Mac Rebennack, Dr. John

- Agradecido a la madre naturaleza por haber podido disfrutar con su creatividad, descanse en paz,  Dr. John - Lisa'Napi

Mac Rebennack, más conocido como Dr. John y auténtica leyenda de la New Orleans Music, falleció el jueves 6 de junio de 2019, a los 77 años.

[. . .] "Estoy haciendo lo que hago para tratar de mantenerme limpio. Pero es lo del demonio de la droga, el adicto a la heroína, el drogadicto, la idea es que me estoy recuperando de eso. Y lo disfruté ”, dijo al entrevistador Stanley Moss. "Hay muchos aspectos hermosos de la vida que me faltaban cuando estaba por ahí de farra. Estoy realmente agradecido de estar limpio otra vez "[. . .]

Malcolm John Rebennack Jr. fue seis veces ganador de los Premios Grammy de la Música

Updated Jun 6, 2019; Posted Jun 6, 2019

Dr. John-ramentertainment.com

Dr. John-ramentertainment.com

NOLA.com

Times-Picayune

https://www.nola.com/entertainment/2019/06/dr-john-left-fans-one-last-record-to-remember-him-by-report.html

By Doug MacCash

Dr. John completó un último registro antes de su muerte el 6 de junio, según un artículo de Rolling Stone.

"En el transcurso del año anterior, en una serie de grabaciones en los Esplanade Studios de Nueva Orleans y en las casas de Rebennack y el productor Shane Theriot, el Dr. John completó su álbum final, una mezcla de nuevos originales, versiones teñidas de country y reelaboraciones de los clásicos del propio Mac  Rebennack grabados con una serie de seleccionados músicos de Nueva Orleans" dice la publicación.

El disco, por el momento sin título, incluirá una revisión "Trippy" de "I Walk On Guilded Splinters", con Rickie Lee Jones, según el avance en Rolling Stone, que no aclara una fecha para el lanzamiento del álbum.

Doug MacCash

https://www.nola.com/entertainment/2019/06/dr-john-a-true-new-orleans-music-legend-dies-at-age-77-report.html

NOLA.com 

The Times-Picayune

By Chelsea Brasted, columnist

Dr. John, the six-time Grammy Award winner whose gritty voodoo-inspired stage persona and whimsical way of speaking were as beloved in New Orleans as his piano-playing, has died. He was 77 years old.

 Towards the break of day June 6, iconic music legend Malcolm John Rebennack, Jr., known as Dr. John, passed away of a heart attack. The family thanks all whom shared his unique musical journey & requests privacy at this time. Memorial arrangements will be announced in due course.

A family statement released by his publicist says Dr. John died early Thursday (June 6) of a heart attack.

Dr. John, whose given name was Malcolm John Rebennack Jr. and who was also called Mac, was born in New Orleans, a place that schooled him in the jazz, R&B, rock and roll, jump blues, funk and Mardi Gras Indian sounds that would come to shape his music. Mr. Rebennack was a man whose style and outlook were shaped, too, by voodoo, that mysterious and mystical spiritualism that developed from the city’s Afro-Caribbean roots. And in New Orleans, that meant he stood out so much he fit right in.

Dr. John,’ funky New Orleans ‘night-tripper’ musician ...-wtop.com

‘Dr. John,’ funky New Orleans ‘night-tripper’ musician ...

wtop.com

Part of a New Orleans tricentennial series on the people and events that connect and inspire us.

Mr. Rebennack was born big and a month late — just before Thanksgiving 1941 — which gave his mother license to call the young tot her “Thanksgiving turkey,” according to “Under a Hoodoo Moon,” Mr. Rebennack’s autobiography (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994). His earliest years were spent with his family shuffling from home to home until they landed in the 3rd Ward, and it was his grandfather who first introduced the would-be pianist to music.

(Note: As writer John Wirt reported for NOLA.com, contrary to the many sources that cite his birthdate as Nov. 21, 1940, Rebennack’s real birthday is Nov. 20, 1941. The Times-Picayune’s Records of the Day column, published Nov. 27, 1941, lists the birth of M.J. Rebennack, a boy, at Baptist Hospital.)

In an early memory recounted in “Under a Hoodoo Moon,” Mr. Rebennack writes that he would listen to his grandfather, who performed in minstrel shows as a younger man, sing: “I been hoodooed/ I been hoodooed / Somebody done put a jinx on me.”

His aunt Andre, who was tuned into what was hot at the time, became his first piano teacher, playing “St. James Infirmary” and “Everybody Loves My Baby.”

The music stayed with him, and a version of that song later landed on “In the Right Place.”

