chapter eight “SKINNY MINNIE IN A WHOLE LOTTA LOOK”
On August 14, 1970, the players for the Polychrome concept album were scheduled to gather at Rivington Records. Each of the ten songs, which Nev had meticulously reconstructed from memory for Hize and the session players just three days in advance, included a color in its title and, true to the artist’s signature style, told a vivid story about an offbeat character. To achieve the organic sound Hize heard in his head, the album was to be captured live, with the assembled players recording each song straight through after a few practice takes. In addition to my father on drums, Hize had recruited an impressive roster, musicians who had some experience working together but had never before played on a Rivington album: bassist John Squine, the rare white colleague with whom my father was friendly; keyboardist Solomon Krebble; and second guitarist Steve Pratt, who was brought in to amplify the album’s louder numbers (including the brittle, high-octane rocker “Chalk White”). A talented college senior at New York University, Jason Moore, came in as intern-slash-engineer, providing some relief to the stretched budget.
Brimming with ideas for the evocative album Nev had delivered, Hize arrived to the studio in high spirits, he recalled, and felt a surge of excitement as he watched his lineup of backing musicians arrive and begin tuning up. His heart sank, however, once his front man walked in.
BOB HIZE:
Nev looked horrid and ghostly pale, as if he hadn’t slept. Dark circles under the eyes and a patchy scruff that made him look like my daughter, Melody, at feeding time—bits of carrot round the mouth. Worse than that, he was giving off a pungent odor. Flop sweat, I suppose. He shook hands with Squine and Solomon and Steve, solemn, and then he got to your dad, who wouldn’t shake his hand and only gave a terse wave with one of his drumsticks from behind the kit. And I thought, If Jimmy’s already unhappy, this is not good. Nev strapped on his guitar with no small effort, and then Howie popped over in full bellow and clapped him on the back—the “attaboy” kind of thing—and Nev went concave. Literally, concave! I pulled him aside and asked, you know, “What in God’s name, Nev? Are you ill?”
That’s when Opal made her entrance, as Opal does.
OPAL JEWEL:
Virgil had come with me as far as the doors of the Rivington building but he wouldn’t come inside. You know in the movies where little Bobby or Sally nurses a wild animal back to health and then releases it back into the woods? And it’s this big, brave moment with the violins going? “Go on, now, this is your home, this is where you belong.” [Laughs] I swear it was like that. Virgil thought he was in one of those damn movies. And I’m looking back at him like, All this and you just gon’ send me to the wolves?
I went inside and up to the Rivington floor, and the first person I see is Rosemary sitting at the desk. Pretty, normal Rosemary, with her shiny brown curls and shiny pink lips and those luscious titties she had sitting up so nice. Meanwhile here I come breezing up, Skinny Minnie in a whole lotta look. I should have felt like a circus clown, I guess. Most people would have. But when I opened my mouth to tell her who I was, that I was there for the recording session, my voice came out strong and steady. I guess that’s when I knew my normal is to be abnormal.
ROSEMARY SALDUCCI:
Oh, I’ll never forget it, the first time I saw her. She looked so gorgeous you wouldn’t believe. Like a page from Vogue magazine come to life.
BOB HIZE:
She looked like holiday on Mars.
HOWIE KELLY:
She looked like a fucking cockatoo. Is that the one with all the colors? Parakeet, parrot… whatever. Crazy nut.
NEV CHARLES:
She finally, finally came to me, and when she did I almost fell into hysterics, not because I was having a laugh but because I was so relieved and astonished and ecstatic to lay eyes on her, all those feelings in a rush, at the exact same second. She’s the fashion heroine, so she can tell you the correct terminology for whatever it was she wore—or better yet, ask Virgil LaFleur, I’m sure he recalls each stitch and accessory. All I can say is that there was this riot of yellow and cobalt and emerald and red, all cascading down her body, tip to toe. And her shoulders poked out from it so that she looked sharp and majestic and, sha!, rather compelling. And so my eyes are dancing all over this getup, and finally I get to her head…. Shaved to the skin. Fucking well done! Fucking well done.
BOB HIZE:
Suddenly the flush was back in Nev’s face, and before she could say hello he literally ran over to Opal and picked her up and spun her, and the studio was so tight with equipment that her foot hit your dad’s bass drum and nearly knocked it over. Of course we were very confused by all this—we had no notion of what had been going on, but Nev’s delight was pure and infectious. Even Jimmy seemed mildly interested, rather than annoyed, by the creative insanity that felt possible before any of them had played a note.
