Allen Toussaint and I were walking across the lobby of a fine but nearly deserted hotel, located just across Canal Street from the French Quarter. An older gentleman had just entered the rear door and was coming toward us when he recognized Allen and stopped in his tracks. His grim expression lit up. He became elated and emotional, grasping and shaking Allen’s hand vigorously, as if his very presence were a sign that all was not lost in the shattered city.
He didn’t speak at first, but his expression said, “If you are back, then we are all back.”
I had never doubted that Allen was a prince in a thin disguise.
We had begun our work on The River in Reverse in Hollywood because we had no choice.
New Orleans was closed to us.
We all knew where this music belonged. We all knew where we should conclude our task, it just hadn’t been clear for a while how we’d get there.
Now A.T. was back.
In April of 2005, I had seen Allen for the first time since the New Orleans sessions for Spike in 1989. When we said our farewells on the showgrounds of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, it was with the hope that we might find a way to work together again. Neither of us could have imagined the circumstances in which this would occur.
That was just seven months earlier.
Before Katrina.
Before the hurricane veered away from a direct hit on the city, decimating the towns of the Gulf Coast.
Before CNN suggested that, for New Orleans, the worst might have been averted.
Before the levees broke and the waters began to rise.
Before most of the city was underwater.
Before the lines of communication went dead.
Before the State of Emergency and the evacuations.
Before the rowing boats and dinghies took to the tide of silt and sewage to rescue the stranded.
Before the fabrications and scaremongering began to stain the television news reports, hungry for more airtime.
Before most of those lies were retracted.
Before the curfew was imposed and the roadblocks went up.
Before the Bush administration began to even pretend to care.
Before fingers started pointing and corruption was rife.
Before someone spray-painted R.I.P. Fats just below the eaves of Fats Domino’s house, up to where the waters had risen.
Before Fats was found shaken up but alive.
Before unidentifiable bodies were found floating in the water.
Before what should have been fixed didn’t get fixed, and now could never be mended.
That was the city that Allen Toussaint had been forced to leave.
I’m pretty certain he didn’t do so willingly.
Or easily.
I’ve never pressed Allen on the details of his experience, but he has never been remotely bitter or self-pitying about the whole episode. His whereabouts and condition were unknown for several days, but Allen eventually made it onto a bus to Birmingham, Alabama, and from there to New York, where friends waited anxiously to help him.
I’d been standing on a rock on Vancouver Island, staring out at the uncommon calm, flat water of the Georgia Strait in the first days of September, trying to get news of Allen’s whereabouts. I was struggling with a fading signal, talking to my friend, songwriter and record producer Joe Henry, who had worked with Allen earlier in the year on the album I Believe to My Soul, recording him in the company of Mavis Staples, Billy Preston, Ann Peebles, and Irma Thomas.
Now Allen’s friends and even some of his family were calling Joe in Pasadena to find out what he might have heard.
A lot of people had headed for Houston or Baton Rouge, but the lines of communication were broken or twisted, and much of what was being said was little more than unreliable hearsay.
A short while later, Joshua Feigenbaum—Allen’s partner in the small NYNO independent record label, and as kind a friend as any man could have—called to confirm that Allen was indeed safe and on his way to New York City.
On September 4, I played the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle and sang the Toussaint song “Freedom for the Stallion” in thanks for Allen’s safe deliverance. Whatever good songs may do, there seemed no better time to sing that melody and all the thoughts it contained.
Ten days later, I was in the wings of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall for the Higher Ground benefit concert. I was standing next to Allen, watching McCoy Tyner play some astounding piano inventions. Allen expelled a soft exclamation of wonder, knowing that we had to follow McCoy, and then we stepped out onstage to perform “Freedom for the Stallion” together for the very first time.
At the close of the evening, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra just continued to play as the audience filed out. They were standing around a couple of drums in the wings and wailing for perhaps another thirty or forty minutes, until a little of the anger and emotion of the night had been burnt or blown away.
At noon the next day, I went to Joe’s Pub on Astor Place to see Allen play the first of what would become a regular solo engagement over the next months. You have to remember that, up until this point, while Allen Toussaint’s songs had been recorded and broadcast all over the world, and musicians had traveled to New Orleans to discover his secrets, Allen himself didn’t find many reasons to leave town and performed mostly on festival occasions in the city.
