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F E A T U R E

Alienated
The Salon Interview:
Caleb Carr
The author discusses serial killers, murderous moms and growing up terrorized by the Beats (10/06/97)

R E C E N T L Y

Toward the End of Time
By John Updike
Fiction
(10/07/97)

The Tetherballs of Bougainville
By Mark Leyner
Fiction
(10/06/97)

Gorilla Suit
By Bob Paris
Nonfiction
(10/03/97)

Jesus Saves
By Darcy Steinke
Fiction
(10/02/97)

Hand to Mouth
A Chronicle of Early Failure
By Paul Auster
Nonfiction
(10/01/97)

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as though i had wings

BY CHET BAKER

BUZZ BOOKS

NONFICTION

128 PAGES

BY CHARLES TAYLOR | it's hard to get over the expectation that memoirs will reveal their subjects in ways their work already hasn't. This rediscovery of an autobiographical manuscript by Chet Baker, thought lost until a Spin writer chanced upon it and contacted Baker's widow Carol, seems like a potential revelation -- until you start to read it.

Whether Baker wrote this entirely by himself or had help is less important than the jumbled feelings that, at first, make the manuscript seem like the work of different hands. "As Though I Had Wings" ambles along in a lackadaisical "and then I did this ..." groove (and then I got my first trumpet, joined the army, got a girl pregnant, etc.) whose standard show biz bio surface is disturbed by the occasional inclusion of an obscenity or the tossed-off revelation that Baker was chipping around with heroin. On the other hand, what appears to be tension between the casual tone and what he's revealing may simply be a true expression of Baker's couldn't-give-a-fuck attitude.

In Geoff Dyer's exquisite "But Beautiful," a series of fictionalized portraits of jazz greats, he writes of Baker: "He was the exact opposite of his friend Art [Pepper], who put everything of himself into every note he played: Chet put nothing of himself and that's what lent his playing its pathos. The music he played felt abandoned by him. He played the old ballads and standards with a long series of caresses that led nowhere and subsided into nothing." And that's exactly the destination and accumulation of this series of reminiscences. Baker can no more rouse himself to care about the cops out to bust him for drugs in California and Europe than he can about the wives and lovers he casts off as easily as he changes his shirt. You can't read a memoir like this and expect the things that keep you going in autobiographies and novels: a story, drama, a sense of having accompanied the protagonist on a journey. It's a memoir of drift, of indifference, a joke played on anyone who's been fool enough to care about Chet Baker. "Barcelona was beautiful in December of '63," the last page of the memoir begins. "I made a deal to work in a cellar club that had been presenting jazz players for a year or so ... I began to make doctors write me scripts of Palfium ... I was soon obtaining scripts ... and it all began once again," writes Baker, on to the next gig, the next fix, the next bust. "As Though I Had Wings" may be an authentic expression of his selfish apathy, but you'd do better to look for Baker in his later guise as death's head hipster facing down Bruce Weber's camera in "Let's Get Lost" or wafting through the pages of "But Beautiful" or in the music he left behind. On numbers like "Everything Happens to Me" or "Fascination," whether playing the trumpet or singing, you hear the sound of a man giving up the ghost, unaware or oblivious that ghosts were all he had to offer.
SALON | Oct. 8, 1997

Charles Taylor lives in Boston. He is a regular contributor to Salon.