NOW AND THEN
‘This book is dedicated to my favourite critic, to my source of continuous joy and inspiration, the person, I would most want to be like when I grow up. She lived and taught me how to live until November 1, 1999. I will always love you, mama.’
PRE-NOTES ON NOTES TO COME
be no bargain-day xtras on freedom and
ain’t nobody givin it away.
echoes from overloud voices get rapped inside
badass black thunderclouds and carried to God who sits at
the corner of forever.
God sent down correctly.
God sent down right on timely:
music – muzak – muzick
soulfulsoothings soulfulmournings
messages that cannot be decoded by stale brains
bluesgospeljazzrhythmscreaminshouting-blasting serene
words and notes that mean:
inside you is where life is and not at woolworthless 5&10.
the message is here: inside the man
bubbling brain cells and heart/soul cells
ax-cell-er-rating faster until understood
and used and passed on and used and passed on and used
and …
Gil Scott-Heron
May 3rd 1971
[from Pieces of a Man liner notes]
CONTENTS
Introduction: Words are for the Mind
Spirituals
Coming from a Broken Home
The ‘Movie’ Poems
‘B’ Movie Introduction
‘B’ Movie – The Poem
Re-Ron
Space Shuttle
Whitey on the Moon
Black History
Dr King
A Toast to the People
The World
Work for Peace
What You See Ain’t What You Goetz
Thought Out
Give Her a Call
Lady’s Song
The ‘Goldfinger Affair’
The Oldest Reason in the World
Is that Jazz?
Lady Day and John Coltrane
Notes from Reflection on Free Will
Plastic Pattern People
Writer’s Note
Spirits
Inner City Blues
Cane
We Almost Lost Detroit
I Think I’ll Call It Morning
Lovely Day
Beginnings
No Knock
Billy Green is Dead
Winter in America
The Bottle
When Your Girlfriend has a Better Friend
Pieces of a Man
Notes from First Minute of a New Day
Paint it Black
Bridging
Alien
Johannesburg
The Vulture
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
H2O Gate (Watergate) Blues (with intro)
We Beg Your Pardon, America
The Ghetto Code
Bicentennial Blues
Message to the Messengers
Speed Kills
The New Deal
Tuskeegee # 626
King Henry IV
A Poem for Jose Campos Torres
Don’t Give Up
Discography/Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
WORDS ARE FOR THE MIND
Life inevitably translates into time. That is why the sum total of it is called ‘a lifetime’. Freedom is the potential to spend one’s time in any fashion one determines. I would always want the time invested in my ideas to be profitable, to give the reader something lasting for their investment in me. It is very important to me that my ideas be understood. It is not as important that I be understood. I believe that this is a matter of respect; your most significant asset is your time and your commitment to invest a portion of it considering my ideas means it is worth a sincere attempt on my part to transmit the essence of the idea. If you are looking, I want to make sure that there is something here for you to find.
The public ‘lifetime’ of an artist is comparable to that of an athlete – about five years. From the thousands of individuals who consider themselves candidates for visibility and public notice, few ‘make it’. I have been blessed by the grace of ‘the spirits’ with the public’s attention for nearly six of those lifetimes – songs that I’ve sung and poems that I’ve written have been heard on every continent, in every country where people have records and books. How could I possibly complain?
This is an ‘overlapping collection’. It necessarily contains a number of poems that appeared in So Far, So Good and a few from Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. I say ‘necessarily’ because their inclusion satisfies the requests of people who have asked for the written text of poems from albums, and also gives me a chance to share poems that I feel are worthwhile but were not recorded. Even if you have heard these pieces sung or recited in the past, reading these poems may offer you a fresh perspective on some of my ideas.
You don’t think that rap is a brand new style?
No. In fact folks been rapping for a good little while.
Which brings us to why I am reluctant to accept the title of ‘Godfather of Rap’. There still seems to be a need within our community to have what the griot supplied in terms of historical chronology; a way to identify and classify events in black culture that were both historically influential and still relevant. In basketball for example, Michael Jordan was the first ‘Skywalker’ unless you’d seen David Thompson. Dr. ‘J’ was the only ‘Surgeon and General’ who could rebound like a center, take the ball full court like a guard and dunk like nobody’s business – unless you’d seen Connie Hawkins. In the same way, there were poets before me who had great influence on the language and the way it was performed and recorded: Oscar Brown Jr, Melvin Van Peebles and Amiri Baraka (a.k.a. LeRoi Jones) were all published and well respected for their poetry, plays, songs and a range of other artistic achievements when the only thing I was taping were my ankles before basketball practice. It was The Last Poets (both groups), and their percussion-driven group deliveries, who made the recordings which serve to place my title as ‘Godfather’ in question. If there was any individual initiative that I was responsible for it might have been that there was music in certain poems of mine, with complete progressions and repeating ‘hooks’, which made them more like songs than just recitations with percussion. I put this down to my background as a piano player prior to my attempts as a songwriter or to writing poems that could be performed in a musical setting.
