On that morning of September 25, 1961, when Clark, Halliday, and McEwan entered the building, before Clark overdosed, Smith recorded this exchange:
Halliday, to Smith: Hey, when you get over there [Japan], look for some methedrine because, you know, that’s where they invented it. When you come back, I’ll be working. Boy, I wish you all the best. I know I’m corny, but you sure been good to me.
(Pause.)
Halliday: You don’t have Ronnie Free’s number, do you?
Smith: I don’t have the slightest idea where Ronnie is.
* * *
Free left New York abruptly in 1960 or 1961 and never went back. He didn’t show for a gig with Marian McPartland and nobody saw him again. In 2001, McPartland told me, I was thrilled to have Ronnie working with me in my trio at the Hickory House. He was considered the great young hope among drummers on the scene, a really wonderful player. He had a different style, more swinging, very subtle. Free is a good name for him. He didn’t play bombastic solos like many drummers did. Ronnie was one of the best I ever saw. Then one night he just disappeared. We had a gig and he didn’t show up. Nobody saw him after that. Thirty or thirty-five years later, in the early 1990s, I was walking down the street in Columbia, South Carolina, and I couldn’t believe my eyes, but Ronnie Free was walking right toward me, looking exactly the same. My first words to him were, What happened to you?
* * *
Ronnie Free is the most ubiquitous presence on Smith’s recorded tapes other than Smith himself. He is documented playing drums on more than a hundred reels, roughly 250 hours.
One night in 1960, Free shared his drum kit with Roy Haynes. These your drums, Ronnie? Haynes asked. Yeah, man. Here are some sticks. This is one of the few times Free’s voice can be heard on the tapes. Usually it’s just his drumsticks tapping the surfaces of his instruments, sometimes wood-shedding by himself, or in tandem with the saxophonist Freddy Greenwell, or with the pianist Hall Overton, or the three men forming an ad hoc trio. Other times, he can be heard in explosive jam sessions with dozens of musicians. No words from Free, just percussion.
In a 1965 lecture at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Smith, traveling with a portable tape machine, recorded himself making the following comment: They [the musicians in the Sixth Avenue loft] were searching for something they can’t find in their club dates. One night, a saxophonist named Freddy Greenwell came in after midnight on a Sunday night. A drummer named Ronnie Free was there. They started jamming together, and they continued to play until Friday, almost without stopping. Ronnie was a brilliant young drummer, and he drove the session along with tremendous fury and grace. He was working on something, searching for something, and he kept playing until he found it. Many different musicians dropped in throughout that week and played. They’d leave, and Ronnie and Freddy kept right on playing. It was an amazing show of determination. I was inspired by it. I try to put that level of determination in my own work.
* * *
March 24–25, 1960. Smith is talking with the saxophonist Zoot Sims, the pianist Bill Potts, and Free, who has lived in the loft for roughly two years by this time. Potts is noodling around with notes on the piano keyboard.
Sims: Do you dig these fucking wires and mics, man?
Potts: I like this. I like this pad, man. I want to get a pad like this.
Sims: Yeah, well, let’s move in …
Smith screams in protest: ARRRRRRGGHHHHHH!
Free: I’ll probably be moving out before long.
Sims: You gonna be moving out? Then, to Smith: He’s been with you all the time, man?
Smith: Ever since I made the mistake of inviting him in for a couple of hours.
Potts: Then he stayed for a few years, huh?
Free: Shit, I ain’t got no watch.
[Laughter.]
* * *
When I discovered Smith’s tapes in 1998 and began researching the Sixth Avenue loft, Free’s name often came up in interviews with musicians, but nobody seemed to know where he was or if he was still alive.
Free was indeed still alive. Earlier in 1998, he had written a brief memoir in “The Note,” a xeroxed, stamped newsletter mailed out by the jazz archive at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania. In the piece, he mentioned sessions at Smith’s Sixth Avenue loft. By word of mouth, I was alerted to that piece and I eventually found my way to Free, who was living in Hot Springs, Virginia, playing drums in obscurity at the Homestead Resort.
