Sam Stephenson on Sonny Clark
Clark seated at piano backstage at Syria Mosque for Night of Stars event, 1946. Courtesy Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Heinz Family Fund; © 2004 Carnegie Museum of Art, Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive.
In the wee morning hours of September 25, 1961, while packing to leave for Japan from Idlewild Airport later that day, Smith turned on his tape recorder and let it roll until dawn. He had live microphones in the hallway and stairwell. He captured Sonny and his friend, the saxophonist Lin Halliday, arriving at the building and walking up the bare wood stairs with Lin’s seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Virginia “Gin” McEwan. Sonny and Lin had been playing at the White Whale in the East Village earlier in the evening with bassist Butch Warren and drummer Billy Higgins. Sonny sticks his head in Smith’s door and says to the notorious pack rat, “You’ve got a lot of shit in here.” Smith responds, “I’ve been shitting for a long time.” They laugh. Sonny and Lin then go into the hallway bathroom on the fourth floor and shoot heroin. Smith’s tapes catch Sonny moaning to near unconsciousness. Lin grows anxious and then frightened. He sings to Sonny to try to keep him awake. Earlier that summer, Gin had saved Sonny’s life with amateur CPR after an overdose. But now, when Lin calls out for her—“Gin? Gin? Gin?”—she does not respond; she had already moved somewhere else in the building. The tension in the harrowing scene mounts. How miraculous (and perhaps questionable) that such a moment is caught on plastic reel-to-reel tape, to be heard in real time a half-century later in a digitally transferred file.
Meanwhile, in his room packing for Japan, Smith plays vinyl records of Edna St. Vincent Millay reading her poetry and actress Julie Harris reading Emily Dickinson. (Smith owned the entire Caedmon Records inventory). Over time, Sonny’s dose wears off, and he and Lin shuffle down to the automat for cheeseburgers and milkshakes. For money, they tote several dozen bottles that Smith gave them to redeem for deposits at the grocery store. It’s not clear if Smith ever saw Sonny Clark again. He spent a year in Japan, and Sonny went on to record the great tracks with Grant Green, as well as several other classic Blue Note albums, before dying sixteen months later.
