I played Madison Square Garden was in September 1979, four years after the Arista celebration. I was working with a quintet of Carl Cornwell, Ed Brady, Rob Gordon, and Tony Green. There was a weeklong series of concerts being held by “M.U.S.E.,” the Musicians United for Safe Energy, a group formed by Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Jesse Colin Young, and some others after the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in March of that year. I hadn’t had a lot of time to get myself together for that one because we had only been invited about two weeks in advance of the event.

  The shows started at 7:30 each night because there were a bunch of different artists playing. We were scheduled to play second, behind Peter Tosh. Not. Because when “hit time” arrived, Peter refused to go on and somebody from the group of musicians who were running things was standing halfway down the twisting ramp under the arena waving frantically at our limo driver as we pulled up. If the first act wouldn’t or couldn’t go on, everybody moved up. The organizer asked whether we could go on first. Hell, we could play at four in the afternoon.

  A documentary film about the event called No Nukes came out later, and we appeared in it doing something from our set. If we looked a little disheveled (and I managed to do that pretty often), that time it was because we went from the limo to the stage. No problem. Well, there was one problem. The night before, when Chaka Khan came out to play, the youngsters from New Jersey were hollering for their man: “Brooooooose!” They started the call every time the house lights went down. But Ms. Khan didn’t know about that traditional call. She thought they were booing and left the stage.

  I was introduced to the house by Browne, and before I could remark to myself on his being another Jackson, I was hearing the same calls for Bruce that had sent my Chicago sister back behind the curtains. Those yells came rolling down over me from the darkness of the upper section of the stands like giant waves as the five of us, not Springsteen, emerged from the shadows behind a truckload of instruments and equipment. At the time I wasn’t aware of what had happened the night before, but I heard what they were saying and I knew who was backstage. So I gave them a “good evening,” and told them that Bruce would be with them later and that I’d appreciate it if they’d let me do my little bit since I was already out there and had a band with me.

  No problem. They either figured “what the hell” or were too drunk to know I wasn’t Bruce, because they calmed down and let me do my three songs. We opened with “South Carolina,” slowed it down a touch with “We Almost Lost Detroit,” and closed with “The Bottle.” I g
uess I noticed all of the film and recording equipment all over the apron, but I honestly hadn’t given much thought about making the cut that would give me space on the vinyl or in the film. That was a bonus.

  I was working at T.O.N.T.O. studio in those days, Malcolm Cecil’s Santa Monica facility near the beach, and when I got a call from California about being mixed for the release M.U.S.E. was producing, I told them to go to Malcolm. I was in New York at my mother’s house when I got another call, this time saying Jackson Browne was catching a Friday night red-eye flight from L.A. and would need my signature on a paper when he landed. I gave him my mother’s address—she was up on 106th Street at that point—and said I’d see him there.

  It was raining and gray in Manhattan that Saturday morning. My mother was standing near the window cleaning up some breakfast dishes when she spotted a limousine cruising to a stop in front of her building. Odds were it was Jackson, based on how many limos we used to see at Franklin Plaza. I joined her at the window and sure enough, a tall, thin dude with dark hair hopped out of the back seat and trotted through the sprinkles to our front door and we buzzed him in.

  He looked like he had been forced to stand up all the way from L.A., but he’d landed in a New York frame of mind: one step behind the world. Didn’t matter. My mother wouldn’t let him leave.

  You start to feel New York on the pilot’s approach to your runway, when the plane straightens out after that final wide turn and you plunge through the clouds and find yourself eye level with the skyscrapers across the river. There’s an immediate jolt of adrenaline that brings your body up to city time. With apologies to San Francisco and the beautiful skyline that causes folks from there to call their town “the city,” I have never felt my arms and legs energized and my pulse rate rise in the Bay Area the way it does when I’m in NYC.

  And people always remind themselves not to be “city slicked” by fast-talking New Yorkers who give you five minutes worth of information in thirty seconds and charge you for an hour every fifteen minutes. It is so much of a lifestyle that it has broken down to life without style. Even well-meaning folks can be misunderstood by visitors stunned and mystified by a life speed the locals clearly consider “the usual.” Sometimes the visitors are determined not to let New York interfere with their visit, to let nothing deter them from their business.

  Jackson Browne came into my mother’s apartment locked on leaving, on getting to where he was going. But my mother was as firm as she was friendly. And I had to listen to the tape before I could approve it anyway. While I looked around for the cassette player, she was guiding him to the table.

  “Come and sit down, you poor thing. It will only take a minute and you’ve got to have something to eat.”

  Jackson reluctantly sat down and relaxed, maybe for the first time in hours.

  I listened to the tape. It was an abridged version of “Detroit,” smoothly shortened to fit the producers’ request that it not exceed three and a half minutes. I was okay with whatever, recognizing the recognition of my participation that would come with being included on the album and film. Hearing the song, I was reminded of how that whole evening had gone and how much I had enjoyed seeing folks from the music community working together and trying to do something positive.

  30

  I saw Stevie Wonder with Barbara Walters on 20/20 one August night in 1980. Seeing Stevie on that show made me realize he was braver than I would ever be again without the TV equivalent of a prenuptial agreement—I’d been double-crossed too many times. So there I was, watching Stevie go one-on-one with the queen bee of beating people up.

