Special Report: Running The Streets Of The Crescent City

MARDI GRAS IN NEW ORLEANS

By John Sinclair

Well I 'm going to New Orleans,

I wanna see the Mardi Gras

When I see the Mardi Gras,

I wanna know what the carnival for.

—Professor Longhair, "Mardi Gras in New Orleans" (C) 1949, 1972 Hill & Range Music(BMI)

It's Mardi Gras Day, early in the afternoon, and five tribes of Indians are finally marching into a big showdown at the intersection of Washington and Derbigny, uptown in New Orleans. The Wild Magnolias and the Golden Eagles, banded together with their immense second line, have been dancing and chanting all the way up Washington from Dryades; the Golden Stars and the Young Sons of Geronimo, backed by a huge gang of supporters from their own neighborhood, are prancing down Washington from the opposite direction; and the Black Eagles, with twenty or thirty of their own pals behind them, are heading up Derbigny, hell-bent for a showdown.

All around them, in every direction packing the streets from sidewalk to sidewalk, hundreds of neighborhood citizens mill about, trying to get a clear shot at the action. "Oh, them Indians is pretty today," people who can see the costumed warriors bubble to their friends. "Yeah, an' just as crazy as ever, too!"

Before the confrontation got underway, Bo Dollis, the Big Chief of the Wild Magnolias, and Monk Boudreaux, Big Chief of the Golden Eagles, had paused at Washington and Magnolia to pull their forces together. The spy boys had been running ahead, searching tor traces of other tribes on their turf, and they carne running back with shouts of "Golden Stars! Geronimos! Headin' down Washington!" The flag boys checked their standards and then raised them high in the air, showing off the hand-beaded and brightly-feathered insignia of their respective tribes.

The First, Second, and Third Chiefs, the Queens and Princesses, the Witch Doctors—all wearing the indescribably beautiful hand-sewn costumes of their tribes—got their massive headdresses together, shook out their rows of colored ostrich feathers, made sure their long Indian braids were firmly attached to their heads, and then conferred with the Big Chiefs, who were setting the chant and otherwise preparing for the big confrontation. The trusted inner-circle members of the second line—that mass of noncostumed followers who march behind the Indians n the streets, beating tamborines, blowing whistles and chanting back the responses to the calls and boasts of the Chiefs—were getting their marching orders now, and the spectators on the sidewalks started moving into position for the big push across Claiborne (a major Street) and up to Debigny, where all the tribes would meet at last.

Now the Wild Magnolias and the Golden Eagles resume their forward motion, their cries and shouts getting louder and stronger by the minute. "Let 'em come, let 'em come," a flagboy hollers impatiently, and as the second line pounds out a steady chorus of "Hey Pak E Way," the Big Chiefs begin to carry on for real.

"Injuns is ready!" "Hey Pak E Way!"

"Hey people, is ya ready?" "Hey Pak E Way!"

"Let's all have fun now!" "Hey Pak E Way!"

"Let's all have fun now!" "Hey Pak E Way!"

"Let's do what we wanna!" "Hey Pak E Way!"

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"MARDI GRAS"  continued from page 9

"Let's do what we oughta!" "Hey Pak E Way!"

"Oh that's my gang ya'll!" "Hey Pak E Way!"

"Well that's my gang ya'll!" "Hey Pak E Way!"

"Wild Magnolias!" "Hey Pak E Way!"

"Gonna do what we wanna!" "Hey Pak E Way!"

Going across So. Claiborne Avenue passing white motorists gawk through their car Windows, point and stare as the Indians dance through the intersection in full tribal regalia, pushed on by the surging second-liners and their relentless tamborines. Spy Boys and Flag Boys gesture fiercely, stopping traffic to let the Chiefs and their legions through. Then it's straight ahead up Washington, the chiefs dancing and singing like wild Indians, the second liners strutting and shouting that endless "Hey Pak E Way," the Flag Boys running ahead crying "Flag Boy make Cha Wa! Make No Houm Bah! Make Way for Wild Magnolia!"

