Jackson Hole Underground

(The Neville Brothers were in Jackson last night to play a concert at Center for the Arts. Last summer, before their performance at Targhee Fest, I sat down with the venerable keyboardist Art Neville, aka Poppa Funk, for an interview, in which we discussed the fate of The Meters, the state of New Orleans, football and the Iraq War.)

It was late in the afternoon, and golden light bathed the Targhee basin. A black SUV pulled up behind the stage, and out stepped one of my musical idols, Art Neville.

A crew member helped him from the vehicle, and he walked slowly with a cane. I set up two folding chairs. There was a break in the festival, and it was quiet.

I asked him how he was feeling, having heard that the band was struggling with the altitude at 8,000 feet. “I feel pretty good,” he said, “as long as you don’t have any wild animals running around.”

This was his first visit to the Teton Range. I asked him what he thought of Wyoming. “Good people,” he said. “I can see that already.”

The Neville Brothers were traveling across the country on their 30th anniversary tour, and the 69-year-old Neville was savoring every moment. “At this stage of the game, I treat everything as a blessing, especially being with my brothers,” he said. They are still “little bitty boys with a heart of steel,” he grinned, borrowing a line from the song “Hey Pocky A-Way.”

He lit a cigarette, and took in the view. Splinters of sun glimmered among the pines. We got right into the Neville Brothers’ musical heritage. Who were the parents who spawned such a funky family?

The legacy started with his grandmothers, he explained, along with his grandfather “Slaughter” Neville and great uncle “Sly,” all lovers of music. The first real performers were his mother, Amelia Landry, and her brother, George, who had a dance team that was “incredible,” Neville said. “All the old people would talk about them.”

He recalled growing up in the Calliope Projects in New Orleans, going to Catholic school taught by nuns, and later moving to Valence Street in the Uptown neighborhood, the same block where he still lives today.

“Music was all around us in the neighborhood,” he said. First it was gospel and R&B. Rock and roll came later. (Click photos to enlarge.)

Art Neville would play a role in developing that sound, first as a member of The Hawkettes, who recorded the 1954 hit “Mardi Gras Mambo,” and later as one of The Meters, the seminal funk group that had its heyday in the 1970s. In 1976, he and siblings Aaron, Charles and Cyril formed the Neville Brothers with help from his uncle George Landry, who became Big Chief Jolly of the Wild Tchoupitoulas, one of the tribes of Mardi Gras Indians who are integral to the city’s social traditions.

Besides performing with his brothers, since the early 1990s Neville has played with bassist George Porter Jr. in the reincarnated Funky Meters, now featuring his son Ian on guitar. The original Meters — featuring Porter, guitarist Leo Nocentelli and Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste on drums — reunited at the New Orleans Jazz Fest in 2005 and played a handful of gigs, but the reunion was short-lived.

I asked Art Neville whether the original Meters were going to tour again, and he shook his head. “The Meters ran its course,” he said. “I hated to see that group go.”

We talked about the progress — and lack thereof — New Orleans had made in rebuilding since Hurricane Katrina. He told me about his brother Cyril’s house being flooded with eight feet of water, and brother Aaron moving to Nashville. After a period of uncertainty, Art had resettled on Valence Street.

I asked if the Neville Brothers were going to perform together again at Jazz Fest, a delicate subject given Cyril’s incendiary remarks about racial cleansing. Art laughed, saying that’s the question everyone’s been asking, including Jazz Fest producer Quint Davis, who he had just seen in California. (Nine months later, the Neville Brothers would return to close out the festival for the first time since the hurricane.)

New Orleans “will never come back like it was,” he said.

I told him about the Raise the Roof benefit in Jackson Hole that raised $10,000 for Katrina relief, told him about my own story of going to Jazz Fest for the first time, seeing the Neville Brothers and Meters on the final day, and how the trip changed my life, turning me into a journalist. There must be thousands of other stories like this, I told him, of the strong connection people feel with New Orleans through music.

“I figure we’ve touched people we’ll never know,” he said.

