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We were honored to back Roy "Little Jazz" Eldridge for a week, Charlie Watts turning up one night to see him. We began as an R&B band, but evolved into a straight-up, hard-core, mainstream jazz band. I started the Blue Flames with my friend Scott Hamilton. I wish I still had it.Īfter graduation, I attended RISD on partial scholarship for two years Tina Weymouth and Chris Franz from the not-yet-formed Talking Heads were two of my classmates. It was all-metal with fake wood grain, stolen from our high school, and it weighed about 1,000 pounds. I immediately bought my first string bass, co-owned with a friend. I had been playing with cover bands and rock bands, but that was history once I heard Willie Dixon. It was here that I first heard a Muddy Waters record with Willie Dixon on bass, and it rocked my world. "Mom's house, mom's rules" didn't mesh with my desire to get laid and do drugs, so I got my own crib. I left home at 17, while I was still in high school. Dad's idols were Gene Krupa (a lowlife drug addict, according to mom) and Benny Goodman, whom he tried and failed to emulate on the clarinet. Since mom was a fanatic for musicals, sang in the civic chorale, and played piano, there was always music in our house. We were one of the few white families living in an all-black neighborhood. My mom raised my two brothers and me, having divorced my father while I was still young. There was also a rich music and arts scene the city had always been a jazz town and was home to the Rhode Island School of Design, where I went to school. Jazz, Blues, Booze, and Drugs I was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, a city which contrasted the ghetto squalor of South Providence with the Ivy League university surroundings and the mansions of the east side. "Dope Game ain't no joke" was scrawled above my bunk in Del Valle. I took care of my own, truly, and was never a hustler, a pusher I made just enough to support my habits and day-to-day living expenses. People came to me, and I gave them a good, safe product for a good price. I have no guilt about my dealing days, either. I know I can never do another shot, another hit, another snort, ever.
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I shot well over a million dollars into my arms, lost everything I owned, and still I came out with my health. I have no regrets, except for hurting the ones who loved me. When I read back through my diaries, it reads like complete fiction, but many will identify with what I have to say.
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The Dope Game and prison are such different worlds, so completely removed from the one that we all know, that I needed to put it down on paper in order to put it behind me. It helped me to think, to remember, to pass the time. Prison was supposed to be a place for those who were a danger to society. Prison is big business now, especially in George W.'s Texas, where 150,000 people are locked up, mostly for drug charges, with thousands more waiting in the county jails. Police departments, courts, lawyers, rehab centers, methadone clinics, and prisons also benefit from drugs being illegal. I don't believe in the "war on drugs." It's an expensive sham, costing billions and keeping the gangs and drug lords in business.
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I neither condone nor condemn drug use, especially heroin. I lost everything, including my freedom, serving time in a Texas penitentiary. I was a "playa," and The Dope Game was rough.
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I went from hanging with rock stars, politicos, movie stars, and other celebrities to running with street whores, junkies, and crackheads. In just a few years, I went from five-star hotels to living on the run in cheap motels, from king-sized beds in VIP suites to pallets on the floor in dirty junkie pads. I was also a heroin-shooting, cocaine-smoking, hard-core junkie. Besides recording five albums as a T-Bird, I played and recorded with Roomful of Blues and on Bonnie Raitt's Nick of Time, Big Joe Turner's last album, Toni Price's Swim Away, Duke Robillard's Swing Time, and Ministry's Filth Pig, and I was the only Thunderbird to play on Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan's Family Style. From 1984-94, I played bass for the platinum-selling, multi-Grammy award-nominated Fabulous Thunderbirds.