December 2007 | blackfilm.com | features | THE BUCKET LIST An Interview with Beverly Todd

HONEYDRIPPER
An Interview with Danny Glover
by Brad Balfour

Danny Glover Enjoys Rocking Out In ‘Honeydripper’

As one of America's pre-eminent Black actors, Danny Glover has made films that are both incredibly entertaining and commercially successful such as the "Lethal Weapon" series and ones of critical and political importance such as "The Color Purple." Having racked up enough years of experience to make enough films that are both entertaining and intellectually engaging, Glover has the luxury of doing films that he wants to do regardless of the budget or the marketing.

Besides Glover's film career, he's been an outspoken political and social activist. It's that intersection between entertainment and activism that form the common bond between Glover and veteran director/screenwriter John Sayles, and in turn, made their recent collaboration, "Honeydripper," such a satisfying union of social commentary and joyous energy.

And since American pop music basically has its origins in the African American history (and continues to be energized by its ongoing dynamic with cultural innovations), "Honeydrippers" personalizes a crucial moment in modern music, that point when rhythm and blues emerges in its own right just as the civil rights movement starts to gain steam.

Set in 1950s Alabama (where it was also filmed), Glover plays piano player Tyrone "Pine Top" Purvis, the owner of a failing jazz/blues club—squeezed by the competition that's switching to R&B— until he hires a young electric guitarist (talented newcomer Gary Clark, Jr.) who initially deceives the audience that he's Guitar Sam but ultimately wins over the audience and saved Glover's butt. Woven into the tale is an uncanny look at the rural Black lifestyle and the underlying anguish of segregation in the South.

Oscar-nominated Sayles' 19th feature includes such other major names as Charles S. Dutton, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Stacy Keach, Mary Steenburgen,Yaya DaCosta and Sean Patrick Thomas as well as such notable musicians as Keb' Mo' and Dr. Mable John.

Q: This movie makes so many salient points but is there one particular reason that you took on this project?

Danny Glover: Well, I had a chance to work with [director] John Sayles. I could have worked with John on a couple of other movies, but that didn't work out because I wasn't available. But I had a chance to work with [him here] and really appreciate his work, and that's what it was. He reads the story and he reads the narrative. You find yourself moments there.

I like reading the script and then walking away, riding in my car, thinking about the moment. Or going somewhere and all of a sudden waking up in the morning, and saying, "Man..."

When I'm engaged in that way, I know I want to be a part of the experience. My being part of the experience is much more—it's a journey. Doing a film, whether you're working on it for three weeks, or whether you're working on it for 30 weeks, it's still a journey. And it's a journey where you're taking the word off the page and transforming those words into behavior, a character's behavior and relationships.

I always think that I still love acting. I always think that's so fascinating. And when you have the right language that you digest it, that it's expressive in the way that it is, you want to be a part of it. It's simply that. All I had was to simply read the script to understand why you want to be a part of it.

Q: Was there a particular moment in the script or a line of dialog spoken by your character that steered you to doing the project?

DG: Not really. I mean, I see people always think about what we do, we look at the idea of the individual as a character, and what that character's going to play. But when I look at a piece, I look at the story.

I look at the story itself and the relationships within the story. My ideas around work don't just begin with the character. What is the story? And what is the thrust of the story? What does the story say? What does it mean? How does it make me feel?

A character could be sketched as a great character and give all kinds of platitudes and do all this and that. Does that mean that it's a story? It's a story when you start from one place and you meander, you go some other place and you find emotion, character, all the emotions that reside in us human beings, and that's what resonates with me.

Q: Did your experience as a working actor help enhance your experience, change your experience and process in working on this film--with an indie film like this it's a tight schedule without a rehearsal period—was that interesting and challenging?

DG: I use the same process. I come prepared, and I come prepared for something magical to happen. I have in my mind an idea of what I want to happen, but when you get with Charles Dutton, Lisa Gay Hamilton or many other fine young actors there, something else happens in the midst. I always come prepared for that. And whether I'm doing "Lethal Weapon" or an independent film or whatever, I'm always prepared for that.

