It is more than a little strange to be back in New Orleans on the first cool-ish night of autumn after the summer that would never end. That mustard gas death smell that pervades my Bywater neighborhood is backing off a bit now that the relentless heat and humidity has eased down to a low simmer. Garbage, parts of houses and lots of jetsam are piled high in the streets and dead refrigerators are multiplying on the sidewalks like tribbles. And we are the lucky ones, torn by wind and rain but able to move back in, to congregate at Markey’s bar and tell our stories over and over. Just across St. Claude Avenue the devastation is relentless. From there into Gentilly and Mid-City, let alone the Lower Ninth Ward, block after silent block provides miles of evidence in service of the grim truth that much of the New Orleans we know is dead and gone, perhaps forever. Of course we’re determined to recover, and it is heartening to see so many people working so hard to fix what they can, but the city, which right now has been reduced essentially to a narrow band between the Mississippi River and St. Claude, North Ramparts Street and St. Charles Avenue, has lost an essential part of its identity. The social clubs and neighborhood joints of Gentilly, Tremé, and the Lower Ninth Ward that nurtured the culture of street parades, brass bands and the magnificence of the Mardi Gras Indians are gone with the departed residents of those ghost-town neighborhoods, and it is far from likely that those intricate family-based institutions will reassemble in force.
Last winter I worked at the Fair Grounds racetrack and on my walk home each day I enjoyed watching a high school marching band practice after school. Week by week they honed their sound until they started mini-parade practices on the side streets off Esplanade Avenue. It was inspiring to watch these teenagers parade under the majestic live oaks, slowly working their sound into powerful march cadences. All in service of one lofty goal at Mardi Gras. But some of those kids will continue to play music and this was their training ground. Those schools are closed now and those marching rhythms—the best of them—are silenced. How strange our truncated six-day Mardi Gras will be without those magnificent marching bands of the New Orleans public school system.
Weird. It’s hard to know what to feel. Joy at the progress being made by the Tipitina’s Foundation and OffBeat in helping New Orleans musicians get back on their feet, gratitude for the well-wishers from all over the globe contributing what they can to the cause, sorrow for the unnecessary and downright criminal loss of so many lives, so many loved ones, so many homes. Nameless fear of Dread at the sight of a major American city laid to waste.
Nevertheless, “When the going gets weird,” quoth the legendary Dr. Gonzo, “the weird turn pro.” Last week a busload of clowns parked on my block, fully loaded and ready to pitch in on the comic relief effort. The capacity New Orleans residents have to remain whimsical in the face of disaster has never been needed more than it is right now. And the music is coming back. Deep in the heart of Mid-City, past scores of desolate blocks of flooded out houses along lightless streets, the parking lot at Mid-City Lanes was packed for the re-opening night of Rock ‘n’ Bowl starring Eddie Bo. The crowd was a little unusual with so many young soldiers from “Camp Lucky” on hand, but when Bo swung into a 20-minute version of “Check Your Bucket” it was clear that this is maybe the last place on earth where you’re gonna hear music played just like this. And that’s something worth living for all by itself.
—By John Swenson
George Porter, Jr.
“I go crazy when I stay away from New Orleans for too long.”
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Bassist George Porter, Jr., one of the godfathers of New Orleans funk, had his life and career turned upside down by Hurricane Katrina. He had been enjoying an immensely productive year highlighted by the historic reunion of the original Meters at Jazz Fest along with his regular work with the funky Meters and its offshoot PBS, the group he formed with drummer Russell Batiste and guitarist Brian Stoltz, as well as working with drummer Johnny Vidacovich and guitarist June Yamagishi and his own group. Porter had been working on a new solo album which was near completion in his home studio.
“We left the city on Sunday. That Thursday night I played at the Maple Leaf. Then Friday night I played at Cobalt’s. And then Saturday night I played at the Maple Leaf again with an all-star band with Theresa Andersson, Simon Dodds, had two of my horn section, Tracy Griffin and Clarence Johnson and Mike Lemmler on keyboards. And Theresa Andersson was a guest artist. We played there until five o’clock in the morning. This was Saturday night, so Sunday morning I left there and went to bed about six, and slept for three or four hours, woke up about ten, ten-thirty, and was sitting outside on the gazebo in front of the house. I love the smell when the marsh is coming, you know? I wasn’t planning on leaving. I was sitting on a swing in the gazebo when my granddaughter came up to me and sat down next to me. And she had that look on her face, and she just looked up and said, ‘Grandpa, when are we leaving?’ And I said, ‘Go tell your mama to go pack her bags.’ And before she could even get to the door, she just kind of high signed everybody and they all went walking out the door with their bags.
“They were just waiting for me to say, ‘We’re going, you know?’ We left and went to Tuscaloosa, Alabama that Sunday night and Monday, it hit the area. We went in three different vehicles—my van, my wife’s car and my son-in-law’s pickup. My daughter Katrina drove her mama’s car. Katrina was so upset she wanted to change her name and I’m constantly telling her don’t change her name, I love her name. She was freaked out.
“Late Monday evening, the hurricane got to Tuscaloosa and shut down Tuscaloosa. On Tuesday morning, we got up, packed our stuff to move out of the hotel and were headed to North Carolina. And my mom called up on the telephone and asked me where was I? And I told her that we were headed for my little cousin’s house in Charlotte, North Carolina. She said, ‘No, come back.’ My other little cousin was down in the land of my grandfather, which is Donaldsonville, Louisiana and she said, ‘there is plenty of room down here, come back home.’ We made a U-Turn on Interstate 20, came back on 61 through the back ways and we have been down in Donaldsonville.
“We’re resettled now in Darrow, Louisiana, 19 1/2 miles from Baton Rouge, 52 miles from New Orleans.
“I’ve been back in to New Orleans several times. We had almost five feet of water on the first floor of both houses. My daughters live right next door to me. My warehouse, where my equipment and stuff was, got several feet more than that. I had a whole lot of equipment downstairs in a courtyard. I lost a PA, I lost three sets of drums, seven bass amp cabinets, all my Ampeg stuff that I have an endorsement with, the rack of PA amps, like six amps in that rack, some mixing decks, a 24 channel and a 16 channel set. My live operation is pretty much (heh) history. I hadn’t thought about it that way. I do have the Ampeg endorsement, but what really hurts is I had my own monitors and a small PA for weddings and stuff, I do a lot of weddings, so to do that I need my own PA. I bought my own monitor system because I got tired of playing in small clubs where the monitors was horrible.
