Offbeat Magazine

The Creole Rat Pack
By Richard Giraldi

In 2006, Paul Sanchez walked away from the rock group Cowboy Mouth, a band he helped form 16 years ago. He had lost his house to Katrina's floodwaters, and once he was off the road, he started the process of dealing with the storm--something touring helped stave off. He later developed a seizure disorder that makes it difficult for him to tour.

Some would have called it a career, but Sanchez shows no signs of slowing down. He currently resides in the Marigny and performs regularly at Frenchmen Street clubs such as d.b.a. He will also soon release two projects, a brand new solo record, Exit to Mystery Street, and John Boutte’s new album, Good Neighbor which he co-produced.

Sanchez jokes that Boutte and himself are the “Creole Rat Pack,” or the “black and white New Orleans.” They met at a backyard party thrown by musician Michelle Shocked, whom Sanchez met during his time in New York City. They developed a friendship that led to mutual admiration when they realized the eerie similarities in their lives. Their birthdays are one day apart. Their sisters raised them both, and their fathers were buried in the same cemetery at the end of Canal Street. But the idea for producing a Boutte album didn’t come to Sanchez until they performed together at a Musicians’ Clinic benefit for a group called The Threadheads during last year’s Jazz Fest.

“Afterwards one Threadhead,(Chris Joseph), came up to me and said, ‘That was great, you guys should make a record.’ And I said, ‘Well, we would need money,’” says Sanchez. “He asked how much? I gave him a figure and he said great.”

Sanchez felt so strongly about recording something special with Boutte that he scrapped the original idea of an acoustic record. Instead, Sanchez asked the producer of his new solo album, Dave Pirner, to help out with Boutte’s album. Pirner, the Soul Asylum front man impressed Boutte and joined on as Good Neighbor’s co-producer. Sanchez would arrange the songs, but he left the recording mechanics to Pirner. The three didn’t stop with Boutte’s album, however. They regrouped for the recording of Sanchez’s Exit to Mystery Street.

Shortly before his departure from Cowboy Mouth, Sanchez finished an album titled Between Friends, which features a number of his favorite New Orleans singers on his original compositions. Sanchez admits it probably wasn’t the best solo move because it made booking gigs difficult, so he decided it was time for a true solo effort. “I wanted to do something tracing my New Orleans roots. I wanted to see what New Orleans was for me. I didn’t know. I was lost,” says Sanchez.

Sanchez found his inspiration in an unlikely source, friend and Los Angeles screenwriter Coleman DeKay, who was in New Orleans last spring for Jazz Fest. “He had this really wild story about having come to Jazz Fest a few years earlier and met this beautiful blonde who he thought was a witch and all this weird stuff,” says Sanchez, “Having been married happily for 14 years, it was great to be able to write a song about having sex at Jazz Fest and taking mushrooms and bachelor adventures.” Sanchez and DeKay collaborated on the song, “Exit to Mystery Street,” which became the title track to Sanchez’s new album.

Shortly after writing more new material with DeKay and Boutte for Exit to Mystery Street, Sanchez developed a concept for the album. “I wanted the record to sound like you are walking down Frenchmen Street and sticking your head in a different bar and hearing a different band at every stop,” says Sanchez. The record features guest spots from a number of prominent New Orleans musicians including Matt Perrine, Ivan Neville, Susan Cowsill, Big Sam Williams, John Boutte, and Freddy Omar. Sanchez understands the importance of musical community, and these musicians not only inspired Sanchez but helped him grow as a musician. “If I get a gig and somebody is paying me enough money, I’m going to hire as many of those cats as I can to come by and hop up on stage with me because I love them,” says Sanchez, “They formed me. Did I produce John Boutte’s new CD? No. John Boutte produced me.”

A melancholy song from the broken cradle of jazz

Two years after Katrina, New Orleans music scene is a faint echo of its past

By Teresa Wiltz
THE WASHINGTON POST
Monday, August 27, 2007

NEW ORLEANS — In a crowded bar in the French Quarter, locals are passing a tip bucket while singer John Boutte whoops and hollers, crooning tales of regret and rage over the havoc wreaked by that witch Katrina. Adding his own spin to an old Randy Newman song, "Louisiana 1927":

Michael Williamson
WASHINGTON POST

(enlarge photo)

'People tell me I should get ... out,' says New Orleans musician John Boutte. 'Hell, no. Why should I leave? This is my home. My ancestors' bones are here.'

Michael Williamson
WASHINGTON POST

(enlarge photo)

Singer-songwriter Paul Sanchez, below, says, 'We all lost more than we can ever articulate.'

