Original subtitles

What Gil Scott Heron's work means to me as a poet, as a writer, as a

storyteller, as a truth teller, it means everything.

It means the most. It means that we can do this.

Gil Scott Heron in the universe was a quasar. You know, it's like an

interstellar event of music.

You will not be able to stay home, brother. The revolution will not be

televised. It's funny and like...

You laugh and you go, ooh, at the same time.

We're not all brothers and sisters, obviously, because if we were, we

wouldn't be, like, being fire hosed and everything. So Gil Scott Heron expressed

that in the music.

What happens oftentimes is that when people decide they're going to be poets,

they go out and try to find words that nobody understands but them. We decided

that if you were trying to be a poet and you really wanted to communicate, you

couldn't really use terms that no one else understood except you.

If you did that, you should write a diary.

I see Gil Scott Heron as another Bob Marley or a failure of America, and I

think that he's making a very positive contribution to the ongoing existence of

humanity.

All right, how's everybody?

A junkie walking through the twilight.

One of the most important aspects of Pieces of a Man is the fact that it's

music that delivers a message. It's message music.

And that really fit into 1971 in the sense that you had Marvin Gaye's What's

Going On, you had Sly and the Family Stone with There's a Riot Going On, and

of all those other albums that were around that year.

that have had historical impact, that are still being discussed to this day.

There was only one album that came out on an independent label out of the blue,

and that was Pieces of a Man.

In just taking the words of that title, Pieces of a Man, both the

strength and the vulnerability of a man, the soulfulness, the

creativity, the beauty.

All of the aspects that can make up a man are in this record.

The sort of identity that black music was starting to take on with pieces of a

man, you know, one year, two years, three years, four years later, you're

starting to see a whole new black music environment that

didn't really involve the white power structure.

Pieces of a Man is a litany to black manhood, and it is a

tribute to two people. One, of course, is Brian Jackson.

And the other, of course, is to Gil Scott Heron, who kept opening up his

heart and opening up his heart and opening up his heart.

Him and Brian Jackson don't leave you any choice with that collaborative.

weaving of melody and cadence and rawness.

Pieces of a man established the sound that Brian and I were able to continue

with because of his songwriting and arrangements.

This was something that helped to establish us as songwriters and as

artists. Brian Jackson is the other half of Gil Scott Heron. He knew what Gil was

doing. He heard his musicality. He knew the chords he was using. He knew the

rhythm. He knew the timbre. He knew where the voice rested. He knew where

the stories were coming from. So he was able to say, right, I'm not touching

this, but let me just shape it because I know what he's doing.

I am Brian Jackson, and I'm a father, a musician, and a

student.

My parents, there was always music in my house.

I used to sit in front of their hi-fi system, and I just used to rock back and

forth to the music that I heard.

Some of my favorites were drummers, drummers like Max Roach, Kenny Clark.

I wanted to be that guy that made those sounds.

Ironically, around the same time that my parents separated, I wanted to learn how

to play. It started out being drums, and she was like, no. So we settled on the

piano.

When I was seven, and I was still bugging her every day, practically, she

finally told me that it was okay for me to take lessons.

I went and I took a lesson, and she taught me the scale.

And I was like, in heaven.

One day I came home from school, and she leads me into the living room, and there

was this larger-than-life spinet piano.

You know, I'll never forget that.

Well, I was 11 years old at the time. You figure 1971, hearing Pieces of a Man

was something that my uncles and older people were heavily into at that

particular time.

Backlogging later on, of course, in sampling and crate digging, you found

out that that was the album that The Revolution...

will not be televised was on.

When people first started to hear the word revolution over here, they wanted

to see it instantly. And when they didn't see it instantly, they said,

well, there's not going to be one.

But information, you see, and information that leads to change takes

place first in the mind. Because before you can change what people do, you have

to change their minds.

And you have to give them information, generally, because they will not change

their minds without information.

Okay,

this is kind of a good setup.

