Pages tagged “issue 24”

"What happened to the Liberty Bell I heard so much about? Did it really ding-dong? It must have dinged wrong. It didn't ding long.—Allen Toussaint, from "Who's Gonna Help Brother Get Further?"

Two men are caught in the spotlight, both middle-aged, both impeccably dressed. One is black, one white, each is wearing a dark suit, and, altogether inadvertently, both are wearing purple ties. It is a Monday night in February at Joe’s Pub, an intimate showcase club in New York City, and Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint are previewing their new album with a two-man performance for their record label and its foreign distributors. Elvis, the more rumpled one, rakish in a purple shirt and Stetson-styled dress-up hat, takes on his familiar frontman role—eloquent, witty and characteristically generous with praise for his 68-year-old musical partner, who sits erect and attentive at the piano, a small smile playing about his lips. Allen Toussaint, with a perfectly sculpted gray Afro and moustache, is a New Orleans legend. He has produced hits for such other New Orleans legends as Irma Thomas, Ernie K-Doe, Lee Dorsey and The Neville Brothers, and has provided assistance to rock stars from Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, Dr. John and The Band to—Elvis Costello. But he is—as he will be the first to tell you—a man who has always operated behind the scenes. “The proof of my labors still gets out there,” says Allen, “it’s just not brought out there by me.”

Elvis decided at their brief soundcheck/rehearsal this afternoon that he will play guitar on only one song, so he looks to Allen for his cue. From the first notes it’s clear he is as drawn in as anyone in the room by the spare and stately power of the music. They lead with one of their first collaborations, “The Sharpest Thorn,” guided by Allen’s elegant, almost classical accompaniment. They sing old songs and new songs alike, with Elvis almost invariably providing the lead vocal, and Allen—as on so many of his hit productions—providing the indispensable second voice. There are echoes of Allen’s mentor, New Orleans piano legend Professor Longhair (“the Bach of rock,” as Allen dubbed him without a trace of irony), throughout the program, but only on Allen’s “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further?” (a song he wrote in 1970 that brilliantly delineates the 20th Century African-American urban experience without ever sacrificing its wryly idiomatic tone) does Allen take the lead. There are angry songs by Elvis that focus on the current political situation, there are tender love songs, there are songs that work as sheer entertainment, but the mood of the evening never falters, the sense that each and every person in the room, including the musicians, is lost in the music. By the very joyfulness of its expression this is, decidedly, music to make you smile.

"I think the marriage of [our styles] is very interesting inasmuch as how bold Elvis is, how attuned and aware of what's going on. He's not a coward, and that's good—for someone to have such a talent and be able to bring it forward. He says things that many people would like to but don't know how to say. Elvis has taken me by the hand and said, Let's take a trip."—Allen Toussaint

"Allen is a tempering influence on my tendency to really—I mean, if I'm let off the leash, I will go into it quite a bit, [but] you know, he will say just the right thing. It's not to say that either of us expresses our ideas better than the other, but he's got such an instinctive and natural ability to lend each of his talents in a different way and in different proportion—and, most important, [with] generosity."—Elvis Costello

It is the most improbable of collaborations. For the last 20 years at least, Elvis Costello—the former Declan McManus of London and Liverpool, at one time a certified pop star—has been a whirling dervish of creativity. In the last two years alone he has been working on an opera about Hans Christian Andersen for the Royal Danish Opera, put out a raw roots album (The Delivery Man) with his band, The Imposters, sung and recorded with a 52-piece Dutch jazz orchestra, Metropole Orkest, and showcased a 15-minute suite from the ballet he was commissioned to write for Italy’s Aterballetto dance company with symphony orchestras around the world. In the last few months he has performed at the Apollo, sung on a duets album with Tony Bennett, performed with Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch at the Grand Ole Opry, shot a VH1 tribute to his music with Billie Joe Armstrong, Death Cab For Cutie and Fiona Apple, and embarked on numerous other plans for a far-flung series of events in virtually every one of the seven lively arts. As Allen Toussaint says admiringly, “Elvis operates at one speed—top speed. If you wound him up any tighter, I think he’d explode!”

Allen, meanwhile, has led what can only be described as a quiet, somewhat reclusive life in New Orleans—if quiet reclusivity can be said to include a gold Rolls Royce and a Mercedes convertible, a home, production company and well-appointed recording studio, Sea-Saint, in the same comfortable Gentilly neighborhood, and a position of sufficient prominence in the world of music that for close to three decades everyone came to him. He saw no reason, and no likelihood, of ever leaving his hometown (“Everything that was dear to me was near to me”)—until Katrina. With Katrina he made the same preparations he always had: he boarded up his home and studio with the same numbered boards he had used before, and he prepared to wait out the storm at the Astor Crowne Plaza on Bourbon Street. When it became obvious Katrina wasn’t just another storm, he hired a school bus to take him to Baton Rouge, flew to New York, and there embarked upon a life he had never envisioned. With the help of his friend and business partner, Josh Feigenbaum, he found a comfortable midtown apartment, started playing a solo Sunday-brunch gig at Joe’s Pub (“This was something that was totally foreign to me”) and joined in the fundraising tributes sprouting up all over, but particularly in New York City.

That was how Allen came to know Elvis Costello. They had worked together previously when Elvis joined the legion of musical pilgrims coming to New Orleans for an infusion of elegant funk (it is Allen’s piano you hear on “Deep Dark Truthful Mirror” from the 1989 album Spike). Elvis had begun singing Allen’s “Freedom for the Stallion” as a salute to New Orleans in Katrina’s immediate aftermath, and then he and Allen performed it together at Lincoln Center, reprising it the next day at Joe’s Pub. That, according to Elvis, was where the idea for the album was born. At first it was going to be a salute to Allen’s work in the form of an Allen Toussaint Songbook, but within days the concept expanded to include Elvis’ fiery new composition, “River in Reverse,” written the afternoon of the Parting the Waters benefit at Town Hall, and then very quickly—as Elvis continued to connect with Allen on an almost daily basis—it grew to incorporate a more ambitious collaboration. Allen had by now learned that his house and studio were lost. He and Elvis were backstage at Madison Square Garden’s From the Big Apple to the Big Easy benefit, and Elvis went up to him, “and I just said quietly, ‘So sorry to hear it,’ the way you would, and he just said, ‘The things I had served me well when I had them.’ Which I thought was a remarkable reaction. And then he said, ‘I’ll have to write some more.’”

