In August 2005, Legacy producer Leo Sacks was sitting in a pizza parlor in midtown Manhattan, watching the surging floodwaters swallow New Orleans.
As the extent of the calamity became clear, Leo told his friend Andy Kowalczyk: “We need to start the healing; we need to make a record right away.”
Andy, a financier with a musician’s heart, agreed. “It’s the right thing to do,” he said.
Their favorite street paraders, piano ticklers, trumpeters, rhythm-and-blues singers, Mardi Gras Indians and funkateers were scattered to the four winds. “I felt helpless to care for the people and the city that I love,” Leo says today.
But five weeks later these musical healers gathered in Austin to heal themselves. Christened The New Orleans Social Club, they made, over seven 20-hour days, the triumphant Sing Me Back Home (Burgundy/Honey Darling 2006).
“A treatise in great American music,” wrote The Boston Globe. “An awe-inspiring display of life-affirming power,” The Philadelphia Inquirer said. “Catharsis never sounded cooler,” offered Entertainment Weekly.
Leo recently returned from New Orleans where he is filming a documentary about the murdered New Orleans gospel legend Raymond Myles, tentatively titled A Taste of Heaven: The Heartbreak Life of Raymond Myles, Gospel Genius of New Orleans; here he shares some recollections about the making of Sing Me Back Home.
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From the diaspora of musical genius, we found Ivan Neville and Henry Butler, who share in their fingertips the history of Crescent City piano. We found those Sultans of Syncopation, bassist George Porter, Jr. and guitarist Leo Nocentelli, founding members of The Meters who know how to keep time in the dark. And we found the irrepressible drummer Raymond Weber, whose spirit is as strong as his heart is gentle. Raymond doesn’t need a watch to keep time either.
They wondered whether they would ever go home — or would want to go home again. For some it was a test of faith. Others saw it as opportunity to reaffirm their trust in the wisdom of the Universe.
Cutting live in the studio with nominal overdubs, the sessions became a testament to hope and the human spirit. We set up shop in a deep-dyed, down home studio on a lonely trip of asphalt called Wire Recording. Everyone gladly savored mundane pleasures: eating barbeque, playing ping pong, watching TV. There were homey touches, too, like the Christmas lights strung up over the vocal booth, but most importantly the endangered MCI analog tape machine that made the music sound raw and real. This sublimely funky setup thrilled our sonic skipper and co-producer, the wizardly Ray Bardani. “Old school!” he exclaimed to our host, Wire’s gracious owner Stuart Sullivan.
And when the tape rolled, the musicians rolled, too. They channeled their rage and fear and frustration, their heartbreak and heartache, their defiance and devotion — their vulnerability — into a celebration of The Old Neighborhood.
The healing came slowly, like an unspooling film, in snapshots, one frame at a time. Mac Rebennack couldn’t come to Austin but was happy to play his part as Dr. John on “Walking To New Orleans” – joining the session from New York. “You got all my fellas,” Mac said on the speaker phone. “Y’all know what to do.”
Plopping a plate of paprika-spiked fried chicken on his Hammond organ, Ivan Neville was determined to find a greasy vibe that would bring John Fogerty’s ageless anti-war anthem, “Fortunate Son,” down to where it needed to be. Listening back to that Hammond humming, George Porter blurted out, “Wat’cha gonna do with the money?!” Everyone knew who he was talking to, in Washington and down river in New Orleans. “That’s rollin’!” Ivan said, hollering like the Saints had just won the Super Bowl.
Ivan’s uncle Cyril sang about what so many of us refused to see until the storm clouds disappeared: what it truly means to be poor in black Orleans. Pouring his heartache and fury into “This Is My Country,” one of Curtis Mayfield’s most heartfelt prayers for social equality, Cyril deftly turned the song into an exile’s patriotic lament. “Those words from Curtis could have been written yesterday,” he said, biting into a piece of chocolate cake on his 57th birthday.
We asked Troy (Trombone Shorty) Andrews, fresh from a world tour as a featured soloist with Lenny Kravitz, how he wanted to sound on “Hey Troy, Your Mama’s Callin’ You.” “Bone dry,” he said. “But first I have to have some Popeye’s.” He dipped a biscuit into a bowl of red beans and rice, then closed his eyes, cocked his head and cut two cold-blooded solos — first on trombone, then, for a just response, on trumpet. The solos wrapped around each other like grandmas’ hands in prayer.
“After the storm, I didn’t even want to play,” Shorty said. “Now I feel like a musician again.”
Our beloved Mardi Gras Indian Big Chief Joseph Pierre (Monk) Boudreaux appeared in a floppy white tennis hat with his tambourine, looking like an apparition — and he almost might have been. “People said I got drowned in my house,” he said. His eyes were sad but he was grinning like a cocoa cat who had just cheated death. I wanted to play his card wild.
“Whaddya wanna do?” I asked, so he started to sing: “Why you wanna chase me from my hometown…”
Monk loves his Bobs — Marley and Dylan; it was only natural to attach a reggae groove. Cradling his battle-weary bass guitar, Porter called out the changes – you can hear them on the tape — and Monk’s poem about salvation, became a meditation on redemption.
