OffBeat

OffBeat started “Backtalk,” its monthly Q&A in January 1996, when Michael Tisserand interviewed BeauSoleil’s Michael Doucet with brothers Sid and Nathan Williams—the former, the proprietor of El-Sid-O’s; the latter, the leader of Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas. Since then, we’ve talked to much of the roots music world and many outside of it. In the process, we’ve got insight into the lives and careers of subjects such as Bo Diddley, Randy Newman, Keely Smith, Earl King and Hal Willner; beyond that, we’ve got new perspectives on history, aesthetics, show biz, and the events that shape our world. Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore talked about recording in the shadow of the rubble of the World Trade Center in the days after September 11, 2001. Not surprisingly, we’ve learned a lot about New Orleans. Jeff Hannusch interviewed blues and R&B artists about the city’s past, the clubs that were once central to the music, and some of the unsung people who made it.

 

Some we’ve talked to more than others. We’ve interviewed Terence Blanchard three times and Irma Thomas, Ellis Marsalis, Aaron Neville, George Wein, Quint Davis, Branford Marsalis, Harry Connick, Jr. and George Porter, Jr. twice. Considering the role those people have played in the life of the city’s music scene in the last 20 years, it’s really surprising that we didn’t interview them more.

 

Nathan Williams, Michael Doucet, and Dennis Paul Williams by Michael Tisserrand (January 1996)
Did any of you ever have words with him or receive any advice from Clifton Chenier?
Nathan: One time, he came and played at my brother’s club, and I wasn’t playing at the time. He had the hiccups, so he couldn’t sing “Hungry Man Blues.” [Harry Hippolite, Chenier’s longtime guitarist and Nathan’s uncle] was playing with him at the time, and he said, “Come up here, my little nephew, let that boy sing ‘Hungry Man Blues.’” So he started off on the accordion. And I sang, Yeah, baby. [Chenier] looked at Harry: “He bon, he bon.” And he said, “You’re going to be something, baby.” When Clifton died—and I’m going to tell you, this is the God’s truth, and I wouldn’t have no reason in lying—and after I went to the wake, I came home. He came to me like natural, like in my sleep. He said, “Keep on going.” He said, “You’re going to make it. Don’t stop playing that music, just keep blowing it.” I’m living witness. I’m not lying, he came like natural. I said, “Nat, this is something.”

 

Ernie K-Doe by John Sinclair (February 1996)
How did you discover this lady [Antoinette K-Doe] who just became your wife?
I’m gonna tell the truth like it was. I saw this lady in 19…in ’62. I just had bought my brand new Cadillac-and I was on my way to the Apollo Theatre in New York, and I stopped in this place on Touro and St. Claude. She was workin’ behind the liquor counter, and she was bendin’ down, and during that time I said, “Oh no, I ain’t gonna mess with her.” She was dressed nice, in a white dress—I never will forget this—and I wouldn’t mess with her. I ordered my drink, and she had somebody else behind the bar to fix my drink while she was puttin’ up the liquor behind the bar. I never did forget her, but I never did think that me and her would tie up together because back then-hey, she wouldn’t have liked me. Then again, I wouldn’t have liked her, because I was…ooh, man, look, I was doin’ my thing.

Ellis Marsalis by Geraldine Wyckoff (March 1996)
You’ve not only worked with Branford and Wynton, but many musicians from other generations, such as your recent contribution to Wess Anderson’s new album, The Ways of Warmdaddy. How does that affect your playing?
Depends on who it is. Older musicians can put a date on the music. If you’re doing their music, then it’s incumbent upon you to be familiar enough with the vocabulary of the idiom that they’re functioning in. If you’re doing your own idiomatic music, then they in turn will be trying to express what musicians play from your idiom. I’ve learned a lot from dealing with younger people in terms of the language, in terms of vocabulary.
I was primarily a bebop piano player and eventually [John] Coltrane came along and shook the tree and a lot of other stuff fell out of it which wasn’t really bebop. After that, there was kind of like a void and then the fusion thing came in, and, well, I never got too much into fusion. By the time the ’80s came, when Wynton went to New York, the group he had was sort of taking up where Miles [Davis] and them had stopped in the late ’60s with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. And I had played with musicians that sort of played like that a little, not in an imitative sense. The short time that Nat Perrilliat, James Black and I played together, we approached music in a similar way.

 

Pete Fountain by David H. Jones (May 1996)
I thought I’d be retired by now, but here I am. I should be dead what with all the Jack Daniels that I put in my body during the ’60s. I lost 10 years during that decade. I tried to beat Jack Daniels, but he beat me. He whipped my butt. I can’t remember some things from the ’60s. I mean I did a couple of great albums during that time and—God—I can’t even remember being in the studio. It’s stupid water, ignorant juice. You go by radar, I guess, but near the end of those days I kept thinking, “This is wrong.” It was the end of the longest hangover in the world. It was my fault, but I’m making up for lost time now. I’ve cleaned up my act considerably during the last 30 years. I’m doing good.

 

Terence Blanchard by Jonathan Tabak (July 1996)
I had a great music teacher who constantly used basketball as a metaphor for jazz.
I think there’s a lot of similarities. Basketball is very much like a jazz ensemble because you have guys who are going to be the emotional leaders on the court. But it’s a very flexible situation. You have set plays, which are the tunes, right? You have set options that you are going to run, right? But, depending upon the defense that you run up against, it’s going to determine who gets the ball, where the ball is going to go, whether it’s going to go down low, or if you’re going to pop it out. And everybody gets a chance to have some interaction, or contribute.

 

Charmaine Neville by Jonathan Tabak (August 1996)
Is it true that you actually bring grits along with you on your trip?
Who told you that? Yes, it is true. (laughs) I can’t believe someone told you that. I usually carry in like one suitcase, pots, pans, all my seasoning, my grits, dried meat and stuff that I want, you know? I’ll dry it and freeze dry it. I hate to be without good food.

 

Tito Puente by Jonathan Tabak (September 1996)
I heard that your son, Tito Puente, Jr., just released his first album?
Yes. He’s a rapper. I got interviewed by some reporters and they asked, “What does your son play, Mr. Puente?” I scratched my head and said, “You know, I never asked him. I don’t know what the hell he does.” (laughs) I asked him, “Hey, Tito, what do you play? You don’t play piano, you don’t play drums, guitar. What?” He said, “I rap, dad.” I said, “You what?” He said, “I’m a rapper.” I said, “You mean, you recite the tunes, you don’t even sing them?” But he’s on the charts, already. In fact, I play on one of his sides; I took a timbale solo there. When I finished doing that, I asked him, “Who’s the executive producer?” He said, “I am, Dad.” I said, “Wonderful! I’m proud of you. Who’s the producer of this record?” He said, “I am.” I said, “Wow! You’re really taking care of business! Tito, who’s going to pay me?” He says, “I ain’t got no money, Dad.”

 

Geno Delafose by Arsenio Orteza (October 1996)
Do you really think you need voice lessons?
Well, my voice is fine for singing zydeco and Cajun music, but when it gets to the soul side of things, like “Teardrops” or some country ballad, I’d like to be able to sing and know how to control my voice. Singing, to me, is like learning how to play baseball. Anybody can go ahead and get a bat and hit a ball, but after a while there’s a special way you should hold your bat to make yourself a better hitter, and that’s what I want to do with my voice. It’s good now, but it can be better.

 

Willy DeVille by Christi Daugherty (November 1996)
Loup Garou seems to have a strong emphasis on love songs, and many of those songs seem influenced by love songs of the 1960s. One album reviewer wrote that your songs could be “the number 1 convertible makeout songs of 1962.” Was that intentional?
Yes, absolutely. Back when I was growing up I listened to the radio and they were singing beautiful songs. These songs were personal, they could be about me and my girlfriend. “Da Doo Ron Ron”—I loved that stuff. I still love a beautiful love song. I like a classic with a twist, though, you know. Instead of saying, “I love you more than anyone in the world,” I would tend to use the word “addiction.” The Drifters were a big influence in my life. All that music was. When I was a kid, my brother, who was six years older than me, would be listening to the radio and to songs like “Stand by Me” and “Spanish Harlem.” He taught me about music. I can remember being at breakfast and him saying to me, “You hear that? You hear that, man? That’s the sound of Spanish Harlem!” I wanted to write one of those songs. Those break your heart teenage ballads.

 

Maria Muldaur by David H. Jones (December 1996)
We used to have these hootenannies every Saturday night. Everyone would pay a dollar and we’d rent this loft space. There’d be maybe 50 to a hundred people there and Pete Seeger and Rev. Gary Davis, some bluegrass group would stop by and it would be a round-robin of playing. The hootenanny would break up around 1 a.m. and I had a loft downtown and people would come over there. I remember Rev. Gary Davis coming over and sitting up all night, drinking from a hip flask and playing guitar and talking and then, without getting any sleep, we would drive him up to Harlem where he’d deliver a sermon. I felt really blessed to be a young girl and to be around so many of our culture’s elder statesmen. I really was in the right place at the right time.

 

Boozoo Chavis by Arsenio Orteza (January 1997)
You recorded Hey Do Right! a year and a half ago?
Well, it took that long for them to get the thing together. We cut the album in May, and now we’re way over here in January. We cut it in maybe 25 or 30 minutes.

 

But it’s 43 minutes long.
People said they’d never seen a man cut an album like that before.

 

Was that the fastest you’d ever made a record?
I think I made one album faster than that at Maison de Soul.

 

Lillian, Tricia, John and Tanya Boutte by Jonathan Tabak (February 1997)
John: Danny Barker was one of my dearest friends. I was living in the Treme just before he died, and three days before he died, he went around the neighborhood and he was checking everybody out, but you could tell he was saying goodbye.

