The Chicago Sun-Times published this interview December 15 with the most outspoken of the Neville Brothers at one point of Arlo Guthrie’s Amtrak train music tour on the City of New Orleans to raise funds for Katrina victims.
Thing is, he wasn’t not going to be in New Orleans at the end of Guthrie’s journey.
He says that there is nothing for left there for him or his brothers and their musical progeny, relatives and friends:
“Would I go back to live?” Neville asked. “There’s nothing there. And the situation for musicians was a joke. People thought there was a New Orleans music scene — there wasn’t. You worked two times a year: Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest. The only musicians I knew who made a living playing music in New Orleans were Kermit Ruffins and Pete Fountain. Everyone else had to have a day job or go on tour. I have worked more in two months in Austin than I worked in two years in New Orleans.
“A lot of things about life in New Orleans were a myth.”
Whenever friends or acquaintances said that they were planning on going or said that they were going to New Orleans to visit, I cautioned them. Don’t take whatever you see at face value. Don’t believe everything that you hear, because much of it is a lie. Even the gravesite of Marie Laveau in St. Louis Cathedral Cemetery may not contain the bones of the real voodoo queen. I’ve been shown by those who know at least one more unmarked site housing the bones of the mother, who was also named Marie. There was even a Marie III.
Neville said, “For a lot of us, the storm is still happening.” He and his wife have bought a house in Austin, TX. The Nevilles appeared at a big New York benefit for Katrina relief at Madison Square Garden, with Cyril wearing a teeshirt that had, “Ethnic Cleansing in New Orleans” written on it, as blacks, formerly 68 percent of New Orleans’ 451,000 residents have not returned in great numbers. Said 2005 Grammy nominee Marcia Ball about Cyril:
“Austin has so much to gain from Cyril,” Ball said in a phone interview from New York. “He was always the social conscience, the message man. He’s worked with kids and set up educational groups. He’s already approached Austin High School. Austin is a different kind of town than New Orleans, which has been a dead-end street for a lot of people for a long time. You can be the best graduate in a New Orleans public high school and there’s nothing for you.”
The other Nevilles are also exiles. Art and Aaron Neville and their families have settled temporarily in Nashville, TN. Charles Neville, however, has resided in rural Massachusetts for a decade.
When Katrina hit New Orleans, the Neville Brothers were performing in New York. They regrouped in Memphis, where Neville said that he found that the music scene was just as paltry as it was in New Orleans:
“Memphis was the same scene as New Orleans in that there were three clubs with 3,000 musicians trying to get gigs,” Neville said. “New Orleans has Tipitina’s, House of Blues and the Maple Leaf. The decision to go to Austin was a no-brainer. There was a good music scene.”
Tribunes might agree with what Neville had to say next:
“Now you got cats that come down there every now and then to be king of a parade or whatever. They couldn’t find helicopters to get people off of roofs, but they found helicopters to bring certain people in for photo ops. I’m not mad at anybody, but at the same time we put a lot into that city and never got what I think we should have got out of it.”
Nowadays, Cyril Neville and his wife Gaynielle appear in a weekly, Tuesday show called “New Orleans Cookin’ & Jukin'” at Threadgill’s in Austin. Gaynielle cooks red beans and rice and gumbo, and together they perform with their group, Tribe 13. Neville believes that they have been thoroughly accepted in Austin, long considered, along with its university area, as the “Berkeley of Texas.”
Look for some interesting stuff to come out of Texas in the next few years. But I don’t blame him for leaving entirely. Many New Orleans blacks in previous decades came to feel that they were limited by the city and what it had to offer and what it ultimately respected or cared about. They found themselves elsewhere where there were better opportunities: the West Coast, Chicago, Detroit, the East Coast. My father and stepfather were just those kinds of people who later brought their families or remarried and settled away from New Orleans where their circumstances improved.
Cyril Neville thinks the only reason that he would return to New Orleans would be if blacks had more ownership of businesses and venues in the city:
“People are talking to me, but some of the people I know went through much more than I did. There are 3,000 children missing in New Orleans. [The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children places the figure at 1,300.] Hundreds of bodies are waiting to be identified. The people of New Orleans have been scattered to the four winds. Their lives were determined by people in Washington and Baton Rouge before the storm hit. Without African Americans having ownership, economic equity and the same type of things the French Quarter gets — like tax cuts — the city will never be the same. The 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th Wards should have their own tourist commission. Build our own hotels and restaurants in those areas. The key is ownership. Then I would think about going back and living there. But we’re still practicing American democracy. How can we ever bring it to somebody else?”
What does that mean for thousands of other New Orleans musicians who don’t have the wherewithal as the Nevilles? Many still need the basics: food, shelter and medicine; and some are elderly, past their prime. They also need gigs. What do you think? Is New Orleans really done for as a place for music, much as Memphis and Chicago are relics of a blues and jazz scene that happened decades ago? I know that creativity, like the rise and fall of civilizations, comes and goes in cycles. What is left?