Still mourning the unexpected deaths of Snooks Eaglin and Antoinette K-Doe, the New Orleans music community suffered yet another bitter blow on March 17 with the sudden passing of Eddie Bo. A dynamic singer, producer and songwriter, Bo was one of the last living links to the New Orleans “Junkers” piano style, a tradition that he picked up from his mother, later honed at Grunewald’s School of Music and eventually took to the national charts. With a discography spread out over a staggering number of record labels, Bo made his mark with R&B and rock ’n’ roll, then took his hard-edged soul style to new heights as one of the pioneering practitioners of funk.

Born Edwin Joseph Bocage in New Orleans on September 20, 1930, Bo grew up in a family of Creole musicians and laborers whose skills included shipbuilding, bricklaying and carpentry—the last of which Bo pursued throughout his lifetime. His uncle Peter played in the bands of King Oliver and Sidney Bechet, furthering Eddie’s musical interests which soon took in the modern jazz sounds of George Shearing and Art Tatum. After graduating from Booker T. Washington High School, Bo served in the Army where he earned the nickname Spider Bocage due to his ability to “spin a web” around his opponents in the boxing ring. Upon his discharge, he took his nom de plume to the stages of the Club Tiajuana and the Dew Drop Inn, making his vinyl debut on Ace Records in 1954.

Bo had already decided to concentrate on R&B rather than jazz. “The mass of people, the people that went to concerts to listen to jazz, they didn’t know what they were listening to,” he said. “They just wanted to be entertained. If you know how complex and intricate jazz is—really there’s no way you could know unless you went to school. They’d just be bullshitting—excuse my French—faking and acting like they understood. But they understood what a backbeat was; they could feel the rhythm.”

Bo’s next release on Apollo was “I’m Wise,” which Little Richard immediately covered and rode to the top of the charts as “Slippin’ and Slidin.’” Undeterred, Bo switched to Chess Records where he cut the storming second-line rocker “Oh-Oh.” Due in no small part to Edgar Blanchard’s hypnotically blistering guitar lines, the song’s flip side, “My Dearest Darling,” went relatively unnoticed. Not so in the hands of Etta James, who took it to number five in the R&B charts and grazed the pop top 40 with it in the fall of 1960. Nevertheless, as good as James’ interpretation was, anyone who ever heard Bo’s live rendition of “My Dearest Darling” would have to admit that he officially took it back in later years.

The 1960s were busy years for Bo. He started his first label, Blue Jay, at the beginning of the decade and released the superb “Our Love (Will Never Falter).” He capitalized on the Popeye dance craze (the South’s answer to the Twist) with the R&B pounder “Check Mr. Popeye,” and scaled the local charts with the New Orleans favorite, “Every Dog Got Its Day.”

Bo’s sound was becoming heavier, and a string of seamless discs produced for Joe Banashak’s Seven B imprint—“Horse With a Freeze,” “Fallin’ in Love Again” and “S.G.B. (Stone Graveyard Business)” to name just a few—bore a drum-driven, guitar-heavy style that marked his emergence as a proto-funk pioneer. “Lover and a Friend,” a duet recorded with Inez Cheatham, was only one of many outstanding productions featuring female vocalists. Names like Inell Young, Mary Jane Hooper and Pat Brown are inextricably linked to Bo’s, and the same can be said of funk classics credited to David Robinson, Chuck Carbo, Little Buck and Walter “Wolfman” Washington.

Originally released on tiny labels including Golden Cup, Fireball and Orbitone, much of Bo’s funk catalog has been heavily sampled, owing partially to his excellent choice in drummers, using James Black, Smokey Johnson and Bobby Williams when possible. Less obscure, but no less powerful, was the work that resulted from his partnership with local seafood king Al Scramuzza, which yielded the hit “Hook and Sling.”

Striking out on his own, he formed Bo-Sound Records and in 1970 scored his first internationally distributed hit with “Check Your Bucket.” Bo released his first two albums, The Other Side of Eddie Bo and Watch for the Coming, at the end of the decade, managing to strike a masterful balance between his early jazz roots, his recent funk style and the disco of the day. Following a sabbatical away from the music business in Florida, he made a triumphant return to his hometown in 1989, releasing records and gigging full time until his death, often on double bills with Snooks Eaglin. His energy was infectious, and he never failed to move a crowd, be it at the Jazz Fest, the Rock ’n’ Bowl, the Ponderosa Stomp or at his own Check Your Bucket Cafe.

“It’s all about the creativity of what you feel inside,” said Bo, surveying his often underrated career. “You want to create something that nobody had but you. That’s what I was trying to do, I was trying to create something that I could say, ‘That’s Eddie Bo.’ I think I did it.”

As one half of the most successful duo in country music history—the Louvin Brothers—Charlie Louvin began performing on the Grand Ole Opry in 1955; and, along side his brother Ira, quickly became a country music superstar. It had been a long, winding and often rocky road from their origins in musically fertile Sand Mountain, Alabama, where the brothers had gleaned their vocal style from close harmony duos such as the Delmore Brothers and the Blue Sky Boys as well as the local tradition of Sacred Harp (also known as Shape Note) gospel singing.

By the time they made their first recording in 1946, the Louvins’ style seemed almost old-fashioned. Many duos like the Blue Sky Boys, though still relatively young, were nearly retired. But the brothers were too fiercely determined and too talented to be held back. “Although they did not make the big time until the tail end of the (duet) tradition,” wrote Charles Wolfe in Close Harmony: The Story of the Louvin Brothers, “they were to take it to new heights and forge for it a permanent place in modern country music.”

Despite a fine run with MGM that produced unforgettable classics like “The Great Atomic Power,” it was at Capitol Records where the brothers’ creativity truly flourished. Their debut LP, 1956’s Tragic Songs of Life, nodded to the past with ancient murder ballads such as “Knoxville Girl” and “Katie Dear” but its use of electric guitars, drums and modern arrangements were firmly entrenched in the present. Encased in a murky, mysterious sleeve that drew the listener in before the first note was played, Tragic Songs was perhaps the first concept album, and led the way to the even more graphic My Baby’s Gone and Satan is Real, pioneering a practice that wouldn’t come into wide use for another 15 years.

Parting ways in 1963, Ira and Charlie pursued respective solo careers. In the summer of 1965, Ira was tragically killed in a head-on collision on the way back from a show in Missouri. Certainly a blow that could have broken a lesser man, Charlie soldiered on, scoring with “See the Big Man Cry,” and even establishing a Louvin Brothers Museum in 1969.

Always adored by country fans, the Louvins’ music has been continually rediscovered and championed by subsequent generations of rock fans, beginning with Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris and running clear through to Elvis Costello and Cake, who Charlie has toured and recorded with, respectively. [Louvin plays One Eyed Jacks April 4 with interview Michael Hurtt and his Haunted Hearts.—ED.]

Your latest albums, Charlie Louvin Sings Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs and Steps to Heaven hearken back to the Louvin Brothers days in their dueling subject matter. When you started out in 1941 with Ira, were you thinking that you were going to do both gospel and secular music?
No, we weren’t, Michael. Actually, we were a variety show. Fred Rose, probably the greatest human who ever lived, was trying to get us on Capitol. Capitol said, “Now, we’ve already got a country duet. But if they want to sing gospel music we’ll sign them.” Believe me, we needed a contract. So we cut straight gospel for four years. But then we wanted to do something else because the gospel people didn’t cotton to us.

Because you were a string band and these were the days of the gospel quartet?
Right. They referred to us as a carnival act because we played stringed instruments. They only used a piano back then. Martha Carson was one of the greatest female gospel singers that ever lived. But her husband, X. Cosse, wanted her to do something other than gospel. He figured if they dropped her neckline a little and sang something else, he could make a lot more money. So they propositioned Capitol and (producer) Ken Nelson told her: “If this doesn’t go and your (gospel) fans don’t like it and they drop you, you’ll be off the label.” And sure enough she was.