 

Joshua Redman by Jonathan Tabak (March 1997)
You seem more interactive with the popular culture than the typical jazz musicians, who stereotypically find it repulsive and absurd.
I don’t know what the “typical” jazz musician is, but yeah, I live in this world, this culture—whether you want to call it pop culture or just people culture. I watch and listen to and interact with and react to everything that’s around me. I love jazz, I love the tradition of jazz, I’m loyal to that tradition in a sense, but by the same token, I watch MTV. I like to go to rock clubs, I like to go dancing, I like to hang out with people who could care less about jazz. Jazz does not limit my experience at all. Music should be an honest expression of your life experiences, and the more life experiences you can have, the more things you can interact with—and be excited by—the better.

 

Charlie Musselwhite by Scott Jordan (April 1997)
I’m always amazed at the show lineups from the Sixties in California, where you had bands like Santana, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and then guys like you, Albert King and Paul Butterfield on the same night. Yet none of the blues players ever went the psychedelic route.
To me, psychedelic music was just guys who were guitar owners and big amplifier owners who had learned a few chords and they were playing really loud and making interesting sounds. And it was sort of fun, but I didn’t take that stuff seriously too much. To me, blues is real music and I think a lot of people felt that way. Not to say that what they were doing wasn’t valid; I just didn’t know how to do that and didn’t have any interest in it.

 

Quint Davis by David H. Jones (May 1997)
Was there ever a make-or-break year for Jazz Fest?
There was one complete and total life-and-death moment when there would’ve been no festival, and that was at the very beginning when George (Wein) first came in. The original board was already in place and it was headed by Durel Black. The board primarily wanted a nighttime concert series headed by big names similar to Newport. George had this idea of a heritage fair. In that first year at Congo Square, the event lost some $40,000 or $50,000. In 1997 [when this interview was conducted] dollars, that’s about $400,000, and at that point there was a large faction of the board that thought that was enough to kill the fair portion altogether. No money, no discussion. Basically, the board said we’ll keep the night concerts but the heritage fair has got to go. George thought the fair was the heart and soul of the festival, so George told the board that it was up to them. It was their festival. But, if they chose to eliminate the fair, then he would resign, and it was Durel Black who sided with George and set the festival on its modern course.

 

Scott Billington of Rounder Records by Scott Jordan (June 1997)
I recorded John Delafose in the studio in the late ’80s. I told him that I had two days booked in the studio, and I was going to have hotel rooms for him and the band to come and stay in New Orleans for the night. John said, “Oh, I don’t know about that.” I’m thinking, maybe he needs more than two days. He finally says, “Listen, it’s not going to take any more time for us to make this record than it’s going to take us to come to the studio and play the songs.” Meaning, I don’t need two days to make a record. They came to Ultrasonic (Studio) and we got the sounds happening in about an hour, and two and a half hours later, they had laid down 18 songs, very high energy performances. When I asked if they wanted to stick around so I could give them some rough mixes on cassettes so they could take it home and listen, John says, “Well, no. We got to go home and feed the horses. Why don’t you send it to us?”

 

Solomon Burke by Scott Jordan (July 1997)
I can remember when Look magazine did a feature on Nat King Cole, and it was the first time I’d ever seen a Black man on the cover of a big magazine. They were saying the Capitol Records superstar is getting five cents a record, and I was like, my god, that man is rich! Five cents a record! Today some of these kids, you tell them five cents a record, they’ll beat you up! It’s a beautiful world to see the change.

 

Cosimo Matassa by Todd Mouton (August 1997)
You mentioned Allen Toussaint as someone was really creative in the studio.
I used to kid him. I used to say he could make a chicken out of a feather and a wishbone, and he really did. He could match a song to a singer, he could match an arrangement to a song and a singer, and he could work it out. He would simplify it and drop things and change things and make it work.

 

John Mooney by Sonny Goldreich (October 1997)
Who do you listen to?
Everybody. I hardly ever listen to blues. I like to listen to what’s on the radio, but if I want to listen to something, it’s usually Thelonious Monk. Aside from that, I just listen to what’s on. The other day I was listening to Garth Brooks. He writes some great songs. Fiona Apple, it kills me some of the shit she does. Alanis Morrisette. I like the Spice Girls. What I see with a lot of these people, there’s a real seriousness to the artistry, but there’s also a sense of humor. The Spice Girls make me laugh; the music’s good, but it’s real tongue in cheek.
Who’s your favorite one?
Of the Spice Girls? Baby Spice.

 

Herman Leonard by Jan Ramsey (November 1997)
Was there anybody that you wanted to photograph that you never got to?
No (laughs). I mean, there’s plenty now but not at the time. In retrospect, I wish I would have done Coltrane and a lot of other people. But I was so busy, there was so much richness around for me for subject matter. I would have loved to have been able to do more intimate personal shots of people that I admired like Sinatra. I have a lot of pictures of him, but they’re all off the cuff. I would have liked that because I admired the man so much for his musical expertise. Everybody thinks of him as a singer; this guy is a musician in the full sense of the word. He astounded me from time to time at recording sessions, how he would listen to the arranger, Nelson Riddle, or whoever was doing the arrangements, and make changes. It wasn’t, “I’ll sing what you write.” It was “What about this? How about the timing? Let’s get rid of that trumpet in this section.” That is a musical mind.

 

George Porter, Jr. by Alex Oliver (December 1997)
When Tori Amos hires you to record with her, is she looking for the George Porter funk bass, or does she dictate the sound she’s looking for?
There are probably only a few signature George Porter things. Most of the time, when I’m playing on someone else’s session, I’m very much trying to make what I play fit with the music. I like playing, and I consider myself a musician’s musician. I don’t just play funk. If they’ve got a country and western session out there, I’ll play it, and not only that, I’ll know how to play it.

 

Zachary Richard by Angelie Alciatore (February 1998)
My whole career has been so unforeseeable. I was living in New York in the early ’70s, had a record deal, the company went through some political changes, and then basically I was out on the street. I went to France and had this whole other thing happen to me. That basically kidnapped me for 10 years. When that slowed down, I came back to Louisiana and started the American phase of my career. I never really anticipated doing that, either. I thought I was taking a break from the French thing, and then the English thing took off. So now I’m faced with the real dilemma, never being able to unite those two aspects of my professional career. There’s a French career and there’s an English career, but they have almost no influence on one another.

 

Dr. John by Jeff Hannusch (May 1998)
You look like you dropped some weight.
I’ve been running a mile everyday (laughs). No, I’ve just been not eating at four in the morning like I used to, and I’ve been walking the dogs like a human being.

 

Jimmie Vaughan by Scott Jordan (June 1998)
Was it a rollercoaster ride when “Tuff Enuff” took off?
The only thing that was overwhelming was that you had so many damn gigs that we couldn’t really keep up with them. We got really wore down, just from trying to keep up because it’s hard to say no. Somebody calls you up and says, “We’ve got a gig here for 20,000 bucks if can be here in Florida tomorrow.” And we’d go, “We’re in L.A. tonight, we can’t possibly get over there.” They’d say, “If you take a red-eye you can make it.” And that was what happened.

 

Nicholas Payton by Jonathan Tabak (July 1998)
I hate when people try to make music more than what it is, you know, when their personal philosophies or ideas totally override the music. Some people talk so much about what they’re doing, when you hear it, it can be a let down.

 

Fred LeBlanc of Cowboy Mouth by Rick Koster (September 1998)
The thing about Elvis Presley and the Beatles is they kept having hits. Big Star made really great, wonderful records, but nobody bought them and they were dropped after only two records. We’re dealing with corporate America, and that’s the ball field you have to be prepared to play in if you want to get with a major.

 

Rockin’ Dopsie, Jr. by Jeff Hannusch (October 1998)
Tell us about some of your early memories of your father.
Before he really made it in the music industry, my dad worked construction. He played music at night and worked during the day. I remember him coming home from playing a local gig at 2 a.m. or driving back from Houston at 5 a.m. and having to be at work for 7. He was a hard working man. I have to give him a lot of credit; he always supported his family. You’d see him a lot Monday to Thursday, but on the weekend he was pretty much gone.

 

Randy Newman by Scott Jordan (November 1998)
It’s nice to hear the third disc on the box set [Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman], the “odds and ends” disc, with all your demos and live performances.
I didn’t remember some of those at all. Not a thing. I didn’t know where the next chord was going to go in some of them.

 

Levon Helm by Scott Jordan (December 1998)
We [The Band] had to listen [to “the Basement Tapes”] for a while in order to stop doing stuff that didn’t sound so good. I’ve had Duck Dunn tell me that, too, that working at Stax Records and being the house band for Stax Records made him a much better player because every day he would record and would have to listen to himself back.

 

Did you ever directly cop licks from Earl Palmer or Smokey Johnson?
Oh yeah (laughs). I came up with a drum fill that I thought was pretty hot, and I was just about to pat myself on the back, and started listening around to some stuff and damn it if Earl Palmer didn’t already do it on one of Little Richard’s records. The hook that Earl Palmer did on “Keep a Knockin’,” that drum kick-off, that’s one of the greatest hooks in music for my ears.

 

Donald Harrison, Jr. by Jonathan Tabak (February 1999)
It seems that, even by New Orleans standards, you have an extremely musical family.
I found out a few years ago that my mother had studied clarinet with Alvin Batiste when she was in high school. And my father was a folk musician. He knew so much history of New Orleans music. He could sing Mardi Gras Indian songs going back to the turn of the century. At home, my parents played all types of music, so I never became a jazz hypocrite, which is what some of my friends are. We have arguments about that because they say you’re only supposed to play jazz, then I catch one of them playing classical music and I catch another one playing funk.

 

Sam Butera by Mark Miester (April 1999)
How do you feel about hearing the arrangement you wrote for Louis Prima on a Gap commercial?
It makes me angry. You know what they gave me for using the thing? Three pairs of pants.

