Every music lover has
moments of revelation. I still recall vividly the first time I heard the
Animals riveting (yes, it was riveting – I know it’s the critical cliché to end
all critical clichés, and I don’t care) take on the American folk chestnut
“House of the Rising Sun.” It was playing on the car radio. I made my mom leave
the car running as we pulled into a parking space in front of my bro’s jewelry
store in downtown Lawrence.
Never in my sweet, short life had I heard anything like it. I was a pre-teen. My
exposure to black music was limited to Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte;
suffice to say Charley Patton wasn’t playing on WHB. The Animals’ singer, Eric
Burdon, was from Newcastle,
England, but
that voice, and its amazing conviction and intensity stemmed from his adoration
of the American blues tradition. I didn’t even know it yet, but I was hooked.
The mise en scene of
“House of the Rising Sun” was New
Orleans. When you’re a white bread kid in the sixth
grade from Kansas your impressions of New Orleans came from Al Hirt and Pete
Fountain (okay, Louis Armstrong might cross your radar occasionally, but almost
as a novelty). That’s what you saw on television. No knock on those dudes, but
they represented a commercialized, somewhat sanitized version of the music of New Orleans. That sound
occasionally seeped into the pop mainstream of the Sixties. Fats Domino may
have been past his chart prime, but songs like “Iko Iko” by the Dixie Cups and
the odd hit from Lee Dorsey (especially “Working in a Coal Mine”) gave a hint
what was cooking in the Big Easy. Aaron Neville had a hit with “Tell It Like It
Is” but its rhythm n’ blues sound was not especially Nawlins-centric.
For me, another
revelatory moment was the first time I heard Dr. John – on a short-lived Kansas City underground FM
station called KCJC. The tune was “Mama Roux” if I recall correctly. I’d never
heard anything quite like it. Heck, most of America hadn’t. The gumbo of
styles, representative of New Orleans,
that became available to anyone receptive to it in the Seventies, was still
underground culturally in 1968. The Meters first album didn’t drop until 1969.
Professor Longhair, after recording for several labels in the Fifties with
marginal commercial results, was working as a janitor throughout most of the
Sixties. The aforementioned chart hits by Dorsey, Neville and the Dixie Cups
only hinted at what was going on in the diverse neighborhoods of the Crescent City.
Dr. John, the Night
Tripper was a persona created by a Los Angeles
based New Orleans
ex-pat named Mac Rebennack. Rebennack had played on many recordings as a very
young man in New Orleans.
He moved on to Los Angeles
where he was a go-to session man between 1963 and 1968.
As Dr. John,
Rebennack combined the full simmering roux of New Orleans sounds (sanctified church music
and Saturday night grind) and mixed them shrewdly and affectingly with the
psychedelic wail of the emerging counterculture. Three similarly themed albums
cementing the Dr. John cult followed the debut record (Dr. John, the Night Tripper - the album that included “Mama Roux”).
Rebennack followed those first four releases with Gumbo, an excellent session that paid homage to hometown piano
heroes like Professor Longhair and James Booker, produced by fellow New Orleans legend, Allen
Toussaint.
Over the last
thirty-some years the Dr. has kept active. As a solo artist he’s responsible
for twenty-eight albums. Not bad for a guy who hasn’t had a hit in forty years
(1973’s “Right Place,
Wrong Time”) and who fought a junk habit until the late Eighties, as I
understand it. There’s good music throughout that twenty-eight record catalog;
but nothing quite as unique or captivating as those early records – until Locked Down.
