August 2001

There are 21 tiles on the floor between the wall and door of Gil Scott-Heron’s bedroom. I know this because I re-counted while a beautiful girl with a quiet name sat on his bed, rolled her lips around a glass pipe and told me either that I was scared of her or that I scared her; it was after midnight, she spoke softly and it was difficult to understand.

Gil and I were going to Nashville for a show. We were supposed to stop in D.C. and pick up some guys from his band, but we had to wait — for the van, and for other things. Gil said that a friend of his needed something. And Gil, though he didn’t say it, needed something too. From 5:30pm, when I arrived, until long after midnight, when Mary (not her name), a woman who seems to hold the apartment together, asked me if I was staying over, we were all waiting for different things. And though we never saw the van, something else showed up and just kept on showing up until Halloween, when Gil Scott-Heron went to prison.

Gil, the accessible legend, the revolution repairman, jazz poet, singer, writer, pianist and all around beautiful human being, will not be anyone else, whatever the consequences. This October, the city he lives in gave him one to three years. Drugs, failure to appear in court, failure to appear at rehab, whatever. His crimes, such as they are, pale next to what some artists have been charged with, but Gil doesn’t have the name right now, doesn’t have the cash or the lawyers, and so he’s locked up. Self-destruction is the celebrity’s problem and the veteran’s crime.

For Gil, the night I stayed at his apartment may have been just another Wednesday; I don’t know. For me, it was a difficult evening. Difficult because I was already imagining him in Nashville, because I couldn’t understand the girl on the bed and because for somebody who doesn’t know him, like me, it’s difficult to deal with how real Gil Scott-Heron can be.

The reality started long before the 1–3 years, before the revolution, Johannesburg and any kind of real winter. In a Tennessee that existed before all of these, Gil learned music.

He was born April Fool’s Day, 1949, in Chicago, and moved with his mother to Jackson, Tenn., soon after, without his father. When he was still a child, his grandmother bought the upright piano from the funeral home next door for near $7 and had it carried into the living room. There were lessons from Ms. Tyler, who lived up the street, and Thursday concerts for the ladies’ sewing circle.

A few years later, Gil gave his first public vocal performance: “I sang ‘Jamaica Farewell’ in a talent show in second grade,” he remembers. “Everybody had to do something, and that’s the only thing I knew. I didn’t even know my father was from Jamaica.”

He also managed to be one of three black children integrated into a Jackson grade school. His mother told him he didn’t have to go, but he went anyway. “Forty signed up, three decided we would go,” he says. “We didn’t stick together as a group.”

A decade later, Gil and his mother moved to the Bronx. High school in New York brought bands and gigs at parties and dances. “You could make $35 a weekend, and that was good money,” Gil says. “Me and my mom, our rent was $73 a month, and we’d try to get that together and then work on everything else.”

New York also brought original songs, which always started with the music, but included strong words. “I would try to describe with the words what the music was like, rather than the other way around,” he says, “because if you don’t have them both saying the same thing, you don’t have a song, you just have some music and some words.”

And though his songs were lyrical, “I didn’t consider myself a poet or a songwriter. I always wanted to write, but I wanted to write novels more than anything; they usually had more substance, I thought, than most songs and most poetry.”

He went to Lincoln University, he explains, because of its history of writers. These include, among others, Langston Hughes, whom Gil claims as a big influence. “He was a big influence in everybody’s stuff, if they read it. His characters became part of your neighborhood.”

At Lincoln, Gil met Brian Jackson, the man who became his longtime collaborator and friend. With Brian and musicians in the Midnight Band and others, Gil went on to write and record such hits as the well-known “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” “Winter in America,” “The Bottle” and “Johannesburg.”

He also started a long career of being misunderstood.

“We are at the mercy of people’s interpretations, and that’s unfortunate sometimes,” Gil says. “We were referred to as militants, but we never accepted that. We weren’t the ones who had the guns... It’s like ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,’ it was satire, it was not a militant manifesto. The revolution will take place when you change your mind about whose side you’re on, about which way you’re looking at things, about how you’re being manipulated and moved and editorialized... The revolution takes place in here,” he says, tapping his head. “That’s what we were trying to explain; the appearance of things is not as significant as the substance of things.”

Downstairs from Gil’s a few weeks ago, I saw a young, striking Latina in tight jeans leaning against a parking meter talking to a girlfriend. I couldn’t take my eyes off her — even when she held one nostril closed and blew out the other, spraying the sidewalk with snot. She cleaned her face with the back of her hand and wiped that on her jeans. I have no idea if she was beautiful.

