Wild Bill entertained Capone, lived, and keeps playing

Press, 18 February 1989, Page 25

Wild Bill entertained Capone, lived, and keeps playing

By

CHRISTOPHER MOORE

NOT AROUND for the birth of the Blues, he was there when Ragtime set toes tapping back in Defiance, Ohio. He was there when jazz swept up from the South, a potent musical hurricane perfumed with hot music, bootleg gin, violence, corruption and bobbed hair. He saw jazz slowly give way to a suave cousin as the Big Bands sounded a fanfare for the 30s and 40s.

The unsinkable, pugnacious, entirely memorable Wild Bill Davison, now finds himself in the age of compact discs, music videos, new wave, old wave and Michael Jackson — but, dammit, the man still insists on playing jazz the way he’s always played it: lava-hot, bitter-sweet with a smoky quality which , makes the eyes water without warning.

The sound of Wild Bill’s cornet surging upwards through the band raises a rash of goosebumps. He can make an ordinary moulded piece of brass sulk and beguile like a beautiful woman, cry like a motherless child and murmer seductive throaty irrelevances into the ears of anyone who cares to listen. In his hands, the cornet becomes a soul-stir-ring last trump or something soft, sweet and almost forgotten in a cold age of electronic music. Many people still care to listen to Bill Davison who at 82 (and who’s counting the years?) travels around the world carrying his trumpet case and the joyous expectations of the kid from Defiance, and who arrived in the Chicago of the early 1920 s to leap on the jazz-age bandwagon. After a 20-hour flight to New Zealand, he’s preparing for a Christchurch concert in the marbled halls of the city’s Parkroyal Hotel. Anne Davison bustles around their hotel room making coffee arid keeping an eye on her husband. Bill settles back in his chair, lights a cigarette and plays the nostalgia blues.

He formed his first band in Defiance when he was 14. The Ohio Lucky Seven was, by his own modest admission, “a damn good band.” A group of kids learning to play by listening to the professional bands. By 1917, Bill and his group were listening to the Dixie Land Jazz Band on shellac 78 discs.

“They had a cornet player who could do anything with music he wanted. He could change the

sound. He started me playing the cornet ... and years later I was able to tell him how much he helped me develop my music. "Suppose that I go back to when it all started,” Bill reflects. “Our first job was at an icecream social at the Defiance Baptist Church. Only knew three songs but we got 50 cents and all the ice cream we could eat for playing the job. I must have eaten two gallons of the stuff." He was “going on 19” when he arrived in Chicago, joining a band and making his first recording in 1923 — a largely forgotten ballad entitled “Horsey, keep your tail up.” “Never been so ashamed of anything in my life. The saxophone player sang falsetto and I was on that record ...” he says. The Chicago unions governed a musician’s life, dictating where, with whom and when he would play. But Bill displayed the qualities of his home town and stuck it out.

“If you played in one place

twice, it was a steady job and they would kick you out. Play on Monday, then on Saturday and you were all right. It wasn’t considered consecutive days ... “I eventually got to play with the top bands. There was the Doctor’s Band — all surgeons who liked to play jazz and did it very well. They inherited me and I went to play with the guys.”

The Ohio Kid then met a man called Al Capone. ■ “Capone was the only gangster who bought an entire city. He bought the Chicago police department, ... the mayor. Everybody was cooking and everything was goin’ on. I worked in a place called The Midnight Frolic at the time. It was a hell of a band and we played for the floorshow. One night I was told that a fellow in the balcony wanted to see me. There was this, guy wearing a fedora, light grey tie and a cigar in the corner of his mouth, sitting where no-one could see him.”

“Hey, kid,” the man in the

fedora called out, “sit down.” Bill sat down and was asked how he liked the Midnight Frolics and playing with the band.

“I told him that I liked it fine. He told me that he liked my music, and folded a $lOO bill into the top pocket of my suit coat, followed by a handful of fifties for the guys in the band. I was walking down the stairs and met a waiter ... “Who is that guy up there,” I asked him. ” ‘You don’t know Al Capone?’ he said.”

Bill is probably among the few men who gave a command performance for Capone and lived to tell the tale. It was an invitation he couldn’t refuse — the drive to the Capone suite in the Lexington Hotel in the Capone limousine, the steel shutters protecting the Capone Empire and its ruler.

“When I was leaving, he asked me whether I had a good time. Yessir, I replied. You drink? he asked. Sure, I said, doesn’t everyone? He told me to go into

room and help myself.. Inside were thousands of. bottles of whisky. “Took my trumpet, out of its case and put two bottles in there. Put more inside my coat. Must have looked like a wrestler as I walked out. Capone thought it was very funny ...

"There were three rules for living in Chicago — you didn’t see anything, you didn’t talk about it, and you never, never made passes at anyone’s woman. You could stay in town a long time as long as you stuck by the rules.”

