Dr John, eminence gris-gris
If they asked me, I could write a book about Dr John, who died on Thursday aged 77. He was a sideman, a showman, a kind of performance artist with his Dr John Creaux the Night-Tripper alter ego and the music-hall voodoo of songs like ‘Walk on Gilded Splinters’, a songwriter but, above all, a piano player whose every phrase could only have come from his native New Orleans. In 1956, when he was 14 and still Malcolm John Rebennack, Jr. the son of an appliance vendor who fixed record players and sold records, Dr John met Professor Longhair, who was no longer Henry Royland Byrd and who had developed a piano style which combined a rolling, rhumba-influenced left hand with a flamboyant, bluesy right hand.