The character of those pieces, particularly the early ones, brought about descriptions and analyses from journalists and critics that not only took in the metric and rhythmic values of them as poems or songs, but stumbled to conclusions about our philosophy. Because there were political elements in a few numbers, handy political labels were slapped across the body of our work, labels that maintain their innuendo of disapproval to this day. Words like ‘radical’ and ‘militant’ and ‘muckraker’ stuck out in the reviews like weeds in a rose garden. Those terms were amusing at first because we had no idea that they were ‘terminal’. We attributed them to idiots under the pressure of editor-inspired deadlines who had not bothered with the words, but responded only to the street-sound drumbeats that sounded as if they were calling for the revolution that so many journalists in the late ’60s thought would bring the end of the world.
So if it ain’t exactly rap, and it ain’t radical militant muckraking, what is it? Because of the contributions of Ron Carter and Hubert Laws on Pieces of a Man and the background of Bob Thiele, the owner-producer of The Flying Dutchman record label as a ‘jazz’ producer, Brian Jackson and I became ‘jazz’ a
rtists. It certainly couldn’t have been because of guitarist Bert Jones or drummer Bernard Purdie, and I doubt if it was because of ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ or ‘Save the Children’.
I felt awkward with the ‘jazz’ label because that associated my efforts at song-writing and piano-playing with Duke Ellington and Miles Davis and Dolphy and Coltrane and … you dig? The closest I thought I would ever get to them was with the song ‘Lady Day and John Coltrane’, an up-tempo blues tribute to two of my favorite musicians. It was enough to make you think that if you wrote a hymn you got an automatic one-way ticket to heaven.
So what did we have in total? A militant-radical-muckraker? That’s a great deal of description without even the briefest inference that there might be a piano player in the house. Rarely and barely one word about ‘I Think I’ll Call it Morning’ or ‘Save the Children’ or ‘Give Her a Call’.
I must also admit that some of my poetic ideas have not been all my own. I rarely wrote lyrics for Brian Jackson melodies without Brian giving me a point of reference for direction. There were also times when I ran into places along the song’s road that I could not navigate, and lines that completed verses and supports for bridges were ‘given to me’. By ‘spirits’. The lyrics were ‘blessings’. For me these songs became ‘spirituals’.
I have been blessed because I have had the opportunity to do what I enjoy and find it to be something that others enjoy also. Many of my favorite ideas are here. It is kind of you to take an interest. I hope that you enjoy them as much as I have enjoyed preparing them to be shared. I do hope you enjoy these things that I have been taught along the way. They are the most valuable things I have.
They represent hours of concentration
And seconds of spiritual inspiration
With most of the beauty that I have seen
And what I have learned about what it all means
To be lifted by ‘the spirits’ and touched from within
To a place I can smile inside ‘now and then’
Gil Scott-Heron
November 3rd 1998
SPIRITUALS
I have no idea how many times I’ve been asked what I call my music, or how many jokes I have thought up to substitute for a serious answer – ‘I call it collect’, I might say, ‘I call it mine’, was another.
Collectively, at various times, we have called what we did Midnight Music, Third World Music, and Bluesology. Seriously trying to define it I’ve said it is Black music or Black American music. Because Black Americans are now a tremendously diverse essence of all the places we’ve come from and the music and rhythms we brought with us. And it has been our way of paying tribute and offering respect that we have included the many facets of our community.
But what do you call reggae, blues, african vibration, jazz, salsa, chants and poetry?
In truth I call what I have been granted the opportunity to share ‘Gifts’. I would like to personally claim to be the source of the melodies and ideas that have come through me, but that is just the point. Many of the shapes of sound and concepts have come upon me from no place I can trace, notes and chords I’d never learned, thoughts and pictures I’d never seen – and all as clear as a sky untouched by cloud or smog or smoke or haze. Suddenly. Magically. As if transferred to me without effort.
