All She Wrote

The following events may or may not have occurred. Names have been changed to protect the insane.


From the Diary of Roscoe Cleophus Twilliger, Esq. Side man to the legendary Fuzzhead Jenkins, Bluesman, Writer, and Daddy. Arch Enemy of Flatbush Jones, Yarn Cat Mass Producer.

Fuzzhead walked in, beaming.

The band had been having a rough go of it lately. Instead of our names being “Fuzzhead Jenkins & All She Wrote”, we should be going under “Fuzzhead Jenkins and All She Left.”

Yeah, we had the blues.

The blues is a movement in the composition of life. They aren’t just music; the blues represent the experience of love, loss, learning, joy, sadness and most of all, intimacy. They can come at any time, unannounced or expected and only one thing is certain: you have to work through the blues to get out of them, and when you’re done, you truly know you’ve been somewhere.

Every member of the band had woman trouble. Fuzz was luckiest because he had no woman. Anymore. He never said why. Aboubaka and I split with little closure and less communication, throwing my year off thus far. Rollo’s woman just announced she was with child…someone else’s. Again. Thutmose’s wife just left him…apparently, marriage is not about feelings nor trust nor understanding, but business. If anybody hasn’t a head for business, it’s Thut. Thutmose gets beat weekly in money deals by my nine year old, Lil Zeke.

Earl Grady’s woman left him hanging, saying they were too intimate. That made no sense to the rest of us, as they were always getting caught doing it like forty going north. Apparently, a serious relationship between two thirty something’s where they engage in regular carnalities is a bad thing, let her tell it. She feels used, like that’s all their thing is about. Now, every fool knows women get more interested in the do in their mid thirties, and by and large, men of color are happiest when they can engage in the world’s favorite activity with someone who knows how to make a good meal afterwards, but Earl Grady’s woman wants something more. She just doesn’t know what. Boy is a mess over there. I caught Earl Grady talking to his bass the other day. Not mumbling while he played. Talking to it. Like it was his friend.

Fuzz counted off, and we swung into “Everybody Plays the Fool.” We were swinging, alright, and when Fuzzhead hit the lyric, “and now you cry and when you do, but next time around someone criiiiiiiiiies for you, yah yah yah” the audience remembered there was a band in there. Even we were a bit taken aback. Something changed that night on the stage. And we all knew the blues were moving on.

After the set, at the studio that used to be Dr. Wax in Harper Court, Fuzz sat us down and explained, “I realized the audience doesn’t understand the blues. Hell, they don’t even recognize the blues. Americans in general have a thing about creation and amnesia.”

Earl Grady stopped whispering to his bass long enough to say, “Huh?” I swear he’s gonna do somethin’ to that instrument. It won’t be nice.

Fuzz looked at him. “Boy, we create art and then forget it’s importance. Couple that with the overall dumbing down of our society, and the fact that a group of people happily refer to one another as the most derogatory term their oppressors could find…”

I lit a cigarette. One of the water vapor ones. “Move on Fuzz.”

Fuzzhead passed out some manuscript. I looked at the notes.

“Have you lost yo’ damn mind?” I stubbed out my steam square. “We can’t do this song…”

Fuzzhead leveled me with a look. “Why?”

“It’s…ignorant…”

“So is so much of what is out there…”

“We aren’t rappers.”

Fuzzhead sat down at the piano and began banging out a tune. It was catchy, but familiar.

“Fuzz, that’s ‘What’d I Say’! That’s Ray’s song…”

“And we’ll pay him for it, or at least, his estate…believe me, none of the listening audience will know. Again, they can’t remember who made what music tow years back.”

“Man, these lyrics…”

“Are no worse than what we got out here now. We past the blues. We need to get paid. Perhaps this reverse psychology will open people’s minds…If nothing else, we’ll get paid, which is probably a big reason why the women left.”

To my knowledge, the man did not use illegal narcotics.

“We gonna need some horn players…the Baba twins are available… “

“Whatever…it’s your band.” Everyone knows the Baba twins, while outstanding horn men, are incredibly flatulent, on and off stage. The things one does for a gig.

So we started gigging, quietly recording Fuzz’ new song. It took three attempts on as many days to get through the lyrics without all of us breaking into laughter. We were even looking to do a video, but Fuzz was afraid the images may stir action where the lyrics did not. The blues? Women? Who had time to think of such things. We were about to start racial Armageddon, and all of us were black. And a handsome, big head dude with a fondness for cashmere jackets and a warped sense of humor was taking us there in overdrive.

They don’t do the bandstand shows anymore. Well, maybe ‘Soul Train’, and we weren’t going to risk getting lynched by the new guest host and the Chinese dancer. And Don Cornelius. He was always in the background somewhere, and we all know Don got a rep for beating ass. No, sir.

