So that's the bridge.
So, now, if you guys were to do
an intro just by yourselves...
Like we were marching down the street to it.
Even though it's this,
like, that would be like I imagine that's kind of like it.
We should open the fucking doors, man.
Sync, corrected by icephoenix www.addic7ed.com
_
You hear about different cultures around the world
trying to preserve their history.
Native Americans hand down stories
from generation to generation.
And you have museums all over the world
preserving art and culture.
I honestly believe that we should be doing the same thing
just with music.
That's what this place is all about.
The pace of the city has a lot to do
with how we feel about things.
Those paddle wheels make a distinctive rhythm.
A streetcar going down St. Charles Avenue...
making this clackety-clackety sound.
We have become complacent with some old-world charm.
Oh, man, when you get steeped in the history,
you get seduced by it.
You go to sleep with live music, you wake up with live music.
Literally.
It's just like no other place on the earth.
Being from here
is in the fabric of what we do.
No matter what type of music we're playing,
you'll hear New Orleans there.
A city like New Orleans,
I was so drawn to it, because in a way,
that's what this entire series is all about.
Rock 'n' roll is really the evolution of jazz.
When Louis Armstrong's "Hot Seven" albums first came out,
people lost their minds.
It was punk rock, you know?
It was out of control.
A lot of the jazz musicians became
the first wave of rock 'n' roll musicians.
I went there to be educated, because I never went to school.
And I thought, "I'm gonna go to where the stuff
came out of the ground naturally, you know?
You can't speak of New Orleans
without speaking of Dr. John.
Now leave a little room for me!
Most people I talk to don't call you "Dr. John."
Well, my name is really Mac Rebennack.
Where are you from?
I'm from the Third Ward.
Same ward where Louis Armstrong came from.
Every time I walked past
where Louis Armstrong used to live, he'd say,
"If you want to do something bad enough,
you can do it."
It made me think.
That's what Louis came up in.
That was good enough for me.
Was it a musical family?
Well, my aunt Dottie Mae used to play piano
with Pete Fountain and George Girard...
All of the cats that became famous later.
I just remember she knew how to play that style
that was called "butterfly stride."
She used to say,
"Watch the piano player's left hand.
That's important."
That's what I did.
She was a very special person.
If you're from New Orleans the way we are,
you're not just from New Orleans.
Like, you're four generations,
five generations from New Orleans.
Growing up and being, like, the son of a musician
is a badge of honor in New Orleans, you know?
- Hi, I'm Dave. - Good to see you, man.
- How are you? - Very nice to meet you.
- Nice to meet you. - I'm James.
- Nice to meet you. - What do you play?
- Saxophone. - Oh, shit.
_
When I think of New Orleans,
I don't think of recording studios, really.
I just think of hundreds of years of music.
Preservation Hall really took hold after the hurricane
when people realized that there was something to lose.
Look at this guy.
Wow. Yeah. What a trip.
This is a trip.
It was a little tricky
because Preservation Jazz Hall
is not used to a blaring rock band.
We moved the drums across the room
from traditionally where they play,
which opened up the sound a little bit.
Then we moved their amps... Just baffled them enough
so it wasn't completely collapsing the room with volume.
It's funny because you can hear
people walking by on the street.
You hear the horses clip-clop by and the carriages,
and people peering in the windows
and the street performers strolling by.
Our microphones catch miscellaneous noises going on,
and that's part of the charm.
Where's Ben Jaffe?
Hey, Ben!
Is it gonna be okay that we record here?
This is so cool!
This is like my childhood dream come true!
Oh, my God, this is gonna be so crazy.
Wow.
Has anyone made noise in here yet?
- We get pretty loud. - Do you?
Yeah, yeah. No, don't be worried about the volume.
- Okay. - Yeah.
How much has it changed?
- Zero. - "Zero." Really, zero?
It was how my parent... You know,
they wanted to keep it just like they walked into it.
- Yeah. - And that's what they did.
They just said "We're never gonna change...
Change it from that experience," you know.
Rad!
Well, I'm going to Pat O'Brien's.
I'll see you guys.
This place is so thick with vibe.
