Requiem for Jaco by Bill Milkowski
(article featured in "MUSICIAN" December 1987)

It was that inevitable stomach-churning phone call in the middle of
the night. The one we all had been dreading for years. The caller
was choked with emotion. His words fell like bricks.

"You heard about Jaco?"

In the wee hours of the morning on Saturday, September 12, Jaco
Pastorius had appeared at the front door of the Midnight Bottle
Club, a sleazy after-hours joint in a shopping complex in Wilton
Manor, a bland suburb of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He had been
barred from the members-only club, perhaps for previous incidents
of drunken behaviour, but this night he was determined to get in.
When Jaco was refused entry he apparently tried to kick down the
front door. This did not go down well with the club's manager, Luc
Havan. Several vicious karate chops to the head later, the onetime
greatest bass player in the world lay face down in a pool of blood,
his skull fractured, one eye ruptured, nearly every bone in his face
shattered. When police arrived at the scene, Havan said that Jaco
"fell down." The district attorney would later conclude,

"No way. He was beaten." Havan was arrested five days later and
charged with aggravated battery. He posted a $5,000 bond and was
later released. Meanwhile, Jaco lingered in a coma at the Broward
General Medical Center. Word was that he'd be paralyzed on one
side of his body if he was able to pull out of it. And yet, there was
still hope. Family members reported that Jaco was responding to
commands..."Wiggle your toe," "Squeeze my finger." Doctors even
speculated that he might be sitting up and drinking from a cup in a
matter of days. The status of his condition was changed from
critical to serious.
Then quite unexpectedly, on the evening of Saturday, September
19, a blood vessel burst in Jaco's brain. His entire right side was
gone, along with the basic left-brain cognitive functions of
understanding, logic, reasoning.
By Sunday there was zero brain activity, yet he lingered on. On
Monday they removed Jaco from the respirator. He stopped
breathing but his heart continued to pump (miraculously) for
another three hours. Jaco's father Jack, a journeyman jazz drummer
and singer all his life, cradled Jaco in his arms and crooned "Watch
What Happens" as the final beats ticked off:

Let someone start believing in you
Let him hold out his hand
Let him touch you and
Watch what happens

At 9:25 p.m., Jaco Pastorius died. He was 35.

We all reached for our favorite Jaco cuts when the news came
down: "Three Views of a Secret" or "A Remark You Made" to remind
us of his sublime Iyricism; "Barbary Coast" or "Come On Come Over"
to revel in his irrepressible funkpower; "Fannie Mae" or "Liberty
City" or "The Chicken" to rekindle his jaunty, playful spirit; "John
and Mary" or "Continuum" to stand in awe of his compositional
brilliance; "Donna Lee" or "Chromatic Fantasy" or "Portrait of Tracy"
to reflect on his incredible command over his chosen instrument.

Those of us who knew Jaco saw his torment, but we also
experienced his infectious highs, those inspiring moments when he
magically transcended the groove and seemed invincible. We never
stopped believing in Jaco, though many had long ago given up on
him. Diagnosed as a manic depressive, he was plagued by wild
mood swings and bouts of bizarre, unpredictable behaviour. Alcohol
only aggravated the condition, at times pushing him over the edge
into psychosis. Near the end, Jaco was raging out of control.
Numerous stories had filtered up from Fort Lauderdale about Jaco
crashing gigs, upsetting patrons, starting fights, trashing equipment,
hurling his bass at hecklers, being escorted out of clubs by police.
He had been barred from many nightclubs along the Florida coast
for creating such disturbances. And in the final months he had been
arrested on a number of occasions, with charges ranging from
drunk-and disorderly to breaking-and-entering and grand theft
auto.

