Hoodoo Man

Most​ people in most places, past and present, have seen magic as a part of life: potentially dangerous but certainly efficacious, an essential, everyday means of getting things done. A good-luck charm, a visit to the shaman, a love spell, a holy talisman, a lock of hair, a photograph of someone you love: who truly believes such things are without meaning? But does any of it really work?

A sceptic could, of course, try to find out, through scientific experiment or by studying the deceptions of magicians, healers and witches. You might even try stepping into the sorcerer’s shoes, pantomiming their arts and seeing what happens. But there is a risk: what if, by play-acting as a magician, you become the real thing? The American anthropologist Franz Boas records the story of a powerful Kwakwaka’wakw shaman, Qā’sElid, who had embarked on his apprenticeship because he wanted to know whether the magic of shamans was real or if they were just pretending. So he learned the tricks of the trade, becoming especially proficient at a procedure in which a feather, concealed in the mouth and bloodied by biting one’s tongue, is ‘sucked out’ of a sick person during a ritual then proclaimed the cause of their illness. Having used this trick to cure a patient who had asked for him after seeing him in a dream, Qā’sElid’s renown spread, and soon neighbouring shamans started to beg for his secrets. He began to wonder whether the tricks he had learned were actually potent; they certainly seemed to effect more impressive cures than the charlatanry around him (some of his peers didn’t even bother with the bloody feather, merely sucking and blowing at their patients). Qā’sElid ends his narrative far less certain about magic than when he set out. What seemed false had become true.

Qā’sElid had inadvertently become what Malcolm John Rebennack Jr, in his first work as Dr John, billed as the ‘last of the best’:

They call me the gris-gris man
Got many clients, come from miles around,
Running down my prescription
I got medicine to cure all y’alls ills,
I got remedies of every description

Rebennack cooked up his gris-gris under the musical supervision of another New Orleans musician, Harold Battiste, during time carved out of Sonny & Cher’s recording schedule at the Gold Star studio in Los Angeles in the summer of 1967. The results were released the following year as a notably short long-player, Gris-Gris, credited to Dr John, the Night Tripper, despite the doubts of the head of Atlantic Records, Ahmet Ertegun (‘What radio station is gonna play this crap?’).

The album ended up in the hands of a young David Toop. Unspooling its peculiarly effective mixture of sideshow fraudulence, oneiric hokum and deeply coded, deadly serious New Orleans folklore on a mono Dansette in a friend’s bedroom – a device that was hardly up to deciphering ‘the eccentricities of the stereo mix’ – Toop was spellbound. ‘The record has haunted me ever since,’ he writes. More than five decades later, during which time he became a fixture on the British experimental music scene, a prolific music writer and a professor at the London College of Communication, Toop has returned to Gris-Gris to see what spooked him; Two-Headed Doctor is a shapeshifting tumble into the New Orleans night to see if he can find out what it was that put the motion in the potion.

Gris-Gris is a very strange record. The cover sets the tone: tinted darkroom-red and wreathed in smoke, a double-exposure photo gives Rebennack the two heads of Toop’s title, and his appalled grimace makes it look as if he has ‘just witnessed the slow death of a baby unicorn in a graveyard’. The music lives up to this image with a reverberant, richly layered stew of sounds without any obvious musical precedent, except perhaps some of the more wasted hippie jams of the era. Gris-Gris is funky but not funk, bluesy but not blues, soulful but not soul, and not a rock record either, though it certainly rocks in places. Starting out with the echoing, bass-heavy ‘Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya’, then moving through a series of frenzied percussion jams and lurching rhythm and blues numbers before concluding with the eerie, maledictory creep of ‘I Walk on Guilded Splinters’, it really doesn’t sound like anything else. The instrumentation is unorthodox: the mandolin features heavily, alongside banjo and slide guitar, flute and organ, harpsichord and woodwind; electronic effects mask the voices of some of the instruments, while the rhythms draw equally from the tradition of the New Orleans street parade and the drums of Congo Square. The songs, where they are songs at all, feature an obscure cast of characters – Zozo La Brique, Mama Roux, the King of the Zulus, Coco Robichaux – who play bit-parts in an abstruse drama narrated in the grizzled croak of ‘Dr John’, a ringmaster who speaks in code and issues occult threats (‘Walk through the fire, fly through the smoke/See my enemy at the end of their rope … Put gris-gris on your doorstep, soon you’ll be in the gutter/Melt your heart like butter’). Cryptic and inimitable, Gris-Gris stomps and skulks its way through a mesmerising half-hour of sonic theurgy.

