Still Grazing by Hugh Masikela

Author:Hugh Masikela [Masikela, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jacana Media
Published: 2004-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

On my twenty-ninth birthday, April 4, 1968, I was in New York City, having played a concert the night before in New Jersey. I had just left the Village Gate, where I had stopped for a few cognacs before heading uptown to my hotel. While I was driving a rented Cadillac up Sixth Avenue, an announcement came over the radio that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. I was shocked. A few seconds later, while I was stopped at a red light, a car plowed into my rear. I got out of the car to talk to the driver, a gray-haired old white man. An elderly woman, who I assumed was his wife, was seated next to him. They were both shaking like tree leaves in a storm, and suddenly they began to cry and begged me not to hurt them. I told them to go home and get some rest, and they drove off in disbelief. When I got to my room at the Mayflower Hotel, I turned on the television and saw there were riots going on in almost every black ghetto in America. No wonder the white couple had been crying and begging for mercy. I had not wanted to involve the police in my fender-bender because I had been drinking and snorting cocaine all day. I had two grams of cocaine in my jacket pocket, had been smoking a joint in the car, and was carrying a pocket full of rolled joints. This had become my lifestyle. I wasn’t alone in this; all over the world, not every participant in the struggle for liberation was sober. In fact, the stress of it all drove many radicals into their graves either through booze or drugs, and even through sex.

Miriam was far more active than I in civil rights causes. She even attended Dr. King’s funeral in Atlanta. I stayed so high that I missed many historical events that were taking place right under my powdered nose. We played Symphony Hall in Chicago during the summer of 1968, on the day that the riots were at their full fury, yet we didn’t learn about the events that had taken place until we landed in Cleveland the next day and read the morning papers. Stewart and I had been prohibited from entering Mister Kelley’s, where Cannonball Adderley was playing, because we were not wearing ties. We cussed the manager, jumped back into our limousine, and returned to our hotel to get higher, while the riots were taking place all around us. Many delegates to the Democratic Convention stayed in our hotel. The hotel manager tried to impress us by telling us he had rejected the Mississippi delegation and booked us in their place. We didn’t understand what the fuck he was talking about.

The spring and summer of 1968 turned out to be one of the most insane periods in my life. I went totally nuts. We hired the accounting firm of Pilger and Dubey to manage our finances. Except

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.