No one had a groovier slide in their glide or motion in their ocean than Dr. John. Dubbed The Night Tripper when his debut album GRIS-GRIS was released in 1968, he arrived with enough vibrating velocity, hoodoo juju and mos’ scocious magnitude that it felt like the earth was turning a little swifter whenever his music played. One of the most beautiful things about Dr. John, and there were so many, was the way he could walk into any room–from the White House to New Orleans’ infamous Glass House—and completely light up the surroundings. That’s because no matter where Dr. John went, there was no one even remotely at his level of luminosity.
He was a creation of the outer zone, that place where characters seem to drift down from the heavens and help illuminate the earth, defining their own space like an astral projection of the highest order. He would be dressed in some crazy mishmash of clothes, whether if they were checks or stripes or plaids of just plain purple, and he was always totally in synch with his swinging spirit. And then there would be all the things hanging around his neck: gold leaf figurines, dried monkey paws, a few alligator teeth, a carved African mandala or two with some Spanish moss just for a subtle accent. Naturally, there was almost always an elaborate wooden walking cane on hand, often hand-carved by the New Orleans cane-carving king named Daddy Boy. It was a Jazz Festival tradition that when he was alive, Daddy Boy would sit in a tent at Jazz Fest carving and selling his canes, with an endless supply of Miller beer. And as a little lagniappe, he would happily remove and show people the wooden nose he’d carved for himself and colored with brown shoe polish to replace his real nose shot off in a street disagreement. Now that was New Orleans, full of what Dr. John liked to call care-actors. It was also the place that Dr. John could never be outdone.
Born Malcolm Rebennack in New Orleans in 1942, there was something otherworldly about his songs that spoke not only to a higher power but a whole other universe. Dr. John was able to mix up enough percussive polyrhythms, jangling ostrich guitar, romping and stomping horns and psychedelicized jungle chanting that the music often sounded like it was a combination of holy roller celebration and back-of-town get-down. There’s been nothing like it since his entrance onto the world stage, and maybe that’s because there was nothing like it before the man hit the scene and mesmerized his listeners for over half a century. To be around Dr. John, the planet was a non-stop circus of conviviality, confusion and good old goofiness. It swirled to a gentle boil that made the world feel like it was a big gumbo pot, and we were all invited to simmer in it for decades of delightful debauchery. Nothing was normal when Dr. John was in the house.
As soon as a brain-numbing normality had become the life du jour during the 1950s Eisenhower era, the young Rebennack split off from the pack and became his own Grand Marshall in an endless parade of inspired individualism, even if he was just a session guitarist at Cosimo Matassa’s recording studio. He was eyeballing everything that walked in the door, from the highly-feminized Esquerita to a suave Lloyd Price, and likely plotting moves to the front of the room. After an altercation with a club owner ended up with Rebennack getting two of his fingers shot, the musician switched to the piano as his main axe and started bumping and stomping a personalized street parade with whoever he played. When it was time to get out of New Orleans, likely pushed by some shady characters who made it known the city wasn’t big enough for him and them, Mac Rebennack took a short vacation in a federal pen in Texas for a narcotics violation and then some mind-altering session work at Duke Records in Houston, home of Bobby Bland, Junior Parker and other rhythm & blues kingpins. It was another lesson in absolute musical magic watching those non-pareil singers lay down their vocals. Rebennack once explained how the sound of the horns recorded at the Duke studio, usually arranged and produced by bandleader Joe Scott, came to signify the feel of heaven itself. “Man, those saxophones and trumpets were so knocked out,” Rebennack said. “Between tracks, they’d go out to their cars in the parking lot, do some of that fine Houston heroin, so when they got back inside and the tape was rolling, them horns had that warm, fuzzy feeling.” He was the kind of person who would dig as deep down in the bag of life as his arm would reach. Rebennack found quirky sideshows wherever he could and then augmented them into his own trip so when it came time to invent the persona of Dr. John in Los Angeles in a few short years, there would be an endless bag of high-wire inspirations to choose from. When it came time for Dr. John to be born and be played by Rebennack’s Crescent City early bandmate Ronnie Baron, there was one small glitch. Baron flew the coop, moving to Las Vegas to work with bandleader Don Costa. That left Malcom Rebennack, who had never really been a singer before, to step into the sequined robes, feathered headdresses and goofer dust throwing frontman spot and light the fuse. Luckily, the child prodigy had no problem with that. After all, he’d appeared in Ivory soap ads before he could walk, so by the time Dr. John popped out of his shell with the release of the mind-curling GRIS-GRIS album, it felt like fate was being fulfilled right there on gritty rock & roll stages all across America. Malcolm Rebennack, and the entire country itself, would never be the same.
