34
There were a couple of places that were cool to play because they were hotels and your room was next door or upstairs. On Peachtree Street in Atlanta I was right upstairs, but by the time I got there after two shows at the Agora—previously scheduled, without Stevie—on November 4, 1980, Ronald Reagan was the president.
It was not supposed to raise an eyebrow. Living in the D.C. area, I’d read the papers and listened to radio and TV quoting polls that all predicted his victory. But the reality of it was still something of a shock, like a brief contact with an open circuit.
It was an occasion to stay up a little when, after being hoisted to my room by a creaking elevator, I found myself watching the president of the United States of America playing second banana to a monkey. Ted Turner’s Atlanta superstation was doing all-night monkey shines, playing one of Reagan’s movies with the monkey, Bonzo. Bonzo Goes to College, I think it was. Anyway, one of the flicks where the monkey had all the best lines and all the laughs. There was something unsettling about watching the president of the United States holding hands with and talking to a monkey.
It was nearly 1 a.m., but I called Virginia and spoke to my wife. Baby Gia was asleep, gaining pounds and inches daily. Brenda was sleepy and on her way to bed. Everything was good there. We would see each other in two days and they were going with me to Montreal on Saturday. We decided to discuss the details when we were both awake.
But before she hung up, she read my mind and said, “Oh yeah, isn’t it a scream? He really won.”
It was a scream all right. Some people were screaming now and the rest would probably have to take a number because we’d all be screaming sooner or later. I was rolling a joint and being relieved that he had not won by one vote because I had made no arrangements for an absentee ballot.
It was Iran, of course, more than anything else that I felt defeated Jimmy Carter. The fact that Americans had basically been taken prisoner, held as hostages in the embassy in Tehran for months, and President Carter had been unable to get them out either by negotiation or helicopter invasion. Evidently, when Carter had vainly ordered military helicopters across the desert, he forgot to tell the siroccos and other sandmen to lay down on their jobs and the furious winds caused a collision between the American air vehicles, which canceled the raid.
The whole fucking situation had been bizarre, starting with Carter’s campaign promises to stop the supply of military support to certain world leaders, including the Shah of Iran, but he found out after the election that the deal was set in concrete and couldn’t be stopped, at least until the Iranians insisted on the departure of the Shah and the arrival of the venerable Ayatollah from France. The pictures from Iran of his arrival, with what looked like a million people marching and whipping themselves, was something I’d not likely soon forget.
The Shah had been accepted in Egypt and aside from his bank accounts, he was carrying a clear message from the new leader of his country: “Do not go to the United States.” Some twenty-five years past, in 1954, the Shah’s father had been chased out of Iran and went to the United States. Eight months later there had been a countercoup that put the elder Pahlavi back in the castle. The Ayatollah had not forgotten 1954, and when his directions were ignored and the Shah arrived in the States, allegedly for cancer treatment, the U.S. embassy was surrounded and the fifty people inside became virtual prisoners, to be held there until the new government was stabilized. Later that same week, the Blacks inside the embassy were released and told they were free to come home. All except one, the radio operator, accepted the offer. So I imagined four dozen people sitting around in there listening to the radio.
The seizure of the embassy started a slide in Jimmy Carter’s popularity, forcing a man who would rather not be threatening to okay the plan hatched by the people whose job it was to hatch crazy shit.
Another movie with Ronnie and the monkey came on. Americans had a thing about animals relating to people on a human level. There was a talking mule, Mr. Ed, and a TV show with a dog who was smarter than its owners. There was less than hidden meaning in the choice of Reagan movies being shown. “Message” movies. An idea whose time had just shown up.
What I was thinking was that America had just voted to make Stevie’s job harder than a long shot.
Most presidents were good for two terms. Unless some disaster took place during their first term. What happened at the embassy in Iran was essentially not Jimmy Carter’s fault. And as far as one could see there was nothing that Reagan could do about it. The failed rescue attempt was not Carter’s fault, either, but was seen as his failure. His only hope had been for the workers there to be released before the election. Otherwise he could have been running against a man with one leg and he would still have looked like a jackass in the Kentucky Derby. So the voters elected another jackass instead. Great.
I had to take the Republican victory as another obstacle for Stevie. And since I was now signing up for the remainder of the tour, forty-odd dates that would last another four months, I was set back, too.
I would have liked to be down the hall with the band talking about the show. We had sounded pretty good in the club that night. I always felt better in smaller venues where we were closer to the crowd. But I was going out first thing in the morning, so I couldn’t afford any monkey business. You dig?
I was scheduled for a solo performance of poetry and music on the campus of Kent State University on November 5. I was in rare form, telling a mixed audience of students, faculty members, administrators, and noncampus residents of the town that Ronald Reagan had been a political cast member since the 1960s. (In fact there had been several Californians from places like Santa Rita who had wanted him cast aside.)
It was unbelievable to me that the country as a whole had a hole in its head. Even with a good director, Reagan had never been anything other than nondescript. Nothing he had done in Hollywood recommended him for a position that at times called for the best actor in the world.
