One afternoon around 1990, as a teenager working my after-school job in an optometrist’s basement office, I was listening to a local college radio station when the DJ, needing a break, decided to play the entire B-side of a record. I had never heard anything like it. Sludgy grooves, wails of unidentifiable wind instruments, and the clatter of an incongruous mandolin and harpsichord drifted in a steamy cloud of artificial reverb. In the middle of it a young man, supported by several backing vocalists, murmured incomprehensibly: “Je suis le Grand Zombie, my yellow belt of choison/Ain’t afraid of no tomcat, fill my brains with poison.”

I was intrigued when the DJ said that the music was by Dr. John, from his 1968 debut album Gris-Gris. I recognized the name from a track on Atlantic Blues: Piano, a double-LP compilation I had bought as part of my efforts to learn to play in that style. But the music I heard on the radio was nothing like those songs. It was pianoless, nearly formless, not the blues but a suggestion of other dark mental states or colors. Where did it come from?

Born Malcolm “Mac” Rebennack in New Orleans, in 1941, to a white family with a deep history in the city, Dr. John led many lives between his precocious musical start in the 1950s and his death in 2019: session musician, petty criminal, addict, funky hitmaker, Muppet model. With his gravelly bayou drawl and his raffish, behatted, bearded stage presence, he became a kind of global ambassador of “New Orleans music,” a phrase that has a specific meaning in a way that cannot be said about “Los Angeles music” or “New York music,” two other cities where Rebennack lived. It means Black music: jazz, blues, R&B, and, more recently, bounce, the city’s local variant of hip-hop. It is music of loose but forceful grooves, laid-back vocal deliveries (like those of the great Lee Dorsey and Betty Harris, to name just two of the city’s best-known R&B singers), pan-Caribbean “Spanish tinge” (to use the Jelly Roll Morton phrase that became a jazz-writing cliché), parade horns, Mardi Gras Indian chants, and, especially, Storyville brothel piano. Even zydeco, which blurs into Cajun music, is from out of town.

Rebennack was involved with this sound on a professional level from an early age. If you believe his deeply sleazy and entertaining 1994 memoir Under a Hoodoo Moon, as a teenager he was gigging as a guitar player at dives all over the South, writing songs, and producing sessions at Cosimo Matassa’s French Quarter studio with a litany of New Orleans legends, from Fats Domino to Huey “Piano” Smith to Allen Toussaint. After Rebennack got one of his fingertips shot off in a post-gig altercation in Jacksonville, Florida, followed by a brief stint in prison, his friend the pianist James Booker taught him the basics of organ playing, which led to a lifetime behind the piano keyboard. Though Rebennack never achieved anything close to Booker’s tonal nuance, formal risk, eclectic references far outside blues, or effusive magnetism on the instrument, he became the world’s most famous representative of New Orleans piano (with, for a short time, the possible exception of another Booker student, Harry Connick Jr.).

By the mid-1960s, like quite a few of his New Orleans studio-rat friends, Rebennack found himself in Hollywood, applying his skills to records by Phil Spector, The Monkees, The Rolling Stones, and Canned Heat, among many others, in what now looks like a golden age for recorded music. As the industry boomed and technological advances gave rise to the multitrack analog studio, which reigned until the digital transformation of the last thirty years, a professional class of session musicians arose alongside it. The producers who kept the tape machines rolling in Los Angeles studios filled their rolodexes with the names of players adaptable, consistent, and efficient enough to meet the demands of whatever show business needed to record in a union-mandated block of studio time. 

Rebennack joined the clique of elite LA session musicians in 1964, thanks to his New Orleans friend Harold Battiste, a producer and arranger for Sam Cooke and the founder of the Black collective record label AFO (All For One) Records, which documented New Orleans’s overlapping R&B and jazz scenes. Primed by the success of Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” (arranged by Battiste—the oboe was his idea), the Atlantic Records offshoot Atco gave Battiste his own sublabel, Progress. His newfound creative control enabled him to ensconce himself with Rebennack and a gaggle of fellow New Orleanians—plus a few LA friends—in the famous Gold Star studio, where they had just enough time to make the thirty-three minutes of music we hear on Gris-Gris.

