Mac Rebennack, Part 1
No Depression, May 2006
One moment stays with me from the day I spent with Mac Rebennack, a.k.a. Dr. John, in Seattle. He was staying in a guest suite near the waterfront. We were about an hour into our interview when I asked if he could illustrate some point he was making by demonstrating it at the small grand piano near the dining area table where we’d been talking. He was happy to oblige, so we walked a few steps over to the keyboard, sat down and played whatever it was. I stood to his right, where I could see the peculiar shape of one of his fingers, I think on his right hand. Though the tip aligned with the knuckle, most of the finger was bent into a half-moon shape. You could see why he switched from guitar to piano as his main instrument years ago, after the gunshot wound that resulted in the rather uncomfortable looking deformity.
It also testifies to the fact that Doc’s life was hardly typical, not even for New Orleans. There was plenty of sadness and anger in his past. In fact, that day in Seattle he wasn’t far past dealing with emotional upheaval in his life. Hurricane Katrina had recently blown his world apart: his beloved French Quarter, the brothel he briefly ran and from which he peddled the drugs that would hasten his own addictions, the Bourbon Street dives where he had sat at the feet of Professor Longhair, Huey “Piano” Smith or James Booker and later played his own gigs past dawn. From this foundation he would move beyond his routine as a session musician and establish a persona whose lavish costumes and chant-driven music drew from voodoo incantations as much as R&B and jazz.
My first impression of Doc that day was that he was weary and worn down. His nose was running. As we spoke some of the reasons became clear — not only the disappearance of some dear friends in the wake of the storm but also because of his daughter’s murder several years earlier. Neither of these burdens were known to me as we spoke, but when he brought them up I let him lead me down that road as far as he would decide to go.
As we talked, Doc seemed to loosen up. I guess I sensed that by asking him to focus on his earliest days, back before the travails of the present. Whatever the reason, as time passed I understood that he was one of those guys who could ramble as far and wide as you please. My job was to prod him here and there, depending on what I was hearing from him or where I felt we needed to go. I began asking questions I’d never brought up in interviews before, even about the weather in New Orleans, knowing by that point that he would answer in some evocative, revealing way. Getting him to talk was like feeding the boiler on an old train that could run for miles on just a couple lumps of coal. As I often did, I dug into some promising elements of my research on his story to establish some trust and then rolled with him from there.
Note: Doc had a way with the English language. His grammar was often mangled, his words unique mutations of normal English. I tell people that if he felt had pissed someone off, he would likely describe them as “cantankerized.” Naturally, I’ve left all of this intact in the transcript, which conveys his essence much better than spell-check ever could.
***
You’ve been through plenty of ups and downs.
I'll tell you something: Life just rolls. If it wasn’t for music, I think I’d flip out. I lost my daughter a couple of years ago. Her case is still in Homicide in L.A.
What happened to her?
Right around when I was fourteen or fifteen years clean off of narcotics, my daughter went to L.A. She’d been missing, and they found that she’d been in a morgue for a while. All I know past that, to this day, is very little. I know how the police operate. It’s a system where unless somebody rats somebody out, it’s probably …
What’s her name, Doc?
Jessica. Her twin sister Jennifer has been toughin’ on this one bad. That’s how life is. There’s parts of life that are ugly. You see stuff happen, you watch people on TV and you start to get blasé to stuff. Stuff creeps in around you, and all of a sudden something is in your life. There’s a lot of that. A lot of bad things happen. It ain’t about you can get blasé to it.
Then there were all the tragedies that happened after that. Sparky’s pad burned down. Then the hurricane hit. It was like bing, bang, boom. People from New Orleans scattered and splattered all over the country, being evicted. We had no way to reach anybody. The ones we knew how to reach are no longer at the number we had, whatever that was. It goes on and on. We’d find some of them, like we saw Henry Butler in L.A. and Colorado. And he’s supposed to be coming here … Let me get a handkerchief. I don’t know how I caught this thing, but this is the reality tip.
[Mac leaves the room, blows his nose and returns.]
Sometimes in life you’ve got to take a little accounting of priorities. The worst thing in my bracket is that we don’t have time to do the basic things that anybody who has some balance in his life can do. That’s really pathetic. The least little things that I could do to help me gets [sic] past the things that’s in my way to do things, I don’t get a chance to do them because we got to make the gig.
