302: Gris-Gris, by Dr John

Dr John (USA)
Gris-Gris (1968)
7 tracks, 33 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Right at the beginning of this blog, on the sixth entry, I talk about Dr John’s Gumbo and lamented the fact that I’d never managed to catch the Good Doctor live; that he was right at the top of my must-see list. I never did see him live. Since I wrote that entry, Dr John has passed – he died in June aged 77. He was in New Orleans when he went, and was honoured as a true son of the city in the way that New Orleans does best – the Dr John Second Line has already become a legendary occasion of celebration and mourning through the medium of spontaneous, leaderless music making. There are a lot of videos from that day, but the first I saw – this one, from Dust-to-Digital – impacted me hard. You can feel the love of the city for a man who loved it in return. It’s only fitting that we take another listen to one of Dr John’s most important albums.

Gris-Gris actually marked the invention of Dr John. The man’s real name was Mac Rebennack, a New Orleanian session player specialising in R’n’B piano. He was just about scraping by in Los Angeles, but needed a real creative outlet. And so was born Dr John, The Night Tripper. Originally a character, Dr John’s aim was to distil the essence of New Orleans and its music using the language of psychedelic rock that provided the soundtrack to California at that time.

This is a very different album to Dr John’s Gumbo. Where the later album was all about the very specific brand of NOLA piano jazz and boogie with all the exhilarating perkiness that entails, Gris-Gris presents the city’s more esoteric side, looking less at the picturesque colonial architecture of the French Quarter and more out into the surrounding swamps where the language is a mixed-up creole of French, English, Spanish and ancient African words.

Although there are stand-out tracks and hits in this set (‘Walk on Guilded Splinters’, ‘Jump Sturdy’ and ‘Mama Roux’ among them), the real impact isn’t about any particular piece of music; it’s the whole atmosphere that is the real triumph of the album. It is a dark work of funk, Afro-Latin rhythms and Voodoo references, all echoing together as if emanating from the belly of a deep cauldron. Jazz is present to a degree, but more important are the waves of rock, soul and gospel that sizzle and shimmer in among the rest of this ominous and vaguely threatening musical potion. Most heady of all is Dr John’s distinctive voice, high-pitched and pinched and with the strongest, most beautiful accent. His speech-song is littered with arcane imagery in all of the languages of New Orleans, and, word and sound together, he paints an extremely evocative image of place, time and atmosphere.

Gris-Gris was Dr John’s big arrival, a mysterious Voodoo priest of psychedelia, a man plucked out of time to change the directions of rock, jazz and R’n’B. Between this album and Dr John’s Gumbo, his prodigious musicality and his deep reverence for the ever-present New Orleans are starkly obvious. He was rightly hailed as a musical hero of the city and his loss leaves a big hole in the cultural landscape not only of New Orleans, but the world. He was celebrated in life and in death, and those celebrations will continue. His legacy lives on.