With the news of The Meters making the initial cut for the 2013 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame comes this online fan poll, which you should cast your vote in rightnow… That is, after checking out OffBeat‘s May 2005 cover story on the New Orleans icons, posted below.

Congrats!

John Swenson’s original story follows.

 

The Meters Are Right On Time

The original Meters:

Art Neville on keyboards.

Leo Nocentelli on guitar.

Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste on drums.

George Porter Jr. on bass.

Saturday, April 23, Sprint/Sanyo Stage, 5:30 p.m.

Like seeing the 1955 World Champion Brooklyn Dodgers with Jackie Robinson play at Ebbets Field.

The analogy is not lost on Porter, who plays with Neville in the offshoot funky Meters but understands the demand for the original item.

“It would be like seeing the Dodgers play the New Orleans Pelicans,” said Porter. “That game didn’t happen. I remember sitting in the park, that’s the only baseball game my dad ever took me to. It was the Dodgers’ minor league team. The Pelicans refused to play because Jackie Robinson was on the team. That stopped me from ever going to see baseball again. But if that game was to happen again I would pay to see it. That’s what seeing the original Meters would be like, seeing a piece of history.”

If Professor Longhair is the wellspring for New Orleans R&B piano over the last 50 years, the Meters are the paradigm for every New Orleans R&B and funk band since the 1970s as well as a whole school of hip-hop.

In a real sense, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is an extended Meters tribute year after year. Meters music runs through the sonic architecture of Jazz Fest like scaffolding, providing the underlying structure for groups from Galactic to Papa Grows Funk to Bonerama to the various offshoots of the Neville family and the funky Meters themselves. The inspiration is everywhere. The final day of Jazz Fest is perennially closed by two bands, one at each end of the Fair Grounds infield. At one end is the Neville Brothers, a band whose historical interaction with the Meters runs together like the trunk and branches of a live oak tree. At the other end is the Radiators, whose eclectic combination of elements has the Meters as a foundation stone.

The Meters sound is a sturdy distillation of New Orleans funk and second line parade music, yet in its nuances it is as complex and delicately balanced as a snowflake. The band’s very identity is similarly complex. Different members have strikingly contradictory descriptions of the group’s genesis, and even the question of who the Meters really are is a shifting reality depending on which member you talk to. Art Neville speaks of having both brothers Aaron and Cyril in a prototype version of the band, and on Fire On The Bayou, the sixth of the band’s eight albums, Cyril’s name appears on the credits.

Yet the other members of the original quartet all follow a hard line best delivered by Nocentelli:

“The Meters are the Meters man, and that’s it. There’s four guys. You know the names. As far as I’m concerned that’s the Meters.”

That fidelity to a core identity comes from having to fight fiercely throughout your career for a tiny but influential niche in music history that has grown dramatically in importance over the decades. The Meters music provides a bond to the four original members that transcends all their personal relationships, and keeps bringing them back together after acrimonious breakups.

 

PURE INSTRUMENTALS

The band’s first hits were pure instrumentals on the Josie label. “Sophisticated Cissy” and “Cissy Strut” were Top Ten R&B hits in 1969, while “Look-Ka Py Py” and “Chicken Strut” each hit Number11 in 1970. In 1972 the Meters moved to Reprise Records, where they recorded a series of classic albums and became a sought-after rhythm section for Robert Palmer, Dr. John and Paul McCartney among others. “Hey Pocky A-Way” was a top 40 hit in 1974 and the group opened for the Rolling Stones’ 1975 and 1976 tours.

But the last decade has witnessed the most extraordinary bump in the popularity of Meters music as the band has become one of the more popular sampling sources for hip-hop artists.

