Read Online Clint Eastwood by Richard Schickel - Free Book Online Page B

he baled hay on a farm belonging to one of Jack McKnight’s relatives near Yreka, in northern California. The next summer he worked for the state forestry service in Butte County, also in the northern part of the state. It was often extremely hard labor. Butte ranked second among the state’s counties in number of fires, and “it was a very hot summer up there, in the hundreds every day, and very dry—lots of brush fires would start. And when there wasn’t a fire you’d go out and cut trails and cut timber.”
    Sometimes in those years he would cut himself a little slack by joining his parents at a vacation cabin they had on a lake near Fresno, and he remembers a couple of summer romances from those days. But his relationships with young women, numerous though they were, do not define Clint in these years any more than his schoolwork or his part-time jobs or his fascination with the internal-combustion engine does. It was, finally, jazz that did so.
    He was becoming more and more sophisticated in his understanding of it, in part because of his environment. Oakland at that time had the largest black population of any city west of Detroit, and rhythm and blues was in the air, on the air, constantly. One of the local radio stations, KWDR, devoted a three-hour afternoon slot exclusively to this music, and Clint was addicted to the program. He began playing, as best he could, the tunes he heard on it.
    Not that it was the only influence on him. He recalls the Frisco Jazz Band and Lu Watters’s Yerba Buena Jazz Band, both Dixieland groups. Clint and friends would drive out to a place called Hambone and Kelly’s in El Cerrito, which was basically a black jazz club (and was casual about checking IDs), to listen to music.
    There was also a small club on Lake Shore Avenue where Dave Brubeck’s trio (it included Cal Tjader and Ron Crotty) “drew like crazy” as he established his style. Clint became a devoted fan, following Brubeck to San Francisco when he began playing there. He also remembers hearing Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker when they came through town.
    Despite the presence of Brubeck and Paul Desmond, the Bay Area in the forties was not yet the avatar of the new jazz sound that it would soon become. In his definitive history,
West Coast Jazz
, Ted Gioia describes it, in these days, as “the last bastion of the mouldy figs.” He argues that New Orleans jazz made its way along the railway tracks to San Francisco at about the same time it made its way up the Mississippi to Chicago, but that most of the jazzmen who got their start on the West Coast developed their mature styles (and their reputations) only afterthey moved east. The San Francisco jazz scene, generally less venturesome than the one in Los Angeles, remained essentially committed to the past. Gioia observes that the San Francisco musicians’ union remained divided into a black local and a white one as late as 1960.
    Clint ventures no opinion about the Bay Area’s degree of hipness in those days. His tastes were eclectic. He was buying Charlie Ventura’s records, and listening to Woody Herman’s various herds, soaking up a hipper big-band sound than was generally available locally. And he was aware that bebop “was coming in real big,” and so he found himself “going around trying to understand bop and what it was about and not being sure I understood it, but wanting to learn more about it.” To this end, he went to hear Dizzy Gillespie, the figure who would provide the moral contrast to Charlie Parker in Clint’s
Bird
some four decades later, when he appeared with a seventeen-piece band at a club in San Francisco.
    But the aesthetic turning point for him was a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert at the Shrine Auditorium in Oakland in 1946: Coleman Hawkins, Flip Phillips, Lester Young—“I mean, he was like the cat’s ass, you know, for tenor saxophone”—and, yes, Charlie Parker, all on the same program.
    Bird was, for Clint, “a whole shock to