The Last Holiday

by Gil Scott-Heron

  I had to admit I didn’t know Sydney Omarr from Sydney, Australia.

  “Well, you just wait right there until I finish this, and I’ll get to you,” she said.

  She went on with her talk to Brute. I was still trying to figure out how she knew I was an Aries and how she’d known I was standing in the carpeted doorway without turning around. I was still looking for the mirror on the opposite wall that had given me away when she got up from her seat, leaving a befuddled Brute contemplating his life.

  When she turned and walked over to me, I was more impressed and even less inclined to think zodiac. She was short and petite, light caramel with huge liquid eyes. There was a hint of mischief lurking just behind her attempt to be all business. She picked up a little notebook and pen.

  “My name is G . . .”

  “I know what your name is,” she said. “What I need to know is your place of birth, day of birth, and time of birth.”

  “I can give you all that,” I agreed slowly. “But I’m not tryin’ . . .”

  “Look,” she indicated impatiently, “I ordinarily charge fifty dollars apiece for these work-ups, but what I’ll do for you is a birth chart and a lunar return chart and it will mention specific days and events. If none of these things come about, you owe me nothing.”

  I hate it when people call me out like that, when you’re put in such a position that you really look like a jackass if you don’t go along with it. How can you refuse a hundred dollars’ worth of service for free? Hell! You don’t believe it, right? Okay, fine. You’re in a win-win situation. If you’re right, you win. If she’s right, you win because you learn something.

  I told her: born in Chicago, April 1, 1949, at 11:20 a.m. No matter, there was no way she resembled a shriveled gypsy with a crystal ball.

  “How long does it take to be an expert in this?” I asked without sarcasm.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been at it for eight years and I’m a novice.”

  I had more confidence in her immediately.

  “Who’s that old geezer?”

  I was jerked back to the Summit on a string.

  The Britannia Row booth engineer had come out of the sound cage and was standing behind our row, between me and Stevie. He was pointing accusingly at the stage floor and a gentle white-haired soul with slightly bent posture, dressed in jeans, and opening and closing crates of equipment, jotting and scribbling what he saw on a wrinkled note pad.

  “That’s Malcolm Cecil,” I said, leaning back to look the engineer guy over. He was short, muscular in the way equipment men will be, wore glasses, was pale from his constant time indoors, and wore a sour expression on his face. “I got Cecil to do sound for me a couple of nights,” I said to Stevie. “You don’t mind, do you, man?”

  Stevie didn’t mind. I knew that he had worked with Malcolm in L.A. on the more or less solo LPs they had done half a dozen years ago, and that they then parted company under circumstances I did not understand.

  To the engineer I said, “He’s just taking stock.”

  I was surprised with the energy of his displeasure.

  “I’ll take his stock,” the Brit said with vehemence.

  I laughed. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” I said. “In fact, I wouldn’t do that if you were me.”

  He said something that sounded like a negative assessment of Taureans. “Bullshit,” he snorted, walking away. “That old geezer.”

  Calvin had joined us in the back row. Sure enough he had a copy of the communication hookup Stevie had been wearing and a smirk on his face.

  “That was good,” I told him. “That was all I needed to hear. As if I didn’t have a problem already, now I gotta worry about Calvin playing detective and telling on me.”

  I gestured toward the sound man.

  “Somebody better tell him to forget about messin’ with Malcolm.”

  It was easy to underestimate Malcolm. His shock of white hair and bent physique from years of tilting forward over soundboards could grant you the right to feel that the man lived a turtle’s life and never peeked out of darkened studios and had all of the physical potential of a stick of furniture. That would be another one of those conclusions I mentioned. It went with, “Yeah, we got a pool,” hearing the running approach and crash and adding, “but there ain’t no water in it.”

  “Who’s this big dude coming,” I asked Calvin.

  “That’s Grayer,” Calvin said.

