Eclectic Company: Louisiana Through The Looking Glass

Even though it’s been at the epicenter of my life since I could reason, there are just some days when I can’t bear to listen to music. Not in a plane, not in the rain, not in the house, not with a souse, not in the mall, or while on hold waiting for some secretary to some bureaucrat to take my call. Some days I just do not want it Sam-I-Am. Musicless, I get restless, pacing around wherever I am like a tiger in a cage. It isn’t that I don’t want more music, it’s that the sound, no matter how gentle, has grown fingernails, and it’s scratching down my mental chalkboard. When that happens, I like to soothe myself with a good read: like a book about music, especially if the writing is tangy and smart.

Today was one of those days. I’m in Los Angeles, here for tomorrow’s funeral of a friend, Mary Herczog, whose love of music, especially Louisiana music, was profound. For years we met in New Orleans at the Jazzfest, or at Marc and Ann Savoy’s crawfish boil in Eunice, and Mary and her husband Steve Hochman, who married under an ancient live oak tree in Marc and Ann’s backyard, often brought a decorated anniversary cake, and danced to a Cajun tune. There will be music at her funeral, including a second line, for which I am prepared. But no music today please, not yet.

So I took myself off to Barnes & Noble in Burbank, and browsed among the music books for comfort. There were copies of Ozzy Osborne’s new whathaveyou, the usual mix of music history, music and cultural theory, music business and music lesson books, and then I saw “Lousiana Rocks: The True Genesis of Rock & Roll” by Denham Springs resident and former DJ & award-winning journalist Tom Aswell. At $29.95 and 500 pages, it is part encyclopedia, part history trail, part homage, and all of it is well-researched and extremely interesting.

Centering the work around the contemporaries of Baton Rouge native John Fred (nee Gourrier), whose “Judy In Disguise (With Glasses),” had charted at number one early in my high school years (when I was still caught between the hipsters and the hippies, the doo wop and early Brill Building rock and roll on one hand, and the folk rock, country rock, hard rock, psychedelic and acid rock that followed them on the other. Little did I know it then, but this was going to trouble me for failing to swear allegiance to only one uber-hip rock style forever). Aswell’s book is divided by musical genres, and subdivided within those categories into encyclopedia entries on hundreds of musicians and Louisiana-associated music business folk who Aswell lauds as the champions and originators of rock and roll.

It is probably a teensy tiny bit of an exaggeration to claim that rock and roll was born in Louisiana, as Memphis and Detroit and Chicago and other cities where African-American musicians had decamped to in the mid-Twentieth Century had significant roles to play, and rock pioneers came from all over the geographical and musical genre maps. But it is also clear that few places offered as many varieties of musical styles, and that factor, perhaps more than any other, makes it a fair argument.

You can hear most of the styles and others, and the inheritors of those traditions that funneled into Jazz at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, spanning the last weekend of April and first weekend of May. More info from www.nojazzfest.org. It is almost past time to book hotels and the famous restaurants, because up to 100,000 people per day come to Jazzfest, and they’ve gotta sleep and eat somewhere. You should make your plans now. And let me recommend the midweek between the festival weekends (Monday through Wednesday) pilgrimage from New Orleans back to Eunice and Lafayette, that Festival Tours makes each year. Regular stops include at home visits with D.L. Menard, the Cajun Hank Williams, for cookies and lemonade, Marc & Ann Savoy and their award-winning musical extended family, for a crawfish boil, and Geno Delafose, at his ranch, for a Zydeco barbecue. A Cajun cooking class with chef Pat Mould usually includes musical accompaniment from Michael Doucet. More info from www.gumbopages.com/festivaltours.

With Johnny Depp staring at me through red-rimmed eyes in a white zinc paste face from every bus stop bench in Van Nuys, I had Alice in Wonderland on my mind when I hit the Barnes & Noble. So it was no surprise that I impulse purchased the Rhino Records compilation “Under the Influence of Alice: Music Inspired By the Classic Tale,” which was stacked on a display of Alice books, lunchboxes, diaries, etc. The 12-song project starts, natch, with Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane singing “White Rabbit,” ends with The Incredible String Band’s “Mad Hatter’s Song,” and passes through The Cure, Scarlett Johansson, Emilie Simon, The Flaming Lips, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Elvis Costello, The Sisters of Mercy, The Glove, and David Moore. All the tunes were worth rehearing or learning, but only the first and last tunes directly alluded to characters from the stories of Alice Liddell and the girl modeled on her who went through the looking glass under the watchful and inappropriately loving eye of mathematician and child nude photographer Lewis Carroll. At Oxford, where Carroll taught under his real name, Reverend Charles Dodgson, I went past the Alice memorabilia shop almost every day, but never thought to collect Alice any. More exciting to me were images of the last Dodo, in all its exotic taxidermic glory in the University’s Pitt Rivers Museum, where Dodgson clearly had his imagination fired as well. But the Alice books have been magical and scary and satisfying as only the books of childhood can be, so it was nice to revisit some music created, in many cases, actually, under the influence. Might have to get under the influence myself, and see if that improves my mood.