http://www.brooklynrail.org/2007/11/express/an-american-griot-gil-scott-heron-with-d
November 2007
Don Geesling (Rail): I'd like to start things off by asking you about
the Harlem Renaissance and its influence on your work over the years.
Scott-Heron: It has been a big influence! Langston Hughes was one of
the people who had gone to Lincoln. And when I was at Lincolnone of
the oldest black universities in the countryit had a tremendous
collection of black writers. I had spent a lot of time in the black
stacks at Lincoln and read up on things that had happened during the
Harlem Renaissance and its background. And I had studied under James
Saunders Redding [who] was a part of the Harlem Renaissance. He
taught black literature there and he taught it in two parts; the
first part began in the 1780s.
Rail: Going all the way back to Phyllis Wheatley?
Scott-Heron: Yeah, Phyllis Wheatley and Jupiter Jones, the first half
brought you up to the 1900s and the second half was from 1900 to
1960. By the time I took his class it was 1968-1969.
Rail: How did you first encounter the works of Langston Hughes?
Scott-Heron: Well, Langston Hughes used to write a column for all the
black newspapers and my grandmother used to subscribe to The Chicago
Defender. So even when I was living with her, on Thursdays the guy
who sold The Chicago Defender would come by and bring her a copy of
her newspaper. That was her weekly newspaperwe didn't take The
Memphis Press-Sentinel or The Commercial Appealour only newspaper
was The Chicago Defender and that's where my grandmother would keep
up with what she wanted to know about.
Rail: Why The Chicago Defender and not The Jackson Sun or one of the
other local papers?
Scott-Heron: Well, I was born there, my mother lived there, and The
Chicago Defender was part of that whole Pittsburgh Courier, Amsterdam
News, a part of that whole network that carried black news, you know,
and kept people brought up on what was going on in the black communities.
Rail: Getting back to the Renaissance, what do you see as the link
between your poetry and that of Langston Hughes?
Scott-Heron: Well, the fact that I enjoyed his stuff so much, and my
grandmother used to read me his columns every weekend, and I did my
senior paper at Fieldston in high school on Langston Hughes's writing.
Rail: What did you take from him most as a writer?
Scott-Heron: The fact that like, it's easier to laugh than it is to
cry and we have a lot to cry aboutbut there was a great deal of
humor in his writing and a great deal of laughter in my life. I'm
saying, my grandmother comes off like a very strict and hard working
woman but she could laugh. And we enjoyed Langston Hughes' stuff like
the "Jess B. Semple" things that he used to write. Those were her
favorites and they became my favorites. As far as I was concerned my
grandmother knew everything and she could do no wrong, so if she was
in favor of it, so was I. The humor that Langston Hughes had as a
part of his make-up and a part of his character came through in his
writing; they were things that I felt were very important to have as
an artist. . I'm saying that [humor] was a direct link between me and
Langston Hughes.
Rail: Did you dig his experiments with poetry and the Blues?
Scott-Heron: Yeah, like his and Arnaud "Arna" Bontemps …Over the
course of the Harlem Renaissance they always refer back to the blues,
and you know, living in Tennessee, the blues artists were the ones I
was most familiar [with] from the radio.
Rail: So you were able to grasp that aspect of their work right away?
Scott-Heron: Yeah, I could see the necessity of it, I could see the
humor of it, and I could see the rhythm of it.
Rail: Did you ever pick up that album on Verve that Hughes did with
Mingus and Leonard Feather? (The Weary Blues)?
Scott-Heron: No, but I met Charlie Mingus and he spoke about it! I
met Charlie Mingus at a place called The Joyous Lake, which was up in
Woodstock. When we used to play in Woodstock, Charlie Mingus would
come by. And he talked about the fact that my work reminded him a lot
of Langston Hughes, and that was a very high compliment.
Rail: Absolutely! Did he ever bring his bass by the club?
Scott-Heron: No, he just came by to be entertained; I brought my band
in and Charlie Mingus had a booth. And members of The Band that
played with Bob Dylan would come through and Paul Butterfield people
and like they had a whole artistic community up there at Woodstock.
Rail: What year was this?
Scott-Heron: (It) was '75, '76 when I first started going up there…I guess.
Rail: Switching gears again, how did you come to the attention of
producer and Flying Dutchman records owner, Bob Thiele?
Scott-Heron: [Pitching songs] was the whole idea behind my going to
see [Thiele] at Flying Dutchman. I told Bob Thiele I was a songwriter
and I told him that I had a partner (Brian Jackson, Scott-Heron's
collaborator on nine albums) and that we wrote songs and that we
thought that he was recording the kind of people that we thought
might be interested in what we were doing; and he said that he didn't
have any money to do an album of music at the time. But he had read
my book of poetry and he said "if you do that and make any money,
maybe we can get some money together and do an album of music."