Yet beyond or beneath the theatrics there is a disconcerting sense that something much more serious is going on, that all the hokum and stage magic might be misdirection of the sort that enables something secret to enter the room. Could this unknown white session musician in fancy dress actually be an authentic Louisiana hoodoo man, a root doctor, a gris-gris man? Is the whole thing so fake it’s real? The answers Toop comes up with are fittingly strange. Gris-Gris turns out to be a rich mix of Mardi Gras songs, breathless exoticist pulp, minstrel shows, Cajun lore and New Orleans street-seller cries, zombies and grimoires, Caribbean stick-fighting chants, Creole cooking, real voodoo and its down-home cousin hoodoo, the traditions of the ‘Mardi Gras Indians’, Professor Longhair and James Booker and Sam Cooke and Jelly Roll Morton and a hundred other croaking, squeaking, grunting voices of the bayou, levée and gulf. Animal voices and fish voices and spirit voices: a graveyard full of ghosts, old and young, all trying to make themselves heard, if you know how to listen.

Born​ in New Orleans in 1941, Rebennack had been immersed in the social and musical worlds of his hometown since he was a child. His early life was spent in the 3rd Ward of the city, the district where Louis Armstrong was raised and which has produced many other musicians. His father, also named Malcolm John Rebennack, had a store repairing and selling electrical appliances. When it went under, he began selling records from a hole-in-the-wall on Gentilly Road, in the east end of the city. When this business too went bust, Rebennack Jr took advantage of the remaining stock: ‘I had nutin’ to do a lot but sit at home and listen to those records.’ Starting out as a fan of country and western (‘Hank Williams, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, I was a real hillbilly freak when I was a kid’), he became captivated by jazz and blues, at first through Dinah Washington and Jimmy Scott. There were many musicians in the extended Rebennack family, and the streets of the 3rd Ward resounded to the cries and songs of street sellers and hawkers. An encounter with the legendary New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair turned him towards making music his profession, and by his late teens Rebennack was playing piano and guitar in Black R’n’B bands. By the beginning of the 1960s he was regularly writing songs for both white New Orleans rock’n’rollers such as Jerry Byrne and Jimmy Clanton, and Black recording artists such as Art Neville and Ben E. King. He also issued a handful of instrumental sides as Mac Rebennack and His Orchestra, or Mac Rebennack and the Soul Orchestra – one of these, ‘The Point’, appeared in 1962 on AFO Records, a local, Black-owned imprint started up by the pianist Harold Battiste.

The abundantly talented Battiste came from a venerable New Orleans musical family, and was a half-hearted convert to Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam. After a period as a talent scout for Specialty Records, and with his eye on the Nation’s message of Black economic independence and social uplift (he had less time for its dismissal of whites as lab-grown devils), Battiste had started AFO – ‘All for One’ – as a way of advancing Black collective ownership and control of music in New Orleans. A stint as a session player and arranger in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s had given him a first-hand impression of the ruthlessness of the music industry – Battiste had helped Sam Cooke write the eternal ‘You Send Me’, but he didn’t get a credit, and therefore didn’t get any money either. AFO was his attempt to set up an alternative model. The artists and musicians he gathered there included Cooke (who was backed by Battiste’s house band, the AFO Executives, until his death in 1964) and a number of experienced New Orleans artists, including eccentrics such as the turbaned Prince La-La, and old running mates from his time in LA. Among them was Rebennack, whom Battiste had first used as a songwriter for Specialty back in 1958.

Some great music was recorded by Battiste at AFO, but no hits; in 1963 it folded, and Battiste went back to LA. During his previous stint there he had worked with Sonny Bono at Specialty. On his return, Bono introduced him to Phil Spector, and Battiste became a backing musician in the ‘wall of sound’, playing on recordings by Ike and Tina Turner and the Ronettes, and on ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’ by the Righteous Brothers. Rebennack, who decamped to LA around 1965 to join Battiste’s tight-knit group of New Orleans transplants, was also eventually absorbed into the impenetrable gleam of Spector’s soundworld.

At the same time, Battiste was working as producer and arranger for the pop duo Bono had started with his girlfriend Cheryl Sarkisian; they billed themselves as Sonny & Cher. It was Battiste who took a single afternoon to transform Bono’s idea for a three-chord ‘oom-pah-pah’ waltz into the million-selling ‘I Got You Babe’. Battiste’s work that day in effect underwrote everything that would subsequently happen to Sonny & Cher. But it was at that time a great rarity for a Black producer to be working in the world of white pop and rock – Tom Wilson, who produced Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Nico and the Velvet Underground, is the most overlooked figure here – and it was Sonny Bono who took the writing and production credits; on the back cover of Look at Us, the couple’s debut LP, Battiste is listed merely as the pianist. Nevertheless, Battiste had now witnessed the ‘almost occult power of pop music to transform ordinary individuals into beings apart’. Toop suggests that the experience informed his role in the transmogrification of the pasty, heroin-hooked Rebennack from a talented New Orleans expat working the LA studio circuit into a smoke-shrouded avatar of the bayou folkways.

