Whelan's Travels

Road Trip's Over.

It's Over. Been done. Now I'm in New York, where Josie runs the show.

On the street...

At playtime...

And in between...

I'm leaving for India tonight. Everyone please check in at whelanstravels for more of, well, more of whelan's travels.

Much Love,
robbie.

Our main purpose for visiting Biloxi, Mississippi, having not heard of the Mad Potter until somebody emailed me after we had already left, was to volunteer to fix shum shtuff up.

The entire Biloxi/Gulfport area (it's pronounced bill-UX-ee, by the way... I was unawares at first) was levelled by a one-story-high wave that Katrina brought as a housewarming gift. The coast, as you can see above, was a mess.

Before we got to do-gooding, I got my fix here. Lost $5. Don't wanna talk about it...

This is the house that we were working on, sweating so much we didn't have to pee. Biloxi is hot.

Nail-gunning EXPERT.

"So this is what, like a window?""

New Orleans Ain't No City, It's a Scar

"I was playin' every Sunday on Burgundy
in some shitty little bar...
I was working on a novel called "New Orleans
Ain't No City, It's a Scar..."

-Old 97's

Prescient words from Mr. Rhett Miller, once again.

Matt and I drifted down to New Orleans, where we happened to be unemployed, but interested in seeing what's going on after Katrina, and to spend some money in a city that seems like it needs it. We stayed in the French Quarter, the famous, relatively untouched by hurricane district where the riche white French built everything a few feet above sea level, those clever dogs. Here's the Hotel St. Pierre, our digs...

a yellow French Quarter house...

some pretty blue shutters... the French Quarter is the closest to a tidy European town you're gonna get in America. Everything is very historical, there's lovely gaslight at night, and people really put a lot of care into the upkeep of their houses...

Here's where the King (no, not that king, silly!) of Creole lived...

We actually did stay on Burgundy, just like the song... (pronounced bur-GUN-dee)

stucco...

as the frogs say, Francais Quartier...

french and creole language bookstore....

The Arcadie...

And earlier, when nwe were in Mississippi, I mentioned Muddy Waters, the guy who's got his mojo workin'. Ever wonder what that means? We did, so we looked it up. A lot of the old blues guys would go down the river to New Orleans to the voodoo priestesses and buy a "mojo hand" or a "mojo bag," a little sack of herbs that's supposed to make your wished come true. Wishes, as far as bluesmen are concerned, usually meant, "I wish I weren't impotent," or "I wish she would come back to me because I'm no longer impotent, since sniffing my mojo hand," etc.

There you are. That's what Muddy's talking about. Matt and I were hoping for some Mojo, so we went to Rita's, the realest-looking voodoo store in the Quarter, and took some contraband pictures (note: none of this voodoo shit pictured here works anymore... we destroyed its soul by photographing it...).

We thought this might be flood damage, but it wasn't...

Jackson Square, home to America's oldest but somehow least tasteful Catholic cathedral...

The main drag... Decatur Street? Don't remember.

But oh my god, the food.... That I remember. Here's a catfish po'boy...

cup o' gumbo from the corner store...

Blissful, incredibly delicious gumbo from the Gumbo Shop restaurant...

After Matt and I lived in luxury for one morning, we took a driving tour of the neighborhoods north of the Quarter, close to Lake Pontchartrain, to check out what Katrina actual did. The place was like a ghost town. Basically every house, for hundreds and hundreds of blocks, miles of city, was abandoned and wrecked, boarded up and spraypainted with the FEMA "x" for "searched".

(except the above)

"where is fema? fema don't want us home"

"1 orange cat under house"

We heard that Ray Nagee is sending in bulldozers to raze this whole area if the houses are not reclaimed by their owners by October 25th. It's nuts because massive parts of the city are condemned, so they're gonna knocked down and redeveloped. Not only will the city physically change, but the make-up of basically every neighborhood will too. The poor black families that didn't have insurance or who rented their homes will not be a part of the New Orleans. Very strange to imagine.

more mess...

very "everything is illuminated"...

and finally, the weirdest and most alarming thing... this is one of TWO work crews we saw in total while we were driving around the whole afternoon. And these guys are basically just throwing stuff out...

Crossroads Blues

"I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above 'Have mercy, now save poor Bob, if you please'...

You can run, you can run, tell my friend Willie Brown
You can run, you can run, tell my friend Willie Brown
That I got the crossroad blues this mornin', Lord, babe, I'm sinkin' down..."

-Robert Johnson

"O, I wish I was in the land of cotton
Good times there are not forgotten..."

-traditional

I originally wanted to stop in Clarksdale, Mississippi, because I heard that both Sam Cooke and Ike Turner were born there, and I figured there'd be some sort of monument. There was quite a bit more in this little town than I expected, though, and not much of it had to do with Sam or Ike. It mostly had to do with the Delta blues, and it turns out Clarksdale is an epicenter of sorts.

