Marooned

THE THING ABOUT NEW ORLEANS MUSIC IS THAT ALMOST ANY CLAIM MADE ON ITS BEHALF COULD BE TRUE. TAKE THIS ONE. JAZZ WAS MADE IN NEW ORLEANS,” says hot-boy-turned-hip-hop-elder Juvenile. “Rap itself started in New Orleans. People think it came from the East Coast or the West Coast. But it didn’t, it came from New Orleans. Everybody in New Orleans knows that.”

Why not? The Mardi Gras Indians might have been the original b-boys. They rode so deep they made you stare or follow. They gave each other ill titles like Big Chief and Spyboy, called themselves names like Wild Tchoupitoulas, Wild Magnolias, and Comanche Hunters. They fussed year-round to make sure their gear looked the flyest. They protected their flags like territory. And they rolled block-to-block looking for other gangs to battle, spitting rhymes about how they’d never bow down.

The words were only half the story, or less. They needed a beat to go. (And anyway, writing about music by obsessing over lyrics is like talking rain and forgetting the clouds.) To flip Jay Cocks’s script, rap was the magnetic part, the part that made somebody/anybody/everybody scream. The fun was all in the funk, the breaks that by themselves sounded calls and demanded responses. And in the beginning, down in New Orleans, they funked the finest.

Historians might date funk to the moment in 1967 when Los Angeles’s Dyke and the Blazers syncopated down “Funky Broadway,” or perhaps two years before that, when James Brown broke it down on “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag.” Mid-60s Bronx-style bugalu—with its bang-bang horn stabs and exuberant dances bursting out of the wedding party of montuno and Memphis—was just as important. Funk came from both the sound of North American blues adapting to the herky-jerky pulse of the swelling cities, and the sound of Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean polyrhythms percolating up from the global South.

When the two came together, history shot forward. As 1977 was to punk and 1982 was to hip-hop, 1970 was to funk. Sly Stone’s “Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin” and “Everybody Is A Star.” The Art Ensemble of Chicago’s “Theme De Yo Yo” and “Bye Bye Baby.” Rufus Thomas’s “Funky Penguin” and “The Breakdown.” King Floyd’s “Groove Me.” Donny Hathaway’s “The Ghetto.” Curtis Mayfield’s “Move On Up.” Funkadelic’s self-titled album, and Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow. David Axelrod’s Earth Rot. Eddie Palmieri’s Harlem River Drive. Santana’s Abraxas. Jimi’s Band of Gypsys. In the middle of it all, in hottest July, two monsters: James Brown with his precociously, ferociously talented new band, the JBs, cutting a new version of “Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose,” cross-fading four-on-the-floor funk with three-two clavé, and Bootsy Collins, Johnny Griggs, and Clyde Stubblefield bridging North and South in the break. And the Meters’ second paradigm-shattering album, Look-Ka Py-Py.

Funk picked up where bugalu and rhythm and blues left off. It was a recovery and visioning project. Rhythms locked away during the Middle Passage and isolated by slavery and racism across the diaspora were released for a reunion-turned-celebration: the pulse of the streets of Havana, San Juan, Sao Paolo, funky Nassau, Port-Au-Prince, Port of Spain, Santo Domingo, Kingston, San Francisco, the Bronx, Augusta, the clavé and the soul-beat coupling and layering at accelerating rates, reviving a carnival consciousness at the level of muscle memory and spirit dance. Funk was Black unity projected back into the global city.

But what the rest of the world caught up to in 1970 had been going on in New Orleans, a mainline vortex for the Africanized New World, for at least a century, where rhythms like calypso, rumba, junkanoo, mambo, samba, and reggae joined the blues. They all came together in the second line, the funeral march’s second procession, with people singing and playing and drumming a passed soul’s return home. The process was open, a foundational chant and meter at the center, everyone else getting in where they fit in, a dynamic, democratic architecture of rhythms providing as many ways to be inhabited as there were players to build it. On Mardi Gras Day, the liveliest of death’s street pageants, the Indians led the most traditional of second-line parades. Dressed in boldly colored, hand-sewn costumes and masks, Mardi Gras Indian gangs brought lightning and thunder, shouted about how bad they were and the greatness of their fallen comrades. The world opened, and rhythms gathered like spirits.

