The music legend, guitarist, piano man, jive talker and psychedelic godfather Malcolm John Rebennack – better known as Dr. John – died “towards the break of day” on Thursday, of a heart attack, a statement has confirmed. He was 77.
That last bit of information was something only discovered, or at least disseminated, late last year, in fact: in his fantastical 1994 autobiography “Under the Hoodoo Moon,” Dr. John had declared his birth date as “just before Thanksgiving 1940.” But in a column for the Times-Picayune published in November 2018, author John Wirt unearthed a birth announcement from the same paper 77 years earlier: Mac, as he was colloquially known, was actually born November 21, 1941. The factual fluidity was, in its way, appropriate to an artist who lived and worked in the shifting, hip space of the trickster, and also to one who was as iconic of New Orleans as Louis Armstrong, to whom his final album, 2014’s Ske-Dat-De-Dat… (The Spirit of Satch) was a tribute. (Armstrong’s real birthday was misrecorded for decades, too.)
Dr. John’s influence was vast — among other things, it’s largely agreed-upon that the Night Tripper served as the inspiration for the groovy Dr. Teeth, leader of the Muppets’ Electric Mayhem band. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, and was nominated for 15 Grammy Awards over the course of his career, winning six. His recording of Randy Newman’s composition “Down In New Orleans,” for the 2009 Disney film The Princess and the Frog — which was inspired by the New Orleans chef and civil rights activist Leah Chase, who predeceased him by only a few days — was nominated for an Academy Award. In 2013, he received an honorary doctorate from Tulane University in New Orleans, prompting many to make the obvious joke that he was now Dr. Dr. John.
The rocker, whose first solo recording was the instrumental 1959 guitar rumble “Storm Warning,” had his biggest hit with the crunchy 1973 groove “Right Place, Wrong Time” — produced by Allen Toussaint, with the great New Orleans funk band The Meters backing him up — which cracked the Billboard top 10. Dr. John spent his creative life making connections between the deep and broad heritage of New Orleans — the fertile crescent of all American music, arguably — and the electric progress of rock and funk. Songs like “Mama Roux” and “Walk On Guilded Splinters” were slinky trips through a dreamy, goofer-dust glittered bayou; later tributes to greats like Johnny Mercer and Armstrong showed his reverence for the long tradition of American songcraft. Throughout his career, he hopped back and forth at his pleasure. In 2012, his Dan Auerbach-produced Locked Down was hailed as a return to Gris Gris form, dripping with shadowy rock-and-roll voodoo, and won the best blues album Grammy. But for his next and ultimately final project, he pivoted back to Basin Street and recorded a loving paean to Satchmo.
With contemporaries that included Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, Ernie K-Doe, Cosimo Matassa, Professor Longhair, James Booker, Irma Thomas and Dave Bartholomew (all but the latter two passed away at the end of the 20th century or the beginning of the 21st) Dr. John was one of the last players standing of a New Orleans generation that witnessed rock and roll taking on form — and indeed, carved it into a shape of his own.