If Smith’s career were measured by the amount of time and resources he spent on his subjects, Free would be up there in significance with Maude Callen or Albert Schweitzer, the subjects of two of his most iconic photo-essays. But Free wasn’t the subject of a journalistic assignment, which made Smith’s documentation of him more revealing. We see what Smith was drawn to document when there was no expectation or deadline.
* * *
Ronald Guy Free was born on January 15, 1936, in Charleston, South Carolina. His mother, Daisy, was a bartender, and his father, Herbie, was a card dealer, taxi driver, and garbage collector for the city. His sister, Joan, was born two years earlier. The family lived at 38 Spring Street in one of Charleston’s poorer neighborhoods on the border between the black and white sections of town. Herbie Free was by all accounts a violent alcoholic. Daisy was a sweet, earnest woman, but no match for her husband’s drunken tirades. Herbie never became the musician he wanted to be, so when Ronnie expressed an interest in drums at age six, Herbie pressured him to pursue it.
Ronnie’s father was cruel, awful to him, said the late Ms. Dale Coleman, a former writer, schoolteacher, and a close friend of Free’s since their shared childhoods. He forced Ron to practice until his fingers bled. He was proud of Ron’s ability, but he always told Ron he was no good. The only expressions he ever made were violent ones. You name it, he did it to Ron—screamed at him, kicked him, beat him, slapped him.
Ironically, I owe much of my practice skills to my old man, says Free. I developed my ability as a result of my father forcing me to practice as a kid. Somewhere along the way he decided that I had to become the best fucking drummer there ever was. He would come home drunk in the middle of the night, wake me up, and make me show him what I’d learned that day practicing on the drums, the rudiments. If he didn’t think I was playing well enough he’d slap me upside the head, kick me, pinch me, beat me. Then, the next night he’d come home and be the opposite, hugging me, telling me how much he loved me, telling me I was going to be the greatest drummer that ever lived. Smelling like liquor the whole time, whether he was beating me or hugging me, it was one extreme or the other. All of it was inappropriate, to say the least.
I realized if I became good enough, the drums were my ticket out of town. I enjoyed playing, though. The sound of drums always has seemed to fill me with courage, inspiration, and the feeling that anything was possible. Drums have a history of use in warfare as a means of providing troops with courage. It works that way for me, too.
By age eight Ronnie was taking drum lessons from a local teacher, Patrick Leonard. He practiced religiously, said the late Leonard. I recall passing his house on Spring Street when he was a little boy and seeing him out there on the front steps practicing with his drumsticks.
Coleman and other childhood friends said that Free would turn a chair or milk crate bottom-up and knock his sticks on them for hours. At twelve, Free began sneaking into bars and clubs and playing with jazz and blues bands on the white and black sides of town.
With the blessing of his parents, Free quit school at age sixteen in 1952 to go on the road with Tommy Weeks and His Merry Madcaps, a music and comedy trio. I waved goodbye to my parents at the bus station in Charleston, off to seek my fame and fortune, says Free. The Madcaps were a terrible trio with funny hats and bad jokes and all that, but it allowed me to see much of the country. When we got to Minneapolis, I left for a better-paying job playing the girlie show with Royal American Shows, a touring carnival out of Tampa, Florida. It was an amazing experience, traveling on the road as a teenager with all the freaks and carnies.
By 1955, Free was being influenced by Max Roach’s drum work on records with the trumpeter Clifford Brown and the saxophonist Sonny Rollins. He realized he had to move to New York City to play with musicians of that caliber. He moved in with a family friend on Staten Island—a man named Dick Tarrance who had been a boarder in Free’s childhood home in Charleston. Free found jobs playing for lounge singers and comedians on Staten Island until he obtained his Local 802 musicians’ union card, which would allow him to play in Manhattan. The city made a deep impact on the young artist.
Dick Tarrance had this house on top of this, like, a series of hills on Staten Island, with a beautiful picture window. I’ll never forget, the first day I was there, I think was around Christmas of 1955—and it snowed the first morning. We got up and we opened those curtains. I’m from Charleston, South Carolina, where it never snows and there are no hills. Everything’s flat and straight. I’ll never forget that morning looking out over those layers of hills down below me, and those snow-covered rooftops. That was one of the most breathtaking sights I’ve ever seen.
A few months later Free received his union card and began working in Manhattan.
