by Edd Dickerman
I was playing with a ‘banjo band’ in a club on Monterey’s Cannery Row – one night a character came up to me on a break and asked if I was Edd Dickerman – I don’t always admit it, but he mentioned mutual friend Ray Skjelbred, so I thought he might be all right. He introduced himself as ‘Jim’ and asked if he might sit in – our bandstand was a flatbed truck from the 20′s parked against one wall – Jim leaned his chair against the wall and warmed up on his cornet quietly for a couple of tunes – then stood up and blew the crap out of that joint. I remember thinking, like Bogart said in Casablanca – “this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship!” and so it was. Jim became a regular at the Warehouse and I remember playing second trumpet with him from time to time – he always said, “Great second, man!”
Years later, when I had returned to the Bay Area, I often played in groups with Jim – he drove an old VW bug that he had decorated in a particularly ‘Jim’ fashion – he had cut the heads out of many photographs of his friends and glued them to the dashboard – as he drove along, there were dozens of his pals, thumb-nail size, looking out into the interior of the car.
One night the owner of the club, who played the washboard with us, mostly on the weekends, made a ‘joke’ that insulted one of Jim’s best friends, ‘Fast Eddie’, who was playing banjo with us. Jim just quietly packed his horn in its case and walked out the door forever. It wasn’t long before I had also had a belly full of that guy and did the same. I found a job at a gas station with a boss I didn’t hate quite as much. Gasoline was 23ยข a gallon in those ‘good old days’!
One afternoon I was working at the gas station, and here come Jim and Fast Eddie – in battered sneakers and ragged tuxedos they’d found at a Goodwill store! When they saw me, they shouted: “National Tuxedo Week, man!” They were on their way to force Bill Dendle to join the movement, wearing his grungy tux for a week, and taping some tunes – I was busy. I was glad to see that they observed that holiday – I’ve never missed this important annual rite.
It has seemed to me that to some degree Jim’s astonishing talent may have been a curse in his later life – he had been able to survive without developing any other skills, never being reduced to flipping MacBurgers or wielding a broom or shovel – we had a great laugh when he told me that his folks wanted him to be a stockbroker – difficult to imagine a career more incongruous for a spirit like Jim’s. I told him once that he could put together a band with almost anyone he wanted with his stature in the jazz community – he shuddered at the suggestion of assuming that responsibility. He was able to spend his life, enviably, having FUN with his music and his musical pals.