On our flight together to New Orleans in late November 2005, I’d asked Allen what it was like on the road in days gone by. He was thoughtful for a moment, looked out over Texas, and said, “I’ve only been on the road twice. Once in ’58 with Shirley and Lee, and then in 1974, on the bill with Little Feat.”
What a fool I was not to realize that. How could he have written and produced all those records if he had not been in New Orleans all that time?
What everyone saw that day at Joe’s Pub was a master songwriter awakening to a new set of possibilities. Allen may have lost his home and his studio and seen the rich pool of musicians on which he had always called scattered to other cities of refuge, but his songbook was invulnerable.
Two nights later, the “Big Apple for the Big Easy” telethon was staged at Madison Square Garden. It brought together musical stars from both cities. The money raised was not inconsiderable, but even if it was a drop in the bucket, it was better than no bucket at all. It was almost certainly the biggest gathering of New Orleans musicians since Katrina. The Neville Brothers were there, so were The Meters, and the show would not have been complete without Kermit Ruffins.
Elton John posed for pictures with Clarence “Frogman” Henry. Irma Thomas kindly introduced me to The Dixie Cups before bringing the Garden to its feet and then to its knees with the Bessie Smith tune “Backwater Blues.”
Ry Cooder played with Buckwheat Zydeco and Lenny Kravitz, who also delivered a fine version of Allen Toussaint’s “Hercules” before I joined A.T. and his band for “On Your Way Down,” and we closed out his set with “Yes We Can,” which was fast becoming the song of the hour.
Jimmy Buffett reminded people that Katrina had not been the misery of New Orleans alone and spoke and sang for the rest of the Gulf Coast. Aaron Neville joined a reunited Simon and Garfunkel to sing “Bridge over Troubled Water.”
Backstage, during rehearsals, you could see all of the New Orleans musicians greeting their friends, but they were also sharing their woes and news from home. Most of it was pretty grim.
In one such scrum of embraces, I overheard someone yell, “Did you hear that a shark was washed up in Jackson Square?”
There was an almost hysterical edge to the laughter that followed.
No one quite believed it.
No one absolutely doubted it.
I finally got up the nerve to ask Allen what he knew of his home and his studio.
The news wasn’t very good.
I heard myself say, “I’m so very sorry.”
Allen paused for moment, nodded his acknowledgment, and then added, “Well, the things that I had then, they served me well.”
• • •
IT WAS TWENTY-TWO YEARS earlier when Yoko Ono had pressed play on the small boom box that stood between us on the low coffee table.
All the lights went out.
There was a small gasp of surprise from those gathered in the studio lounge. Then, in the silence, Yoko said, “Well, I guess John doesn’t want us to hear this.”
It was impossible to know if she was making a joke.
In 1983, Yoko had reentered the studio to mix what was to be released as Milk and Honey, the last John and Yoko album. I had been invited there that night to discuss cutting a track for Every Woman Has a Man Who Loves Her, an album of Yoko’s songs performed by other artists that she had also been planning with her husband at the time of his murder.
The tripped fuse was quickly located, the light restored, and we repaired to the control room, where an engineer was finishing up the Milk and Honey mixes.
The 24-track tape was rolling and studio banter could be heard. With all the lights off in the recording room, the illusion was that John was still out there somewhere in the gloom, joking with the band, putting on his Goon voices, just as he had done on the Beatles Fan Club Christmas record in 1963.
I thought it must have been tough for Yoko to come in to work every day and hear her husband’s voice on tape like that, or perhaps it was a comfort to her.
I know I was glad when the volume was cranked up on Lennon’s animated count off to “Nobody Told Me.” At that moment, it sounded like the best thing I’d heard all year.
I never met John Lennon. I just couldn’t imagine how our paths might have crossed in the three frantic years in which my career in New York and his life had overlapped. Now I’d been asked to record a version of “Walking on Thin Ice,” the song that John and Yoko had been mixing on the night of his death.