 

Bo Diddley by Rob Fontenot (June 1999)
You claim you invented rock and roll guitar. Is that true?
Who can you find before me? Me and Chuck Berry were the first people who did that, who started playing that kind of guitar. But what gets me is, when my white brothers started playing guitars and trying to sound like us, and people started saying that Elvis started rock ’n’roll. Elvis ain’t started a goddamn thing. I love him. I love what he did, I really do, but we was there before.

 

Dale Hawkins by Jeff Hannusch (July 1999)
You had an interesting guitarist named Carl Adams.
He had a couple fingers blown off by a shotgun when he was a kid. Some people would consider that a handicap, but to Carl, he still had a full house. He played with the strings upside down and he taped the guitar pick to his hand.

 

Taj Mahal by John Swenson (August 1999)
You’ve recorded everything from Louis Armstrong’s “You Rascal You” to the New Orleans R&B you played at Jazz Fest. You put a really nice arrangement on that and you prove that this stuff still is contemporary.
It’s always contemporary. This is humanity and we’re singing songs about our trials in whatever direction. I don’t care if you speak Serbo-Croatian, you got some version of the blues in there. I mean everybody, whether it’s going to the minor to make that point, or the dirge to make that point. Whatever, it’s there.

 

Idris Muhammad by Jonathan Tabak (January 2000)
Did you leave New Orleans by choice?
No, I was at Dooky Chase’s getting a sandwich and Joe Jones was there with me and he said, “Sam Cooke is in there, in the dining room eating. He’s complaining about the drummer, so go talk to him.” I introduce myself and he’s talking and eating and he says, “Man, you know any of my songs?” I said, “Yeah.” So he starts to singing and I start playing on the table and he hired me. Played the Municipal Auditorium that night, no rehearsal. He took me out of town. I was with him for about two years. I didn’t leave New Orleans because of problems, I left because of gigs. I needed to be someplace were I could explore my talent.

 

Earl King by Jeff Hannusch (February 2000)
I haven’t been overseas for a few years, but I’d like to go again. Now you take Japan, that place is intriguing. The first time I was there was with Johnny Adams. Johnny walked all over Kyoto because he could take that heat. It would be a 110 degrees and Johnny would come back to the room, leave the windows closed and put a blanket over the AC. If it rained, Johnny would put a quilt on.

 

Pinetop Perkins by Rob Fontenot (March 2000)
You were playing behind Howlin’ Wolf for a time, as well. Was he the character everyone made him out to be?
Oh yeah. Last time we was playing with Muddy in Memphis, we was at a roller rink. And [Wolf] didn’t carry a band with him, so we backed him up. He came in wearing a big yellow suit. Brand new. And everyone in the audience started laughin’ at him, sayin’, look at that man in that monkey suit. He got up on the microphone and he said, “I don’t know what y’all laughin’ at. I got enough money to burn up a wet mule.” (laughing)

 

Terence Blanchard by Jonathan Tabak (April 2000)
When we first got in the business we were trying to be on the cutting edge, very rebellious, and not trying to fall into a particular style. The band that Donald Harrison and myself had was an experimental band. But as a musician, you get to the point where you’re like, “Well damn, ‘Caravan’ is a great tune. ‘Satin Doll’ is a beautiful tune. Maybe I should try to investigate melody. Maybe I should try to investigate writing in song form.” So as a musician you change, you go through phases.

 

Ken Burns by Jon Pult (May 2000)
You’ve mentioned Armstrong several times. I’ve found in listening to his music and poring over his writings, his letters and even in talking to people who met the man, that he does not seem of this earth. In New Orleans, you called him the “heart and soul of the film.” What effect did he have not only on the series, but on you personally?
When I see the “Dinah” footage (filmed in Denmark in 1933), it’s like seeing e=MC2 on a blackboard written in the hand of Einstein. I know that in politics, almost every American can look back and say we needed Abraham Lincoln to come along when he came along, and the sacrifice that he made for his country was beyond belief. If you gave me a choice right now of being able to have lunch with Abraham Lincoln or Louis Armstrong, I’d have lunch with Louis Armstrong, because Armstrong’s contribution is no less important to the future character of the Republic. We can say Lincoln saved the Union, but what kind of Union does one save if you don’t have a Louis Armstrong there to remind us how to swing?

 

Keely Smith by Bunny Matthews (June 2000)
Where did the concept of your act come from, with Louis as the comedian and you as the straight woman?
That was an accident. We did five shows a night at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. We worked from midnight ’til 6 in the morning and we did 45-minute shows. The first half-hour, I stood there and did nothing. I’d ooh and ah in the background of a song but I never sang, I never talked, I never did anything. It was really a tiny, tiny stage.
There wasn’t a lot of room and we had an upright piano up there. I used to stand in front of the piano, lean up against it, fold my arms and stand there for half an hour. I’m a great people-watcher. Even today, I do that. I could tell you who came in what door, who they were with, what they were wearing, what time they left. I was so busy watching everybody that Louis would come over and pull on my skirt and break my concentration. And I’d look at him like, “Don’t bother me.” Then I’d go back to looking where I was looking. A lot of people thought that turned into my deadpan, but that wasn’t what it was at all.

 

Irma Thomas by Jeff Hannusch (August 2000)
I remember cutting “It’s Raining” and Allen handed me the lyrics to the second verse in the middle of recording the song. But those [Minit] records were just regional hits, and I mean regional in the strictest sense. Beyond Pensacola, they never got any airplay. It’s only in recent years that “It’s Raining” has become popular. When it got in the movie Down by Law, it finally started getting national popularity.

 

DJ Jubilee by Jeff Hannusch (September 2000)
“Back That Thang Up” came right out of the St. Thomas. I was deejaying one night and this girl was backing her thing up at me. I just started telling everybody to “back that thing up.” I just added that part to the song I was writing. By that being a hot dance at the time, I made “Back That Thang Up” the title.
The term “Wobble Wobble” came from a homosexual. He was telling me, “Jubilee, they can’t handle me ’cause I be wobblin’.” But wobblin’ is the way a girl shakes her behind in a club. They make their behind go wiggle, wiggle and shake, shake, just like Jello jiggles. So I started telling the girls, “Make it wobble.” During the time with Tommy Boy I was in the process of creating that song. I made the hot part of the song “Jiggy” and not “Wobble Wobble.” If I’d have made “Wobble Wobble” the hot part of the song, I’d have titled it “Wobble Wobble,” and it would have taken off differently. That’s where Master P got it.

 

R.L. Burnside by Rob Fontenot (December 2000)
Whose idea was it to hook up with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion?
They heard one of my CDs and called Fat Possum and said, “Can we open for him?” I hadn’t heard of ’em. So they opened up for me, and we’d been settin’ back in the dressing room, drinking. And I’d be telling them dirty stories, you know. And they said, “Man, we oughta make an album of that!” I said, “Man, I can’t even do that stuff on stage.” They said, “Yes, you can.”
So a little while passed, and I was at home just drinking some beer under a shade tree, and they said I got a phone call. And Jon said, “R.L., you ready to do that album?” And I said, “Well, if it don’t help me none, it can’t hurt me none.” (laughs) We rented a hunting club and did the album in four hours.

 

Kidd Jordan by Bunny Matthews (January 2001)
Do you think being from New Orleans had an effect upon your music?
I don’t know what “New Orleans music” is. Anybody who makes music from New Orleans is New Orleans music.

 

This is one of the reasons why I have such a problem with people who put me in the avant-garde category. I can’t deal with it when somebody says, “Well, that’s not New Orleans music.” I played with the Hawkettes, pre-Neville Brothers, pre-all of this. I played with Professor Longhair, all the rest of them blues singers. So I know how all that goes. I was in Boston last week and they were playing the Meters. I said, “I remember when the Meters—especially Zigaboo—were little kids, sitting on the porch, listening to me practice with Idris Muhammad who was Leo Morris then.” The Meters played some good music, but I was dealing with that music before it came out. I was enthused about it, but I’ve been hearing that for years. What I’m trying to say is that the music’s got to develop.

 

Olu Dara by Bunny Matthews (March 2001)
What advice would you give a young kid who wants to play trumpet?
I would tell him not to. I’d tell him to sing and play guitar. I never liked the trumpet. I thought I liked it in the beginning but as I got older, I felt that it really wasn’t first in my band. My voice is first and the guitar and harmonica run a close second. I’m talking about the things I want to do. The trumpet doesn’t make me feel as good as the singing and playing the harmonica and playing the guitar. It seems like it’s separate—it seems like I have to go take a step into another room. When I play the trumpet, it turns my music right into jazz. But I don’t want it to go into jazz. I want it to stay, you know what I mean? If you hear a trumpeter’s tone one time, you gonna hear that same tone the next time. But with a voice and guitar, you can do things with them. You can twist and turn them a lot. The trumpet is not elastic enough for me.

 

Jimmy Scott by Scott Aiges (May 2001)
When I listen to you, what I feel you’re communicating a sense of almost devastating loneliness and longing, but there’s also with that a real feeling of resolve and resilience.
Yeah. Well, hey, you’ve got to keep moving on. You can’t pipe your mind in all of your hurts, you know?

 

You can’t what, I’m sorry?
(slowly) You can’t pipe your mind in all of your hurts in life. Once you pipe in, it’s destruction to yourself to do that. So you try to pipe it in and make it blend in with reality of time. You know?

 

Ike Turner by Bunny Matthews (June 2001)
Why do you think so many people use drugs?
I think being inquisitive, they start off trying it and they like it at first, like I did. And then you want some more and the next thing you know, you’re living for it. I can say this in total fairness, man—anybody that’s doing drugs, they all want to be off, I swear to God. They really do. I know they do.
They want to be off, but they don’t have the will to get off. You have to be strong, man. I used to pray to God, “Please let me get three days without it. And I would never look back.” And I would lie to myself every time and say, “Joe is coming over” or “Bunny’s coming over—he’s gonna want some.” And I would order some. Only when I went to jail did I get myself clean.