Of course, Jaco had a fanciful alibi for every one of these charges.
But then, it was hard to really believe anything he said near the
end. Alcohol had so clouded his mind that he probably believed
most of the stories he concocted. About a week before that fateful
confrontation at the Midnight, Jaco spoke to me on the phone about
getting back together with Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter. He was
wildly enthusiastic and assured me that a tour was happening,
although no such plans were ever really in the works.
Musicians, clubowners and record company executives who knew
Jaco well sadly watched the decline, helpless to do anything about
it. They saw Jaco panhandling in Greenwich Village in the summer
of '86. They watched as he hit rock bottom--piss-soaked and passed
out on the West 4th Street basketball court, where he hung by day
and crashed by night. They were appalled as he ambled up to
passersby, begging for quarters.
Some had more sympathy for Jaco than others. Clubowners were
particularly callous about his plight, having had to endure Jaco's
wild rages and public outbursts on more than one occasion. He was
notorious, during that summer of '86, for sitting in on other people's
gigs, which usually amounted to jumping onstage, plugging in his
bass and letting loose with an obnoxious blast of feedback-inflected
anger. Clubowners would cringe when Jaco entered their
establishments.

When he entered Sounds Of Brazil one night after having chugged
several beers on the basketball court, clubowner Larry Gold had
him forcibly ejected by his burly bouncers. It wasn't merely that
Jaco was loaded; he was dribbling his basketball on the dance floor
during a performance by Loremil Machado and his Bahia Band. Said
Gold after that incident, "Jaco's bounced his last basketball in my
place."
I witnessed a rather ugly scene last year at the Third Street Music
School Settlement, a cultural center in Manhattan's East Village
where Jaco was the featured guest at a Meet the Composer concert
attended by students and parents. Jaco showed up barefoot and
deranged, smashed on wine. There was no bass in sight. For the
occasion he had assembled a makeshift crew of friends, including
trumpeter Jerry Gonzalez and saxist Rene McClean. Jaco started the
show by noodling around at the piano, working up gospelish vamps
and singing along in a drunken, raspy-throated stupor. His motor
skills were badly impaired. The band members seemed confused
and embarrassed. Now and then Jaco would break into a song like
"Amazing Grace. " Occasionally, he'd get up from his piano bench
and break into a crazy dance step, startling the students and
parents. This went on for 15 minutes or so before someone in the
audience yelled, "Play the bass!" Jaco responded by giving the one-
finger salute. The crowd was aghast. Some concerned mothers
grabbed their children by the hand and urgently marched them out
of the concert hall. Jaco continued noodling on the piano until he
began shouting at the drummer, apparently trying to tell him how
to play a particular tune. Finally, he got up from his piano bench
and walked over to the drum set. He reached into the drummer's
kit bag and pulled out a pair of sticks and commenced flailing away
violently on the cymbals, as if to show the guy how it was done.
Finally, he sent the cymbal, stand and all, crashing to the ground
before storming out of the concert hall himself, cursing and
shouting the whole way. Puzzled concertgoers looked at each other
in disbelief. As the patrons filed out, I noticed one young man
crying. In his early 20s, this aspiring bass player had made the trip
from Connecticut just to see Jaco up close and in the flesh. ''He's my
hero," he said as the tears streamed down his face.

Friends and family members were embarrassed and pained by
Jaco's displays of erratic behavior in public, but he turned a deaf
ear to all pleas to straighten out his act. "He had people in awe of
him trying to help," says Bobby Colomby, who produced Jaco's
stunning debut album. "But something in his psyche, something
inside of him, wouldn't let him be happy. He was suffering from a
mental illness, and his refusal to be helped was just another
manifestation of his illness. But we do not have a system in this
country that deals with it very well."
Jaco began courting a macabre death wish during the summer of
'87 in South Florida. He drank himself into stupors. He'd walk into
bars and hurl racial invective at the biggest, meanest dude in the
place, then stand at attention with arms at his side and let the guy
whale on him. He lost a few front teeth in this manner. There was
even one ghastly report out on the railroad tracks.
It was as if he were trying to pay penance for some deep seated
feelings of guilt...perhaps about leaving his first wife Tracy and
their kids John and Mary (now 13 and 16), perhaps about deserting
his second wife Ingrid and their twin sons Felix and Julius (now
five and a half).