  We were joined by a suitably casual but exceedingly large brother in a pea coat, a sports shirt open at the throat, and well-worn jeans. He had a light brown complexion, round face, a big head with a lot of hair, and an expression when he looked at me that said he had seen one of my species before under a microscope. He had a little square over his breast pocket that said STAGE MANAGER. That meant he was the man responsible for the clock and keeping shows on schedule, not so much when you got onstage as when you got off.

  I agreed to be on by 8:05 p.m. each night and to hit my last note no later than 9:05. That would give the humpers and stage muscle twenty-five to thirty minutes to change the sets for “Wonderlove” and Stevie. Stevie’s set would run the clock out, but at 11:30 or so he would call for backup to do his last two numbers: “Master Blaster,” the reggae-flavored tune that included the line that was the title of his new LP, and “Happy Birthday,” his tribute to Dr. King.

  Grayer must have been six-foot-six and he looked as though his sense of humor had been baked off him somewhere outside. I could picture him striding around the backstage area most nights with a cinematic scowl on his face. That was for show. Grayer turned out to have a sense of humor that was approximately his size, but he was also willing to go a round or two with the next person holding a conflicting opinion if their opinion meant something.

  Big Jim, as I learned to call him, was from Boulder, Colorado, and a fan of mine. It turned out that Grayer was wearing such a hard-assed attitude when we met because he had heard that the Midnight Band of mine had a reputation as “somewhat unpredictable with regard to the clock.” That had worried the people producing the shows, worrying about us starting and stopping on time. I thought that was funny as hell, knowing that Bob Marley and the Wailers were coming in after two weeks.

  “Them brothers don’t start rolling their show joints until they’re ten minutes late,” I told Grayer. “I’ll be around an hour in advance.”

  I meant that. It lasted for about twenty-four hours.

  That first night Stevie was a clown onstage, a ham, a performer—not old but old school. Maybe schooled by Smokey Robinson himself on how to work a crowd, how to pace a show, how to stretch a song out and get the audience into a call and response sing-along. He also had a fondness for life on the edge—literally. Especially the edge of the stage. He scared the shit out of me the first time we were out there onstage together for “Master Blaster” and “Happy Birthday.”

  I went over and joined Stevie behind his bank of assorted keyboards at center stage. Stevie sang the verses and I tried to harmonize on the choruses, more or less singing along in neutral, trying to do no harm. After the verses were done, the two of us went on patrol. He placed one hand on my shoulder and we walked the perimeter of the stage, giving fans on the side and behind the stage a chance to say “I love you, Stevie.”

  It was fun, singing about a good time and having one, slowly strolling around, waving to hundreds of smiling faces while thousands more clapped in rhythm. All of that was cool. It wasn’t the takeoff that got me nervous, it was the landing, when we got back to home base by the keyboards.

  The vibes were positive and love was truly in the air, and it seemed to embolden Stevie out there. He started creeping forward, moving back out toward the edge of the stage. I tried to hold his arm, but we were clearly not on the same page. Finally, still smiling, Stevie started moving back away from the edge, and I felt like dialing 911 because I’d just about had a heart attack.

  33

  At 7:15 I still feel grogg
y

  And the day ahead looks gray and foggy

  I’m suffering from a bad case of day-old jet lag

  I start to try and slow-motion drag

  Myself into a nice wake-up shower

  Where I would like to spend an hour

  But the clock is ticking so as I get in it

  I’m thinking more about ten good minutes

  But just as the water decides to get hot

  Someone at my door gives a loud double knock

  And I’m thinking the last thing that I need right then

  Is to give up this shower to let room service in

  So one-handing a towel around my waist

  And gathering what’s left of my own stork-like grace

  I head for the door while I’m still soaking wet

  And focusing on how the coffee I’ll get

  Will hit the right spot and somehow make it clear

  What the hell’s going on? What am I doing here?

