Saturday, July 9, 2022

the last book I ever read (Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, excerpt four)

from Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles by Mark Rozzo:

For now, it was a time of thumping on bongos, lazing around coffeehouses, rolling joints, reading poetry, thinking about art, listening to jazz. For Dennis, the 1950s were “a great melting pot for the races,” and he got to meet some of his Black musical heroes: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, and Miles Davis, who became his sparring partner in a boxing gym. Miles would taunt Dennis with profundities as they shot jabs at each other, to which Dennis would spit back, “So what? So what?” Davis used Dennis’s retort as the title of one of the most revered compositions on Kind of Blue. Dennis would say of his aesthetic foundations, “I’m really from jazz.”



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