Music, T-shirts, and other matters of life and death in post-Katrina New Orleans
By JON GARELICK | May 10, 2006
HURRICANE BENEFITS: Busing tables at Dickie Brennan’s Bourbon House will get you a 401K.
|
Everywhere you looked during the first weekend of the 37th annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, the big theme was, of course, recovery. “We’re back!” said banners on the sides of restaurants. The sign over the Congo Square stage at the Fair Grounds racetrack, where the festival is held each year, proclaimed: “Louisiana Rebirth: Restoring the Soul of America.” And Shell Oil, this year’s sponsor, had billboards all over town: “Shell Is Coming Home,” with the “Coming” crossed out. But amid all the optimism, you couldn’t overlook the prevalent downside. The banner on the side of one of the older and fancier Royal Street restaurants in the French Quarter read: “The original New Orleans Brennan’s will just keep rolling along . . . as soon as possible!” And the Bourbon Street T-shirt vendors have found fresh meat in the Katrina disaster: “FEMA: Fix Everything My Ass!” I guess you could say that’s a step up from “I Got Bourbon Faced on Shit Street.” In the Quarter and the adjacent Central Business District, New Orleans looks battered but vital: checkerboard patterns of patched windows in the high-rises, a shell of an eight-story brick building advertising condo and office space around the corner from the gleaming and open-for-business Sheraton, the soaped-over plate-glass windows along Canal Street. Sure, parts of it are what we used to called “depressed.” But there’s still plenty to convince you that if New Orleans isn’t “back,” it’s at least “coming back.” Many downtown businesses are hindered mostly by staffing problems, the absence of employees who evacuated and can’t afford to move back. And my wife and I heard more than one downtowner complain that the traffic has been brutal during commutes, with former in-town residents displaced to the suburbs.
It’s only when you move outside the CBD and the Quarter that the enormity hits you — the negligible distance in recovery from August 29, the distance yet to go. And that’s where the cynical humor of some of those other T-shirts finds its bite. “New Orleans: Proud To Call It Home” was the original. That was quickly parodied by the booze hound’s “New Orleans: Proud To Crawl Home.” Post-Katrina, the verb changed to “Proud To Swim Home,” and now it’s come full circle to “Proud To Call It Home.” Only this time illustrated by a FEMA trailer.
Extending from the Quarter and into the Ninth Ward and Chalmette (a couple of the hardest-hit neighborhoods) you see that yellow-brown floodline that Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose calls the city’s “permanent bathtub ring.” Get deep into the Ninth and it’s not just the collapsed homes but the empty ones that are so haunting. Driving over the bridge across the Industrial Canal, you look down and see the bulldozers and work crews rebuilding the levee and the flood wall — the levee that, when it was breached, flooded the Ninth. And then, just downhill from the bulldozers and the new wall, you see the homes that got hit first. Farther out, some of the homes are just bent and crumbling. Or their roofs are rotted and gone, not because the wind took them but because they were submerged under 24 feet of water for 10 days.
Related:
Bruce Springsteen’s rock dream: Little Big Man as Hot Rod hero, Folk re-revival, The 40 greatest concerts in Boston history: 5, More
- Bruce Springsteen’s rock dream: Little Big Man as Hot Rod hero
Columbia has been so successful that, no matter what Born To Run sounds like, Bruce Springsteen is in all probability going to be rock’s next superstar. In fact, if one can judge from the crazed crowds outside New York’s Bottom Line, he already is.
- Folk re-revival
The laugh that opens Bruce Springsteen’s We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions is the first clue that what’s about to follow might actually be fun.
- The 40 greatest concerts in Boston history: 5
Bruce Springsteen | Harvard Square Theatre | May 9, 1974
- Roving lie
Thanks for the window in to the NH GOP dinner and Rove’s tactics (“ Is The Bloom Off The Turd? ”).
- The big apple
With his big, bearish presence and Buddha-like air of reflective certitude, Rick Rubin has been christened savior of the music industry.
- Lucky 13
Our producers Hall of Fame
- Adam raised an Eve
Why do some Bruce Springsteen fans have such a big problem with Patti Scialfa?
- Springsteen comes of age
This article originally appeared in the June 6, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
- Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Session Band
He sung each clenched syllable as if it might be his last, strumming his guitar like he was working an old, rusted waterpump, and smiling so hard it looked like it hurt.
- Man's work
“It's hard to figure out what it actually takes to be a man," Springsteen said during a rare post-sound-check interview. In recent years, though, he’s had the financial security and the time on his hands to figure it out.
- The Hold Steady
Like many of America’s smartest rock bands — from Fountains of Wayne to the Drive-By Truckers — this Minneapolis-to-Brooklyn quintet are an anomaly. The Hold Steady, "Killer Parties Remix"
- Less
Topics:
Jazz
, Entertainment, Hurricane Katrina, FEMA, More
, Entertainment, Hurricane Katrina, FEMA, Pete Seeger, Jesse James, Phish, Robert Ford, Dave Matthews Band, Clarence Henry, David Freedman, Less