President Bush said, "Great job, good job!

"What the levees have done to this poor Creole's land . ..."

Backstage, the Virgin Mary gazes down from her perch on the wall while the bar's managers count the proceeds ... $147. They count again ... $147. And then hand the loot to Boutte, the son of seven generations of musicmaking New Orleans Creoles.

"I'm rich," Boutte says sardonically.

Two years post-Katrina, it's like this for the city's musicians: New Orleans may be the music mecca, the birthplace of jazz. But it's no place to make money.

Nearly 4,000 New Orleans musicians were sent scattering after Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005. Many of them have been trying to return ever since. Today, the soul of the city — its rich musical legacy — is at risk.

"Everything is shrinking," says David Freedman, general manager of WWOZ-FM, a public radio station in the city. "In the clubs, you get the impression that all's back to normal. When you start scratching the surface, it's smoke and mirrors.

"So many musicians have not come back. How many can we lose before we lose that dynamic? To what degree do we just become a tourist theme park?"

The waters rushing in from Lake Ponchartrain obliterated already fragile support systems. Neighborhood-based Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs, once the backbone of New Orleans society, helping their dues-paying members with burial and hospital expenses, have been displaced. Eighty percent of the city flooded; more than 200,000 homes were destroyed in the process. Rents have close to doubled since the storm.

The upside to calamity, if there is one, may be artistic.

"Post-Katrina, everybody is getting in touch with their New Orleans roots," says singer-songwriter Paul Sanchez, co-founder of the country-rock band Cowboy Mouth. "We all lost more than we can ever articulate. And as artists, it's our job to articulate that loss."

A Change is Gonna Come

By Geoffrey Himes

In early June, John Boutte was at his studio workspace in the French Quarter, the “Boutte Bat Cave,” as he calls it. When asked about the storm, he quickly demurs.

“I never use the word ‘storm’,” he says. “I always say, ‘When the levees failed.’ The problem wasn’t the storm; the problem was the levees.”

“What was it like?” he asks. “It was like standing by I-10 and watching your family suffer a car wreck and you can’t get up on I-10 to help them. That’s what it was like. I was able to communicate back to New Orleans; I had ‘Jesus on the Mainline.’ I could get a first-hand account of the madness. But there were no flights back to the city; how weird was that? Before that day, it had never crossed my mind to pray that my home would still be there when I got back from a trip. We take a lot of things for granted. They caught us with our pants down, and our dirty drawers were showing.”

He stayed with a sister in Orlando, Florida, then with a friend in Naples, Florida, then with friends of a friend in North Carolina. Finally, five-and-a-half weeks after the levees failed, he got back to his hometown.

“It was devastating,” he recalls. “Trees knocked down; houses knocked down. I thought I was finished crying, but my heart just sank. Every now and then I still get depressed. We all do."

“I received a lot of help from strangers and friends. MusiCares really helped out, and so did Higher Ground, Quint Davis’ group in New York. The generosity came from everywhere. I’m a proud kind of guy; I don’t want people to give me shit. I’ve always worked for it. It’s a humbling experience when you have to go to people and you find out how generous people can be. What goes around comes around; they’ll be blessed for everything they did.”

He met Cowboy Mouth’s Paul Sanchez at a party in Michelle Shocked’s backyard years ago.

“Paul and I hit it off,” Boutte says, “and he said, ‘Let’s write some songs.’ I hadn’t written any songs in a long time; I wasn’t sure I wanted to sing my own songs on stage. Anyone who’s done it will tell you that it’s scary to get onstage and sing; you might as well be buck naked. But when you’re singing your own songs, you’re buck naked with your heart cut open. I didn’t know if I wanted to expose all that. But Paul said, ‘Let’s get together and have a writing session.’

“We sat around getting to know each other, kicking around ideas and then we stepped outside to get something to drink at the K&B. We saw the graveyard, and Paul said, ‘My dad is buried there,’ and I said, “My dad’s buried there.’ I said, ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, we’re all going to end up at the foot of Canal Street.’ Paul said, ‘That’s brilliant; that’s a song.’ So we went home and wrote ‘At the Foot of Canal Street.’”

That became the title track of Boutte’s 1999 album, which also featured the Boutte-Sanchez composition “Sisters,” Allen Toussaint’s “All These Things” and Boutte’s original recordings of “Didn’t It Rain” and “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

When the levees failed last August, something shifted within Boutte. It was no longer enough to sing beautifully about romantic relationships. It was necessary to explore the pain, anger and hope of post-Katrina New Orleans in his music. But how? He could become a protest singer-songwriter, but that wasn’t his strength and there were too many of those already. No, his strength was interpreting old songs to give them new meanings.

