Mofro

S E T    L I S T

Skeeter Lazy Fo Acre Free Nare Sugar Fireflies Air How Junior Got his Head Put Out Dirt Floor Cracka Lochloosa 10,000 Islands Killing Mr. Watson Homework Manchild What You Lookin’ For Ho Cake Encore Seminole Wind Blackwater Harp & Drums Encore 2 Florida

Jook Savages Go Gotham
Or, Of Ho Cake & Trouble Funk While I despair of ever again encountering southern singers on the white hand side as immortal as those of Gregg Allman and Bobby Whitlock, John “JJ” Grey, the front man/cracker philosopher/conceptual artist of North Florida’s Mofro, possesses a genuine, rich voice as warm as sunshine that grabs a hold of your ear and won’t let go. Unwittingly perhaps, this swamp funk band has ascended the ranks by leaps and bounds since their first appearance in Gotham not so long ago — this show was their third time ’round — to sit at the vanguard of a diverse cluster of redneck acts remaking the Southland in their own image. If some enterprising director were to remake Easy Rider today no doubt Mofro’s music would be tapped as the perfect counterpoint soundtrack. Protesting land rape, fighting to save Dixie from the plague of swamp-clearing subdivisions, superhighways and Wal-Marts, these purveyors of “front porch soul” are men born to tote the burden of a mission but they don’t shy away from it and this gives their music legs. The way Grey came to testify was made plain during “Lochloosa”, a celebration of a Deep South preserved in amber, and “Free” when he declared that “freedom don’t come cheap.” Even before he took the stage, asking “How y’all doin’ tonight?” folks was primed for some other shit after a great segue from ReRe’s “Baby I Love You” to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s cover of JJ Cale’s “Call Me The Breeze”. And Grey obliged, hopefully promising “thrills, spills and chills.” ”Air”, my favorite, a mind and spirit-expanding song buoyed by haunting Fender Rhodes from the evening’s MVP from Tallahassee Mike Shapiro, spurred the wall-to-wall throng to spontaneously sing along and me to remark — as Grey shook his maracas and tambourine — of the primary “minority” in the house: Asians getting’ fonky! Gwine with yo’ bad selves. At one point Grey made clear his favorite topics to sing about — beautiful women, (soul) food and surfing — thus the majority of the songs at Mercury revolved around southern pride, food (collards and grits and poke chops) and booty in that order. One song, “Homework” by the late Boogie King John Lee Hooker, contained great innuendo in lyrics like “gotta do my homework, gotta stay home” and featured both Jacksonville native/NYC resident Bob Reynolds on tenor sax and Shapiro vamping on what seemed to be the riff from Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” — via Sly Stone’s “Thank you falettinme be mice elf agin” of course. A cover of Muddy Waters’ legendary lover man boast “Mannish Boy” followed, inspired by Grey’s recent repeat viewing of The Last Waltz DVD: “I make a deaf woman hear, I make a blind woman see…Ain’t that a man?” Grey also repeated Arkansas drummer Levon Helm’s (The Band) great line about his mostly Canadian group’s successive trips to crack the Big Apple and how the cold metropolis “kicked [their] ass three times before it healed up” and they’d learned how to conquer. Brer had the crowd most in his pocket when on new song “What You Lookin’ For” with its fine “If You Want Me To Stay” bass line he purloined a rap from the immortal trash-talking diva Millie Jackson’s live albums. Comparing Miz Millie to a cross “between Tina Turner and Richard Pryor,” Grey echoed her admonishments from the stage about ugly men and the work they have to do in their pursuit of women, ending on an urgent chant of “give it up goddam, give it up!” Dropping hilarious science like how that feminine favorite chocolate really has no staying power as a gift and is both “crack and an instant fat pill,” Grey claimed expertise in these advisory matters having once worked as a florist. It was his very own “blue” commercial, missing only Spike Lee actor John Canada Terrell silkily hawking the CD compilation Slow Jams (sponsored by cracker meal of course). He’d already strayed into Millie territory when singing “You can leave me for another woman as long as you bring me with you…” The band even got ’round to killins just before the beers were first topped up on a tune about “How Junior got his head put out” which saw French bass player Fabrice Quentin bringing the Bo Diddley beat; his skill was definitely friendly fire. As the played “Lazy Fo Acre” just after the opening kazoo-spiced instrumental, Grey looked over at Shapiro with sheer wonder as if he’d never heard the notes before. Not only is this a music first band but they are intriguingly complex and refreshingly sensitive to cross-cultural differences. Quentin is from Normandy — you think it’s impossible to fathom a funky bass from France but this is the hour to check your prejudices at the door; these whiteboys don’t fake the Funk — and befriended Mofro mainstays Grey and lead guitarist Daryl Hance when the latter pair resided in Tottenham, North London for a year during which time the singer broadened his horizons and no doubt sharpened his appreciation for such artists as Yellowman. He made an apt comment while chatting in “Nare Sugar” about how Jamaican dancehall reggae is but another version of his region’s jook house music; having resided in Barbados and occasionally frequented their Friday night fish-fry at Oistins on the South coast, it reminded me just how much them islanders are in love with country music. Everything about their worldview and approach to life, suggests Mofro are more than able conduits of this subterranean flux aesthetic of the African Diaspora and alert enough to harness its power to their own admirable ends. They are themselves fascinating, Quentin dancing with his instrument, Grey abandoning his slatted wood chair to wail on harmonica or exhort the audience to jump with him towards the firmament, flanked onstage by the almost impassive but deeply soulful Shapiro on organ, clavinet and Rhodes and Hance subtly playing bottleneck, hunched over his axe. Everyone laughed with him when Grey introduced his boy at show’s end, referring to Hance as the “gentle, quiet, don’t wake him up giant” and warned the audience not to make him smile. The food songs, like much in-demand “Ho Cake”, hung tough but were overshadowed by the stunning emotional landscapes of the encores “Seminole Wind” — from Okeechobee to Micanopy, developers have taken their toll — “Blackwater” and the self-explanatory “Florida” helplessly overrun by amusement parks (as Grey sang, it reoccurred to me that we were forbidden to ever go to Disney World since my father considered Uncle Walt a fascist), death metal and Orlando teen pop and plastic resorts catering to Spring Break-bound college kids. The aforementioned “Lochloosa”, haunted by the minstrel grin of Mickey Mouse (a cartoon character originally conceived to mimic whitefolks’ erroneous notion of coon behavior) and Grey’s hated air conditioning, was the centerpiece of this loose suite, serving as a wistful paean to “every mosquito, rattlesnake and cane break” to be found in the primordial Garden of the black water swamps. Even derailed by broken strings on both guitars — Grey quipped “Y’all paid twelve dollars for the privilege (of seeing him restring his guitar) and I suck at it!” — the singer managed to sympathize with environmentalists and extol the virtues of JazzFest and its New Orleans locale so like a third world city that he loves because it doesn’t change and he admits to being “a dumb ass redneck who can’t get with the times.” Ah, men after my own Dixie-fried heart. These boys don’t shy away from politics or provocation. Or ruthless self-examination:

I left home for the good life
Left home for the good life
But man I felt alone — daddy say
How you gonna live if you don’t know which way up or down is Roll black water roll
Roll black water roll I woke up in a city
And I ain’t know which way was home
Guess I’m gonna leave come tomorrow (from “Blackwater”, words and music by John Grey)

Piloting the whole enterprise is the southern gift for story-spinning; it was a pleasure for a colleague and I to be regaled with true tall tales about generations of cracker culture in the Blackwater region and the Everglades by Brother Grey — peopled by fictional characters like the central couple in Zora Neale Hurston’s reviled and misunderstood Seraph On the Suwannee and larger-than-life real ones such as Edgar Watson who (allegedly) killed Western outlaw bandit queen Belle Starr (a new composition was “Killing Mr. Watson”). Grey’s own creation myth involving a boyhood stroll past a jook house down by the railroad tracks where he was arrested by the emanating music of the Isley Brothers, Waters, Stevie Wonder, Hooker and other luminaries which he says has been kicking his ass ever since is ripe material for a song in the vein of “I Wish” (fitting since when some reveler inevitably yelled for “Freebird!” the music was sounding like an outtake from Songs In The Key Of Life). Grey’s stature as a visionary was underscored by a means probably invisible to most of the witnesses, as he intermittently switched to kazoo, an African instrument whose origin rests in holy men blowing into human skulls to make that buzzing sound which communicates with the deities and the dead. Mysteriously, live at the Mercury and elsewhere upon their shining path, Mofro brings the spirit world down to this plane onstage nightly (not for nothing did they elicit two encores). As befitting their heartwarming regionalism, Mofro’s music is not the jumped-up, off-the-wall psych of Detroit’s Funkadelic nor is it the percussion-heavy funk of Chocolate City’s Go-Go (think Trouble Funk and the master, Chuck Brown), despite the presence of a drummer Craig Barnette more than able to keep from disturbing the groove. Their sultry sound is the next potent link in a long and eclectic kudzu-draped lineage surprisingly diverse enough to web the following: Maxayn (when will the remains of Capricorn Records reissue their albums on compact disc?!), Hugh Masekela, Little Feat, Delaney & Bonnie, Wet Willie, Leon & Mary Russell, Bobby Womack, Johnny Jenkins, Allen Toussaint’s Sea Saint productions featuring the Pointer Sisters (“Yes We Can Can”) & Labelle, the Dorothy Moore of “Misty Blue” (Ah, Malaco), Dobie Gray of “Drift Away” and even the occasional shades of Galt MacDermot. Aligning themselves with such friends and label mates as Robert Walter, Mofro live seem to be reviving the magical era when a constellation of all-stars from the Stax Stable, Leon Russell’s Tulsa Mafia, New Orleans and the Chitlin’ Circuit all seamlessly networked and often reassembled themselves in powerhouse configurations guaranteed to give your ass wings. It remains to be seen if the renaissance of Americana they are apart of will become truly widespread to the mass. Walking on air, indeed. With one foot in the shifting, floating grasses of the swamp and the other rolling down the highway, Grey and his band mates seem capable of even this miraculous feat. [I still want to know if the name stands for “more Afro”]