To my left was Bernard Purdy. Ron Carter was kind of directly to my

left, which was a little disconcerting.

Not because he's ugly or anything, but just, you know, because he's Ron Carter.

To Ron's left is Hubert Laws.

And then around to this way, kind of to my right, Burt Jones. And everybody's,

you know, like socially distanced.

These guys were destined to work together.

And the first time that they worked together, they create one of the most

classic albums of the 1970s.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised was twice recorded.

The first time was on Gil's initial album, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox was

its name.

I don't know whose idea it was to do The Revolution Will Not Be Televised a

second time with Purdy and Ron Carter and Hubert Laws playing the way they

did.

It could have been Gil's, could have been my dad's. This is something that we

weren't ready for.

Bob Thiel said, look, I want to record this.

Let's get in the studio and see what happens.

You will not be able to stay home, brother.

You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.

Gil starts reciting the poem, and Ron is like... And

all of a

sudden, Purdy starts playing, and then Hubert chimes in.

Like, Ron is leading this. You know, he's got this.

I'm just sitting there watching these guys do this. Then you hear that there

are key changes that go on, and Ron... At some point, you know, he knows when

it's going to switch, and he looks at Purdy, and they just switch, and now

they're in another key. And Hubert, he hears it, and he just goes with it.

So they're just going through all of these keys just with a look.

The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.

The revolution will not get rid of the nubs. The revolution will not make you

look five pounds thinner because the revolution will not be televised,

brother.

Gil was just going with it, man. He was just going. He just kept reciting it. He

kept reciting it. He was hype.

He was so hype, man, because these guys were like just killing it, man.

The whole texture of that record was based on that kind of in

-your-face truth.

And it was interesting to me that he allowed the music to help carry him

through these words.

Words that were really...

over the top back in the day be effective in helping him get his verbal

point across?

We

wrote

it as a piece of satire, actually, to use all these contemporary phrases and

put them together.

We had an idea that watching television would not accomplish anything.

We wanted them to change the way they looked at things. We could see clearer

without it.

We were the first kids who were kind of targeted by the media. So all the stuff

was sold to us because we had television.

So we got all these products coming at us from white America, which was the

irony of the revolution will not be televised, which was the brilliance of

it. Bernard Purdy is just riffing along with him, doing these like machine gun

fills in between chord changes. And Hubert Laws is just blowing all over it

with explosive riffs. And I mean, the whole thing just was, it's a mind

blower.

The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado,

white lightning, or white people. You will not have to worry about a dove in

your bedroom, the tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.

He's taking jabs at everybody.

Hollywood, y'all ain't no good either.

Politics, y'all ain't no good either. You know, the way he weaves in

television shows and movies and, you know, Tom Jones and country music and,

you know, it's all there.

That's hip-hop. That's what hip-hop does.

predict the winner at 832 on report from 29 districts.

The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be televised. If

you're looking for a connective, a link to modern day hip hop, the opening track

of the album is the most obvious link of what we now call rapping.

No question there was a line between what Gil Scott Heron was doing and then

Public Enemy was doing because I think in a way that made it clearly evident

that there was a bridge. There was that humor.

but also musically what we was doing as the Bomb Squad, you know, resembling

what musicianship was underneath Gil Scott Heron for that whole album.

I think that confidence, even the bombast of hip-hop, doesn't

happen without building upon a legacy of somebody speaking truth to power.

Gil Scott Heron is often thought of as, you know, the father of rap.

And yet I think that, you know, with hip hop, it really begins with a call to the

dance floor. That's what the original emcees were doing.

And it's when hip hop develops a certain level of sophistication where they

really want to reflect what's going on, not on the dance floor, but in the

streets, that Gil Scott's influence really starts to kind of cement itself

within the hip hop continuum.

The revolution will be no rerun, brothers.

The revolution will be live.

While none of us could see the benefit of doing this song over again, by the

time it was over, we just all looked at each other and was just like, wow.

