Sunday, August 16, 2015



New Orleans or Nah Orleans

     I was born in New Orleans, in 1951.  I grew up in tight cultural orbit of The Crescent City with WTIX The Mighty Six-Ninety and WYLD radio as soundtrack, listening to Jock-a-Mo before it became Iko Iko, Ernie K-Doe, Fats Domino, Al Hirt, Irma Thomas (whom I met 24 years later in Memphis, along with her musician father, Rufus Thomas of Funky Chicken and Walking the Dog fame), and young Aaron Neville (Tell It Like It is), and many others, while in my childhood bedroom or while fishing from the T-pier dock by my house near Biloxi's Back Bay, pullin' crabs outa da net, hooking a flat flounder or watchin for the shiny specs of speckled trout glimmering in the sun, and reelin' in hardheads, saltwater catfish, and trying to avoid getting gored by its sharp top fins, and pray if you ever step on one that you're not barefoot or wearin' thin sole tennis shoes because you won't ever forget it again.

Sometimes I felt far from home but most of the time felt as if I'd never left New Orleans and was only on an extended nature vacation in Biloxi fit for a kid.

     Music can be that, be a lifeline to the soul, and New Orleans radio never let me down.  I once even won a tiny Japanese transistor radio from The Mighty 690 in a contest.  Visiting my grandparents in New Orleans regularly also helped me stay close to my roots, including trips to Audubon Zoo with my Papa and eating at the tiny counter at the casual and cramped nearby Camellia Grill afterward with him not far from the zoo and park and from Tulane and Loyola Universities.

     It didn't hurt the cause that I learned to play pool in New Orleans on a 1930s antique Brunswick-Balke-Collender table Papa kept in his aboveground basement that my mother had learned to play on.  In a way, it felt like I had New Orleans itself as grandparents. Nor did Biloxi let me down, the small city having absorbed the laidback vibe of its Big Easy neighbor while savoring its own coastal savoir laissez faire milieu.

     Musically, I inferred that the whole world sounded like Allen Toussaint and Professor Longhair and what a disappointment to later learn otherwise.  I also half-assumed the whole world got to hear "Carnival Time" by Al Johnson every springtime while it blared from my transistor's tinny speaker and later felt the world had been cheated by half because it hadn't.

     Not only was New Orleans in my blood, but I was also in its blood, whether it wanted me there or not. I wasn't an antibody or even a free radical but happily just along for the ride. I eventually came down with Beatlemania, also through the groovy graces of WTIX, and in its throes evolved 'uniquely', as did most of the rest of the world.

     I moved back to New Orleans as soon as I could, not just for Mardi Gras, but for college, studying among other liberal arts the observable effects of legal alcohol for 18-year-olds.  I rode the Freret Jet city bus at night down Freret Street to the Quarter and back, once standing next to one of the original Ink Spots coming home from a gig still wearing his tux, and next to who knows who else in this city of perpetual characters. 

     I only stayed a year then but moved upriver to Baton Rouge within drunk-driving distance and enrolled at Louisiana State University, where I graduated, and later moved back To New Oeleans for another unique year, all this being before designated drivers became common.

     My father, from the Mississippi Delta, speaking of music, once lived upstairs in the French Quarter across from famous Court of Two Sisters restaurant.  My mother grew up in New Orleans a block away from Notre Dame Seminary and the Archbishop's residence near the end of the St. Charles streetcar line at Carrolton and Claiborne Avenues. This intersection is where the streetcar turned around and began making its way back uptown to Canal Street, across from which began the living time capsule of the French Quarter.

     My Nana, who perfected a gumbo for which I still have the recipe if not the touch for a perfect roux, later ate lunch with Pope John Paul II at the Catholic rehab facility next to the seminary while she mended a broken arm. She said it was an alright lunch but wasn't particularly impressed with His Holiness, which she expressed as a half-hearted shoulder shrug and slight tilt of the head sideways.