My drummer, after so many years of building a pad in the Lower Ninth Ward, it’s gone. The bass player is from the Ninth Ward; he’s living in Michigan right now. It’s made everything more complicated. I’ve got to keep the guys in this band alive. And I’ve got my daughter in New Orleans, with her FEMA roof. She came out pretty good, but these FEMA roof things are, like, it rains and it starts dripping.
If the wind wrecks your house, insurance covers you. If they decide it was damaged by water, you’re out of luck.
It’s bullshit. Listen, it’s a game. We all know that. Nobody wants to pay. It’s a very racially prejudiced thing. And it’s ugly. I’m very upset. I saw [harmonica player] Lee Oskar last night, and he’s saying they want to just turn it into Disneyland. The jive talk people are all saying they want to make this the biggest land grab since California arrived. And the Gulf Coast, all the way from Texas to Florida, is unprotected. It’s very sad to me. John Paul Woodley Jr. [assistant secretary of the army (civil works)] agreed with the Dutch ambassador when he was in Louisiana, that the only way they could was not to put up another Third World country levee but to put up this thing that the Dutch made, which is modern-day stuff. … But I blame the local politicians, the state politicians and the federal politicians, all of whom knew. They all pocketed money for so long. Who cared about the people?
They knew a Category 5 was going to happen eventually.
Listen, it was predicted way back, as far as the late Sixties and early Seventies. But the fact is, the Corps of Engineers caused the problem in the first place. They’re why the wetlands are no longer there. It just adds insult to injury. The whole Gulf coast is unprotected.
I happened to be in Minnesota on a gig, looking at the hurricane as it was getting closer and closer. I watched it hit the remaining wetlands and just wipe out Mississippi. My road guys live there. One of them got wiped; his mother died in it. I had lost my mother and my aunt that taught me to play the piano in the last couple of years, but it’s just the idea that when you lose ’em in a hurricane, it gets you a little salty.
My father always called that little pocket, where that hurricane hit, “Sippiana.” We could trap, hunt and fish on that Sippiana border. We could go there via water; we didn’t have to go from Mississippi to Louisiana. The land don’t have state borders; it’s just waters. It’s just like, real people don’t have real borders. It’s just maps and lines.
But the fact is, it’s very sad, how this has affected the musicians. I look at the guys that are there right now. I’m very, very proud of guys like the brass bands that are there right now, the guys like James “12” Andrews. His brother Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews is out on the road with Lenny Kravitz right now, but when he’s in New Orleans, he’s there for the people. His brother was a good big brother for them. Their grandfather was my business partner, so I feel like part of his family. We’ve been close for so many generations in that family. Uncles and everybody around them have been parts of my life in recording sessions, doing business, every kind of way you could look at life. This is the thing of New Orleans: We all pass things down. And this is the thing I drew being lost. It’s not like another city.
Family Ties
You know, I did some work for the Preservation Hall band recently, and a number of them come from families that go way back with you, including the Lastie and Barbarin guys.
I go back to Paul Barbarin; I know he’s family to Earl Palmer. There’s so much of that in New Orleans. The music in the families is passed on, but the families pass it on to other people around them. See, people didn’t need the money to survive. This is what made it not fit the rest of the country in some positive way. Community effort worked to help. Reverend mothers did community service. They didn’t charge people for things. My mother was a St. Jude Novena mom. She made St. Jude Novenas ten years to have me. She made St. Jude Novenas for Charles Neville, for Aaron Neville — I was St. Juded into the woodworks. And that’s cool. She worked for the Catholic Church. She did this and that. She was a prayin’ woman.
How do you feel about religion?
I believe in prayers. I believe in the spirit. I ain’t no religious guy, but I feel like I’m a spiritual guy. This is what I resent about big churches today. It's money, money, money. Big companies today, they’re about money, money, money. This is what I resent about government today; it’s about money, money, money. What about people, people, people? That really irritates me. What happened to the sense of community? That’s what made this country special.
When you left New Orleans, it must have been a shock to see how different things were out there in the wider world.
