From VOCATION AND CAREER IN CONFLICT: AN ANTIMEMOIR (March 25):

One New Years Eve--it must have been 1957--I was in the band barracks dayroom, by myself. Drunk. Everybody was out on a gig. Even the CQ.

New Years Even is the biggest night of the year, for a musician. The phone rang. I answered it. It was a bar on the Dallas Highway, the Turf Club, needing a drummer.

I said nobody was there but me, and I was drunk. They said, "Can you play drums?" I said, "Yes, but I don't have a set of traps." They said, "We've got the traps. Stay put and we'll send a cab for you."

I had never played a set of traps before, but how hard could it be? All you had to do was play snare drums, tom-toms, and cymbals with your two hands, play sock cymbal with your left foot, and play bass drum with your right foot. Drunk.

The bandleader was Bobbie Nelson, of nearby Abbott, Texas. You might have seen a picture of Willie Nelson in an Abbott Panthers baseball cap.

Bobbie played "Tiger Rag" and "Beer Barrel Polka" on the piano so fast I couldn't keep time, and the bouncer threw me out in the road, where an NCO, driving back to the base, picked me up.

I passed out drunk in the drill field, trying to crawl back to my barracks. I don't remember if I puked in the Good Samaritan's car.

Albert Ayler was in an Army band.

They say his chops were so strong you could hear him across the base, above the rest of the band, when the band practiced on the drillfield.

Bicycle Horn, they called Ayler. The musicians of Cleveland, where he was from, wouldn't play with him.

John Coltrane played with him. Roland Kirk played with him. His brother, Donald, played with him.

I called a book BICYCLE HORN one time.