In Memoriam: Gene “Mighty Flea” Conners 12/28/1930 to 6/10/2010
The author (with hair!) & the Mighty Flea. Leonard Jones on bass, Ralf Heinrich, drums. Frankfurt, Germany, sometime in the mid ‘90s.
He was a tough walking, big talking, hard drinking piece of jazz and blues history. He may not have been a household name, but trombonist, vocalist, and bandleader Gene “Mighty Flea” Conners was true old school. Coming from the fields near Birmingham, Alabama, he took quickly to music and by age 16 was already performing with Lionel Hampton in his big band. Later spells in territory bands led him to Rhythm & Blues and Johnny Otis, and in between stints with Illinois Jacquet, Ray Charles, and Dinah Washington, he served as an assistant coroner in the Korean War, ran a carpet business in California, got into trouble with the mob, lived for many years in Europe, and later owned a dog racing farm in Arizona. He resided for a while in L.A. and got into the studio scene, making recordings with everyone from Sonny & Cher on up. He had close to a dozen children with five wives on two continents and a lady friend most everywhere he went. By the time I got to know Gene, or “Flea”, as we referred to him (the “Mighty Flea” was a nickname awarded him due to his diminutive size and ornery demeanor), he was living with his latest wife and newborn son in a seven-bedroom house in Rheinberg, Germany. An inveterate tinkerer, he had renovated most of the place himself, while tables and chairs he had crafted were distributed throughout his home and his paintings hung on the walls. He had done most of this while being in his mid-60s.
My Time with Flea
My time with Flea began after I had been living in Germany for about three or four years. I was awakened early one morning by a call from my drummer friend Tommy Harris asking if I could fill in for Flea’s regular guitarist in his quartet. Groggy as I was, I jumped at the chance. I had a half hour to get on the train from Frankfurt to Giessen with all my equipment to meet Tommy for a ride up to northern Germany. I must have done well enough on the gig because I ended up working with Flea for the next six years.
The Battle of Berne
I have many memories of my time with the Flea. We did concerts all over Germany as well as in Switzerland, Belgium and Austria. One of my first gigs with him was my most memorable. We were booked to play a week at Marian’s Jazzroom in Berne, Switzerland. Up to that time, I had just played a couple of concerts with Flea. Suddenly, I would be playing my first residency of any kind.
I have to say, being a traveling musician in Europe, at least at that time, was pretty awesome. Except for the border issue – I had to get a special work visa for my stay there – it was first class all the way. We stayed at a top-notch hotel, were well paid and treated to an expensive meal every night, then played at a classy Swiss jazz club in the evening. It all seemed idyllic. Then came the gig.
As I mentioned, Gene Conners was old school. He would start playing a tune and I would have to hope I recognized it, and even more importantly, knew how to play it. If I didn’t, he’d get all in my face and razz me about not knowing the repertoire, yet had never given me a list of his tunes. Furthermore, he kept crowding me on the bandstand, pushing me off to the side, where there wasn’t any room to play. It was all very unnerving and unpleasant.
I called my girlfriend at the time, fed up and ready to quit and go home. Luckily, she was able to talk some sense into me. She told me it was really a great opportunity to perform, not to mention a chance to make some decent money. I decided to suck it up. Luckily, I had brought a real book with me to Berne (for all of you not in the know, a “real book” is book of jazz standards with melodies and chord progressions) and every night after a gig, I’d go through the tunes Flea had called which I didn’t know and shed them. By the end of our run, I had amassed a decent repertoire of jazz tunes, as well as learning some of Flea’s favorite blues and R&B stuff from his Johnny Otis days (for example, he almost always would call “Hand Jive”). More to the point, Gene really began to accept me as a player.
The Good, the Bad & the Ugly
Photo courtesy of Leonard Jones
I am grateful to Flea for many things. He taught me how to be tough, yet supportive on the bandstand. He encouraged me to find my own voice – whenever I started trying to be clever, he would yell at me, “Just play your shit, man!” I learned from him the value of dressing well and, most importantly, to always be on time. He would berate me with stories from his stretch with Ray Charles, who was notorious for leaving latecomers stranded. He was full of tales and would expound on all his exploits, sometimes repeating these sagas when he’d had too much to drink. Once, when I was in a bind, he loaned me a pretty sizable chunk of cash and let me pay it off slowly from my gig money. I often stayed at his house after a concert. There was even a photo of us playing together on one of his walls.
In the end, though, money did come between us. Gene had a habit of paying too little for the gigs we did. Also, for years I had been telling him we should record an album. It seemed he would never get around to it. One day I noticed that he had just released a CD with some other musicians on it. I was devastated. I just couldn’t see working with him again after that and the next time he called me for a gig, it just happened that another friend had offered me one for the same day. I told him I was taking my friend’s gig. We never played together again, though we did stay in touch for a while. Eventually, I relocated to New York and sometime after that Gene and his family moved to Arizona to be with his dogs. I tried a couple of times to track him down but never succeeded.
Now he’s gone. Here’s to you, Flea. I miss you.
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© Russ Spiegel, 2010
www.russguitar.com
russ@russguitar.com
Russ Spiegel was born in Los Angeles, and raised in Santa Monica, California. He studied Composition, Arranging and Guitar Performance at the Berklee College of Music in Boston on a scholarship, and went on to get his Masters degree in Jazz Performance at the City College of New York. Russ is a commissioned composer who has released several CDs, written music for film, TV, and musicals, toured Europe and Asia, and much more.
hey russ
nice reading about Flea. I’m learning a lot more about you by reading yourblog. very interesting.
HOpe to see you soon
michael wolff
ps
i’m interesting in writing a blog. how do you do it? do you do it through a specific website or blogsite?
thanks
HI Michael,
Thanks for your kind words.
As to doing a blog, I think you just need to register with WordPress.com.
In my case, I was asked to do it by the folks at earbits.com and they already had an account there.
Hope to catch up with you soon. Give me a shout when you are back in town, maybe we can grab a beer and/or catch some music.
Russ
Hello, I just read your story about Gene Might Flea Conner. Gene was my Ex-husband and friend. I lived with him in Los Angeles from 1967 to 1975. We had two children a boy (his namesake) and a girl, both now in their forties, and four grandchildren and one great grandchild. He was my manager, (you think you had problems with him!) But he was a genius when he played that horn, he started in the funeral marches in New Orleans about 14 years old, played with Lionel Hampton soon after, lied about his age. His story would make a great movie, but your right, he never became famous, and he should have, he had all the bells and whistles. He was a hard man to love but impossible to hate. Did you know he’d been knighted? Did you know he was inducted into the Jazz hall of fame? Did you know that the museum of Jazz (where ever it is) has asked for his old Conn Trombone, the one I saw him polish a million times way back in the sixties,that he’d already had for years and years, and still had the day he died? Gene did like to talk about himself, but who had more stories to tell. When he was a young man he almost got lynched in San Diego, Calif, for playing “Race-mixing” music in a club he owned. He had to leave town! He wanted to be remembered for his music, and he is, but what he never understood, is that he is remembered for far more, his children love him so, his grandchildren love and honor his memory. Even now his wife of 30 plus years is at home with her 17 year old son, trying to dismantle a life lived full, to give a piece of him to his children, not an easy task. Even if he’d never picked up that old conn horn, he’d have been a success at whatever he did, and we will remember him forever, as Gene, as dad, and as Grampa. Thank you for your story of him, every word was true, and were grateful!
Thank you Gloria so much for sharing this!