Dr. John was session player for Sonny and Cher, Buffalo Springfield, and other pop acts, but he also wanted to make his own music. With other New Orleans transplants, he recorded his first album, Gris-Gris, in 1967. It was named after the term for the charms, amulets, and incantations used by voodoo believers that were meant to fend off evil. As shadowy and murky as the swamps, Gris-Gris — and its centerpiece, eight minutes of eerie, lurking chants called “I Walk on Guilded Splinters” — embodied the way Dr. John took his hometown’s musical heritage to new outer-space dimensions. Dr. John mixed in funk, psychedelia, field hollers, Latin rhythms, and rock & roll, a template that would continue for decades.
While working on the album, Dr. John came up with a plan for his live shows that would transport Mardi Gras to the stage. Working with producer Harold Battiste, he concocted the idea of a “Dr. John,” named after a 19th-century Louisiana voodoo priest and jack-of-all-mystical-trades. “I was just tryin’ to hustle album deals, just tryin’ to hustle money,” he said in 1997. “The Dr. John thing was just a concept, a one-off thing.” Ronnie Barron was supposed to play the character onstage, but when he declined, Rebennack donned the headdresses, feathers, and beads himself. “Nobody else could have done it like he did,” says Aaron Neville. “He brought it to life.”
The persona was even wilder onstage: Someone Dr. John called the Chicken Man would bite off the heads of live poultry while nude dancers paraded around. (In St. Louis, the band was busted and Dr. John, as bandleader, was arrested.) “I was trying not to make him self-conscious by looking at what he was wearing,” says Bonnie Raitt, who saw one of those early shows and later toured with Dr. John. “I hadn’t been exposed to the voodoo side, so I brought a whole lot of ‘whoa’ when I met him.”
Source: David Browne / Rolling Stone
Photo By Barry Feinstein
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