In 1966, Baker was savagely beaten (allegedly while attempting to buy drugs) after a gig in The Trident restaurant in Sausalito, California, sustaining severe cuts on the lips and supposedly broken front teeth, which ruined his embouchure. He stated in the film Let's Get Lost that an acquaintance attempted to rob him one night but backed off, only to return the next night with a group of several men who chased him. He entered a car and became surrounded. Instead of rescuing him, the people inside the car pushed him back out onto the street, where the chase by his attackers continued, and subsequently he was beaten to the point that his teeth, never in good condition to begin with, were knocked out, leaving him without the ability to play his trumpet. He took odd jobs, among them pumping gas. In a 1980 interview he stated that he worked for a long time at a gas station, working 7 am to 11 pm until he came to the conclusion that he needed to find a way to return to his music. Meanwhile, he was fitted for dentures and worked on his embouchure. Three months later he got a gig in New York City. In Chet Baker, his life and music, biographer Jeroen de Valk writes that Baker only lost one part of one tooth at the aforementioned fight, kept on performing for a while - 'and initially not badly at all', until he was fitted with dentures a few years later.