One Long Tune: The Life and Music of Lenny Breau

Chapter 7. Turn Out the Stars: December 1972—1976

7. Turn Out the Stars December 1972–July 1976 “I stopped progressing in a business sense when I started on drugs. I wasn’t playing as much and not at the bigger places, but I still feel my mind kept on learning. I could always play things in my mind.” —Lenny Breau1 After leaving Richard, Lenny returned to Winnipeg to visit his children . On December 13, in search of heroin, he connected with a drug dealer in a downtown tavern, and the pair took a cab to a drug house in Winnipeg’s North End. Lenny scored and returned to the cab, but as the vehicle pulled away, it was stopped by the police who had been watching the house and had seen the buy go down. Lenny was frisked, arrested, and taken to jail where he was charged with possession of heroin. Valerie covered Lenny’s bail, and the court remanded him until January 8, 1973. News of Lenny’s arrest spread quickly through the city, fuelled by articles in local papers detailing the bust. Lenny had not lived in 166 Winnipeg for five years, but he was still a hometown celebrity and his public, while aware of his eccentricities, was shocked to find out that he was a heroin user. Melody and Chet were taunted at school while the parents of their tormentors shook their heads in disgust. “The attitude was like ‘Hometown Boy Wonder Disappoints Winnipeg ,’ sort of thing,” says Valerie. When Lenny appeared in court in January, the judge set his trial date for March 21, and Lenny returned to Toronto for a date at George’s Spaghetti House with Montreal bassist Michel Donato and drummer Claude Ranger. Globe and Mail critic Jack Batten wrote that the trio’s sets were comprised of “good, swift inventive jazz” played for an audience largely made up of “dazzled and envious fellow musicians.”2 Lenny’s lawyer had his trial date pushed ahead to May 10 and Lenny remained in Toronto, working frequently with Billy Meryll. Meryll’s girlfriend was then working in Vancouver and she arranged for Lenny and her partner to come to the city to play a two-week stint in early April at a jazz club called The Nucleus. They opened on April 5, using a local drummer named Al Weirtz and received a glowing review in a local newspaper, which read in part, “[Lenny’s] crisp and articulate style is a mellow pleasure for the ear, the mark of a craftsman whose constant inventiveness should delight guitar aficionados of all persuasions.”3 A few weeks later, Lenny returned to Winnipeg for his hearing, justifiably concerned that a conviction would earn him the sort of stiff jail sentence typically handed down by the courts in Canada at that time for possession of heroin. Fortunately, his lawyer managed to persuade the judge that Lenny had turned his life around in the months since the bust, and presented him with an affidavit from a Toronto clinic to prove that he had been enrolled in a methadone program since January. This apparently swayed the judge, who handed down a two-year conditional sentence after telling Lenny, “you must not indulge in this sort of thing because you are just destroying yourself.”4 The ruling included a proviso stating that Lenny must report regularly to a probation office and continue his methadone treatment at a certified clinic in whatever town he happened to be. This was an enlightened and anomalous sentence at a time when possession of heroin was usually punished with lengthy jail time. Still, it did little to help Lenny with his problem, which Turn Out the Stars 167 despite his lawyer’s contention, had not disappeared. In fact, audience members at the Nucleus gig say that while Lenny played well during his string of dates there, both he and Meryll were obviously stoned on heroin some nights. Therapy was not part of treatment in most methadone clinics; addicts were simply given a supply of the drug and told to move along after little more than a pep talk. Nor did clinics monitor their clients, which explains how Lenny could be using heroin in Vancouver while being officially registered in a methadone program in Toronto. The judge had, in effect, given Lenny a state-sanctioned license to procure methadone—a drug that he had used almost exclusively for recreational purposes for three years—with great...