I had the up-sides and the down-sides of it, both ways. I got some very cockeyed prospects [sic] of it, and I got some very deep perspects of it, all at the same time. Being in the business, you don’t get time to decipher what is what. When you’re out there, scratchin’ and scramblin’, trying to survive in this business, it don’t give you time.
Listen, I was talking to George Davis [New Orleans songwriter and musician, composer of “Tell It Like It Is”]. All we ever wanted to do was just play music. We never thought of living the lifestyle of the rich and wealthy. All we wanted was to be good musicians. George studied more than me. That’s cool. I studied guitar. I had great guitar teachers. But I play the keyboard now. I was very blessed that my Aunt Andre taught me how to play the piano when I was a kid. I learned how to play a little boogie-woogie.
I also learned from being a guitar player on a lot of recording sessions for good guys. Coming up, just wanting to play so bad, we did a lot of great records. We’d have background groups with guys like Art and Aaron Neville or Chuck Carbo or a guy named Izzy Cou [Izzy Cougarden], Izzy had a big record with “Blow Wind Blow” for Johnny Vincent. Chuck, when he was with the Spiders, he was my mother’s favorite singer, even over Johnny Adams or Aaron. We did a lot of great records. When I started as a studio musician, they taught me right off the wheel. Alvin “Red” Tyler and all of those guys would say, “Whatever kind of music we’re recording today, you play that the best you can. It doesn’t matter what kind of music, we’re going to play it good.” It didn’t matter if it was gospel music, if it was jazz, if it was funk, R&B, country and western. We did all kinds of sessions. Nobody discriminated or said it was separate. We just played the best we could to fit the song.
On one of the first sessions I ever did with Earl Palmer, he said, “Well, Red’s gonna make the call on what [chord] change we’re gonna use there.” Then I noticed that whenever there was a discrepancy, Red Tyler made the call. He was so respected amongst the cats, that was it.
You were playing head arrangements.
Occasionally we did a readin’ chart. But I’ll be honest: My father brought me to study with A. J. Guma at Werlein’s Music School. He told my father, “This kid, he’s really not reading. He’s got a great ear and he’s got talent, but he can’t read.” My dad’s like, “Well, he learns all his lessons. He goes home and he practices Lightnin’ Hopkins or whatever.”
So my dad made a call about bringing me to a guy he knew, which was Papoose [Walter Nelson]. He taught me for a while and then he didn’t have time; he was working with Fats [Domino] and going on the road a lot. So all of a sudden I was going to Roy Montrell, who was my longest-term guitar teacher. Roy was this killer guitar player. He played everything. He used to take me to Loyola Field House, and I heard all these great flamenco guitar players and this stuff he liked. Then for guitar lessons he’d stretch out and play jazz, but he’d give me chord sheets and I'd have to play this thing. He’d yell at me, “Play in second position!” And I’d have to figure out how to do this. When I’d mess up, he’d say, “Slow it, man!” I’d get more nervous. But it was a good lesson because my dad knew If I worked in different sets with people he trusted, I’d learn stuff. It was very encouragemental to get a dad that loved music, sold records and knew all these people.
My sister used to sing, when she was a kid, with Fats Pichon’s band. I got to meet Fats and Danny Barker and all those cats as a little kid. There was an innocence to what I knew about, because I thought my father’s records were all New Orleans records. So many of the people were from New Orleans but I didn’t have a clue that Thelonious Monk and Art Blakey were not from New Orleans. I used to like the record “Bye-Ya.” It had a New Orleans second-line groove. It just sounded like part of our culture. I heard a brass band playing it on a truck to advertise their gigs. All those brass bands would ride on trucks to advertise somebody’s gig that was coming to town. I heard the same song that I had on a record because my daddy would let me have records that had been in all these black hotels, where they would have little jukeboxes with 78s. When one side was kind of wore off, I’d get to have it. One side was pretty scratchy and the other side wasn’t.
The World Outside
Mac, when you were growing up in the Third Ward, what did you see when you looked out from the window in your house?