As he grew up, Mr. Rebennack would favor nightclubs, drugs and trouble-making over schooling, picking up a musical education instead as his ear turned to New Orleans’ natural teachers on stages and in barrooms around the city, like the Pepper Pot and the Cadillac Club. In those hazy venues and in local recording studios, he met Professor Longhair, Papa Celestin, Dave Bartholomew, the Basin Street Six, Walter “Papoose” Nelson, Roy Montrell and others.

“Yeah, I studied everybody that I could study,” he told music writer John Wirt in an April 2017 feature. “Hey, they was great pardners of mine. Back then, that was life.”

As helpful as that kind of studying was, Mr. Rebennack ended up getting kicked out of Jesuit High School, but he spent much of the 1950s recording and playing guitar with Professor Longhair, Art Neville and Frankie Ford, among others.

The switch of his focus to guitar in his adolescence after playing piano as a boy came because “every guitarist I knew could get work easy,” Mr. Rebennack told Smithsonian magazine in a 2009 interview. But strumming a guitar wouldn’t last.

“Around 1960, I got shot in my finger before a concert. A guy was pistol whipping Ronnie Barron, our vocalist. Ronnie was just a kid and his mother had told me, ‘You better look out for my son’. Oh god, that was all I was thinking about. I tried to stop the guy, I had my hand over the barrel and he shot”.

The next year, he was busted on drug charges and was sent to federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, according to Mark Kemp’s “Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race and New Beginnings in a New South” (Simon and Schuster, 2007).

When he got out in 1965, he booked it to Los Angeles, where Mr. Rebennack became The Nite Tripper, cultivating his infatuation with voodoo and his own offbeat mysticism while also serving as a session musician for artists like Sonny & Cher and Frank Zappa.

A reluctant frontman, Mr. Rebennack was convinced to pick up that mantle by his conga player, according to the Smithsonian interview, and he borrowed the name “Dr. John” from the story of an 1800s “free man of color … and a gris gris man.”

His first album, 1968’s aptly-titled “Gris-Gris”, was intended “to keep New Orleans gris gris alive”, he told the magazine. The Mardi Gras, West African and psychadelic chanting sounds were a hit with the long-haired hippies Mr. Rebennack knew in California, and the album ranks on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

The album launched a long career in which the Nite Tripper and Mr. Rebennack would converge, most obviously in the man’s New Orleans-centric patois that, when transcribed, may confound an English educator but would delight a listener.

When Wirt, the music writer who interviewed him for an April 2017 story, asked Mr. Rebennack what he hoped to still achieve in his career, he said, “"I’m tripping through the shortcuts of existment to feel it and that’s good".

But in the 1970s, Mr. Rebennack was taking no shortcuts. His musical oeuvre grew to include another handful of records like “Dr. John’s Gumbo,” a collection of covers of New Orleans standard that helped introduce the world to Mr. Rebennack’s hometown sounds and is also listed on Rolling Stone’s top 500 albums, and he worked with Allen Toussaint and The Meters to produce the funky “In the Right Place,” which gave him the Top 20 hit “Right Place Wrong Time.”

His work garnered no shortage of fans around the world, including his fellow musicians, which prompted opportunities like a performance at The Band’s final concert in 1976 and session work or collaborations with The Rolling Stones, Neil Diamond, James Taylor and Carly Simon, Lou Reed, Leon Redbone, Van Morrison, Christina Aguilera, B.B. King, Ringo Starr, The Black Keys and dozens of others. Mr. Rebennack’s work also been widely sampled, like on Beck’s “Loser” and P.M. Dawn’s 1991 “Comatose”, according to Rolling Stone.

The 1980s saw Mr. Rebennack come to a reckoning point with his addiction to heroin. He told Bomb Magazine in 1990 that he had been on methadone maintenance for about five years and that, in 1989, he’d entered rehab.

“I’m doin’ what I do to try to stay clean. But dope fiend, heroin addict, junkie, the idea’s that I’m recovering from it. And I enjoyed it,” he told interviewer Stanley Moss. “There’s a lot of beautiful sides to life I was missing when I was out there ripping and running. I’m real grateful to be clean again”.

His 2008 album, “City That Care Forgot,” offered his gritty meditations on Hurricane Katrina and the official response to the disaster that wreaked havoc on his hometown.

“None of my work has been as aggravated or disgusted as this record. I had never felt the way I do now, seeing New Orleans and the state of Louisiana disappearing”, he told Smithsonian magazine in the 2009 interview. “We've given the world jazz, our kind of blues, a lot of great food, a lot of great things. It's so confusing to look at things these days”.

