Let's Get Lost

but did he disappoint you as a son? 521 00:43:33,020 --> 00:43:36,565 Yes. Mm-hmm. Yes. 522 00:43:40,694 --> 00:43:42,654 But... 523 00:43:42,737 --> 00:43:44,781 let's don't go into that. 524 00:44:12,306 --> 00:44:14,975 I first came across him when I was 16 years old 525 00:44:15,017 --> 00:44:18,270 playing in a high school dance band in Oregon. 526 00:44:18,353 --> 00:44:23,275 And we'd just discovered Charlie Parker. And read Young Man With a Horn. 527 00:44:24,109 --> 00:44:26,361 Chet was the young man with a horn in a way. 528 00:44:26,444 --> 00:44:29,489 From Here to Eternity had come out a couple of years before, 529 00:44:29,572 --> 00:44:32,992 and there's a touch of Robert E. Lee Prewitt in there, as well. 530 00:44:33,034 --> 00:44:35,911 And this was the Eisenhower era. 531 00:44:35,995 --> 00:44:38,997 There weren't that many anti-social, 532 00:44:39,039 --> 00:44:42,209 slightly anti-social role models to look up to. 533 00:44:42,292 --> 00:44:46,045 And when the first Chet Baker albums on Pacific Jazz came out, 534 00:44:46,713 --> 00:44:50,383 here was this incredible, fluent music. 535 00:44:50,466 --> 00:44:52,802 And we all wondered where it came from. 536 00:44:52,885 --> 00:44:55,596 There was a channel of a danger that he communicated 537 00:44:55,679 --> 00:44:58,682 in the way that James Dean did, on a more underground level. 538 00:44:58,765 --> 00:45:00,559 And he looked like kind of a bad boy. 539 00:45:00,642 --> 00:45:03,562 At that time it wasn't an underground culture so much, 540 00:45:03,645 --> 00:45:05,313 but that's all we had to go for. 541 00:45:05,397 --> 00:45:08,775 Finally Hollywood picked up on the image and decided to make a film 542 00:45:08,858 --> 00:45:11,194 on the early life of Chet Baker starring Chet. 543 00:45:11,277 --> 00:45:16,031 But Chet got busted and went to Europe, so they changed the story a little bit 544 00:45:16,115 --> 00:45:18,408 and put Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood in it 545 00:45:18,492 --> 00:45:20,994 and called it All the Fine Young Cannibals. 546 00:45:21,078 --> 00:45:24,039 A whole lot of people were just obsessed with Chet Baker. 547 00:45:24,122 --> 00:45:29,460 Jazz musicians then had names like Bach and Lockjaw and Peanuts and Dizzy. 548 00:45:29,544 --> 00:45:32,338 He was just named Chet, which is sort of a soft sound. 549 00:45:32,421 --> 00:45:34,381 Americans' role models of the time 550 00:45:34,465 --> 00:45:37,760 were more like a football fullback or halfback. 551 00:45:37,843 --> 00:45:41,638 That's why Chet, you see him on this... I don't know how old he was there, 552 00:45:41,722 --> 00:45:44,599 but that's about what he looked like during this period. 553 00:45:44,683 --> 00:45:46,368 He looked about 21 or 22. 554 00:45:46,392 --> 00:45:49,729 The way he played, what he looked like, his name, 555 00:45:49,937 --> 00:45:51,582 everything all went together. 556 00:45:51,606 --> 00:45:55,234 Sometimes you see jazz musicians who are wonderful, but the visual image 557 00:45:55,317 --> 00:45:57,569 doesn't have much to do with the way they play. 558 00:45:57,653 --> 00:46:00,072 With Chet it was all of a piece. 559 00:46:18,881 --> 00:46:20,507 He affected a lot of us this way. 560 00:46:20,590 --> 00:46:23,301 We used to, absolutely, with bated breath 561 00:46:23,385 --> 00:46:25,595 wait for the new albums to come out. 562 00:46:25,678 --> 00:46:28,514 He's a real incredible original. 563 00:46:29,724 --> 00:46:32,810 Even the movie continued to embellish the romantic myth 564 00:46:32,893 --> 00:46:34,728 of the jazz trumpet player, 565 00:46:34,812 --> 00:46:37,231 but it was an international group of people. 566 00:46:37,314 --> 00:46:41,985 And jazz was the cement 567 00:46:42,068 --> 00:46:44,988 that really kept that whole lifestyle going. 568 00:46:46,281 --> 00:46:48,032 When you see movies about the 50's 569 00:46:48,116 --> 00:46:52,828 everybody thinks it was about Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens 570 00:46:52,912 --> 00:46:56,332 and stuff like that, but people that I knew in the 50's, 571 00:46:56,415 --> 00:46:59,626 I mean, they had a record collection. It was partly eclectic. 572 00:46:59,710 --> 00:47:01,628 There'd be a Frank Sinatra record, 573 00:47:01,711 --> 00:47:04,839 there'd be West Side Story, some shows, but it was jazz. 574 00:47:04,923 --> 00:47:07,550 I didn't know anybody who had a Buddy Holly record. 575 00:47:07,634 --> 00:47:12,680 And I was a teenager in the 50's. I spent my whole teens in the 50's. 576 00:47:20,479 --> 00:47:23,315 I hung out with a lot of jazz musicians in Paris. 577 00:47:23,398 --> 00:47:24,691 Everybody came through. 578 00:47:24,774 --> 00:47:28,736 Bud Powell was at the Louisiana Hotel, Dexter Gordon at the Crystal Hotel. 579 00:47:28,820 -->