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THE DOCTOR IS IN They call me Dr. John, --"Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya-Ya" from the album Gris-Gris,
1968-- Back in 1973 when Dr. John hit the charts with the Allen
Toussaint produced, Meters backed "Right Place, Wrong Time",
I was 11 years old and had a good ear for a novelty song. If it was
weird or different or just plain didn't sound like it belonged with
the rest of the stuff on the radio, I was down with it. "Gimmee
Dat Ding", "Ahab the Arab", or any of Dickie Goodman's
sound collage "interview" singles were fair game. "Right
Place, Wrong Time" drew my attention, not because the song itself
was so odd (it's funky and has cool keyboard work, but isn't odd) but
because the performer, one Dr. John, was definitely not your standard
Top 40 Radio performer. In '73 he appeared on Don Kirshner's "Rock
Concert" and "The Midnight Special". Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. Though Dr. John the Night Tripper was a persona and found some degree of commercial success by being in the right place at the right time (the height of psychedelia), Mac Rebennack the musician was a complete product of New Orleans' post-World War II music scene and its history-steeped mystique. Dr. John conjured images of a New Orleans that, even in 1967, no longer existed-Bourbon Street was already known as a tourist trap by then. But the persona went deeper than that, deep into the history and the myth of N'awlins, the African and Caribbean influences that spawned the Mardi Gras Indians. The music that Rebennack, as Dr. John, performed completed the magic, because it was as serious and authentic as it could be. Rebennack had paid his dues in the clubs and recording studios of New Orleans in the mid-1950s and early 60s, and it showed in his piano playing, his deportment, and even his speech patterns. When personal difficulties and a lack of work exiled him, along with many other New Orleans session men and producers, to the West coast, he found a way to reconnect with the music and the city that had nurtured him. Dr. John the Night Tripper, far from being a gimmick or a novelty, was a way for Mac Rebennack to earn a living as a musician while honoring and coming to terms with both his own past and that of his hometown. THE NEW ORLEANS YEARS Malcolm John Rebennack, Jr. was born on November 20, 1941. His mother, Dorothy, came from Mobile, Alabama and was of Irish and French ancestry, while his father, John Rebennack, Sr. was born in New Orleans. John Sr. owned a radio and electronics shop. By the time he was three Mac was already playing around with the family piano. As he grew, his father nurtured his interest in music, allowing him to listen to the 78 rpm records that he sold in his store. The music Mac heard at his father's store was primarily country and blues, including Hank Williams, Gene Autry, Champion Jack Dupree, and Memphis Minnie. When Mac reached his teens his mother took him downtown to Werleins's Music where he picked out a guitar, and soon he was playing along with records by Lightning Hopkins and other blues artists. He spent hours practicing guitar and piano, learning to play blues and, as he entered high school, rock and roll, which was making inroads into New Orleans. His father was friends with Cosimo Matassa, owner of the only recording studio in town and the man who engineered every New Orleans R&B or rock & roll session cut during the 1950s. Matassa let young Mac hang out in the studio and watch recording sessions as well as running errands. Mac talked to and became friends with many of the musicians, including Red Tyler and Lee Allen. At this same time Mac was attending Jesuit High, a prestigious school with a reputation for academic excellence. Rock & roll music was in full swing, and Mac formed his first band, the Dominos. Still playing the guitar, Mac was popular with his fellow students and soon was thinking about playing music fulltime. He left school during his junior year, playing with the Dominos, taking session work at Matassa's studio, and finishing high school via correspondence course. Mac's band changed names frequently depending on the singer they might be backing , but under any name they were in frequent demand. Soon they were out on the road: "We use to work like forty, fifty days on the road…Baton Rouge, Alexandria, Monroe, Shreveport, go up in Arkansas, work all the cities there. Then we'd go through Oklahoma, come back through Texas, work the Gulf Coast into Florida, and come back home. Just workin' one nighters, except in those days we was drivin' to all them gigs" recalls Rebennack. Come 1958 and Mac, now seventeen, joined the musicians' union local and started to write songs. He and a friend, Seth David, started writing songs together and were able to place a few with Specialty Records through Harold Battiste. In fact, during the period between 1956 and 1963 more than fifty of Mac's compositions were recorded in New Orleans. While many of these weren't heard outside the Crescent City, some were hits throughout the South. Rebennack didn't earn much money for these since the small record companies that released the records often didn't bother paying writers' royalties; sometimes the songs would be credited to the artist or producer. Mac worked like a fiend, though, playing guitar and writing songs, earning mostly union wages. He worked with anyone, black or white, who he thought might have talent. His language became studded with black slang and his guitar playing closely resembled the style of many black players at the time. As the 1960s came along, things looked great for Mac Rebennack's future. Two things happened in 1961 that interrupted the career path that Mac was on. The first was a shooting that occurred at a hotel in Jacksonville, Florida. Ronnie Barron got into an argument with the hotel manager, and Mac sought to intervene. Somehow the gun was fired and Mac's left index finger was struck and damaged. Though doctors were able to do reconstructive surgery on the finger, it took a year to heal, and he was never again able to play guitar as he had before. Mac played bass in some Dixieland clubs on Bourbon Street, but found the music and the touristas hard to take. He began to play piano again and learned to play organ with the help of New Orleans great James Booker. He also became a heroin addict, a habit that dogged him until he was finally able to kick it for good in 1989. The second thing that happened to disturb not only Rebennack's career but also the careers and livelihoods of many in the New Orleans music business was the election in 1961 of Earling Carothers "Jim" Garrison as District Attorney for the City of New Orleans. Garrison put the screws to club owners, cracking down on gambling and prostitution and revoking licenses. Clubs began to close down because their owners couldn't afford or didn't want the trouble. Mac recalls that "The club work that use to be so plentiful evaporated between '61 and '63. It seems to me mosta the clubs he was padlockin' was the joints that was somewhat available for gigs." In a 1998 interview, Mac called Garrison "A real asshole…they fucked up whole chunks of the city to make some money, they tore down half of the clubs to put up the hotel we're sitting in right now." The result was a diaspora of studio musicians and producers, most of who ended up in California. After a stint in a Fort Worth hospital for drug rehabilitation, Mac went there as well. Mac's old buddy Harold Battiste was now working in Los Angeles as a producer for Sonny and Cher, and he hired Mac to play with the duo on the road as well as getting him session work. Rebennack worked with a number of high-profile L.A. producers, including Leon Russell and Phil Spector. By 1967, when Jim Garrison was arresting and prosecuting Clay Shaw for conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, Mac Rebennack was constructing the new persona that would take him from session musician and producer to psychedelic rock icon: Dr. John. |
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©Copyright 2001, Jazzitude, Marshall Bowden |
Dressed
resplendently in a long robe, adorned with bones and crosses, trailing
brightly colored feathers and glitter dust wherever he went, the Doctor
cut a singular figure. To me (and a good many others), raised in the
Midwest with no exposure to the music or culture of New Orleans, he
was a novelty act. This perception of Dr. John persisted into my 20's,
when I was listening to jazz and began to listen to R&B and other
forms of music that had influenced the rock performers of the 1960s
and 1970s. Somehow, I couldn't see Dr. John as an authentic representative
of the New Orleans music scene. Though his music was intriguing and
solid, his outward appearance and Night Tripper persona just seemed
like a gimmick.