Dr. John during a 2013 show at Havana, New Hope, Pennsylvania.
Photo by Chris M. Junior
Malcolm John "Mac" Rebennack, Jr. — better known as Dr. John — was born 79 years ago today.
Rebennack was a singer-songwriter, pianist and guitarist, whose music combined blues, pop, jazz as well as zydeco, boogie woogie and rock and roll. Active as a session musician since the late 1950s, he gained a cult following in the late sixties following the release of his album, Gris-Gris, and his appearance at the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music.
He came to wider prominence in the early 1970s with a wildly theatrical stage show inspired by medicine shows, Mardi Gras costumes and voodoo ceremonies.
In 1973, Rebennack scored a Top 20 hit with the jaunty funk-flavored, "Right Place, Wrong Time," still perhaps his best-known song. In May, 2013, he was the recipient of an honorary doctorate of fine arts from Tulane University. He was jokingly referred to by Tulane's president, Scott Cowen, as "Dr. Dr. John.”
Born in New Orleans, Dr. John's Acadian ancestry traces back to the imperial territory of Alsace-Lorraine. He claimd that his lineage took root in New Orleans sometime in the early 1800s. Growing up in the Third Ward, Dr. John found early musical inspiration in the minstrel tunes sung by his grandfather and a number of aunts, uncles and cousins who played piano.
He did not take music lessons before his teens, and only endured a short stint in choir before getting kicked out. His father, the owner of an appliance store and record shop, exposed him as a young boy to prominent jazz musicians like King Oliver and Louis Armstrong.
Throughout his adolescence, his father's connections enabled him access to the recording sessions of burgeoning rock artists such as Little Richard and Guitar Slim. From these exposures, he advanced into clubs and onto the stage with varying local artists.
When he was about 14 years old, Dr. John met Professor Longhair. This started a period in his life that would mark rapid growth as a musician and the beginnings of his entry into professional music. At age 16, he was hired by Johnny Vincent as a producer at Ace Records. There, he worked with artists like James Booker and Earl King, his musical experience expanding notably.
He struggled through intermittent years of high school. While a student at Jesuit High School, he was already playing in night clubs, something the Jesuit fathers disapproved of.
They told him to either stop playing in clubs or leave the school. He chose the latter. According to lore, this was the seed of his classic, "Right Place, Wrong Time."
Rebennack's career as a guitarist came to an end when his left ring finger was injured by a gunshot while he was defending singer/keyboardist Ronnie Barron, his bandmate, Jesuit High School classmate and longtime friend.
After the injury, Rebennack concentrated on bass guitar before making piano his main instrument. Pianist Professor Longhair was an important influence on Rebennack's piano-playing style.
In 1963 in Los Angeles, he became a "first call" session musician in the studio, providing backing for Sonny & Cher (and some of the incidental music for Cher's first film, Chastity), and for Canned Heat on their albums Living the Blues (1968), Future Blues (1970) and Freak Out! for Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (1966).
Dr. John grew up with full exposure to the realities of New Orleans. Prostitutes, pimps, thieves and addicts all participated in the same nightlife scene that contributed to his development as a musician.
He was introduced to marijuana, among other drugs, at a young age, ultimately gaining an addiction to heroin in his teen years. He recalls being "loaded" the first time while at high school, identifying the high he would chase for all of his life.
Not so fondly, Dr. John looks back on the shortsighted moneymaking schemes he would devise through his teens and twenties, all to pay only for the next dose of heroin. During the 1950s, he sold narcotics, ran a whorehouse and even opened a business offering abortions (illegal at the time).
Drug-induced nightclub furies throughout Louisiana and Florida would result in frequent shootouts and altercations with the police. He picked up a list of arrests that finally led to prison time in Texas. His sentence ended in 1965 and he left for Los Angeles.
His characteristic, nameless genre of jazzy funk, emphasized with a flair of psychedelic rock, was a direct image of his drug habit throughout his hoodoo albums of the 1960s and up through the 1970s. He failed to heed the warnings of friends and paid no attention to his mother's concern. Through the 1980s, he continued his habit, failing to beat addiction after numerous stays at rehabilitation.