     She'd known actually spiritual rabbis in her life, you see. Rabbi Feibelman at Temple Sinai, about a five- minute drive away, was wise, quiet and humble and didn't have to wear garish costumes in public and rode in a Buick, with no need for a bubble-top rabbi-mobile. Her tastes were more down to earth, but the baked chicken was pretty good, almost up to her own kitchen standards cooked in her venerable huge gas oven and stove which weighed about as much as a small military tank.

     My Papa, whose industrious hobby was raising prize-winning camellias in the deeply dug fertile ground, layered in historic Mississippi River flood events across the whole city. He was vice president of Standard Coffee Company on Magazine Street for 30 years, including the summer of '63 when Lee Harvey Oswald, aspiring patsy or not, worked there as a machine oiler.

Standard Coffee's owners, the two Reily brothers who also owned Luzianne Coffee, extolled him as a true marketing genius because he expanded their regional door-to-door coffee and home goods sales business from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. That gave him license to argue loudly and repeatedly with the brothers in board room meetings, leaving the rest of the staff outside the room wondering if Mansfield was going to be fired this time. Luckily for Papa, the Irish Reilys loved their Jewish sales savant and they never tired of each other.

     New Orleans, for me, beyond the family connections and stories, and the old city's Strange Times On The Bayou mystique, had a 'Fast Times At Contact High' flavor and was a peculiar delight of a city with its extrovert originality reinventing itself every morning-after. I wouldn't tire of meeting new people, for five minutes or five years, because the city's free-riffing casual candor of trusting individuality was alive and thriving. No Two People Alike could just as easily be the city's real nickname, which remains The City that Care Forgot.

     The Crescent City will always be the wind-beneath-my-whims and precious
behind-the-levees dry land of my birth and of a few risky years of teenage debauchery and intrigue, including my secret Fat Tuesday forays with best friends driving from Biloxi to New Orleans at Mardi Gras, and its lush black subtropical bottom river-wash soil, the kind my Papa's blue-ribbon prize camellias grew in, may yet end up holding my own dusty grounds.

     My thoughts of post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans are these:  I'm happy for the people who still get to live there and visit there and wish them all very well.  I'm very sad for The Diaspora who were forcibly displaced and prevented from returning if they wished to or otherwise couldn't.

     The corporate buskers of the new city, as nice as it may be getting, have created more or less a Nah Orleans, rather than a new New Orleans.  Nah Orleans is a partly big Potemkin village alcohol-laden hologram and represents a commercially driven social-engineering feat of partial ethnic-cleansing, though someday the city could regrow its soul, but only if The Diaspora are properly mourned and redressed.  Talk about a need for a Right of Return.  And an argument for better levees.

     I wish for a new generation of leaders, who aren't driving drunk with absolute bottom-line corporate power, to help New Orleans regenerate its former more diverse self, keeping the positive changes, but retrieving its soul, because the city and its people deserve it, especially including The Diaspora storm refugees.
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-- In 2nd photo: 
Harry Tervalon, Sr., right, with his longtime grill-mate, Wildred Batiste.  Tervalon, who worked the first day Camellia Grill opened, stayed there and worked for another 49 years.

-- If I Didn't Care, by The Ink Spots -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvwfLe6sLis

-- Carnival Time, by Al Johnson -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccu2_MRMF5Y

-- Lower 9th Ward Blues, by Al Johnson -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvXjNfAXc_k

* "The legendary Joe Banashak held auditions for his Minit Record label at WYLD in the fall of 1958. The line-up included the cream of the crop of New Orleans R&B artists—Irma Thomas, Aaron Neville, Ernie K-Doe, Jessie Hill, Benny Spellman and Allen Toussaint, who became the arranger for the label. WYLD was the harbinger of the black music scene in New Orleans".

http://www.offbeat.com/articles/radio-history-black-radio-and-new-orleans-music/


                                                                   Mother and daughter