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Dr. John
The Definitive Pop Collection
Atco/Rhino
R2 70814
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Disc One:
01. Gris·Gris Gumbo Ya Ya
(Mac Rebennack)
From the album Gris-Gris, 1/22/68
Atco #33-234
Arranged and Produced by Harold Battiste
02. Mama Roux
(Mac Rebennack/Jesse Hill)
Atco single #6635, 11/21/68
Arranged and Produced by Harold Battiste
03. Jump Sturdy
(Mac Rebennack)
From the album Gris-Gris. 11/21/68
Atco single #6635 11/28/68
Arranged and Produced by Harold Battiste
04. I Walk On Guilded Splinters
(Mac Rebennack)
From the album Gris-Gris; also issued [in two parts] as Atco single #6607, 8/14/68
Arranged and Produced by Harold Battiste
05. Black Widow Spider
(Mac Rebennack)
From the album Babylon, 1/17/69
Atco #33-270
Arranged & Produced by Harold Battiste
A Sonny & Cher Production
06. Loop Garoo
(Mac Rebennack)
Atco single #6755, 5/15/70
Remedies, 4/9/70
Atco #33-316
Produced by Tom Dowd, Dr. John & Charles Greene
07. Wash, Mama, Wash
(Mac Rebennack)
Atco single #6755, 5/15/70
Remedies, 4/9/70
Atco #33-316
Produced by Tom Dowd, Dr. John & Charles Greene
08. Familiar Reality – Opening
(Mac Rebennack)
From the album The Sun Moon & Herbs, 8/31/71
Atco #33-362, 8/31/71
Produced by Malcolm Rebennack & Charles Greene
09. Iko Iko
(James “Sugarboy” Crawford)
From the album Gumbo; short version issued as Atco single #6882, 3/10/72
Gumbo
Atco #7006, 8/31/72
Produced by Jerry Wexler and Harold Battiste
10. Somebody Changed The Lock
(Mac Rebennack)
From the album Gumbo, Atco #7006, 8/31/72
Produced by Jerry Wexler and Harold Battiste
11. Mess Around
(Ahmet Ertegun)
From the album Gumbo, Atco #7006, 8/31/72
Produced by Jerry Wexler and Harold Battiste
12. Junko Partner
(Bob Shad)
From the album Gumbo, Atco #7006, 8/31/72
Produced by Jerry Wexler and Harold Battiste
13. Tipitina
(Roy Byrd)
From the album Gumbo, Atco #7006, 8/31/72
Produced by Jerry Wexler and Harold Battiste
14. Huey Smith Medley:
a. High Blood Pressure
b. Don’t You Just Know It
c. Well I’ll Be John Brown
(Huey Smith/Johnny Vincent)
Atco single #6882, 3/10/72
From the album Gumbo, Atco #7006, 8/31/72
Produced by Jerry Wexler and Harold Battiste
15. Traveling Mood
(James Waynes)
From the album In The Right Place, 2/25/73
Atco #7018
Produced by Allen Toussaint
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Disc Two:
01. Right Place Wrong Time
(Mac Rebennack)
Atco single #6914, 1/26/73
From the album In The Right Place, 2/25/73
Atco #7018
Produced by Allen Toussaint
02. Such A Night
(Mac Rebennack)
Atco single #6937, 8/14/73
From the album In The Right Place, 2/25/73
Atco #7018
Produced by Allen Toussaint
03. Life
(Allen Toussaint)
From the album In The Right Place, 2/25/73
Atco #7018
Produced by Allen Toussaint
04. Qualified
(Mac Rebennack)
From the album In The Right Place, 2/25/73
Atco #7018
Produced by Allen Toussaint
05. I Been Hoodood
(Mac Rebennack)
Atco single #6914, 1/26/73
From the album In The Right Place, 2/25/73
Atco #7018
Produced by Allen Toussaint
06. Cold Cold Cold
(Alvin Robinson/Jesse Hill/Mac Rebennack)
Atco single #6937, 8/14/73
From the album In The Right Place, 2/25/73
Atco #7018
Produced by Allen Toussaint
07. Quitters Never Win
(Mac Rebennack)
From the album Desitively Bonnaroo, 4/8/74
Atco #7043
Produced and arranged by Allen Toussaint for Sansu Enterprises, Inc.
08. What Comes Around (Goes Around)
(Mac Rebennack)
From the album Desitively Bonnaroo, 4/8174
Atco #7043
Produced and arranged by Allen Toussaint for Sansu Enterprises, Inc.
09. Mos' Scocious
(Mac Rebennack)
Atco single #6957, 3/18/74
Atco #7043
Produced and arranged by Allen Toussaint for Sansu Enterprises, Inc.
