Malcolm John Rebennack (November 20, 1941 – June 6, 2019), better known by his stage name Dr. John, was an American singer and songwriter. His music combines blues, pop, jazz, boogie woogie and rock and roll.
Active as a session musician since the late 1950s, he gained a following in the late 1960s after the release of his album Gris-Gris and his appearance at the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music. He performed a lively, theatrical stage show inspired by medicine shows, Mardi Gras costumes and voodoo ceremonies. Rebennack recorded more than 20 albums and in 1973 produced a top-10 hit, "Right Place, Wrong Time".
The winner of six Grammy Awards, Rebennack was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by singer John Legend in March 2011. In May 2013, Rebennack received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from Tulane University.
Early life and career
Rebennack was born in New Orleans in 1941 of French heritage. Growing up in the Third Ward, he found early musical inspiration in the minstrel tunes sung by his grandfather and a number of aunts, uncles, sister and cousins who played piano. He did not take music lessons before his teens and endured only a short stint in choir before getting kicked out.[4] His father, the owner of an appliance store and record shop, exposed him as a young boy to jazz musicians King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, who later inspired his 2014 release, Ske-Dat-De-Dat: The Spirit of Satch. Throughout his adolescence his father's connections enabled him access to the recording rooms of rock artists, including Little Richard and Guitar Slim. He began to perform in New Orleans clubs, mainly on guitar, and played on stage with various local artists.
When he was about 13 years old, Rebennack met Professor Longhair. Impressed by the professor's flamboyant attire and striking musical style,[4] Rebennack soon began performing with him, and began his life as a professional musician.
At age 16 Rebennack was hired by Johnny Vincent as a producer at Ace Records. There, he gained experience working with many artists, including James Booker and Earl King. While a struggling student at Jesuit High School, he was already playing in night clubs, something the Jesuit fathers disapproved of. They told him to either stop playing in clubs or leave the school; he chose the latter, and from then on focused entirely on music.
In late 1950s New Orleans, Rebennack gigged with local bands including Mac Rebennack and the Skyliners, (Paul Staele/Dennis "Bootsie" Cuquet, drums; Earl Stanley, bass; Charlie Miller, trumpet; Charlie Maduell, sax; Roland "Stone" LeBlanc, vocals), Frankie Ford and the Thunderbirds, and Jerry Byrne and the Loafers. He had a regional hit with a Bo Diddley-influenced instrumental called "Storm Warning" on Rex Records in 1959. At A&R he and Charlie Miller recorded monophonic singles on 45s for Johnny Vincent and Joe Corona for local labels Ace, Ron, and Ric. He oversaw the rhythm section while Miller wrote the horn arrangements and headed up the horns. This continued until Miller moved to New York and to study music formally.
Rebennack's career as a guitarist was stunted circa 1960, when his left ring finger was injured by a gunshot during an incident at a Jackson, Mississippi gig. After the injury, Rebennack concentrated on bass guitar before making piano his main instrument, developing a style influenced by Professor Longhair.
Rebennack became involved in illegal activities in New Orleans, using and selling narcotics and running a brothel. He was arrested on drug charges and sentenced to two years in a federal prison at Fort Worth, Texas. His sentence ended in 1965 and he left for Los Angeles.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1965[5] where he became a "first call" session musician in the Los Angeles studio scene in the 1960s and 1970s and was part of the so-called "Wrecking Crew" stable of studio musicians. He provided backing for Sonny & Cher (and some of the incidental music for Cher's first film, Chastity), for Canned Heat on their albums Living the Blues (1968) and Future Blues (1970), and for Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention on Freak Out! (1966).
Voodoo influence
As a young man Rebennack was interested in New Orleans voodoo, and in Los Angeles he developed the idea of the Dr. John persona for his old friend Ronnie Barron, based on the life of Dr. John, a Senegalese prince, a medicinal and spiritual healer who came to New Orleans from Haiti. This free man of color lived on Bayou Road and claimed to have 15 wives and over 50 children. He kept an assortment of snakes and lizards, along with embalmed scorpions and animal and human skulls, and sold gris-gris, voodoo amulets that protected the wearer from harm.
Rebennack decided to produce a record and a stage show based on this concept, with Dr. John serving as an emblem of New Orleans heritage. Although initially the plan was for Barron to front the act assuming the identity of "Dr. John", while Rebbenack worked behind the scenes as Dr. John's writer/musician/arranger/producer, this didn't come to pass. Barron dropped out of the project, and Rebennack took over the role (and identity) of Dr. John.[7] Gris-Gris became the name of Dr. John's debut album, representing his own form of "voodoo medicine".
1968–1971: Dr. John, the Night Tripper
Beginning in the late 1960s, Rebennack gained fame as a solo artist after adopting the persona of "Dr. John, The Night Tripper". Dr. John's act combined New Orleans-style rhythm and blues with psychedelic rock and elaborate stage shows that bordered on voodoo religious ceremonies, including elaborate costumes and headdress. In 1970, when Howard Smith asked him where the name "Dr. John the Night Tripper" came from, he responded, "Before that I was Professor Bizarre. Cats used to call me things like "Bishop" or "Governor" or somethin’ but they started callin’ me "Doctor" for a while, so I just hung it on myself for keeps." [9] On the earliest Dr. John records, the artist billing was "Dr. John, The Night Tripper", while the songwriting credits billed him as "Dr. John Creaux". Within a few years the "Night Tripper" subtitle was dropped, and Rebennack resumed using his real name for writing and producing/arranging credits.
Gris-Gris, his 1968 debut album combining voodoo rhythms and chants with the New Orleans music tradition, was ranked 143rd on Rolling Stone′s "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list. Three more albums, Babylon (1969), Remedies (1970) and The Sun, Moon, and Herbs (1971), were released in the same vein as Gris-Gris.
