Like Communists, the Unabomber and would-be Andy Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas, the Ninth Ward band Morning 40 Federation has its own Manifesto, which can be read in its entirety on the group’s web site (morning40.com). To paraphrase, the Manifesto is dedicated to the pleasures of drinking alcohol, especially in the utilitarian form of 40-ounce beers, the earlier in the day the better: “Part of the reasons for publicly drinking 40’s in the morning in New Orleans are that you can and you shouldn’t and the Morning 40 Federation says you should.”
Getting blitzed is a long and hallowed tradition in New Orleans, a doctrine that once drew such infamous drinkers and Morning 40 spiritual fathers as Charles Bukowski and Tom Waits to reside in our city. The Federation’s imbibing is no act—it is the act. As chief wordsmith/ vocalist Josh Cohen confesses: “The only times I’ve ever played a show sober was if I was too hung over from the night before to even stomach a drink or if I was sick. So we’re getting loaded the whole time we’re playing and we’re playing in an environment where people are getting loaded—i.e., a barroom. We write a lot of our songs while we’re loaded in bars, on bar napkins and stuff. At the risk of being called a shtick band numerous times over we still find a lot of inspiration in alcohol.”
If any parents contemplating sending their youngsters to New Orleans for (ahem!) higher education are reading this, it should be noted that before Cohen moved to Louisiana, he was a teetotaler: “In fact, I was anti-alcohol. I was a stoner kid. Actually, even a vegetarian when I moved here. But that all went down the toilet. Now I’m eating smothered pork chops and drinking Maker’s Mark on the rocks.
“I just found so much joy and laughter and precious moments in bars, hanging out with my comrades and bartenders that I like a lot. I was thinking about it a few years back, when I was really on a bender: there’s a kind of a feeling of community and a feeling of love that you get from bartenders when they give you free drinks which can easily be construed as some kind of family environment of warmth and generosity. You have so many magic, treasured moments when you’re drinking. It’s just too bad you can’t remember any of them.”
Thanks to the Federation’s latest CD, Trick Nasty, virtually anyone with electricity can now remember, recall and reinvestigate the band’s music in the comfort (depending on the availability of air conditioning) and safety (depending on the neighborhood) of their own shotgun home. Killer environments is a subject of some interest to Cohen: “It’s funny because I’ve actually lived in the Murder Capitals of the World. D.C. was the Murder Capital when I lived there. Then I moved to Oakland and Oakland became the Murder Capital. And then I moved to New Orleans while it was the Murder Capital. I’m sort of touring the Murder Capitals.”
On Morning 40’s debut album (You My Brother), the thematic material included chili cheese fries at the Clover Grill, 13-year-old girlfriends and semi-criminal mischief. This time around, there are even fewer concessions to family values with testaments to testicular hygiene, cunnilingus and the Caucasian Problem, the latter broached in “God Help Me (To Love White People).”
“It’s about the funky headspace you get in when, for example, you’re hung over and you’re not in a very good mood and there’s all these people around getting in your way,” Cohen observes. “That feeling, like being caught in a traffic jam or walking up Decatur Street, trying to get to work, having all the big Midwestern tourists with their Café du Monde bags and their wide asses taking up the whole sidewalk, walking very slowly and aimlessly, like they don’t know where they’re going. I don’t always feel that way but sometimes I just submit to feelings of not being very happy with the people of our culture. That song is about that mood where you don’t like normal people. It’s a testimonial to grumpiness.”
This summer, the Federation is preaching its musical message to the masses in clubs across America and, inevitably, dealing with the occupational hazard of hangovers. Both Josh Cohen and lead guitarist Ryan Scully espouse hair of the dog as a good remedy for hangovers with Scully also pushing Alka-Seltzer Morning Relief (“It’s just packed with caffeine”) and Cohen promoting Pedialyte (“a baby drink for when babies get dehydrated—it’s full of electrolytes, a lot more electrolytes than even Gatoraid”).
Among the duo’s favorite local taverns are BJ’s (“a blue collar bar, down in the Bywater”), El Matador and the eternally festive Saturn Bar, where, Cohen testifies, the proprietor “has great prices for imported beer and he’s carrying VEP [Vieillissement Exceptionnellement Prolongé] Chartreuse, one of the only places in town to carry it. VEP Chartreuse is pretty hard to find. If you go to a fancy restaurant, they’ll charge you 11 bucks a shot for it. The Saturn only charges five bucks a shot. In stores, it sells for 90 bucks a bottle or more.
“It’s fantastic stuff. It’s mentioned in several of our songs. It’s made by French Carthusian brothers. Only three Carthusian brothers know the ingredients, protected by vows of silence, and none of them knows the entire recipe. They put 130 different secret Alpine herbs in secret proportions in it. If you’re going out to get loaded and you only drink Chartreuse and nothing else, it has psychotropic properties—almost like absinthe but different. It’s like a mystery drink, which adds to the novelty for me. I don’t want to know what’s in the stuff.”
BINGO! MANIA
Frequent Morning 40 co-conspirator and Liquidrone leader Clint Maedgen (in my tarnished opinion, the single most creative musician in the New Orleans cosmos) has a new side project entitled Bingo!, which Clint describes as “a little bit carnival, a little bit country—I call it carn-try.” Featuring various members of Morning 40, Egg Yolk Jubilee and the Charm City Brokers, the combo is performing Thursday evenings at Fiorella’s from 9 until midnight, mixing bingo games, short films and actual music. Available at the gigs is the limited edition (a mere 150 copies!) Bingo! CD which comes stapled to an ancient V.F.W. Post No. 3267 bingo card. Mere English can’t express the greatness of this project. One cut, “Lost And Found” (which I believe features an electric drill and some sort of child’s toy), has already found a permanent home on my answering machine.
LOUNGING AROUND
Besides Bingo!, the single CD that has most entertained and enlightened me in recent times is Putumayo’s World Lounge, subtitled “The ultimate chill-out soundtrack for a global cocktail party.” That statement is no exaggeration: you’ve got musicians from Germany, Italy, France, Argentina, Japan, the Netherlands, Algeria and the U.S.A. playing violins, flutes, electric guitars, sitars, tablas, bagpipes, accordions, Hammond organs and maracas with dub mixes direct from East Pluto, Bombay and the back of James Bond’s mind. I have yet to play this CD for anyone, sober or not, who did not want to possess it. For those not conversant in French, allow me to translate the lyrics to Pink Martini’s “Sympathique”: “I don’t want to work/I don’t want to eat/I just want to forget/And then I smoke.”
THE FUNKY BEATLES
One of things I’ve learned in life is that you don’t pick on either Jesus or the Beatles (and of course, if you’re John Lennon, you don’t make flip remarks about Jesus, true or not). Unless you want to incite half of humankind, which can be fun nevertheless. Back in March, I stated that Ringo Starr was no match for such New Orleans drummers as Charles “Hungry” Williams or Earl Palmer, which elicited a letter from local recording engineer Sean Tauzier pondering my mental stability and concluding that if Ringo could’ve played like “Zigaboo” Modeliste, maybe I would have a nice thing or two to say about the Fab Four. Recently a package arrived from Mr. Tauzier and inside was a copy of “Struttin’ Yesterday” by the Funky Beatles (“featuring Ringoboo on drums!”), engineered by Mr. Tauzier and released on the Crapple Records label. The ingenious Mr. Tauzier deftly added a very funky drum track to the Beatles’ “Yesterday” and now I’ve gotta say something nice. Okey doke: love is all you need! And a New Orleans drummer!