I was born in Chicago on April Fool's Day, April 1st, 1949.

I come from a combination of a black man from...

from Jamaica and a black woman from Jackson, Tennessee.

My father was the first black player for Celtic, probably the first black player

in Scotland. They referred to him as the Black Arrow.

My mother and father were having problems getting along with each other

and my mother was going to have to reorganize herself, relocate. She had my

grandmother take me back to Tennessee with her.

So I arrived in Jackson in late 1950 and was there through 1962.

I was a great believer that my grandmother knew everything.

And my grandmother was fond of Langston Hughes. She used to point out his column

in the Weekly Black Paper. At that time, it was something that we appreciated

because the least educated, the least respected, the least appreciated

characters in those stories always came out on top.

Langston Hughes was one of Gil Scott Heron's heroes, if not the hero.

And we were brought up to disrespect Langston Hughes because Langston Hughes

spoke plainly. He spoke like the common man. We were like, you know, no.

And Gil said, no, that's the voice of the people. That's how we sound.

And Gil captured some of that for our generation.

I didn't want to stay in Brooklyn.

I was in way too much trouble.

another four years in Brooklyn, it would be a miracle.

What I needed to do was go somewhere in the sticks, which Lincoln certainly

qualified for.

When I got ready to go to college, I was looking for someplace that would help me

develop as a writer.

Langston Hughes and Melvin Tolson and Thurgood Marshall and Kwame Nkrumah,

among others, had been students at Lincoln University.

Next thing I know...

This guy with the full size of the room comes in, introduces himself.

He says, hi, how you doing? Like that. How you doing, little girl?

And so he sits down at the piano, doesn't say much, and he starts playing

this song called Peace.

I thought to myself, this guy is a teenager.

How could a guy write a song like this?

Like, do you have any more of those?

And he riffed off a couple more. I couldn't believe it. The depth of...

of maturity, it just blew me away.

And then my mind started, then the wheels started turning.

He told me, look, you know, I've got some melodies and stuff that I've

written.

If you do lyrics, maybe we could hook up.

So I sit down and I play this tune.

And I guess it grabs him, because I saw him unsheathe a pen from his

pocket. A lot of people write melodies and stuff when they have a classical

background, and you couldn't find a way to sing that with three voices.

Bryan Sings followed a pattern, and it made sense.

He stuck to the idea.

And he says, play it again.

So I played again.

After three plays, there's one thing he said to me that became kind of our MO.

He said to me, well, how does it make you feel when you play it?

Well, it's kind of a tribute, you know, it's a tribute to all of those who came

before us, you know, all the people who made it possible for us to be here. And

he took that and it was a song called A Toast to the People.

That was our first song.

I think with any great artist,

you need to have.

a certain kind of test period, a period when you get together with a

group or some sort of musical situation, some sort of musical collaboration, in

which certain ideas are put to the test for the first time.

That's the role that Black and Blues played for Gil Scott-Heron. We wrote a

lot of songs and tried out a lot of songs with Black and Blues.

So yeah, a lot of things came from...

from that experience.

Their collaboration is Gil's legend.

I mean, everything that we think we know about Gil Scott-Heron is because of

their collaboration.

Ryan would, you know, give him a sort of an emotion or story or some sort of seed

of an idea.

And simply from that, a whole song would be built.

You know, that's how fast they worked.

And that kind of collaborative teamwork doesn't happen often.

I come from the blues. I come from that type of attitude.

I come from Tennessee.

Gil Scott Heron, growing up in the South, he was almost like, I think, a

spring uncoiled.

You see things with your eyes that don't match your ears.

And then what you see with your eyes at that particular time is a straight

out...

unapologetic racism.

Without question, Gil Scott Heron was drawn from the tradition of the blues to

take the conditions of yourself, the conditions of your people, and to put it

into the music and tell it like it is. The blues is the most truthful music

on the face of the earth.

But I decided at that point there that I was going to be an urban bluesologist.