"Small Talk at 125th & Lenox," "Whitey on the Moon," "Brother," and
"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" got picked up…He called me up
and said 'who do you want to perform with?' By that time,
[Scott-Heron's Lincoln-based band] Black and Blues had broken up, so
that's how we got to work with Ron Carter, Hubert Laws and Bernard
Purdie. (Pieces of a Man, 1971)
Rail: So you made up a wish list and he made it happen.
Scott-Heron: He made it happen, yeah.
Rail: In Bob Thiele's memoirs he wrote that you said "that anyone who
had produced Jack Kerouac and John Coltrane can't be all that bad."
Scott-Heron: Well, that's what attracted us to Flying Dutchman. That
Bob Thiele was starting his own label and we felt as though if he had
that kind of contact with Archie Schepp and if he could produce John
Coltrane, then hell if he couldn't produce us. (Laughs)
Rail: Were you a fan of Kerouac and the other Beats?
Scott-Heron: You know, I wasn't that into the Beat stuff because I
was into the blues. But I did understand where they were coming from.
The Beatniks were the forerunners to the … hippies. And a lot of that
came out of the neighborhoods that I lived in when we moved down to
17th Street, to the Fulton Houses.
Rail: There in Chelsea?
Scott-Heron: Yeah, you know that's just right on top of the Village.
We used to go down there to the coffee shops down there. I'd try to
sneak in and see if I could see what was going on.
Rail: Did you know Joe Bataan and Edward Birdsong growing up in Chelsea?
Scott-Heron: Joe Bataan recorded "The Bottle" (as "La Botella" on the
Afrofilipino LP). He recorded an instrumental version. He did it with
a saxophone solo lead. You know, like, I had "What Good Is A Castle"
and Riotthat was the album with Joe Bataan that I had. I used to
describe my neighborhood as 85% Puerto Rican, 15% white people and
me. So, there were a lot of Latin rhythms and Joe Bataan was a big
excitement in the neighborhood.
Rail: How about H. Rap Brown, you've mentioned that he was from your
neighborhood?
Scott-Heron: H. Rap Brown lived around on 18th Street. I didn't meet
him when he was in the neighborhood but I heard about him later on as
somebody who was trying to take some of the pressure off of Stokely
[Carmichael]. And José Feliciano used to play over at the pizza shop
over there on the corner. He used to play "Mack the Knife" on the
guitar when he was trying to earn himself a few coins.
Rail: So you were able to soak up all kinds of musical influences
living in Chelsea?
Scott-Heron: Oh, I'm saying like, you know, Julius Lester lived up at
23rd Street; Edward Birdsong was from 18th Street; Ritchie Havens
lived down on Hudson Street; the Wilson brothers had a loft down
there before they started Mandrillman, it was a very, very artistic
neighborhood. A lot of artists were living down there.
Rail: And of course in the late '60s the Last Poets had their East
Wind thing going onthe poetry collective up there at 125th and
Lenox. Did you ever drop in on that scene?
Scott-Heron: That was something that (percussionists) Isaiah
(Washington) and Charlie (Saunders) took me to because they lived at
117th and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. Anytime I'd go to their
neighborhoodthey worked at a place called Pride Inc., which was also
located on 125th Streetwe used to go by there all the time.
Rail: What was Pride Incorporated?
Scott-Heron: It was like Operation P.U.S.H.a job place. It was where
people would go to get training for jobs in construction work and
different job assignments, you know. Like any kind of work you could
do, if you could do it they could find you a job. If you wanted to
work, they could use your talents. (Laughs)
Rail: In the introduction to "Comment #1" and on "Enough" you spoke
of "the Rainbow Conspiracy" and the alliance between SDS (Students
for a Democratic Society) and the Black Panthers. What was the
Rainbow Conspiracy?
Scott-Heron: A lot of people tried to confuse what was going on with
the people in the Latin community, the people in the black community
and SDS. And [the Rainbow Conspiracy] is what they used to call it.
Any time they would see Felipe Luciano and his people from the Young
Lords and the people who were trying to get the Black Panthers
organized in New YorkI didn't get to know those people as thoroughly
as I might have, but they were all down in the Village. They used to
have handouts and they were trying to do fundraisers and stuff so
they could do things for the community. I never joined any of those
organizations, because like once you join one of the organizations,
it made you enemies with somebody else. You start arguing back and
forth and you've wasted your energy that you could be using and
you're both trying to do something for the community. Which is why I
stayed out of most organizations. I wanted to be available to all of
them. I played for Shirley Chisholm, I played for Ken GibsonI played
for anybody who was trying to do something positive for black people,
just count me in and I'll be there.
