In the entire history of jazz, Bix's last few days in that apartment is, of course, one of the saddest and most tragic stories of all. The well known story of him, alone in his room, the snakes on the wall, the Mexicans hiding under his bed armed with knives, the high temperature while suffering delirium tremens on a hot summer's night, if all true, brought to an early end the life of one of jazz's most unique and gifted players. Louis Armstrong insists it was his friends that killed him, he says they weren't really his friends at all, they were hangers on. In the Bix biographies, covering these last few weeks of his life, most of his musical contemporaries who could have helped him, his few real friends, were themselves occupied playing in various parts of the Country. Hoagy was a visitor, as was the mysterious and elusive Helen. Red Nichols tells of on August 3rd of him sitting with Bix in Plunkett's Club and Bix suffering a "hacking cough". Yet only a few week's earlier it was all so different. In 'Bugles for Beiderbecke' in 1960 Wareing and Garlick wrote "One of Bix's last desires was to take an all-star white band to tour Europe. He had heard that good jazz was appreciated on the other side of the Atlantic, and the knowledge that he would not have to pander to commercial requirements stimulated his imagination. He actually succeeded in getting some good men together for an audition, including Tommy Dorsey, Bud Freeman, Joe Sullivan and Gene Krupa, with either Jimmy Dorsey or Pee Wee Russell for the clarinet chair, but without backing the venture never materialised". In Bix's life there were many lost opportunities, but this last venture, if it was for real and had it gone ahead, jazz history would have been so different. Who knows, Bix might have liked England so much, he may have decided to live here permanently!