Current mood:	thoughtful
Current music:	Radio Tarifa - Temporal - La Tarara

I Love You If You're a Viper: The Story of "Mezz" Mezzrow
"I dreamed about reefer five foot long
Mighty Mezz but not too strong
I'll be high but not for long"
- Stuff Smith and the Onyx Club Boys, "The Viper's Drag," later recorded by Fats Waller

Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow (1899-1972) is at first an unlikely entry into the history of Jazz music in the United States. Born of immigrant Jews in Chicago, he fell in love with Jazz music and became determined to gain entrance into the world of Black Jazz musicians. He learned to play the clarinet, and played in Chicago speakeasies during Prohibition. When prohibition ended, he moved to Harlem and soon set about using his connections to become one of the premiere vipers in the scene. Vipers were dealers, but at the time they were the heroes who supplied the best weed which fueled the explosion of jazz music in the first half of this century. Vipers, including Mezz himself, entered the popular imagination in classic songs like the "The Viper's Drag." Soon, he was so well loved that Mezz's nickname itself became slang for marijuana -- a fat joint of primo weed became known as a Mezzrole.

Mezz himself recalls the story of his first joint smoking session in a Chicago jazz club:
"The first thing I noticed," recalled Mezz, "was that I began to hear my saxophone as though it was inside my head, but I couldn't hear much of the band in back of me, although I knew they were there. All the other instruments sounded like they were way off in the distance; I got the same sensation you'd get if you stuffed your ears with cotton and talked out loud. Then I began to feel the vibrations of the reed much more pronounced against my lip and my head buzzed like a loudspeaker. I found I was slurring much better and putting just the right feeling into my phrases - I was really coming on."

Mezzrow may have been of somewhat marginal musical talent, but in the 30s he presided over the The Disciples of Swing, one of the earliest integrated bands. He organized many important jazz sessions amongst players who were truly talented, and then of course gave them the party favors too. As well as being a viper, he is also remembered for his memoirs of Jazz's early history, called Really the Blues. A passionate defender of the rights of African Americans, he did tend to use some crude stereotypes even as he praised the talents of the Black musicians around him. He became so closely tied to the Harlem scene that he was even listed as "negro" by the WWII draft boards.

In the end, it was his love of reefer and his desire to supply it to his musically talented friends that was his undoing. Entering the back door of a jazz club at the 1940 World's Fair, he was frisked by a narcotics officer looking for another dealer. He was found to be carrying a number of joints he planned to give away to the musicians. Under the laws passed in the early days of the modern drug war, he was convicted and sent to Riker's Island where he played in the prison band. He spent time as a record producer, but a couple more jail sentences sent him to Paris, haven for so many expatriate jazz musicians to this day. It was there he died in 1972 at the age of 73.

Mezz's story reminds us of the influence and importance of marijuana in the formative days of Jazz, and how for a time the 'viper' was a hero, not a villain. I can't help but compare the way the viper appears in The Viper's Drag to the infamous anti-drug PSA which showed on TV when I was growing up, where a drug dealer talks about how he loves getting kids hooked and then actually morphs into a snake. Sometimes in fighting the drug war, the tendency is to focus on the example of nonviolent drug users wrongfully sent to jail for victimless crime, but we should also remember the nonviolent drug dealer who is deprived of their life and liberty too.

Other sources:
Sherman, Carol et al. Highlights: An Illustrated History of Cannabis. Ten Speed Press. Berkeley: 1999.

(I would like to hear from you if you enjoyed this short article. I did not see an entry on Mezzrow in Erowid's Character Vaults and thought some might enjoy reading about him here.)