ALWAYS MUSIC

ALWAYS MUSIC

 

But the rhythm and blues got me away from the ghetto life. I got into some bands and played the rhythm and blues scene and then I didn’t need a therapist.

 

I was with Marvin Holmes and the Uptights. He got the best gigs in Oakland. There was a club owned by a professional basketball player. Big, tall light-skinned black guy. He booked well-known people. He was coming along, he was pretty hot. My friend Rabu, (Buford) hooked me up with this guy. He was well-known but he couldn’t write music. So I would write his music for him, that introduced me to studio music. Sly Stone came into one of our gigs riding a big dog. So many things happened, I can’t keep up with them.

I guess, in high school I played in jazz band, we used to call them stage bands. I was in the sax section. I’m still in touch with friends from there. Now some of them died, some have a bad heart. We also had a basement band and Paul Jackson was in that band. He later became Herbie Hancock’s bass player and lived in Japan and got hooked on drugs.

His sister, Joyce, was nuts about me, but I was older and I liked the older girls. Joyce played flute and went to a famous music college back East and played in the Philharmonic with Leonard Bernstein. But last I heard, she came back and wasn’t doing so good.

Anyway, I can show you in The Real Book (standards for musicians), some of the most popular tunes by Herbie Hancock, he’s got writing credit there. Paul was just 16 then, so me and Jamie were older and were leaders of the band