time for five weeks in February and March — Austin; Houston; Cankton, Louisiana, for cockfights and the Wheel; New Orleans for Mardi Gras; the Mississippi Delta; Memphis (try and stop by Minglewood); Nashville; New York; on my way back try and find Ace Records in Jackson; Austin again for Pearl and norteno; highball for home, and hope to get enough writing work to pay for it. 1 never do, but that’s okay, too. The most amazing find was Mardi Gras, but that’s another story. As for the rest, well, come on, we’ve got to be in Houston by friday afternoon. As Big as Freddy “They used to be at least one guy at a record company could listen,” says the Crazy Cajun, Huey Meaux, sitting behind a desk at his Sugar Hill Studio in Houston, “but now they all salesmen, and they lookin' for superstars. They ain’t lookin’ f’music no mo’.” Meaux, a legendary ’60s producer with such high-powered Texas rockers as Barbara Lynn, Roy Head, Cookie and the Cupcakes, and Doug Sahm, is still doing okay with his latest act, Freddy Fender, but he’s beginning to feel time moving out from under him. “ I go into some New York company,” he says, “and this^guy says, ‘I love your old records,’ and I say, ‘Well, good, ’cause I got a new artist who’s gonna be as big as Doug, as big as Freddy,’ and he just don’ wanna hear . it. They ain’t no room f’them little bitty hits that turned into big hits any more — they all lookin’ for million sellers in front.” TKO The fighting cocks have been at it for nearly half an hour. The little red rooster that was the favorite has taken an unlucky fall at the beginning of the fight and broken his back; he’s rolling around, trying to keep away from his opponent, a big black and white rooster who’s too lousy to finish him off but keeps pecking anyway. It’s no fun for anyone. The Cajuns and Mexicans are taking it calmly; this is not a good fight, but the back-broken rooster is game, and that’s what cockfighting is about. The hippies are sickened, but this is Louisiana so only the women go “ Ick,” and they do it quietly; the men yell “TKO!” and “He’s bleeding bad,” but none of the hippies leave. They’ve paid a dollar each to taste America the way it used to be, and if it’s stronger than anticipated, well, is it worse for a chicken to die in the pit or live in a box eating growth hormones on the way to Kentucky Fried? You take what you can get these days: when the cockfights are over, they make gumbo out of the losers. Jay's Lounge and Cockpit is in Cankton, Louisiana, but don’t look for a town or you’ll miss it; look for a bunch of cars parked alongside Highway 93. The cockpit has been here for 70 years — a low-ceilinged room with a packed-dirt fighting ring (earth, blood, and chickenshit, one supposes), and low bleachers on all four sides. The lounge is newer. Jay, a cockfighter first and a club owner second, calls it The Last Honky Tonk, and has T-shirts to prove it. The point is arguable. There are still some good joints around, at least in Texas and Louisiana. But it is for sure The Last Cock- fighting Honky Tonk. In the lounge. Asleep at the Wheel is starting their second set, and the joint is jumping. Both bars are four people deep, and they ran out of Pearl an hour ago so you’ll have to take any beer you can get, even if it’s Jax. As the music starts, most of the hippies in the cockpit drift back toward the stage, and the dance floor fills up fast. The cockfighters (many of whose grandfathers fought cocks here 60 years ago) hardly notice; there’s more than $1000 going down on every fight, and the best birds won’t fight until midnight. Asleep at the Wheel is probably the biggest draw Jay books — which is high praise for a band that started out on a Commander Cody folk-country track. But the Wheel is way past that now; they've gone Cody (and the New Lost City Ramblers) one better and become the thing they loved — old- time musicians. They play an eclectic bag — Randy Newman, Cleveland Crochet, Louis Jordan, plus a lot of hot originals, including the idiosyncratic masterworks of resident crazed- country writer Leroy Preston — but their stock in trade is second-hand regional music: blues (from Texas and Mississippi), Basie (from Kansas City), Cajun music (from Louisiana), and Western Swing (originally Texas Swing). Music with age on it, and a local address. The Wheel makes good records, but they don’t sell very well. If a band doesn’t have superstar potential (e.g., universal appeal and no rough edges), it’s supposedly not worth heavy promotion. The small labels that understood how to market regional music have mostly gone under; the ones that remain, like Jin, Swallow, Arhoolie, Crazy Cajun, and a handful of others, are tiny, serve very specialized audiences, and operate at a tremendous