1 Dead in Attic (31 page)

Whatev. It is what it is. We are what we are. No apologies necessary.

There are two days left before our season of atonement, remembrance, and renewal.

Live it.

Take them to the ruins.

It's important. It will always be important.

This many months in, maybe you're tired of giving your relatives and friends the misery tour or maybe the city's wreckage is not what you want to dwell upon as you prepare to soak in the rays and revel in the sights, sounds, and smells of JazzFest.

Maybe you'd like to take the opportunity to step out of the darkness and into the light, if only for a weekend. Maybe you'd just like to kick your feet up and cut loose with your out-of-town friends and talk about things that people in other places talk about: baseball, gas prices, and what's the deal with Tom Hanks's hair in
The Da Vinci Code
?

Fine. Talk about those things with them. Talk about those things while you drive them around the city and show them what happened here.

It's important.

I have more visitors coming to stay with me this JazzFest than I have had in fifteen years—back when I was single, immortal, and had three million friends and a freezer filled with vodka bottles.

They're coming this year because they love this place and want to support this place and because of the general realization in the Great Elsewhere that any dollars spent here in New Orleans are a contribution to a good cause.

And it's quite possible that many visitors will want to witness what this city looks like right now—witness what it really feels like; they'll want to see the breaches, the brown lines, the Lower 9th, and the cloud of emotional dread that hangs over it all.

They'll want to understand what happened here, the scope of human suffering that occurred before and occurs still.

Then again, many may not want to see that. Quite frankly, they'd prefer to stick to Dylan, the 'dudes, and Fats, thank you very much. And my answer is: If you want to see Fats at the Fair Grounds, you've got to see his house on Caffin Avenue first.

You must pay to play.

No one who visits me this year is going to get to the festival without seeing Lakeview and eastern New Orleans first.

Yeah, even just a regular drive to the Fair Grounds from any point in the city is a strong cup of coffee, an unfiltered look at the damage done, and evidence enough of what went down here. And though I don't intend to bring my guests down, I think it's a small crime of negligence not to put this festival into context for them.

In that way, really, it actually becomes a bigger celebration than usual. A rebirth. A return. A claim to our heritage and our future. A testimony to the triumph of the human spirit.

The New Orleans spirit.

I think JazzFest visitors can collectively be considered among the most intellectually curious and influential visitors we'll see in the course of the year.

They will probably drink, yes, but they're not here for the liquor. I'd wager that the Bourbon Street strip clubs do not experience any great spike in business this time of year. But the record stores, music venues, art galleries, and bookstores do. These folks matter. They want to get it. So give it to them.

Undoubtedly, the spectacle of legions of video-toting gawkers in florid print Hawaiian shirts and straw hats and wearing socks with sandals and shorts will present a disconcerting sight among the colorless wreckage of the Lower 9th.

But it means no disrespect. It is no disrespect, any more than wanting to see where the Twin Towers once stood or the city of Pompeii.

From history, we learn.

Teach them. Teach yourself. Remind yourself, because we forget. We get used to it.

I recently drove a TV news producer around town and was down in the 8th Ward and remembered so painfully what it had looked like in September, so I was provoked to nod my head at the transformations since then and I offered, “Lookin' good!”

The producer, from New York City, looked at me as if I were out of my mind. “It does not look so good,” he said.

Gut check. Correct. It does not look so good. It looks as though a war was fought here and we lost the war.

So never forget. And never surrender.

Arriving at JazzFest long before the gates opened Friday morning, I headed for the nearby Fair Grinds coffee shop for a cup of joe, to begin my personal celebration of JazzFest, beautiful JazzFest and not just another JazzFest, if you know what I mean.

And I think you do.

The Fair Grinds has not reopened since The Thing. But it has been giving free coffee to the neighborhood since October, providing a service of importance just a notch below that of the first responders.

Think about it: Once you put out the fire in my house and fix my head wound, please—may I have a cup of coffee?

Fair Grinds proprietor Robert Thompson says it may be another month, maybe two, before it opens again, because of hang-ups, bang-ups, and delays.

“We're in the New Orleans quagmire,” he shrugged. “We're swimming in molasses.”

That's a beautiful way, when you think about it, to describe a terrible thing. And more proof that when you get down to it, everything is about food.

Beneath our cheery demeanor this weekend as we greet our guests and our grandiloquent cultural gathering, the fact remains that we are a community largely held together by duct tape and delusion.

And truthfully, as I entered the festival grounds, I fully expected more of the ignominious weeping attacks I'm prone to that make everyone around me avert their eyes in embarrassment, but, in fact, I held up.

You try and you try and you try to get into the zone where you stop mourning what we aren't anymore and start celebrating what we are and what we will be one day. And I got there. I got a new attitude. A new set of clothes.

We told our kids they were playing hooky, and we rolled out. Oh, happy day.

The kids, they behave on days like this. After all, if they're getting on your nerves—if they whine too much—you simply say: Okay, you're right, this sucks. What say we just take you back to school for the day?

That usually works.

I wanted them to be there on the first day JazzFest played in the year 2006, with the idea that I will tell them when they get older—when they're teenagers—that they were here for this, were a part of it, part of something bigger than them and bigger than Mommy and Daddy and part of something important and even though their likely response will be “That's great, Dad, but can I use the car tonight or not?” I will still shoulder this burden for them and with them until “this” is them.

We waited in line a really, really, really long time to get into the Fair Grounds, and it's nice to know some of the festival's charms haven't changed despite the storm.

We grooved to the New Orleans Jazz Vipers. Anders Osborne laid out at least three new Katrina-themed songs, but they were neither maudlin nor sad but just good. I had managed to get this far in my life without ever hearing Johnny Sketch and the Dirty Notes and now I have and now I have a new favorite band.

