Steve Forbert: Steve Forbert’s Midsummer Night’s Toast

Steve Forbert's album Mission of the Crossroad Palms, released in 1995, which would make him at least 40 on this cover, though it's hard to tell

Birthday greetings to Steve Forbert, who celebrates No. 57 today.

Once upon a time, Forbert was anointed “the next Bob Dylan,” if for no other reasons than they both wrote music, played harmonica and came from states that started with Mi. (Minnesota and Mississippi).

Of course, this made them no more similar than William Faulkner and Sinclair Lewis because they both wrote books. Forbert’s songs were simpler, peppier and younger; Forbert often wrote about his world, with “a young man’s ear;” Dylan wrote about the world around him with an old man’s eye.

“Being called the next Bob Dylan wasn’t exactly a good thing . . .,” wrote Steve Leggett on allmusic.com, “first because who on earth would want that hung around his neck, and second because his approach and style were nothing much like Dylan in the first place. It was a recipe for perceived failure . . .”

A career letdown for sure. Forbert’s Romeo Tune, on his second album Jackrabbit Slim in 1979, peaked at No. 11, but he never got that high again; of course he wasn’t the next Dylan because there’s no such thing, anymore than there’s a next Ali or Sinatra or da Vinci.

 ”It was just a cliché back then, and it’s nothing I take seriously,” Forbert said in a 2009 interview with NPR (npr.org). “I’m off the hook — I don’t have to be smarter than everybody else and know all the answers like Bob Dylan.”

Many of Forbert’s early songs were coming of age, and having come of age, material wasn’t as prevalent. He’s continued to write and perform, and his work has matured, even if you can’t tell it by looking at him. It’s hard to believe the artist staring back at you from 2009′s The Place And The Time, his most recent album, was then 55.

Or maybe age is in the eye of the beholder. Young and hopeful, Forbert went down to Laurel for love  with “just a touch of madness in my eye” (“I’m glad to be so young talkin’ with my tongue, Glad to be so careless in my way”). He still looks young and hopeful, although even Forbert’s optimism didn’t spare Laurel (“It’s a dirty stinkin’ town yeah”).

(On a personal aside, we once wandered into Laurel, Miss. during the heyday of Forbert’s popularity on an overnight ride to New Orleans. I asked our server at the all-night diner if she knew that Forbert had written a song about her town. When she said no, I figured it best to spare her the details lest she spill the coffee. And though my memories are bleak, I don’t remember Forbert’s description being wrong).

A link to Steve Forbert’s Midsummer Night’s Toast below:

 I got my fingers a-tapping on the hard,
stone steps.
I’m waiting for lightning and the rains to fall.
Young lovers are loafin’ with their sidewalk smiles
And all their rainbow dreams.

sources: allmusic.com, wikipedia.org, npr.org

Dr. John: How Come My Dogs Don’t Bark (When You Come Around)

Birthday greetings to Dr. John, born Malcolm Rebennack, who celebrates No. 71 today.

Rebennack was a guitar player known by his given name until two events in the 1960s altered his course: a gun accident injured a finger and detoured him to the piano, and he changed his name to the identity that would soon make him famous. His namesake was John Montaigne, a 19th-century doctor, whose treatments apparently were more in line with voodoo than the American Medical Association. The first Dr. John was once arrested, according to Tom Aswell’s Louisiana Rocks: The True Genesis of Rock and Roll, for prostitution, with a woman named Pauline Rebennack. The modern-day Dr. John, according to Aswell, thought the surname too much of a coincidence to overlook.

Most casual music lovers know Dr. John for 1973′s Right Place Wrong Time, but he never lost touch with his roots as Malcolm Rebennack, or as a session player (on Rickie Lee Jones’ debut 1979 album, for example, Rebennack — not Dr. John, who was by then famous — is one of six listed keyboards players).

“Doc has been my name all my life, and John is my middle name. I’m proud of all my names — Malcolm John Michael Creaux Rebennack,” Dr. John said in an interview on npr.org. “I’m proud of them names.”

Dr. John once said, in a Rolling Stone interview with Andy Greene, he always liked Johnny Cash because Cash “remembered my real name. Not many people do.”

In the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he’s enshrined as Dr. John, although his bio pays homage to his given name. His 2011 induction was the right place at the right time.

“See, I don’t know nothing about singing,” he told npr. “I never wanted to be a frontman. Frontmen had big egos and was always crazy and aggravating. I just never thought that was a good idea.”

Ideas, Dr. John had, most of them provided by his native New Orleans, and many of them outlandish. But he attracted attention not just for the show, but for the substance of the music, too.

“. . . many are the coats,” wrote Ashley Kahn, in an essay that originally appeared in the program from the 2011 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induiction program, “he’s worn: riff-master, R&B guitarist and boogie-woogie piano professor. Psychedelic voodoo rock shaman and stately New Orleans musical ambassador. Bandleader of top-tier talent and A-list sessionman/producer. Player of downhome blues and singer of uptown jazz standards. ‘Ain’t no difference,’ Dr. John said of himself a few years back. ‘It’s all one sucka in there however you want to break it down . . . ‘ ”

Dr. John was music’s Dr. J long before Julius Erving became basketball’s. He’s still going, of course. Asked by Greene about retirement, Dr. John said: “I think it’s only proper that I play until the last note of a set, then fall over and die. The band won’t have to play an encore and they’ll still get paid for a gig.”

sources: npr.org, answers.com, nitetripper.com, rollingstone.com, rockhall.com

Nicholas Payton: Fleur de Lis

Birthday greetings to trumpeter Nicholas Payton, who celebrates No. 38 today.

Payton is one of the many musicians from New Orleans; you can follow Payton’s musical lineage back as if it were a family tree. His father Walter, who died last fall, was an accomplished bassist and educator; Nicholas was taught by Ellis Marsalis; Nicholas toured with pianist Marcus Roberts, who played with Wynton Marsalis, who is currently the best-known in the long line of New Orleans trumpet players to which Payton belongs.

(It’s only a coincidence that the coach of New Orleans’ Super Bowl-winning Saints is Sean Payton. Or is it?)

“In New Orleans music, trumpet is king,” Payton told Ashley Kahn on npr.org. “(There’s) something about the sound of the trumpet — its expressiveness, its sort of regal quality.”

The trumpet is not Payton’s only means of expression. He also plays piano, and he blogs on his website about topics ranging from race to music and in between. His blogs on race are provocative — we don’t concur with all of his conclusions — but they frequently stimulate revealing exchanges in the comments sections. If you get involved, you’ll be challenged.

Said Payton in Tony Green’s liner notes to the 1998 album Payton’s Place: “A lot of people have a very limited view of me, of what they see me doing. I don’t want to go against my reputation, as far as what I have established, but I don’t want to be categorized as a traditionalist. I’m still very conscious of my roots, but at the same time, I want to use my foundation as a starting point that will allow me to expand and express myself.”

Listen to the cut below from Payton’s 2008 album Touch of Blue to hear him do just that.

sources: wikipedia.org, nicholaspayton.com, npr.org