voodoo believers that were meant to fend off evil. As
shadowy and murky as the swamps, Gris-Gris — and
its centerpiece, eight minutes of eerie, lurking chants
called “I Walk on Guilded Splinters” — embodied the
way Dr. John took his hometown’s musical heritage to
new outer-space dimensions. Dr. John mixed in funk,
psychedelia, field hollers, Latin rhythms, and rock
& roll, a template that would continue for decades.
While working on the album, Dr. John came up
with a plan for his live shows that would transport
Mardi Gras to the stage. Working with producer Har-
old Battiste, he concocted the idea of a “Dr. John,”
named after a 19th-century Louisiana voodoo priest
and jack-of-all-mystical-trades. “I was just tryin’ to
hustle album deals, just tryin’ to hustle money,” he
said in 1997. “The Dr. John thing was just a concept,
a one-off thing.” Barron was supposed to play the
character onstage, but when he declined, Rebennack
donned the headdresses, feathers, and beads him-
self. “Nobody else could have done it like he did,”
says Neville. “He brought it to life.”
How authentic was the character? “I don’t believe
Mac had nothin’ to do with no voodoo,” says Neville.
“It was all part of his shtick. He had a good heart.”
Dr. John himself demurred as to whether he was an
actual voodoo practitioner or not (“I don’t have voo-
doo dolls or anything like that,” he said at the time).
“There’s a lot of the Mardi Gras spirit in many areas
of show business,” he said. “It’s always been my feel-
ing that when someone goes to see a show, they
should get all their senses pleased.”
Yet his fascination with hoodoo rituals was also
sincere. Dr. John once said his grandmother, in some
sort of trance, had lifted a heavy wooden table intheir home. He was baptized Catholic, but as a teen,
he sometimes played at the Guiding Star Spiritu-
al Church, which welcomed Christians, Jews, and
voodoo practitioners. “I dug the spiritual and hoo-
doo-church people because their bag wasn’t like or-
ganized religion,” he said.
To cast a spell on anyone he didn’t want around,
Dr. John would make “goofer dust,” a combination of
graveyard dirt, gunpowder, and grease from the bells
of a graveyard chapel. “He believed in [voodoo ritu-
als] — it was not a shtick,” says Bill Bentley, one of his
publicists. “He had all these herbs he would carry
around with him. He once said this lady put a spell
on him and something bad happened to him.”
When Dr. John visited the Band before the 1971
New York shows that resulted in their Rock of Agesalbum, he saw they were nervous and sprinkled mys-
terious powder around a hotel room. “He said, ‘It’s
gonna be OK now,’” says Robertson. “He was always
spreading his juju whenever it was necessary.”W
ITH “RIGHT PLACE WRONG TIME,” Dr.
John brought his gris-gris funk to the
Top 40. But the Night Tripper perso-
na proved too expensive and contro-
versial to maintain, and he soon re-
placed it with a more urbane style and wardrobe,
embodied by his appearance at the Band’s Last Waltz
show in 1976, when the Doctor played “Such a Night.”
“That song was the feeling of the evening,” says Rob-
ertson. “His presence was so warm and beautiful,
and that performance projected that as much as any-
thing that happened the whole night.”
By then, Dr. John had relocated to New York,
where he befriended Doc Pomus, the wheel-
chair-bound tunesmith who had co-written “Save the
Last Dance for Me” and an array of classic Sixties hits.
The two quickly became friends and collaborators.
“It blew my dad’s mind that Mac knew so many of
the songs my dad wrote,” says Sharyn Felder, Pomus’
daughter. “He said he never felt as musically connect-
ed to anyone since the early days as he did with Mac.”
The two would huddle in the bedroom of Pomus’
Upper West Side apartment, drinking root beer and
cranking out songs, including “There Must Be a Bet-
ter World Somewhere,” which B.B. King covered.
But Dr. John remained a heroin user and often shot
up in the family bathroom. Girlfriends and ex-wives
(he was married three times, most recently to song-
writer Cat Yellen, and had six children)“He was a human
melting pot,” says
Dan Auerbach,
who produced
‘Locked Down.’
“It made him the
most incredible
mutt ever.”
LOCKED DOWN
Below: With Dan
Auerbach in 2011.
To persuade Dr. John
to record with him,
Auerbach showed
up unannounced at
the duplex shared
by Dr. John and an
ex-con buddy.MARDI GRAS
EVERYWHERE
Left: Backstage,- “It’s always
been my feeling that
when someone
goes to a show,”
he once said, “they
should get all their
senses pleased.”
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: MICHAEL PUTLAND/GETTY IMAGES, 2; ERIKA GOLDRING/WIREIMAGE; KEVIN MAZUR/WIREIMAGE
August 2019 | Rolling Stone | 69
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