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Deceased Thursday at the age of 77, Malcolm John Rebennack Jr. was a former Catholic schoolboy who turned himself into a bona fide high priest – and a lifelong ambassador for the gritty and scintillating groove of New Orleans.
Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, Dr. John – the name and characterization that he adopted in 1968 with the publication of the emblem Gray Gray The album, based in part on the story of a 19th century voodoo priest, won 15 Grammy nominations and six wins over a career spanning more than 50 years. He overcame drug addiction, spent a long time in prison, knew witches and invented his particular way of speaking English. (The title of his 1974 album Par excellence Bonnaroo half Creole slang and half of his singular patois, and gave the name to one of America's most successful music festivals – whose founders, majored in New Orleans by worshiping Dr. John, are probably surprised to be mentioned in most memorabilia of icon music.) In 2013, he accepted an honorary doctorate. from Tulane University, making him a double doctor.
Mac, as his friends and most locals in New Orleans called him, worked all his life with a row of great cats, none as cool as him, including Mick Jagger, Willy DeVille, Buddy Guy, Ringo Starr, Frank Zappa, Gregg Allman, Rickie Lee Jones and Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys. And he left behind an impressive catalog of music, ranging from his first sessions at Cosimo Matassa's groundbreaking J & M studio – Ground Zero for rock & roll – to his glorious fusion of swamp furrows and psychedelism in his legendary character. Night Tripper to his many clever and sincere tributes to the luminaries of the Great American Song Book. It's hard to pick a few, but here are a few to start with.
"Storm Warning" (1959)
In 1959, the magazine inserts that the daily New Orleans Times-Picayune Malcolm J. "Mac" Rebennack, Jr., 17, "A boy with 4000 songs", dedicated to entertainment and other light meals, has the theme "A boy with 4000 songs". (The New Orleans Archives Researcher, James Karst tweeted a screencap June 6). In fact, the teenager – still a student at the Jesuit High School and, in fact, a recent winner of his talent competition – was already selling his compositions to local record artists and playing the guitar in sessions. at the J & M studio of the engineer Cosimo Matassa, where Little Richard had recently cut "Tutti Frutti". "Storm Warning", released on Matassa's Rex Records label, was a worrying roar of guitar with a zany and crazy saxophone part and a propulsive rhythm. It was also Mac's official debut as an artist and he made an announcement: to paraphrase another Southern fixture, there was a boy coming. He was going to be a gun son.
"Bad neighborhood" (1962)
This rhythmic and bluesy novelty, accompanied by sound effects from billiard balls, was a collaboration with Ronnie Barron, a classmate at Mac Rebennack High School, recorded under the name Ronnie and the Delinquents. (Together, they also tasted an adorable paean in Morgus the Magnificent, the host of the B horror film show, awarded to Morgus and the Three Ghouls.) That's when from a fight after a concert with Barron that Mac had a finger known His decision to switch from guitar to piano was taken, which prompted him to relocate to Los Angeles, where musicians from the New Orleans such as drummer Earl Palmer and composer-arranger Harold Battiste were doing well. Battiste, the musical director of Sonny and Cher, proposed the character inspired by Dr. John, inspired by the voodoo priests, to Mac: they wanted Barron to do it, but he was bound by a recording contract that forbade him the task . Thus, Mac Rebennack has become the inimitable Dr. John, Dr. John Creaux at his recording credits. (As for "Bad Neighborhood", Bob Dylan included it in the episode of his "Theme Time Radio Hour" issue of the 2009 luxury edition Together through life.)
"I'm walking on guild bursts" (1968)
Written for Rolling stone In 1999, Tom Moon declared "I Walk on Guilded Splinters", last title of Dr. John's album, 1968. Gray Gray "Everything you want in voodoo music." Fifty-one years ago, who even knew that they wanted voodoo music? Ahmet Ertegun, fortunately, who released the first album of the newly created doctor on Atco's Atlantic affiliate (and several later albums of psychedelic roots sprinkled with dust, though this was quoted by Mac in his 1994 autobiography). Under a Hoodoo MoonErtegun fell on the roof when he heard this shouting, "How do we market this boogaloo shit?") It was the New Orleans team in exile evoking the myths of their city by rocking & # N & # 39; roll: Harold Battiste producing, John Boudreaux on drums, Ernest McClean on guitar, Shirley by Shirley & Lee and Tami Lynn singing, using his employer's studio, Sonny & Cher, proved useless . "I walk on guild bursts" was a supernatural spell whispered on congas and supernatural clichés, a potion of LSD, black cat bones and rum for the loa. "We were looking for an unusual and textured sound that cats have achieved," wrote Dr. John.