You know? You just feel like, the sweat of generations
you know, pouring off the walls.
To see all our gear in there is a trip, you know?
It's so out of... It just seemed out of place.
Like, "Fuck, I hope we don't
rattle the fucking building down
or whatever, with the volume," you know?
Originally it was built as a Spanish tavern.
And then over the years it's been a lot of things.
It was a photo studio
where most of uptown aristocracy
would come downtown and get their photos taken.
So you'd go into people's houses on St. Charles Avenue
and you'd see their portraits in their Mardi Gras gowns
and they're in the courtyard of Preservation Hall.
This is our control room.
Oh, my God, this is cool.
Wow, this takes the cake, dude.
This is the one.
Thought you would enjoy it.
Oh, my God!
Butch is gonna freak out.
Wow. Is that your dad?
- Yeah, that's... - No way.
Yeah, looking down on us.
Uh-oh. Better do something good.
So how did your dad start Preservation Hall?
He had played tuba.
He went to military high school on a tuba scholarship.
But, you know, in college he was a business major
and, you know, didn't really think of himself as...
Definitely was not a jazz tuba player.
He was a marching band tuba player.
And when he got to New Orleans
they discovered this whole tradition of marching bands.
What we have here is called "jazz funerals."
You know, the first part of the ceremony is slow dirge music.
Back in the day it was more like marching bands.
They were real uniform and polished.
We're talking before integration here,
when the black cemeteries was way out of town.
They'd play solemn music.
When they "cut the body loose," as they called it,
and turned back around, the band would crank up.
Got to take that long walk back.
It certainly is hipper to dance and strut back
than it would be to walk back.
The brass band that was playing in front
would be considered the "first line."
But then that "second line" of people
are the people who heard the drums.
Just the everyday people on the street.
People who don't even know who it is that's dead.
Thousands and thousands of people
with these brass instruments,
drums... Jumping up in the street.
It's just a beautiful thing.
My parents came across one of these bands
the first week they were in town
and they followed the band through the French Quarter,
and they ended up back at this art gallery on St. Peter's Street
two blocks from Jackson Square.
And they met...
All of these people they met...
Artists and writers and poets
and actors and photographers.
They all congregated in this one gallery.
For whatever reason, this was like,
the meeting place for everybody,
and that eventually became Preservation Hall.
- Ain't it cool? - What the fuck, dude?
Have you been here before?
No.
What, Taylor, is it?
This is Ben. This is Ben.
You guys, this is Ben Jaffe.
- Hi, Ben! - This is his place.
- Beautiful. - Oh, my God, thanks.
His dad ran this place for a really super long time.
So what do they do here now?
They play music seven nights a week.
- Well, there it is. - Live music.
So it's like a bar, kind of, basically.
Uh, it's not a bar.
New Orleans people of course are aware
their jazz heritage is disappearing
and some are trying somehow
to save the only art form
that is strictly, entirely American.
One effort to save it is here at Preservation Hall.
When I was a kid, the French Quarter
was kind of off-limits to people like me.
This was 1961, so this was the segregated South, you know?
Mr. Jaffe integrated things
long before anybody else thought about it.
This was one of the few places
where black and white people would come together
to listen to music.
It was the only place. It was the place.
And my parents risked a lot
by being open about it... Their policies...
And outspoken about it. Yeah.
It was very difficult
to hear New Orleans jazz in New Orleans
a few years ago.
So we rented an old art gallery
and began Preservation Hall.
Both of your parents took the responsibility?
Yeah, well, my mom was like the bouncer.
She sat at the gate all night collecting money
and like, deciding on who would get in and who wouldn't,
because people would be rowdy.
And my dad was the guy who was going around town
locating musicians and putting the bands together
and kind of keeping the place physically in shape.
People are sitting on wooden benches,
sitting on the floor.
There's no drinks.
Pretty hot in here, too, in the summer.
People come to hear the music.
People hear it.
That music was dying.
You know, trad jazz like that was dying.
Ben's dad bought that place
and started putting on those...
They were performing for tourists.
