Dreaming of the Masters

Sadly, we have to interrupt our planned series of Sun Ra posts to report that New Orleans legend Dr. John passed away this week.

We first heard the Doctor when the song I Walk On Gilded Splinters played late one night on the radio way back in 1968 when we were a mere 14 years old.  Appropriate to have heard it late at night as it is a nighttime song; even when you listen to it during the daytime, it still sounds like the night.

Coming out as it did years before our first exposure to cajun culture or zydeco, or even reggae for that matter, I Walk On Gilded Splinters was like nothing that we had ever heard before.  We had no exposure to Mardi Gras culture at that time, so Dr. John's outfits and Indian costumes looked to us like something from some parallel dimension.  And the voodoo talk of mojo and gris gris was all completely new to us.

The song's lyrics shift from English to creole French and back again and are full of cajun voodoo slang, and to this day we still can't understand everything he's saying.  For the longest time, we thought the line 'til I burn up was did I murder? Today, some lyric websites transcribe it as 'Ti Alberta, whatever that means.  We still don't know and probably never will, now that the Doctor has left us.

We'll likely never know what he's singing before the title line, either.  At 14, we thought it was Come Suzie Q, come, come.  No two lyric websites seem to have the same words for that line, some saying Walk to me, get it, come, come, and others Come get it, get it, come, come, neither of which make any sense before the line I walk on gilded splinters, but logic doesn't seem to be an integral part of the song. Others sites go phonetic with variations of Kon killy, killy kon kon.  These days, we're thinking it's French slang, something like Comme qu'il y a, qu'il y a comme comme, or some such idiomatic expression, but we'll never know.  Oh, sweet mystery of life!

When this song played on the radio back in 1968, it absolutely transformed our evening. It provided a glimpse into some spooky, sexy, psychedelic alternative universe, one we never knew had even existed, and we loved it.

Dr. John went on to mainstream success in the 70s with a series of Top 40 hits, but to be honest, he was never bad.  Even at his most commercial (Right Place, Wrong Time), there was always some black-water bayou funkiness going on somewhere in his songs, and throughout his career, he repeatedly returned to his New Orleans' voodoo boogie roots.

You gotta like that.

Trivia time:  The prog rock band Emerson Lake & Palmer took the title of their very popular (at its time) album Brain Salad Surgery from a line in Right Place, Wrong Time, and the Bonnaroo music festival gets its name from Dr. John's 1974 LP, Desitively Bonnaroo.

Post-Script:  It's fitting and appropriate to interrupt our Sun Ra coverage for Dr. John, especially because Sun Ra apparently opened for Dr. John in New York one night in 1981.

According to Robert Palmer's review of the show in the NY Times,

Club 57, East 15th Street and Irving Place, has strayed from its new-wave rock orientation before, most notably with James Brown, but presenting Dr. John and Mr. Ra on the same bill last weekend was a particularly inspired move. The booking attracted members of New York rock and funk bands, a few black jazz fans, some dazed-looking hippie holdouts and enough Club 57 regulars to pack the dance floor and make for an interesting cultural mix. 

Mr. Ra performed first. His musicians' colorful costumes glittered in the spotlights, and several times during the set his horn players jumped off the stage and mingled with the audience. His music has always included plenty of potential sing-alongs and dance rhythms along with hard swing, free-form episodes and bursts of electronic noise, and the audience seemed utterly comfortable with it.

Mr. Ra doesn't play short sets, and by the time his musicians had packed up and Dr. John's band had set up it was 2:30 A.M. But the crowd was still large and enthusiastic, and if Dr. John's set got off to a slow start, it was mostly because he had misjudged his audience. 

He began with some recent funk numbers and with hits from his most successful albums, and although the New York-based band he has been leading for the past several months has developed an admirable New Orleans strut, the tunes weren't really right for the crowd or the hour. Thirty minutes into the set, he hit a strong, socking groove on Junco Partner, the Louisiana prison song and rhythm-and-blues classic. It was just what the time and place demanded.

R.I.P., Dr. John.   You walked on gilded splinters and you once took the stage after It's After The End of the World (a staple of Sun Ra's stage show).  No one can demand that a musician do more than that to prove their worthiness.