“I played a gig last weekend in Baton Rouge, and I did one gig with Johnny Vidocovich and June Yamagishi, Johnny was in Houston and June was in Memphis, I believe. It was nice to stretch out and play like that again. The original Meters did Radio City Music Hall six or seven days after the storm. We did two gigs that night. After playing Radio City with Dave Matthews, that was the early part of the night, then the Meters and the Neville Brothers played at Madison Square Garden. We got a police escort from Radio City to Madison Square Garden, I had never seen a police escort in New York City before, it’s hilarious. The Neville Brothers went onstage, played one song, then the Meters came out onstage, played one song, then the Neville Brothers came back onstage with us and we did a song together. Then we had a three phase encore in which a lot of the other artists came out and sang some stuff. The Neville Brothers did their traditional Jazz Fest ending, then the Dirty Dozen and ReBirth Brass Band came out from each end of the stage and we were doing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” It was killer. We had the two rhythm sections onstage with the Dozen and ReBirth, Irma [Thomas] and other New Orleans artists all playing together.
“My solo record is on permanent hold. I have the master on the hard drive of my computer. Everything in the studio on the third floor of the house survived. The house was broken into and burglarized late Sunday evening. All the televisions, all the VCRs, all the DVD players, the cassette players, the laptop computer on my wife’s desk, my old Apple Titanium and I had an Apple 3600 in my granddaughter’s room, they took all of that. They never went into the studio. There were nine bass guitars up there, a couple of guitars, a whole set of keyboards, a whole functioning studio up there. The other thing is that my wife and I are entering our 40th year of marriage. Every year since we got together I would give her diamonds for her birthday or Christmas. They had laid out those 39 years of diamonds on her bed and they left ’em. I just couldn’t believe it.
“If the New Orleans music community is going to suffer much at all, it’s going to be the part of the community that depended upon New Orleans totally for their income. You know, the guys that played the local little clubs, you know. Those guys are going to find a really hard way of getting back. Guys like myself, the Brothers and ourselves, we don’t really depend on New Orleans. When we play at home, like myself, I play these little jazz gigs at the Maple Leaf or Cobalt’s, I play some music I don’t get to play with the Funky Meters, the Meters, Runnin’ Podnahs or PBS, the bands that I play in. So I get to play some jazz or some free-form fusion which is music I don’t get to play. Those gigs are not about the money. They are about just being able to just play. There were tons and tons of little clubs in the Ninth Ward and East New Orleans that housed probably 700-800 musicians, maybe 1,000 in different parts. Those guys have got no place to go at this point. Those guys played in the Ninth Ward all the time and never even came across Canal Street. They played down there. They were the soul and the hearts of what the downtown music scene was about. That will be lost, absolutely.
“There were a few players like Herlin Riley who is from that neighborhood. Shannon Powell is from that neighborhood. Those guys, again, don’t depend on New Orleans for their income. So the music will live through those guys but the neighborhood music is going to die. There are a lot of people who come from all over the world that come and venture into some of the neighborhoods that I don’t even go in [laughs]. I would be afraid, but I know a lot of people who come from all over the world and go into those little neighborhoods and see that music because that is the real shit. It is the real, real stuff and they don’t get to play at Jazz Fest. You don’t get to see those guys at those festivals but there are some great musicians down there.
“I don’t think that the tourism thing is going to get hurt that bad. I believe the city is going to grow back but the thing that will be displaced more than anything is definitely the lower-income communities, like the Ninth Ward, East New Orleans, where the income for the whole year might have been $12,000, if that much. When they start rebuilding the homes down there, ain’t nobody going to be able to afford it. They are going to be putting up $60,000, $70,000 homes down there and ain’t nobody going to sell a $60,000, $70,000 home to a guy who is making twelve grand a year, if that much. That part of the city won’t be back for a couple of years because they got to go in there, mop that thing, take down probably three layers of soil, and start filling it in again. And then start building it. That is going to be three years before that is going to come back. That’s absolutely gone.
“Anything above Frenchmen Street, or probably Port Street coming up, the lower French Quarter, that is going to be suffering real bad. That is the lower French Quarter area, I don’t think they got a lot of water much down in that area. Once you cross the Industrial Canal, it was horrifying, that was the Lower Nine and that made it bad, bad, bad. When you lose the Lower Nine and you move away from the river going towards the inner part of the Lower Nine, the Upper Nine got bad.
“It is going to be a big change. I am thinking that it is going to be a change for the better. I am hoping that the displaced people won’t be ignored. I know they are going to be hurt, hurt really bad, but hopefully a lot of those displaced people are finding better situations when they moved on. The working man, you know the people who work the bars, and clean up the bars and all that kind of stuff, I am not sure how the city is going to deal with bringing those people home. Because those guys weren’t making $8,000-$10,000 a year. And if you build a house that is worth 15 or 20 grand, it ain’t going to be worth a shit. It ain’t nothing but beaver board. That is worse than the old-time slave quarters. So that is a rough one. Personally, I would like to see the city give more thought to the plight of that community because everybody that stayed on the uptown side of the city fared fairly decent. And uptown has always been considered like the city, you know? That is the part of the city that you sell to the world. They ignore anything below Esplanade but that is where all the working class were. All the people that was physically keeping the city running lived down there. I know they ain’t going to come get those people who lived off of St. Charles Avenue to shuck no oysters. They need to figure out how to get those guys back in there, the working class, and then not only do that, but bring them a fair wage.
“I saw Jesse Jackson in front of some committee and they were talking about the working community, the laymen, to come back into the city and work for $6.00/hour. But they were bringing in these guys from these corporations from Missouri and Michigan and all that stuff, all over the country and they were paying them $15/hour to do the same work that these other guys were only doing for $6.00/hour. Now something is wrong with that picture. The federal government is paying this bill. It is not like a local tab. It is the federal government doing that. The federal government has decided to separate the classes. So you live in Michigan and you got a high school education but basically your high school education these days can’t get you shit. So a guy with a high school education is still working a menial job but right now this guy with a high school education can come into New Orleans and work for $15-$16 but the guy who lived in New Orleans in the Ninth Ward who doesn’t have that high school education go to do the same work but only get $6 hour. There is something wrong with that. It sure hasn’t got anything to do with just because this guy has a high school education. A high school education ain’t worth nothing.
“I’m definitely moving back. I can’t stay away too long. I go crazy when I stay away from New Orleans too long. I’m gonna put one of my houses back together. I’ve got a house in Darrow, Louisiana, but I’m gonna keep my main house in New Orleans where the studio was at and I’ll go back and forth. When I’m working in the city instead of driving those 52 miles I’ll just stay at my house in New Orleans.
