My Bipolar Pop Life

Jay McShann’s death at 90 made me think of my bipolar pop life: separated but equally obsessive loves of black bands at the Paradise Theatre and white ones at Eastwood Gardens. Growing up in Detroit in the 1950’s, before the 1967 riots, it was easy mixing with “the colored”. The Paradise on the main drag, Woodward Avenue, not far from the Cultural Center of Motown (the Main Library and the Detroit Institute of Art, and kitty corner from the Macabees Building where “The Lone Ranger” was concocted) and before that moniker became a “black” musical advertising slogan.

If you were willing to hohum through a western or some other infra/Art movie (I was entering a Ingmar Bergmann phase), eventually you could relish the royalty of the colored Big Bands, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and the unKnighted Jimmie Lunceford. Greg Kamin, who aspired to be a Big League drummer, and I would cut classes at Edwin Denby High to save money on a cheap afternoon ticket.

In 1980 when I went back to bury my brother Mike, in a sentimental mood, I discovered the real history of the Paradise. Originally, it was Orchestra Hall, where the Detroit Symphony performed. As the blacks moved up from the South to work in the defense factories in the 1940’s, the white galloped off to Northeast and Northwest Detroit, and Orchestra Hall defected to the River Plaza at the end of Woodward Avenue.

Indeed no less an ear than Pablo Casals judged that venue as the best performance space in North America. Alas, rock music killed the big bands and the Paradise went silent for years. Shortly after my fraternal visit, a benigningly obsessed oboist went about raising twenty three millions dollars to repossess a renewed Orchestra Hall.

In the mid-eighties when I was relentlessly pursuing a police department lawyer who had the charismatic good fortune to own a Mies van der Rohe apartment in Lafayette Plaisance, I took time out to attend an orchestra rehearsal, and tracked down the obsessed oboist in the Green Room where I playfully chided him for destroying half of my youth. He smiled slyly and replied, “What do you mean “destroyed”. We have jazz concerts every Saturday night!”

And then at the Far Northeastern Edge of Detroit, at Gratiot and Eight Mile Road (the city limits) lay Eastwood Gardens, an outdoor dance pavilion where Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, and so on, played! There was no better date! I can still feel the svelte contours of my first serious love, fellow Denby grad, Fran Gilpin the night we danced to Gene Krupa and gaped open mouthed at the singing of Anita O’Day. (I just learned in her recent obit that her stage name was Pig Latin for “money” or “dough”.) And I won’t soon forget the snotty looks I got in 1949 for “integrating” the Junior Prom at Eastwood by double-dating with a colored couple from the U of D.

Alas, in 1982 when I came back again to Detroit to bury my Mother, Eastwood had closed. (Heh, Rock Music was an equal opportunity destroyer.) The grossest detail was that a Thom McAn shoe store had replaced it. Big Bands, what was left of them, had moved out to Oakland, where I dried my tears by having a really tasty interview with my childhood idol, Tex Beneke.

Glenn Miller started me smoking with his Chesterfield Hour (actually only fifteen minutes every weekday at 7:00 P.M.). I still recall the panic when I discovered at our Lake Huron cottage, Birchloft, that I had only two minutes to race the 200 yards to Aunt Loretto’s Silver Birches. “Something Old, and Something New, Something Borrowed and Something Blue!” We crossed our fingers that he would replay “String of Pearls” or “At Last”, or “Little Brown Jug” or “Skylark”.

Tex smiled indulgently as I recalled the thrill of hearing him warble “Chattanooga Choo Choo”. I one upped him describing my recent visit to a entertainment complex in that Tennessee city. He repaid my piety by telling me how he got the name “Tex”. He was playing with a midwestern band when Gene Krupa was passing through Detroit looking for side men to start his own band. Krupa didn’t need a tenor sax and wired Miller with a tout for Beneke.

Glenn got him on the phone and offered him $40 a week. Beneke had the chutzpah to hold on for $50! Then he told me how he had driven through a snow storm nonstop to New York (that was before the Pennsylvania Turnpike). He arrived at the Hotel Pennsylvania totally pooped, and asked Miller if he could crap out for a couple of hours. Perhaps recalling the young man’s nasty salary experience, Miller barked, “Get your horn, Tex, and get on the stand!”

Then Johnny Desmond serendipitously knocked on Tex’s door. He proceeded to recall how the Miller band loved Eastwood dates because on Sunday afternoons it often stormed and the jitterbugging girl couples would soon be offering a wet T-shirt show to the band members whose music kept falling off the stands. And Johnny Desmond’s Italian mother was their favorite cook. The Gardens were so far from downtown that they boarded at local houses including where the former Detroiter lived.

That last Detroit trip was also the premiere of the Detroit-Montreux Jazz Festival. And I struck up a great friendship with Achille Scotti, the pianist and composer for the Radio Swiss Romande jazz orchestra.

It was great, but it wasn’t the bipolar world of my youth, the black Paradise and the white Eastwood. Separated, but equally endearing.