When I’d look out the window, I could see this big clothesline that went from the Vedders, who lived next door, right up by my window, way up in the air. People used to run clothes up there to dry. If there wouldn’t be no clothes, I could see right past the fence to Gavie Luzlon’s yard. I’d just stare out the windows sometimes. It was pretty because cane grew out there. You could get fishing poles right out of your yard. It was special. My grandmother used to grow stuff out there in the yard. It was a real blessing.
My father made a back porch kind of thing into a bedroom for me. My father was a talented man. I had a little space loaded with stuff. I would make art stuff and paint pictures and collect stuff from cemeteries. I’m trying to remember why, but for some reason my father put a punching bag in my room. And I had this German Shepherd dog. My mother had developed a fear of dogs, but one of my favorite pictures of her, when she was a calendar model, was with her white fur on. She looked gorgeous — and she was with a Belgian Shepherd.
And I could walk around the neighborhood. My father sent me to the corner to Duke’s Delicatess. Right behind it was Rappolo’s Bar, where there was this great piano player named Woo-Woo. He’d play the “Junket Blues.” I didn’t even know what he was playing until later. But years and years later I found out he only played these hard blues in the key of F-sharp. I have no idea how this guy learned how to play.
Was he the hot piano player in your neighborhood?
No, because everybody in my neighborhood played the piano real good. The neighbors on one side, the lady next door, my mother, my aunt, my Uncle Jo — they all played good. My Aunt Reba was a professional piano player. She had played for the silent movies, but then she was living in San Francisco and playing at some big church. Then my Aunt Dottie Mae and my Uncle John was over on Cleveland Avenue, just a few blocks from us.
That was the first place I actually heard a jam session. I remember my Uncle John playing the bass and Roy Zimmerman, who was a killer stride piano player, the way my Aunt Andre was. They played like James Booker played, this style called butterfly stride, where you make a tenth chord with your left hand and then you bend a note in it, and you play whatever you play with your right hand. It’s a very difficult style. Booker mastered this, but Roy Zimmerman, who I got to work with later, was just a master. My sister would sit down at the piano and sing all these Pearl Bailey songs. She was talented. There was so much talent around. But these were just people. They passed into my life from a lot of directions early on.
What street was your house on?
It was on Jefferson Davis Parkway, even though people called it Hagen Avenue.
What was the weather like when you were a kid? How did it affect your life?
I remember as a kid, they told me not to drink water out of faucets. As a little kid, I got malaria. I had a ton of childhood diseases that people don’t get today, and it was due to the weather. Also, before we lived there, we lived by my grandmother’s house, where my grandfather lived.
Was this also in the Third Ward?
Yeah, but it was on the other side of Orleans — not far. It actually might have been part of the Second Ward, but it was close.
“I remember things of music that don’t exist anymore.”
What do you remember about your grandfather?
He was a minstrel guy. I was so little that I don’t remember it well …
So he did minstrel shows?
Yeah, he was with the Al C. Fields Minstrels, back at the turn of the century. I stole a lot of his songs from him later. I’d ask my Aunt Andre or somebody to play them and sing them for me, and I’d just start ripping them off. That’s how I started writing songs. A lot of songs I wrote, like “I’ve Been Hoo-Dooed,” that’s ripped off from a minstrel song. I remember him singing “Didn’t He Ramble” before I ever heard brass bands playin’ it, when I was a little bitty kid. And he’d sing “Cabbage Head.” Later, because he was from Ireland, I found out that’s an Irish folk song, almost word for word. Somebody sang it to us in Gaelic when we was at the Galway Festival. I remember things of music that don’t exist no more.
I remember there was a hurricane when I was real little. My father and me went fishing. Back then, people didn’t get as much warning. But the weather looked bad. My father had built a kayak. He was really good at building things. He had made ribs for the boat and covered it with some sort of canvas thing. Then he put some stuff on it to make it solid. I used to love to lay in a pirogue when I wasn’t catchin’ nothin’ or didn’t have to pick up the crab nets. I just 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 how to hunt, if I saw a water moccasin, I’d shoot it. And my father would get very angry because he reloaded every shotgun shell by hand. He was just that way. He loved doing everything with his hands. He was very cool.
Music Everywhere
You grew up fast, once you got out and started to play music.