There’s no place quite like New York, particularly in my mind, because I’d been hearing about New York all my life, the milieu. All the musicians that came through Charleston when I was a kid, any of them you talked to, they’d say, Well, you’ve got to go to New York.
So I had these ideas of the Great White Way, you know, instant stardom and fame and fortune, and all these ridiculous ideas. Then to suddenly be there, it was like I was in a storybook or something. It was a surreal experience for the longest kind of time. I remember I stayed overnight in a hotel one time in Manhattan, when I was still living on Staten Island. I’d had a gig and it was too late to take the ferry back to Staten Island. My room was on the second floor of a funky little hotel. It was just a couple of doors off Broadway. It was somewhere in the Forties, I think. It didn’t even have any screens or anything in the windows, but I could open my window and I could look out that window onto Forty-sixth Street or whatever street it was, and a little farther down I could see Broadway there. It was like a child looking through a magic mirror or something. That went on probably for the first couple of years in New York, of just feeling like I was Alice in Wonderland, that kind of thing. [Sighs.]
It was scary, because Charleston is a little sleepy Southern town. New York makes you feel really, really, really, really small and unimportant. I already felt that way before I left Charleston, so it’s just like [sighs] the loneliest I’ve ever been was in New York City surrounded by all those people. Even when I was with friends or whatever, I still felt lonely because they all seemed to feel at home there, you know, and comfortable there and seemed perfectly normal, whereas I’m still in this surreal otherworld kind of thing.
So, it was a major culture shock. There’s a lot to fear. I was very fearful anyhow, because I had no self-confidence. I was confident that I wouldn’t amount to much [laughs], so I kept getting these shocks because I kept getting these gigs, man, with all these guys I’d read about in Downbeat magazine and Metronome and blah-blah-blah. Some of them I’d had pictures of on my bedroom wall, and things like that, man, and here I am gigging with these people.
I just tensed up, man. I was just—fear is a form of faith. And belief is very powerful, regardless of what you believe. If you believe positively about something, it’s very powerful. But if you believe negatively, as I did, because I was damaged goods when I arrived on the scene because of my—I have a very abusive childhood thing that I’d never really learned how to cope with. [Clears throat.]
Free’s first official gig in New York was in the pit band for an off-Broadway show called the Shoestring Revue. The eminent bassist Oscar Pettiford attended one of the shows and was taken by Free’s solos. Oscar—O.P.—called me a few nights later and had me play with him on a few record dates, says Free. I started getting these incredible gigs overnight. But it all was happening too fast.
After I got to New York, yeah, everybody was pretty much smoking pot, and Shadow Wilson introduced me to heroin. He was definitely a childhood hero of mine. I first caught him at Birdland when I was about twelve years old when my parents had taken me to New York. Shadow was playing with Erroll Garner and playing mostly brushes, and he just knocked me out. It was so tasty and swinging so hard, and everything was just perfect. After I moved to New York—this was six years later, you know—I met him at Café Bohemia one night. He was working with Roy Eldridge. Somebody introduced us and told him I was a new drummer. The first words out of his mouth were “Ronnie, you want to get high?”
So, I thought he was talking about grass. I said, “Sure, man.” So he says, “Come on downstairs.” He whipped out this little packet of white powder and took a matchbook cover and scooped some up off the corner of the matchbook. He tore off a piece of it, scooped it up, and offered it to me. I didn’t even know what I was supposed to do with it. So, I said, “No, you go ahead.” [Laughs.] So he goes [sniffs], “Ugh.” So, I go [sniffs], “Ugh.” I think we did it at least once or twice in each nostril.
Then he said, “Come on, let’s go across the street. There’s a little bar over there. We’ll get a beer.” So I made it as far as the alley and puked my guts out, man, got sick as a dog. After that, though, it felt pretty good. That was the beginning of something pretty awful.