“It was something you looked forward to seeing. Pan drums, tambourines, cowbells, and bottles. It’s tribal in one way, but in another way, it’s also pretty high-tech,” said Meters drummer Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste. “It was definitely a percussive culture. Now I just happened to be born there.” In 1965, the year that the 13th Ward boys who became Meters first began playing together, the Dixie Cups brought the second line, clavé and all, to the top of the pop charts with a sticks-and-chants version of Sugar Boy Crawford’s Mardi Gras Indian adaptation, “Iko Iko.” New Orleans music was South and North, tribal and futuristic, pop and vanguard, all at the same time. Small wonder that a half-decade later, Modeliste, Art Neville, George Porter Jr., and Leo Nocentelli, who had known nothing but this musical world, and so were worldly beyond all imagining, sounded like prophets.

In 1969, they recorded over a dozen three-minute marvels of rhythm and color, including all the songs on their self-titled debut and a handful more that would be released on Look-Ka Py-Py. The effect was immediate. Before the year was out, Motown’s Funk Brothers cribbed Nocentelli and Porter’s bottom lock for the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back,” then took the sideways–Bo Diddley ride-or-die second line of “Here Comes The Meter Man” and the karate-kick intro from “Cissy Strut” to build a breakdown for “ABC.” Legend has it that Pretty Purdie gave Miles Davis and his band copies of Meters records to study before they went in to record Bitches Brew. Even Booker T. & The MGs, once the Meters’ model, tacked southward from orthodox bluesy funk to the wide-open Latinized groove of “Melting Pot,” a vector continuing forward to Lonnie Liston Smith’s “Expansions,” Babe Ruth’s “The Mexican,” and the Jimmy Castor Bunch’s “It’s Just Begun.” The Meters didn’t just create classic break records—a stunningly large portion of the breakbeat canon is unimaginable without them.

They must have sounded mysterious, uproarious, and seductive, all at the same time. When Jay Cocks wrote that Bobby Marchan’s crazed chant on Huey “Piano” Smith’s “Don’t You Just Know It”—“Ah ha ha ha, hey-ey yo, gooba gooba gooba!”—sounds “like a gang of twisted Masons shouting a password,” he might have also captured what the next generation of white musicians heard from Black NOLA musicians. The Who swiped the Dixie Cups for “Magic Bus,” but the Meters would become the musical brown sugar for Paul McCartney, Lowell George, and especially Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Connect the dots from “Meter Man” and “ABC” to “Sympathy For The Devil.” Just maybe, the Meters kept all of rock from sucking in the ’70s. In 1971, John Bonham put his drum kit into a deep stairwell to approximate Modeliste’s lumberjack snare and canyon-sized kick for “When The Levee Breaks.” With outsized world heroes like Jorge Ben, Juan Formell, Mulatu Astatqé, and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the funk went 360.

The cover of The Meters featured measuring devices—rulers, a barometer, a scale, a compass, a sextant, and at the center, a metronome and clocks, metaphors for the diversity and multidirec-tionality of their rhythms, and above all, a tribute to the musicians’ extraordinarily complicated relationship to time. In a sense, the band’s music embodied New Orleans in the last half of the twentieth century: time running out, a city declining through political abandonment, a singular cultural space so central in globalizing America, in producing magnificent art beyond the constraints of time, and yet so valueless in the present that it would be forced into physical abandonment.

From the time of Brown v. Board of Education through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the hits of Little Richard, Fats Domino, Lee Dorsey, Ernie K-Doe, and many more had helped bring down America’s racial Jericho. But all the liberation they gave their fervent white fans couldn’t save sweet Sugar Boy Crawford from being beaten like Bop on his way to a gig in Monroe, left paralyzed in a hospital bed, awaiting outrageous charges of drunk driving. The Meters were four children of segregation, alive in the rhythms of the secret old world. But they were also set free to hammer out the contours of a new one. Around them, the world would pivot from the American century into a global millennium.

