Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 133

Record label: Atlantic

Produced: Harold Battiste

Recorded: Gold Star Studio, Los Angeles, California; autumn 1967

Released: July 1968

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Mac Rebennack, (v, g, o); Steve Mann (g); Alvin ‘Shine’ Robinson (g, v); Ernest McLean (g); Harold Battiste (bs, clarinet); Ron Johnson (b); David West (b); Richard ‘Didimus’ Washington (d, pc); John Boudreaux (d); Dave Dixon (v, pc); Jessie Hill (v); Shirley Goodman (v); Tami Lynn (v); Joanie Jones (v); Sonny Raye (v); Ronnie Barron (v, o); Morris Bachamin (ts); Plas Johnson (s)

Track listing: Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya; Danse Kalinda Ba Boom; Mama Roux (US/S); Danse Fambeaux; Croker Courtbullion; Jump Sturdy (US/S); I Walk On Gilded Splinters

Running time: 33.32

Current CD: Collectors Choice COLC1311

Further listening: Babylon (1969); Gumbo (1972); Dr John Plays Mac Rebennack (1982); Anutha Zone (1998)

Further reading: Under A Hoodoo Moon: The Life of the Night Tripper (Mac Rebennack with Jack Rummel, 1994); www.drjohn.org

Download: iTunes

Mac Rebennack had no intention of singing on this brooding underground classic; New Orleans belter Ronnie Barron had been designated for the job. But with Barron unavailable – ‘his manager thought it was a bad career move’ – the man who had worked as a session keyboardist and guitar player (until a gunshot wound put paid to the picking) on albums by Professor Longhair, Joe Tex and Frankie Ford morphed into his alter ego – mystical, menacing growler Dr John, The Night Tripper, a character he had learned about in the ’50s from voodoo artist Prince LaLa.

‘I figured it would be a one-off thing,’ recalls the Doctor.

Rebennack was familiar with the mystery and magic of Crescent City – his nightmarish 1965 Zu Zu Man borrowed liberally from the voodoo chants and incantations that were as prevalent as incense smoke in the tawdry French Quarter. But Gris-Gris went further, grafting voodoo’s dark, esoteric heart to a hypnotic groove with funky blues, sparse, repetitive minor chord melodies, funereal keyboards and Afro-Cuban syncopation shot through with feral noises, gibberish and metaphysical threats and boasts, creating an unwholesome witchy brew of sorcery and chicanery that fascinates as much as it disturbs.

‘One thing I always did was believe. I used to play for gigs for the Gris-Gris church. I dug the music, and that’s what I was trying to capture.’ Using left-over time at Gold Star from a Sonny and Cher session, Dr John and his fellow refugees did their best to turn the legendary studio into a voodoo church: ‘I remember Hugh Masekela was cutting next door to us and the engineers at Gold Star were nervous. They were used to Phil Spector and Sonny Bono and people like that coming in, and they saw my crew and next door they saw Hugh’s crew and these guys didn’t look like your regulation studio-looking kind of guys, and we were burning candles and incense to get into the mood and everything. But I got a kick out of that.’

Centrepiece I Walk On Gilded Splinters was based on a traditional voodoo church song. ‘It’s supposed to be “Splendors” but I turned it into “Splinters”,’ said the Doctor. ‘I just thought splinters sounded better and I always pictured splinters when I sung it.’ And the ambling, subliminal title cut wormed its way into the nascent waves of American FM radio where it became a late-night staple, catching the cresting wave of psychedelia and hippiedom. More than three decades on, the album retains its extraordinary power to cast a spell.