Not that Rebennack didn’t know those folkways already. He was as deep in them as a white boy could be. By all accounts he lived the life (‘always late, always high’), drinking in the sonic heritages of New Orleans and the South as he went. ‘We were out with the real people,’ he recollected: touring the South with mixed groups before desegregation, where band members had to play behind a curtain or hide on the tour bus (‘nightly negotiations with the pathology of racism and its dangerously contradictory rule book’, Toop writes); trying to hold down a spot in a band with a succession of names – the Spades, the Skyliners, the Night Trains, the Loafers. It wasn’t all sweet: as a white musician trying to get in on a Black musical world, Rebennack was regarded with suspicion and sometimes hostility. But he was a good musician, and he impressed Battiste enough to get on the roster. He was paying his dues.

Touring Florida in 1961, Rebennack had the ring finger on his left hand almost shot off during an altercation with a motel owner. It was sewn back on and he would eventually get it to move again, but his first instrument, the guitar, was now a problem, so he switched to piano and keyboards under the tutelage of the great James Booker. The following year, a crackdown on bars and clubs led by the district attorney for Orleans parish severely restricted work for musicians, making an already precarious way of life even less secure; not long afterwards, Rebennack was arrested with a quantity of heroin and jailed. Released three years later in 1965, he left New Orleans without going home, following the path marked by Battiste out to LA.

From here, the twin stories of Battiste and Rebennack start to converge. After his success with ‘I Got You Babe’, Battiste had access to studio time and the ear of a major record label. He was producing and arranging for artists of all sorts, and had earned himself space to experiment. Rebennack, arriving in LA, linked up with the AFO crowd, and Battiste began to throw him session work: pop (Phil Spector, the Monkees, Sonny & Cher), soul (Johnnie Morrisette, the O’Jays, the Sims Twins) and rock (Buffalo Springfield, Iron Butterfly, Frank Zappa). And he had some ideas of his own. ‘A project had been forming in his mind for some time,’ Toop writes, ‘almost an opera, a folklore opera like the old medicine shows.’ At its centre would be a musical hoodoo man, a mysterious figure, almost a myth. Rebennack had a character in mind already, drawn from New Orleans folklore. Dr John Montanee, or Jean Montanet or Montane or Montanée, or John Bayou, or even Devil John, was a Black free man of New Orleans who owned several properties and kept slaves around the middle of the 19th century. Reportedly of Bambara origins, this Dr John was reputedly a powerful hoodoo man, keenly aware of the ceaselessly shifting line between what was real and what was not: ‘It is said,’ according to one source, ‘that he confessed to intimates that he believed in none of the black magic he practised.’

Toop’s narrative is far from straightforward. No opportunity for pareidolic digression, oblique observation or canny aside is wasted: every character’s strange history comes to light, every thread is teased out until it thins to invisibility. Toop’s own past, his own history of ideas and connections and sonic epiphanies, is also always in the mix. Two-Headed Doctor is in some ways an experiment in just how much close examination a single object – in this case, an album – will bear. It takes a similar approach to the idea of history, and the writing of it: any object or fact or event is just one node in a vast web of connections; the historian chooses a route through it, picks up some characters and leaves others behind, and produces a new story. A complex object like Gris-Gris is the precipitate of multiple pasts, all of which hold a space within it. Toop has invited all the ghosts to speak, and at this point in the story, as Rebennack and Battiste decide to make a record together, they all begin to clamour at once.

Rebennack​ had his half-formed idea; Battiste had a crack team of New Orleans musicians, and seems to have seen a chance to score a hit with music he cared about. Rebennack didn’t want to be the frontman, but Battiste persuaded him otherwise: more or less everyone else involved was Black, and both men knew all too well the workings of American racism. As Toop puts it, ‘an album aimed at the white rock market was only likely to succeed if the singer was white.’ So Rebennack was (literally) dressed up for the role, taking on the persona of the historical gris-gris man Dr John. The masquerade had begun, and for Rebennack it would never end – he was Dr John for the rest of his career. For Battiste, it seems that fitting a white, faux-psychedelic mask over his Black experimentalism gave him a rare freedom. ‘The studio was like a Mardi Gras reunion,’ he would later say. ‘Everybody laughing, telling stories all at the same time … I felt better than I had felt in the studio for a long time. I was comfortable, connected spiritually to the people and the music we were making. I became more involved than I had expected, and it became more than a production to me.’ This time he kept his credit.

