My Life in the Sunshine Read online

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2022 by Nabil Ayers

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Portions of this book previously appeared on The Root, Vox, The Stranger, and Code Switch.

  Photograph on this page by Alan Braufman, used with permission.

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Ayers, Nabil, author.

  Title: My life in the sunshine: searching for my father and discovering my family / Nabil Ayers.

  Description: [1st.] | New York : Viking, 2022.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021045247 (print) | LCCN 2021045248 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593295960 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593295977 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Ayers, Nabil. | Sound recording executives and producers—United States—Biography. | Ayers, Nabil—Family. | Ayers, Roy. | Fathers and sons. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

  Classification: LCC ML429.A97 A3 2022 (print) | LCC ML429.A97 (ebook) | DDC 782.42164092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021045247

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021045248

  Cover design: Rodrigo Corral

  Cover photograph: © Diane L. Randall

  Designed by Meighan Cavanaugh, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen

  pid_prh_6.0_140163109_c0_r0

  To my parents,

  Louise, Alan,

  Shannon, and Jim

  Contents

  Straight Outta Compton

  1. Ubiquity

  2. Valley of Search

  3. A Love Supreme

  4. Destroyer

  5. Ascension

  6. Electric Ladyland

  7. Living for the City

  8. Don’t Stop Believin’

  9. Super Freak

  10. Searching

  11. Ebony and Ivory

  12. Manny’s Music

  13. Meat Is Murder

  14. Gigantic

  15. When Problems Arise

  16. Summertime Rolls

  17. Ayers

  18. The Real Thing

  19. Nevermind

  20. Easy Street

  21. Sour Times

  22. Sonic Boom Records

  23. Smooth Criminal

  24. Putting the Days to Bed

  25. Love Will Bring Us Back Together

  26. Love Will Tear Us Apart

  27. We Live in Brooklyn, Baby

  28. 4 American Dollars

  29. Seasons Change

  30. Alkebu-Lan

  31. You Got A Little Soul in You I See

  32. Oh God Guide Me

  33. Roots Deep in Slavery

  34. A Dream about My Father

  35. And the Grammy Goes to . . .

  36. Los Angeles

  37. West Coast Vibes

  38. Inglewood Park Cemetery

  39. Everybody Loves the Sunshine

  Acknowledgments

  Straight Outta Compton

  When I see a movie theater advertising Straight Outta Compton, I know how I’m about to spend the next two hours. What better setting, I think, to watch a blockbuster about the LA rap group N.W.A. than this—the city from which it emerged.

  It is the summer of 2015, and I am in Los Angeles for the FYF music festival, where, backstage, I am repeatedly mistaken for a newly famous director who has made music videos for Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, and Frank Ocean, and goes simply by his first name, Nabil. When I am introduced to some people, it’s telling to hear their voices suddenly become more hip-hop—attempting to drop a bit of street into their words—an affectation they adopt only when they think they’re meeting the rap video director.

  “Not that Nabil” always elicits a humble apology. People aren’t aware that even though he has made videos for hugely famous Black artists, Nabil is half-white and half-Iranian and looks much more white than I do.

  While I was hoping to spend today at the festival with the artists I work with, instead I slowly walk around the newly revitalized downtown Los Angeles, recovering from a terrible case of food poisoning. The thought of seeing Straight Outta Compton in a comfortable, air-conditioned theater is much more appealing than the sensory overload of a crowded music festival. I force down the rest of my banana, guzzle my remaining seltzer, and still feeling weak, buy a ticket to the matinee.

  Compton begins with a bang. In five fast minutes, the Los Angeles police destroy a drug house. Bullets and expletives fly, vicious dogs bark, and armored vehicles smash through residential walls like they’re made of paper. And I’m completely sucked in, happy to have my mind numbed by Hollywood action, even if the portrayal is devastatingly true to life.

  The bombastic opening scene ends, and the ensuing silence is broken by a piano sound, followed by an unmistakably familiar, lazy synthesizer melody. My pulse suddenly feels very present in my body. The song’s patient, buoyant pace drives the camera’s slow movement, which reveals a bedroom adorned with posters, records, DJ gear, and eventually a teenage boy lying down with his eyes closed and headphones wrapped around his head. The character, meant to be N.W.A. founder and producer Dr. Dre, wears a Los Angeles Dodgers jersey and hat as he subconsciously air-plays the piano, the congas, and the synthesizer along with the song. The overhead shot shows a record spinning with a legible red Polydor label at its center. The scene, which contains no dialogue, does everything to convey that Dre is lost in the music.

  The camera closes in on Dre surrounded by album jackets, and I brace myself, knowing what I’m about to see.

  And there it is, one album, standing apart with its white border. A man in a tight yellow T-shirt, a beard, and an Afro stands against a bright yellow background. His hand rests confidently on his hip, and he smiles as he looks off camera, radiating casual conviction. I can’t read the album title, but I don’t need to. I already know the man on the cover.