  I didn’t doubt Stevie’s ability to represent himself, but TV ratings are not based on making subjects look good. They don’t even have to make you look like you. They have to make an audience look. But it’s hard to make Stevie look bad. He is as clever with his vocabulary as he is versatile with his keyboards. He was adept at saying what he thought about your line of questioning if it was out of order, always maintaining that same smile of his. I nodded at the screen as he played a few chords of “Happy Birthday” on the piano, with a smile.

  The news was that Stevie was going on tour in October with Bob Marley and would be promoting his new LP, Hotter than July. He was also planning a rally in Washington, D.C., in January 1981, to bring attention to the question of a national holiday honoring Dr. King. Happy Birthday.

  I watched Barbara Walters because Stevie couldn’t. With the half-glasses sitting on her nose like an acrobat on a seesaw, reading glasses that she used to read Stevie while she scanned her notebook.

  I knew the announcement of the tour meant that Stevie would be coming to D.C. and I knew when they got there I would have a ticket.

  It didn’t work out that way. What I mean is, I got to the Washington concert but I didn’t have to pay. And that was also something that I could not have predicted. I didn’t find out I’d get in through the stage door until November.

  A few days after I saw Stevie’s interview with Barbara Walters and told myself that I wanted to see his show, I got a call from an old New York friend named Clive Wasson. I didn’t know what kind of work Clive was doing, but I could almost hear the L.A. in his voice.

  It was a pleasant conversation. We had some people that we both knew and spent a few minutes going over their current situations before Clive got down to business. He was working for the folks who were promoting Stevie’s tour with Bob Marley. The problem was that Bob was on tour with the Commodores and was playing in the next few weeks in the same cities Stevie would do in early November. And just where would the Midnight Band be in early November?

  I had spent the better part of five years getting people familiar with the Midnight Band onstage and on three albums. But now that the name had indeed established some recognition even among promoters, there was no Midnight Band. We had reformed and added women to our songs on Secrets in 1978, and then took those women vocalists on the road. After less than a year we’d cut back to a quintet we’d called A Mere Façade, but the West Coast representative of our record label came to me in Denver one night and said, “Who are these Arab dudes you’re playing with—who’s Emir Fasad?” After I got up off the floor from laughing, I needed another name change because the potential for phonic distortion was obviously more extensive than I could overcome. People continued to refer to whoever I brought with me as the Midnight Band, but Brian’s departure, in March 1980, had erased the last trace of “Midnight” from my music. At that point I had reconnected with Carl Cornwell, the play-anything wizard I had known since my days at college, and we reconfigured the rhythm section and added horns. The band we organized had a totally new sound, and I called it the Amnesia Express. From mid-April through early July, I had been on tour with the new group and then recorded an album scheduled for release in late November.

  All I had in my calendar for November was a gig in Atlanta and a solo show at Kent State University. I figured I’d play a few gigs before Christmas so the guys could all play Santa Claus, but what Clive was proposing wouldn’t interfere with any of that.

  “I’d be glad to be employed for a couple of weeks,” I told Clive.

  I gave Clive the number for my agent in New York to discuss the dates Stevie had on tap for his first two weeks. As far as I was concerned, I was looking at found money. It was looking like our folks would have a Happy Thanksgiving and we could work on a Merry Christmas later.

  Things were looking up.

  31

  Show business is just like any other business in certain respects. Of course, people in show business have a visibility that paints a “larger than life” aura around them. Their work in music, movies, or some facet of entertainment makes them a part of people’s lives. They are so well known in the corners of everywhere that it feels as though they’ve lived more than one lifetime. The fact that certain aspects of the arts endure beyond the span of normal expectations makes them a part of generations born after their contributions were completed.

&
nbsp; The exploits and exploitation of the arts make individuals with no more talent than a turnip famous for ages. The stories their lives inspire give them reputations that inspire continued repetition. There are heroes and zeroes. There are people of sincere and genuine talent and others who couldn’t do wrong right. Just like, I imagine, every other walk of life.

  You meet some people that you wish like hell you never had, and others who make such an impression on you that you feel convinced you made the right career choice. You meet some people you are proud to call your friends, and others who are so crooked that when they die you’re sure they’ll be screwed into the ground. The influence these people have on your life depends on when you meet them. I will always believe that you need to meet good people, talented and generous people, in order to later withstand the bitter disappointments that destroy the careers of so many talented people.

  I started at the top when it came to wonderful, talented, and generous people. During my first week of publicity for The Vulture and my book of poetry I was a guest on a New York radio program hosted by Mr. Ossie Davis and Miss Ruby Dee. And in all honesty, I don’t remember a word I said if I said anything, because they also had John Killens and John Williams on, the two brothers who were both great Black novelists, and I think I just sat there in the studio with my mouth hanging open.

  I doubted if Ossie and Ruby remembered me from that. Apparently, though, they had kept up with me; prior to our first gig on the Hotter than July tour, which kicked off in Houston the last week of October 1980, they invited me to do a TV show they now had on Houston’s PBS channel.