CITY IN RUINS
SEPT. 9-OCT. 28, 2005
With most of New Orleans' performers taking refuge out of town, the city falls silent. Then, slowly, the music scene starts to come back to life.
Greg Dulli, the Afghan Whigs and the Twilight Singers, who lives in New Orleans: ''What you saw on TV doesn't prepare you. There were no animal sounds. The smell was death. It looked like the apocalypse.''
Joe Dyson, jazz drummer ''We went to Baton Rouge and stayed with my aunt — maybe 15 people in one house. One of the things that had always kept me going was playing music. But I didn't have any instrument. For the first time, I believed there was really no music in my life. The tune that was in my head, it just stopped.''
Bethany Bultman, cofounder, New Orleans Musicians' Clinic ''The clinic was founded in 1998, because 90 percent of the musicians in New Orleans were living below the federal poverty guidelines. After Katrina, we were faced with the task of trying to keep people alive when, in most cases, they were living in their cars. I felt like traditional jazz needed to be at Preservation Hall and it needed to be at the airport and it needed to be in the national park and it needed to be wherever the hell I could place it. I felt it was very important to start paying musicians a hundred dollars a person and get them back to work.''
Robin Chambless, production manager and board member of the New Orleans Musicians' Relief Fund ''I was calling people all over the country saying, I have so-and-so in this town, can you get them a gig? Because nobody wants handouts. Like my mama says, We don't want no handout, we want a hand up!''
Dr. John ''I'm very grateful to the New Orleans Clinic and the New Orleans Musicians' Relief Fund. Small organizations — they've done more than these big organizations with a lot of money. Everything is f---ed up with the politicians and all. There's nobody taking care of business but the people.''
Jordan Hirsch, executive director of housing charity Sweet Home New Orleans ''One gig that's often referenced as the first after the storm was Walter 'Wolfman' Washington at the Maple Leaf [Bar]. They were working off a generator. I think that was maybe three weeks after.''
Stephen Swartz, percussionist ''Walter's been around since the '60s. Everyone knows him. He's blues and funk pretty much. I sat in with him twice in late October and November at the Maple Leaf. The locals that were there really supported almost all the events you could imagine.''
Donald Link, co-owner of the restaurants Herbsaint and Cochon ''I came back within two weeks. We made up some fake passes and snuck into the city. At Herbsaint, the tables were set, just like the day we left. It was just like frozen in time. Except for the flies. There were gargantuan, Godzilla's Island-type flies. We opened five weeks after Katrina. I was expecting to see construction workers and police. But we were packed with our regulars. Everybody's walking around, hugging each other, table-hopping. It was an amazing scene.''
Jordan Hirsch ''Musicians helped each other. The Arabi Wrecking Krewe were people who gutted the flooded homes of musicians that they knew.''
Armand ''Sheik'' Richardson ''At first [the Krewe] tried to salvage things, but everything fell apart in our hands. We threw away 55 grand pianos. Black Steinways — just the most beautiful things you could imagine.''
Spencer Bohren ''The musicians came back, but they didn't have gigs, exactly. Johnny Sansone found places for them to play.''
Johnny Sansone, blues harmonica player ''There was a restaurant that wasn't quite open yet. So we started to give shows there. We might take somebody that was a jazz player and have him play with a blues guy. We had Cajun musicians playing with country guys. Just to cheer some people up.''
Lumar Leblanc, leader of the Soul Rebels Brass Band ''We were actually the first brass band to do a second line [after Katrina]. A second line parade basically includes the band and the people that follow the band; it's a moving party. We did one that was protesting the response to Katrina. It went all the way to City Hall. The officials were too intelligent to come out of there.''
NEXT PAGE: ''After everybody pulled [out], one person said, 'I'm coming to New Orleans. I don't care if I have to sleep in a sleeping bag.' That was Trent Reznor.''
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