Talent Does Not Equal Style

This story is not really about the Blues, and is as yet unpublished, but it is most assuredly true... Why do talented people insist on sabotaging their own careers? And why do some musicians live life like they are playing a game of Survivor or Big Brother?


Interview with the Vampire: A “Conversation” with Jaco Pastorius
By Gregg Juke

It was somewhere around 1985-1986… I’ve blotted the memory from my mind for so long, and the experience was so surreal, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly. But it was right around the time that Jaco, Kenwood Dennard, and Hiram Bullock put together their ill-fated band, and released their equally ill-fated, self-titled album, called simply P.D.B. These activities were followed, of course, by an ill-fated tour…

I was a young, idealistic musician and music journalist/broadcaster, working in public radio for my local N.P.R. affiliate-- hosting a jazz show, producing a few others, and doing interviews with as many of the touring cats as I could wrap my mic and pen around. Occasionally, I would arrange a phone conversation with someone prior to a local concert appearance, and then follow-up with a “live” post-concert interview— a great way to support and promote the music, meet famous musicians, and provide valuable content and scoops for the home team at the same time (or so one hoped).

When I received the press release announcing the P.D.B. album and tour, I was excited-- it sounded like a great band; and when I found out that Jaco and company would be performing in my hometown, I was ecstatic, and began work on setting up an interview in earnest. I was a big fan of Weather Report, Jaco’s Word of Mouth Big Band, and Hiram Bullock from the David Letterman show and his voluminous studio work. Kenwood Dennard was less familiar to me, but I had heard him with “Brand X,” and read quite a bit about him in all the drumming magazines—he was considered the up-and-coming inheritor to Billy Cobham and Narada Michael Walden. For a young fusion fan, this group seemed like it might be the second coming of the Mahavishnu Orchestra… nothing could have been further from the truth, but that revelation didn’t come until later, and I’m jumping ahead of myself ever so slightly.

As the astute reader scans down the page, he or she will eventually notice that nothing like an “interview” with Jaco appears here, and with good reason. I assure you that such an interview did take place, but that even by today’s slack journalistic standards and relaxed mores, it would be completely unprintable. What follows is the story (or my best reconstruction after almost 20 years) of my conversation with Jaco Pastorius. At least, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

After setting up an interview with Jaco through his management, with the requisite referral from his record company, a time was arranged for me to call him at home; sometime in the early afternoon on a weekday (probably around 3 pm; I usually worked nights, and I remember having to come in early to prepare for the “big interview”). I put the call through, the number rings, the phone is answered-- and it is indeed Jaco Pastorius himself! After catching my breath, I begin to ask questions, and he begins to answer.

The problem is inherent in his answers, and there is no denying that this interview will be pantloads of fun for Jaco, and full of anguish and squirmingly ill-natured torture for me. It is apparent that Jaco is off his medication—his communicative powers vasillate between incoherence, pinpoint seconds of sarcastically-barbed lucidity, followed by more incoherence, followed by stream-of-conciousness shock value diatribes peppered with more innuendo and F-words per sentence than Howard Stern could muster on his best day. I politely remind Jaco that this interview is for radio. No discernable effect, other than to perhaps kick things up a notch, to “take ‘em to another level,” as the crazy kids say—more sordid talk, more streams of expletives, nothing relevant to my questions or the music. “Hurry up with this,” he urges me, “I’m trying to hustle some basketball in the street.” I follow this statement with a line of questioning, to make sure I fully understand him. “You’re betting on a game, or playing in it?” “Both” he says. “Now hurry up, I’ve got a c-note on this game.” Could the great Jaco be playing me for a fool? (Of course, he’d been doing that successfully for several excruciating minutes already…) Did he really need to hustle basketball in the street? One of the worlds most well-known, respected, successful musicians? Perhaps the greatest electric bassist of all time? (Later, the sad truth would be revealed—he probably was “off his medication”—if he wasn’t on any, he sure needed some; and he really did need the money.)

Somewhere along the line during our very brief exchange, which literally seemed to me like, oh, 10 hours hanging tenuously upside down over a giant buzz saw (kind of like in a Bond film, only I wasn’t cool enough, or didn’t have the pocket spy gear to extricate myself), I jokingly mentioned that I’d “sure have to do a lot of editing to this tape.” I had actually been running over each of his responses in my mind, naively thinking, “Well, this will be alright; I can use a few words from that sentence… and maybe that one from that last sentence… I’ll piece something together…” But it all blew up in my face when I played the “editing” card; Jaco was unaware that the interview was being recorded—he thought that he was holding me in this personal little hostage crisis live on the air, and when he discovered his game was only half as good as he thought it was, he went ballistic.

