Gumbo Ya-Ya: David Toop on Dr John’s Gris-gris

In an exclusive extract from his new book, Two-Headed Doctor, David Toop recalls the first time he heard the weird and wonderful debut album by the American singer-songwriter

And so it begins. As if calling out of darkness, the first sound, serpentine melody of a reed instrument, in timbre close to the Indian shehnai but breathy on its last note, as if steeped in Ben Webster. Then the voice, intimate and sinister: “They call me Doctor John, known as the night tripper.” Two names, used by a mysterious ‘they’, though in truth the hoarse whisperer was known to those who knew him as Mac, short for Malcolm, and how many albums begin with a personal introduction anyway? Another notorious example appeared later in the same year, ‘Sympathy For the Devil’ by the Rolling Stones, the lead track on Beggars Banquet. “Please allow me to introduce myself . . .” Only Satan and his associates would be so bold, though Fats Domino’s disarming first line of ‘The Fat Man’, recorded in Cosimo Matassa’s Rampart Street studio in 1949 – “They call, they call me the fat man . . .” – has a gleam in its eye which is far from Satanic.

I first heard Dr. John’s Gris-gris LP in early 1968, sitting in a small room in Nelson Road, north London. This was the room in which my friend Penelope Timms lived, part of a two-bedroom flat occupied by her and her mother. No doubt we listened to it on a single loudspeaker, Dansette type record player, as most of our generation at that time were obliged to do, and so the eccentricities of the stereo mix would have been lost on us. Penelope and I were part of the same teaching group at Hornsey College of Art, both Foundation students in our teens and both, to some degree, outsiders. She was aloof and unclassifiable, what I think of as a Goth-hippie who may or may not have been interested in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement, spoke of Virginia Woolf and alerted me to post-Beardsley artists of enchantment like Arthur Rackham. She would sweep into class forbiddingly, wearing a long black velvet coat of her own making, the kind of woman who would have heard people whisper ‘witch’ in another age, or perhaps even then. At her request I photographed her in the many-buttoned coat, posed against a backdrop of streets close to Hornsey college annex, and (as I can now identify with Google maps) St. Ann’s church, South Tottenham, built in 1861, where the moustachioed stone head to the right of the door has lost its forehead at some point in the intervening fifty years. Revisiting those photographs I can imagine her priceless, cigarette-armed expression of disdainful boredom transplanted to the mid-seventies Punk scene or shifting a few degrees towards the beauty of tragedy for early-eighties Goth.

No useful memory remains of that first hearing gifted to me in Penelope’s room but I was quick to buy my own copy, an expensive US import, and fell deeper and deeper under its spell in the next few years. The junk and curio shops of the period were full of strange cargo so I acquired a hollow-necked mandolin cheaply enough, only because mandolin featured prominently among the exotically unpredictable instrumentarium of Gris-gris (played, as it happened, by New Orleans veteran Ernest McLean, who in the year of my birth played guitar on Fats Domino’s ‘The Fat Man’). I learned rapid tremolo picking in order to emulate McLean’s fluid melodic lines that scuttled along the frets like a black widow spider running up a window frame. Also, I played with a bottleneck, confused by the close interplay between mandolin and what could be bottleneck twelve-string guitar, the latter played by Steve Mann, whose tragic story will follow in due course. A year later I took up flute, partly inspired by Roland Kirk and Eric Dolphy but also by Lonnie Bolden’s playing on Gris-gris.

Reincanting the charts of now

If I had possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of music at that time I might have begun to unpick the entwined threads of Gris-gris and its making. The record sounded like nothing else, seemingly came from nowhere and related to nothing I could identify with any confidence: whistling, whispering, mumbling, pig grunts, exhalations of breath, chants and vocal imitations of nocturnal forest sounds, arco double bass and electric bass, nursery rhymes, impenetrable accents and languages, tambourines, unidentifiable tuned percussion imprecisely struck, mandolin, banjo, flutes, congas, bottleneck guitar, second line drumming with virtually no cymbals, dense percussion, organ bass, harpsichord, reed instruments played through electronic effects and organ lines sounding like anything but themselves. There was no piano, despite what some later commentators have claimed, and in fact very little harmonic underpinning in the majority of tracks. Instead of piano or guitar chords to fill out the ensemble sound there is the celebrated Gold Star echo chamber, into which instruments and voices sank as if dropping away into the abyss.

Zozo la Brique, Jump Sturdy, Coco Robichaux, Queen Julia Jackson, Mama Roux, Tit Alberta – questions flared like fireworks. Who were these characters who populated the lyrics. Were they voodoo practitioners, alive or dead, fictitious or real? Ishmael Reed’s visionary novel, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, was published not long after, in 1969. Years later I read it and was startled to bump into Zozo la Brique once more. So these were real people, or named phantoms, or figures of legend at least. “O Doc John,” Reed wrote, “Doc Yah Yah and Zozo Labrique Marie Laveau the Grand Improvisers if I am not performing these rites correctly send the Loa anyway and allow my imagination to fill the gaps.”