People that came to New Orleans expecting to hear jazz
and they couldn't find it anywhere,
they could find it at Pres. Hall.
Preservation Hall...
Now that's where you'll find all the greats.
And when I was a teenager,
the ones that's still alive?
That's where they're playing now.
And that's where all the people all over the world
the minute they hit New Orleans,
the first place they want to know...
Where Preservation Hall is.
When you become a member of the Preservation Hall band,
you come up through the ranks.
Our clarinet player, Charlie Gabriel, he's 82.
So what we were thinking for an intro
was to do a variation of that riff,
- but swing it a little more. - Okay, do the riff.
He's a fourth-generation musician.
And then you play around it.
His great-great-grandfather
was a musician in New Orleans in the 1840s.
Our trumpet player, fourth-generation.
And our drummer, you know, fourth-generation.
Yeah, I think we should just go round everyone up
and just start playing, and then we'll hit "record."
- All right, that sounds like a winner. - Sounds fun?
You can't create that, you know.
And we wouldn't exist if that didn't exist.
It's just wonderful how it gets passed along
and passed along here.
What's it like to play in that room?
It's great.
No microphones, no nothing.
Only about, I think, a hundred people
can fit in there at the most...
and they're right on you.
So whenever I play my trombone solo
I got to stand all the way in back.
I might hit somebody. That's how close they are.
This is, like, the last place.
It really is. I mean,
now the name of the joint's becoming literal,
you know, because it's...
It's, like, the last place.
New Orleans has been my biggest inspiration
in music in my adult life.
I mean, I really got into Dr. John
and Professor Longhair.
Not that I can play like 'Fess or Dr. John.
When Dave mentioned we were going there,
I'm like, "We're going where? What?"
It's been like this kind of like, temple for me
to go every time I stop in.
That first day, I look at my e-mail
of kind of what's going on the first day, just setting up.
And it says, "Dave, interview Allen Toussaint."
I'm like, "What? Holy shit."
I'm like, "Oh, this is gonna be a really good week."
Definitely a bucket list situation.
Okay, the first question
I always ask everybody is, "Where are you from?"
Oh, I'm from New Orleans. Very much so, yes.
I was raised in an area called Gert Town,
which is right here in town.
What do you remember about that time?
You know, this city was still segregated in so many ways.
That's true,
but we would integrate with each other
'cause we had accepted the fact "You're a musician, too.
Of course we're gonna play something."
Like, I don't remember when Mac was "segregated."
He and I were playing on recordings together,
and from way back,
we would just go find each other
and play together in various places.
It was actually on the law books
that it was against the law
for black and white musicians
to perform on the same stage,
you know, be in the same room, and all this kind of stuff.
In fact, Mac went to jail from being in the Dew Drop.
I was really pissed off.
There was these two police.
I'm thinking, "Aw, shit. They gonna break my legs."
The story goes, he looked around and said,
"Y'all get ready to come back and get me next week,
'cause Ray Charles playing here and I'm coming back."
It just seemed jive to me.
That's life back then.
He was a wonderful guitarist.
We were 15 and 16 during that time.
I didn't know he was going to turn out
to be such a great pianist.
If I hadn't got shot in my finger,
I would probably still be playing the guitar.
What? Really?
That's fucking crazy. How did that happen?
Well, this guy was pistol-whipping
the singer of my band.
This was a problem.
His mamae was cutting some meat,
and she told me if anything happened to him
while he was on the road with me,
"I'm gonna chop your cajones off."
I remembered that.
It kind of freaked me out.
Anyway, when I was hitting the guy,
the gun went off.
It was really crazy.
They sewed it back on,
but they didn't, ya know, do the greatest of a job.
But that's life. You gotta roll with it.
If you don't roll with it,
you're gonna roll under it.
He was a great musician, anyway.
If he would have been playing saxophone,
he would have been great on that.
When I was growing up,
part of the scene was my living room.
The Neville family was extremely important to our music.
I mean, they are the first family of funk.
At times I'd come into the living room at my house,
and there he was standing up in the living room talking to my brothers.
All these cats was great.
Sometimes I would be handed the drumsticks.
