Obituaries

from The Washington Post…

Dr. John, flamboyant soul of New Orleans music, dies at 77

He rose to fame in the late '60s after concocting his voodoo-influenced,
patois-laced persona of “the Night Tripper”.

By CHRIST MORRIS | 7:39PM EDT — Thursday, June 06, 2019

Malcolm Rebennack Jr., shown performing as Dr. John in 2008, concocted a voodoo-influenced, patois-laced persona as “the Night Tripper”.
— Photograph: Dave Martin/Associated Press.

MALCOLM REBENNACK Jr., the flamboyant New Orleans singer-pianist known as Dr. John whose hoodoo-drenched music made him the summarizing figure of the grand Crescent City R&B/rock-n-roll tradition, died on June 6 at 77.

His family said the cause was a heart attack but did not disclose where he died.

Mr. Rebennack had already tallied more than a decade of experience as a session musician in New Orleans and Los Angeles when he rose to solo fame in the late '60s after concocting his voodoo-influenced, patois-laced persona of “the Night Tripper”.

In their history of postwar New Orleans music “Up From the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II”, Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose and Tad Jones wrote richly of the artist they called “a true original.”

The writers described him exclamatorily: “Dr. John! — sunglasses and radiant colors, feathers and plumes, bones and beads around his neck, the crusty blues voice rich in dialect cadences, and then the man himself in motion: scattering glitter to the crowds, pumping the keyboard, a human carnival to behold.”

After flashing his fantastical character on a quartet of early albums that garnered him an enthusiastic underground following, Dr. John settled in to become New Orleans's great latter-day exponent of bayou funk and jazz, playing in a style that reconciled the diverse streams of the city's music.

His early '70s work was distinguished by a collection of historic New Orleans favorites, “Gumbo”, and a pair of albums with famed New Orleans producer-arranger-songwriter Allen Toussaint and funk quartet the Meters — the first of which, “In the Right Place”, spawned a top-10 hit.

He memorably branched into traditional pop with his 1989 album “In a Sentimental Mood”; the album spawned the first of his six Grammy Awards, for “Makin' Whoopee”, a duet with Ricki Lee Jones.

Dr. John would delve deeper into jazz terrain later in his peripatetic career with Bluesiana Triangle, a collaboration with saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman and drummer Art Blakey, and homages to Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. But the earthy R&B of his hometown served as his main stylistic and emotional propellant.

In 2008, his Grammy-winning collection “City That Care Forgot” dwelled movingly on the havoc wreaked on his city by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

As an in-demand sideman, he recorded with Levon Helm, Gregg Allman, Van Morrison, Harry Connick Jr., Ringo Starr and B.B. King, among others. He released “Triumvirate”, a “super session” date with guitarists Mike Bloomfield and John Hammond Jr., in 1973.

His turns on the big screen ranged from a memorable performance in Martin Scorsese's “The Last Waltz” (1978), a documentary about the Band's farewell performance, to an appearance as a member of the fictional “Louisiana Gator Boys” in “Blues Brothers 2000” (1998). He guested regularly on the New Orleans-set HBO dramatic series “Treme” from 2010 to 2013.

He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.

Dr. John in 2010. — Photograph: Sean Gardner/Reuters.

Malcolm John Rebennack Jr., known as “Mac,” was born in New Orleans on November 21, 1940. He began playing the family piano but soon acquired a guitar, which became his principal instrument during his early professional career.

By the time he dropped out of Jesuit High School in the 11th grade, he had already acquired a taste for heroin and the chops to work as a session guitarist at J&M Music, which spawned major R&B hits by Fats Domino and other local R&B stars. He played his first date behind singer Paul Gayten.

During this period, he got to know some of the city's most influential keyboardists, including Professor Longhair and the eccentric virtuoso James Booker (who taught him to play organ and later joined Dr. John's touring band).

He recorded steadily, appearing on local hits by Jerry Byrne (“Lights Out”) and Roland Stone (“Down the Road”, a.k.a. “Junco Partner”) and as a leader (including the 1959 instrumental “Storm Warning”). He also worked as an A&R man and sideman for Johnny Vincent's Ace Records.

On Christmas Eve 1961 on a tour stop in Jacksonville, Florida, Mr. Rebennack and pianist Ronnie Barron got involved in a scuffle with a motel owner, and the guitarist was shot in his fretting hand, nearly severing the ring finger. During a slow recovery, he moved first to bass, and later to keyboards.

The studio scene in New Orleans was beginning to dry up in the early '60s when Mr. Rebennack was busted for heroin possession, drawing a two-year sentence in federal prison in Texas.

