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Overview
The stunning memoir of Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winner Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Holiday has been praised for bringing back to life one of the most important voices of the last fifty years. The Last Holiday provides a remarkable glimpse into Scott-Heron’s life and times, from his humble beginnings to becoming one of the most influential artists of his generation.
The memoir climaxes with a historic concert tour in which Scott-Heron’s band opened for Stevie Wonder. The Hotter than July tour traveled cross-country from late 1980 through early 1981, drumming up popular support for the creation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. King’s birthday, January 15, was marked with a massive rally in Washington.
A fitting testament to the achievements of an extraordinary man, The Last Holiday provides a moving portrait of Scott-Heron’s relationship with his mother, personal recollections of Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, Clive Davis, and other musical figures, and a compelling narrative vehicle for Scott-Heron’s insights into the music industry, the civil rights movement, governmental hypocrisy, and our wider place in the world. The Last Holiday confirms Scott-Heron as a fearless truth-teller, a powerful artist, and an inspiring observer of his times.
“Leave it to Scott-Heron to save some of his best for last. This posthumously published memoir is an elegiac culmination to his musical and literary career. He’s a real writer, a word man, and it is as wriggling and vital in its way as Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One.” —The New York Times
“Even after his death, Scott-Heron continues to mesmerize us in this brilliant and lyrical romp through the fields of his life. . . . [A] captivating memoir.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802194435 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 337 |
| Sales rank: | 1,033,287 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Article written in memory of Gil Scott-Heron by his longtime friend and editor Jamie Byng:
guardian.co.uk/music/2011/may/29/gil-scott-heron-appreciation-jamie-byng
The New York Times Obit:
nytimes.com/2011/05/29/arts/music/gil-scott-heron-voice-of-black-culture-dies-at-62.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Gil%20Scott-Heron%20obit&st=cse
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Words have been important to me for as long as I can remember. Their sound, their construction, their origins. Because of that interest, there are few places I could have been raised that would have provided more wonderful raw material than the southeast quarter of North America.
The word Tennessee means "land of trees" to the folks native to that part of the world three or four hundred years ago. Residents of the region respected the land and their attention to the details of their surroundings stands out in their descriptions. They examined their environment thoroughly, creating drawings of what they saw from a mountain that provided an unobstructed view for miles in all directions. South and east of the mountain, a blanket of treetops led to trails marked by the Seminoles. Due west, the Chickasaw people lived on the banks of the horseshoe-shaped Tennessee River that one encountered twice as it sliced the state into thirds. And everywhere stood dense forests. Tennessee, they say, was once 90 percent trees, the land of trees.
The natives from the heights of the Appalachians scattered when the new folks came into the mountains from the east. These graceless, grimy intruders were more than a different tribe. And less. They were more than a different skin color and language. They had no respect for the land and its inhabitants. Arriving in waves, they attacked the mountains as if to level them. They slashed jagged holes and damned the streams before thunderous explosions collapsed the face of hillsides, leaving only the ugly scars to evidence their search for the black rocks they called coal. The natives charted their ragged trails of mutilation from the peak above Chattanooga. And they led their families west.
When I was a boy in Tennessee, our first class in the morning was geography and time was always dedicated to Tennessee and how it was connected to history. Tennessee was the Volunteer State. University of Tennessee sports teams were the Volunteers. I remember being shown pictures of Davy Crockett and Smoky the Bear. I also recall the slightly curved diagonal line I drew that linked Knoxville to Nashville to the city named after an ancient Egyptian metropolis, Memphis.
Memphis, Tennessee, was only ninety miles west of Jackson, my home. But Memphis was as far away as the North Pole in my mind. People in Jackson were always talking about somewhere else, mostly Memphis, because it was a close somewhere else and you could drink alcohol there, while Jackson was in a dry county. I talked about going to Chicago, where my mother lived. Some of my grandfather's relatives were in Memphis and I had visited them, but what I remember about the trip was getting carsick and throwing up.
The history that we were given about Memphis was done in light pencil that hopscotched its way to a semisolid landing with Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show. The city had started as a midway market, a meeting place on the banks of the Mississippi River that squatted in the muck almost squarely between New Orleans and Chicago. As such, it provided a perfect location for traders of all description and from all directions, who brought everything to exchange — from furs to furniture and cotton to cattle. As the steamboats and paddle wheelers sought the shallows of Memphis and St. Louis, they stirred great clouds of silt and sand, turning the surface of the waterway a burnished brown. The Mississippi became known as the Big Muddy.
The docks at the edge of the village were a magnet for hunters, trappers, farmers, and natives, who rolled up in wooden wagons to trade loads of tobacco, produce, and buffalo hides for guns, whisky, and farm implements. They all walked and rolled past the narrow, squalid shacks, no more than cages, where there were echoes of moans and rattling chains from human cargo.