So when we started wanting to mix our music, he said, “You want to pull a Martha Carson.” No, it’s just that we’re kind of outcast here. We can’t play clubs because we shut the bar down. We just…we want to do this. “Well, if it don’t go, you know you’ll be off the label.” We said, OK, we have to take that gamble. So we recorded “When I Stop Dreaming.” And thank God it caught on. So from then on, we didn’t drop gospel. We did as many gospel albums as we did secular, but it put us in a different world.

Did you play in many churches?
We hardly ever played a church. We played a few and if the plate came back with very little money in it, the local preacher would say, “These guys could be out in a beer joint making great big money, but here they’re singing for the Lord and you didn’t even give them enough to fill their gas tank up. So I’m going to pass this one more time. I want to see some folding money in it.” And that’s just too close to begging for me. I’m glad that we finally got to do some secular music; it gives you a better chance to express yourself.

How would you go about writing your songs?
Ira was a born songwriter and I was the idea man. I’d hear somebody say something on the street or in a cafe and if I thought it sounded like a song title, I’d write it down, give it to Ira and ten minutes later he’d have a song. Did you ever hear our song “The Price of the Bottle?” That was a true song. In North Carolina, they’ve got state stores. I went in the store with Ira and he went to buy a bottle and got it, and got in line to pay for it. The guy in front of him was trying to give the cashier a check. Well, the guy didn’t want a check. Then he named his dad and that rang a bell with the cashier and he accepted his check. Well, you heard what happened the next morning.

He got in a car wreck.
That guy actually did have the wreck and Ira remembered his name. He had a wreck that killed his wife and kids on the way home. The song ended, “So I ask you friend, what is the price of the bottle?” So, there’s some truth in all of those songs. If you listen to the song you can almost hear the tires squeal.

Ira was very particular about his songs, right?
Right. Fred Rose, who corrected worlds of Hank Williams songs, wound say, “Ira, don’t you think if you said this instead of that..?” Ira would say, “Fred, if you don’t like it just say so, I’ll throw it away and write another one. But if you publish it, I want the way I wrote it.” He was hardcore on that. You couldn’t convince him that you could do something to his song and that it would sell more. He’d say, “I didn’t write it to sell.”

So consequently, the Louvin Brothers songs were recorded exactly as they were written, undiluted, so to speak.
That’s very true. And that’s what made them different. If someone would have slicked them up, they probably wouldn’t be alive today.

When I listen to the recitation in “Satan is Real,” I think Ira would have made a great preacher.
Ira got into the gospel songs almost like he was preaching. He could have been a preacher because he knew the book. Now knowing and doing, there’s a great gulf between the two. Just because you know something isn’t right doesn’t mean you’ll avoid it. But somebody wrote the other day, and I read it, that the Louvin Brothers music didn’t tell you how good it was going to be in heaven; it explained how bad it was gonna be in hell! That’s the way he put it, although I’d never thought of it that way. But it’s hard to believe in heaven and exclude hell.

Tell me about creating the album cover for Satan is Real.
My oldest boy had a Lionel train on a four-by-eight piece of plywood. We didn’t have the money to buy a new sheet of plywood, so we removed the train, split that plywood right down the middle and made a sixteen-foot booger man. Ira did the woodwork with the pitchfork and the horns, we painted it red, and we got a bunch of car tires and soaked them in kerosene and diesel fuel. When the time came, we lit the fires. After we got the fires going good it started sprinkling rain. The rocks laying around were a certain kind that blow up when they’re hot and water hits them. So when we were trying to take the picture, rocks the size of your fist were blowing up and flying eight and ten feet in the air. The photographer wanted to wait ’til later. We said, “There is no later. If we can stand out here with our instruments in the rain, certainly you should be able to take the picture!” So he did. As it’s turned out, it’s one of the most famous covers in any genre of music. It’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Ken Nelson, your producer at Capitol, is one of my favorites.
I think what made him famous was that he let the artist determine how the song should be done, whether it was Buck Owens, Faron Young, Jean Shephard or the Louvin Brothers. We pretty much knew what we wanted the song to sound like, and Ken would actually ask us, “What instrumentation do you want on this?” And Ken never pushed a song on us in the studio. He’d say, “What’s the first song?” we’d give him the title, we’d do the song, “What’s the next song?” He didn’t go through the songs and say, “We don’t want to record this” or “This isn’t a good enough song.” Now, he did bring a few, like Hazel Houser’s “My Baby’s Gone,” “River of Jordan” and “Praying.” And then the Smith Brothers wrote “Pitfall.” But all in all, he wouldn’t bring a song if he didn’t think you’d freak out over it.

There is a song on Steps to Heaven called “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” written by Thomas A. Dorsey.
That was written by a black minister whose wife was pregnant, and he had to go to St. Louis to preach a revival. The doctor told him, “You go ahead and do your revival. This child ain’t gonna come ’til at least two weeks after you get back.” So he went to St. Louis and when he was fixing to preach the first night, someone handed him a note that said, “We lost the mother but we saved the child.” On his way home, he wrote that song. I got to meet him in 1979. I said, “You thought seriously about just joining your wife, didn’t you, preacher?” “Oh no, I wouldn’t do that. I’m a man of the cloth.” I said, “Well, you wrote it in your song.” He said, “I did?” “Yeah, in the third verse where you said, ‘At the river I stand, guide my feet, hold my hand.’ What were you doing down by the river?” And he said, “I did think about it, but I didn’t do it.” I would have probably went ahead and did it. I would have went swimming.

Yet you’ve faced insurmountable tragedy in your life with the death of Ira. The fact that you’ve been able to go on like you have is heroic.
Well, it’s the only thing I knew how to do, Michael. So I thought, well, I’ll give it my best shot. Of course there’s still a few old people that come to see how I made it this long, but we’re playing to a world of young people. I think they might be the great, great grandchildren of the people that came to see the Louvin Brothers. They know what they like and if I can be a part of that, then I’m very lucky.

Published April 2009, OffBeat Louisiana Music & Culture Magazine, Volume 22, No. 4.

Few musical genres have suffered as much bastardization, misinterpretation and just plain abuse as the blues. Once reserved almost exclusively for the juke joint—that back o’ town bastion of crap-shooting, corn liquor and their inevitable outcomes; knives, straight razors and the occasional revolver—it is now more commonly heard in over-priced bars festooned with ferns and frequented by fanny-packed tourists and well-heeled professionals. It’s the inevitable problem that arises when a style of music emerges from the underground and is thrust into the mainstream. Everyone winds up influenced by it, but few understand what made it so gripping in the first place.

In these dark days of dilution when even Hollywood action movie star Steven Seagal claims to be a blues man, this unfortunate phenomenon does have its upside: On the rare occasion that one stumbles upon the authentic article, in all its ragged, real-deal glory, the effect is shockingly immediate. And from his two-toned Stacy Adams shoes to his colorful felt Homburg hat—to say nothing of his gritty guitar and vocal styles—New Orleans’ Little Freddie King is just that.

Born Fread Eugene Martin in McComb, Mississippi on July 19, 1940, he took the nom-de-plume Little Freddie King in the late ’60s. He’s been playing the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival since its inception, and the fact that for the last four years he and his band have been relegated to the opening slot of the Blues Tent doesn’t bother him one bit.

“It was eleven o’ clock in the morning, donut and coffee time,” he recalls of his recent performance, “And didn’t nobody even have to give us a chance. They just went wild.”

