"My group consists of Dr. Poo Pah Doo of Destine Tambourine and Dr. Ditmus of Conga, Dr. Boudreaux of Funky Knuckle Skins and Dr. Battiste of Scorpio in Bass Clef, Dr. McLean of Mandolin Comp. School, Dr. Mann of Bottleneck Learning, Dr. Bolden of The Immortal Flute Fleet, The Baron of Ronyards, Dido, China, Goncy O'Leary, Shirley Marie Laveaux, Dr. Durden, Governor Plas Johnson, Senator Bob West Bowing, Croaker Jean Freunx, Sister Stephanie and St. Theresa, John Gumbo, Cecilia La Favorite, Karla Le Jean who were all dreged up from The Rigolets by the Zombie of the Second Line. Under the eight visions of Professor Longhair reincannted the charts of now."
"I will mash my special faix deaux-deaux on all you who buy my charts, the rites of Coco Robicheaux who, invisible to all but me, will act as a second guardian angel until you over-work him. All who attend our rites will receive kites from the second tier of Tit Alberto who brought the Saute Chapeau. To Chieu Va Bruler up to us from the Antilles to the bayou St. John. Aunt Francis who told me the epic of Jump Sturdy and Apricot Glow. Mimi, who in silence, says the lyrics to Mamma Roux in Chipacka the Chopatoulis Chocktaws without teepees on Magnolia Street and wise to the Zulu parade and the golden blade the sun-up to sun-down second liners who dig Fat Tuesday more than anybody and that's plenty. I have also dug up the old Danse Kalinda to remind you we have not chopped out the old chants and the new Croaker Courtbuillion to serve Battiste style of Phyco-Delphia. We did the snake a la gris-gris calimbo to frame our thing into the medium of down under yonder fire. We walked on gilded splinters to shove my point across to you whom I will communicate with shortly through the smoke of deaux-deaux the rattlesnake whose forked tongue hisses pig Latin in silk and satin da-zaw-ig-day may the gilded splinters of Aunte Andre spew forth in your path to light and guide your way through the bayous of life on your pirougue of heartaches and good times... Push and the shove that you need to get your point across no matter what the cost."
Triggered by this Toop-treatise out soon on Strange Attractor
Two-Headed Doctor
Listening For Ghosts in Dr. John's Gris-Gris
By David Toop
Two-Headed Doctor is a forensic investigation into a single LP: Dr. John, the night tripper's Gris-gris. Though released in 1968 to poor sales and a minimum of critical attention, Gris-gris has accumulated legendary status over subsequent decades for its strangeness, hybridity, and innovative production. It formed the launch pad for Dr. John's image and lengthy career and the ghostly presence of its so-called voodoo atmosphere hovers over numerous cover versions, samples, and re-invocations. Despite the respect given to the record, its making is shrouded in mystery, misunderstandings, and false conclusions. The persona of Dr. John, loosely based on dubious literary accounts of a notorious voodooist and freed slave, a nineteenth-century New Orleans resident known as Doctor John, provided Malcolm "Mac" Rebennack with a lifelong mask through which to transform himself from session musician in order to construct a solo career.puzzle, experimental rhythm, blues disguised as rock, and elaborate hoax, Gris-gris was a collaborative project between Rebennack and producer/arranger Harold Battiste (at the time musical director for Sonny & Cher). A few brief sessions held at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles brought together many of New Orleans' finest musicians, including Shirley Goodman, John Boudreaux, Plas Johnson, Jessie Hill, Ernest McLean, and Tami Lynn. Along with their complex histories, the cast of characters implicated in the story includes Ornette Coleman, Lafcadio Hearn, Zora Neale Hurston, Cher, Sonny Bono, Sam Cooke, Ishmael Reed, Black Herman, Prince La La, and many others. The story details in discursive style the historical context of the music, how it came together, its literary sources, production and arrangements, and the nature of the recording studio as dream state, but also examines as a disturbing undercurrent the volatile issue of race in twentieth-century music, the way in which it doomed relationships and ambitious projects, exploited great talents, and distorted the cultural landscape.
David Toop discussing the book (and much else) on the Rock's Back Pages podcast
An album I've never really got with, despite owning a vinyl copy for decades now... initially lured by the fab cover version / UK near-hit by Marsha Hunt of the Dr's most famous tune "I Walk on Gilded Splinters", the last track on Gris-Gris
Toop-treatise does sound intriguing.... tad hauntological, even
Still there is something that niggles a bit about these records which seem soaked in a kind of erudition... and that then demand an equally erudite response ("forensic" as the jacket copy puts it)
(Digressing slightly - I am sure I read some prominent American rockcrit - one of the really big beasts - having serious issues with Dr. John's stage shtick at this time... the witch-doctor robes and the hoodoo hocus hokum... feeling that it was more than a tad suspect.... perhaps this is some of what Toop is picking over in his monograph)
But maybe it's time to plunge again into the phantasmagoria... attuned to its made-in-LA fabrication aspect (c.f. Little Feat)... a fantasy from afar.
Talking of fantasies from afar and studio-concoctions
Guess which unlikely Brit pop star was influenced by Dr. John?
This fellow!
Highly unlikely on the pretty-boy-face of it - but the good Doctor was an avowed inspiration to David Essex and producer-partner Jeff Wayne when they made these peculiar pop-not-pop records
While researching Shock and Awe, learning about the Dr. John connection drove me to check out some of the amorphous sequel records he made after Gris-Gris - like Babylon and Remedies
Now I think about it, if I recall right Mike Leander - just prior to making "Rock and Roll, Pt 1 + 2" - had also been listening to Dr. John and similar bayou-gumbo swamp-rock things like Exuma - as well as to the Afro-rock drum-looped boogie of John Kongos, as in "He's Gonna Step On You Again".