Nancy Necktie, my companion and guide, is running around like an Indian herself, skipping and smiling and snapping photos of everything in sight. Masked in whiteface and some neo-psychedelic costumery, camera clicking away, a bottle of beer in her free hand, the young neckwear magnate is having the time of her life out here in the streets with the Wild Magnolias. She's been to Bo Dollis's house at 1960 Jackson, attended rehearsals at the H&R Bar at 2nd & Dryades, watched the Indians sew together their incredible creations in the last days before Mardi Gras, and now it's actually happening—the legendary ritual of the wild Indians, the one day of the year when the streets belong to the creatures of beauty and song.

Elsewhere in the funky southern metropolis pandemonium also reigns, but it's of a whole different order and magnitude: the official Mardi Gras celebration takes place downtown, in and out of the Vieux Carré, or French Quarter, and out in various exurban neighborhoods, where the elaborate floats of the straight Mardi Gras krewes are towed down the streets by tractors, and bands are hired to lend the spectacle a slender shred of authenticity.

Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday—the last day before Lent begins-—is basically the province of the white New Orleans aristocracy, a gaudy component of the local social season which starts three days after Christmas and winds up the night before Ash Wednesday, fifty parades and an equal number of exclusive society balls later. The celebration, modeled on the traditional French Shrove Tuesday festivities, took root in Nouvelle Orleans soon after the exotic seaport was colonized by the french, and by the early 1720's numerous citizens could be seen parading roughly in costume through the streets of town on a Mardi Gras morn.

By 1766, when the Spanish took over, the custom had been firmly established, and even a long-standing ban by the Spanish authorities was finally overturned so that by 1803, when the French retook possession of Louisiana and then quickly dealt it off to the U.S. of A., the Mardi Gras parade was an irrepressible fact of life in New Orleans. The Americans put a stop to it in 1806, but the tradition was so strong by then that the Yankees were persuaded, in 1827, to let the maskers return to the streets for that one day a year.

Unable to suppress the joyous carnival spirit of old New Orleans, the Americans soon figured out away to impose their own twisted set of cultural values on the celebration, and in 1838 a group of American businessmen organized the first formal Mardi Gras parade. But let me quote from the eminent Mr. Robert Tallent, author of the definitive tome Mardí Gras: "Until then (1838) maskers had formed lines and chains and walked and run through the streets on Mardi Gras to the amusement or disgust of the spectators, but without real organization or plan. They romped and shouted and behaved as foolishly as possible, but those taking part were usually considered wild young men at best. Perhaps a few groups had also ridden about in carriages and wagons, but there was no semblance of order.

"It was the Americans who gave Mardi Gras its present pattern. It was they who, at least to some extent, took it away from the people and changed what had I been an unorganized and informal street revel into an entire social season, a highly stylized program of balls and pageants, related to debutantes and a caste system as rigid, although in a different way, as that of the I Creóles . . . The Americans . . kept alive and increased the whole concept of imitation aristocracy and the ridiculous snobbery that still characterizes some of the Mardi Gras krewes." (pp. 103-104).

Since then the American pattern has spread over Mardi Gras much as it has spread over the rest of the land, reducing the multi-various beauty of native and other immigrant cultures to a plastic smear seen through a slide projector in a museum. In New Orleans now the Mardi Gras celebration is a strange combination of Chamber of Commerce-type parades, organized and produced by rich New Orleanians, and a gargantuan week-long street festival in the Fort Lauderdale-Woodstock mold, with beer and wine and liquor flowing freely twenty-four hours a day, through which the organized parades pass in all their hincty glory.

The modern-day celebration reveals its true nature during these prolonged passages, when the wealthy maskers on their expensive floats pose haughtily high above the crowds and the peons stretch out their hands and holler, "Throw me something, mister!" The aristocrats reward these pleas with paltry showers of plastic beads and trinkets and scant handfuls of phony "doubloons" stamped with their krewe's name, the suckers on the street turn their attention to the next float in the parade, and the whole procession lurches on down the block.

