A Former Drummer’s Ode to Seamy Side of the Street

“I wish I’d lived back then,” David Higgins said wistfully. “I wish I’d played back then.” The drummer-turned-playwright’s ode to the be-bop era is “Bad Dreams and Be Bop,” a ‘50s-set story on the life and death of a driven, drug-addicted jazz drummer. Co-directed by Darrell Larson and Suzanna Styron, it opens tonight at the Gene Dynarski Theatre.

“When I played, I wished I could do it 24 hours a day,” Higgins said. “Sometimes I’d practice for eight or nine hours, just like this character. That’s all I cared about. At the time I started writing ‘Bad Dreams,’ I was playing in lounge bands, Holiday Inns. When you’ve been playing in rock ‘n’ roll bands for so long, struggling to make a buck, you see those guys and think, ‘I could do that for six months, make a steady paycheck.’ But we were like a live jukebox, playing the top hits of the day--and wearing three-piece suits. I ended up spending most of my paycheck on the bar bill.”

Although the playwright admits that he still likes “to drink a lot,” he considers himself far removed from the characters he portrays: “There was sort of a fashion at the time to be self-destructive. Charlie Parker was the be-bop superman. He could drink more than anyone, shoot more skag (heroin), was a notorious womanizer--and he played his sax better than anybody before him . . . or since. Everybody was trying to emulate him, thinking that to play like Bird you had to be like Bird. So they OD’d, ended up in sanitariums or jail.”

Although his clean-cut, boyish looks belie it, Higgins (who took up the drums at 13) credits his own “not altogether respectable” past for a familiarity with the darker side of the music world.

“When you work in bands for 15 to 20 years, you’re in the seamier side of society--and I’ve seen a lot of those seamier things firsthand. I’ve never dealt drugs, although I’ve certainly taken them. But I never liked them that much.

“I’ve known guys who’ve gone to jail for dealing drugs, but I never got involved. And I never went around with a tape recorder to research ‘Partners’ (about three drug dealers planning to murder their partner). You just sit around and listen, you hear a lot of stuff--and you don’t have to implicate anybody.”

Except, perhaps, himself. Higgins recalled that when “Partners” (which had two local stagings in 1987) premiered at the Actors’ Theatre of Louisville, the reaction was largely antagonistic.

“A lot of people canceled their theater subscriptions or walked out (on the play),” he said. “It was the way the characters talked about the women that was so offensive.

“It was all stuff I’d heard before. Guys hanging around bars--well, basically, that’s the way they talk. One lady who was drunk said to me, ‘How could a nice boy like you write a play like that?’ The notoriety was nice, but I didn’t expect it. And doing interviews is OK, but there is some pressure to try to sound articulate, not (be) as profane and crude as I usually am.”

He smiled. “I like writers like Thomas McGuane, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, Norman Mailer, John Irving--people who get off on the seamier side of life. That’s the part that interests me. I live in the black part of Pittsburgh, a pretty decadent location. There’s a bullet hole in the kitchen; I never repaired it because I kinda like it. But the gangs now. . . . Crack--wow. They’re giving drugs a bad name. I hate to sound like I’m on Nancy Reagan’s bandwagon. But when you see what’s going on, people getting killed. . . . “

Although he’s capable of finer sentiments (“Bad Dreams,” he said, “is really about someone learning how to love another human being. Of course, as soon as he falls in love, he’s dead shortly thereafter”), Higgins admits that a degree of menace is par for the course.

“I feel comfortable with that, because I know how to react to those people. But I didn’t grow up that way. My parents are both very well-educated Tennesseans, Christians. I don’t think they’ve ever read my plays. My father was a technical writer, a newspaper editor when he was younger and a real nice guy. It’s hard to believe he’s my dad. My environment is what shaped me, certainly not my parents. They’re very devout. Actually, so am I. I pray constantly.”