jazzitude

Jazz: The Music of Unemployment

In 1969, George Wein, impresario of the Newport Jazz Festival, decided it would be a tremendous idea to put the Mothers of Invention on a jazz tour of the East Coast. We wound up working in a package with Kirk, Duke Ellington and Gary Burton in Miami at the Jai Alai Fronton, and at another gig in South Carolina.

The touring package did not carry its own PA -- we had to use whatever speakers existed in each of the venues we were booked into. The hall in South Carolina was rigged with small jukebox speakers, set in a ring around the building. Useless, but there we were -- we had to play the show.

Before we went on, I saw Duke Ellington begging -- pleading -- for a ten-dollar advance. It was really depressing. After that show, I told the guys: "That's it -- we're breaking the bande up."

We'd been together in one configuration or another for about five years at that point, and suddenly EVERYTHING looked utterly hopeless to me. If Duke Ellington had to beg some George Wein assistant backstage for ten bucks, what the fuck was I doing with a ten-piece band, trying to play rock and roll -- or something that was almost rock and roll?

I was paying everybody in the band a weekly salary of two hundred dollars -- all year round, whether we were working or not, along with all hotel and travel expenses when we did get work. The guys in the band were pissed off -- as if their welfare had been canceled -- but at that point I was ten thousand dollars in the red.
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