Somehow, Fuzz landed us a guest spot on one of the evening shows. I am guessing he called in a favor. I think he twisted DJ OPM’s arm. Fuzz and OPM went way back, and he had agreed to let OPM produce the remix to the new song, although we tried to explain to Fuzz that blues bands usually don’t do remixes. He isn’t hearing us. Times like this make me miss having a woman. Women are good to gripe to, and they are usually on your side. Here we got a hijacked version of Ray Charles’ “What I Say” with some lyrics that will likely lose us our US citizenship.

So we’re in the green room, waiting to go on, when Fuzz says, “Fellas, we’re about to make history.”

Even Earl Grady, a man who has basically taken a musical instrument as his lover, shook his head.

I had so much respect for these shows. Conan’s exit inspired me. Now this…

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” we had already tuned up during the sound check, but it always helps to play a couple chords during the intro, get the audience into it, “Fuzzhead Jenkins, and All She Wrote.”

Fuzz started out real mellow and groovy on the organ, playing the opening chords. Behind him, three beautiful, short black women swayed with tambourines. Fuzz insisted they represented the women we’d lost. The Baba Twins were off right of us, the band. I noticed there was a ventilation system between them and Fuzz, telling me that perhaps he was not as crazy as he appeared. Earl Grady doubled up his bassline with Fuzzhead’s, Thutmose Clearwater sat behind his drums, motionless as the Sphinx. Usually, I was on piano, but this configuration required me to do lead guitar. All we heard was the groove of Fuzz’ organ and his feet tapping the floor. He leaned into the microphone and in his clear tenor, began the song.

Two measures into it, Earl Grady’s bass thrummed harder, and the back up girls’ tambourines swang with the beat. It wasn’t hard. The music was someone else’s, after all. But the lyrics weren’t drowned out, either. I had my pistol in the small of my back in case there was a riot. Like Iceberg Slim wrote, in the desert, a sucker is grateful for even the shade of a toothpick. If there was a riot, I’d risk murder.

There was no worry. The crowd was on its feet, dancing, bopping along, and Fuzz was hollerin’ the lyrics. Mid strum, I realized that it wasn’t a BAD song. I mean, boosted instrumental aside (and face it…in the blues, we boost and improvise on everything) . We swung hard into the first chorus, and Fuzzhead stood up, kicked back the piano stand, and wailed into the microphone,

“Porch monkeys! Yah! Porch monkeys! Porch monkeys, yeah porch monkeys! Porch monkeys, umhmm, porch monkeys, porch monkeys, yeah, porch monkeys, get it good like you know you should do the lil gal monkey til you run outta wood cuz it’s all you do good aw yeah! Porch monkeys, yahhhhhh!”

The band never missed a beat. One or two of those bleats from the horn section were suspect, but we kept wailing. Them girls were working up a sweat, trying not to double over laughing while keeping in step.

Fuzz had worked himself into a lather, he was enjoying this buffoonery so much.

“Ya music’s stupid and you got no class…ya wear ya pants halfway down ya ass…n thinks its cool” In the background, on the horn changes, the girls sang “Porch Monkeys, yeah, porch monkeys!” Fuzz was possessed. On the next verse break, he began, “You pass on my lovin' all the time…but let some fool thug grab yo’ behind! Wonder why you sad (porch monkeys, yeah, porch monkeys!)”

As we came to the conclusion, Fuzz hollered into the mike, “Tell you what you are…tell you what you are now! Tell you what you are! Yeaaaaaaaaa!”

The band came crashing to a halt and the applause thundered. Fuzz wiped his brow with a towel and sat down with the host, who was still visibly excited. The crowd was hollering “Encore!” I wanted out of there. Earl Grady held his bass protectively. Thut had ducked below the drums. The girls were long gone. I knew somewhere, the NAACP was mobilizing troops to come take us out. The host chatted on.

“…the rhythm, the musicianship! And, look, you don’t have to tell me…it was a message song. I know. But what a message! The animal rights people will LOVE it!”

The song picked up major airplay. Urban radio, pop radio, blues stations. Can you say, “Crossover?”

And Fuzz? Couldn’t tell him nary a thing.

I was at the McDonalds drive through one day, thinking of how I missed Aboubaka, and the little girl who bought my food said, “That’s my HIT! Porch Monkeys! Yeah, porch monkeys!” What the hell was wrong with us?

Time magazine ran a cover photo of Fuzz, one of those shot from below as he got off a plane, and the title, “Monkey Man.”