Likewise, what’s apparent about Gil makes it easy to assemble the wrong impression. His present circumstances obscured him in at least one New York newspaper, which recently referred to him as little more than an addict. Other critics haven’t always been as base, but they have been inaccurate, variously referring to him as a 60s' radical, a Last Poet (group of extreme Civil Rights–era artists) and a Black Panther, among other things.

“I was none of those,” he says. “We played some of the Panthers' breakfast programs to raise some money... But we played for everybody. If you join one group, they say ‘Oh, he’s one of those; you can’t play over here.’ So we didn’t join none of them.”

But he was still miscast, usually because many feared the strength of his convictions — a strength often and still rooted in being black in America.

“I’m in America, I’ve got to experience racism,” he says. “There’s no such thing as a black American, we’ve evolved into a whole new race... We can’t go back much further than our grandfathers with any certainty, and the only certainty we have is that they weren’t where they wanted to be.”

His perspective has made it difficult for critics to see any color but black in his songs. But there are other colors, as in the song “A Very Precious Time.”

Was there a touch of spring?
Did she have a pink dress on?
And when she smiled her shyest smile
Could you almost touch the warmth?
And was it your first love, a very precious time?

“I haven’t been a Yankees fan since the Civil War,” he comments, watching a baseball game on TV. He smiles at his own constant one-liners, even while others shake their heads (and smile). His humor, like his compassion, is not the most-discussed aspect of Gil, but it’s there, in jokes and in songs like “H2O Gate Blues.”

On occasion, he even wears it on his sleeve, so to speak.

During a sold-out tour in Scotland, Gil startled audiences by wearing a Celtic scarf and a Ranger hat at the same time — simultaneously supporting local archrival soccer teams. His father played professional soccer for a Scottish team long before Gil ever arrived, and it was a poignant gesture, which Gil carried off without thinking twice.

“I don’t know anything about not mixing things,” he says.

His “mixing” has helped him cross borders and earn fans around the world, even if he’s not always known in his home of New York. This summer, a 30ish black employee at a record store in Queens was puzzled when I requested a CD. “Gil Scott-Heron, what kind of music is he?” he asked.

Two months later, in Tokyo, a Japanese movie production assistant in his 20s knew Gil’s work. “You mean the jazz poet guy? Man, he’s great.”

It was the same with King, a young black man from South Africa. Clutching a copy of one of Gil’s books, The Vulture, King stood in a line a block long this summer to see Gil’s sold-out second set at a New York club.

I got in first, just in time to watch Gil get on stage. With his hat pulled low over his eyes, he sang, almost danced behind his keyboard, and talked to the audience, alternating between easygoing and awe-inspiring. He smiled the whole time he was up there.

“He speaks to me, you know?” King said. “He speaks to the real people, the people on the street; he’s the people you know.”

Part of your neighborhood.

Gil’s apartment, which he shares with at least two other people, is not one of the lavish palaces many young, less-gifted and black artists enjoy today, though he’s ironically often credited with starting the genre that makes their success possible.

Gil has something like 22 albums, including compilations. His songs are popular all over the world, he’s written at least five books and he’s had a number of films and videos made about him, including “Black Wax,” which was recently released on DVD. He was the first artist signed to Arista records, and he told me he was the first jazz/rock performer at L.A.’s Roxy. He sells out venues in Europe and the United States, and his albums continue to be reissued.

But Gil has this thing with money: “I still give it away when I get it,” he says. “I send it to people before they ask for it.”

It’s true. “Gil isn’t like everyone else,” says the girl with the quiet name. Everyone else, she says, gives her cash and then “gets sexual.” Gil doesn’t ask for anything. He gives but doesn’t take. She says she doesn’t understand.

“For me, I think he’s the guy that’s always transparent, the only guy I know,” says Jean Claude Yebga, a French saxophonist who gigged with Gil all around Europe. “Everyone else is into hiding... but he, he’s always transparent. Even though they try to categorize him into something political, he just wants to be an artist.”

Near 3am the night I stayed over, Gil told me to “hurry up and get in here.” He and Mary were looking out her bedroom window, down onto a cement courtyard formed by the four walls of the apartment building. Two guys, each easily younger than 20, were fighting. Around us, to the top floors, other heads were sticking out of windows, giving the whole thing an urban coliseum feel. Someone was counting out loud — part of a new “timed fight” thing, Mary explained. Rival gangs now apparently square off, send two fighters at a time against each other and count while they fight. When they hit 30, the fight is over. This fight ended, and Gil and I went back into the living room.