“I’m not sweatin’ it. I know that God has a plan, we just have to sit back and wait for it to get punched in. I’m willing to wait.”
—By John Swenson and Dan Willging
John Gros
“There’s no culture in the United States of America like New Orleans.”
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John Gros was enjoying a breakthrough year in 2005 leading two bands, the enormously popular Papa Grows Funk and his own solo group. Papa Grows Funk was on the road when Katrina hit.
“We were en route back home from a tour,” said Gros, who has returned to New Orleans. “We played Japan for a month, then we went from Tokyo to Boston and did four nights in the Boston area. Our scheduled day to get home was August 29th. I never made it. We all knew watching it on TV it was bad. Some of the guys had flights scheduled and switched their flights. Jellybean rearranged his to Dallas where his wife was heading. Donald Ramsey and June Yamagishi flew into New Orleans earlier, Sunday morning. Donald’s sister picked him up at the airport and they went straight to Memphis. June made it back to his apartment, where he stayed until Wednesday afternoon. Jason Mingledorff couldn’t change his flight so Jason drove with us to Birmingham, where his dad picked him up and brought him to his home in Montgomery. Myself and my roadie Rick drove around the outer wall of the hurricane to Lake Charles. I stayed at a friend’s house who I grew up with. I got through to June Wednesday afternoon on his home phone and he said ‘I’ve got a ride. Can I stay with you at Lake Charles?’ So June and his roommate and Hiro the guitar player in Kirk Joseph’s band, so you had three Japanese guitar players and six cats in a small little car evacuating from the City of New Orleans. They stayed with us for a week, then June, myself and Rick took off for San Francisco for the next Papa Grows Funk tour, which was already scheduled. We stopped at Sequoia National Forest on the way out, then played San Francisco all the way up to Seattle, then everybody scattered—Jellybean went back to Dallas, June went to Miami to stay with some friends there. Marc Piro went to Baton Rouge and Jason went back to Montgomery. So me and Rick drove home, stopping at Yellowstone National Forest and Mount Rushmore on the way back. We came home for two or three days then we flew off to Prague for a week where we played a benefit with this Czech band. I got back the first Monday in September, flew from Houston to New Orleans, went home to my house, checked everything out, then went straight to the Maple Leaf. They were up and running on a generator and I set my piano up in the dark on the stage and pointed it toward the bar and started playing. I was so homesick and I was glad to be playing music in New Orleans again. I opened up with “Stealin’” back in my same old used to be. I did three Monday nights on solo piano and then Papa Grows Funk started the week before Halloween night.”
Gros lost a number of dates for his solo band, but has kept PGF going strong.
“Everything I had booked with the solo band was late September early October and it all got canceled. I was just determined that I was not gonna let the hurricane ruin all the hard work that I’ve been putting forth over the last five years with Papa Grows Funk. We had a game plan to focus on developing markets already in place. Luckily we didn’t lose all of our work, we just lost half of our work. Hank [Staples] at the Maple Leaf is a big proponent of getting things up and running and getting things moving. I don’t know how much business we will be doing but I call them community service gigs.”
Despite his positive outlook, Gros was shocked at what he saw upon his return to New Orleans.
“I see complete devastation, at all levels. Socially, economically, culturally, it’s just complete devastation. It’s weird. The whole vibe is completely different. The neighborhoods where you don’t see any green is the most disturbing to me. Of course it’s all gonna come back but it’s gonna be very weird to see what’s going to happen to New Orleans East and St. Bernard Parish. But I look at it all as an optimist. The city of New Orleans, the political machines, the eviscerated school board, the housing situation, everything has been so corrupt over the years that this offers a chance for New Orleans to completely change the way the city does everything. Politically, economically, it’s the perfect time to put a new infrastructure together. One that’s gonna focus on communities and industry. The music industry is gonna be fine. It’s a shame and it’s totally understandable, that so many of our musicians have gone, but everybody’s trying to find work and trying to find a roof over their heads. In the short term there’s gonna be a big void in New Orleans musically, just like in a lot of other areas, restaurants are shut down, other businesses. But I predict the musicians will come back. This is a place where musicians can make a good, honest living while being around their families and the friends that they love, the culture that they love. You can’t do that in a lot of other cities. There’s no culture in the United States of America like New Orleans. We are so attached to it—it is a magnet. And I can’t see it watered down to any great extent, I just don’t see it going that route. Some musicians will make it back, I hope most of ’em do, a lot of them won’t, though. And if they don’t hopefully they’ll create opportunities for themselves wherever they go and they’ll spread New Orleans culture wherever they go. That’s good for all the non-cultural towns, meaning any other city besides New Orleans.
“I’ve got a positive outlook. I’m not in a position of power where I could really change the way the education system is set up, where all the government housing is set up. Set up home ownership so people have pride in their neighborhoods and the kids can bring that attitude to their schools and we can get rid of the apathy and negativity that has plagued us. If you can start there the great city of New Orleans is going to be an even greater city.”
Gros thinks the music is one of the main attributes of the city that will be on the leading edge of its revival.
“On my trip back from Prague I was on the plane with Quint Davis and he said we would have Jazz Fest but he just didn’t know where. My thought is that after the grandstand burned down we still had it there. I would assume they’re not gonna be expecting gangbusters attendance so they can easily do it without the grandstand.
“I just can’t wait to see the songs that are going to come out of all of this.”
—By John Swenson
Mike West
“We just can’t sit there and wait for the gutless wonders of the federal government to decide what to do.”
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Mike West, wife Katie Euliss and brood were on tour when Katrina was making her move to ravage the Gulf Cost. As the clan trundled towards the Sunshine State, the fear of the unknown haunted them every mile along the way. Unfortunately, their beloved Ninth Ward neighborhood, the inspiration for many a song, suffered the hardest blow the Crescent City experienced. As Mayor Nagin predicted regarding the city’s downsized population, West and family are now Kansas-based in the land of Dorothy, Toto and Split Lip Rayfield.
Where were you when Katrina hit?
We had this slow disbelief that this was going to happen when we left on Wednesday. Everywhere we played, they had that damned Weather Channel on. The night the hurricane came, we were in Punta Gorda, which was trashed by a hurricane a year and a half ago. At least, they were very understanding of what we were about to face. And then we had a couple of days where the information coming out of New Orleans was nil. We were sitting there, getting so frustrated with the Weather Channel and the news because they didn’t have anybody [reporters] in there for a long, long time. Ah, New Orleans missed the bullet. And we tried to call and of course, couldn’t get through to anybody.
