“All I can say is this,” he declares: “I was driven to play the music. But I don’t know what some of those gigs sounded like, although I could imagine there were extremitudes between the good ones and the bad ones. I know we had a kickin’ band, because most of the guys was fucked up too. They probably had nights where they was extremely kickin’ and extremely lame. But I can’t say that for sure, because I was just as fucked up as they were.”
By 1989, weary at last of his 35-year addiction, Rebennack went into rehab and cleaned up. (A concert recording from that year, Live At Tipitina’s Mardi Gras 1989, was issued by Hyena Records this past March.) Encouraged by Cat Yellen, his wife and writing partner, he slimmed down by 50 pounds and allowed other influences to expand his sound.
His heritage was always there, and on some projects he allowed it to take the full spotlight. In the early ’80s, he’d played solo piano and let his Longhair roots show on Dr. John Plays Mac Rebennack and its sequel The Brightest Smile In Town (the latter reissued this year by the Cleancuts label under the title Dr. John Plays Mac Rebennack: The Legendary Sessions, Volume Two). By contrast, he employed a full and funky band on Creole Moon in 2001 and the star-studded 2004 release N’awlinz Dis Dat Or D’Udda.
Recently, he’s been trying on a new guise as a song interpreter. He entered this phase in 2000 with Duke Elegant, a set of works by Duke Ellington, which he covered with a modern funk and blues feel seldom applied to this repertoire. Its tight orchestration wasn’t entirely a matter of choice, though; prior to cutting the album, Rebennack had been riding waves of brass and saxes on his first big-band tour. He would have kept sailing in this direction if economic pressures hadn’t run them aground.
“I had a real good horn section, with Red Tyler, [saxophonist] Ronnie Cuba, and [trumpeter] Charlie Miller,” he says. “We got Big Chief Smiley Ricks [of the Wild Renegade Hunters Mardi Gras Indian tribe] on percussion. John Clayton, the bass player, who did the charts on our Afterglow record, did new charts for us, so we were equipped with 27-piece-band charts.
“But at some point the label froze on some of the tour support. Red Tyler sat me down and said, ‘You’ve got to let the horns and the percussion go, or you ain’t gonna have no band. You’re losing your drawers out here.’ Red, being a real friend, said that straight-up to me. Believe me, it broke my heart. I love having the whole crew.
“But I did it, and then we cut Duke Elegant with just the trio. We did it fast, in a cheap studio somewhere in New York. The organ stunk. Nothing worked right. But I’m happy that we did get to do the Ellington stuff.”
Now comes Mercernary, a tribute to Johnny Mercer, whose way with a lyric appealed to Rebennack’s pleasure at finding fresh insights into the material through unexpected arrangements. This is obvious from the opening moments, in which he hums along to John Fohl’s Delta slide guitar. They take their time, savoring their interaction, until the band kicks in; that’s when you realize the track’s title, “Blues In The Night”, is as much about the mood of the intro as it is about the song itself.
“I knew Johnny Mercer was from the south,” Rebennack says. “I knew he wrote with guys like Hoagy Carmichael, but I didn’t know he wanted to write for Broadway plays and got froze out of that scene, so he went to Hollywood and struck pay dirt. As a hustler, I related that that. That’s why I call the record Mercernary — not in a military terminology, but that’s what you got to be. He did almost all the things I’ve had to do to survive. He sang, he played a little piano, he became an A&R guy — he started Capitol Records! Plus he wrote a lot of great lyrics with guys that wrote killer changes.
“The horn thing is very sparse on this record too, and I’ll tell you this: I had so much work to do the week before this record that I was shot when we actually cut it. This is the only record I ever made where the guys would be propping my eyeballs open. I never made a record in worse shape. But you know what? That’s part of reality. I don’t feel bad about this record at all. It just sounds like reality to me.”
Sadly, reality these days is a mixed experience for Rebennack, who labors not only under the effects of Hurricane Katrina on his life but also over the death of one of his twin daughters, Jessica, whose murder two years ago in Los Angeles has yet to be solved. When her name comes up, he sags in his seat, seeming to feel the weight of every day he’s lived over nearly 66 years. Then he addresses the subject wearily, not as a victim but as a philosopher made wiser by sorrow.
“Look,” he begins, “that’s how life is. There’s parts of life that are ugly. You see stuff happen, you watch people on TV, and you start to get blase. Stuff creeps in around you, and all of a sudden something is in your life. You can’t get blase to it.
“So I think about people like Bobby Charles, who wrote ‘Walkin’ To New Orleans’; where he was living, the hurricane just took it out. He’s so miserable right now. I don’t even have a good number on him. I had a number, but I had one of these” — he holds up his cell phone — “and it died. Now, he knows my damn number, so if I hear from that sucker, I’m gonna cuss him out.
“But then I got a friend who’s been back in New Orleans, almost since you could first get back after the storm. He got his FEMA trailer, but they didn’t give him a key to get inside. He worked and worked and got his key, and they said they were going to get his lights on, so he went to pick up one of his kids, and they got back — no lights. The kid has to see now how his daddy’s been living, with candles. That’s just one story in a million. It’s gonna take a long time to put the chunks back together, with no real help coming in, with so much lies being told.
“But,” he adds, “if I put all of my concern over all of the friends I lost, or on the daughter I lost, I could flip out. So I try to do the best I can with all of it, but it’s not an easy road to follow sometimes.”
He looks carefully at the recorder on the table. “The word,” he enunciates carefully, “is ‘convoluted.'”
Robert L. Doerschuk is a former editor of Musician magazine and author of the book 88: The Giants of Jazz Piano.
