POST 15...Crawdaddy Music Roots Part 2: The Big Easy and Beyond

In 1973, I arrived in New Orleans as a freshman at Loyola University, both scared and excited. I was nervous about living away from home for the first time, yet I couldn’t wait to explore this musical gumbo town that I had only tasted of in high school. The first people I got to know were the other students in my dorm, a lot of them music majors. Loyola didn’t have a jazz degree program but nobody seemed to care. These classical music majors all played jazz anyway and there were several extracurricular music clubs on campus.

One kid on my floor from Kansas City was the main drummer in the school’s premier swing band. He kept his drum kit set up in the middle of his dorm room. He would put on the headphones with a Count Basie record blasting, and swing like a mo-fo all day long. Another buddy was a classical guitar major from Boston, who had already mastered Hendrix, Clapton, Beck, and Page, and had moved on to study jazz greats like Kenny Burrell, Joe Pass, and Wes Montgomery. His roommate was a trombonist who was writing horn arrangements for an 18-piece jazz band. Another guitar player friend was a New Orleans native, who in addition to his classical guitar major, had a smokin’ local band that played clubs all over town—lots of Southern rock and New Orleans funk.

Now here’s the point: all of the above were freshman—seventeen or eighteen years old, already playing like seasoned pros: writing, arranging, gigging in New Orleans bars. I was the small-town hick from the Redneck Riviera, learning “Sweet Home Alabama” as my dorm mates were jamming to Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Billy Cobham. It was the beginning of a huge, street-level musical education for me. I couldn’t play jazz or even read music, but all my new musician friends were kind to me and appreciated my Southern guitar style. I knew all the Duane Allman and Dickey Betts licks, could sing pretty well, and was hip to Jeff Beck. That was something I guess.

I got a job as a desk clerk at the Prince Conti Hotel in the French Quarter.  My hours were midnight 'til eight am. You see all kinds of characters in the Quarter at four in the morning—jazz musicians, transvestites, prostitutes, cruising into the lobby asking for some favor, or just wasted and mumbling. This was my introduction to serious night life and the specimens it creates. This was also where I first started smoking weed, which as you may recall is magical journey at first. Your mind enters a state of wonder and the power of music is amazingly enhanced. Watching seriously talented jazz or funk musicians play in tiny little clubs after smoking some fine Colombian activated some big archetypes in my unconscious.

And as if all this wasn’t enough, I then discovered The Meters. It was 1973 and they were very tight by then, had played on tons of New Orleans records (Dr. John, etc.) and were starting to get some recognition. (They would later do a world tour with The Rolling Stones!) Well anyway, there was this beer & burger bar on campus called The Wolf Pub. It was underneath the student union hall. I tended bar and sold fake char-grilled burgers that we heated up in a microwave... and The Meters played there every Friday night for about four months.

It was a graduate level course in funk—the real deal! I watched every move they made, my biggest discovery being how sparse and full of empty space their music was. Nobody stepped on anybody else's toes.  The guitarist Leo Nocentelli played a Recording Model Les Paul through a solid state Kustom amp, so there was no distortion. He played CLEAN. You could hear every note which shot straight into the middle of your brain.

Art Neville had a white Hammond B3 and matching white Leslie, with a black light mounted inside the Leslie. The black light sat behind the spinning top horn, and would automatically light up when he kicked on the fast rotor speed, creating a weird black light strobe effect.

And of course the George Porter-Ziggie Modeliste backbone carved through the nasty air of that basement college bar, laying down a bass and drum groove I had never heard before. I couldn’t even understand how they did it...but I kept listening.

The Meters were laid back and friendly, sporting giant Afro’s, extreme-flare bell bottoms, and exotic polyester shirts. I became their skinny white errand boy for those few months, supplying them with brews, burgers, and blunts. At this point in the game I was not a funk player myself, though lots of the rock and soul music I knew had funk elements in it. Watching The Meters was my first real lesson in what funk is truly about. They were charter members in a very small, elite group of players who invented funk, no doubt a New Orleans creation based on the punch-and-bounce grooves of the old second line parade beats.

