*Legendary musician Quincy Jones sat down with Scott Feinberg for the latest episode of the Awards Chatter podcast and during their wide-ranging interview, Jones confessed that the late Ray Charles got him hooked on heroin when he was 15.
“He got me hooked for five months at 15,” Jones said. “After we finished at the Washington Social Club and a couple of other ones, we’d all go down to Jackson Street to the Elks Club. That’s where all the bebop jam sessions were. Nobody got paid. We didn’t give a damn.”
Jones, who was on the pod to discuss his upcoming biopic “Quincy,” said he befriended Charles when they were both teenagers, noting that drug use “goes with bebop,” the report states.
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“When they finished playing they’d go over in the corner and they had it on their thumb,” he continued. “I just snuck in the line and got me a little hit.”
He then dropped the bombshell that when the bands he played with traveled to New York, they bought heroin from a Harlem-based dealer named Malcolm X.
Jones explained that he eventually kicked heroin after falling down five flights of stairs. He lost the urge to use while recovering and away from some of his drug-abusing colleagues.
“The mistakes are what help you grow and learn,” he said. [If I hadn’t fallen.] I would have been in New York, where I was hanging out with Charlie Parker. I would have been a junkie forever. Bird was always high. Thank god we did it and got it over with.”
Listen to the entire interview over at The Hollywood Reporter.
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