“I loved New Orleans so much,” says Allen, “it took a lot for me to leave.” He still was not certain, even after coming to New York, that he was ready to step into the spotlight, but on the other hand there was no denying that the ground had shifted. In the last decade, the stars had stopped coming to New Orleans, and Allen, for his part, resolutely—some might say obstinately—refused to leave home for any of the opportunities the world might have to offer. Looking back on it, Allen says, “I was busy every day, I was making music and making tracks. I stayed with the music as if I was on a mission—but without a mission. Because I didn’t have something that I had to have ready the next day or the next week. When Katrina came, it’s almost as if Katrina said, ‘OK, you’ve been here doing this, let’s go put it to use.’”

"The music itself—not only the words—has a subtext. I don't that Allen's ever thought about it or analyzed it—I don't think that's in his nature. There are certain writers who are analytical, and there are others that just accept the thoughts that come to them. Whether they are about matters of the heart or matters of the world, they treat them equally. I might be opposite to him in that. You know, I consider everything that comes to me. But sometimes you can be in the middle of a song and recognize what it's actually saying, and that's the power of [the music]."—Elvis Costello

One of the things that drove the album from the start was the growing realization—not just on Elvis’ part but on Allen’s as well—of the richness, depth and complexity of Allen’s old songs. Elvis had known most of the compositions they were considering for the album for at least 20 years, but the full range of their social, political and emotional implications had never occurred to him, probably as much as anything because of the good-time New Orleans feel of their original presentation. Allen, too, was surprised by some of their nuances. He had never seen himself as political. He was not one to “shake a fist at the politician or the political scene—or beat someone over the head about something, even if it’s artistic. But Elvis found some of these songs of mine that were written 30 or 35 years ago totally applicable to the [current] situation, and when I hear them I see now that, yes, I guess that that was their destiny.”

Perhaps it was the fluidity of their composition that allowed them to find so unexpected a new life. Perhaps it was simply Allen’s evolution as a songwriter. He looks back on some of his classic early compositions as embodying the “soft-shoe approach—you know, light-hearted, debonair, not thick in any fashion. But then I guess I got to a point in my life where it became, ‘OK, I got this, but now it’s got to have and then some.’ Not to be different but because it deserved to go somewhere else. Because I found pleasure in that. Sometimes,” Allen says with a shrug, “my son says, ‘Daddy, why don’t you write like you used to, before you started wearing those suits and ties?’” He laughs, and his voice trails off. “I don’t know….”

There was never any question about what Allen was going to do with his life. He knew, he says, from the time he was six-and-a-half years old, and his parents simply accepted it because they had no choice. At 13 he started his own group, The Flamingos, with blind R&B singer/guitarist Snooks Eaglin. He made sure Snooks got all the words right, and he painstakingly wrote out note-for-note arrangements for the band for the same reason Elvis would learn to read and write music in his 40s—to be able to present the music properly, even if it was, in Allen’s case, just the jukebox hits of the day. Once he entered the recording end of the business in the late ’50s, he began writing songs himself for the most natural reason: The recording artists needed songs. “They need a song? Of course, write a song. Sometimes at a recording session they would need another, so we’d go on break, and I’d write another right then and there. Ever so humble, I must say, but song it was.”

He rehearsed the singers at home. “Guys and girls [Irma Thomas, Art and Aaron Neville, Betty Harris and Benny Spellman, among others] would get together in the front room of my parents’ house, and we would have a jam session all day long.” Allen would work out background vocals for each song, with every singer not featured on that particular number making up the chorus. He passed out the arrangements in the studio, and they would do four songs in three hours. They were, he says, simple songs and fun times, when the world seemed like a kinder place. On his own, Allen listened to everything: gospel and hillbilly, the Metropolitan Opera and Professor Longhair, Grieg and Chopin. The first classical piece he learned was Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor; he taught it to himself from a record when he was barely in his teens, “and the piano I was playing it on was flat, so for two years I was playing it in the wrong key!”

With the same mix of determination, originality and self-invention, he sought his true voice. In Lee Dorsey—an auto repair man, or body-and-fender artiste as Allen dubbed him—he found it: an instrument as curiously original and idiosyncratic as his own. “I can always see Lee moving through the world,” he told New Orleans music historian Jeff Hannusch, “and me back there watching and writing about it.” For Dorsey he wrote and produced “Ride Your Pony,” “Working in the Coal Mine” and “Holy Cow,” all pop and R&B hits in the mid ’60s, writing and arranging the sessions with Lee’s voice in his head, creating “pockets” for the singer to fit right into. With Dorsey’s 1970 album, Yes We Can, and singles sessions from the same period, for the first time Allen found a way to explore some of the more ambitious concepts that he had unconsciously been yearning to express. “Those songs,” he told Hannusch, “would probably never have been written if it hadn’t have been for the kind of guy that Lee [was].” “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further?,” “On Your Way Down,” “Tears, Tears, and More Tears” and “Freedom for the Stallion”—which provide much of the template for the new album with Costello—all stem from those Dorsey sessions, while The Pointer Sisters’ version of “Yes We Can,” a big pop hit in 1973, was one of the first productions out of Allen’s new studio, Sea-Saint. From this point on, Allen’s horizons just kept on expanding, both as producer (he was responsible for LaBelle’s 1975 #1 pop hit, “Lady Marmalade”), songwriter (Glen Campbell’s “Southern Nights,” a simultaneous #1 hit on the pop, country and adult-contemporary charts in 1977) and artist, a career on which he embarked with some ambivalence in the immediate aftermath of Lee Dorsey’s Yes We Can. From Allen’s point of view it was almost as if he had been pushed into it. He still saw himself as “the one who made a demo for someone with the zeal for being front-stage center. My life [had always] been, OK, here comes John—I’m ready for John. Here comes Sally—I’m ready for Sally. Then here comes me… No, I’m the one waiting for John and Sally.”

