Our esteemed rock columnist, Alex “St. Rock” Rawls, and I have recently been engaged in a spirited email debate concerning New Orleans rock bands. After reminding me that not all citizens share our love of irony and that life cannot always be the Space Mountain at Disney World and that not every interview can be as exciting as one conducted with Ricki Comeaux, he declared that the Continental Drifters and Cowboy Mouth were New Orleans’ two leading rock bands. I was dumbfounded. I informed His Saintliness that I didn’t consider either group a “rock” band. Rock bands consist of 20-year-old, cute musicians in leather pants who “party” with Carmen Electra’s little sister and perform music that is heard on Clear Channel-owned radio stations—stations, I reminded Alex, that we would never listen to.
Since I’ve lived in New Orleans my entire life (well, at least until I migrated to Abita Springs) and Alex hasn’t, I know a New Orleans rock band when I hear one. The first rule is that they don’t sound like they’re from New Orleans.
As has been well-documented, the Beatles destroyed the New Orleans music scene in the 1960s. Nobody wanted to hear black R&B after the invasion from Liverpool. Well, maybe the Beatles did (stopping by to chat with Clarence “Frogman” Henry during their one and only visit to New Orleans), but they were in the decided minority.
Daydreams & Curry, a band I’ve previously praised in these pages, is the New Orleans version of the Beatles. In 2000, the group released Water, the best New Orleans rock album of the year (according to moi). This summer, the band is delivering Youth & Royalty, an absolutely summa cum laude sophomore effort, even more stunning than Water. Remember when the Beatles went to India and returned to record the White Album? Greg Wiz, D&C’s drummer/vocalist/primary songwriter, and Dave Rosser, one of the band’s two guitarists, toured India last year. Their auditory souvenir is Youth & Royalty. It’s perfect pop rock—short, perceptive, catchy songs basted with weird guitar effects (courtesy Dave Rosser and his comrade-in-strings Dasher), bassist Donald Ramsey’s funk-tionalism and the dominant, precise drumming of Greg Wiz, who, in this band, is not only Ringo Starr, but John and Paul as well.
“A couple of the songs are actually stories that I had come to learn in India,” Greg explains. “The album’s title was inspired by a picture I had taken in India: this bus is driving by a huge palace with an ad on it that said ‘Youth.’ There was a lot of dichotomy in India. You see these little kids living on the streets and then you see this huge palace. That’s what Youth & Royalty initially meant.
“In India, it was like being on tour without playing the music. We traveled from city to city. We arrived in Bombay, went down the coast, went up into the Himalayas for a week. When I got back to New Orleans, I didn’t leave the house for five days—partially from the plane ride and also because I was kind of culturally freaked-out. I felt like I’d just taken about 900 photographs of India in my head and was trying to develop them all at once.
“Going there, everybody said, ‘Man, it’s going to change your life.’ With that in mind, you’re waiting for this bolt of sunlight to hit you but really the way it changes you is from reflecting on it for the rest of your life, like any strong experience.
“In Bombay, in addition to having a place to stay, we had people who would cook us meals and really, that is another aspect of the album’s title: the whole time I was there, I felt like I was in a state of youth and royalty. I was treated like a king by everybody. People were so respectful. You hear people talk about karma and in India, it seems like a real thing. You see people really caring about their actions and how they effect the outcome. It felt very genuine. And then that gets kind of twisted by their whole caste system.”
As for the actual recording of Youth & Royalty, it was a process that occurred, literally, from coast to coast. Greg’s day job, unlike many musicians, is actually playing and recording music. Besides pounding conga drums for Tulane University’s dance classes, Wiz is often recruited by record producers because he understands how to perform in the studio: “A lot of recordings, drum-wise, get ruined by these sizzly cymbals all over the place.”
When the time came to cut Youth & Royalty, Greg summoned the services of several notable accomplices: “It started off in New York. I have a friend, Mike Napolitano, a producer/engineer who’s worked with a lot of cool people [Blind Melon, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Royal Crown Revue]. He had just bought a Pro Tools rig and he was looking for a guinea pig to do some drum tracks. So I went up to New York and got a few tracks done and after two or three trips, I had drum tracks for 12 songs.
“Then I brought them back to New Orleans and from there, we hooked up with Dave Pirner [Soul Asylum vocalist/guitarist and New Orleans resident], who had just bought a Pro Tools rig—a digital recording system. Their studio at Karen Brady’s house is called Royal Sound—it’s cool. It kind of has the vibe of Kingsway [producer Daniel Lanois’ former New Orleans studio]. Karen pretty much ran Kingsway for ten years and she was responsible for giving the studio its flavor. We did all the bass tracks and some keyboard and percussion tracks at Royal Sound.
“At that point, we switched it over to two-inch analog and went out to Los Angeles—myself and the two guitar players. We went out there and spent a week at Sound City. All of Tom Petty’s records were done there, Fleetwood Mac did Rumours there. We did all of the guitars and most of the overdubs at Sound City. We showed up with guitars and we didn’t know what the studio had. We were fortunate in that George Drakoulias, a producer who’s worked with the Black Crowes and the Beastie Boys, had been working with a band that had left all its gear at the studio because they were coming back to record the following week. We had Vox amps, Matchless amps and about $6000 worth of cool effects pedals.
“Then we came back to New Orleans and there was one more session with the special guests—the back-up singers, the horn players [including saxophonist Jerry Jumonville, trumpeter Grant Harris and French horn player Meredith Blanchard]. It was pretty much finished and we went back to Los Angeles at the end of March and Mike did the mixing for us, along with Ben Mumphrey.
“The reason we took this route of doing it was to work with friends who had lived in New Orleans and moved to other cities. That’s the reason why we jumped all over the place. And because all of the studios in New Orleans where I had worked and was comfortable working—American Sector, Kingsway, Magazine Sound—had closed. It was an interesting adventure, traveling, hanging out in different cities.”
One of Youth & Royalty’s most intriguing (and Beatles-esque) songs is “Ballad of Veerappan.” Like the Fab Four’s “Ballad of John & Yoko,” Greg’s composition is a true story: “Veerappan is this forest outlaw who’s been living in hiding in South India, near Bangalore. His reputation is that he’s a very fierce man who’s beheaded law officials and smuggled sandalwood and killed elephants for their ivory. He’s like a Robin Hood character. He has a loyal following because he takes care of the poor.
“The first day that we got to India, the top story in the news was that Veerappan had kidnapped this actor, Rajkumar, and ironically, Rajkumar had played roles in films where he went up against characters like Veerappan. Veerappan took Rajkumar off into the forest and the abduction was surreal: Veerappan and five of his men showed up at Rajkumar’s cottage and asked Rajkumar’s wife, ‘Do you know who I am?’ And she said, ‘Oh yes, I know who you are.’ And Veerappan handed her a tape with his demands on it and takes Rajkumar off into the night.
“Eventually, they take the demands to the Bangalore leaders and they listen to ’em and shoot them down. The demands are for lower tariffs on tea, a statue of a poet to be erected, the adoption of their regional language and mostly things that were generated towards taking care of the poor. They called on this guy Gopal, who was editor of a magazine, to negotiate. He looked just like Veerappan, with the big black moustache. This went on for the entire five weeks we were there and I think three months beyond that.
“I think eventually Rajkumar was freed and Veerappan is still on the loose. He’s got all these lookalikes and decoys. It sounds like total fiction but it really happened.”
