Nighthawk Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  An English professor from UCLA sat in the front row, busily taking notes, as he would on their whole West Coast tour, for he was, he proudly confided to Jerry, cataloging the entire span of Hawk’s work, not recording the songs but listing and cross-referencing them by title and noting all their little differences. In the end he came to the conclusion that Hawk knew 641 songs which differed sufficiently from one another to be considered individually as separate and independent units. Of these 318 were traditional or adaptations of traditional material, 211 were Hawk’s variations on what might be considered blues standards, and 112 might be considered original compositions. “She-it,” Hawk said when asked about it. “I can’t even count up to 641. But if that’s what the professor tells you, it must be so. It seem like a lot, don’t it, though? Maybe he counted some of them twice.”

  At the end of the concert Hawk invited Lori up on stage. “I want you to give a nice hand to a little girl who can really sing something herself,” he insisted over her protestations and blushes. At last he got her up on stage, and she sat down at the grand piano without a mike, forming a tentative chord with her left hand, playing a few treble notes with her right. Jerry couldn’t understand it, really. She was no better (probably no prettier) than a thousand others, but Hawk saw something in her apparently beneath the conventional exterior. After the concert there was a reception, and Hawk stood around talking with Lori for almost an hour, quietly discussing, neither playing the fool nor disgracing himself with crudities as he often did on these occasions. Afterward Lori came up to Jerry and in a voice that was barely audible said, “I was kind of thinking of dropping out of college.”

  “Don’t do that, you might learn something,” said Jerry, who had a tendency to be flip and would have given anything now to take back that cocksure grin—but then, at the time, he must have thought he was the jumpingest cat, after all he was the one who had discovered the Screamin’ Nighthawk, and, despite the reservations he was constantly expressing to Hawk and the world at large, he himself in his heart of hearts knew it was never going to run out. Hawk may have been the one with talent, but he was the connoisseur of art, and art was a bottomless well just waiting to be plumbed, or something like that. It was a time in his life when he might have thought the critic was more important than the song.

  “Oh, I mean college doesn’t mean anything to me. I just feel like there’s no point,” she said, biting her lip. “I mean, I already made up my mind.”

  Jerry nodded. He felt above it all in a way.

  “I was wondering, though. Hawk said you might need a secretary. Someone to answer the phone, something like that.”

  Jerry looked her over, up and down coolly. Back then he pretended that she didn’t take his breath away. “How old are you?” he said from the comfortable vantage point of nine or ten years.

  “Nineteen,” she said. “I’ve already told my parents. They didn’t like it, but what can you expect? They want me to get a job at Disneyland. My father’s a soil engineer, and he did some consulting work when they built it. He thinks he can get me a pretty good job until I decide what I want to do. But I know what I want to do—I know I want to be a musician. I haven’t done much of it, really, I may not be any good, but that’s what I want to do.”

  So she came East with them. At first Jerry didn’t dare to approach her. She was like this dream that had weirdly materialized. He helped her find an apartment. He installed her in his Watertown office, tried to think up letters to dictate just to look busy, had her type up the biography as far as it went, let her talk to Hawk when he called from time to time. Nothing much was happening. Every so often a booking came through. Jerry had some publishing and was managing a couple of folk singers and a bluegrass trio that played the little coffeehouses around Boston. He was still trying to negotiate the record deal with Cascade. And he was fighting against the thought that he was falling in love with Lori, that he could fall in love with Lori, that if he lay back and waited for things to happen, she would just fall into his arms. The first time he kissed her he came up behind her and put his hands lightly on her shoulders. He half-closed his eyes and felt a weightless detachment, prayed that the phone wouldn’t ring and she wouldn’t look at him oddly, as if she had known all along that this was what it was all about and was prepared to suffer it patiendy. That wasn’t the way it was. He could still recall vividly just how it was. She turned around slowly, a flickering smile on her lips, touched his fingertips reassuringly, put her arms around his neck, and melted into his embrace, not yielding to some external force but not holding back anything either. She was so warm! That was what he remembered most of all. He felt as if she could heat the room with the glow from her skin.