The LP cover offered further hints, though they were meagre. Like many others who have encountered the record over the years, my imagination was filling the gaps, of which there were plenty. With foresight I might have set to work on tracking down every last participant, interviewing them and deciphering the mystery, but of course, that was not what my life was about. Now all of them are dead, with the notable exception of Plas Johnson, aged eighty-nine at the time of writing and unlikely to recall much about a few saxophone lines played through an effects box during a Gold Star studio session in 1967.

Notes on the back cover were dissembling, deliberately mystifying though replete with clues for those in the know, clearly a deliberate strategy in what we would now call the ‘establishment of a brand’ or some such weasel squeaking. This character – Dr. John – stares out from the back cover, a zombie look about him, bearded, tousled, heavy lidded, draped in what looks like snakeskins. “WHO?” the text to his right asks, all uppercase “MY GROUP CONSISTS OF DR. POO PAH DOO OF DESTINE TAMBOURINE AND DR. DITMUS OF CONGA, DR. BOUDREAUX OF FUNKY KNUCKLE SKINS AND DR. BATTISTE OF SCORPIO IN BASS CLEF, DR. MC LEAN OF MANDOLIN COMP. SCHOOL, DR. MANN OF BOTTLENECK LEARNING, DR. BOLDEN OF THE IMMORTAL FLUTE FLEET, THE BARON OF RONYARDS, DIDO, CHINA, GONCY O’ LEARY, SHIRLEY MARIE LAVEAU, DR. DURDEN, GOVENOR PLAS JOHNSON, SENATOR BOB WEST BOWING, CROKER JEAN FREUNX, SISTER STEPHANIE AND ST. THERESA, JOHN GUMBO, CECILIA LA FAVORITE, KARLA LE JEAN WHO WERE ALL DREGED UP FROM THE RIGOLETS BY THE ZOMBIE OF THE SECOND LINE. UNDER THE EIGHT VISIONS OF PROFESSOR LONGHAIR REINCANNTED THE CHARTS OF NOW.

All errors of spelling and punctuation have been left intact, since the absence of proofreading adds an extra frisson to the wonky strangeness of it all. According to Harold Battiste, arranger, producer and, as I will argue throughout this book, co-visionary who deserves equal credit, all the materials for the package were assembled by him in some haste. The record had been recorded in August and September, 1967, after which Battiste met with Sonny Bono, his partner in a side-business venture called Progress Records. They discussed policies and percentages, leasing the masters, drawing up artist contracts and organising the song publishing. In October a meeting was held with Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records.

“What am I gonna tell my promotion men? What radio station gonna play this crap?” This is Battiste’s account of the meeting, as documented in his 2010 autobiography, Unfinished Blues, though why Ertegun felt obliged to take the record, given his negative reaction, is unexplained. Dr. John, in his autobiography, Under a Hoodoo Moon, has a more colourful account: “. . . I was doing a session for Bobby Darin when Ahmet Ertegun walked into the studio looking for me. He was pissed off, wanting to know what this Gris-gris album was all about. He was walking around the studio yelling at me: ‘Why did you give me this shit? How can we market this boogaloo crap?’ He was stuck with a record that was done on the sly and he was acting as if he wouldn’t release it.”

It seems unlikely that Ertegun, astute and informed as he was and a New Yorker, would confuse Gris-gris with a style of Nuyorican Latin-soul fusion whose only similarity was a set of conga drums. Atlantic released a record of boogaloo (or bugalu as it was also known) by The Harvey Averne Dozen in 1968, along with Charlie Palmieri’s classic Latin Bugalu. Perhaps, as Jon Abbey has suggested to me, he was referring to Louisiana boogaloo, or party music, or perhaps he was invoking Lou Donaldson’s 1967 swamp-funk-jazz track, ‘Alligator Boogaloo’ – typeset by the Blue Note art department as “Electric Bogaloo” – featuring as it did two stellar New Orleans musicians: Melvin Lastie on cornet and drummer Leo Morris (Idris Muhammad, as he later became). The real problem was unclassifiability, a genuine concern for marketing departments, then and now. In the end, the record was advertised on release with a half-page in Rolling Stone magazine as ‘The Sound of Cajun-Rock!’, which in terms of accuracy was barely an improvement on ‘boogaloo crap.’ A further sign of the marketing department chewing their pencils down to the graphite was the LP release promo ad poster, which ran the back cover text in full under photographer Raphael’s profile shot from the front cover, with a single word centred at the top, in quote marks: ‘FEEL’. In other words, we can’t tell you what this record is all about; you have to listen closely and feel it. As for the question of why he was stuck with the record, the answer no doubt lies with Sonny Bono – an energetic hustler from the Phil Spector school whose leverage with Atco was still strong in 1967, based on Sonny & Cher hits like ‘The Beat Goes On’. If Ertegun’s instincts had warned him that the going on of Sonny & Cher’s beat was about to come to a shuddering stop then maybe there would be no story for me to tell.

<i>Two-Headed Doctor: Listening For Ghosts In Dr. John’s Gris-gris by David Toop is published by Strange Attractor</i>

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