I recalled seeing him perform with Funky Meters at the Saenger Theater one Jazz Fest, and how he looked up at the nearly all-white audience in the balcony and said that’s where he used to go to watch movies, the colored section. I asked him what it’s been like to see so much change in his lifetime, as the Neville Brothers have worked to promote peace and racial harmony.

“I see a lot of things that didn’t change,” he said, his mood suddenly growing somber.

“Like what?” I said.

“The war,” he said. I was caught a little by surprise; I knew he had served in the military (the Navy before Vietnam) and didn’t know where he stood on Iraq. But the grave look in his eyes would provide extra motivation as I organized the Jackson Peace Rally in the coming weeks.

We joked about Dick Cheney owning a home in Jackson Hole and about his hunting prowess. Neville shook his head with the jaded sense that no matter what he or I say, Dick Cheney won’t give a shit. “There’s a small percentage of people who can understand what it is to be peaceful,” he said.

All the while, it was a treat to listen to that voice, a low, husky rumble that says, “cool cat.” Every time I hear him sing “Mardi Gras Mambo” I am transported back to another era of music, a sound as distinctly American as Elvis Presley or James Brown.

He took a drag from a cigarette, probably his third of the interview, ashing into a soda can. I motioned toward the pack of smokes on his lap and chided him, “You know those are probably not helping you too much here at 8,000 feet.”

He laughed. “In my life, I’ve quit everything there is to quit — except cigarettes,” he said. “I can’t. It’s like the oil,” a reference to our discussion about Iraq.

I asked him about the Saints, who were coming off the best football season in the franchise’s history. Did he see any of the games? “I saw all of ‘em — on TV,” he said. “I had the best seat in the house.” I told him I am a Jets fan. “Broadway Joe — that’s my boy,” he said. “He’s a bad motherfucka.”

Occasionally he would pause to play with his cell phone. He has different ring tones for family members; when his daughter called, the phone rang with “Let It Snow.” Another of his tones is “Play That Funky Music White Boy.”

You’re into the new technology? I prodded him. He said he has two computers, one Mac and one PC, and uses ProTools for mixing music.

I asked him what’s his favorite song. He thought for a moment. “Don’t Know Much,” he said, a duet his brother Aaron recorded with Linda Ronstandt. The Nevilles would perform it that night at Targhee. He later added “Tell It Like It Is,” another of Aaron’s old hits.

I presented him with a small Wyoming flag and explained that I bring the banner to Jazz Fest every year and fly it at the Fairgrounds. Nearly every time the Neville Brothers have performed there since 1997, as well as during the Meters reunion, that flag has been in front of the stage.

“The white buffalo,” he said. We posed for a photo. It’s the state flag of Wyoming, I told him. “I know what it means,” he said. “My brother Cyril told me about it.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, so after the festival I did a little research online and was embarrassed to find out that the white buffalo has special significance in Native American culture, a sign that peace is coming. Cyril Neville has been an activist for native causes, and the brothers sing about the reservation in songs like “My Blood.” That gave me a chill.

We talked briefly about fishing, about how he ought to take the family to Wyoming for a vacation and float the Snake River. A proud poppa, he was practically giddy as he talked about his family and how his son Ian had just bought a house in New Orleans. (Ian would visit the other side of the Tetons two months later to perform with Dumpstaphunk at the Jackson Hole Mountain Festival.)

By this point people were milling around the backstage area as the Neville Brothers prepared to go on. I looked up to see the Gospel Brother, Aaron, leaning on a fence behind my chair. “Doctor” Charles Neville was toting his sax. It was time to wrap it up.

What is the secret to making such funky music? I asked Art, citing the lasting legacy of the Meters. It’s no secret, he explained. “Positive thinking. The music is positive. You’ve got to have something to ease the pain,” he said.

And with that, I helped a crew member raise him from his chair, and Poppa Funk hobbled toward the stage.

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© 2008 by Jim Stanford — Click photos to enlarge.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 4:42 pm and is filed under music, funk, targhee, jazz fest, new orleans. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.