the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt fifteen)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

Yet the stars in Bernhardt’s eyes (and ears) didn’t prevent him from noticing what, in Evans’s home life, went beyond slobby eccentricity. “Elaine looked like she had been in a concentration camp and Bill had tracks all over his hands, et cetera.”

The et cetera covered what was too painful to elaborate on—these were two junkies in love, with each other and, perhaps just as much, with junk. And the pushers loved them: there was nothing like a steady customer. The tracks all over Evans’s hands implied what wasn’t seen: tracks all over his arms, legs, and feet; collapsed veins necessitating a constant search for fresh needle-access points. Keen-eyed admirers in clubs noticed that the left-handed Evans had overinjected his right hand and arm to the point of nerve damage: in early 1963 “he played one-handed throughout a week’s booking at the Vanguard,” Pettinger writes. “With his left hand and some virtuoso pedaling, he was able to maintain harmonic interest in support of treble lines. In morbid fascination, pianists dropped by to witness the phenomenon.”

The bassist Bill Crow witnessed it on another occasion: “He would dangle the dead hand over the keyboard and drop his forefinger on the keys, using the weight of the hand to depress them. Everything else was played with the left hand, and if you looked away you couldn’t tell anything was wrong.”