Gris-Gris

Dr. John | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (May 9, 2000)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Collector's Choice
• ASIN: B00004SW9R
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Music
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #160,020 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #79 in Music > Indie Music > Rock > Blues Rock

Track Listings

1. Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya

2. Danse Kalinda Ba Doom

3. Mam Roux

4. Danse Fambeaux

5. Croker Courtbullion

6. Jump Sturdy

7. I Walk On Guided Splinters

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Covered in a variegated spray of New Orleans Mardi Gras feathers and shiny voodoo baubles, Mac Rebennack's highly personal mythology was finally made real on this 1968 album. This was his first appearance made under the new guise of Dr. John Creaux, the Night Tripper. Before then, he'd been a pivotal figure on the Crescent City R&B circuit. Afterward, he became one of its most significant blues ambassadors. This album is a classic of the admittedly specialized psychedelic swamp-gumbo genre, boasting at least four tracks that have become cult favorites. "Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya-Ya," "Mama Roux," "Jump Sturdy," and "I Walk on Gilded Splinters" each delicately mix catchy choruses and weird spatial sound effects, with radical stereo separation, intensely croaking, close-quarter vocals from the doctor, pneumatic keyboard riffs, pinprick electric guitar, and booming Afro-Caribbean percussion. The album still stands at its original 33-minute length, with no bonus cuts unearthed, but its high density more than compensates for any brevity. --Martin Lonely

Product Description

The most exploratory and psychedelic outing of Dr. John's career, a one-of-a-kind fusion of New Orleans Mardi Gras R&B and voodoo mysticism. Great rasping, bluesy vocals, soulful backup singers, and eerie melodies on flute, sax, and clarinet, as well as odd Middle Eastern-like chanting and mandolin runs. It's got the setting of a strange religious ritual, but the mood is far more joyous than solemn. ~ Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 40 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars GET THIS ALBUM! January 8, 2000

By Michael Goodman

Format:Audio CD

If the only Dr. John stuff you've heard is his more trad New Orleans stuff, you may be unprepared for this amazing debut. This album sounds like it was recorded from the deep of a voodoo night! Specifically,it conjures up a gris gris(voodoo) ritual put on record with great percussion, spooky music that goes from something unbelievably funky(Mama Roux) to something almost barouque(the second and fifth tracks for instance) rooted in a different, darker side of New Orleans than, let's say, Fats Domino or Allen Touissaint! Swampy is a good adjective to describe it-echoey and delirious are two others! Vocally the arrangements are amazing with Dr. John taking center stage around both men and women singers weaving great lines and sometimes making animal sounds! The character of Dr. John (a real gris gris doctor from the 1800's) as well as all things hoodoo are the basis for all the lyrics. The musicians are playing very free and at times "out" so it may be a little too weird for some ears. But if you have adventerous tastes, this album belongs in your collection because there is definitley no album like it. It is evocative, funky, DANGEROUS, and, best of all, musically brilliant. You won't be disappointed.

69 of 76 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Je suis la grande zombi... May 26, 2000

By boeanthropist

Format:Audio CD

There've been various reissues of this album over the years -- Alligator, Repertiore, and now Collector's Choice -- I have no idea how this particular CD edition stands up -- Alligator's was great, Repertiore's sounded like it was mastered off shoddy worn vinyl and then de-noised to such an extent that the sound lost nearly all of its booming depths, and Collector's Choice (though again, I haven't heard this particular version) have as a label distinguished themselves over the past 7 or 8 years by allowing cut-rate remastering talent to come in and ruin some of the 1960s best and most obscure albums (Skip Spence's OAR, the United States of America album, etc.) -- whatever: forewarned is five-armed. As for the album itself, I've safeguarded an original ATCO pressing through countless rent-strikes, burglaries and relocations, and it's one of the few I'd actually admit into that stupid Desert Island Disc rostrum. It's worth reading Rebennack's shambling autobiography to get the larger story, but to wit: a bunch of seasoned New Orleans 50s studio vets, relocated to Los Angeles after many difficult narcotics travails and incarcerations, take advantage of (a) their Atlantic/Ertugen Bros. studio connex, and (b) the ubiquitously gullible hippy thing happening all around them, and come up with a psychedelic voodoo medicine show which (no matter how much of a joke some of them may later make it out to be) is far too genuinely steeped in authenic New Orleans culture and real studio chops to relegate it to the wastebin destined for so many other 'novelty' acts of the time. Chinese-water-torture percussion, snake-slick slide guitar, and Dr. John, the feathered crock-o-the-block himself, chanting fluid paregoric incantations to astral entities the rest of us wouldn't want to come within a light-year of. Scary, and late-night, and positively medieval in places. There have always been certain albums which make evil seem downright fun, but this seething cauldron is their king.

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A shadow play July 2, 1999

By "icb"

Format:Audio CD

Music to conjure memories I never had. Absolutely primal, the only things that I've heard to compare are maybe a couple of Hank Williams songs, and, oddly, Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures and Amon Duul II's Phallus Dei. Music that you feel has been around since the beginning, lurking somewhere, waiting to be played. The performances make me see shadows dancing across the New Orleans graveyards, where the tombs are above ground. "Walk On Gilded Splinters," forget about it - Humble Pie butchered it in a really fun way, so that's alright, and I think Johnny Jenkins did a version, but no one ever matched the smoldering mood that Mac Rebennack's band managed to give to it here. It's like they're playing it in a cave on the edge of a swamp or something. The rest of the album has the same mood: percussive, tribal, old European, very much a product of its place.

It's no surprise the album's out of print, obscure psychadelic classic that it is and record companies being what they are. Still, it's a shame. Gris-Gris is a masterpiece.