A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Another Helping of Moody Food

Ann’s and my week in New Orleans, LA didn’t quite shake down as I’d hoped. The same thing happened in 2012 in Lethbridge, AB. We drove south that August to see His Bobness in a small capacity minor league hockey rink. My plan back then was to bump into him after his concert in the bar of the Ramada Inn where we were staying. Where he had to be staying provided the bastard just didn’t get back on his tour bus and beeline for the next night’s show in Creston, BC. My plan was to talk baseball with Dylan. I’d done my homework, boned up on the Minnesota Twins; poor bullpen and lack of timely hitting. Lots of runners left on base.

My quarry last week was Aaron Neville. My intention was to thank him for “Struttin’ on Sunday,” a song that twice prevented my suicidal arithmetic of garage joist, orange electrical cord and flimsy Hunter green plastic patio chair. I was going to tell him how his covers of “Everybody Plays the Fool” and “Louisiana, 1927” transcended the originals, and Mr Neville, sir, what could I possibly say about your band of brothers? You guys blew my mind when I saw you in Calgary. Missed you by a delayed flight day at Montreal’s International Jazz Festival. He’d be a hard man to miss approaching Ann and me on the sidewalk, a tattooed giant, easy to spot in an urban population of less than 350,000 souls. The trouble with sidewalks in a sinking city is that they heave and the great ancient roots of magnolia and oak trees only exacerbate matters. For all of our walking, I mostly kept my head down, watching my feet and Ann’s. Treacherous going, missing paving stones, missing utility access lids. Our excursions were much like encountering Royal Jenny, an attractive and scantily clad blonde dominatrix, in our hotel’s elevator, look down, don’t look anywhere else and anyway, I’ve already had my balls busted – my doctor says my prostate doesn’t feel quite right. How would I know? I want to believe Ann and I saw the cuffs of Aaron Neville’s pants and shoes somewhere, maybe in Treme (the final ‘e’ should have an accent grave but I don’t know how to add one if Word doesn’t do it for me) or the Garden District. Could’ve happened.

Bourbon Street’s overture begins in the late afternoon. Incessant drumming, kids and tweens banging upturned five-gallon plastic job site pails. More beats arrive by bicycle, mobile deejays hauling Radio Flyer wagons of computer equipment. If you must butcher a gorgeous song like “Just My Imagination” do it like the Rolling Stones because, you know, the Funk Brothers nailed the low end the first time. Musicians set up on the narrow beds of pickup trucks; Ann and I never, ever, imagined we’d hear George Jones songs laid down by a guy with dreadlocks. The motorized music brigade roars up after dark. You can hear this subculture coming, ripping down Canal Street. Garish, low-slung three-wheeled Batmobiles blasting hip-hop to synchronized LED lights, bow-legging Harleys almost as big, competing with sound systems better than the stereo we have at home. Good God, y’all, the joyous noise is a ceaseless, a relentless full frontal lobe assault. It’s all life affirming: remember, some of that static you pick up twiddling between AM stations is the fading echo of the Big Bang, the universal one note.

Ann and I locked in on the Soundstage, a club on Bourbon Street. We returned a few times to catch sets by Willie Lockett and The Blues Krewe (it pains me to type that particular proper noun). He’s a big man, as big as Howlin’ Wolf maybe and he’s got that growl. He performs seated, he needs a clawed cane to get around between sets. He’s missing a few front bottom teeth. Maybe he’s a local hero, we don’t know but he’s clearly paid his dues and his bona fides include his stint with Gatemouth Brown last century. When he called for requests from the stage, I froze. I should’ve yelled “Dust My Broom” (Elmore James) because Willie’s guitarist was a hot player, slick but all business, no paddlewheel showboating. When Willie was sitting alone at the bar, I was too shy to approach him. What do you say that’s not a cliché when you don’t know what to say? "Hello, Mouth, this is Foot." Maybe it would be like meeting Aaron Neville or Dylan and babbling off script, as squirmingly uncomfortable as a prostate exam conducted with a stiletto heel. Ann and I did our duty with dead presidents and the tip bucket.

Storyville is a fable. Those few Basin Street blocks of barrooms and bordellos are now the stuff of myth, legend. And I have to smile at what’s been lost because when I was a kid if Mom wasn’t crooning “Blue Moon” in the kitchen, she was belting out “Barrelhouse Bessie of Basin Street.” The neighbours used to knock on the common wall. Family lore has it that Mom’s brassy and frightfully bold embrace of the risqué led to her suspension from convent school. My taste runs more toward the “Basin Street Blues.” Frenchmen Street, a little hipper and a little less touristy than Bourbon Street, is in the vicinity, in that nether zone between the French Quarter and Treme. Neither Ann nor I can tell you that music is any more authentic, it’s just different performances of Dixieland, blues, funk and Billboard chart covers. Sounds like every musician trapped between the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico has chops. And doesn’t all that competition payout double at the window for listeners.

