The Book Cooks Two-Headed Doctor: Listening For Ghosts in Dr. John’s Gris-Gris
Spirit of a mask The music sounded old and secret yet in its artifice it was newborn. Nothing was straightforward. Gris-gris, an LP of seven songs credited to Dr. John the Night Tripper, emerged on the Atco label in early 1968. In those days it was possible to buy US import records in London, for a high price, before they were released in the UK and that’s exactly what I did. More than fifty years later the card of the cover is splitting apart and one of the labels is stained but I still have my original copy. Seventeen years old when I bought it, I reflect on it now as one of the significant markers of a life spent investigating music, sound and listening. Even then there were scholars who knew that Dr. John the Night Tripper and Dr. John Creaux, as he styled himself in the songwriting credits, were the same person, alter ego of a New Orleans guitarist and piano player named Mac Rebennack, prolific since his teenage years in the fecund rhythm & blues scene of Louisiana. They would also have recognised the name of Harold Battiste, a New Orleans producer, arranger, multi-instrumentalist, political thinker and entrepreneur who had somehow become, of all things, musical director for Sonny & Cher, of “I Got You Babe” fame. Those same scholars would have easily identified from the cryptic sleeve notes of Gris-gris a Dr. Poo Pah Doo of Destine Tambourine as Jessie Hill, singer and tambourine player, whose 1960 hit – “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” – was a crossroads of New Orleans characters, styles and haunts. Hill’s signature record connected together Cosimo Matassa’s studio, producer Allen Toussaint, an intro courtesy of Fats Domino’s bandleader Dave Bartholomew and a New Orleans proclivity for articulate nonsense, sound poetry and deep cryptolectic traditions, elsewhere found in the work of Huey ‘Piano’ Smith and the Clowns, Little Richard, Louis Armstrong, Lee Dorsey, The Ikettes, The Meters, Papa Charlie Jackson, Louis Dumaine, Eddie Bo, Danny Barker, Larry Williams, Smiley Lewis, Louis Prima, Earl King, Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry, Professor Longhair, Art Neville and the Wild Tchoupitoulas. Fascinating as this was, I found my decision to write a book about Gris-gris somewhat mystifying and not particularly easy to reconcile with my other activities. The record was important to me in my teens and early twenties, faded into the background, then drew me back from time to time as life changed and flowed on, even as I cast off childish enthusiasms for other growling mountebanks and their musical fantasies. Somehow its perplexing aspects grew in my mind without permission. Since I was already thinking about problems of authenticity and appropriation in relation to African diaspora music and its imitators (of which I was one) I am sure I asked myself, how much of this is genuine, has depth, how much is fraudulent, how much is an invented world? I was already self-conscious and perturbed by my personal relationship to Black music, even though it was the fashionable thing for a white teenager in the 1960s, at least until 1968 or thereabouts. The longer I studied Gris-gris the more its medicine show mysteries deepened and as I accumulated practical and historical knowledge about music, along with experience in recording studios as a musician and producer, the questions of its making began to obsess me. Partly this was because it played an early part in my own musical evolution. For some years in my teens I played guitar in blues bands. In 1969 I took up flute and around the same time acquired a mandolin, both instruments to some extent chosen because of Harold Battiste’s unusual arrangements for Gris-gris. Experimental and commercially unsuccessful though it was, Gris-gris was the record that established Dr. John’s name and persona, transfiguring him from Mac Rebennack, a busy New Orleans session musician and songwriter in his late twenties, to a mystifying, charismatic and somehow ageless figure from the Louisiana swamps, steeped in voodoo, hoodoo, Creole and Cajun history and the rich heritage of New Orleans cultural life, not least its rhythm and blues tradition, piano styles and unique second line rhythms. The record has haunted me ever since, partly because it is in itself hauntological, spooky with revenants, zombies, snuffling hogs, semi-human birds, spectral atmospheres, half-languages, whispers and intimations of a ghostly New Orleans, but also because of its mysteries, from the wilfully obscure sleeve notes, the musical style seemingly from nowhere, the flamboyant names given to its players, the subject matter of its songs and Raphael’s cover photographs of Rebennack decked out in amulets, snakeskin and furs, reddened by fire, haloed in smoke. How did it come into being, given the bathetic circumstances of (as is often reported though not necessarily true) being recorded in spare studio time donated by Sonny & Cher of “I Got You Babe” fame? Why was so much of its instrumentation so difficult to identify and how did it connect New Orleans – from eyewitness accounts of dances performed by enslaved Africans in Congo Square, Lafcadio Hearn’s rewriting of voodoo legends, the nineteenth century music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, venerable Mardi Gras practices and the network of brilliant musicians who had performed on records with Fats Domino, Henry Mancini, Little Richard and Sam Cooke – to Gold Star recording studios, the Wrecking Crew, Harry Partch, Les Baxter, Scatman Crothers, Disneyland, Sun Ra, Zora Neale Hurston, Frank Zappa, Bing Crosby, Ornette Coleman, Japanese ghost stories and the ghostly echoes of Phil Spector sessions? Gris-gris was recorded at speed, mistakes left in, in studio time booked on the