Gerry Mulligan - Being Gerry Mulligan: My Life in Music

W ELL, BECAUSE THESE GUYS in Chets pack were spending time at the house every night when we werent there, the neighborhood sees all of these guys around and God knows, I guess theyre playing music loud and smoking pot all over the place, and generally made it their own and making a mess. So I come home from the gig one night with Chet, and the police are there. The upshot of that whole thing was Chet, with his always riding the narcotics police and this gang hanging out, I got busted because it was my house. Everybody denied ownership of the pot, but its my house so I got stuck. I wasnt any too pleased about that and I wound up being sent to the honor farm, which is part of the county jail system, for I guess ninety days or something, because Chet got himself a sharp lawyer. I had gotten a really rotten lawyer. He was really the reason I was in jail because he was so bad. I mean, he was so busy trying to impress the judge that he said, Yes, I think it would be good for that boy to spend ninety days in jail!

Then, of course, Chet had gotten himself a sharp lawyer who was very ready to blame it all on me because I was older. Chet with his damn running buddies. As soon as we left the house for work, they descended, eight or nine of them, who sat around smoking pot all night and the neighbors complained. Thats how this whole thing exploded.

I unfortunately got a really dumb lawyer. So again it was my fault because Im the older guy. I led him astray. Oh great, man! When I was first busted, they made a big fuss about it. But I dont think people pay much attention to that; one persons tragedy is another persons one-day news ingestion from the newspapers, and the next day its something else again. It certainly was no circus like they did to Bob Mitchum. Luckily I was well-known in a particular area, and the people who were interested in music or interested in jazz knew about me from the club and all that, but nobody was paying attention to me. But it looked good for one day. You know: Jazz Musician Busted! Thats certainly great for circulation for one day, isnt it? The one-day wonders.

The peculiarity was, finally, when all the smoke cleared, I found myself getting off the bus at this minimum-security compound in Castaic, California, or wherever the hell it was, somewhere up there. But it turns out that they were really waiting for me because there was a big kind of a battle going on about what the attitude should be in the state prison systems. There were people who were for punishment. Thats what jail is for, punishment. And people who were care and treatmentoriented who would say that jail is for rehabilitation and trying to help these people adjust socially to being able to live in society.

I found myself caught in the middle of this because the care and treatment guys thought, well, I am a well-known musician and I could come up there and theyve got a lot of musicians doing time for smoking pot, you know, so I can put together a show for them. It was perfect. I could put together a show for Christmas. They said, Will you do it? and I said, Well sure, why not?

They said, Well, in order to do this, though, you have to go through at least a week or so with the labor gangs picking up rocks in the river-bed or something, because we cant put you right into this thing because the punishment guys will be angry about that. And they made me the head man in the dormitory so that I didnt have the same chores to do. I had chores to straighten up the place in the morning and then I could go off and write while the other guys had to do the labor details. Well, that created a lot of resentment from these guys and from one guard in particular. One guard was fighting for the care and treatment thing and these two guys were kind of in competition. The other guard was a mean bastard and he was just waiting for some kind of an opportunity to come down on me.

What happened was I started to work on this music for the show, and the role that I had in the dormitory building, the barracks building, was called mother: the mother of the barracks. Well, I was mother and the mothers were supposed to go eat earlier so that when the other inmates came over there to have breakfast, the mothers could straighten up the place, you know, so it all worked out. Well, one morning I show up late for breakfast and the guard who had been laying for me took one look, man, and off I went to maximum security. Oh Christ, what was I in the middle of. Maximum security was like being in San Quentin for Gods sake, only it was overcrowded. There were three guys to a cell and they had this really horrendous thing, man. Im telling you, its an experience to go through because you realize what tens of thousands of people go through every day throughout the world. You know what it feels like to be penned up in a prison like that. It was a very hard learning experience and I feel sometimes that it would have driven me right out of my mind because you wake up every morning with lights on, I dont know, six or something like that. You have to roll up your beds, and the beds go up so you dont have anything to sit on. Youre not allowed anything to read, you werent allowed any writing materials, and they had music on all the time. It drove me crazy. It was pop music, kind of dreadful stuff. Luckily there were some pop tunes going then that werent totally atrocious, but still, you never could get away from it.

One thing that saved my sanity at that point: there was a funny little Mexican guy in the cell with me, and he was one of these people who was just full of stories and he told stories endlessly. It was like being locked up with a Mexican raconteur. So he really made it possible to get through this. I wound up there for seventeen days.

Most of the guys I was around were in there for drug use. They segregated people. They had a homosexual compounda barracks that had a fence around it and so they were kept to themselves. Next were the narcotics violators, and so on. I never paid enough attention to find out what everybody had done. It was none of my business, really. So most of the guys that I had any contact with also were in there for some kind of narcotics violations, maybe using or selling, one or the other. Of course the scene then wasnt anything like it is now. I mean, now it really feels like gangsterville all around, wherever you are. There is so much money involved. It wasnt like that then. It was kind of all pretty much amateur.

But that was a shockgetting out of maximum security. During the period that I was in maximum security, Gene Norman came up there once because he was a friend of the sheriff and he got permission to come up to see me. He was the only visitor I had when I was in max and, you know, not being allowed to read anything its not even punishment, it became torture. To take a civilized person and suddenly take everything away from him. Its like a musicians version of hell. Take everything away and play nothing but pop music for him. Great! Its a form of ongoing purgatory.

Gene came up with the idea of doing a concert in town. He wanted to come out and get me and bring me into town, and we would rehearse and play a concert downtown in the theater and get back in the car and bring me back up to maximum security. I said, I dont think I want to do that. Thank you very much, I appreciate it, but no thanks. I could just see the advertisements for the thing: Like One Day Only! On leave from the Los Angeles penal system doing a one-nighter! The management has brought to you with great trouble and expense, fresh from a tour of Castaic, California!

In the meantime, Arlyne (Brown), who eventually became my first wife, had come out there to get a lawyer for me. She got an outfit called Narcotics Anonymous interested, and they realized that I had really gotten a dreadful lawyer. They used to talk about this lawyer and his brother, the different people he had represented, and the things that they did to him when they got out of jail, like putting sugar in the gas tank of cars. I remember reading in the paper while I was in there that the brother was beaten up by somebody. I could readily understand why, because he was just incredible. In order to make points, he was trying more to impress the judge with himself than he was trying to present my case, and the judge was a man they used to call a hanging judge. He had put his own son in jail, who was caught joyriding in cars with some other teenage kids, and sent him to San Quentin. You know, like a first offense and not even truly auto theft, man; the kids were joyriding. He sent him to San Quentin, and the kid got in a fight and he was killed. So it was a terrible story and made one rightfully afraid of this judges whims. But as it turned out, the judge was much more fair than one would realize, and when I found out after the fact what this lawyer had said to him, then I could understand what happened.