I could claim my objection to Reagan was out of concern for the man’s personal well-being. Aside from his age, I thought the man might be suffering from an inner-ear problem. There was often a connection between the cochlea and one’s balance. And Reagan seemed to be tilting to the right.
It was apparently a problem that started in the 1950s, when Reagan had been a Democrat and considered something of a liberal during the McCarthy era. As the president of the Screen Actors Guild, he was called on to defend fellow artists like David Susskind and Dalton Trumbo from the mail-monitoring senator from Wisconsin and his crony, Roy Cohn. As the years passed, the governor started tilting.
First he changed parties and became a Republican. Then his ideas brought him a reputation as a conservative. Finally, by the time students were locked up in a compound overnight in Santa Rita, he was labeled an ultraconservative. That might have been an illness he contracted because of his state’s proximity to Arizona, where the old guard Barry Goldwater was guarding the conservative doctrine. Turning conservative might have been considered a regional revamping of political posture or just a role adjustment. Whatever. By the 1970s there was very little difference between himself and Attila the Hun. The problem now, as I saw it, was how far was too far to the right.
And as unfamiliar as East Coast voters were with the specifics of a West Coast governor’s political positions, there should have been enough ex-hippies in America to render Ron’s run null and void. But it was not his Hollywood that fanned my flames. It was that as president he would choose justices for the Supreme Court.
The audience at Kent State that November night was the kind I enjoyed: folks who were aware of current events, were quick to pick up on my use of the California state-guard language, my facility for phrasing, my dissection of diction, even my most outrageous puns were taken in fun. Politics was not my favorite topic on poetry stops—or in life. As a rule, heaping helpings of political opinions were a quick way to either bore people to death or become their least favorite
poet.
But if you were alive on the planet earth and Black, particularly a Black American, in the most awkward and uncomfortable position imaginable, that of a certified, tax-paying citizen, with roots in the land around you that went back three hundred years, you still got the short end of every stick except the nightstick, and there was damn near no way you could not have political pressure on you and therefore have political opinions.
You were the odd man out.
I told my laughing group that I felt another poem coming on, and skewered the political past of the ex-head of the Screen Actors Guild, the ex-ambassador, ex-governor, et cetera, claiming that the man had more Xs than a Black Muslim mosque.
Somehow I had developed an extra sense, “social forethought.” And so many of the people, places, and things I mentioned, even my throwaway lines, became significant later. Ronald Reagan was a good example. Back in 1974, in “H2Ogate Blues,” I’d identified Reagan, then an ex-governor of California, as part of America’s new wave of leaders.
I told the Kent State audience I was “half and half” about the Republican victory. Personally, as a citizen, I was sorry as hell. But as far as my career was concerned, it was great. I didn’t want to constantly be caught trying to make a fool out of the president. I wanted a man who could do that for himself. A man like Nixon. A man like Gerald Ford, whom I’d dubbed “oatmeal man” in 1975 in “We Beg Your Pardon,” off The First Minute of a New Day. (“Anybody who could spend twenty-five years in Congress and nobody ever heard of him has got to be oatmeal man.”) Of course, I’d heard of Ford. And had not thought the career congressman from Michigan would provide any good material. The man had never given anyone a clue that he might even have a personality.
But he did have a knack for inadvertent physical comedy. There were pictures of him as a college football player in the era of leather helmets. He once tripped and tumbled all the way down the stairs of the presidential plane, Air Force One. That inspired the song called “Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There.” And he was good for the occasional malapropism. Like when he was asked during an interview with a sports announcer at the baseball all-star game whether he stayed current with the game, and he replied, “Oh, I manage to see a few games on the radio.”
And now I had Reagan. Write on!
By the end of February 1981, I had completed 80 percent of “B Movie,” my most seriously hilarious political tirade.
Leaving Kent State that night, though, I had to admit that my full attention hadn’t been on the crowd. I was doing a concert on the very spot where the peace movement had been shifted into overdrive by the shooting of four demonstrators by the National Guard. What a bitch of a year that had been. And now I was off to rejoin my band to continue to support Stevie on the Hotter than July tour.
35
Montreal, November, 7, 1980
I had no choice aside from moving quick
An ex-country hick whose image was city slick
The last one they would’ve ever picked
When I was in school doing my weekend stick
Compared to my classmates I couldn’t sing a lick
And through record store windows when they saw my flick
On the cover of an LP they wished for a brick
Because it wasn’t just out there it was actually a hit
And what they were wondering was what made me tick
It was that in spite of themselves they could all feel it
In reality I was heading for work
In the back of a cab I was changing my shirt.
My Mickey Mouse was saying it was five to eight
So theoretically I was already late.
Next to me on the backseat were my daughter and my wife
And I’d probably say never been happier in my life.
Light rain was falling on the Montreal streets
And I slipped on my shoes and leaned back in the seat
As we pulled up to the Forum where the Canadiens played.
Tonight: “Stevie Wonder” the marquee proudly displayed
But not a word about me or my “Amnesia Express”
But I was feeling too good to start getting depressed
It was only four days since I had found out for sure
That Stevie wanted me opening the rest of the tour.
