Road Music, Chapter Six: New Orleans, Louisiana

For this series, we’ll be following Paste’s own Curmudgeon, Geoffrey Himes, as he sets out on a massive road trip across the South, exploring musical landmarks, traditions and history along the way. Sixth stop: New Orleans, LA.
The biggest mistake out-of-towners make when they visit New Orleans is spending all their time in the French Quarter. The Quarter is not without its charms, especially if you move away from the touristy section by Canal Street to the more interesting blocks near Esplanade. But to really taste the full flavor of this fabulous city, you have to get out in the neighborhoods. Take a streetcar; take a bus; drive your rental car; walk, but do it.
The French Quarter is where the locals go to turn their art into paying jobs. The rest of the city is where the locals turn their non-job lives into works of art. It’s in their gardens and yard sculptures. It’s in their strange sense of fashion. You can taste it in their cooking. You can hear it in their music. This quotidian aesthetic is present all year long, but it’s unmistakably obvious during Mardi Gras season.
Mardi Gras gets a bad reputation because of the French Quarter, which fills up with drunken frat boys (both current and former) shouting and puking. It’s an entirely different experience out in the neighborhoods, where the parades are more of a family event, as people of all ages share the curbsides and compete for the plastic beads and fairground toys tossed from the passing floats. All generations are represented, and the alcohol consumption is more about getting a happy buzz on than drinking oneself stupid.
Many families in the city own a Mardi Gras ladder. It’s a step ladder with a seat for small children at the top. Attached to the seat is a bar for keeping the kid safe and small rubber wheels for rolling the ladder through the streets to your favorite spot. Some even have tubes for funneling beads down to a bag below. There’s no better magnet for beads than a cute young child on a ladder, and if you position yourself right, you can benefit from the spillover. And there’s no better symbol for Mardi Gras in the neighborhoods than these ingenious contraptions that allow the whole family to indulge in some silliness.
The nighttime parades, which take place in the days before Fat Tuesday itself, are the best parades. If you’re standing on St. Charles Avenue when the parade turns the corner from Napoleon Avenue, the lights suddenly pierce the darkness and reflect off the sides and ceiling of the long tunnel formed by the ancient live oak trees on either side. The flambeaux, African-American men carrying gas-fueled torches and shiny reflectors, light the way.
Then come the riders on horseback and the first of countless marching bands. The bands range from high school bands playing simple parts to college bands playing more complicated arrangements to pros moonlighting near home. But the songs, whether recent R&B hits, pop standards or traditional carnival tunes, are always given brass band treatments. And they always have choreography to go with the music. Most of these aren’t professional musicians; they’re doing it for the joy of being in a parade watched by thousands of people.
The floats are the main attraction, decorated with fiberglass figurines of iconic creatures or current celebrities, often with satirical lampooning. From the lower and/or upper balconies of each float, masked revelers toss favors into a sea of beseeching arms and the cries of, “Throw me something, mister!” Of course, most of what’s thrown are necklaces of those cheap, colored beads.