Bobby Lounge: I Remember The Night Your Trailer Burned Down : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

I can't tell you much about mysterious Mississippi spitfire Bobby Lounge other than this: That's not his real name, and he made an unforgettable entrance at this year's New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, wheeled onstage by a nurse in an iron lung (actually a huge steam-room cabinet). Then, chugging beer in obvious perfect health, he turned into Bessie Smith, Jerry Lee Lewis, Flannery O'Connor and Bob Dylan (the lyrical-surrealist edition) all at once, playing blazing barrelhouse piano and belting outrageously vivid blues from the far fringes of Southern life. This debut album has everything I saw at Jazz Fest but the lung, including the twisted recipe of love "I Will" (mix bondage and Popeyes chicken; stir vigorously), and the parade of unnatural wonders in the rolling-boogie epic "Take Me Back to Abita Springs," a kind of "Desolation Row" exploding with Little Richard-style piano and starring, among other things, an infant flamenco dancer, a singing burro and the queen of England's underwear. Lounge has a very high opinion of himself: He closes here with the gospel-piano sunrise of "I'll Always Be Better Than You." But in your heart, you know he's right.