Everything Happened to Chet

Chet Baker may not have been the most self-actualized human on earth — his drug addiction and basic disregard for the well being of others has become a thing of legend — but boy did he appreciate irony. Recording the song “Everything Happens to Me” during a 1955 European tour, we find Baker in Phase One of his professional life. Still in his twenties, he’s not addicted to heroin, he’s yet to be incarcerated, his trumpet playing is buoyant, his singing soft with androgynous charm, and he looks like a million dollars. He takes on the clever ironies of the song (“I never miss a thing, I’ve had the measles and the mumps”) with the lightest of touches. It’s basically all a lark for Baker; the poor schmuck in the song may be a Grade-A loser but Chet keeps his distance from the guy as if his sorrows might well be contagious.

Baker’s trumpet solo and scat vocal are as contained and lyrical as his balladeering. Yet there’s an undeniable sense of conscious detachment throughout it all as if Baker’s dream-like delivery, both vocal and instrumental, was of more importance to him than any deep emotional commitment to the song’s mordant lyrics. It remains a lovely performance, further enlivened by the sensitive pianisms of Raymond Fol, but it also reminds you how experience had yet to toughen Baker up. (The performance also makes you aware of what a champion compartmentalizer he was. The pianist Baker had brought over with him for the tour, the brilliant Dick Twardzick, had died of a heroin overdose a month before the recording. Not a tinge of sorrow slips into Baker’s take. )

Cut to 1983. By this time heroin, incarceration, a brutal mugging that excised front teeth (never a good thing for a horn player), failed marriages and relationships, and non-stop peripatetic touring that makes Bob Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour” look like a weekend jaunt, had marred Baker’s life. (And just be thankful that I didn’t post a picture of what this former pretty boy looked like by the time he was in his fifties. Each vicissitude seemed to dig a further inch deeper into the lines on his face.)You’d think that “Everything Happens to Me” would be the last song he’d want to revisit. Talk about too close for comfort.

But Baker obviously had a leather-hard sense of humor, or at least he understood how irony could best be used as effective emotional armor. Now, in 1983, the lyrics have become for Baker a bitter echo of the misspent years. (“I guess I’ll go through life catching colds and missing trains” is the very least of Baker’s travails.) If the 1955 performance was a bit too cool, the later version is all too real. Baker sounds beat, yet not broken. After Kirk Lightsey’s gorgeous piano solo, Baker even rouses himself for a halting, yet equally beautiful, trumpet statement. Resilience has the final word. Everything may have happened to this hard-living musician, but luckily hard-won art was the lasting by product.