That One Night We Thought We Were Immortal: Remembering Dennis Archer 1952~2020

     Pharoah Sanders circa 2016, a Christian Weber photo*

 

Dog days of summer 1974.  Nixon is being impeached. A television news broadcaster commits suicide on live tv.  Mama Cass dies of heart failure at age 32.  The Detroit Tigers dynasty has run its course and beloved hometown hero Al Kaline will hang up his cleats at season’s end, outlasting Nixon by a couple months.  The war in Viet Nam is waning, at least as far as American lives lost goes; our allies though lost 120,000 soldiers that year.

            The war is something we have thought less and less about since we escaped the draft a couple years earlier.  Dennis drew a low draft number and was ordered to report, but showed up with a last-minute medical excuse signed off by his pacifist family doctor.  I had an untouchably high draft lottery number.  Rosemary, Dennis’s girlfriend, couldn’t be drafted of course, but I remember that her brother Tom, who shared a birth date and therefore a low number with Dennis, had to join the National Guard to avoid going to Viet Nam.  We had all known each other since middle school days.

 

Our nights often began, and sometimes ended, at Misko’s, where a shell of beer cost thirty-five cents and the jukebox hadn’t seen a new record since about 1962. Misko’s was a neighborhood bar that featured hand drawn posters of the owners: “the fighting Misko brothers,” amateur boxers in the 1950s.  One of their sons, Charlie, a year older than us, tended bar. Charlie had played football at one of our high school’s rivals and sometimes I’d sit at the bar and reminisce about what then already seemed like the old days.

Obviously there was nothing happening at Misko’s.  There never was. We were like bored children, whining “there’s nothing to do.”  I was vaguely aware of Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, reputed (and disputed) to be the oldest jazz club in America, reputed also to be the scene of Miles Davis’ getting off heroin (disputed, by Davis himself, though the story never died).  I knew Coltrane, everyone, had played there.  I put a dime in the pay phone and asked who was playing that night.  Pharoah Sanders. We didn’t know who Pharoah Sanders was, but that didn’t matter. 

Dennis was a classically trained viola player who played in orchestras as long as I had known him and yet, his musicianship was part of his life never shared with me. In the winter he would bring his viola into Misko’s because he didn’t want to leave it out in the car in the frigid air. He endured interminable remarks suggesting the case held a machine gun–these were The Godfather years.  He was probably the only classical musician who ever hung out in Misko’s.

Okay, Baker’s Keyboard Lounge. We’re in. How do we get there?  It’s on Livernois, can’t miss it. We were off.

I remember that I drove, which was unusual, as I hadn’t always had a car.  The fact that I did is what allows me to pinpoint the year in memory. 1974 was the only summer I had that car in Michigan.  And, also, my last summer in Michigan; the following spring I drove west until the road ended and didn’t hardly look back.

I can’t remember if we expected to be the only white people in the place.  We should have. But we felt more accepted than merely tolerated.  Yeah, you’re white, we’re over it.  (Note from the future, i.e. now: white privilege much?)

The club was small and dark and the room was almost empty.  We sat at a table directly in front of the band, ten feet from Pharoah Sanders himself.  He was backed up by a drummer, stand-up bass player, and a guitarist.  Sanders was wearing some kind of khaftan, a gown really, and he looked like  some old testament prophet about to summoning the angels with a sacred instrument. And then he blew that horn.

To say that we had never heard, or experienced, anything like it would be an enormous understatement.  It was almost as if the music was inside us, or we were inside it.  Something was happening.

 

Writing in 2016, Nick Marino described Sanders this way:
“A free-thinking astral traveler and spiritual gangster, he’s the official saxophonist of your soul’s awakening.

His definitive song may be “The Creator has a Masterplan,” a thirty-two minute vision quest that journeys from moments of pastoral beauty to demon-purging squall –just like life itself.”

 

That was what was happening: our demons were being purged.  We were hearing a long mad riff on “The Creator has a Masterplan.”  ** Dennis was out of his chair much of the night, moving—you couldn’t say dancing exactly—to the music.  It was as if you could see those astral planes opening up a direct line of communication between Dennis and Sanders’ horn.  Dennis looked as if someone had nailed his feet to the ground so that he couldn’t fall over as he rocked and bowed and howled.  In between tunes Dennis threw all his money at the stage.  If he could have spoken it would have been in tongues.

At some point, we noticed we were the only patrons in the place.  At some point closing  time passed.  We were outside of time.

And then we were out on the street, as if having awakened from a dream.  I drove through the deserted Detroit streets back to our lives which I now knew were unnecessarily ordinary.  Dennis and Rosemary lived in a rundown house just inside the Detroit border.  I vaguely recall that the rent was $100 a month.  I don’t remember dropping them off or what he may have said.  Probably just, “Yes.”  Or something equally succinct.

Dennis and I would stay in touch, but not see each other in person very often in these intervening forty-six years.  He suffered from poor health due to various habits to which he was faithfully wed.  His sister told me that when it was near the end she asked if he wanted to see or talk to anyone.  “He said he just wanted to sit and smoke as much as possible for as long as possible.”

The doctors had given him six months but he took eleven more after that, a fact from which he derived much pleasure.  I have hundreds of memories of him, most great, a few confounding. But if I had to choose one, I’ll take this one, the night he and the music and Pharoah Sanders were mysteriously and mind-blowingly all one beautiful alive thing.***

Shine on you crazy diamond~

                                                                            ∞

* This photo is placeholder until I can access my archives and find one of Dennis and me.

** You can heard this tune on the album Karma from 1969

*** I wrote about Dennis previously in the  essay "The Purposes of Ascent" in my book of essays,                     Warnings Against Myself.