Pubdate: Tue, 10 Jul 2001
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2001 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Amy Waldman

A RAVAGED MUSICAL PRODIGY AT A CROSSROADS WITH DRUGS

The judge in State Supreme Court in Manhattan stared sternly through her 
glasses at the defendant, whose body trembled. "You have been around this 
planet for a long time, and you've been using drugs for a fairly 
substantial amount of time as well," she said. "What I want is for you to 
go and get some help with this problem."

She was giving Gil Scott-Heron a choice. He could go into a lengthy drug 
rehabilitation program. Or he could go to state prison.

Mr. Scott-Heron, the musician, writer, spoken-word poet and activist whose 
politically pointed lyrics in the 1970's helped give rise to rap, reached a 
crossroads on July 2. After years of reports about his drug use, and after 
10 days in jail, the gaunt 52- year-old pleaded guilty to felony possession 
of cocaine, and agreed to enter a residential treatment program in September.

In return, Mr. Scott-Heron, the onetime prodigy whose albums full of 
anthems about race, economics, love and addiction have found fans across 
several generations, was allowed to leave the country for a European tour 
that was already supposed to have been under way.

That moment of courtroom reckoning has inspired dismay among friends who 
see him as a victim of punitive drug laws, and hope among others who want 
him to get help, but little surprise. Mr. Scott-Heron has always denied 
having a drug habit, and continues to do so, adamantly. "Most of the people 
who comment, I've never smoked a joint with," he said. But friends, 
relatives, fans and professional associates have concluded differently. 
Cocaine, they believe, particularly crack cocaine, has had him in its grip 
for years.

His body, if nothing else, would seem to give him away. His cheeks are 
sunken, many of his teeth gone, his physique emaciated, his deep, rumbling 
voice sometimes slurring into unintelligibility. A reviewer described him 
as "a raggedy old man." A fan wrote on the Internet last week: "Life, and 
the elements within, has beat the brother down pretty bad, as many of you 
who have seen him perform recently will attest."

Mr. Scott-Heron is certainly not the only famous person to battle 
addiction, or even the best known. His case, like that of Robert Downey Jr. 
or Darryl Strawberry, shows how fame adds an excruciating public cast to 
private disintegration, but also how it can insulate a person against the 
worst consequences of his habit. Drug user or not, Mr. Scott- Heron is 
still a profitable commodity to many people, whether promoters, publishers 
or band mates, who know that to confront him about his drug use could mean 
losing his favor.

Mr. Scott-Heron said in an interview last week: "The people who have the 
most access to me -- people who I've played music with for 20 years -- the 
fact that they're still around, either they have the I.Q. of a plant or I 
don't have a problem." He pleaded guilty, he said, only because he had to 
keep his tour commitments: "I had to say what I had to say to go where I 
needed to go."

When he began his career with an explosive brilliance, there was no hint 
that a judge would be deciding his fate 30 years on. Born in Chicago, 
raised in Tennessee and New York, he won a scholarship through his writing 
to the prestigious Fieldston School in the Bronx. He went on to Lincoln 
University in Pennsylvania, and at 19, wrote his first novel. At 21, he 
released his first album, which included the iconic "The Revolution Will 
Not Be Televised." He was, wrote Nat Hentoff, the columnist, a "protean 
phenomenon."

He set angrily political poems about black pain and what he regarded as 
American hypocrisy to funk. He wrote of the race into space in "Whitey on 
the Moon":

A rat done bit my sister Nell.

(with Whitey on the moon)

Her face and arms began to swell.

(and Whitey's on the moon)

I can't pay no doctor bill.

(but Whitey's on the moon) . . .

He penned lyrics about Watergate, illegal immigrants, and, in one of his 
biggest hits, "Johannesburg," apartheid. He rapped about Ronald Reagan in 
"Re-Ron."

And he empathetically addressed addiction's cost and chokehold. "You keep 
sayin' kick it, quit it, kick it quit it! God, did you ever try to turn 
your sick soul inside out so that the world could watch you die?" he wrote 
in "Home Is Where the Hatred Is."

People said hearing his music changed their lives. In 1975, he was the 
first artist signed to the Arista label, where he made 11 albums. He was 
seen as a legend in the making.

Today, although rappers like Chuck D of Public Enemy cite his early work as 
a major influence, he is seen as someone who did not make it as far as his 
talent merited. Many artists become less productive or reliable over time 
even without drugs, and many struggle with record labels, as Mr. 
Scott-Heron has. (He was abruptly dropped by Arista in 1985.)

But it seems likely that some of his promise was squandered through drugs. 
Since 1984 he has made only one new studio album, the 1994 "Spirits." He 
has continued to tour regularly, and sell out shows often, but also has 
earned a reputation for failing to show up for concerts. And he has been 
arrested on drug charges in England, Canada and Australia as well as New York.

"Has anyone seen Gil Scott-Heron?" one fan wrote on the Internet after Mr. 
Scott-Heron did not appear for a performance.

Another fan wrote, "This happens a lot when Gil is supposed to play," 
adding, "Go and see him before it's too late."

