“Earl Palmer tried to pull my coat,” he says, referring to the great R&B and early rock drummer who had left New Orleans several years earlier and become a fixture in L.A. studios. “He took me on a long ride because I’d said something wrong to one of the contractors on a session. I’d never met a contractor in my life, so he tried to wisen me up. But I just didn’t get how things was done out there, even though I did have lots of connects.
“[Saxophonist] Plas Johnson had been there for years already. He was like an institution, doing all the hip rock ‘n’ roll hits, doing the Pink Panther for Henry Mancini. And Harold got me in through Phil Spector and, a little bit later, Sonny & Cher. Sonny was actually cool with me, but Phil was wacked out. He was scared of everything. He was the only guy I knew that had a gay bodyguard. I mean, he had a bodyguard that wouldn’t hurt a fly. Now, who the hell hires a gay bodyguard? The only way he could deal with life was if he wasn’t afraid of his bodyguard. And his ‘wall of sound,’ to me, wasn’t nothin’ but padding on the payroll.
“I have no idea why I got these gigs,” he sighs. “Maybe people used me as an oddball or just because I was from New Orleans, because I kept running into people I knew. I saw Gaynel Hodge [co-founder of the Platters], who wasn’t from New Orleans, but he was one of the guys that told me about California before I got there. Gaynel was from Etta James’ family, so that helped a little bit. I saw Boogie Daniels, this tenor player that used to work with Charles Brown and wrote ‘Earth Angel’ with Gaynel. From Paul Gayten being out there, I got plugged into different gigs. Lee Allen, who was out there at the time, got me some gigs. So there was extremes of negative and positive.”
Through fellow expatriates John Boudreaux and Dave Dixon, Rebennack found a community of New Orleans refugees in the Crenshaw district of southwestern Los Angeles. Being part of this enclave helped Rebennack stay, in his word, “sane.” It also got him thinking about finding a way to inject popular music with a massive dose of New Orleans folklore as well as musical tradition.
He explored the concept through club appearances with artists who shared his nostalgia for what they’d left behind. Jessie Hill, who wrote the R&B classic “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” and played drums with Professor Longhair and Huey “Piano” Smith, joined Rebennack in something they called the Zu Zu Band.
Eventually Rebennack came up with the Dr. John concept. And when Battiste offered him some studio time Sonny & Cher hadn’t used up on one of their sessions, he used the opportunity to transform that vision into music.
The result was Gris-Gris, a kind of free-form incantation conjured by Hill, Plas Johnson, Battiste and Bob West on twin basses, percussionist Richard “Didimus” Washington, Shirley Goodman (from the Shirley & Lee duo that had hit with “Let The Good Times Roll”), and others who had wandered westward, far from home. The meaning of the title — which referred to small sacks of herbs, stones, oils, and other items, as well as fingernail clippings and sweat from those who carried them for protection — was understood by everyone at the session. Their roots in New Orleans bonded them together and, in a sense, protected them, too.
As he had done countless times, Rebennack made all the logistical and musical arrangements. Once the tape began to roll, his intention was to join the band in backing his old friend Ronnie Barron, for whom he had conceived the Dr. John role. But Barron couldn’t make the session, so Rebennack, with some reluctance, took over the lead vocals.
“Didimus gave me the balls to do that,” Rebennack says. “I told him, ‘I can’t do this, man.’ He said, ‘If Sonny Bono and Bob Dylan can sing, your ass can sing this shit!’ So I tried it, and next thing I remember, we were cuttin’ it.”
From a marketing standpoint, this was a lucky roll of the dice. Music drenched in voodoo references, expressed in murky textures that had more in common with free jazz than commercial pop, and delivered by a black artist in exotic and vaguely threatening attire didn’t exactly fit the demographic labels were targeting. But the same outfit on a young, long-haired white guy scanned closer to the hippie aesthetic. To consumers who had no trouble with Carnaby or Haight Street imagery, Dr. John wasn’t that strange at all. In fact, his arrival couldn’t have been timed better, though Mac didn’t know it at the time.
“I just had some cockeyed desire in my heart to preserve something of the gris-gris music,” he explains, “because even before I left New Orleans, a lot of that was kind of shattered. It wasn’t negative; it was just spiritual people that had different understandings of roots and herbs and what people call homeopathic medicine — people that had different ways of doing things than the AMA.
“Personally, I don’t see nothin’ wrong with it. I never look at it like a religious thing; it’s just a spiritual understanding. So that’s how I saw it; I didn’t perceive it as marketing or anything like that.”
What they came up with was unlike anything being tested on the charts at the time, which explains why Ahmet Ertegun, head of Atlantic Records, hesitated for a year before releasing it in 1968 (it didn’t chart). When he did, though, the impact stamped Rebennack with the Dr. John identity and kicked off his career.
His sole top-10 hit, “Right Place Wrong Time”, came five albums later, in 1973. For decades, its momentum helped him persevere through his lingering drug habit. Most of the time he could perform well enough, though he as he remembers it now, he couldn’t always get his stage chops together.