There’s a “Finishing Note” from Yoko on the back of the original 45 sleeve detailing the elation she and her husband felt the days after the release of Double Fantasy in 1980. The last paragraph reads “Getting this together after what happened was hard. But I knew John would not rest his mind if I hadn’t. I hope you like it, John, I did my best.”
I didn’t take this assignment lightly. I knew I had to do something utterly different with the song.
Our tour of that year was about to take us “down the Mississippi to the Port of New Orleans,” as Johnny Horton once sang. We looked at the map and the list of our dates and realized that any recording session would have to be in Memphis or New Orleans.
That wasn’t the worst news in the world.
“Well,” I said jokingly, “we could always call Allen Toussaint or Willie Mitchell,” thinking it was completely fanciful that either man would be interested in working with me.
Yoko’s production assistant faithfully wrote down what I’d said, placed some calls, and the next thing I knew, I was talking with Allen Toussaint about recording “Walking on Thin Ice.”
I thought, Be careful what you wish for.
My head was spinning at the very thought of Allen listening to Yoko’s original version and then to any of my records, and wondering how the two would ever meet. As a production assignment, this wasn’t exactly “Lady Marmalade.”
Our ticket sales in New Orleans were actually so slow that we arrived to find our show had been canceled. An evening of leisure afforded me the chance to take in Willie Green drumming behind the Neville Brothers as they closed down the Pontchartrain Amusement Park for the last time. After the show, I spoke with Aaron Neville and told him that I was planning to go on to catch a late set of The Dirty Dozen Brass Band.
“Where’s it at?” asked Aaron.
“The Glass House,” I replied.
“A word to the wise,” said Aaron. “I wouldn’t go there.”
I looked up at Aaron’s imposing frame and the tattoos on his cheeks and thought better of it.
The next day, we arrived at Sea-Saint Studios, well rested. Allen was yet to arrive, but in the hallway we encountered his partner, Marshall Sehorn, who seemed like a bit of an old pirate, and I wondered what we were getting into.
Once in the recording room, Pete Thomas took a seat behind a pale blue Ludwig kit that was already nailed down in the drum booth, and he became convinced that it must possess magical funky properties and proceeded to play the drums for an hour straight, while everyone who set up around him was making plans to strangle him.
Allen walked in looking immaculate. He immediately set us to work.
Pete anticipated having to decode some complex mysteries.
“What do you think I should play?”
Allen said, “What you were playing was just fine,” his voice rising and lengthening on “just” and sparkling on “fine.”
I took away a rough mix from the session on which the voice of one of the engineers could be heard over the talk-back, announcing, “‘Walking on Thin Ice,’ take one.”
It was a shame that it was edited out in the mastering process.
We didn’t quite believe our luck or want to seem like we were taking the easy way out, so we pressed on for four or five more attempts before Allen reassured us that our first take really was the one we should use. By now, Allen had got measure of the other two Attractions. He listened intently while Steve Nieve put the finishing touches on his organ part and then huddled in the control room with Bruce Thomas for an hour until they had completely redubbed the bass part. Bruce usually didn’t have very much time for anyone else’s opinion about what he was playing, but he worked very well with Allen, turning this into one of his most unusual and humorous bass lines.
It didn’t occur to me until later that the slippery phrases that answered the organ were actually pretty pictorial, just as Allen had arranged a baritone saxophone to mimic the steam whistle on Lee Dorsey’s “Riverboat.”
I believe he sees music in pictures.
Allen then put The TKO Horns through their paces. I’d arranged for them to play a refrain that quoted a Hi Records track by The Masqueraders. The song was called “Let the Love Bell Ring.”
A bell, just like the opening notes of John and Yoko’s “Starting Over.”
Allen hammered the motif into shape until it fit the song perfectly.
The horn section was from Birmingham—and I don’t mean the one in Alabama—but by the time Allen had dictated the rest of the horn parts, you’d have never guessed that this was a team of Brummies, rather than his regular crew.
They were all speaking in his language.
Allen then took me aside and said the words that I’d dreaded hearing all afternoon.
“Elvis, would you help me with the broccoli?”
“Broccoli?”
“Yes, broccoli.”
This is it, I thought. Everyone is going to start talking that strange New Orleans jargon and I’m going to have to pretend I know what it all means.
