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Travis: Following in the tradition of our two previous conversations, on Massive Attack’s Mezzanine and Drive-By Truckers’ Decoration Day, again we’re talking about an album neither one of us had been familiar with until we, after a long and random series of twists and turns, decided to check out. This time, it’s Crawfish Fiesta, the first posthumous full-length album release by Professor Longhair, from 1980. Shortly after recording this in 1979, Professor Longhair, a 1940s-50s New Orleans music legend and “The Father of New Orleans Piano,” passed away. Before his death, he enjoyed a rediscovery and comeback with a few albums in the second half of the 1970s, and for Crawfish Fiesta reunited with one of the many New Orleans mainstays he mentored, Mac Rebennack, who before he became known as Dr. John played guitar in Professor Longhair’s band.

My knowledge of Professor Longhair was limited to a footnote in musical history until we decided to listen to this album. Tyler, were you familiar with his work at all?

Tyler: Not a bit.  A little silly, as I know some Dr. John and enjoy that hoodoo-voodoo N’Awlins vibe.  Can’t say I knew anything before now about the Professor, though.

Travis: I knew the name, and the song “Tipitina” from visiting New Orleans, but nothing else. So I was coming into this pretty fresh, with no real expectation as to how it’d sound except that it’d be piano-forward. On first impression, kicking off the album with “Big Chief,” I thought to myself, okay this is a little more whimsical than my typical taste, but it’s also pretty damn fun. How about you?

Tyler: Oh, I was in.  “Big Chief” is great.

It’s a spirit-lifter and a fine way to open the door.

Travis: Agreed. As I listened to it and the following song, I was swept up in the forward moving rhythm, rambling snare, boogie piano, unconventional singing, punctuation from the horn section. This is definitely music meant to be heard live, preferably somewhere crowded and sweaty that, if you lean too hard on the wall, it might fall over.

My first listen through the album, with a few exceptions that I imagine we’ll discuss as we get more into detail, was a pretty fun ride all the way through, with that thought in the back of my mind, that I wish I were hearing it live rather than in this form, but with Professor Longhair long gone, this is as close as we could get to his final material.

Would you agree that Longhair deserves his doctorate?

Tyler: Yes.  Yes I would.

I felt good listening to Crawfish Fiesta.  This is happy music with no need for intermittent balladry.

Travis: I’d agree. I think the mid-tempo blues numbers (“Something on Your Mind,” “It’s My Fault Darling”) slow down the proceedings and I just generally didn’t like them as well as I liked the faster tunes. It was also listening to the mid-tempo songs that it really came out on repeat lessons how damn antiseptic the production sounds.

Tyler: See, I hear that.  Things here are very bright, very crisp, very note-perfect.  I don’t think it necessarily hurts the listen, but it doesn’t help.  I can’t help but long for something a little swampier, smokier, a live air that’d be the soundtrack at your joint with the rickety walls.

Though, given the era, I actually expected a lot worse.

Travis: Ha, that is fair. Even the most hard-rocking or hard-funking bands had trouble escaping 1980 without some tinny too-perfect skeleton in the closet. But for me once the novelty of the music and its hooks and horns wore off, on repeat listens the production really started to get to me. It turns music that should be like you say swampy and smoky and removes all the danger. It takes something sexy and sexual and turns it G-rated. Until as I’m listening to “Whole Lotta Lovin'” my third time through the album I’m feeling like I’m in some sort of Epcot NewOrleansLand and this is my background music.

So, when I got to that point, I cheated a little bit.

Enter: New Orleans Piano (Mono version, 1972), a Professor Longhair collection of sides recorded for Atlantic in 1949 and 1953, along with the single “Big Chief” (same song as the first track on this one), his original version which was a hit in 1964.

Tyler: Oh-ho!  You went deep!

Travis: I liked the music so much on Crawfish Fiesta and hated the production in equal measure, I had to hear this stuff how it was supposed to sound. 

Narrator: it sounded so much better.

Tyler: Shelby Foote: “<quasi-defense of Confederacy, folksy chuckle>”

Travis: Shelby Foote: Loving Crawfish Fiesta.

William Tecumseh Sherman: loving the original Atlantic singles

Tyler: Ulysses S. Grant would be the one boozily knocking over the wall.

Was he a certified drunk?  I probably shouldn’t make that crack.

Travis: I believe he was. As was I, when I lived in the General Grant Apartments at Laclede Station and Watson.

Tyler: Probably a lot nicer than the President Grant Apartments.

Travis: Back to Crawfish Fiesta, though. Despite my near-psychopathic hatred of the production, many of the songs are gems, and the playing is on point throughout. I wish it sounded a lot more like Dr. John’s late 60s material than, say, the Who’s first Keith Moon-less album, but 1980 happened to the entire music industry, I guess.

Tyler: When I think bands that escaped 1980 intact, I think: Pretenders.  Somehow that thing came out whole.

Unless that debut came out in ’79 and I have completely embarrassed myself.

Travis: I don’t remember exactly, but they handled it well. London Calling was a 1980 album. The Clash I guess didn’t make their shitty 1980-sounding album until later.

Tyler: I downloaded that album, Cut The Crap, off Napster.  It is not good.

Travis: Blondie handled 1980 well. Joy Division. Many of the post punk bands, as well as the new wave bands that embraced the sparkle to do something new with it. But down and dirty New Orleans piano R&B, not made for those times.

Tyler: Did Joy Division ever cover “Red Beans?”

Travis: They likely never even ate red beans.

Tyler: In seriousness, I’m impressed by how intact the Professor’s voice is.  Hell, Dr. John started his career singing scratchy.  Longhair’s tones here are smooth and on point.

Travis: It’s a good voice. He sings smoothly but without ridding himself of the unique New Orleans accent. His piano playing is also all over the place in a good way.

