New Orleans blues harmonica wizard Andy J. Forest has been doing a semi-regular Thursday night gig at d.b.a. and often plays Happy Hour sets at House of Blues, but the gig his Ninth Ward neighbors wait for is closer to home at Melvin’s, the funky occasional music club on St. Claude Avenue. The motley hordes of Forest’s neighbors show up in force for these events, causing such mayhem that Forest pushes the party limits until he’s body surfing across the dance floor on his frattoir.

“They never come down to d.b.a.,” he admits. “The beer there is too expensive for them.”

Last year Forest bought a house in the Ninth Ward on Piety Street and he’s had his hands full renovating the place from stem to stern ever since. He plans to marry his girlfriend Gwen later this year, and his 15th album, Way Down Yonder In the Bywater, is filled with songs about his new wife and his new home.

Forest’s love affair with his new neighborhood starts with the cover art, which features some of his paintings against the backdrop of the gorgeous voodoo paintings that adorn the storefront of neighbor Sally Glassman’s Island of Salvation Botanica.

“I just bought the house here and fell in love with Gwen, so I was writing about those experiences,” said Forest. “I was looking through some of my older stuff and realized I was writing a lot of songs about being on the road. This is probably the most personal album I’ve done.”
The title track references local bar Bud Rip’s by description alone.

“I could have been talking about Markey’s or Vaughan’s, but Bud Rip’s is right across the street from me,” he said. “I was just in a John Travolta movie. I worked as an extra. They did it at Bud Rip’s. They put a stage in there. They took it out afterwards but I was thinking, this would be a great venue. Gwen and I danced in the scene with John Travolta. We were in the background, so I don’t know if it will be visible. But he had a dance scene in the movie like he usually does and they said ‘Can you two dance?’ and we said ‘Well, OK’.”

Anders Osborne, who produced Forest’s last record, Sunday Rhumba, served the same function again on this record.

“Anders took my demos, which were done acoustically just because we didn’t have a big place to do them, and he wanted to go with that vibe but it really wasn’t what I had in mind,” said Forest. “I wanted it to be intense and hard rocking but he liked the mellow sound of the demos.”
So Forest compromised with his producer to create an album that balanced full throttle blues performances with softer, more introspective songs.

“Anders is great to work with as a producer,” Forest raved. “I’ve produced some demos for friends and I’m used to producing my own stuff. He gets very enthusiastic about the material he’s working with. I think he has a lot better ears than I do, he hears things that I don’t hear. He’s very quick, serious, and at the same time he’s fun to work with, he’s at the board and he’s sitting there, dancing around, singing the lyrics. His enthusiasm is contagious. He makes you feel good about yourself too if he likes a tune. He enjoys producing.

Forest was born in the Pacific Northwest and raised in California.

“I bought my first harmonica when I was 12,” he recalls. “There was a restaurant out in California where kids could go called the Ash Grove. I saw Rev. Gary Davis out there, B.B. King, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Muddy Waters, Taj Mahal. I listened to everything. I started buying records and listening to harmonica players. Little Walter was a big influence.

DOWN FOR MARDI GRAS
Forest first came to New Orleans in 1974, and like so many before him, fell in love with the city he now calls home. “I had friends down here who invited me down for Mardi Gras and like so many other people, I just stayed. I was going to pass through on my way to see the world, I was gonna go to the Carribean, Africa, Europe, and Australia.

“When I first came here I played with James Booker, hung out with some of the guys in the Radiators, met Billy Gregory and John Mooney. There was this club in the Quarter, Geno’s Back Room, on St. Philip near Decatur, it was an after hours place. Bands would play from two to ten in the morning. In the afternoon Angelle Trosclair and this guy named Catfish played. I had the habit of taking my harps and a microphone and going to any club and asking to sit in. The bartender Geno told Booker ‘He plays harp, let him sit in,’ and he said ‘OK.’
Booker would call the key out, he’d say ‘A Naturallll…’ and I didn’t know if ‘natural’ was some special key, so I’d just go ‘OK.’ I’d sit on the piano bench with him and he gave me this big introduction. I was blown away because I was only 19 or 20 years old.

“Booker called me to do a gig one time. He didn’t show up. Nobody else did, either, but there was this big banner outside the place saying ‘James Booker Band’ and I had never seen him with a band, but I didn’t then either because nobody showed up. So I just went home.