I have a musical theme in most films that I use. I pick my character's musical theme; I was doing a movie about a serial killer and there were two things that got me to where I wanted to go. I was doing pilates. This is 1995, when primarily women were doing pilates. Very few men were doing pilates. And [I was] humming in my mind John Coltrane's "Equinox." Those are the kind of things that put me where I wanted to be in the character.

So I would hum "Equinox" and there's always something about the rhythm in there. If you listen John Coltrane's version of "Equinox," it's a classic, a jazz standard. And pilates have given me a center. So everywhere in which I moved—I was always moving one specific place—what I tried to do was physicalize it. The piano gives you a certain physical space to go. It puts you in the center from the piano and everywhere else and from whatever you could imagine in a scene in front of a piano. I love piano players, from Chucho Valdés to McCoy Tyner—I could go on and on.

Q: Does this film make you appreciate realms of music that you haven't been thinking about lately?

DG: I think at this stage in my life I reflect on all the music that I've heard. In 1967, I was listening to Ravi Shankar and Indian music. In 1965, I was listening to Dylan. Then in '67, I was listening to Hendrix and everything else.

So it reflects on all the music. Because my dad's from the midwest, the music that was played around my house when I was a kid growing up, was the music of bebop and John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins, all the music from that point in time--I could go on and on. That's the music I heard during the week because my dad loved all music but, more than anything else, he was a jazz man. The music from my mother was gospel music. And the music that I heard around where I lived--I grew up in San Francisco and Oakland--was blues and everything else.

All that music has, in some sense, a common thread [to it]. First of all, what it makes you feel like. And when I listen to [a blues tune like] "Red House," whether it's Jimi [Hendrix] singing it [It was released in the States on his 1968 release "Smash Hits"], or whoever else is singing it, it makes me feel the same way. So that's the fortunate part of being able to look back at music right now.

I can carry around John Coltrane's "Ascension" in 1967 [which I heard when I was] 20 years old and try to figure out what he was saying in it. Or listen to Bob Dylan and know what he was saying in it, and being able to see how that kind of music reflects on my own life.

Q: So you appreciate the dynamic between the juke joints on a Saturday and gospel on Sunday?

DG: Well, I appreciate the dynamics because I've been in that. I was fortunate--the kind of moral conditioning for me is the story my mother said to us when we were children. [She said] We had to write, "Dear Grandma, how are you?" "Dear Grandpa, are you fine," "I am doing fine" and everything, the letter we sent off and the package.

I will be eternally grateful to my mother and father because I did not have to pick cotton in September. Instead, I went to school in September. It set the whole conditioning of understanding her relationship and her enormous love that she had for her parents. {My mom] was the first to go to school in September in her community and, in her family, to graduate from Paine College a private historically Black college in Augusta, Georgia] in 1942, 65 years ago this year.

So with all due respect, the reason why I'm sitting in front of you is that my mother didn't have to pick cotton in September. And so, in one sense, she left the South, but she never forgot the South, and cherished and embraced her lineage and background.

I had a grandmother who was a midwife. The family matriarch, Mary Brown, my grandfather's mother, was born in 1853. She was a roots healer. She held me in her arms when I was two years old, and she was [about] 97 years old. But all of that's how music plays in that. I've been able to hear music.

I remember when I did [Robert Benton's film] "Places In The Heart" and I read the doxology [a short hymn of praise to God in various Christian worship services], I thought about all the times that I heard the doxology, from the church that I go to in San Francisco to the church that I spent time in in New York when I visited my aunt, to the church that I heard on the back road in rural Georgia as a kid growing up, or as kid when I traveled to the town, or my grandmother's church or my grandfather's church. All those places...it's amazing.

I remember when I read that script [for] that film with Sally Field [she plays a widow fights to keep her farm with the help of Moses--played by Glover], I said, "Boy this is amazing... how many times I've heard this and what conditions I've heard that in, and what it meant at particular points in time. What it meant to me [is that] church is almost over, time to get out of here. All the stuff... It meant in some way the sound of something resonates with you. This whole complex, this kind of cultural interchange around music, and all forms of music is that, it's what has been available to me in the period of the 20th century.

Q: Was your "Honeydripper" character Tyrone Purvis' view of music different from yours because he was a musician?