“Sure,” I said, trying to appear nonchalant, and followed Allen outside. We got into his gold Rolls-Royce—the one with the number plate that read PIANO. We drove just a short distance from the studio and entered a house full of strange, enticing aromas.
I walked into a kitchen filled with steam and industry. A woman handed me a grey metal serving tray—the kind that I associated with school dinners. She tipped an entire colander full of steaming broccoli into it, while sweet-smelling shrimp were borne in from a barbecue on the back patio.
I helped Allen load the feast into the boot of the Roller, and we drove back to the Sea-Saint.
This was New Orleans. We were not simply making a record. We had been invited to supper.
Back in the studio lounge, we all had more than our share of these sinful delights, grateful that we already had the take in the can.
Then it was my turn at the microphone. I chose to sing the song quite softly, really only hitting one word with any force.
“Life” seemed the right word for underlining. I even asked Allen to flip on the same kind of slap echo that was often heard on John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band vocals, each time that word came around, as a small salute.
After all, the subtitle of the song was “For John.”
• • •
ED BRADLEY was speaking about three of New Orleans’s most famous sons, Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino, and Dave Bartholomew. Despite the size of the crowd at Madison Square Garden, he had that calm, confidential authority that only comes from a lifetime in broadcasting.
Behind him, the stage manager stage-whispered with considerably more urgency, “Forty-five seconds to air.”
The Dirty Dozen Brass Band and I were hidden in the darkness and about to launch into a version of Dave Bartholomew’s “The Monkey,” his 1950 parable about man’s real place in the process of evolution. I’d recorded the song in Clarksdale a year earlier. I was to declaim each verse while Dave Bartholomew himself was poised with his trumpet and would intone the payoff line “The monkey speaks his mind,” just as he had done on the original record.
It didn’t look as if evolution was going to reach us fast enough. We were about to go live to the crowd at the Garden and the television audience, and none of our microphones or audio monitors were working.
“Thirty seconds to air . . .”
Now there was a panic among the technicians. Ed Bradley already seemed to be winding up his introduction when I suspect his producer spoke over his earpiece and told him to stall or to take a little detour.
My wife, Diana, slipped into her place at the piano bench in the shadows, as she was due to lead The Dirty Dozen in Fats Domino’s “I’m Walking” as I made my exit. I looked directly at the Dozen’s Gregory Davis and he just shrugged. I suppose there are worse things in life than being made to appear a fool on national television.
I’d first made contact with Gregory after seeing The Dirty Dozen burn down a club on Seventh Avenue in New York City, sometime in 1987. The next year, T Bone Burnett and I invited them to play on the New Orleans sessions for Spike.
I remember talking down the words of “Deep Dark Truthful Mirror” with Allen Toussaint before he laid down his piano part. I knew the intentions of the song were pretty clear from the opening lines:
One day you’re going to have to face a deep dark truthful mirror
And it’s going to tell you things that I still love you too much to say
It is hard to live with someone who repeatedly hurls himself into the oblivion of alcohol and anger. It’s harder still when that person is you or someone you are pretending to love.
Spike contained a lot of songs about disordered senses, but this one was more brutal than the rest. At first glance, no line seemed more absurd than “A butterfly feeds on a dead monkey’s hand.”
This was not a Halloween recipe, but from a verse about an unstrung puppet hobbling home on a liquid stick of alcohol and slumping, close to collapse, while gruesome images played on a television set.
What little compassion could be mustered for the subject was only present due to the majesty of Allen’s piano playing and the beautiful blur of the Dirty Dozen’s horns as they wound around my voice like someone staring into the light through a kaleidoscope.
“Fifteen seconds to air, you guys.”
Cables were being frantically unplugged and reconnected without success. Now Gregory Davis and Efrem Towns were firing off anxious flurries of trumpet notes, but their playing was being swallowed in the vastness of Madison Square Garden.
“Ten seconds. Are we ready?”
There was now a note of desperation as the technician struggled to connect us. Dave Bartholomew seemed completely untouched by the chaos of people frantically trying to find the missing link around his feet. Then again, he had begun leading bands and arranging for records in the late ’40s and early ’50s, when they would have been cutting to wax. Take a listen to the solo on his “Basin Street Breakdown,” where the guitarist plays the same trilled phrase for nearly a solid minute. It’s enough to make you lose your mind.
