What's it like to miss New Orleans? A cliche question. Nonetheless, the ache is there. At times there is actual pain. It's such a unique city it gets under your skin deeper and stays longer than any other place I know. I lived there for some 25 years, and was born and raised on the Mississippi Gulf Coast just up Highway 90--then, I-10 now--from the city of dark dreams, white linen and red-hot music of many flavors.
Almost everyone I love with the love that transcends all other loves, lives in New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
Happy Jazzfest: Linda, Joseph, Michelle, Sylvia, Reagan...and the Cavaliers from the Biloxi River to the Pacific Coast Highway.
So many wonderful Jazzfests I remember, from the earliest days, to the last one I attended. It was for the Jazzfest wedding of a just-about-life-long friend, M.C. Gainey--yes, the actor, and the ceremony was right there under the big tree. It was only a couple of months before Ellen and I left the U.S. for China in August, 2002.
NEW ORLEANS, April 28 -- Of course Bob Dylan had the appropriate songs when he headlined the first day of the 37th New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, a celebration of New Orleans culture where Hurricane Katrina was on everyone's mind.
He didn't say a word beyond introducing his band. But he sang the baleful "High Water" and the not-so-carefree "Watching the River Flow"; he sang "Lonesome Day Blues," with lines like "The road's washed out -- weather not fit for man or beast." When he sang "Positively Fourth Street," it sounded like an indictment of the government's response to the hurricane; when he closed his set with "All Along the Watchtower," his band played power chords like warnings of the apocalypse.
Mr. Dylan, who recorded his album "Oh Mercy" in New Orleans in 1989, wrote about the city in "Chronicles, Volume One," his autobiographical book. "There are a lot of places I like," he wrote, "but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment." He added that it was "a great place to really hit on things."
