I knew this guy at Berklee who was my black friend. We used to smoke a lot of pot, listen to jazz, and play chess. A lot of chess. He was tall and good-looking and always had a white girl with him, or he was about to hook up with one.
I guess he liked white girls. I like white girls, too. Anyway, he was a character and I liked him. (Not in THAT way, but in a normal, healthy way.) His name was Albert Sutherland, I used to call him Al, and I think he was from the Midwest somewhere, like Missouri or something.
Al had a funny saying he’d always say, over and over, but in different ways. He would normally say his funny saying when we were listening to jazz music. The saying was, “Ooh, that is some other shit.” I cracked up every single time he said it. Every single time. He liked that I Always cracked up, so he kept saying it different ways, kind of like how a jazz musician would approach it.
There are pretty much infinite ways to say “Ooh, that is some other shit.” You could say “Ooh, that is some OTHER shit,” or “Ooh, THAT is some other shit,” or “Ooh, that is SOME other shit…” It was all about what accents on which words and the subtle inflections on the rhythm of the phrase. Arn would usually say his saying when we were stoned and listening to Joe Pass, Larry Carlton, John Coltrane, or Oscar Peterson. We would hear something and Arnold would say, “That is some OTHER shit.”
After a while, I started saying, “That is some other shit,” and he cracked up because I’m the white guy trying to sound black and he thought it must’ve been cute or something that I was imitating him. The thing was, though, that I wasn’t really trying to imitate him. When I really thought in the moment that something was some other shit, I would say that because I meant it. His saying was infectious.
Al also used to hook me up with good pot deals. He was sort of a small-time pot dealer on the side. We were pretty tight, and I used to consider him a pretty good friend. We spent a lot of time together. We must’ve played at least 500 games of chess. He was actually a little bit better than I was and reminded me that he was on the chess team in high school. That impressed me. The bottom line was, he could beat me more often than not, and I am no slouch at chess, so I thought it was pretty cool that he was that clever.
But he wasn’t that great of a musician. He practiced and practiced guitar all day long, or so it seemed. Even so, his chops were kinda too fast and way too sloppy. He never just played anything cool; he always was trying to reach a plateau that he couldn’t quite maintain. I know a lot of people who play like that and if they could just play within their means, then they would be fine. Maybe someone should just say something sometime and clue these people in. Maybe someday I’ll just say, “Listen man, play within your means, because that ain’t happenin’ like that.” But hey, I’m just one guy and it’s only my opinion, (even though I’m right on this one.) Albert should have been on talk radio, doing something else besides music, because he was so good at saying that dumb phrase over and over in a million different styles. In a way, his musical creativity was being channeled into that funny saying and not into his guitar. One day, while Al and I were friends, he asked me if he could borrow a 10-speed bike. I used to work at a bicycle store and I convinced my boss that Al was cool and that he just needed to borrow the bike for a couple days. So we lent Al a really nice bike and that was cool. For a while, that is.
Albert never gave it back and it made me look like a real jerk. After that, he basically disappeared. The guys at the store warned me that it sounded fishy and that I better be sure I could trust him. I told them that he was different and a really good guy.
I couldn’t believe that he would do that to me, after all that fun we’d had and all those good times of hanging out playing chess and listening to some really great bebop and jazz and commenting over and over in all different ways “that it was some other shit.”
I’d see Albert around once in a while after that episode and I would say, “Hey, man, did you return the bike yet?” He’d say that he was going to do that tomorrow, but he never did.
I quit my job at the bike shop soon after in disgrace, and Albert and I never really hung out all that much anymore. I guess he was just a thief and I was just a sucker for his “other shit” charm. He’s probably still saying “Ooh, that is some other shit” to some knucklehead in St. Louis somewhere, riding that stupid bike as a homeless, chess playing, bad jazz musician…
Every now and then I’ll say “that is some other shit” to an old friend of mine who went to Berklee because he knew Albert and that famous saying; but it’s just not the same without Al being there, laughing with us and saying in his own special way, “Ooh, that is some other shit.”