"This collaboration with Elvis is a luxury. I had already thought in my mind that he would be the general because, after all, he invited me in. But when we did start, we were [both] very reluctant about the take-charge. Which was odd."—Allen Toussaint

The problem was, simply, finding an approach that worked. This wasn’t a question of Elvis fitting himself into someone else’s established style, as he did with Burt Bacharach, nor was it a matter of submitting finished songs for Allen to arrange. The intent was a true creative partnership, but at first, Elvis says, there was just too much politeness. In the end it was Allen’s piano playing that furnished the inspiration. He had recorded “Tipitina and Me”—an elegiac, minor-key variation of Professor Longhair’s exuberant signature piece—for Our New Orleans 2005, one of the first of the tribute albums. Now, as Allen fooled around with the figure at the end of a somewhat dispiriting first day, Elvis asked if it would be alright to write some lyrics to it. He came back the next morning with “Ascension Day,” a moody gospel piece for voice and piano (“Not a soul was stirring / Not a bird was singing, at least not within my hearing”). The music, Elvis says, “had opened up a series of images. When I heard that piece for the first time, I felt like a curtain came back, and I was looking into a world—not of people standing around with stained T-shirts and no shoes, trying to drag their few possessions out of the way of a body of water, but more of a roomful of people of great nobility and gentility. There’s no irony, there’s no self-regard; I’m sure Allen’s doing it just because he loves the way it sounds and feels.”

From that point they were on their way. The first collaboration after “Ascension Day,” was on a song idea of Costello’s, “The Sharpest Thorn.” It was, Elvis says, about “somebody who goes out full of pride to a celebration, a parade, and comes home at the end of the day with confetti in his hair, his pockets picked, a little poorer, a little wiser. It wasn’t a serious song [at the start], but it was lifted up by these images that Allen suggested almost out of thin air. He just suddenly said to me, ‘Could it be about good and evil?’ And I said, yes, it could absolutely be about a moral dilemma. Then at another point he said, ‘Is there any place for the Archangel Gabriel in this song?’ It was the most extraordinary thing. Allen literally put us in a reverie with those few remarks and his response to the music, the way he asked questions about certain cadences and articulated the changes [with] a gospel accompaniment.”

Oh no, Allen demurs in a separate conversation, “Elvis already had the plot going.” And as far as the music was concerned, he simply felt “very reverent about it. When I first heard it going in a certain direction, I thought—I actually wrote down in my notes—I will funkify this. I will make it funky. But I noticed when I was playing it, I didn’t dare touch it. It felt like it would have been sacrilegious to do anything but the purest form of what it was.”

Along with writing and song selection, they quickly settled on a recording format. They would, if at all possible, work in New Orleans, and they would employ both Allen’s customary four-man horn section and guitarist along with Elvis’ band, The Imposters, to achieve the abrasive edge Elvis felt the album needed. Had they simply worked with New Orleans musicians, Elvis says, it would have been like remaking the old records, only with a new vocalist. This way you get “to play with your own interpretation, but when it comes to the articulations that lie above the beat, it wouldn’t have been the same if we’d got a New York horn section.” The idea was to create an authentic original voice.

Within a month they were in the studio. They started in Hollywood, because New Orleans was still closed down, and they got the first three songs in 25 minutes, before the horns arrived. “I thought, Wow, we’re not even going to get to New Orleans,” says Elvis. “We’re going to finish this record in three days!” “We were really spoiled,” Allen agrees. When the horns finally got there on the second day, things slowed down considerably because Elvis was committed to the idea of cutting everything live. It was definitely harder, says Allen, who had been cutting separate tracks for convenience’s sake for over 30 years, but it was a revitalizing experience. “The horns were playing the song, they were not just playing parts,” says Allen, “They were hearing the song coming at them, [just like] Elvis was hearing the horns coming right back at him. I must say, it was wonderful to see that happen. I don’t recall fixing anything.”

Everyone left for New Orleans the first week of December, as soon as New Orleans began to reopen and they were able to get into a hotel and recording studio. For Allen there was nowhere else on earth to be, and for Elvis the same allure that had originally drawn him to the city’s music remained, in a heartbreakingly different way, as he drove through desolate, deserted streets seeking out a vanished world. New Orleans was where they recorded Elvis’ angry “River in Reverse,” the song with which the idea for the album began, but it was also where Elvis was determined to get Allen to step out front-and-center on his own wide-ranging portrait of a world, “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further?” “I was tricked into singing it,” Allen says, laughing as he recalls the way Elvis had him teach everyone the precise syntax of the chorus (“Pray tell what’s gonna happen to brother / Who’s gonna help him get further? / One another. / ‘Is that the truth?’ / ‘Yeah, you’re right’”) and then demo the song with the band.

We may seem happy
Like everything’s alright
From the outside looking in
Everything’s uptight
But deep down inside we’re covering up the pain
It’s an old thing
It’s a soul thing
But it’s a real thing...

There’s old dude standing on the corner
Waiting for a fox to pass
The only thing he’s got to go by
Is this is where he saw her last
And there’s old John, two dollars in his pocket
Talking loud and thinks he’s rich
And look for little fool, too cool to go to school
Get a job, in two days he quits

I’ll tend to heat up quickly,” says Elvis on The Charlie Rose Show, “[whereas] with Allen you’ll be laughing at the wit of the line before you’ve realized the seriousness of what he said.” What gives Allen’s songs their sense of mystery and power, he says, what permits them to open up—much like Sam Cooke’s songs—from their commonplace expressions and everyday settings, are the layers of nuance and suggestion that lie just beneath the surface. On the other hand, “John actually has a face,” Allen says with some amusement, referring to the character in his song. “He used to wear grey pants and a red shirt.” In response to my assumption that Allen was the one who came up with the idea for the angry—or maybe it’s just humorously indignant—trombone solo by Big Sam Williams in the middle of the song, “No way,” says Allen. “No way—and let me say it again. It was the expertise and awareness of Elvis that caused that to happen. Someone told Elvis, ‘You know, that trombone player can really play, and he came over and said, ‘Why don’t we consider having a trombone solo?’ Now when was the last time you heard a trombone solo on a record? I would have missed that. But Elvis don’t miss. He sees the moment.” Allen pauses. “I think that’s why his life must be joyful to him.”

