[Dixielandjazz] Dr John:

[Stephen G Barbone]

June 7, 2008 - NY TIMES - by Jon Pareles
He Still Loves New Orleans, and Now He’s Mad

NEW ORLEANS — Mac Rebennack, the 67-year-old New Orleans pianist,  
guitarist and songwriter better known as Dr. John, carries the city’s  
lore in his fingers, his scratchy voice and his memory. He has lived  
in New York City and on Long Island since the 1980s, but when he  
revisits his birthplace it’s as if he never left. New Orleans culture,  
he said in his ever-surprising vocabulary, has “wacknosity” — things  
only New Orleanians do.

In late April he was back in his old hometown, revisiting his past and  
present. He performed during the first weekend of the New Orleans Jazz  
and Heritage Festival, introducing some of the songs on the angry new  
album he released this week, “City That Care Forgot” (429 Records).  
(Dr. John is to perform in New York City on June 17 at the Highline  
Ballroom.)

Three days later he was at the Ponderosa Stomp, which had persuaded  
him to revive songs he wrote back in the 1950s. Most were written for  
other people (like Ronnie and the Delinquents’ “Bad Neighborhood”),  
and he hadn’t performed them since. In the afternoons Dr. John was at  
the Music Shed, a recording studio in the Garden District, singing  
Randy Newman’s theme song for “The Princess and the Frog,” a Disney  
movie about old New Orleans due to be released next year.

“They wanted his voice, which is not a bad idea if you’re going to do  
New Orleans,” said Mr. Newman, who was at the sessions. “He’s the real  
thing in every kind of way.”

Mr. Newman has known Mr. Rebennack since the 1960s, when both men  
worked as Los Angeles studio musicians. “You don’t have to tell him  
much about music,” Mr. Newman said. “He knows where he is, wherever he  
is.”

Through the years, Dr. John has carried New Orleans style worldwide:  
in his two-fisted barrelhouse piano, in his syncopated drawl, in the  
second-line funk rhythms of songs like his 1973 hit “Right Place Wrong  
Time” and in the psychedelic voodoo character he created when he  
became Dr. John the Night Tripper in the late 1960s.

Before the recording sessions, Dr. John told some tales. On early  
tours, he said, the Night Tripper’s troupe included a nude dancer and  
a geek who bit the heads off chickens, drank their blood and tossed  
their bodies to his black snake. In one town the geek was charged with  
cruelty to animals. Defending himself in court, he declared, “Arrest  
Colonel Sanders!”

Dr. John also had, it seemed, a story for every street corner in his  
hometown. He recalled the one where Gypsies ran a bujo scam, promising  
to cleanse supposedly cursed money and filching it instead. There was  
the saloon where the booze wiped off the bar was collected in a  
galvanized tin, dumped into milk bottles and sold to down-and-out  
drunks. There was the Circle Food Market, where, decades ago, Sister  
Gertrude Morgan, a gospel evangelist shaking six tambourines — on her  
hands, her feet and her dress — used to sing like James Brown to  
redeem sinners. The front yard of her home in the Ninth Ward, Dr. John  
recalled, was all four-leaf clovers.

The streets he showed a visitor were less vibrant. They’re the New  
Orleans he sings about on “City That Care Forgot,” still deeply  
scarred nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina.

“There’s hardly any part of this city that you’re not going to see  
something that’s still whacked,” he said. The van, driven by his road  
manager, rolled past a tent city of the homeless that has spread under  
the long overpass of Interstate 10. Crossing the Industrial Canal, Dr.  
John said, “As far as your eyes can see on this bridge, and the next  
bridge and the next bridge and the next bridge, you can see masses of  
destruction slid in between masses of not-so-destruction.”

“How many of those people are scattered and splattered around the  
United States to this minute?” he asked. “How many people got back and  
had no way to rebuild?”

As the van moved through the wreckage of the Lower Ninth Ward, he  
said: “I knew a million people here, and they got wiped. The first  
time I come out here, I couldn’t even find where blocks ended and  
started. There were 5 and 10 houses smashed together. You could smell  
dead people in them.”

He released a mournful seven-song EP, “Sippiana Hericane” (429  
Records), less than three months after Katrina. But he kept hearing  
more grim stories. “The more people I would talk to — everybody had an  
epic movie saga,” he said. “One guy got his grandma out of her house  
and came out and saw his grandfather’s body hanging from a tree. I’d  
be walking on Canal Street and I’d hear the stories. And I got to the  
point where I got to be scared of saying to someone, ‘How’d you do?’ I  
had to do something to get past that.”

Gradually, sorrow turned to resentment and rage. “City That Care  
Forgot” flings indictments both local and global. “Short version is,  
we gettin’ mad,” Dr. John sings in “We Gettin’ There,” which gripes  
about contractors and insurance companies and goes on to tabulate  
greater costs: “Ask anybody if they know a friend that died from  
suicide/They gonna say ‘Yeah for a fact.’ ” In the title song, a  
steadfast slow groove with jabs of bluesy guitar from Eric Clapton,  
Dr. John sings, “Better get used to that fonky smell/Toxic mold under  
the fresh paint.” And in the gospel-flavored “Promises, Promises,” on  
which he shares vocals withWillie Nelson, he sings, “The road to the  
White House is paved with lies.”

In New Orleans style, the bad news arrives with a backbeat. Dr. John  
and his band of New Orleans musicians, the Lower 911, come up with  
easy-rolling grooves: funk, blues, gospel, even a tinge of zydeco.

Dr. John wrote five of the album’s 13 songs with Bobby Charles, the  
elusive South Louisiana figure who wrote “Walking to New Orleans” and  
“See You Later, Alligator” and whose hometown, Abbeville, La., was  
smashed by Hurricane Rita. Most of the album was recorded in a studio  
in Maurice, La., Dr. John said, “sitting on one of the most polluted  
bayous in the state of Louisiana.”

Dr. John and his band made two albums in the same sessions: “City That  
Care Forgot” and a set of Mr. Charles’s songs sung by Shannon McNally.  
“Some cuts on me, some cuts on her — it kept the band from getting  
complacent,” he said. “It would shift the gears of the conversation.”

One collaboration by Dr. John and Mr. Charles was “Black Gold,” which  
links oil greed to global warming and the war in Iraq. “Bobby hits  
your nerves good,” Dr. John said. “That’s one of his fortes: he can go  
straight for the jugular. I could give Bobby some words or a thought,  
and within an hour it’s finished.”

When the van got back to the studio, Dr. John resumed his longtime  
role as an ambassador of New Orleans. The Jazz and Heritage Foundation  
— which runs the festival’s nonprofit cultural programs — and the  
state of Louisiana, in a project called Sync Up, had invited a  
delegation of film music supervisors to promote Louisiana music —  
songs, musicians and recording studios — to Hollywood. Dr. John posed  
for photos with them: the bearded potentate, carrying a carved staff  
and wearing amulets and Mardi Gras colors, paired with the sleek but  
clearly starstruck Californians.

“Anything helps,” he said. “Everybody here is scuffling.”