Stirring up crowds is nothing new to King, who’s been playing the blues in the Crescent City for nearly 50 years. But since being displaced to Dallas after Hurricane Katrina, and returning to the city half a year ago to reside in the Musician’s Village, things seem to be on the rise. His fourth CD, the self-released Messin’ Around tha House, continues to spread his gut-bucket blues gospel far and wide while his self-contained band suddenly seem to be everywhere, from clubs all over town to festivals all over the country.

King, who spent his first three decades in New Orleans literally soaking up more life and near death—shootings, stabbings, jail sentences, drinking, all night rambling and plenty of hard work—than most folks who make it to a healthy 67, takes a philosophically humble view of his recent good fortune.

“I never did expect it. But when you don’t even think about it and just give it up; don’t care no more, then boom! All at once that’s when it happens.”

Not long ago, the only place King and his band could be seen was on the last Friday of every month at BJ’s Lounge, a ramshackle corner bar room buried in the bowels of the upper Ninth Ward, just a stone’s throw from the Industrial Canal. A run-down dive of the type that’s rapidly disappearing—as much due to gentrification as levee breaches—BJ’s remains the penultimate place to catch one of the most unique gigs in the whole shrinking blues world.

Past the pool table and through thick thunderclouds of cigarette smoke, Little Freddie steps to the microphone and begins finger-picking his hollow-bodied guitar, throwing in distorted, gnarled chords that ring with nasty tones snatched directly from the heyday of John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins. His wardrobe is Canal Street finery at its most swirling, be it purple, yellow, bright red, royal blue or any combination thereof, and is as sartorially splendid as his music is primal.

Like Hooker and Hopkins, who King cites as his two favorites, it’s immediately clear that he can stand on his own, with just his guitar and stomping foot for accompaniment. But then drummer “Wacko” Wade Wright makes his presence known with an authoritative cymbal crash and bassist Anthony “Skeet” Anderson anchors the rhythm with his ancient Vox violin-shaped bass. The final ingredient is Bobby Lewis Ditullo, who unobtrusively lays down the melody with lonesome harp wails that slowly intensify as the groove takes off.

Those who make the New Orleans nightclub scene regularly will notice that, aside from their sound, there’s something else that makes this band unique: none of its members are ever seen playing with anyone else, a rarity in a city where everyone seems to play with everyone, and more often than not, don’t really rehearse except when they’re onstage.

“That’s my problem with the music scene here,” says Wright. “You go to see someone and you don’t know what you’re getting because you never know who’s going to be playing behind them. And depending on who it is, it really changes the sound.”

The fact that King’s band is such a remarkably dedicated unit means that they not only know the songs inside and out, they anticipate idiosyncrasies that would be lost on even the best musicians. Their exclusivity is by design, not chance, says Wright.

“Not just anyone can play behind Freddie,” he states, citing the fact that like many a true blues man—most notably the aforementioned Hooker and Hopkins—King developed his own sense of timing long ago.

“When we first started playing together, I told him, ‘Look, when you go into a ride, I don’t care where you go. You can go into outer space if you want, but make sure you come back in on a count with the bass drum, and I’ll reverse the snare drum beat if I have to.’ That’s why Anthony doesn’t play a regular walking blues bass line. He listens to Freddie’s guitar lines and plays in between the cracks. When we feel he’s going to break down on his timing, we compensate for it. And I think we’ve got the feel after 13 years.”

Wright and Anderson were honing their musical chops at high school CYO dances when King first hopped a freight train to New Orleans in 1957. It would be nearly forty years before they all began playing together.

“When I met Skeets, he was playing with the Rhythm Kings out of Warren Easton High School,” says Wright, who was drumming in his own combo the Nite Owls. “I jumped to the Rhythm Kings and we started playing behind Jerry Byrne and Frankie Ford.”

Besides white R&B singers like Byrne and Ford, Wright and Anderson backed local black stars like Eddie Bo, Bobby Mitchell and Irma Thomas. Wright even played drums for Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns one night, but the parallel universe of the New Orleans blues scene might as well have been miles away.

In reality, like everything in the Crescent City, the two worlds existed right on top of one another, but rarely co-mingled. New Orleans blues was truly an underground phenomenon, a back alley world populated by artists like Babe Stovall, Lil’ Son Jackson, Boogie Bill Webb and Polka Dot Slim. Their countrified styles may have originated other places, but were somehow uniquely New Orleans, shot through with an urban electricity that could have come from nowhere else.

Though his father, Jessie James Martin, was an itinerant blues man himself, King developed his style wholly in his adopted city.

“When I first came down here I was looking for a job,” says King. “Our school had given a picnic down here and I took a liking to New Orleans. I told my mama, ‘I like it down in New Orleans. I’m going back down there and stay.’ She said, ‘You’ve got no business down there. Someone will kidnap you and kill you.’ I said, ‘I’m going to go.’ And sure enough I did.”

Over the years, King would do everything from slinging bananas on the riverfront to repairing television sets in his home, but in the first weeks that he arrived in New Orleans, his interest in music ignited.

“My daddy showed me some chords but I never could use them right,” he says. “When I got to New Orleans, Sears and Roebuck had this little Silvertone guitar with the amplifier built into the case. And that was just what I needed. After I started practicing, I’d play at home, then I’d bring it to work with me, play on the way to work, play my whole lunch hour. I just kept on working on it. Then I would slip down on Bourbon Street, watch the other guys play. Trying to catch on, you know? But I could not catch on for anything to what they were doing! It was above my knowledge; my computer would not pick it up. I would get home and try to do the same things they were doing and wasn’t getting anywhere.

“So then, in the next couple of months I went and bought a little 45 record player. I came home with it and put the records on there and they played too fast; my brain wouldn’t pick it up. There were three speeds to it so I decided, ‘I’ve got to slow it down.’ I put it on 78 and that was too fast—it was like a jet taking off—so then I put it on 33 and a third and that broke it all the way down and it started dragging. That was just what I wanted. I could follow the music note-by-note and that’s how I really learned to play. I had no teachers at all, period. None at all.”

As for the records that King listened to most during this period, he cites Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed and Blind Lemon Jefferson as favorites. “But I also loved country music like Lonnie Glosson, Ernest Tubb and Wayne Raney; I’d listen to it at work to help me concentrate.”King’s first gig came about through local musician Lloyd “Curly” Givens, who owned a thrift shop on Conti Street that also specialized in corn liquor.

“My friends would come by my house with some drinks,” says King. “I’d be playing my guitar and when we ran out of alcohol, we’d go buy this corn liquor that Givens was bootlegging, He found out I could play a little bit because I was doing pretty good on two or three songs.”

Givens insisted that King come to Scotland, Louisiana, where his friends owned a juke joint. “I said, ‘Man, I ain’t good enough to play at a bar or lounge where people are. I’m just not that good.’ He said, ‘As long as you just play one song, you’re good enough.’

“Back in those days, if you just had one can and a stick and pretended like you were beating a drum behind a guitar player, it was good enough for them. And man, when we got there, them people was swamped out. You talk about a crowd. Everyone was drinking corn liquor, regular booze, home brew, and we played all night long. I played two songs over and over and then I wound up learning another one.

“Givens got drunk on me around about four o’clock that morning and put a rosary around his neck and started crying. When he did that, I started to get worried. I said, ‘How am I going to get back home?’ Finally his wife called, and about two hours later she showed up. Then he wanted to start a fight with her behind the wheel. I thought, ‘If I ever get home I will never go anywhere with you again.’ That was my first gig and it was terrible!”

Things improved vastly when King began gigging with Big Joe Williams, Boogie Bill Webb and Polka Dot Slim. “Polka Dot played spoons and harmonica and when he got a job, a lot of the guys he played with wouldn’t show up so he would call me. We played a lot on Bourbon Street.”