They sang a song about St. Bernard Parish that was neither sad nor maudlin but just good.

Funny, the announcer who introduced the Dirty Notes did one of those “Let's hear it for our sponsors!” routines that nobody ever listens to and he laid out Southern Comfort and everyone clapped and then American Express and then Shell and people clapped and you just couldn't imagine such a thing a few years ago.

Or ever, really, from your typical anticorporate JazzFest crowd. But everyone clapped. Because everyone realizes that without the big money—the guys in suits—this would likely be just another April weekend in New Orleans. Just another spring Friday.

Among the many lessons we have learned here in our little town is humility. Generosity and giving are hard enough, but this receiving thing can just knock you flat on your ass.

And so the day rambled along, and despite the occasional political T-shirt and the occasional Katrina ballad and the occasional thank-God-we're-here exhortations from stage emcees, it had all the flavor of, really, just another day at JazzFest.

A really good day at JazzFest. To hell with The Thing. Let's party.

And then the set by local rockers Cowboy Mouth provided just the right ominous poignancy, and isn't ominous poignancy really what you're looking for when you walk out your door each morning?

Drummer/singer Fred LeBlanc preached to the masses: “Some folks say we shouldn't talk about the elephant in the room today. Some folks say we shouldn't think about it. I say don't avoid it. I say dance all over the son of a bitch.”

It was a point taken to heart, and the crowd danced all over the son of a bitch.

Then, the weirdest thing. It came during one of their signature concert sing-along songs that they were forced by circumstances to quit playing this past fall.

It's a chestnut: “Hurricane Party,” a rollicking (and true) story about giving the finger to hurricanes in that insouciant and mildly charming way we used to do around here until, well . . . you know.

So they stopped playing it this fall as they toured America even though fans called for it. They stopped out of respect. Out of mourning. Because it just didn't work anymore.

But when Cowboy Mouth played the reopening of the House of Blues in December, they decided what the hell, let it rip, and they've put it back in their repertoire since, much to the delight of the Mouth faithful.

A flirtation with the fates and furies? Maybe. But it's only rock 'n' roll.

Or is it?

In the middle of the song Friday, the power went out at the Southern Comfort stage where Cowboy Mouth was playing. In my twenty-two years of JazzFest attendance, I've never seen this happen, a colossal technical glitch that ground a performance to a halt.

Total silence. Right in the middle of “Hurricane Party.”

I mean, that's a coincidence, right? Please say yes.

After about ten or fifteen minutes, tech crews got the power back. Cowboy Mouth came back onstage.

Chastised by meteorological hoodoo? You better believe it. Rather than finish “Hurricane Party,” they restarted their show with “Over the Rainbow” from
The Wizard of Oz.

I'll leave it to you to decipher the symbolism therein. I've had enough of it myself for one day.

JazzFest 2006 can be regarded only as a huge success; the muses and the weather teamed up for a sublime celebration of Louisiana music, food, and culture.

And you don't say—even some jazz.

It was more evidence that the triumph of the human spirit is the engine running this city.

But there's no question that the festival's final moment allowed for a flood of conflicting emotions and—for JazzFest veterans—poignant absurdity.

For as long as I can remember, the festival's “closing ceremony” has pretty much followed this script: All the other stages shut down, the concession stands close, and all that remains is the encore on the Big Stage—Fess, Ray-Ban, Acura—whatever it's called in any particular year.

And that encore is imprinted in the New Orleans canon: As daylight fades to dusk, Aaron Neville sings “Amazing Grace” and then the First Family of Funk jumps in with a rousing version of Bob Marley's “One Love” or some other anthemic sing-along and fifty thousand people in the crowd fall all over themselves with tears, laughter, group hugs, and the general righteousness that attends the realization that you are, for one brief moment, at the center of the universe.

This moment has always spoken so clearly to the power of music, togetherness, community, love, and all those other squishy ideals we're afraid to speak of anymore but that still stand as worthy goals nonetheless.

If you have ever witnessed this glorious moment—where exhaustion, drunkenness, and aria mix their sultry stew—it stays with you forever. And I mean: forever.

Bereft of that annual emotional capstone, this year's festival was kind of like witnessing a grand opera without its finale.

For various reasons—Aaron's asthma, Cyril's sense of embittered entitlement—it's clear that the Neville Brothers, as a family unit, are not going to lead any part of the rebuilding of their hometown. Each brother has participated in benefit concerts outside the city, and that's, well, that's great.

So we move on. The landscape has changed, and we adjust to a new paradigm and that paradigm doesn't include the family band that has provided the sound track of our lives for the past thirty years and so be it.

But what a sound track. We will love them forever. But, as a T-shirt I saw at the Fair Grounds said, I guess we can call them the Never Brothers now.

The substitution of Fats Domino to fill the huge void of the closing act was brilliance on the part of festival producers, but Fats is always a no-show risk and he stayed true to form by bowing out at the last minute, showing up nattily dressed but also claiming ailments that would prevent him from performing. And so, in a quick stage rearrangement, we got—for that sweet, palpable group love moment—Lionel Richie.

To the JazzFest snob—and that seems like most everybody, because most everybody takes the appropriate sense of ownership from this event, our event,
my
event, dammit!—this news was nothing less than heretical.

The master of cheesy 1970s dance tunes and unbearably maudlin '80s ballads was going to lead us into the sunset? Into the future? Sure, there were the obligatory final jazz, zydeco, and gospel acts—but the visceral closer, the curtain call, the group therapy, the massive teardrop moment is always at the Big Stage. But Lionel Richie? It was so Not JazzFest and so Not New Orleans and probably anything but the cathartic moment that the thousands waited for, but I'll tell you this about Lionel Richie: he rose to the occasion.