Another glam intersection with Dr John: the Marsha Hunt cover version of "Splinters" was produced by Tony Visconti .... Indeed Hunt was Marc Bolan's girlfriend (this is during Tyrannosaurus Rex days rather than T. Rex)
Cher also covered "Splinters" back in 1969 (Gris-Gris's producer-arranger Harold Battiste was Sonny & Cher's music director)
Out of many other covers, this "Splinters" by Paul Weller from 1995 sticks out.
I guess here the Modfather is retracing a certain evolutionary path once taken by Steve Winwood (with Traffic) and Mighty Baby (once The Action). Or indeed the Small Faces>>>Humble Pie trajectory.
Mod into proggish sophisto-rock with roots flavors. Southern fantasies from afar (very afar in this case).
(Perhaps Weller influenced a little by the Primal Scream Dixie-Narco move?).
"Splinters"-aside...
Mostly with Dr. John / Mac Rebennack, I remember hearing these much more straightforward New Orleansy records that John Peel would play now and then - contemporary releases but sounding like mystifying musty quaintness when nestled next to the Fall and the Undertones.
A Dr John interview from 1982
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Peel also played The Flowerpot Men's version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJIiY2EMtKA weird that out of all the versions the one on Humble Pie's "Rockin' the Fillmore" took the most liberties
ReplyDeleteJames Ellroy must have despised Dr. John, because he invented an apocryphal album to dis as "dope and revolution nonsense" in one of his '80s novels.
ReplyDeleteThanks for alerting me about that Toop book. Early Dr. John is part of what I think of as alt-roots or experimental roots music - stuff that belies the usual distinction between folk/trad and avant-garde. Fellow American travelers: the previously mentioned Little Feat, Taj Mahal, Ry Cooder, Kaleidoscope (with David Lindley, not the UK psych pop), John Prine (more on the basis of lyrics), Terry Allen (an actual conceptual artist who wanted his friends Lowell George and Laurie Anderson to co-produce one of his albums) - maybe extending into jam/psych groups like the Allmans and the Dead if you're generous
ReplyDeleteSide note - the only group working in Rebennack's area of hoodoo stagecraft was Parliament Funkadelic (obviously without the undertones of appropriation you mention), but George Clinton has been very open that part of his goal for the group was following on from Stax and Hendrix in working Black Southern roots music back into Motown-and-vocal-group Northern Black music (as he said in his autobio, how come Eric Clapton knew about/was doing this stuff and he wasn't?), so there is in fact a somewhat deeper connection there
If you want to see the kind of 60s LA ''musical Okies heading west to make their fortunes doing session gigs and writing songs' atmosphere that spawned most of this, here's a young Terry Allen taking advantage of the pop show Shindig!'s phony nature (the offscreen 'audience' was in fact a set of recordings of teenage girls going nuts, cued like a sitcom laugh track) to stage a minute-forty-five piano-and-kazoo break https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiOuK-vhjQU
DeleteI think you've identified a genre there!
DeleteAlways meant to give Taj Mahal a listen, attracted by the name as much as anything.
Not familiar with Terry Allen.
So you have the from-afar California fantasy of the South (Creedence probably count here, albeit raw-'n'-basic rather than sophisto-rock) and then the real thing which would be Lynyrd Skynyrd, Allman Bros, god help us Wet Willie etc
I was going to write "Elvin Bishop" but I looked and he's actually from Glendale not that far from where I live
I suppose many Californian actually coming from the South originally, or their parents, complicates the idea a bit
Bishop actually went the opposite route - born in Glendale, raised on farms in Iowa and Oklahoma, then went to University of Chicago on a physics scholarship, which is where he started hanging out in black clubs before being recruited by Butterfield and Bloomfield
DeleteCalifornia is a little more Southern than it's generally thought of, but particularly in the 30s through the 60s, when you had a bunch of people emigrating first to escape the Dust Bowl and get agricultural work and then to find jobs in the military/aerospace/electronics industries - part of the reason Disneyland featured Dixieland and string band/bluegrass acts in the park in those days was because there were so many players of both, professional and amateur, floating around in SoCal, so why not put em to work enhancing the old-timey atmosphere?
I first heard Zuzu Mamou used in Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, and I thought it was magnificently eerie. It’s not on the soundtrack album, and I spent many years trying to track it down. It is perfect for the film, which like Dr John himself is a questionable-but-entertaining outsider’s vision of Louisiana voodoo / bayou mythology.
ReplyDeleteSee also Nik Cohn, another foreigner who was fascinated by Black Louisiana culture.
It’s not too hard to hear the echoes of Dr John in New Orleans Bounce, Juvenile and Lil Wayne, although presumably that is the result of shared roots in second-line drumming, etc, rather than any direct influence. Those artists’ presentation of themselves as a kind of secret royalty may owe something to voodoo hierarchies, too.
Echoed also in possibly my favorite R&B track of all time, Amerie’s 1 Thing, based on a fantastic rolling beat from Oh Calcutta by New Orleans legends The Meters.
I didn't know that about the Amerie tune - fantastic.
DeleteAngel Heart is a classic "Time Out film" - well reviewed, big features, etc, but has left no trace in the cultural memory or indeed, I should wager, in many personal memories either.
Always meant to read Cohn's New Orleans rap book Tricksta but never got around to it.