First things first, though. Above is a shot of our first glimpse of the King. No, not that King, silly. We're talking the King in 1840. King Cotton. In a huge field along side of Rte. 61 heading south along the Mississippi. We saw no people picking it really, just big machines. Below, you'll see Abe's BBQ, which Matt refused to stop at, I think because I'd already had barbecue twice that day or something...

Clarksdale is a washed-out, decrepit-looking town, but you can imagine how it must have been full of workers a long time ago, and perhaps sort of thriving, but if you know anything about the blues, you know that most of the people around here are black, and that things only thrived for the white man.

One thing I never really understood, however, even after being there, is why this area is called the Mississippi Delta. What people mean when they say that is the northeastern part of the state around Clarksdale, Rosedale, and a couple of other cities that you'll hear made mention of in Robert Johnson tunes, an area made moist by something called the alluvial plain of the Mississippi River. The delta of the Mississippi itself, is located, as everyone knows, in New Orleans. It confuses me. Hurts my head. Here's a sculpture of a dead lady:

Okay, that was random. Sorry about that. The point is, that sculpture is made out of clay taken from the bottom of the Yazoo River, which is part of the alluvial plain. That's an alluvial dead lady. She is relevant because she was sculpted by this frightening-looking mad-dog of a man:

His name was James "Son" Thomas, a singer, guitarist, folk-artist, and lastly but not leastly, gravedigger from the area. The placard on this display, which we found in the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, mentioned that this happy fellow sculpted lots of shit out of alluvial clay, including fish, birds, and "other animals native to the Mississippi Delta," but didn't actually show any of them. It was a little bit more about the dead gal.

Clarksdale is also home to Muddy Waters, the man who's got his mojo workin', and who basically invented the modern blues. He used to have a house in Clarksdale, but it got blown away by a tornado, and now it lives, re-built, inside the museum, next to the crazy guy who sculpts dead fish out of clay.

Here is a guitar that Muddy Waters sold to the owner of a brothel in New Orleans so he could have money to skip town after he knifed somebody in a jook-joint scuffle (that's a good song title, no? "Jook Joint Scuffle"? Somebody write that number...).

And here is the guitar that ZZ Top made out of a board from Muddy's blown-away house...

Yeah...

Here is "blues alley" behind the museum. Full of "Delta Entertainment". Sorta gave me the blues.

A jook joint. Somebody probably getting knifed in there right now.

And to close out, a photo of me at the crossroads (feeling blue, naturally) of Rtes 61 and 49, where around 1930 or so, Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in return for his uncanny ability to play the guitar, sing incredible songs about love, loss, and death, and run and hide from the crazy dead-guy clay-sculptor of Clarksdale.

There was so much more at this museum and the town and along the roads of the Delta, but I don't have the time or photos to properly explain it all. You should all go check it out for yourselves.

-Robbie

Soulsville, USA, and the rest of Mississippi

There are only two photos here of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, but that's only because they jacked Matt's camera before we were allowed in. Suffice to say it was a, and perhaps the highlight of our trip. Dozens of rooms of photos, records, videos, and memorabilia about the record label and the history of soul music in general. The short version of the story is that Stax records was Motown's biggest competitor in the early 60's, and the record label that launched Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Isaac Hayes, Rufus, Johnnie Taylor, Booker T. and the MG's (actually, they were the Stax in-house band, recorded on most of Stax records, and wrote a good number of the songs), Eddie Floyd, the Staple Singers, and a ton of other acts, including a lot of one-hitters that are on oldies radio today. Stax was known for having a grittier sound, more influenced by Memphis blues, and with less of Berry Gordy's huge, 25-part arrangements with string sections and all that. They were one of the first record labels to integrate, and they spread their wings to a huge amount of young talent. It's just incredible music. All of it. And if I had $125 to spare, as many as of you might, I would buy the complete Stax singles boxset so you can see for yourself. I couldn't afford it.

But here we are outside the original building, a neighborhood in west Memphis known as "Soulsville USA" because of the number of musicians who lived in the neighborhood and because Stax and its subsidiary Hi Records were based there. On the inside we saw much cooler stuff, like some original acetates of Aretha Franklin's early stuff and Isaac Hayes' gold-plated Cadillac, spinning on a pedestal. The outside is cool too, I guess...

Down the street, where Memphis Slim lived...

And on, out of Memphis and across the Mississippi line, we made out way to William Faulkner's old estate in Oxford, lovingly called Rowan Oak.

He had this sweet walkway up to the front steps. Here I am modelling my "Wattstax '72" t-shirt, which commemorates the "black Woodstock" that Stax records put together in the L.A. Coliseum, in the most appropriate of literary locations, the home of a subtle, anti-lynching, proto-civil rightser himself, Billy the Falconer.