The Memphis day was from "can see" to "can't see," and with the first hint of another sunrise the procession from the docks to the foul smelling mudhuts beneath the auction blocks began. There, nearly naked black men and women barely covered by rotting rags were led in, bound and shackled, with rawhide nooses around their necks. The least cooperative captives were hobbled with ankle chains that limited them to short, stuttering steps. They would be sold, these bucks, to the cutthroat Cajuns from the sea-level swamps. It was said that each year spent in the paralyzing heat of a Louisiana summer took five years off a man's life. When a slave was sold to the Lords of Louisiana, the observers lamented that he'd been "sold down the river."
Memphis matured from midway market to a major metropolis. Saloons and whorehouse tents, once soaked with the sweat of drunken sailors and reeking with the acid stench of swine, slime, sewage, and slaves is now better known for Graceland and the Grizzlies than for Beale Street and the blues. Its filthy foundation as a headquarters for whores and for humans sold to the highest bidder was obscured by the magic of musical melding. Sun Records considered itself the fuse that lit the 1950s with Elvis and rock 'n' roll. With Carla and Rufus Thomas and Otis Redding, Stax Records brought blues to the hit parade with hooks and horns and a solid beat, evolving into Al Green and Willie Mitchell. Memphis meant music.
And unless you stop to think for a minute, you might forget that it was in Memphis that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed on a motel balcony on April 4, 1968. That assassination is one of our starting points.
Stevie Wonder did not forget.
In 1980, Stevie joined with the members of the Black Caucus in the United States Congress to speak out for the need to honor the day Dr. King was born, to make his birthday a national holiday.
The campaign began in earnest on Halloween of 1980 in Houston, Texas, with Stevie's national tour supporting a new LP called Hotter than July, featuring the song "Happy Birthday," which advocated a holiday for Dr. King. I arrived in Houston in the early afternoon to join the tour as the opening act. I was invited to do the first eight shows, covering two weeks, and I felt good about being there, about seeing Stevie and his crazy brother Calvin again.
Somehow it seems that Stevie's effort as the leader of this campaign has been forgotten. But it is something that we should all remember. Just as surely as we should remember April 4, 1968, we should celebrate January 15. And we should not forget that Stevie remembered.
As Stevie sang on "Happy Birthday":
We all know everything That he stood for time will bring For in peace our hearts will sing Thanks to Martin Luther King
Stevie Wonder could not see. He was blind. Blind was damn near part of his name. From the first time his name was broadcast and the tune's title was tagged, he was stamped "Stevie Wonder, the Blind Boy." I knew it was all part of programming, of selling Stevie to the public, but I still felt a little sympathy for the brother because it put something in capital letters he probably didn't need to hear.
I had never heard "Blind Ray Charles" or "Blind José Feliciano." It couldn't have been because Stevie played an instrument, because Ray Charles played piano and José Feliciano played guitar. What the hell?
There had been a stretch when brothers and sisters were taking on what they considered religious names. Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali. Bobby Moore became Ahmad Rashad. In the old days guys named something else became Rock Hudson and John Wayne. Malcolm Little became Malcolm X. Ma Bell became Nine X. And Stevie ...
Stevie started out carrying a tic-tac-toe of AKAs. He was known as "Little Stevie Wonder" when his first Top 10 tune turned the American airwaves into his one-man tidal wave. Had I been around in those days with a microphone, it would have been a title wave. But since his real name was Steveland Morris, he had actually been riding the waves on a fictitious surfboard.
He might have been little when he was first spotted by the record executives at some show down in Motown, but by the time he played "Fingertips" on American Bandstand, he was clearly pushing six feet and looked like he could slam dunk Dick Clark.
I first had the chance to see Stevie Wonder at the Apollo on 125th Street when I was fifteen and living in the Bronx. The young man at center stage holding a harmonica and a microphone while urging the crowd to clap their hands was as tall as I was, and only the dark glasses that concealed his eyes reminded me that his hundred-watt smile from inside the bright spotlights was offered to a darkness that began behind his eyelids and not just beyond the footlights. The guy could flat-out play, and I hoped the "Blind" part of his introduction would be dropped rather than become attached to him as a professional name, like Blind Lemon Jefferson — as though plain old Stevie Wonder was an amateur handle.
Stevie continued to grow in all directions. To his full adult height of over six feet, but also in the public eye as a wonderful musical talent. An exceptional keyboard player, an enthusiastic percussionist, an inventive and challenging composer of both rousing dance numbers and thoughtful ballads, tunes that stuck with you and came back to you with fresh feelings. He demonstrated his full conceptual grasp as a composer and arranger with his orchestrated score of the movie The Secret Life of Plants.
The texture of his voice and vocal range made his every offering as a singer an individual accomplishment. His songs were sung by other artists, but not "covered." Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he remained highly valued as an attraction and was in constant demand.
I thought about Stevie often before I met him. Aside from his constant presence on the radio, he spent a good deal of time on my personal stereo. Along with the early look at him I got at the Apollo, I saw him again a few years after that, during a summer break from college when I stayed on campus to work as a sort of camp counselor. We took a bus from Lincoln University's Pennsylvania campus up to a New Jersey fairground for two hours of Stevie's songs and showmanship.