financial disadvantage in the vinyl market. All of which means that if it’s good, it probably isn’t being recorded — and you have to go honky-tonkin’ if you want to hear it. The Wheel is a special case, but their relationship to their material is special, too. They are, in a sense, performing folklorists; certainly, a great deal of their material is in revival mode. In any case, their records sell just enough to keep their label from dropping them, but they make their bread playing live. And in a way, that’s good. The audience at Jay’s is here because, aside from the Wheel, you can’t hear most of this stuff live anymore — and music needs to be live somewhere along the line, spontaneous, simultaneous, fallible, and free from overdubs. More and more, music is coming to mean recorded music, with an antiseptic emphasis on multi-track overdub perfectionism. That’s as dangerous for music as it is for life. Jerry Lee Lewis says it this way: “You can’t go back and overdub when you’re making love.” Thank you, Killer. The kids at Jay’s understand all this, but they couldn’t talk to you about it — any more than they could tell you why they paid that extra dollar to watch two roosters trying to kill each other. All they’d say is that they’re here to dance — which is the right answer anyway. If people are dancing, something is going on. The floor is packed, and the dancing is intense. No hippie dancing, either, but full-contact neo-jitterbug, with fast spins and turns that seem all the more amazing considering the density of the floor — and where did these kids learn to jitterbug, anyway? On the slow ones, people dance close — and Susan Trilling (whose old man is playing bass on stage) teaches me to do the Texas Shuffle. Learning old dances is even better than learning old ballads or old slang. It’s a concrete link with the past, as if someone gave you a cherry 1939 Packard that ran perfectly. Thank you, Susan. The cockfights are over around one in the morning, and the fighters drift into the club to drink a beer before they hit the highway. They slide past the dancers without any real contact — as if one group or the other were back-projected. Onstage, Link Davis, Jr., the Wheel’s resident Cajun, from Basile, Louisiana, 30 miles northeast — is singing “Cajun Stripper,” original title, “Bosco Stomp.” Bosco is in the neighborhood, too, but the cockfighting Cajuns don’t seem to care. Their folklore is killer chickens, and it’s alive alive-o. Walk on the Water, Walk on the River The H-R Bar is Wild Magnolias territory, uptown New Orleans. This is the night before Fat Tuesday, the final chance to get it together before the big blow-off last day of Mardi Gras, and even on the street in front of the H-R you can feel the energy building up. The Magnolias are black Indians, one of 30 or so tribes who celebrate Mardi Gras (and a few other special occasions) by dressing themselves in elaborate dream-Indian costumes of plumes and sparkle — and whose street-chants and dancing may go back hundreds of years to the earliest slave gatherings in New Orlean’s Congo Square. When they perform for white folks (on record, say, or at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fest) the Magnolias are extremely sophisticated, even slick. Tonight is Mardi Gras rehearsal, for members only. Outsiders are not exactly prohibited, but I’ve been warned to watch myself. Cars are pulling in and out like pistons in front of the bar — pimp- mobiles and funkytown jalopies, letting out dancing crowds of black people dressed variously in fancy rags and downhome threads, all of whom swirl around on the sidewalk, talking and jiving and second-lining to the drumming from inside. (The second- line is a New Orleans dance in which you plant your two feet and move what your mama gave you.) Whenever a car stops a woman sits on it, and whenever a woman sits down a man walks up to her and starts sweet-talking. The door to the bar is open, but inside people are packed so tightly that you have to dance your way in. Getting from the door to the bar is like making love io 15 strangers of both sexes, and getting a drink at the bar is the supreme test of cool under pressure. It’s about 110 degrees, and you can hear the drumming with your stomach. There are three giant congas, assorted smaller drums, plus bongos and tambourines scattered through the room, and everyone is dancing and yelling and getting crazy. There are at least 300 people inside a room big enough for 100, they’re all drunk and only four of them are white — but it doesn’t feel threatening. Not in terms of color anyway. The people in closest to the drums are chanting, but unless you’re in the inner circle the words are hard to make out. I catch a few bits of rhyming Mardi Gras chant (“Flagboy coming/Spyboy humming...” ) and what might be fragments of a leftover field holler ("Walk on the water/Walk on the river...” ) but the one chant that’s easy to make out is a repeated four-syllable “ firewater!” tha t is passed around the room with a tambourine full of money. If you don’t want trouble you have to kick in at least 50 cents to buy whiskey for the drummers. The heat, the pressure, the drummed polyrhythms are completely overpowering; it’s not something you listen to, it’s something you breathe instead of oxygen. In fact, it’s a lot like a Jamaican Grounation ceremony, and here and there people have got the Ghost, screaming out their heads and jumping ecstatic. Suddenly, it hits me that this is African ceremonial magic — voodoo, or something very close to it, courtesy of the well-known West Indian connection. And I find myself unexpectedly terrified. I've loved black music all my life — chased after it, studied it, learned from it. But I’ve never hit it so pure or powerful before; this is no pale shadow of a ghostly blues song — it’s alive. (Sorry, no records available; it wouldn’t sell.) And if I don’t get out now. I’m going to be here all night. Outside on the street, it’s an hour short of midnight, and the scene is still jumping. I cool off for a few minutes, half-decide that it was just claustrophobia, and start back inside — but I stop at the door. That stuff in there is serious. From all reports, Congo Square was pretty serious too. If I were ready to give it up, I could go back inside. I want it worse than anything, but I can’t do it. Next year I’m gonna be ready. Hey La Bas! Eh Legba! The next day, photographer Michael Smith tells me that he dropped by the H-R around midnight, and “things were just getting started.” The worst of it is I bet he was right. Old Evil Spirit (For John D., Joan, Greil) Somewhere in Richland, Mississippi, just south of Jackson. John Hurt’s Richland Woman is probably still getting down with her shingle-bob haircut and her shot of good booze, but that ain't nothin' to us. The Mississippi Delta starts in Jackson, and we're running north on Highway 49W, the smallest line we can find on the map. It turns out to be a goddamn four-lane, divided highway with fancy signs that say Delta Drive! No wonder the blues are dying. John Morthland drives while I pore over the map. trying to remember which blues singer was born where. We know Skip James is from Bentonia, and then there’s Belzoni and Yazoo City — Jesus, the ring of the names, like a knife-edge slide on an old Paramount 78. Why has it taken me so long to get here? Where the hell was Robert Johnson born? This is serious, neither of us can remember, and we’re getting all the blues singers’ home towns mixed up with Civil War battle sites. Hey. look, there’s a town called Midnight in between Silver City and Louise. Midnight, Mississippi! Here’s Avalon, up on Highway 7! And goddamn, we're gonna go right through Parchman, Parchman Farm, remember? Robert Johnson...Greenwood? No. Got it! Clarksdale, right? Yeah, we're goin' right through Clarksdale! 49W turns into two-lane backtop in Pocohontas, an abandoned mill town set in low, rolling hill country. There's a black man riding a horse by the side of the road in Pocohontas. and in Flora there’s a gorgeous old two- story wooden house with balconies and hand-carved railings, set in the shadow of a tall, teardrop gas-tank right out of Red Desert. Alongside the road, they're bulldozing the right-of- way for the continuation of a four-lane highway — fast, efficient, no distracting roadside business. It's going fast, folks. Heading north, there starts to be a lot of water on the land as the Mississippi spreads out into little streams and opens into unexpected lakes and backwaters. There are cottonfields under water, and little shacks with black kids playing in front. Then we're in Bentonia, Skip James’s home town, and we pull off the highway looking for signs of the man who sang “Devil Got My Woman.” We find an old wooden railroad station, worn and crumbling, a few stores, the Bentonia National Bank, Bill’s Barber Shop, and the Bentonia Package Store. We drive through town, double back, and drive alongside the railroad tracks. There’s no sign of Skip, no hint of his life or time. It’s not 'til we hit Yazoo City, with its steeper hills and moss-caught trees, that we find Skip’s sign — six grim, towering cypress trees wholly engulfed in grey Spanish moss, standing like tall ghosts by the roadside. “ I’d rather be buried in some 'cypress grove.” sang Skip in his high, haunted voice in 1931, “than have a woman that I can’t control." The Yazoo River is big and blue, running east-west between trees to the 25
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz