It’s astounding to read in Straight Life that Art had to be propped up to play on sessions that became epiphanies of the West Coast jazz movement. Pepper’s intonation was clear and balmy (on clarinet and tenor as well as alto), but the texts of his solos were shaded with longings. The tensile and deliberated phrasing was a means to a direct and manly emotional expressiveness that was virtually antithetical to the cool posturings of those improvising beach boys who tried to recreate California jazz as fun in the midnight sun. Could he really have been nodding out when those cover photos were taken? He appeared so strong and uncomplicatedly handsome. He recorded his last Contemporary date in November of 1960. Except for a sideman gig eight weeks later, a guest stint with Buddy Rich’s orchestra in 1968, and a little-heard featured spot with the Mike Vax Big Band in 1973, Art Pepper disappeared from records and, as far as most people were concerned, from public view for fifteen years.
He had made the big time: San Quentin. Pepper was caught stealing to support his habit, devoting his most creative energies to planning heists, many of which could have been better executed by Laurel and Hardy. (The most satisfying moment of his life, he says, was a successful heist.) The prison sequences in Straight Life are among the best I’ve ever read, vivid and impassioned and stubbornly convinced that the moral life of the yard—where a rapist is treated with contempt, but a gang rape proves a gang’s bravery; where a rat is lower than a child molester—is superior to that of the outside. His language and vision superficially resemble that of Gary Gilmore in Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song: both men are proudly homophobic, murderous on the subject of informers, indifferent to the outcome of their crimes, vain, and convinced of their own courage and moral impunity. In San Quentin, Pepper starts thinking “how great it would be to kill someone and really be accepted as a way out guy,” but he always, sometimes through the intervention of friends, managed to keep some control; several acquaintances explain it as cowardice. He also turned increasingly racist in jail, a widespread phenomenon that in a particularly lucid moment he traces to the prison system itself. (Paradoxically, this in no way mitigated his conviction that the great jazz players and, indeed, the moral giants of the music were predominantly black.) Upon his release, he spent time in North Beach in San Francisco, seething to kill blacks; he talks about organizing a white vigilante committee “who’d stick up for the white race.” Soon enough he returned to heroin to alleviate the hatred over which he had no more control than he did his sexual obsessions.
Finally, at the nadir of his life, he retreated to Synanon. The Sixties were in full gear, and he wore an earring and hit the rock joints with his tenor; but his life was empty and even his mother refused him lodging. The description of life at Synanon is as uncompromising as the jail sequences; he is alternately damning and grateful. The best thing to happen to him there was meeting Laurie, who became his wife, lover, mother, babysitter, manager, editor, and co-author.
Art left Synanon in 1971. Four months later, his father died—a release, Laurie speculates, that may have made it easier for Art to think of himself as a man. He started working as a musician again, playing casuals and clinics, touring colleges, sitting in. But his ambivalence about music remained. In 1977, three events, in Laurie’s estimation, forced him to reappraise his gift and his life: In March, he played a concert series in Tokyo with Cal Tjader, and the crowds cheered him as though “he might have been the Beatles”; in June he toured the East Coast for the first time as a leader, playing two dates at the Village Vanguard; in September, he got busted after a car accident that almost killed him. Laurie recalls, “Art discovered then that he couldn’t go ‘home’ again to jail. There was no honor, no welcome there. All his buddies were dead. He was an old man. He wasn’t a bigshot. He went through a long spell of depression, aggravated by sobriety and by Les Koenig’s death in November. When he went back to Japan with his own band in February of 1978, he’d just about decided to be a musician. Galaxy signed him in September. That did it. That and the publication of Straight Life.”
Pepper’s sudden reappearance in 1975 had been something of a second coming in musical circles. For the next seven years, his frequent recordings and tours, and the publication in 1979 of Straight Life, transformed him from a gifted altoist who had made a string of semi-classic albums in the Fifties to a touchstone for the very aesthetics of jazz music. He wasn’t merely back; he was back with a vengeance.
What sobered the critics and fans (many of them musicians) about those last years was the aggressiveness of his creativity, a refusal to coast that made every performance a conscientious statement—a “trip,” in the prison lingo he favored. If you thought you were going to sit back, sip your whiskey, and drowsily tap your foot, you were in the wrong place. Pepper could draw blood (usually his own), especially on ballads. He was always thinking, thinking, thinking. And he made you think; he reminded you how you came to love this music in the first place.
Armstrong once said, “Jazz is only what you are.” Pepper’s understanding of that was profound. He had lived a dark, cold life and this was his last stand. He shamelessly set it all out on the table, in writing and in music. He was a drug user, and he put that into his music. He was white in a music in which most of the innovators were black, and he accepted that as a challenge. “It looks to me like life begins at fifty,” he wrote, “and I never thought I’d live to see fifty, let alone start a new life at this age.” He set up an ambitious agenda for himself (to be the best saxophonist in the world, for starters), and, driven in part by a paranoia that convinced him that everyone wanted him to fail, he found new ways to stretch his endurance. You could hear that in his playing, and it was riveting.
The subject of music is not ignored in Straight Life. Pepper discusses his influences at length, his concern with tone, his conviction that a man’s music must respect the moral Tightness of his life—he gives Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Zoot Sims, Dizzy Gillespie as examples. There’s a revealing description of his famous ‘50s session with Red Garland—I wish there were more of the same—and sharply observed anecdotes about road trips with Kenton, Buddy Rich, and others. His account of a jam session with Sonny Stitt that closes the book is as lyrical a celebration of a bandstand plight as I know of. When he wails like this, Pepper the memoirist isn’t too far from Pepper the recording artist.
But it is Laurie Pepper who is responsible for the book’s shape and much of its literary texture, and her efforts can hardly be overpraised. Using the standard oral history techniques of modern anthropology, she crafted a brutal montage of voices—relatives, acquaintances, and friends, as well as disingenuous magazine interviews—that amplify and contradict Pepper’s steely narrative. She allows Pepper to come through whole, boasting of a crime on one page and declaring absolute innocence on the next. The text is eloquent, witty, and credible. When I reviewed the book for The Village Voice, I wrote that Pepper was better than William Burroughs on the subject of drugs and better than Malcolm Braly on prison life, an evaluation that is easier to make today, when neither Burroughs’s Junky nor Braly’s On the Yard are as well remembered. But it hardly matters that Laurie Pepper brought the book to life; her ear and editorial instinct turned Art’s stories and obsessions into a hellfire narrative. The collaboration was seamless, and every page is wounding and real.
When Art returned to New York in May 1980, he asked me to come by with my copy of Straight Life so that he could inscribe it. One of the things he wrote was, “[Thanks] for being so honest in the last article.” That was the Voice review, in which I had enumerated many of the least appealing aspects of his character, as detailed in his book. He liked people to be polite, but honest. Our first encounter had followed his 1977 debut at the Village Vanguard. I had sat there opening night mesmerized, and then went home to write a reverie in which there were even more egregious puns than the title, “The Whiteness of the Wail.” I really didn’t know anything about him, except the Contemporary records and some of his own liner comments, and the way he looked and sounded on stage—gaunt and tenuous, compulsively talkative,