Jaco Pastorius
Truth, Liberty & Soul

Truth, Freedom, and Soul. You've put them all in.

So you made it.
You chased fate so much, you provoked it so much, you mocked it, you always showed ready for your fate, you provoked it so much that it played a really bad one on you, really. It didn't even give you the satisfaction of dying as you now thought you could die, after an ethanol coma, or after one of those cannonballs you would shoot up of coke and whatever else together.
And now you're here, face down, at night, in the city where you grew up, where you went to school with excellent results and played basketball, volleyball, hockey, baseball, and football with excellent results, you're face down, at night, in the city where the music monkey grabbed you so young and without neglecting study and sports you learned, son and grandson of drummers, to play the drums, then the bass, the guitar, the piano, and you chose the bass because, playing football, you fractured your wrist and the drums were certainly not ideal after surgery.
You're face down, at night, in the city where you dismantled your '62 Fender Jazz, a jewel you defretted and filled with boat epoxy resin and then repainted it with six coats of boat paint, creating a prototype you would never leave, until someone stole it from you a few days ago, a bastard who took advantage of the fact that you had fallen asleep, dead drunk, in a park lawn and you had left it behind a tree, probably sold it for ten dollars, if lucky. That same bass with which you recorded on an audiocassette your personal version of Bird's "Donna Lee," then sent it to Joe Zawinul who called asking if you played electric bass too, besides acoustic bass. When you told him it was an electric bass he cursed you, thinking you were joking. And then he hired you, in Weather Report, he hired you...
You're face down, at night, in the city that saw you return after touring the world with the planet's most famous jazz band, one that changed its skin with each new album, making virtuosity not an end but a trademark, mixing jazz with funk, accenting the dark zones of melody and hunting the silence behind a blood-stripped note. Uncle Joe, the Austrian, who speaks little but was like a father to you, and Uncle Wayne, hats off, Uncle Wayne replaced Coltrane in Miles Davis' band back then, should be worshiped in a temple. You disappointed them all, you were always beyond their control, you, the electric bass prodigy, the virtuoso of the unseen and unheard, the crowd gatherer, the innovative hippie and bringer of a new way to be on stage, even in a jazz context where roles are always well-defined and precise and the bassist has always been a support. You, instead, conscious of the admiration the band uncles had for you, were always in the foreground in the Weather band, with them accepting your compositions too from the start, show me employers like that... The band, they say thanks to your presence which attracts especially young people, I mean, young people listening to jazz instead of Duran Duran or Boy George, I mean, can gather one hundred thousand spectators and do world tours playing in theaters and places previously reserved for rock bands, they who don't even use even beats when they burp, so to speak. Europe, USA, South America, Japan, there's no difference, everywhere Weather Report with Jaco Pastorius sells out...
Did we mention you're face down? You're with an arm under the trunk and one abnormally twisted behind your back, with prostitutes and night owls watching you lying there, in the middle of your blood pouring from nostrils, ears, mouth, black as the night around. The ambulance arrived quickly and the paramedic did his best, then they loaded you... You can see you're tall and very thin, everyone shakes their head, they know junkies, end-stage drunks, homeless people can end up like this... But what did you do to get beaten to a pulp, more than beaten to a pulp, hit on purpose in precise places, vital centers like the head, neck, cranial walls, then on shoulders, groin, knees, sternum, and again on the head, head, head. You have an eye out of its socket, detached and the other not visible anymore.
No, you weren't caught by a gang of brats or beer-fueled skinheads looking to beat and burn a homeless person, nor were you found by one of those night vigilantes with an eight-inch knife and an M16 on the seat next to him, ready to hit indistinctly the junkie shooting up in an alley or the gays kissing on the seafront.
You returned to your adopted city after traveling the world for ten years with the most important jazz and funk band in the world, after recording pieces and entire albums with artists that would make many well-established session musicians tremble, since you lent your bass to Joni Mitchell, Pat Metheny, Ian Hunter, Al Di Meola, Herbie Hancock, and even Jimmy Cliff and dozens of others, amazed by your creativity and verve. Sure, the step from virtuoso phenomenon to circus phenomenon is very short, and lately you've been behaving just like that, faster and faster, more never-seen-before, fuller of substances and super spirits, more and more.
But now you live on charity, perpetually drunk or high, or both. You've been arrested several times, disorderly intoxication, panhandling, thefts, or even for being completely naked on a pickup truck roof or for occupying an abandoned house with other outcasts. And one of your concert participations, a year ago, cost thousands of dollars, your jazz bass lessons would have bled a medium family dry in six months if it weren't that you, the bass, always taught it for free, to anyone.
You provoked fate, you knew you were sick and knew the name of your disease, it was diagnosed by Peter's father, the famous psychiatrist, your drummer friend whom you had brought into the band, and the verdict was "Bipolar disorder associated with schizophrenic episodes and manic-depressive syndrome, possibly of genetic origin." Brief stay in a luxury clinic, then out, drinking and bursting on the streets at night.
Combining alcohol or drug abuse with the disease meant carving your name on the tombstone and you always had the chisel with you. With alcohol, you punished yourself for the lousy life you made your loved ones live, the two women you married and your four children, you hit the bottle until you lost consciousness and woke up in places you didn't know the next morning, not knowing how you got there, and with whom...
In short, as your last wife said at your funeral, simply, no one deserves a death like that but you found someone to do the dirty work for you, and it wasn't even a pusher, the one who killed you, it was a nightclub manager, imagine that... You always did this, all your life, always pushing people to the limit, just like you did with music, after all. That night, high and full of poor-quality alcohol, you saw that Carlos Santana, an old friend, was playing in Fort Lauderdale, and you knew that with him was the bassist you had replaced in Weather Report, Alphonso Johnson, hell, not just anyone. So you snuck backstage, dirty, in jeans you've been wearing for a month and a tank top whose original color wasn't even distinguishable anymore. At the end of Alphonso's solo, you jumped on stage and took his hand, lifting his arm, like boxing referees do when they declare a winner. Alfonso, the audience, Carlos, all recognized you, eyes wide open, but who, Pastorius? It's a vagabond who looks like him, no, it's him, my god, how he has become, he even peed himself while bouncers dragged him away... What's he shouting? That Johnson is the greatest... But didn't he always say he was the greatest? He's crazy, always has been...
Carlos Santana told the bouncers it was all right and took Jaco by the weight, bringing him backstage, but he made the mistake, instead of taking him home (yeah, but which home, Carlos, I live on the streets, eat from friars...) of talking to him about God and redemption, and that's where it ended.
Maybe Carlos slipped him a hundred dollars, crying and kissing him on the dirty cheek, he says he doesn't remember now...
Then you wandered a bit around the docks and returned to the nightclub area, but who lets in, at four in the morning, someone dressed like you, screaming and pounding on glass, kicking the door? And here comes the club owner, a Vietnamese refugee, he doesn't say a word but starts hitting you, he is known to be skilled in various martial arts and hits you anywhere, at his leisure, long and violently, until he leaves you on the ground in the condition we described.
You lasted ten more days, in hospital, in a coma, and when your last wife gave permission to unplug the machines, your heart was still beating, by itself, for another three and a half hours, very regularly, and then it stopped suddenly, just like you used to at the end of your solos, looking slyly at the audience.
You were supposed to turn thirty-six, in two months.

Truth, Freedom, and Soul. You've put them all in.
In memory of John Francis Pastorius III, Jaco to everyone, always and forever.