  The music is so loud that I physically feel it in my chest and ass. The lyrics offer the first voices in the scene. “My life, my life, my life, my life . . . in the sunshine” blasts from the modern theater speakers and the chorus of male and female voices further shakes my weakened constitution.

  I’m alone in a dark movie theater, three thousand miles from home, feeling skinny and sick and completely caught off guard by the most famous song by my father, Roy Ayers.

  “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” was a moderate hit when it was first released in 1976. But it’s grown over time—it’s been sampled more than one hundred times by various artists including Mary J. Blige, Common, J. Cole, Tupac, Snoop Dogg, and Black Eyed Peas. It’s been covered by D’Angelo and Cibo Matto, spanning decades and constantly refreshing itself into modern context. I’ve heard it in many different iterations over the years, a perennial, persistent reminder of my otherwise absent father.

  After one very long minute of music, Dre’s mother surprises him by turning off the record, which snaps him out of his meditative state. My chest feels hot and my breath is short.

  My first reaction is to sink into my cushy chair and look around the theater to see whether anyone is looking at me. Is this what
it would feel like to run into him? I wonder. I’d last seen my father nine years earlier—when I was thirty-four—but that had been planned: a lunch in Seattle, my first ever meeting with him as an adult. The time before that, when I was eleven, I had no idea who he even was. Since moving back to New York City, where he lives, I’m always slightly, subconsciously on guard—ready to run into him. But I definitely wasn’t expecting it in a dark movie theater in Los Angeles while getting over food poisoning.

  Though my father and I live in the same city and are both in the music business, our paths have never crossed in the seven years that I’ve lived in New York. Occasionally, someone asks me how he’s doing. It surprises me every time, and I usually respond with something like, “You’d probably know better than I would,” which feels confrontational and often leads me to quickly offer a slightly apologetic, less biting explanation that he’s never been a presence in my life.

  How, I wonder, did a hippie child in New York City who never knew his father become a grown man who still didn’t know his father but encountered his music regularly? Were moments like these truly coincidental? Or had my father’s DNA guided me into a life in music, and ultimately to the places where his presence caught me off guard?

  It has been over a year since I last tried to contact my father, and though I was unsuccessful, I decide it’s time for another try. I know he won’t become the father I’d never had, but maybe he can become the father I meet for lunch once or twice a year, the father who tells me about his life and my family history, the father who texts me each year on my birthday. He might not respond, but even if my father ignores me, I will have tried.

  Little do I know in that moment that the impact of that minute in the theater—the intensity of hearing my father’s music, my music, in a public place, through huge speakers and staring at his picture on a giant screen—will be the catalyst that opens up two centuries of perspective on my family.

  1.

  Ubiquity

  Dear, Louise—

  Dance, swing, love, groove, and be as sweet as you are.

  Roy

  On a warm summer evening in 1970, Roy Ayers signed the glossy eight-by-ten photograph of himself and handed it to my mother with a proud smile. She felt awkward accepting an autographed photo from someone to whom she felt so close, but she also knew that beneath his tremendous talent and his infectious warmth, Roy was an ambitious, self-centered person who was steadfastly focused on his career, and unavailable to her.

  Each time she saw him, she worried it might be the last.

  My mother had first met Roy when she was twenty, in 1970, when she and her eighteen-year-old brother Alan—an aspiring jazz saxophonist who’d once met Roy—bumped into him one night at the Village Gate, a jazz club in New York City. By then, Roy Ayers was already quite well known. He had played alongside legendary musicians like Herbie Mann, Jack Wilson, and Leroy Vinnegar, and then, between 1967 and 1969, released three acclaimed albums under his own name on Atlantic Records. By 1970, Roy Ayers was a twenty-nine-year-old master of the vibraphone, a large, beautiful, complex instrument better known as the vibes.

  That night at the Village Gate, my mother found Roy to be strikingly gorgeous with his beautiful brown eyes and his warm, confident smile. She also felt an instant chemistry. My mother has always been a talented conversationalist, and Roy matched her on that front with his charming and charismatic demeanor. When she also discovered that he didn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs, and that he ate health food like she did, her fascination grew. She didn’t have a phone at the time, so she couldn’t give him her number. Instead, she just said, “Here’s my address: 46-48 Downing Street in the Village. Knock on the door if you’re ever in the neighborhood.”

  I’ve tried to create that night’s scene in my mind: my tall, perfect-postured dancer mother looking just like the photographs I ingrained in my memory from those days, her wavy, golden-brown hair catching the dim light and her striking blue eyes turning heads in the smoke-filled club crowded with downtown hipsters; her brother Alan buzzing with excitement to see that night’s performance, and elated to be chatting with a respected musician; and Roy, who I imagine looked like he did on his albums from around that time, with a tight Afro, and bushy sideburns. Roy was there only as a member of the audience that night, but I’m sure his energy lit up the room.

  Anyone who wasn’t lucky enough to talk to him that night likely wished that they were.

