To wade into the loose, slinky grooves of Gris-gris, the debut album by Dr. John the Night Tripper, is to sink into an uncertain landscape. With no map, no guideposts, one must situate themself in the murk—the clicks and sighs, the hisses and stutters—the vast shadow world the music conjures.
When Gris-gris appeared in 1968—featuring its spell-casting centerpiece, “I Walk on Guilded Splinters”—critics and casual listeners didn’t quite know what to make of its defiant otherness. Neither exotica nor psychedelia—popular subgenres of the era—it firmly occupied a space of its own.
Even more mysterious was that these seven cuts—which evoked voodoo practice, hoodoo “cures” or “charms,” and summoned figures from African and African American folklore—all peppered by Creole and Cajun patois were conjured in a Hollywood recording studio. Assembled and arranged by New Orleans expat producer Harold Battiste, the production featured a young, charismatic session player, Mac Rebennack, still newish to town, his 3rd Ward Yat accent thick and wily.
Recorded for Atco Records, at Gold Star Studios in August and September of 1967, Gris-gris marked the birth of Rebennack’s hastily quilted-together persona, Dr. John Creaux. That Santa Monica Boulevard rushed along outside as he was recorded, you’d never know: Los Angeles as Louisiana as their auditory play on cinema’s day for night. While happy to have the work after a perilous patch in the South (a gunshot wound to his hand, jail time in Texas—two separate incidents), Rebennack was reluctant at first to step into a front man role. Whatever misgivings he held, there’s no trace within the grooves. Once the album’s pulse bloomed, he transmogrified; the floors and walls fell away. Nearly 60 years later, the album feels at once ancient and out of time.
For David Toop, the author of Two-Headed Doctor: Listening for Ghosts in Dr. John’s Gris-gris, the album—an influence and talisman of his teens and twenties—is as uncanny as it is uncomfortable.
Wide-ranging and roundabout, Two-Headed Doctor does more than explore the creation of a landmark record; it layers cultural history, confronting the quagmire of invented personas, the narrow space between artistic invention and ventriloquism, and the long echo of race-based caste systems.
Toop is a scholar, curator, and musician. He’s also a white man who performs music of the African diaspora. Over time, he found himself wrestling with his own role, its implications: the “problems about authenticity and appropriation.”
In revisiting the Gris-gris sessions, sorting through source materials and mapping the crossing and diverging pathways of Battiste’s and Rebennack’s careers, he concludes, “Listening to these session tapes is to hear each stage in the audible making of a mask.”
The “two-headed doctor” of the book’s title derives from African diasporic religious practices. In the American South, “Hoodoo practitioners were often referred to as ‘two-headed doctors,’ underscoring the many dualistic elements of their identity: their ability to do both good and harm,” Toop says, quoting researcher Billy Middleton and his book Two-Headed Medicine: Hoodoo Workers, Conjure Doctors and Zora Neale Hurston.
Toop favors the deep waters, pulling from a broad sampling of scholarship and folklore—disparate voices, countries, disciplines, and practices, crossing oceans and centuries. He centers Black scholars, musicians, writers, artists—Zora Neale Hurston, Nell Irvin Painter, Ishmael Reed, Daphne A. Brooks, among them—to parse the matters of spirit and earth.
While Toop does, at turns, offer tantalizing, behind-the-recording-console moments, his study succeeds in drawing our attention to something larger: the world that both allowed, even necessitated, Rebennack, “disguised in costume and regalia,” to step in, while Black artists were cordoned off from opportunities to make art—and a living—from their own culture and music.
Battiste, one of only five Black producers working in Los Angeles’s rock and pop scenes, was at the time a producer and an arranger for Sonny and Cher. Still, his chances to fly beyond the record industry’s racially segregated category barriers were slim to none. Put simply, Toop asserts: “The director’s chair was white.” Gris-gris, in Battiste’s hands, was a labor of love and an offering for the culture. “I felt better than I had felt in the studio for a long time,” Toop quotes from Battiste’s 2010 memoir, Unfinished Blues: Memories of a New Orleans Music Man. “I was comfortable, connected spiritually…. It became more than a production to me.”
Like a planchette moving pell-mell across a Ouija board, Toop’s narrative switches paths, topics, leaps into adjacent backstory. We lean toward where his curious spirit takes him. Consequently, just as Gris-gris itself demands trust in the guide, the gravelly voiced, “dismembered thing” the “Night Tripper,” Toop’s critique does as well.
Upon release, Gris-gris was “barely reviewed,” but Rebennack’s new wrapped-in-colorful-yardage persona, “Dr. John”/“hauntologist,” subsumed him. It stuck, for better or worse, or good or harm, until his death, at 77, in 2019. Ultimately, Toop’s incisive investigation, published 57 years after the album was recorded, functions as the bracing “lights-up” moment in an inky-dark nightclub, post–last call: the cracks and stains, the rough wear revealed, all mystery stripped away.
Even so, Two-Headed Doctor isn’t a trial. It is a rigorous inquiry into authenticity, voice, and privilege; in the end, through the lens of Toop’s scholarship, the legacy of Gris-gris feels changed but not lessened. Instead, with much unfinished urgent work around race and equity, its elaborate backstory serves as a vibrantly relevant case study for the moment.•
Join us on April 17 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Ishmael Reed will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Justin Desmangles to discuss Mumbo Jumbo. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