  For a while that was all there was—kissing at odd moments, in odd corners, touching each other, sharing an anticipatory secret. Then Lori invited him over to her apartment to hear some of the songs she had been writing. She played them in that touchingly clumsy fashion he had grown used to, too many changes to be called blues but too stark for rock, on a piano she had been renting for the last few weeks. They were all “personal” songs, mournful songs, “straight from the heart,” as Hawk would say. Jerry was deeply moved. “They’re beautiful,” he said to his surprise, when he should have told her to forget it, that he alone could appreciate what she had to offer. That night for the first time they went to bed together.

  They slept with each other for several months. Jerry wanted to move in, but Lori didn’t want him to. “You can’t be too possessive,” she said, and he thought she was shy. Then when things started to go bad he began to wonder if she had some kind of secret life. Did she have other’lovers) Was she as uninhibited with them as she was with him? He never found out. On her own Lori found her way to a recording contract—perhaps through some contact she made at the office, probably not, it didn’t matter, not through him. The first Jerry knew of it was when Cascade called up one day. He thought it was about Hawk. Instead it was Sid, the president of the company, whom he had never been able to reach. “What are you talking about?” Jerry said when he realized it wasn’t Hawk they were talking about at all.

  “What, are you bullshitting me? Are you her manager, or what? She says to get in touch with you, so naturally I assume you know something about it. Look, if you’re playing cute, don’t bother. You’ve sent this stuff all around the block, right? Hey, I’m not playing games with you. I’m telling you straight out, I think this chick has got it. I just want to know who’s heard her already.”

  Jerry tried to recover as rapidly as he could and assured Sid that the tape hadn’t traveled at all, as far as he knew. “Yeah, yeah, well, I wanted to check with you—I got your word, right? All the songs are original, right? As far as you know. Hey, hey, just kidding. I hear an Arif Mardin arrangement behind her, only tasteful, you know, none of this complicated shit. We’ll bring in King Curtis as session leader, give it that New York spade feel—”

  Jerry just kept listening, bemused, wondering if some kind of mistake hadn’t been made. Then the man mentioned a figure that Jerry thought he could not possibly have heard right, so he asked him to repeat it.

  “How about Hawk?” Jerry said, gulping back disbelief.

  “Yeah, yeah, sure, no problem, I figured that’d be the pitch, we can handle that okay.”

  “What kind of an advance—”

  “Look, let’s not dick around. You know as well as I do there ain’t nothing in it for us. The blues thing is dead anyway. So what do you say we call it a thousand against royalties, one record option, shit, it’s charity, am I right? You bring the schwartze, but I want the chick.”

  When he got off the phone, Jerry called Lori into the little back room that he designated his private office. She seemed embarrassed and a little bit ashamed. “It was just, you know, I saw the way you sent out demos all the time, and it was just so, I guess it was the impersonality of it, I figured I’d never meet any of these people, so what harm would it do to try?”

  “Bu
t you didn’t even tell me,” Jerry protested, hurt, although he was not so sure whether he was hurt by her lack of candor or the simple fear of her actually achieving enough success to go out on her own. The mistake, he realized in retrospect, was in not realizing that she was on her own all along.

  “Well, it wasn’t anything,” Lori insisted with that blank intransigence that he found so baffling, and disturbing.

  “Oh shit, Lori,” he started to say, then thought better of it. “Look, you can’t fool around like this if you really want to have a career.”

  Lori seemed to stare right through him. “Look, I told them you were my manager, because I trusted you,” she said. “I still trust you. But I won’t go on trusting you if you talk about my ’career,’ ever again. That isn’t what I want. I don’t know what I want, but that isn’t it.”

  “But they really want to sign you.”

  “What about Hawk?”

  Jerry explained the deal to her. Lori shook her head. “He’s not going to sign for that kind of money.”

  “Lori, they’re not going to pay any more.”

  “Then jack up my price. Or get the money out of my advance. You just make sure Hawk gets his five grand.”