  Here was the hell of this business: for stretches at a time, your schedule could be as bare as a dressing-room refrigerator ten minutes after Keg Leg decided it was time to load up and hat up—at which point he transferred all extra beer, juice, and sodas to a cooler on the bus or the back of the truck. Then, quicker than you could say what the fuck is going on, your life was an avalanche of things you didn’t have time to do and it wasn’t your life anymore. And it made no difference how long you had known the tour would be starting on a particular date and how much time you had to prepare so that you wouldn’t be rushed, you didn’t get everything done and you were rushed.

  Naturally it wasn’t all your fault. To be brutally dishonest and childishly unwilling to accept responsibility for personal oversights and overwork: none of it was your fault! After all, between your office and the record company and the booking agent and promoter’s office and your band rehearsals, your time was eaten up like goldfish in a bowl with Jaws.

  There is a certain element of going on a concert tour that must be similar to giving birth. In a creative-writing course I’d taught at Federal City College, I had asked that my students write about an experience they had gone through that they could recall vividly and in detail.

  One young woman chose to describe the ten hours she had spent in labor when her first child was born. After hearing her read, one of the first questions from the class was, “How many children do you have?”

  She said, “Four.”

  The following question was, “If the first experience was as disagreeable as you wrote, why would you have more children?”

  And she said, “Somehow you forget how bad it was.”

  For me, going on tour was like that. Every time I had a 7 a.m. wake-up call after a collapse at any time past two and was looking bleary-eyed at seven hours or so on the highway, there’s a tendency to wonder, “What the hell am I doing here?” Like the woman in “Labor Day,” you know that the end of the road is not the end of the day. When you arrive at wherever, that’s when you have to go to work. So, considering the discomfort and inconvenience even when everything goes according to schedule, why would you go out? You forget.

  On Saturday morning, November 1, at the Houston Texas Holiday Inn, when I got my seven o’clock wake-up call, I remembered.

  The beauty of those “flashups,” since they couldn’t be called “flashbacks,” was that the whole gauntlet of grief was self-inflicted. I signed on for the shows. I saw where I had to be and when. I came in after 1 a.m., called the desk after 2 a.m., asked for a wakeup call at 7 a.m., and got over my amnesia at about 7:05.

  If anything can make you unhappier than inconveniences on the road, it’s probably inconveniences and not getting on the road. Like if there’s anything worse than choking down only a couple bites of a really nice-looking cheese omelet because you’re going to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, it’s leaving that omelet and a cinnamon roll and the rest of a pot of coffee and not going to Baton Rouge. Well, that’s a little stretch. Because we were going to Baton Rouge, but I hadn’t needed to leave 75 percent of my breakfast after only 25 percent of my shower and getting down to the lobby half-dressed. Understand?

  I was not incredibly happy. I had sharpened my sarcasm on that first weekend’s routing with Stevie, making sure he knew there was no shortcut to Dallas from Houston by way of Louisiana. He took the needles with his customary smile.

  “Who put this weekend together, Marty Feldman?” I said to him as though it hadn’t already been explained.

  We were going from Houston to Baton Rouge to Dallas. The ride to Louisiana was obviously a few hundred miles out of the way. It was simple. The Dallas arena was booked for Saturday, November 1, and available Sunday, November 2. Tours never wanted to miss a Saturday night, and the Baton Rouge Centroplex was the closest venue of the size Stevie was looking for. Plus, with Louisiana State University located there in the state capital, there was a sellout down the street. Gotta go there.

  The question we had asked ourselves when we saw that rather unusual zag that should have been a zig on the tour map was, “How do we go?” Because clearly we had to get back the next day. So two cars were reserved at Houston’s inner-city airport, Hobby. If the cars had been put on hold at Houston International we’d have been halfway to Baton Rouge when we picked them up. And they probably would have been there. At Hobby, they were not. At least both of them were not. The car that was available when we arrived at just past 8:30 was quickly filled with five band members to pick up Route 10 east just outside the airport. Which left five folks for the second car that wasn’t ready until nearly 10 a.m. By that time, Malcolm Cecil, the house engineer on these gigs, was about to start pulling out some of his rather substantial head of hair. What had been a schedule with a good hour and a half of room in reserve got tight when the car wasn’t ready.