Because it was going to allow me to chronicle things that wasn't nobody else

keeping up with.

You got to remember, he loves words.

He loves to play with words. And putting the ologist next to blues is like

taking something that's very rootsy and elevating it to a level of

sophistication that's supposed to surprise you.

And when he talks about blues, I don't think he's just talking about the blues

structure, the 12-bar blues.

What he's talking about is the blues as this connective, driving, creative force

within Black American expression.

Billie Holiday being the singer and John being the musician was a lot like us.

Obviously, it had to have some blues in it.

So in the end, it turned out to be a blues, but it went like maybe five times

as fast.

Whoever made the decision to record Lady Day and John Coltrane first in the

session was a very wise move because it cements the connection.

that Gil Scott Heron and Brian Jackson and their generation sees as they are

part of the continuum that Ron Carter and Bernard Purdy and Hubert Laws

represent.

I love this song. It's very fun to play.

There's a reason why Gil Scott mentions John Coltrane

and Billie Holiday because those are two artists that put their

emotions about American life into music.

The things he says about John Coltrane and Billie Holiday were of themselves,

understood themselves, and if we want to be better, we have to be like them.

And it's beautiful to listen to because you seldom hear a poet sing to their

muses. It's beautiful to hear.

And it's very personal.

The bass line is in here already.

That's fine, okay? But then when Ron does it, he does this thing.

And it just moves it forward. It's like now it's like a horse.

And then Bernard Purdy comes in with this.

And it's like all just moving. I mean, it's like you could be at the racetrack,

man. Meanwhile, Burt is laying down the chords with me.

Burt is just going, just so easy.

It sounds like the faster the song is, the slower Burt plays.

It's the contrast of all of these things that I think really makes it work.

A dark page in the annals of America has been written to the crack of an

assassin's bullet.

A nation mourns the world grieves.

A man who became 35th president less than three years ago is dead.

I think things turned when JFK was assassinated. The cheers of the crowd

almost muffled the three shots. The assassin's aim is deadly.

The world was going through a lot of changes. And in America, you know, with

the Vietnam War and, you know, politics as such, it was just, it was kind of a

shit show.

Six days of rioting in a Negro section of Los Angeles, left behind scenes

reminiscent of war-torn cities.

The 70s just got us deeper into the morass. And here we are, just barely

in our 20s, looking around and saying, are we going to survive?

The fact that my generation said, no, we're not going to turn the other cheek.

We love you, Dr. King, but we're not going to do it.

Particularly after Dr.

King was assassinated, there were the riots, and we were burning our own

neighborhoods down.

And that jazz music that came through also mirrored that. You could hear the

discordance. So when you listen to Gil's music, you can hear all of that kind of

stuff in there.

By the time I got to college like I had determined that I wanted to write my own

songs as well I already wrote short stories and stuff from time to time. I

started writing poetry and I dropped out of Lincoln University after my freshman

year to write a novel which became the vulture It was about the death

of a drug dealer in the old Chelsea neighborhood and when the people who

were publishing my book

And here we go on Bob Thiel.

He's a record producer.

He's someone who fell in love with the jazz life.

He is being...

coached, guided, schooled by John Coltrane, the pioneer of avant

-garde jazz, the father figure of the whole free jazz movement of the 1960s.

Coltrane opened it up for me by just sitting and talking to me and telling me

what he was trying to do.

To me, it was fate. I mean, Coltrane explained what he was doing, explained

his tone, explained his reason for extending songs indefinitely by

using vamps, what he was trying to do.

And the more I listened, the more I became involved.

You know, he loved his Duke Ellington. He loved Count Basie. He would

eventually work with Louis Armstrong, you know, famously writing the song,

What a Wonderful World, and delivering that to Louis Armstrong, you know. That

was his roots.

He left ABC.

and decided to start Flying Dutchman Records.

So that would have been in, like, 69, 70, and, you know, with no money, which

was completely typical of my father.