  My mother remembers distinctly that when she met Roy, she said to herself, This is the person I’m going to have a baby with.

  Looking back now, I can only imagine my mother felt pretty lost at the time. She and Alan were close, but she lived by herself in New York, and even though he visited often, Alan spent most of his time studying at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. My mother was a young woman in a gigantic city—a city she loved, but one in which she felt very alone. Roy represented a chance to create the family environment she’d never had growing up, along with the qualities she hoped for in her future child: kindness, artistry, and creativity.

  But my mother went out with Roy only three times over the course of that year—not exactly a hot and heavy relationship, and definitely not one that would lead to a baby.

  * * *

  • • •

  My mother and Alan grew up in Wantagh, Long Island, where their parents—Bert and Jean Braufman—bought their home for $9,000 in 1951. The brief stories my mother has told me about her childhood are heartbreaking: The loss of her younger sister Nancy, born with a mental disability and heart disease, who died at the age of seven. Her mother’s multiple sclerosis, which was described to my adolescent mother as “an incurable disease.” Her father’s returning home from work, reeking of scotch and yelling so loudly that his voice made my mother’s locked bedroom door vibrate. My mother’s own battle with eating disorders during the twelve hard years she trained with Andre Eglevsky, one of the most respected ballet instructors in the world.

  But weekends offered a glimpse of a different life when the family drove to New York City. On these trips my mother encountered movie-like views of bright lights and towering buildings, women with fabulous clothes and hairstyles, and people of different races who yelled, cursed, shoved, and haggled. I suspect it was these childhood trips that instilled in my mother her need to be in the city, among its diversity, creative energy, and volatility. When she was eighteen, she finally moved there.

  In New York City, my mom was truly on her own—she wasn’t a kid from the suburbs spending her parents’ money on big nights on the town that ended in late-night taxi rides home. Instead, she earned $1.25 an hour waiting tables so she could afford the $125 per month rent for her apartment in Greenwich Village. The traditionally Italian neighborhood hosted a racially and economically diverse population that served as a daily reminder of my mother’s draw to the city. She loved living there as much as Alan loved visiting.

  Thanks to a former Long Island neighbor, my mother and Alan soon abandoned their secular Jewish upbringing and became members of the Baha’i Faith, a religion previously unfamiliar to them, but one whose ideals of peace and equality aligned with their own. Though the religion had emerged from the Middle East, the Baha’i Faith in New York in the early seventies attracted people of all races, from all walks of life. The Baha’i Faith opened up new possibilities for my mother and Alan. It connected them to like-minded people. And it ingrained them with deeper faith and spirituality.

  When she wasn’t waitressing at night or participating in Baha’i gatherings, my mother spent her days exploring New York City’s endless neighborhoods. On these long walks, she’d often stop to watch children play in the parks. It was those moments that ignited her choice to become a young, single mother. She wasn’t focused on a relationship—that could come later in life. But while she was young, she wanted a friend to love who would love her back, someone she could shower with atte
ntion and who would never feel as lonely or upset as she did growing up, someone to balance out the trauma of her own childhood. Though my mother wasn’t actively looking for the father of her imaginary companion, the moment she met Roy, she believed she’d found him, which made her even more determined to connect with him.

  * * *

  • • •

  On April 27, 1971, after leaving an event at the Baha’i Center, my mother insisted to Alan that they visit Roy’s nearby apartment.

  She wanted to try to get pregnant that night.

  It had been several months since my mother had seen Roy—so long that she worried that he wouldn’t remember her, or that he might be with another woman when they arrived. But when Roy opened the door, he welcomed them both with long hugs. They spent the evening catching up in his sparsely furnished living room, discussing their lives in New York City, and music—Alan had joined Roy onstage to perform a Miles Davis song a few months earlier. Then the power went out.

  Suspecting that the blackout wasn’t citywide, Roy had a car take them to my mother’s apartment. There they continued to talk, but my mother’s desire to get pregnant was at the forefront of her thoughts. When Alan fell asleep on the couch, my mother and Roy retired to the makeshift bedroom—separated by thick, homemade curtains—where she slept on a mattress on the living room floor.

  There, my mother bluntly told Roy she really wanted to get pregnant with him. He agreed, but he also made it clear that if she did get pregnant, she’d be on her own. Roy had always been up front with my mother—his career was on the rise, and he had no interest in a serious relationship. But my mother desperately wanted a baby with him, and this was her chance.

  My mother’s memory has always astonished me. To this day, she can describe the percussive guitar strum that her neighbor—the folk singer Richie Havens—played in his impromptu apartment performances, and the way the sound traveled up the stairs to her apartment; she can recount with tactile detail the material with which she sewed the dress she wore on the night she met Roy; and she can describe the thick curtains—cut from a gigantic Indian bedspread—that separated her and Roy from Alan on the night I was conceived. But no amount of prodding gleaned any more information about her conversation with Roy on that night, the conversation that led to me. My mother insists that it was that brief—that easy.