We spoke to Terry [friend/housemate] the night of the hurricane and said, “Hey Terry, there are two cars there, please get out if you want. ‘No, no, I’m going to hunker down.’” Then the first thing we found out two days later when we picked up the cover of the New York Times, there was our street with boats on it, pulling people off of roofs.
So there you were and you couldn’t go back home, so what did you do after that?
We were in Pensacola and at that point we knew that our home was taking in a huge amount of water. We presumed our dogs had died. And someone calls us and said, “Hey, we saw Terry on TV. He had your dogs.” Terry had kept our dogs’ heads above water in the flood when the water was chest high. And he had taken broken doors, used them as rafts and put the dogs on them.
He actually stayed?
Oh yeah, he kept the dogs from drowning for about eight hours. What happened was the National Guard rescue workers were not allowed to take pets to the Superdome. Terry was one of those folks who just refused to go. He was like, “if you are not taking the dogs, you are not taking me.” Eventually the sergeant in the National Guard was like ‘I’m going to get you out of here.’ When the last truck left our neighborhood, the sergeant took Terry and our three dogs to the Hilton in the French Quarter and that’s where he holed up. An ABC reporter found him and did an interview. And that’s how we knew he was alive. Eventually, Chris [Maxwell] from our record company said, “I’ll go pick him up.”
We were going to go back to New Orleans but we couldn’t go back there. So we drove across I-10 to Baton Rouge. Trees were all black; everything was chewed up but the interstate was open. By the time we got there, Terry had got out of New Orleans and was at Chris’ house with our three dogs. So we all holed up with Chris and Liz [Chris’ wife], Terry, me, Katie, three dogs and two children. Bless their hearts. They put us up for days before our Arkansas tour and Terry stayed there for almost three weeks. And we got another month and a half of touring. We can’t go back home. They are not letting us in. So we were just trying to make a few dollars because we don’t have anything than what is in our vehicle. So we hit the road and Chris said he would look after our dogs.
So, then after Colorado, we headed back south. I was really hoping to get back and check out what was going on because we were in the lower Ninth Ward and they still were not letting residents or even insurance adjusters in to inspect property. They had it sealed tight for everything but journalists and rescue workers. But my friend Andrea is wily and said it doesn’t take anything to print a press pass. She didn’t even have power. She had been running her computer, a scanner, a digital camera and a laminator off a generator. She printed me a press pass so I could get through security to see our house. At this point, it had been sitting there for three-and-half weeks. It took about eight feet of water so everything was trashed, torn up, black with mold. Had to wear a full mask respirator to go in there. There was basically me, my neighbor Kathleen who also snuck in on a press pass, and a friend of ours, Shawn. We were the only people in our neighborhood. It was like a ghost town. Occasionally a truckload of National Guards would go by and say hey, because they were bored and lonely too. At first, we were worried they were going to throw us out because we weren’t supposed to be there. But they just wanted to shoot the shit, so it was like hey, how y’all doing?
We had insurance and I was trying to get the insurance company to sneak in. One guy managed to sneak in and I managed to take him to a few different properties. One of the places was right by where the levee broke and that was just a twilight zone. There was nothing left but bricks and foundations.
How far did you live from where the levee broke?
Probably ten blocks or so. We have a structure but we have just a horrible mold thing. Katie and the kids stayed behind because the dirt you walk on was toxic. And it is really dusty because it hadn’t rained. That mud from the flood was toxic too. And now it looked like Arizona, all curled up and dry. Even if we could clean up the house, we can’t live there with our children because we can’t let them run in the yard. One, we didn’t know and still don’t know if they were going to pull some sort of eminent domain stunt and redevelop the area and kick us out. And if they do let us keep our property, we can’t have our kids there. We were just like well, we just have to move along and make the best of what we can. We just can’t sit there and wait for the gutless wonders of the federal government to decide what to do.
So why Kansas?
We toured a lot in the Midwest and ended up here [Kansas]. It is very affordable. It’s cheap. I have produced albums for a few people up here. I have a reputation in the area so I was like well, let’s move to Wichita. People say you got family up here? I say no. People are as nice as they can be. None of us have been through a midwestern winter. People are just giving us clothes. Even with all our clothes, we don’t have a stitch to wear for a Kansas winter.
In fact, a friend managed to steal one of the street signs. We’re going to put up a Jourdan Avenue street sign in our new studio. So it still is going to be the Ninth Ward Pickin’ Parlor again. We’re keeping that, you know. [laughs] We are bringing the ghetto to Kansas.
—By Dan Willging
James Andrews
“New Orleans music can only survive in New Orleans.”
“The people are the ticket,” declares an emotional trumpeter James Andrews a week after his return to New Orleans in early November. “There would be no music without the people of New Orleans. The real population of New Orleans makes the culture and it takes everybody to participate in our culture to make the music bloom and blossom. The flavor is on the road right now.”
One of Andrews’ major concerns is for the future of the social aid and pleasure clubs and the Mardi Gras Indians. The activities of these centuries-long, historic, black cultural organizations, including weekly second line parades, jazz funerals and the Indians’ creations of feathered and beaded suits, are costly and are funded by the members themselves. Many of them were from neighborhoods destroyed by the storm.
“The biggest thing I hate to see is that the second lines—the social aid and pleasure clubs and the Indians—are going to lose their population,” Andrews laments. “The poorer the people, the less likely they’re coming back. They can’t afford to come back. You can’t even find a black motherfucker nowhere in town. All the black neighborhoods are like—‘No one home baby.’ The black community is getting the short end of the deal because half the population was renters. Some people are in better shape where they’re at now and they’re going to stay. They’re getting jobs. They were stuck. They couldn’t find good work or even get enough money to get a bus ticket out of this motherfucker [before the storm]. Everybody got out of here to find their destiny.
While great sadness over the devastation of his hometown looms over Andrews’ thoughts and feelings, the gregariousness and wit that is the trumpeter’s core weaves throughout the conversation. Andrews, who evacuated with a family-filled entourage—“my mama, my grandma, my sister and her two children, my little sister, my old lady, her uncle and auntie and my other auntie, my crazy auntie”—still laughs when he remembers the first night in Monroe. He and his girlfriend Karen were staying at her mother’s house and the rest he put up at a nearby hotel. Stopping in, he discovered the group in the dining room at a table laden with premium food and drink.
“I said, ‘What? What ya’ll doin’?’” Andrews vividly remembers the answer: “Oh, we charged it to the room. “I said, ‘Whoa, let’s cool our horses on this baby, we’ve got to last on this.’”