Still, Mr. Scott-Heron has maintained enough function, including writing a 
nonfiction manuscript that he says is 800 pages, to cite it as evidence 
that he is not a regular drug user. "It's hard to have a habit when you're 
working all the time," he said at the apartment in a drug-infested part of 
Harlem where he lives.

Prickly when the subject of drugs arises, he is otherwise charming and 
funny. An avid sports fan, he said of the Mets, "I think they're having a 
worse year than I am."

To his younger half brother, Denis Heron, that ability to get by is the 
problem. "I guess we were hoping he would hit bottom, and we could jump 
in," Mr. Heron said. "But he's a survivor. He's learned how to hover right 
above crashing."

The challenge that his situation has posed for his family, friends and the 
criminal justice system is whether, and how, to force help on someone who 
denies that he needs it.

"I sort of lost interest," said Mr. Heron, who barely sees his brother 
anymore, adding that he saw nothing to do "short of grabbing him and 
throwing him in a room and saying, 'One of us isn't walking out until we're 
both sober.' "

In the end, Justice Carol Berkman of State Supreme Court did resort to 
coercion -- threatening prison to force treatment.

"He didn't want to do this, he had to be pushed," said Mr. Scott-Heron's 
Legal Aid lawyer, Robert Kitson. "He had to be put in jail and threatened 
with the end of his tour before he went into rehab."

Outside the courtroom, the person pushing the hardest has been Mr. 
Scott-Heron's former girlfriend Monique de Latour. She has confronted his 
band mates for their failure to act. She has urged promoters not to book 
him, saying that supplying him with cash supported his habit. She has 
pressed prosecutors to put him in treatment. And on July 2, she faxed 
Justice Berkman a letter arguing for rehabilitation, not prison.

Many of Mr. Scott-Heron's friends see her as a woman scorned venting her 
fury. They say that she is trying to ruin his life, and that she has 
betrayed him by publicly discussing his drug use and helping ensnare him in 
the criminal justice system.

Ms. de Latour is "vicious and malicious," said Alistair Abrahams, Mr. 
Scott-Heron's manager in Europe, who was busy last week trying to 
reassemble the pieces of a tour. Mr. Scott-Heron said he had not seen Ms. 
de Latour in 18 months, and called her a "very unhappy woman."

Ms. de Latour, an artist whom Mr. Scott-Heron met in Australia in 1995, is 
undeterred. "If they want to blame me, that's fine, if it's going to get 
Gil some help," she said. His band mates "think he needs to be on stage, 
whatever it takes," she said. "My point is, he may drop dead next week, and 
then you won't have anyone to be on stage."

His band mates talk not about drugs, but about Mr. Scott-Heron's 
generosity. Larry McDonald, who plays in Mr. Scott-Heron's band, Amnesia 
Express, said, "No matter how people perceive someone with problems like 
this, he is one of the nicest people I've ever been around, and probably 
the closest I've come to working with true genius."

Mr. Scott-Heron's case poses a question: does friendship mean helping 
someone to live as he wishes or forcing him to live as he should? Some 
friends see drug use as a personal choice. "I think someone should be free 
to do to themselves what they wish," said Jamie Byng, publisher of 
Canongate Books, which is reissuing Mr. Scott-Heron's novels and poems in 
the United States. He blamed "the absurd war on drugs" for Mr. 
Scott-Heron's plight.

Mr. Scott-Heron's lawyer agreed, pointing out that his client now has a 
felony on his record for possessing 1.2 grams of cocaine.

Mr. Byng did say that he has so worried over Mr. Scott-Heron's health over 
the years that he feared getting a call saying he was dead. But, he and 
others said, it was not their problem to solve.

"I didn't realize that playing God was something I was supposed to do," 
said Larry Gold, the owner of S.O.B.'s, the club in Manhattan where Mr. 
Scott-Heron often plays.

Some argue that there has always been a connection between drugs and art. 
And some wonder how sobriety would affect Mr. Scott-Heron. "There's 
certainly the possibility that when somebody sobers up they're not as 
vital, not as creative, not as charismatic," said Anuj Desai, editor of 
Black Book magazine, which published a rhyming piece by Mr. Scott-Heron 
this month.

It is hard to assess Mr. Scott-Heron's creativity now, because so little of 
it has been made public of late. The manuscript of his latest book, "The 
Last Holiday," which he has been working on for at least eight years, has 
just been delivered to his publisher. It is his extended riff on a tour 
with Stevie Wonder in the early 1980's to help make the Rev. Dr. Martin 
Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday.

The success of an 18-to-24-month rehabilitation program, the length the 
judge suggested, is hard to predict. Long-term treatment is considered the 
most effective, but coerced treatment has yielded mixed results.

Last week, Mr. Scott-Heron, overjoyed to be free, and free to tour, seemed 
unconcerned. In September, he said, he would try to convince the judge that 
she had been wrong about him. If not, he would agree to her conditions -- 
rehab or prison.

Asked if he had ever been in a program before, he replied, "I was on 
'Saturday Night Live.' "
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