  Jerry was bewildered. He felt as if everything had changed between them in an instant. He tried to embrace her, but she was stiff. “I’m really happy for you,” he said.

  “I know you are,” she said in words whose import he would never fully gauge. He played them back over and over again, heard their tone exactly as it was, could never understand why one had followed the other. “That’s why we can’t be like we’ve been any more. We can be friends, can’t we? Because if we can’t, I want to leave right now—”

  “I don’t understand,” said Jerry.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know what it’s like. You want everything to be exactly the way you imagine it to be, but it can’t be like that, it can’t ever be like that. I feel as if you’d smother me, because I’d have to be what you imagined that I really was, do you understand what I mean?”

  “No.” Jerry shook his head. He was still trying to puzzle it out eight years later.

  They recorded at the Record Plant in New York City. It was the first time that Hawk had ever spent more than an hour or two on an album. Ordinarily he balked even at doing alternate takes, let alone more than the eleven or twelve tunes he was contracted for.

  “But your bass string was out of tune,” said one producer in despair.

  “Then get me overtime,” Hawk boomed out through the microphone. “I ought to get combat pay for what I have to put up with.”

  At the Record Plant there was none of that, though not, Jerry thought, because Hawk was overawed by his surroundings (he couldn’t have given less of a shit that Jimi Hendrix had trod these boards or that this was state-of-the-art technology), but, of course, because of Lori’s presence. Jerry could have been bitter, he reflected, that Hawk was willing to put so much more trust in Lori than in himself, but it was such a pleasure to relax with Hawk, perhaps for the first time in their long association, that he simply allowed himself to bathe in the experience, as if he, too, were an innocent onlooker privileged to witness this primitive ritual.

  “This is a very basic music,” said Eddie, the engineer, fiddling with the dials. “And that’s just what these musicians are —very basic.”

  Russ Levine, the producer, was deferential to the point of contempt. Somehow none of it mattered.

  “What was the first song you ever heard?” said Lori, as the playback of the last song died out, and Hawk looked lost and mystified in the dimly lighted studio amidst baffles and electronic equipment left over from someone’s rock session.

  “I was a last-born baby,” offered Hawk. “Didn’t hear nothing but my daddy and his daddy making music, fiddle music, jigs, reels, all that kind of trash. Wasn’t nothing like the blues then —oh, there might have been one or two tunes that was close, but the first blues song that I can recall, an old feller in our town, he wasn’t nothing but a bum, really, and people all called him Turkey, I never did find out his last name, he sung a song about ’Devil jump a black man, run him a solid mile/ You know he caught that nigger, and he cry like a natural child.’ Of course peoples today don’t want to hear that kind of junk, they don’t want to hear about no devil or about no black man either, but that was all that we was hearing when we was just kids coming up.” And then he sang it.

  There was a stunned silence when he was through. Russ Levine and Eddie knocked on the window and signaled thumbs up, but Hawk just looked phlegmatic, as always.

  “Some of these old-timers,” said Russ, shaking his head, as Jerry felt that small feeling in the pit of his stomach that he identified with pleasure but might equally well have identified with fear that the pleasure would stop.

  Lori kept pressing him to remember the songs he had first heard and played, no great feat since Jerry doubted that Hawk had ever forgotten anything, he claimed he still remembered the feel of his mother’s womb; the trick was in getting him to acknowledge it. The sessions went on for three or four days, with Lori always expressing the desire to hear one more tale, to try to improve a song with just one more take. Finally he just declared that enough was enough, packed up his guitar, invited Lori to come down to Yola before too long, and disappeared into the night.

  The two-record set that was released got a Grammy nomination and won the downbeat critics’ poll for 1969, but it didn’t sell any better than any of the others and Hawk was disgusted when they put together a third record from the outtakes. “I knowed I should have quit when I was ahead,” he insisted angrily to Jerry. “Then if they wanted another record, they would have had to come up with some cash, Jack, none of these silly-ass awards.”

