Jaco

Listened to his first album, and the Joni Mitchell albums (4), and Heavy Weather by Weather Report. I listened to more, his second album and a Weather Report collection featuring him. It's a playlist.

I came across Joni's essay after he passed: "You take a big flaming juicy ego like that and add drugs to it-it's no good. I mean, Freud thought he'd made great breakthroughs treating inferiority complexes with cocaine. Imagine what it does to add that to someone who's already Mr. Confidence!"

"Jaco, you know, was a gerner. A gerner is a funny-face maker. They have competitions in England. They pull their lips over their noses. A lot of the best gerners have no teeth-they can collapse their whole face. It's a folk art, and in rural places like the north of England, maybe Wales, they have contests where these hideous contortions are adjudicated. And Jaco was a master at it. He did all sorts of obscene things with his face. He'd say, "Do you want to see me make my face like a woman's pussy?" I swear! I don't know if I want to say this & but he'd do it. He'd turn his mouth so it went sideways, pull his lips into obscene shapes and I'd say, "Oh my God!" He was so much fun to be with."

"He loved his kids; he was really good with kids and animals. Jaco was a great spirit before his deterioration by toxics. He'd come to L.A. to make his fortune, and spent a lot of time away from home. Once his wife called to say his child was mad with him because he never came home. Jaco said, "That's good, that's good, it shows the kid is thinking!" He had such a positive attitude about certain things. It was detached in a certain way, but not without warmth. I thought he had wonderful eyes before drugs clouded them. Look at that portrait of him on his first album cover and see if he doesn't look like some Tibetan sage."

"He'd say, "I'm the baddest. I'm not braggin', I'm just telling the truth!" And I'd give him that. As far as I was concerned, he was telling the truth. It didn't even seem inappropriate to me that he knew it. But in order to keep the beauty of that bravado, you have to be able to back it up. And when his talent and inspiration began to be corroded by the clouding over of perception that accompanies overindulgence in drugs and alcohol, he became a tragic figure on the scene. Anyone who's that arrogant going up, people love to carve up going down. Therein lies the tragedy."

There's nothing like reading about him missing a recording session because he was with Weather Report, and then turning on Heavy Weather 1977. She mentions the Mingus album and I listen to that.

"I saw him for the last time in New York a couple of years ago. I went to an art opening with a group of people. We came out and were looking for a place to eat. We saw this little restaurant across the street with a hand-painted sign: JACO PASTORIUS TONIGHT. So I went across to see him. We all walked in and he was sitting at the bar. I went up and tapped him. When he turned his face to me he was just . . . gone. It was a gone face. He hugged me like he was drowning. Then he switched into this gear: he started yelling my name around the club. "Joni Mitchell is the baddest! She's the only woman this, she's the only woman that." Until it was embarrassing. Everyone there was embarrassed. The room was embarrassed, I was embarrassed. He kept hollering my name. It was a very small club, there were maybe ten people present. Anyway, we ended up jamming for a minute. I just got up and started improvising on this electric piano. There was a vocal mike on it, with a cord draped along the back of the piano. At one point Jaco moved forward and he short-sheeted me for a joke; he pulled the cord down so it ran along the keyboard from the middle C down, an obstacle course. In trying to move it back up, I inevitably hit a clunker and somebody in the audience yelled out, "Never mind the mistakes, Joni." Jaco was laughing. So I just stopped and said, "Look, this isn't going to work. I'm just going to let Jaco play and I'll sing to him." So I grabbed the mike and let him take the lead. He'd used to play "out," but there's out and then there's out. This was not good. It was frustrating. It was heartbreaking. And so I just let him play and I followed him and sang with him. That way, no matter where he went I could try and be supportive. But he was not in the mood to be supportive. That particular evening, he was a saboteur."