Time had transformed the melody to “Loving You Is On My Mind,” a gorgeous instrumental that Leo Nocentelli composed for the Meters’ 1975 album Rejuvenation — it was now a poignant love letter to New Orleans. A portrait in cool in a Negro Leagues baseball jersey, a black beret and wraparound shades, Leo raised his arms in triumph, like Muhammad Ali. In that moment we knew he felt a tender reprieve from the sorrow that lay heavy in his heart.
Because in that moment we knew he wasn’t worrying about his home in Burbank, strained at the seams with fortune’s castaways –15 family members from New Orleans.
Some fine street paraders (Jeffrey Hills, Keith Frazier, Corey Henry) brought their borrowed instruments (tuba, bass drum, trombone) from Houston and marched to the beat of a medley built around “Jesus On The Mainline.” As they poured into the living room to celebrate their joyful noise with saxophonist Charles Neville, we found Henry Butler in the piano room, a portrait in solitude.
The room was situated apart from the main studio, so the band watched him on a monitor, this blind man blessed with infinite vision, as if he were a distant presence that they were keeping near to their hearts. Henry put his hand on my left shoulder and we walked to the vocal booth. I held my breath as he brought new meaning to “Somewhere,” from West Side Story. Henry had lost his home.
“But I survived,” he said.
Looking smooth as a star in a powder blue velour track suit and designer sunglasses, Deacon Joseph Carter, Jr., of the Mighty Chariots of Fire showered his volcano of a voice over the unbreakable beat of “99 1/2 Won’t Do.” “You got to make a hundred,” he screamed with divine inspiration, like a young Wilson Pickett. “Yes, sir!,” a worshipful Mister Leslie Sims, Jr., said, on his own walk to Jerusalem.
Soul Queen Irma Thomas bravely carried her own rugged cross all the way from her temporary home in Baton Rouge. She was a teenaged mother when she recorded “Look Up” in 1960, and she made no apologies because she asked for a lyric sheet. “I’m sorry, honey,” Irma said, “but I don’t remember the words.” With her kindred spirit Marcia Ball at the piano to guide her, Irma slipped back in time but never out of character: “Spot that silver lining/follow it till it’s through…”
The roots-rocking subdudes rolled into town, eager to roll tape: they had been road-testing a new arrangement of Earl King’s “Make A Better World” and were anxious to make him proud. Tommy Malone played guitar and sang with sass and swagger, and when Steve Amadee, Tim Cook, John Magnie and Jimmy Messa pitched in their gospel harmonies, their voices blended like a robust roux.
We could taste the hot sauce when Willie Tee arrived.
A kingpin of Crescent City pop and soul, a protégé of Cannonball Adderley and the mastermind of The Wild Magnolias’ Mardi Gras Indian music, Willie’s home, on the southern edge of Lake Ponchatrain near the breached 17th Street levee, had been swallowed up by eight feet of nasty water. The storm had brought him to Princeton University as an artist in residence, but his term was coming to a close and he was facing some tough choices:
Should he rebuild? Could he afford to? Would the future be friendly? Where should he live in the meantime?
Seizing the moment, Willie broke out a new version of “First Taste of Hurt,” a slice of ferocious funk he recorded with the revolutionary Gaturs in 1968. “Who were we to know/We did not have the wisdom/And now is not the time to question the decision…”
“I guess home is in your heart,” Willie said later, “wherever that is.” He died this fall, at age 63, of colon cancer, but it might as well have been of a broken heart.
Ultimately, John Boutte, a scion of the city’s renowned Boutte family, captured everyone’s mood with a wrenching version of Annie Lennox’s “Why.”
“I just want you guys to know,” he said, touching his throat, “I didn’t smoke at all today.”
And so the sojourners rebuilt The Old Neighborhood. They came together to find continuity and healing and rediscovered the gentle comforts of home. We were excited when Burgundy Records embraced the project. No one was getting rich, but there was a shared sense of purpose that gave the sessions the feeling of a mission. This was a labor of love that put some money in the players’ pockets and would benefit, after expenses, the Salvation Army and the LSU Health Services Center, which runs a clinic for New Orleans musicians.
The reviews certainly were gratifying; the members of the Social Club even taped an episode of the venerable PBS series, Austin City Limits. But they never anticipated the chilling phenomenon that may have cancelled out all the great reviews and prevented Sing Me Back Home from reaching a wider audience. It was the cruel, all too human reality that came to be known as “Katrina fatigue.”
Influential tastemakers at radio and retail, it seems, had determined that America’s appetite for the music of New Orleans had been satisfied before our record was released. The public, they presumed, was stuffed — like an oversized po’boy — on the sounds of the Crescent City.
And now here we are, two and a half years later. Countless lives are still in storm-tossed transition; the demolition of thousands of low-income homes abandoned since the storm has begun. Clarence (Frogman) Henry’s “Ain’t Got No Home” still resonates with the legion of the displaced, and that, to paraphrase Fats Domino, is indeed a damn shame. For all of us.
Copyright © 2007 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT. All rights reserved.
