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the subject of Jelly Roll Morton, his reaction
would be something like “That plagiarist!? That thief!?” He would become apoplectic. So you learned not to mention Jelly Roll Morton around Clarence Williams. I am told that Duke Ellington felt the same way about Morton. I do not know what Morton had to say about Clarence—to my eternal regret, Morton died before I could get my hands on him—but I do know what he had to say about W. C. Handy, the man who wrote “St. Louis Blues,” “Memphis Blues,” and a bunch of other hits. What he said was “Well, yes, there was a lot of unprotected material around in those days . . . ”
    Back then, I found this pretty disenchanting. I thought, “How could this band of brothers, these great pioneers, talk of one another so irreverently?” It was terrible. Now, looking back, I find it pretty damn funny. I suppose that as I get older, I get more curmudgeonly myself, and I can identify with that kind of thing.
    All in all, I was learning more than I could possibly assimilate—it took me years to even begin to get a handle on everything I was seeing and hearing. Admittedly, my failures in this respect may to some extent be traceable to other aspects of the jazz life: Eddie Condon once remarked that when you are a musician, a dozen people might offer to buy you a drink in the course of an evening but nobody ever walks up and says, “Hey, let me stand you to a ham sandwich.” Between starvation and inebriation, it’s a miracle that any of us survived, much less actually learned anything.
    Of course, as a dedicated apprentice hipster, my experiences in this field were not limited to alcohol. My acquaintance with the demon weed dates to around 1954, a halcyon year for vipers. 6 I was working at yet another country club, somewhere on the prairies of New Jersey, with yet another pick-up trad jazz band. As we were shuffling off the stage to take our first break, the bass player, a little guy named Arnie, whispered conspiratorially, “Hey kid, you wanna try a new kind of cigarette?”
    I was no square; I had read Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues , and knew all about marijuana. To let him know how hip I was, I said, “That’s cool, Daddy”—I’m sure he was impressed—and we betook ourselves to the parking lot, where he produced a little, ratty-looking, tapered cylinder of grayish paper, stuffed, he said, with “dyno doojie.”

    “Take a deep drag, and hold it in your lungs as long as you can,” he said. It was like inhaling a forest fire, but I did as I was told. “As long as I could” turned out to be about three-tenths of a second. I immediately hacked the smoke back up with a series of coughs that must have rattled every window in Monmouth County. Arnie was delighted. He laughed so hard, he almost fell down—so much for Big Dave the hipster.
    After a few more tokes, I sort of got the hang of it, but where was the euphoria? Except for a slightly sore throat, I felt nothing. We smoked the joint down to a tiny butt, burning our lips in the process. The butt, he explained, was called a “roach” and could be disposed of in several ways. His preferred method was to knead some tobacco out of the end of a Chesterfield, push the roach into the vacated space, and twist the loose paper shut. “Shooting the bullet,” he called it. So we finished the whole joint, and I still didn’t feel a damn thing. I was baffled. Was the dope no good? Was Arnie putting me on? Had Mezz Mezzrow lied?
    We could hear the horns warming up, so we hurried back inside, and I took my place on the stand, just in front of the bass and drums. I picked up my banjo. It looked silly, so I giggled. The drummer called the first tune, “Royal Garden Blues” in B flat, counted it down, and we were off and running. My hands were fascinating: they just kept moving without any conscious direction, making all kinds of wonderful patterns. Then the tune was over, and everybody stopped. But not me, I was really