"In the last months, he was like an empty she, " says Othello
Molineaux, the virtuoso steel pans player who worked frequently
with Jaco ever since they met back in '71. "Just seeing him, you'd
get the feeling that he wanted to go. He sort of said as much to me
at times. That spiritin' him, that thing that made us smile... that was
Jaco. That's what protected him all those years, even last summer in
New York when he was panhandling in the streets and sleeping in
Washington Square. That's what got him from day to day. But in the
last few months you could feel that that was gone. That lifeforce is
what made us have hope for Jaco, that he could turn it around and
make a comeback. But it wasn't there anymore."
Some say Jaco was deeply depressed about sitting on the sidelines,
having been virtually blacklisted from major-label action since
Warner Bros. dropped him in 1984. As one Warners insider put it,
"These record executives today are strictly bottom-line guys. They
don't take shit from Madonna and Prince! They were certainly not
gonna eat shit from Jaco. He never made this company any money.
In fact, they lost money on him, so they weren't about to put up
with his shit now or ever.
"And the thing is, it wasn't a question of talent. If it were up to
that, they'd have been falling all over themselves to sign the guy.
The problem was his ego, his brain. They didn't want to deal with
the guy because of that. Everybody knew all about the horror
stories-blowing his advance money, showing up wrecked for gigs,
walking around the streets dazed and barefoot, panhandling and all
that shit. It's a small industry, even though it's a big industry in
terms of dollars. Everybody knows everybody else's business. Word
gets around quickly and the word was out about Jaco. Nobody
would touch him."

Ricky Schultz of MCA/Impulse/Zebra was perhaps the only
industry executive near the end to express any interest in a Jaco
comeback. He had known Jaco from his days at Warner Bros. and
had worked on promoting his Word of Mouth album. He was well
acquainted with Jaco's legendary ego, his frequent tirades, yet he
never hesitated to call Jaco a genius.
"I was around for the slide, "he said a few months before the end,
"then I kind of watched it from a distance. I was there when Jaco
was throwing chairs in the Warner Bros. office. That did not reflect
well on him at all. Genius or not, they just didn't want to deal with
that type of behavior. But now I want to help Jaco. I want to help
him save his life. I know he's very difficult to work with. He has an
uncanny ability to piss some people off and I don't know if I want
to subject my staff to Jaco yet. But I'm ready to do battle with him,
and that's kind of what you gotta do when you take on Jaco."
They had talked about a comeback album. Jaco had new material,
some of which he had written during a four-week stint in a Florida
jail. Jaco called me frequently from jail to discuss his plans. He was
very enthusiastic about this album, which he planned to call Dixie
Highway.

The Kaylis funeral home, where the wake took place on September
24, is on Dixie Highway. It's one of the main drags in Fort
Lauderdale. Railroad tracks run right alongside, and Jaco spent
many a night walking along those tracks.
"Everybody in Lauderdale drives everywhere," says Peter
Yanellos, chief engineer on Jaco's Word of Mouth album. "It's
definitely a car culture, but Jaco walked everywhere. And in his
honor, I walked to the wake and I walked to the funeral."
It was a closed-casket wake. Flowers from close friends relatives
and fans filled the room. A huge, exotic bouquet from Joni Mitchell
stood out in the crowd. Over in one corner was an arrangement of
red carnations in the shape of a bass guitar emblazoned with one of
Jaco's signature slogans: "Who Loves Ya, Babe!"
As the priest led the solemn crowd in the rosary, a train rolled by
outside, its lonely whistle-cry filtering into the funeral home and
growing faint as it passed. That familiar sound struck a chilling
chord, recalling the train-on-the-tracks intro to Weather Report's
"Barbary Coast."