He climbed the short stairs to the stage in the Jazz Tent with the front brim of his straw hat turned up, the sleeves of his pale blue shirt rolled up to the elbows and the cuffs of his white slacks rolled up to the knees. He was backed by an expanded version of his d.b.a. band, and every song they sang carried new connotations.

“I felt like we were forgotten,” he says. “We’re Americans; we’re native sons. We belong to this land. But people treat us like we’re like the red-headed stepchild of the family; everyone wants to come and rub that stepchild’s head once in a while. Then they go home and say, ‘That’s New Orleans; it’s not really part of the country.’”

The Jazz Fest set reached its climax on Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927.”

“Paul [Sanchez] and I were sitting on a porch in the French Quarter one night,” Boutte recalls, “talking about Jazz Fest. I was trying to pick his brain for ideas because I wanted this show to be special, especially after the levees failed. Paul said, ‘Just give them yourself. Give them New Orleans. People are hungry for New Orleans.’ Then he played me that tune, ‘Louisiana 1927,’ and I knew what he meant.

“I’d never heard the tune, though I’d had people come up and request it at shows. So it was fresh to me. I didn’t have to try hard to make it mine because I didn’t know any other version. Paul suggested that I personalize it, that I make it more significant for what’s happening now. So we started kicking around how we might change it. I realized that Randy Newman had written it from the perspective of someone on the outside looking in, but I wanted to sing it as someone on the ground, as someone here in the shit. We changed a few words and when I sang the tune, I went, ‘Wow.’”

At the Jazz Tent, Leroy Jones announced the song with a forlorn sigh of a trumpet solo, as if burying a soldier with honors. After a smack of a cymbal, Boutte sang out the news: “What has happened down here, y’all, is the winds done changed.” His voice had an R&B grit absent from Newman’s version, a New Orleans drawl that indicated just where “down here” was. “The river rose all day; the river rose all night,” he sang in a sad elegy. “Some people got lost in the flood; some people got away alright.”

“When I sing a song, I do it the first time under control,” Boutte says in June. “Then I do it the second time without control; I just let it come. You have to give people something familiar, so they know where they are. But once you make that connection, you can go anywhere; you can just let go.”

So after Boutte had sung Newman’s original lyrics through one time, he started to mess with them. “Check this out,” he shouted to the crowd. This time, the line, “The clouds rolled in from the north and it started to rain,” became “The clouds rolled in from the Gulf.” This time the line, “Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline,” became “Twelve feet of water in the Lower Nine.” Now a buzz was running through the crowd beneath the canvas tent. Many of these people had seen what 12 feet of water could do to the Lower Ninth Ward.

Reacting to that buzz, Boutte shouted to the band, “Break it down y’all.” The musicians cleared some space for the singer to go into his storytelling mode. Newman’s line about “President Coolidge came down in a railroad train with a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand” became Boutte’s line, “President Bush flew over in an aeroplane with about 12 fat men with double martinis in their hands,” and he added a cocaine-snorting sound as punctuation to his description of the Dubya Gang. That got loud laughter from the audience, but he got serious again when he asked, “Ain’t it a shame what the river has done to this poor Creole’s land?”

Now people were rising spontaneously from their folding chairs as if moved by the spirit in church. They egged Boutte on with hollering and hands waving above their heads. He responded with, “Looo-eeez-eee-annn-a, they’re trying to wash us away.” Who was trying to wash us away? Well, he’d made that clear in the previous verse. What were we going to do about it? “Don’t let them wash us away,” he cried again and again. The stomping, shouting crowd sang back at him, “Looo-eeez-eee-annn-a.” Singer and audience were united in a ritual of shared pain, shared hope and shared determination, and it seemed unlikely that anyone would ever wash them away for good.

“I’ve always performed with drama,” he says in June, “but since the levees failed, I’ve had to dig a little deeper. It takes a little more meditation and preparation than it did before. I have to connect with people’s suffering and find a way to bring them up. You don’t do that by putting on an act. You do it by being yourself, by being honest about your own suffering and finding some hope in the middle of all that. You do it by being as human as you can.”

CNN LIVE SATURDAY

Mardi Gras In New Orleans

Aired February 25, 2006 - 18:00 ET

LIN: Well, you were just listening to a new song called "Home" by the rock group Cowboy Mouth which reflects the mood of many displaced Katrina victims. The band is the city's favorite home-grown rockers. Paul Sanchez was heavily affected by Hurricane Katrina. But he joins us live now from New Orleans.

