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Dr. John Is Still Makin’ Crosses
Rolling Stone Issue #92
September 30, 1971
By Bob Chorush
Los Angeles – Dr. John, the Night Tripper, lives in a typical San Fernando Valley tract house where a human skull voodoo drum shares equal billing with baby bottles and shoes. It’s frankly an ugly house on the outside; and startlingly intriguing on the inside.
The intrigue stems from Dr. John and his bizarre and incongruous collection of canes, tape recorders, drums, feathers, records, Zap Comix, drawings of Christ, empty bottles, necklaces, wife and child. Rumors that I had heard about “the last of the best” being dead added to this air of mystery.
Malcolm Rebennack is not dead despite the rumors and no matter how many ways his name gets misspelled. The rumors stemmed from a vacation that he took to Texas without informing friends, combined with a recent automobile crash in which Mac wasn’t hurt. In the day time, Mac describes himself as “the day stumbler,” as he stumbles around his living room trying to explain the birth, growth and life of alter-ego John Creaux, the Night Tripper, the voodoo rocker, the gris-gris man, the professor.
The name is just a jacket to Mac. Just a nickname. “Some people knows me as John. Some knows me as Mac. It’s just a different word or a different time and tha’s just what people knows me as.”
Dr. John was a voodoo king well known in Louisiana Bayou Cajun lore. It was a likely name for New Orleans-born Rebennack to adopt. It fit him and it fit the refashioned and updated voodoo music that Rebennack was performing in his attempt to bring back the old style voodoo church music in a contemporary form.
Mac and his house are surrounded by a heavy odor of incense. Wearing one gold earring, a red bandana, an embroidered work shirt and jeans, Mac seemed a little uncomfortable in his “straight” neighborhood. His neighbors don’t know what he does or who he is, despite frequent loud rehearsals in his garage, which is in the process of being remodeled as a soundproof rehearsal studio. When I arrived, Mac was working on a tape of a group he is producing, called Inner Space Fungus.
Mac speaks in a thick New Orleans accent punctuated with torturous silences. Purpose become poipoise. My becomes mah. Funky becomes fonky. He speaks in double negatives that are twice as negative. His subjects don’t always agree in number with his verbs.
“I had the idea in my head for Gris-Gris for quite a while. I had been wanting to record it. I tried to give the idea to other artists to record, ‘cause I felt that the album paints a good picture. To me, painting that picture is what people appreciate more than a record. A record come and go, where a picture has a more lasting value. The main thing with a picture is that it leaves that thought in your head. Every time somebody sees it he gets something different out of it. That makes it something other than when you just hear a record and nothing’s happening with it. It’s just a record.
“But I had a hassle with that first album. People was very panicked about putting it out ‘cause they didn’t know what category it fitted in. But that’s cool by me. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t need no categories anyway, it just limits certain people. Like when an artist is known as a rhythm and blues star, you put brackets on him. I hope to see the day when they don’t have all that no more. When it’s just an artist is an artist and he’s just playing for music.”
Mac grew up around the superstitions of New Orleans where he couldn’t help but go into a drug store and see the potions of powders and voodoo stuff. As he grew up, he became interested in the music of the voodoo churches and began to rewrite and update some of it. With Jesse Hill, Mac wrote tunes like “When the Battle is Over” for Delaney and Bonnie.
In 1960, Mac paid his first visit to the Temple of the Innocent Blood where he first saw Sister Caterine, a famed practitioner of “white” voodoo. Soon after, he met Sister Eunice, from whom he learned voodoo and guitar. Perhaps typical of a Cajun, Mac speaks of the recently departed Sister Eunice in the present tense as he last knew her.
“Sister Eunice taught me some tunes and stuff but she is an old guitar player who played around New Orleans and in the voodoo church. She don’t play too much pop music or anything but she taught me some jazz tunes and got me interested in some modern jazz music. She opened my taste for more kinds of music. Her along with her nephew taught me different chord progressions on the guitar. How to use things on the guitar and not just what this is, but what was all happening with the music. We’d sit up all night in the woods and when we’d get through we’d want to play some more ‘cause we were just full of music ‘cause it was the stone love of playing music. There wasn’t no money in it. It was just wanna make music. I was a little kid and some of the older people would show me what they knows. I used to aggravate them, I imagine, but I learned things like that.”
With voodoo came personal superstitions and gris-gris. Dr. John says that he is not a particularly superstitious man, yet he will still make a cross on the ground with his foot, purely from habit. He doesn’t carry rabbits’ feet or other talismen with him, yet he is never too far away from his bone necklace or his eagle-feather flute.
“The thought behind gris-gris is just like when you send a Hallmark greeting card. It’s the thought behind it. Gris-gris is just like roots and stuff. Like you might wake up and find a cross on your porch with a chicken’s foot and some moss wrapped around it. Somebody might be saying to you that we don’t dig you living here. The impression that you get is that you’re not welcome or not wanted.
“All voodoo works that way. It’s the thought behind it. The thought not only comes from the sender’s head but it goes to the receiver’s head. I’ll tell you one thing, gris-gris goes good in bed. It’s like anything else. There’s a good side and a bad side. You never hear anything about the good side because the bad side looks more exciting and better.”
Rebennnack’s professional music career began in 1957, when he joined the musicians’ union at the urging of a field representative for Capitol Records. He later had a falling out with Capitol and an album that he recorded for them was released under the name of his saxophone player, although Mac got author’s credits.
Soon Mac was doing studio work for the big time Louisiana labels like Ace and Minute, as well as recording for Imperial Specialty and Chess Records who would come to New Orleans to get that “fonky” sound. Mac found himself playing with his old idols, the top jazz and rhythm and blues musicians in the country. Lee Allen, Red Tyler, Allen Toussaint, Earl Palmer, John Woodrow.
It was only natural when Mac was in London a little over a year ago to record his recently released fourth album, The Sun the Moon and Herbs, that he called up some British friends who used to do the same type of studio work.
“I called up Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger and Ray Draper. I figured them three could help me get up a band. Well, each of them came in with a band, so the sessions at Trident worked out nice.
“Jagger and them fit in and knew what to do. I was pleased. They were helping me and I felt that this is more to me than somebody being a jive daddy. Everybody can be a jiving junior flicker but not everybody can be a stone man. It’s something else in this day and age. More men is chicken than anything else. It shook me to see some cats that’s making money and don’t need help to help other cats.”
Malcolm Rebennack explains himself, and Dr. John and the snakeskin vests, and the Eskimo boots. All the intrigue.
“What I’m saying is that we are one. If we can communicate down to the one, that’s a common denominator. We don’t have to count much greater than that. You don’t have to have a lot of smarts to learn how to count to one. So if we can dig it that we are one anyhow, we might get some more understanding into this world. ‘Cause you ain’t gonna wanna hurt yourself, and that’s all you’re doing when you hurt other people.
“Everything I say is just the same old, same old, same old thing.”
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