John Francis Pastorius III was born on December 1, 1951 in
Norristown, Pennsylvania. He had been exposed to jazz at an early
age by his father, Jack, who gigged around the Philly area when
Jaco was growing up. At age seven, Jaco moved to Fort Lauderdale
with his mother, Stephanie, and two younger brothers Rory and
Gregory. Jack remained in Philly. Down in Florida, Jaco was exposed
to a wealth of musical influences, from Caribbean sounds to Cuban
percussion ensembles to rhythm 'n' blues. From the radio he soaked
up the music of James Brown, the Beatles and classic Stax and
Motown. Originally a drummer, Jaco switched to bass after
breaking his wrist in a football game at age 13. One of his first
bands as a bassist was Las Olas Brass, which he joined when he was
15. There followed a number of local gigs with bands like Soul
Incorporated, Woodchuck and Tommy Strand & the Upper Hand. At
19, Jaco got his first big break when Southern soulman Wayne
Cochran recruited him for his C.C. Riders band. He remained with
the group for nine months, touring the chitlin' circuit and gigging
six nights a week.
Baritone saxist Randy Emerick recalls those early dues paying
days. "It was pretty much a straight-ahead rhythm 'n' blues
situation, which Jaco dug. So he fit in right away. He was hand-
picked for the band by Charlie Brent, who had been doing all of
Wayne's arranging at the time. Jaco actually learned a lot from
Charlie about arranging. In fact, Charlie was one of the few people
that Jaco really had a lot of respect for. Jaco was a very self-
confident guy back then, but not really 'out.' He was absolutely
straight back in those Wayne days. He was strictly into the music.
The alcohol and drugs came much later."
Emerick remembers nothing but good times with Jaco. "We
roomed together on the road and we got very close. He treated me
more like a brother than anything else. Even in later years, like
when we toured Japan with the Word of Mouth band, he was
always real friendly to me and never caused me any trouble. I
guess when he decided to get really bizarre he just did it with other
people."
Jaco left the Cochran band and immediately hooked up with Peter
Graves, the trombonist and leader of the house band at Bachelors
III, the popular Fort Lauderdale nightspot co-owned by Joe
Namath. The band was nine horns and a rhythm section, and with
Jaco pushing the groove, they reached some magical
heights. "It was frightening how on the band could be some nights
with Jaco in it," says Graves.

As Graves remembers, "I had heard about Jaco on the street going
back to the Las Olas Brass days. I had just moved into the Broward
County area from Miami in '71 and I had heard about this young
whippersnapper. I was even told by some people, 'Don't try and
deal with him. He's too young, too brash.' But as soon as I hear stuff
like that, I say, 'That's exactly what I'm looking for.' And when I
first met him I immediately sensed this enormous talent. As raw as
it was, it was enormous. And we immediately became close friends.
It was just one of those magical things, you just sense it...that this is
somebody you wanna be around."
Jaco and Tracy were already married with kids, but times were
tough for them. "I would have him write charts for the band and
give him any kind of extra work that came along, just to help keep
him and Tracy and the kids alive," says Graves. "Because he was
that brash, cocky type of guy, some people just wouldn't work with
him or have him work for them. I chose the other route. And it was
because of that that we became very close. He sensed in me a
confidence that I wasn't going to abandon him." Jaco ended up
staying on that gig for the next five years, while also working on
the side with Ira Sullivan and teaching bass part-time at the
University of Miami.
Near the end of the club's existence, around '75, Jaco auditioned
for Bobby Colomby in Bachelors III after hours. "I'll never forget
the look on Colomby's face as Jaco sat there playing solo," recalls
Graves with a hearty chuckle. "The astonishment on Bobby's face
was worth a million bucks."
Colomby remembers that fateful meeting with Jaco and the events
that led up to it.
"I was playing in Lauderdale with Blood, Sweat & Tears and we
were booked at Bachelors III.
One afternoon I was playing baseball and spotted this vivacious
blonde in the outfield of the Bachelors III team. I started talking to
her and got around to asking, 'Are you married?' And she says,
'Yeah. My husband is the best bass player in the world.' I figured
she was just being a nice, supportive wife, but I was still interested
in checking this guy out.
"He came by the club that afternoon when we were setting up
and he introduced himself as Jaco Pastorius, the best bass player in
the world. Later that night, after we finished our final set, I asked
our roadies to leave the bass amp up onstage. I said to Jaco, 'You got
your bass?' He nodded and went out to his car to bring it in. Then
we all sat around and he starts playing. And, of course, my hair
stood up and my eyes popped
out of my head and I'm hearing the greatest bass player in the
world. He wasn't kidding!"

