When you’re trying to hustle down Royal Street, it’s easy to curse street musicians as musical roach motels for unsuspecting tourists.
The crowds they attract slow you down, and you know you’re smarter than the suckers grooving’ on these hokey versions of folk and blues standards, but the embarrassing truth is that on occasions, the tourists are right and there is something musical there. There is also, as OffBeat’s December cover story on David and Roselyn showed, more to street musicians than their scruffy shows; they’re real people with rent, bills, and kids to put through college.
In Mister Satan’s Apprentice, harmonica player Adam Gussow tells a similar story, the story of a young, white, university-educated harmonica player, and Mister Satan, an older black man educated on the streets and on the road with such musicians as King Curtis, Marvin Gaye and Etta James.
Gussow, the harmonica player, first saw Mister Satan playing guitar and accompanying himself with a jerryrigged percussion setup on the streets of Harlem, and timidly sat in. Before long, their street performances became an act that would lead to a couple of Satan and Adam CDs and an appearance in 1992 at the Jazzfest.
Their rise gives the book structure, but there are themes that seem more important to Gussow than that story. The book is most obviously a love letter to his mentors; harmonica player Nat Riddles and Mister Satan, but it also explores the race component associated with the blues.
More than once, Gussow is anxious about his place as a blues musician, his place in Harlem and in a predominantly black social environment. He also shows a pretty funny onstage and offstage burlesque of race relations as he gets a job in the pit band for the road company version of “Big River,” die musical based on Huckleberry Finn.
What he has to say isn’t terribly new—”The color and culture game was trickier than I realized”—but since a lot of people haven’t made that connection yet, it’s always reassuring to see it in print.
More than being about race though, Mister Satan’s Apprentice is about Gussow’s journey to find a voice. The book jumps around chronologically, alternately telling stories about playing music and dating women, and both are crucial because the former gave him technical ability while the latter gave him something to say.
Gussow clearly believes the blues mythology that the music must be born from pain, and his long, difficult relationships gave him something to blow through his harmonica. After a breakup and a trip to Europe, he returns to his ex and tells her, “You’ve bequeathed the blues to me, Helen. Thank you;” raising some interesting “color-and-culture” questions, such as whether or not his girl trouble is on par with the African-American experience, and whether or not a guy who can afford to go to Columbia, Princeton and Europe really knows much about the blues.
In ways though, such criticism is unfair. Mister Satan’s Apprentice is subtitled ”A Blues Memoir” because more than anything else, it’s Gussow’s coming-of-age story, and is best thought of as akin to the army of similar novels by upper class white Northeasterners, but with harmonicas and guitar players born again into their own, homemade religion.
His story isn’t your story, but it’s recognizably real, and his faux pas may be embarrassing, but they’re the well-meant faux pas committed every day. Gussow brings a novelist’s sensibility and skill to Mister Satan’s Apprentice, making it far more than a book about harmonicas…though you will learn a lot about harmonicas reading the book.
In other business, an obituary cocktail sounds like the most decadent drink yet, a designer beverage equivalent of Ex or other rave drugs, something served at formal galas, and its ingredients – a martini tinged with absinthe sound even more indulgent still.
Obituary Cocktail is also the tide of a photo essay on New Orleans bars by Kerri McCaffety, and through her lens, the bars look like the natural places to sit and share a few dark laughs while waiting for the end of the world.
In Obituary Cocktail McCaffery has captured some of New Orleans’ most famous bars as they have never been seen before. Amazingly, her barrooms are clean, almost unnaturally so, and with the help of daylight and slow exposures, she shows us bars that are so bright they belong in, oh, Indianapolis, or some place civilized.
Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, the bar that patented “dank,” looks homey and rustic, while the bordello-esque Red Room seems suddenly cosmopolitan. Vaughn’s, which can’t be made elegant without dynamiting first, is one of the few bars shot at night, and it too is transformed. This neighborhood joint looks like the front room at the Damnation Bar and Grille, and the blur of motion makes it seem like the most happening circle of Hell going.
Obituary Cocktail is a handsome document of New Orleans bar culture, perhaps missing only the patrons who are absent throughout much of the book. McCaffery shows the bars at their finest, allowing the craftsmanship and design to be seen for the first time without all those drinkers getting in the way.She also includes some of the stories, lies and drink recipes associated with the different bars, the latter presumably for those who are in constant search of one more alcohol adventure.
Of course, this being New Orleans, that could include just about everybody.