At age twenty, Free’s career and lifestyle took off: One night, I met O.P. at Junior’s Bar, and Woody Herman was there. O.P. kept telling Woody how good I was. The three of us left the bar and went to O.P.’s apartment, where he and I jammed while Woody listened. A few days later Woody’s manager called me and offered me the drum chair in his band, a band I’d been listening to with my parents as a kid. Some of my heroes were in that band. It was unbelievable! But I wasn’t ready emotionally. I was scared, I lost all my confidence. I had a recurring nightmare where I was playing drums with sticks the size of baseball bats. I couldn’t keep up with the band’s tempo—the sticks were so heavy—and Woody would be standing in front yelling at me to play louder. It was awful. I’d break out in puddles of sweat, man. I was so paralyzed by fear, I couldn’t hear the music at the rehearsals or gigs. I couldn’t get it together. If you are scared, you can’t hear the music.
Free lasted only a few weeks with Woody Herman’s band in 1956. Herman fired him after a disastrous gig in Cleveland. Herbie and Daisy Free had driven to Cleveland to see Ronnie play that night. Free was devastated.
I was in tears backstage. The vibraphonist Vic Feldman, a real gentle soul, tried to console me, says Free. He told me it wasn’t the end of the world. But all I could think of was that it was over. My parents had driven all the way from Charleston to see me get fired.
Free returned to New York and continued to land good jobs, but his drug use mushroomed. He kicked his heroin habit by taking cough syrup with codeine to take the edge off. But he began consuming larger quantities of alcohol, marijuana, and especially amphetamines. I was a neurotic, screwed-up mess, says Free. If I found a pill on the street, I’d pop it in my mouth not even knowing what it was. At one point, I was taking about a hundred amphetamines a day.
Free found homes in several different lofts around New York, ultimately setting up his drums at 821 Sixth Avenue in 1959. He was at home in the casual atmosphere, without public pressures, and there he did his greatest work.
* * *
I asked Free to describe his relationship with Smith inside the loft: Well, Smith was—he was a case. I never got to know him real well. He was always working and always had all kind of projects going. He’d have tables and countertops all just covered with pictures and negatives and charts and graphs and God knows what all—tapes, because he taped all the sessions and everything. But I don’t remember ever really having a conversation with the man, to tell you the truth. He was very much into his work, and I was into the music. It was kind of a mutual coexistence, more than anything. He was always busy doing his thing, and I was busy doing mine, and that’s about it. We had, you know, a level of friendship because I know if he was broke, he had no qualms about asking me if I had any money, and vice versa, you know. We would swap goodies—he would give me some of what he called “psychic energizers,” and I would give him Desoxyns or whatever I had. I think he had a prescription for them, whatever they were. It just sounded like something you’d want to try. “Oh, yeah, I’d like to energize my psyche,” you know. We were both desperate, when you get down to it.
One thing that’s not talked about often is that you kind of almost have to hide out in order to develop your craft. You have to be isolated in order to practice enough to be any good. That’s what Smith’s loft provided, a place to isolate and practice. It was almost like an underground thing that was built up around a whole music culture—art in general, you know. They’ve always been relegated to attics and lofts and cellars and smoky nightclubs and so forth. So, that’s a stressful situation, and you’re in environments where people are drinking and carrying on and so forth.
But I don’t see it as that different. I guess musicians got a little more—I can’t even say that! I started to say that musicians maybe carried it to an extreme that most people don’t, but there are a lot of people in so-called straight society, man, that are fucking alcoholics and drug addicts, lunatics dressed as conventional folks. And who even knows to what extent all that is going on? So I’d just like to get away from that stigma about it, because, you know, it’s not that different.
I asked Free how it came to be that he left New York City abruptly and never went back. His ensuing story took five and a half hours to tell, with several breaks, including one break overnight. Gene Smith plays a central, if subtle, role in the story.
Things started changing for me when I was working at the Village Gate with Mose [Allison]. I forget who was playing bass. We were playing opposite Horace Silver. This was his band with [the trumpeter] Blue Mitchell, and was it [the saxophonist] George Coleman? Roy Brooks was playing drums. I forget the bass player’s name. But I had hit kind of a low. I had been all through the roller coasters of being on top one minute and skid row the next, and all points in between. I had serious drug problems.
No matter what I did to myself—I thought I’d be instantly healed if I got to play with [certain musicians], you know, this band or that band, or if I played in this venue. I would get the recognition and all that would make me feel good about myself, make me confident, and make me feel healthy, you know, give me some self-esteem. But I was still the same screwed-up neurotic mess, no matter what. Things were getting worse by the day. Of course, the longer you’re in it, the harder it is to get out, and I was just really depressed. I just bottomed out.