In his most recent years, Mr. Rebennack partnered with trombonist Sarah Morrow, who served as the art director of his backing band, The Nite Trippers, after moving up from a role in his previous band since 2012, for about three years.

In honor of Mr. Rebennack’s deeply influential well of music, which over the years grew to include nearly three dozen of his own albums, the Saenger Theatre hosted the sold-out “The Musical Mojo of Dr. John: A Celebration of Mac and His Music,” a sold out tribute for and featuring the man himself. Guest artists that night included Bruce Springsteen, John Fogerty, Widespread Panic, Mavis Staples, Terence Blanchard and Jimmie Vaughan.

In 2016, Mr. Rebennack unveiled a new band, The Gris-Gris Krewe, which replaced Morrow as musical director with Roland Guerin and featured drummer Herlin Riley in its ranks.

Also in 2016, NOLA.com|Times-Picayune dining critic Brett Anderson dined on raccoon with Dr. John, and wrote about the experience. “His fridge is always filled with fascinating meat from friends”, said friend Karen Dalton-Beninato, who also handles Rebennack’s publicity.

Anderson wrote that Mr. Rebennack recalled childhood hunting trips to Barataria Bay with his father. Anderson wrote: “My daddy hunted for years and years,” he said, sounding, as he forever has, like a beatnik bullfrog with a speech impediment. “He would stop me from shooting ducks, gooses, speckled belly gooses, if he didn’t think my aim was right. And I thought I was a pretty good shot.”

In fall 2018, a two-story mural of Dr. John popped up on Toledano Street.

The artist MTO captured the good doctor at the height of his trippiness, decked out in furs, feathers and Mardi Gras Indian beadwork. Look for the painting at the corner of Toledano and Dryades streets.

A French artist known as MTO has produced a likeness of psychedelic r&b master Dr. John in an uptown neighborhood.

Funeral arrangements for Dr. John are pending.

By Chelsea Brasted

Dr. John’s second-line parade rambles through Treme

Updated Jun 8, 2019; Posted Jun 7, 2019

https://www.nola.com/entertainment/2019/06/dr-johns-second-line-parade-rambled-through-the-treme-friday.html

By Doug MacCash

NOLA.com | Times-Picayune

New Orleans’ great psychedelic rhythm and blues master Malcolm John Rebennack Jr., better known by his stage name Dr. John, died on Thursday (June 6) at age 77. On Friday afternoon (June 7), an army of the good doctor’s fans assembled outside of Kermit’s Treme Mother In Law Lounge for a steamy yet joyous second-line parade in his honor.

Trumpeter James Andrews prefaced the procession with a solo recitation of Dr. John’s classic “Such a Night,” as the crowd closed tightly around him. Andrews introduced Dr. John’s granddaughter Stephanie O’Quin who would be joining the memorial ramble.

With a drummer, Sousaphone player and phalanx of assorted horn men at his side, Andrews led the celebrants under the roaring highway I-10 overpass plying the “Hey Song” amidst the concrete columns.

Dr. John was known for many things: his keyboard dexterity, brilliant songwriting, voodoo priest persona, growling New Orleans inflection and playful fracturing and reassembly of standard English. If Dr. John described the second-line route, he might have said that it rambulated to Xplanade Avenue, ternt on North Robertson and circulated back. Or something like that.

Along the way, the parade passed within sight of huge mural portraits of other late New Orleans musicians Allen Toussaint, Travis “Trumpet Black” Hill and Ernie K-Doe, unintentionally symbolizing Dr. John’s varied musical influences.

Free-style dancers practiced their footwork at the periphery of the parade, Baby Doll costumers marched in a cluster, a woman waved a sign that read “Roll On Dr. John” and scores of photographer/videographers documented everything from every angle. At one time, second-line parades were only experienced by participants and neighborhood spectators. In the digital age, second line parades are like pebbles in a pond, rippling in every direction thanks to social media sharing.

Dr. John was like that. For six decades he used his immeasurable talent and eccentric vibe to spread the New Orleans vibe globally. Who else played with everyone from Irma Thomas to the Rolling Stones, from the Meters to The Band, from Frankie Ford to Ringo Starr?

The parade ended where it started with the band playing a sweaty, soulful version of “I’ll Fly Away,” as barbecue smoke wafted. In the dim cool of the Mother In Law lounge, Dr. John’s granddaughter explained that though she lives in Atlanta, she’d made her way to New Orleans when she hear he’d died. The parade, she said was “pretty incredible, really hot, really nice.”

“It makes me so happy to see all these people here for him.”

By Doug MacCash,