Chet Is Back: Lou Waxman on Chet Baker, Ruins, and Romantic Tragedy

 Music fans are fascinated with the dead.  RIP Bob Weir.  But that is not what Lou is talking about, although it kind of is.  Music fans are fascinated with death.  If you need any proof, look at all the podcasts that cover the subject of music and death in some manner.  Disgraceland, Death by Music, Death of a Rock Star, Musical Murders, Dead Rock Stars.  It is a lot and that is just what AI tells Lou about.  Then there are all the podcasts about The Grateful Dead, but that is another matter.

In the post about Lee Morgan, Lou talked about musicians and murder a bit, but there is a subgenre regarding unsolved mysteries.  Everybody loves an unsolved mystery.  Sure, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy are rock stars but the most famous serial killer of all is Jack the Ripper and that is because we do not know who he is.  Patricia Cornwell be damned.  In terms of unsolved musician mysteries, the murders of Biggie and Tupac probably top the list, but there are several others.  What happened to Richey Edwards of The Manic Street Preachers?  Or Bobby Fuller?  Or Nancy Spungen?  Or Johnny Thunders?  In terms of The Grateful Dead, what is up with all the missing and murdered Deadheads over the years.  The pairing of music and true crime is a thing.

In this regard, musicians are like gremlins.  Bad things happen when they are exposed to water.  Bathtubs are dangerous.  Just ask Jim Morrison, Whitney Houston, and Dolores O’Riordan.  Swimming pools are also deadly.  Brian Jones is Exhibit A on this one and a true crime of the unsolved mystery variety.  Was Brian Jones murdered?  Everybody knows about Brian Jones; he is a charter member of the 27 Club, but have you heard of Lenny Breau, a jazz guitarist whose body was found in a swimming pool in 1984?  The coroner ruled that Breau was strangled and his wife was a suspect, but the case remains a mystery.  It's like Jaws if you are a musician.  Don’t go into the water.

In a trip to The Vogue, Lou picked over some jazz LPs, and he bought Chet Is Back by Chet Baker from 1962.  This was a 50thanniversary reissue on 180-gram vinyl.  This album was recorded in Italy after Baker got out of jail on drug charges and was one of his many comebacks.  Baker has more comebacks than a James Brown concert.  The story of Baker is well told.  The documentary by Bruce Weber was nominated for an Oscar.  Weber is best known as a photographer and from the start of Baker’s career, with the photographs of William Claxton, Baker has been photogenic to the extreme.  By the way, Bruce Weber is crap.  Herb Ritts is crap.  Helmut Newton is crap.  These are the Ansel Adams of softcore shit.  Robert Mapplethorpe is bueno.

Baker is a Romantic figure and that is why he is an object of fascination.  Like Shelley and Byron, Baker is a poète maudit, mad, bad, and dangerous to know.  A doomed figure like Poe or Rimbaud.  That is the young Chet Baker.  Unlike Shelley or members of the 27 Club, Baker outlived all that and became another Romantic trope:  the ruin.  The Romantics championed the beauty and tragedy of ruins and fragments.  Many of the best Romantic poems are fragments, like “Kubla Khan”, or about ruins, like “Ozymandias”.  Photographs of Baker later in his life are like photographs of crumbling Greek or Roman monumentsor sculptures.  The beauty of the bones is still there but the flesh has wasted away.  The cult that surrounds Chet Baker is the same as the cult that surrounds Nico.  When you are that beautiful there is nothing you can do, no matter how hard you try, to destroy it.  Somehow it survives all the abuse.  The same goes for God-given talent.

But you know all this.  The tragedy of Chet Baker is a Say No to Drugs advertisement while at the same time being an advertisement for taking drugs.  Some will view Baker as a cautionary tale, and some will view Baker as a call to arms.  But did you know there is a something of an unsolved mystery surrounding Baker’s death.  He died in 1988 in Amsterdam.  This is a junkie thing to do.  As Willie “The Actor” Sutton said when asked why he robbed banks, “That’s were the money is.”  Makes sense for a drug addict to go to Amsterdam.  Lou would go to Milwaukee and Havana.  Some people would go to Bangkok.  Or not.  (Sidebar:  Lou is not a drug guy.  He experiences drugs vicariously like live music, but he smoked pot in Amsterdam for three days in 1992 while Eurorailing around Europe.  It is what you do.  When in Rome.  Lou does not gamble but he gambles in Vegas.  Amsterdam is also known for its red-light district.  This was not Lou’s thing, but he did walk around there a lot and one night he saw an absolute angel behinda glass door along a canal.  She looked like Milla Jovovich and completely stood out from all the other women in the district.  So much so that in time quite a crowd gathered in front of her door.  To the extent that one onlooker was pushed into the canal by the crowd and had to be fished out.  The gawking went on for a good half an hour.  Everybody watched but no one would actually cross the threshold of her door.  Until one guy did.  Lou shits you not, everybody booed.  A flickering light of innocence in the red-light district was snuffed out.  Thoughts of girls next door or high school sweethearts were sullied.  So, the guy walks in and the entire crowd boos and just before our angel closed the curtain on the door, she sticks her tongue out at the crowd and the entire crowd cheered.  This happened.)  

Anyway, Baker died in Amsterdam in what some consider suspicious circumstances.  He fell out of his hotel window.  Throughout his life, Baker endured incidents with drug dealersand the ne’er-do-wells that inhabit the drug world.  Some speculate that Baker was thrown out the window.  Over time the accepted story is that Baker was locked out of his room and attempted to walk the balcony back into his room.  That is a very junkie thing to do.  But so is getting murdered by a drug dealer.

Chet Is Back is a great record and highlights that the fascination with an artist does not always have to be about death and disaster.  It can also be about creativity and vitality.  Baker has it here.  He had it to the end.  Ruins are a tourist attraction for a reason.  They remind us of the big questions and they generategreat photographs.

Suggested Sites and Sounds:

Was Brian Jones Murdered?:  Who Killed Brian Jones? The Theory Explained | Vinyl Rewind

The Truth: The Truth About Their Murders: Jaco Pastorius, Lenny Breau, Chet Baker, Lee Morgan, Wardell Gray

William Claxton and Chet Baker: Chet by Claxton & Tribute to Chet Baker [Enregistrement VHS]

Let’s Get Lost:  Chet Baker - Lets Get Lost HD (1988)

 — Lou Waxman