“Right now you have people who are street poets who don’t know anything about making music but they know how they want their music to sound,” says Modeliste. “Our music is already there ready to go; they learn how to do their craft over that style of music. We had a whole lot of music that was only music, without words. I think they embraced that because it was easier to write over something that didn’t have words. I was living in Los Angeles and Dr. Dre was producing some guy and he called me in to play drums on this track. They told me they had never used drums before. They had a stack of LPs and a lot of ’em would be Meters, I saw at least four Meters albums they had been sampling. So people who wanted to be like them were sampling the Meters too. Yesterday I found out there are two new rap records using Meters samples. One is called Tweet, she used to sing with Missy Elliott, she just recorded an album and one of the songs on it is titled ‘Sex, Sports and Food’ and it’s just the ‘Hey Pocky A-Way’ drum beat and the intro lick Art Neville plays sampled over and over. There’s another guy called Juice who put one out with the guy from New Orleans, Juvenile, and they used the Meters song ‘Thank You.’ That title is called ‘Project Lover,’ it’s really hot out here in San Francisco. So even if they’re just sampling it, it shows me that the music has some kind of valuable content. If your music stands the test of time through two, three decades and it comes back again, then I think you’re really saying something, you’ve made history, and that’s what I’m most proud of, that we did something historical, and if I die tomorrow I feel like I’ve left a whole lot of music behind for people.”

It all started in the 13th Ward on Valence street, where the Neville family lived and Art Neville was truly an Uptown Ruler. Even now Neville insists that he is merely the product of his neighborhood influences, a walking repository of New Orleans culture that he sees as flowing through him and on into generations to come.

“I got it from the neighborhood, where I lived, man,” Neville explains. “I just listened to everything around me, and I’m about ten years older than the other guys in the Meters and I guess that gave me an edge, although they all listened to basically all the same things I did.”

Neville always had a knack for an inventive turn on a tune, making “Mardi Gras Mambo” his own as a member of the Hawkettes in the ’50s. The whole neighborhood checked him and his younger siblings out for the music they were making.

 

DREAMERS COMIN’ UP

“I grew up with Cyril,” said Ziggy Modeliste. “We used to go to parties together, football rallies, wherever they had live music we would go. So my first contact with the Nevilles was though Cyril. Art’s band used to rehearse across the street from where I was living.

“I met Art that way but I knew him a while before we started playing together. When I was 13 or 14 my parents bought me a set of drums. Cyril and I would stay in the back room and play drums every day. We was gonna be drummers together comin’ up. Art hired me, asked my mom if I could do the gig because I was underage. Both of us would go down and Cyril would play some of the set and I’d play some of it. We used to do little frat house gigs. I was making some money and I was polishing up my game. We were doing stuff like Art’s repetoire, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, the stuff that the frat house gang kicked up on, ‘Pass The Hatchet,’ party music, house music. That was the flava back then.

“Aaron got a hit record and went on the road and Art went with him. So that broke the band up for a little while. I started playing with other bands again and then I got with Deacon John. Deacon John was responsible for really showing me the way you should conduct yourself, he put a lot of stuff into my career. Plus back then in the day he was paying good. You had to wear a suit. Every week he’d be playing somewhere big. Out in Mississippi, Alabama, somewhere in Louisiana or here in town, he worked a lot.”

Zig always kept an eye on what Art Neville was up to, and he saw that Neville was playing with a growing variety of sidemen.

“I was looking for a nice, hip band that could play,” says Neville. “That’s what it really was about. We achieved that much.”

“Art started forming a band that he wanted to be around himself, Aaron and Cyril, that’s what it was really supposed to be about,” Modeliste recalls. “They had Gary Brown playing saxophone, George and Leo was in the band. Snooks Eaglin used to play with them, different guys got in on it. I got a chance to get in on it after they played the Nite Cap Lounge. We played there for about a year and a half and went straight to the Ivanhoe. That’s what really got the band tight, the Ivanhoe, because we would play six nights a week from 10 o’clock till 2 in the morning. You do that six nights a week you’re bound to get tight. We had a few originals, but mostly it was the songs Art wanted to play. Allen Toussaint came down and hired us. We started cutting with Allen and one thing led to another and one day they said ‘You’re in the studio anyway, why don’t you put something down and we’ll try to see if we can get something happening?’ That’s how it all started.”

The Ivanhoe was where the classic Meters quartet honed their style into the quintessential New Orleans rhythm section. Neville had the vision of a New Orleans version of Booker T and the MGs in his mind, Porter’s groove meshed perfectly with Modeliste and Nocentelli was one of the most gifted guitarists of the era, a compositional wizard who had already made his indelible mark on the New Orleans session scene.