I always prayed that I could make people feel
the same way Ray Charles made me feel.
Those cats would always make a good blend.
We was always playing it together
from way back in the game.
It was slamming.
Mac became "Dr. John."
Seemed like a whole 'nother life...
Another person came in and started something new over here.
He's a character, man.
- What's his deal? - He's an original cat.
He's cooler than you.
And he's cooler than everybody you'll ever meet.
Did you create Dr. John to be a front man?
No.
I was gonna make Ronnie Barron be "Dr. John,"
and I was gonna call him "Reverend Ether."
Frank Sinatra's manager
or arranger, or whatever the hell he was,
said, "If Sonny and 'Cheryl' could sing,
and if Bob Dylan could sing,
you could sing, asshole."
I think he hit a raw nerve with me
and it hit home.
He's amazing, you know?
It's like, everything that he plays
is the best thing ever.
It's perfectly behind the beat.
Everything he knows about music is so pure
and so... complete.
It's like, nasty and dirty,
but intelligent and, uh...
you can hear a million years of music
in everything he does.
It's that guy's bachelor party this week.
I fucking met that dude yesterday.
Right there.
That dude with the fucking headband and the sunglasses.
- Oh, not him. - No way!
Yep. I told him we were playing here tonight.
And his dad! He's with his dad! What's up?
Look, dude's in the headband.
He brought his dad on his bach' party.
They're fucking down.
Allen Toussaint.
He's like, the guru, man.
It's been a long time since I didn't know
who Allen Toussaint was.
He's written every famous song
that is known for being New Orleans.
Everybody that I grew up listening to,
Allen had something to do with it, you know?
I mean, everything from all of Irma Thomas' stuff,
all of my brother Aaron's stuff.
Lee Dorsey.
He wasn't just the cat writing the songs.
He actually was the cat in the studio
that was making that stuff sound like that.
Please stop it, now.
That's what I wanted to know how to do...
Write the songs and then make people love 'em
and go buy 'em.
And he was a master at it.
Okay, ladies.
I don't think you ought to make that in the middle of that.
I think you should wait till the verse comes up.
There's certain things you could tell
that's an "Allen thing."
One of my favorite songs is a song called
"Street Parade" by Earl King,
with the Meters playing, Earl King is singing.
Allen wrote the horn parts.
I don't think they repeat themselves the whole time.
These horn parts never repeat.
Why would you do that, you know?
It's the only song like that I've ever heard.
I remember one time writing a song.
I'd gotten to one of those points like other artists
where you can't say you're finished,
because now it's subject to critique.
Van Dyke Parks used to visit sometimes back in the day.
And he came upstairs in my office
with his short pants and his safari hat,
and he knew that I was having this dilemma.
And he told me,
"Imagine you're gonna die in two weeks."
So I wrote "Southern Nights."
When I was a little boy going on about six,
my father would take us out to the country
to visit our relatives out there.
All of them spoke Creole, very little English.
I'd sit on the porch and I'd look up into the trees
and everything was above me.
As writers, we would like to be inspired all the time.
We would like the clouds to open up and receive us.
"Southern Nights" was a song that did that.
It was a kind of spiritual feeling
to be in that environment
and to know where we came from, so we'd know where we're going.
All these cities had so much to offer,
musically and culturally.
And then sometimes there's obstacles.
Sometimes it's weather,
or in the case of New Orleans...
We recorded in the middle of the French Quarter.
Kill the tape.
Let's call Dave Grohl in here.
He hit the bar.
You know, if you put a guy like Dave in New Orleans...
- Is Dave across the street at that bar right over there? - Yes, he is.
...sometimes you gotta go look for him.
We didn't have to look far.
Do you want to come check out this drum...
- What's that? - Hold on, I gotta pay...
Came to haul Dave out of the bar.
How much?
- See y'all. I'll be back. - I'll be here.
You pull me out of a bar,
better have a good reason.
It's like the Faces, dude.
Sounds good.
I had a blast doing the drum track.
I did it quick.
And it's exciting and it pops
and I get the sense that Dave likes it.
I'm going back to the bar.