Colomby had been offered a production deal by Steve Popovich,
then the head of A&R at Epic. "he basically said, 'Anything that you
find that you wanna produce, we'll put out, ' probably fully
expecting me to go after some pop band. So I called Steve Popovich
and said, 'I'm ready to make that record. This is someone very
special. It's a bass player.' And the reaction was, 'Great, what next?
An accordion player?' But I was very adamant about Jaco getting a
chance to be heard. And Steve says, 'Well, let me hear the guy.'
"So Jaco comes to New York. We're in the back of some restaurant
and he's setting up his gear. Popovich used to a bass player himself,
so he's naturally curious. And the head of marketing at the time,
Jim Tyrell, also used to be a bass player. So when Jaco starts
playing, the both look at each other and go, 'Ohmigod!' His whole
approach was so unique...his harmonic thing, his amazing facility on
the instrument. They had never heard anything like it before."
They assembled a stellar group of musicians for Jaco's 1976 debut
on Epic, including Michael Brecker, David Sanborn, Randy Brecker,
Hubert Laws, Lenny White, Narada Michael Walden and Herbie
Hancock. The album came out and floored everybody. That same
year, Jaco also appeared as a guest on albums by Pat Metheny
(Bright Size Life, ECM), Joni Mitchell (Hejira, Asylum), Al Di Meola
(Land of the Midnight Sun, Columbia), Ian Hunter (All-American
Alien Boy, Columbia) and Weather Report (Black Market, Columbia).
It was a very good year indeed. The buzz was on from New York to
Tokyo and all points in between. Jaco was sittin' on the top of the
world.
Colomby recalls that during this period of great activity in '76,
Jaco was totally straight. No booze, no drugs. "He was very healthy
then, physically and emotionally. He had the big ego but he was
very seriously into the music. In fact, of all the people I knew back
then...if you had said to me, 'Who's the last person you'd guess
would ever do drugs?' I would've said Jaco. He was the least likely
candidate because he was so proud of his physical health and his
athleticism.
"Of course, all that changed. He was a genius, but he was also very,
very disturbed emotionally, and I don't think any one person could
have helped him. I think this end that he had, as violent and awful
as it was, is something he really set up. I think had had it, as if he
just wanted some relief. He had gone in a direction where he really
wanted an escape.

A pall hung over the Fort Lauderdale area when the news about
Jaco hit. Musicians, friends and family members could only shake
their heads and mutter, "How could this be? Who's next?" In the
space of a few months, three homeboys had died, all at age 35.
They had been schoolmates and had been nurtured on the same
South Florida music scene.
Bobby Zohn was the first to go. The news of his death by sudden
heart attack on the night of June 13th greatly upset Jaco. Zohn
(a.k.a. Bob Herzog) had co-written the soulful vehicle for Sam &
Dave on Jaco's debut album, the funky "Come On Come Over." He
was a legendary white soulman around South Florida. A great
rhythm guitarist and passionate singer, he fronted the Blue Riddim
Band, the first white reggae band ever to play the Sunsplash
Festival in Jamaica. They later released a fine album on Flying Fish
Records.
Next was Alex Sadkin, the hot new producer of Duran Duran,
Foreigner, Simply Red, Robbie Neville and Arcadia Project. He and
Jaco had played together in Woodchuck way back then. Sadkin died
in a car accident a month after Zohn passed, and the news crushed
Jaco. It also frightened Stephanie Pastorius, Jaco's mother. Upon
hearing of Sadkin's death, she told family members, "Things comes
in threes. I just hope Jaco's not next".