 

Clarence Carter by Jeff Hannusch (July 2001)
You and Etta James recorded at the same studio—Fame—and had some tremendous hits. What was it about that studio that was so special?
Well, Fame was located in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Back then, Muscle Shoals was a dry county. We couldn’t drink beer, so instead we concentrated on making music. But there wasn’t really anything special about the building. What I really think made that studio special was how excited you were when you went in to do a session. You’d be thinking to yourself, “Aretha Franklin, Jimmy Hughes, Wilson Pickett or Etta James were just in here and cut hits. Why can’t I cut the next one?”

 

Ellis Marsalis by Fred Kasten (August 2001)
We’ve always had a problem getting trombone players and some trumpet players and also piano players [in UNO’s jazz studies program]. Bass players are not that prevalent either. Usually, your bands benefit if the university has a football team and usually you can recruit trombone players and trumpet players because there’s a band there that’s needed for halftime football activities. Since we don’t have that, we have to be a lot more creative. Not that I think that we should have it—I’m glad UNO doesn’t have a football team.

 

Tom Drummond of Better Than Ezra by Alex Rawls (September 2001)
How did you end up playing the Al Gore rally at Jackson Square?
We did some stuff for Clinton actually, and we met some of the Vice-President’s staff members four years earlier, and we all happen to be Democrats. We called up his office and said, “If there’s anything we can do, we’d like to help out.” They said, “We’re coming to town to do a rally. Would you like to play to warm up the crowd for us?” So we did it, and we ended up doing it again in Milwaukee. Actually, we were scheduled to play the ball if he won.

 

But he did win.
(pause) We won’t even get into that.

 

Miriam Makeba by Christopher Blagg (November 2001)
When I went to South Africa in 1997, I was studying music in Capetown. I noticed that a lot of the young people were turning their backs to the traditional music, calling it a backwards music. They were being inundated by MTV and flashy Western sounds and images that proved stiff competition for the indigenous music of the townships.

 

How is South African music going to stay alive against the influx of the West?
There was a honeymoon period after elections in [in 1994], a fascination with America and the West. But they are coming back now. There are many of us who are trying to keep the traditions alive. That is why I recorded my record Sangoma. Many of the young people now are taking our songs and doing them their way. Take for example a young lady like Sibongile Khumalo. She studied classical music, but she still sings the traditional music. I think that is beautiful because some people, when they study classical music feel they cannot sing the traditional music. She doesn’t. I like that in her.

 

Alvin Youngblood Hart by Christopher Blagg (December 2001)
The image you project doesn’t fit the blues stereotype of the sharp suit and hat.
Well, who wants to fit that anyway? When I was a little kid I used to ask my great grandpa, “Poppa, you want to go up to Memphis?” and he’d say, “No, I’m not goin’ up there. You got to dress up all the time.” I’m with him on that.

 

Jane Monheit by Geraldine Wyckoff (January 2002)
You are a physically stunning young woman and that can be advantageous. But I wonder if sometimes in the jazz world whether that may also be a disadvantage.
I never thought of myself as being anyone who looked different than anyone else, and it never had anything to do with my music—not in my mind. I didn’t think how I looked had anything to do with that because I wasn’t trying to be a pop star. I thought in the jazz world that wouldn’t matter. And it turns out it does. I’ve read reviews in the past where there’s been more time spent talking about my hair or my dress than what I sang.

 

James “Sugar Boy” Crawford by Jeff Hannusch (February 2002)
Did you ever mask as an Indian?
Oh no, I never did go out for that kind of thing. You might not believe it because of “Jock-A-Mo,” but I was afraid of the Indians.

 

Johnny Vidacovich by Bunny Matthews (March 2002)
[Professor Longhair] was a great guy to me, taught me a lot of stuff, spent time with me. He would play rhythms on my leg in the van when we were traveling. He was a tap dancer and a drummer, and he could play really fast stuff with his hands. Fess was very funny, liked to play lots of jokes, liked to tell me a lot of things that were not true and then laugh at me when I found out.

 

He was very much about drums and piano. There was none of this laying-back thing. Shit had to be dancing, it had to be moving, it had to be on the edge. Slightly contradictory to what people think music is around here. There wasn’t nothing laid-back about his concept.

 

What about James Booker? “Angel Eyes” is the most beautiful thing Booker ever recorded.
One time, there was a baffle in front of me and the piano was on the other side of that so I could basically see Booker’s head and shoulders. James [Singleton] is standing over here and Red Tyler’s on the other side. We’re playing this one tune and I’ve got my headphones on. Booker’s playing and singing and I’m grooving—I’ve kinda got my eyes closed. I’m hearing all this stuff on the high end of the piano and at the same time, I’m hearing all this stuff on the low end of the piano. I thought, “Oh wow—Booker’s getting into some new shit!” I look up and I don’t see his head. I look at Red smiling and James is about ready to stop playing, he’s laughing so much. The song’s over and I said, “James, that was a wild piano solo Booker played. What was so funny? What was everybody laughing about?” He said, “Man, you didn’t see it but his false teeth fell out right on the piano so rather than stop, he leaned over and picked them up with his gums!” That’s the fucking Booker story—one of the nice ones!

 

Ingrid Lucia by Bunny Matthews (April 2002)
What are your earliest memories of New Orleans?
A few things—going into Walgreen’s with the lunch counters and having the old black ladies say, “Hey baby, come here….” And I remember the old diner at the end of Canal Street, going there with my mom a lot for coffee in the afternoon. I remember at Mardi Gras there were a lot more marching bands. We lived in Algiers for a while and Mid-City and the little neighborhood restaurants had great jukeboxes with Al Jolson and Guy Lombardo.
We started a family band when I was about 7. Nobody knew how to play music. We were all just standing in Jackson Square one Mardi Gras singing “Darktown Strutters Ball.” My dad had this crazy idea that if we threw money at the audience, they would be really responsive. I remember wearing this big blue Mardi Gras ball gown that we found in a garbage can and eight people were singing and I would throw the money out and run around and get all the nickels and dimes and tell these little old ladies, “Get the money! Get the money!” That was the first performance.

 

Bonnie Raitt and Jon Cleary by Jan Ramsey (May 2002)
Raitt: There are a lot of age groups on radio that are bumped, people like me. A lot of artists that thought we were “in,” in the early ’90s with my Grammy win and a couple of hit records, by ’96 they really have taken a lot of people over 40—at that point I was 46—off towards VH-1, to the point where it didn’t make any sense to make a video anymore, so we are actually doing TV ads that are going to run where we are on tour. That’s because they’ve shown the 45 to 55-year-olds don’t spend enough money for radio stations to put them on the air. It’s really a fight for ages: look at Rodney Crowell and Boz Scaggs and Delbert [McClinton]—they made three of the best records of their whole career last year and it’s a blip on the radar, you know.

 

Snooks Eaglin by Jeff Hannusch (June 2002)
I was looking through some early 1960s issues of the Louisiana Weekly and saw that you used to work at the Dew Drop as “Li’l Ray Charles.”
That was Rip Roberts’ [who at the time exclusively booked Charles in the area] idea. He booked me in there for a decent salary. But, if Frank [Painia, the owner of the Dew Drop Inn] would have tried to book me, I’d have told him, “No.” Frank was alright, but he only wanted to pay musicians $6 a night for six hours. That ain’t no money. But they had good food in there—the best red beans and rice in town. We’d stop in there on the way home from the Playboy Club almost every night and every time we’d run into Art Neville.

 

Did you work for Painia’s partner Hosea Hill at the Sugar Bowl in Thibodeaux?
I worked out there a long time ago with Diamond Joe. Hosea was a nice dude, he really paid well for entertainment. He wasn’t tight like Frank.

 

What about Club Tijuana?
Oh yeah, but that was one place you didn’t make much money at all. I met Guitar Slim in there. I went in there to play and after I got finished, they asked him to play. But Slim said, “No bruh, I don’t feel good tonight.” He didn’t want to.

 

Maybe he felt like you’d cut his head.
That’s what I know. (laughs) I don’t try to scare off guitar players, but they chicken out when I got on the stage.

 

Robert Randolph by Christopher Blagg (July 2002)
For someone who grew up in the sheltered House of God environment, how are you handling the temptations and life of touring?
Temptations on the road are no different than temptations at church. I make that clear to everyone. The road is no different than church. Just look at everyday life. Especially in my neighborhood. You grow up around drugs, you grow up around girls. On the road there’s tons of girls. If I were to stay at home and go to church or church conventions, there’d be girls there, too. I’ll tell you this, just like I told the guys in my band. Church guys get laid more than any rock ‘n’ roll star. A great church gospel singer probably gets laid more than a rock star like Mick Jagger. You’d be surprised. All the people that go to church aren’t good. They just go there.

 

Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth by Alex Rawls (August 2002)
Murray Street [Sonic Youth’s 2002 album] was also very personal for us because our studio has been on Murray Street for the last eight years. It’s two blocks away from the World Trade Center, and to actually get back to work there after being prohibited to work there for a two month period, we needed special paperwork and to get behind barricades to get down to our street, which was completely ravaged, torn up, boarded over. We had to walk down these narrow concrete abutments to get to the building to get into our place. The whole area was devastated and evacuated, so we were the only people there working through the night in the studio.

 

Was the album finished by September 11?
No, no. We were just beginning. We were just starting. Jim O’Rourke, who plays with us, was sleeping on the couch that morning and was very rudely awakened. He barely made it out of there. Lee [Ranaldo] lives just down the block and his whole family was evacuated immediately.

 

Wow. So you had band members who were part of the running throng?
Yeah. It was bad. I wasn’t there; I was up in Western Massachusetts, but Kim [Gordon] was there at our apartment which is 20 blocks away. I had talked to her early in the morning and told her she should call the studio to get Jim out of there because the buildings are on fire. Then when they came down I couldn’t get through anymore on the phones and wasn’t able to communicate with Kim, Jim or anybody all day.