My family tried to protect me. I was consisenarily warned, but I always went out with rebellious, goofball guys. I always had that tactic of thinking, “These are the hipsters. That’s where i’m gonna be, like these guys.” I made some stupid calls. it’s funny, but almost everything my father told me transpired, but it took me a lot of years of looking at it later. People like Professor Longhair, they gave me fatherly advice. But I was one of those dumb kids that just don’t listen and pay humongous prices for that.
There’s something to be said for learning through experience, though.
I got to play with a lot of great musicians, not only in the studio but working in some strip joints. I started playing those kinds of gigs with Leonard James. He had about a million tactics to hustle a gig. He’d talk to some guy and maybe leave his saxophone case open by mistake. Next thing, he’s putting it together and playing with the jukebox, and the guys may be interested or not. If the guys’ not interested after all of that, out of his sax case come these demos that we cut at Cosimo’s. He’d give the guy one and say, “Man, listen to that at home. Maybe you’d like to put it on your jukebox.” Usually that conned the guy. It didn’t even have a label; it said “Cosimo’s Recording Studio” or something. But that got us gigs all over.
There was a guy on St. Charles Avenue. In them days, New Orleans had the strips. Canal Street, St. Charles Avenue, La Salle Street, Jackson Avenue, Louisiana Avenue: There was musical strips all over New Orleans The Vieux Carré was basically tourista turf. That’s where you got to see some of the strippers that were famous and all of that. But if you wanted to see what the locals wanted to see, you went to them other places. That’s where you saw all the great black acts. I mean, you could go from seeing Ray Charles to Joe Turner. It was such a vibrant thing.
And there were all these other bands along St. Charles Avenue and Canal Street, this one block of Canal Street. Red Town had a jazz group. Next to it, at the Texas Lounge, there would be Latin nights. What it was, a lot of the Latin bands that were going to New York got stuck in New Orleans. There was a vibrant Afro/Cuban community in there. All these great Cuban musicians, like Arsenio Rodriguez, was stuck in New Orleans.. Then if you went a little further down the street, there was Paul Gayten, a great R&B artist and record producer. There was so much music, and it was different kinds of music. There was no one thing.
There was always the great second-line bands. When I was a kid, I could identify the one that Jesse Jones was the bass drummer with from blocks away, because he played such a loud four: doonk, ka-joonk, ka-joonk, BAM! You could hear him from blocks away and you knew that band was coming down the street. This was part of you. Everybody who grew up in New Orleans had a part of the second line in ’em. You knew they were leaving the funeral when you heard that, or the parade was coming. You heard it in church. It was part of the community.
And each band had its own bass drum feel.
Oh, yeah! When we were cutting the Johnny Mercer record [Mercernary, 2006], Herman Ernest did something on the drum set, and I said, “Herman, I know you just did a little tip of the hat to Freddie Coleman.” Freddie was one of them guys that always tickled me. He was just a funny guy. I used to see Freddie Morgan at his brass band gigs. He used to work a gig on the west side; it was Frog Joseph and Thomas Jefferson, and they had this killer Dixieland band. Freddie Coleman was working with them at this joint. He was one of them characters.
My father always loved seeing the great trombone players that came out of New Orleans: Kid Ory, Frog Joseph and those guys. I would say, “Well, Dad, what about Big Boy Myles [a.k.a., Edgar Myles]?” And he’d say, “Well, he’s a good singer, and he’s all right on the trombone. But he’s not in their league.” But I was a kid, and in my league he was up there with them guys. But what the hell did I know? It’s like, Frog Joseph’s son Craig became this great tuba player. There’s that passing-it-down thing.
Musicians were part of a community, yet they were also competitive with each other.
This was a pretty common thing. A guy gets on a gig and ... I guess there’s a better word, but they get lazy. They got the gig, and somebody picks up on it, and they have a little cutting contest. All of a sudden that guy’s off the gig, somebody else has got it and he gotta go find him a new gig. Well, that makes that guy go back to what he was doing when he got the gig. There was enough gigs where it wasn’t so desperate. There was plenty of work. But none of those gigs paid that great. Hell, Union scale for a recording session, when I first did it, was twenty-something dollars for a sideman and fifty bucks for the leader. If that was your top money, you know you wasn’t making great money working club dates.