Soon thereafter Andrews called his brother Troy (“Trombone Shorty”), who had evacuated to Dallas with his girlfriend and her family. “I said, ‘I think this is your mama too. Let’s face the music together.’” A person standing nearby who overheard the conversation commented, “Wow, man, is that your little brother? If he ever had a grown-up call, that was it.” “Troy had 14 motherfuckers on his [credit card] bill,” exclaims Andrews with a burst of laughter. Presently, the talented young trombonist is on tour with Aerosmith.
Andrews remained in Monroe for about a month and went out to a few clubs and sat in with some blues bands—“They wasn’t playin’ no jazz.” Like everyone else, he spent a lot of time calling people and trying to make connections and see what was happening and was in touch with his brother everyday. Finally, Andrews just said, “We gotta go,” and headed to Baton Rouge to be closer to New Orleans. “At least in Baton Rouge I thought I could feel some of the flavor comin’ from New Orleans. I’m like you, I like to walk around and see people.” But he found that wasn’t really possible in the state capital. “That really fucked me up.”
The trumpeter began traveling and played his first gig with pianist Henry Butler in the unlikely town of Portland, Maine. He hit Boston and then New York, performing primarily with those cities’ local musicians. In Jackson, Mississippi he joined Walter Washington, Al “Carnival Time” Johnson, Kevin O’Day and Jack Cruz for one of numerous Hurricane Katrina benefits that included blowing at a sold-out concert with the rock group Wilco in Chicago’s Concert Hall.
“All the gigs I did were fundraisers for the hurricane,” says the trumpeter. “All the money that we raised was going to the Red Cross. The people in those spots have been very generous because they know our situation. One thing about the whole thing is that it shows how big New Orleans music is and how many fans we have in the whole world because people are pouring their hearts out to New Orleans musicians now.”
With his family based in Houston, Andrews headed there and enjoyed meeting up with fellow trumpeter Kermit Ruffins and the guys in his band who were heating things up at their now-regular gig at Sammy’s. Andrews explains that before Ruffins’ arrival after the hurricane, the job was held down by a Mexican band. “The Mexicans asked me when is this New Orleans shit going back to New Orleans? I said, ‘They might never go back.’ Now the place is poppin’ with New Orleans and they have the biggest crowds ever in the area.”
The September night that President Bush addressed the nation from Jackson Square marked the first time Andrews returned to New Orleans. He and brother Troy were in the city to do a special for MSNBC. The second time the trumpeter returned was in October to perform at the Ogden Museum.
“That’s when I really got homesick,” Andrews admits. “I said, ‘It’s too much; I can’t take it. I like travelin’ but not under these situations. I always had a key to put in the door. It’s nice being on the road and all that but, uh, uh, it’s too fuckin’ much. I like to go places and visit and play but I like somewhere to call home, man. And none of them [the cities and towns] have this charm that we’ve got—the flavor that New Orleans got. Them places are dead to me. You can walk down the street and say ‘Where y’at?’ And those people act like you’re like a crazy man.”
Through the generosity of friends, Andrews again has a key to a home in New Orleans. Now residing in the Bywater, he’s trying to line up some work at any number of clubs with a particular eye to land gigs where he can “get something started, where I can build something up.”
Like all of us, Andrews is all too aware of a singular problem. “The people you want to play with that have the New Orleans sound, they have no fucking place to stay if they do come back. If I didn’t have a place to stay, I wouldn’t come back either. Where are the people going to live when they come in? This is a different New Orleans right now. This isn’t the New Orleans we grew up to know. You know the conventions and that shit are dead right now—that’s where the money at. It’s going to be a long time before the party comes back here but it’s coming back day-by-day. The comeback is going to be a bitch.”
“I’m glad to be back home,” declares Andrews whose previous residence in Mid-City was destroyed. “Now I’m back to stay—back for good. I told Troy to come on back home when he finishes his tour.
“People took a hit man—everybody. I think the New Orleans shit will come back together. I think people are going to miss their friends and families scattered all over the country especially when it gets around the holidays. They’re going to miss this New Orleans hospitality. They’re going to miss this southern charm that we have in New Orleans.
“I’d say, ‘Where do we go from here? Only God knows.’”
There is no other city like New Orleans and New Orleans music can only survive in New Orleans. That’s why we’ve got to bring the New Orleans musicians back.
—By Geraldine Wyckoff
Davis Rogan
“Why do I deserve all this love and opportunity?”
Davis Rogan is one of the people who give New Orleans a reputation for eccentric characters. A longtime WWOZ DJ who founded the station’s brass band show and a musician who fronted the avant-garde brass band All That, Davis had recorded an album, The Once and Future DJ, before Hurricane Katrina hit and lost the master in the mail after the deluge. Fortunately his engineer, who had evacuated to Texas, had a safety copy on his hard drive. The album has a song called “Hurricane” about people who don’t leave New Orleans during hurricanes! Davis ended up having his record release party at a Manhattan tavern the night before he left for a European stay during which he performed at an anarchist festival in Paris. He has returned to New Orleans but intends on living in France for some time before returning to his hometown for good.
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“The day before the hurricane hit I got the final artwork from the designer and I went to FedEx to send it off but there was a long line so I went to Express Mail it through the U.S. Postal Service. I dropped it off and went to Liuzza’s By the Track and had an Oyster Rockefeller soup and watched the people watching the TVs, one of which was tuned to a baseball game and the other to the approaching hurricane. Sunday morning it was evident that we were gonna be hit with a category five hurricane so I went to Baton Rouge but my disc was stranded in New Orleans. My disc was six feet underwater in the outgoing Express Mail.
“The guy who mastered and mixed my disc had evacuated to somewhere in Bumfuck Texas with his hard drive and managed to burn another copy of it for me. Disc Makers shipped the disc to Baton Rouge while I was in New York, couch surfing. I had sent them a pleading letter and a dozen e-mails but they still fucked it up. Disc Makers wins the Michael Brown award. I’ll never work with them again.”
The album is a departure from Davis’ work with All That, closer to his roots in New Orleans piano R&B.
“Even when All That was happening there was a deep love of the New Orleans piano tradition underneath all of it. I always loved rhythm and blues, and when the vision of All That dissipated I returned to my roots in the New Orleans songwriting tradition. Some of the songs on the record were written right after the breakup of All That and some were written on the fly in the studio.
