Alex Rawls- Some thoughts on the past, present and future of New Orleans music. The battle of New Orleans
The lifeblood of the city’s scene are the musicians who play two or three nights a week with different combos, playing at D.B.A. one night, the Spotted Cat on another, Tipitina’s on the weekend. Many of those gigs are played for the cover charge or even tips; will musicians be able to pay inflated rents on that kind of money?
Will members of brass bands be able to afford New Orleans? What about the traditional jazz players, many of whom were already worried about their livelihoods under the best of circumstances? Aside from Preservation Hall, the Palm Court and Fritzel’s on Bourbon Street, there were few venues to hear traditional jazz before the hurricane. Some of the trad-jazz musicians can be a little self-important about how they’re keeping the traditions alive, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.
Driving through New Orleans after the hurricane was a startlingly lonely experience. So few vehicles are on the road that the mostly dead traffic lights are no inconvenience. Even scenes of recent violence now look still, if not quite peaceful. Along North Carrollton Avenue, grocery stores, bars and restaurants were looted, but now all there is to see are large, blank sheets of plywood. Occupants haven’t come back to close up the point of entry at some places; their jagged broken windows hint at what the city must have been like, for a time. On Tulane Avenue, someone must have taken a sledgehammer to a brick wall to get in. Even the signs of damage — water lines, cars covered in a brownish-gray scunge that is the residue of the flood — are still.
On St. Charles Avenue driving Uptown from Lee Circle, though, there’s a sign on a storefront — “Don’t try. I’m inside with an ugly woman, two shotguns and a clawhammer” — that has been updated twice. Out front of Sarouk Rugs, Robert Rue is talking to people and doing business. He has three oriental rugs drying on his sidewalk, rugs that people who returned called him about cleaning. He never evacuated, and the businessman — in his late 50s with a ponytail — radiates his love for this adventure. He went around to friends’ stores and businesses and painted “Looters Shot” and “Die” on their windows.
“I’ve been through 37 hurricanes and tropical storms and I’ve never left,” he says. His store is dark, and he offers empty milk cartons as chairs, along with water to deal with the stifling closeness. Contrary to his warning on the sign, he didn’t stay in the store the night Katrina approached. He rode out the hurricane in a house in the nearby Garden District. He doesn’t have a shotgun, either, and his clawhammer only has one claw — though it looks more dangerous as a result. He doesn’t spend time defending himself, though. He waves to cars that pass by and talks to the few people who are back in the city as if they’re his neighbors. And with few people living between him and them, perhaps they are.
One of Rue’s signs counts off the Mardi Gras parades that will pass his store, and in conversation, he twice mentioned the MOMS Ball, an annual Mardi Gras costume party with the Radiators supplying the music all night long. Its origins are in hippie/freak culture, though the party has transcended that; the Howlin’ Wolf nightclub, site of the MOMS Ball for the last few years, is wall to wall those nights with costumed revelers ranging in age from 21 to 60-something.
The bohemian element of New Orleans that the MOMS Ball represents is a significant part of the city’s tradition, and it’s an element that must return for there to be an audience for music in New Orleans. People such as Rue suggest many will return, and with six universities in the city — Dillard, Loyola, Southern University of New Orleans, Tulane, University of New Orleans, and Xavier — there will still be a college-age pool of students and liberal arts faculty members potentially interested in seeing live music.
“College is a big support leg of the culture,” says WWOZ’s Freedman. All but Dillard say they’ll be up and running again in January, and Dillard, which suffered water damage, is optimistic.
That’s good news for Ivan Neville. “College students are a good percentage of the audience for Dumpsta Phunk,” he says, referring to his project with cousin Ian Neville. Unlike in other cities, college students don’t come to New Orleans looking for modern rock, much to the frustration of modern rock bands. Instead, they support funk and brass bands. Rebirth Brass Band has made an institution of its Tuesday night gigs at the Maple Leaf Bar on the strength of Tulane and Loyola students discovering the joys of brass bands for the first time.
In addition to the old bohemians and the students, the young bohemians in the Bywater were a large part of the live music audience. The Bywater flooded, but not nearly as badly as CNN and MSNBC initially made it sound. Mr. Quintron and Miss Pussycat live on St. Claude Avenue in the Bywater, and they had two feet of water in their house. He’s concerned about the future of the Bywater, which was once a fairly inexpensive working-class neighborhood, though in the last few years it was already starting to gentrify. He worries it will join the Faubourg Marigny and French Quarter as the historic, old part of New Orleans, and will be priced accordingly. “These neighborhoods are going to become more precious and more the jewels of the city than ever before,” he says.
The young bohemians are notoriously rootless and notoriously poor, which means they’re in danger of not coming back. Because New Orleans has based its economy on tourism, service industry jobs employ a lot of people, and a lot of the Bywater in particular. Until the tourism industry rebounds — if it rebounds — many of these people will find work elsewhere, and stay there.
The clubs are largely waiting for there to be an audience before they open. Lefty Parker plans to open the Circle Bar for live music as soon as he has clean water, hopefully in October. In the French Quarter, Rio Hackford says One Eyed Jacks will open first as a bar, then phase in live music. Other live music venues are taking the approach of Adam Shipley at Tipitina’s” “When there’s an audience, when we have power, there will be music on Tipitina’s stage.”
Five members of the National Guard stopped to ask what I was doing in the lower Garden District. I was with Benji Lee of the New Orleans hard-rock band Supagroup, and we were getting their equipment out of the drummer’s house so the group could go on tour.
“Is this your house?” one guardsman asked.