I can imagine Dave seeing the needle running close to the run-out groove and thinking about pulling the guitar out of the guy’s hand before he wrecked a perfectly good waxing.
“Five, four, three . . .”
Dave was ready for blastoff.
The monitors suddenly kicked in.
“Two-one . . .”
The man wearing a headset pointed at us to start playing, and “The Monkey” spoke his mind, right on time.
The recitation lists all the reasons why man could not have “descended from our noble race” of monkeys as:
No monkey ever deserted his wife
Starved her baby or ruined her life
Nor would the monkey ever:
Use a gun or a club or a knife
And take another monkey’s life
Some of the testimony could have come right out of the news headlines.
Another thing that you will never see is a monkey build a fence around a coconut tree
And let all the coconuts go to waste
Forbidding other monkeys to come and taste
Why, if I put a fence around this coconut tree
Starvation will force you to steal from me
Or, as Allen Toussaint had written in the final verse of “Freedom for the Stallion”:
They’ve got men building fences to keep other men out
Ignore him if he whispers and kill him if he shouts
I didn’t get to stick around to hear my wife sing “I’m Walking,” as I was already running down one of the concrete corridors to the stage door and into a fast car downtown to a converted synagogue on the Lower East Side for a concert organized by the Angel Orensanz Foundation. I’d agreed to sing my part in Roy Nathanson’s “Fire Suite” with The Jazz Passengers on a benefit bill alongside Yo La Tengo and John Zorn.
People were playing and singing for New Orleans all over New York that night. I was even planning to catch Little Jimmy Scott’s late set at the Blue Note, but my second show ran too long to make it back across town.
The next day, I began writing “The River in Reverse.” It took the outsider’s view of a tragedy, the powerlessness of a remote witness who has sold his soul for the right to look away.
There was declaration of “uncivil war” in every mealy-mouthed pronouncement from the White House and their stooges at Fox News or in the yellow press.
The things that they promised are not a gift
The commentary of the hour contained the unmistakable inference, if not an outright slander, that the people of New Orleans had been asking for it.
By being corrupt.
By being foolhardy enough to live there.
By being poor, and other crimes that were a matter of birth or the color of their skin.
You could turn on the television at any hour and encounter a puppet show playing on the fears and counted blessings of the distant and pious. You didn’t have to look hard to see people governing with “money and superstition.”
For Jesus’ sake, there must be something better than to leave those who cannot defend themselves to the mercy of the elements, or for that matter, the rocket’s red glare.
It was all part of the same litany.
A man falls through the mirror of a lake
They fish him out quick and they call him a fake
Were we really to accept that this was the best we could do?
Could we not turn back or reverse this cynical indifference and insensitivity?
Or, as that king, commonly called Canute, once said, “Imperio igitur tibi, ne in terram meam ascendas, nec vestes nec membra dominatoris tui madefacere praesumas.” (Translation: “Therefore, I order you not to rise to my land, and not to wet the clothes or body of your master.”)
Mr. Bartholomew’s song had already provided me with an idea for the last line of my song:
So erase the tape on that final ape running down creation,
running down creation, running down creation
I wrote this all out in one draft. Typed it out on two sheets of paper.
Three nights later, I sang “The River in Reverse” for the first time at “The Parting of the Waters,” an event organized by The New Yorker at Town Hall.
Allen’s conviction that New Orleans would be restored and he would return was unshakable, but while he was here among us, there seemed a chance to do something that served the moment.
The idea of recording The River in Reverse together entered my mind while I was watching Allen play from the pages of his songbook for the second time at Joe’s Pub. He seemed almost startled by the reaction of the people in the audience upon hearing even his rarest tunes.
Joe McEwen—who had been my A&R man at the time of King of America and remained a friend and counsel—was sitting in another booth, and we apparently had the same thought at almost the same moment. He told me that Verve Records would release whatever we recorded.
