by Dawn Davies
I joined our award-winning high school jazz band, but although I enjoyed playing sax, my heart wasn’t in it. I never connected with the greats: Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Stan Getz, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and others. The sound didn’t look or feel good to me. It was pebbled and sandy, and made me sad to listen to it, sad like a dark Sunday afternoon in winter, where there is nothing to look forward to except tomato soup, a grilled cheese sandwich, and early bed. Plus, I felt extra dorky. The case was heavy and I sweated when I carried it in the Florida heat. Also, the lead tenor sax player was a child prodigy and, with him in the picture, my lack of skill was evident on a daily basis, and what’s worse, I saw a photo of myself once with my cheeks sucked in, blowing on that saxophone, and it reminded me of a pornographic photo I had once accidentally seen at too young an age.
When I needed a break from the classical and jazz, I would listen to rock and folk songs, sometimes looking for “new” stuff in my mother’s old records. I accidentally stumbled upon Jaco Pastorius playing bass on a Joni Mitchell album, and within a few minutes, his sound changed everything about how I looked at music.
* * *
I don’t remember where or when I first heard Jaco play with Weather Report, but I know the song was “Birdland,” and I listened to it hundreds of times in a row, exclusively, for months. Weather Report’s “Birdland” sounded perfect. It was the suds in a washing machine on high, the green taste of a new reed, bitter and slightly tangy on the tongue, the feeling in the teeth when you play a metal mouthpiece and you know there is too much air in the note, paint splattered on a white wall, a sexy girl with laryngitis telling a boy “yes.”
Within a week of hearing “Birdland,” I was messing around on someone’s bass guitar, and within a few months, I had bought my own. I had begun to practice, starting where I had with the clarinet, learning my way around the scales, awed by the sight of the vibrating strings, which I looked at as closely as I could while still keeping my eyes in focus. The golden vibration of the strings is what I saw behind my lids when Jaco laid out a long note. It besotted me. The desire to own this feeling drove me to learn as much as I could about Jaco, and, for the first time in my life, I trolled for information like an obsessed fan, indiscriminate of source.
Someone told me that Jaco was classically trained and knew music theory like a beast, and that he developed his talent by transposing classical guitar arrangements for the bass. I began to do the same. When I found out that Jaco was from Fort Lauderdale, it thrilled me to know that on some level, even theoretically at least, when I went to the beach with my friends, or to the music store, I could possibly run into him. He lived where I lived. He was from where I was from.
There are two kinds of people in the world: the lucky ones who always seem to win raffles and lottery scratch-off tickets and T-shirts, and the rest of us. As my interest in bass playing grew, I often seemed to almost run into Jaco, but not quite. One summer day, I took the bus down to Peaches Records and Tapes on Sunrise Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale. I had some sweaty cash rolled up in the pocket of my cutoffs, and was prepared to part with a good chunk of it to find a live recording of Jaco and Weather Report playing a certain Jimi Hendrix song in Europe. Peaches was a valuable resource for the music lover in those days. They had an inventory that, unless you were into some obscure stuff, usually yielded you a good find or two on every visit. They staffed employees who knew music, and who could help you find what you were looking for. Jaco’s portrait, a photo from his first solo album, was also painted on the front of the building.
That day I went straight to the jazz section and started thumbing my way through the Ws. An employee strolled over.
“Looking for anything specific?”
“Weather Report. ‘Third Stone from the Sun.’ Live. You know it?”
“Jaco, huh? You know, he was just in here yesterday.”
I gnashed my teeth.
I also used to frequent a music store on Oakland Park Boulevard called Modern Music, which was the best music store in South Florida at the time. Modern Music was where real musicians gathered, where the best repairs were done, where you could get the latest gear. We just called it “Modern,” as in, “I’ll be back later. I’m going over to Modern to see if they can tweak my pickups.” I would find my way there at least once a week, sometimes to take a bass lesson, but mostly just to hover, looking at instruments, listening through the thin walls to students playing in the small side rooms, thumbing through music books, and watching instruments go in and out of the repair shop. One day, when I walked in for a lesson, my bass teacher said, “You should have gotten here fifteen minutes earlier. Jaco was just in. I kid you not.”