JOHN SQUINE, BASSIST, POLYCHROME:I
Bob Hize is a brilliant producer. Strategic in the studio, each mic precisely placed. That’s not to say he wouldn’t let us get loose with the music itself—Nev would improvise on the lyrics, change them up here and there—but every day Hize would dictate the order he wanted us to record in, and there was usually a good reason behind it. Take the Polychrome record—I was expecting we were going to go straight through that thing, recording in the order Hize had sent the songs to us originally. Instead he insisted we nail down “Yellow Belly” and “Girl in Gold” the first day, even though those were toward the end of the schedule. Whatever, it didn’t bother us much, because we were so good together—we were ready for anything. But then watching Opal, I realized why Hize was doing that. Both those songs had Nev heavy on the lead vocal—Opal had simpler parts, a few “ooh’s on the chorus and only one or two lines to sing. Hize was letting her ease into it. He was giving her time to observe and learn. Because the way she was looking around, concentrating so hard with those painted-on eyebrows knit every time he gave a note, it was clear she didn’t know what the hell she was doing. At one point, Jimmy muttered to me under his breath, “I’m gonna give this exactly three days.”
BOB HIZE:
She arrived in her full regalia, full of swagger, but this was a room of professionals. We couldn’t be tricked. Her lack of experience was clear from the start. Not that Nev was loads better—Jason Moore kept tittering that the guitar was out of tune—but at least he knew somewhat how the process was supposed to go.
On the small backing parts Opal had, she sang loud and confident, which was promising, except that she nearly blew poor Jason’s ears out in the monitors because she was standing much too close to her microphone. When I gave her a pop filter to attach she turned it over and over in her hands until Solomon had the good sense to help her clip it on. And then again with the microphone—well, this was rather charming, but on “Yellow Belly,” one take was good and raucous, and everyone was smiling and nodding as they all built to the end, and at the last bit Opal got overexcited and grabbed at her mic like I suppose she’d seen rock stars do on telly, and sent the whole apparatus crashing down. Your dad and the other players were livid because it was the best take of the day and they thought she’d ruined it—but when Jason and I played it back, the crashing noise was actually quite clever. [Laughs] It was like this unexpected crescendo that made sense in the context of the song, which, you know, is this rollicking thing about a draft dodger on the lam. So that’s actually the take you hear on Polychrome—the crashing of the equipment at the end, and then Nev’s hysterical laughter.
OPAL JEWEL:
You can’t compare performing on open-mic nights to what this was. This was creating something new that was living and breathing. Here you had these guys, really good guys, who could do more than just play instruments—they could play emotions! And adjectives! You get what I’m saying? Like, we’d do a first take and Nev would say it was good, but the way he heard it in his head was more whimsical. Don’t you know those guys would switch it up for the next take, pluck or hit something a teeny bit different, so that the sound had more looseness, more silliness, even though it was the same notes? I was like, Wow. That was incredible to me. That was magic. It’s true that I had a lot to learn about the process, but I got so wrapped up in everything, in being with Nev in the center of this hurricane, that my excitement kicked my nerves right on out the room. Up till then I had spent so much time freaking the hell out that I had not made room for the notion that hey, this might be fun.
And then Bob Hize… Me and Rivington didn’t end up so hot, but Bob was kind to me, especially at the beginning. Patient and tuned in and looking out, all the time. Say that.
BOB HIZE, UPON BEING TOLD OPAL’S ASSESSMENT:
I don’t know if I’m a particularly kind man. Maybe so. I hope I’m judged to be, dying as I am. [Laughs] I needed to embrace Opal because… well, because I knew—everybody who had two eyes and common sense knew—that Nev was in love with her. It was easier to work with it than against it.
NEV CHARLES:
When we got the first day down, Hizey took Opal and me to eat at a twenty-four-hour diner, and he smoked ciggies while she and I stuffed ourselves—I was ravenously hungry, probably because I hadn’t eaten well leading up, but now the old appetite had come roaring back. I remember there was a cranky child in the booth beside ours, out way past his bedtime, and he had been crying in that wound-up way that sleepy babies often do, neh-neh-nehhhh, but when our lot sat down he shut right up. Opal was quite something to look at, all done up.
So we were noses deep in breakfast for dinner—waffles and sausages and eggs and a ham steak besides, and a few mugs of coffee that ramped up the jitters even more—and then Hizey made his excuses and he dropped bills on the table, enough to cover, and he left us by ourselves. We stayed in that diner until the sun came up. There were so many questions I wanted to ask her, about where she’d been hiding and why, about what she thought of the music, but I thought better of it, figured I should just be grateful that the day’s session had gone well, so instead we passed the time dreaming out loud, mostly. The beginnings of any new thing are so lovely.