On his release from jail in 1965, he headed to Los Angeles, where a group of New Orleans expatriates that included producer-arranger Harold Battiste had set up shop as studio musicians. Mr. Rebennack worked with, among others, Canned Heat, the Mothers of Invention and Sonny & Cher.

In L.A., Mr. Rebennack moved to fulfill a lingering musical concept grounded in New Orleans history that he had originally developed for the reluctant Ronnie Barron.

In his 1994 autobiography “Under a Hoodoo Moon: The Life of the Night Tripper” he wrote, “In the 1840s and 1850s, one New Orleans root doctor was preeminent in the city for the awe in which he was held by the poor and the fear and notoriety he inspired among the rich. Known variously as John Montaigne, Bayou John, and most often Dr. John, he was a figure larger than life.”

Dr. John in 2013. — Photograph: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters

Using studio time left over from a Sonny & Cher session, Mr. Rebennack and Battiste cut an album of hazy, incantatory songs steeped in Crescent City voodoo imagery. Issued by Atlantic Records' Atco subsidiary as “Gris-Gris”, the collection failed to chart, but it inaugurated several years of extroverted live shows that established Dr. John as a unique under-the-radar performer.

Three more similarly styled albums — “Babylon” (1969), “Remedies” (1970) and “The Sun Moon and Herbs” (1971) — deepened the Dr. John image; the latter album, recorded in London, included guest appearances by Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger.

However, he turned away from his original swampy style for an album he described in the notes as “More Gumbo, Less Gris Gris.” Co-produced by Battiste and Jerry Wexler, “Gumbo” (1972) was devoted to covers of New Orleans roots music by Longhair, Huey “Piano” Smith, Sugar Boy Crawford and others; its good-time Mardi Gras atmosphere lifted it to No.112 on the charts.

His first set with Toussaint and the Meters became his biggest commercial success: “In the Right Place” (1973) included the No.9 single “Right Place Wrong Time”. While the follow-up LP “Desitively Bonnaroo” (1974) failed to duplicate its predecessor’s popularity, its title inspired the name of the popular Bonaroo Festival.

A schism with Atlantic — possibly prompted by Wexler's daughter Anita's introduction to heroin by Dr. John — led to a period of label-jumping by the musician.

In 1989, he landed at Warner Brothers Records with “In a Sentimental Mood”, a well-received set of standards elegantly produced by Tommy LiPuma that included the Grammy-winning duet with Jones. That year, he finally kicked his more than three-decade addiction to heroin. Another Grammy winner, the self-descriptive “Goin' Back to New Orleans”, followed in 1992. Around that time, he also sang the opening theme to the TV sitcom “Blossom”, “My Opinionation”.

He abided as an “eminence gris-gris” for the remainder of his career. He settled in for a long stay at Blue Note Records in the new millennium; his five-album sojourn for the imprint was inaugurated the Ellington tribute “Duke Elegant” in 2000. (His homage to trumpeter Armstrong, “Ske-Dat-De-Dat”, was released by Concord in 2014.

The intensely felt “City That Care Forgot” was succeeded by the atypical “Locked Down” for Nonesuch Records in 2012; the album, produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys and eschewing pianistics for a tough hard-rock-based sound, also collected a Grammy as best blues album.

Information about surviving offspring was not immediately available.

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• This story was originally published at Variety magazine.

• Chris Morris is an acclaimed writer and editor specializing in the video game and consumer electronics industries. He has covered both fields since 1996, offering analysis of news and trends and breaking several major stories, including the existence of the Game Boy Advance and the first details on “Half-Life 2” (after a five year cone of silence from the developer). Chris is also a veteran financial journalist with more than 25 years of experience, the last 18 of which were spent with some of the Internet's biggest sites. As Director of Content Development, he was a key part of the senior management team that helped grow CNNMoney.com to one of the most prominent financial sites online. Later, as Managing Editor of Yahoo! Finance, he orchestrated changes that resulted in a 61 percent increase in unique users in less than a year, climbing from 11.7 million to 18.8 million. While there, he was also responsible for maintaining relationships with over 30 editorial partners. He also has extensive experience in newspaper, magazine and radio. Today, he works with a number of clients including (but not limited to) CNBC, Yahoo!, Variety, Common Sense Media, Coast 2 Coast Radio Networks, GamesIndustry.biz and Wired.com. His work has also appeared on the web sites of USA Today, Fox Business, the Chicago Tribune, Fidelity and several other sites.

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