The funeral mass at St. Clement's church on September 25 was a
profoundly moving affair. The presence of Joe Zawinul and Wayne
Shorter as pallbearers carried heavy meaning for those in
attendance, including Pat Metheny, Peter Erskine, Kenwood
Dennard, Miles Evans and dozens more who flew in to pay their
respects.
Randy Bernsen, Tom Wilkinson and Rich Franks played Jaco's
beautiful ballad "Las Olas" during the consecration. Peter Graves'
nine-piece horn ensemble played "Continuum" during the holy
communion. And when those nine horns blended together on the
melancholy "Three Views of a Secret," as Joe and Wayne and the
rest marched the coffin down the aisle and out of the church to end
the mass, there wasn't a dry eye in the house.
After the ceremony, close friends of the family retired to Tracy's
house to sit and reminisce about Jaco while listening to the records
that Stephanie had brought over from her Jaco archives. Outside on
the patio, Zawinul, Erskine and Shorter toasted their lost comrade
with shots of Jack Daniels as they flipped through Erskine's
personal snapshot book from Weather Report days.
"I'll never forget," began Zawinul with a laugh. "The day I met him
he walks up to me and says, 'I'm John Francis Pastorius III and I'm
the greatest bass player in the world.' And I say to him, 'Get the
fuck outta here!' But he gave me a tape and later he wrote me a
letter. And what I liked about this letter was that he printed large,
very bold. Not this small, cramped stuff you gotta squint to read. So
I listened to the tape and was knocked out by it. Then I called him
and asked, 'Can you also play electric bass?' He was playing so fast
and so fluid, unlike any electric player at the time, that I thought it
was an upright bass. Then I asked him, 'Well, can you play funk?'
And, of course, I found out."
Joe threw back another shot of Jack and smiled as Jaco's funky
bassline from "Opus Pocus" punctuated the conversation. "He was a
fucking genius, that guy!"
Drummer Erskine recalled his fateful meeting with Jaco while on
the road with Maynard Ferguson's band. "We were playing a gig
somewhere in Miami and Jaco had come down to check out the
band and say hello to an old buddy of his, a trumpeter in
Maynard's band at the time named Ron Tooley [who had played
with Jaco in Graves' band at Bachelors III].
"So between sets I noticed that Ron was speaking to someone. I
went over to talk to Ron and he says, 'Oh Peter, I want you to meet
Jaco Pastorius.' And there was this guy with stringy hair wearing a
goofy pair of horn-rimmed glasses and a Phillies baseball cap with
his shirt buttoned to the top button. And I just stood there and
looked at him in complete amazement and said, 'No shit!' He didn't
look anything like the guy in that black-and-white photograph on
his album cover. From that, I had this impression of this very
sophisticated guy. He had a very Continental appearance, but this
guy standing before me was this sort of wild beach-bum character."
What impressed Erskine most about that initial meeting, he said,
was Jaco's genuine warmth and his feelings of musical brotherhood.
"He was very sweet. After we talked he very gently said, 'Hey, have
a great set. Enjoy it!' And I knew he meant it. He was really
supportive and sincere.
"And then after the gig we hang out with Jaco that evening. One of
the guys in the band had a cassette player and Jaco had a final mix
of Heavy Weather [Weather Report's epic ´77 album]. We were so
excited, all the guys in Maynard's rhythm section, to hear this stuff.
It was like...amazing! That record was so stunning to hear. We all
stayed up all night and listened to it over and over and over again."

A few months later, Jaco used his influence in Weather Report to
get Erskine into the band, replacing Alex Acuña. Jaco and Peter
became close friends as roommates on the road, playing and
traveling together for three years as members of the world's
premier fusion group.
Once he joined the group, Erskine began noticing a gradual change
in Jacob's attitude. "They were partying a little harder by the time I
joined up in '78," he recalls. "I always thought that Jaco was trying
to out-macho Joe with the drinking and the boasting and
everything. 'I'm the baddest this and that and I'm in the greatest
shape ever,' and that sort of thing. It was just fun stuff at the time
but then suddenly Jaco started pursuing some other muse. The
increasing ingestion of...whatever...began reaping totally different
effects on Jaco."
His stage demeanor changed from reserved to outrageous-part
Hendrix, part Belushi, part kabuki. Jaco's antics thrilled his fans but
turned off stodgy jazz critics who dismissed it all as showboating.
And gradually that sort of bizarre behavior began manifesting itself
offstage as well.
"There was always a little bit of the devil in Jaco," says Erskine.
"He was mischievous at the very least. The outrageousness was
always a part of him, but he was always fairly rational about it.
Any outrageous moment would be followed very shortly thereafter
by a little under-the-table sort of...you know, he'd lean back and
give you a little wink just to let you know that he knew he was
pretty outrageous, for effect or whatever. But then, gradually, the
boundary lines just started to blur."
Erskine pauses, shakes his head and adds, "It's tough when a guy
sets out to join the ranks of the jazz legends that completely fucked
up their lives, but Jaco seemed determined to follow the path of
guys like Bird. It's so sad. I mean, here is someone who had what
seemed to be the most unbelievable potential. He really had it by
the tail. I mean, he was like the biggest thing at one point...almost
in the whole music industry. It was pretty unbelievable...for a
creative instrumental musician to have that much impact. And
then...boom! The enfant terrible thing came out and...whoosh!"