I don't know what New Orleans music would be today
if it wouldn't be for what the Meters created back in the day.
The Meters are like the Beatles here in New Orleans for us.
I think the Meters turned out to be
is the embodiment of everything
we're sitting here talking about.
They're just straight-up New Orleans funk.
Leo Nocentelli on guitar.
Zigaboo Modeliste on drums.
And the bass player, George Porter.
The Neville Brothers were Art and Aaron.
They were like a part of the fiber
of the early days of the Meters.
I discovered the Meters through Led Zeppelin.
I read somewhere that the Meters were...
John Bonham, the drummer of Led Zeppelin...
They were one of his favorite bands.
And it only makes sense...
when you listen to the "pocket"
and the groove the Meters had.
I was fascinated with Zigaboo, the drummer.
It's such a strange, unorthodox, different way
of approaching rhythm. I never heard it before.
He was very syncopated.
He used the "ands" of "one"
way more than normal drummers would use.
And when he makes them, I would read him.
You know? I'd know it's coming,
so I would "and" with him, you know?
It wasn't "correct," they way he played.
It was just how he felt. He played how he felt.
It's just the artistic air around New Orleans.
It's like a gas that's leaking out,
and everybody is, you know...
Inhaling it, exhaling it.
And all of a sudden, boom!
Because I was invited to make this record
with the Neville Brothers,
we were rummaging through a bunch of cassettes.
And we bumped into a whole box of cassettes
that were the Meters' rehearsals.
I couldn't hear a word they were saying
'cause I'm Canadian and they're from New Orleans.
And so, Zig, the drummer,
he's trying to describe something
to the rest of the band in another language.
No!
No, man!
It sounded like some strange Japanese to me.
I always thought from the very beginning
that this group were like song stylists.
And that's where we got our peculiar
and extraordinary talent
meshed together
to come and make one whole music!
That's the thing I remember.
Don't mind me. I'm crazy, man.
Thank you!
They kind of invented a form for New Orleans...
That beautiful Meters sound, you know?
Not getting any cooler in here.
Hawkins is glistening, man.
Look like a big ol' tray of deli meat
left out in the summertime.
Dripping with the juices.
"Taylor juice." Au jus.
Could I have some "Taylor au jus"?
No, I'm all good, dude.
All right, y'all ready?
We are rolling.
One, a-two,
a-one, two, three.
Without a doubt,
the hottest performance of our entire career
was at Jazz Fest,
and I mean that in a meteorological sense
'cause it was fucking hot.
I looked at some of those gospel bands
singing in those robes... God damn!
I remember being asked to play
and thinking, "God, do we belong there?"
I was honored to be asked,
because all of the music was so real.
How long has Jazz Fest been going? Do you know?
I think it was, like...
1969 was the first Jazz Fest.
Jazz Fest was supposed to happen originally in the 1960s.
And George Wein, who produced
the Newport Jazz Festival and Folk Festival,
civic leaders in New Orleans brought him down
saying, "We want you to do that here
in New Orleans for..." You know.
And he came down, he's like, "Can't do it."
I've wanted to do a festival in New Orleans for many years.
It was very difficult in the early days
'cause it was before the Civil Rights bill was passed in 1964.
I came down there as early as 1962
and tried to get them to understand
that they couldn't do a festival
with the laws they had on the books.
He's like, you know, "Until these hotels
will allow Duke Ellington and Miles Davis
and Dizzy Gillespie to stay in their rooms
and eat in these restaurants,
it's not gonna happen."
It took, you know, 10 years
before the city became completely integrated.
Have you been to every one of 'em?
Almost all of 'em.
How many times have you been to Jazz Fest?
Every year.
- Of your life? - Yeah.
First time I played Jazz Fest,
I think I was four years old.
The horn was taller than me.
I've been knowing him since he was that tall.
His name is Trombone Shorty 'cause he's been playing it
since the trombone was taller than him.
We used to hustle in Jackson Square for tips.
We just wanted him to stand there with the trombone.
Because it was so cute, people would tip us out.
And then he actually started to, like,
learn how to play, you know?
I remember my mom telling me the story...
Bo Diddley was on the stage
and I was playing the parade part.
