In early December of 2005, only a few short months after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast and raised the water levels around New Orleans high enough to breach its faulty levees and swallow much of that beloved city whole, British singer/songwriter Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint—pianist, songwriter, producer, arranger and patriarch of Crescent City musicians—were holed up in a recording studio on Piety Street in the neighborhood of Bywater, just on the bowl’s rim of the city’s lower Ninth Ward.
The Piety Street studio is housed in a late-nineteenth-century building that had once been a post office and, as such, is a heavy slab fortress, standing flat and gray on a quiet corner. On December 10 of that wicked 2005 season, it was a rare building being occupied along that stretch of the ward, and one of the few that had electricity and running water (though it was still without phone service). The floodwaters had stopped a mere block away from the building’s front door, and when one stepped outside of its bunkerlike confines after dark, the surrounding row houses and storefronts were darker than the night sky, and lifeless by comparison.
Late on this Saturday night, Elvis, Allen, myself (being their producer), our engineer, and a small band of musicians were working doggedly to finish the project we’d begun eleven days earlier in Los Angeles, everyone exhausted, raw and emotional, charged and anxious, as we hurried to add a few last flourishes to some sixteen songs before the curtain came down in earnest, and all of us would scatter either home or back out on the road, far from this seemingly godforsaken war zone.
All in attendance were bleary and stooped. The horn players, natives of New Orleans, had, to a man, all lost their homes. Allen Toussaint moved through the room with an elegant buoyancy that defied not only his own losses (friends, a home, a lifetime’s worth of possessions), but the weight of seeing his beloved hometown washed away to a ruin that was as heartbreaking as it was preventable.
Pushing on toward midnight, Allen stood in a dark, glass-walled isolation booth, layering a deft backing vocal to one of his own songs cut earlier that afternoon. He was lit dimly from below by a single small bulb clamped to his music stand. The lights of the control room, though few, were enough to reflect the room’s own image back from the glass, rendering Allen barely visible on the other side of it, and then only as a faint, floating, ghostly presence . . . his gray afro and thick mustache catching shards of light as he nodded and grooved along to the music he heard through headphones.
As tape was being spooled back to the beginning of a verse, I peered hard at Allen’s face as it continued to bob and weave in the silence between takes, and I offered, without much forethought, “Allen, you know, in this light, you look just like Richard Pryor—had he taken better care of himself, of course. You look like his ghost moving in that room.”
Allen said not a word to me in response to this but met my gaze intently, smiled broadly, and nodded, affirming his own understanding of how he might appear to me in that moment.
Toward the end of that same hour, my cell phone rang loudly from the back of the control room. Everyone turned to look, since none of us present had ever been able to find coverage within the cold, thick walls of the old building.
Scrambling down the hall and out onto the frigid, pitch black street, hoping not to lose the call, I said, “Hello?” and at first mistook the noise on the other end for pure static, only to realize that far from this decimation, in Southern California my wife stood joyfully crowded in a theater full of revelers for our son’s winter holiday concert. She didn’t speak but simply held the phone high above her head as people sang and cheered and the high school jazz band lurched into a raucous swing number. And then the call faded.
I stood teary and alone now on the corner of Piety and Dauphine streets and noticed something I hadn’t a moment before: a half block away, a single strand of Christmas lights threaded around a wrought-iron stair rail . . . blinking on and off from the stoop of a seemingly abandoned and powerless townhouse. The joy and music of the quick call had disappeared in my hand, but the phone still showed a signal and blinked with a new message waiting—received, oddly, in unison with the call that had just sneaked through somehow.
“Hey, Joe? Joey . . . hello. I’m sure you’ve had dozens of calls already, but I just wanted to say, you know . . . that I am really sorry. I just heard.”
Richard was dead.
Just nine days following his sixty-fifth birthday, Richard Pryor, whom I had come to know and who had so intensely occupied my thoughts and work for so long now, had finally loosed those spidery fingers and let himself rise like smoke, up and out of his frail, useless, earthly frame to which he’d been tethered for years, unable to speak—but not unable to hear and brood.
Drifting, I concluded, on his way to making one last haunting stop in Peoria, Richard seemed now to have materialized in front of me for a fleeting moment of farewell in the frightened, fighting city of New Orleans that, like himself, had for so long wildly—scandalously, anomalously—flowered up in glorious defiance of all that surrounded it; a strange specter of beauty laid at the threshold of an otherwise dispirited country never far from the throes of violent transformation.
But he had always been drifting: an unknown to all including himself. His slippery countenance—with the duality of the naive genius, the righteous hustler; the fluid sexuality; the laugh masking tears—made Richard so strangely and persuasively other that most everyone can recognize some part of their secret selves in his reflection, because we all believe ourselves, ultimately, to be strangers. This may account for the subversive sprawl and endurance of his influence: that his brokenness left him so vulnerable to the times that he absorbed them all. It left little room for anything else; and when the storm of his zenith years passed, Richard was left teetering and hollow like a once-flooded house, whose high waterline, nonetheless, confounds as it provokes awe.
That Richard, while exiting, might take pause in the person of Allen Toussaint—a man whose music is as deep as silence, his silences as telling as a compass blade—shouldn’t have surprised me, and didn’t. Richard, as we know, was always charged like a vibrating wire . . . standing like a reed and giving buzzy voice to every wind blowing through; riffing with a tumble of words driven as much by tough rhythm as conscious thought; sounding always as if at any moment his cry or laugh might stem and flower, becoming fully—finally and forever—song.