But you could at least pay the rent with it.
Actually, most musicians supplemented their income, whether they were driving cabs or doing whatever. It wasn’t like it was easy to have a career. You couldn’t bank off of music, put it that way.
But was there a line you might cross where your relationship with somebody like Longhair, a mentor of yours, might become competitive?
I can’t speak for nobody but me, but Fess was always a labor of love for me. From the day that St. Cyr the Beatnik got him busted for giving a guy half a deck of weed on Carnival Day, he couldn’t work in New Orleans for a while. If it wasn’t had been for Lena Rupe [wife of Specialty Records founder Art Rupe], who was en route from Specialty Records and started her label and was recording him again, and Joe Assunto kept him working at the One Stop Record Shop, doing anything. I’d hang with Fess over there. I’d start going over to his pad sometime. I got to know his family. He was scuffling. I think it was Wallace Davenport, a trumpet player, called us for a gig at Lincoln Beach, a black beach, on the back of one of those big rhythm & blues shows.
After that gig, Solomon Spencer, who booked the club at Lincoln Beach, said, “Well, we’re going to bring Roy Brown.” He had a record that Dave Bartholomew did, and they were going to try to start getting him some work. Roy was a real fragile guy. He wrote great songs and he was a killer singer. Even Jackie Wilson said he influenced him a lot. He was special.
“‘Fess … had that Caribbean mix with the blues and everything that was special about New Orleans, rolled into just one guy.”
So we were working a gig with Roy, and all of a sudden I was talking to Fess, and he said, “You think we can get the boys together? I got a gig.” Now, we probably hadn’t had the gig but maybe a week, but we gave Solomon Spencer notice to take one gig. I don’t even remember if we ever did the gig. We rehearsed for it, more than we ever did with Roy Brown. But Fess was something special to all of us. He had that Caribbean mix with the blues and everything that was special about New Orleans, rolled into just one guy. So we did his thing.
In some kind of way, later on, that very band — maybe one guy is different — but when I produced Mardi Gras in New Orleans on ’Fess for Joe Ruffino’s label, when me and Edgar Blanchard were A&R’ing over there, that was almost the exact same band. I may have just knew that those guys all complemented ’Fess. My incidents of when something is may not be worth a damn, but my picture that it happened and who was there is cool.
Hard Lessons Learned
You started writing songs when you were about fifteen.
I’d been writing before then. I used to bring songs to Dave Bartholomew, Bumps Blackwell, Paul Gayten — I brought ’em all over. But I think Cosimo was letting me hang around the studio more, so I started knowing Huey Smith and Earl King. Huey gave me a book when I was real young. It was a little kids’ book of poetry. He said, “If you write stuff like that, if you listen to what the little girls do when they jumpin’ ropes, and if you get that kind of flow, then you’re writing stuff that people can connect with. This shit you’re writing now ain’t gonna work!” I’d been writing all kinds of nuts stuff. I’d been reading Tales from the Crypt and writing a song on it: “Man, that word looks good!” I didn’t know what I was doing.
Huey was telling you to write from real life.
Yeah, and over the whole time I knew Earl I’d call him sometime and we’d have five-hour conversations, sometimes just about songwriting. He was the first guy that taught me about publishing your own songs. He changed Jessie Hill, Alvin Robinson, all of our lives to how we would look at this as a business. We were like, “We wrote all these songs and we ain’t gettin’ nothin’ for none of it. Maybe if we got some publishing, we could at least look out for that.”
One company used to pay me my royalties, which was Specialty Records. I used to think the world of them. Then they ran a game on me and said, “Listen, your royalties amount to so little. What do you think if you come in and pick out the amount of your royalty in [partial ownership of] Specialty Records?” Well, at that time, they had such a great catalog. They had gospel stuff, blues stuff, and all of their stuff was killer So I did it. But I didn’t realize that I’d opened a door for them, and my money got a little funny with them.