Though King made some never-released recordings for the tiny Booker/ Invicta concern on South Rampart Street, he debuted on record in 1966 playing “chop guitar” on Slim’s fantastic reading of Earl King’s “Trick Bag,” released on the Baton Rouge-based Apollo label. It was around this time that King began playing with Harmonica Williams, with whom he’d form his first band and cut the first electric blues album in New Orleans history.

King met Williams through A.B. Bruer, who recognized Freddie as a fellow guitar player and introduced himself. “A few weeks later A.B. ran into Harmonica Williams, and told him about me. So he and Williams came by my house and we went and practiced about half the night, with Williams blowing his harmonica, A.B. playing the bass, and me playing what little I knew. Things rocked on about a month or two and then we ran up on (drummer) Rudy Taylor. We went and made a few gigs on Jackson and Willow at Irene’s Bar, and then we stepped up to Newton’s Bar on Second and Dryades. Newton played guitar so we’d jam with him, drink and have fun. We called ourselves the Mississippi Delta Blues Band.”

Two of the group’s biggest fans were Tulane students Steve Johnson and Parker Dinkins. “They would always come by and hear us play,” remembers King, “and one night Steve said, ‘Freddie, I love the way y’all play. Won’t you get your band together and we’ll cut a record?’ I said, ‘I don’t know about that, man. I don’t think we’re good enough for that yet.’ He said, ‘Oh yes y’all is.’ Now see, Williams could already go with the harmonica, he could really blow. I said, ‘Well, maybe in about another couple more years we might be good enough.’ He said, ‘No, you’re good enough right now.’ I said, ‘Well, maybe we’ll try it out.’”

After an aborted attempt at recording at Newton’s new club, the Crystal Palace, with the entire band drunk out of their minds and heavily distorted results, Steve suggested Gary Edwards’ unfinished studio on Mandeville Street.

“We had to use plywood and pieces of cardboard to patch it up and get the best sound that we could get,” says King. “But we started playing and Parker started recording. When we got to the last track, Newton busted in the door. He had been gambling and had lost everything, almost lost his house. He said, ‘Man, I got the blues.’ I said, ‘What’s the matter with you, Newt?’ He said, ‘Man, I lost everything I own. I’m going to cut me a song now and I’m going to sing this song the way I feel.’ I said, ‘What’s the name of it?’ He said, ‘I’m going to give it the name ‘Born Dead.’ So he got up there and sang that song and that was the hit. That was the best song out of all of them.”

“Born Dead” may have been galvanized by Newton’s gambling problems, but the song’s subject matter was far darker, a harrowing tale of the segregation era South that climaxed with the line, “You know a black man in Mississippi, he just may as well have been born dead.”

Released in 1971 on Johnson and Dinkins’ Ahura Mazda label, Harmonica Williams with Little Freddie King, known unofficially as Rock ’n’ Roll Blues, has long been a sought after item among blues fans. Upon its release, it garnered the band several West Coast festival tours, during which King also played and spoke at various California colleges.

He wouldn’t record again for over two decades, and the intervening years were riddled with ups and downs. During that time, he worked a variety of day jobs, one of which was rebuilding alternators at Anderson’s family business, Skeet’s Auto Electric. In 1976, he toured Europe for the first time with John Lee Hooker, but for the most part he stuck close to home, playing long stints at joints like the Stereo Lounge in Shrewsbury and the Busy Bee in Central City, which he’d later immortalize in “Bucket of Blood.” 

“Every weekend I played there, someone got stabbed or shot. And sometimes when I was working during the week, I couldn’t get away from it. It was two blocks from Skeet’s, so I’d slip off from work and go there to get a drink. They’d have already started cutting and shooting, so I’d have to go and get me a drink somewhere else. It was bad.”

Once, during a band break, King was hit by shotgun pellets when a woman he was sitting with was murdered by her husband. No stranger to domestic disputes, he was shot and stabbed by his own wife as well. His rough-and-tumble existence smoothed out when he quit drinking in 1984, but along with the booze went his desire to play night clubs. Limiting himself to Jazz Fest performances, he began tackling vocals when Williams left New Orleans in 1989.

Wright and Anderson began playing with King in the mid-1990s when he needed a band for the Fest. “He came off with a lot of original stuff which we really liked,” says Wright. “We were used to slick R&B, but Freddie was all over the place.”

The lineup was finalized with the addition of Ditullo, whose bartending job at BJ’s presented them with the now-legendary monthly gig that solidified their sound. Since the bar had no live music license, the band played for tips, but the synergy they developed was priceless. Orleans Records’ Carlo Ditta had already put King back on the map with his first solo CD Swamp Boogie, but it was 1999’s Sing Sang Sung, also released on Orleans, that first captured the band in full lowdown swing.

“It ain’t pretty,” wrote Robert Fontenot in these pages shortly after the live album hit the streets. “You can practically smell the Chinese food and chicken coming from Chun King…the slop bucket wheeze put out on his cover of King Curtis’s ‘Soul Twist’ is potent enough to turn George W. Bush into the Godfather of Soul. It’s that country and that ghetto.”

“The big thing on Sing Sang Sung,” says Wright, “is that it got airplay in France. We were selling it off the bandstand, and they really loved that greasy sound. I sent (Fat Possum Records’) Matthew Johnson a couple of songs, and when he heard ‘Walking with Freddie,’ he said he couldn’t turn it off. It had him captivated.”

Johnson, who had long wanted to re-release Rock ’n’ Roll Blues but could never track down the rights to it, signed King for 2005’s You Don’t Know What I Know. Initially, Johnson expressed interest in recording King both alone and with different musicians. But as King noted at the time, “I like my band, they help me keep my time right.”

“Freddie’s got a real edge to him,” says Wright, “so our idea was to let him be raw and dirty in the middle. Let him come out and murder you with the band as the bouquet around him. But Fat Possum wanted it raw and dirty all the way through. In the end, Matthew wanted the record so he let us go with it.”

While the album’s lone solo track, “You Rascal You,” sounds frail and confused, suggesting the musical primitive that Fat Possum may have originally envisioned, full band blasts like “Crack Head Joe,” “Tough Frog to Swallow” and “Hot Fingers” rewarded Wright and King—as well as their fans—for sticking to their guns. Anxiety over the idea of King’s music being looped through a computer on two remixed tracks proved to be less of an issue. In fact, they grew to like them so much that they included three previously unreleased ones with new band tracks on Messin’ Around tha House. Fat Possum has since turned its attention to hard southern rock, and the label and King parted ways amicably. Still, “the idea behind the new album was a continuation of Fat Possum’s ideas,” says Wright, who’s well aware of the fact that blues purists frown on what they perceive as pandering to a younger audience.

Remixes or not, it’s still Little Freddie, and Wright remains amazed at his musical partner’s abilities.

“I call Freddie’s music trance blues,” he concludes. “You can sit down with him for a couple of hours and he’ll play rhythms and sounds that you’ve never heard before. It’s just hypnotic.”

Published June 2008, OffBeat Louisiana Music & Culture Magazine, Volume 21, No. 6.

“I hope you don’t take this the wrong way,” I stammered to the tall, robust-looking gentleman I was waiting on at La Crepe Nanou Restaurant, “but I didn’t know any of you guys were still alive.”

The fact that I was face-to-face with one of my biggest musical heroes yet completely unaware of his above ground status wasn’t as weird as it sounds: he was Joe Bihari, the youngest—and arguably most important—of the Bihari Brothers, a family so crucial to the development of rock ’n’ roll that you’d think everyone would know he was still alive. But most music fans had never heard of him.

The Biharis—Jules, Saul, Lester and Joe—were record men, and they had so many hits that to even scratch the surface seemed impossible: B.B. King, Etta James, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Elmore James. Hell, they were supposed to release Ike Turner‘s “Rocket 88”—often acknowledged as the first rock ’n’ roll record—but Sam Phillips violated their contract and sold it to Leonard Chess.