Fort Lauderdale in the early eighties was a simpler place than it is now, and a little more magical. We moved at a slower pace, possibly because it was the last echo of a time before guaranteed central air-conditioning in every house and business. It could take all day to get a thing done. You could fill an old milk jug with water and wrap some sandwiches up in tinfoil and ride your bike to the beach, and stay until the mosquitoes started biting. If you had to be at work by four, you somehow had time to practice, meet up with friends, read the paper, take a swim, do your chores, and still take a bus to your job, and then maybe catch the tail end of a show afterwards. No one I knew had any money, but we were richer then—we had time to give away, and we were generous. Older, wiser musicians would take a few moments and tell the younger folks a story, or show them a riff, or listen to one. Guys would gather and debate the virtues of a new arrangement of an old song, or talk about a recent concert with simple appreciation, and without malice or envy.
It was also a time when musical Nephilim walked among us, without molestation or entourage, playing phenomenal sets at small venues. It was a time when everyone with a regular babysitting or lawn-mowing job could afford a ticket. A time when you could safely camp out in line at Sunrise Musical Theater the night before ticket sales opened for a show, and if you were first in line, you got the front-row seats. You didn’t need to be a member of royalty or sell a kidney to afford it. I saw Al Di Meola from the second row. Al Jarreau from the first row. I shook Peter Gabriel’s hand. I sat so close to Frank Zappa at one of his shows that he sweated on me. I saw the great jazz drummer Pete Erskine play at a venue so intimate that it didn’t need amplification. I met Boots Randolph’s band at a Denny’s on a weeknight, forty-five minutes after seeing them in concert, and waited on Geddy Lee, the bassist for Rush, at a restaurant where I worked not too long after. It seemed odd that, since I went to the same places Jaco went, and listened to the music of some of his peers, I would not have run into him.
I upgraded and got a copy of a ’62 Fender Jazz bass because Jaco played one, and I was trying hard to get his sound. For several months I listened to Jaco’s new solo album, Word of Mouth, exclusively, then I bought a cassette for the car. I memorized the album and entertained myself for hours with the thematic echoes that wove in and out. I listened to “Three Views of a Secret” every night while going to sleep. This song was a reckless run through every emotion in a relationship, from first meeting to death, so multilayered it was like the Bible. I tried to imagine what Jaco was thinking when he arranged it, tucking in little secret vocal tracks I could barely hear, matching a bass sound with an angelic falsetto, building in slow intensity toward the end of the song like the pot builds up heat with the frog sitting right in it.
I also imagined Jaco scoring the horn parts to “Liberty City” while sitting at the beach with his kids—the same beach I went to. I thought of him listening to his favorite music before falling asleep, like I did, wondering if he saw his own musical experimentation as a form of time travel, with how he molded a typical big band sound into another realm of big band, in essence, taking listeners to a musical place none of us had been, nor should have gone for another seventy-five years. Jaco’s brilliance was never more apparent to me than when I studied this album. I was awed by his ability to push the en
velope, flex his genius, while at the same time making me feel like I knew a part of him that no one else knew. That’s what Jaco did—his music made everyone feel like they knew him, or had a right to.
I would often catch a ride down to the Musicians Exchange, a strange little club on the seediest part of Sunrise Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale. It was kind of a dive—a two-story place with a dark, dangerous-looking parking lot in the back of the building. When I crossed that lot on the way to the entrance, I would imagine getting stabbed or abducted there, and could see the cops knocking on my parents’ doors, delivering the news, and perhaps my personal belongings, to them—my Velcro Ocean Pacific surfer’s wallet, with Jaco’s picture tucked behind my driver’s license, a bass pick from my pocket, and my Sony Walkman with a Weather Report cassette inside. Once, when I was desperate to see Buckwheat Zydeco live, I took the bus down and stayed out late enough for the buses to stop running and got stranded on Sunrise Boulevard, among the pimps and working girls and drug dealers and nightwalkers trying to score some temporary pleasure in the middle of the night. I had to call someone to come get me.
One night I had menstrual cramps and declined an invite to go down to the Exchange with some friends. The next day I spoke to one of them.
“How was it?”
“Amazing. I met Jaco in the men’s bathroom. I peed right next to him.”
By the way, there are two kinds of women in the world: those who take Tylenol and get on with things, and those who let cramps ruin their opportunities.
I think Jaco was a guy who pushed the limits with how he lived. He certainly did on a musical level. I didn’t know him. I can’t pretend to know much about him. The legend that surrounded him on the street was often just gossip from people who heard from a friend who was in a session with someone who knew someone he went on tour with, gossip that probably fueled many inaccuracies about him. I heard from my bass teacher that he was starting to go crazy. Or do drugs. Or both. Someone told me he shaved his head while on tour in Japan. Someone told me that he stood in the middle of a river and threw his favorite Fender into the water. Someone told me he jumped out of a window. Someone else told me he slashed all the tendons in his left forearm and would never play again.
I think the reason people talked about him with such malicious vigor is because he was the closest they would ever get to someone with a truly extraordinary mind: a Miles Davis, a Richard Feynman, a Michelangelo, a Mary Cassatt, a Marie Curie, a Carl Linnaeus. I often dreamed of going back in time and seeing them in action. Often before falling asleep at night, I imagined elaborate and vivid scenes where I would simply stand in a corner, perhaps as a maid, or a laboratory cleaner, or a backstage witness, while they did whatever it was they did best. Sometimes we had conversations. My admiration for these people was based on recognizing a kind of genius that comes rarely within a field. Their bodies of work would be studied by generations of students and fellow experts. They broke through constraints of time to master concepts others weren’t ready to handle. People want to be part of that. There are the fans and the students and the hangers-on, but there are also those who look for the angel to fall so they can feel better about their own commonness, about the truth that is their average contribution to the world, which brings me back around to the idea that there are two kinds of people: those who build others up with the things they say and do, and those who tear them down. In loyalty to Jaco, I stopped listening to the rumors.
One night I went down to the Exchange to see a local band. I borrowed my mother’s car and drove down on a Thursday night after helping with the dishes, after studying for a biology test and walking the family dog. I parked as far away from the Dumpster as I could so I wouldn’t get abducted and put into a snuff movie, then walked inside and up a narrow flight of stairs. I settled somewhere in the middle of the room, alone at a table with a teardrop-shaped candleholder covered with plastic mesh. The band was finishing up a song, and as I let my eyes adjust to the dim light, the song faded away and the guitarist said, “Jaco Pastorius on bass guitar.” Jaco put down the bass, and stood up, grabbed his drink, and went toward the bathroom. The band started up another song. I choked on my spit.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who wait for things to pass them by, living a life of regret, and those who grab the world by the tonsils. I was a shy girl. I had a history of cowardice, often letting things, valuable things, slip away. I couldn’t raise my hand in class. I couldn’t make eye contact with the cute boy. I could never take a solo with the band, or even play any kind of improvisation in front of other people. I froze instead, and scrambled for the sheet music. Improvisation is about sharing secret parts of yourself on the fly, without controlling the content, without controlling what people know of you, and without caring what people think. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t put my soul on display for others to understand raw things about me the way Jaco did.
My heart started to pound in my throat and I felt dizzy. When Jaco came back he walked around the room and mingled with a few people. I did nothing. I waited. Waited. My heart was wrecked—a tympani hijacked by a manic psychiatric escapee. I was going to collapse if I didn’t breathe. I would kick myself if I let this opportunity go, so when Jaco stood, I leaped up and called out, “Mr. Pastorius!” waving like a child on a Ferris wheel. Jaco saw me, appeared to think twice about it, then walked sideways over to my table, as if he were on a boat with an uneven keel.