During early to mid-1969, Dr. John toured extensively, backed by supporting musicians Richard "Didymus" Washington (congas), Richard Crooks (drums), David L. Johnson (bass), Gary Carino (guitar), and singers Eleanor Barooshian, Jeanette Jacobs from The Cake, and Sherry Graddie. A second lineup formed later in the year for an extensive tour of the East Coast with Crooks and Johnson joined by Doug Hastings (guitar) and Don MacAllister (mandolin). Also in 1969, Dr. John contributed to the Music from Free Creek "supersession" project, playing on three tracks with Eric Clapton. Washington and Crooks also contributed to the project.
By the time The Sun, Moon, and Herbs was released, he had gained a notable cult following, which included artists such as Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger, who both took part in the sessions for that album. This album served as a transition from his Night Tripper voodoo, psychedelic persona to one more closely associated with traditional New Orleans R&B and funk. His next album, Dr. John's Gumbo, with drummer Fred Staehle serving as the band's backbone, proved to be a landmark recording and is one of his most popular to this day.
1972–1974: Gumbo, In the Right Place and Desitively Bonnaroo
Along with Gris-Gris, Dr. John is perhaps best known for his recordings in the period 1972-74. 1972's Dr. John's Gumbo, an album covering several New Orleans R&B standards with only one original, is considered a cornerstone of New Orleans music. In his 1994 autobiography, Under a Hoodoo Moon, Dr. John writes, "In 1972, I recorded Gumbo, an album that was both a tribute to and my interpretation of the music I had grown up with in New Orleans in the late 1940s and 1950s. I tried to keep a lot of little changes that were characteristic of New Orleans, while working my own funknology on piano and guitar." The lead single from the album, "Iko Iko", broke into the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, eventually reaching #71. In 2003, Dr. John's Gumbo was ranked number 404 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
With Gumbo, Dr. John expanded his career beyond the psychedelic voodoo music and theatrics which had driven his career since he took on the Dr. John persona, although it has always remained an integral part of his music and identity. It was not until 1998's Anutha Zone that he again concentrated on this aspect of his music wholly for a full album. "After we cut the new record", he wrote, "I decided I'd had enough of the mighty-coo-de-fiyo hoodoo show, so I dumped the Gris-Gris routine we had been touring with since 1967 and worked up a new act—a Mardi Gras revue featuring the New Orleans standards we had covered in Gumbo."
In early 1973 Thomas Jefferson Kaye produced an album featuring a collaboration with Dr. John, Mike Bloomfield and John Paul Hammond. This album, Triumvirate, was recorded in Columbia Studios, San Francisco, and Village Recorders, Los Angeles.
In 1973, with Allen Toussaint producing and The Meters backing, Dr. John released the seminal New Orleans funk album In the Right Place. In the same way that Gris-Gris introduced the world to the voodoo-influenced side of his music, and in the manner that Dr. John's Gumbo began his career-long reputation as an esteemed interpreter of New Orleans standards, In the Right Place established Dr. John as one of the main ambassadors of New Orleans funk. In describing the album, Dr. John states, "The album had more of a straight-ahead dance feel than ones I had done in the past, although it was still anchored solid in R&B."[citation needed] It rose to #24 on the Billboard album chart. In July 1973, the single "Right Place Wrong Time" peaked at #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, as well as peaking at #19 on the Hot Soul Singles chart. A second single, "Such a Night", peaked at #42. Still in heavy rotation on most classic rock stations, "Right Place Wrong Time" remains his most recognized song. Artists such as Bob Dylan, Bette Midler, and Doug Sahm contributed single lines to the lyrics, which lists several instances of ironic bad luck and failure.
Dr. John attempted to capitalize on In the Right Place's successful formula, again collaborating with Allen Toussaint and The Meters, for his next album, Desitively Bonnaroo – part of which a Tennessee festival took as its name – released in 1974. Although similar in feel to In the Right Place, it failed to catch hold in the mainstream as its predecessor had done. It did produce the single "(Everybody Wanna Get Rich) Rite Away," which peaked at #92 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and to date is the last time he hit the Hot 100. It was his last pure funk album until 1994's Television,[11] although like his voodoo and traditional New Orleans R&B influences, funk has continued to heavily influence most of his work to the present day, especially in his concerts.
In the mid-1970s Dr. John began an almost 20-year-long collaboration with the R&R Hall of Fame/Songwriters Hall of Fame writer Doc Pomus, to create songs for Dr. John's releases City Lights and Tango Palace, and for B.B. King's Stuart Levine-produced There Must Be a Better World Somewhere, which won a Grammy for Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording in 1982. Dr. John also recorded "I'm On a Roll" – the last song written with Pomus prior to his death in 1991 – for the now out-of-print Rhino/Forward Records 1995 tribute to Pomus titled Til the Night Is Gone: A Tribute to Doc Pomus. The tribute included covers of Pomus-penned songs by Bob Dylan, John Hiatt, Shawn Colvin, Brian Wilson, The Band, Los Lobos, Dion, Rosanne Cash, Solomon Burke, and Lou Reed. According to Pomus' daughter, Dr. John and her father were very close friends as well as writing partners. Dr. John delivered one of a number of eulogies and performed with singer Jimmy Scott at Pomus' funeral on March 17, 1991 in New York City.
On Thanksgiving Day 1976 he performed "Such a Night" at the farewell concert for The Band, which was filmed by Martin Scorsese and released as The Last Waltz. In 1979, he collaborated with the legendary Professor Longhair on Fess's (another nickname for Henry Byrd) last recording Crawfish Fiesta, as a guitarist and co-producer. The album was awarded the first W.C. Handy Blues Album of the Year in 1980, and was released shortly after Longhair's death in January 1980.
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