10. (Everybody Wanna Get Rich) Rite Away
(Mac Rebennack)
Atco single #6957, 3/18/74 Atco #7043
Produced and arranged by Allen Toussaint for Sansu Enterprises, Inc.
11. Let's Make A Better World
(Earl King)
Atco single #6971, 7/15/74
Atco #7043
Produced and arranged by Allen Toussaint for Sansu Enterprises, Inc.
12. Honey Dripper
(Joe Liggins)
From the album Dr. John Plays Mac Rebennack, 1981
Clean Cuts #705
Produced by Jack Heyrman and Ed Levine
13. Makin' Whoopee!
(Gus Khan/Walter Donaldson)
From the album In A Sentimental Mood, 4/25/89
Warner Bros. #25889
Produced by Tommy LiPuma
14. Accentuate The Positive
(Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer)
From the album In A Sentimental Mood, 4/25/89
Warner Bros. #25889
Produced by Tommy LiPuma
15. Goin' Back To New Orleans
(Joe Liggins)
From the album Gain' Back To New Orleans, 6/23/92
Warner Bros. #26940
Produced by Stewart Levine
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The original Dr. John was the most celebrated name in the New Orleans voodoo culture of his day. John Montenet claimed to have been a Senegalese prince who had been captured by the Spanish in the early 19th century and taken to Cuba. After being freed by his master he became a sailor and made his way to New Orleans. It was there, in America's voodoo capital, that his spiritual talents flourished. He was famed as a healer, fortune teller, and a seller of gris-gris (talismanic bags containing herbs, oils, bones, graveyard dust, and other items selected for the owner's protection). He is believed to have been the first practitioner in New Orleans to mix other elements, including Catholic ritual, into the voodoo mix.
Over a century later the Dr. John moniker was assumed again, this time as the stage name of one Malcolm John Michael Crow Rebennack, better known as Mac. There may have been an ancestral link: a Pauline Rebennack had been involved with Dr. John (Montenet) in the 1840s, at which time she had been arrested for involvement in voodoo activities and running a brothel.
Mac Rebennack was born in New Orleans in 1941. His father owned an appliance store and stocked records. There was a piano in the house, and as an child Mac used to gaze upon it. “I was hypnotized by its beautiful white sheen and the way it glowed like a ghost in the evening light,” he wrote in his picaresque autobiography, Under The Hoodoo Moon. He was soon proficient on this and other instruments.
By the time he turned 20 Mac was already a veteran of the local rhythm and blues scene, a musical prodigy adept in almost every aspect of the record business. He had started hitting the clubs early, a white kid who moved in black circles, slipping into the Brass Rail and the Dew Drop Inn, and soon he was appearing onstage at these fabled venues. He spent his teenage years working as a songwriter, session musician, and talent scout for the Specialty, Ace, Ric, and Ron labels. He produced records by Chris Kenner, Johnny Adams, Sugar Boy Crawford and numerous others. In 1960 his composition “Lady Luck” became a big hit for Lloyd Price, but Mac was stiffed on the songwriting credit and never saw a nickel. His own first record, “Storm Warning,” was issued on the Rex label in 1967, and in the early ‘60s he cut sides of his own for Harold Battiste’s AFO Records.
It was a fast life, fueled by not-entirely-natural substances. Mac supplemented his musical career with pimping and other marginal sidelines. He spent a disproportionate amount of time in jail, usually on narcotics-related offenses. As he tells it, he and his pals "were picked up on 72-hour investigations on a basis that was abnormal even for street characters." In 1961 he lost a finger in a motel brawl in Jacksonville. The finger was subsequently reattached, and he eventually regained full use of it, but after this mishap he played less guitar and the piano became his main instrument.
Two years later, during a corruption and drug crackdown by district attorney Jim Garrison, Mac was sent to the Fort Worth federal prison. After serving two years he suffered the further indignity of being forbidden from returning to his beloved hometown. Instead he went out west and hooked up with the New Orleans expatriate contingent in Los Angeles. Harold Battiste was working as musical director on The Sonny & Cher Show. Mac performed with the latter duo and recorded with Buffalo Springfield, experiences that he later described as a “musical nightmare.” The only relief came from session work with Little Richard and Larry Williams. “My concern,” he said, “was just to get away where I could write and play.”
The opportunity came in 1967 when Harold Battiste arranged some free studio time for Mac and his friends at Hollywood’s Gold Star studios. These after-hours sessions took place between Sonny & Cher dates. The cadre of Crescent City exiles included such notables as Jessie Hill (of “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” and "Whip It On Me" fame), Shirley Goodman (of Shirley & Lee), and percussionist Richard "Didimus" Washington. It was a way of both staving off homesickness and paying tribute to the musical heritage and mystical lore of The City That Care Forgot.