The essence of New Orleans music has always been its private codes and languages, the inner worlds of sound that organized the villages of Africa, were dispersed in the Americas by the horrid strictures of slavery, and were once again available to Crescent City kids as a birth-inheritance. Art Neville, the founder of the Meters, was the eldest of the most famous Uptown musical family. At least a decade older than the other three band members, he came of age as New Orleans artists pulled North American pop south bar by bar, measure for measure, accent by accent, from the top of the charts. His first hit, 1954’s “Mardi Gras Mambo” (its nod to Havana repaid decades later by Jesus Alemany’s ¡Cubanismo!) simply made the shift explicit.

Around the time the Civil Rights Act was passed, Neville recruited three kids to back up himself, and his brothers, Aaron and Cyril. Guitarist Leo Nocentelli, bassist George Porter Jr., and Modeliste were each intimately familiar with the city’s great musicians—life-guides through an Afrodiasporic universe of rhythm, melody, and sound—not to mention each other. Cyril’s best friend was Modeliste. Modeliste and Porter were cousins, Nocentelli a childhood and family friend. When the band’s gig stage literally shrunk, Art’s brothers found themselves out of the band, and the Meters were suddenly a vocal-less unit.

In their intensely competitive high school music programs, the three teens had blossomed, and under Neville’s tutelage, they entered the world of the city’s working musicians. One day, Modeliste was studying Smokey Johnson’s monstrous drumming on Professor Longhair’s forty-five single, “Big Chief,” the next he was by the bandstand, youth work permit in his pocket, studying his new mentor in action. Nocentelli was tapped by Allen Toussaint to back and write for Lee Dorsey before he was old enough to legally drink.

As the fires of 1968 began, the Meters were one of the only Black bands playing on Bourbon Street. But the scene was changing. Eight hours a night, six nights a week, they performed Booker T. & The MGs, Stax, and pop covers, oddball local hits like Roger and The Gypsies’ “Pass The Hatchet,” and sinewy originals at an integrated club called the Ivanhoe. They saw their audiences go from being all-white to mixed. If “rock” had by now, with perhaps the great exception of Jimi Hendrix, become rhetorically and socially white—“soul” its separate, sometimes equal counterpart—the Meters were in the first swell of the sea change that pulled American music back toward a global Blackness. They would anticipate the post-Motown racial crossover, the success of Santana, Bob Marley, and Run-D.M.C.

Those long, ecstatic nights at the Ivanhoe gave them an uncanny ability to read, even anticipate each other. They nurtured a bebop band’s virtuosity, but balanced it with a dance band’s functionality, and developed the kind of efficiency and chemistry that separates championship teams from the rest. “We thought as one person,” says Porter. “We used to do things that were scary.” On songs like “Cardova,” they redefined The One, fitted together like pieces of a puzzle, complicated. Porter and Nocentelli doubled up on a dubwise throb. Modeliste scribbled percussive haiku. Neville added punctuation. Nocentelli’s solos were both ornate and economic. With space, balance, and brevity, everyone shined in their own spotlight.

Unlike the MGs, which remained unquestionably Booker’s band, the Meters sounded like—that is, through their first breakup in 1971—a leaderless crew, four the hard way. Nocentelli was the melodic engine, casually spinning out colorful bolts of ideas, hinting at the range of each song’s latent possibilities. On their cover of Sly Stone’s “Sing a Simple Song,” his bracing licks in the bridge suggested something much more complicated. Neville, though capable of a bold lead as on the galloping “Art,” mainly added structure and complementary colors.