DG: Music was his tool, this vehicle to get out of this paradigm that had him destined for another life. Music was the one thing that in some sense, sound travels--he could travel with that sound and move with that sound. It was liberating for him because it introduced to him another world, another place, other sounds, more complex ones and challenges that he had to deal with in terms of all that, because he's limited.

I think Tyrone is limited as a musician. He followed the road. He followed the plan. He found himself in a situation where his life changed as a result of that. He made a living. He was pragmatic in the sense of his music, and pragmatic in the sense of his life. This is a pragmatic man, a man who would lead to the point where he has his own business. He's trying to figure out after some boom years during the war, with the segregated armed forces during the war.

The juke joints were the places he hung out in and where he listened to music, to the blues and everything. Now we find that it's a jukebox. And now we find that the music is changing. He is married to not only that music—the music that was the track that he followed—but also he's married to the whole idea that this other form of music that was now creeping up was something that was unacceptable to him. So he finds that, because he is pragmatic, in order to make things change for him, he's going to bring in somebody in order to change the dynamic. He's a businessman in a sense. He's not going to down not fighting. Not Tyrone.

Q: And he wasn't a great musician...

DG: No, he was not a great musician.

Q: But he was good enough not to have to pick cotton?

DG: He's a musician who's going to work—a working musician. It's like there's working actors, [and] working musicians. He's going to get a job. He's going to save his money. He's learned, he's had that experience where the confrontation leads to death and so he's finding a way in which he's moving on to something else. And he keeps moving with the music.

Q: In your experience as a working actor, were able to apply something from your own experience to that of your character?

DG: Well, that's before we get to the moment in 1950. I found that in other ways in my own life that I could carry that [over]; it didn't necessarily parallel with trying to use my [experience] as a working actor or as a working musician, because on the one hand I think music is something that we all have. I mean, the first sounds outside of the voice and spoken word is music, in someone making some sort of sounds musical in some way.

So I found that that's the least of my issues. All the music that I've talked about resonated with me, from blues to everything that I've listened to. Everything has its own... it's a part of my own historic memory and psychic memory, because of the impact it may have had at a certain point in my life.

I told [singer/songwriter] Richie Havens one time, that listening to him helped me in moments in my life. And so I didn't use that as a format. The music itself was a part of that.

What is the emotional life? What are the dangers that the character goes through in that moment that translates to his whole life and what he's gone through? What is that journey, which is a part of the journey [that] is his whole life. Where I'm at at that moment has its own history in terms of how it came from where I came from and how I got to this particular point.

That's what basically for me was challenging—there are parts of my own life that I can use. There's part of [our] own story that we can make in. We have our own life. We have our imaginative life. And we have the life stories that my dad told me. I was in Akron, Ohio, giving a speech and I always made a habit of calling my dad; he died in 2001. This was in 2000.

I made it a habit of calling from wherever I was. After he had gone to dialysis, he would go home and go to sleep and I would call him and talk to him and say, "How ya doin' buddy, what's going on." He was in San Francisco, where I had lived. And so he said, "Where you at, man?" I said, "I'm in Akron, Ohio." He said, "Yeah, I've been to Akron, Ohio." I said, "Oh yeah, dad." He grew up around Cleveland, Ohio. He said, "I spent six months in jail there when I was 18 during the Depression." I said, "What?"

I never heard that story before. I could imagine [it though]. This little guy, he was 5' 4" or 5' 5" (my dad was never more than a tiny man) and what he could have been through then, who he was, I could imagine his life story; what I knew of him, and how much I loved him and how much I appreciated him. So all the times he was saying, "You guys ain't doin' nuthin','' he'd tell me and my brothers, "You guys ain't doin' nuthin' that I ain't done. I know what you're doin." I knew he had a real experience and a real context.

Those are the kind of ways in which I kind of put together the character's life, making the life specific--specific in the moment, and using that story, perhaps as a story that helps define Tyrone's life at a particular moment. 'Cause I think about, man, what it must have been like for a teenager? My dad was born in 1919, so that meant in 1937 he was 18 years old. What it must have been like for a black teenager in the midwest in 1937 being arrested. What all the things that could have happened to him? And look who he is.

Q: Being a black man in a movie set in 1950s Alabama—and not coming from the South—how was it for you going there to work in Alabama?