What does your performance at Mardi Gras mean to you?

PAUL SANCHEZ : I love it. My wife and I live in the French Quarter now. We lost our place. But we embrace New Orleans. We're glad it's Mardi Gras and glad we are home.

LIN: Your new CD, "Voodoo Shop," listening to some of the songs, they really hit home. I'm wondering, Paul, what refrain on this CD really expresses what you feel post-Katrina? Means the most to you?

SANCHEZ: Well, there's a song called "Home" on there that tells how it went down for all of us. And somebody asked me if it was my expression. And I said no, it was a scream of pain. That says it.

LIN: And you were 400 miles away in Atlanta finishing up this CD at the time when Hurricane Katrina was hitting. I'm wondering, Paul, what was it like for you to be so far away and watch this on television with the rest of America?

SANCHEZ: Well, my wife was with me. She's our tour manager. So I was relieved that the person I love most in the world was with me. And then you are horrified. Nobody could call anybody.

LIN: Yes, we are looking at your home. And the devastation. You can see the water line nearly up to the ceiling.

SANCHEZ: Yes, we had one suitcase apiece with us when we were in the studio making the record. And that's still to this day what we have. We rented a place in The Quarter. And got a bed and a couch and a TV so we could watch CNN.

And you know, that's home again now. We'll start again. We have each other and that's what we had then and that's the biggest relief, which a lot of folks didn't have and still don't. Losing the person you love most is worse than losing your stuff.

THE STORM STILL RAGES

By John Swenson on August 29, 2006 12:00 AM | Permalink

New Orleans native Paul Sanchez and his band Cowboy Mouth were recording new album Voodoo Shoppe in Atlanta when Katrina hit. As Sanchez sits on the front porch of a Creole cottage in the French Quarter on a beautiful spring day, a mule-drawn carriage ambles by lazily and friends stop along the street to chat. It’s hard to believe that only two blocks away devastation stretches for miles without end, but the tears Sanchez cannot hold back as he speaks of his hometown tell the story. Like so many other newly homeless New Orleans musicians, he lost everything in the flooding following Katrina, including the Gentilly home he and his wife Shelly owned, his music equipment and all his solo back catalog and merchandise.

“We were in shock,” he recalls. “My wife and I were online at a site she jokingly called yourhouseisunderwater.com and you could see a satellite picture of your house. We just got a new roof put on which was supposed to be hurricane proof. It was perfectly intact but the rest of the house was underwater. We sat there every day for three weeks looking at the house. I was down to all my possessions in a suitcase. We came back in December. It was weird; you see people going through the ruins of their house and you say, ‘don’t go through it, it’s useless.’ But when you’re there, it’s your house, so we stumbled through it and started going through all this wet stuff we couldn’t keep and then we realized you just have to say goodbye to your stuff. My house sat in sewage for three weeks, and every inch of the place, where you laughed and ate and made love, it’s covered with shit and you never want to see it ever again.”

Sanchez tried to figure out another place to live but realized he couldn’t survive away from the culture that’s nurtured him over a lifetime. “It’s really cool to be home,” he says. “The people are really beautiful and they make me very hopeful about the future. The politicians are useless; it’s the same old business. Let’s clean up the city; let’s get the rubble and the dead cars out of here. The people are the reason to be here—for moments like riding my bike with John Boutté to the second-line parade in his neighborhood. He took us to Claiborne and St. Bernard, a spot where he used to play ball—we came to this playground and there were literally hundreds of cars that had been ruined and abandoned after the storm. People were dancing everywhere and all of a sudden one of the kids in the crowd jumps on one of the cars and starts leaping from car to car. It was amazing. It was a statement, but not a violent statement; It was an expression of frustration, of dancing on the abandoned city. The whole day had been beautiful, white people and black people dancing together, celebrating New Orleans in that very unique way, doing a second-line. Dancing on the abandoned vehicles. Dancing past the destroyed homes. That’s New Orleans, that’s the jazz funeral right before your eyes.”

Happy Trails

He left the success of Cowboy Mouth behind,but Paul Sanchez isn't exactly ready to ride off into the sunset just yet

Friday, December 22, 2006

By Keith Spera Music writer

As the Canal Street ferry churned across the Mississippi on a recent afternoon, Paul Sanchez and jazz singer John Boutte stood at the rail, watching St. Louis Cathedral recede.