All I could do was play one loud note...
"Blamp!" I was playing that note, and my mom was like,
"Shh! You're gonna get us put out of here."
And so I kept doing it, and Bo Diddley was like,
"Who is that stepping on my show?"
And then they lift me up, and I was gone.
Crowd-surfed with my trombone
and I'd ended up on stage with Bo Diddley.
- That's crazy. - Yeah.
He's become... Well, I'll put it like this.
The Neville Brothers had been closing our Jazz Fest
since Professor Longhair passed away.
When the Neville Brothers
decided that they weren't gonna do it,
the natural progression was Trombone Shorty.
Now he's... You know, he's a monster.
It's unbelievable.
One of the things I believe in
is the importance of passing on traditions
the way they were given to us.
We play all styles of music.
There's calypso, Cuban.
We have the Mardi Gras Indian sound.
The music there exists because the culture itself
is so rich to begin with.
It's not just the Deep South.
New Orleans is the northernmost point in the Caribbean.
New Orleans was the largest port for a century.
It's where coffee entered America.
It was the entry point for Central America,
South America, and Africa.
I mean, part of our history is, you know,
something that we're not very proud of, you know...
Is that we are the port
where hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Africans
were brought into the United States
and sold into slavery.
This was a place
where people from a lot of different places met,
traded goods and ideas.
And some of those ideas was musical.
You listen to the music
and you can pick out all the ingredients
from all those different styles.
You can pick out Spanish melodies
and you can pick out African rhythms.
You know, the Bo Diddley riff is just an African riff.
How much rock 'n' roll have we built on that?
There is a place called Congo Square
and this was the only place in the South
where black people could actually have drums,
'cause that was outlawed.
Sunday at Congo Square,
these cats played that music
to commune with their ancestral spirits.
That caused Europeans to start coming out on Sundays
to check what was going on.
This famous pianist,
I think his last name was Gottschalk,
he wrote this thing called the "Bamboula."
His music was based on what he heard
being played at Congo Square.
That was part of our natural evolution.
What you doing tomorrow, Dave?
- What's that? - What you doing tomorrow?
Singing. Nothing.
Feel like coming by my aunt's house and jamming?
- Yeah! Absolutely. - Cool.
- Could I? - Oh, yeah.
- Really? Okay. - Sure, yeah!
She'll cook for us, too.
That's the way we used to do it back in the day,
with Jessie Hill, Professor Longhair, Dr. John.
- Go by her house... - Oh, my God, I would love to.
That'd be so fun.
The importance of the music to the people
is what really blew me away.
How you doing?
- How you making out, man? - All right.
- This is my aunt, man. - Hello. I'm Dave.
- Nice to meet you. - Nice to meet you, too.
How are you doing?
This is where we normally jam at.
Everybody know to come here when you guys start singing?
Oh, yeah.
My grandfather was one of the ones
who introduced the drums to the church.
That's right. You know, Ben told me about that.
It's an honorable,
respectable family tradition,
so much that you have it passed down
from generation to generation.
It just brings so much joy to all of us
when we can just come together
and be able to just play together.
I don't know if every city
considers music to be that important.
And as a musician, I mean,
that's the holy land.
Right now the storm is 225 miles
south-southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River.
We had a little gazebo in front of the house.
I was just sitting on the swing in my pajamas
and swinging, enjoying that smell and that water
and that moisture in the air.
I love that smell.
I was not going anywhere.
I knew that there was a group of us
in the city who weren't gonna leave.
I've been through all the hurricanes,
and I had no intentions of leaving.
My granddaughter came and sat down next to me.
She looked up at me.
She said, "Grandpa, when we leaving?"
And I say...
"We're not."
We were supposed to be coming home
that day that that thing hit.
So we were all in a hotel in Memphis.
We all went to bed that night
with the news that at the last minute
the storm had made a little shift to the east,
and so the eye didn't pass over New Orleans.
New Orleans had dodged another bullet.
So in our mind,
we were gonna hang out in Memphis a couple days
and go home and clean up the yard
and go back with life.
Is it as bad as you thought it would be?