  When Malcolm finally pulled up in the vehicle, I climbed into the shotgun seat and immediately fell asleep. I was surprised to wake up twenty or so minutes later still parked in the terminal lot.

  Malcolm had lost his usual smile. Or thrown it away. The car was ready. Four of the remaining five of us were there. But what Malcolm wanted to know was where the hell was Ed Brady? I knew where. And after weaving my way back through the terminal building, sure enough, I found him. Bent over what was then a fairly new form of video game called Space Invaders. Brady could kill a couple of hours in front of the ever-advancing electronic invaders without pause.

  Shortly thereafter we were off to “Looz anna,” but by now Malcolm’s hour and a half window had been slammed on our fingers by Avis and Space Invaders.

  We fretted and slept and slept and fretted. Up front, Malcolm and I were constantly recalculating our distance and possibilities. It was kind of ironic because in Houston the only exchange between me and Grayer, Stevie’s stage manager, had been about my group playing on time. At the speed Malcolm was driving, nearly seventy-five miles per hour when space opened up, we were figuring a razor-thin margin, like out of the car and onto the stage. But while Malcolm could do seventy-five in wide-open Texas, we weren’t in Louisiana long before the flashing lights were right in our trunk. As he pulled over onto the shoulder, Malcolm told us very seriously, “Don’t say a word, guys.”

  While feigning sleep, I caught a glimpse of a Louisiana state trooper’s Rod Steiger profile as he sauntered up on us with his notebook in his hands. Malcolm’s hands were full, too, and when he rolled down his window he threw the whole thing, both hands full, into the air.

  Right after that he was giving an Oscar-winning performance.

  I didn’t catch the whole speech because I was biting my lip and burying my face in my hat. The queen had less of a British accent. Before collecting the credentials he had deliberately dumped, Malcolm had adapted a tone and attitude that he added to thorough frustration and criticism of American treatment of its visitors. How in the hell was he supposed to cope with delays from the car rentals, time wasting directions, et cetera, when all he was trying to do was get “the African b
oxing team” he was in charge of to the Centroplex on time?

  Rod Steiger might have had it written into his contract that he be supplied with a dictionary or an interpreter. Our Rod Steiger had neither. And holding Malcolm’s driver’s license limply in his hand, he wobbled back to his cruiser. He returned with a bit more confidence.

  “I’m sorry ’bout all y’all’s problems,” he said respectfully to Malcolm. “If y’all can jus’ pull in behind me we’ll get you to the Centroplex.”

  With lights flashing and sirens wailing we made it on time.

  Later that night we found out that Bob Marley wasn’t just resting up from his roadwork with the Commodores. He was sick and had entered the Sloan-Kettering clinic. I knew what that meant. Cancer. Bob Marley had cancer. Or, to be honest, cancer had Bob Marley.

  I talked about it with Stevie; he was worried and upset. I was told to keep the news a secret. But naturally there were too many people on the inside of the circle, and the rumor mill was going full blast. The promotion was being handled by Dick Griffey Productions, and they had to have some information about who they were supposed to be producing. That, plus there was pressure being applied by Stevie’s record company, Motown. If Bob wasn’t going to do the tour, what about one of their new rock and rollers? They would give the tour more support. Buy more spots for radio and more space in newspapers.

  I had been totally honest when I spoke with Stevie on the question of doing the whole tour. Yes, I was interested. No, I didn’t think I would have much trouble rearranging my dates. And yes, my new album, Real Eyes, was due out around Thanksgiving. But no, my label could not be counted on to do a lot of advertising before it was released. If Stevie was worried about the promotion money that would have been contributed to pump up Bob and the Wailers, well, maybe he’d better go with the rockers.

  Stevie disagreed.

  He confirmed in Dallas on November 2, 1980, that we would continue for the duration of Hotter than July, through the rally in D.C. and on into February 1981. And now my staff were busy in New York and D.C. trying to rearrange the appearances I was canceling in order to do Stevie’s entire tour.