I remember the very first contract I signed for a songwriting deal, with Eddie Mesner at Aladdin Records. For sheet music, I got money. It took me a long time to learn, because my head was about playing music. None of us was businessmen in New Orleans. We had such a lack of business approach to music, we’d say, “Who was the leader yesterday? Well, So-and-So’s gonna be the leader today.” We just passed it around. It wasn’t like who was really the leader on a session. Nobody got paid for overtime on sessions. Nobody got contractor money for calling the musicians. The Union didn’t know about it in New Orleans, so we didn’t know about it. But the fact was, it was pretty easy to get the guys, especially for scab dates, which wasn’t Union dates. I could pretty much go by Leroy’s Steak House, which was part of the Dew Drop next door, and find some guys. Or I’d ask, “Where is So-and-So?” if I didn’t see him, and somebody would say, “I can get him on the phone. I could get a band real fast for a bootleg date.
The weirdest things that happened was while I was setting up guys for dates in a hurry. What happened was, somebody in New Orleans would have a hit, and every record company would want to cut something like it right there, which was a stupid idea. That wasn’t what we did good. They’d come with a song that had nothin’ to do with something like a hit they heard, but they wanted it to sound like the hit. We knew better, but was hard to convince some producer about it. I remember Leonard Chess coming to New Orleans and having this idea in his head. I wish Paul Gayten had been at that date because Paul could have pulled his coat to it, but Leonard blew a whole date.
How?
He had this idea to cut it like this hit that was already going. Listen, that’s one reason why I respect Ike Turner. He knew to go into the studio and get some of the guys that played on that hit. I remember him hiring me to play guitar on a date. I didn’t want to play guitar, so he said, “Can you play any bass, kid?” We’d just swap around. He was playing piano when we started the date. After a while he said, “You got anybody who can come in here and play the piano right quick?” I said, “Yeah, I can get Marcel Richards.” “Call him!” He knew: Don’t go for what somebody did. Just get the feel for what was popular and people were dancing to. That worked.
In those days there were two musician’s unions in New Orleans, one for white players and the other for black. What were the differences between those two worlds?
When I was producing sessions, I mixed the bands up pretty heavy. I’d use some of the trumpet players that I had on gigs with me, like [cornettist] Jack Miller and with some white trumpet players that were just for the reading, like maybe Charlie Miller, to mix them up. I tried to get the guys that I felt would fit that date best.
This led to problems with the 174, the white union, and 496, the black union, arguing over who should have the contract on that gig. That was the first problem. Second problem: When I came in there, I had to personally bring checks from the black union and the white union. It was all bullshit. It’s the American Federation of goddamn Musicians, and I’m getting flak about this crap because I’m trying to do something? But you know what? The musicians don’t give a damn about that. The guys were always so grateful to get sessions.
“I still got my Union pin on my brim.”
Both locals were just trying to make some money.
496 had almost all the R&B dates. All of a sudden I started mixing, where some of them went through 174. That caused a lot of crap with 496. But then on the other side, the white union had most of their grabs on Dixieland or country and western. I started bringing some where they went through the black union. They didn’t even know what kind of session it was. All they knew was, who was I to do this shit, this goddamn kid? I was brought before the trial board over various crap. It’s just politics to me, but you know what/s sad? The musicians fought and fought and fought to get stuff right. There were things set up before anybody was there, way back in racist days. Like, I couldn’t bring in a lawyer to say that my Taft-Hartley Act rights was violated by something the union did. It was in the bylaws of the union. Anyway, I got in a lot of crap for it. When the two unions merged, some of it went away. Some of it didn’t. And if you notice, I still got my union pin on my brim. [Doc points to his AFM card, tucked into the band of his black beret.] They gave it to me. They’re about to give me my next one.
In some ways they did a lot of good things. A lot of the gigs were union gigs. Guys like Dave Bartholomew had the big bands, and when I used to put the big bands together we’d back these big shows. You had to have a certain amount of musicians on the gig; they backed you. A lot of the strips in New Orleans were union strips, so the guys at least wasn’t working for lunch money on a night gig. The saddest part, since they joined up and there is one union, is they’ve weakened so much. I don’t think this has to do with New Orleans; it’s just a sad thing in the state of events that has transpired. There’s no studio work per se; everybody does their stuff in their home studios.
In our next installment, Mac introduces us to Professor Longhair, Cosimo Matassa and the golden age of music in New Orleans.
This reminds me a bit of the Jelly Roll Morton interviews! Great stuff...