Dr. John – Hoodoo Guru
These non-union sessions were a fact of life in a town where work was plentiful but the pay was barely enough to get by. “Most musicians supplemented their income, driving cabs or doing whatever,” Mac says. “Hell, union scale for a recording session, when I started doing it, was $25 for a sideman and $50 for the leader. You weren’t making great money on club dates either. But we never thought of living the lifestyle of the rich and wealthy. All we ever wanted to do was to just be good musicians.
“When I started as a studio musician, [saxophonist] Red Tyler and all these guys would say, ‘Whatever kind of music we’re recording today, you play it the best you can.’ It didn’t matter if it was gospel music, if it was jazz, if it was funk, R&B, country & western. We did all kinds of sessions the best we could. We played to fit the song. Nobody said it was separate. Nobody discriminated.”
Nobody, that is, except the musician’s unions. There were two in New Orleans at the time: Local 174, whose membership was restricted to white musicians, and Local 496, which formed in the early 1920s to ensure representation for the city’s black performers. They would merge as Local 174-496 in the early 1970s, but as Rebennack was coming up in the business, the racial fissure that cut through the local music world, though archaic and increasingly irrelevant, made finding or booking gigs more of a headache than it needed to be.
“When I was producing sessions, I mixed the bands up pretty heavy,” he explains. “I’d use some of the trumpet players I had on gigs, like Jack Willis, with some white trumpet players that were there just to read the charts. I always just tried to get the guys that I felt would fit that date best. This led to problems with 174 and 496 arguing over who should have the contract on that gig. That was the first problem.
“Second problem: I had to personally bring checks to both the black union and the white union, including checks that had to go through the other union first. See, 496 had almost all the R&B dates. Then I started mixing, and most of them went through 174. That caused a lot of crap with 496. On the other hand, the white union had most of their grabs on Dixieland or country & western, but then I started bringing some of that through the black union. They didn’t even know what kind of session it was; all they knew was, who was I, this goddamn kid, to do this shit?”
Rebennack shakes his head at the memory. “It was all bullshit. It’s the American Federation of Musicians, and I’m getting flak about this crap? But, you know what? The musicians didn’t give a damn about any of this. The guys were just grateful to get sessions at all. And the unions did some good things. A lot of the strips in New Orleans were union gigs, so at least the guys wasn’t working for lunch money on a night gig. And, if you notice” he points to an insignia attached to the black beret perched on his head “I still got my union pin on my brim.”
By the early ’60s, Rebennack was known around town as a player and an operator, able to cover pretty much any kind of music, write tunes on demand, and recruit and direct the right sidemen for the job. His A&R abilities were respected too, as he brought young artists such as Roland Stone and former Night Trains bandmate Ronnie Barron into the Ace stable.
Occasionally he left town with the backup band behind one headliner or another. On one tour with Barron, Rebennack found himself on Christmas Eve, 1961, looking for the singer just before they had to leave for their gig. He discovered him being pistol-whipped by the motel owner, who had stumbled upon his wife in a tryst with Barron. Rebennack lunged forward and started slamming the assailant’s hand against the wall, trying to dislodge the gun. A shot fired, nearly blowing off the ring finger on Mac’s left hand.
Emergency surgery kept the finger attached, but it was bent sideways, in a half-moon curve, too pronounced to use anymore for fretting easily on guitar. Rebennack had gone to Florida as a guitarist who doubled on piano; he went back as a pianist to a town where the musical climate was changing, and not for the better. For about a year, as he built his piano chops and took organ lessons from his friend James Booker, he played unsatisfactory jobs on bass and drums and did A&R and session work for Huey P. Meaux, a Texas-based record wheeler-dealer whose master stroke would be to convert a country/blues shouter named Doug Sahm and his band into a gussied-up act called the Sir Douglas Quintet, just in time to ride the British rock wave of the mid-’60s.
In New Orleans, though, work was slowing down. The district attorney, Jim Garrison, was following through on a campaign pledge to shut down disreputable bars and dives, which translated into fewer places to play. Many top artists were already on their way to Los Angeles or New York. Even before the Garrison sweep, Rebennack had been taking odd jobs to supplement his precarious musical income; some of them trolled from the darker side of life. None was as grim as the work he picked up from underground abortionists, which involved bagging extracted fetuses and finding discreet places to dump them. Now, with prospects even dimmer, and with a drug habit to feed, Mac slipped one rung lower when police busted him for heroin possession and the court shipped him off to prison in Fort Worth.
With his release in 1965, Rebennack headed to Los Angeles, where he stayed initially with his sister and later in a seedy flat that overlooked the Cecil B. DeMille gate at Paramount Studios. His plan was to hook up with Harold Battiste, whom he had known as the A&R guy that took Johnny Vincent’s place at Specialty Records back in New Orleans. Respected as a player and businessman, Battiste found work for Rebennack on sessions for Frank Zappa, Iron Butterfly, Canned Heat, and other acts that were turning southern California into the center of the corporate rock industry. These dates brought in decent money, but it came at a price.