Dr. John – Gris Gris

New Orleans remembered in Los Angeles

Gris-Gris was recorded in Los Angeles, but much of its musical memory belongs to New Orleans. Mac Rebennack had worked there as a guitarist, songwriter and session musician before moving to California in the mid-1960s. The recordings made at Gold Star Studios in 1967 appeared the following year under the name Dr. John. They introduced a new public identity: the Night Tripper, a character built from local stories, imaginative roles and musical experience. The debut presents a world considerably broader than the familiar image of a New Orleans pianist.

Harold Battiste was essential to the project. Another musician from New Orleans, he had become an arranger and producer in Hollywood, working with Sonny & Cher among others. That connection helped make studio time available for Gris-Gris. Battiste also shaped the production and performed on the album. Its creation can therefore be understood as an encounter between two places. Musicians with shared roots used a Los Angeles recording environment to develop something that rearranged those memories into a new and unusual musical setting.

Many instruments, many voices

The instrumentation extends from flute, clarinet and saxophone to guitars, mandolin, banjo and several kinds of percussion. Plas Johnson contributes tenor saxophone, Lonnie Boulden flute, and Steve Mann bottleneck guitar and banjo. Ernest McLean plays guitar and mandolin. Battiste is credited with bass, clarinet and percussion, and John Boudreaux with drums. Even before considering the vocalists, that collection of instruments suggests why an ordinary rock-band description would be inadequate. The individual colours are part of the album’s musical construction.

Shirley Goodman, Tami Lynn, Jessie Hill and Ronnie Barron are among the participating voices. Historical credits sometimes introduce the players with humorous names and invented titles, extending the world of the Dr. John persona onto the sleeve. Behind those playful descriptions are identifiable musicians with specific skills. The available credits establish album personnel without assigning every contribution to a particular selection. The ensemble should therefore be understood collectively, as a combination of singers and instrumentalists rather than a fully documented series of track-by-track line-ups.

A seven-song sequence

The titles lead through dances, characters and imagined scenes. “Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya” opens the record before “Danse Kalinda Ba Doom”. Rebennack and Jessie Hill share the writing credit for “Mama Roux”, while “Croker Courtbullion” is Battiste’s composition. The names connect the musicians’ backgrounds with their creative reshaping of inherited material. The album’s identity is already present in its repertoire, rather than depending solely on the visual presentation of its lead performer. Its songs and voices participate in creating the world that the sleeve introduces.

“I Walk On Guilded Splinters” closes the programme and subsequently travelled well beyond it. Cher recorded the song, and Humble Pie later made it an extended part of their live repertoire. The Cher connection brings the story back to the studio time that had helped the original recording happen. Within Gris-Gris, however, the piece remains the conclusion of a seven-track album. Listeners who first encountered it through another performer can hear it here in the context from which those later interpretations emerged.

The Atlantic 75 pressing

This is AAPA 046-45 in the Analogue Productions Atlantic 75 Series, a double LP on 180-gram vinyl running at 45 RPM. Ryan K. Smith at Sterling Sound is responsible for the mastering and lacquer cutting, with the publisher naming the original master tape as the source. The release contains all seven original selections and no bonus material. The first three sides hold two tracks each, while the complete fourth side is devoted to “I Walk On Guilded Splinters”.

A Stoughton Printing tip-on gatefold jacket provides two pockets for the records. Quality Record Pressings is specified by the publisher; later unnumbered pressings in the series may also come from RTI, so a particular numbered copy is not assumed. The edition offers a clearly defined presentation of the 1968 debut. Behind its extraordinary central character are a specific recording place, period and group of musicians: an ensemble working in Los Angeles in 1967 to give its shared musical memories a new form, with Battiste and Rebennack at the centre of the undertaking.

You order from Michael 45 in Germany. We arrange the US import and dispatch from Hilden.

Also on SACD: Gris Gris

More by Dr. John: In The Right Place · Dr. John’s Gumbo

Customer questions: Atlantic 75: which titles are worth buying? · Buying Analogue Productions records in Europe

Series: Atlantic 75 Series – all 75 albums, time journey and the people behind Atlantic

Musicians

Participants and documented credit status. Track references correspond to the tracklist.

Album credits without confirmed track assignments. Disputed roles are not included as confirmed.