By Jim Bloch
After getting clean of heroin on his father’s farm outside of St. Louis in the fall of 1953, jazz trumpeter Mile Davis headed for Detroit, hoping to cement his new found sobriety. The Motor City did not quite accommodate the horn player’s plans.
Petting the monkey
Once he arrived in the Motor City, it appears that Miles began where he had left off in New York City and his addiction quickly deepened. In no time, he was hanging out with a dealer named Freddie Frue.
“Anyway, I was staying in a hotel, and I would never eat or anything. He was my dope contact in Detroit,” Miles said in his 1989 autobiography. “Freddie would come upstairs and bring my care package for the day. It was hard to kick my habit because of guys like him and because I was weak.”
When he was able to, Miles sat in with the house band at the Blue Bird Inn on the city’s near west side.
The Blue Bird doorman Carl Hill told jazz writers Lars Bjorn and Jim Gallert that in the fall and winter of 1953-54, “(w)hen Miles first came to the Blue Bird … he was strung out and living in Sunnie Wilson’s hotel on Grand River and the Boulevard … So when he came in he had on this old grimy white shirt and a navy blue sweater and (owner) Clarence (Eddins) told him to go home and put on a tie… So Miles went outside and took a shoelace out of his shoe and tied it up under his shirt and said: ‘How do you like this, boss?’”
Eddins liked Davis and did what he could to support the troubled musician. Both stood about 5’7” and Eddins, a natty dresser, gave him clothes.
“When Miles first came to the Blue Bird, Willie Wells played circles around his ass because Miles was all messed up … debilitated … he was buying things on credit,” Hill said.
Wells was a trumpeter whose group filled in for the Blue Bird’s regular house band led by Billy Mitchell, which featured Pontiac-born Thad Jones on trumpet, in November 1953.
Miles had apparently pawned his horn for drug money, retaining only his mouth piece. He started borrowing the trumpet of teenage trumpeter Lonnie Hillyer, who lived near the club. Hillyer had turned 13 on March 25, 1953 and would soon be studying under jazz pianist Barry Harris.
Mitchell told an interviewer that Hillyer’s mom confronted Miles on stage at the Blue Bird and grabbed her son’s horn.
“If he’s such great trumpet player, how come he does not have his own trumpet?” she asked the audience.
In another version of the story, Mrs. Hillyer allowed Miles to borrow Lonnie’s horn on the condition that he return it each night to the Hillyer home, which he did.
Kicking the monkey
There is always a mystery about why an attempt at recovery suddenly works when so many earlier attempts failed. What finally led to Miles kicking his heroin addiction?
A confluence of people and situations seemed to set him on the right track.
Part of the reason may have in fact rested with the poor quality of Detroit heroin.
“(S)hooting it wasn’t doing nothing for me except putting more holes in my arms,” Miles said.
He had a run-in with a local gangster who warned him to quit mistreating a particular woman friend. Miles, needing a fix, told the guy to get lost.
“He looked at me like he’s almost one second away from killing (me),” Miles said. “But then this pity came into his cold eyes. He studied me for a second, looking at me like I was some scroungy dog that had crawled in out of the streets.”
The gangster called him a “pathetic, pitiful, miserable” junkie “who don’t even deserve to live.”
He freaked Miles out.
“(A)fter (the guy) shamed me so bad, I started really trying to clean up my act,” Miles said.
Another source of inspiration came from one of the trumpeter’s few idols, boxing great Sugar Ray Robinson. Robinson had little connection to Detroit beyond the fact that, when he was 11, he had lived on the same Motor City street as Joe Louis, then 17. And one of Robinson’s most famous fights, his 1943 defeat to Jack LaMotta, took place in Detroit.
“Anyway, I really kicked my habit because of the example of Sugar Ray Robinson,” Miles said. “Sugar Ray looked like a socialite when you would see him in the papers getting out of limousines with fine women on his arms, sharp as a tack. But when he was training for a fight … he was serious, all business. I decided that was the way I was going to be… Sugar Ray was the hero-image I carried in my mind.”
Detroit brimmed with talented musicians who did not do hard drugs and their approach to the music influenced Miles.
“There were some good musicians in Detroit and I was starting to play with some of them,” Miles said. “That helped me and a lot of them were clean. A lot of musicians in Detroit looked up to me because of all the things I had done. And so one of the things that made me stay clean was that they did look up to me and since they were clean it made me want to stay that way.”
His gigs with drummer Elvin Jones began to pack the Blue Bird.
The cleaner Miles got, the more he played, the better he sounded and the better he felt.
“I really felt good for the first time in a long time,” Miles said. “My chops were together because I had been playing every night and I had finally kicked heroin.”
Miles continued to battle addictions to alcohol and cocaine for the rest of his life. But his rocky romance with heroin appeared to be behind him.
His new quintet, which included John Coltrane on tenor sax, played the Blue Bird, Oct. 5-10, 1955.
Having lived in the city and now employing 20-year old Detroiter Paul Chambers on bass, it was like a homecoming.
“Detroit was a gas,” Miles said.
Jim Bloch is a freelance writer based in St. Clair, Michigan. Contact him at bloch.jim@gmail.com.
