“Some of the best songs that the Meters have ever done came out of this album. I don’t really remember that much about it other than that we had a good time trying to record it, and it was coming from all over the place. It says on the album itself, ‘original recording, produced by Allen Toussaint and the Meters.’ We had a lot of stuff going on then. I penned a couple of songs. It was real fun. We had Cyril Neville in the band at that time. He lit a fire under all of us and gave us a bit of a new twist on our identity when we were doing this album.

Art Neville could probably give you a better description of why that album came to be called Fire on the Bayou. But fire, for us, really meant that the band was burning, that it was taking care of business. Whenever the band was playing, it was creating a fire. So if this one is titled Fire on the Bayou, that meant we went down in the bayou, and we was putting some fire down wherever we was playing. That’s my take on it, which may not be a good analogy. I’m sure Art would have a closer idea of what ‘Fire on the Bayou’ meant.

When we first started out, we was trying everything. We had a little comedic side, and we just came up with the idea to have something funny on the album. ‘They All Ask’d For You’ was kind of a Dixieland song, and Dixieland was not something that we was accustomed to doing on records. But it seemed like it was close enough to home for us to try to do that. It turns out that it worked out a lot better than we anticipated, which is always a good thing.

When we were shooting the cover, we got on this boat, took off from the boat launch and went out in the bayou. So we found a little island and it wasn’t really that much land, but we found a little bit of a clearing where we could get out of the boat. But since we were out in the swamps there was a big snake out there. I can’t tell you what kind of snake it was, but when we discovered the snake out there, it was time for us to get off the island. We took a few pictures out there, and I said, ‘Hey man, it is time to go.’ They was trying to push the snake into the water but that snake said, ‘I’m not going anywhere, I’m staying right here on this little island. I was here before you were.’ Now that’s just one of the stories, you just had to be there to see it. It was just so funny.”