JAZZTIMES.COM 43and feeling that it is almost impossible,
while reading Straight Life, to reconcile
the sublime nature of Pepper’s art with
the dark, self-destructive tendencies
that animate his memoir.
This tension between the artist and
the man is what made the book so star-
tling when it was first published, and
today—reading the book for the third
time—I still find it hard to reconcile.
Art Pepper, who died in 1982, was a
man of contradictions. He left behind a
lifetime of beautiful music and a book
so scalding in its sexual candor and
emotional brutality that in today’s mar-
ketplace it would be too hot to handle.
Straight Life does not delve much
into Pepper’s evolution as a musician.
There is a sprinkling of anecdotes about
recording sessions, and significant pag-
es on his time as a young saxophonist
with Stan Kenton’s orchestra. But this
is mostly a book about the man’s psy-
chosis: his years as a heroin addict, and
his various stints in prison. On both of
these accounts, the book stands as one
of the most revelatory ever published.
Gary Giddins, reviewing the book in
The Village Voice back when it was pub-
lished, called it “superior to Burroughs’
Junkie on that subject and Braly’s On
the Yard on that one.”
Pepper was not the first musician
to detail the unruly particulars of a
narcotics habit or to test the boundaries
of literary propriety. In Really the Blues,
first published in 1946, Mezz Mezzrow
describes acquiring an opium addiction
in the 1920s; in Lady Sings the Blues,
a memoir attributed to Billie Holiday
and co-writer William Dufty, the singer
cops to having a heroin addiction and
describes the cruel ways that police
and narcotics agents harassed her and
sought to destroy her career; in Charles
Mingus’ Beneath the Underdog, which,
in some ways, was a precursor to
Straight Life in its lowlife verisimilitude,
the irascible bassist famously describes
(in detail) having sex with 26 Mexican
prostitutes in two-and-a-half hours at a
cheap bordello in Tijuana.
All of these books, in a way, sought
to break through the genteel formula
of popular autobiography, in which
publication to a mass audience requires
creating an artificial distance between
the writer (often a ghost writer) and
the reader. Pepper, on the other hand,
like a street-corner storyteller, drags
the reader deep into his hellish descent
with the kind of novelistic details you
might expect from a writer like Hubert
Selby, Jr. or Henry Miller. When Pepper
is released from his many stints in
prison, there is little doubt that he will
return to the junkie life. Usually he is
copping and using dope within days of
his release. When it comes to his relent-
less compulsion for self-destruction,
the possibility of redemption through
artistic expression is a distant dream.
At times, reading Straight Life is like
reading the autopsy of a man who is
already dead but doesn’t know it yet.
So what is it that drives this brilliant
artist to debase himself and consis-
tently undercut his illustrious career?
Though he never comes right out and
says it, it’s clear that Pepper’s bête
noire is the reality of race in America.
The book was constructed by Pepper
in a series of interviews with LauriePepper, his wife and co-author, at a
time when the Black Power movement
was in full throttle. There are times in
the book when Pepper cuts loose with
statements of racial aggrievement that
come off as whining, given what is now
commonly referred to as the reality of
“white privilege.”
Pepper became a professional musi-
cian at a time when segregation was still
very much in place. His descriptions
of having to use his whiteness to get
around the Jim Crow laws—flagging
down cabs for black musicians in the
band, ordering and picking up food
from establishments where blacks were
not welcome—are sensitively rendered,
with an acute awareness of the basic
inhumanity at play. But these passages
also raise the specter of what price ispaid by the person who is called upon to
play the “white savior” role. Black jazz
musicians, in a way, became dependent
on white musicians like Pepper to deal
with the day-to-day mechanisms of life
on the road in a racist country. It doesn’t
take a genius to see how this might lay
the groundwork for internal relation-
ships within a band that are fraught with
anger and resentment.
These emotions were kept buried in
the 1940s and ’50s, but by the 1960s the
racial dynamics of jazz, as with all of
society, bubbled to the surface. Pepper
describes one time playing at a club in
Los Angeles with his own group. On a
break between sets, a friend points out
that Pepper’s own bandmates, who are
black, are laughing at him behind his
back. Pepper confronts his drummer:We went out in front of the club and I
said, “Man, what’s happening with you?”
And he said, “Oh fuck you. You know
what I think of you, you white moth-
erfucker?” And he spit in the dirt and
stepped in it. He said, “You can’t play.
None of you white punks can play.” I said,
“You lousy, stinking black motherfucker!
Why the fuck do you work for me if you
feel like that?” And he said, “Oh, we’re
just taking advantage of you white punk
motherfuckers.”... I was really hurt, you
know; I wanted to cry, you know; I just
couldn’t believe it—guys I’ d given jobs to,
and I find out they’re talking behind my
back and, not only that, laughing behind
my back when I’m playing in a club!At times, reading
Straight Life is
like reading the
autopsy of a man
who is already
dead but doesn’t
know it yet.