Still Grazing

by Hugh Masikela

  During our recording sessions in Kumasi, Nga was concentrating on how we would acquire the gold bullion we were supposed to airlift out of Ghana. He was spending almost all of his time with our architect friend who was to facilitate the gold operation. From time to time, Nga would fly or drive up to Kumasi to give me progress reports.

  Oscar Cohen at Associated Booking Corporation got word back to me in Ghana through Stewart Levine that he had lined up a major tour for OJAH. Back in the States, we rehearsed for a whole week in Washington, D.C., with all of the original members of OJAH. It was a wonderful reunion. After the tour, Stanley and I went into the Antisia Studios in New York, which were owned by Harry Belafonte alumni, percussionist Ralph McDonald, composer/vocalist Bill Eaton, and composer/bassist Bill Salter, who had played in Miriam’s accompanying trio for more than ten years. The Antisia gang collaborated very closely with Bill Withers and Grover Washington Jr., and wrote hit songs like “Just the Two of Us,” with Bill Withers and “Where Is the Love” for Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway. They helped to engineer and conduct the overdub sessions we had to do with members of the Ipi Tombi cast while I worked with Stanley and the singers inside the recording room. Miriam wanted the tapes sent to her in Paris, where she planned to complete the recordings, but Stanley and I requested that she arrange for a payment of $10,000 to us for the work we did on the record, and to cover some of the studio fees we had paid back in Kumasi. She thought this was very unreasonable, and has never forgiven me for it. However, Ralph McDonald and his partners understood our position because they were record producers themselves. They did not release the tapes until Miriam’s French record company, Sonodisc, paid the money and Antisia’s own studio fees.

  Following the recording sessions, Stanley and I went back to West Africa, first stopping in Liberia. I spent most of my time there with Tshidi, although I hung out with Nga, Bob, and Stanley every night while Tshidi concentrated on her studies for her final year at the University of Liberia’s medical school. Generously dipping into Nga’s bottomless bottle of pharmaceutical cocaine, we prowled all over Monrovia’s dance clubs, restaurants, garden discos, and after-hours joints, dancing, dining, drinking, debauching, and generally raising hell. One night after Stanley Todd had returned to Ghana, I was out clubbing and bar-hopping with Nga and Bob Young. We ended up in Krutown, across the bridge from downtown Monrovia. This was the industrial part of the harbor city, where the drinking spots drew dock workers, fishermen, and sailors. Most of the clientele did not care too much for foreigners. Nga dared us to enter a bar that was a stronghold for Kru fishermen who were very resentful of President Tolbert’s coddling of exiles from southern African countries. They especially hated South Africans with a passion. I was very reluctant to go, but Nga was insistent. “Look here, Masekela, this is a free country and we can drink anywhere we want.” Before I could object any further, Nga had pulled me in by the hand up to the bar, where he was ordering drinks from the barman. “Give us three bottles of cold Heineken and a bottle of Courvoisier VSOP, no ice.” All of a sudden the jukebox was turned off and the place was quieter than a graveyard.

  While we were enjoying our drinks, some of the fishermen came to stand directly behind us. The burliest one, with rippling muscles and a body-fitting T-shirt, roared in a booming voice, “I’m tired of these fucking South African bitches coming into our country and taking all our women while Tolbert treats them like little babies and gives them anything they want. Meanwhile, we poor people’s children are going hungry. I want to break these motherfucking bitches’ heads into little pieces.” I was terrified. I looked to see how far we were from the door so I could run out of there. I whispered to Nga that we should just pay our bill and get out of the place, but he ignored me. Instead he turned around to address the speaker. “Are you the leader of all these people?” Nga inquired coolly, a fresh cognac in one hand, a beer bottle in the other. “What if I am?” the man rumbled. Before he could continue, Nga, a guerrilla commander who was trained to kill faster than lightning, had put down his drink on the bar counter. He reached out to the man’s ears, about a foot above his own head, pulled the man’s face down to his, bit off the fisherman’s nose, and spit it on the floor. He wiped his mouth with his jacket sleeve and pushed the bleeding man away from him. Nga turned around and picked up his drinks while the packed bar was emptying fast. All the fishermen were scrambling out of there except for one old man in the far corner of the joint who pointed angrily at Nga and shouted, “How can you bite the man’s nose? How you expect him to breathe?” The bartender rushed to the bleeding fisherman’s aid with a towel to try to stop the flow of blood. The man’s nose was lying in a congealed clot on the sawdust-covered floor. Nga nonetheless stayed cool. “Bob, Masekela, let’s finish our drinks.”