Like Phillips, Chess and Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, Joe held a special place in my heart: he’d not only discovered and recorded so many of the artists I loved, he’d released their records. When it came to down-to-earth music—blues, hillbilly, rock ’n’ roll—record men were lighting rods, conduits and more often than not, snake charmers, reaching deep inside of their artists and conjuring up something that they themselves often didn’t know was there.

“I’m the last of my brothers still living,” Joe told me with neither hesitation nor offense.

I really didn’t know where to begin. If Bihari had done nothing but record Clarence “Bon Ton” Garlow’s “Crawfishin’” and “Route 90”—two songs that wholly defined the magic of Louisiana for me years before I lived here—that would have been enough. The spirit throbbing through those tunes was the reason I lived in New Orleans. Then there were those scintillating early sides by my favorite guitarist of all time, Johnny “Guitar” Watson.

Instead, I asked Joe what brought him to the city.

“I’ve always loved New Orleans. I grew up here, right around the corner at the Jewish orphanage on St. Charles Avenue, which is now the Jewish Community Center.”

I’d always associated the Biharis with Los Angeles. That was where their labels—Modern, RPM, Flair and Crown—were based. They’d had Meteor in Memphis, which is where Joe was born in 1925. He was sent to the orphanage because his family was so poor, but by the time he graduated from Isidore Newman School in 1943 he loved the blues, thanks both to a guitar-slinging custodian and the orphanage jukebox, regularly stocked with discs from the distributor in Houston where his brother worked.

The siblings launched Modern in 1945, releasing everything from boogie-woogie pianist Hadda Brooks to Cajun pioneers Chuck Guillory and Papa Cairo. The latter’s “Big Texas” (recorded in New Orleans), was swiped by Hank Williams for “Jambalaya,” while the former’s “Extemporaneous Boogie” helped bankroll the Bihari’s labels.

Joe began to specialize in remote recording sessions in 1948. He was soon roaming the South with 19-year-old Ike Turner, setting up his tape recorder in churches, barrooms, storefronts and living rooms, and never letting segregation stymie his efforts. “I came from New Orleans, so it was all salt and pepper to me, but there were others who didn’t feel that way.”

Shortly before he died, I asked Turner about his old friend. “Hell, yeah we ran into a lot of trouble. The Biharis put me up in a studio in Clarksdale and them rednecks came in there and tore up all the equipment. They asked Joe, ‘What the fuck do you think we fought the Civil War for?’ Joe said, ‘I don’t know why you fought it, but you lost it!’”

Bihari will visit the Ponderosa Stomp Music Conference to give an oral history of his life in the record business. [Full disclosure: writer Michael Hurtt is one of the conference’s organizers.]

“I haven’t been to New Orleans since my 60th reunion at Newman,” says Bihari, who will speak at 11 a.m. on April 30. “I’m really looking forward to it.”

The Ponderosa Stomp Music Conference runs from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the Cabildo in Jackson Square April 29-30. Admission is free.

New Orleanians know longtime resident John Sinclair more as a multi-tasking guardian of the arts than a counter-culture warrior. The wide swath he cut after moving to Louisiana in the early ’90s (he now splits his time between Amsterdam and Oxford, Mississippi), included simultaneous stints as WWOZ disc jockey, poet, performer, archivist, MC and author of portraits of blues and R&B legends in the pages of this magazine.

In his home state of Michigan, Sinclair will always be remembered as a political agitator of the highest order, managing proto-punks the MC5, founding the radical White Panther Party and being sentenced to 10 years in prison for the possession of two joints, resulting in the John Lennon and Yoko Ono song, “John Sinclair,” which helped free him after two years

His recently re-published 1972 book, Guitar Army details those revolutionary times, but Steve Gebhardt’s newly completed documentary, Twenty to Life: The Life and Times of John Sinclair weaves Sinclair’s past and present into seamless high focus through music, archival film footage, interviews with friends and family, and, most pleasing to Sinclair, his poetry and performances.

“Steve made the documentary of my freedom rally when he was with John and Yoko in ’71,” says Sinclair. “Twenty years later, in 1991, he got the idea to make a picture about what happened after the freedom rally, and that’s where the title comes from.”

Initially, Sinclair was resistant to focusing on his past, having just ratcheted his performing and recording career into high gear with the formation of his band the Blues Scholars. But Gebhardt struck a balance between past and present that makes the film all the more captivating.

“Steve figured out ways to go from the story to excerpts from my poems that comment on the story,” says Sinclair. “It’s really exciting to me because a lot of times I didn’t even think of the poems that way. But he’ll find a piece of a poem I wrote and put it in between two scenes that illustrate it.”

Sinclair curated the impressive soundtrack himself, mixing his own productions of the Up, MC5 and Mitch Ryder with lifelong musical cornerstones Howlin’ Wolf, Sun Ra and New Orleans favorites the Wild Magnolias and Rebirth Brass Band.

“For an American poet to have a movie, I couldn’t be happier,” says Sinclair. “At 87 minutes, it’s got everything from footage of my first communion and the Detroit riots to the recording of my 2001 blues album that Andre Williams produced.”

The film makes its area debut at the Green Room in Covington on October 12 followed by an in-store the next day at Louisiana Music Factory. For additional screenings and information go to JohnSinclair.us.

World famous jazz musicians “Cannonball” Adderley and Weather Report counted him as one of their favorites. The Geto Boys and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs sampled his songs. He’s Willie Tee, and when he passed away suddenly on September 12 of complications from colon cancer, New Orleans lost one of its most creative and talented musicians and cultural ambassadors.

Born Wilson Turbinton on February 6, 1944 in New Orleans, Tee’s jazz-inflected piano style and breezy, laid-back vocal approach crystallized on the 1965 R&B hit “Teasin’ You,” while his role as musical director for the Wild Magnolias melded Mardi Gras Indian culture with jazz and funk for the first time, a combination that has since become the soundtrack of the city.

Influenced by his older brother and lifelong musical partner, saxophonist and flutist Earl Turbinton, Tee took up the piano before kindergarten. When his family moved to the Calliope Projects in 1950, the street chants and unique polyrhythms of the Indians swept into the brothers’ lives, and in tribute they christened their first band the Seminoles.

Harold Battiste was a junior high school music teacher when he first encountered Tee. “Willie was in my class, and I found out that he could sing,” remembers Battiste. “He sounded so good that I got in touch with his mama and asked her if I could take him on a gig with me. That was either ’55 or ’56, and he was not only singing and playing piano, he was also fooling with the saxophone at that time.”

When Battiste established AFO (All for One) Records in the early 1960s, Tee’s burgeoning interest in jazz was fuelled by the wide musical swath cut by the AFO Studio Executives, the house band Battiste had assembled from the cream of the Crescent City’s session players.

Tee’s debut single, “All for One,” which coincidentally used the company’s name for its title, was a haunting, minor-keyed ballad performed with the confidence of a seasoned veteran. After one more single for AFO, Tee waxed “Teasin’ You” for the newly-minted NOLA imprint. Composed by Earl King, it was a perfect fit for Tee, who easily fell into character as a self-assured boyfriend watching his lover get hit on by a hopeless rival. Picked up by Atlantic, it hit number 12 on the R&B charts and became a timeless classic on the still-vibrant beach music scene of the Carolinas. Atlantic’s follow-up, “Thank You, John,” failed to hit nationally but, like its predecessor, found an endless life of its own in the Southeast.

Tee stayed grounded in his home city, waxing eight more sides for NOLA and an LP for Capitol before striking out on his own with the fierce psychedelic funk outfit the Gaturs, often featuring brother Earl. A 1970 Tulane Jazz Festival appearance found them jamming with the Wild Magnolias, which resulted in the singles and legendary LPs that brought Indian music to the masses. The Wild Magnolias and They Call Us Wild are widely regarded as masterpieces; not just the first, but the best, of their kind. Always extremely close, the Turbinton brothers continued to collaborate off and on until Earl’s recent death on August 3.