The opening song on the album, “Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya” kicked off a sacred assault on the earwaves. It was the kind of music that let it be known life had probing levels we’d never seen. The band played like their jambalaya had been dosed with Purple Owsley, and the songs were drenched in a voodoo vocabulary that not even all the players knew what was going on. These were Crescent City natives, too. And what players they were: percussionist Jessie “Oh Poo Pah Doo” Hill, drummer Johnny Boudreaux, guitarist Ernest McLean, saxophonist Plas Johnson, singers Shirley Goodman (straight outta Shirley & Lee fame) and Tami Lynn, with all kinds of other New Orleans notables, ex-cons and assorted flamboyants. Song after song rolled from the record, turning up the righteousness of Dr. John’s ride by the second: “Danse Kalinda Ba Doom,” “Mama Roux,” “Croker Courtbullion” and one of the all-time most effervescent album enders, “I Walk on Guilded Splinters.”
The entire smear was like a circus had come to town, but instead of clowns it was jammed to the brim with many of the most original musicians on the planet. Produced by long-time New Orleans legend Harold Battiste, the sessions had been scheduled with leftover studio time from the album Battiste was working on then with Sonny & Cher. Really. So credit that chart-topping couple with the premiere of Dr. John’s first release, which actually makes total sense considering that Sonny Bono had once been an A&R whiz with Specialty Records during the ’50s, specializing in Big Easy artists. In the inner world of rock & roll music, it’s like so many tributaries lead to rivers that lead to the Gulf of Mexico that lead to sonic holiness. There are no mistakes in that land of endless wonder.
Not surprising, GRIS-GRIS did not light up the record sales charts or radio airplay lists, but enough inquisitive minds found the music and allowed Dr. John to launch his own idiosyncratic cult, one that lasted the rest of his life. There would be a major hit, “Right Place, Wrong Time” in the 1970s, and dozens and dozens of albums that supplied an unstoppable second line of high-stepping energy and lowdown oozing, something that helped lift America into an exalted state of musical nirvana. Dr. John was someone who brought his entertainment with him, and always sparked the millions of ions which surrounded him. When he shared his presence, it was without a doubt his show. We were the lucky visitors to that place that lives behind the curtain of normal life, the place where the air feels like it’s been piped in from the ether zone and the sounds of the St. Charles streetcars, chirping birds, hypnotic voices, praline sellers, horse carriage drivers, Bourbon Street barkers, Popeye’s cashiers, tug boat captains, Bourbon Street tap dancers, nuns in the nightclubs and, yes, even the slowed-paced police, meld into a roaring force of breathless humanity.
Once in New Orleans during the 1990s, I visited Dr. John in his hometown, ostensibly to work on publicity for his life-defining GOIN’ BACK TO NEW ORLEANS collection. It was a high time: Malcom Rebennack knew he’d hit the mother lode of music which, for him at least, was what the whole meaning of existence was. He used to talk about the “meat world” and the “spirit world,” and there was never any doubt where he liked to park his wooden cane at night when he got horizontal.
That afternoon after I got picked up in front of Tujague’s bar on Decatur Street in the French Quarter, we set out in his manager Stanley Chaisson’s polished Oldsmobile. There were serious errands to run: Rebennack was on the hunt for a certain cologne he liked and a special brand of denture cream. Then we visited with an ex-father-in-law who was in the hospital. “Family is family,” he said. “Aint nothin’ changes with no fancy court
papers.” Finally, as the sun started to lose some of its burn, we headed for Bozo’s, an old restaurant in Metairie. “We gotta get some of them Bozo oysters,” Rebennack said, smiling from ear to ear. “Way back when, Pete Fountain’s father used to shuck ’em there.” I was speechless, basking in the glow of an offhand remark that made me realize life is one long line of warm wisdom and inside information, adding up to a mountain of soul that surely holds the secret to why we’re all here, no matter how long we last.
When Malcolm Rebennack passed away recently, the French Quarter streets shed king-sized tears and the trumpets in the Ninth Ward blew long lonesome notes for New Orleans’ favorite son. Then, before you could say “Yeah you right,” the snare drums started popping and the bass drums began beating and the whole world tipped its hat to a man whose likes we shall not see again. Forevermore, Dr. John’s music will be the soundtrack for this state we call being alive. And all those funkified songs the man so generously shared with us shall remain the eternal sound of whatever permanent place
we call home.
Bill Bentley