News of Bob Marley’s illness was a helluva blow
I thought. And the eight o’clock news came on the radio
It looked like a sellout though the weather was damp
And fortunately no cars blocked the underground ramp.
As the cab took the curves beneath the old hockey rink
I was lighting a Viceroy and still trying to think
Of how Hartford had sounded and the tunes we should play;
Made mental notes of the order and felt it was okay
Keg Leg, my man, stood near the security line
’Cause I never had I.D. and couldn’t get in sometimes
I was carrying Gia as we moved down the hall
And I nodded and smiled as I heard my name called.
Things were getting familiar and I was finding my niche
But I didn’t want to give producers any reason to bitch.
I told my brother to get the band ready at eight o’clock
And it was damn near ten after when I moved into my spot
James Grayer gave me a smile and tapped his Mickey Mouse
The lights went down and the crowd perked up
Because I was finally in the house.
I was a late-afternoon arrival in Boston, having gone with the wife and daughter back to Virginia between dates. Which was why I didn’t know anything at all about the conflict, confrontation, and, finally, conflagration at the hotel the night before.
It was just as well, because I must admit my first thought when I was asked whether I’d heard about it was, No, but I damn well should have! I had naturally thought of Keg Leg and my brother Denis. (That was a helluva thing, wasn’t it? Keg Leg having been named Dennis at birth made him even more pleased about finding that nickname when he was working with Denis Heron.)
“It was a bitch!” I was told, but I moved on to my dressing room to check my Rhodes. And then I saw Grayer. Big Jim had two black eyes.
Not having been there, I could not say what took place. And not having spoken to Grayer personally about the incident, I could not say what an eye witness reported. And though I heard in detail what at times seemed to exceed what an eye witness could have eye witnessed with only two eyes, I could only say there seemed to have been a difference of opinions over the two days, and it appeared that one of those differing points of view had been defended by James Grayer, the manager of stage, time on stage, and, based on the veracity of his tenacity against a quoted number of simultaneous opponents, kicking ass.
The opposing points of view were said to have been held by an erratically shifting number of hotel security guards and a gentleman whose evening was looking like it might be written up as if his job had been to escort a young lady to the bar for Mr. Grayer.
Whatever the ultimate number of participants holding the perspective counter to Grayer’s, Stevie Wonder was unhappy. And he made his dissatisfaction about Boston’s image as a cultural phenomenon, a legend in its own mind, a leading battleground against busing, a place of prejudice and bigotry only Jim Rice of the Red Sox could truly describe day by frustrating day.
In the middle of his two hours, when he was left on the stage alone to do “Lately” and “Ribbon in the Sky,” Stevie started talking. And if there was ever any doubt about how perceptive he was, about how well a man could piece together his feelings from pictures drawn for him, how completely he was able to read the tenor of a time, the climate of an area, the tension-soaked atmosphere of a city, those doubts would have been erased in six or seven heart-stopping, pin-dropping minutes when the Boston Garden was like the sound of fifteen thousand people who had just inhaled: there wasn’t even the sound of anyone breathing as
the brother spoke. You would remember not the words, but how Boston felt. Like it had been read from stones dotted with Braille.
36
By 1980, I was an old hand at playing Madison Square Garden. If I had still been living in New York, I could have gone through a yawn or two on my second night there with Stevie. New Yorkers had a shield of cool oblivion and paid little attention to the Garden, the Empire State Building, and even the Statue of Liberty.
Indeed there were millions of New Yorkers who had never visited any of those landmarks and knew only that the Garden was down near Times Square and that you played ball there.
Only the most literate music fans would mention that Madison Square Garden was also a concert venue. And even they would have to say also a concert venue, indicating that was not its primary function. Sort of like why there were so few hockey games at Carnegie Hall.
I might have been losing my arenaphobic attitude by that point. I had now done seven shows without an “airplane hangar effect,” echoes that never died. I was deciding that arenas that weren’t auditoriums could be modified like cafeterias that weren’t gymnasiums that I played basketball in while at Fieldston. I had already decided that my prejudice against arenas was selective, that I didn’t necessarily dislike playing in front of a lot of people. In fact, the more the merrier. I was starting to compare the experience to playing on television, which I had initially hated. The idea of having my songs and my band all squeezed through a midrange mono speaker the size of an ash tray had depressed me as much as the thought of doing a lip-sync on American Bandstand or Soul Train. It had almost broken my heart to see the Temptations stumbling their way through “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.”
There was one thing undeniably advantageous about playing in a venue like Madison Square Garden. There would be, on certain occasions, an energy generated that turned a concert into an event, that gave an indoor performance an air of a festival, an aura of celebration. That was the special buzz, an inaudible hum of excitement and energy that vibrated through everyone in the place. It was running all through the Garden; in the darkened tunnels that led to the dressing rooms and the storage spaces crammed with sports equipment and other event paraphernalia. Hell, everyone from Jumbo to Tom Thumb or whoever P.T. Barnum had promoted had plodded or pranced through these shadowy passages. I felt it.
The Last Holiday Page 21