And because he was in tune with what was going on in the times, it was

clear to him that Black music would have a very strong identity with Flying

Dutchman. And, you know, one thing led to another, which was obviously Gil

Scott Heron.

would be in the mix.

Gil ran into us in the student union one day, and he said, hey, this guy, Bob

Thiel, approached me about an album of his poetry book called Small Talk at

125th and Lenox.

And we thought, well, yeah, why not?

But Gil wasn't totally sold on the idea, because he wanted to do the music.

So he went to Bob and said, look, I want to do this album, but I'm not really

into this poetry thing. That's not what I do. I'm a singer.

I got a band.

We write music.

And he said, OK, look, I'll tell you what.

It's a three album deal.

You have two albums left.

If this poetry album does OK, we'll think about doing an album.

Bob Thiel found out that he had an artist in Gil Scott-Heron who wasn't

just a poet, who didn't limit himself to the idea of singer or songwriter or

poet or spoken word artist, etc., that he wanted to take full advantage of

that. And sure enough...

I suppose the small talk in the 125th and Lenox did okay.

Spearheaded by the revolution would not be televised. And he decided to record

us. And that's how Pieces of a Man came about.

Bob Thiel was a great one for trying to capture the times by using Pete Hamill

and Robert Scheer and different authors.

He was very interested in recording artists and leaders of various aspects

of the political movements.

And he says, all right, so who do you want on the album?

And I mean, the list, man, was as long as my arm. We want Ron Carter, Stanley

Clark. We want, let me see, Elvin Jones and Wayne Shorter and Herbie

Hancock. You know, just everybody, man.

And he laughed and he said, OK, yeah, I'll tell you what, you know, I'll see

what I can do.

The fact that he's able to get Ron Carter, Hubert Lois and Bernard Purdy.

You know, at the moment that all three of them are at a creative and commercial

height, one phone call and they're there.

Gil was sweating in his own way because he was the

guy whose name was on the album.

Bob Thiel had already labeled him a new black poet.

That's a problem. And now he's a new black singer.

I had had 12 years.

to practice what I did.

But Gil, he really was untested.

There's a tradition in the Black American church when the preacher, in

the middle of his sermon, there's something in a song that will make his

point.

At the rock where I first saw the light And the burden of my heart rose

away It was there by faith I received my sight

And now I am happy all the day When Gil sings a

song, he does that If you're driving through the country On a

lazy afternoon

You know what his singing was, brother, to me?

Fragile. I love the courageous fragility that he put into his

songs and his music. He was always telling us about his heart and how he

felt and how he hurt.

And right now, I feel the thing that I'm most qualified to do is in the field in

which I drew my education, and that concerns poetry and art.

To save the children.

A young girl walking through the twilight.

I'm on my way home.

I left three days ago, but no one seems to know I'm gone.

Home is where the hatred is.

Home is filled with pain and it might not be such a bad idea if I never.

Never went home again.

America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse.

In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out

offensive.

People were coming back from the war, and they were not in good shape.

But because he was so tuned in to his environment and to his people, he picked

up on it.

Home is Where the Hatred Is is a song that Gil and I started working on at

Lincoln University. And when he first played it for me, the thing that struck

me about it was this motif.

It was something about that that transmitted the urgency.

You know, when you hear that, you can't help but feel a little bit tense.

And then when you start to, when the lyrics of the song start to unfold, you

understand that this is the song coming from the perspective of an addict.

You keep saying, kick it, quit it, kick it, quit it, God, but did you ever try?

I knew a guy who was shooting drugs, and some of the things that he questioned

each time he'd get high about, how he needed to change his way of living and

go home and start over, and he couldn't do that because he wasn't ready.

It's speaking from the soul of someone who doesn't want to be a junkie, but he

also doesn't want to live the life that he would be feeling and doesn't want to

experience the pain without some sort of cushion.

