An eye-opening book about a local legend

...which made me care about who he was, for the first time ever.

I have to confess something that’s going to prove me to be a piss-poor excuse of a Quad Citizen: I have never really cared about Bix—the man, or the race named after him.

I’ve lived in the Quad Cities since 2011. For all of that time, I knew the basics that I figured any local should know—or maybe the one “basic,” which is that the hugely popular running event held every summer, the Bix 7, is named after an guy who’d played the cornet and made some contributions to jazz as a developing genre. (It had confused me at first to learn that there was absolutely no connection between the man, “Bix” Beiderbecke, and running races.)

But recently I happened to stumble across a book that caught my attention: a graphic novel about him that I hadn’t known existed. I was looking up another book in that section. (I’m a huge fan of graphic memoirs, like Polar Vortex: A Family Memoir, whose author I interviewed for this blog.) This one, a graphic novel simply titled BIX, happened to be pulled out and set back down by another patron, otherwise I might not have seen it.

I picked up it and flipped through it quickly, noticing that the story started with Bix as a very young child. Suddenly, from just that one panel—specifically, an image of young Bix reaching up to plink out some notes on his family’s piano—I realized I knew nothing about his life. And for some reason, something about thinking of him as a child, rather than the man in Gatsby-era clothing I’d seen in one or two images, drew me in. So I checked it out.

And as I sat on my front porch on a hot day last week, taking in his life story at the same time as I took in my own surroundings, I felt transported. That’s saying something when you consider that the book doesn’t say much at all—it’s almost all images, with just a few lines of dialogue.

Here’s an apt synopsis rom Goodreads:

From [an] acclaimed Eisner Award–nominated creator…comes a gorgeous and spare illustrated exploration of the rapid rise and tragic fall of 1920s legendary jazz soloist Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke. Told in stunning illustrations, Bix is a near-wordless graphic biography highlighting the career of […]one of the most innovative jazz soloists of the 1920s next to the legendary Louis Armstrong. Composing and recording some of the landmark music in the early history of the genre, Bix struggled with personal demons, facing the disapproval of his conservative parents and an increasing dependence on alcohol. Told mostly in silent panels to reflect his outsider quality and inability to communicate in anything other than musical terms, Bix tells the story of the rapid rise and tragic fall of a musical legend—a metaphor for the glories and risks inherent in the creative life.

Home was where the heart …wasn’t

As the story opened, immediately after I saw the depiction of the Beiderbecke home, I put the book down and picked up my phone. Grand Avenue, isn’t that kinda close to here? I typed the full address (1934 Grand Ave.) into Google Maps, and it confirmed what I’d thought: the house was practically in my neighborhood, a four-minute-drive away. It’s correct to call it his childhood home, because it was where he was raised, but, as I’d learn from the book, it was also where his parents had continued to live, (and where he would return for periods of recuperation at the height of his career.)

Refocusing on the book itself, I learned several things I’d never heard before. When I’d heard in passing about him being a contemporary of Louis Armstrong, I guess I’d always pictured “old man Louis Armstrong.” It was somehow entirely different, and more interesting, to think of them meeting and interacting as young men and relative unknowns, especially considering the realities of racial segregation. Another much-more-familiar-to-me name that arose was that of Bing Crosby, with whom he’d played and recorded.

But while these elements helped place him in the realm of music history and my understanding of it, they were were simply footnotes, because the real story was the human drama: of Bix’s alcohol-induced self-destruction, which the author connects directly to the tragic family dynamics the musician experienced through his brief life—namely, the emotional neglect or downright cruelty from his father. One of the more moving sequences in the book shows Bix proudly mailing each new recording back home to his parents—only to later discover on a visit home to Davenport that they’ve been hidden away, never opened.

The sole criticism I was going to mention was that the book seems to end too abruptly, just as we’re really getting into the story. But then, as I’d reached the end and started Googling again, I understood why his trajectory—from child prodigy on the piano, to cornetist playing the circuit, to a pneumonia-racked man with a cane hitting rock bottom (hard)—felt so rushed: he’d died at the ungodly age of twenty-eight.

How had I never heard this before, that he hadn’t even made it to thirty years old? He’d essentially been an early rock star, living that now-so-familiar flame-out story, (though living at least one year longer than Morrison, Joplin, Cobain and other members of that morbid “27 club.”)

Unlike many Quad Citizens who have at least a passing interest in local history, I’ve never been to see his grave in a local cemetery.

I hadn’t had any interest in visiting the museum devoted to his life, which is located downtown Davenport. But for the first time, a book—one depending almost solely on drawings, no less—made me truly consider him as a once-living soul, one that had suffered greatly.

One of the more moving sequences in the book shows Bix proudly mailing each new recording back home to his parents—only to later discover that they’ve been hidden away, never opened.

But… we still gotta address this part:

Any time Bix the man is mentioned on social media around the Quad Cities, it doesn’t take long before someone leaves a comment saying something like “We can’t have anything nice, gotta name our biggest event after a pedo!”

Here’s a sample:

So, yes, Bix’s legacy has been tarnished—that’s one way we could put it. Or, we could say that a fact about his life—based on police reports from an arrest in Davenport stating that he abused a five-year-old girl—was brought to light in the modern era, angering many once it was reported on. The Des Moines Register link in the above screenshot will take you to a paywalled article. (Famous Iowan Bix Beiderbecke faced sexual misconduct ...). Apparently he was arrested in 1921 for a “lewd & lascivious act” with a five-year-old, sight-impaired girl.

I know (and often wrestle with) that cyclical argument in the arts about trying to separate the human creator from the works they created. But we live in a misogynist culture, and we all used to believe Bill Cosby was a kindly father figure in an oversized sweater, so…I think we have to consider the implications of not mentioning things like this in a person’s life story.

The graphic novel doesn’t touch it.

But it does include a section that indicates he impregnated a girlfriend (in St. Louis, I believe) before blowing town and leaving her high and dry. I don’t know if that’s something the author pulled from what’s been written on Bix, or if he just used artistic license based on something that very easily could’ve happened.

If the graphic novel author wasn’t aware of the terrible police records, would he still have been moved to tell Bix’s story if he found out after the fact?

Did he know it and decide not to go into it?

Either way, let’s wrap up on something less depressing:

the house and an uncanny connection.

Interestingly enough, when I went looking for more information on the house he grew up in, I not only learned that it is indeed still standing, but that—get this!—the current owners are none other than the Italian film directors I wrote about in a previous post. The same ones who brought Brooke Shields to Davenport. (What the what?)

[Pupi] Avati [told a local TV station in 2024 that he] hopes to open the house to the public for tours, but they need to raise more money for further renovations.

“My brother and me pay. Give us your money please, and you can restore the house,” Avati said.

I tried to drive by 1934 Grand Avenue today to snap some pics while on my way to pick up a prescription, but the road was closed due to construction. I’ll have to try again another time.

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Thank you for reading my work!

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