I never had my own band in New Orleans. Looking back, I guess I was too intimidated. I just tried to absorb as much as I could by listening and practicing. Oh yeah, and I was also there to go to college. I had always been a straight-A student in high school, but Loyola was really hard and I was rather distracted with the music explosion I was living in. My first semester produced a string of C’s, D’s, and F’s in my required business classes, and A’s in my music elective classes. The second semester I switched my major to Communications and continued to build my chops. My father was pretty pissed off, so one year in New Orleans was all I got.

Oh, one more sidebar. I became good friends with a local kid, Leon Galatoire, whose family owned the world famous Galatoire’s Restaurant on Bourbon Street. Leon and I used to go down there in the afternoons after classes and two-finger all the cooking pots before the chef chased us out of the kitchen with a giant metal spoon, yelling at us in French.

My parents were absolutely shocked at my poor school performance and weren’t about to pay any more tuition. I was given a choice: pull out of college and do a hitch in the military, or go live with my grandmother in Washington DC for a summer or longer and work a full-time job. They wanted me to get some perspective. I chose DC and moved to the nation’s capital. My grandmother was actually a very hip lady. She had worked pretty high up the State Department back in the ‘30’s and ‘40’s, and though now retired, was still somewhat wired into Washington society. For nine months I lived upstairs in her diminutive yet stately home in the embassy district.  I turned her onto smoking pot, which she agreed to do to relieve her chronic back pain.

I found a pretty cool job driving a delivery van for a Georgetown florist who had some pretty impressive clients. I regularly delivered flowers to Ted Kennedy’s home across Key Bridge from Georgetown. Joan, his wife at the time, would be having her first scotch at 10 am, and their son Patrick who only had one leg would be cruising around the yard in his specially fitted go-cart.

I also set up flowers every Tuesday morning at Henry Kissinger’s conference room office at the State Department, where he held a regular staff breakfast.  I saw him every week and he always seemed very disorganized..."Ver ees my breeef case?"  I went to Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger’s home occasionally, and to the homes or offices of a bunch of other political celebrities. It was amazing to me how much money the wealthy spend on fresh flowers every week. 

I was so busy working and making money that I didn’t really do much musically. I bought a new Stratocaster and just kept practicing. I also practiced singing all day driving all over DC, Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware in my flower van. I would go out and sit in every once in awhile with the local bands in the surrounding towns in Virginia and Maryland.

I must have absorbed some common sense living and working in DC, because I decided to go back to college. So I left my grandmother's and returned to Pensacola to finish up my first two years at a local community college. Living at home with my parents was awkward, but life was bearable as I began the third stage in my musical education after high school and New Orleans: I hooked up with some old and new buddies to form a couple of working bands on the Florida Panhandle. The drinking age was nineteen back then, so I was able to play my first nightclub gigs at that age. We played places like the Tiki Lounge on Pensacola Beach.  We also played college frat parties and lots of rooftop beach parties in people’s private homes.

Brain Damage 1976...

...and a Reunion 25 years later

My main band was a three piece power trio called Brain Damage, playing a blend of rock and funk—lots of James Brown, Meters, Wet Willie, Jeff Beck, ZZ Top, and Bad Company. Today's equivalent would be something like the Red Hot Chili Peppers...hard hitting funk-rock, very sexual.  I'm still tight with these fellas, Hank Bell and Max Soelzer, who are both still heavy into music, and we jam it out when we're all in the same town.

Being lead guitarist and singing half the material back in '76 really built my confidence, because there is nowhere to hide in a trio. This was a formative two years and tons of fun during the summer, working on the commercial fishing docks during the day and playing music and partying three or four nights a week on the beach or wherever we happened to get a gig. Lot's of "carrying on" at Hank's family beach cottage every weekend. Ah, youth...

Adult common sense kicked in once again. I finished community college and took off for Tallahassee and Florida State University to complete my business degree and get a real college graduate job. I didn’t play in any working bands at FSU, because my full focus was required to graduate. But I did practice my ’74 tobacco sunburst Les Paul every day.

After graduation I got hired by one of the largest engineering & construction firms in the world and moved to Houston Texas. They soon transferred me to Saudi Arabia to work as a worldwide buyer. I thought I was a real adult now, “done with music”, and sold all my gear. But that didn’t last. It wasn’t long before I was jamming on into the Arabian night.

Here's a Crawdaddy original tune inspired by my time with The Meters in New Orleans:

Happy Fonk Day To You


Story continues in Part 3...