Finally, after experiencing cardiac problems in New York, Dr. John exited his final rehabilitation stint, sober, in December, 1989. He went on to struggle with psychiatric problems throughout the 1990s, but became sober and mentally stable with the help of medication.
Dr. John was always fascinated with New Orleans voodoo, and in Los Angeles he developed the idea of the Dr. John persona for his old friend, Ronnie Barron. He imagined it as an interesting stage show and an emblem to their New Orleans heritage.
"Well, there was a guy the name of Dr. John, a hoodoo guy in New Orleans. He was competition to Marie Laveau. He was like her opposite. I actually got a clipping from the Times Picayune newspaper about how my great-great-great-grandpa Wayne was busted with this guy for runnin' a voodoo operation in a whorehouse in 1860. I decided I would produce the record with this as a concept."
Of course, he would assume the role of Dr. John himself, which he claims, came apprehensively. He recalls reading about the original Doctor John in his youth, a purported Senegalese prince who came to New Orleans from Haiti, a medicinal and spiritual healer. The Doctor was a free man of color who lived on Bayou Road and claimed to have fifteen wives and over fifty children.
He maintained a fascination with reptiles and kept an assortment of snakes and lizards, along with embalmed scorpions and animal and human skulls.
His specialization was healing, and as such, in selling Gris-Gris, voodoo amulets that protected the wearer from harm. Gris Gris, would, of course, become of the name of Dr. John the musician's famed debut album, his own form of "voodoo medicine."
Beginning in the late 1960s, Rebennack gained fame as a solo artist after adopting the persona of "Dr. John, The Night Tripper." His act combined New Orleans-style rhythm and blues with psychedelic rock and elaborate stage shows that bordered on voodoo religious ceremonies, including elaborate costumes and headdress (reflecting and presumably inspired by Screamin' Jay Hawkins's stage act).
On the earliest Dr. John records, the artist billing was "Dr. John, The Night Tripper," while the songwriting credits billed him as "Dr. John Creaux." Within a few years the "Night Tripper" subtitle was dropped, and Rebennack resumed using his real name for writing and producing/arranging credits.
In 1973, with Allen Toussaint producing and The Meters backing, Dr. John released the seminal New Orleans funk album, In the Right Place. In the same way that Gris-Gris introduced the world to the voodoo-influenced side of his music, and in the manner that Dr. John's Gumbo began his career-long reputation as an esteemed interpreter of New Orleans standards, In the Right Place established Dr. John as one of the main ambassadors of New Orleans funk.
Still in heavy rotation on most classic rock stations, "Right Place, Wrong Time" remains his single most recognized song. Artists such as Bob Dylan, Bette Midler, and Doug Sahm contributed single lines to the lyrics, which lists several instances of ironic bad luck and failure.
In the mid-1970s, Dr. John began an almost twenty-year-long collaboration with Doc Pomus to create songs for Dr. John's releases City Lights and Tango Palace and for B.B. King's Stuart Levine-produced There Must Be a Better World Somewhere.
Dr. John also recorded "I'm On a Roll," the last song written with Pomus prior to Pomus' death in 1991, for the now out-of-print Rhino/Forward Records 1995 tribute to Pomus titled Til the Night Is Gone: A Tribute to Doc Pomus that also included covers of Pomus-penned songs by Bob Dylan, John Hiatt, Shawn Colvin, Brian Wilson, the Band, Los Lobos, Dion, Rosanne Cash, Solomon Burke and Lou Reed.
His movie credits include Martin Scorsese's documentary, The Last Waltz (in which he joins The Band for a performance of his song "Such a Night"), the 1978 Beatles-inspired musical "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and Blues Brothers 2000 (in which he joins the fictional band the Louisiana Gator Boys to perform the songs "How Blue Can You Get" and "New Orleans").
His version of the Donovan song "Season of the Witch" was also featured in this movie and on the soundtrack.
He also wrote and performed the score for the film version of John Steinbeck's "Cannery Row" released in 1982. In 1993, his hit song "Right Place, Wrong Time" was used extensively in the movie Dazed and Confused.
On June 6, 2019, Dr. John died of a heart attack.