OPAL JEWEL:
We were eating in a diner when Nev asked me how I wanted my name to appear on the album, how I heard it announced from the stage. Shocking, I know, but that was something I honestly hadn’t thought about yet. I’d dreamed about my name in lights, up on a marquee somewhere, sure, but I always saw it as what it was: Opal Robinson. That’s the truth. But Opal Robinson was a different person now, separate from this entertainer I was becoming.
NEV CHARLES:
We kicked around a few ideas. Opal Odd was one, which would have made a great future punk name, when you think about it, but at the time it seemed too obvious….
OPAL JEWEL:
I told him I had to keep the Opal. After all those years suffering through other people’s nasty slurs for me, I had earned the right to own what my mama meant for me to be called.
NEV CHARLES:
The series of exotic-sounding foreign surnames: Opal Amour… Opal Magnifique…
OPAL JEWEL:
I dig the French, but I’m a Negro from Detroit, USA. We don’t put on airs like that.
NEV CHARLES:
…just Opal, nothing else, but then we thought, Well, there’s already Odetta and maybe that’s confusing….
OPAL JEWEL:
The sun was coming up when we hit the right one.
NEV CHARLES:
I drank her in, I mean really looked at her—all her vibrant colors, the sparkle on her eyelids, her dimensions and sharp edges. Her rarity. It put me in mind of a gemstone… a jewel. Opal Jewel.
OPAL JEWEL:
“Opal Jewel?” [Wrinkling her nose] I asked him, “Isn’t that kinda redundant? Like saying ‘desk furniture’?” And he shrugged and laughed and said nah, it’s like an exclamation point. A reiteration. It makes it undeniable that’s what you are. So I said it a few times, and it sounded all right.
NEV CHARLES:
She seemed to like it well enough—it raised a tiny smile over the toast crusts, anyway.
The recording of Polychrome spread across four more weeks at a small studio inside Rivington Records. The sessions were scheduled erratically due to the conflicting (and usually higher-paying) gigs of the other players. At Hize’s suggestion, Opal and Nev spent time off during this period rehearsing and getting to know each other better.
OPAL JEWEL:
We were young and we liked to have adventures, and New York was good for that. Some days we’d take the subway out to Coney Island or up through the Bronx—“for inspiration,” Nev would say—and he’d be chitchattering the whole way and strumming on that guitar, making up stories and lyrics about the people we saw. Or some days that meant he was third-wheeling it with me and Virgil around town. That was about as entertaining.
VIRGIL LAFLEUR:
We would concoct fresh daily ensembles for Opal out of what she had in her closet plus some of Miss Ernestine’s old effects, and we would mix in whatever inexpensive accessories or materials we could gather. Well, I was discovering I had a talent! And I was happy to develop it, so that maybe I could start working with the Vogue girls one day.
Oh, Neville was my precious Pup. He’d come with us to the Salvation Army or to the fabric store, playing his guitar in the racks, and I was dying to make him over. He was a perfect model, with that beanpole frame. I could have made him a matinee idol… but the most he’d let me do was buy him a hat. My vision was Midnight Cowboy meets Valentino.
NEV CHARLES:
We’d practice “Evergreen” or “Girl in Gold” sometimes on the subway platform, on our way to this place or that, and the sound bouncing off the tiles was marvelous. After small children started tossing coins at us I got a cowboy hat for collecting our tips. At the end of the show or when the train came, whichever came first, Opal would dump all the money into this handbag she carried, a snap-shut thing that Virgil had covered with the fur of a stuffed animal, and she’d put on the hat and do a curtsy and we’d split the money and find a doughnut to share. A strange pair indeed, me in my holey jeans and she in her couture du jour. I suspect we both loved it—the stares of the tourists, the old folks shaking their heads, the befuddlement when we opened our mouths to sing. Nobody knew what to make of us, and I was pleased to know that together we were as fresh and different as I had predicted.
As for the album’s sidemen: Despite the ups and downs of the first day, the subsequent sessions kept my father, Squine, and Krebble invested enough to continue turning up at Rivington—and turning in some of the most inspired work of their careers.
BOB HIZE:
All the acclaim I’ve been given, right up through that lovely tribute last spring… It’s been nice, but I have to confess: It wasn’t genius on my part. Much of it was a happy accident. Was Opal what I had envisioned as the complement to Nev? No. But ultimately she was better than my imagination, and weren’t we lucky for it?