After losing everything in Katrina, Tee became an artist-in-residence at Princeton University where he taught music and lectured, to the delight of his old instructor Battiste. “He represented what I thought was very important, particularly for young jazz students, in that he listened and played by ear. In jazz, a lot of people who can’t read are treated like second class citizens. But what you do is for the ear, it’s not to be read. And he was a good example of that because he wrote beautiful stuff.”

Tee’s last performance was at a Ponderosa Stomp satellite show in Brooklyn this past July with AFO labelmate Tami Lynn.

“Willie and I were teenagers on the same record label together so we’ve always been like brother and sister,” explains Lynn. “His whole thing was always, ‘Don’t worry Tami, we’re gonna go out there and mess ’em up!’ And in Brooklyn it was the same thing. It didn’t matter who went on first, ’cause he just knew we were gonna tear the roof off the place. Sometimes when you’re singing, those spirits overtake you and with Willie, no matter where I went he’d be right there with me. I like to think of it this way: A jet can’t take off unless it has a runway and Willie was my runway. In fact, Willie was the greatest runway in the world.”

His 1961 smash “I’m A Fool to Care” rocketed him to a decade of stardom studded with heights he’d never imagined and lows that he’d never forget. A whirlwind of silk suits, American Bandstand appearances, rip-off record deals and trashed hotel rooms—and the drugs and booze that fuelled it all—prefaced stints as an offshore oil worker, used car salesman, preacher, pimp and freedom fighter.

But there was nothing that meant more to him than his music. Which is why, even after his health was so bad that he swore he’d never sing again, producer Aaron Fuchs was able to convince him to record the swan song album Been Down That Muddy Road.Hailed as “a miracle and a masterpiece” in the local press, even Rolling Stone was moved, praising Barry’s “tender, fighting soul.” The amalgamation of rough-and-tumble country blues and honky-tonk crossed with Barry’s rich, gospel-flavored swamp pop style framed a stunningly honest musical portrait of a man reckoning with his past, present and future.

As Carol Carimi Acutt’s brand new documentary of the same name reveals, Barry’s past was always present, whether it was in the amazing photograph collection that Acutt uses to weave the film together or in his own mind, which preserved his incredible wealth of experiences.

When Acutt first interviewed Barry in conjunction with the aforementioned album, she was floored. “After I interviewed Joe for two hours and heard his stories I called Aaron and said, ‘I think we’ve got a documentary on our hands.’”

Fuchs—who’d also compiled Barry’s original recordings on the 59-track anthology I’m A Fool To Care—agreed. Acutt began filming interviews with everyone from Louisiana record producer Floyd Soileau to Texas disc jockey “Steve-O” the Night Rider to Mississippi soul man Skip Easterling. But Dr. John says it best in the film’s opening sequence: “If you lined 40 or 50 of us up in a room, you might get close to what actually really happened.”

“Each person had their own view of Joe and they were all different,” says Acutt. “But the one thing that everyone said was that he was very unique. He could do crazy things but people still loved him despite his outrageousness. And I think that shows that he was a very genuine person.”

The feature-length film is beautifully executed; from Acutt’s own black and white super 8 raw footage to Barry’s candid recollections reaching all the way back to his childhood. “Joe was a quintessential old-time storyteller,” she says. “His stories have a rhythm to them, and I think that’s also why he was such a great songwriter. And that’s why I chose to tell his story through his songs.”

But Been Down That Muddy Road isn’t just the story of Joe Barry, as her use of music by his hero Ray Charles and contemporaries Gene Rodrigue and Roy Perkins illustrate. In a larger sense it’s the story of South Louisiana rock ’n’ roll told through one of its most exceptional practitioners.

The film will premiere at the Prytania Theater on Tuesday, May 1 at 7 p.m. with a reception to follow. Admission is free but seats are limited.

Mac Rebennack was born in 1941. Dr. John was born in 1967. What happened in between would color his whole musical career.

“In New Orleans, everything—food, music, religion, even the way people talk and act—has deep, deep roots; and, like the tangled veins of cypress roots that meander this way and that in the swamp, everything in New Orleans is interrelated, wrapped around itself in ways that aren’t always obvious.”—Mac Rebennack

In 1967, Malcolm Rebennack, Jr., exiled to the West Coast after a final drug bust that forbid him “to go to or through New Orleans,” donned face paint, glitter and plumes and emerged as Dr. John the Night Tripper.

His debut album Gris-Gris, and the stage shows that followed it, hawked a brand of psychedelic New Orleans R&B that mixed Mardi Gras Indian street chants with the primal gospel of holiness churches, the pianistic funk of Professor Longhair, heavy doses of hoodoo mysticism and nearly every shred of ritualistic South Louisiana culture that he’d absorbed during his decade and a half in the New Orleans music scene.

From the drag shows at the Dew Drop Inn to the electric guitar evangelizing of the Reverend Utah Smith, it was a netherworld far stranger and more colorful than anything the pioneer of voodoo rock could have dreamed up. His role in it, though often been eclipsed by his later metamorphosis, established a reputation that would inform every aspect of his later musical life.

Populated by high school greasers, high-rolling gangsters, down-and-out dope fiends and jive-talking record men, it was a world that had rapidly begun evaporating with the election of District Attorney Earling Carothers “Jim” Garrison in 1961. Prior to his widely known investigation into the Kennedy assassination, Garrison made his name locally by leading a systematic crack down on Crescent City vice that padlocked night clubs, juke joints and gambling dens. He often led the raids himself, pistol in hand, and by 1963 had managed to single-handedly dismantle the around-the-clock-party that had been Rebennack’s entire young life. It had been one of after-hours jam sessions that lasted well into the next day, followed by “record dates” that produced aural snapshots that just reeked with crazed rock ’n’ roll atmosphere: Jerry Byrne’s frantic “Lights Out” and “Carry On,” Roland Stone’s narcotic anthem “Junco Partner,” and Mac’s own sinister, tremelo-charged “Storm Warning.”

“If we didn’t have an artist and we had some studio time we’d just be the artist,” Rebennack says of the sessions that produced hundreds of singles under monikers from Ronnie and the Delinquents to Drits and Dravy. The former’s 1959 “Bad Neighborhood” was a greasy period piece if there ever was one. Meant to commemorate “the end of the zoot suit era,” its gleeful lines of “Lie, steal, drink all day / good folks try to keep away,” was an outright celebration of the lifestyle that Garrison sought to eliminate.

And the Delinquents moniker was really no joke. “When we hired Ronnie Barron to be the singer with us, he was a li’l thug,” says Rebennack, who’d had remarkably bad luck with great front men thus far.

“We lost more singers to the penitentiary,” he says, naming nearly everyone who preceded Barron with the exception of Frankie Ford. “Deadeye went to the joint for manslaughter, Jerry Byrne fell and went up for statutory rape, then Roland Stone went up on narcotics.”

Local disc jockey Jim Stewart once recalled that Rebennack’s teenage bands “were always high, always late.” But somehow through the haze, Mac would manage to simultaneously wear the hats of talent scout, A&R man, composer, producer, arranger, session musician, and when the need arose, singer. It might have stayed that way had Barron not refused to take on the Dr. John persona, which was invented with him in mind.

Rebennack had started flirting with drugs when he was 12, already well seasoned in the art of skipping school and Mass to catch the street car to the early morning R&B jams at the Brass Rail. Since his father owned an appliance store that serviced jukeboxes, his childhood was spent wearing out stacks of hillbilly, jazz and blues 78s when they came off the boxes. Schooled on “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” by his piano-playing aunt, he soon took up the guitar. By the time rock ’n’ roll hit during his freshman year at Jesuit High School, he was more than ready.