"Roux Mother" (1968)
Also from Gris-grisSpooky and spooky "Mama Roux" was created in collaboration with New Orleans local R & B star Jessie Hill, who is probably best known for her 1961 hit "Ooh Poo Pah Doo", for writing and playing with Professor Longhair (though sadly together) and being an elder of the sprawling musical family of New Orleans, which includes guitarist Fats Domino Walter "Papoose" Nelson, jazz trumpet player Melvin Lastie and Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews, among others. Hill was in L.A. making his solo soul album seriously underestimated Naturally, and fell in with the band of New Orleans expats working together to put Dr. John in the world. With an incantatory background voice that seems composed to invoke a spirit and that highlights Mac's distinctive accent (listen to how he chews the word Queen"Mama Roux" is deeply and funkily in New Orleans beyond her whispered references to spy boys and second lines. The resounding Afro-Caribbean percussion shares ancestry with the founding rhythms of music – or more recent connections with clang and bang sounds on tracks like Dave Bartholomew's "Shrimp and Gumbo" or the version of "Iko Iko "of Dave Bartholomew of course, affix his own stamp).
"The Patriotic Flag-Waver" (1969)
After Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita in 2005 and after BP's oil spill on the Gulf Coast in 2010 (or maybe it had not really calmed down between the two), Dr. John was politely fervently expressed, mourning the injury suffered city and beloved state and condemning the negligence of corporations and governments. He joined the protest marches and made music in a timely manner – the 2005 EP Sippiana Hericane and the award-winning 2008 album at Grammy City that cares forgotten, the first an elegy and the second a fight song. For an ongoing post-Katrina documentary project that gathers portraits of locals with brief statements written on their hands, he scribbles "Croque me my drawers BP" on his. But it was not his first foray into political thought. 1969 Babylon, his second album, he delivered "The Patriotic Flag-Waver", a boring and funny game that did not give any fist. A choir of children comes and goes, singing "My country, it's you", interrupted by a lyrical invective and a sarcasm in a warm country-soul groove. "Stick all the Communists in one neighborhood, terrorize their children, it will really feel good," he sings unhurriedly. "Send the draft cards back to Vietnam, if they protest there, I'm mad." Under a Hoodoo moon, he writes, the climate of pessimism in the latter part of the sixties brought him to comment. "(It was) the year of the Tet offensive and the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.," he writes. "… In his lyrics and his music, this album reflects these chaotic days."
"Mardi Gras Day" (1969)
The title of Dr. John's "Mardi Gras Day" or "Every Mardi Gras Day" was borrowed for a documentary about the Black Carnival in New Orleans and an episode of the HBO show Treme. His sound – published a few years before Mardi Gras' first real Indian funk album from the Wild Magnolias tribe – not only mimics the general chaos of a Fat Tuesday, brass and shouting, but also the music of the band. call and response sing songs sung for at least 100 years by black men and women who sew elaborate costumes with feathers and pearls and parade through city streets on certain holidays. "Mardi Gras Day" – as his rendition of "Iko Iko" a few years later, Indian singing became a hit R & B for many artists – is only one of the many deeply understood tributes of this culture by the Dr. John. "This guy has the whole story of New Orleans music in his head," said HBO's David Simon at New York Times, a euphemism, in 2010.
"Iko Iko" (1972)
During his career, John has dedicated albums honoring the great American pop and jazz composers: Duke Ellington, Johnny Mercer and Louis Armstrong, all sincere and talented. But some of his finest moments away from the scintillating psychedelic funk have been his back and forth in the machine to go back to his old hometown: that rhythm & blues of New Orleans on which he was perfecting himself. ("Goin 'Back to New Orleans", his 1992 similar project, earned him the award for best traditional blues album.) The first time he did it was for his 1972 album. Dr. John's Gumbo, his fifth, recording a series of Crescent City classics and bringing together many alumni of Cosimo Matassa's studio. The list of outstanding titles includes a superb version of Professor Longhair's iconic "Big Chief," as well as Mac's own interpretation of "Iko Iko," inspired by Mardi Gras.