Boutte, a committed French Quarter-ite, relished the Algiers-bound perspective. "Sometimes it's good," he said, "to see things from the other side."

Sanchez smiled. "That's what I'm doing. But I'm taking it to the extreme."

In November, Sanchez left Cowboy Mouth, his primary musical outlet for 16 years. He and his wife, Shelly, still have no permanent home, after Hurricane Katrina's breached levees poured 9 feet of water into their Gentilly house. It has since been razed.

And so, at 47, Sanchez finds himself looking at life from the other side.

"We were so indecisive after Katrina," he said. "It got worse and worse. At first we couldn't decide where to live. Then we couldn't decide where to go on vacation. Then we couldn't even decide where to eat.

"Literally, the first decision I made since my house got flooded was to leave Cowboy Mouth."

Even as he barnstormed through 3,000-plus Mouth shows, he nurtured a side career as a singer-songwriter. With an acoustic guitar, he sketched sly, intimate scenes, alternately bittersweet, humorous and tender.

That is now his primary occupation. His new, seventh solo CD, "Between Friends," features guest vocalists -- including Boutte, Susan Cowsill, Theresa Andersson, Darius Rucker of Hootie & the Blowfish, and Kevin Griffin of Better Than Ezra -- interpreting his songs.

On Monday, Christmas Night, he'll co-headline Carrollton Station with former Deadeye Dick bassist Mark Miller. He's also booked at d.b.a. on Jan. 4.

Beyond that, "we're going to go a little slower, let the roux thicken, and see if we can't have a tastier gravy as a result," Sanchez said. "I'm doing it the New Orleans way. Whether it's singing, eating, drinking, . . . people in New Orleans take their time, because life is to be savored."

Days after quitting the Mouth, Sanchez and his wife left for a previously scheduled three-week vacation in Belize. They fell in love with the country and rented an apartment in San Pedro, a beach town on the island of Ambergris Caye.

Sanchez plans to spend the next few months strumming in beachside bars, returning to the United States for short tours.

"There's probably no musician I have more respect for than John Boutte. He sings in small rooms, but he sings all over the world and makes his living at it. He sings with a mastery that few singers ever achieve. That's a great life to aspire to. That's a New Orleans musician.

"So there won't be a tour bus or posters any more. I know what I gave up. It was 16 years of my life -- blood, sweat, tears, laughter, joy and pain. Fred, Griff and I built that band together. It was a great ride. But I gave it up for the right reasons."

"We weren't the most musical band, and 'nuance' didn't exist in our lexicon," Sanchez said. "But Fred gives a hundred percent. To be onstage with him, you have to give 100 percent. You're drawn into that energy. And that's why the audience is there."

They logged 200-plus nights on the road annually, surviving multiple breakups with managers and record labels to build a dedicated national following.

During a manager search in the late 1990s, they hired Jon Birge, a Tulane graduate and former CBS Records exec. Subsequently, Sanchez said, his relationship with LeBlanc, always tempestuous, disintegrated even further.

So Sanchez was disappointed to learn that his bandmates had rehired Birge this summer.

"I'm not saying he's a bad man, or a bad manager," Sanchez said. "But I found some of the things he was doing alienating. I tried to work with him for three months, and I couldn't."

So Sanchez walked. Ironically enough, "the year and a half after Katrina was the proudest I'd been of what we did. We played some great rock 'n' roll shows.

"We'd each lost parents, we'd lost New Orleans. We stayed on the road to work through that, partly because we couldn't come home and partly because we didn't know what else to do. It forged a bond.

"But the vibe was changing every day. After Katrina, I lost everything. I wasn't going to lose my love for Fred, Griff and Cowboy Mouth. I wanted to quit while I still loved them."

In Belize, he realized the full ramifications of his resignation.

"That was the scariest part, knowing that I didn't have a house, a job, a manager or a booking agent," Sanchez said. "What am I going to do? Show up with a job application that says, 'I played 16 years in Cowboy Mouth'?"

"The first few days in San Pedro, I was a little in shock and a little sad. But it's a wonderful, healing place. I was glad to be there and look at life as present and future, not just past."

Three years ago, he started hosting informal recording sessions at Beatin Path guitarist Mike Mayeux's home studio in Chalmette. When Mayeux evacuated before Katrina, he saved the hard drive containing the recordings that became "Between Friends."

Guest vocalists took Sanchez songs in unexpected directions. He planned to trade lead vocals with Peter Holsapple on "Lonely Wasted and Blue." Then Theresa Andersson, originally slated to sing background, took a turn.