At Jesuit, Rebennack formed his first band the Dominos, with Henry Guerineau, then joined Guerineau’s the Spades with whom he played “the Holy Father Circuit,” as he refers it, starring at CYO dances from Redemptorist in the Irish Channel to Saint Anthony’s in Mid-City. His teachers were current and future Fats Domino guitarists Papoose Nelson and Roy Montrell, who took an axe to young Mac’s brand new green and black Harmony guitar. “He broke it all up, called my Pa and said, ‘Mr. Rebennack, I ain’t teachin’ your son on that piece of shit. Go pick him out something nice.’ I thought I was going to get killed. My Pa was hip, though. He knew it wasn’t about the guitar as much as having that guitar to bring on the gig.”

Montrell took Mac to a pawnshop where he picked out a Gibson that he worked off lugging appliances for his dad.

“My father didn’t say a word til later,” Rebennack wrote in his autobiography Under a Hoodoo Moon. “Apparently Roy had taken him aside and told him, ‘I taught your son a lesson, that you don’t get things because of the way they look. You get them on how they work.”

“He had a way of teaching that kept me coming back for more. During the lesson, he strung me along with ordinary riffs—but then right at the end he’d play some killer lick, his back turned so I couldn’t see his fingers, and say, ‘Hey, wanna learn that shit, kid? Come back next week. Now get the fuck outta here.”

Having already met studio owner Cosimo Matassa, who was a friend of his father, Rebennack spent his schooldays honing his songwriting skills. “Man, I used to go to school, I had a couple of comic books where the outside cover looked like a loose leaf binder. And I’d sit there in class reading that. They thought I was doing something in school but I’d be sitting there writing songs, ripping them off from Mad or Tales from the Crypt.”

He’d also begun hanging out at Warren Easton High School on Canal Street, a hotbed of hip musical activity that had already birthed New Orleans first bona-fide white rock ’n’ roll band, the Sparks. It was here that he first encountered saxophonist Leonard James, whose band was blasting out a set of Sam Butera songs in the school gymnasium. It turned out that James knew all about the Brass Rail too, and dug the same hard-driving sounds as Rebennack did. They were soon rehearsing at James’ house in the notorious St. Roch park neighborhood with guitarist Earl Stanley—now playing the recently introduced electric bass—and drummer Paul Staehle.

“Leonard lived on Robertson not too far from the park and Stanley used to live around there on Dauphine,” Rebennack says. “One of the things St. Roch Park was known for was as a good cop spot. St. Roch church was famous, too, because they’d take the grease out the bells by the cemetery, mix it with some graveyard dirt and some gun powder, add extra nitrate and put that all together with Patchouli oil to make goofy dust. Now, what you did with it was according to how rank a motherfucker you were.”

The mysterious worlds of drugs and hoodoo fascinated young Mac, but in his new musical partners he found an even deeper magic.

“Paul Staehle was bad. I remember him having drum battles with Edward Blackwell and all the top drummers. And Stanley had a finger-plucking style of guitar like Snooks did, North Mexican shit that he’d learned from his daddy. He was into Earl King and Guitar Slim just like I was. We liked those cats because they did something different.”

Rebennack had picked up on the flamboyance of his guitar heroes a little too acutely for the priests at Jesuit, who’d brought his high school career to a halt after a Christmas talent show where they accused him of making “lewd gyrations” with his instrument. The real beef, Henry Guerineau later told Tad Jones, was that they were playing R&B instead of big band swing or Dixieland. “At the time,” he recalled, “it was heresy.”

Stanley, who became the Spades’ guitarist after Rebennack left the band, was having his own issues over at Nicholls High. “I used to hang with the gangsters, all the tough guys,” Stanley says. “I was so bad they threw me out of Nicholls but they couldn’t throw me out of school. So they asked me to leave and I went to McDonough on Esplanade for a couple of months, then I quit when I was 15. That was in ’55.

“I didn’t know Mac when he was in the Spades. I just remember seeing him playing guitar at the dances. I thought, ‘That guy’s pretty good.’ Then I got with Leonard and through Leonard I met Mac. They had a guy playing piano with them, Hal Farrar, he went by the stage names ‘King Helo Attaro’ and ‘Spider Boy.’ Now Hal was a character, he was the character of them all; the main lunatic. He liked to drink vodka, he could care less about anything, just a wild man. He used to have this Cugat jacket he’d wear and he’d play piano and try to do all of Little Richard’s stuff. He even had the little moustache. In fact, he recorded the original demo of ‘I’ve Been Hoodood’ (later to become the flip side of the Dr. John hit “Right Place, Wrong Time”) with Leonard.”

Vocalists Wayne “Deadeye” Herring and Jerry Byrne were also drifting into the group at this point. “We used to do the old low-down blues,” Herring told Jones. “There weren’t too many white bands that could do it. Back then if you sat in with a black band, boy, they’d jump on your ass when you come outside. People took a dim view of that but we did it anyway.”

While band names revolved from the Skyliners to the Loafers to the Night Trains to the Thunderbirds, the foundation remained James, Rebennack, Stanley and Staehle. “Crippled” Eddie Hynes and Eddie Shroeder often floated in on trombone and baritone sax respectively.

“Whether it was Leonard’s band or my band, it was all pretty much the same crew of guys,” says Rebennack, “Nothing really changed other than we changed the name of the band quite frequently. It kinda helped us get some gigs and win some talent shows. We lost them under one name and won them under another.”

The core foursome debuted on wax with an album of raunchy guitar and sax instrumentals, Boppin’ and A Strollin’ with Leonard James, recorded for Decca in 1956. Rough, ready and loose, the LP was the perfect soundtrack of noir New Orleans; at once evocative of French Quarter strip joints, high school dances and hood hangouts like the Rockery Inn. Along with discs like the Saxons’ “Camel Walk’ and the Sparks’ “Merry Mary Lou,” it stands as a testament to city’s incredibly potent—but often obscured—white rock ’n’ roll underground.

“Leonard always took pride in combing his ducktail perfect,” recalls Rebennack. “I mean, he would stand in front the mirror for an hour and then put his be-bop cap on—perfect. He had his little zoot suit pressed, more than the rest of us. We’d just wear them. They were the kind that didn’t wrinkle any way.

“Leonard was a great hustler. He used to walk in joints where they never had a band in their life. I remember us getting a gig in the Ninth Ward at a grocery store. Leonard conned this guy into hiring us but he wanted country music. We didn’t know any country music so we’d play ‘Comin’ Around the Mountain’ or whatever. As long as we were working, we didn’t care nothing about none of the rest of it.”

From dives like the Club Leoma, the Blue Cat and the Jet Lounge, they moved up to the Clock on St. Charles Avenue and finally, the Brass Rail. “While we were working there Paul Gayten says, ‘If y’all want to keep the gig, you’re going to have to quit playing songs like the record.’ And that became kind of a theme with our band. We didn’t play them like the records, we played them our way.”

Gayten also took issue with their slightly out-of-date stage wear. “We had the same suits for so long that I don’t think anybody ever considered getting new uniforms until Paul started fuckin’ with us: ‘Nobody wears zoot suits in Chicago; they wear continental suits.’ Man, here we had all our money invested in these royal blue zoot suits. And what do we do? We got some new suits from Harry Hyman’s or old man Sutton’s on South Rampart—continental suits—and we wore them in Gretna when they had a gang fight at Cass’s Lounge. They throwed us all in the drainage ditch out behind the joint. We ruined our new suits and we hadn’t even paid for them yet!