  About six policemen entered the bar. “Where the man who bite the man’s nose?” one of them asked as two of the cops escorted the bleeding fisherman to an ambulance outside. They had picked up the fisherman’s nose and wrapped it in a napkin. “Let’s go, my friends,” the cop said, and Nga and I were hauled off to a police van outside that was already filled with drunks. Bob was not arrested and went back to to tell Chuchu about the incident. At the police station popularly known as the “Junction Cage,” we were herded into a large coop with barbed-wire fencing that was already overflowing with at least two hundred other prisoners. One of the policemen knew us as good friends of Chuchu Horton, who lived next to the “Junction Cage.” He telephoned Chuchu, who came with Bob and arranged for our release, persuading the station commander to drop the charges against us. We never heard from the fisherman with the bitten-off nose, but word was that it had been reattached to his face and the bar incident had won South African exiles some respect.

  The gold-and-grass airlift plan was finally in place. Alan Pariser landed in Monrovia in a private Gulfstream jet along with Ron Scoggins and a scientist from Switzerland who had secured a gold buyer in his country and two pilots from Los Angeles. The gold and grass had been pre-sold in Switzerland, where Nga, the scientist, Ron, Alan, and I would share the profits. The pilots had already been paid off in advance. Monrovia’s chief of police, an African-American ex-army officer who had become a very close friend and drinking buddy over the years, had arranged the landing permit for us at Sinkor Airport. Sinkor was a suburb of Monrovia, about three miles from town. The architect in Ghana who had secured the gold and the marijuana farmer Al Hajji were the other two partners. They had secured landing rights at a private airfield outside Kumasi. Alan showed us the weapons we would be packing when we picked up the booty and flew it to Europe. Mine was a giant, nickel-plated .357 Magnum. Suddenly I began to realize that I was not cut out for this kind of caper. “Listen, Alan, I have gotten us this far. I ain’t packing any pistol, neither am I going on the plane with you guys. You all take it from here on out. You can give me what you consider my fair share for connecting you to everybody. I can’t go on with the rest of this plan.”

  Nga, Alan, Ron, and the scientist were disappointed in me because they felt that I was central to the plan’s success. I disagreed. The possibility of a gunfight sent a shudder through my body. I wished them good luck and returned to Sister Gertie’s Congotown mansion, bringing an end to a caper that could either have earned me a fortune or gotten me killed. I preferred to be a coward with still relatively clean hands. Bob Young was really pissed off with me for not telling him about the heist. “You should have told me about the fucking scheme. I could have taken your part and we could have pulled it off, man. Instead, you preferred to work with those fucking white boys without me, and the whole shit fell apart. That’s what you get for keeping a secret from your best friend, motherfucker. I would have known how to do that shit right, man.”

  Bob was probably right, because over the years since then, he has mounted very successful business projects all over Africa in legitimate export and import initiatives. Today, he heads what is probably one of Africa’s most efficient road-marking companies, doin
g business in more than twenty countries on the continent, and is the recipient of several prestigious international awards in that field. If he could pull that off, he probably could’ve figured out a simple gold-and-grass smuggling scheme!

