DR. JOHN: Witch Doctor Makes A House Call

The New Orleans landscape has been radically transformed in the half century since dixieland bands blared from passing riverboats and led the raucous funeral parades that wound their way back from the cemeteries. Congo Square has long since yielded to a maze of office buildings and apartment complexes, Toulouse Street has become a haven for strip joints and barhopping stockbrokers, and Louis Armstrong is dead and gone.

Yet New Orleans' last musical renaissance, its late 1950's and early 1960's burst of rhythm and blues, lives on in the hands of such adept practicioners as Dr. John, Allen Touissant, The Meters and The Wild Magnolias. Although Touissant may be the most influential musical force and Th.e Meters the most progressive, it is Dr. John who best embodies the true spirit of New Orleans rhythm and blues. .

As soon as he prances on stage, supported by a gnarled, shoulder-high walking stick and a spirit-drenched palm frond, Dr. John signals the revival of both the ritual and musical excitement of New Orleans style rock and roll. He looks suspiciously like a witch doctor out on a house call. He wears eJ normous platform sandals, a flowings patterned robe, belts, beads, bracelets,^ bells and a mask of make-up, all weight-§ ed down under an enormous head° dress of feathers and braids. He also sports giant saddle-bags of glitter, which he periodically hurls into the audience.

The rest of the Doctor's band appears almost as strange. The rhythm section looks like head-hunters, the horn section resembles savage Indians and the girl vocalists seem to have stepped out of a Gauguin painting. Backstage there were enough steamer trunks to outfit a Broadway play. Most of the robes, capes, top-hats and feathers are caked with dust, giving them a gloriously seedy, hand-me-down appeal.

"Don't you go and think we're some glitter-rock sandbox band," Dr. John says in his gritty, hoarse growl, "We're just in keeping with an old line New Orleans tradition. Music was always part of the celebration - either a funeral or a house party. So it was just natural to dress up for our end of the festivities."

Born Malcolm John Creaux Rebennack, Dr. John was immersed in the New Orleans musical scene long before he emerged as a solo artist with a stage name cppped from a notorious 19th century voodoo king. Even the title of Dr. John is steeped in local Lousiana lore.

"The original Doctor John reigned over the voodoo rituals in the late 1800's," the latest incarnation said as he unravelled some of his costumes back-stage. "He was sort of a male Marie Laveau. I'd taken an interest in New Orleans history and discovered

that I was living in the same house that the original Doctor John had owned. But the name's not as important as the person - 'cause lots of spiritual leaders have used the name Doctor John.

. "It's really part of a New Orleans tradition that everyone uses nicknames. Alvin Robinson (Dr. John's guitarist) is called Shine and there's lots of others -Sugar Boy Crawford, Tough Lip Tommy, Buck^thead Billy, Ooh Poo Pah Doo (Jesse Hill) and of course Fess (actually Professor Longhair which is yet another alias for Roy Byrd). My two names were Doctor and Professor, but since I didn't want to cramp Fess, I chose Doctor."

Dr. John's career began early - so early that he had to choose between school and session work. "I was in the 7th grade when I was playing in an after hours club from 3:00AM to 8:00PM," he recalled. "Then I'd have to take a streetcar and get to school by 8:30AM. By mid-day I'd be falling asleep. Finally I gave up the books and just played music.

"We'd play in a juke-joint 'till daybreak," Dr. John said, "then jam 'till noon and then we'd be warmed up enough to start our sessions at one o'clock., At that time of my life I could go five days without sleeping and not feel the least effects. But I think I burnt myself out, 'cause now if I go more than a couple of days I collapse. It's that third day that gets me. Sometimes I'm not sure where I am."

Fortunately for the abundant collection of musicians, 1950's New Orleans was a wide open town. Afterhours clubs were wedged into every available basement, alleyway and sidestreet. There was the Pepper Pot, whose house band was Professor Longhair and His Shuffling Hungarians;, The Cotton Club, where Dr. John's band played, and a slew of other exotically named late night joints - The Tijuana, The DewDrop Inn, The Pimlico, The Dream Room, Vernons, Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Surfari Room and The Robin Hood. It was an ideal environment for the loose, syncopated rhythms of New Orleans R&tB.

."They just don't have gigs like that anymore," Dr. John lamented as he repaired a bronze amulet that hung around his neck. "At a place like the Club Forest it was cool to smoke weed on the bandstand cause everyone was doing it in the audience too. Of course one New Year's Eve the FBI backed a big truck up to the back door and took the whole club off to jail - band members, customers, even the bartender. After everyone left they found more pills stuck under tables and joints stashed in chairs than you'd ever seen."

What really stimulated the musicians was the constant competition. Like the famous 1930's sax battles in Kansas City and the blues guitar matches in 1950's Chicago, these "cutting contests" insured the survival of only the most exciting and commercially adept bands. As early as 1949, Professor Longhair earned his "Four Hairs Combo" a job at the Caledonia Inn by chopping up Dave Bartholomew's band.

"You rarely had the privelege of being the house band," Dr. John said, "Cause you could only gig at a club until somebody would bring in another band that would cut your head off. Then you'd have to go cut a band at some other club. Unlike today, it was very competitive - the cutting contests really helped you be up on your axe.