"Peter looked at me halfway through the first take and went, 'We're fired,' " Sanchez said. "She wiped us both off the track."

Former Jolene singer John Crooke remade "Fool's Gold" from an upbeat country song to a slow dirge. Bonerama's Mark Mullins recast "No Bothering You" as "old New Orleans" with drummer Herman Ernest. Kevin Griffin croons "Someone Again," then has fun with the children's song "Wake-y-up-o."

After Hootie drummer Jim Sonifeld recorded "Leaving," his bandmates reworked the track for the 2005 Blowfish album "Looking for Lucky" and a subsequent live CD.

Sanchez wrote the "folky protest song" "Wake Up" with Hootie guitarist Mark Bryan as a carefully considered anti-war anthem. "We wanted to say we didn't agree with the war," Sanchez said. "But he had a friend going to Iraq, and I had a nephew going. So we didn't want to be negative. We wanted to say, 'I love you, but I wish there was another way.' "

Boutte sang a new arrangement by multi-instrumentalist Loren Pickford, a style Sanchez dubbed "Creole swamp protest."

"I learned so much from everybody," he said. "It was a fantastic experience."

Sanchez lost the remaining stock of his first six solo CDs -- as well as the master tapes -- in his flooded house. He asked fans to send copies, so he could dub tracks for the upcoming "Washed Away" compilation.

He sees a mixed, but hopeful, message in its title.

"My life was washed away, but it's not just a negative connotation," he said. "It means your sins are washed away as well. It's a fresh start."

Chicago Sun Times

Cultural traditions serve singer's soul

July 23, 2006

BY MARY HOULIHAN Staff Reporter

Walk down the tree-lined streets of New Orleans' Faubourg Marigny neighborhood on a hot sultry night, and chances are you'll hear John Boutte's voice floating out of one of the area's trendy nightspots. Perhaps he'll be singing soulful versions of Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" or Annie Lennox's "Why," or maybe it'll be one of the bayou-blended tunes he's co-authored with Paul Sanchez, his pal from the alt-rock band Cowboy Mouth.

Whatever the song, its soulfulness will stop you in your tracks, for Boutte lives and breathes the heart and soul of New Orleans.

Born into a large Creole family that goes back seven generations in Louisiana, he was exposed to music early in life, soaking up New Orleans jazz, soul, blues and gospel, then adding his own Creole traditions along the way. Today, Boutte works with a wonderful amalgam of styles -- from torchy jazz to aching soul and African-American gospel -- all convincingly delivered.

"John is the embodiment of all that's good about New Orleans," Sanchez said. "His voice is the poetry of the language of New Orleans. It's uncanny but he makes whatever style he's singing completely believable."

Boutte has performed all over the world -- but never in Chicago. Thanks to Sanchez, he is making his local debut Monday night at Schubas as part of an acoustic show fronted by Sanchez and also including John Thomas Griffith and Sonia Tetlow, also of Cowboy Mouth.

One of the hightlights of the show is sure to be Boutte's rendition of Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927," a song that's gotten a lot of mileage since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans last August -- and possibly the best American song ever written about a flood. At this year's New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, Boutte brought the crowd to its feet when he sang his wrenching version, which he reworked with Sanchez to describe Katrina's devastation, substituting "Lower 9" (indicating the city's flood-wrecked Lower 9th Ward) for the word "Evangeline" and closing with the plea: "Don't let them wash us away."

As evidenced by the song's biting lyrics, Boutte never has been shy about voicing his beliefs about New Orleans and its problems, which he says "began a long time ago." When the flood waters hit, he was performing in Brazil and didn't return home until October. Everyone in his family survived, but houses were lost, including those built by his father, grandfather and great-grandfather.

"Katrina never actually hit us," Boutte said, emphatically. "The failure of the levees is what hit us, and they were designed to fail. 'Louisiana 1927' is about just that sort of situation."

Musical brothers

Boutte found a kindred spirit when he met Cowboy Mouth's Sanchez; they were introduced by singer-songwriter Michelle Shocked at one of her infamous backyard parties.

Born in New Orleans on the same day, year apart, Boutte and Sanchez both have a deep love of the city, its people and traditions. The complex seduction of this Southern city deeply informs their songwriting. Sanchez's song "Voodoo Shoppe," the title cut on Cowboy Mouths new disc, was inspired by Boutte's neighbor, a voodoo priestess.

"There were interesting things going on in that courtyard," Sanchez said, laughing. "It was definitely a New Orleans moment. I learned a lot hanging out there."

