If the 1998 edition of Lafayette’s Festival International de Louisiane didn’t set new standards of excellence, it certainly maintained them. Once again, the three main stages hosted a variety of local and not-so-local roots-music acts whose performances belied their low-level name recognition. With the possible exception of the “salsa dura” trombonist Jimmy Bosch — the Hoboken, NJ native whose years of New York gigging and new Soneando Trombon CD on Rykodisc’s RykoLatino imprint have begun to spread his name — this year’s acts were unknown to the thousands of festival-goers who nevertheless crowded the blockaded streets of downtown Lafayette to hear them.
Not that everyone who attends the festival does so for the music. The only slightly overpriced local cuisine at the many food booths is a big draw too, as are the pockets of African-folk-art booths, where one can purchase anything from expensive but authentic African drums to cheap but inauthentic bootleg R&B cassettes and CDs. And despite each day’s depressingly palpable accumulation of trash — come sundown, one could hardly move without stepping on a grease-soaked cardboard food box — the Festival’s invisible but efficient custodial crew (elves?) worked wonders overnight. Come sunup each day, almost no evidence existed to convict the Festival patrons of their many crimes against tidiness. As for those on the lookout for reasons to attend the Lafayette Fest instead of the New Orleans’ Jazz Fest, the nipple-ring count alone deserves consideration: this column’s taste spies turned up only three teat-baring males, at least one of which had the modesty to wear a mesh shirt. (Rumors that the low nipple-ring turnout had anything to do with the sale of oversized U-shaped magnets at the novelty booths appear to have been unfounded.)
Like past Festival Internationals, this year’s had its share of perks. Several groups, for instance, showed up at the nearby Grant Street Dancehall either for shows of their own or as part of the post-Festival Sunday-night jam session. One such group was the old-timey Cajun trio Poullard, Poullard, and Garnier, who opened Grant Street on Friday night. (The previous night they’d performed on the Festival’s “Fais Do Do” stage; the next night they performed at the Liberty Theater in Eunice as part of the weekly Rendez Vous des Cajuns radio show.) As soon as they concluded their 45-minute Grant Street set, they thanked the crowd for its applause and said, “The real groups will be on next.”
The “real groups” to which PP&G referred were the Bluerunners (who would play the Festival’s main stage on Sunday afternoon) and Lil’ Band o’ Gold, the recently formed Lafayette-area supergroup whose Monday-night residency at Lafayette’s Swampwater Saloon has an increasing number of locals extending their weekends by a day. Led by C.C. Adcock (guitar, vocals) and Steve Riley (accordion, vocals), anchored by the swamp-pop legend Warren Storm (drums, vocals) and Sonny Landreth bandmember David Ranson (bass), spiced up with River Road’s Richard Comeaux (steel guitar) and a three-man sax section comprised of Dicky Landry, Pat Breaux, and the Mamou Playboy David Greeley, the group is the Traveling Wilburys or Little Village of swamp boogie.
“It’s basically an idea Charles Adcock and I had,” Riley explains. “We used to play in a band called Cowboy Stew, which played at Swampwater for quite some time, even after Charles and I dropped out. We’d always talked about starting another band, but we didn’t know where we would play. Then Cowboy Stew quit playing on Monday nights at Swampwater, so we figured, ‘Well, we’ve been talking about this thing for almost a year — now’s the time.’
“When we used to do the Cowboy Stew thing,” says Adcock, “we used to wake up on Wednesday night — after doing it on Monday night. It was hard to recover. So we stopped doing it because it wasn’t good for our health. But when we stopped, it was worse. We found ourselves going out every night. So now we’re back to doing it on Monday nights. One night of free drinking — that’s all we need to do.”
The group has been going on at about quarter past 10 and playing two hour-long sets. In addition to delivering barn-burning versions of classic rock ‘n’ roll and blues (Clifton Chenier’s “That’s My Soul” and Slim Harpo’s “Shake Your Hips” come across especially hot), they turn every fourth song or so over to Storm, who hasn’t sung “Lord, I Need Somebody Bad” or “House of Memories” with support this sympathetic in years.
According to Riley, though, it wasn’t Storm’s singing that initially landed him on the band’s short list of potential members. “We definitely wanted Warren Storm playing drums. His style of playing is unique — really old but really strong and solid. Charles wanted another guitar player to play with him, and Richard Comeaux agreed to do it. We knew we wanted horns, and we got three good horn players. It worked out really well.”
Adcock is quick to stress, however, that the Lil’ Band lineup is anything but static. “There’s an extended list of fraternity. We all have our own bands, so all those guys can play. And in the future I’d like to have special guests. That’s what we used to do with Cowboy Stew when we first got started years ago at Antlers. We had different singers and different people come and play. I’d like to see Tommy McClain and Clint West, all those guys. That’s easy. Maybe even out-of-town cats too.”
Riley and Adcock were out-of-town cats themselves not long ago. In late 1997, they spent several weeks in southern California, recording the new Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys album, Bayou Ruler (Rounder), at the Glendale recording facilities of Mark Linnett. Produced by Adcock and Tarka Cordell, the album puts a rock ‘n’ roll edge on Riley’s sound without diluting its Cajun essence.
“Some of these songs have been around for a while,” explains Greeley, who either wrote or co-wrote half of the album’s dozen songs. “They just didn’t fit on the last album, Friday at Last, which we intended to be a really traditional, totally pure Cajun-French album. So we had these other songs around, and we wanted to put together an album where they fit together. It was an organic thing. It wasn’t so much a conscious effort to write a whole bunch of rock ‘n’ roll. We wrote these songs, they were what they were, and we wanted to put them together in a way that made sense.”
Greeley points out that they also wanted them to sound a certain way. “We went out to California because we could get better sounds there. Mark Linnett has a lot of vintage tube equipment that he keeps maintained in excellent condition. He’s got all the mics and everything that you need to get as close to authentic retro, south-Louisiana, ’50’s, swamp-pop, Cajun sound as you can. You know, the old studios like MasterTrak in Crowley or La Louisianne, studios that did those old recordings whose sound we love so much — they don’t use the same equipment anymore. So we went to where we could get that stuff.”
“You can make a good record in any studio if you find the right angle,” Adcock observes, “but it’s nice in a place that you know. I knew Mark and his studio, and I knew he made great-sounding records. So we decided to go there — partly because of that and also because we just wanted to get out of town and make a record where we wouldn’t have to be leaving to go get our laundry or have girlfriends stopping by or be having to go to mom’s house to eat dinner.”
“Actually,” adds Cordell, “Charles wanted to get Steve drunk every night so he’d loosen up. It seemed to work.”
“Tarka ruled out of fear,” counters Adcock. “If the band didn’t have good takes and good performances, he wouldn’t tell them where their hotels were at night. They’d have to sleep in LaBrea Park.”
But the band did turn in good performances, and many people who’ve heard them consider them among the best performances by Riley and the Mamou Playboys yet. And Greeley for one is not concerned that the album’s less-traditional sound will alienate the group’s core fans. “We’ve been performing these songs for some time now, and people love ’em. I think people are going to enjoy the band more than ever. I’m not nervous at all. Just excited.”
