Customer Reviews

Straight Life: The Story Of Art Pepper

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

An apt title, as Art Pepper tells in his own words what he did, and how he felt about it. Pepper was one of the finest alto saxophonists of all time but also a tortured individual who found escape from the reality of living through heroin. This book is not a fluffy piece of a read and not for anyone looking for such.
Pepper tells the raw truth about his drug use, prison time and even sexual activities ( some of the latter criminal). One is struck by how much time he wasted in prison and being so stoned he was unable to function. If that time could only have been spent recording and playing how much more of a legacy he would have left us!
If you wish to read a searing portrait of the life of a jazz musician and drug addict then read this book for there is probably no finer written example. I found it difficult to put down. Mesmerizing! Highly recommended.

Just an incredible book/life/story of a jazz genius who was hooked on heroin (and then later toward the end of his life on cocaine, etc.) Pepper pulls no punches in the telling. It's all here. While you appreciate the guy's honesty (and love him for it) you can't help but shake your head and feel so damn sad and awful at the hell he put himself through with all the drugs he shot up/used/consumed... Why? Why did he have to go that route? I'm not judging here; we all have our weaknesses, but you can't help but feel shocked at the toll all the smack he shot up took on this guy (you have never met, but feel that you know and give a damn about the same way you would any friend.) I also recommend the video. There is a scene there in the third act, where Art is playing a tune called Our Song on his record player (with his wife Laurie sitting also nearby listening to this beautiful piece of music that he had written for her, for the love that he felt for his lady) and Art is saying: "That's it; that's the best that I can do. It took 51 years to be able to do that..." And I have to tell you it hit me pretty hard as I sat in front of my set watching/listening to this music that Art had created... Art Pepper, an original. I wish he were around. Yeah, I know, there's the music he left behind...it isn't enough. I miss the guy, even though I never met him. I have a feeling you'll feel the same way after reading Straight Life.

There's no insight into Art's music here on a technical level, but it's very revealing on an emotional level. Once he started using heroin, his life became a self-destructive cycle of endless quests for the next fix. This is more of a junkie-prison memoir than a story of jazz music, although heroin was tragically a common thread in the lives of many jazz musicians of his era. Unfortunately for Art, he spent more time in jail than most of his peers did for those illegal pleasures.

His experience appears to belie the gateway theory on marijuana, since he was only a casual user of pot before he started on heroin, and it was no more significant to him than alcohol. He relates little interest in marijuana or alcohol once he started on heroin, though he popped plenty of pills and even sniffed glue in his efforts to calm the monkey on his back and relieve his need for smack. If anything, tobacco might have been the real gateway drug for Art, since his inability to kick that habit was the thing that eventually forced him to leave the Syanon rehab center.

I strongly recommend this book to any fan of Art's who'd like to have some idea of what might have been going on in his head during his different recording periods, or anyone else who might appreciate a brutal, unflinching account of an addict's life.

This brutal portrait of jazz virtuoso Art Pepper reads like a Bosch painting of the infernal pits of Hell...from drug addiction to peeping tom to armed robbery ... and doin time in San Quentin Art Pepper's fall from grace and eventual comeback late in life is related in hard as nails prose...throw in some of the best accounts of Jazz biography with opinions and rants on Miles Davis, Coletrane, Louis Armstrong and others and you have a redemptive, brutal look into the tortured heart of a true criminal/addict/musician...for Pepper was all three and considered each elemental in the struggle of his existence...

Straight Life is at once an all revealing portrait of man and musician. The battle for sanity, sobriety and identity. There is a little bit of Art Pepper in all of us. I could not put the book down. Well worth re-reading.

This is one of the most compelling autobiographies I have ever read. Yes, if you are a fan of West Coast jazz and, of course, Art Pepper in particular you will enjoy it on a level others will not. However, as a memoir of a man this would almost certainly fascinate anyone with its brutally frank, unabashed self-description of the author. Pepper tells it as he sees it, holding nothing back. He is as objective about himself as anyone could be; at times self-deprecating, at times arrogant but always honest. The book by its very nature is a subjective portrait but it is unintentional. It is clear that Pepper wants to be as honest as he can about everything that crosses his mind regardless of what anyone else may think. This book is filled with fascinating anecdotes, rants, and history. Anyone interested in jazz, sociology, drug use, prison life, psychology, race relations, child abuse, California history, et cetera should read this. It is a truly great book and will be considered one of the classic autobiographies of the 20th Century in the future.

