Dr. John – Hoodoo Guru
Aunt Andre also gave Mac his first piano lessons, with more emphasis on boogie-woogie than Beethoven. Another aunt, Dottie Mae, and her husband John often had musicians over at their place on Cleveland Avenue, a few blocks from where Mac and his family lived.
“That was the first place I actually heard a jam session,” Mac says. “I remember Uncle John playing the bass with Roy Zimmerman, who was a killer stride piano player, the way my Aunt Andre was. They played like James Booker, in this style called butterfly stride, where you make a tenth chord with your left hand and then bend a note in it against whatever you’re playing with your right hand. My sister would sit down at the piano there too and sing all these Pearl Bailey songs. When she was just a kid, she was already singing with Fats Pichon’s band, so I got to meet Fats and Danny Barker and all these cats. There was so much talent around.”
Though everyone seemed to play music, Mac realized early on that some of them towered above the rest. These artists had a more original way of expressing themselves, and paid their rent (or most of it) playing gigs rather than working day jobs. This enlightenment came when he was 5 or 6 years old, riding around with his father, who had a record distribution job that involved driving to local clubs, picking up 78 rpm discs that had been worn through repeated play in jukeboxes, and delivering replacements.
Already Mac had been digging the music he could still hear on the B sides that hadn’t been eroded that much. One afternoon, though, after his father had carried his selection of new discs into one venue, he heard some live music happening inside. Curious, Mac piled beer cases beneath an open window, peered inside, and had his first glimpse of Professor Longhair, the most revered among contemporary New Orleans pianists, rehearsing with his band. From that moment, he would later insist, Mac knew that one way or another, music would be his calling.
For all he picked up from watching piano players, though, Mac’s first love was guitar. He studied initially with A. J. Guma at Werlein’s music store, a hub of the musical community since 1842. After a while he moved on to a new teacher, Walter “Papoose” Nelson, whose schedule of concerts and tours with Fats Domino soon made it necessary for him to pass his pupil along to Roy Montrell. A jazz player, Montrell pushed students hard and polished their reading skills. Once he’d finished with his third teacher, Mac had built a strong technique and an ability to emulate other guitarists on demand or come up with original parts when that’s what the song required.
By his mid-teens, Rebennack felt ready to jump into the action as a musician. He had begun writing songs when he was around 14 and was hustling them to local publishers soon after that. The material improved quickly, as he listened respectfully to tips from his mentors.
“I used to bring songs to Dave Bartholomew, Bumps Blackwell, and Paul Gayten, but when Cosimo Matassa let me hang around his studio more, I started getting tips from Huey Smith and Earl King,” Mac recalls. “At that time I didn’t know what I was doing; I’d be reading Tales From The Crypt and writing all kinds of nuts stuff from it. But then Huey gave me a kid’s book of poetry and said, ‘If you write stuff like this, if you listen to what the little girls sing when they’re jumpin’ rope, and if you get that kind of flow, then you’re writing stuff that people can connect with.'”
For a while he balanced education and playing club dates. Adding a heroin habit to the mix accelerated his exit from high school, and at 16 he was working full-time with a group known variously as the Skyliners, the Night Trains, and other names. Not long after that, he wrote his first hit single, Jerry Byrne’s “Boppin’ And Strollin'”. By now people were noticing the young double-threat guitarist and pianist with the precocious business sense and golden ears. He was just 19 when Johnny Vincent hired him at Ace Records as an A&R executive — to this day, the youngest ever in New Orleans.
When not signing talent to Ace, Mac was booking himself on sessions and at live shows. “I played with a lot of great musicians, not only in the studio but in strip joints,” he says. “I started playing those gigs with Leonard James. The Vieux Carre was basically turista turf, where they had the famous strippers. But if you wanted to see what the locals saw, you went to Canal Street, St. Charles Avenue, La Salle Street, Jackson Avenue, Louisiana Avenue. That’s where you saw all the great black acts, from Ray Charles to Joe Turner. On this one block of Canal Street, Red Town had a jazz group, and next to it, at the Texas Lounge, they’d have Latin nights. A lot of the Latin bands that were going to New York got stuck in New Orleans, so you could hear all these Cuban musicians there, like Arsenio Rodriguez. It was such a vibrant scene.”
Often he would pick up work by hanging around at Matassa’s studio. “James Booker, Marcel Richardson, myself, all the young guys, would go there and hope somebody would get sick so we could get on a session,” Mac says. “Cosimo’s studio was a one-of-a-kind daddy. The studio drum kit had this big hole in the snare, but nobody ever fixed it because it sounded so good. I remember when he got his first echo machine. It was this humongous thing, and every time a car came down the driveway it would ruin the tape because all the springs in it would go boi-oi-oi-oing! We’d have to stop. And I remember the first date we did with an electric bass. Roland Cook came in with a Gibson electric bass, hit an open E, and blew all the speakers out. So Cos made sure a piece of foam was stuffed into the bass after that, to pad the sound.”
Matassa’s J&M Recording Studio, which he’d opened in 1945 at the age of 18, was the best possible home base for a young musician in New Orleans. Mac cut his first record as a leader there in 1959, the same year Fats Domino recorded “I’m Ready” and “I’m Gonna Be A Wheel Someday”, Frankie Ford did “Sea Cruise”, and Professor Longhair laid down “Go To The Mardi Gras”, at the same facility. But other places also were worth visiting, especially if you were a contractor looking to recruit a band for a session, whether sanctioned by the musicians’ unions or, in Mac’s words, a “scab” or “bootleg” date. “I could get a band real quick if I went by Leroy’s Steak House,” he says. “I always found guys there, but if I didn’t see the cat I wanted, somebody would say, ‘I can get him on the phone.'”