"The song was originally called" Jockamo "and contains a lot of Creole patois," writes Dr. John about Iko Iko in the cover notes of the album. "Jockamo means" jester "in the old myth. It's Mardi Gras music and the Shaweez was one of the many groups of Mardi Gras to dress up with far-off Indian costumes and become Indian tribes. The tribes dragged along Claiborne Avenue and took their juice while preparing for a performance and a 'second line' in their own style at Mardi Gras. It's dead and gone because there's a highway where these lands were. The tribes were like social clubs that lived all year for Mardi Gras, collecting their costumes. Many of them were musicians, players, prostitutes and pimps. "
"Junko Partner" (1972)
The highlight of Okra could be "Junko Partner", with his horny rascal solo and his introductory parade drums slipping into a lazy, swaggering leg. Later, recorded by famed New Orleans pianist James Booker, from Dr. John's to Clash, this song was a standard of the underworld in Rebennack's hometown. "It was a New Orleans classic," he writes in the Okra liners, "the anthem of the drivers, whores, pimps, disadvantages. It was a song they sang in Angola, in state prisons and whose rhythm was even known as "prison beat". "
"The right place at the wrong time" (1973)
Working with Allen Toussaint in 1973 meant that Dr. John got the young and emerging producer group, the Meters. It's at this point that things, as Mac would say, deserve to be great, and that the narrow and creepy groove of "Right Place Wrong Time" earned her her first and only success in the Top 10. In a review for Rolling stone In 1973, Jon Landau was convinced that the Meters were "the largest R & B studio group since Booker T. and MG" and that, moreover,The drummer enius Joseph & # 39; Zigaboo & # 39; Modelist directs the song with more power than we have the right to expect. "It sizzles and provides the paradoxical line that resonates with so many people:" My head is in bad shape, "the doctor diagnoses," But I'm having such a good time. "
"Such a night" (1973)
Also from In the right place "Such a Night" is still funky but sweet, a bit of a Toussaint signature – and also a look for Dr. John's love for Moon and June's pop song writing, with return lines as "sweet confusion" in the moonlight. He interpreted it, of course – in a big pink bow tie, huge sunglasses and a sparkling dinner jacket, in the manner of a crazy parlor singer – in the setting from the group's 1976 Last Waltz epic concert. In 2017, he joined the 40th Anniversary tour celebrating the show.
"Makin 'Whoopee" (with Rickie Lee Jones) (1989)
Dr. John won his first Grammy for this duet from his sweet and chic collection of jazz and pop standards: the Night Tripper and the Duchess of Coolsville, grunting and cooing in a happy contrapunto on a resounding piano. They were well matched, two hipster locals from the sordid streets of L.A. who had found there a common friendship and creative ground in the seventies. When Jones stayed in New Orleans to write in 1981 The Pirates, Mac told him who was the main actor to see (James Booker) and how to keep annoying spirits out of his apartment with a little gray-gray. Years later, the two men made magic with this playful and tender partnership, in a mutual appreciation of the collection of American pop songs. Afternoon of the death of Dr. John, Jones tweeted: "Bye Mac. I still remember the day we met. I was 23 years old. I saw you arrive on La Brea Avenue, strolling in your Mojo protective gear, with the snakehead cane, beret and patchouli oil … we drove this summer into your break, on the canyon, to return to the canyon. then, ten years later, you asked me to sing on your record and we had a great success together. You are leaving now. I'll have you holla later.
"Revolution" (2012)
In 2012, Dr. John accepted the invitation of Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys to work together on a project that would be hailed as a kind of return to the form of those Atco days with voodoo juice. Locked, celebrated by critics as such, he won the Grammy Award for best blues album in 2013 and ranked 15th on Rolling Stone's Top 50 list. "Filled with vintage R & B muscular grooves, feverish solos, psychedelic arrangements and oracular mumbo jumbo, this is the craziest record Rebennack has made in many years, "Will Hermes wrote. With groovy soul horns and groovy, Farfisa is subject to heavy violence, as the title indicates, though the words on dissent and the call for action are vague , it's the good doctor honed like a razor.
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