I saw Wolfman Washington back in the 80s. A free Montreal International Jazz Festival concert staged on rue Ste-Catherine by Place des Arts. I recall a very tall man whose stage costume was as red hot and flashy as his guitar technique. I never did learn much more about him in those days before Google and my music press habit rarely included Downbeat and so I was delighted to see that costume or something damn similar on display at the New Orleans Jazz Museum. I’d no idea he was a Crescent City product. Wolfman’s red patent leather loafers were big, scuba flippers on my feet. Fats Domino had big feet too, we saw a pair of his shoes, white bucks. And his sartorial flair, including a yacht captain’s cap purchased from Meyer the Hatter on St. Charles Avenue (Fats and me, man, we shop at the same store) and gaudy pastel floral sports coat buttoned up on one lucky mannikin, probably influenced Wolfman. You’ve got to look the part you play, just ask Royal Jenny.

The jazz museum which includes recording and performance space is housed in a lovely red brick building, solid and imposing, a decommissioned United States Mint dating from 1838. It’s serendipitously situated on Esplanade Avenue near the intersection of North Rampart Street, proximate to Louis Armstrong Park, again straddling Treme and the French Quarter, that magical area, a pleasant stroll from our hotel, yes, indeed. Drumsville: The Evolution of the New Orleans Beat is a history of percussion. There are washboards with bells and thimbles, branded metal buckets which once contained lard or oil. What staggers me is an innovation so fundamentally obvious it required a Eureka! moment, the bass drum foot pedal. Its introduction is responsible for the drum kit we all picture when we imagine our favourite bands, one musician but many skins to brush or bash. Hanging unobtrusively in the corner of one of the rooms is a frozen Aww... moment, an enlarged photograph of Charlie Watts, a three-quarter profile candid shot snapped in 2005 of Charlie on his beat quietly examining the relics of his trade.

Ann spent 24 hours in New Orleans 25 or 30 years ago. There’s a souvenir magnet on the microwave shelf in the kitchen, its paper graphic of Bourbon Street jazzmen peeling at the edges (God help me, I bought a spooky black rubber update, voodoo Dixieland horn playing skeletons). Our trip was post-pandemic self-indulgence, a temperate place before winter blows in from not too far north, no commitments to be met once the jet wheels bounced on the Louis Armstrong International Airport tarmac. Our holiday together was squeezed however by local commitments and schedules. Ann is the first violinist and concert master of her orchestra. I too am a concert master, having insisted we buy tickets for the Doobie Brothers performance here in Edmonton in late October and ice it with the E Street Band in early November (since postponed to same Boss Time in 2024). Once we’d decided upon New Orleans as our getaway destination, I investigated berths or roomettes on The City of New Orleans, departing from Chicago, before it struck me that rubbernecking from a night train was as absurd as raking leaves on a blustery day. Anyway, Edmonton is a long way from many places and there are few direct flights to anywhere else and we didn’t have time for a 48-hour travel day.

It's not easy to walk abreast in the narrow eighteenth and nineteenth century confines of the French Quarter whilst holding hands. I always had the sense that we were at the apex of a deep Montreal metro station escalator: stand to the right, but keep moving and watch your footing. “A Doobies album,” I said to Ann. Now what was I going on about? I pointed at the crooked sidewalk beneath our feet, the disturbed corner curb embedded with off-kilter white tiles imprinted with blue type: Toulouse Street. We were awake and alive in a pilgrim’s kind of place. I don’t know what part of Louisiana Johnny B. Goode left to get his kicks and see his name in lights, but I’m convinced he caught a train north from Union Passenger Terminal on Loyola Avenue to Chicago.

It was coming on Christmas on Canal Street when Ann and I flipped our mindsets, suddenly sorry to have to leave but also anxious to get home. Green nylon pine needle garlands snaked around the ghost story lampposts, vampire blood red-ribboned wreaths higher up, just beneath the electric gaslights. We’d walked for miles and our feet were hurting, but we sure weren’t suffering a terminal case of the “Canal Street Blues.” We’d tripped through New Orleans with Dr John, the Meters and the Nevilles. I realized we’d done it all before, starting a long time ago from a long way away, in concert in different provinces in a different country no less: brass bands, Satchmo and “Jambalaya” on our parents’ hi-fi systems; a Mardi Gras parade of strutting Cajun and Mississippi queens and riverboat gamblers on our older siblings’ transistor radios or tinny suitcase bedroom stereos. And music from our own collections had taken us to New Orleans long before we got there.  Déjà voodoo all over again.      

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site www.megeoff.com has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.