I plucked up the courage to ask Allen, and his response was, as ever, generous and open to every possibility. Joshua Feigenbaum offered his apartment as our workshop. We worked there for a number of days, overlooking the calm, autumnal landscape of Central Park, high above the roaring traffic’s boom.
We sought a balance between Allen’s elegance and restraint and my desire to go directly for the throat. There was a Steinway for Allen and a notebook for me.
I made a list of Toussaint songs that could not have seemed timelier—“Freedom for the Stallion,” “On Your Way Down,” and “Tears, Tears and More Tears.” Even “Nearer to You” suddenly seemed just a small world of toil and snares away from “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”
I played “The River in Reverse” for Allen again, and he declared the song complete, but began sketching out a horn arrangement that became as memorable for me as anything I was singing. My words had the anger. His horns had the sorrow.
Then we wrote a song called “Where Is the Love?” My second verse was about the absence of empathy:
Between your heart and hide
Something gets lost, because it takes a tragedy
To trick it out of us
Musically, I had just the opening melody that Allen’s playing immediately rendered more graceful, but I was shocked by both the passion of the music and the unguarded, unvarnished anger of the lyrics that Allen proposed for the bridge in a series of uncomfortable questions.
How can you grace your face in the mirror?
How can you turn a blind eye to all?
What lurks inside of you that allows you to steal from the table of life?
How can you lay your head on the pillow knowing you are so guilty of all but the truth?
It is curious to me now that we recorded but did not include this number on The River in Reverse, but then, not every song wanted to be a lament, and the final ballad on the album was Allen’s beautiful song “All These Things,” a more guarded way of speaking of all we hold dear.
Then we wrote a joyful song called “International Echo,” in which I was thinking about the way Allen had seen his songs “Fortune Teller” and “A Certain Girl” sent out into the world by Bennie Spellman and Ernie K. Doe, only to hear them bounce back to him from England performed by The Rolling Stones, The Merseybeats, The Who, and The Yardbirds.
It can’t be repeated
It can’t be resisted
It went out straight and it came back twisted
If you didn’t see it then, then you probably missed it
International Echo!
We pressed on to “The Sharpest Thorn,” which began with a dandy stepping out on New Year’s Eve:
I wore my finest suit of clothes
The sharpest thorn defending the rose
Hot as a pistol
Keen as a blade
The sharpest thorn upon parade
I showed Allen the first two verses and said, “Where does it go from here?”
He said calmly, “Perhaps Archangel Michael and Archangel Gabriel are involved.”
A lapsed Catholic like me had no problem with that leap of imagination. It only made the scene I was painting seem more magnificent and fantastic. Why wouldn’t you go into the night with a herald and someone to slay your demons and your dragons?
Allen sat down at the Steinway and took hold of a melody I had only tentatively picked out. Thirty minutes later we were roaring out:
Archangel Michael will lead the way
Archangel Gabriel is ready to play
Although we know we must repent
We hit the scene and look for sins that haven’t even been invented
By the time we reached Los Angeles, we had half a dozen new songs to our name and our list of Toussaint classics to cut. The sessions were set up to feature The Imposters playing with Allen and his regular horn players: Joe “Foxx” Smith on trumpet, Amadee Castenell on tenor sax, Brian “Breeze” Cayolle on baritone and soprano sax, and the trombonist Big Sam Williams, with Anthony “A.B.” Brown completing the lineup on guitar.
The recording was begun at Sunset Sound in Hollywood, but we had booked our flights to New Orleans as soon as we heard that Piety Street Studios was reopened for business. We then found the one hotel that was accepting bookings from out-of-town visitors, while all the other functioning establishments were still billeting FEMA staff or filled with insurance assessors.
The first things we saw on the drive in from the airport were the eerie stacks of abandoned cars, caked in silt from the floodwaters, piled up under the freeway underpass. The streets of the French Quarter were almost deserted. There was little or no traffic on Canal Street.
On my way to the studio for the first session, I left the hotel early and booked a car to take me down into the Lower Ninth Ward. The driver was proud and a little wary that mine was a morbid curiosity but when I told him what I was doing in town his whole demeanor changed.