The recording of the album, Elvis says, was in fact “the most joyful experience I’ve ever had in the studio. You go in a room, you do it right, and then it’s done.” Because it was conceived as a three-act “entertainment,” in the end, beautiful versions of Allen’s “What Do You Want the Girl to Do?” and “The Greatest Love”—both of which are highlights of the live show—were left off the final mix, because, Elvis felt, they would have thrown off the balance of the overall presentation. The album, as it is now constituted, begins with three of Allen’s most accessible songs, each transformed by Elvis’ passionate performance, followed by “The Sharpest Thorn,” before embarking on the album’s second—and more overtly political—movement, introduced by “Brother.” The last act kicks in with “International Echo,” with words by Elvis and music by Allen, once again in an unmistakable Professor Longhair vein. Speaking of joyfulness, this is surely as rollicking a number as Elvis has ever written, a tribute not just to the impact of music in general but to the impact of Allen’s music on Elvis, and Elvis’ perhaps on you and me. It’s about how music can work on the imagination, how it “comes from one city, travels around the world and then rebounds back,” Elvis says. It’s a song about how Elvis first heard Allen’s music covered by English beat groups, how he heard “Wonder Woman”—one of River In Reverse’s most obscure numbers—in a wonderfully unselfconscious version by his friend (and longtime collaborator) Nick Lowe’s pub-rock band, Brinsley Schwarz, in the early ’70s, “and then I sought out the Lee Dorsey version and found they’d copied it note for note!”

Send out a message and it’s sure to rebound
What’s that I hear?
What is that sound? Seems to be coming from
under the ground
international echo

For Elvis there is no greater expression of truth than art. Not politics, not posterity (“I have no concern for posterity,” he has said. “I believe when you’re gone, you’re gone”), just a dedication to process and aspiration. He loves “the way painters used to paint the roofs of churches [as if there were] always a world beyond.” That had to do with belief, of course, but it is all to do with conveying a vision that has its own imperative, Elvis has come to feel, it’s all about communicating something that demands expression.

This has been a hard-won realization for a man who was originally perceived as a post-punk sensibility whose only lyrical reference points were “guilt and revenge.” He did much, he now recognizes, to play up that image, and he didn’t really question the confinement it imposed upon him (“There was always the unwillingness to be vulnerable”) until he began working on 1986’s King of America with producer T-Bone Burnett. That was when he re-learned the lesson he had taken from all the records that had inspired him since he was a kid, from Mingus to Hank Williams: that it should not be about keeping the meaning secret but about being “generous with what you’ve got,” as he described it to music writer Bill Flanagan, “giving the song enough space to be what you actually intended instead of trying to turn it into something else.” Since then the expression of his ideas has come in many different forms. 2003’s North, for example, is a nakedly unadorned confession—“there’s no flashy language to speak of, it’s not dressed in any poetic clothes or conceits or any of the devices that I’ve employed that [can] develop like barnacles, you know, on a ship.” Some of the other projects have been more rococo, striking different audiences in different ways, but they have all been an attempt to emphasize what Elvis calls “creativity, not positivity or negativity,” to access one form or another of direct emotional communication. He is not so quick to judge others by their image nowadays, particularly young singers looking to make their marks. Image is one thing, music another. From Elvis’ point of view, he made a lot of wrong choices starting out, he did a lot of things he is not particularly proud of—but he always cared about the music, “I always took it seriously.”

Asked what kind of song he would create for Elvis if he were writing for him today as he once wrote for Lee Dorsey, Allen says, “I would probably write a very, very simple song—one that is easy to be hummed. With a comical chorus, whether it had lyrics or not. Elvis is very bold in his speech, and he admits himself that many times he writes to the dark side. I would find no validity in going in the direction [in which] he goes so strongly and drives his own bus. So I would take all of that power of a giant and submit it as tenderly as a lamb. The way he delivered his spirit of it would make it as emotional, or as spiritual, as it needed to be.”

And if he were to write and produce for himself, if he were given the impossible assignment of trying to spotlight the real Allen Toussaint in the same way he has shone the light on so many others? Here the answer is not so easy. He might, he says in May just before the start of the River In Reverse tour, bring Allen Toussaint more to the forefront now, “just because of the endorsement of other folk.” But left to his own devices, he suspects he would probably still do much the same thing he has done in the past: surround himself with as many beautiful, ambient sounds as he found pleasing, put in the trees and the wind, write bass lines and counter lines—“and, to me, any of those things is just as important, and most of them are more important, than me. When I am recording other artists, I don’t feel that way. I feel that they are most important. With me [it’s] everything else.”

But maybe this is changing. After showcasing the album with Elvis in England, Europe and Japan, after playing San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Atlanta and a host of other cities this summer on a full-scale band tour, it seems as if Allen—almost against his will—is coming closer to center stage. The show is accompanied by all the accoutrements and triumphalism of a standard rock presentation, but at its heart are those same moments of private reverie, shared by artist and audience alike, that made the Joe’s Pub appearance in February so remarkable. Elvis performs many of his most familiar songs (though, he is quick to point out to the audience, with new arrangements by Allen), the wit and patter are all Elvis’, and Allen for the most part remains a bemused, if dignified, spectator, his quizzically raised eyebrows his most explicit commentary on the proceedings. But over the course of the tour he has begun to do more and more vocals, always with Elvis’ enthusiastic public endorsement (“I get the best seat in the house,” he frequently says as he stands onstage for Allen’s beautifully realized tribute to Professor Longhair), and if Elvis’ “Poisoned Rose” is invariably one of the soulful highlights of a soulful evening, so too is “Who’s Gonna Help Brother,” no less than Allen’s recent addition of Paul Simon’s “American Tune.” There is something for everyone here, brought to you unquestionably by way of Elvis’ extraordinary graciousness, energy and generosity of spirit, but Allen Toussaint simply playing the piano conveys no less extraordinary a presence. “Toussaint for President!” someone calls out one night, and Elvis, who has just introduced the show’s single stage prop, a tiny action figure of President Bush, can only assent with the broadest of grins.

For Allen, there would have been little point in making a sad, doleful album: The significance of the music, the significance of music in general, is simply too great. “This is not a sympathy record,” he has said. “The songs here can live in war and peace, anytime, anywhere.” He and Elvis, he hastens to point out, did not set out to make speeches. “We were making the music we love.” The view is little different, even from Elvis’ more political perspective. When all is said and done, it is the music that will survive. “God gave me something to hold onto,” Allen says, “so that the things that happen around me are only as dramatic as I perceive them.” He is meditating on matters of race, on the divided world he was born into, on the way that things have and have not changed, but he could just as easily be speaking of Katrina. “Everything costs something,” he says gravely. “The world is better now… It’s better.”

