THE STORM STILL RAGES
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.”