“When we worked at any of them joints on the West Bank, shit happened. At Spec’s Moulin Rouge, old man Spec used to have guys walking around with pieces dressed like police but they wasn’t official police, they was just guys who worked for old man Spec. Gang fights was, like, prevalent. When the Choctaw Boys and the Cherokees would have their annual beef at the Wego Inn on the Hill, it would be around Carnival. And it would be like, ‘Goddamn.’ You know the shit’s going to happen; it’s just when it’s going happen. I would be trying to play close to the slot machines that were on the bandstand because I figured the slots could deal with the slugs better than me. When I saw anything that looked like it could be trouble, I’d back up toward the slots. But this is the kind of shit you had to endure back in them days because you were dealing with a bunch of crazy motherfuckers. And we were crazy, too.”

If there was one song that distilled the insanity into the length of a 45 RPM record, it was Rebennack’s “Lights Out,” cut by Jerry Byrne for Specialty in 1958. Punctuated by stop-time drum breaks, a foghorn-like saxophone riff and a searing piano solo courtesy of Art Neville, “Lights Out” has justifiably been called “the perfect rock ‘n’ roll song.” Byrne’s breakneck vocal nods to a personality so bent on bringing the house down that fights—and sometimes worse—often ensued.

“Jerry was one of them suckers who worked the house,” says Rebennack, “but he was a piece of work. He drove me crazy a number of times in my life. He was special with that. Hey, guys wanted to shoot me over things Jerry did. He had the ability to kick up more shit with more motherfuckers than anybody I know.”

In 1959, Byrne cut Mac’s equally boisterous “Carry On” and then got sent to prison on a trumped-up statutory rape charge. Deadeye was already behind bars.

“It was a never-ending thing,” says Stanley, “just make a record and things happen, you know?”

Despite the trouble, says Rebennack, “our band was really popular.” They’d toured with Frankie Ford behind “Sea Cruise” and Byrne behind “Lights Out” as well as backing the traveling rock ‘n’ roll caravans at both the Municipal Auditorium and Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park. And the records kept coming, from Bobby Lonero’s “Little Bit” to Morgus and the Ghouls’ “Morgus the Magnificent.”

“I don’t think any of us thought that much about doing a record date,” reflects Rebennack. “The gigs were the fun part. When I started working for Joe Ruffino’s record company, Joe asked my daddy if I could be the president of the company and my daddy says, ‘What are you crazy? This boy can’t even find his fuckin’ shoes!’ But there were so many guys we did sessions for like Andy Blanco at Drew-blan in Morgan City and a bunch of other guys that had different little labels in the country. We played on all of Cos’s Rex stuff and then we did a lot of crazy stuff all through the days we were working for Johnny Vincent over at Ace. I remember we stole ‘Jimmy Crack Corn’ and called it ‘Ain’t No Use.’ We cut ‘Row Your Boat’ with Big Boy Myles. And I don’t know how many different versions of ‘Junco Partner’ we cut with Roland Stone. We were some plagiarizing motherfuckers.”

Stone, the most prolific of Rebennack’s vocalists on record, had already blazed the white R&B trail with local luminaries the Jokers when he waxed the regional smash “Just a Moment” with Rebennack in 1961. His entrance roughly coincided with the departure of Leonard James, who was replaced by Charlie Maduell after he joined the Air Force.

“Charlie was just as crazy as Leonard was, but Leonard never got high. On the other hand, Charlie fit right in with the rest of us because he liked the narcotics, too. Probably the only one that wasn’t a really serious drug addict was Stanley. If we were somewhere in the country, we would burglarize drug stores. When we were in the city, we forged ’scripts. We were strung out dope fiends, what the hell you going to do? There was a pharmacy on the corner of Dorgenois and Canal that used to sell to all the dope fiends. You had to go in there and ask for certain things, that’s when I started getting my collection of Mad comic books together. If I got a comic book and a bag of pork rinds, that meant I wanted some opiates. Everything you ordered meant something else. We used to have so much fun that who’d have ever thought we’d wind up in jail?

“My favorite gig was when Roland was singing with us and we started working at Little Club Forest on Jefferson Highway. At Club Forest, you could tell what audience hit because when all the junkies would come in, they’d just want to hear ‘Junco Partner’ over and over. When the whores came in they’d want to hear whatever their song was that night. So there were all these songs that fit the set. That gig was so fuckin’ off the hook, so much crazy shit happened at that gig alone, I couldn’t even describe it.

“Between Charlie Maduell and Paul Staehle, they would always hide the stash for the band. One night they had a raid and Paul had the whole band’s stash in his sock. They didn’t shake us down, but the FBI came in and they emptied the joint. Somebody paid everyone’s bond and before the night was over, Wes, the Jefferson Parish narc, was selling the customers back their dope in the band room! This is how out there it was.

“And then Charlie went out and walked the bar and did the dance of the Seven Veils. He’s out and there doing a striptease walking the bar. It’s one of them gigs that’s printed in my brain. And we always had what we used to call our ‘band-aids’ back then. Before they called them groupies, we called them band-Aids.”

When Stone fell for one of the young ladies a little too hard, friction arose. “I told Roland, ‘Hey, listen, you can’t marry this girl. She’s our girl. She belongs to the band.’ I thought I was doing him a favor but it backfired. He was obviously pissed.”

Stone showed up for his next recording session with three henchmen in tow including prizefighter Pepi Flores. “They stomped my ass. Charlie went out and got a gun and was firing in the air. I says, ‘Charlie, quit shooting in the air! Shoot these motherfuckers!’ He didn’t even have real guns. They were replica weapons he’d loaded up! But we all went to work the next night together. Me and Charlie wound up having to wear shades and makeup to hide the black eyes. That’s when I learned, hey, when it comes to matters of somebody’s heart, stay the fuck out of it.”

The good times had to come to an end and they eventually did. Stone was busted on a narcotics charge, as was Maduell, who remains in Angola today. Within just a few years, Paul Staehle would die of a drug over dose. Rebennack’s own luck ran out on Christmas Eve of 1961 when he intervened in a scuffle between Ronnie Barron and a jealous club owner who accused Barron of having an affair with his wife.

“I walked in to get Ronnie at the last minute because Ronnie was like Leonard James, he’d take forever to get himself all perfect. So I go to get him and the guy’s pistol-whipping him. Miss Mildred, Ronnie’s mama, said if anything happened to her son on the road she was going to take a butcher knife and chop my cajones off. So I’m thinking, ‘Man, if anything happens to this guy, his mama’s going to fuck me up.’ And hey, she was much more frightening to me than this guy was. I thought I had my hand over the handle of the gun, but it was over the barrel. I’m beating his hand on the bricks and as I’m hitting it, all of a sudden the gun went off and my finger’s just about to fall off of my hand. It was hanging by a piece of skin and then I went crazy. I took Paul Staehle’s ride cymbal out the case and just fucked up the guy’s face. I was trying to pull his eyeballs out his head.”

Doctors managed to reattach the finger, but Rebennack had trouble playing guitar with the intensity he’d become known for. He concentrated on the keyboard, playing organ on virtually all of Huey Meaux’s New Orleans sessions, most notably those of Barbara Lynn and Jimmy Donley. The first—and perhaps wildest—chapter of his musical career officially came to a close when he was busted and sent to federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas. Upon his release in 1965 he headed to California and his future as the Night Tripper.

“You know what the kicks of it was?” Rebennack asks. “We wanted to play music so bad that we didn’t ever think about it. We were trying to make a hustle just off of the gigs and that was part of the fun of it. Everything we done, we had fun doing it. That was the one thing that I always treasured about them days. It was just something that happened. When you’re young and crazy and stupid, you do a lot of crazy, stupid shit. But a lot of that shit is great because you’re too stupid to know better. I know that we made it a point to always have kicks, to always have good times no matter what was going to go down. We never thought, ‘Oh, this is a suck-ass gig we’re going on.’ We went on all kinds of suck-ass gigs! But while we were doing them, we had a ball.”