“What the F#@% do you think you’re doing? You little M*%#%@ F%$#&*!!!! You call me back when this F-ing interview is LIVE! Do you here me? L-I-V-E, LIVE!!!!”
Click. The whole conversation lasted, perhaps, less than seven minutes.

Frustrated beyond my ability to explain or comprehend, I almost immediately, unthinkingly took the tape off of the machine and headed for the bulk eraser. Without hesitation, in a swift and decisive move that I have often regretted, I completely erased the slice of history that I held in my hands. Totally. I bulk erased it four or five times to make sure I got it all. I didn’t want one tiny shred of iron oxide to remain in any specific order; “no one must ever hear this; it would be a crime against humanity,” I thought to myself.

That week, for some reason, I attended the P.D.B. concert anyway. After all, I had a set of comp tickets, and I earned the dad-gum seats. I had visions of confronting Jaco, a la George Constanza with some flaky ex-girlfriend that had thoughtlessly dumped chocolate sauce all over his favorite shirt; but when the opportunity presented itself, I came to my senses. Obviously, this guy was insane, perhaps criminally, and you always want to avoid pushing the buttons of the criminally insane, if you have a choice in the matter.

The show was much, much less than I expected… the closest thing to a serious performing musician on stage was Hiram Bullock, who played guitar, keyboards, and sang with as much energy and acumen as he could muster; but all his striving seemed in vain—he could not bail fast enough to keep this ship from sinking. On the contrary, his shipmates seemed intent on pumping water into the ship to help the process along. Bad notes, bad solos, bombastic aplomb (in the worst sense of the phrase), volume, volume, and more volume—Jaco and Kenwood seemed to be locked in a battle in which the victor would lay claim to “Loudest Basher” on stage. Dennard’s much vaunted “Meta-Rhythmic Orchestra” solo segment (in which he displayed the ability to play a drum rhythm with his feet and one hand, while playing a keyboard with the other and singing simultaneously) was the cruelest of jokes. Somehow, these heavy metal antics only served to please the crowd, and each successive, louder song fomented such response that
near the end the audience was in a whipped frenzy; I felt as if I was the only earthling aware of the comet that was streaking towards the planet on a direct collision course. Or perhaps, Dante viewing some subterranean level of the Inferno. Or something. Regardless, I was horrified, but the audience seemingly did not share my trepidation; the band was called back for an encore, one of the all time worst renditions of Weather Report’s “Birdland” that I have ever heard, bar none. At this point, the crowd was out of control, and so was the band. As the group concluded the piece on an emotional crescendo, using the time-honored tradition of the “crash and burn” ending, a devilish look crossed Jaco’s face; he took off his bass, lifted it high in the air using both hands on the neck (reminiscent of the manner in which one might swing an ax or giant broadsword), and tossed it with all his might over Kenwood Dennard’s drumset. The flying Fender narrowly missed sheering off Dennard’s head, and as he deftly ducked below the massive boomerang, the sound of crashing electronics filled the room (the bass landed smack-dab in the center of Dennard’s processing rack and side-fill monitor set-up). A fitting end to a concert that never should have been…

I was dumfounded; after experiencing both the “interview” and the “concert,” my estimation of these musicians had been diminished considerably and deeply, in a way that actually saddened me. “Wow, guys that great can really be that awful?…”

I was unaware at the time of the downward spiral Jaco’s music and life was trapped in.
As writer Richard S. Ginell pointed out “…Pastorius became overwhelmed by mental problems, exacerbated by drugs and alcohol in the mid-'80s, leading to several embarrassing public incidents (one was a violent crackup onstage at the Hollywood Bowl in mid-set at the 1984 Playboy Jazz Festival). Such episodes made him a pariah in the music business, and toward the end of his life, he had become a street person, reportedly sighted in drug-infested inner-city hangouts. He died in 1987 from a physical beating sustained while trying to break into the Midnight Club in Fort Lauderdale.”

I remember seeing the story of Jaco’s death on the television news. I remember being saddened, but not necessarily surprised. But most of all, I remember wishing I had never erased that tape.

(c) Gregg Juke/Nocturnal Productions; All Rights Reserved