With “Right Place Wrong Time,” Dr. John brought his gris-gris funk to the Top 40. (In Under a Hoodoo Moon, he claimed Bette Midler contributed a line to the song, but Midler now says she only “knew him a little” and had nothing do with writing it.) But the Night Tripper persona proved too expensive and controversial to maintain, and he soon replaced it with a more urbane style and wardrobe, embodied by his appearance at the Band’s Last Waltz show in 1976, when the Doctor played “Such a Night.” “That song was the feeling of the evening,” says Robertson. “His presence was so warm and beautiful, and that performance projected that as much as anything that happened the whole night.”
As he entered his seventies, health issues began to overtake him. Due to cirrhosis of the liver, he could no longer eat his beloved New Orleans shellfish. He began spending more time with his kids, splitting time between his son’s house on Lake Pontchartrain and daughter Karla’s house in New Orleans.
He continued performing despite increased physical discomfort. “He had this outward appearance of being old and slow, but, man, you talk about eagle eyes,” says bassist Roland Guerin, his last musical director. “He knew exactly what everybody was doing. When his head was down and he was playing piano, the audience would be watching his hands, but his eyes were looking directly at me above his glasses. It kept me on my toes.”
by David Browne / Rolling Stone
THE LAST WALTZ - Dr John and The Band
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