“Mr. Pastorius, I play bass, too!” I shrieked, though he was close enough for me to no longer need to holler. Calling him Mr. Pastorius was nerd maneuver number one, and declaring that I played bass out of the gate like that was the most dorkalicious thing that I could have declared, aside from “I play clarinet.” You don’t lead with that. You say something introductory, like, “Great set.” I shrank down inside my tall bones. Jaco squinted at me with his head tipped to the side. He looked older than any of his pictures, and was a little heavier, and had cut his long brown hair short. He was my height.
“You play bass, huh? That’s great.” I saw his eyes move somewhere else.
“Do you have any advice?”
“Who do you listen to?” he asked.
“Everyone. I listen to everyone,” I told him, and I meant it. I wanted to mention Glenn Miller and Yes, and Rush and Art Blakey, and John Lee Hooker, and Joe Walsh and Scott Joplin and Miles Davis and Mozart, but there wasn’t time. I could tell my window was closing.
“That’s good,” he said. “Let me see your hands.” I held them up and showed him my stretch.
“Not bad.” He pointed at me and winked. “Keep practicing. Get your harmonics down.” And then he walked away. He mingled a few minutes more and then walked out of the Exchange and I never saw him again.
I was excited for a few minutes, and when the letdown came, I was surprised. I thought that because Jaco’s music had resonated with me so deeply, meeting him would be pivotal, crucial to my life in some way. But it wasn’t. It reminded me that the music that I loved so much, the music that I could see move behind my eyelids—that was my own experience. Part of music was for sharing—the part that people can experience together—a live performance, a mix tape, the kinship you feel when you make music with other people. But part of it was private—the love you feel for it. The surging swell of emotion that you can’t name when it plays, the way it is almost religious, wordlessly so, in its power.
I went home and practiced my harmonics until two-thirty in the morning, then got up four hours later and earned a C-minus on my biology test. Jaco died suddenly not long after, a sealed book, unclassifiable under anyone’s system, taking with him all of the music he had yet to make, leaving us with not enough. He was my first and last celebrity obsession.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those to whom valuable, tender secrets are whispered in music, and those who just hear the music. Although I had wanted to meet Jaco for so long, I learned that the part of his musical existence I had hungered after was the
private part, the part I had no right to, the part he couldn’t explain to anyone anyway, just as I couldn’t explain mine. What he could share stood alone like good art should, to be experienced. His music, like the music of other truly great artists, speaks a truth, the truth that music, with or without words, can be a type of philosophy, a branch of science, a form of classification, a fanning of genius, and a strain of time travel.
When I listen to Jaco’s music now, I can send myself back to South Florida in the early eighties. I can hear a whisper of how South Florida used to be, salty and hot and open, a place that was relaxed and electric at the same time, a place that is only a memory. Sometimes when I listen, I get a glimpse of a packed concert hall, or stadium, or sixty-seat nightclub spilling over with sound, or a music stand alone in a bedroom, or of Jaco, tan and shirtless and smiling at the beach. I get a whiff of bus exhaust, or feel the echo of a sixty-four-bar solo that I will never forget, played by someone whose name I don’t remember at a warehouse show in 1984. In this case, as with all my favorite time travel, backwards is best.
And here are my time-traveling particles realigning with his, a phantom double of myself popping out of thin air to see Jaco in his creative prime, playing with Joni Mitchell at Red Rocks in 1976, at the start of an acoustic song with just Joni, when Jaco would walk offstage for a few minutes, spot me, and say, “Hey! Come here. Hold this for me, wouldja?” He would hand me his bass, then bend down to tie his shoe. Then he would stand up, lean into me, and say, “You can see it too, can’t you?”