So, I’m working at the Village Gate with Mose Allison, who was kind of—you know, he was pretty popular at the time. I loved the gig and so forth, but again, I had this inner turmoil, this conflict, this paranoia or whatever it was, this psychosis. I can’t emphasize how bad off I was at the time. I’d reached a point where I could take a hundred pills and not feel anything.
One night before the gig, I had some kind of a little skirmish with Mose. He had always done me nothing but good, man. He’d get me gigs, he’d put me on records, and so forth, when nobody else would hire me. He was kind of like a loyal friend and mentor. On this night, though, we had some words over something silly, something that’s unimportant, because it was all in my head, basically, or at least ninety-eight percent of it. So, that really bummed me out, because we’d always gotten along so well and enjoyed playing together so much, and I was always so thankful and grateful to him for liking me and my music.
We went on the bandstand after this little skirmish and something clicked. I played the best I’ve ever played in my life, with the greatest of ease. There was a total sense of ambidexterity. Anything I could think of I could execute it precisely where it should be at the right exact moment every step of the way.
We played, and we swung our asses off. We really connected. It was like a whole new level for me, as far as any experience that I had playing music up to that point. This was just like otherworldly, man, like a level of perfection that I had never even thought possible.
We got off the bandstand—and, I should say, our argument had a racial aspect to it, where I perceived Mose had made a racial remark of some kind in reference to Horace Silver. In retrospect, I could see it was just Mose’s little dry humor thing. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I know I had interpreted it totally through my fucked-up psychotic lens. But the conflict had fueled the music somehow. Anyhow, we get off the bandstand, and there’s a table of black people sitting off to the side, and one of them calls me, “Hey, drummer!” I looked over, and he said, “You’re all right.”
I walked back to the bar, and the bartender told me that some guy had been sitting there asking questions about me, had been saying things about me. I walked out to the hallway, and [the pianist] Carla Bley was the hatcheck girl at the time. She said, “Oh, I’ve got a message for you.” I said, “Yeah, what’s that?” She said, “I was told to tell you that some strange man said that you are really great.”
These seem like little things, but they added up quickly. I’d never had messages like this. I went into the men’s room, went into the booth and locked the door, and fell down on my knees and was crying like a baby, man, because of the power of this whole experience. It was like I had been saved from the fucking jaws of—from the abyss.
I walked home from the gig that night, living in the loft with Gene, and I opened the door, and there Gene had a folksinger sitting on the stool [probably Nechama Hendel, an Israeli folksinger that frequented the loft at the time], strumming a guitar and singing religious, spiritual songs that really resonated with me on the heels of this profound experience I just had at the Village Gate.
I went to the back room of the loft and sat down in this recliner that Gene had there. I asked God to show me his face. Looking at the wall, suddenly I see this sheep’s head dipping down into a pool, drinking water. His head would come back up, and you could see the water dripping from his lips, and you could recognize it as a lamb. In the background, I could see these wings flapping, and I recognized it as a dove.
Now, this must be some kind of subconscious imagery that was buried down in there that I got from Sunday school. My mother used to make us go to Sunday school as a child. So I don’t know where it came from, but I recognized the symbol of the lamb and the dove being the face of God. I felt like my prayer had been directly and immediately answered, man!
Later I learned the technology behind it. Over my shoulder, back behind me on one of Smith’s bookcases, there was a lamp, there was a glass of water—oh, there was a vase with a flower in it, a long-stemmed flower. There was a glass beside the vase, and Smith had a fan in there, one of those oscillating fans. The wind from the fan would blow the flower into the glass, and it would come up dripping water. It cast a shadow on the wall, and it looked exactly like a lamb’s head. The wings were an open book lying there on the shelf with the pages flapping from the fan.
But the reality of what I was seeing didn’t make the experience any less valid for me. I went through about a week of that, of just one thing right after another, and one confirmation after another.
Gene had shelves and shelves of all kinds of books imaginable. I’d pick up a book, and I’d open it randomly, and words would just jump out at me. So I was just plugged into a whole different level of experience there. I’d had this profound awakening.