The enigmatic Will Oldham sees a lightness

At last, Will Oldham as Bonnie 'Prince' Billy has given us a record of cryptic romanticism to complement the silver-rimmed bleakness of his 1999 masterpiece I See A Darkness.

Oldham's impulses are still arresting—he's unguardedly affectionate ("The backs of your knees conceal me / And your eyeballs / They unreel me / Love comes to me") and, with the same emotional intensity, he's frightening ("A strange form of life / Kicking through windows / Rolling on yards / Hitting in loved ones").

Dawn McCarthy's ethereal voice floats over and under Oldham's too-human warble, creating a raw intimacy throughout, and elements that might seem unspectacular in isolation—acoustic guitar, bass, piano, strings—organically coalesce to form disarmingly subtle arrangements.

Too refined for clichés but unafraid to sing lullabies, Oldham comes off as neither tortured nor naive. In that trembling croon, he gently reminds us that he's just another child of this messy world—broken, expectant.

(Above: The Preservation Hall Jazz Band marches through the streets of the French Quarter immediately following the April 27 re-opening of New Orleans-music shrine Preservation Hall, which had been closed since Katrina. Photo by Michael Weintrob.)

It’s been a year since the citizens of New Orleans were subjected to the horrors of Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters. People died by the thousands while relief efforts foundered and the weaknesses of emergency plans were exposed. For a week, the world watched this ultimate reality-television show—even as wheelchair-bound elders and dehydrated infants perished in the stifling heat, pundits made smug jokes about those who stayed behind to suffer, and televangelist/politician Pat Robertson explained away the destruction of New Orleans as divine retribution.

But on the new Dirty Dozen Brass Band album Ivan Neville doesn’t let Robertson’s rhetoric go unanswered—“Don’t go and talk about my Father, 'cause God is my friend,” Neville charges in an emotional rap with the DDBB backing him up on their stunning reinterpretation of Marvin Gaye’s classic What’s Going On. The album is a departure from the Dozen’s trademark second-line brass-band rhythms, but it’s true to the band’s vision of expanding this traditional music into a lexicon that can interpret a wide range of styles. Along with Neville, the DDBB gets help from Chuck D, Guru, Bettye LaVette and G. Love on the project, its Aug. 29 release marking the one-year anniversary of Katrina’s landfall. This is only one of a number of outstanding recordings by New Orleans musicians released in the wake of what’s generally acknowledged as the greatest disaster ever sustained by an American city.

Ivan Neville, son of Aaron and part of what used to be called the “First Family of New Orleans Music,” was displaced by Katrina and now lives in Texas along with several other members of The Neville Brothers. He also contributed to Sing Me Back Home, the outstanding album made by New Orleans musicians exiled to Texas. “Ivan nailed that, he really felt it,” says DDBB saxophonist Roger Lewis, one of the countless musicians who lost his home in the flood. Lewis expresses outrage at Robertson and other public figures who appeared to exult in the suffering of New Orleans’ poorest. “It was an immature statement for a reputed man of the cloth to make,” says Lewis, who’s been taking visiting journalists on tours of the devastated Lower Ninth Ward, where he was born. “We’re looking at the total demise of a neighborhood,” he says as he drives through the debris-ridden blocks of collapsed houses. “Everything out here was under 20 feet of water. It was like a lake. A lot of people’s lives got lost. A lot of people’s history got lost. It’ll take 30 years to clean up this mess.” Lewis also expresses frustration about the recovery’s slow, inefficient pace. “It’s all about greed,” he says. “Somebody been swingin’ with the money. Somebody don’t really care.” It’s a charge voiced by many New Orleans musicians these days.

“I’m mad, I’m tired and I’m salty,” says Dr. John, who recorded the inspirational Sippiana Hericane after Katrina was followed a week later by Hurricane Rita, which devastated western Louisiana. “They try to shuffle us under a rug, but when you look at the bottom line of all of it, there still ain’t been no federal help, basically FEMA’s been a disaster, the [Army] Corps of Engineers has been a disaster, they need to put dikes in there and save the wetlands. Unfortunately it’s something they could’ve done anytime in the last 50 years … but everybody—true to form in politics—pockets all the money they can. It always happens. The city, the state, the feds, everybody does the same thing. We lost another 150 miles of wetlands last year. Bobby Charles, who wrote ‘Walking to New Orleans,’ the whole town he was livin’ in is gone. He used to call me at least twice a year and tell me he’s gettin’ closer and closer to havin’ Gulf Coast property which he never wanted. You got a city where the work force, the people that makes New Orleans what it is, are basically stuck elsewheres. My band members are all over the place. My bass player’s in Michigan, my drummer’s in Baton Rouge … I was talking to [New Orleans musician] Henry Butler—he’s got no place to go back to, he was trying to find a place in Dallas or Colorado.”

Butler, the virtuoso pianist and vocalist who was also part of the Sing Me Back Home project, has relocated to Boulder, Colo., and is adopting a wait-and-see attitude about returning to New Orleans. “I’m keeping my options open,” he admits. “I’m not in a rush to make a quick decision. I wanna see what they do. They don’t always make wise choices in terms of how the politicians deal with the general citizenry. I’m saddened that there’s not really a school system in New Orleans at this point. You’ve got 40 or 50 chartered schools, all operating on different standards. I don’t know how you can call that an educational system. If you can’t educate your children I don’t think you can claim to have a real city.

"I love New Orleans and I don’t want that to get lost in all this, but as long as I’ve been conscious of it I’ve never liked what the politicians have been doing; I’ve never [felt] they truly cared about the arts. I know the current mayor [Ray Nagin], for instance, could care less about music. I know people he’s hired as consultants and they’ve just been ignored.”

