Jazz poet's final attempt to break through isolation

The Last Holiday

A Memoir

By Gil Scott-Heron

Grove Press.

322 pp. $25

Reviewed by Dan DeLuca

This is a sad book. And not just because Gil Scott-Heron - syncopated jazz-poet and political agitator, astute and empathetic chronicler of the African American experience, and, whether he liked it or not, godfather of rap - died in May at 62 after sacrificing the last years of his life to crack cocaine addiction.

The griot best known for "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and "The Bottle" writes in his prologue that the book's "central focus . . . revolves around experiences orchestrated by Stevie Wonder, a true miracle of talent and concern for his fellow man."

That sentence turns out to be doubly troubling because it hints at the odd, almost starstruck and uncritical way musical movers and shakers will be depicted in the book - whether Wonder, music executive Clive Davis, or even Jackson Browne, who organized the 1979 Musicians United for Safe Energy "No Nukes" concerts where Scott-Heron performed.

And it also turns out to be untrue, because despite his intentions to write a book principally about the experiences with Wonder that so mightily impressed him, Scott-Heron never manages to do that. The book is really a conventional coming-of-age autobiography.

The Last Holiday of the title is Martin Luther King Day, the national holiday that Stevie Wonder campaigned to help establish. Scott-Heron, who will be honored posthumously with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy ceremonies in Los Angeles Sunday night, was an opening act on Wonder's tour for Hotter Than July, his 1980 album that included "Happy Birthday," his hit that called for the establishment of a King holiday. The tour included a Jan. 15, 1981, concert on the National Mall in Washington, where King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963.

There are a few chapters about the Hotter Than July tour toward the end of the book, the high point of which is a description of a young Michael Jackson joining Scott-Heron and Wonder on stage at Madison Square Garden for what must have been a scintillating rendition of Wonder's "Master Blaster."