Nude dancers, beheaded chickens, and a large black snake: Inside a Dr John show in the 1960s
Before heavy metal, Alice Cooper, and even the term “shock rock” entered the musical lexicon, Dr John was keenly injecting his New Orleans blues with a little voodoo theatre to seize the senses.
There was some precedent; Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was summoning his skull and bones R&B as early as the mid-1950s, and Arthur Brown was playing the ‘God of Hellfire’ with little more than a loincloth and flaming headpiece across the Atlantic, but it was Dr John who staked out a deeper and more headier realm of carnival showmanship during his late 1960s heyday.
He’d cycled through several monikers before settling on his enduring alter-ego, including Professor Bizarre and the ‘Guvnor’, but for years, Dr John was regular old Malcolm John Rebennack Jr, playing in Louisiana R&B groups while still in high school before a spell in prison for drug charges prompted a decamp to sunny Los Angeles. From then on, John would count a hefty level of session credits under his belt, joining Phil Spector’s famous Wrecking Crew and lending his keys to Frank Zappa, Sonny & Cher, and Canned Heat.
But it didn’t take long for his hometown to start calling. Soaking up the countercultural lysergia scoring the West Coast underground, a harkening back to the boyhood fascinations with New Orleans voodoo and spiritual talismans would birth the Dr John alias and his potent brew of black magic blues.
Debuting his new creation for 1968’s Gris-Gris, a bubbling cauldron of sounds and flavours swirled around his LP entry to the underground, Louisiana swamp rock gelling with dark psychedelia while grabbing at a rawer blast of R&B groove amid its talisman haze.
Such a febrile summoning demanded an equally gripping live show. Presenting a set bordering on a cult ceremony, naked Calinda dancers, animal decapitations, and on-stage alchemy were just some of the many stunts that could join Dr John during a performance.
“They never saw things like Chicken Man biting the heads off chickens and drinking their blood,” John reflected to Uncut in 2015. “He’d flip [the chicken] to a snake that they couldn’t see, and the snake would eat it. It was a large black snake, so the crowd couldn’t see it, and – woosh – the chicken disappeared. We also had magicians – I would come out of a puff of smoke. We threw glitter – and all kinds of roots and herbs to people, and that meant something to them. Nobody else was doing that kind of stuff.”
This was occult stuff even for the 1960s counterculture. Jimi Hendrix had been lighting his guitar on fire, and Iggy Pop was already committing violent acts of self-mutilation over in Detroit, fronting his feral Stooges, but nobody was orchestrating such cabalistic extravagance as John, beaming a slice of backwaters Louisiana befitting the intrepid air colouring the day’s rock and pop charts.
Such weird theatre would prove foundational for future shock rockers and dabblers in the macabre, owing it all to Dr John ‘The Night Tripper’s mysterious plume of voodoo spectacle from the swampy depths of Southern R&B and blues.