JOHN SQUINE:
Session two, she came back in another crazy mismatched outfit, so we’re assuming it’s going to be more of the same BS. But wait a minute now—she’s figured out how to adjust the mic! And oh, that’s a good little run on the bridge…. Okay! Now we’re in business. And by the time we got to “Chalk White” and “Ginger’s Lament,” we were really cooking.
All respect to your mother, but in the time I worked with Jimmy, I don’t think I ever saw him as impressed with anybody as he was with Opal Jewel. He wasn’t the type to go gaga over anybody, but I think she did a number on him. Not because she was that good at that moment, but because we saw she had the capacity to be that good.
BOB HIZE, ON WHAT HE THINKS MAKES OPAL SPECIAL AS AN ARTIST:
She is extremely attuned to the mood of the music and the lyrics. Wherever they go, she goes. She is not one of those girls who can “sing the phone book,” as people like to say. If you stuck some nonsense rhymes in Opal’s hands and asked her to sing them a cappella, I promise you it would be unrecognizable because she’d have nothing to play off, nothing to interpret. But if you put her in with a good band on a song that means something and then isolate the vocal, hearing her raw becomes a whole different story—you hear the range and color and theatricality. Even when she was warming up before a session, she didn’t like doing it alone. She’d ask John or Sol Krebble to play a few notes to help her out—Sol for her upper and mid-range, John for the lower. Suddenly everyone had to reenergize, because Opal was so responsive to what the other musicians would do. We were playing rock music but in many ways the process did feel like jazz.
As he had with a select number of jazz artists before her, Jimmy took Opal under his wing.
JIMMY CURTIS:
Eventually I did learn how to read music, and then I taught a lot of other cats coming up behind me. I still teach ’em. Because that is my responsibility, from one black artist to another. They like to say, usually about us, “Oh, So-and-So just has a natural talent, a natural rhythm, you can’t explain it.” Ain’t that disrespectful? Like, ain’t this an art form that we practice too? That we put our brains and sweat and heart and soul behind so we can learn and improve, just like you?
OPAL JEWEL, WHEN ASKED TO ELABORATE ON THE EARLY DAYS OF HER AFFAIR WITH MY FATHER:
What you want me to say? You want me to say he was handsome? Okay, he was handsome. [Long pause] It’s been a long time now, but whenever the anniversary used to roll around and the newspeople would talk about what happened to him, they’d flash up on the screen this black-and-white “before” picture that somebody rustled up, and he’s a teenager and he’s leaned up against some building, this strapping young man with a cigarette dangling out the side of his mouth. Even better than looking good, Jimmy sounded good, like nobody else I ever heard. That man had a fearsome talent. He was sharp and nasty on those drums. But anybody with half an ear could tell you that.
And then maybe the most comforting to me at the time, it’s the most simple thing, but Jimmy was Black. That’s it. As close as Nev and I got over the years, as much feeling and friendship existed between us, there was something instant between your daddy and me that didn’t require work or words. Oh, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a cultural grounding that we Black folks have, whether you are from Detroit or New York or Los Angeles or Bumblecrack, Mississippi. I remember somewhere in the nineties I went to see Pearl’s youngest graduate from Howard [University], and some of the children on campus were wearing shirts that said, IT’S A BLACK THING—YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND. And ooh, honey, the white people get so mad about stuff like that, about anything that excludes them, but I would laugh and laugh. Because it’s true!
Anyway, since Jimmy and I were the only two Black folks on the record, and since out in the world there weren’t many of us making music like the kind Nev was trying to do, we got to be tight. It was a gravitational thing. I’m not gonna sit here and say I’m proud of it. But it was what it was.
[On how she began seeing him outside of the studio] Miss Ernestine wasn’t having strange men in her house in the wee hours, so after we finished a session we’d go to Jimmy’s spot uptown; it was on my way home anyhow. And he’d let me hear some of the records he’d played on. Nev came along the first few times too, and we’d sit at the kitchen table with Corinne [Dawes Curtis, my mother] or his friends from next door and we’d have a cocktail or some scrambled eggs; he liked his with a slice of American cheese draped across the top. But then Nev stopped coming. Probably he got bored or uncomfortable with being left out of the conversation—we would be drinking and getting loose, arguing loud about Angela [Davis] and George [Jackson] and everything that was going down, and I don’t think Nev knew what to say or how to handle it. And then Corinne stopped waiting up because the sessions were going later and later and she had her nursing shift in the morning, a real job, so she’d be asleep upstairs. Folks fell away till it was just your daddy and me… tiptoeing in the house, whispering on his living room couch. He’d chain-smoke cigarettes and teach me things. At first it was professional and then it wasn’t. [Shrugs] Yeah, I knew what I was doing; I was the one who started it. I don’t have any excuse except that I was twenty-one and had never been kissed. [Long pause] That’s all I have to say.
