Addiction, in any era, is attributed to many risk factors, one of which is having not much else going on in your life. “You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in any other direction,” William S. Burroughs writes in Junkie (1953). That may describe the lives of many addicts in the contemporary American landscape. It did not characterize someone like Miles Davis in the late 1940s, who, before he got deeply into heroin, was in the artistic vanguard and knew it. Miles and his colleagues always had something to recover for. Weren’t they devoted to their art? Why did they jeopardize it?
The drug’s appeal came down to status. Using heroin was a way to prove that you belonged to an edgy set. The beboppers felt that desire especially keenly. Bebop (originally “modern jazz” ) is the jazz form most closely associated with heroin. Bebop combined both technical virtuosity and authenticity, qualities that stemmed from the late-night jam-session culture from which it arose. Bebop represented jazz’s high-modernist period, marking a great leap forward, eventually leading to the postmodernist abstractions of free jazz but without going all the way into tedium. Bebop did more than the swing and Dixieland sounds that it supplanted to give jazz its reputation as high culture. As appealing as big-band swing was (and still is), had jazz’s development stopped there, it is doubtful that its reputation as “America’s classical music” would be as secure as it is now.
That was all in the future, though. In their day, the members of the bebop generation liked to be regarded as outsiders. “Bebop was invented by the cats who did get out of the army,” says the protagonist of the film Round Midnight (1986), played by Dexter Gordon and based on Bud Powell and Lester Young. Beboppers drew a sharper distinction between the modes of entertainer and artist than did predecessors like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.
Bebop musicians played at a fast tempo, often with wit and whimsy, but not much sentimentality. One appeal of bebop lies in its emotional restraint, which sets it against the romantic strains of certain varieties of nineteenth-century classical music and, certainly, saccharine pop songs. (The heroin addict nodding off, too, displays a limited emotional range.) But the main connection between playing bebop and taking heroin was that both were seen as the mark of an unconventional spirit. In critic Nat Hentoff’s view, “Heroin, in short, became the ‘in’ drug more because it was so defiantly anti-square than because of any relationship between the music as such and the effects of the drug.”
Jazz was city music, and all the cities associated with its rise—Kansas City, New Orleans, Chicago—had a reputation for being “wide open.” A working jazz musician maintained nighttime hours, traveled a lot, and was sporadically employed—all qualities associated with looser living. Long before heroin arrived on the jazz scene, alcoholism was rife and sent several jazz greats to an early grave. But boozing had far less status appeal than heroin.
One senses that white musicians experienced status concerns with particular acuteness. Insecurity seems evident on Evans’s face in almost every photograph of him. The Winick study reported that two-thirds of musicians who were “occasional or regular” heroin consumers were white. It was a white trumpeter, Red Rodney, who made the definitive statement about the drug’s status allure: “[Heroin] was our badge. It was the thing that made us different from the rest of the world. It was the thing that said, ‘We know, you don’t know.’ It was the thing that gave us membership in a unique club, and for this membership, we gave up everything else in the world. Every ambition. Every desire. Everything.”
One peer-pressure effect that crossed racial boundaries was the influence of alto saxophonist Charlie “Yardbird” or “Bird” Parker. Bird’s life offers strong evidence that such a thing as an “addictive personality” exists. Single-minded in his devotion to satisfying his various appetites, he was found to be psychopathic by at least one psychiatrist. What Bird’s family and colleagues saw as callous disregard for their well-being has been spun by some later commentators as reaction to racism’s trauma. Many also excused Parker because of his artistic abilities, the reputation of which has only grown over time. The combination in one man of Carnegie Hall and skid row created a potent attraction. The conventional wisdom, as quoted in Ross Russell’s biography Bird Lives! (1973), was: “To play like Bird, you have to do like Bird!”