The interview requests poured in. Fuzz was on CNN, MSNBC and even Fox and the Cartoon Network. There was talk about bringing back “Scooby Do” so the band could guest star. Thut liked that. He always had a thing for that Velma. BET refused to book us, saying we denigrated Black music. They had the producer of their hit show, “Booty Bump Ya’ll” send us a note on letterhead saying how ashamed we made them as Black people, and as a Black network owned by Swedes. Swedes have always identified with brothas. Why we drive so many Volvos.

It wasn’t all gravy. We had security following the platinum charting of “Porch Monkeys”. Some Black leaders were calling for our heads, especially after the DJ OPM remix that said something about “poverty pimps” and “talking black and sleeping white.” One group of angry single mothers put out a retaliation record, “It Ain’t All Our Fault”, but it went nowhere.

Fuzz called us to the studio one day and passed around the music for the new song. This was an original, slow swing blues.

“Fuzz,” I said, brushing lint from my new suit, “I ain’t singin’ this…”

“You ain’t, I am,” he corrected me.

“There’s no harp part on here,” I countered.

“This is our piano song. Every group has to have at least one song where the front man sits at the piano and belts out a ballad. Makes it look more serious. Think “Let It Be” or “November Rain.”

We didn’t argue anymore. Our music was offensive, but it was selling. I read the title.

“Fuzzhead, no,” I groaned. “Somebody is gonna figure this out…c’mon, man.”

“This is real.”

We shot the video for “Black People Read Coloring Books (They May As Well)” live at a South Side blues club, with interspersed images inside ethnic bookstores stocked with those conspiracy books you can’t find anywhere else. At one point, Earl Grady suggested we name the tune “Illuminati Blues”. The fact that he was starting to subscribe to Fuzzhead’s mania was disconcerting, to say the least. The video also showed young kids in an obvious ghetto reading said books, growing older, and their situation not changing. In fact, one young boy is reading the book in front of a liquor store and grows into an old man, reading in front of the same store, while his environment improves not one iota. Part of the scene shows him pushing away a pregnant young woman, dressed for work, and flailing his arms at her when she interrupts his reading. Other shots showed good looking, obviously successful women with black eyes and bruised lips pulling on thugs’ arms, while a young Black man, briefcase in his arm, is trying to pull the woman in his direction and is getting off punches at the thug. They had us on that morning show for the premiere. Elisabeth didn’t get it. Sherri tried to punch Fuzz. Goldberg and Fuzz had a great side conversation about something only they understood.

The National Academy of recording Arts and Sciences gave us “Band of the Year”. When we accepted it, half dressed video dancers protested our presence outside. One young man was interviewed on TV, in full hip hop regalia, explaining in fluent Ebonics why we were the devil incarnate. A 40 piece orchestra backed us for a house burning closer of “Porch Monkeys” that had everyone over 40 dancing in the aisles.

We were preparing to tour when one of the evening news shows broke the story of me and Aboubaka’s break up. It was not abusive. No drugs nor alcohol were involved. She and I had sent some pretty nasty email to each other, though, and somehow, mine surfaced. Nothing I am proud of, but Fuzz was forced to suspend me to placate the record company and the public. Well, he suspended me, and then he took me back, publicly, stating he wouldn’t bow to the Single Mother’s with Adolescent Crazy Knuckleheads (SMACK) lobby. “If they want our music to change, perhaps they either need to make better decisions of whom they let impregnate them or do a better job of ensuring these offspring they insist on raising alone don’t turn out to be urban terrorists of the first order. This was a private matter between a man and the woman he loved, who claimed, after he threw some harsh facts her way, that she had never been sexually satisfied. Obviously, he has suffered enough. I cannot, in good faith, defend his actions, but I will not be pressured into harming this man’s economy because a group of angry women want to make an issue of this when there are more pressing issues to address.”

We were asked to sing at the Republican National Convention, but Fuzz declined.

“I am only interested in not pissing of f the gays or the Israelis,” he often said. The GOP alienated both. We could not afford to have the country’s two most unified constituencies hating us.

Things started to nut up while we were recording the “You Really Have No Power Save Your Big Mouth” album.

Some reporters caught Fuzz coming off of a plane and asked what it was like to be so big. They meant his suit size. Boy’d been gaining weight, eating all that Harold’s. He thought they meant fame.

“It’s amazing,” Fuzz said, adjusting his shades. “We’re more popular than Barrack Obama.”

THAT set off a furor, with black grandmothers everywhere burning dolls of Fuzz in effigy, and Black male school teachers (all three of them) going on television saying how we were the white man’s tool. Racist whites went on their talk shows to decry our claiming more popularity than their favorite excuse tool, The Magic Negro. Black women called us haters. White women, interviewed from luxury vehicles with plates reading such as “NBACHSPT” said we had something against kids of mixed parentage.