ROSEMARY SALDUCCI:
She didn’t have any girlfriends and her sister was far away, so Opal and I became friendly. And I got to realize that as worldly as she seemed, this girl was really innocent. One day she came in to Rivington looking worried and she asked me if I could speak privately with her in the bathroom, and when we got there she told me she’d been using rubbers with her boyfriend but she was having some sort of a problem. Now, I don’t know why she came to me with this—maybe it says something about my character. [Laughs] I said, “Well, what’s going on?” and asked her a few more questions. And she said, “Oh, my God, Rosemary, the itching and burning,” and, you know, all the classic symptoms of a yeast infection. It was so cute, I’m telling you. I took her to a cheap clinic to confirm it and get her something to fix it up, and because I knew the asshole doctor wouldn’t tell her this I said she should clean and dry real good after her boyfriend was done down there, every time. And I said, “Congratulations, honey—you got a keeper!” What? Oh, don’t be such a prude, I’m only being honest. I was happy for her, that she had a man who pleased her in that way, because men did not do that a lot in those days! Or at least they claimed not to. All right, all right, I’m done. But if I had known then that Casanova was Jimmy Curtis, a married guy? Well, I would have told her from experience that’s a road of heartbreak right there.
JOHN SQUINE:
When we were recording, Opal would come in stronger and stronger every time, and I was wondering, Who’s been working with her? Then I’d look over and notice that she was turned toward Jimmy, and he was looking at her, and every once in a while, maybe on a particular break, he’d nod as if he was sending her a secret message, and she’d bust out with some improvisation or riff that we hadn’t practiced before. I didn’t know Jimmy to be a tomcat—we’d worked together a lot and had been on the road, where most of that stuff tends to happen—but it was obvious that something was up.
Of course Nev knew, he had to have known. That’s probably why those guys wanted to throttle each other.
Though most of the early sessions went extraordinarily well, the recording of a song called “Black Coffee,” which Nev had written for Opal to sing, kicked off a war between him and my father. As originally written, it was a bluesy ballad with a dragging beat. Its narrator—a composite of the people, many of them Black and poor, whom Nev had encountered during his tour in search of Opal—is a young single mother gearing up for another grueling day at her miserable, low-paying factory job (“Drop of milk for the baby, black coffee for me / Or I’ll be collapsed by the time it hits three”). At the end of the night, she’s switching off the light and preparing for the cycle to repeat (“Alone once again, I settle for sleep / And pray for the baby, and my soul to keep / I dream of the day we’ll get what we’re due / But for now there’s that kettle, screaming on cue”).
OPAL JEWEL:
“Black Coffee” was a song that I could not stand. I get that Nev meant well with it—these white liberal types always do, don’t they? But he was putting all these words in my mouth, literally, and they were so damn morose. Listen, we were on some different stuff in 1970! We were all singing [James Brown’s] “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud”! That’s what we were on—the joy! But “Black Coffee” to me was musty and sad and old-school Negro, and taking the lead on it was a threat to my particular spirit. Like me saying what a drag it is to live in my skin. It wasn’t how I wanted to represent myself.
My mistake was, I shoulda pulled Nev aside and told him that to his face.
JIMMY CURTIS, ANSWERING THE QUESTION “WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE SUCCESSFUL AS A SESSION PLAYER?”:
Well, it sure ain’t about the dough. You can scrape together a living, maybe take care of your family if you’re lucky to get some touring work on the side. But my personal definition of success is that you don’t do a goddamn thing you don’t want to. If you ain’t feeling it, you ain’t gotta do it.
BOB HIZE:
Jimmy almost brought the whole project crashing down because he flat-out refused to play on “Black Coffee.” He said that he didn’t like what it was about and he said that [using air quotes] “we”—implying him and Opal, I suspect—couldn’t stand behind it. That “we”… It was a goading, a jab, and it worked very well. Nev was atomically upset, so offended that anyone would think he had ill intent or poor judgment, and Jimmy was shouting ten times louder that he didn’t care, the song was rubbish…. Like rams in the battle, those two. And everyone was turning to me as if to say, “What now?”