strength of Harold Battiste’s fragile business arrangement with Sonny Bono. The studio was a Shambala of popular music history, Gold Star in Los Angeles, its cast of characters a check list of predominantly New Orleans singers and musicians both celebrated and obscure, a web of connections that I will attempt to unpick in the pages that follow. One of its biggest questions is how a record like this, aimed at no discernibly specific audience other than what Rebennack disdainfully called the psychodelics, could develop as it did from a collaboration between a white musician previously working largely in the Black music world and a Black musician at that time expending much of his energetic talent in a white music world. At the height of Rebennack’s involvement with the New Orleans rhythm and blues scene he was caught between the segregated Black and white branches of the musicians’ union; as for Battiste, he had joined the Black Muslims in 1959, privately becoming Harold X. What seems likely is that each of them had a distinct vision of what they were doing, driven by different forces; the final results wrestled a convergence from two parallel lines. Remarkable as it was, this particular collaboration survived for only two records – Gris-gris and Babylon – before falling apart acrimoniously, either because of financial and contractual maneuvering or Rebennack’s drug problems, depending on who tells the story. Following that, Dr. John’s career slid downwards until righting itself and staying more or less constant for the rest of his life. The persona of Dr. John was both gift and curse, a new identity that allowed him to be what he had never wished for yet was accepted as a career with good grace, a strong dose of mischief and, one assumes, considerable gratitude. Following his success in Los Angeles Battiste eventually moved back to New Orleans, where he took up teaching, returned to live performances and devoted himself to community support until his death in 2015. Given the disappointments and disillusionments of his relationship to the business aspect of the music business, the role of educator was probably a more fulfilling place for him to end up. Not long after my first hearing of Gris-gris in 1968 I began to think of it as both puzzle and infinitely problematic hoax. In June 1970 I attended the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music, a three-day event which turned out to be the inspiration for the Glastonbury Festival. Aside from the lure of the experience itself, three days of rough living in an atmosphere of almost total disorganization and the opportunity to hear groups like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the Mothers of Invention, I was hoping to hear a live set by Dr. John the Night Tripper, as he was billed. By the Sunday night, rain was pouring down, there were things to do back in London and the schedule was completely adrift. As it turned out, Dr, John with Shirley Goodman and Tami Lynn finally took the wet stage at dawn on the Monday morning. Somehow it seems appropriate that I missed my one chance to see him perform while he was still encased in the mystery of who or what he was. Just to add to the labyrinthine nature of the story, the event poster for the festival used a photograph of cornetist Bunk Johnson with the Original Superior Orchestra, taken in New Orleans in 1910. I would guess that the photograph was taken from the revised 1968 edition of a book called A Pictorial History of Jazz, from page seven, the first double-page spread to feature photographs of the earliest New Orleans jazz bands. So it was coincidence but nonetheless a contribution to the strange ancestral interconnections of this story. Why did I even start this project? In October 2017 there was a sudden lull in work for two months and for some reason I took that opportunity to start raising the ghosts of Gris-gris. Some of the record’s enigmas have responded relatively easily to research; others remain resolutely insoluble. Since all but one of the participants have died and all existing first-hand accounts are contradictory, obfuscatory or self-serving, some part of the enigma will remain intact until another, more tenacious detective comes along. Perhaps they never will, because, after all, is it really that important to drill down into such fine detail given the more serious issues that haunt us all? In response to that I would argue that the record and its making complicates and illuminates narratives of how race, along with attendant issues of music as it is obliged to function within capitalism, continues to distort understandings of how music is created, who owns it, who can speak for it, how it is sold and how it inhabits human feelings, sense of identity, communality and conflict. Perhaps we can learn something from it, particularly given the alarming resurgence of white supremacism as the twenty-first century unfolds. To some degree the record acted as a mask but like the wooden mask in Kaneto Shindo’s film, Onibaba, the shape changed to become one with the face it disguised. At the heart of the mystery was the recording studio itself, a site of magical potential where fantasies can be embodied as music, then dispersed through physical networks and through the ether, primarily radio in the 1960s, now streaming and similar distribution pathways in the present. As if the plus and minus of two electrical connections had been made I realized, listening forensically to the cavernous echo, eccentric mixes and vertiginous edits of Gris-gris, that the studio could bring into being those worlds we otherwise strive for in imagination and hope. Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true; Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, Volume IV.
© 2024 David Toop
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