Tyler: Travis, have you had a tough day? Work life getting you down? The night tripper himself has everything you need to get right.
The night tripper being Dr. John. The everything you need being various intoxicants and herbs (?) and black cat oil if your woman got another man.
Travis: Continuing our discussion from last week, I do not believe in the supernatural, but if anywhere in the USA does feature the presence of the otherworldly, it is New Orleans.
Ghosts, voodoo, curses…all that seems possible in NOLA.
Tyler: From the album cover on down to the end of the final track, we’ve got one supernatural record right here.
When I hear “Danse Kalinda Ba Doom”—not to jump ahead here—I invariably picture skeletons dancing in front of a black background. Every time.
Travis: There’s definitely a supernatural feel on this album (that being Dr. John’s Gris Gris), but also I get the sense that if it were to conjure skeletons dancing against a black background in my vision, you’d be able to see the wires coming down to make the puppets dance, or be able to tell that it’s people in black jumpsuits with skeletons painted on them. There’s a winking showmanship and charming charlatanry to the proceedings, from Mac Rebennack himself taking on the persona of a real historical witch doctor from the late 19th century, to the throw-everything-at-the-wall musical syncretism.
Tyler: I was very, very curious to hear your impressions of this one.
Travis: I’ve always been a little bit leery of Dr. John, based on seeing him speak in the video mentioned in last week’s chat, playing over and over again in the New Orleans hotel room, talking about mixin’ the blues music with the choych music. Everything about him seemed like a put-on, a big fat white guy dressed like a shaman and talking like a black stereotype from the 1940s. White people pretending to be black really rubs me the wrong way, and it happens a lot in two things I really like, music and basketball. Trying to cop the style and soul of an oppressed people without living the hard life to back it up, like some white point guard who plays for Syracuse talking about being “deep up in the game” or something. But reading a little more about him, and learning that the persona taken on for this album ACTUALLY IS a put-on and not just cultural appropriation, opened my mind to hearing the sounds within.
As for those sounds, they are something else. I wasn’t really sure what to expect. The only song here I was familiar with was “I Walk on Guilded (sic) Splinters,” and that was from Paul Weller’s cover, which is fine but nothing special. Let’s just say the original is at least 450 times better.
The album maintains a consistent mood throughout without ever being boring, its atmosphere is spooky and fun and weird, the percussion is interesting. His lead vocals are more like a conman giving you a spiel than a typical frontman, and the female backing vocals carry the majority of the melody. At only seven songs and about a half an hour, it gets in, gets out, and leaves me as a listener wanting more. If I were Gene Shalit writing a review to be blurbed on a trailer, I’d say, “Gris Gris is Great Great”.
Tyler: I hope Gene Shalit heard Gris Gris at least once in his life.
Is he still alive? Whoops.
Travis: Who knows? I do think of him almost every time I cook with a shallot though.
Anyway, yeah, this album rules.
Tyler: Fuck yeah.
Travis: I can’t help thinking back to last week and how Professor Longhair would have sounded with this production.
Tyler: I hadn’t considered that, and now I long for the combination.
I’m thrilled that you’re all-in on this one. I wasn’t sure how it’d shake out.
Travis: Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind = smoky David Lynch jazz club, Massive Attack’s Mezzanine = strip club in Tokyo in the year 3000, Gris Gris = a performance at a plantation house in 1894 used to convince the rich owners that their house is haunted, which the performers then use to sell them expensive exorcism services and con them out of their fortune?
Tyler: Yes.
The whole conman angle really plays, now that you discuss it.
Travis: I have no idea if any of that is intentional, but that’s the vibe it gives me. It takes nothing away from the music to me to know that he’s playing a character, because it’s all of a piece.
Tyler: It’s a pretty damn good concept album, for not being sold as a concept album.
Travis: A cohesive work of art, concept album in name or not.
Do you have any particular standout tracks?
Tyler: “Mama Roux” was the first song I loved off the album, accessible and actually song-like as it is. It’s catchy and it’s the album’s least mystical track. I still dig it.
“Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya” is swampy and sets a hazy stage. I love it as well, from the solo opening bars.
“Danse Kalinda” freaks me out, so many points for being effective. Same with one that stood out especially as we approached this chat—“Croker Courtbullion.” One of the strangest hooks you’ll ever find wedged in your head.
“I Walk On Guilded Splinters” is fire and a bop and all the other pimply hyperboles.
Wrapping it up, “Jump Sturdy” is another vaguely traditional jam with a hook in the eccentric way this has hooks.
Oh yeah, “Danse Fambeaux.” No less great than anything else here.
Travis: “Jump Sturdy” and “Danse Fambeaux” were the only ones I didn’t totally vibe with. I wouldn’t skip them in listening to the whole album but probably wouldn’t listen to either on its own, if that makes any sense. But all those others I rock with pretty hard. I think “Croker Courtbullion” is probably my favorite if I had to pick one, it’s very haunting and psychedelic in a darker way than other music I’d think of as psychedelic from that time. Psychedelic in a Charles Manson way, not a flowers in your hair way.
I liked the afro-latin percussion of “Mama Roux,” the tone-setting of “Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya,” found an odd Appalachian reel feel in “Danse Kalinda Ba Doom” I was not expecting. And “Guilded Splinters” is a bangin’ closer.
The only other artists from any adjacent time I could think of doing anything similar to this are the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, who had their own occult thing going on, and Eric Burdon’s later Animals and early War material, which used percussion and spoken word vocals in a similar strange way.
Tyler: I think of Gris Gris as sort of a New Orleans Astral Weeks, richer with eccentricity than that album, but no less effective in conjuring up a mystical theatrical otherworld that, in the very least, sounds terrific.
Travis: Dr. John: born to mix the gospel music and the R&B music, no plan b
Tyler: Travis & Tyler: Latest Album Discussion Project, Vol. 14
Travis: Do you think Dr. John the musician has anything to do with Doctor John’s, the adult store chain which I have seen in both St. Louis and Salt Lake City, and whose St. Louis location I visited soon after turning 18?
Tyler: You didn’t know? He licensed his name.
That’s not true.
Travis: So Dr. John did not profit from my purchase of “Dorm Room Debutantes” nor the purchase of “Tit-tanic” by a friend who I have since lost touch with and believe is an international spy?
For anyone younger than, say, 35 reading this, there used to be stores where people bought porn on VHS.
Tyler: Somebody recently held up one of the adult shops here in town. Pretty sure they got caught.
On that note, I reckon, we might have found a proper conclusion to our discussion of this storied classic LP. Suburban sex shops, after all, are the Midwest’s voodoo cauldron lounges.
Travis: Dr. John Travolta’s “Grease Grease”
Writers' Loom 