“I just played for fun. I’d sit in with people in New Orleans and I didn’t have any ambition at all. My ambition was never to be too ambitious. I didn’t really think I could compete. I just had fun and people let me play.

“I liked Lee Oskar, too, and when I came to New Orleans that was the sound all the black guys I knew liked. He had just come out with that “BLT” hit. I was working at Brennan’s and when I played that in the kitchen the black cooks said ‘Play that Lee Oskar stuff,’ so I’d go home and learn it and play it for them and they’d say ‘That sounds just like him.’ I didn’t do that in my shows back then, I was playing straight blues stuff, but I really like his tone and phrasing. I took bits and pieces from whatever I could get my hands on.”

Forest hit the road and spent a few years in Europe, where his music career, no doubt influenced by what he learned in New Orleans, took off.

“I stayed for a few years, went to Europe for a few years, came back and stayed. I played on the streets in Paris with an African guitarist and that’s when I started to develop my own style because I had to come up with stuff. I didn’t have a record player there. When I went to Europe I ran out of money and started playing on the street. I got a record offer and people started offering me money. I put together my first New Orleans band when I came back in ’82.

Most of the songs on Forest’s new albums started out as poems, including the album opener, “We Win.”

“That was a poem I wrote that I sent to Gwen,” he said. “I would write poems and send them to her. The original poem was five times longer. The demo was way different. We tried a few different grooves on that. Anders did the arrangement. Antonio Vezzano, he’s my guitar player in Italy, I showed him what I had and he played it a lot better than I could on guitar. Same with ‘…Bywater,’ he added a lot to the arrangement. That groove on ‘…Bywater,’ that octave thing, I’ve been doing that for years, so I decided to write a song to it. I like some of the lines in there. The line about hearing the washboard: ‘hear the rattle of the washboard beat,’ that’s for Washboard Chaz, who I play with from time to time, he lives down here on Mazant, he’s my neighbor.

“‘Fat Chance’ was originally a 12 bar blues and Anders said ‘Just hang on the one’ so he brought some arrangement to it. He kind of pushed the melody into a different direction.”

“Voodoo Lips” is already one of Forest’s most popular live numbers. “When I do that live and I’m selling CDs after the gig people invariably ask ‘Which one has “Voodoo Lips?”’ That’s a good sign.
“‘Weak Point’ was another poem. Anders didn’t initially want to do it, he didn’t think it would fit in. When we were done we still had another hour left in the studio. I said ‘C’mon let’s do that “Weak Point” tune, ’cause bassist Jesse Boyd’s a jazz guy,’ and he said ‘OK, but only if I get to play drums.’ I knew he used to be a drummer when he was a teenager but I’d never heard him play. He sounded good.

“Anders made up the bass line on ‘Levee En Rose.’ I wanted an instrumental with a Leslie harp on it. I put a wah-wah pedal on there. I just wanted to do something different. On Sunday Rhumba I did an instrumental, a kind of distorted, Jimi Hendrix thing, and a lot of people commented on it, WWOZ played it a lot, so I figured I’d do an instrumental on this album.

“‘Imaginary Friend’ is kind of a negative tune about people who say they’re your friend. I won’t say the name, but he filled up my answering machine, screaming. He was my friend for years and then all of a sudden for some really dumb thing while I was out of the country… I don’t wanna mention his name because I don’t wanna get him on my answering machine again.

“There’s an express train in Europe called the ‘Eurostar.’ I wrote that song while I was on that. I compared the experience to hopping a freight train in the U.S. I took a freight from Barstow to Albuquerque. It was a very dusty experience. I was riding on a flatbed with a truck strapped to it and we went through the desert. At the end I had a quarter of an inch of dust covering every part of my body. I tried to play my harmonica but I couldn’t hear it. I knew I was blowin’ but I couldn’t hear it. All those movies you see with the hobos playing harmonica riding the train? Forget it, you can’t hear shit.

“Anders completely changed ‘All I Need,’ It had a different melody, different groove. He said ‘Let’s do it Mississippi John Hurt style’.”

The entire project was a Ninth Ward project. The tracks were recorded at the Truck Farm. “A couple of people from Kingsway opened up this house right up on St. Claude just about three blocks away from us. Andrew Gilchrist engineered and mixed it over there along with Anders, and John Fischbach mastered and edited it right down the block at Piety Street Recording.