Letter from the Circle Barby BILLY SOTHERNGunshots down on Franklin, 11:45Two boys from the Lower Ninth, the coroner arrivesThere's a blind man reading tarot cards over there in Jackson Square. He says the future is uncertain but he don't really care.* * *
Everyone is drowning here and everyone is freeGod protect these fools who build their homes below the sea."Ash Wednesday" by The Happy Talk Band
People here in New York seem shocked when I tell them
that locals at New Orleans' Circle Bar, didn't sit around
listening to Louis Armstrong and the Hot Fives on the jukebox
all night long. While their jukebox, the best in town in my
estimation, wasn't afraid to look back into the city's past
with Irma Thomas' "Drip drop, drip drop, it's raining so
hard, looks like it's gonna rain all night," pouring out of the
speakers occasionally, the live music at the Circle Bar had a
decidedly less anachronistic tone.
I moved from New York to New Orleans almost five years
ago with the promise of cheap, old, beautiful, falling-apart
homes and drawn to the city's current and dynamic cultural
life which I had seen glimmers of while visiting. While in the
past month the media has focused on the city's cultural history
and its most prominent export, jazz, this reflects only a small
corner of what many of us loved about the city. There have
been some honest assessments of local music tastes in the press.
My favorite bit of reporting from the Times Picayune touched
on the looting of the music section of the hated Lower Garden
District Wal-Mart:
"They took everything - all the electronics, the food, the bikes,"
said John Stonaker, a Wal-Mart security officer. "People left
their old clothes on the floor when they took new ones. The
only thing left are the country-and-western CDs. You can
still get a Shania Twain album."
It is true. There was not a single "new country" fan among any
of my friends and neighbors. However, while there may be
more traditional jazz fans per capita in New Orleans than any
place in the world; New Orleans had many great musicians
of all different stripes - from rockabilly, to alt-country, to
klezmer, and many hybrids therein.
The Circle Bar played host to the city's smart and eclectic
rock scene and while the city's music roots have passed a
torch from Buddy Bolden, Kid Ory, Louis Armstrong,
Professor Longhair, and others patron saints of New Orleans
music, the bands I saw there on a daily basis reflected the
Third World city that was laid waste by the storm in a
present and immediate manner.
Luke Allen, the front man of the Happy Talk Band, could
be found behind the bar at Circle Bar serving drinks pretty
much any night that he was not elsewhere singing his songs
or sitting on the other side of the bar. He's a red-bearded
character who wears a staff-issue Angola State Penitentiary
hat and who hails from Salinas, California, "the home of John
Steinbeck," he always explains. In the post-punk tradition,
he is a less-than-perfect singer and held a guitar on stage
mostly to keep him from having to stand there bare, and
so he could jam his cigarette between the strings and the
tuners while he was singing.
Whatever his weaknesses - he would tell you that they are
many - they are more than made up for by his songs about
the city. I realized one night that almost all of the songs had
an element specific to New Orleans. "Ash Wednesday" sings
of flooding and murder in the Lower 9th Ward. "Forget-Me-
Not" sings of losing your mind, getting picked up by the police
in Bywater for murder, and waking up on the 3rd floor of
Charity Hospital, a mental health ward of New Orleans' public
hospital.
The Happy Talk Band's songs are of New Orleans: the Huey P.
Long Bridge, being drunk and naked with a girl on the levee,
Collins-mix and Methadone, and the melancholy jealousy of
dating a stripper. Luke even has an eye for the city's ubiquitous
flora and commented on the angel's trumpets blooms, the smell
of jasmine in a woman's hair when she walks in from the street,
and the cat's-claw vines that creep up anything that sits on the
ground for more than a few minutes in our rich swampy soil.
When do you ever hear New York's "it bands" singing about
Bellevue Hospital or East New York? The Happy Talk Band's
sense of place was mirrored throughout the local music scene,
filled with people who fell in love with the city as one enters a
deeply dysfunctional love affair. Many came to New Orleans
like sailors drawn to the sirens and crashed against the rocks,
but no less smitten. But now they are scattered around the
country.
When I talked to Luke Allen on the phone from Lafayette,
Louisiana, he mentioned that his upright bass player, Mike
Lenore, was tending bar in a restaurant on the Lower East Side
in New York, his drummer, Andy Harris, found work as a cook
in Peachtree City, Georgia, and his guitar player, Bailey Smith,
who was to marry his wife Emily in New Orleans last month,
is trying find gigs with another New Orleans rock band, the r
aucous Morning 40 Federation (
http://www.morning40.com/).
Though the Happy Talk Band remains committed to staying
together and telling the stories of its city, it is hard to imagine
them either playing their beloved Circle Bar or coming to a town
near you any time soon. Here in New York, Alex McMurray
(
http://alexmcmurray.com/ ), who sang his strange and beautiful
songs in gravelly tones at the Circle Bar every Wednesday for
years, is now playing on the Lower East Side a couple times a
week. I haven't been but it's hard to imagine where he is going
to find a tubaist or washboard player with an ear for his sound
in this town or if people will appreciate, or relate to, the drama
of selling your plasma. Who knows, maybe his perfect tuba-
washboard-rock will be the next big thing in the Big Apple?
In short, though everyone was always talking about leaving
New Orleans for some other city to find work, decent public
schools for their kids, or a music business that might allow them
to stop singing first person non-fiction narratives about doing
medical testing for money, these bands and musicians don't make
much sense living anywhere else because the real, sad, living
New Orleans fed their art at the very same time as it was eating
its young.
For my part, I have spent too many nights sitting half drunk in
the Circle Bar staring up at the old florescent clock from K & B,
a defunct, nostalgia-prompting, local drug store chain, listening
to music about floods, poverty, and urban decay. Now, it breaks
my heart that there is no one left in New Orleans to play these
songs and that the rest of the country is forced to hear about these
same horrors on the television in their living rooms while politicians
claim that what unfolded was unforeseeable.
Too bad that Bush didn't spent more time in places like the Circle Bar
in his wild, younger years visiting New Orleans. Sure, he might have
gotten drunk and obnoxious, but it would have provided a much
needed education.
Billy Sothern is an anti-death penalty lawyer and writer from New Orleans. He can be reached at:
billys@thejusticecenter.orgThis piece first appeared at www.counterpunch.org and was reproducedhere with the kind permission of its author.