Butler is doing his part for New Orleans music by touring constantly and bringing the sound to as many people as possible. He recently tore it up at Michael Arnone’s Crawfish Festival in western New Jersey, playing two sets with Corey Harris and sitting in with The Radiators in addition to his own set. “It’s great therapy for me,” says Butler. “I think every New Orleans musician worth his salt is doing that wherever he or she lands. I’ve been working with some of the guys in Boulder and we do New Orleans versions of jazz standards, blues and other things. I wind up breaking down the whole New Orleans rhythmic conception. I can do it because I’ve been teaching kids to do it for years; I’m not one of those guys who says ‘Oh you just have to feel it.’ I tell them where the accents are and, if you can articulate it, some of these guys can do it. … Since so many of us are dispersed, we’re spreading New Orleans information all over. It’ll take a long time to see how it affects the general music cuisine in society.”

Irma Thomas, fabled “Soul Queen of New Orleans,” was all but wiped out by Katrina. Her house and her nightclub, The Lion’s Den, were both destroyed. It’s the second time Thomas has been displaced from New Orleans by a hurricane—she was forced to move to California for several years after Camille hit in 1969. “This isn’t the first disaster I’ve lived through and I’m sure it won’t be the last,” she says defiantly. “Camille was nothing compared to this one. Then I only lost my work, but this time I lost everything. I’m working on getting my home rebuilt, but I’m getting out of the nightclub business.”

Thomas reacted to the disaster—like a number of local musicians—by going into the studio and making an outstanding record, After the Rain, an R&B classic imbued with the spirit that’s made New Orleans music central to the city’s identity. DDBB, Dr. John, Irma Thomas, The Radiators, Cowboy Mouth, Papa Grows Funk, Davis Rogan, Juvenile, Christian Scott, Theresa Andersson, the subdudes, Kidd Jordan, Leslie Smith, Marc Stone, Eric Lindell, Morning 40 Federation, Mute Math and John Mooney are only some of the New Orleans musicians who’ve released excellent albums since 8/29. Though Virgin Records in New Orleans went out of business after the flood, the independent Louisiana Music Factory has thrived by selling local recordings.

New Orleans native Paul Sanchez and his band Cowboy Mouth were recording new album Voodoo Shoppe in Atlanta when Katrina hit. As Sanchez sits on the front porch of a Creole cottage in the French Quarter on a beautiful spring day, a mule-drawn carriage ambles by lazily and friends stop along the street to chat. It’s hard to believe that only two blocks away devastation stretches for miles without end, but the tears Sanchez cannot hold back as he speaks of his hometown tell the story. Like so many other newly homeless New Orleans musicians, he lost everything in the flooding following Katrina, including the Gentilly home he and his wife Sally built, his music equipment and all his band’s back catalog and merchandise.

“We were in shock,” he recalls. “My wife and I were online at a site she jokingly called yourhouseisunderwater.com and you could see a satellite picture of your house. We just got a new roof put on which was supposed to be hurricane proof. It was perfectly intact but the rest of the house was underwater. We sat there every day for three weeks looking at the house. I was down to all my possessions in a suitcase. We came back in December. It was weird; you see people going through the ruins of their house and you say, ‘don’t go through it, it’s useless.’ But when you’re there, it’s your house, so we stumbled through it and started going through all this wet stuff we couldn’t keep and then we realized you just have to say goodbye to your stuff. My house sat in sewage for three weeks, and every inch of the place, where you laughed and ate and made love, it’s covered with shit and you never want to see it ever again.”

Sanchez tried to figure out another place to live but realized he couldn’t survive away from the culture that’s nurtured him over a lifetime. “It’s really cool to be home,” he says. “The people are really beautiful and they make me very hopeful about the future. The politicians are useless; it’s the same old business. Let’s clean up the city; let’s get the rubble and the dead cars out of here. The people are the reason to be here—for moments like riding my bike with John Boutté to the second-line parade in his neighborhood. He took us to Claiborne and Orleans, a spot where he used to play ball—we came to this playground and there were literally hundreds of cars that had been ruined and abandoned after the storm. People were dancing everywhere and all of a sudden one of the kids in the crowd jumps on one of the cars and starts leaping from car to car. It was amazing. It was a statement, but not a violent statement; It was an expression of frustration, of dancing on the abandoned city. The whole day had been beautiful, white people and black people dancing together, celebrating New Orleans in that very unique way, doing a second-line. Dancing on the abandoned vehicles. Dancing past the destroyed homes. That’s New Orleans, that’s the jazz funeral right before your eyes.”

Sanchez’s friend John Boutté is a great vocalist, one of the many outstanding musicians well known to New Orleanians but not the general public. Boutté has forced attention on himself since 8/29, however, through the sheer emotional impact of his performances, first on the Sing Me Back Home project, with his astonishing rendition of Annie Lennox’s “Why?” but most dramatically with his historic set at this year’s Jazz and Heritage Festival. He whipped the crowd into a frenzy with a hair-raising update of Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” urging them to “scream like you’re in the Convention Center… scream like you’re in the Superdome!” Then, in a climax that will stand as one of the great moments in Jazz Fest lore, he rewrote the lyrics to Randy Newman’s epic “Louisiana 1927,” a move that would’ve sounded foolish if it wasn’t so powerfully appropriate. This time the clouds came in from the Gulf, and when Boutté transformed Newman’s line into a reference to the deadly flood that followed the collapse of the Industrial Canal by singing “six feet of water in the streets of the Lower Nine,” the screams of recognition from the crowd nearly drowned him out. By the next verse it was “12 feet of water in the streets of the Lower Nine” and people were out of their chairs, lamenting and moaning like worshipers at an ecstatic church service. “President Bush say, ‘Great job, great job what the levees have done’,” Boutté sang. “Don’t let them wash us away.”

Since the disaster of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, New Orleans has been more celebrated than ever for its rich musical heritage and unique culture, elements that have bravely soldiered on even as the city’s economy has continued dying. Only a fraction of the city’s small businesses remain open, and every day the dire economic realities cause more to close their doors for good. However, more than a third of the city’s population has returned, and most of those who’ve stayed are determined to make the best of it. They’re living without basic services like public transportation, schools and hospitals, even electricity and water in some sections, but they value the unique experience of the New Orleans lifestyle so much that they’re willing to put up with horrible conditions to stay there.

The flood’s devastation blanketed all sectors of the population with misery but saved its harshest degradations for the inner-city poor who lost everything and are dispersed across the country in a continuation of the Diaspora that began 200 years ago when their ancestors were brought to America as slaves. The musical culture that’s been nurtured in those communities and handed down from father to son, mother to daughter and neighbor to neighbor lies at the heart of New Orleans’ music and is gone, perhaps forever, lost among the miles of blasted, rotting houses, some still containing remains of the dead.