My blessings have not just been words and notes. Not just art. My life has been blessed. With the joy of my children with the strength of my family with the opportunity to share something of great value that has brought a great number of people both pride and pleasure.
They have been gifts from the Spirits – so perhaps these songs and poems are ‘spirituals’.
Don’t ever let the spirits die.
Gil Scott-Heron
November 1993 [from Spirits liner notes]
COMING FROM A BROKEN HOME
I want to make this a special tribute
since I am a primary tributary and
a contributary, as it were,
to a family that contradicts the concepts,
heard the rules but wouldn’t accept,
and womenfolk raised me and I was full grown
before I knew I came from a broken home.
Oh yeah!
Sent to live with my Grandma down south
[wonder why they call it down if the world is round]
where my uncle was leavin’
and my grandfather had just left for heaven, they said,
I had NO STRONG MALE FIGURE! RIGHT?
But Lily Scott was absolutely not
your mail order, room service, typecast Black grandmother.
On tiptoe she might have been five foot two
and in an overcoat 110 pounds, light
and light skin ’cause she was half-white
from Alabama and Georgia and Florida
and Africa.
Lily Scott claimed to have gone as far as the 3rd grade
in school herself,
put four Scotts through college
with her husband going blind.
[God rest his soul. A good man, Bob Scott]
And I’m talkin’ ’bout work!
Lily worked through them teens
and them twenties
and them thirties and forties
and put four, all four of hers,
through college
and pulled and pushed and coaxed
folks all around her through and over other things.
I was moved in with her.
Temporarily.
Just until things was patched.
’Til this was patched
and ’til that was patched.
Until I became at
3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and 10
the patch
that held Lily Scott
who held me
and like them four
I became one more.
And I loved her from the absolute marrow of my bones
and we was holding on.
I come from a broken home.
She could take hers and outdo yours
or take yours and outdo hers.
She may not have been in a class by herself
but it sho’ didn’t take long to call the roll.
She had more than the five senses
knew more than books could teach
and raised everyone she touched just a little bit higher.
Common sense became uncommon
and you could sense that she had it.
And all around her
there was a natural sense,
as though she sensed
what the stars say
what the birds say
what the wind and the clouds say
a sense of soul and self,
that African sense.
‘And work like you’re building
something of your own,’ she’d say.
Full time. Over time. All the time.
No nonsense.
And she raised me like she raised four of her own
who were like her
in a good many good ways.
Which showed up in my mother
who was truly her mother’s daughter
and still her own person.
And I was hurt and scared and shocked
when Lily Scott left suddenly one night,
and they sent a limousine from heaven
to take her to God if there is one.
So I knew she had gone.
And I came from a broken home.
So on the streets of New York
the family, me and my mother,
moved on through my teens
where all the ologists’
hypothetical theoretical
analytical hypocritical
will not be able to factor
why I failed to commit
the obligatory robbery, burglary,
murder or rape.
Nor know that I was
fighting my way out of the ghetto.
But I lived in the projects without becoming one,
shot jumpers in the park
instead of people,
went to a school that
informed instead of reformed
read books without getting booked
and had a couple of jobs
to help with the surgery on my broken home.
And so my life has been guided
and all the love I needed was provided
and through my mother’s sacrifices I saw where her life went
to give more than birth to me, but life to me.
And this ain’t one of them clichés
about Black women being strong
’cause hell! If you’re weak, you’re gone!
But life courage, determined to do more than just survive.
Say what? Of course she had a choice:
Don’t do it! Work.
Raining cold mornings, dirty streets
and dirty Goddamn people
worrying her way up rickety-ass stairs
working for Welfare …
I’m sorry if I’m drifting on
but this is all I know about a broken home:
And she sings better than I do
and I listen to her and B. B. manhandle Handel. [Joke]
And hey amigo!
17th and 8th in the park.
13th and 9th in the dark:
congas, cowbells, bongoes and salsa,
beer cans, Ripple and good herbs.
Willie Bobo, Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barreto
and the Mayor of my neighborhood
long before he covered ‘The Bottle,’ Joe Bataan.
Mi madre estudia in
La Universidad de San Juan
y vivia en San Turce
y mi madre vivia en Barranquitas
Yeah. Raised by women,
but they were not alone
because the chain of truth was not broken
in Bob Scott’s home.
And my mother’s name is Bob, Robert,
Bobbie Scott-Heron
and saying thank you, I love you ain’t enough.