By Jim Bloch
Seventy years ago, if you came to the Motor City, you might have come to catch a Detroit Red Wings game at Olympia; after all, the team was on its way to topping Montreal to win the Stanley Cup early in 1954. Maybe you caught the Detroit Lions beating the Cleveland Browns to win their second straight NFL title on Dec. 27, 1953 at Briggs Stadium.
Maybe you came to visit the fifth most populous city in the country, which just had hit its all-time population peak of 1.85 million. Detroit boasted a booming downtown district anchored by the J.L. Hudson department store and cultural institutions like the Detroit Institute of Arts, where recent shows included a memorial exhibit of work of the great Mexican artist Jose Clemente Orozco and graphic works by Picasso and Redon.
Maybe you came to hear jazz music, which was at its peak in the city in the 1950s, with local luminaries on the lip of national renown, stalwarts such as saxophonist Yusef Lateef, trumpeters Donald Byrd and Thad Jones, guitarist Kenny Burrell, drummers Louis Hayes and Elvin Jones, vocalists Betty Carter and Sheila Jordan, vibist Milt Jackson, pianists Tommy Flanagan, Roland Hanna and Barry Harris, bassist Ron Carter and trombonist Curtis Fuller playing clubs like the Paradise Theatre and Club Juana on Woodward Avenue, the Frolic Show Bar, the Flame Show Bar and the Parrot Lounge on John R near Canfield, the El Sino on St. Antoine, the Crystal Show Bar on Grand River, Klein’s Show Bar on 12th Street and Baker’s Keyboard Lounge on Livernois.
“It was a real hip city for music,” said trumpeter Miles Davis, who had played four years with Charlie Parker’s bands in the 1940s, beginning when he was 19, and who had finished second to Maynard Ferguson as the best trumpeter in jazz in Downbeat magazine’s 1952 poll.
But Miles didn’t come for the music. He came for the heroin.
Cheap, crappy heroin.
The monkey arrives
Davis was locked into a dark half-decade of addiction to smack, complete with the endless rollercoaster of recoveries and relapses, 1949-1954. He had been busted in Los Angeles on a narcotics charge in September 1950 while playing with the Billy Eckstine band. The arrest made him nearly unemployable. He was 24.
As his drug use escalated, his life became more chaotic, sometimes productive, most of the time strung out. His nonet, with changing lineups, recorded the tunes that came to comprise the legendary LP Birth of the Cool in 1949 and 1950 even though the album wasn’t released by Capitol Records until 1957. He signed with Prestige records in 1951, but the contract expired in 1952 and was not renewed. In 1953, he filled in for Dizzy Gillespie in at Birdland in New York City. He needed the work and “his habit needed the money,” said James Kaplan in his 2024 book Three Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool. “A couple of nights later he was standing on the sidewalk between shows, high, dirty and disheveled, when (drummer and bandleader Max) Roach walked up, told him he was ‘looking good,’ and put a couple of new hundred-dollar bills in his jacket pocket.”
Davis, a stylish dresser when sober, was mortified.
But he wasn’t alone in his addiction.
“There was a lot of dope around the music scene and a lot of musicians were deep into drugs, especially heroin,” said Miles in his eponymous 1989 autobiography written with Quincy Troupe.
The lineup of heroin users included Parker, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Dexter Gordon, Billie Holiday, Elvin Jones, Chet Baker, Lee Morgan, Sonny Stitt, Jackie MacLean, Art Blakey, Red Rodney, Tadd Dameron, J.J. Johnson, Bud Powell, Fats Navarro, Gene Ammons – the list goes on.
“Using drugs was, in a strange way, a negation of the money ethic,” said tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon. “Guys were saying, ‘I don’t care about this, I don’t care about how I dress or how I look, all I care about if music. We were revolutionaries. We did what was new and hip with no forethought of consequences. Heroin just became part of the scene.”
Miles scuffled. He played in public once between August and December 1953. He made two attempts to get clean at his father’s farm outside of St. Louis. The last one, later in the year, seemed to work. He confined himself to the guest house on the farm.
“I locked the door and stayed until I kicked the habit cold turkey,” Miles said. “I was sick… All of your joints get sore and stiff, but you can’t touch them because if you do you’ll scream.”
The horror continued for a week.
He emerged from the guest house after the agony of withdrawal feeling “good and pure.” He strolled to his father’s house through the “clean, sweet air” and the pair embraced.
“He knew I had beat it,” Miles said.
“The problem was,” wrote Kaplan, “he hadn’t.”
Holiday in Detroit?
Miles knew it, too.
“As soon as I kicked my habit I went to Detroit,” Miles said. “I didn’t trust myself being in New York where everything was available. I figure that even if I did backslid a little, then the heroin that I would get in Detroit wasn’t going to be as pure as what I would get in New York. I figured that this could help me and I needed all the help I could get.”
Miles was putting words to pure junkie logic – that doing heroin would somehow help him kick heroin.
“The dope was so bad in Detroit – it was like (drummer) Philly Joe (Jones) used to say about some dope, you could have bought a Hershey bar and saved your money – because it was cut so much,” Miles said.
Miles played mostly at the Blue Bird Inn, a compact club at 5021 Tireman on Detroit’s near west side. (The Detroit Sound Conservancy just received a $1.9 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to renovate the inn.) He lived in a hotel near the intersection of Grand River and Grand Boulevard, a short walk to the Blue Bird.
How long Miles stayed in Detroit is not clear.
“I stayed in Detroit for about six months,” Miles said in his autobiography. A couple of pages later, he says, “I came back to New York in February 1954 after spending about five months in Detroit.”
The Blue Bird doorman Chad Hill told Lars Bjorn and Jim Gallert for their 2001 book Before Motown: A History of Jazz in Detroit 1920-1960 that “Miles was stranded here in Detroit maybe for the next two or three years…”
One thing is certain. Miles returned to Detroit Aug. 14-Oct. 2, 1954, but not for heroin. He appeared to have peeled that monkey off his back. Advertisements in the Michigan Chronicle promoted a number of regular dates for the trumpeter at the Blue Bird during that month and a half.
Jim Bloch is a freelance writer based in St. Clair, Michigan. Contact him at bloch.jim@gmail.com.
