Dr. John – Hoodoo Guru
None of his gifts would have mattered that much without his ability to get up in front of an audience, whether in a Prohibition-era “speak” or taking it back to Africa on State Department concert tours, and bring the music to life. No other community in America seemed to require an emissary to the rest of the world, but for decades Armstrong rendered that service for his city. His existence alone confirmed there was something different about New Orleans, something worth representing, perhaps because of its fragility as much as its traditions.
Armstrong passed years ago, and now, a couple of generations down the road, Rebennack seems to have inherited his role. His personality is in its own way as compelling as Armstrong’s. Even his persona, built around the Dr. John handle, says something about his city’s lore. He based it on a 19th-century medicine man known around New Orleans as John Montaigne, Bayou John and Dr. John, one of many fabulous characters who may have worked their magic in the not-so-distant past.
When Mac came across a report that Montaigne had been jailed in the 1840s for practicing voodoo with one Pauline Rebennack, he dug further into the story. Though he never confirmed that the doctor’s apprentice was in fact an ancestor, he did learn to appreciate the symbols and rituals that would hasten his emergence in the 1960s as Dr. John Creaux the Night Tripper.
Remnants of the psychedelic roadshow he developed back then still adorn the stage when Dr. John comes to town. And in his slang and swampy drawl, a grittier side of life is echoed. Often he’ll invent a word that, at its conception, is already perfect in meaning and resonance: If you’re Dr. John, you might be “cantankerized” by some fool, even if he’s only a “lame.”
This lush lingo oozes like the lazy pace of life in his hometown, at least as it once was. When its current travails creep into the conversation, though, his tone changes: A hard edge rises, and as the talk moves toward the bumbling and corruption that have become a phenomenon of governance in post-hurricane New Orleans, that edge sharpens into anger, quietly but menacingly articulated.
But then this passes, usually with a shrug and a sigh and a whispered “whatever,” and we’re back to the New Orleans he prefers to remember, when difficulties were nothing that a streetwise musician couldn’t deal with on his own.
It was actually an easy life, at first. He grew up in a comfortable home on Jefferson Davis Parkway in the Third Ward. His mother was a calendar model who spent much of her time offering St. Jude novenas — nine-day prayers to St. Jude — for friends in spiritual need. His father ran a record store, but his strength was in working with his hands.
“My father made a back porch kind of thing into a bedroom for me,” Mac remembers, just minutes after getting up on the morning of his Jazz Alley gig in Seattle. “I had a little space loaded with art stuff I’d made, pictures I’d painted, and stuff I’d collected from cemeteries. When I looked out my window, I could see this big clothesline that went from the Vedders’ house next door right by my window, way up in the air. I’m trying to remember why, but my father had a punching bag in my room; at one point he got one of our neighbors to show me how to box a little. Sometimes I’d just stare out the windows. It was pretty, because cane grew out there; you could get fishing poles right out of your yard. My grandmother used to grow stuff out there too.
“My father was a talented guy,” he continues. “He was really good at building things. He built me a kayak when I was little and we’d go fishing. I used to lie in the bottom of a pirogue when I wasn’t catchin’ nothin’ or didn’t have to pick up the crab nets. It felt safe to me because I knew that if anything happened, my father would magically appear. If he saw a water moccasin, he’d just take his push/pull, pick it up out of the boat, and put it back on the shore. By the time he’d taught me to hunt, if I saw a water moccasin, I’d shoot it. That would make him very angry because he had to reload every shotgun shell by hand.”
This being New Orleans, music was inescapable. You couldn’t walk down the street without the sound of pianos wafting from windows along the way. When his parents sent him out to pick up groceries at Dukas’ Delicatessen, Mac often slipped behind the store to Rappolo’s Bar, where he could listen as someone known as Woo-Woo tickled “The Junket Blues” on the keyboard — always in F-sharp, as the young eavesdropper learned through repeated visits.
Further from his turf, Mac acquainted himself with the unique Mardi Gras Indian tribes and marching brass bands, whose music moved to the heartbeat of the second-line groove. “Everybody who grew up in New Orleans has part of the second line inside,” Rebennack explains. “If you heard it, you knew the parade was coming in, or you knew that the funeral was over. You heard it in church. It was part of the community. And everybody had their own way of playing it. When I was a kid, I could identify [bass drummer] Jesse Jones from blocks away, because he played such a loud four.” He vocalizes the beat: “Doonk, ka-joonk, ka-joonk…BAM!”
Almost everybody in Mac’s family was a pianist. Others were entertainers, including his grandfather, who had traveled in the 19th century with the Al G. Field Minstrels. “I stole a lot of his songs,” Mac admits, “not that I remember them so much from him, because I was so little. Later I’d ask my Aunt Andre to play and sing them for me, and I’d just rip them off; that’s how I started writing songs. But I remember him singing ‘Didn’t He Ramble’, before I ever heard the brass bands playing it, when I was a little bitty kid. I can still remember him doing music that don’t exist no more.”