I discovered jazz music by listening to Willis Conover's jazz program on the Voice of America. But at midpoint in "Straight Life" I found myself wondering about the music that I'd been listening to all these years. To be sure, Art & Laurie Pepper have collected a telling and troublesome account of jazz music from just before WW II until Art Pepper's death in 1982. But it's the jazz musician Art Pepper's own words that provides the most troublesome stuff. Booze consumed his life as much as he consumed it. Soft drugs like marijuana lead to hard drugs like smack (heroin). Pepper even wrote a tune about smack. He recorded the tune on an album called "Smack Up" not too long before he got busted and ended up in San Quentin. Pepper felt so strongly about smack (according to a story he relates early on in the book) that it was the first thing he went looking for when he got out on his first parole. And his second. And then there are all the other people who are junkies or who become junkies because Pepper introduced them to the monkey on his own back. It's the same story, page after page, until I began wondering about the music that had led me to buy the book in the first place, and not because I was that innocent in the first place. I lived through the 60s and had seen my share ruined & curtailed lives. But page after page of smack and the resulting criminal process that supported it for Pepper was just a little too much. I kept waiting for someone to provide intervention. When that one person does show up in Art Pepper's life, he turns her on to cocaine. In the end, and even at the end of his life, the saxophonist who'd played with Stan Kenton and who'd worked in music clinics with high school kids couldn't find anything within himself to keep away from drugs. When Pepper's third wife and co-author, Laurie, tells him that the doctor is going to order some pain killers for his last moments, Art's last words were "It's about time." Time enough to look for the last fix, time enough to run out of time at the age of 57. Which is a time too damn soon in a life, a creative life, too sadly wasted. Reading "Straight Life" was enough to make me think about putting away the alto sax that my son had given me last Christmas. Not to mention the records & tapes (and later, CDs) that I'd collected since I first heard Willis Conover's voice and the music he played on the Voice of America all those years ago. That's because this book is not for the faint of heart. This is a very troubling book to read. Should you buy it? Yes, if you want to get to the belly of the beast, if you want to learn about the basest nature of the human ability to delude oneself, if you have enough guts to say "Enough!" Yes if you want to know about the music. But if you have the least twinge of pain from reading about drugs & sex & a man who simply couldn't look himself in the mirror and say "enough," find something else to read.

Straight from the heart, Art & Laurie Pepper chronicle one of the best Jazz Alto and Clarinet players of all time. Mind blowing, heart wrenching events that detail a life of misadventure, obsession and recovery. Thoroughly recommended.

I just finished this book, and would already place it in my all-time Top Ten Greatest Books List. This book is mesmerizing from start to finish. He doesn't say as much about the actual art of jazz as I would have liked, but reading "Straight Life" is like reading a film noir from mid-20th century L.A. Proof that truth is stranger than fiction.

Art Pepper was a complete and total racist (he grew up in Watts, but blames black people for A) kicking him out of Watts, and B) their attitudes, which "turned" him into a racist). He was a junkie almost from day one, and used drugs literally until the end of his life. But if you've ever owned an Art Pepper CD, you also know that he was one of the greatest to ever pick up a saxophone.

Pepper's accounts of his time in San Quentin Prison (where he spent much of the 1960s) are unreal. After he got out, he became even more addicted to drugs, then joined a SoCal drug rehab center in 1969, which can be best described as a cult. Clearly, they didn't know what they were doing in those days to treat drug addiction. He also made some of his best music in the late 70s and early 80s, right before he died, which is a minor miracle.

He should have called the book Sad Life, because in the end that's what it was. His own mother didn't even want him, and tried to kill her unborn child through excessive drinking, drugs and smoking. He really didn't have much of a home life, which doesn't excuse his later actions, but it makes his escape from that life a true miracle. Basically, he had nothing going for him but his God-given ability to blow a horn beautifully.

It's hard to reconcile his life with the fact that he was an incredible saxophone player. In the end, this book really made me angry because he had so much talent and completely threw it all away. But he was also a guy who was truly afraid of success and would rather be in prison than a major star. That made me sad. His CDs have now taken on a completely new meaning for me, one that I am not sure I like.

Again, I just finished it and it is obviously sticking with me. Clearly, I am moved enough to get on this site and write about it. Top Ten for sure. Wow.

I read so slow that I can never bring myself to read books twice, it just takes me too long. I read about as fast as I talk, some people may say that's quite fast but it's not really. Anyway, this book is quite hard to get hold of and I really wanted a friend to read it. When's he's finished with it, I'm actually going to read it again. I was a massive Art Pepper fan and was even more so after reading this. I recommend listening to the albums that he writes about as you read it. It gives you so much more of an insight as to how talented this man really was. What a life, what a player.