Mac Rennack and New Orleans

[reprinted in full from the New York Times.]

June 7, 2008
He Still Loves New Orleans, and Now He’s Mad
By Jon Pareles

NEW ORLEANS — Mac Rebennack, the 67-year-old New Orleans pianist, guitarist and songwriter better known as Dr. John, carries the city’s lore in his fingers, his scratchy voice and his memory. He has lived in New York City and on Long Island since the 1980s, but when he revisits his birthplace it’s as if he never left. New Orleans culture, he said in his ever-surprising vocabulary, has “wacknosity” — things only New Orleanians do.

In late April he was back in his old hometown, revisiting his past and present. He performed during the first weekend of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, introducing some of the songs on the angry new album he released this week, “City That Care Forgot” (429 Records). (Dr. John is to perform in New York City on June 17 at the Highline Ballroom.)

Three days later he was at the Ponderosa Stomp, which had persuaded him to revive songs he wrote back in the 1950s. Most were written for other people (like Ronnie and the Delinquents’ “Bad Neighborhood”), and he hadn’t performed them since. In the afternoons Dr. John was at the Music Shed, a recording studio in the Garden District, singing Randy Newman’s theme song for “The Princess and the Frog,” a Disney movie about old New Orleans due to be released next year.

“They wanted his voice, which is not a bad idea if you’re going to do New Orleans,” said Mr. Newman, who was at the sessions. “He’s the real thing in every kind of way.”

Mr. Newman has known Mr. Rebennack since the 1960s, when both men worked as Los Angeles studio musicians. “You don’t have to tell him much about music,” Mr. Newman said. “He knows where he is, wherever he is.”

Through the years, Dr. John has carried New Orleans style worldwide: in his two-fisted barrelhouse piano, in his syncopated drawl, in the second-line funk rhythms of songs like his 1973 hit “Right Place Wrong Time” and in the psychedelic voodoo character he created when he became Dr. John the Night Tripper in the late 1960s.

Before the recording sessions, Dr. John told some tales. On early tours, he said, the Night Tripper’s troupe included a nude dancer and a geek who bit the heads off chickens, drank their blood and tossed their bodies to his black snake. In one town the geek was charged with cruelty to animals. Defending himself in court, he declared, “Arrest Colonel Sanders!”

Dr. John also had, it seemed, a story for every street corner in his hometown. He recalled the one where Gypsies ran a bujo scam, promising to cleanse supposedly cursed money and filching it instead. There was the saloon where the booze wiped off the bar was collected in a galvanized tin, dumped into milk bottles and sold to down-and-out drunks. There was the Circle Food Market, where, decades ago, Sister Gertrude Morgan, a gospel evangelist shaking six tambourines — on her hands, her feet and her dress — used to sing like James Brown to redeem sinners. The front yard of her home in the Ninth Ward, Dr. John recalled, was all four-leaf clovers.

The streets he showed a visitor were less vibrant. They’re the New Orleans he sings about on “City That Care Forgot,” still deeply scarred nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina.

“There’s hardly any part of this city that you’re not going to see something that’s still whacked,” he said. The van, driven by his road manager, rolled past a tent city of the homeless that has spread under the long overpass of Interstate 10. Crossing the Industrial Canal, Dr. John said, “As far as your eyes can see on this bridge, and the next bridge and the next bridge and the next bridge, you can see masses of destruction slid in between masses of not-so-destruction.”

“How many of those people are scattered and splattered around the United States to this minute?” he asked. “How many people got back and had no way to rebuild?”

As the van moved through the wreckage of the Lower Ninth Ward, he said: “I knew a million people here, and they got wiped. The first time I come out here, I couldn’t even find where blocks ended and started. There were 5 and 10 houses smashed together. You could smell dead people in them.”

He released a mournful seven-song EP, “Sippiana Hericane” (429 Records), less than three months after Katrina. But he kept hearing more grim stories. “The more people I would talk to — everybody had an epic movie saga,” he said. “One guy got his grandma out of her house and came out and saw his grandfather’s body hanging from a tree. I’d be walking on Canal Street and I’d hear the stories. And I got to the point where I got to be scared of saying to someone, ‘How’d you do?’ I had to do something to get past that.”

Gradually, sorrow turned to resentment and rage. “City That Care Forgot” flings indictments both local and global. “Short version is, we gettin’ mad,” Dr. John sings in “We Gettin’ There,” which gripes about contractors and insurance companies and goes on to tabulate greater costs: “Ask anybody if they know a friend that died from suicide/They gonna say ‘Yeah for a fact.’ ” In the title song, a steadfast slow groove with jabs of bluesy guitar from Eric Clapton, Dr. John sings, “Better get used to that fonky smell/Toxic mold under the fresh paint.” And in the gospel-flavored “Promises, Promises,” on which he shares vocals with Willie Nelson, he sings, “The road to the White House is paved with lies.”

In New Orleans style, the bad news arrives with a backbeat. Dr. John and his band of New Orleans musicians, the Lower 911, come up with easy-rolling grooves: funk, blues, gospel, even a tinge of zydeco.

Dr. John wrote five of the album’s 13 songs with Bobby Charles, the elusive South Louisiana figure who wrote “Walking to New Orleans” and “See You Later, Alligator” and whose hometown, Abbeville, La., was smashed by Hurricane Rita. Most of the album was recorded in a studio in Maurice, La., Dr. John said, “sitting on one of the most polluted bayous in the state of Louisiana.”

Dr. John and his band made two albums in the same sessions: “City That Care Forgot” and a set of Mr. Charles’s songs sung by Shannon McNally. “Some cuts on me, some cuts on her — it kept the band from getting complacent,” he said. “It would shift the gears of the conversation.”

One collaboration by Dr. John and Mr. Charles was “Black Gold,” which links oil greed to global warming and the war in Iraq. “Bobby hits your nerves good,” Dr. John said. “That’s one of his fortes: he can go straight for the jugular. I could give Bobby some words or a thought, and within an hour it’s finished.”

When the van got back to the studio, Dr. John resumed his longtime role as an ambassador of New Orleans. The Jazz and Heritage Foundation, which runs the festival’s nonprofit cultural programs — and the state of Louisiana, in a project called Sync Up, had invited a delegation of film music supervisors to promote Louisiana music — songs, musicians and recording studios — to Hollywood. Dr. John posed for photos with them: the bearded potentate, carrying a carved staff and wearing amulets and Mardi Gras colors, paired with the sleek but clearly starstruck Californians.

“Anything helps,” he said. “Everybody here is scuffling.”

[photo of Mac Rebennack from Beat the Devil Web site|blog]