AprilCadence2013

Slim and Him Bob Rusch Interview
self conscious, it was integrated as a normal part of the society, now today,
what we call jazz, what I call jazz, is looked at as a sort of anomaly, as a not
freakish thing, it’s exotic almost.
H: Slim, what’s that story, that joke you tell about—my brother’s on drugs,
my sisters…. how does that go.
S: Oh yes—so the story is: My mother’s in the jail house for crack, and my
father’s been married 62 times, my sister is pregnant and she’s twelve, and
my brother has a jazz (record) collection.
So, when people ask, what do I tell them that my brother does?
(laughter all around) [there must be 100 variations on that joke, but I like
Slim’s version]
BR: It’s a very different world, it really is.
H: How old were you when you did your first interview?
BR: I think I was 12 or 13—I interviewed W.C. Handy. He died in the mid
50’s.
H: It says a lot about him, that he would do an interview with a twelveyear
old kid.
BR: People were more accessible—W.C. Handy was in his eighties then
probably, and probably no one was paying any attention to him, so he was
very flattered when somebody came up and said he wanted to interview
him.
I went with my fried, whose father was a shrink, and he had a great bit
heavy boxy thing, which recorded green discs. I don’t know if other shrinks
would know what I’m talking about. Anyway, when you lug that up to
Tuckahoe, NY, and it was heavy, and W.C. Handy came down—first time I
had ever seen a stair escalator or stair chair. He came down in one of those
he was blind, and his wife was very nice, and she gave us sodas or some
thing, and of course we were anxious to interview him. And, I made the mistake
of holding the mic up, right up in front of him so it came out very
blurry. I wasn’t self conscious about holding it because he was blind—he
couldn’t see anything anyway. The one thing I remember about that is we
asked him all the usual dumb questions any 13 year old’s gonna’ask—“How
did you come out with these blues? Etc. He says: “Well, there’s really no
secret to it. I grew up in Memphis, and my mother would go out to the back
yards of the row houses—usually had a little courtyard, and next to it was
another courtyard, next to it was another courtyard, and people hung their
laundry out there, While they were hanging their laundry they would yell
over to each other things, things she might say that he might hear…..some
woman saying: ‘Didn’t the moon look lonely last night,’ and there you have
a blues lyric. He was very self-effacing, he didn’t say he went into seclusion,
it just came to me. He just said: “All I did was take what was around me”
H: It wasn’t the muses who spoke; it was the neighbor doing laundry.
62 | CadenCe Magazine | april May June 2013