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Mardi Gras Mambo: Dr. John & The Meters |
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Sunday, 05 February 2006 00:03 |
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Mardi Gras Mambo
Dr. John & The Meters
St. Bernard Civic Auditorium, February 29, 1976
By John Sinclair
The fourth annual Mardi Gras Mambo, featuring native sons Doctor John and The Meters, blasted off in the St. Bernard Parish Civic Auditorium, a dreary 3500-capacity hall distinguished only by its open dance floor, on the Sunday before Fat Tuesday, and by the time the festivities ground to a halt five hours later the capacity crowd had been turned every way but loose by the nitty-gritty Mardi Gras sounds laid down by the funky Doctor and his second-line pals.
Filling the dance floor with their incredibly costumed presence--at least two-thirds of the colorful mob was in full Mardi Gras drag, including half a dozen buddies decked out as a six-pack of Dixie beer--the almost all-white, freaked-out, under-30 audience danced, shouted, and generally partied its collective brains out in fulfillment of everybody's wildest public fantasies, and the musicians had as much fun as anybody in the place.
Doctor John, of course, is the number one ambassador of Mardi Gras music--his efforts go back to his first album, Gris-Gris, in 1968, and the Wild Indian anthem "Mama Roux"--and his attendance at the Mambo was deemed so absoluteIy necessary to the success of the event that the Doctor was moved to perform even though he had been laid up with a disappearing throat for a week before the gig.
His road band had been taken off job alert and lay scattered all across the country, so when the day came to set out the second line feeling, the mighty Meters consented to back up the Doc as they have so many times in the past, augmented by the Dr.'s regular organist Ronnie Barron (also visiting his home town for the holidays) and vocalist Robbie Montgomery, the former Ikette, who was flown in from L.A. for the occasion.
The second line feeling, it should be noted here, is the essential component of all Mardi Gras music, and the direct source of both hot jazz and classic rock & roll (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Larry Williams, Professor Longhair). It's the original beat of the street, the sound of the stomp-down second-liners, the kids and young men who march right up behind the Wild Indians on Mardi Gras Day, beating on tambourines, blowing on whistles, clapping their hands and chanting back the responses to the shouted calls of the Indian Chiefs, stepping out down the middle of the street on this one day in America when people can "do what they wanna" right out in the open.
All the Meters--Arthur and Cyril Neville, Leo Nocentelli, George (Freak Man) Porter and Joe (Zigaboo) Modeliste--and Doctor John (original moniker: Mac Rebennack) came up in the streets of New Orleans, following the Indians every Mardi Gras Day from the cradle on up. The Meters play straight-out rock and roll now, basically, with Nocentelli's very modern rock guitar lines predominating, but they continue to be based in New Orleans and keep in firm touch with their roots in the second line.
Dr. John himself has specialized in the art of the second line sound since he started recording, and at this time of year he's so deep into it he can't talk about any thing else.
The real Mardi Gras Mambo is in the streets of the 3rd Ward, uptown, on Mardi Gras Day, but the feeling can be reproduced any time in any place where people are gathered to get down and have a good time--provided, of course, that the musicians on hand are steeped in the beat of the street.
At the St. Bernard Civic, at the other end of town from the 3rd Ward, in a white-dominated neighborhood, with a young white audience milling around inside a standard suburban service center milieu, the simple presence of Dr. John and the Meters gives the evening the authenticity and energy it needs to turn everybody royally around, and the spirit of the streets is transmitted directly to the children of the shopping centers.
The music is the same that you've heard on their records, played with all the intensity of the moment, but Mardi Gras in New Orleans takes it all into a higher dimension: into a place where the music lives and breathes the way it was meant to, and where--as in the streets--it is immediately rewarded with shouting and dancing, and people partying their asses off. Which, one is forced to conclude, is exactly what it deserves!
--Detroit
April 1976
(C) 1976, 1997, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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