 

THE TOP GUY

“I was like the top guy in the city,” Nocentelli recalls. “I was in demand. I was doing a lot of the early recordings with Allen Toussaint: ‘Get out of My Life Woman,’ ‘Working In the Coal Mine,’ ‘Mother-In-Law’.”

Nocentelli wrote the bulk of the band’s early material.

“When I was writing that music back then I was just doing it because it was something I wanted to do,” he recalls. “I fell in love with the idea of the Meters as a vehicle to exploit a lot of the songs I wrote. Many of them were written long before I played with the Meters. I wrote ‘Cissy Strut’ in my garage a year or two before I introduced it to the Meters. The reason I wrote it was that there was a song called ‘Hold It’ and every band opened up the set with it. It got redundant to me, so I wanted to write something that had the same kind of feel but was something different. I introduced it to them when the band was working at the Ivanhoe. I said check this out and we started playing ‘Cissy Strut’ and we started using it to open up our sets.

“We started playing the Ivanhoe when desegregation first entered on the scene, especially on Bourbon Street. There were only a few black bands down there back then so the Meters really stood out.

“Even though desegregation was just taking hold back then, we’d find ourselves playing and looking out the window and Bourbon Street is packed with people who don’t want to come into the club, and most of the people were black. Even with desegregation, they still didn’t feel cool about coming into the club. So there was a sea of people on the corner of Toulouse and Bourbon, a whole group of black people supporting the Meters because they knew we were black. They wanted to show their support but they were scared to even come into the club.”

The Meters never had any trouble turning on the crowds, but behind the scene there were business problems right from the start.

“Somebody didn’t want us to make it,” Neville believes to this day. “Somebody knew how to divide and conquer. There were four of us and two of them.”

“Them” in this case refers to Allen Toussaint and his partner Marshall Sehorn who signed the Meters to be their studio band.

“The people that was in charge, the record company people, couldn’t make everybody do what they wanted to do. I understand that too, but that’s why we couldn’t see what we had,” Neville explains.

“If they made a mistake, the mistake they made was letting us do tracks on our own,” Porter speculates. “If we had never started cutting on our own we would probably still be the house band for Toussaint. I’m not sure if we as a group knew what we had because if we knew how good we were I don’t think we ever would have broken up.

“Allen had been checking us out at the Nite Cap the whole period of time we were up there. I don’t know if he was checking us out at the time or checking Art out because Art was famous, whatever Art Neville would be doing, people in the know would come to see what Art was up to. When we moved to the Ivanhoe we had been playing together for probably two and a half years. As a rhythm section we were thinking alike. We were thinking really close together. As a producer Allen saw something in us that he didn’t have in his sessions, musicians that played off of each other. I think that was his attraction to us. He could give us parts to play but because of our way of interacting with each other the parts that he gave us to play with our natural ability to play off each other made his parts better. We built better pockets.”

 

THROWING OUT ART

After making three albums for Josie the Meters suffered their first major breakup when Neville left the lineup in a dispute stemming from overtures made by Phil Walden to manage the band.

“They threw me out of the group,” Neville recalls. “I stayed out maybe a year or two, something like that. How can you throw the guy out that starts the group? Hey, that’s what I asked. But nobody remembers that.”

What is remembered is that the Meters regrouped in the early 1970s to record the classic albums Cabbage Alley, Rejuvenation and Fire On The Bayou for Reprise. Still, the seeds of dissension continued to grow even as the band made some of its finest music. Neville still thinks the Meters could have been on a par with Booker T and the MGs.

“We made a few gigs with those guys,” he says. “We played the Apollo Theater, which at that time was one of the top places to perform. We played the Regal Theater in Chicago. They had the O’Jays, the Chairmen of the Board, the Spinners, a whole bunch of artists came out of there doing great. And we were the best, the crowd went wild when we played.”

Porter believes that the disappointment of seeing other groups pass them by contributed to the Meters’ internal battles.