Earl Grady tried to marry his bass in Kuala Lampur around this time, causing speculation that perhaps this wholesome band preaching accountability was not quite what it seemed. Someone got a hold of the liner notes of that first album and reached the conclusion that “Porch Monkeys” was derogatory after all.

Aboubaka went on television, invited for the sole purpose of talking about yours truly, then refused to say anything about me, saying our time had “come and gone”. I turned that into a song title and sent her all the royalties. She went on television again, claiming she had given me a million dollars to start the band.

Thutmose’s wife said he was not the father of any of their kids, she felt he was a poor businessman and regularly engaged in infidelity, although there were at least five pieces of evidence walking around proving she found love and happiness at three in the morning elsewhere.

The real beginning of the end, though?

Fuzzhead found a woman.

Akeba Sountaka wasn’t even good looking. She claimed she was a musician, but we never saw her pick up an instrument. She played the spoons at dinner, once, and was terribly off key.

Suddenly, the woman Fuzz referred to as his “African Queen” was everywhere, all the time with us. Now, we had to start referring to him as “Mr. Jenkins.” Akeba could be bossy as hell, always trying to interfere in the creative process, causing problems between me and Fuzz, not letting him eat mild sauce on his Harold’s. I missed Aboubaka something awful. Thutmose had taken to raising his wife’s kids, all of whom he claimed, and spent a lot of time at Little League games and the like. Earl Grady was dating some piano player, a cute pixie-ish yellow momma named Alicia. Nice behind on that one. Good voice, too.

One day, Akeba started clowning, saying that Fuzz wrote all the music and did most of the work. I threatened to have her deported back to Africa, and she started arguing that she wasn’t even from there. Everyone but Fuzzhead KNEW Akeba Sountaka was just plain old Tammy Watson from 43rd Street.

“It’s time,” Fuzz said one day, looking up. “I’m tired.”

The final album cover showed us walking across Harper Court to the studio. The final video, “Ya’ll Made for Good Material”, was actually shot in the studio. In a haze of smoke, smiles, tears and instruments, Fuzz at the piano, that old Akeba next to him, me playing lead guitar, Thut on his drums, beaming, and Earl Grady on his bass, that cute Alicia’s head on his shoulder, we brought the end to an era.

That night, on the rooftop of the Harper Court building, we started with “porch Monkeys” and ended with the blues, thanking our fans, placating our critics. When it was over, we sat down with the greatest movie critic ever, and as he talked to us through his computer, we unwound and laughed, knowing it would be our last time together.

Fuzz married Akeba. Well, he tried. Turns out she was married to someone else. Two somebody else’s. He retired from music, took up writing and teaching college, and basically swore off women. Except those who really found his intellect sexy and were younger than my son, Lil Zeke, who by then was Big Zeke, and had kids of his own. Akeba threatened to write a book about the group’s secrets until one local talk maven exposed that Akeba was functionally illiterate and couldn’t count past six. We won’t mention the bi polar issues.

Thutmose died cheering his kid on at a Little League game. His wife was so angry that she beat on his corpse for fifteen minutes, asking what she was supposed to do with “all these kids by myself”. Everyone loves differently, but his death ended talk of a reunion.

Earl Grady’s affair with Alicia ended on good terms, and she became a recording artist in her own right. Earl is still one of the best bass men in the country. He does commercials for credit cards and local fast food chains now.

Me? I had one ex wife, a son, and a lot of memories. I kept on living. I kept on loving. And you know what? I learned love comes back. You just gotta leave it alone. The blues will teach you that.

"Ya'll made for good material,
ya'll made for good material,
ya'll made for good material....
but now I've got to go,
I'm not meant to play here anymore, yeah

I started as a means,
to see if there were others sharing my dreams
and find a like minded few
who see the world as I do

But time has made it clear
upon closer inspection the beliefs I hold so dear
leave me in the minority
what was meant a lesson is in fact reality

"Ya'll made for good material,
ya'll made for good material,
ya'll made for good material....
but now I've got to go,
I'm not meant to play here anymore, yeah

Sometimes the hardest thing
is seeing what is really there
sometimes the bravest statement
is to ask if anyone cares



You can't go through life a caricature
I can't keep shaking my head in wonder
What do you do when you don't fit in
when it's too late to start over again

How you see love life and dreams
it is clear you're the only one it seems
who feels for things the way you do
who believes logic has a place next to the blues
Well, let me tell you: your days of making me feel outcast
because I might be right are through


Ya'll made for good material,
but then time moved past
and life it started to show
that it's time to move on, and realize
it is what it is.