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Coco Robicheaux: Spiritland |
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Features
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Wednesday, 18 January 2006 18:40 |
Coco Robicheaux
Spiritland
Orleans Records
By John Sinclair
Spiritland. If this place could be located geographically, you'd probably find it in the low bayou land of southern Louisiana, in the former swamps back o' town in New Orleans or out in the steamy river parishes where the mosses hang from the trees and the mist rises from the land and the water.
But Coco Robicheaux's Spiritland is more likely a mental province, a shadowy place situated somewhere in the mind and viscera which is connected with the world of the ancestors by a thin electrical thread of spectral energy.
Better yet, fix the one within the other: the Spiritland of the imagination rooted in the bayou landscape and the humid precincts of the Crescent City. There you have a quick paradigm for the creative world of Mr. Coco Robicheaux and precisely where he's coming from.
A native of Ascension Parish, Coco has been a fixture on the New Orleans scene since way back in the game. He's a founding member of the Professor Longhair Foundation, and that's his bust of 'Fess that greets you when you walk into Tipitina's. His braided ponytail reaches well below his waist, and you get the idea it's been growing unimpeded since the early 1960s, which definitely attests to Coco's status as one of the original--and obdurately enduring--adult hippies of the Deep South.
It's all there in his music, too. The ten original compositions that make up his album have been written and scored out of the circumstances of Coco's life experience, and each directly reflects an aspect of the unique Robicheaux reality. The result is an extremely auspicious debut disk by a man whose music has long screamed out for someone to record it.
* * * * *
Coco Robicheaux was born Curtis Arceneaux on October 25, 1947, as the artist puts it, "on the side of the road somewhere in California, outside this little town called Merced. This was kind of different because all my cousins were born on the kitchen table at my grandma's house in Ascension Parish--my relatives have worked the same land there for generations.
"My dad was in the Air Force, he travelled all over, but when I was born my parents were on vacation in California. My mother always said, 'When you were born, three wise men came.' It turned out that they were Mennonites with long beards who lived in these trailer homes outside of Merced.
"My great-grandmother, Philaman ('Gran') was a hoodoo woman, she was real big in our little part of the world, and she kind of used me as her altar boy. She'd only travel in a buggy--automobiles were regarded as the Devil's contraptions. She didn't believe that kids should have money of their own, so when we did little chores for her she paid us in eggs, and we'd take 'em into town and trade 'em for candy and things.
"I played my first professional gig in Gonzales, Louisiana, in Ascension Parish, at a sock hop in the high school gym in 1959. It was right before Christmas, and my cousins didn't have any shoes, so one of them wore my grandmother's shoes to the gig. It was $3 for the gig, $1 for each of us, and all the Cokes we could drink.
"I was playing trombone and singing, and my cousins played trumpet and drums. I got into show business because some of my other cousins were musicians--Van Broussard was my cousin, and also Grace Broussard, who was with Dale & Grace that had a hit record with that Don & Dewey tune, 'I'm Leaving It All Up To You.' We did Van's song, 'Winter Wind,' which was a big hit over in there.
"I started high school in Gonzales, then went to Slidell. I was playing the slide trombone in Slidell before I started playing slide guitar. I was with a little band called the Rebels, and then I was with a group called the Phyve for quite a few years, playing trombone and singing lead. We had a big horn section and did all the James Brown numbers.
"We played this place on the old Covington Highway called the Bayou Lounge every Friday and Saturday night for years. We had our own radio show on WBGS--that's Bill Garrett's Station--and a TV show over in Mississippi, but the guy hated the way I looked and got rid of us.
"That's when I made my first record, for PeeWee Maddox on the J&B label out of Long Beach, Mississippi. This was in the early mid- 60s, and the record was 'I Lost My Girl' b/w 'I'm No Good.' We made another record here at Cosimo's studio called 'The Frog,' but a singer named Bobby Reno came in and put his voice over our tracks and had a little local hit with my song. We had a whole album's worth of stuff recorded at Cosimo's that disappeared somehow.
"I moved into New Orleans when I was 17 and started playing guitar soon after that. In fact I found my guitar one day when I was walking down Bourbon Street--I found the head of a guitar on the street. I picked it up and thought about hanging it up on the wall. So I kept walking, and about a block later I found the broken-off neck and fretboard from the same guitar. I picked that up and kept on walking, and after another block I found the crushed and mutilated body of the guitar.
"So I took it home and put it all together, hooked it up with fishing line--you could get a whole reel of fishing line for what you'd pay for a set of strings. Then I met this dude who told me he could show me 500 songs in 5 minutes, and he sat down and showed me the IV-V-i progression, which opened the whole thing up for me.
"After I started playing guitar I kind of hit the road for a few years. I went out west as a migrant worker, picking weeds in Texas, and ended up picking cherries up in Washington state. San Francisco blew me out--this is in 1966, when it was really getting hip--and I moved there in late 1967 or early '68.
"I left San Francisco in 1969 after the People's Park thing in Berkeley. I was at the head of a column of thousands of people with a pickaxe in my hand--my job was to bust up the concrete so they could plant trees and flowers there--and I thought I'd better get out of town before they caught up with me.
"They'd been calling me Coco Robicheaux since I was a little boy--it was the name of the kid who got snatched up by the loup garou, and they would call kids that when they would be doing wrong, to scare you. But I started using it full-time after some dude stole my ID in San Francisco and did a bunch of terrible crimes under my name. This guy plagued me for years with all the bad stuff he did under Curtis Arceneaux, so I just called myself Coco after that.
