Consultations with the Doctor

By JAY COCKS

Funk explained, second line defined, boogie-woogie exalted

Listen to Dr. John Plays Mac Rebennack and you hear one of the best albums of the year, solo piano at its funkiest and most soulful. Take in one of the Doctor's appearances on his summer concert tour and you get a brilliant initiation into one of the most enduring American musical traditions: rhythm and blues, New Orleans-style. Mac Rebennack--known since 1963 for his professional appearances as Dr. John--has been a first-class musician, a cabin-class superstar and a keyboard boogie man, keeping the tradition of his native city alive and treating it proud. He is also a garrulous archivist of local musical lore and a dexterous spinner of tales. In his sunny town house in Manhattan's Chelsea district, the Doctor, 40, is the man to consult on matters of great musical history and moment.

On Sound. "New Orleans music is Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Cuban and Mardi Gras Indian. Combine that with natural street rhythms like Bo Diddley or the hambone little spasm bands that play boxes and garbage-can covers in the streets and you have a piece of the thing. Add parade drums to that and you have a little more. The Mardi Gras Indians incorporated all this rhythmically. On Mardi Gras day the Indians would wear costumes--a lot of feathers--and come out in the morning to greet the sunrise and all move toward the center of the city. As they went, they'd challenge one another to see whose dancers were the best dressed and whose music was best. Then they'd all converge in this one area. That's the peak."

On Style. "A lot of the music I play is music the Mardi Gras Indians do. The guys that did this thing--Professor Longhair, Smiley Lewis, Guitar Slim--died off. There was nobody to keep it alive except the few guys who worked with them. Me, James Booker, Huey Piano Smith, Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint. I guess I would call my own style barrelhouse with blues and jazz mixtures. Rock 'n' roll too.

"I like music that's rhythmic and funky. Today that word's misused completely. Originally, funky meant 'stinky.' Like, 'Your mother is goin' to spank your funky butt if you don't clean up your act." Now funk means something that is sharp and looks nice or smells good. Funk to me means more what it was originally. We have what we call this second line. More bass drums involved in the rhythm. I'll play the low bass notes with my left hand to give the illusion of a bass drum, and I'll kind of pound the piano to get the feeling that the drums are there. As the rhythms become tense they become more nervous. As they relax themselves they become more laid back, and that's where the really funky side comes in."

On Youth. "My mother had twelve sisters or so and my father had four or five brothers, and almost all of them played music. My aunts and uncles would always come by and we'd just sit down and jam. At four or five I could play a boogie on the piano.

My father was in partnership with Cosimo Matassa, who owned the only big recording studio in New Orleans. In the '40s they would deliver records to black hotels that had juke boxes in the rooms. My father would give me all the old 78s. When I was a teen-ager he got me a work permit so I could work clubs. He knew I'd sneak out and not go to school anyway. So rather than have me get a prison record, he'd just say, 'Well, go ahead and do it if you're going to do it.' I went on tour in the South at 16 with bands like Frankie Ford and Jimmy Clanton."

On History. "I used to play in real bucket-of-blood-type rooms--a lot of trouble, shootings, stabbings. In most places, the club owners didn't make their money on music. They made it on gambling, prostitution, drugs and drinking. The underworld has been bringing drugs in and out of New Orleans for more than a hundred years. When I took heroin and stuff off and on through the '50s and into the late '60s, it wasn't something I did to feel something on a higher level. It helps play ers to put a wall between themselves and an audience where people are hitting each other on the head with bottles.

"There was some clubs you could play twelve hours straight with no break. That was called working a jitney job. One guy at a time would go to the bathroom and somebody would cover for him. There was a lot of strange things back then.

"There was a stop-off point when the music of the '60s came in and was unrelated. The Beatles came in. And in 1962 the D.A., Jim Garrison, padlocked a lot of clubs. Maybe 500 to 1,000 musicians were instantly put out of a means of a living."

On Education. "When I was a kid I'd go around with my father, and once I met this guy behind a bar room called the Pepper Pot, sittin' on a log, smokin' a joint or somethin', just relaxing. I was a little kid coming to bother him, and he just took time to tell me things about music. I didn't even know it was Professor Longhair.

"His music was different. It sounded like a combination of calypso and rumbas and Latin mixed with rock and funk and rhythm and blues. He didn't talk like anybody else I had ever heard. You'd say to him, 'What do you call what you're doin'?' and he'd say, 'Double-note crossovers and over-and-unders.' He called the bass drum 'the foot propeddler.' He'd show up at work some nights during the '50s wearing a tux and tails with a turtleneck shirt and an Army fatigue cap with a watchband on it. He'd wear white gloves and have a big plate of food like chicken or crayfish put on the piano. While the band warmed up he'd be right on stage, eating. When he was ready to play he'd take off his white gloves, which were all soiled with grease, and make people laugh and have a good time. He was maybe a bigger hero in New Or leans than all the people who made it."

On Keeping On. "There were two main differences between New Orleans and the rest of the country. People danced more and danced looser there. And people had a rapport with the music. They wouldn't like it if you just played one thing. You had to give them everything. It isn't that way now. I won't ever go into the French Quarter any more. You can walk to all the clubs and hear maybe two good bands. It's like all the guys that are coming up now gotta go further and further out of New Orleans to make a Living."

-- By Jay Cocks.

Reported by Denise Worrell/New York

With reporting by Denise Worrell

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.