What came out of these sessions comprises Gris Gris, a record that sounds as original and otherworldly today as it must have sounded in the heady era of its initial release. "Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya" introduces Mac's new persona: a peripatetic root doctor bragging about the potency of his remedies, mumbling and growling over eerie echo-laden chants, shivering percussive patterns, and menacing jabs of guitar. "Mama Roux" is a beguiling confection blending New Orleans roll with voodoo incantation and exhibiting Mac's easy way with a melody. The record culminates with the sepulchral "I Walk On Guilded Splinters," an aural hallucination, palpably inhabited by shadowy forms: the musicians seem to be performing in a thick fog, dissolving into an ether of soughing, hissing, and croaking.
Nothing quite like it has been heard before or since. To Mac it didn't seem like anything unusual. As he says, "The way we was looking at music-making was that it was circular in its grooves, with no corners. That was what the old-time hipsters had meant by hip – something that hadn't been squared off to fit into some kind of market-ized nightmare ... none of us imagined the material would ever be released."
Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun overcame some initial reluctance and put the record out on the Atco label. It fit the climate of the times and was mistaken for psychedelia. Mac's transformation into Dr. John the Night Tripper was made complete. The proper sartorial accessories were adopted: long tasselled robes, suits of alligator and lizard skin, feathered headwear, grease paint, and bizarre walking sticks comprised his touring regalia.
Other records followed. Babylon was a willfully uncompromising work set in unorthodox jazz meters and filled with apocalyptic lyrics. The experience of recording Remedies, which contained many fine moments, including the swampy "Loop Garoo," pushed him over the edge. He had been stretching himself too far, both musically and chemically, to the extent that his friends felt he might benefit from a recuperative spell in a protected facility. Following some time out at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Center he went to London, where he recorded The Sun Moon & Herbs.
By this time, Mac, a perpetually questing musical soul, was beginning to tire of the flamboyant persona. "Let's forget about the gris-gris and go for the gumbo," suggested producer Jerry Wexler. Mac concurred: the "Night Tripper" tag was dropped, and the resulting Gumbo was a pure celebration of the New Orleans R&B he'd grown up with. It is here that Mac truly comes into his own as a pianist, swinging with grace and authority over and under a band of Crescent City stalwarts that included Battiste on bass, saxophonist Lee Allen, Melvin Lastie on cornet, and Freddie Staehle on drums. Mac freely and generously revels in his influences with special emphasis on his pianist mentors Professor Longhair ("Tipitina") and Huey "Piano" Smith ("High Blood Pressure"), with a view to spreading the word on the original recordings. It also featured an exuberant rendition of "Junko Partner," a standard, as Mac points out, "in Angola State Penitentiary . . . an anthem for the dopers, whores, pimps and cons ... the rhythm was even known as the 'jailbird beat.'”
The New Orleans spirit underwent a transmutation of a more contemporary nature on his next record, In The Right Place, which found Mac keeping company with The Meters on a set of crafty, infectious funk produced by Allen Toussaint: a potent combination of New Orleans talents all at the top of their game. The record exudes an irresistible shimmering warmth. It was Mac's most commercially successful, yielding two hit Singles, "Right Place Wrong Time" and the gently rolling "Such A Night" with its moody slide trombone arrangement: one of Mac's most memorable compositions, it had, in fact, been languishing for many years before Toussaint persuaded him to dust it off and finally record it. Right Place established Mac's reputation as an American original.
After one more record, Desitively Bonnaroo, he left Atlantic. In subsequent years he has toured and recorded extensively. His releases have included a collaboration with Art Blakey and David "Fathead" Newman, a tribute to Duke Ellington, and a 1997 recording produced in England with members of Supergrass, Spiritualized, and other reverent young English musicians. Over the years Mac has become something of a cultural ambassador for his native city (and recently a vocal opponent to government policies regarding Hurricane Katrina): a gracefully evolving oldtime hipster, who has both secured and expanded upon the rich musical legacy of New Orleans.
John Tottenham
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Project Supervision: Steve Woolard
Remastering: Dan Hersch, Dave Schultz & Bill Inglot at DigiPrep
Product Manager: Marc Salata
Compilation & Discographical Annotation: Charles Norbeck
Editorial Supervision: Sheryl Farber & Cory Frye
Art Supervision: Erin Solis
Design: Meat and Potatoes, Inc.
Photos: Michael Ochs Archives.com, cover, p. 7; Gems/Redferns/Retna Ltd., p. 2; MPTV.net, p. 12; Richard E. Aaron/MPTV.net, p. 15
Project Assistance: Andrea Craig
Management: Peter Hinbeger/Ed Girrard – impactartist.com
Web site: drjohn.org
