A Timeless Wavelength

Dr. John – Croker Courtbouillon

Those for whom the name “Dr. John” is synonymous with New Orleans R&B and funk (for example, his album In the Right Place) would be shocked to listen to his first album, Gris-Gris, released under the name “Dr. John the Night Tripper.”  While there are some funky and bluesy elements to this album, it is a far cry from Crescent City funk.  This is a genre all its own, a distinctly Louisianan form of psychedelia.

In the late 1960s, musical and spiritual exploration went hand-in-hand, and the desire to push the boundaries of popular music often coincided with the pursuit of less mainstream religions.  George Harrison came back from India with a newfound enthusiasm for Hinduism, and suddenly Beatles albums were filled with sitar and tabla.  The Doors were inspired to incorporate psychedelic elements into their music by the peyote-fueled rituals of the Native American Church.  And bands like The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin dabbled in the quasi-Satanic mysticism of Aleister Crowley.

It should therefore come as no surprise that a musician from Louisiana, with its traditions of voodoo and spiritualism, would want to jump on the psychedelic bandwagon.  The young Mac Rebbenack devoured Robert Tallant’s books of Louisiana folklore, adopted the stage name “Dr. John” from a legendary voodoo healer, and set out to stake a place for Afro-Carribbean spirituality in the popular music of the Sixties.

The album Gris-Gris is like a soundtrack to these books of folklore.  Its first track, “Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya-Ya,” references Saxon, Dreyer and Tallant’s Gumbo Ya-Ya:  Folk Tales of Louisiana, and “Danse Kalinda Ba Doom” draws its lyrics from that book’s pages.  “I Walk on Guilded Splinters” similarly adapts a song found in Tallant’s Voodoo in New Orleans. But “Croker Courtbouillon” is perhaps the strangest and creepiest song on this album.  It starts off with a 6/8 swing ornamented with harpsichord and flute, but quickly devolves into a chaotic mass of guitar, percussion and animal noises halfway between voodoo chant and free jazz.    It’s what Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” would have sounded like if Syd Barrett had grown up in the Louisiana swamps.