NOLA 1975

I Had a New Orleans feeling this morning while thinking about cooking up a “King Cake “for the annual Cake competition we have every Christmas with the family. I put on some Wild Tchapotoulis, and off I go.

I haven’t been down there since 1975 and really don’t recall it very well, but it sure left an impression.

Me and my Friend Brandon drove down there from Long Island in his VW Van. We stayed with some hippies off canal street somewhere, but I couldn’t even tell you where for sure. I remember it wasn’t too far and walking distance to the French Quarter.

We stayed with some friends of Brandon’s. Brandon was a few years older at the time.

I recall being a little self-conscious about that. Still, I was ready and anxious to continue West to our eventual California destination after just a few days there.

I dug NO it, but I wasn’t anywhere near as musically informed as I am now, especially about the depth of New Orleans music. I knew almost nothing about it, and if I did, it was only the big hits of the day that could be associated with it. Fats Domino, Dr. John , and the like.

I remember these Nola hippies weren’t especially friendly nor glad to see us. Our host, whom I had met once before in Boston, was an interesting character. He was, as I thought at the time, kind of an Egg Head science guy. Brilliant and was called “Motor’ or “Motorhead.” He was very mechanical and, at the time, was very into the old French Peugeot cars from back in the day. He was an old friend of Brandon but not incredibly close. It seemed as though he was just trying to be a good hippy and help out a friend passing through town.

I was headed to California with Brandon and was already plotting to split from him when we got there. I wanted to be independent, and Brandon struck me as Clingy. He was older and had had his act more together than I did. I really owed him a lot in terms of influence. He turned me on to a lot of stuff music-wise and books as well. I believe that it was Brandon who gave me the Kerouac book “On the Road,” which really set me off on my adventures. Also, Leo Kotke and John Fahey. They were as guitarists were a revelation to me. They seemed like some kind of secret guitar society! “Blind Joe Death” and all that.

I was lucky I connected with him, and I’m not sure why it became important to separate from him. Still, it did seem to me at the time that he was too dependent on me being his traveling companion. I don’t remember any overt gay stuff, but maybe there was something like an obsession with me that was going on.

He was at least six years older and had been in love with a girl who was a friend of mine and was very obsessed with her. He was kind of heartbroken about being dumped by her, so his clinginess may have been as a result of that trauma, but I remember feeling creeped out by it. When we finally did get to southern California, we split off into different directions. I remember him feeling insulted that I wanted to be independent. It was a weird thing, and we never reconnected after that.

While in New Orleans, we did spend one night in the French Quarter drinking in a bar that Motor told us had been a haunt of Lee Harvey Oswald’s. It was called the “Club Havana,” which made sense after learning how he was very much part of the communist party. He had been to Russia to study and in Cuba with Fidel.

All the conspiracy theories that Cuba had something to do with the JFK assassination or New Orleans gangsters were behind it. The Club Havana was small and dingy.

I could easily see Mr. Oswald sitting by himself. Alone, nursing a beer and getting drunk on his own and not getting any attention and being mostly unnoticed there. The sad sack Patsy in the making.

There were a few drag queens there, and that wasn’t too unusual in the quarter, but it was something new to just nineteen-year-old me. There were all kinds of drunken behavior there, and minor skirmishes broke out between the drunk clientele.

Eventually, we pushed off, and Motor took us to visit Jackson Square to show us the monument to White Supremacy. He explained to us just how un-evolved New Orleans was regarding race. We were horrified that such a thing could exist and had never seen anything like it in the Yankee world we grew up in.

Someone had vandalized the commemorative plaque with black paint. It was splashed across it, so it definitely got a reaction from the locals.

We did spend the next afternoon crabbing in Lake Ponchartrain. We took Rotten Chicken and crab traps over there and filled up on the crabs. Rotten Chicken was the bait of choice in NO, and it seemed as though everyone was using that. New Orleans was funky and not really a place that we had any intention to stay much longer.

I wish now that I had been a little more informed than I was. The little bit that I had read was when Sal Paradise (Kerouac’s character in On The Road) made a stop there to visit his old pal “Old Bull Lee,” Bull was strung out and using meth with his crazy strung-out wife. Later in real life, he would shoot through the head in Mexico City a few years later. Old Bull lee, of course, was the dark and delirious William Burroughs who was still getting going in various stages of his depravity at the time of that book. I remember thinking at the time that New Orleans felt like that chapter in Kerouac’s book.

Even the house we stayed in with Motor and the other hippies had this depraved feeling to it. It was as if we had just shown up there and the people that lived there had something to hide and that we were not cool and intruding.

I wondered about Motor’s relationship with Brandon and how they knew each other. Motor had been part of a hippy cooperative or group that lived in the Roxbury section of Boston deep in the Ghetto.

He had been part of this group assembling “Cement Boats,” and their plan was to sail around the world in them. They had a warehouse in Roxbury.

It sounds counterintuitive that such a thing as a boat made of cement could be seaworthy or even float. Still, in fact, they do exist and and are considered feasible.

It was a unique bunch of quirky hippies that were kind of innovative in that Stewart Brand “Whole Earth Catalogue” kind of mentality. I found that interesting and creative. The same type of people built geodesic Domes out in the country and created communal living spaces.

Brandon was an intelligent fellow and, as I said, exposed me to a lot of things that I would not have otherwise experienced.

I don’t know if he went to college. I do recall that a lot of them went to Northeastern University in Boston. That might have been where he met all these exciting types like “Motor.”

Whatever it was, it was far out of my ken. College wasn’t even on the spectrum for me.

So I went off on this New Orleans track to just try and recall what little I had experienced there, and I surprised myself that one I can remember as much as I do. I never went back, even though I feel like I immersed myself pretty heavily into that style of music. I actually play quite a lot of that style in my set and love what was cooked up down there by all the greats like Allen Toussaint, Dr.John, Huey Piano Smith, Professor Longhair, The Meters, JAMES BOOKER, Earl King, and so many more.

Over time I learned about the tribes and Mardi Gras Day and folklore but never experienced any of that or Jazzfest.

Many of my friends go down there annually and make the pilgrimage.

So, it has been Forty-six years since I set foot down there. I suppose I may see it again sometime. Still, I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t resemble the place I saw in 1975. Still, I can barely recall that, and that was the whole purpose of this exercise to try and see what I had left in my memory vaults connected to that time.

I have this faint memory of a woman staying at the hippy house with Motor and some guy who was her boyfriend. In my memory, she was beautiful and had thick curly black hair and barely gave us the time of day and seemed very frustrated that Motor had invited more hippies to stay at the house just off Canal Street.

It was a white building that was heavily decorated with Wainscoting everywhere and the afternoon sun blasted in, giving it slatted shadows.

She was beautiful and may not have existed at all.Her flowered light cotton dress May have been something that I made up in my mind over time and that may have been blurred together with the image of William Borough’s soon to be dead wife.

But she exists up here in my head, and I imagine that for some reason, she decides that I’m okay and takes me off somewhere in the shadows and makes love to me. Yeah, that’s how I want to recall New Orleans.

Now whoever finds the baby in the Cake wins a prize!