We made our imperceptible descent from a higher elevation. If this was what it looked like after three months, you could only guess at the horror of the first days and weeks. The foundations of whole blocks of dwellings were discernible among the smears of dried mud, but the houses on which they had stood had been erased, leaving debris everywhere. A barge was still wedged up on the levee as if another strong surge might have hurled it right over into the neighborhood. There were several half-collapsed, concertinaed structures that had been shifted out of place and left at a drunken angle. A dirty blue car had been flipped over and crushed by some ferocious impact. Another car and a refrigerator were perched up in otherwise bare trees, their branches bent out of shape by this unlikely, unwelcome fruit.
There were no birds.
The only sound was a chain saw that someone was running in the distance from a portable generator and a dull thud of the radio playing through the window of a parked vehicle a block away. A man was up a ladder tacking up wire to a post in an attempt to reconnect to something. The task seemed equivalent to placing a sticking plaster on a gunshot wound.
I could only imagine the darkness of night.
The driver turned the car around when my eyes were full and we drove quietly past the first signs of rebuilding and renewal, him keeping up a steady, positive commentary on the recovery that he believed was under way.
Allen had contributed a muted and melancholy transcription of Professor Longhair’s “Tipitina” to the Our New Orleans benefit record on Nonesuch. A.T.’s version was called “Tipitina and Me.” The very idea of him taking such a usually joyful and rambunctious number and making it a more thoughtful and personal piece seemed to pull back a curtain on another time and place. The music suggested two simultaneous, superimposed realities. One was the brutal present, the other a memory of nobility and beauty. It was a trick of imagination, not a piece of reportage.
I had wanted to see these things with my own eyes, as the words I had written for “Tipitina and Me” had already imagined them.
Not a soul was stirring
Not a bird was singing, at least not within my hearing
I was five minutes past caring
Standing in the road just staring
Thought I heard somebody pleading
I thought I heard someone apologize
Some fell down weeping
Others shook their fists up at the skies
And those who were left
Seemed to be wearing disguises
I called this song “Ascension Day,” for reasons that must surely be obvious.
On my way back to Bywater, where Piety Street Studios was located, I passed many of the houses that had symbols sprayed on the outside walls to indicate where people had been found in defiance of the evacuation order. Some houses had symbols to indicate the presence of abandoned and possibly vicious dogs or that the residents had been too infirm to depart or even that bodies had been found inside.
My friends from the city told stories of having to negotiate around the roadblocks once the waters had receded to discover the fate or state of their houses and then working for days with pumps to draw out the filthy, stagnant water lying in their basements and lower stories. They had to don facial masks to combat a blight of mold. Pulling precious mementos out of the slime or simply cleaning out putrid meat and spoiled produce from freezers left without power for weeks.
The complexity of the recovery around it made it all the more remarkable that Piety Street was open for business, but then, it stood on relatively higher ground and therefore did not take any water.
The sessions themselves were nowhere near as somber as all of this might suggest. Indeed, once within the studio walls, Allen’s evident relief and the New Orleans players’ joy at being back to work in the city became completely contagious. Our only problem was that we could not work too late, even if we wished to, as a curfew demanded we be off the streets by one a.m.
It was peculiar to see troops in sand fatigues manning barricades with armored cars better suited to Iraq, but just as unsettling to be driving out of one of the illuminated districts past a stretch of residential city blocks to which the power had still not been restored. The darkness seemed random and inexplicable.
“Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further” was the best thing we recorded at Piety Street, and it might be my favorite cut on the whole record.
It was a song that Joe Henry had proposed we include after he agreed to take the producer’s chair. It was also the one time we were able to persuade Allen to the microphone to take most of the lead vocal, although Big Sam very nearly stole the song from both of us with his trombone solo.
The song was glorious to play. As it said, “We’re covering up the pain.”
But you didn’t have to look very far outside the studio door to see what Allen had meant by his closing lines:
What happened to the Liberty Bell, I heard so much about?
Did it really ding-dong?
It must have dinged wrong, it didn’t ding long
When it came time for me to leave the studio, Yoko walked me out into the hallway. Beyond the courtesies and practical plans, her parting remark was, “John used to say, ‘He’s our kind of guy.’”
In that split second, I wondered whether he’d been watching when we did our song-switch act on SNL or just heard one of our records, but, of course, the words went in deep.