But even given its essentially vile social role as an annual public affirmation of the reactionary conditions of everyday life in New Orleans, the Mardi Gras celebration is an incredibly vibrant and positive event to be taking place in the streets of an American city. And since it is strictly controlled by the ruling class of the city, Mardi Gras enjoys the full and almost uncontrolled enthusiasm of the local news media, which would certainly be freaking out of their gourds if any other stratum of society were to propose such an all-out bacchanal.

Dig this, from the front page of the daily Times-Picayune, under the banner headline "Million Had A Good time": 

"The tragedy of the 1976 Mardi Gras, in this our Bicentennial year, is that 209 million of the 210 million Americans were not here to celebrate it with us."

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MARDI GRAS Continued from page 11

"For the one million or so of us who were here, we know we a good time."

It is this officially-endorsed atmosphere of Anything Goes on Mardi Gras which has long set the stage for all kinds of unofficial shenanigans in the streets on Shrove Tuesday, including the lewdest and most bawdy hi-jinks by the high-stepping sports of the lower classes, who have always seized upon this day of merriment for the upper class as their opportunity to act out their own public fantasies in similar measure The aristocratic organizers of the formal festivities graciously give their social inferiors the freedom to cavort as they wish, for to attempt to do otherwise would cause them to curtail their own fun, and they enjoy themselves much too much to do that.

Consequently there is much more to Mardi Gras than meets the untrained eye, including a long tradition of drunken violence, gang fights, and general devilment which has often threatened (as in the 1850's) to put an end to the whole carnival celebration. At the same time there is the splendid musical tradition of Mardi Gras, from the well-known parade-band jazz of the Young Tuxedo Brass Band, the Onward, Olympia, and Excelsior Brass Bands and many others, to the primitive call-and-response chants of the wild Indians and the barrelhouse, goodtime R&B of Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint and Doctor John.

It is at this point, dear readers, that your humble correspondent presumes to step into the picture. A follower of the music of New Orleans since I first heard Fats Domino in 1954, at the age of 13, and an amateur ethno-musicologist to boot, I had been hot on the trail of the Mardi Gras sound ever since the good Doctor John (Mac Rebennack) had regaled me with tales of the wild Indians, Professor Longhair and the Zulu Parade back in '72. My nose was opened up wider early in 1974, when a chance meeting in Los Angeles with French record producer Phillippe Rault exposed me to the Wild Magnolias and the whole cultural reality of the wild Indians.

Rault had just been in the studio with the Magnolias, cutting their first record-and the first such recording by any Mardi Gras Indian tribe-with a mind-boggling collection of New Orleans musicians, including the legendary Blind Snooks Eaglin on wah-wah guitar, jazz saxophonist Earl Turbinton on reeds, his brother Willie Tee on keyboards and arrangements, Julius Farmer on bass, Larry Panna, drums, and Alfred "Uganda" Roberts, congas. Rault had the master tape with him-we were sitting around smoking hash at Village Recorders, where Ed Michel was putting together another Gato Barbieri record for ABC/lmpulse and listening to my tapes of the 1973 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival on the side—and as Michel threaded it up on the four-track, Phillippe handed me a large scrapbook filled with material on the Magnolias.

My mind was blown! In the scrapbook were pictures of black men with long braids, dressed in the most beautiful garments of beadwork and feathers, and crowned with these magnificent Indian-styled headdresses made of and three-foot-long ostrich plumes dyed to match the rich, brilliant colors of their costumes. The music now blasting through the huge studio monitor system was similarly intense, a series of hypnotic chants on the African call-and-response model which told the story of the yearly Indian ritual and the mighty exploits of the tribes.

