Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir Hardback - 1998

Excerpt

I sent my baby a brand-new twenty-dollar bill
If that don't bring her back, I'm darn sure my shotgun will.

--John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson

Nobody actually knew what had happened to Nat. One moment he was the crown prince of New York's downtown blues scene, double-parking his cab in front of Dan Lynch's Blues Bar on Sunday afternoons, striding indoors with a harmonica in hand to blow chorus after squalling chorus at the weekly jam sessions; the next moment he was gone, fled South to his father's or sister's in Norfolk or Newport News. He'd been shot in the chest on the corner of Thirteenth Street and Second Avenue, just down the block from Lynch's. That was the only fact everybody seemed to agree on. The guy who shot him was either a drug dealer or a jealous lover or pimp connected to Doreen, Nat's brilliant white girlfriend, a prostitute and junkie. Nat had either been yelling at Doreen or slapping her around or both. The shooting wasn't supposed to have happened--Nat was too smart, too generous, too self-disciplined--and yet it seemed fated. Everybody who knew him was shocked; nobody was surprised. Nat Riddles would go get himself shot, and disappear.

He'd be back. He always came back, after the stories people told had had a chance to swell and ripen. Some Sunday afternoon when the jam session was flying high he'd shoulder back through the swinging doors of Dan Lynch, flash his dazzling smile, bear-hug ten or twelve dear old friends, yell out to Chuck Hancock on the bandstand, kiss Karola and Diana at the bar--"I love it!" he'd say as a cold Heineken found its way into his hand, "I love it!"--and stand there beaming as Chuck's alto sax screamed, honked, and snarled. Nat was back! He'd been president of the student government at Long Island University, a Tae Kwon Do adept, a trophy-winning disco dancer, a graphic artist at Pratt. He'd freebased cocaine in the days before crack. He was perpetually on the verge of becoming the blues world's Next Big Thing. A young black harp-player with the Sound. White guys who loved blues couldn't get enough of him. "Nat!" they'd yell. "Hey, Nat!" He called all waitresses "darling" and made the older ones melt where they stood. He was my master. One of two.


We met on a cold April night in 1985. The lovelorn neighborhood harmonica player--recent dropout from the graduate English program at Columbia--had just made his big-stage debut on the steps of Hamilton Hall, where three hundred sitters-in protesting the university's investment policies in South Africa were being entertained by various campus bands. A Marine Band harp blown through a large outdoor P.A. system ruled the world. I was bopping home down Amsterdam Avenue, lost in the sound of my own notes decaying as they spiraled up and collected under the walkway between the Law School and Philosophy Hall. Bird was my model: sweet, angular, endlessly unfolding lines.

A yellow cab heading uptown passed me, slowed, then hung a U-turn and pulled up to the curb. The driver leaned over and rolled down the passenger-side window. He was older than me but not much, and black. He smiled as if we knew each other.

"Was that you?" he asked.

"You mean playing just now?"

"Yeah."

I shrugged. "I was noodling."

"It sounded nice. I thought I oughta see who the hell you were."

Still leaning on his elbow, he flipped open a tool kit sitting next to him on the front seat. The trays were cluttered with harmonicas, cables, a ball microphone.

"You play?" I said.

"I've been accused of that more than once." His smile was a promise, an effortless seduction. He selected a harp, cupped it beautifully with enfolding hands, and stared at me as he played, eyes narrowing slightly as he bore down. I stood at the open window, struck dumb. The gods had blessed me with another visitation. I blinked in the glare outside Plato's cave. The records I'd been listening to--Little Walter, James Cotton, Junior Wells, my old high school collection--were mere shadows of the true and beautiful.

"Shit," I said.

"You like that?"

He shut off the engine, got out of the cab, came around front, set his open toolbox on the hood.

"You've got the music in you," he said, selecting another harp. "All you need are a few of the subtleties."

We stood on the corner of 118th Street and Amsterdam in the cold wind for forty minutes while he recapitulated the stylistic evolution of American blues harmonica. John Lee Williamson--the first Sonny Boy, not to be confused with Rice Miller--was our honored forefather. You wanna build a mansion, you gotta pour some concrete. Little Walter and Junior Wells were blowing straight John Lee stuff before amplifiers came along and shook everything up. Kim Wilson of the Fabulous Thunderbirds is an awesome motherfucker and blows some shit that would spin your head. Not to mention Sugar Blue, the baddest street blues harmonica player ever to come out of New York.