Years later, I read a passage from one of Lennon’s last interviews in which he said, “I cannot be a punk in Hamburg and Liverpool anymore. I’m older now. I see the world through different eyes. I still believe in love, peace and understanding, as Elvis Costello said, and what’s so funny about love, peace and understanding.”
Perhaps he thought I wrote the song.
Somebody once told me that if Elvis Presley’s drummer, D. J. Fontana, likes you, he may give you a gift of a small square cut from the calfskin bass-drum head that he used when he worked with the King.
Just a small memento.
When our recording was delivered, Yoko threw us a discreet and elegant party in San Francisco on what was the last night of our tour. I’d never seen so much crushed ice in my life.
Later still, a beautiful cedar box arrived in the mail with an inscription of thanks etched on a copper plate. But the heavy scent of the wood was too reminiscent of incense and funerary for an altar boy like me. I placed the box gratefully on an upper shelf and never thought to take it down again.
My most lasting gift was of a different order.
It was not simply that the making of “Walking on Thin Ice” brought about my first introduction to Allen Toussaint or even that I had returned twice more to New Orleans, in such utterly different circumstances.
It wasn’t even about the recording of The River in Reverse.
It’s a fine, sincere piece of work, but I’d be an idiot if I thought I could sing “Nearer to You” as well as Betty Harris, and I certainly never dreamed we’d surpass the way Lee Dorsey sang many of those songs on one of Allen’s masterpieces, the Yes We Can album.
I just wanted those songs to be heard again, and then again. I was the one with the way and will to put those songs and their composer before a new and different audience. I hope anyone who hears those songs for the first time on our album gets the same pleasure I did upon encountering the original renditions.
Or as Curly Moore once sang, “Don’t Pity Me.”
That’s a great record, too.
In the spring of 2006, I was Allen’s guest at the first Jazz Fest following Katrina. It was an extraordinary afternoon in which to play even the smallest part. Then we got to reprise those songs over again as the two of us traveled from a bar in Chicago to a nightclub in Tokyo, as a preface to the release of The River in Reverse.
The Imposters and Allen’s musicians went on a twenty-five-date U.S. tour that took us from Green Bay, Wisconsin, all the way back to the French Quarter. To complete the set, Allen wrote horn arrangements for many of my songs: “Bedlam” from The Delivery Man, “Clownstrike” from Brutal Youth, and the ballads “Poisoned Rose” and “That Day Is Done.” He found a deeper well and some pretty psychedelic humor in a few of those charts.
In concert, we prevailed on Allen to take the spotlight more often, singing “Brickyard Blues,” “A Certain Girl,” and “Fortune Teller.” Later in the tour, we even got to play my favorite of Allen’s early Lee Dorsey hits, “Get Out of My Life Woman,” an arrangement that will always be as new as next week. Each night, we’d take an interlude at the piano where A.T. would tear up “Big Chief,” I would sing “Ascension Day,” and we might share the vocal on his beautiful melody “What Do You Want the Girl to Do?”
Needless to say, Allen returned to New Orleans just as soon as it was possible, and his faith in the city’s restoration was repaid in time, but seeing him become a performing, touring musician for a while was a remarkable transition to behold.
One evening, Diana and I sat with Joe Henry and his sister-in-law, the song-and-dance woman Madonna, who had slipped into the Village Vanguard unnoticed and sat otherwise unattended and unmolested through Allen’s entire set of instrumental music from Morton to Monk, trading the chorus on Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” with Don Byron, Christian Scott, and Marc Ribot.
Not so very long ago, Allen sent me an e-mail greeting from Quito in Ecuador, where he was playing a date. I’d never heard of anyone playing in Ecuador. The world no longer has to come to New Orleans to see Allen Toussaint. He’s been taking that part of New Orleans that lives in his songs out to the world.
In the summer of 2007, Steve Nieve and I toured Europe with Allen’s band, including his son-in-law, Herman Lebreaux, on drums.
The moon was rising and the temperature falling below a hundred degrees Fahrenheit for the first time all day as we took the stage for an encore at the amphitheater of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens.
The ruins of the Parthenon were illuminated above us as Allen began to play “Yes We Can.”