This is the missing link, I flashed immediately. This is the music that carne before the jazz bands marching back from the funerals, the direct link between  African "perambulating chants" and American rhythm & blues dance music. This is where it all came from—where all American popular music, finally, goes back to—and it's still in its purest form, right out there in the streets for people to move to.

Suddenly what I was seeing and hearing meshed together in my mind with what Dr. John had said about the wild Indians and the whole Mardi Gras trip, and it all began to fit together. These Indians were black men, working-class denizens of the Third, Seventh and Ninth Wards in New Orleans where blood and culture lines go directly back to slavery, to the West-lndies and to Africa itself, and where religion is still a vital part of everyday lite. Not religion in the European sense, but magic—voodoo–ancestor worship—praise songs directed to specific gods—communal dancing and singing to drums and tamborines—haints and spells, incense and herbs, black cat bones and mojo toofs, all grounded in the ancient religious belief that the gods are everywhere, control every aspect of daily life, and must be appeased through any and every possible means.

In this culture, which thrives in New Orleans and other areas of the south-—not to mention many northern cities—to this day, the official Christian religious trappings have been adopted as an overlay, providing a cover for the practice of the ancient African religions and their modern-day Afro-American permutations. Thus Mardi Gras, for example, means little more to New Orleans blacks than an opportunity to practice the ancient rituals in public for once, utilizing the anything-goes atmosphere created by the ruling Christians to indulge their own barely-suppressed version of reality for one day each year.

While Mardi Gras is simply the day before Lent in the white Christian community—the occasion for one final fling before saying "farewell to the flesh" (the literal translation of Carnival) for forty days—the holiday has a wider and deeper resonance with respect to the former Africans in North America and throughout the New World. For Afro-Americans and native "Americans" alike—the people who were here before the whites arrived—the beginning of Lent could serve as a metaphor for the imposition of Christianity itself, that insane institution which rails against the pleasures of the flesh all year round, reduces all gods to one omnipotent, omniscient father-figure, and insists that work, rather than good clean fun, is the only path to eternal salvation.

In this context the violent extremes of the New World carnival celebrations n Trinidad and Rio de Janeiro, for instance, or the intensity Ê of the black Mardi Gras festivities n New Orleans, should be easy to understand. All the pent-up energy and desire to be one's self which must be ruthlessly suppressed for survival's sake the rest of the year s unleashed during Carnival season, and the pagan rites-dating back directly to the communal cultures of África and South and Central America -can safely be practiced in the streets.

Where the old religion

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MARDI GRAS Continued from page 13

still lives, as in New Orleans, it exists in greatly permutated form, having assimilated into itself elements of the whites' religious trips, components of a number of African and New World sects, and the customs and practices of modern-day urban ghetto life. It can be seen in its pure state only on Mardi Gras Day and on St. Joseph's Night, a couple of weeks later, when the Indians parade in the streets in full costume, and even then the African ritual has been altered to reflect the American experience.

The wild Indians resent a unique and highly unusual synthesis of two aboriginal cultures, the West African and the Southern American Indian. which share a great many factors in common: a tribal, communal form of social organization, a pantheistic religious environment, and a highly formalized system of communal worship centered on music and dancing, to name a few. Originally masking as Indians in order to participate in the Mardi Gras celebration of the whites (or so one popular story goes), New Orleans blacks in the latter 19th century adopted the Indian persona and began to develop it for their own purposes, investing it with enough pure Africanisms to make it more and more suited to their peculiar needs.

It is widely said that the blacks who became "Indians" on Mardi Gras held the original Indians in great respect, particularly admiring their refusal to bow down or humble ("houm-bah") themselves before the whites. They also expressed tremendous admiration for the Indians' beautiful ceremonial garb and for their ferocious fighting ability; in fact, until recent years the wild Indians met in actual combat on Mardi Gras, with the various tribes (there are now some twenty to thirty) challenging one another to sure-enough wars on the battlefield complete with guns, knives, broken bottles, and other instruments of mayhem.