Yeah, it is.
Being on the good side of it,
I think we fared very well.
I knew people that lived on the other side
that were raking up their lawns.
Like, the hurricane had passed.
It was all gone. They were outside raking.
Then all of the sudden, here comes water.
"Where is this coming from"?
And all of a sudden,
the water started coming down the walls.
And next thing you know it,
it was coming up from the floor.
Tomorrow we're looking at TV
and saw people walking through the water
and recognized some of them.
And then we realize,
"Oh, no. We ain't going home."
Uh, downtown's pretty fucked up.
This whole place is going underwater.
I gotta go, okay? I just got to focus on driving here, okay?
Was it just total chaos?
It wasn't, um...
It wasn't total chaos, but there was desperation.
We have no protection back here. We have nothing to eat.
We... This is our lives, y'all.
There wasn't food. There wasn't water, medical help.
And it was in August, you know?
The hottest time of year.
I drove in with a friend of mine in an ambulance.
He was an ambulance driver
and they were letting people like that in.
I can see that levy that broke.
Walked to the top of a bridge and looked.
Everything was just gone.
I have young people, friends of my son's,
who wound up in our house.
And then when the flood came,
they had to walk through that water
all the way to the Superdome.
Then they said after they got in the Superdome,
they wished they hadda stayed out in the water.
We want out of here today!
We had enough! We can't take no more!
We hungry. We starving. We need help.
We need medical attention.
They got old people that's sick.
They got people dying in there.
Um, you don't never get over something like that.
You just learn to live with
what the result of it was, you know?
I mean, I have nightmares
about things that people told me they went through.
We all had huge losses.
We lost property, and we lost businesses.
We lost family members.
They told us to bring our families here.
Now, my mama's out there. She's an old person,
and I don't have nothing no more or nobody else.
It's a mess.
And it was like, "What are they doing?"
Everybody that needs to be rescued,
but, just the resources...
There's just not enough resources yet
to get to 'em all right away.
It was like a nightmare.
My daughters was cooking chicken
and my wife was cooking beans
that we'll have food for a day or two in the city.
Halfway out the city everyone said,
"God dee-nam-it!
I left all the food on!"
Did you feel like the entire city
sort of came together when all that...
Yeah. I mean, you had to, you know?
That's all you had was each other.
There's eight guys in the band.
Seven of them lost their houses.
You know, we could have just given up,
fallen to our knees, you know?
Instead, it was like we each like, pulled each other up.
With Katrina, that's when we dug deep
to pull our lives back together
and used the culture to help lead us home.
That's something that I'm just, you know,
honored to, like, have been a part
of what these guys did after the hurricane.
Passion goes such a long way, doesn't it?
If it comes from the heart,
it comes from a real place, you know?
Like, here we are like, 10 years later,
and it's unbelievable, you know?
150 kids playing the music
that, like, my parents helped preserve 50 years ago.
I think that that's beautiful.
I'd like to introduce you to a good friend of mine.
I mean, I just met him this week.
This is my friend Troy.
You might know him as Trombone Shorty.
You know that guy?
And this is my good friend Ben Jaffe.
The storm actually helped people from the city
appreciate the music a bit more.
I think after the storm, some type of way,
we got a lot of young musicians
that just popped up out of the blue...
I have no idea from where...
And they're influenced by the Preservation Hall.
It's really crazy. Like, every time I come back,
I'm seeing some new musicians, which is cool, you know?
I mean, moving the music forward.
If that hurricane
wasn't enough to push them out,
then nothing's gonna make those people leave that city.
I wish I lived in a city like that.
I wish I lived in a city where every Sunday
you could have a second line parade.
A band marches down the street
and people come out of their houses
and they dance along
and you're walking down the street
next to a lawyer who's next to a gangster
who's next to a librarian
who's next to a college student
who's next to a policeman,
and we're drinking and smiling
and everyone's getting along so well.
I feel like if only every city in America
had one day a week
where we could all get together
and march down the street dancing,
we'd be a much happier human race.
Too close. Too close.
That's it.
_
Sync, corrected by icephoenix www.addic7ed.com