There may never have been a more oddly mesmerizing musical stage presence than Dr. John. The outlandish, stunningly talented New Orleans music legend died June 6 at age 77, more than 60 years after his first professional gigs. To watch him on stage was to understand how genius and a form of madness can easily coincide.
Dr. John, born Malcolm “Mac” Rebennack, was flamboyantly funky with a stage voodoo persona complete with walking stick featuring what I thought was a snake’s head, but what the New York Times identified as “voodoo beads, a yak bone, an alligator tooth and key rings from Narcotics Anonymous.” His musicianship owed much to the unique New Orleans melding of R&B, boogie-woogie, and percussive funk, with occasional hints of his early psychedelic rock phase. But his sensibilities inhabited a bizarro world: Imagine, perhaps, Warren Zevon and Louis Armstrong somehow melding into one.