Under the older practices the Indian tribes were judged on their fierceness, fighting ability, and the number of casualties they were able to inflict on rival tribes. After the second World War much pressure was brought to bear against the systematic violence of the Indian confrontations, and gradually the values of beauty in dress and artistic prowess in the songs and dances of the ritual became pre-eminent. Now the Big Chiefs go into fits of dancing and singing frenzy when they meet another tribe, striving to impress the spectators with their beauty and grace rather than their ability to inflict harm on their peers. And on St. Joseph's Night formal competitions are held among the many tribes, with the Big Chiefs, secondary chiefs, flag boys, spy boys, queens, princesses, and witch doctors all vying to be named the baddest in their category.

The costumes are the central focus these days, and the Indians spend many hours before Mardi Gras Day designing, cutting, sewing, beading and feathering their own elaborate outfits. Each year a new design and color scheme are devised by each tribe, and after St. Joseph's Night—the second and final appearance of the Indians for another year—the costumes are taken apart bead by bead and feather by feather. (A new tradition begins this year, however, as the Indians have decided to keep their outfits intact until after the annual Jazz & Heritage Festival, held in the middle of April, where they will make an official appearance in 1976 and hereafter.)

The members of the tribes grow up in the tradition, marching first as young boys, then as spy boys and flag boys, and finally graduating into the ranks of the Chief and Witch Doctors. There is also an increasing number of little girls and young women in full costume taking part in the ceremonies these days, marking a distinct break with tradition. All the members of a particular tribe come from the same hood, the second-liners are their neighbors, friends, relatives and co-workers, and they dance and sing for the rest of the people in the immediate community. Most white New Orleanians, and many blacks as well, don't even know the Indians exist, and the Indians don't particularly care if they do.

The Wild Magnolias, the Golden Eagles, Young Sons of Geronimo, Golden Stars, Mowhawks, Black Eagles, Wild Tchoupitoulas, Golden Blades, Little Red White & Blues, Wild Squatoolies and the rest of the tribes have emerged and evolved within the boundaries of New Orleans' black neighborhoods, where they exist as year round cultural heroes—particularly among the young men of the community, who follow their exploits, march with them on the holy days, and wish to god they could wear the formal dress of the Chiefs and other official tribesmen. They provide a thread of cultural continuity which is as strong and bright as their garb—rehearsing and hanging out in the neighborhood bars, bragging of their conquests and their plans for next year, and generally providing a clear and visible link to the glorious culture of their ancestral homeland.

Until the past few years the Indians were almost totally unknown to the world at large. Since the Wild Magnolias cut their album (released here on Polydor Records in 1974) and have accepted public engagements outside the Mardi Gras context, however, it's just a matter of time until they move into the mainstream of American popular culture, bringing the rest of America a musical and cultural treat unlike anything it's ever seen before.

I was blessed with the opportunity this year to visit New Orleans during Mardi Gras, where I marched in the streets uptown with the Wild Magnolias and witnessed this incredible phenomenon for myself. l'd like to thank my guide, Ms. Nancy Ochsenschlager of Ann Arbor and New Orleans; Quint Davis, manager of Professor Longhair and the Wild Magnolias and producer of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival; Doctor John, Ronnie Barron, and Earl Turbinton, native musicians of New Orleans; Cyril Neville, George "Freak Man" Porter, and the rest of the Meters; and everyone else who helped me get my story in the Crescent City; the staff of the Home Sweet Home motel, where I rested my weary ass each morning after conducting my lengthy. investigations into the life of the city; the publishers of the Sun, who grudgingly paid my way; and everyone else who helped make my first visit to New Orleans a thoroughly enjoyable, educational, and inspirational trip. A New Orleans photographer and filmmaker named Jules Cahn has recently issued a 15-minute color videotape of wild Indian footage, and if you ever hear that it's being shown somewhere near you, please don't miss it. Bonaroo!