  Shortly after the gold-and-grass debacle, I got word from Casablanca Records that they’d booked us on a tour with George Clinton’s Parliament Funkadelic and Bootsy Collins, with OJAH as the opening act. The two groups traveled in a convoy of four buses and a few limousines. A bevy of beautiful groupies followed the buses in their cars. We hardly slept from snorting cocaine around the clock with this musical entourage. Just before our fifth concert, we were hit with the bad news that OJAH was not making it with the audiences and Jeffrey Osborne and LTD would replace us. Neil Bogart had been less than impressed with the recording material we’d delivered to Casablanca. Nonetheless, he felt that touring with Bootsy and Clinton would introduce us to a new audience and perhaps boost my chances of getting my recording contract renewed. Being dropped from the tour signaled the end of my Casablanca chapter. This would also be the last tour I did with Stanley Todd and the West African Band. Many of us had been together since the summer of 1973, when Fela introduced me to Hedzoleh Soundz. We had come to the end of the line, and it was heartbreaking to say good-bye.

  Before returning to Liberia, I spent some time with Stewart Levine in Los Angeles. He was now living with Quincy Jones’s oldest daughter, Jolie, and her son Donovan. Jolie and Stewart had been having an on-and-off relationship for some time, and had finally decided to tie the knot.

  One evening the telephone rang. Stewart was on the other line and asked me to answer the call. It was Herb Alpert. Herb was surprised to hear my voice, and suggested that we get together and explore the possibilities of doing something together before I headed back to Liberia. Caiphus, Stewart, and I met with Herb the following day.

  When I returned to Liberia in September 1977, I arrived to find that Tshidi was five months pregnant. She had moved in with a friend from Zimbabwe named Netsai, whose brother was a lecturer at the University of Liberia. They had a beautiful home, and I moved in with them. With Nga’s assistance, we found a luxurious two-story beachfront mansion with a tennis court facing the Atlantic Ocean. I rented it right away, and before I went back to Los Angeles to begin recording with Herb Alpert, Tshidi, Mabusha, and I moved into the beach house, which I had already partly furnished. I opened an account with Chuchu Horton at the Bank of Liberia, and left Tshidi with funds to complete furnishing the house. From Los Angeles I sent her more money so that she could buy a car, because the house was far away from public transportation. The recording with Herb was a joyful experience, with Caiphus and Stewart producing. We did an old Zimbabwean classic dance hit from the 1940s, “Skokiaan,” which had once been a smash hit for Louis Armstrong; “Ring Bell,” first recorded by Miriam Makeba on her Phatha-Phatha album; “Lobo” by Brazil’s Edu Lobo; a Caiphus Semenya ballad; and six other favorites of Herb’s. The album came out quite strong, and we planned a tour in the spring of 1978. Two weeks later I was asked by Philemon and Miriam in Paris to come and help them complete her album Country Girl, which we had started in Kumasi, Ghana.

  I arrived in Paris to an acrimonious Miriam complaining about how Stanley and I had ripped her off when we had requested that she pay us $10,000 for producing her album in Ghana and for part of the studio expenses in Kumasi. Throughout the entire week that I spent working with her, Philly, and a couple of Paris-based African musicians, Miriam only spoke to me about completing the album, which songs to attend to, how the record company was in a hurry to release the album, and how much of her time and money had been wasted. And she kept reminding me that the deadline was in a week. No hotel accommodations had been arranged for me, so I slept on the floor in Philly’s hotel room. We were picked up early in the morning and driven to the studio, ordered to do what was expected, then taken back to the hotel after the sessions, which often lasted beyond midnight. It was a very unpleasant week, but one that showed me that Miriam had developed a love-hate disposition toward me after all this time. She was nice when she needed me and mean when she was avenging the string of wrongs she felt I had done her. There were a few occasions over the years after the Paris recordings when she would suddenly lay into me in public and remind me of all the things she’d done for me and how I’d treated her ungratefully in return. I don’t think she ever forgave me for walking out on our marriage.