Toop does not shy away from the racial complexities in all this, including his own tricky identifications as a young, white British music fan who was heavily invested in Black American music. Such racial entanglements – flagrant theft included – in rock’n’roll and all that followed are constitutive of postwar popular music. Rebennack and Battiste understood exactly what they were doing, but still, they were doing it. Gris-Gris is a record made by a white man wearing a black mask, and Rebennack’s feathered, faux-hoodoo theatrics would become his professional calling card. His follow-ups Babylon (1969) and Remedies (1970) burnished his reputation among more mainstream peers. Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger, artists whose shameless donning of Black sonic masks rested on far shakier foundations than Rebennack’s, both feature on The Sun, Moon and Herbs (1971); Rebennack in turn contributed backing vocals to ‘Let It Loose’ on the Rolling Stones album Exile on Main Street (1972).

It wasn’t until In the Right Place (1973) that Dr John became more widely known. Backed by New Orleans royalty the Meters, and produced by Allen Toussaint, the album yielded the top-ten hit ‘Right Place, Wrong Time’ as well as ‘Such a Night’, which Rebennack played at the Band’s final concert in 1976, as recorded in Martin Scorsese’s documentary The Last Waltz (1978). Rebennack never really hit these heights again, but he had secured his place in the American blues-crossover mainstream. He picked up a string of Grammy Awards from the late 1980s through to the early 2000s; by the time of his death in 2019 he had released well over fifty albums. So it is that perhaps the best-known and internationally most successful embodiment of New Orleans’s musical mysteries was a white man dressed up as a Black magus.

In the course of his research, Toop gained access to the tapes and scores from the original sessions. Listening to them, he hears the record coming into shape, assembling itself out of fragments and myths, a musical loup-garou, shapeshifting into its final form: the changes of lyrics, the changes of speed (after the recordings were finished, Battiste slowed down the whole recording slightly, resulting in a disorientating, fractional detuning across the board), the play and alteration of song and rhythm, the mysterious splices and overdubs, the extreme use of stereo panning, the ghostly interventions – mutters and breaths, indeterminate sounds, lost drums – that layer and thicken the sound. The second half of the book is a track-by-track walkthrough: every moment, every lyric, every instrument and effect, every distant sonic cousin or ancient connection or new link is unspooled and examined. The record is revealed as a musico-magical palimpsest of New Orleans history: through the mask, the spirits speak.

Rebennack understood the masquerade, that he was letting others speak through him. He had barely any experience of recording his own voice; now he made a new voice for the character he was inhabiting, or which, inhabiting him, seems to have pulled him into pieces: ‘I pitch it painting a picture not only of voodoo but of myself as a dismembered thing … Instead of using my regular, natural voice, I whispered – hhe-be-be-be – used that thing, not only to make it mysterious and eerie but to make it so that I could come back and be myself at some other point.’ Toop makes the point here that ritual dismemberment is a feature of shamanic practices, where the breaking apart of the shaman in a dream or a vision is often part of the initiation process. And masks, as the vessels or embodiments of spirits, always have their own voices: where masquerade is practised, in many parts of West Africa but elsewhere in the world too, each mask, representing or embodying a particular entity, has its own voice, its habitual way of speaking. Sometimes the spirits don’t use human speech (they are not human, after all): they may speak in whistles, buzzing sounds, rhythms, growls and yelps. The same is true of spirit possession: in Haitian vodou, every lwa that enters the possessed speaks in a different voice and has a different character. The possessed person exhibits the personality of the lwa; their voice changes and their movements are taken over by the spirit. Which spirits were called into the studio by Battiste and Rebennack? Were they still somehow at their strange work in 1998 when Battiste’s other creation, Cher, masked her voice with autotune for the megahit ‘Believe’ and became a star once more?

‘All of the hoodoo doctors have non-conjure cases,’ Zora Neale Hurston wrote in her account of New Orleans, Mules and Men (1935). ‘They prescribe folk medicine, “roots”, and are for this reason called “two-headed doctors”.’ Magic and non-magic, the power to heal or do harm, ordinary herbal cures and gris-gris on your doorstep. Always both things at once: medicine and magic, black and white, fake and real, true and false. The mask is a made thing, a piece of carved and embellished wood, but it calls the spirit into the person. All the art and artifice of Gris-Gris was pure invention, made from whole cloth: Rebennack was no hoodoo man, the character was a fiction, the garb was straight out of the prop cupboard. But when you play-act at real magic, and you know how to do it, who is to say what is real and what is not? You might really end up as the last of the best.