“We saw opening bands for us get famous and go on to have big records even though they couldn’t play as well as we were playing,” Porter explains. “We had better songs, too. I think that happened to us on so many occasions the individual players started thinking more as songwriters and we started to become more individuals than a group. We wanted to write commercial songs, and we were kind of starting to sound like everybody else. At the time if we wrote a song that felt like a Commodores song the Commodores was already doing it. If we shot ourselves in the foot it was only because we wanted to be like everybody else. We wanted a hit record. We had already been doing that, but didn’t realize it.”

Just as the Meters were enjoying the highest honors their peers could bestow on them, getting plum session gigs and opening for the Stones, the group was about to break up.

“Mick Jagger told me, ‘They don’t see the whole picture, the Neville Brothers and the Meters together’,” says Art. “They wouldn’t let Cyril do it, even though Cyril was out there with us. We could have brought him up there as guest artist.”

The Wild Tchoupitoulas album finally combined the Neville Brothers and Meters in a project, but several Meters felt snubbed in the process.

“It was the beginning of the end,” said Porter, “when that record came out and the Meters were barely mentioned even though the Meters co-produced that record, we wrote all our own parts, we pretty much arranged the record. Art signed a contract at the time that the rest of the band wouldn’t sign, and his manager convinced him that if we wouldn’t sign it he should just go on with the Wild Tchoupitoulas. It was just a matter of time because the writing was on the wall.”

After making a last album, New Directions, Art left the Meters and started the Neville Brothers. His vision to merge the two groups failed, just as his dream to play in a band with his brothers was finally realized.

“Art always had a dream and he used to tell it to us all the time, he always had the dream that the Meters would be the band and Charles, Cyril, Aaron and himself would be in front, that we would be the band behind the Neville Brothers,” Nocentelli recalls. “The Meters was the perfect band, so what better situation could there be for Art than to have his brothers in it? I think it was something Art always wanted to do. When he left the band it gave him an opportunity to form the Neville Brothers with his brothers. And as far as Art is concerned it has proven to be a very successful move. I think it was good for Art. It wasn’t good for the Meters.”

 

RUSTY OLD MEN

There have been reunions—one in 1980 in New Orleans, another in 2000 in San Francisco. There have been many more near-misses. But this is the big one.

“It took a certain elimination of the politics that’s really prevented the original Meters from doing a lot of things,” Nocentelli argues. “I think this could have happened ten years ago and we would all be very wealthy guys right now, but there were outside forces that interfered with the decisions of certain people. We proved it right now because we are finally able to get together. There have been a lot of harsh things said to each other. Before this opportunity at Jazz Fest came along, I thought it was over, period. I wouldn’t even entertain performing with the rest of the guys. My hat goes off to Quint Davis because he realized that the only way to make this happen was to look at the group as three individual entities—Art and George, Zig, and myself. I don’t think the Meters are a group per se. But we will always have the music in common because that’s our music and nobody can take that away from these four guys.”

“You always wanna go back,” Modeliste philosophizes. “It’s something about people, we all want to go back to the glory days. My habit naturally is playing music and one of the habits I had was playing with these three guys. That was a very important part in my life, that particular time which I have since abandoned. So it’s always good to revisit the happiness that you used to have, recapture the moment. I’m just hoping I can find that same kind of solace and enjoyment that I did when I played with the Meters years ago when I was a very young man. I think it’s going to be interesting to see how it all plays out and I think if nothing else it should be good. We just rusty old men now but maybe we can still put it together.”

“I don’t think about it,” Porter insists. “As harsh as it may seem, I’m just at the age where I don’t get excited about that no more. It’s a gig, I’m gonna go there, I’m gonna have me a good time, I’m gonna play my ass off and it’s gonna be fun but as far as anticipation or excitement, that don’t exist anymore for me, for anything. I think I just got past that, y’know? Every time I’m on the gig I have fun. I bring 150 percent every time I get on stage. I’ve never hit the stage thinking ‘Why the hell am I here?’”

“I’m happy to do it, man, I don’t think we’re gonna do this again,” says Neville. “I figure this will be about the last one I’m gonna do. The Meters were the best musicians that I played with. I’ve played with some great musicians over the years, but they were the top of the line. I can’t figure it out, what went wrong. It was funny and sad but I really would like to play with them another time, and that’s gonna happen at Jazz Fest.”