HOWIE KELLY:
For the most part, I was staying out of the studio, since that was Hizey’s deal—I would just drop in sometimes to make sure there was no funny stuff happening. But during one of the sessions there was a racket in the hallway, yelling so loud I could hear it down in my office! Well, I wasn’t about to stand for that, because I got business to do on the phone! I go to find out what the problem is and they’re going at it, Nev and your old man, and Hizey and Opal and Rosemary just standing around looking like dummies. And I say over all that noise, [shouting] “You wanna yell? Okay! I’ll show ya how to yell! Now shut the hell up or you’re all on your ass!” Back to my office, slam the door… settled.
BOB HIZE:
On the face, the song was as good as the others—about a particular person in a particular situation who just so happened to be Black. But the difficulty was, the difficulty still is, that everything having to do with race in America is so bloody complex and deep-rooted, and Nev and I, being the pale Englishmen, we weren’t well versed, pardon the pun. We didn’t even have an audience yet, we didn’t know if our fans were going to be Black or white or purple, which was a big problem in and of itself, but with this song there was the threat of alienating an entire chunk simply by being tone-deaf to the times.
Besides that, “Black Coffee” was reliant on the drummer, and I didn’t want to go out and find another. In fact, I had hopes that your dad would stay on through the supporting live gigs. I knew all of them could be brilliant together—I was witness to it at the beginning, before the egos landed.
Opal was quiet, but judging from the fact that she didn’t contradict Jimmy when he kept dragging her into it, I could suss out that she was going to side with him. I didn’t ask her to say it out loud because I couldn’t bear to do that to Nev, and Nev was mindful of his own feelings as well, careful not to press her to choose, because I think he knew he would come out the losing end. The other lads were loyal to your father too; they’d worked with him before and would probably have to work with him again. So the writing was on the wall, wasn’t it? I said as gently as I could to Nev, “I’m sorry, but I think we’d better cut it.”
NEV CHARLES:
We’re going to need a string orchestra for this next bit…. Are you ready? Prepare the violins! [Laughs] I felt very alone, and in some respects betrayed. I still stand by “Black Coffee,” and it found its place, didn’t it?II
But when everybody rejected it I was out of sorts, and can you blame me, really, considering Polychrome was my record and not Jimmy Curtis’s? That he was allowed to make such a decision was galling to me, especially with him running around with my featured singer and creating all this drama.
JOHN SQUINE:
Your father did have a temper. You could be telling him an actual fact, like the sky is blue, but if he felt disrespected or that you’d talked down to him in the way that you’d said it, he would glare at you with a straight face: “No, motherfucker, it’s red.” [Laughs]
So it got to the point where Nev walked out the building and we thought he might not come back. Yeah, it was kinda childish, maybe it was jealousy over Opal; I don’t know.
NEV CHARLES:
I retreated to the flat on Ninety-Sixth Street and I moped in my pajamas for a couple days; I reconnected with a sweet girl who fed me sandwiches and let me wallow, and I really considered just chucking it all. Maybe heading back to England—that was always an option.
Eventually I sent the girl home and rang my dad for a little support, emotional, financial, but do you know what happened? A stranger picked up on the other end, a stranger who called herself Carol and said she had heard a lot about me, Morris’s boy gone off to America, and I said, “Oh, are you the new housemaid?” and she said, “No, I’m a special friend of your father’s.” A special friend! [Making a disgusted face] She finally put Dad on the line and I was shocked and appalled, but he sounded chipper, totally inappropriate and relaxed, as if they’d just been up to something, and I said, “But Dad, Mum’s birthday is in two weeks!” or whatever, and he said, “I know it, lad, and God rest her soul. But life goes on, and I won’t pout through it.” Well, I felt proper foolish then, because that’s exactly what I had been doing, pouting, and nobody was even dead. Oh, God, unfortunate choice of words… I’m sorry, but you understand. So I let “Black Coffee” rest for the moment, I put it in the old percolator [tapping temple]. And I went back to finish my record.
I. Squine was Jimmy Curtis’s closest friend among the Polychrome musicians. Today a grandfather of twelve at age 72, he stays young at heart by running a summer music camp for kids in upstate New York.
II. Nev’s lost tune ultimately landed on the soundtrack for the controversial 2001 movie-musical The Jungle, a tweak on Upton Sinclair’s novel starring an all-Black cast; as performed by actress LaTasha Prather and produced by Nev himself, “Black Coffee” was nominated for Best Original Song at both the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes.