There’s no taller order for a writer—or anyone else for that matter—than trying to translate into words the loss of a close friend. I’m talking, of course, about Kelly Keller, who passed away on September 25. I’ve thought a lot about the fact that I’m probably still too shell-shocked and emotionally shattered to even write anything at all, but I’ve also realized that, although words often cheapen the things that we really want to say, sometimes they are all we have. I was originally going to write this column about one of Kelly’s all time favorite musicians and people—and someone whose career she helped revive—Detroit soul genius Nathaniel Mayer. Nathaniel’s story will have to wait, but I mention him because he’s indicative of the legacy that Kelly left with us.
On Sunday, October 3, Mayer and his band the Fabulous Shanks made a special last minute foray to New Orleans to play a show in Kelly’s honor at the Circle Bar, the club she designed and opened in 1999 with her good friends Dave Clements, Jim “The Hound” Marshall and several other partners. From the day its doors swung open, the Circle Bar was a total extension of Kelly’s personality and few things would have pleased her more than the atmosphere in her bar that night. As Mayer steamrollered through fractured soul rockers like “I Want Love and Affection (Not The House Of Correction),” “Village Of Love,” and “My Last Dance With You,” it became evident that even though this was the saddest of occasions, and one of the hardest weeks any of us in that room—audience, band, bartenders, but friends all—had ever faced, Mayer and the Shanks were doing what they do every single time they play: putting on a show that is, miraculously, impossibly, ten times better than the last one; the one that Kelly, I and every other Mayer admirer swore was so good that it could never get any better. Just a few weeks previous, Wayne County Ramblin’ film maker Dan Rose had related a story about a show in Memphis where Nathaniel appeared to literally be healing people. Well, it was happening tonight.
The audience was in a sweat-drenched, suds-swilling frenzy. Fabulous Shanks Jeff Meier and Jack Oblivion—late of the legendary Detroit Cobras and Oblivions, respectively (they also worked together in the Compulsive Gamblers)—were grinding out stinging single note leads and vibrato-drenched chords on their guitars. Saxophonist Suzie Hendrix was wailing over it all with total R&B abandon. A rhythm section that looked like they might have come from Black Flag but sounded as if they could’ve exhausted James Brown drove the backbeat like men possessed. Herb Hardesty, Fats Domino’s saxophonist since day one, sat at the bar and surveyed the scene with a smile on his face. Swamp blues harmonica king Lazy Lester towered over everyone else, sipping a pint of European ale and grooving to Mayer’s kinetic work out. More good friends of Kelly’s—and also the loudest garage band in the world—Oxford, Mississippi’s Jenny Jeans, who’d opened the show, were, like everyone else in the room, having a very bittersweet blast.
This was the world that Kelly Keller created. Without her, it never would have been.
It would be virtually impossible to pinpoint the influence that Kelly had on the New Orleans music scene, but it’s even more impossible to imagine what it will be like without her. Even attempting to list a small portion of her innumerable accomplishments—musical and otherwise—would be futile, but I will say this: when she opened the Circle Bar she single-handedly changed the face of New Orleans night life. Here was a place where you were just as likely to hear Jerry Byrne, Cookie and the Cupcakes, the Spiders or Lefty Frizzell blasting out of the jukebox as you were Badfinger, Roky Erickson,the New York Dolls or the Pretty Things. And that jukebox wasn’t merely a jukebox; it was a preview of the caliber of artists that you could expect to see holding forth there, live and in person, on any given night. Kelly wasn’t merely satisfied with having Barbara Lynn’s records on the jukebox; she made sure that Lynn played there, just as she did everyone from bayou rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Classie Ballou to schizophrenic garage rockabilly genius Dexter Romweber to Japanese blues iconoclasts Howlin’ Hachima.