"Man," he said, "Sugar used to walk the streets with his head down, practicing, and he was always high. I mean always. And he was the only player I've ever seen who could stop a street full of people dead with his playing, just like that. Set his little amplifier on the sidewalk, plug in, and go. Diddleyotten rebop, wabba dabba doo-bop! They wouldn't throw no change, either. I'm talking bills--ones, fives, tens, fluttering through the air. A whole blockful of people, man. Taxicabs would pull over, women--beautiful women, gorgeous women, luscious women--would stop dead in their tracks. That was Sugar. I ain't tellin' you no lies. He was always practicing, too. Every time you'd see him he'd be walking down the street with his finger in his ear, figuring things out."

The cold finally chilled us. He gave me his card before he went. Nat Riddles, Harmonica for All Occasions.


He showed up at my apartment for our first lesson in one of those ten-dollar Panama hats the tourists buy down on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. He knew how to wear it. Without apparent effort he'd nailed the precise angle where Superfly meets Bogey.

"I like it," he said, glancing around the large living room. I had lots of space now that Helen was gone.

He tossed his hat on the bed, set down his tool kit. He inspected my record collection. No Big Walter Horton?

The windows were open--a warm May afternoon--and occasional yells and honking horns floated up from the street as I slipped a tape into my boom box and we took out our harps and went at it, face to face. His sound was a groaning joyous stridency swelling between his hands, explosive but contained. Mine was Little Cricket fidgeting before the Dancing Master. When he tapped his foot, Time shuddered. I leaned forward--hungering, imitating, holding back. He could have flipped me off my chair with one shoulder-feint.

"Open your hands," he admonished.

My vibrato was spirited but lightweight, ungrounded. His was rich, slow, dark, controlled, powerful, effortless.

"Are you really doing it just with your throat?" I asked.

He gazed at me and played a soft quivering low note.

" 'Cause I can get it, you know." I played my staccato, chattering version.

He said nothing. His note grew softer, more liquid. He continued to gaze at me. He lifted his chin slightly so I could see. His Adam's Apple quivered softly, effortlessly. His throat was very dark and smooth and beautiful.

I stared. He kept the note going--soft, humming, deadly. My eyes fell.

"I'll work on it."

The note burned into me, silencing me. Somebody yelled in the street down below.

"I can't do it, Nat," I murmured, pleading.

We moved onto tongue-blocking. Chicago-style blues harmonica--Big Walter, James Cotton--depended on a forceful tongue-slap against the wooden comb to produce octaves alternating with chords. Maximum control, big sound. Nat was somehow able to articulate in multiple dimensions at once, vibrato behind double-tonguing punctuated with throat-pops.

"Naw, man." I laughed when he described his technique. "You can't be doing that."

He waved his hand. "There's nothing I do that DeFord Bailey wasn't doing fifty years ago."

"You got this stuff off records?"

"Off records, whatever. From guys like Bob Shatkin and Lenny Rabenovets. We've got some awesome harp-blowers in this city, man, guys who were doing it and doing it properly long before I came along."

"I've never heard anybody play like you."

He smiled. He had a corroded wire retainer around one of his front teeth. "They're out there, believe me. Chicago ain't shit next to Brooklyn and the Bronx."

He made a fluttering, feathery sound in the middle register. I tried and couldn't get it.

"Flutter your tongue," he said.

I fluttered my tongue. A pale imitation.

"It's like eating pussy," he said.

I laughed. "Do you ever meet women--you must meet women who'll say, like, that guy must . . ."

"Oh, they know. They'll come up smiling and say, 'I know you. You're a harmonica player. I know about you guys.' "

1974. I'd seen my first naked woman's breast in the spring of junior year at the Rockland Country Day School, a couple of months after turning sixteen. Eric Balch and I had gone skinny-dipping with Laurie Stillman during ninth period in the lake down below the back woods. The Day School was in Congers, two miles from our house. Seth and I were the townies. The rich kids from Upper Nyack and Sneden's Landing drove Mercedes's and BMWs, skied on Rossignols and Nordicas, took Christmas vacations in Aspen and Sun Valley; we rode our bikes. Congers had nothing going on except the same old shit: vacant lots, lakes, and Dr. Davies' Apple Farm up on Route 9W. And now, amazingly, sex.