That's what's so refreshing about Gil Scott Heron. Nothing was too ugly

to say something about it. We're used to playing this song with an

upright bassist.

When he busts out with electric bass, my mind was completely blown.

But it was exactly what the song needed.

And then, of course, Bernard Purdy added the funk.

Then all of a sudden, we break into the chorus, and he does this for the effect

of it. It's just incredible.

There was no better drummer than Purdy.

There was no better bass player than Ron Carter.

But if you put Ron Carter and Purdy in a room together, it's going to be amazing.

These guys, we had never rehearsed. You know, they just came in the studio, they

unpacked their stuff, and they started playing.

Purdy had never heard this song before.

Ron Carter had never heard this song before. They had sheet music, and the

sheet music didn't tell you to play any of that stuff they played.

It was just chords.

So the chart read like this.

If you were to read the sheet music, that's what you would have seen.

Okay, so all this other fancy nuanced stuff that was in there and Ron Carter

playing this.

I mean, all of this stuff, man, it's extemporaneous. It comes right off the

top of his head.

He's saying in some of his lyrics that because I'm catching nothing but hell,

I'm feeling nothing but low.

And I'm being pushed to.

This white powder.

I'm being pushed to this pain.

I'm being pushed to this darkness.

But he's saying it in such a beautiful and poetic way that it causes the

listener to say, wait a minute.

That whole kick it, quit it part, it certainly was improvised at the end. I

remember Bob Thiel saying, yeah, that kick it, quit it part, you know, just do

that at the end. Just keep saying that over and over again.

Because it wasn't a part of the song.

I think we used to end it by just saying, never go home again, never go

home again, can't go home again, can't go home again.

And I think Gil said a couple of times, kick it, quit it, and Bob was like,

yeah, yeah, that's it, you know. Give me some more of that. And, you know, that's

how it happened.

The closest I can get to explaining how Gil Scott Heron

had been able to write a song like Home is Where the Hatred Is when he was

not drug-dependent. See, there are some poets who are wordsmiths. There are some

songwriters who are tunesmiths.

Gil was a soulsmith, you know? He was able to actually get inside.

of a spirit and tell you what he saw.

It's a sign of the ages.

Markings on my mind.

People don't give Brian Jackson enough credit because Brian Jackson did what

all great producers do, stood back.

He stood back because for him the music was more important than himself.

There were lots of pianos at Lincoln

University. Pianos in the practice room, pianos in the auditorium, pianos in the

chapel. We'd always find one and we'd get to work.

And this one day, I actually came upon Gil as he was sitting at a piano.

I just heard him doing this.

And I said, wow, man, that sounds very plaintive. He says, I don't know where

to go with it, you know?

And I said, well, it's a good start.

Pieces of a Man is the one that is the most poetic, the most emotional.

It really is the centerpiece of the album.

He's not just putting together lyrics to make a record. He's speaking from a

place of real political, social, family

concern. What is the toll?

Jim Crow? What's the toll of slavery?

What's the toll of not having control and power about the protection of your

family and even the ability to keep your children safe?

What's the toll of that?

I don't know if it was Bob's idea or whose idea it was.

Everyone kind of lays out, except me and Mr. Ron Carter.

Of course, when Ron starts playing, he puts some rhythm into it and he goes...

And I'm already grooving. And then he goes.

And I'm like, whoa!

That is so cool.

You know? And I'm like, God, I hope he does it again.

And so after every phrase, Jackie jigsaw pieces.

Tossed about the room.

He keeps doing that, and it's just so haunting.

And giving the piece a signature.

The musicality, the interaction between Brian Jackson and Ron Carter, I don't

think is better anywhere else on this album.

I saw my grandma sweeping.

First scene, grandma sweeping up the pieces. Then the next scene.

The mailman comes and the mailman says, sorry, this is a pink slip.

You know, don't feel bad. It happened to nine other people.

I saw the thunder and heard the lightning.

I felt the burden of his shame.

But kid, that's pretty deep. If you can feel the burden of your dad's shame, you

know.