Modeliste offered a propulsive, idiosyncratic minimalism. “A lot of times I was letting the music breathe, and just wasn’t sticking to the same backbeat all the time like all the rest of the music was so uniformly put together,” he said. On “6V6LA,” he turned a monochromatic vamp into a jaw-dropping workout of cymbal and snare, with an eyebrow raise to Eddie Bo’s drummer James Black and his sensational stickwork on “The Hook and Sling, Part 2.” By contrast, Memphis drummers like Al Jackson Jr. and Willie Hall sounded rigid, even formal.

With characteristic humility, Porter once said, “I think my part in Zig’s life is to get as close to his heartbeat as I can. That’s my job as a bass player, I am supposed to make him make sense to everyone else.” But his indispensable, endlessly inventive bottom sealed the Meters’ funk. On “Livewire,” the band’s showcase tune, Modeliste recut Johnson’s “Big Chief ” beat like DJ Premier at an SP–1200, and with a succinct, meaty bassline, Porter converted the massive break into a vehicle for Nocentelli and Neville to drop explosive solos.

Toussaint signed them up as his house band, had them back Dorsey and Betty Harris, LaBelle, and himself, and brought them into bed with Sansu Enterprises’s Marshall Sehorn, the start of another lost-royalty tragedy that ultimately sunk the band. (The game show–styled throwaway, “Sehorn’s Farm,” was a contract-slavery in-joke that quickly lost its humor.) But it became clear soon enough that what they were creating in their all-day-all-night sessions at Sea-Saint Studios wasn’t just stuff for a singer to wail over. In 1969, Toussaint and Sehorn released “Sophisticated Cissy” and found themselves on a runaway train. They cut a deal with New York indie Josie Records to distribute the single and watched it reach Billboard’s R&B Top 10.

Written by Nocentelli, the song wasn’t even a dance tune. It was a bluesy crawl turned into a display of purpose and control. It might have been a performance about setting up a performance, like a gentleman’s club dancer primping before she goes onstage—Porter’s bass rumbling like the diva to her makeup table, Modeliste’s drums feeling every pimple and wrinkle, Neville’s organ throwing strobes on her practiced, mirrored poses, Nocentelli’s guitar commenting sarcastically on the whole scene. There was a sense of knowingness about it, almost an understanding that all the color, the masking, and the pomp exerted not a small cost.

New Orleans has always presented itself as being about taking care of the guest—“When you go to New Orleans,” Professor Longhair sang, “you gotta go see the Mardi Gras,” as if it were being staged only for the visitors’ benefit—but “Sophisticated Cissy” seems instead to shift the spotlight to the dignity and pride of the host. This is the direction African American pop music has moved toward over the past century, the arc from Motown to Def Jam, the reversal of the crossover from Berry Gordy’s Black-to-white to Rick Rubin’s white-to-Black. Why wouldn’t the hip-hop generation—with its first-person fixation and its personalized concerns with redress—be drawn to the Meters?

As punk exploded in London and hip-hop enjoyed its first (unrecorded) “golden era,” the Meters split up, after transforming popular music as thoroughly as earlier generations of New Orleans musicians had. They expected not much more than to be forgotten, the fate of a cult band, a secret knowledge. When the clocks started showing up again—now around the necks of a new generation, stopped at 11:55, representing their urgent, combustible mix of apocalyptic pessimism and shut-’em-down idealism—it was time for the Meters to be rediscovered.

Modeliste was living in Los Angeles during the late ’80s. One day, he turned on pioneering hip-hop radio station KDAY and was surprised to hear himself back on the radio. James Brown signified Black and proud and East Coast, not to mention generational difference, as in Stetsasonic’s Daddy-O’s pro-sampling manifesto, “Talking All That Jazz”: “Tell the truth James Brown was old, ’til Eric and Ra came out with ‘I Got Soul.’” But the Meters tended to inspire eccentric, liberating, often visionary performances.