“For the hurricane song I had a structure in mind. I wanted to be Roy Brown—screw Ray Charles, I wanted to go all the way back to Roy Brown, I wanted it to be a classic New Orleans rhythm and blues tune in E flat. I wanted a song that used the word umbrella in four syllables—um-ba-rell-a—and I wanted to use the New Orleans phrase ‘Ahmena’ meaning ‘I’m going to’ and I wanted a male-female dialog at the end. These are the things I was thinking about when I wrote the song. The structure was in place but I needed a topic—it was like a Lieber-Stoller kind of thing. So I decided to write a song about the people who leave and the people who don’t leave in a hurricane. The song would have been resonant even without Katrina because it’s about the way that people in New Orleans feel about hurricanes. People in New Orleans feel like they don’t have to leave in a hurricane and I feel like I captured a prevalent mindset before the shit went down.
Davis’ emotionally charged reaction to returning to New Orleans offers a glimpse at the churning mental twists and turns that evacuees have gone through since coming home.
“I picked a great day to be there—9/11. I’d been turned away twice at gunpoint, then when I finally got in… what I saw is too heavy to talk about [he holds his head in his hands and muffles a sob]. I saw the dead body on the fence on Airline Highway. I drove past the 7th Ward where I smelled the stink of the drug dealers who had been murdered by the Orleans Parish Police Department. It’s all way too fucking heavy.
“It’s huge, it’s tragic. it’s terrifying, it’s awful. Some people will use this as a reason to crawl in a hole and die. Some people will say I’m going back to New Orleans to rebuild. Others will say ‘Dude, I’m gonna stay the fuck away from New Orleans for a while to get my head together,’ and that’s a valid response. I’m not gonna compare my suffering and loss to anybody else’s because this affected so many people on so many levels, all I can talk about is me personally. It made me think that when this happened I was teaching and trying to live on the straight and narrow and slowly driving nails into my coffin one binge at a time, resenting everyone. I’m just trying to make the best of it and look at it as an opportunity to start over. I’m not saying I don’t have empathy for all the people who’ve suffered, because God knows I feel for them, anyone who’s reading this magazine has suffered more than I have.
“I was meant to get out of New Orleans and this horrible circumstance has led me to this opportunity. Let’s say you’re faced with two options—return to New Orleans, where your house is destroyed, but you can live on a military base and teach music in junior high school. Or you can go to Amsterdam and see Maceo Parker. I had to choose the latter. The fact is I’m not psychologically or emotionally equipped to teach junior high school right now.
“There is an outpouring of love after the tragedy and everyone I know wanted me to come stay with them. In Portland, Oregon they offered New Orleans musicians a place to live and gigs. But you know what was required? That you live in Portland, Oregon. I don’t want to live in Portland, Oregon. I have to admit that in the midst of watching me lose something and people I know lose everything, in the midst of being offered all these opportunities, I feel a certain amount of guilt. Why do I deserve all this love and opportunity? On the other hand I need to get over that. I want to rebuild New Orleans. I want repatriation for the poor black folk who lived in the 9th Ward. How can I best serve them? With a shovel in my hand? Or by making something of myself and being a voice for New Orleans?
“I dream in French, and my one aspiration in life is to learn French. In Paris the neighborhood I lived in is called Gentilly. The metro stop after Gentilly is Le Place. Please. Let’s talk about how great France is. Don’t think for a second that I don’t feel hurt and don’t make me feel guilty for trying to find some opportunity out of this shitty situation. That’s all I’m saying. I’m trying to make the best of this and move forward. I’ve never been good at shoveling but standing onstage and telling a story is something I’m good at. I believe in myself and when it all comes down to this the hurricane is not that much different than being told you’ve got six months to live. I’ve taken up smoking. It’s all or nothing. Here it is and what are you gonna do? I believe in myself and I feel deeply for my city and the best thing I can do for myself and my city is to make a statement. So that’s what I’m gonna do. I’ll keep coming back. I’ll be in New Orleans on Mardi Gras Day. I’ll be in New Orleans for Jazz Fest. I’ll rebuild my house and I’ll be back.
—By John Swenson
Jumpin’ Johnny Sansone
“My van and all my equipment got lost in the flood.”
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What were you doing when the hurricane was coming to New Orleans?
I was in Toronto working with a Cuban group from Santiago, Cuba, yeah, I was up there recording with them.
So you saw everything on TV?
All we had was the car radio. So I wasn’t sure what was going on. When I found out how bad it was going to be, there was a little hotel bar in town and I went there and the guy just kind of let me hang out. They had Fox in the bar. So I just started watching that until we had to leave Toronto.
So how long were you there?
I was actually stuck there. I was supposed to be there for 10 days and I was there for almost two weeks. And then my wife was at our house in Mid-City. So she evacuated to Abita Springs with her friend Dixie. The last time I talked to her on the phone, I knew that was going to be the last time I was going to talk to her because I knew the power was going to be out.
We just kind of said, well, I will try to call you tomorrow, that was, I guess, Monday morning. It was Sunday night when I talked to her and Monday when I tried to call her at 6 a.m. and the power lines were down by then. And then I didn’t talk to her for like six days. We had gigs and I went on a Toronto news station and talked about it. They came down and interviewed us at the gig. I was telling them that she is missing. At the time, there was a lot of trauma on TV. People were flipping out. Of course, I was because I didn’t know where she was. Who knows how hard Abita got hit, you know? They are out in one of those country cottages in the country, so what happened was some trees came down around the house and the car and they couldn’t get out. They couldn’t call. I was getting ready to fly from Toronto down, well, I was just about to book the flight. I was just about to leave Toronto to the closest place I could get was Memphis. And I was going to rent a car there and go to Abita Springs. I had the address of the house and just try to find it. She called her sister just minutes before I was about to book the flight and said they got out and they were in Jackson. I flew over to her sister’s house in Minnesota and stayed there. We stayed there for a couple of days to figure out what was going on. We drove back to the East Coast where my sister lent me her car. And we started driving around doing benefits. I got immediate gigs. I did guest chef stuff at an old inn. She was a guest bar tender. We just cruised around doing whatever we could anywhere we could.
Where you did go, Johnny?
I drove back to New Orleans and got in kind of a slippery way. It was harder to get out than it was to get in. Jefferson Parish wouldn’t let you out of Orleans Parish. So I drove right in at 6 a.m. in the morning but I tried leaving at 7 a.m. the next morning and it took me four hours to get out. This was right at a good time because it was right when the water was down and before the people started coming, so it wasn’t real long lines, they started saying you came back if you had a pass or something. They still didn’t know what was happening. I was able to kind of sneak through. And then got the cat, sealed the house. The cat was still there.
She was still in the house?