 

Dave Pirner by Christopher Blagg (September 2002)
The Meters were a really big deal to me. When I heard the Meters I had a musical epiphany. I had grown up playing in four-piece bands, but their approach to it just turned my head around with what you could do with that number of musicians. There wasn’t a singer and they were featuring parts of the band that couldn’t have been more opposite to what we feature in punk rock all the time.

 

Branford Marsalis by Geraldine Wyckoff (October 2002)
Most musicians, we’ve lost the way. We don’t have any understanding of our profession; we don’t have any historical perception. All we do is turn on the TV and say, “I’m a better musician than Madonna. How come she sells more records than I do?” And the answer is, “Oh well, maybe I could wear some skimpy clothing and play Madonna songs and people will buy it.” Musicians always make the mistake of thinking that people buy based on what they hear. People buy based on what they see—the large American populace. Quite frankly, in a jazz concert there ain’t a whole helluva lot to see. Guys standin’ around with horns, they don’t do dance steps. We don’t do twirls. There’s no light show. Hey, we won’t give them anything. So we have to cater to the small, small minority of the people who actually use their ears and can hear music. That’s our lifeblood. And when we alienate them by trying to make records that we think are going to sell to the mass populace, it’s not going to work.

 

What was the best thing about being at Columbia?
If I hadn’t been at Columbia, you and I wouldn’t even be on the phone right now. It wasn’t about finances at all. I didn’t make a dime from a Columbia record—not one. The contracts—as they are at any record label, so I’m not singling them out—are basically structured so that it forces you to play pop music. They have reward points – songs that are shorter make more money than those longer in distance. Records with more tracks on the album make more money than those with less tracks. What Columbia did, particularly in the ’80s when Wynton first got there, is that they put their marketing muscle behind me and behind Wynton and to a lesser degree behind Terence [Blanchard] and Donald [Harrison] and it allowed me to be a name that was discussed on an international forum. I have to appreciate them for that. On top of that, they let me make 16 records that didn’t sell shit. I tip my hat to them.

 

John Stirratt of Wilco by Christopher Blagg (November 2002)
Why do you think the rock and the singer-songwriter tradition in this city is so weak compared to other music forms?
A warmer climate is just not conducive to rock ’n’ roll. I swear. In any country even, the farther south you go, the less rock. That’s why Detroit will always be a better rock city than New Orleans. As far as a singer-songwriter tradition, I think maybe for good reason, there’s less of a confessional attitude in warmer areas, and in this city especially. I’ve really thought about this a lot. I think there’s an idea that rock ’n’ roll and singer-songwriters need some kind of adversity, and with warmer climates it’s just not there.

 

John Prine by Alex Rawls (December 2002)
Are you a slow writer?
Yes and no. When I start writing, I can write three that I really like and then go eight months and not be able to put “Once upon a time” together. You feel like you’re writing for the first time sometimes.
I got two little boys—a seven-and an eight-year-old. One’s in second grade. A couple of weeks ago, his teacher asked me to come in and talk to the class of second-graders about the subject of writer’s block! She didn’t know how ironic it was. I guess they had a little project where they were writing something and they were going to go through the same efforts you’d go through to get something published, and some of them couldn’t get started on their stories. She picks me to come in and give a speech on writer’s block, so that’s what I’m preparing now—how to tell a second-grader about writer’s block.

 

Do you ever worry that the well’s run dry?
I used to back when I was about two to three albums into this whole thing. I worried then—“Jeez, what happened? I used to write all the time.” In retrospect, it had become my job, and I had to decide how to make it fun again. See, it was my hobby before, and all of a sudden the record company is calling and saying, “Hey, it’s July and you said you’d give us a record by April.” I took all the pressure out it when I started my own record company.

 

My buddy Roger Cook is nothing but a commercial songwriter. He started his career with “Long, Cool Woman (in a Black Dress),” and I think his biggest hit was “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” That gives you an idea of the spectrum of this guy’s stuff. He writes some great songs, but they’re really commercial. He’s just a buddy of mine, and we play dominoes and shoot snooker together. We spend all this time together and we’re both songwriters so we might as well write once in a while, and I’ve got three Number Ones out of it. And I didn’t put any effort hardly at all into it because he’s always writing and I’m never writing.

 

Dave Alvin by Michael Hurtt (January 2003)
There’s a strain of wounded patriotism that not only runs through most of your songs, but seemed to encompass everything the Blasters represented. That was very rare during the Reagan years.
There was a lot of confusion—or misunderstanding maybe—among some people in those days over the song “American Music.” Especially one or two writers in England kind of trying to peg us as a Reagan band, which was the furthest thing from the truth. Patriotism got co-opted by the right and when that happened, the left started to disown it on any level. I don’t see why a commentator on Fox News’ quote unquote “American Experience” is any more valued or real than Blind Lemon Jefferson’s. They’re both Americans and everybody’s got their own view of it. To me, like I said, it’s in the music. When you study American folk music, all the history of the country’s right there. All the blood and deceit and envy and jealousy, it’s all right there in the music, and the music is what triumphs. Folk music—whether it’s acoustic or electric—is survival music, it’s music that helps you understand an un-understandable world, so that’s why you play it; it’s your therapy.

 

Pharoah Sanders by Geraldine Wyckoff (February 2003)
Do you think there is something intrinsic in the modal form that creates and uplifting effect to the human ear or psyche? I’m thinking of songs like your “Creator Has a Master Plan” or Coltrane’s “Love Supreme.”
I would think so. Music is healing, too. It has colors and shades of color. A person has an aura around them—maybe you’ve had that feeling, I don’t know. Maybe at certain times of night or day, when you don’t hear anything, maybe you could listen to yourself and you hear that key note. I think everybody has a key note. So every time someone plays in that key, I think there’s some sensational feeling when you look at it spiritually.

 

George Clinton by James Bailey (March 2003)
Things really came back around for you with hip-hop.
Funk is the DNA of hip-hop. We knew funk would come back around again but for a while we thought it would be a British thing. The [Red Hot] Chili Peppers were the ones that said, “What makes you think it’s not gonna be an American group?” (laughs) Hip-hop came along with the sampling and everything, and we had done the album The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein but that was more cloning than we ever expected! (laughs) Ice Cube used to call himself one of our clones. Then all the bands who tried not to be funk in the ’80s were wishin’ they had been funk then or wanna be funk now. But I refuse to do old school concepts because that plays in to the hand of how they can get rid of you when they’re done exploitin’ you as an oldie but goodie.

 

Irma Thomas by Rob Fontenot (May 2003)
Do you feel like you were treated well by the business?
No one really did get treated well. Your residuals would be slow and eaten up by expenditures. And you never got a royalty check. The record company would find ways to gobble it up. They weren’t giving you but half a percent of gross or net or whatever. All the money you earned was from nightly appearances and that didn’t just happen to me. That was the norm. So when people ask me that, I say, “Compared to what?”

 

Quint Davis by Jan Ramsey (June 2003)
I met George in 1969. I worked on the first [New Orleans] festival in 1970. George was always looking for kids who wanted to do something.

 

The first festival I ever worked was the riot at Newport when they burned the stage down under my feet, while I was on it. Then in 1971, I took both B.B. King and Muddy Waters to Africa for the first time in history. This is the same kid who was dancing with the little B.B. King 45. I was the road manager, tour manager, stage manager—just me. Now how bizarre is that?

 

At that point, I wasn’t really hired per se. I did the Jazz Fest for a few months. I started doing tours every year from November ’til the summer. Or I’d go to Nice and stage manage. These tours were really sink-or-swim. One guy who had done a tour with Chuck Berry had a nervous breakdown. I did two of ’em.

 

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned, working for George Wein and Festival Productions?
George told me once, “What you have to learn, if you want do something important, importance only comes from longevity. What you have to learn is the economics of creativity. Otherwise, you’ll just do something once that’ll cost a lot, lose a lot of money and it’ll never happen again. You have to master the economics of creativity.”
It took me years to understand what the hell he was talking about. People think about art and music and “I don’t want to be bothered with business—business sucks.” But there’s an economics to creativity. George really understands the bottom line. You would be amazed how many people don’t—people in the rock business, people who handle millions of dollars don’t know where the bottom line is. They just have such a big cash flow they don’t have to know the bottom line. George knows what a bottom line is, how to construct it, where to find it, how to maintain it.

 

Harry Connick, Jr. by Geraldine Wyckoff (July 2003)
In reference to the new album, you were quoted saying that you’ve heard your sound change. Would you elaborate on that?
What’s that expression, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”? It’s similar. Although I’ve been playing consistently through the years, it’s different when you’re playing with a quartet—you’re playing more in a sense. And I hadn’t done that in a long time. So I had grown as a person and I had grown as a musician, but I hadn’t heard how that would manifest itself when I played. So sitting down and playing with the quartet, I noticed that I didn’t want to do things I had done the last time I sat down with a quartet. It was an abrupt change because I hadn’t heard it in a long time. I was sort of the spectator. It’s like seeing a kid one summer and seeing him again the next summer and he’s grown two inches. It was kind of wild. I was listening to myself play saying, “Gosh, I would never have played like that.” So that was different for me. It was pretty cool really.

 

Terence Blanchard by Geraldine Wyckoff (August 2003)
You don’t play in New Orleans very often, which is probably one of the reasons people might not realize that you live here.
I do that by design. When I first moved to New Orleans I tried it. It’s funny, because Art Blakey told me this years ago, he said it would happen to you, that people would ask for favors. And I thought, “Okay fine, it’s my hometown, I’ll do this for this.” And then at a certain point, when do you stop doing favors? And the thing that I was worried about was becoming local. It’s a hard decision because I grew up playing at Snug Harbor when it was called the Faubourg and I grew up playing at Tyler’s.

