Take a spoonful of hoodoo, a pinch of gris-gris, a healthy dollop of
funk and bake it in a steamy cauldron below sea level with spicy influences
from a fistful of cultures. When that dish comes out of its New Orleans oven,
it’s transmogrified itself into fonk, spunky cuisine sportin’ legs, driven by
a syncopated backbeat called second line. Mac Rebennack, better known to his
loyal subjects as Dr. John, is the embodiment of that sound that has come to
represent the Crescent City.
The fonk oozes out of Dr. John in a patois so thick that you almost need a
translator to understand. In the beginning, some were afraid that you’d need
help understanding the music as well. When his album Gris-Gris debuted
in 1968, Atlantic Records president Ahmet Ertugun hated it. “What is this goddam
boogalee coon-ass record you stickin’ me with?” Rebennack remembers the label
head yelling. “He hated it because it was made on Sonny and Cher’s (Ertugun’s
act)… studio time.” At the time, Rebennack was a studio musician, working
on a Bobby Darin session when Ertegun tracked him down to vent about the record
he thought he was getting stuck with. “He cussed me out for like an hour on
Bobby Darin’s studio time.” Rebennack thought that the record wouldn’t come
out, and when it did, believed that at best it would be a one-off deal that
some people in New Orleans would like. “But it became some kind of goofball
cult record. I had no idea. In my mind it was just capturin’ a chunk of old
New Orleans stuff.”
Since then, the Doctor’s recorded work has captured chunks of New Orleans stuff in varying degrees, with ’72’s Gumbo as the benchmark. Experimenting with glitter and a show biz hoodoo persona in the early 70s gave way to flirtation with the blues in the ’73 group Triumvirate, with Mike Bloomfield and John Hammond, Jr., and a funkier presence in later years.
Rebennack has since returned to his roots. ’02’s Creole Moon is a favorite. “It’s a true reflection of me and my band going in the studio and making a real homegrown record, true to New Orleans, all of the chonks and pieces of New Orleans music now more than any one record that we did.”
His latest, N’Awlinz Dis Dat or D’Udda on respected jazz label Blue Note, is a celebrity-studded strut through the Big Easy. Backed by the Dirty Dozen, Mavis Staples renders a rousing version of “Lay My Burden Down,” which Rebennack performed a fonky live version of with Shemekia Copeland on his last tour. Randy Newman steps in for “I Ate Up The Apple Tree,” a Bible-based lullaby that John used to serenade his kids with. B.B. King and Gatemouth Brown tear up “Hen Layin’ Rooster,” and Willie Nelson drawls a laid-back vocal on Louis Jordan’s “Time Marches On.”
Ironically, Dr John doesn’t live in the city he is the musical ambassador for. He now lives in upstate New York, a fact he credits to a domestic situation. “You’ve hoid the joke about ex-wives being good housekeepers? Well, she kept the house, and I kept goin’.”
But that’s only part of the reason. Rebennack says it’s hard for New Orleans artists to make a living in their own city. Most of the authentic musical strips disappeared in the 60s under D.A Jim Garrison’s clean up crusade and have not been replaced. “They’re still stuck with the one touristas strip on Bourbon Street. You’d think that at least they could put up one more that’d be for locals.” The singer says that when the city had all seven musical strips it attracted the record industry, making New Orleans a recording center. But the reasons given at the time for shutting down the musical strips had nothing to do with music. “It drew other kind of stuff in there — high rollers and prostitution and narcotics and other things, but even with that, it was all like isolated in them areas when they shut all that down, it just spread all over the city.”
But the music has survived and flourished, thanks in no small part to Rebennack, who survived his own battle with narcotics, kicking a thirty-year heroin addiction in the 90s.
The Doctor’s survival tips are pretty basic. “I’m breathin’, that’s my secret,” he cackles. “You lucky you got that much outta me. You know I’m from New Orleans and we’re very superstitious about talking about what we do.”
Doctor John appears with his band the Lower 911 Friday at the Neighborhood Theater at 8 p.m. Tickets are $40. The Melvin Sparks Band opens.
This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2005.