I'd gotten a good enough look--two gumdrop-sized nipples, brownish aureoles, a heartstopping twin jiggle--to last me all summer. I'd gotten buzzed on the quart bottle of Schaeffer we'd passed around, too. Drinking beer at school! This flirtation with evil was unprecedented; it stunned everybody and thrilled me. Adam was doing this shit? The Day School was 120 kids grades six through twelve, most of whom were tripping or smoking pot or both. I was a holdout--for no good reason--and about to crack. My reputation was so spotless that the druggies often brought me along as insurance during reefer-jaunts into the back fields, in case Mr. Goldstein, the bearded stuttering art teacher, came snooping.

"Oh," Mr. Goldstein would say, noticing me dawdling just outside the circle of red-eyed kids, "it's you, Adam. I . . . I . . . well, never mind." And he'd turn and go.

I was that good. It was humiliating. Plus my nickname: Lips. Glenn Alynn, a pudgy, spit-spraying ski bum in the grade below me, had started it. My lips weren't any bigger than his, but he'd managed to convince everybody through sheer repetition. Lips! Hey Lips! I already knew I was ugly, with my squinty eyes and big butt; I'd never had a girlfriend and obviously never would. The nickname just made it worse. One day, despairing, I went to the headmaster, Mr. Downs, and asked him to make Glenn stop. Mr. Downs gazed at me.

"Lips?" he said.

"That's right. I could take it at first, but it's gotten ridiculous."

"I can't make people stop calling you names, Adam," he explained, trying hard not to smile.

School had always been this kind of nightmare. Public school was worse, one reason I'd transferred to the Day School back in ninth grade. You get skipped into first grade early because you can read, you're smaller and weaker than everybody else from then on, you get hairy balls a year later in junior high. If it wasn't bullies slapping me around and getting girls to laugh, it was the fact of being hopelessly uncool. Doing my homework, not doing drugs, knowing nothing about rock music, not getting invited to the big weekend parties at Ellen Kurz's where everybody got wasted to the sounds of "Sympathy for the Devil" and had orgies they'd whisper about Monday morning. Sex was the problem. Everybody else at the Day School was getting some. I wanted some. A girlfriend, at least. A kiss or two.

The fall of senior year I decided to act. Skinny-dipping and beer drinking had broken the ice; it was time to kill off the hopeless brainiac reject I'd been. One gray October afternoon I drove over to the Nanuet Mall, walked into Allegro Music, and asked the sales guy if I could take a look at one of the Hohner Marine Band harmonicas. He unlocked the display case and handed me a small cardboard box. The only other musical instrument I'd ever owned was the white plastic flutophone I'd screeched "Claire de Lune" on back in fifth grade. Harmonica had been calling to me, recently. My dad would cycle through the same two or three records while daubing away in his attic studio; I'd overhear Bob Dylan wheezing on his and whooping "Honey jes allow me one more chancccce. . . ." The big hit on WABC during the summer of '74 was the Ozark Mountain Daredevils' "If You Wanna Get to Heaven," driven by a pesky little harmonica: "If ya wanna get to heavennnn . . . you got to raise a little helllll. . . ." Not to mention The J. Geils Band Live Full House album played at deafening volumes in senior class homeroom every morning, with Magic Dick blowing his face out on "Whammer Jammer" after Peter Wolf egged him on. Eric Balch and I knew all the words and acted them out:

We gotta get it crazy tonight. You gonna get it crazy tonight?

I'll get down to it.

Ah said you are gonna get it craaaaaazy?

I'll get down to it.

Ah said you gonna moogoomoogoomoogoogonna get it all down get it all night get it all right get it out of sight and get it down, baby?

Yeaaah!

Whammer Jammer, lemme hear ya, Dickie!

All that was waiting for me, down the line. I pried the chrome-plated grail out of the small cardboard box as the sales guy watched, cradled it lovingly, cupped it the way I imagined the pros did. You weren't allowed to play the thing until you'd paid for it. The sales guy fanned the bellows on a harmonica-tester to show me it worked. I shivered, thrilled. Eric would flip when he found out.

I picked up an instructional book, too, the only one that looked halfway cool: Blues Harp by Tony "Little Sun" Glover, with a picture of a wild-eyed black guy in a headband on the cover, wah-wahing through his cupped hands.