 

Aaron Neville by Bunny Matthews (September 2003)
I was intrigued by the photo inside the CD [Nature Boy] of your hand with a jar of honey and a bottle of cayenne pepper. Is that something you use for your throat?
Yeah. I don’t know if it works or I be psyching myself out. (laughs)

 

Have you been using that a long time?
Yeah, I heard Stevie Wonder was doing it one time so I said, “Well, if Stevie can do it, it’s probably alright.” You take hot tea, put a little honey in it and sprinkle a little cayenne in it—not too much ’cause it’ll choke ya. It kind of soothes your throat.

 

Tony Green by Bunny Matthews (October 2003)
The biggest influence for me was Sun Ra and his Arkestra, who I’d heard about and I had some of his records. Then I started going to his gigs and I was totally blown away. My best Sun Ra story was that they came and played in Italy. I went there and all the guys were tuning up with the tunics on and pyramids on their heads. I said, “Hey guys—I don’t know if y’all remember me….” Sun Ra asked me if the next day I wouldn’t mind taking him around Venice. That was a day! We went into St. Mark’s Cathedral and he said, “Oh man, this place!” I said, “It’s a beautiful church, isn’t it?” He said, “This is a church?! Oh no man, we’re outta here! I can’t stay in here! I don’t go in churches!”

 

Ben Jaffe by Geraldine Wyckoff (January 2004)
How do you hear New Orleans classic jazz changing? What remains the same?
The repertoire is probably the thing that changes the least. But the thing about the repertoire is that there are thousands of songs in it. When I’d talk to my mom about the early days of Preservation Hall, she’d say that she’d sit there at the kitty for a month and not hear the same song. It was really [trumpeter] Milton Batiste and the Olympia that started incorporating new repertoire into the New Orleans jazz catalogue. They started playing things like “Go to the Mardi Gras.”

 

Sweet Emma sounded different than Jelly Roll Morton. At its core and essence, it’s dance music that will never change and can’t change. You can only take so many ingredients out of a plate of red beans and rice before it’s not red beans and rice anymore.

 

Initially, I was concerned because this [Preservation Hall Jazz Band—Shake That Thing, recorded at the Hall in 2001] is the first record that didn’t have an original member of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band on it. Not that the general public would notice that. But emotionally, it’s a milestone for us because in 1984 my father was making a decision whether to continue Preservation Hall or not because it was getting to the point where the musicians that he knew and was friends with when he first came here were gone. There were only a handful of musicians that remained. They made a decision that it was even more important to continue Preservation Hall.

 

Chris Owens by Bunny Matthews (February 2004)
I started when I was 19. Look at this picture [a 1960s photograph of Sol and Chris dancing; Chris’ skirt is breathtakingly short and tight]. I started the miniskirt—I did. This star from England came in with Mary Quant. He said, “You know, you started the miniskirt.” That was how I dressed. One time I started wearing the bikinis but as styles change, I change.

 

I had a lady from Russia who did my clothes and I had one for a long time from Japan. I do all the designing, buy all the fabric and all the beads. I’m right with them—I’m right there showing them how to fit me. Now I have a lovely lady from Honduras who sews my costumes. It’s funny—there’s nobody from America.

 

I have my own ideas, from traveling all over the world, going to the Lido and Folies Bèrgere in Paris. I see ideas and think, “Well, that would look good on me.” You know whose clothes I really loved, when she worked the Moulin Rouge? La Toya Jackson. To me, if you want to know what’s sexy, it was her: little mini-skirts, bolero jackets, high boots. Class. But when you see these g-strings, like Christina Aguilera wears—no, I would not do that. That’s just first-class stripping.

 

You’ve always objected to being labeled an exotic dancer.
Oh absolutely. I’ve shied away from that because my background wouldn’t allow it—number one. It wasn’t my thing to do that. But singers are doing it now. I have worn the bare midriff and the hip-huggers. I feel like, they’re going back to that? I’ve already done that! I wish it would go back to shoulder pads—I really liked the’80s look. I think that was hot.

 

Archie Shepp by Geraldine Wyckoff (March 2004)
You were quoted in something I read as saying you’re playing less and less free or avant-garde music because other musics are more commercially viable.
Yeah, free music isn’t free. You’ve got to pay for it. Well, that’s not true in every case. There are people who’ve come after me like [saxophonist] David Murray and some of the younger guys who are playing today who are playing very much out of the same idiom that I was one of the pioneers of, one could say, and they’re making a good living in some cases. Not like Wynton Marsalis, but surviving very well on free music. That music could be commercially viable. I suppose it’s a question of generations. Audiences tend to identify with people of their own generation. Younger people are in search of their contemporaries.

 

You were teaching music history or jazz history? As an educator, did you have some type of core philosophy?
I’ve been retired from teaching for two years—oh yes and thank the Lord. I paid my dues. I taught African-American music from the United States. I say that advisedly because jazz in my estimation is a very limited way to describe the entirety of African-American music. I begin in Africa—I talk about Diasporic music from Cuba, Haiti, the Antilles and the evolution of that music on the mainland in the Americas from 1619 to John Coltrane. Basically, my investigation of African-American music ends there because I think Coltrane is the stopping point for the evolution of this music. I played with John and had the privilege of being around him and I think as far as diatonic music and fundamental harmony—basic root movement—he exhausted all the possibilities of that form in his piece called “Giant Steps.”

 

My teaching grew out of my philosophy that much of American popular music by way of the African-American begins in Africa and this can be confirmed by the writings of various scholars. Of course, this is quite clear in a place like New Orleans where you had Congo Square. In Sydney Bechet’s book, Treat It Gentle, he talks about the early dances in the Square. He gives a very elaborate picture of the implications of African music as regards to the eventual evolution of African-American music. So my basic philosophy grows out of a continuum, an experience that continually evolves right on up to rap music, which I feel is the music of our time today. It’s not just generational but the inspiration to create new ideas that I don’t think exists in jazz anymore. It’s become for me a very middle-class, bourgeois experience. I began to research more blues as the most vital and fundamental experience. So we’re left with rap music as the expression of our times the way jazz used to be.

 

Al Green by Bunny Matthews (May 2004)
What does Al Green sing in the shower?
[sings, in an extremely rough voice] “Rescue me, I want you in my arms…Rescue me, I want your tender charms… ’Cause I’m lonely and I’m blue…I love you and your love, too…Come on and rescue me!”
Or “Sitting out in the morning rain…BA-DUM! I used to feel so uninspired…Du du du BA-DUM!” I do all the sounds and everything. “You make me feel…BA-DA-DA-DA!” All kinds of silly stuff like that, man. I don’t know what I be doing. I’m in there by myself and I figure I can do the “BA-DA!” and everything else.

 

Fats Domino by Michael Hurtt (June 2004)
Herb Hardesty has been playing with you since 1949. Many people don’t realize that he’s the one responsible for most of the tenor sax solos on your records.
He played on my first record and he’s still with me. And he played with Dave’s band before he played with me. Once we had a show in Washington D.C. and I rode back with somebody else. Bernard, my chauffeur, and Herbert drove my car back. I’d bought a new Cadillac and I had it checked the day before we left because the drum in the brake was sticking or something. I got it out of the shop and they claimed they’d fixed it, but they didn’t fix it right. And it got hot, and it burnt. Not many miles from Washington. They said it was close to the Virginia and Maryland state line and there was a fire station 20 feet from where my car was burning, but the firemen said they couldn’t cross the state line to put the fire out. My car was burnin’ up and Herbert was takin’ pictures! Hardesty! Instead of tryin’ to put the fire out some kind of way, he was takin’ pictures of it! Boy, I was mad! Especially after I saw the pictures!

 

The only time you left New Orleans for any extended period of time was during the ’60s when you played Las Vegas and recorded that great live album Fats Domino ’65. Were there any R&B stars out there at that time?
When I was playing at the Flamingo Hotel, Big Joe Turner was playing in a club out there and he come to my room to see me. I said, “I’m cookin’ pig’s feet, Joe.” He drank Scotch, and he used to talk bad: “Fats, you got any ’totch?” I left him there to go down to the Strip and said, “Joe, watch these pig’s feet for me, you hear?” We went downtown to the Strip and everybody was eatin’ steaks, tryin’ to get me to eat and I said, “I ain’t gonna eat anything, oh no. I’m gonna wait ’til I get home for those pig’s feet.” When I got back there, he’d drank all the Scotch. I didn’t mind about that, but he ate all my pig’s feet! All of ’em! I had none left I’m tellin’ you! I left Joe Turner in my room and when I got back, those 24 pig’s feet was gone! There was nothin’ I could do. I couldn’t get mad with him but I said, “You could have saved me one of those pig’s feet!”

 

George Porter, Jr. and Cassandra Faulconer by Ian McNulty (September 2004)
Faulconer: I’ve played with some incredible drummers. And it always bums me out when I know that they’re amazing players but I just don’t hook up with them. I don’t know if that’s happened to you, George.

 

Porter: That’s what I call the “me-me effect.” You know, it’s all about me. The worst part of that scenario is that the drummer is the guardian of the groove. And if the drummer has a head that’s bigger than the groove or bigger than the band, then chances are you’re going to have a bad night of music.

 

Faulconer: We can try to reel them in. If they’re really going out there on their own, I just stay on one groove and say, “Look, this is where it is.”

 

Porter: I’ve had nights where I just lock it down; I just put my foot down and not budge on that groove until the rest of the band is like, “Hey, one of you just has to give.”

 

Mark Mullins of Bonerama by Bunny Matthews (December 2004)
If you grew up in Metairie like us, Led Zeppelin was much more important to your upbringing than, say, Ernie K-Doe.
Yeah. A lot of people are publicly afraid to say that but it’s true.

