Sunday was warm, but the zydeco and R&B at the Bayou Festival was hotter. I can’t remember the last time a local festival provided seating but there it was, tables, umbrellas and shade. A few die-hards claimed the Saturday crowd was denser than on Sunday; certainly years past in concerts – any concert or festival – had to have been better attended, that’s just the nature of our times.
The nature of the Bayou and Mardi Gras Festival was color mixed with a touch of the outrageous… highly decorated purple and yellow suits over spangled and sequined vests, matching hats and color-coordinated umbrellas. Mardi Gras wear is not street wear, except maybe in New Orleans and in Long Beach in late June. The color came alive during the New Orleans Traditional Brass Band pumping out “Down By the Riverside,” “Mama Don’t ‘llow” and “L’il Liza Jane,” all the while leading a parade of all the gaudily suited players and locals in shorts and tee shirts – festival wear in our town.
It was a two stage event, R&B with a Dr. John-inspired band on the smaller Club N’ Orleans Stage and a Bayou Stage with the zydeco and brass bands hypnotizing the crowd…they must have been hypnotized, as there was little reaction to the great sounds, but lots of intricate two-stepping on the sizable parque dance floor cooled out under a tent.
Nathan & the Zydeco Cha Chas were the real thing. The squeeze box guy brought several accordions and the washboard player kept the beat with what looked like gleaming pieces from the dinner table. They did an outstanding zydeco blues and mainly instrumental rendition of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home To Me.”
We left before the featured blues act, wanting to go out on a zydeco note. But we couldn’t resist stopping by the N’Orleans Stage to catch a few minutes of the Coasters… and wouldn’t you know it… they were also bringing back Sam Cooke on “You Send Me.”
On our way out of the Shoreline concert site, we stopped by the standing room only crowd – or should I say, stand as there was really no place to sit, except for the cost of a drink… and even then, most of those seats were taken – Soul Motion concert on Pine and Broadway.
The superb Boogaloo Assassins were blasting out a “Louie Louie” bass line and the vocalist urged the crowd – “eveybody do the Jerk!” And many people did. Young people did the spot-on hand motion at the Soul Motion. Was I the only one who reflected on “Louie Louie” originator Richard Berry and Don Julian who wrote “The Jerk” and with his soul group, the Larks, took it to the national top five in ’64…and how these two giants of R&B, doo wop and proto-soul music were regulars on my KLON R&B show in the 1980s… always ready to guest… sometimes showing up with no warning or bringing guests I could only dream of interviewing.
These two guys plugged me in and they didn’t have to…that’s just how much they loved the music they created – Don Julian and “The Jerk” and Richard Berry and “Louie Louie” – and on Sunday, the Boogaloo Assassins crowd was non-stop dancing to what had been created when these two were as young as those dancers.
Which means the next column is about KLON’s founding as a jazz station in ’81.