"I came back to New Orleans in the early 70s and just hung around a lot. I wouldn't play around town too much, but I'd go out to these country places and travel around to Texas and Florida. I got wiped out by Hurricane Allen over in Texas, by the Mexican border, and all I had left was my car, so I moved on to Key West and was living behind Sloppy Joe's bar in my Lincoln Continental. This was in the early 80s, and I had a band there called Mojo Hand, in Key West.
"I came back to New Orleans again just after Mardi Gras in 1992 and decided to concentrate on my music, writing songs and playing around with whoever I could. I signed up with Orleans Records two years ago and got hit by a car the next day, which kind of held up the project for a while, but once I got back on my feet it started moving along pretty good."
* * * * *
After playing around town at places like Checkpoint Charlie's, the Dragon's Den, and Margaritaville for the past couple of years, working with guitarist Kenny Halliday and with Irene & The Mikes, Coco has developed and consolidated an impressive body of original material and, thanks to producer Carlo Ditta, gained the opportunity to record it with a gang of splendid musicians of his choosing.
For his core group of players, Coco lined up the legendary Earl 'Stereo' Stanley on electric bass & organ, Kenny Halliday and Michael Sklar on guitars, drummer Gary Reiger and Professor Longhair sidekick Alfred 'Uganda' Roberts on congas. Tommy Malone (lead) and Mark Dobriner (rhythm guitar) contributed to the mix; Rick Allen and Diz 'Honey Bear' Watson provided piano and keyboards; Spike Perkins, Doug Therrion, and James Singleton are heard on bass; and J.J. Juliano (drums), Bro. DuDu and Ms. Dahlia (percussions); and Peter Nu (steel pans) fattened up the rhythm section.
Nancy Buchan's melancholy violin and Smokey Greenwell's soulful harmonica provide first-class accompaniment in both solo and obligatto spots on several selections, Sonny Schneidau is here and there on piano, and the inestimable Boo LaCrosse provides a couple of tasty trumpet solos. Tenor saxophonist Tom Fitzpatrick and The Roadmaster Horns (courtesy of Walter 'Wolfman' Washington) are definitely on hand, joined by the forceful Mr. Hart McNee on baritone saxophone and bass flute.
The perfect backing vocals were provided by local luminaries Irene Sage, Lenny McDaniel, Holly Bendtsen, Allison Miner, and Coco himself, under the leadership of New Orleans R&B legend Ms. Geri Hall, lead female voice for Huey 'Piano' Smith & The Clowns.
* * * * *
With the long months of sessions at Chez Flames Recording and Carlo Ditta's Orleans Records studios finally completed and Keith Keller's mixes freshly finished, Coco sat and played me the tape of this program, dropping the following bits of illumination in the process:
"'Walking With The Spirit' and 'Spiritland' are what I call "3:33 songs," because they seem to come to me right at 3:33 a.m. 'We Will Fly Away' and 'Cryin' Inside' are in that same time zone. Two of these songs came to me exactly at 3:33, one at 3:30, and one at 3:00 a.m."
'Pit Bull'--"I got that line about whammer-rammers from these two old dudes I saw walking down the street one night. One of them grabbed the other one by the arm and said, 'Look out, they got one a them whammer-rammers in there--he hit that fence and about give me a stroke.'"
'Broken String'--"It seems like nobody really deals with the simple problems of working musicians, like the story in this song. That's Sonny Schneidau on piano and Smokey Greenwell on the harmonica."
'We Will Fly Away'--"This comes out of what I think of as the Cajun back-country melancholy that's so deep. It features Michael Sklar and Tommy Malone on lead guitars and Diz Watson on keyboards."
'Working Man'--"This is kind of a country & western reggae song with Rick Allen on organ, Mike Sklar on lead, Gary Reiger, Spike Perkins, and a trumpet solo by Boo LaCrosse. I wrote this after I worked on building a house for this dude in Florida, and when we got done he wouldn't even let us come on his property--and we had ,built his damn house."
'I Knew Without Asking'--"I wrote this while I was laid up in bed recovering from being hit by an automobile, just thinking of all the other places I'd rather be. It's dedicated to a woman named Heven--I had just completed the song when I met her. It was recorded in one take with Jim Singleton, Gary Reiger, Dahlia, and Michael Sklar. Singleton was in a hurry, so he wrote the part out, ran through it once, said 'let's cut it', and then split."
'Saturday Night Before Christmas'--"Another melancholy Cajun ballad. They like to hear one of these once in a while, but not so often that they'd just sit there and blow their brains out. Kenny Halliday and I played this 'live' on your radio show on WWOZ last Christmas time, I believe."
'Cryin' Inside'--"I wrote this for Mighty Sam McClain. It was arranged by Cranston Clements and sung by Mighty Sam at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, and it wound up in a documentary movie called Up Jumped Moses about this cat Moses Dillard. Somehow Moses Dillard heard a recording of Mighty Sam's performance from Montreux while he was in his prison cell and used this song with his prison choirs at the Tennessee State Penitentiary, so the choir appeared singing this song in the film about Moses Dillard."
'St. John's Eve'--"This piece includes field recordings I made at Bogue Falaye at midnight on St. John's Eve in 1993. St. John's Eve is a big night that honors St. John, or Legba as he is known in the African church."
* * * * *
So here it is, dear friends--the long-awaited debut disc by the one and only Coco Robicheaux, man of many stories with voice of honey under gravel. To this writer's ears, Spiritland speaks eloquent testimony to the depth of feeling and breadth of vision Coco brings to his music.
Coco's songs are fine, juicy slices of Deep South life served up on handsome, well-made platters of musical sound, with Coco's voice poured over, under and around them like a thick dark Cajun roux. And, as my friend Jerry Brock says, "Coco can do this music as well as it's ever been done."
I know one thing: once you give this record a play, you'll come back to it time and time again, and you'll like it better and better with every spin.
--New Orleans
July 1994
(c) 1994, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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