Into the Maelstrom, with the Night Tripper

So a few years ago, Dr. John's set on the Main Stage at Crawfish Fest was called off because of high winds and threatening rain. It sucked, but we couldn't blame anyone... the weather was clearly gonna get nasty, and cutting the set kept him -- and the audience -- safe.

But then, as the rest of the fest went on, we got word -- after the show officially ended, Dr. John was going to play in the pavilion, a quasi-indoors stage. The sides of the place were open, but there was a roof over the stage and the audience area, so we were good to go.

Well, Dr. John took the stage directly from his tour bus, parked behind it -- and all hell broke loose. The skies opened. There was thunder. There was lightning. And there were heavier torrents of rain than anything I'd ever been outdoors for. All pounding around us at all sides...

...except there in front of us was Dr. John, the Night Tripper, absolutely in his element. All around us, Nature was flexing its terrifying muscle. And amid that thunder and dread, Dr. John played a piano festooned with skulls and juju bags, laying down down-and-dirty, voodoo-infused funk. And when he sang "I Walk on Gilded Splinters," you couldn't help but shiver.

"Put gris-gris on your doorstep
And soon you be in the gutter
Melt your heart like butter
And I-I-I can make you stutter."

Eventually, the show ended. The Doctor took his bows, and headed back into his tour bus and into a nice, warm hotel. The rest of us ran back to our cars through the unrelenting rain, fueled up by a powerful hex and ready to drive through anything.

Rob

Small Revenge

Years ago, my pal Chris and I were in a Pizzeria Uno in Pennsylvania that was just god-awful. Bad food, bad service, unfriendly staff, etc. Just a hellhole of a place. Before we left, we went to the jukebox, and as a parting gift, set it to play "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" five times in a row. Just so they knew what something was like if it wasn't served cold.



Roll out the headless thompson gunner! We'll have a headless thompson gunner of fun!

Rob

A Room with a Wild Party

The other day, in search of a movie completely out of my regular wheelhouse these days, I watched our DVR recording of the Merchant-Ivory film A Room with a View. Which makes great use of an amazing cast, some at the start of their careers, and some more experienced actors who've just gotten better and better in the decades since. But once I wrapped it up, I started scanning around for other M-I films I'd missed (which is most of them, most alarmingly The Remains of the Day).

But I'd noticed that one of their earliest films was an adaptation of Joseph Moncure March's poem The Wild Party -- a favorite of mine ever since Art Spiegelman reissued it with his illustrations in the 90s. Now, this is a loose adaptation -- the action has moved to Hollywood rather than NYC, and the old vaudevillian is now a Fatty Arbuckle-type fading silent-movie star (played by James Coco), trying to launch one last picture. And Queenie is Racquel Welch, and she doesn't really have any chemistry with anyone who's not named Racquel Welch. She's got a little with James Coco in the beginning, and barely any with her young lothario, played by Riptide's Perry King. It's just not a good movie. (From what I can tell, it didn't open in NY until an early Merchant-Ivory retrospective, some 6 years after its release.)

And yet as a mid-70s version of 1920s excess, it's kind of fascinating to behold. It could have used more -- a lot more -- of March's verse hanging the scenes together. I was really hoping to hear some of that out loud, especially since I'm not quite sure where my book is at the moment. But que sera, and all that. And at least I got to hear this song, a faux-20s paean to hedonism: "Ain't Nothin' Bad About Feeling Good."

Rob