DG: Well, I was born and raised in San Francisco but I spent so much time in the South as a child. When I say that, I mean when I was six months old my mother left me with my grandmother, her mother, and father. And I came back to San Francisco almost a year later. Then when I was two, my mother sent me and my sister down and it had been a [difficult] year, she was expecting a third child, my brother.

When I actually picked cotton in "Places In The Heart", I picked cotton on my grandfather's farm. I went there and spent the summer picking cotton. I think when my grandfather saw this 16-year old kid, he thought he had a farmer. I trailed my grandfather. I trailed him by memory. I went down there the time I was 8 and when I was 12 and 15.

When I first drove around the country by myself, I was 19. I went to see my grandparents. I drove around the country when I was 22, and went to see my grandparents, spent time there, and even worked on the farm. When I was doing "Master Harold And The Boys" on Broadway in 1992, my grandfather called my mother and asked me to come down there and help him kill his hog. I said "Grandpa, I can't go down there. I'm in a play." I'm in a play, but he expects his big 6' 4 grandson to come down there and do somethin'.

When I lived in New York in 1979 I'd go down there and help build. When the house burned down I built a septic tank that's down there now in that house. I'd refinish the floors, plate tile on there, help them, worked around the farm. So the South is not something new, even though I grew up [in San Francisco].

Q: When Jackie Robinson [the first African-American major league baseball player of the modern era; born in Georgia but grew up in Pasadena] went down there for the first time, he couldn't believe it.

DG: I was a child and it's how your parents, particularly your mother, situate you. I have this kind of memory, a subliminal memory, of my experiences--I didn't know it until after my mom passed and my sister and I talked about it--how we went on the train when I was two and my sister was just starting to walk and how she would run out and my mother would go out and grab her and sit her down. And I would run off, and she'd curse us out, basically, because we just kept on running on the train all across the country.

I spent so much time with my grandparents. Of course, when I came down to Georgia and saw the segregation, my response was anger. I'd come from a different situation. I remember when I went down the road, there in 1962, I walked into a place that said clearly on the front "Negroes in the Back" and I walked through.

My grandfather heard about it, and he told me, "Son, how do you want to go home? How do you want to go home... Do you want to go home with you [unharmed], or do you want to go home another way?" You know what I'm saying? He was very explicit when he implied what kind of way.

I'd come down there with the groups that forged my identity at the time I was 15 years old, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. All those groups there forged my identity. And when I came down there I was mad, in a sense. But I also saw changes happening and probably the changes that were happening to Jackie Robinson were the changes that Jackie Robinson didn't see when he first went to the South.

Q: What do you think about today's music?

DG: Well, I think that today's music is a derivative of everything that we've talked about. Everything in today's music is derivative. And I'm saying, however we may see the commercial aspect or the commodified aspects of that, it's still a derivative of something.

You look at early hip-hop. You listen to some of those spoken-word artists. I had a chance, when I was a young student out of San Francisco State 40 some-years ago, to listen to poets like Sonya Sanchez, or a friend of mine, Reggie Lockett, and other poets that would come out there and read poetry all the time.

Before that, I used to go to all the little coffee houses in San Francisco that were an extension of North Beach, where beat poets would come out, and a new generation of poets after beat poets, and sit around there two blocks from my house. I grew up in Haight-Ashbury, listening to poets. I'm going there 16 or 17 years old in a coffee house, sit down there and listen to poetry, and listen to somebody who had a guitar and began to sing.

Those are the kinds of forms, when I say hip-hop and everything else, that comes out of that. But they come out of these musical genres and historical genres at the same time. The intensity of music in its translation from rural to urban is exemplified through Motown and other companies. It's intensified through another struggle that brought about the evolution of hip-hop music.

We know where hip-hop, spoken-word music, came from and we know what it was about. It talked about the specific conditions that young people are having to deal with. And it was their expressive form of talking about those experiences in their own voice. It couldn't take the voice of 20 years ago, or 10 years ago. It had to take their own voice.

Now in a commodified world, where consumption becomes important in a different kind of way, and consumption becomes the kingpin in everything else, how do you market this and sell it? And it's unfortunately sold by the "blink this, blink that" by the same [forces] that often happen with [this] culture: sex and violence.