Gil Scott-Heron has transcended this earthly plane...he was only 62. The news of his passing was shocking but not altogether surprising. I had seen him just last summer, performing at a small Philadelphia club called The Tin Angel. Gil had begun the show by coming out and telling jokes--one-liners--in a straight stand-up comedy mode, which was suprising. I hadn't seen Gil in person for close to two decades and his appearance startled me. He looked gaunt and worn and at least several years older than his physical age. His trademark Afro was gray...but his eyes still twinkled and he still had that mischievious smile.
After ten minutes of quasi Borscht Belt joke-telling, he sat down behind a Fender Rhodes and began to sing and play, with that familiar, loose, jazzy sensibility, touching on some of his early classics. Between songs, as always, he delivered his ruminations, spiked with humor, irony and home truths. After several songs, he introduced a female keyboard player, and launched into a series of songs backed by their two keyboards. One by one, other musicians--a guitarist, a bass player, percussionist and saxophonist--strolled out and were introduced as they joined in the groove and guilt it until it was a pretty good approximation of the the Midnight Band. Toward the end of the set they jumped into a propulsive version of "The Bottle", Gil's somber tale of alchohol addiction and its fall-out; it had been the first Gil Scott-Heron song I had heard.
I guess you could say I came late to Gil Scott-Heron's music since when I had heard "The Bottle" in 1974, he already had three albums under his belt--the seminal "Small Talk At 125th St.", the classic "Pieces Of A Man", and "Free Will." And the version of "The Bottle" I heard first was the hit cover version by Brother To Brother. But I soon learned that the original was by Gil Scott-Heron, so I grabbed his new LP "Winter In America." , which contained the hit. The album was a revelation, a mix of jazz, blues, funk, poetry, rapping, singing, politics, spirituality and emotion. It was serious, angry, funny and thoughtful all at once. Gil was a writer at heart and his writer's eye kept him from lapsing into mere slogans. And he was just too intelligent and too honest to purvey easy answers or "feel good" platitudes. His intellect dealt easily and naturally with the conceptual realm but it was grounded in the reality of the streets, informed by the perspectives of the common man.
Socio-political analysis was a driving force in Gil Scott's work but it was never an end in itself. On "Winter In America' there are tender songs such as "A Very Precious Time", "Song For Bobby Smith" and "Your Daddy Loves You", looking at love, the unlimited potential of a child to make a better world and the deep connections of family. With Gil Scott you get a 360 degree perspective--revolutionary thinking leavened with humanism. Then there was "Watergate Blues", first-rate political analysis of the Nixon era that culminated in the Watergate affair and all that it revealed, that was both devastatingly incisive and often very funny--all set to a blues vamp.
I got to see Gil Scott-Heron perform in the Seventies a couple of times, his band anchored by his long-time collaborator, keyboardist/composer Brian Jackson. Gil presided over the stage with an easy, commanding grace, like a benign prince, tall, handsome, lanky, self-possessed yet engaging. He presented you with challenging ideas yet did so in a very entertaining way. There was nothing quite like the experience of Gil Scott-Heron and his band holding forth live
In the Eighties I kind of lost track of Gil, after his "What's The Word, Johannesburg" anti-apartheid number. I began hearing that he had a crack habit, something that shocked me. If anyone could be invulnerable to drug addiction I had thought it would be Gil. He was too aware, too smart, too grounded, or so I thought. And he had written some of the most earing and true pieces about addiction. Besides "The Bottle" there was "Home Is Where The Hatred Is" (later recorded powerfully by Esther Phillips, herself a heroin addict), "Angel Dust", "Speed Kills", and others, so my reaction to hearing that Gil was caught up with addiction was dismay; "no, not you, Gi!" I thought. I didn't want it to be true it was. It undermined his health--probably contributed to his early death--and led to stints in prison which derailed his career, his personal life and his public voice. It just goes to show that anyone can be caught up.
Media stories about Gil Scott-Heron's death tend to pigeon-hole him as a "godfather of rap", partly because his palette of monologues, poetry, and long narrations WERE, like the creations of The Last Poets, and the jive talk of R & B dee jays, seeming pre-cursors to the rap movement, and also because a number of rappers sampled his recordings and name-checked him as an influence. But Til was not very impressed with the work of most rappers (he once said "I can't accept the blame for it (rap)"). He took rappers to task for glorifying violence and negative attitudes toward women as well as for being superficial and not sufficiently mindful of history and the larger cultural context. Yet he was not blindly dismissive; he saw the potential and power of rap and argued that it should be used more constructively and intelligently.
Casting Gil Scott-Heron as "godfather of rap" diminishes his art and his cultural significance. He was a writer (indeed both novelist and poet), musician and political commentator. He was well-read and widely informed. He was a voice for the dispossessed and a tireless chronicler of the contradictions inherent in American society. His life and work was a constant reminder that revolutionary thought need not be humorless or without an appreciation for the vagaries of humanity. Indeed he demonstrated that revolutionary thought could be more effective, more persuasive with these qualities. Now Gil Scott-Heron is gone...and I wonder who will fill the voice his passing has created.
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