Shame about what?

And then we get to this part.

And then it's supposed to be a break.

And what does he do?

I mean, I'm supposed to do that, okay? I was supposed to do that.

He did it on the bass, and I'm thinking, how the heck did he do that?

You know, his hands are like, they're massive, you know, and he did it, but

when he did it, it had so much feeling in it. You know, when a piano is just

like... Which is nice, but when he did it, it was like...

You know, I'm like, oh man, I'm finished.

I'm totally finished.

Black maleness was on the ascendancy, and the stronger you looked, the more

able you were able to conquer everything.

That's the image people wanted to put forward.

Not the image of a man who was broken.

That was amazing.

That's an amazing act.

That's a counteract.

There was Gil Scott Heron saying, no, that's all a facade.

That's all up front.

The power of the blues is to both tell it like it is and then to start the

healing process.

And so now the last part.

And now I hear the sound of sirens come knifing through the gloom.

So a man snapped out, right? He tore up that letter. He went crazy. They came in

and took him away.

Right in front of his little...

girl or his little boy.

And this child is recounting this horror.

Well, at the end of that session, man, we were drained. I must have slept for

like a week after that. You know, I was, yeah, I was finished.

Gratified, grateful, and just profoundly confused at what, like, I

just was like, what just happened here? And then we had to wait and find out

what was the result.

i think that different ideas take different vehicles i've written plays

i've written poetry i've written novels i've written songs and some ideas work

best this way and some the other way i'm trying to constantly find whatever

vehicle it is i need you know in order to to uh put this idea with it when

we got that test pressing in our hands the first notes i mean this was a record

this was an album it was a real album

I think what my dad discovered at Impulse was a continuity in the

albums themselves that you could always see on the spine of a record. It was so

easy to identify an Impulse record.

When he went to Flying Dutchman, he had the same intention.

And so with Gil Scott Herring.

His debut album follows this incredible idea of packaging it at a level

of respect and almost reverence for the music within.

And in the case of Pieces of a Man, an extra poem written by Gil Scott-Heron,

which reads as if he had done it right there in the moment when the album was

being created.

Be no bargain day extras on freedom and ain't nobody giving it away.

Echoes from over loud voices get trapped inside bad ass black thunderclouds

and carried to God who sits at the corner of forever.

Accelerating faster until understood.

and used and passed on and used and passed on and

used and... It was really the

first commercial record that began a whole new

expression for, you know, Black music that had melody and

words that were not...

You know, they weren't dressed up like a Motown record or a Stax record.

It was very different.

And I think it opened the doors for a lot of other music that would come out.

The best thing that new generations have to do, they have to study the execution

of the records.

Pieces of a Man and Revolution will not be televised as your anchor one and two.

Even if you don't know anything else, you can start there and at least have a

half conversation.

Pieces of a Man is an album written by two young black men growing up in the

60s and 70s, trying to make sense of it all and trying to put the pieces

together so that we can move on.

The strength of Gil Scott-Heron is that he

does what Hemingway says, the definition of a hero.

Breaks everyone, Hemingway said, but some are strong in the broken places.

And that was him.

Kill Scott Heron was more than just a new black poet.

Kill Scott Heron was maybe one of the oldest black poets I'd ever met at age

19. And one of the greatest.

poets of the 20th century.

And I'm honored to have worked with him.

You know, I mean, it's just like music.

When everybody gets into the groove, you know, like you can see it, you can feel

it. And there's a certain rhythm to the poetry and a rhythm to the solo

performances and a rhythm to the way that you're trying to describe things.

And it lets you know if you're in the group. Of course, you need to have more

attention than you normally need to have to get the music thing over.

But it depends on how you present it. And we try to present it in such a

fashion that it attracts your attention.

tried to heal my broken heart and it might not be such a bad idea if i never

if i never went home again home again home again home again

kick it quit it kick it quit it kick it quit it kick it can't go home again