If you want to, I can tell you a beautiful story about my impressions of him at that time.
TP: Please.
RD: While . . . See, there was kind of a screen between us and the dancer. We could see her through a veiled curtain of some type, so that the drummer would catch the bumps and things like that. And we arrived back together back and forth to work from Chicago to Calumet City. And one of the waitresses used to ride in the car with us, and we met a couple of the dancers that way, too.
But the thing that impressed me about Sun Ra was that for the whole time . . . This was like you call a factory job. He would be reading a paperback book for the whole time he was playing, and he'd turn the pages, you know, and play and never missed a beat, turning the pages and reading. I said, "This guy is phenomenal." I can do that now. I can do two or three things at once, and do them quite well.
But the thing is, he looked over at me and he said, "See the guy over there who's drunk?" I said, "Yeah." There was a guy laying on a booth, who had probably seen the show more than once or twice, but he was drunk -- I mean, he was actually very drunk. As the expression goes, he was pissy drunk. And he said, "Watch me sober him up." And I watched . . . And we were playing "Body and Soul." Then Sun Ra started going further and further out with the chords, and I was watching his left hand to see what he was doing . . . He wasn't playing any louder than he had been playing before, because it was all background music. And sure enough, this guy must have been about 50 feet away from us, and he stirred . . . and within three minutes he was standing straight up as if he was a soldier standing at attention. And then Sun Ra looked at me kind of with that little grin he had; he just looked at me and said, "See?" [Laughs] And I said, "What else do you do?"
Hot damn. I heard a story like that about Milford Graves once, and I definitely believe it.
posted by Brad Larcen 8/03/2001[edit]