  Around six o’clock Hawk sat up in bed. He rubbed his head with his recalcitrant left hand, then held it out in front of him and watched it respond clumsily to the brain’s commands. He shook his head disgustedly. An old man. He was an old man. He remembered the contempt he had once felt for Ole Man Mose when Mose had gotten too feeble-brained to do for himself. It was funny how life had a habit of catching up with you. On the one hand he felt no different than he had forty years ago, fifty years ago. Old?—don’t know nothing about old. Tired was something else. He was the same, it was just his body that was tired. He spat through his few good teeth on to the floor. “Mattie!” he called in a voice barely audible even to himself. “Mattie!” He was hungry.

  Mattie poked her head through the curtain. “You got a visitor, Roosevelt,” she said. A visitor. He didn’t want no visitors.

  PROBABLY THE PREACHER, that lowdown scalawag Reverend Other Williams. Be hovering over the bedside, say, You better pray for your soul now, like I done tole you so many times before, the Lord he finally catched up with you, and maybe he’s right. Call me Brother Roosevelt all the time—Brother Roosevelt, we’s worried about your soul—like I was the president or something. I suppose it don’t matter none—never did like my name, though. From the time I was a little bitty boy. Grandma used to call me Punkin, then it was Punk for short. Big fellows, little bit older than myself, they used to call me Feets, cause they think it so comical the way my toes always be sticking out of Daddy’s cut-off brogans. Then for a while it was Litde Mose cause, really, that was who I patterned myself behind, I come up behind him just like ol’ Sonny House come up behind that litde yellow squirt, Charley Patton. Friend say, Man, you play that box just like Mose. You know, I be slipping across the field with my old gal, Sal, and I couldn’t tell the difference between the two. Aww, get off with your racket—that’s what I say, but I was so swelled up inside, man, I thought that was it, just like these kids today, they grunt and groan till they sound like that little Jimmy Brown, don’t understand, that’s just the starting point. From there you got to git your own. Dog Man say to me one time, Man, will you play that “Riverbed Blues,” just this oncet like Ole Man Mose. Say, man, I wouldn’t bother with you, but I got a thing with ol’
Ella Mae Trimble, and if that moon slip behind a cloud I want to see if I can’t slip her out the back door without her husband knowing that she gone. See, that’s where that song come in. He so crazy about that song the way that Mose do it, he say he can listen all night long. So I play it, Doggy give me two bits, and I tell him for two bits I play the song one time, play it twice for four, play it all night long if you like, just slip me a dollar. Shoot, I didn’t know no better, neither did Doggy and Ella Mae. That fool listen to me sing, it start him to thinking about Ella Mae, when he can’t find her he go get his shotgun, and if Doggy couldn’t outrun a hound, he be so full of buckshot he be spoiled. Don’t know what happen to Ella Mae, but we didn’t see her at no dances for a while. But that was just the way it was in those days—play all night for a fish sandwich and glad to get it, too. Shoot, we thought we was doing good. Play those blues, Night-hawk, they used to say. And I could play ’em, too. Little old shanties set way back in the country, nothing but dirt floors and kerosene lanterns and the chairs flying—my, my. Come on, Hawk, make that box talk, all right, all right, aww, Mr. Hawk, you don’t know what your music do to me—

  “HAWK? HAWK? Say, Hawk—” A girl’s voice. Pale-blond hair, sitting there—where she go? Lori, Lori, that Lori girl. Hawk’s big laugh rumbled in his throat. “Hey, girl, what you doing? What you doing down here?”

  Lori touched his hand. Hand felt warm. “You all right, Hawk? I didn’t mean to wake you. Mattie said—”

  “Oh sure, sure.” His voice came out in a hoarse whisper that wasn’t him (“Oh babe, I don’t know myself”). “I been awake a long time. How you doing, baby?”

  “I’m doing good, Hawk.” Lori looked as if she was about to cry. What you gonna cry for, gal? You think this old man’s gonna die? Shoot, no, this old man’s too mean to die. He started to laugh but only spluttered until he began to cough.