Soul legend Howard Tate, whose whereabouts were unknown for 30 years, was merely another obscure name on the Circle Bar jukebox until the Mystic Knights Of The Mau-Mau—an organization of rock ‘n’ roll maniacs of which Kelly was a prime player—learned that he’d been located alive and well and made a hasty phone call to book his first ever comeback gig there. Needless to say, when the New York Times and other major publications began writing about Tate’s remarkable rediscovery, New York City’s Village Underground was cited as the place that he’d played that first historical show. In reality, Kelly was the one who took that gamble and made it happen. She was running on pure faith, having no idea whether Tate still had the chops to pull it off. Certainly she knew that the turnout in New Orleans could never compare to what it would have been had her bar been located in New York, Los Angeles or London, but somehow none of that mattered. In fact, that was almost the whole point: what better place for such an event to take place but in New Orleans? Just the fact that it happened was enough of a reward for Kelly.
And that’s to say nothing of every local band that had something unique and soulful to offer. Her inherent ability to recognize the potential in a band or an artist truly put her in a class by herself. Anyone who knew her, and many of those who didn’t, would agree that she should have been on this earth for at least twice as long as she was, but they’d also agree that in the short time that she was with us, she made it a more joyful place to live in.
The number of lives she touched with her irrepressible charisma, humor, enthusiasm and impeccable taste—not just in New Orleans but everywhere she lived and went—is truly inestimable. But most importantly, she touched those lives in an extremely rare and personal way. She took no credit for the things that she did, instead showering it onto her friends, always zeroing in on the attributes of a person that she felt needed to be explored and encouraged. There’s no telling how many people would never have gotten up the courage to get on stage and play a song or paint a picture or write a story without Kelly telling them that they just had to do it. And there’s also no telling how many people in this world would never have met one another had it not been for her.
Sitting in a ’60s relic of a Cajun diner called the Chatterbox in Kelly’s hometown of Eunice right after her funeral gave you an idea. Almost every seat was taken, and the cast of characters—myself included—could be described only as that. One of Kelly’s mentors, Empress Antoinette K-Doe,sat at the head of a long table that included various members of Rock City Morgue, Baby Rosebud and several other bands. Miss Pussycat looked stunning in a dress that appeared to have come from a maritime ball circa 1948, but that she’d actually sewn from scratch just hours before. DJ Pasta barely had to look at the menu before ordering up a “Cajun Whopper.” One Eyed Jacks owner Rio Hackford dug into a gigantic bowl of gumbo as C.C. Adcock and Mr. Quintron bonded over something sitting in the corner that they finally ascertained was a boudin maker.
Moments before, Adcock had walked over to radio station KBON. He’d asked the DJ to dedicate the afternoon to Kelly and play some of her favorite songs for friends who would be driving back to New Orleans. As an obscure-but-great swamp pop song from J.D. Miller’s studio filled the room, the Iguanas’Derek Huston cranked the volume on one of the two boom boxes that the waitress had set down for us next to the boudin maker. We sat there over our gumbo and shrimp po-boys and beers and talked about the person who had brought us all together, while the radio played songs by Slim Harpo and Barbara Lynn and Jimmy Reed. I keep going back to the Chatterbox in my mind because I know that if Kelly could have seen us—as I know she did—all dressed up and trying hard to look respectable, hanging out in the diner where she supposedly snuck her first teenage drink (the attached bar was called the Swamp Lounge!), she would have thought it was the greatest thing in the world. I can hear that one-of-a-kind laugh right now.
Like everyone else who knew Kelly, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I’ll never again walk into the Circle Bar and see her standing by the cooler and singing along with a ? and the Mysterians song. That I’ll never spin an obscure soul or doo-wop record at the Mod Dance Party that instantly clears the floor of every hipster in the joint, only to have her dance over to me with her thumbs up exclaiming, “Yeeeaaahhh!!!” That I’ll never have another long phone conversation with her that touches on all kinds of subjects and ends abruptly when both of us suddenly realize that we’ve been yakking for hours and we’re buried knee deep in unfinished work. That I’ll never drive up to Breaux Bridge with her and DJ Matty and our great friend Heather West on Mother’s Day determined to eat crawfish and find out that no one is serving it because, after all, it’s Mother’s Day (!)
There was no one else like her. And there never will be. Goodbye, my friend, but just for now.