"Never a night went by when there wasn't a battle of saxophones between Lee Allen and some other hot chopper -most likely Sam Butera. Maybe they'd clown around too. Like Lee would run into the bathroom and come tramping out with some ladies' under-drawers on his horn. But it was serious too. I'll never forget the gre^t battle of the blues between T. Bone Walker and Guitar Slim. It was the greatest cutting contest of all time. They just had 'em on the floor. But it happened every night."

These all night "jitney-jobs" stimulated as much endurance as competition. The New Orleans bands frequently had to play as much as twelve hours of nonstop music in an endless series of dank, smoke-filled clubs. This put a premium not only on energy but on versatility as well.

"Our band once got hired to play a place in Southern Louisiana called Grand Isle," Dr. John said, savoring the memory, "and we never stopped blowing all night. So when I had to pee, the band would switch around and cover for me. That's the way you learned to play all the instruments in the rhythm section 'cause you never knowed who'd have the loose bladder. You didn't have to be a hot dog, just good enough to keep the crowd dancing. That was the barometer. If there was no fussing and fighting then you knew you were holding up your end. As a result, I'm comfortable with all sorts of instruments."

Compared to the loose all night jams, a highly structured atmosphere prevailed in New Orleans session dates. This was largely due to prevailing commercial attitudes. With the optimum length for a hit single no more than two and a half, or three minutes, a song had to be condensed to the most standard saleable form: a brief opening statement, a series of verses and choruses and a final instrumental hook to end the song. Even with these limitations, an especially successful instrumental song ("Ooh Poo Pah Doo," for example) would be extended to two parts, one for each side of the 45.

44 We'd play in a juke-joint til daybreak, jam 'till noon and be warmed up enough to start sessions at one o'clock. I used to go

Time limits were not the only consideration. "What really makes New Orleans music hard to record," Dr. John explained, "is its complicated rhythms. My natural instinct is to play multi-complex sub rhythms and in between rhythms - but they're so complex that they're not really commercial. As a result, we could never play our free-for-all parade style and make it work on an album. To communicate to a commercail audience, we had to use simpler, more concise grooves."

Sometimes to let off steam after working on these precision arrangements all day, the New Orleans musicians would engage in what Dr. John euphemistically refers to as "after hours" records.

"When the singers chops were blown after singing eight or ten hours," he said, "I'd take over and scat sing some pornographical numbers 'till the band tuckered out. I'd sing for the pimps, whores, dope dealers, street thugs and gamblers who used to hang around the studio late at night."

Born and raised a Homan Catholic, it was through New Orleans music that Dr. John became involved in the underground world of the occult. For years he had quite a reputation as a sorcerer, reputedly putting hexes on rival musicians and unfriendly neighbors. But now that he has just been made an official Doctor of Hoodoo and Witchcraft in the State of Lousiana, Dr. John takes a more lofty approach to such spiritual matters.

"Like most people I was taught to be scared of the hoodooists," he said as he leafed through the rough draft of a book he is writing on the occult. "But when I had the opportunity to play music in the church and hang around with the guys I saw that they weren't no poison specialists. They were curing people.

"What attracted me was the music. In the hoodoo church music is a big part of the ritual. Especially when the saints come down and possess one of the people. The music helps a person not get hurt when he's mounted by a spirit 'cause the drums and the mesmerizing effect helps keep everyone alert. You see, it's an insult for a spirit to mount someone who's not alert. He might say, 'Well, I'm gonna show this son of a bitch and do him in.' When you're possessed you don't fight it. You have to give up your personality and accept the spirit's force."

As an accredited priest in The Religious Order of Witchcraft (formerly known as The Chapel of the Innocent Blood), Dr. John is quick to defend the hoodooists against charges of malpractice (or perhaps we should say malpossessiop).

"Let's face it, hoodoo has been misused, especially when it's been underground for all these years. All those psychic readers and palmists used to fake it, 'cause a real reader don't need no deck of cards. He would read you just with his finger tips. I used to work for those faith-healers in the churches where they paid folks to come up with crutches and throw them away like they was cured. That sort of thing gave hoodooists a bad name.

"But most of 'em were doing good works. They're an alternative to the big churches that stuck a plate under your nose and made you sit in the pew. The hoodooists worked with poor people who could use the medicine the hoodooists had. There's lots of people not eligible for medicare who need cures for rat bites and everyday ghetto problems without spending a fortune buying candles and herbs from their local spiritual leader and other hustlers."

This is where Dr. John's book (as yet untitled) comes in. It promises to be a layman's encyclopedia of witchcraft, a standardized compilation of hoodoo home remedies. It includes instructions on how to make potions for religious rituals, herbs for illness and trinkets and charms for good luck.

"It basically teaches people how to make all the hoodoo stuff themselves," Dr. John said as he displayed a trunkful of herbs he had brought on tour with him. "This way people don't have to pay a fortune for something that might be talcum powder. We tell them what to use, and most of it is common household stuff they could find in a health food store. Basic items like salt, water, candles and incense is all you need."