Free The Good Life by Tony Bennett Page A

rid of the steel helmet and the rifle that I’d been carrying around all those months. We were “billeted,” as they called it, in a fabulous house in Mosbach, one of many houses that the invading army had taken over from the conquered Germans. The place was a three-story mansion that had been owned by a local beer baron—it was right behind his brewery—and he was so rich he had a piano on every floor. We weren’t exactly the gracious uninvited guests, to tell the truth: we really messed the place up.
    Not long after V-E Day the band was moved about twenty kilometers east to a town called Kunzelsau. We set up shop in what they called “the castle,” a beautiful old structure that looked like a schoolhouse. I shared a room with Manning Hamilton, one of the band’s trumpeters, who also sang in the quartet. The house in Kunzelsau had been owned by an elderly banker, and though he didn’t have a brewery in his front yard, he had something even better: a small farm.
    We’d been living on C rations for so long that we’d almost forgotten what real food tasted like. You can’t imagine how good fresh fruit and vegetables taste after months of army food. The old banker also had a few chickens, and he came around and begged us not to kill them. We promised we wouldn’t, for a very practical reason: we’d rather have the eggs for breakfast every morning than a single chicken dinner. Each morning we waited for the hens to lay an egg or two and there was always a race to snatch them. I’ll never forget how wonderful genuine eggs tasted after eating the army’s powdered ones for so many months. It was grand!
    We were having a high old time in Kunzelsau. The army had hastily put up signs all over the area directing other groups of soldiers to this battalion or that headquarters. We took all the direction signs for the 255th Regiment band and stuck them every which way so that no one could find us. We were like phantoms: the only guy who knew where we were or where we would turn up next was the officer who handed Marlin our daily assignments. Once a week we’d go down to headquarters and pick up essentials like underwear and food, and then we’d hurry back to our house. We were free to jam all day long. It was a glorious time.
    We didn’t even mind that the paymasters couldn’t find us. In fact, when George was about to be shipped home, he received a check for $875, a fortune for a soldier back then.He got his entire year’s salary all at once because no one had known where to find him. Money wasn’t important because there wasn’t much to buy anyway.
    What was important to us was getting down to the PX to pick up our allocation of cigarettes. It wasn’t only that we smoked a lot, which we did; cigarettes were the “legal tender” of the time. You could get anything you wanted with cigarettes. Anything. Jack Elliott, the pianist with my second army band, traded twelve cartons of smokes for a really fine camera, a prewar Leica. Red Mitchell, who played in the band, found an old German violin maker who agreed to make him a bass fiddle in exchange for fifteen cartons. That deal worked out spectacularly for both of them—the violin maker gradually bartered the cigarettes into a fully outfitted machine shop, and Red Mitchell became one of the great bassists in jazz history.
    We moved again sometime in June, this time to Seckonheim, a small town between Heidelberg and Mannheim. The band kept growing as we found more and more good musicians who wanted to join up with us. The most special to me was Freddy Katz, who played the piano. He would have a very meaningful impact on my life. By now we were a full-fledged “big band” and had worked out a regular routine. Late in the afternoon, just when it was getting to be quitting time for the troops, a big army truck showed up at our house to pick us up. The driver knew where we were supposed to be playing that day and we’d all pile into the truck with our gear and drive