Well, He Thinks William Borroughs and Henry Miller Were Geniuses So What Did You Expect?

Had a few minutes so I decided to document the guy Simps so ignorantly nominated as the ultimate kew-el white guy, Chet Baker.  This article is hardly encyclopedic in listing the drug induced train wreck that Baker was but it's accurate and enough to be going on with. 

Much of Baker’s life after 1958 is spent chasing the next high and doing almost anything to get it, from selling his trumpet to stealing drugs, money and prescriptions to using his many girlfriends and wives to run drugs for him, often at great risk to their own safety. Gavin renders the contours of Baker’s descent in prose as stark and austere as one of Baker’s own songs. Here’s Gavin’s description of the night when Baker forced his girlfriend Sandy Jones to shoot up with high grade heroin and left her alone in a comatose state:

Starting with his mother, Baker’s feelings about women had always been violently ambivalent: he needed them, yet he hated them for it. Jones became his latest victim. Years later she recounted the time “Chet tried to kill me.” In fact, it happened twice, although she never understood why. One day he came to the apartment with “a whole out fit of the darkest stuff in the world.” He shoved her into the bathroom, cooked up the dope, tied her arm, and plunged in a needle. “I got weak in the knees,” she said. “A couple of days later I came to.” She learned that Baker had walked out, leaving her on the floor – “blue, blue, blue.”

Chet Baker is a repellent figure, too coarse and pathological to be considered tragic. He was the ultimate nihilist. As a doper, he makes Keith Richards look like a novice. He seems to have had little curiosity about his condition, and even less empathy for the dozens of other lives he helped to wreck, including those of his children. When his son Dean was hit by a truck and seriously injured, Baker didn’t even call to check on his condition. Still Gavin’s account is strangely sympathetic. Baker lived moment to moment, fix to fix, gig to gig.  And yet he was able, even in a heroin haze, to play some of the most unforgettable melodies in jazz, tunes that continue to haunt the mind long after his death.

And if that wasn't enough, there's more:

Though one of Baker’s lovers exalted his talent for cunnilingus (he was a trumpet player, after all), Baker’s sexual technique drifted far from traditional notions of romantic love. He had no interest in foreplay, didn’t like to kiss and basically wanted to have missionary position sex as quickly and harshly as possible.  The sensual experience of being next to Baker also lacked a certain erotic appeal.  Hygiene didn’t come high on Baker’s list of priorities. He didn’t like to bathe, wash his hair or brush his teeth—when he had teeth. He rarely changed his clothes or washed them. By the mid-1960s, he walked around in sandals, because his feet were swollen from repeated injections, his untrimmed toenails curling like a Chinese empress. Nearly all of Baker’s long-time lovers became heroin addicts, after they encountered Chet.


Baker was a beater. He would berate and slap and punch his wives and girlfriends, often in public. His wife Carol was repeatedly seen sporting a pair of black eyes. He tried to strangle his longtime girlfriend Ruth Young with a telephone cord and later broke into her apartment, looted the place and sold her grand piano to pay for drugs.

Yeah, a real dream beau, the picture of kew-el.  

I doubt Stupy knows any of this, he like most middle-brow non-jazz listeners knows "My Funny Valentine" and the young Chet's biggest hits most of all the hit with non-jazz fans, "Chet Sings" from the early years of his recording career which is a better demonstration of the consequences of Housman's athlete not dying young but lingering on into a degenerate early adulthood and middle age.  Baker didn't die too soon at the age of 58, he died way too late. I say that noting how many of his many girlfriends and wives he beat up, cheated, robbed, got addicted to drugs, etc.  The world would have been better off if he'd done what he finally did before he took so many down with him.  Oh, yeah, and his crooning on that, probably his most famous disc, read about that at the end of the article.  

Also read the accurate description of Baker's crappy musicianship.  I would suspect that his drug use was partly if not muchly due to his insecurity because he knew he was a very limited musician.  Some musicians had said the same thing contributed to the alcoholic downfall of that far better candidate for coolness in a white Jazz man, Bix Beiderbeck.  I once wished I could have gone back and taught the poor guy how to read music and to have encouraged him to stop drinking, though that second one is a hell of a lot harder.  Beiderbeck was a true genius, Baker wasn't. As you can read in the rest of the article.

I do think you should note what drugs did to a true musical wonder, Charlie Parker and how even his advocacy for the young Chet Baker was a symptom of the tragic degeneration of that genius as drugs took him down.  It didn't make much of an impression on Baker.   He was many things, cool wasn't one of them.