Rail: In an interview with the Black Panthers' newspaper (The Black
Panther) in 1975 you criticized white folks who were joining the
movement, particularly in regards to SDS.
Scott-Heron: Yeah, they had a movement and they needed to be in that one.
Rail: That's what you said then: that you welcomed their interest but
told them to "go revolutionary" in their community and go talk to their people…
Scott-Heron: Well, see, they was the ones that were lynching people,
we wasn't killing them. They needed to talk to their own folks.
Rail: Between 1970 and 1974, the movement changed. Society was
changing; the Panthers had been neutralized and pan-Africanism came into vogue.
Scott-Heron: Pan-Africanism was a part of it initially. I think a lot
of this started with Stokely Carmichael who changed his name to Kwame
Ture and went to Guinea and started talking. Stokely Carmichael used
to work with Marion Berry in SNCC. So when I moved to D.C. and
started teaching at the University of D.C., I found out a lot of the
things they had been doing down there and a lot of the folks they had
worked with and a lot of the echoes of what they had been trying to
do were still there and working.
Rail: So your interest in pan-Africanism, you trace it back to Stokely?
Scott-Heron: Yeah, absolutely.
Rail: In the liner notes to the "Johannesburg" 12-inch single, Jesse
Jackson is mentioned as being an influencewould you care to
elaborate a little?
Scott-Heron: Jesse Jackson was an inspirational person. You see, if
you're going to change things, if you don't change the law, you don't
change anything. So, Jesse Jackson's attitude was about changing the
laws and about people needing to know more about Thurgood Marshall
and needing to know more about what happened, because how you change
America is the law. You can burn your community down and somebody
else will build it up and all you're doing is burning down some
houses. But if you change the law, then you have done a whole lot to
change the foundation of society. So I'm saying, in the meantime, I'm
looking at myself as a piano player from Tennessee. Because that's
what I was really trying to do; play some piano and write some songs.
You know, like, the fact that I've had some political influence, I
mean, that was all well and good, but I never considered myself a politician.
Rail: But you do consider yourself an activist, right?
Scott-Heron: I consider myself a piano player, I mean, I was writing
some songs that other people could use. Because we helped in any
political attitudes or any political thingthat's what was necessary
in the black community. I never ran for any offices, I'm saying,
aside from being the president of my freshman class for a few months,
that's the only election I was ever involved in: that was enough.
Rail: Who would you regard as being your main political influences on
those first three albums?
Scott-Heron: On Pieces of a Man, the only thing that I could really
consider political was "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," and we
had recorded that without music on Small Talk at 125th & Lenox. I
didn't think that much about it.
Rail: But how about Free Will?
Scott-Heron: Free Will was poems that we had wanted to record on
Small Talk that we hadn't had room for. I was still in school and I
was working on another novel (The Nigger Factory). Actually, if I
could have done Free Will again, it might have been all tunes. Yeah,
Brian [Jackson, Scott-Heron's collaborator on nine albums] and I were
students at the time and we had written a few songs, but the songs
that we had really wanted to record, by that time Victor Brown
(vocalist) and Isaiah (Washington, percussionist) had graduated. I
was working on The Nigger Factory and on my way to graduate school
and Brian and I hadn't had that much chance to get together. And Bob
Thiele was anxious to follow up the Pieces of a Man album because it
was so successful. We did Free Will, so we did songs that we had left
and the poems that we had left and we knew that we were going. As far
as I was concerned that was the end of my contract. Like, I had
signed a three record deal and that's all I had planned to do was
those three records. The deal I made first was for The Vulture, my
novel; what I wanted to be was a novelist, Brian wanted to be a
recording artist and the things that happened, happened. I wanted to
be a song writer, but I never saw myself
Rail: As a recording artist, per se?
Scott-Heron: I wanted to write novels, that was the concept.
Rail: But you were also able to get a lot of your songs covered in
the early 1970s.
Scott-Heron: That was what the idea was, to record the music.
Rail: The idea behind the Flying Dutchman records then was trying to
get those songs out there for other people to hear
Scott-Heron: [And] to be covered.
Rail: Let's talk about a few of those early cover versions. Who cut
"Lady Day and John Coltrane?"
Scott-Heron: A woman named Penny Goodwin. (1974) And The Intruders
did "Save the Children." (1973) LaBelle did "The Revolution Will Not
Be Televised" (1973) and Esther Phillips covered "Home Is Where the
Hatred Is" (1971).
Rail: Okay, last question: speaking of "The Revolution Will Not Be
Televised," that's probably one of your most misinterpreted and
misappropriated pieces. In general, how do you feel about people's
misuse of your work over the years?
Scott-Heron: As an artist, you always subject yourself to that. I
think a lot of people look at The Great Gatsby but I don't think that
F. Scott Fitzgerald is turning over in his grave! (Laughs)
.
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