As New Orleans rebuilds and tries to find its new identity, people like Boutte are an integral part of that reconstruction. With his personal history and "stranger-than-fiction" life, he's a direct connection to the French Creole and black traditions that go back to the city's early days.

"It's a language and culture that celebrates life in its own special way," Sanchez said. "John brings that to the stage with the stories he tells and the songs he sings."

Boutte admits he was nervous about this year's Jazz Fest performance. He knew it would be emotional, and he wanted to help people bury the past and look to the future. But Boutte also wanted to make a statement.

"Sometimes you have to have a funeral before you can move on," Boutte said, pausing. "I think my performance was a sort of therapy both for me and the audience. People were aching for New Orleans, and I wanted to assure them that until we wipe the entire human race off the face of the Earth, New Orleans is still going to be there."

mhoulihan@suntimes.com

Cowboy Mouth Finds a Way Home
By JOHN SWENSON

Offbeat Magazine

March, 2006

Fred LeBlanc’s persuasiveness is the key to his art and the not-so-secret ingredient to Cowboy Mouth’s success. He will do anything to stimulate a crowd — climbing the scaffolding and diving into the audience are typical moves, although he’s given up the practice of throwing the drums into the audience at the end of the set.

“He’s like a cartoon character,” says Paul Sanchez, whose relationship with LeBlanc goes back more than 25 years. “If he has to, he’ll light himself on fire. It’s a trick he can only do once, like Daffy Duck does in the cartoon, but he’s willing to go there".

The band has never had an album that approached that stage intensity until now. After 16 years of struggles, close encounters with stardom, a string of managers and record labels and a bass player problem reminiscent of Spinal Tap’s difficulty keeping drummers, the band is working together more closely than ever, energized by new bassist Sonia Tetlow, and it recently released what is by far the best recording it has ever made, Voodoo Shoppe. The title track is a clever R&B-influenced song about the former apartment of Sanchez’s good friend singer John Boutté, who lived upstairs from a botanica.

Sanchez gave the drummer his first job when he was just out of high school.

“He came to my garage,” Sanchez recalls. “The garage door’s open, this kid drives up and reaches into his trunk and pulls out this drum kit that looks like a toy. It’s really a small kit. He drags it up the driveway and I’m going, ‘Oh. no!’ So I say, ‘Okay, let’s try this’ and it was immediately obvious that he was a good drummer. I asked him to sing some harmony on ‘Sit Down I Think I Love You’ and it was obvious he had a great voice, too. So I said ‘Cool, you're in the band.’ He says ‘Let’s take a ride to the store.’ We go to the store, he buys a pint of Jack Daniels, asks me if I want a sip and I said ‘No, not really I've gotta go back and rehearse.’ He says ‘Okay!,’ downs the whole thing and says ‘Okay, let's go play!’ I thought it was going to be a rough ride. It was.”

Their stormy partnership was the flip side of the band’s charismatic impact as they fought like Martin and Lewis delighting an ever-growing audience. They played together for several years as the Backbeats during the early 1980s before breaking up. LeBlanc joined a rockabilly band, the Mistreaters, before signing on with Dash Rip Rock, where he made his first big splash. Meanwhile, Sanchez moved to New York to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter.

“I swore I’d never play in a band with Fred again,” says Sanchez. “Then I met with the guy who produced Neil Young’s Harvest, and he was interested in signing me, but he wanted to hook me up in a writing partnership with this drummer from New Orleans…”

Sanchez turned him down, but when LeBlanc called him two years later and asked him to join his band, Sanchez reunited with him. The two had known John Thomas Griffith’s work with the Red Rockers from the Backbeats days and asked him to join. The sound was magic, but the old tensions surfaced immediately. With only days to go before their first gig, they had a problem.

“We needed a name, and Cowboy Mouth was the only name we could all agree on,” says Sanchez. “It was the only name that didn’t spark an argument. I read the play, and the monologue about what rock ’n’ roll means is great and Fred sort of lives that, he’s a rock ’n’ roll savior with a dirty mouth.”

Griffith had a hard time coming to terms with the confrontational atmosphere in the group.

“When I joined the band, we went out on the road those first years and they would fight like cats and dogs,” he says. “I never understood it. I thought you were supposed to get along in bands, hang out, party together and have that camaraderie. There was always friction. It was horrible.”

