A friend compares the Neville Brothers to a synthesizer. All the pop, country, reggae, world music and rhythm & blues found on jukeboxes in New Orleans can be heard in their music, and their genius is to make it all sound like Nevilles music.
Other bands have tried to similarly pull together seemingly disparate sounds, but the Neville Brothers continue to do it best because their synthesis comes from who they are and their lives in music, while the others sound contrived and driven by marketing strategies.
Of course, the Neville Brothers occupy the unusual place they do in music because they have confounded the best-laid marketing strategies, but that only makes their story more interesting. In The Brothers, Art, Aaron, Charles and Cyril Neville (with David Ritz) retell the story of their lives in and out of New Orleans music, and while it’s a remarkable book, it’s hardly the book you’d expect.
By now you may have heard The Brothers deals extensively with the Nevilles’ various drug addictions. In this way, the book is a revelation because it’s unlikely anyone who didn’t know them realized the severity of their situations, but it’s also a mark of the honesty they brought to the project. The Brothers is similarly unflinching in its depictions of figures like Larry Williams and Johnny Taylor, the latter of whom hired Charles to play in his band, then abandoned him and the band one night as he had abandoned many others along the way.
Williams comes across as a larger than life character who, if their descriptions are accurate, is a book or movie waiting to happen. When he took Art and Aaron on the road with him to support singles like “Bad Boy” and “Slow Down,” he was always a moment away from having to burn rubber out of town. When he ended up pimping in Los Angeles, he remained an outsized presence as likely to settle a dispute with a laugh as a gun, but he stayed a presence in Aaron’s life because he never stopped trying to be a mentor to Aaron despite his career change.
Stories like these give readers a peek inside the music business, but ironically, at the point when most people would like a closer look, the Nevilles shy away.
The Yellow Moon era—arguably the point at which their public profile outside New Orleans took a big step forward—is largely dashed through, along with most of the last 15 years. Only 70 or so pages are dedicated to that period, while the previous three-quarters of the book explore their more dissolute days in, at times, unpleasant detail. That said, the book is remarkable in its depiction of an African-American family in New Orleans. If the family name was “Johnson” instead of “Neville,” little in this book would be different.
The seduction of the streets, the small successes followed by cruel neglect, the weird testing of the elasticity of family bonds, and the subtle and overt effects of racism are as much a part of the stories of many black families as they are a part of the Nevilles. This insight alone makes the book an often powerful read.
The book highlights another facet of the Neville Brothers that is similarly unexpected: the Nevilles’ sense of themselves as icons. The notion that their stories could be the stories of many other black men in New Orleans comes because the brothers reveal little about themselves that doesn’t fit into the tale of someone overcoming hard times though faith in God, music and family.
Like politicians careful to stay “on message,” they leave out anything that doesn’t fit in that narrative. Sure, they confess to their foibles, but those establish what they had to overcome, but extraneous information that humanizes the Nevilles—Art’s affection for science fiction, Aaron’s for soap operas—is downplayed or left out. Similarly, the actual words they use to tell their stories seem controlled.
Art and Aaron seem to have spoken carefully to Ritz, and if Cyril didn’t revise his passages, then he told his stories in very writerly prose that made certain nothing inadvertent was communicated. In the big scheme of things, this is a minor issue, but those reading The Brothers to get a better sense of who these men are will likely be a little frustrated.
Then again, perhaps that is to be expected; after all, one constant in the Neville Brothers career has been their desire to make a difference in New Orleans, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they tell a story of hope in The Brothers. Their sense of purpose is as much a part of who they are as their funk and their spirituality, and expecting the book to be anything different might be as unrealistic as expecting Martha Stewart to write about the college mixer when she got so loaded she . . . well, you get the point.
The Brothers tells a story that most of us—even in New Orleans—don’t entirely know, and the way they expand their experiences beyond themselves makes the book not just a good music bio or New Orleans book, but an interesting read for anyone interested in the stories of families.
A column ago, “Bookmark” looked at R. Meltzer’s A Whore Just Like the Rest, a collection of writing by the long-time rock critic. One of his co-conspirators at the time was Lester Bangs, but the person with whom he had the closest connection was Nick Tosches, whose own collection, The Nick Tosches Reader, was just published.
Tosches actually escaped the rock-crit ghetto in a way no other writer has done, having written remarkable books on Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin and most recently, Sonny Liston. Tosches’ stories are guy stories—stories of paisans, boxers, loan sharks, and toughs of all stripes—but his ability to convey insights into male subcultures compel readers to stick with stories they might otherwise lack interest in.
His earlier rock writing is interesting for documentary purposes, and his poetry would be better left out, but in pieces like his remarkable profile on George Jones, he integrates the music figure into the larger culture—the opposite of what much conventional music journalism does—and sees how oddly they fit. In short, the book is required reading.