Friends and associates first began getting seriously concerned
about Jaco during the tumultuous tour of Japan in '82 with the
World of Mouth band. As Erskine recalls, "That's when he really got
out of hand. It was a pretty great band, actually. Some of the best
players in New York were in that band, but Jaco was completely
sabotaging the group left and right. Somehow it managed to sound
good on the record and Jaco wound up sounding great himself, but a
lot of us were pretty unnerved at the shows. That's when he really
got heavily into painting his face with magic marker, stripping and
running around naked. It was pretty awful. And it was scary. It
was like a different person than the guy I met down in Miami that
night with Maynard's band. The look in his eyes...everything just
seemed wrong."
Jaco was arrested at one point during that '82 tour for riding
around Tokyo naked on a motorcycle. In '83, while on tour with a
scaled-down septet version of the Word of Mouth band, Jaco
plunged 25 feet from a balcony in Rimini, Italy, resulting in a
broken left wrist and three cracked ribs. The tour was cancelled but
Jaco was soon back in New York, jamming at the 55 Grand club in
SoHo while wearing a cumbersome cast.
At the '83 Playboy Jazz Festival in Los Angeles, Jaco caused such a
commotion onstage, trashing around and knocking over equipment,
that festival promoters were forced to give him the hook. In 1984,
he was ushered out of the lobby of Blue Note Records in Manhattan
for creating a disturbance by shouting, cursing and finally taking
off his clothes. In '85 he was arrested in Philadelphia while trying
to break into the home of his father. Soon after that incident, he
entered a rehabilitation center in Pennsylvania and returned to the
New York scene a few weeks later, subdued on lithium.
The entire summer of '86 was a nightmare that culminated,
through the urging and plotting of his concerned brothers Gregory
and Rory, in Jaco finally submitting and entering the psychiatric
ward at Bellevue Hospital in New York. He remained there for six
weeks under the scrutiny of psychiatrists, though he was hardly a
model patient. He resisted all attempts to cut through his
psychological armor and get to the heart of his problems. He'd jump
up and walk out of therapy sessions at key moments, just before a
breakthrough, and his constant line was: "Hey, I'm cool. They're
nuts. Not me. You and I know that's the real deal. They're calling
me nuts and I'm saner than anybody."
During his stay, Jaco would spend hours on the pay phone at the
end of the hall, calling everybody he knew in the music industry,
on both coasts. With a fistful of quarters he'd ring up Bruce
Lundvall at Blue Note, Rod Templeman at Warner Bros., George
Butler at Columbia, this magazine, and anyone else he could think
of. To no avail. He was a blasting cap in the industry, and people
were mindful to keep a safe distance.
When I visited him at what he called the Bellevue Spa and Casino
Hotel, he declared, "They did all these tests on me. They had me
hooked up to something that looked like the board at the Power
Station...electrodes and shit all over my face. And they found no
traces of alcohol or drugs in my blood, which is what I told `em. So
it looks like I'm on the road to gettin' outta here. Hell, I'll be back.
Everybody wants me. They're standing in line to sign me. I'm ready
to burn, man. I'm straight as an arrow, strong as a bull and rarin' to
get back to work."
He popped in a tape he made in Europe with gypsy guitarist Bireli
Lagrene. A blazing, danceable funk version of Jimi Hendrix's "Third
Stone from the Sun" blared through the speakers in the bellevue
recreation room. Jaco listened and nodded approvingly. "Do you
hear that? Killer! Killer! There's nuthin' out there that's this bad.
Yeah, I've got the real shit. This is killin'! Yeah, now it's time to
make my move."