The cigarette smoke curls up to the ceilings and the old nostalgia blues keep on playing ... the Chicago days, the trip to Seattle, the days when he played the melaphone, the banjo, guitar and "a little trumpet.” These were his days of jazz, booze, broads and fast cars. The night when an attractive young woman in a ringside seat sat and spilled at the young musician on the stand. He smiled back. She continued smiling.

“Afterwards I went to the bar and passed her. She had a note in her hand and told me that she’d like me to call her sometime. Ten minutes later, the boss told me to go home. ‘To hell with the floor show, just go home.’ “It turned out that the girl’s fellow had seen her talking to me and wanted to kill me. I went home.” The band played on as the Twenties sailed onwards to-, wards 1929 and the Depression. “It was the greatest age for jazz. Chicago was considered the Jazz Capital of the World. We used to brag about the 1000 bands working within the city limits, today you can’t find one ...,” Bill says.

He also remembers the Chinese restaurants, packed with piners and jazz enthusiasts, and the wild, brawling on Saturday nights when fights erupted on the dance floor and the band played “Tiger Rag” as loud as humanly possible to drown the sound of smashing chairs and breaking glass. He remembers watching as a man was pistol whipped to death a few feet from the bandstand — "didn’t see anything, didn’t talk about it.”

“There was the night at the

Rendezvous Club when this guy walks in and sits down at a table marked reserved. The only table left but it was reserved. He was asked to find somewhere else. He refused, pulled out a .45 and started shooting the lights out. “The band on stage did the only sensible thing. In about two seconds, it was about six blocks away and still running.” - The Crash came in ’29, and the bright tawdry glitter of Chicago, and the spirit of an age was extinguished. “People lost all their money. The boys were wiped out. The drummer and the clarinet player commited suicide. I couldn’t understand it, I made more than they did but I didn’t have any money to lose. Spent it all. There’s something in that — don’t ever save your money.” Half a century later, Bill still has his band. Most of the musicians he knew and played with during the 20s, 30s and 40s, have gone, but Bill plays on, tours the world and contemplates the modern music world from the position of an elder statesman of jazz who still sings “Sweet Mama” with a certain beguiling innocence.

“There’s this young trumpet player, Tom Sanders, who is something of a protege. We’re good friends and he plays in my band. I introduce him as ‘my son.’' When he introduces me I’m his ‘father’' who was born before there was any history ... “Jazz doesn’t need defining. It’s a feeling. It’s born in you. it’s there all the time and you’re either good or bad. The only problem about getting old is the physical demands. I practise four hours a day come hell or high water. Today I didn’t practise — have to practise tomorrow I guess.”

Anne Davison comments on the decline of musical standards. They have been together for so long that their thoughts are often played as a duet. “The class has gone out of music today,” Wild Bill growls from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Kids listen to slop. Two guitar lessons and you can play in a rock band. I can listen to some bands blit I cant stand to, look at ’em. No baths, no hair-

cuts — is this what brings people in?

“Jarring on the ear? Goddam it, it’s more than jarring ... the songs have no end or beginning, no melody. No nothing. Take a guy like that Michael Jackson ;.. Mr Jackson, it emerges, is a neighbour of the Davisons in Santa Barbara. Bill’s views on Mr Jackson are unprintable, but it becomes apparent. that he prefers the company of Mr Jackson’s pet monkey to its owner.

“Put it like this: I doubt whether he would have survived Chicago.” An outraged atomic cloud of. cigarette smoke erupts from the chair ... “I did a two-hour television video recently about my life.

How I remembered things I don’t know. They played some of my records. I shocked myself at the job I did. They even filmed my model railway and, son of a bitch, if it didn’t look like the real thing. >-There are times when I don’t play as well as I used to and feel that I’ve let myself down. I’ve got a couple of bad teeth which will have to come out. I’ll have to have transplants — and if that works, I’ll keep oh playing. “The only thing which makes me angry is when the media is always goosing me up about being 82 years old. All the young broads still run like hell ...”

“When he stops looking, we’ll put him in hospital,” Anne comments.

“She went out with Tyrone Power once,” Bill replies. “To think that she has the audacity to put his damn picture on our dresser. Everytime I go to the bathroom I turn his face to the wall. When I come back, its back again.” Four years ago, Bill was told to give up drinking ... “The guy told me that if I continued drinking, he’d give me about 10 days to live. I want to live for a few years yet. “The only trouble came when some Swiss fans afterwards presented me with a birthday present — 75 bottles of scotch with my own label,” he says. '■He was so stunned that for the first time in his life, he couldn’t talk,” Anne adds. Talk and music fuel Bill’s life. After 82 years, this feisty streetwise musician has no intention of letting them play “When the Saints go Marching In” while they bear Wild Bill to his grave.

Obituaries are somehow not Bill Davison’s songbook. “Lemme tell you ... I’m going to do something that I thought would be impossible. There’s this jazz band in Leningrad which wants me to go and work with them. And they’re going to pay me 'American dollars and not roubles ..."