Nat had plans for me. First thing we had to do was baptize my Mouse. I'd bought it right after Helen moved out and hadn't worked up the nerve to wail through it outdoors. I drove him downtown after my first lesson to pick up Charlie Hilbert, his guitar man. Charlie lived in a dingy fifth-floor walkup with a huge German shepherd named Snapper. Snapper went berserk on the landing--barking, roaring, howling--as we trudged up. Charlie was a smallish white guy with a goatee and a nasal New Yawk accent. He yelled at and whapped Snapper to shut him up. Snapper whimpered lovingly as Nat pulled his ears. Charlie had two beat-to-shit Mouses, which we grabbed and tossed into the back of my car along with his guitar case. Somehow I'd managed to fall in with real blues guys!

We drove down to the Village and set up against the north wall of Cooper Union's Great Hall: Charlie in the middle, our three little Mouses in a row. Nat had on the Panama hat and a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Blind Lemon Riddles, he joked. I gazed at the people strolling by. You were impossibly exposed out here--vulnerable, alive, naked to the world. The groove floated between Nat and Charlie like a taut, durable rope. Where should I grab hold? I was a third dancer with two left feet. Didn't I tell you he could blow? Nat said later as we packed up.

A week later I was wandering through the Village with my new girlfriend, a Bahamian woman named Andria, when we came across Nat and Charlie. They were working the corner of Sixth Street and Avenue of the Americas, squatting on their upended Mouses--Charlie hunched over, Nat sitting tall with legs spread. Nat's lizardskin loafers were new and looked sharp with his white Panama. He was preaching to a small crowd, telling them how the blues was American music, Southern music, and how he and Charlie were from the South--Charlie from southern Staten Island and he, of course, from the South Bronx.

"If we don't have the blues," he laughed, "don't nobody have the blues. Ain't that right, Charlie?"

I leaned against a trashcan with Andria in my arms, swooning at the evening's luck. Nat supported his cupped harp and bullet microphone with a near-vertical arm, pivoting fluidly from his waist, working the groove like a slow-motion boxer. Each phrase he blew came from deep and led with flawless logic to the next.

"Another mule kickin' in my stall," he sang, winking at me. "Adam knows all about that."

Andria and I got drunk around the corner in the BeBop Cafe and floated back an hour later bearing a pair of ice cold Heinekens from the deli next door. Nat saw the brown paper bag with protruding green bottleneck coming at him and stopped blowing.

"For me?" he said, touching his chest. "Awww, you guys are just too much."

He handed me the mike while he drank. It was round and light and bigger than I expected, harder to cup.

"Don't be playing like no white boy, now," he admonished, putting on a black Southern accent as he waved his beer. "Noooo. Show the peoples how well Uncle Nat done taught you, son."

My hands got cold, my mouth went dry. Somehow you push through. Then the notes start to come and you're playing, it's a Friday evening in the Village and you're bathed in blinding light, struggling to hold the groove even as it sags away from you, your new master and new lover looking on. Old hurts flame through your heart, vaporize in a hot rush. People toss money. Where else would you rather be?

Media reviews

"A fascinating and, indeed, almost unique contemporary American memoir. The story Gussow tells -- wonderfully complicated by questions of race and class, innocence and experience, sorrow and joy -- is simply unforgettable."
--Arnold Rampersad, author of Jackie Robinson

"Mister Satan's Apprentice tells of playing the harp through some rough, sad days; but it does so with upbeat enthusiasm. Between evocations of good jams and bad gigs, Gussow tells how a half-Jewish Princeton student became a fixture of the Harlem music scene; how art transcended barriers of race, class, and ego; how he got from optimistic apprenticeship to a nearly spiritual mastery. Like the music, Gussow's euphonious prose soars."
--Andrew Solomon, contributing writer, New York Times Magazine

"Gussow is one of the best blues harmonica players of his generation and now he makes his mark as a writer. His book is an important contribution to the literature of blues in America. Any serious student of blues harmonica who hears Adam play can never hear the instrument in quite the same way again, and everyone who reads his memoir will see the blues in a different light. Gussow writes like he plays the harp--lyrically and with deep feeling."                            
--Charles Sawyer, author of The Arrival of B. B. King

"Offers fascinating and engaging insights into Harlem street life during the volatile 1980s, the dynamics of New York's blues scene, and the mind and music of one of the most brilliant and idiosyncratic performers in modern blues. Above all, Gussow's intimate memoir allows his readers to experience the joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, of his own dialogue with that most complex and crucial of American issues: relations between the races."
--David Nelson, editor of Living Blues


"Intellectual by day, blues-playing Harlem street musician by night, Gussow tells a great American coming-of-age story."                
--Elaine Showalter,  professor of English, Princeton University, and author of The Female Malady