No, she got out of the house. She has a little kitty door but the ramp that she got to go down on blew away, floated away or whatever. She couldn’t get back in. So she was outside for I don’t know how long. I wasn’t even going to stay overnight but she disappeared right around five o’clock and there was a six o’clock curfew. So I couldn’t leave until I found her again. She came walking up around six-thirty and it was too late for me to leave. And the guard guys were coming by every couple of hours, checking on the house, checking on me, make sure I wasn’t looting. A big helicopter went down right by my house on the Bayou St. John. It was pretty scary. And then got back, went back to Toronto and did some more stuff there. My van and all my equipment got lost in the flood. So I just cancelled everything I had. And I have been driving around in my sister’s Mercedes, using borrowed equipment and it has been great. Everybody has been really good to add me onto their bands and stuff.
Do you mind me asking you if you had a lot of damage?
We were really fortunate that the water didn’t rise high enough to get inside the house but some windows blew down and then flooded the house from the outside. So it rained and rained inside of the house and water blew into the house but it wasn’t the kind of floodwater, so we were lucky there. Everything that was on ground level, all my motorcycles, and my shop, and my storage stuff, the whole washer-dryer thing, a bunch of shit was unaccountable. And all the vehicles and my houseboat was out into New Orleans East. I got no idea where that is now, [laughing]. That could be anywhere. That could be in Mississippi by now.
—By Dan Willging
Rhoades D’Ablo
“This hurricane pushed everything back—it’s as if time stopped.”
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Few things on this earth can bring the lead singer of a band called the Devil’s Right Hand to prayer. That’s just what happened to seasoned hellraiser Rhoades D’Ablo during his fateful three-day stay in the Superdome in the days after Katrina. “I asked for help, and I guess someone was listening. I kept telling myself, ‘After all the close calls I have had in my life on the edge, I don’t wanna die here in hell.’” In an increasingly popular blog on his MySpace.com profile, D’Ablo recounts his day-to-day experiences from the moment the hurricane moved into New Orleans to his living nightmare in the Dome to his eventual journey to Texas and Mississippi, where he temporarily resides.
D’Ablo, like many a cynical and weather-weary New Orleanian, had opted to stay put when he heard that another hurricane was headed into the Gulf of Mexico. This decision was especially crucial considering the fiasco last year when nearly all of southeast Louisiana attempted to evacuate for Ivan, a hurricane that barely scratched our area. The failed contra-flow plan of that year and the deplorable traffic situation that resulted were still fresh in everyone’s minds. This was shaping up to be just another case of the one that just missed us. On top of that, the last truly punishing hurricanes that had hit New Orleans were Betsy and Camille, both in the late 1960s. What’s a little rain and wind this time around?
“I was busier tracking the storm on the Weather Channel than I was paying attention to evacuation orders or to whatever Ray Nagin was saying. By that time my girlfriend Laura had already left, and by Sunday afternoon I was at a bar havin’ a drink, wondering what was going to happen.” D’Ablo did not even realize the severity of the category five hurricane until it was literally on top of him. “I first thought it might be pretty serious when I could hear it outside, and the walls in my house began to ripple. But even then, from my vantage point, it still didn’t look like it was flooding until I took the boarding off of my front door and water was to my porch.”
Even after the initial shock of wading through the flood waters, D’Ablo wouldn’t realize the extent of the hurricane’s damage until the next day. When he woke up that morning, all looked to be dry and back to normal, until he rode his bike down to Canal Street and the Ninth Ward, just after the levee had broken. “The Ninth Ward looked like a complete war zone, with people crying and cursing Katrina, and the cops weren’t even letting us onto Canal Street.” After surveying the damage and heading to Robert’s Supermarket for provisions, D’Ablo headed home and had the last good night’s sleep he would see for the next few days.
That morning, he had heard on a neighbor’s radio that “if you want to evacuate, you need to hurry up and get yourself to the Superdome.” So that’s exactly where he headed after packing a few essentials. (This included a case of his thirty favorite CDs and a bottle of wine… c’mon, what rocker would be complete without his music and merlot?) After being bused to the Dome, D’Ablo and the friends who accompanied him began on what he calls on his blog “the first of the nine gates of Hell.” The stench was phenomenal, a mixture of death and human waste, but the sights were probably worse. One of D’Ablo’s cohorts had related to him that he’d witnessed a rape twice in one day from where he’d been sitting. Among the horrors D’Ablo himself witnessed, aside from the odd corpse strewn about, were a riot started by gunfire, the burning of the Astroturf, and a man who took the call of nature a bit too seriously. “There was this naked guy walking around pissing on people and shitting himself. Most people weren’t much better in the Dome, and it’s bad when being civilized amounts to using a beer bottle. I don’t know if the guy was high on crack or what…wouldn’t have surprised me at that point.” That was the point at which D’Ablo says their protectors in the National Guard and FEMA gave up, either frightened or hopeless. “By then, the National Guard wasn’t even checking people in or inspecting them. They were just letting people from off the I-10 into the Dome. That’s when we started to see the thugs coming in with drugs and firearms. It was like an episode of Oz, more like being in a prison than in a shelter.” He also notes that FEMA and the National Guard appeared to have buses, ambulances, and a fleet of other vehicles outside the Dome that they refused to utilize. “There were enough cops there to put everyone in line. I mean, they do this kind of thing every Mardi Gras. But the National Guard assured everyone that they were in control, and of course they weren’t. I could go to my grave trying to understand why we couldn’t leave immediately in those vehicles.” And none of this would have been quite as bad had everyone not been fed the same line each day: “You’re going to be evacuated today.” D’Ablo and everyone else at the Dome had to suffer through this misinformation for three hopeless days until a miracle came in the form of true military presence. “It wasn’t until the Army got there that we were actually able to evacuate and get adequate food and water. I knew they would regain the control that the Louisiana Guard had given up on. It took three hours for the Army to fix what the National Guard screwed up in three days.”
When D’Ablo and company finally got onto the bus that would lead them to glory, things didn’t seem to change by much. Most of the conditions in the Superdome carried over onto the vehicles (D’Ablo bemoaned that it felt like the “Dome on wheels”), but everyone was more optimistic now because they knew they were on their way out. Everyone realized exactly how much the hurricane had changed the look and structure of the city when the bus driver, a native New Orleanian, lost the convoy he’d been following and had no idea what street he was on. Instead of their intended destination in Dallas, their bus ride took them through Baton Rouge and into the Dallas suburb of Mesquite. D’Ablo felt an overwhelming sense of relief when a friend’s mother finally picked them up and brought them to her house. After three days doing without, he was finally able to shower and eat a good meal. “I put those damn clothes I was wearing in a plastic bag and threw them away. That smell of death is really something that doesn’t go away.” Shortly after, Laura showed up, and from there they moved on to her mother’s house and then their more permanent residence.