Tyler: It boogies and it woogies.  Tell you what, “Whole Lotta Love” just came on, and I hear your point about the sexiness being absent on this album. I loooove Longhair going “whole-lotta-whole-lotta-whole-lotta-whole-lotta,” but when he drops “love” to be suggestive it doesn’t really call anything to mind.

I’m not offended by the production.  But, yeah, it isn’t where this music plays best.

I presume, anyway.  I never got to be the one who definitely leaned on the wall.

Travis: “Big Chief” is the big highlight for me. I also like “Her Mind is Gone,” “You’re Driving Me Crazy” is fast and fun, and “In the Wee Wee Hours” has a fun ramble. I don’t really like “It’s My Fault Darling” but I have to mention his rhyme “wieners for lunch/packin a Joe Louis punch”.

Which, in looking up for verification, I cannot find in any lyrics for the song, but I just listened to it again to make sure I wasn’t imagining it.

Tyler: I’m big on “Red Beans,” which I’m sure is supposed to be full of innuendo but which really just makes me want red beans with a hambone cooked by the man himself, Professor Longhair.

Travis: “Red Beans” is fun as hell. It also makes me want to go to this defunct Cajun restaurant at Lindell and Union that had a plate that was red beans and rice, jambalaya, and crawfish etouffee.

Nothing beats the New Orleans eating experience, but that place, whose name I cannot remember, was damn good.

Tyler: The lone time I visited New Orleans, my then-girlfriend and I spent the first night drinking our way through the Quarter—my intake no doubt doubling hers—and wound up at a spot called “Rosie’s Place,” where I had a housemade muffuletta and the girlfriend ate red beans and rice that had been simmering in a slow cooker.  To quote Ordell Robbie before he gets Beaumont into the trunk, that’s some good eatin’.

Drunk facts: I got sick into a sidewalk trash can later that night.  Warning signs!

Travis: I too drank my weight in Planter’s Punch and Hurricanes, et al, in my only adult visit to New Orleans. But I got to eat at what I maintain was the best restaurant in the world, K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen (which closed in 2020, killed by the pandemic), saw the Rebirth Brass Band’s Tuesday night residency show at the Maple Leaf, and took a haunted buildings of the French Quarter tour. I don’t necessarily believe in ghosts, but if anywhere in the US is haunted, it’s New Orleans.

Tyler: Cafe du Monde son!

Travis: My visit to New Orleans also gave me my first taste of New Orleans music legend Dr. John, who popped up on the hotel’s default television channel whenever you’d turn it on, explaining the music of New Orleans by just mumbling “then you take the choych music, and mix it with the R&B music, and the blues music, and the gospel music, and the choych music, and the…”

Tyler: Man, we wound up in a bar on Frenchman Street on like a Sunday night, place damn near empty, watching local musicians and enjoying the early evening.  That one was pretty profound.

Travis: Did they mix the choych music with the blues music?

Tyler: If we ever do Gris-Gris, you are in for a trip from the Night Tripper.

Travis: Speaking of Gris-Gris, I have a few other New Orleans music recommendations for those who might have enjoyed Professor Longhair, as it seems we’ve pretty much wrapped up our…Fiesta.

Tyler: Additional N’aawwwlin’s moment I will highlight: happening by complete chance upon a crawfish boil at some local hole in the wall with a patio.  The kettles on the sidewalk were enormous and packed with the crawfish, red potatoes, and bulbs of garlic.  The bartender offered instructions on how to eat the crawfish.  The local supergrocery here offers pans for boils like that, ingredients ready to go, but matching that afternoon’s feast would be an impossible order.

Travis: Hell yes.

Tyler: “Coming in two weeks: Travis & Tyler In New Orleans”

All that money we used to spend on booze could buy some serious Creole culinary mastery.

Travis: Also: being tricked into going into just a regular low rent strip club by its promise of a live sex show that did not actually exist.

then commiserating with the older southern couple sitting in front of us about the lack of live sex show.

Tyler: Was it Shelby Foote??

“A woman loves a man in a special way on stage, a-heh-heh-heh.”

Travis: Shelby Foote Fetishe.

Anywho

For those down with the New Orleans vibe of Professor Longhair, I also recommend: Struttin’ by the Meters, Fiyo on the Bayou (1981) by the Neville Brothers (featuring the awesome and amazing “Brother John/Iko Iko”), the Rebirth Brass Band’s Feel Like Funkin’ It Up, and the self-titled album from the Wild Tchoupitoulas, a group of Mardi Gras Indians who made an album out of their parade chants featuring two of the Neville Brothers acting as a rhythm section…it is FONKY.

Do you have any to add?

Tyler: I can tell you about some Dr. John.  Gris-Gris, that first album, is so strange, and wonderful.  It’s truly worthy of a listen.  Two albums after that, he released an absurdly bizarre record called Remedies that includes a jam called “Wash, Mama, Wash,” which is a massively suggestive set of lyrics set against a song that comes on like Animal Crossing music.  “Rub-a-dub-a-dub-a Mama, bust them suds, scrub Mama scrub.”

A couple albums after *that*, he was no longer playing under the “Night Tripper” persona.  Dr. John’s Gumbo sounds nothing like Gris-Gris or Remedies—it’s instantly accessible zydeco-funk-rock like we heard from Crawfish Fiesta.  Finally, there’s a fine 1981 album called Dr. John Plays Mac Rebennack, an oft-instrumental solo-piano collection.  It’s warm and sounds good.

Travis: Right on. Shall we end this Fiesta with a final joke about Ken Burns’ Civil War?

We could make it in small font, and call it a Foote Note.

Tyler: I think you just did our work for us.

<folksy chuckle>

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