The city has always been known as a party town, a desirable convention destination and sports mecca, but both the Convention Center and Superdome were badly mangled in the storms and the chaos that ensued, and all but a few large corporations have relocated out of town. The party continues, but with far fewer business people and many more adventurers and thrill seekers drawn to this surreal, lawless wasteland.

Increasingly it looks like the music is all that’s left. And the younger, hardier tourists who come to New Orleans for this music have been rewarded with one richly memorable event after another, from the emotional moment of Voodoo Fest last Halloween to the triumph of a New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival that proved the city could pull off a major logistical event with a heavyweight like Bruce Springsteen as its main attraction. The House of Blues is back in business, as is Tipitina’s and other upriver clubs like The Maple Leaf and Carrollton Station. Venues that featured occasional music, like The Kingpin and Vaughan’s, have added additional live music nights to their schedules. “There were a lot of bands that were around town, looking for places to play last November,” says Steve Watson, co-owner of The Kingpin. “We figured it was our job in the recovery to give these musicians work.”

Bourbon Street—years ago the center of the city’s music scene—has devolved into a tawdry T-shirt mall filled with angry, violent drunks and lined with bars featuring karaoke and dumb cover bands doing “Play That Funky Music.” But Frenchmen Street—a bohemian enclave just downriver from the French Quarter—has become a serious street hang over the years and has assumed additional importance since Katrina. The corridor runs from Checkpoint Charlie’s past the Hookah Cafe, The Blue Nile, Cafe Brasil, d.b.a., The Apple Barrel, The Spotted Cat and Snug Harbor. You can’t get a loaf of bread or a light bulb in most New Orleans neighborhoods these days, but the Frenchmen Street corridor remains the most vibrant street-music scene in the country, a stretch where you can hear all kinds of jazz, blues, rock, metal, avant-garde and country music, most of it with no cover charge.

During Mardi Gras, Frenchmen Street was packed with revelers. One of the most anticipated shows was a Mardi Gras Indians jam session at d.b.a. headlined by Big Chief Monk Boudreaux with a John Gros-led group as the backing band, and featuring Anders Osborne, who collaborated with Boudreaux on two memorable albums for Shanachie Records.

Gros began the set, fronting a band with Jellybean on drums, Donald Ramsey on bass and Robert Maché on guitar. Though the songs were written before Katrina, they all seemed to reference the tragedy, climaxing with angry funk rocker “Rat a Tang Tang,” written as a shaggy-dog story about punishing someone who did Gros wrong, but ending up as powerful anti-Katrina mojo. Osborne joined the fray, chanting “Indians, here dey come!” to bring up Boudreaux and add Kirk Joseph to the mix on sousaphone. Monk picked up the chant and, with Jellybean rolling a second-line drum rhythm, the moment was pure New Orleans, a mixed group of black and white musicians hammering out a monster groove that had every body in the place moving. At the height of the piece the PA and all the house lights cut out, but the back line still had juice, so the guitars and drums continued in total darkness, breaking into a wild jam as the crowd picked up the chant: “Indians, here dey come!” After about 15 minutes of this, the band took a break and hasty repairs were made to the power system. In a town where there’s a new band called The Rolling Blackouts, a power failure isn’t going to stop anything. The PA came back online and the show, now lit by candles, resumed with Boudreaux chanting an incantation and other Indians moving toward the stage to answer his exhortations. “Mardi Gras morning well here it come,” Monk bellowed over a hectic pulse. “We’re gonna get together and have some fun.” The words seem simple on the page, but in this context, the lines—repeated over and over with variations—took on a magical vibe as Monk transformed into the shaman, an elemental force that seemed to invoke the furious moment of the storm itself. Osborne took off on a solo flight, then Monk began another chant: “Everybody got soul, soul, soul,” and just as it hit another peak the power went out again. The crowd erupted in excited cheers and whistles, and the call-and-response went on for half an hour with the band wailing in the darkened room and the audience continuing the chant.

“Monk said his voice knocked out the power, and he was just getting warmed up,” a slightly disappointed but still smiling Gros says after the show. “He would have gone all night long.” But the important thing is that the show still happened, even without power, and none of the audience members left unfulfilled. This kind of frustration/reward dichotomy is the reality every New Orleans musician now faces. During Jazz Fest, Cowboy Mouth was in the middle of an intense set when the power gave out. When the subdudes returned to town to debut their new album, Behind the Levee, they played at Southport Hall with tarps covering the stage to keep the leaky roof from dumping rainwater on the band. Meanwhile, in Mid-City, Walter “Wolfman” Washington played acoustic candlelight gigs at Banks Street Bar, and Eddie Bo re-opened the legendary Mid-City Lanes even though the building’s first floor was destroyed by the flood.

Few musicians have permanent homes to return to and many have moved on. Others have made compromises. “I’m not proud of it, but my house filled with water and I sold it as-is, and I’m leaving town,” says Radiators guitarist Dave Malone, who moved to a place an hour-and-a-half outside the city but is looking to find a new place in New Orleans. Meters bassist George Porter Jr. moved his family but is working on rebuilding his home so he can stay in town when he plays local gigs. John Brunious, leader of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, is staying in a French Quarter apartment but doesn’t know for how long. “I love New Orleans,” says Brunious after the PHJB played a stirring set on the back lawn of New York’s Gracie Mansion to kick off this year’s JVC Jazz Festival. “But there’s nothing left there.”

Brunious has seen the neighborhoods he grew up in reduced to rubble and his friends scattered across the country. “The musicians in the PHJB all grew up within a mile of each other, playing together and listening to the great musicians of the past,” says Ben Jaffe, who runs Preservation Hall, the St. Peter Street shrine to traditional New Orleans jazz. “Now the banjo player is living in Houston, the drummer is in Georgia—we’re gonna lose a tradition that’s been part of our heritage. We’ve got to get these musicians back to New Orleans to teach these kids about their heritage. I hate to say it, but New Orleans jazz has been on the endangered species list for a while. There need to be some red flags going up. We only have a small window to do this because we’re losing musicians every day … It’s tragic that the city could lose The Neville Brothers. There’s no way to put a dollar value on the cultural significance of someone like Cyrille Neville or Aaron or Art Neville living here in New Orleans. Those guys participate in Mardi Gras Indian practices, their children are a big part of the hip-hop community, and they participate with the Tipitina’s Foundation in teaching young kids recording techniques.

