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September 2005
Dear Everybody: Like the rest of you, I have looked on in horror all week at what has befallen the people of the Gulf Coast, and the city of New Orleans. It is truly a tragedy for all of us. Every time I turn on CNN and see a ruined building or a flooded street in the Crescent City, it seems like it’s a place I have been. Often that is true…I have spent a significant amount of time in New Orleans, and none of the music I have made would have happened were it not for that city’s immense and wonderful musical heritage. I owe my little musical career to that city and the countless great musicians that come from there. More importantly, all of us that play any of the American musical forms – blues, jazz, rock & roll – owe something to the Big Easy and its musical progeny…it is the cradle of all that is great in American music.I returned home here to Los Angeles just this afternoon, and read an absurd letter in the L.A. Times by some absurd person living in North Hollywood who was upset that her tax dollars were going to go towards rebuilding a city built in such a precarious location. New Orleans should be moved, she opined. Oh yes, and while we’re at it, I guess we should scout some potential new locations for Los Angeles…sooner or later, our own Big One is going to come calling. But did they move San Francisco when it was nearly leveled by an earthquake in 1906? Of course not. A truly great city is always a product of where it is. New Orleans is below sea level, and surrounded by water on three sides, and it is planted squarely in hurricane country. And aside from the history and the music and the architecture and the food…oh Lord the food…that is part of what makes it a truly great city. If you spend enough time there to get a feel for the place beyond getting drunk on Bourbon Street and nursing your hangover with chicory coffee and beignets at Café Du Monde, you find that the place is not defined by frivolity, but by fatalism. Have one more drink, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, and blow that horn like it’s your last gig, because one day all you know and love will be swept away. This is what makes New Orleans so much more than just another town with a lot of bars. Peter Applebome wrote this week in the New York Times: “Forget this idea they’re going to move the city somewhere else…it’s not going to happen. New Orleans is the opposite of America, and we must hold onto places that are the opposite of us. New Orleans is not fast or energetic or efficient, not a go-get-‘em Calvinist well-ordered city. It’s slow, lazy, sleepy, sweaty, hot, wet, lazy and exotic.” That is exactly right. And that is also exactly why I love the place so much. There is no American city more unique and singular than New Orleans. People who have lived there all their lives often find it very hard to function anywhere else. They are from a world apart. And they will be back. The greatness of New Orleans depends on its impractical location, its impractical nature, and its wonderful people, who are as unique and irreplaceable as the city they live in. We should treasure them and their city always. Even if you have never been to New Orleans, know that in this increasingly homogenized big-box McCountry we live in, you are lucky beyond measure that it exists at all. Love, Bob
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