Cut From Steel

He put the horn down for six years and picked it up at 55

Miles Davis played the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1975. He played one more New York festival that September, and then he stopped completely.

Davis dropped out of music for five years. He had a hip replaced in December 1975 using bone taken from his own shin, and the joint failed. In his autobiography he wrote that heavy use of alcohol and cocaine took the place music had held in his life.

You should notice what he did with the body he had left. Davis went back into a studio in May 1980 and was hospitalised soon after with a leg infection. He kept going regardless. The Man with the Horn was recorded between June 1980 and May 1981, his first recordings of any kind since 1975.

In June 1981 he stood up at the Village Vanguard in New York and played a ten-minute guest solo with Mel Lewis's band. Davis was 55 years old. The live recordings from that year became We Want Miles, which won him a Grammy.

Davis never got his twenties back. He got a second run of a decade, started from a body that had been sending him notices for years. The body posts the letter long before the phone stops ringing. Your job is to open it.

You used to wake up with it. Now you don't.

You noticed about three years ago, or you noticed that you had stopped noticing. Mornings are unremarkable now. Nothing hurts, so you filed the whole thing under fifty-four and got on with the day.

I want to tell you what that morning event actually was. Healthy men have roughly three to five erections across a night of sleep, tied to the REM cycles. The one you used to wake up with was the last of the set, caught before it finished.

You were running a free hardware test every night for thirty years. And then the report stopped arriving.

It's not age. It's these three.

I will give you three things worth understanding before you decide this is simply what fifty-four looks like on a man.

01 / What The Night Test Measures

Clinicians have used nocturnal tumescence for decades to work out whether erectile trouble is psychological or physical in origin. When the night-time erections are there, anxiety and circumstance move up the list of suspects. Their absence moves a physical cause up the list instead. The test is imperfect, and no careful urologist treats it as a verdict on its own.

02 / Age Moves The Baseline

Research on older men found that the frequency and duration of night-time erections decreased progressively with age, independent of how well the men slept. In one study, the majority of those above 60 did not have full sleep erections at all. So a share of this genuinely is the calendar, and you deserve to know that before you frighten yourself.

03 / What Cleveland Clinic Actually Says

Cleveland Clinic is careful on this point. Waking up without morning wood on occasion is not a reason to be overly concerned. A trend is a different matter, and the clinic says the absence could be an early indicator of erectile dysfunction or of dysregulated hormones, and may also point to a sleep disorder or to stress. Testosterone tends to rise as you sleep, which is part of why the morning is where this shows itself.

Take it back today

I want to be straight about the limits here. Nobody can diagnose you from a paragraph in an email, and the honest version is that the night-time test narrowed a question for doctors in an era before better tools existed. It remains a signal rather than an answer.

You should still treat a year of absence as information worth carrying into a room with a doctor. The blood supply to that part of a man runs through some of the smallest vessels he owns, and small vessels tend to complain first.

I want two sentences out of you at the next appointment. Tell the doctor how many mornings a week it used to happen, and how many it happens now. Numbers get taken seriously in a way that saying things are not what they were never does.

You have been treating a missing signal as a small private embarrassment. It was your circulation filing a report, once a night, for free. Say the two numbers out loud this month.

— Travis

Insider Member's Corner

6 free habits that keep the plumbing honest:

You have earned the right to spend money on something that makes a noise.

01 / Sound · Klipsch Forte IV

Klipsch has built its Heritage speakers in Hope, Arkansas since the 1940s, and the Forte IV is the one most men end up wanting. A 12-inch woofer, horn-loaded mids and highs, and a sensitivity high enough that a small valve amplifier drives them properly. They are sold as a pair and priced like furniture, so check Klipsch's own site before you fall in love with a photograph. Put Kind of Blue through them once and the argument is over.

02 / Glass · The Vesper Martini

Ian Fleming wrote this drink into Casino Royale in 1953 and had Bond dictate it to the barman... three measures of gin, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet, shaken until ice-cold, with a large thin slice of lemon peel. Kina Lillet no longer exists, so most bartenders reach for Lillet Blanc or Cocchi Americano. It is a serious drink and you should have one, singular.

03 / Room · A night at the Village Vanguard

The Vanguard has been running in a Greenwich Village basement since 1935, seats about 130 people, and has recorded more landmark jazz albums than any other room in America. Miles Davis played his way back into public life on that stage. Book the early set, sit near the front, and leave the phone in your pocket for ninety minutes.