  At Charles de Gaulle Airport, I had just finished checking in when I saw a beautiful, jet-black teenage girl of about eighteen sitting on one of the benches crying her heart out. I walked up to her and asked what was troubling her. She told me she was on her way to Accra on vacation from school in Los Angeles. She had been let out of the airport by mistake, and the immigration officials were refusing to let her back inside the terminal gate area. A new shift of immigration officers had come on duty since then, and they were claiming that she had entered the country illegally. I was feeling no pain at the time, since I’d been celebrating the completion of Miriam’s album and was looking forward to sleeping in a bed again. In my street French, I let the immigration officers know that if the young lady was not immediately put into my custody, an international incident was going to be unavoidable.

  French officials are immune to insults as long as they are expressed in their language. They soon released Elinam into my custody, and I checked her in on the same flight that I would be taking. I bought her some perfume and we had a bite in the airport café and flew to Accra sitting next to each other.

  Elinam’s parents, Mark and Diamond Cofie, who had been worried about their daughter’s no-show, were relieved when we arrived in Accra. Stanley Todd had come to the airport to fetch me, and all of us ended up at Elinam’s house for a festive meal. We left the Cofie household laden with drinks and food—all in appreciation for my having looked after their daughter.

  After a week in Accra with Mama, I was off to Liberia, where Tshidi would soon give birth to our baby. Aside from providing financially for Tshidi’s comfort, my behavior was clearly far from what might be expected of a father-to-be. But Pula was born on the first evening of the 1978 rainy season, on the 20th of January. When it rains in Liberia, it comes with a violent introduction of thunder, winds, and lightning that makes one wonder if the world is coming to an end. Motlalepula, her maternal grandmother’s name, means “the one who comes with the rain.” I pretty much stayed around the house for the first three months, taking care of my beautiful daughter while her mother went to work.

  When March rolled around, I had to head back to Los Angeles for rehearsals with Herb Alpert before our national tour. Larry Willis picked most of the band, mostly old friends of ours from New York: Buddy Williams on drums; “Boyzie” Williams on bass; Larry on piano; Arthur Adams on guitar; Manolo Badrena on percussion; and Jonas Gwangwa on trombone. We rehearsed for a couple of weeks and hit the road beginning in San Francisco. We played medium-sized clubs all over the country. I was completely crazy on this tour, drinking, smoking, and partying like a pirate. That Herb Alpert was able to stomach my insane behavior without coming down on me still boggles my mind, but he was enjoying the camaraderie of the great musicians we were playing with. More than that, he was able to talk a lot of jazz shop with all of us. For a long time Herb had been perceived as a multimillionaire who played mariachi-flavored pop Muzak and knew very little about other contemporary music. On the contrary, not only was he responsible for guiding A&M Records to become one of the world’s top music companies, but he was able to bring to the label famous and unknown artists who became major icons in the industry: the Carpenters, Paul Williams, the Brothers Johnson, Sergio Mendes, Joan Armatrading, Quincy Jones, and the Tijuana Brass. But people who considered themselves jazz purists liked to attack him. One night Herb and I went to catch a Joe Williams performance at the Century Plaza Hotel near Beverly Hills. Between sets, Joe came over to our table and started to put Herb down by claiming that he “wasn’t really happ
ening.” I was more embarrassed for Joe than for Herb, because I thought he was being picky, petty, and perhaps a tad jealous. Herb was actually an avid scholar of jazz, with one of the richest libraries of the genre, a very keen student with a sincere desire to excel in it. This tour gave him a chance to spread his wings and stretch out.

  Herb was traveling with his wife, Lani, and their three-year-old daughter and suggested I have Tshidi and Pula join me on tour. But I was too crazy even to entertain such a thought—I was at my most pathetic. At the end of the tour, Herb felt that we should go for a second album. I first went to Liberia to spend some time with Tshidi and Pula. When I returned to Los Angeles toward the end of the summer, I was thirty-nine years old and had three children, but was not much of a father to any of them. I knew I needed to change my lifestyle. Deep down in my soul, I wanted to. I was beginning to realize that I was making a great many bad decisions at a time when I had a golden opportunity to do many wonderful things.