Robert Doerschuk- Glitter and Glue – the everyday players who bind New Orleans music together all have their own ways of dealing with hard times in the Big Easy.
“We stopped in Picayune to pick up my mother and my little brother. From there we left at 6 p.m. and it took us until 2:30 in the morning to make the three-hour drive to my grandma’s place, northeast of Jackson (Mississippi), way out in the country. We were without power there for two days. All the big trees were uprooted, even thought the storm was only Category 1 by the time it got to Philadelphia, about eight miles north of us.”
Suddenly adrift, Drury headed north, to stay with friends in Memphis. What she found astonished her: The community opened its arms. She received a printout right after her arrival, with information on hotels that were offering free lodging and apartments that had lowered their rents and waived their deposits. “I had my guitar, my Martin, stolen after I got here,” she says. “So the Merchant’s Association organized a donor for me and got me a guitar; it’s not a Martin, but it’s a guitar. And they started giving me gigs.”
She was on her way, as we spoke, to a performance at a bowling alley for a program sponsored by the Memphis Grizzlies, the NBA franchise, to buy backpacks for underprivileged students. “They’re even paying me for this,” she says, a little disbelieving. “The only thing is that they want me to play New Orleans music, which I’ve never done. But, hey, I’ve been shredding, so I’m going to start doing ‘Mardi Gras Mambo’, ‘Iko, Iko’, maybe ‘Fire On The Bayou’…”
For now, her trip to New York is on hold. Like many of the musicians who’ve lost their footholds in New Orleans, Drury can only take things day by day. “I haven’t even been able to think about writing a song from all of this,” she admits, “until the other day, when I was sitting around with my friends in Memphis and I said, ‘You know what? I just realized that I lost my guitar strap. It was a gift, a shiny, rock & roll guitar strap.’ And this sound engineer said, ‘Well, let’s just get some glitter and glue.’
“So I’ve started writing a song, called ‘Glitter And Glue’,” she says, with a smile. “It’s about people coming together and making you feel like you belong, and how strange it is to be thrown out here and realizing that, in some strange way, it might be the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
In an office in the School of Architecture, the University of Missouri at Kansas City…
Out here on the prairie, not far from where Mike West scans the flat, dry horizon, Jacob W. Wagner has been taking a lot of phone calls. A few weeks ago he was a young professor of urban planning at UMKC, but suddenly he’s become the target of newspapers and radio interviewers because of qualifications that have turned him into an expert of extraordinary relevance.
Wagner wrote his dissertation in urban studies just last year at the University of New Orleans. His focus was New Orleans, how it worked and threatened not to work. When he wasn’t tapping on computer keyboards or poring over library records, he was usually on his way to play mandolin at the Cigar Bar, uptown on Tchoupitoulas Street, or at any number of clubs in the Quarter where he might pick up a gig with Ricky Castrillo’s band.
It wasn’t full-time, but Wagner knew how it felt to play for tourists as well as locals. “The thing is, people in New Orleans go out to hear music,” he says, almost incredulously. “Imagine that: Americans getting up from behind their TVs, going out, and participating in this celebration of life through music!”
He sensed this vitality almost from the moment he and his wife moved into Mid-City. “I found out that Buddy Bolden is buried a block away at Holt Cemetery, which is actually a potter’s field,” he relates. “Jessie Hill, the guy who wrote ‘Ooo Poo Pah Doo’, is there. There are rumors that Robert Charles, who set off a race riot in 1900 because he resisted arrest and shot a bunch of police, is there too. And when it’s Mardi Gras, you walk with your neighbors to the parade. You walk, with your feet on the street. You begin to hear the brass bands. The sun goes down and the lights come up and this parade is going by. You just can’t get that anywhere else, and all I could think was, ‘This is where I want to live.'”
It says something about both Wagner and his adopted city that romance and mystery are as important as academics in his view of New Orleans. “It has a seductive allure,” he suggests. “It turns people into natives, whether they like it or not, and they begin to appreciate the decay that’s all around them. They become what Malcolm Heard, at the architecture school at Tulane, calls ‘optimistic activists’ people who fight for preservation and are hopeful about the future.
“That,” Wagner insists, “is what we need right now. We don’t need more Wal-Marts. We don’t need suburbanization. We don’t need builders who would build another Houston. We need people who will build new structures that respect the history and urban fabric of New Orleans. I’m talking about lot sizes, the density of the neighborhoods, and the orientation toward the street. This is a walking city and a streetcar city from the 19th century. My greatest vision would be to bring back a very strong public transit system, with light rail that runs on electricity and buses that run on renewable fuels.”
Beyond infrastructure, Wagner believes that attitudes about housing need to be revolutionized or, perhaps, counter-revolutionized, based on pre-20th-century practices. “We’ve abandoned the idea, in the United States, of building arts and replaced it with building in mass production,” he says. “We don’t just mass-produce automobiles and hamburgers; it’s also buildings and neighborhoods now. But that’s exactly what can’t happen in New Orleans. You have to work house by house. It’s going to take a couple thousand dollars for each one, but we can give people tax breaks and financial incentives to clean up the houses than can be salvaged and rebuild the ones that can’t.
“There needs to be a plan, and that plan has to include affordable housing, not just for musicians but for everybody. A lot of the historic structures were in fact built to be affordable. That’s why you’ve got to have architects and historic preservationists working together, trying not to duplicate the past but to refer to in innovative ways.”
Only then, Wagner believes, is it possible for the city’s culture to revive. “The issue is street culture, which is the engine of new creativity,” he points out. “Will that come back? Will we have a Latin city in the United States that teaches us what carnival means? That depends on whether this massive migration from the city can be reversed. The push factor was obvious: Katrina kicked them out. There are pull factors too: better jobs in the towns they moved to. But come January and February, these folks will begin to realize that they’re living in a town that doesn’t know what Mardi Gras is, and there will be a lot of sadness.”
This, too, he knows from experience. “When I moved up to Minnesota for a while last year, I tried to have my own Mardi Gras celebration,” he says, a little ruefully. “But people didn’t know what I was doing. You can’t go outside and have a parade in two feet of snow. Minneapolis is cool…but it’s not New Orleans. No place is.”