![]() ![]() ![]() Thus, Mac Rebennack became the inimitable Dr. John character along with Mac: They wanted Barron to do it, but he was bound a record contract that said he couldn’t. Battiste, the musical director for Sonny and Cher, came up with the voodoo-priest-inspired Dr. (Together, they also waxed a delightful paean to a local television B-horror-movie program host, “Morgus the Magnificent,” credited to Morgus and the Three Ghouls.) It was during a fight after a gig with Barron that Mac’s finger famously took a bullet, prompting both his decision to switch from guitar to piano and - a stint in a Texas prison on drug charges helped make the decision too - a move to Los Angeles, where New Orleans musicians like drummer Earl Palmer and composer-arranger Harold Battiste were doing nicely. ![]() This rollicking rhythm & blues novelty, complete with clacking pool-ball sound effects, was a collaboration with Mac Rebennack’s high-school classmate Ronnie Barron, recorded under the name Ronnie and the Delinquents. It was also Mac’s official debut as an artist, and it made an announcement: To paraphrase another Southern luminary, there was a boy child coming. “Mac” Rebennack, Jr., “A Boy With 4000 Songs.” (New Orleans archive-digger James Karst tweeted a screencap on June 6th.) Indeed, the teen - still a student at Jesuit High School and in fact, a recent winner of its talent contest - was already selling his compositions to local recording artists, and playing guitar on sessions at engineer Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Studios, where Little Richard had recently cut “Tutti Frutti.” “Storm Warning,” released on Matassa’s own Rex Records label, was an ominous guitar rumble with a zany, careening saxophone part and a chugging, propulsive rhythm. In 1959 the magazine insert that the daily New Orleans Times-Picayune devoted to entertainment and other light fare ran a feature on 17-year-old Malcolm J. It’s hard to pick just a few from the many, but here’s a few to start. And he left behind an awe-inducing catalog of music, from his early sessions at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Studio - ground zero for rock & roll - to his career-defining glorious merger of swamp grooves and psychedelia in his storied Night Tripper persona to his many skillful and heartfelt tributes to the luminaries of the Great American Songbook. Mac, as his friends and most of New Orleans called him, worked with a murderer’s row of cool cats over his lifetime - none, admittedly, as cool as he - including Mick Jagger, Willy DeVille, Buddy Guy, Ringo Starr, Frank Zappa, Gregg Allman, Rickie Lee Jones and the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. ![]() from Tulane University, making him a double doctor. John, are likely astonished to be mentioned in most remembrances of the music icon.) In 2013 he accepted an honorary Ph.D. (The title of his 1974 album Desitively Bonnaroo was half old Creole slang and half his singular patois, and gave the name to one of America’s most successful music festivals - whose founders, having come of age in New Orleans worshiping Dr. He beat drug addiction, did a long-ago stint in jail, knew witches and invented his own particular sideways way of speaking English. John - the name and characterization he adopted in 1968 with the release of the landmark Gris Gris album, based in part on stories of a 19th-century voodoo priest - earned 15 Grammy nominations and six wins during a career that spanned more than 50 years. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, Dr. Malcolm John Rebennack Jr., who died Thursday at age 77, was a onetime Catholic schoolboy who remade himself into a bona fide high priest of funk - and a lifelong ambassador of gritty, glittery New Orleans groove. ![]()
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