“New Orleans is the cultural spine of the United States. We are the epicenter. We’re not the South. We’ve never been the South. We were settled by the French, we were settled by the Spanish. We’re an African city, the northernmost point of the Caribbean.”

Jaffe has dedicated his life to keeping this music alive, and the only hopes for the culture’s survival are the singular efforts of people like him and other small-business owners who’ll buck the odds and stay in New Orleans no matter what the future holds. Andy J. Forest, a local songwriter, virtuoso harmonica player and visual artist, has invested every penny he and his wife Gwen could get in a new coffeehouse, Cofféa, which promises to be an important meeting place for local artists. Forest plans to be part of his city’s future. The café is located right next to Piety Street Studio, one of the few studios in New Orleans that continued operating after the hurricanes.

Owner/engineer Mark Bingham watched Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint work their magic at Piety Street on The River In Reverse, ran the mixing board as The Radiators made their definitive studio recording, Dreaming Out Loud, played on John Mooney’s Big Ol’ Fiya and watched Morning 40 Federation develop from a ragtag group of eccentrics into a great contemporary rock band on Ticonderoga.

Morning 40 has become the band most closely associated with the bohemian Ninth Ward neighborhood known as the Bywater, where Cofféa and Piety Street Studios, Vaughan’s, Markey’s, The Saturn Bar and Elizabeth’s restaurant are all clustered around the 19th-century Creole cottages that are among the few houses not destroyed by the hurricanes. Though their music bears little relation to traditional New Orleans jazz and funk, Morning 40 still embodies the sound of the Bywater streets.

“I don’t think you can fake that,” says saxophonist Josh Cohen, “and the reason is because we wrote those songs as we were out getting drunk at the bars in New Orleans, hanging with the people in New Orleans. Of course Morning 40 Federation is influenced and inspired by traditional New Orleans music. How can you not be? The syncopation of the rhythms, the repetition of riffs, hitting the flatted fifth every now and then for that blues impact.

“I think Katrina hitting New Orleans gave us a renewed sense of purpose and reaffirmed that what we’re doing is significant—if nothing else, just to give people an outlet to relieve stress through going out and seeing a show and dancing and forgetting their problems. If we were a bunch of wimps we could’ve moved out of New Orleans for convenience’s sake because it’s inconvenient to live there now, especially in the Bywater—there’s no grocery stores around anymore since Robert’s closed down. There’s a series of inconveniences associated with living in New Orleans, but we’re like spokespeople of New Orleans to some degree, and we realize that it wouldn’t send a good message if we left. It’s also because we have a deep love and affinity for the city. I’ve traveled around the country and there’s no place as friendly as New Orleans.”

Young rock musicians like Morning 40 Federation may in fact be the future of a New Orleans music scene that will be less rooted in tradition and more in keeping with the innovations that originally created those traditions. “To my mind New Orleans has been a transplant scene for the last 15 years,” says Bingham. “The only new stuff coming out of New Orleans music really has been hip-hop, and the local-music power structure ignores that as much as possible. People are still gonna come to New Orleans because it’s a free zone and there’s still going to be hundreds and hundreds of musicians here. The people who are still here will still play Jazz Fest and play the second-line stuff at brunches if tourists come back. There will always be a traditional scene because it’s fun music to play and there’s an ever-modern audience for it. But it’s a double-edged sword to institutionalize the sound of New Orleans as what happened before 1975. If the tourist commission keeps promoting New Orleans music as something it’s not, it’s only a matter of time before it catches up to them.

“The jazz departments in New Orleans colleges are extraordinarily conservative, it’s like ‘Straight No Chaser’ University. And it’s rough, because jazz wasn’t meant to be codified, and when it becomes codified, let’s all go to sleep. Far be it for me to tell people how to promote their city. As a creative center it already exists but, when you have a creative music center, the press and music establishment are the last people to find out—people in power won’t let you write about it until it’s already over. A lot of these bands from my neighborhood, I wouldn’t even know they existed if I didn’t live and work among them. To have the Morning 40s and Moose Jackson and The Radiators and Mooney all in the same camp, Shannon McNally and Jim Dickinson working together, I love this whole weird mixup of things.”

New Orleans businesses have developed vague plans for music in the city’s new footprint, like the 20-acre jazz theme park proposed by a downtown hotel conglomerate, but institutionalizing its cultural history as a museum piece without restoring the communities that supply the young musicians is ultimately an empty gesture. “The people of south Louisiana, New Orleans and all, we all of the spirit,” says Dr. John. “We got strong beliefs in that we ain’t letting them bury us under the Gulf of Mexico. I’m hanging on to every little bit of our culture. The thing I most fear is I don’t wanna see New Orleans become a shuck Disneyland or a shuck Las Vegas.”

For too many, though, New Orleans is unfortunately turning into a war zone. The murder rate is back up and street violence has escalated to where the National Guard and state police have been called in to restore order, and a curfew has been imposed. The city is desperate to keep bad news from reaching potential tourists, but at least one street gang has been mugging pedestrians in the French Quarter and jazz great Hilton Ruiz was beaten to death on Bourbon Street under circumstances so clouded his family has been forced to file a lawsuit to find out what happened.

“All I have in this world,” raps New Orleans hip-hop star Lil Wayne on his latest, Tha Carter II, “is a pistol and a promise … Gangsta gumbo—I’ll serve ’em a pot of it.” In late June, five black teenagers got a taste of that pot. They were massacred in Mid-City, in part of what police describe as a turf war among rival drug gangs. The scenario shocks even beyond the fantasies of the haughtiest gangsta rap. It’s all part of a horrendously chaotic present reaped from the seeds of a past when crime and political corruption ruled the city hand in hand. There is, of course, always hope, and with any luck the inspiration of the city’s music community can help create a new identity for New Orleans, one where “gangsta gumbo” is only part of a rhyme and not the definition of everyday life.

To read more about New Orleans at PasteMagazine.com, check out the following links:

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