He used to take his daughter to Krispy Kreme for doughnuts. “You wait outside for the man to come out of the kitchen, then you go in and the doughnuts are hot and you get the stuff all over your face,” he says. Gil’s been in love, and he’s been alone. He knows what it’s like to be the man on stage who ends an evening with, according to something in his stacks of writing, “no lady to say goodnight to after he said goodnight to all of them.”

He knows what it’s like to be a lot of men. Still, it’s hard to reconcile his circumstances with the beauty he creates, the lucid words on the page with the man who waited for a van — and for other things. But that’s how it is, the circumstances are real, the wait is real and Gil, well, there’s no question. And when he gets out, on some quiet evening when, as he says, the neighborhood salsa has lost its pop and he’s able to concentrate on what he’s doing, maybe he’ll write about what it’s like being real where no one can see you — or where they can, but choose not to. He’s more familiar with the latter situation. Maybe that’s why he’s so sure that the appearance of things is not as significant as the substance of things, because he knows that behind the shared apartment in Harlem and the attractive Latina with the stark gesture, there’s a touch of spring in any season and no one else but Gil. 

Afterthought

From where I sit in 2017, the person who wrote that story in August of 2001 for CRUNCH magazine, just before some pretentious bastards flew planes into buildings and things kicked off, looks like a kid. I certainly felt like one entering Gil's apartment, which was populated by people I didn't recognize or understand, sitting in front of me doing things I'd only seen on a dark corner near my shared Queens apartment or in a shadow while I was waiting for a late-night train. And really, looking through the smoke and the rest of it, his apartment might have been empty for all I know. I might have been sitting there watching ghosts, reflections of souls walking around in another time, gaping at me when the curtain between our worlds fluttered and they saw the stranger on the sofa. But how beautiful was Gil, or his reflection anyway. At one point, trying to distract me from the boredom and awkwardness while we waited, he led me into his bedroom, gestured to a pile of boxes against the wall in the corner and said, "You can look through there and read what you want," and so I did. There were five or six cardboard boxes next to his bed stuffed with typed pages in no recognizable order. I grabbed a handful, sat down and started reading. Stories of packing up lonely after gigs. Of hanging out with Stevie Wonder at a soundcheck. A conversation with an NBA great who was also a close friend, just chilling somewhere. The prose so elegant—and so clear, so precise, so unlike the figure before me. Over a couple of days in the muddled amber half-light of the Harlem flat Gil called home, I got to know him a little and, probably, to love him in a way. Leaving two (three?) mornings after I arrived, dumping out into the stark sunlight somewhere near 125th St., I remember feeling relieved but incredibly sad, as if I'd touched a grave, been pulled inside for years and only just escaped back into my own time. I recognize how melodramatic that reads, and how some might chalk it up to naiveté, to a middle-class white guy finally seeing some kind of reality, but that's just plain wrong. I'd been around by then, met death and all sorts of darkness all over the world, and I'd looked up into countless skies and watched plenty of stars fall. But I'd never stood next to a fallen star on the ground, seen the space once occupied by light so empty and so heavy, with a gravity greater than any possessed by the Earth to which it had fallen. Maybe falling stars don't burn out, they just grow too heavy to fly, over-encumbered by the wishes we've all cast upon them as they rose and then soared. Maybe a fallen star is what happens when we don't have enough faith in ourselves. When I heard Gil had been picked up by the NYPD, I went out to Riker's to visit him, rode the bus with all the wives and mothers, went through the screening, was put at a small table and told to wait. And I waited. But Gil never came. When I asked about him I was told he was too sick to move, that he was lying on the floor of his cell doubled over and that he couldn't get up. I asked the two guards I met [young, African American, one man, one woman] if they knew who he was and why he was sick. They said no, they didn't. Angry, I explained how they'd ripped him off of a 30-year habit cold turkey and how he needed help, who he was, that half of the musical artists they liked owed a large part of their success to Gil and anyway, beyond being a legend of sorts he was a human and how could they just leave someone doubled over on the floor. One just looked at me and blinked, while the other looked over toward the stairway leading down to the cells. Neither moved to do anything, and so when the time was up I was ushered out of the room with the wives and mothers and I left without seeing him. The story about my days with Gil was difficult to write in 2001, and it would be just as hard to write today if I had to walk through it again. And I do, sometimes, walk through pieces of it, whenever I put on one of his songs or hear someone mention him, which happens from time to time. Gil died on my birthday in 2011. I don't pretend that means anything. It's Dashiell Hammet's birthday, too, and other people's. And, you know, the substance of things is more important than the appearance of things. But it hurt.