Gene had books on Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism. He had the Torah and the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita and the Koran. It was like a library in the loft. I had everything imaginable right there at my fingertips. I was reading these Eastern guys, and these guys actually made sense. It was a whole different approach from anything I’d seen. I’d hole up in there for days, never even leaving the damn loft. Between playing drums and reading and catching a little snooze every now and then, I was just content to stay in there and just saturate myself.
You have to remember, I dropped out of school at age sixteen, and I was only in my early twenties at this time, so when I read these words—“When the student is ready, the master will appear,” or “the teacher appears,” or something like that—I almost could hear like a gong in the background going, “Duhhggg!” I thought to myself, “I’m ready! Sitting on ready!”
I went forth in search of the master. So, I went out late one night and I started walking the streets. I wound up … it must have been down in the Twenties somewhere. I think I was walking eastward. Maybe it was down toward the Village a little farther, possibly even the East Village.
I passed a bunch of what looked like winos sitting on a stoop passing around a bottle of wine from person to person. There was a scrawny little black guy—maybe five foot six or seven—there with a really big mouth and an obnoxious-sounding voice that was kind of dominating the scene. I walked on by. And the next thing I know, this guy had left his group and was walking right by me. He said, “Excuse me, sir, would you mind if I walk along with you?”
I said, “I’m not really going anywhere in particular,” or something like that.
He said, “Well, if it’s all the same with you, sir, I’d rather walk with you. My name is Little Jimmy John Junior.”
The master had appeared, Free said, laughing.
* * *
The story that unfolded from this point took Free more than three hours to tell. We took several bathroom breaks and so Free could walk his dog, a yellow Labrador named Nugget, in the crisp and clean Appalachian mountain air.
When we sat back down inside and Free resumed telling his story about Little Jimmy John Junior, he annotated his story with periodic comments like, “I know this makes no sense” and “I know my sequences are going to be out of order.”
The basic story went like this: the two men spent three days wandering around town, getting thrown out of bars for being rambunctious and obnoxious, dashing across intersections in the middle of traffic, making cars slam on brakes, not worrying or caring about the consequences of anything they did. At some point along the way, Free and his master separated and Free kept performing the uninhibited movements and behaviors on his own. He ended up being picked up by police and committed to the mental ward at Bellevue.
Word of what happened to Free made it back to the Sixth Avenue loft. The story he told me resonated with the faint memories of just a few surviving musicians from the loft. For example, in an interview at his home in Bellingham, Washington, in June 2005, the pianist Joey Massters remembered that Free had been picked up by police for “wild jaywalking through the streets” and committed to Bellevue. The bass player Sonny Dallas had a similar memory. Both musicians visited Free during his confinement.
A couple of weeks later, Herbie and Daisy Free drove up to New York and released their twenty-four-year-old son from Bellevue. They took him back to Charleston. After a period of recovery and sobriety, Free returned to New York and reengaged the scene, settling back into Gene Smith’s loft.
It was a fresh start. Free pursued gigs anew. He landed the prime opportunity with Marian McPartland. Things were looking up. Then, on one random evening, walking up Sixth Avenue to the Hickory House for work, Little Jimmy John Junior came busting out of a random doorway and into Free’s path. The wild spree started all over again. He didn’t show up for his gig with McPartland. He ended up in a fetal position on the floor of an unknown bathroom.
Something came over me. I don’t remember what led up to it, but I remember lying on the floor in this bathroom, literally crying like a little baby, uncontrollable crying. It seemed like I was even kicking my hands and my legs and arms like a little baby does, you know, “Wah! Wah!” I was thinking about my mother. It was like a whole wave of memories and things came washing over me, taking me way back to babyhood, much less childhood. There was all kinds of really tender feelings and love and just adoration for my mother, and it was like I really reverted back to babyhood there just for that period, however long it took. I’m not sure if it was minutes or hours or days.
Whenever it was over, I felt completely cleansed. I felt like I’d washed away years of trauma and inhibition and uptightness that I didn’t even know I had. I felt free, man. I just really felt like I had just dropped all my hang-ups. It was an incredible experience. I thought, “Well, okay, my work here is done.”
I quit playing altogether. I went back to Charleston and never came back. I called Smith’s loft and had somebody ship my drums back down to Charleston. I burned them in the yard.