 

And, Jimmy Page married a girl from Metairie.
He sat in with Harry and the big band one night in Miami. Harry’s looking at us, “Play some riffs!” That was exciting! I didn’t get to talk to him; Harry had him cornered, asking him a million questions. All the jazz guys in the band were like, “Whatever. He didn’t sound that good.” I was like, “That was Jimmy Page, man—come on!”

Frankie Ford by Bunny Matthews (January 2005)
Frank Caracci, who owned the Ivanhoe and the 500 Club, called my mother and I came back [from California] for two weeks of Mardi Gras. He told me, “If you’ll come back and stay with me, I’ll build you a club here.” And I had a piece of it. I stayed there for the longest until Mr. Frank left. Me and the piano. Then I was at Lucky Pierre’s until ’78. The stories about that place!

 

It was all prostitutes, right?
Oh no, no, no—we had the carriage trade. We had the Uptown people. Most of the girls that came in there, that did work, they were in mink coats. They weren’t hookers—they were strutters.

 

What does that mean?
It means you could’ve taken them to the Blue Room. In any restaurant, they knew how to act. As far as the working girls, it was an elegant place and they fit in. I made great, great money there. I built two houses, one for my parents.

 

A man was in one night and said, “I’ll give you $200 if you can do ‘Un bel di’ from Madame Butterfly.” I said, “For 500, I’ll do it in Italian!”

 

Joe Krown by Bunny Matthews (April 2005)
Do you remember the day you met Gatemouth Brown?
Oh yeah. We were in a hotel up in Canada and I was looking for the road manager and out popped Gate. I was a little intimidated by him. There were certain things that I was real good at doing, certain things that I wasn’t as versed at. The way Gate would describe stuff was “Play more like this” or “Play less like that.” He’s not a real big fan of New Orleans music, so anytime I cut into any kind of New Orleans stuff, he was like, “Okay, don’t play any Professor Longhair style piano—don’t do any of that at all on any of my stuff.” He hates that, that’s not what he’s about.

 

Gate was real specific about organ playing. There were certain organ players that he liked and others that he just couldn’t stand their style. He loved the Jimmy Smith style and he hated what we call “block chord style,” which is something like what Wild Bill Davis played or Bill Doggett.

 

You see, the organ really came into effect in the late ’40s and early ’50s when they were trying to scale down the big bands. The organ was playing all the big band arrangements and it sounded very chordal. When Jimmy Smith came out, he was one of the most prominent players of the B3 playing jazz and that’s what Gate liked to hear. He wanted single notes, like a tenor sax solo would be. After gigs, Gate would say, “Don’t give me that Shirley Scott stuff—give me that Jimmy Smith stuff.”

 

A lot of the ways he phrases stuff when he plays—especially the swing stuff—is very horn-oriented. He wanted to hear you blow. When he was coming up, there was a whole competition between players where they’d have cutting sessions. They’d have one band and line up the guitar players and see who could outplay who. I’m pretty sure that in his time, Gate was probably the quickest draw, the fastest hand—whatever you want to call it. He didn’t have the hits that somebody like T-Bone Walker or Guitar Slim had, but he certainly was able to outplay all those guys. That’s what his reputation was.

 

We toured with Eric Clapton for about 60 dates in 1995. Gate has this thing where he thinks all blues guys are copying somebody else and that they should be original. Then when he hears somebody doing something original, he doesn’t get it—it’s beyond him. So really what he likes is himself and he loves Count Basie. He’s very competitive about guitar players.

 

I heard Clapton play for almost three hours every night for 60 nights and he tore it up every night. Gate, on the other hand, took it as, “Here’s another younger generation guitar player stealing from the older generation.” He got tired of Clapton’s playing instantly and dreaded it. But Gatemouth doesn’t like listening to anybody for any length of time.

 

Brian Wilson by H. Andrew Schwartz (May 2005)
Speaking of inner strength, your brothers Dennis and Carl are both gone now, Dennis drowned accidentally in 1983 and Carl succumbed to cancer in 1998. Is it hard to be without your brothers?
No, no it isn’t. No. I don’t miss my brothers—I let them go. They’re gone so I let them go. I can’t hang on to my brothers because they’re dead. Life goes on with or without my brothers. They can’t sing anymore, they’re dead.

 

Aretha Franklin by Geraldine Wyckoff (August 2005)
So do you listen to music at home? What’s in your CD player?
Actually I was listening to my concert in Atlanta. I do listen to all my concerts when I get home. Other than that, I’ve been enjoying artists like Gerald Levert and Jaheim, one of the hip-hop artists. I like some of Destiny Child’s things. I like the Clark Sisters, Vanessa Bell, Bobby Jones and I love Ruben’s [Studdard] latest single, “Send Me An Angel.” I love that.

 

Robert Mercurio of Galactic by Bunny Matthews (September 2005)
Why do you think Galactic has been so successful when so many other local bands of the same era failed?
One thing I’ll say, and I want to credit Joe Cabral of the Iguanas for this, he told us, “Pick the guys in your band and then that’s it. No subbing, No ‘Stanton can’t make it, we’ll get Kevin O’Day.’ None of that.” He credits the Iguanas’ success to that. When you go see the Iguanas or Galactic, you know you’re going to see these guys. Then you build some consistency, which is the flaw of many New Orleans bands. It seems like such a simple thing, but it’s not because people in New Orleans are in 20-million bands.

 

The second thing was definitely getting out on the road and not thinking, “We’ll just play around town and hopefully somebody will come along and turn us into rock ’n’ roll stars.” That just doesn’t happen, especially with New Orleans music. Maybe if you’re in a rock band or a pop band, that can happen, but we knew that no A&R person was going to stroll into Café Brasil and make us the biggest funk stars out there. There’s a reason there’s not a term called “funk star.” (laughs) There’s rock stars!

 

We always knew there was a limit to the chance that someone could come in, push a magic button and make us stars. None of us ever believed that. The magic button does get pushed for a few people, but we’ve never seen it.

 

We said we’re going to have to push our own button and go out and tour. It was hard. We would do 200-plus gigs a year and make so little!

 

That was our success. I don’t think it’s because we wrote great music, I don’t think it’s because we’re just the best looking bunch of guys out there. I think it’s because we went out and toured and stuck together.

 

We also had a strategy to it, which was every three months we had to come back to a town. If we played L.A., we were going to be back there in three months. What a lot of bands do is that one tour and if doesn’t go that well, they’re like, “Oh, we can’t do that again.” Our first tour didn’t go that well—some nights we had maybe two people, maybe our cousins were there. But we knew that the reoccurring thing is what you have to do. You have to get into people’s heads. We brought out a lot of opening bands from New Orleans and we always tell them: “You’ve gotta come back and play these markets. You’re opening for us tonight in Athens, Georgia—you’d better come back within three months or no one’s going to remember you.” There’s hundreds of bands out there and people forget about you quick. I’m not saying we’re the smartest guys in the world, but there has to be some sort of rhyme and reason to do what you’re doing or you’ll never move forward.

 

Rachel Nagy of the Detroit Cobras by Alex Rawls (February 2006)
The first time I saw [Irma Thomas] play, it was the first time I understood Beatlemania. She got onstage, she opened her mouth and I started crying. I fell down and [bandmate] Mary [Ramirez] started kicking me, going, “Get up! Shut up!” It was ridiculous, and it was the first time I’d had any sort of musical hysteria ever. If she asked me for a kidney, I’d give it to her, and I don’t care about anybody that much.

 

Bailey Smith and Ryan Scully of Morning 40 Federation by Alex Rawls (March 2006)
What condition are you in when you go onstage?
Scully: Sauced. For Mardi Gras, one or two of those shows I probably will not have slept from the night before. I’ll be blotto. I’ll always have five or six beers before I go onstage. But, I don’t smoke pot before a show, anymore. Pot makes me self-conscious —

 

Smith: — and that’s no fun really loud and through a microphone. (laughing)

 

Scully: I have to ham it up, and marijuana’s not very conducive to hamming it up. Alcohol is, though.

 

Smith: We got this agent from the Agency Group and he flew down here to meet us. There was a party next door to Tipitina’s at the Tchop House. We were playing, it was your birthday. Remember that? The whole beginning of the show—I don’t remember it. I swear, I think we were playing “Bottom Shelf Blues” and I realized I fucked up, and then I realized I was onstage with a guitar in my hands. We were way into the set! Josh (Cohen, singer and sax player) looked at me, like [Shakes his head disapprovingly]. I felt a little guilty. We usually avoid that.

 

Scully: We seriously don’t suck anymore.

 

Is it a weight to carry to have your band named for drinking?

 

Smith: It is in some ways, like when really, really drunk people come up to you in the middle of the day and they expect me to be wasted, and I’m not. These are really drunk people, and they’re excited about it.

 

I used to worry, “Oh, shit. Now I have to write another song about drinking.” Morning 40 Federation’s just the name of our band. We don’t have to write songs about drinking, anymore.

 

Scully: Not really. Think about how many songs there are about love. We can write an infinite number of songs about drinking, drugs, partying, stinking—you can go on forever, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But, the songwriting does have a little more depth.

 

The spirit of the music is the same. It’s all celebratory music, positive music. Positive in it’s negative way.

 

Linda Ronstadt and Ann Savoy by Alex Rawls (August 2006)
Is Adieu False Heart a bit of a forlorn record?
Savoy: Yes, I think it is. Love is sad (laughs). Love is strange. There are a couple of cheery numbers on there. I think love makes you suffer like nothing else and it makes you happy like nothing else, and I think this is reflective of love.

 

Ronstadt: It’s a sad record. But, you know, people don’t sing because they’re happy. Art is there to help you identify your feelings. Joy is not happy. Joy is triumph over sorrow, a surge of emotion that you recognize in name. But it’s not just happy. When you’re sad, you’ve got to have a song about it, because how else are you going to get through that experience? People tend to write songs about things that have shaken them, and that have changed the way they look at everything else.

 

Aaron Neville by Alex Rawls (September 2006)
Did it feel strange to miss Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest this year?
Yeah it was. But Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest weren’t the same as they had been over the years.

 

I haven’t been back since the storm, but my son [Ivan] has been down there, and he tells me about it. “You’d have to see it yourself,” he says. I said no I don’t want to see it. I’ve got a memory; I want to leave it like that. That’s my stomping grounds. I grew up, born and raised there. I’ve got a picture in my head of New Orleans, and I don’t want it to go away.

 

Before and during Jazz Fest, people were asking if the Nevilles were really going to miss their gig closing the festival.
It was a let down for us too. But then again, the Meters were there and nobody said anything about them in the paper or on the TV. The Meters were there, Ivan was there with Dumpstaphunk. They mentioned everybody from away from New Orleans. I said that’s strange. Every TV thing, every newspaper that came out of New Orleans—or CNN—showed Bruce Springsteen and whoever else was there. They did not mention the Meters or Ivan Neville. Makes you wonder.

 

Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers by Alex Rawls (October 2006)
You tend to tell stories in your songs, and they’re often the stories of people in hard times. Do you ever stop to think about the ethics of telling these people’s stories?
I grapple with that all the time. As I get older, it gets harder. When you’re younger, you go with the inspiration and don’t think about it. Not to mention, for years and years nobody heard anything I wrote. I wrote 3,000 songs before anybody heard a single song of mine other than close friends who couldn’t get me to shut up when I wanted to play at a party. Now, there’s a fairly good chance that if I write something, a good number of people will hear it, which comes with a certain responsibility. Irresponsibility is good for artistry, so it’s a delicate balance you have to strike.

 

The first time I had to come to grips with that was “The Living Bubba,” which is probably the best song I’ve ever written. [It’s a dramatic monologue written in the voice of Athens, Georgia musician Gregory Dean Smalley, who died of AIDS. It’s hard to imagine a more plaintive expression of the will to live than the chorus, “I can’t die now / ’cause I’ve got another show to do.”] It’s the most important song I’ve ever written, at least to me. When I wrote it, it was six months before I’d let anybody hear it because I was wracked with guilt. What right did I have to write about this guy? We weren’t close friends. We were very friendly acquaintances, but I wrote it because I was so moved by what I saw. I wrote the song right before he died, but I was so scared about what his friends would think that I wouldn’t let anybody hear it. And I wrote it in first person from his point of view.

 

Michael Ivins of the Flaming Lips by Alex Rawls (November 2006)
We could sing about cars or girls, but for some reason we are drawn to the ideas of death and what does it actually mean. More in the context of life. I know for me personally, I don’t think anything happens of any great import after one dies. I look at it in a way that five or six hundred years ago when you were eating a shit sandwich and living in a shit house, life must have been so terrible that your only option was to hope for some relief after you died. That made it so you could continue living in the worst conditions ever. Now we have telephones. We have a better understanding of a lot of things in general. Life’s not that terrible; in fact, for some people it’s pretty darned good, and why you have to fall back on these really antiquated ideas, that really doesn’t make any sense.

 

Monk Boudreaux by Geraldine Wyckoff (February 2007)
What is your biggest concern about the future of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition particularly with so many people now scattered across the country?
It don’t worry me because I know they’re going to be here. They’re going to come regardless of where they are. They’re going to be here for that day and they’re going to come with their Indians suits, too.

 

How about in the long run? It’s always been such a neighborhood activity and family activity.
It’s been going on for over 100 years, so they’re not going to stop no matter where they are. They’re going to go back to their neighborhoods regardless whether they’re living there or not. That’s where they’ll be leaving from. Somebody’s going to be in the neighborhood.

 

Considering the financial burden it takes to make a suit, I thought that maybe some Indians might opt for smaller, less elaborate suits but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
See, the thing is you don’t do it all the time. You have a whole year to prepare. You just put a little bit on the side—and you pay your bills. Now, when it gets close to Mardi Gras you may not pay your light bill. A long time ago, Indians’ lights used to get cut off and we used to go help them get their lights back on. It’s a thing that has to be done. It’s not like you’re coming out of your pocket with $4,000 or $5,000 right off the bat. That’s why you start right after Mardi Gras. You spend as much money as you can afford. We don’t sit down and figure out how much we spent because that’s gone. No sense worrying about it because it’s gone. I don’t keep receipts.

 

Harry Connick, Jr. and Branford Marsalis by Jan Ramsey and Alex Rawls (March 2007)
Branford Marsalis: One of the realities of this great city is that it is very family-oriented. Because generations of families take care of each other, it’s a very insulated community. One of the things that I realized when I went to New York—and I’m a pretty bright guy—I wasn’t really prepared for being on your own, and the way you have to live. In other communities where it’s not as insulated as New Orleans, kids are prepared for that at an early age.

 

With respect to that, one of the things that I’m very happy about with the way Habitat is setting this up is that they’re helping us move away from that insulated environment that the musicians used to live in, and having them think in a way that’s more in line with the market realities of this country.

 

I think that Habitat does a great job of making them—if they are willing to do the work—rectify their debt problems and understand what it means to be a homeowner, and most importantly, it gives them tools to help them keep their homes. You have to get the homeowner to eradicate the behavior that got them into their debt situation in the first place, or they won’t have their home very long.

 

Somebody told me last night that we’re out here raising money with their names, and we need to write them a check. The money is being raised to build the homes, okay, and if you’re a low-income applicant and you have credit problems, Habitat has the mechanisms in place. They have been counseling people, working with people. And the reason why the model works—the reason we’ve been with them 15 years—is that if you can convert a person who had bad habits, who didn’t pay their bills, to being a homeowner and a responsible person, to get in the habit of taking care of stuff, families’ lives change.

 

Bob French by Alex Rawls (April 2007)
Is there any live music on Bourbon Street anymore?
There is a lot of noise out there. I used to have people come up to me and ask where they can find music on Bourbon Street. I said, “Frankly speaking, you are never going to find any music on Bourbon Street. The only music they have on Bourbon Street is at Fritzel’s. When I first worked the street many years ago, there were not only good musicians on the street, but there were good bands on the street. Sugar Boy [Crawford] would work the street, Frogman Henry would work the street, Eddie Bo would work the street. The Dukes of Dixieland had a place, Pete Fountain had a place, and there was oodles and oodles of music.

 

If someone doesn’t do something about it soon, about the music, there are going to be a lot of musicians who never come back. They are working where they are. Clarence Johnson was working with my band. When I came back, I thought things were going to get better and called him up because I had a little string of gigs. He said, “Bob, I am not coming home. I got a job teaching plus I got have a hook-up for gigs.” When the good musicians stay away, it makes it bad for everybody.

 

Tom Morello, the Nightwatchman by Alex Rawls (June 2007)
Protest music seems like very function-based music. Do you agree? Do you think about how this music is going to be used?
Occasionally. There are really two songs on the record that were written from a very conscious standpoint. One was “Union Song,” and that came after playing countless union rallies, and all the songs that were played came from the 1960s or earlier. I thought, “We need songs for now.” We need songs for globalization, and songs that incorporate Spanish in them, and songs for cold nights on the picket lines, and songs of solidarity and encouragement for now. The rest of the songs came from somewhere I don’t know. They weren’t written for a specific purpose. I put the antenna up and whatever came down, came down.

 

Some of this music is clearly designed to rally the troops, and it’s music made with a purpose in mind.
The goal very early on was to be the black Woody Guthrie. Two things I’ve always been drawn to are heavy music and rebel music, and music doesn’t need a wall of Marshall stacks to be heavy. I think One Man Revolution is the heaviest record I’ve been involved in, and there isn’t a single guitar solo on it. From Springsteen’s Nebraska record to Dylan to Woody Guthrie to the darker Johnny Cash songs, even Leonard Cohen and Roger Waters, the right lyrical couplet can be heavier than an entire Metallica album.

 

Edward Anderson of Bleu Orleans by Alex Rawls (August 2007)
One thing I find fascinating about Bleu Orleans is that you are trying to make genuinely contemporary jazz.
People say, “We really want the jazz to be contemporary,” but when you really hit them with something that you feel is representative of today sometimes, the people aren’t ready for it or the critics aren’t ready for it. The people we call the jazz police, the club owners and what not, they are, like, “This isn’t really what we cater to.”

 

The problem we run into in New Orleans is that so much of the jazz is defined by tourism. That’s the reality that no one wants to deal with. People want to keep it safe and regulation so that it is something that will easily market to tourism. When you come up with something that is confrontational or something that is controversial in a sense, then you have to deal with that. We understand that at this point. We’re not so naive to understand that we’re not going to run up against that. At this point in time, it’s a beautiful thing that happens when you reach close to middle age, you stop caring. You understand that you can’t let some body else’s ignorance justify your direction. You have to do what is true to you artistically.

Chef John Besh by Todd A. Price (September 2007)
Do you think there was any legitimacy to what [GQ’s] Alan Richman said [in his article slamming New Orleans’ cuisine]?
In anything there are some legitimate concerns, but you have to live with us and understand what is going on. Alan Richman’s article says that we’re corrupt and a bunch of drunks. I take exception to most all of it. Look at who the drunks are—they’re the people that leave their Middle Americans homes to come down here. They’re prim and proper there and here they’re rowdy and drunk as hell. You’re going to be hard pressed to find my mom and your mom out on Bourbon Street late at night. We’re a city that puts family and relationships before progress. We tend to stay here, and we’re very cloistered. I knew when I married a girl from New Orleans that I was never leaving. That’s who we are. I think Richman doesn’t understand that. I think articles or sound bites on TV don’t do us any justice. We’re deeper than that.

Published November 2007, OffBeat Louisiana Music & Culture Magazine, Volume 20, No. 11.