He put on an awesome display of virtuoso performances on a number of instruments. Seeing his growth since 125th Street on harmonica to the master of a variety of keyboards and percussion instruments and the ease with which he handled his singing chores elevated the brother to the top of my ladder as a performer and a talent. His playing, singing, and songwriting had expanded exponentially while he still retained the unrestrained joy that exploded like a physical force from his opening notes and lassoed everyone within reach of his frequency of freedom. I had never attributed to Stevie any supernatural powers or felt as though he was visited by aliens or touched by some witch waving a magic wand, but after seeing a couple of his performances, I was definitely captivated by the energy he always generated from the stage.
I was glad that by the time I met the brother — in the mid 1970s — he was just Stevie Wonder. Or Stevie. He had either lost or thrown away most of the ill-fitting descriptives that had been spread over him here and there like ugly coats of paint. Otherwise I could have ended up at thirty years old sharing the bill with "Little Blind Stevie Wonder." But things worked out.
A few years before the offer to tour with Stevie, Clive Davis had invited him to a show we played at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. After that Stevie would show up spontaneously at shows once in a while, at the Roxy, at the Wilshire Theater, but I never knew he was coming. That was what friends did. They could show up without a royal proclamation and know they'd be welcome. With the kind of schedules entertainers have, it's not odd that things happen spontaneously. You get a minute, you hear somebody's in town, and you want to see them. The bigger the celebrity and the more things they had to do, the more spontaneous things were.
I always called everybody "Brotherman" and Stevie had his own personal names for people. Soon after we met he began to call me "Air Reez," which was cool because I am an Aries.
Meeting him also sent me back to the Bronx for memories of what I had thought of the early "Little Stevie" and I felt happy for him. It has been a private joy of mine to have felt that kinship with the brother nearly all my life. Never caring in the beginning or now when someone might say, "He's blind, you know."
That meant the harmonica on "Fingertips"
Was no sooner settling on Stevie's lips Than what inevitably came to their mind For some reason was that the brother was blind.
Which obviously didn't mean a helluva lot
'Cause it said what he didn't have but not what he got.
His music hit a certain chord And moved you like the pointer on a Ouija board Your feet made all of your dancing decisions And didn't give a damn if he had X-ray vision.
So why was it that people always remarked
"He's blind" as though Stevie was condemned to the dark?
Suppose you looked at it the opposite way:
They had 20/20 vision and still couldn't play.
And when they danced seeing didn't help them keep time And things like that made me wonder just who was blind.
I'm going to have to ask you to accept some information on faith, the way I did. For instance, that on the morning of April 1, 1949, at Provident Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, a very pretty young Black woman named Bobbie Scott completed a roundtrip to and from the hospital delivery room. According to the information on the birth record, she gave birth to a child that was a legitimate-black-male, the tic-tac-toe of birth certificates in that day and age.
A lot of people's positions in life changed that day. Birth always directly affects far more people than is readily apparent. Everyone related to either parent gets an additional name to be called. My mother's mother became a grandmother, my late grandfather's sister became a great aunt, my grandmother's brothers became great uncles, their children became cousins again, and my mother's brother and sisters became an uncle and two aunts.
My father's family was affected the same way: his mother and father became grandparents, his seven brothers became uncles, and their children became cousins. My father, who was originally from Jamaica, and all seven of his brothers had the middle name "Saint Elmo." I'm not sure how many of his brothers named their children Saint Elmo, but my father decided he wanted to name his son after himself, name for name: Gilbert Saint Elmo Heron. This was cool with my mother up to a point. Using the same first name was cool. The use of the same last name was not only cool, but also fit with the legitimate-black-male of the birth certificate. But using Saint Elmo would have brought the known number of men on the planet with that middle name to nine, which was one too many as far as my mother was concerned. Not cool.
According to my mother, she had absolutely nothing against Saint Elmo or the fire that may or may not have been his responsibility. She did not question the veracity or the sobriety of the many seamen who had reported seeing this flaming phenomenon along the masts of ships at sea. She simply didn't like the name Saint Elmo, and she convinced my father that unless the saint came marching in, there would be no "Mo."
My mother suggested finding another name that started with "S" so the initials of father and son would remain the same. My father's problem was that he didn't know any other middle name that might go with his last name — all of the Heron men he knew had Saint Elmo as a middle name. Then my mother suggested "Scott," her maiden name. My father didn't think much of Scott — all the Scotts he knew had it as a last name — but he reluctantly agreed.
My mother had been named after my grandfather, Bob Scott. Everyone called her Bobbie, but her full name was Robert Jameson Scott. Her parents, Bob and Lily, obviously didn't care much about convention when it came to the names of their children. They gave them the names they wanted them to have. Bob Scott had died in 1948, after going blind ten years before. My grandfather had been an insurance man before and through the worst of the Depression and then began to break down. First, constricted veins blocked circulation in his legs. Then he went blind. He began to lose his grip, slipped, lost his mind, and later became violent and had to be committed to the hospital for the criminally insane at Bolivar, Tennessee.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Last Holiday"
by .
Copyright © 2012 the estate of Gil Scott-Heron.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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