Ultramagnetic MCs’ “Ease Back,” for instance, was driven by a reversed sample of Robert McCollough’s famous whistling sax solo from The JBs’ “The Grunt,” DJ Moe Love’s chopped, pitched-up break mimicking Modeliste’s stop-and-go metronome, and Art Neville’s money shot from Look-Ka Py-Py’s “Little Old Moneymaker” inserted by producer Paul C., the John Bonham of his time, into the chorus. It was a no-gravity track, speeding in its orbit, perfect for Ced Gee and Kool Keith’s abstract braggadocio. West Coast heads, from Dr. Dre to Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow, were particularly enamored of the Meters. The most loopy may have been DJ Pooh, who first added “Cissy Strut” to King Tee’s 1987 single “The Coolest,” and built much of his sound around the Meters aesthetic. Back then, using the Meters to ratify one’s freshness was odd, but Tee and later Public Enemy (on “Time-bomb,” which sampled 1974’s “Just Kissed My Baby”) and Marley Marl (on Heavy D’s “Gyrlz They Love Me,” from Look-Ka Py-Py’s “Thinking”) made it seem natural. As both Robert Farris Thompson and Fab Five Freddy have noted, the defining and redefining of coolness was itself an ancient Black art.

The Meters’ music would, of course, eventually become raw material for hundreds, if not thousands, of hip-hop tracks. The band members, with the wounded humility of sidemen, still believe it was because the tracks seemed unfinished, grooves in search of a front person, a human voice to stamp them with capital-“I” importance. In fact, all of the songs on The Meters—not to mention most of the next two Josie albums—were entirely self-contained, didn’t need anything else. They were coherent, pleasing, and nearly impossible to imitate. Like an Eames chair, not a line on a song like “Ease Back” was out of place. Another element might have tipped the whole thing over.

Modeliste once described the songs as “soundbites,” as “entries of different grooves and different ideas about grooves.” Indeed, they could fill a jam-band encyclopedia, hundreds of little ideas that could each be stretched out like twenty-minute rubber bands. From a hip-hop head’s point of view, Meters songs were endlessly divisible. You could break them down to their most basic elements—filter in Porter’s supple bass, capture Neville’s splashy chords, wrangle a quivering Nocentelli line—and then break those pieces down again. They were as accessible and desirable to fakebook craftspeople possessed of artisan taste as untutored cut-and-stitch kids who had just come up on a little technology.

Way down below it all was Modeliste’s crafty playing—unexpected, improvised doubled hits, crashes, and rolls, often not where they were supposed to be, but always where they needed to be, cool about getting back to the one, always on their own time, the sound of a thoroughly human heart thumping its uniquely strange rhythm. Following Modeliste through a song can make you hear the world differently, subtly reorient your entire personal sound-scape. But the truth is, each of us has grown up in a world like the Meters’—one large and rich in its sonic relations, one that awaits all the connections to be made. Too often, we just don’t hear them yet. Maybe that’s why Black music always tends to sound futuristic.

The older the Meters got, the more literally they sketched out their influences—calypso, high-life, reggae, mambo—unpacking on their Reprise albums all that they had done so instinctually on those first three Josie records. This is not to say—some have, but not me—that the albums they did after 1971 were the lesser for it. We should find virtue in exploring the roots and branches outward, diminishing false differences and divisions, and confronting a North American pop aesthetic that remains so jingoistic, devaluing, and destructive. Instead it is to say that sometimes the stuff that seems the simplest is really the most complex.

“Cissy Strut,” the Meters’ first big hit from that bright spring of 1969, is that simple song. But it’s played for more than it’s worth, with what Rufus Thomas called “the push and pull.” Nocentelli, Neville, and Porter push the song forward. Modeliste does the pulling. Armed with a hurricane of hi-hat accents, he seems to be channeling an entire second line. At the center of the storm, you can hear him moaning like Monk and getting hit in his soul like Mingus. Generations of kids with their cheap samplers and freeware await over the horizon, to put that ghost in their machines, set it free in the circuitry. In New Orleans, old rhythms, like the funky old spirits, never die. They just keep on marching, all around the worlds we come to know and the others we may.