Treme #3

Dear John,

I’m offering you this first piece as a means of introduction, but also to shamelessly plug my record, which is kind of why I’m doing this.

I also promise you next week’s installment will be way less wordy.

There are several excellent web sites that explain and dissect the 20 plus songs per episode of Treme. In this blog I’ll try and focus on just a few and offer what special insight I may have. Who am I? Let me explain.

In the summer of 2005 I wrote and recorded my fourth record, The Once and Future DJ. Having crawled from the burning wreckage of my funk big band juggernaut All That, I had eschewed my B-3, Clavinette and Rhodes for a plain old piano and a quartet. Singing, not rapping. At the tender age of 30 I’d given up on trying to make it in the music business, but I figured another record would lead to a few more little local gigs to supplement the minimal income and assuage the drudgery of teaching elementary school music.

On Saturday April 28th, 2005 I put the master disk and a check for 1000 copies in the mail at the post office on Loyola Avenue.

Oh what a difference a slight hurricane and a major civil engineering failure can make.

The master disk was washed away but my producer had evacuated with his hard drive and my baby was not lost in the floodwaters. By mid September I held my CD release party, in the East Village of New York, not Frenchman Street in New Orleans.

Offbeat Magazine editor and writer John Swenson divides his time between NY and NO, needless to say he was in New York at the time and I gave him a copy. Offbeat Magazine returned to print in December of 2005 and Swenson wrote a review of the disc. David Simon was in New Orleans researching a show he was going to pitch to HBO. He read the review, bought the record and decided to base one of the main characters on me.

Okay music junkies, see if you can follow this chain of events.

I made a good record, it got a good review, somebody important read the review and a worm hole opened up where I got to quit my day job and go back to making music for a living. I know it seems mythical, but this really happened.

So, the song I’d like to spotlight for episode three is a composition of mine entitled “Strippers.” I wrote this tune in about five minutes. I was getting stoned on my balcony in the Treme neighborhood when, well let me quote the lyrics.

well I was hanging on my balcony

having myself a little smoke

well I was hanging on my balcony

having myself a little smoke

when this white girl walked by

I tell y’all it ain’t no joke

well she had great big breasts and a really small dog

and I’m sitting here and staring like a bump on a log

she walked into Cicciao’s bought herself a little something sweet

took her dog and her candy bar and walked off down the street

I saw her the very next day

with some friends who were similarly endowed

I saw her the very next day

with some friends who were similarly endowed

and as a property owner I had to sing ‘cause I was so proud

I got strippers

moving in my neighborhood

I got strippers

moving in my neighborhood

well you can call it gentrification

but I’m gonna call it good

In episode #2 Davis first spies said young women. We see the strippers again in episode #3 and then we see the scene of Davis writing the lyrics on his wall. Davis’ real life friend Henry Griffin arrives and Davis plays the song for him, on guitar - not piano.

One morning last December I was sleeping late. because I can and I open my door to see the street has been blocked off by a few big Hollywood trucks. It’s all lights camera and so on. Walking down the street one way are two hot young women with great big breasts walking really small dogs. Going down the street the other way is Steve Zahn, gawking.

Ahhh, I thought, life is a strange and beautiful thing. Or life imitates art, that depends if you wanna call the Strippers song art.

Are there other songs on this disc that spin into plot threads for the character Davis? Brah, I signed a confidentiality agreement I ain’t saying shit, but perhaps you’ll listen to the record, available on eMusic, and see what happens.