Cowboy Mouth continued to be a popular touring band, but the group never really found itself in the studio, even after being signed for major label deals with MCA and Atlantic Records. “We used to write the songs quickly and go into the studio and bang them out in between tours,” says LeBlanc. “So our records sounded like a bunch of guys banging it out in the studio.” Voodoo Shoppe , on the other hand, emerged out of the chaos that followed a period when the band agrees it probably came closest to breaking up.

“It got to the point where we accepted where we were and didn’t bother to do too much about it,” says LeBlanc.

As the ’90s came to close, the band seemed adrift. The respect that accompanies a cup of coffee on major labels had worn away, and it was surviving on the strength of the band’s collective energy. The individual members were growing apart creatively, though, and side projects seemed more important. Sanchez made six solo albums and his most significant writing partner was Boutte, while the last Cowboy Mouth studio project, Uh Oh, was essentially a LeBlanc solo record.

“We came close to the end many times, and each one of us individually came close to leaving,” says Sanchez.

On previous albums, band members had all brought songs to the project. This time, they determined they would write all of the songs together.

“We decided to make a real Cowboy Mouth album for the first time,” says Sanchez.

The record was recorded in three locations with three different producers — Russ-T Cobb in Atlanta, Mark Bryan in South Carolina, and Mitch Allen and Mike Mayeux in New Orleans.

So there they were, in the studio late last August recording the final takes of an album that they felt would define Cowboy Mouth once and for all when the world came crashing down on them.

“We were all in shock,” says Sanchez. “The flood hits and Russ-T has got to finish the record with people who are literally sobbing, glued to the TV, glued to the Internet, watching our city being destroyed and then we would have to go on the road to do gigs and we came back and Rita was hitting. He was really calming. He kept it light, funny, kept it moving and made a record.”

The band’s newfound unity paid immediate dividends when new songs emerged in the aftermath of Katrina — “Home,” a defiant vow to rebuild the city and "The Avenue".

Playing live was difficult at first after the hurricane.

“I couldn’t imagine going through that hurricane with a band that wasn’t from New Orleans,” says Tetlow. “We didn’t have to explain how we felt to each other. I don’t know that I would have been able to play shows with any other band.”

At first, the band stopped playing one of its most popular songs, “Hurricane Party,” which Sanchez had written about deciding not to evacuate during Hurricane Andrew.

“It was almost impossible for us to play,” says Sanchez. “I just couldn’t do it. The kids like to throw tootsie rolls during that song and those tootsie rolls landing on the stage sounded like nails in my heart. I just couldn’t sing the song, but kids just kept holding up their New Orleans driver’s license and calling for it. Finally, we got home and we were doing the reopening of the House of Blues show and we put it back in. It was cathartic because it’s the nature of live performance, but they were the most difficult shows I’ve ever played in my life. The best thing about playing music is that you can disappear in the moment.”

Times Picayune - Lagniappe

December 21st 2001

Keith Spera

When Cowboy Mouth guitarist and vocalist Paul Sanchez Steps away from his day gig, it's to craft intimate, instantly memorable unplugged albums.

His traditional Christmas weekend performance will also serve as an unofficial release party for his latest CD.

"Hurricane Party" is something of a departure for Sanchez. Past solo efforts adhered to mostly to the acoustic folk tradition; "Hurricane Party", produced by Tim Sommer - the former Atlantic A&R rep who signed Hootie and the Blowfish - features fully fleshed out arrangements. The Continental Drifters' Peter Holsapple and The Bangles Vicki Peterson pitch in, as do Susan Cowsill, Bonearama trombonist Mark Mullins, members of Tom's House and jazz/r&b vocalist John Boutte. "Foot of Canal Street" opens like a dirge, then kicks into a parade beat, as it would for a jazz funeral. At this weekend's show, expect Sanchez to showcase "Hurricane Party" material and old favorites, including his tale of holiday woe, "I Got Drunk This Christmas."

Off Beat Magazine
July 2000
-letters to the editor-
Falling Down
Missy Hecksher's review of Paul Sanchez's show at the Carrollton Station and his live record that has just been released was excellent. I remember being at "The Station" on the night of Sanchez's show (January 15, 2000) and it was fantastic. When Peyton's brother Cooper Manning and his girlfriend(wife?) had trouble getting in the door. I knew it really was"Sold Out!"

Thanks, Ms. Hecksher for the great review. I could not have described the great evening and c.d. any better. My personal favorite from the night was "They Were Married"(though I do like "I Got Drunk This Christmas" too). When Igot the c.d. and listened to the guy in the audience falling down again I couldn't believe it! "LOL!"Keep on writing!

October 01, 2007

John Boutté Knows What It Means