Rhoades D’Ablo now resides in Pearl, Mississippi, but he is not sure for how long. Living the quiet life in such a small town can take its toll on a wild-man rocker like D’Ablo. “It’s definitely not New Orleans. Sometimes I think just knowing that we’re living here on a temporary basis keeps me sane.” Not that he’s been resting on his laurels by any means. He just got back from laying down tracks for a Katrina benefit album with members of Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age in the deserts of Joshua Tree, and got to perform with his friends in the band Elsa at a show in Jackson. Although relieved to find no damage at his Marigny home (he and Laura snuck into the city disguised as SPCA rescue workers), D’Ablo says his losses occurred on a less physical level. “I lost the next three months of my life. I was supposed to be producing Sabbath Crow’s CD, starting a residency at Marlene’s Place, working with local booking agents. This hurricane pushed everything back—it’s as if time stopped. You go into the Saturn Bar, and their calendar is still set to the day before Katrina hit.” The Devil’s Right Hand, though scattered by the storm, will soldier on. For the time being, however, the band will be dividing its time between Pearl, New Orleans, and Austin until they can return to the city for good. As for the blog that has grown so much in popularity on the Internet, a number of people are looking to publish it as a full-length book. D’Ablo says that he has even heard from a veteran Hollywood producer who has optioned it to be made into a made-for-TV movie. But seeking fame and fortune via his memoirs is the least of his concerns at the moment. “I’d much rather gain fame through the Devil’s Right Hand. Plus, getting my money from them is like getting money from FEMA; I’m just not gonna hold my breath waiting for the checks to roll in.”
For the full details of Rhoades D’Ablo’s Katrina experience, read his blog at http://www.myspace.com/RhoadesDabloTheDevilsRightHand.
—By Jermey Deibel
the subdudes
“The guards they were cooler, they said ‘Go for it, sir.’”
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Two members of the subdudes, Tommy Malone and Jimmy Messa, are displaced and relatively homeless. John Magnie, Steve Amedee and Tim Cook all reside in Colorado, but they have been affected by their bandmates’ upheaval.
“We’re obviously not as bad off as Jimmy and Tommy,” said John Magnie from the road, “but we’ve all been affected. We had to cancel two weeks of gigs because of the hurricanes—one for each. That’s affected all our incomes. My heart goes out to everybody.”
Tommy Malone, like all others, was keeping a close eye on Katrina as she gathered strength in the Caribbean. He and wife Jennifer made plans to leave Saturday, August, 28, with toddler Maggie for Jackson, where Jennifer’s parents live. On Saturday, Tommy moved all his expensive guitars and important household papers and items to the second floor of his Mid-City home. Grabbing “a couple of shirts and two pair of drawers,” the family took off around 1 p.m. It was easy going—no traffic to speak of and a beautiful day.
They settled in Jackson, Mississippi. All the power went down in Jackson and they had kept their ears glued to WWL beaming out of New Orleans on a battery-powered radio. It was then that they learned of the 17th Street levee breach and massive flooding, waters rising as fast as a foot an hour, in Mid-City. Their spirits sank, and they feared the worst.
The heat and power outage drove them to an aunt’s house in Denton, Texas for a few days. It was there they learned about the online satellite photos, which allow you to zoom in on a specific address. As they looked at close-ups of their submerged house, their fears were confirmed. It looked like at least 3 feet of water had crept up the sides of their house.
Sadly, the Malones had only moved back to New Orleans from Jackson a little over a year ago and had just finished renovating one side of the downstairs for an apartment for Tommy’s in-laws. Also downstairs, on the other side, were some vintage amps, cabinets, speakers, and acoustic guitars Tommy had been collecting for years. Frantic, Tommy mailed his house keys to a friend in Baton Rouge and asked him to go in and salvage what he could. The friend was able to rescue all the guitars and important household items from the upper floor, but reported that the downstairs was totally inundated with water.
On Tuesday, September 27, almost one month after the hurricane, Tommy and Jennifer drove from Jackson to New Orleans to check on things themselves. They were first turned back at River Road by the National Guard, but decided to try to get in from Jefferson Highway. “The guards they were cooler,” Tommy related, “they just said ‘go for it, sir.’”
As reported by his friend, the Malone residence took a lot of water and will need much repair and rehab. Tommy plans to rebuild and is confident that New Orleans will do the same.
Jimmy, after fleeing from both Katrina and then Rita, is now living in one room of what is left of his house in Slidell with wife Beth, two dogs, a generator and an air conditioner. The good news is Jimmy grabbed all his guitars and amps when first fleeing and has them stashed in various places for safekeeping.
Like many others, Jimmy waited as long as he could to evacuate, hoping to avoid the slow go of contraflow. He finally left shortly after noon on Sunday, August 29 with his truck loaded with everything he could possibly carry. First stop was Abita Springs to drop off a few of his guitars. Both he and Beth, like so many others, expected to be returning within a few days but decided to err on the side of caution. Besides, their home stood on pilings, 13’ above-ground. It would never flood.
Armed with the typical New Orleanean laissez faire ’tude, they decided to head to Austin where they knew they could find a place to stay and have a little fun at the same time. Much to their chagrin, it took 17 1/2 hours to drive to Austin. So much for fun. Awaking to learn that the eye of Katrina had passed six blocks from their house, they headed back to New Orleans to assess the damage. Astonishingly, when they pulled up to their house, it was still standing but had sustained some damage and massive flooding. The house to the right of them (within two feet of theirs) was nothing but a slab, while the house to the left was entirely untouched.
They decided to find a place nearby to stay and sign up for FEMA and other assistance. They started heading west. “Nearby” turned out to be lodging in Lake Charles. They settled into a couple of motel rooms for what they through would be a week or two. Jimmy headed back on the road with the subdudes following a couple of cancelled gigs.
Beth decided to bring Jimmy’s mom, who had lost her home in St. Bernard Parish, down from where she was staying with Jimmy’s sister in Folsom. Beth and Mom arrived safely back in Lake Charles only to flee back to Folsom a few days later with Rita bearing down.
“I think New Orleans will rebuild and people will come back,” Jimmy said. “But some won’t. I ran into Henry Butler at the Telluride Blues and Brews Festival and he said ‘I ain’t going back to New Orleans. I seen enough.’ That’s pretty funny.”
—By Kathleen Rippey