Jaco was released from Bellevue in late '86 and split for San
Francisco, where he stayed at the home of a drummer friend named
Brian Melford. A couple months later he returned to his South
Florida roots. It was the beginning of '87 and there seemed hope for
him. Jaco was cool, according to close friends in Fort Lauderdale. He
was not drinking a drop and he was conscientiously exercising and
rehearsing daily with pals like guitarist Randy Bernsen and bassist
Charles Norkus. Bernsen remembers it as an inspiring period.
"He looked great and was playing great. It was so exciting. He was
accepting starting out at ground zero, playing around with the local
cats again. He was getting back to work. We'd wake up, go for a
swim and then play music for hours. We did a duet gig together at
some restaurant...played Beatles tunes and some of Jaco's stuff. And
he was magnificent. It was so inspiring to see him like that. His
spirit seemed so strong."
But something went awry. Suddenly, around March, Jaco's mood
turned dark. He stopped the regular routine of exercising and
rehearsing and began drinking heavily. The booze had long ago
wreaked havoc with his liver and now it was seriously threatening
his brain cells.
By summer, Jaco was out of control again. It was a repeat of that
pathetic summer he had spent on the streets of New York City the
year before-sleeping in parks, panhandling, never washing, running
amok. He seemed lost, frustrated, tormented, desperately clinging
to his past glory. He began breaking into the homes of his friends
and family, grabbing all the Weather Report and Word of Mouth
albums he could find, thinking, "These are my records." He'd walk
into record stores in Lauderdale and pull the same stunt, which on
one occasion led to an arrest. He also began crashing concerts,
trying to climb onstage and sit in with bands. He had tried
commandeering the stage the previous summer during a Chick
Corea Elektric Band gig at Pier 84 in Manhattan, only to be subdued
by stagehands. And on one of the last nights of his life he tried to
do the same during a Santana concert at the Sunrise Musical
Theatre in Fort Lauderdale.

The horror stories continued to pour in right up until Jaco's tragic
episode outside the Midnight Bottle Club. But down in South Florida
they prefer to ignore the horror stories and remember Jaco as the
altar boy at St. Clement's church, the paperboy who did his route on
a motorcycle, the lanky kid on the high school basketball team, the
local bass-playing phenom who broke out and make good.
"I think sometimes all those heavy stories about Jaco tend to
detract from his music, "says Bernsen. "But now people are going
back to the music and rediscovering the magic. Last night I listened
to Jaco's records all evening and I tell you, man, he was there. His
spirit is in the music."
Apart from his regular discography, there are many other
recorded documents of Jaco's phenomenal playing floating around.
He had already recorded a third album for Warner Bros.-an
ambitious steel pans project he wanted to call Holiday for Pans-
before being unceremoniously dumped by the label in '84. Those
48-track master tapes sit idly by, still waiting to be released.
Currently there is a legal tussle over them, and several different
parties have already come forward claiming ownership, including
one guy down in Florida who put up $5,000 to bail Jaco out of jail in
exchange for his signature on a contract. The executor of Jaco's
estate, his brother Rory, hopes to acquire the tapes and put out a
posthumous album with all proceeds going toward a trust fund for
the four surviving children.

At a benefit concert Saturday night, hours after the funeral
services, the tears turned to cheers. Pat Metheny and Peter Erskine
were on hand to pay tribute to their pal. "I can tell you that today
there are hundreds of thousands of people in the world who are
really sad about Jaco not being around, "said Metheny to the
enthusiastic crowd at the Holiday Inn in Fort Lauderdale. "But
there's one thing I'm sure of. Jaco is checking us out and he's really
happy."
They played tunes that Jaco loved to play: "Stella by Starlight," "All
the Things You Are," James Brown's "The Chicken," Herbie
Hancock's "Cantaloupe Island," and, of course, Buster Brown's
"Fannie Mae." The Peter Graves Atlantic Driftwood Orchestra did
faithful rendetions of Jaco's "Liberty City," "Three Views of a Secret"
and "Domingo" (one of his oldest and as yet unrecorded
compositions).
Jack Pastorius, who at the wake had grabbed the spotlight by
banging out a bongo solo on the coffin lid (guess where Jaco got his
outrageous streak from?), got up and crooned "I've got You Under
My Skin" and later sat in on drums for a rousing conceptualize
music the way he did really deserves that title, "maintains Peter
Yanellos. "I've worked with a lot of people in different styles of
music over the years and you see a lot of things you admire, but I
was in awe of his musical conception."
But as Jaco once said of himself, "I'm not a star. I'll never be a
Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley or a Ray Charles. I'm just an imitator,
man. I'm doing a very bad imitation on the bass of Jerry Jemmott,
Bernard Odum, Jimmy Fielder, Jimmy Blanton, Igor Stravinsky, Jimi
Hendrix, John Coltrane, James Brown, Charlie Parker...the cats, man.
I'm just backing up the cats."