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"One of the best records I ever made -- and I made a bunch -- was Gumbo," says legendary producer Jerry Wexler of Dr. John's aptly named 1972 album of classic New Orleans R&B covers. "I've done a lot of stuff with superstars -- Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles -- but that thing is in my heart. I did it with Mac [Malcolm Rebennack, Dr. John's real name] in L.A., but everybody on the session was from New Orleans, including the background singers.
"New Orleans is portable," Wexler contends, "if you have the musicians."
Wexler also spent a lot of time in that city, as both a fan and a record man, and he speaks fondly and frankly of his experiences and the city's musical heritage to Rolling Stone. For further enlightenment, seek out the many records he made there with Guitar Slim, Professor Longhair and Ray Charles, among others. But start with Gumbo.
How did you get all of those New Orleans session men out to L.A. for Gumbo? I know a few had already emigrated there, like Dr. John.
Many of them were in Dr. John's band, so they were traveling together. It was just a question of the background singers, which included Shirley Goodman of Shirley and Lee ["Let the Good Times Roll"].
I'll tell you an interesting thing. I wrote the liner notes, which purport to be a Q&A between me and Mac. But I did the Q and I did the A as well. Because I know music. And I know his speech, what his interests were. If you read those liner notes, you will see a fairly penetrating excursion into New Orleans rhythm and blues history. It involves Huey Smith, the Nevilles, James Booker -- all of those. And we did songs these people made famous. So the whole thing was very dear to my heart.
When you made Gumbo, New Orleans R&B was past its commercial heyday. Some of the original artists had stopped making records or passed on. It was also the era of glam and arena rock. Yet you were celebrating these hidden roots of American popular music.
There is a very cogent answer to that -- the name of the album. Mac had just come off the voodoo and Night Tripper stuff. I said to Mac, "Let's forget about the gris-gris and go for the gumbo." In other words, never mind the Marie Laveau stuff and the witches burning candles. Let's do the root of the music.
But I have a side story to tell you: My daughter Anita had an apartment across the way from Atlantic Studios on 60th Street. She was living with her then-boyfriend, [engineer] Jimmy Douglass. Somehow, we wound up there one day -- Dr. John, Leon Russell, Jimmy and myself. And they were jamming. Jimmy played some bass. At that time, there had been a backlash on Leon Russell among New Orleans people, that he was copping off Dr. John. Dr. John said, "Yeah, the New Orleans people ain't diggin' it. They're burnin' candles on Leon." So they played back and forth. Then Mac sat down at the piano and played "Tipitina," Professor Longhair's anthem. Leon Russell was wearing a huge silver crucifix with a big chain. He took it off, put it around Mac's neck, and he went out the door.
For New Orleans people, "Tipitina" is an anthem. They named a club after it. When Ahmet [Ertegun] and I recorded it with Professor Longhair in 1953 in New Orleans, he came into the studio with absolutely no material. We said, "What the hell are we gonna do? We have no songs." But there were two songs around then: "Tra-La-La" and "Ti-Na-Na." Both were purported to convey encoded dope messages, like an R&B "Louie Louie." And they were both built on eight-bar chord changes, which was a very natural, harmonic basis for Longhair. Eight bar blues was very strong in New Orleans. We said to Fess, "Let's do something like "Tra-La-La" and "Ti-Na-Na," on eight bar changes. We cobbled it together in the studio.
Do you remember the first time you went to New Orleans?
I went to New Orleans during the war, when I was en route from one camp to another. Of course, I availed myself of the cuisine. I think I ate at the Court of Two Sisters [in the French Quarter]. But in the early days with Ahmet, when he and I used to go to New Orleans together, we would stay either at the Monteleone or the Jung Hotel. Back in the day, they had segregation, and segregated taxi cabs, black and white: not the color of the cabs, but the color of the passengers that they could legally convey. We would want to go to some R&B nightclub to see one of our acts, or to check somebody out, and usually our distributor would drive us to the club then leave us. Now the question was how do we get back? There was only one way. We'd get a black cab, so-called, and when we crossed Claiborne Avenue, we laid down in the back as he drove into the Quarter, so we couldn't be seen. He would let us off in the alley behind the hotel.
There was another time. We were in New Orleans, it was Joe Turner's birthday, and the Dew Drop Inn was throwing him a big bash. Ahmet had the flu, so he was laid up in the hotel. I went, and I got a little happy [laughs]. I got shitfaced, man. I couldn't go home. Frank Painia, who owned the Dew Drop Inn, put me up -- I slept there overnight. Now the Dew Drop was more than a restaurant and nightclub; it was a hangout place, for rehearsals. I get up in the morning and there's Joe Turner, Smiley Lewis and Jessie Hill. They're all there. Joe Turner is having spaghetti for breakfast, wearing long underwear with suspenders and no shirt. Frank Painia said to me, "Wexler, you're the second white man who's slept in my joint. The first one was [B-western film star] Lash LaRue."
What was it like to make records in New Orleans, as opposed to Memphis or Muscle Shoals? What did you get in New Orleans that you couldn't get in other cities?
There was one thing in each of the places -- the individual players. It's not the studios, it's not the food, it's the players. And in New Orleans, you had great players like [drummer] Earl Palmer and [saxophonist] Red Tyler. Cosimo Matassa's studio on Governor Nicholls Street was a mess. We did a session there with Guitar Slim. What would happen is we would set the levels, get everybody ready. But when it came to Slim's solo, he turned up the gain on his guitar so loud it would blow out the tubes. And Cosimo didn't have any spare tubes. Every time the tubes blew out, he'd send a kid to Canal Street to buy two or three more. We had to wait until he came back. Of course, there was no air conditioning. Let's say it was not state of the art.
Why do you think the music business seemed to leave New Orleans behind in the late Sixties and Seventies?
A lot of New Orleans people felt they had been victimized by the music business, as if it was some conspiracy. That's bullshit. Nobody wants to stop making hit records. We want more big-selling records coming from more places, from more individuals and more groups. It was just that the pendulum was swinging. It was the arc of time. It may have been that the artists didn't have strong managers or agents, strong representation. When you think of New Orleans, you don't think of that -- you think of the singers and musicians. Some of them were doing the business themselves, and a lot of them didn't know what it was all about. Today, musicians are well informed: Don't give away your copyrights, that sort of thing. They didn't know that then.