The album was “almost like a joke,” Battiste recalled in a 2007 interview with the arranger and journalist Richard Niles:

I asked Mac if he had any ideas of what we could do under my Progress Records deal, and he came up with the voodoo thing. He’s a prolific student and he knew about this legendary cat Dr. John, an old voodoo man. So that album was crafted mixing voodoo with the psychedelic thing—a kind of spoof on the West Coast obsession with underground music. Neither of us thought it would be taken seriously.

What started as a spoof became an enduring document of how LA musicians in the late 1960s could use the tools of their industry to create works of striking depth and strangeness. In that era of the music business the lines between working professional, celebrity, and visionary weirdo often depended on little more than the time of day: Glen Campbell, the guy playing guitar behind the Beach Boys or Sammy Davis Jr. on one session, could be singing a Jimmy Webb song that would make him a superstar on the next; Emil Richards could use his truckload of percussion on a generic film score in the morning and then apply it to microtonal experimental blues at night. On Gris-Gris, without playing any piano and with a lot of help, Rebennack created something well beyond the limits of his work-for-hire piano gigs, a gateway between the music industry’s pitiless capitalism and a realm of raw, funky, enigmatic expression. The unstable, ritualistic groove and otherworldly voices on the album’s last track, “I Walk on Guilded Splinters,” the song I heard in that basement thirty-five years ago, have propelled many listeners through that portal.

In Two-Headed Doctor: Listening for Ghosts in Dr. John’s Gris-gris, the eminent British music critic David Toop offers a book-length exploration of the album’s aural pleasures and historical, cultural, and literary implications. At once a chronicle of the record’s making and a critical analysis of its complex sources in folklore, literature, and a range of musical histories, Two-Headed Doctor is itself a kind of a gateway into a realm of musical appreciation that few of us get to occupy. In Toop’s hands Gris-Gris takes on a wider range of meaning than Battiste and Rebennack could have imagined when they rolled into Gold Star one morning and spun up that Hammond organ.

Toop was well situated to succumb to Gris-Gris’s spell. As a teenager in the 1960s he was, like many British people of his generation, caught up in a love affair with African American music, especially blues and R&B. By 1968, when he heard Gris-Gris, he was a regular at the legendary London Roundhouse, where he cemented his echt-Boomer rock-and-roll credentials by seeing early Cream and Pink Floyd performances but also heard the free improvisation ensemble AMM. He was part of the emergence of an aesthetic that embraced rock and roll, the Western classical-rooted work of John Cage and his circle, the free jazz revolution, and all the other auditory wonders flying across the globe on shiny black discs or warbly tapes, from ethnographic and zoological field recordings to raw commercial product churned out by giant corporations, hyperlocal entrepreneurs, and inspired/crackpot amateurs.

Since the 1970s few critics or artists have done more than Toop to advocate for this expansive way of thinking about music and sound. As a musician his work stretches back to New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments, a split 1975 record with the artist Max Eastley for Brian Eno’s Obscure Records label, and to Alterations, the vertiginous improvising group he formed in the late 1970s with Steve Beresford, Terry Day, and Peter Cusak, which at one moment could sound like early Sonic Youth (several years before they existed) and at the next could be a woozy music hall sing-along or a clattering, slapstick toybox explosion.

As a critic, Toop has long been a music nerd’s music nerd. Starting with Rap Attack (1984), considered by many to be the first book about hip-hop, he has demonstrated a rare ability to write about the many meanings and implications of sound, whether or not it fits prevailing definitions of “music.” He is a lover of discographical minutiae; a collector who treasures rare R&B 45s from way outside the Motown/Stax mainstream, faux-exotic records sold in long-closed tiki bar lobbies, samizdat Black nationalist jazz albums, and Detroit techno 12-inches; a researcher who journeyed deep into Brazil’s Amazonas to record Indigenous rituals; and a writer who can explore all of that with the clarity of an ethnomusicologist or with a woozy, J.G. Ballard–like style that blurs fact and fiction.

Rather than investing too much fixed meaning in ideas like authenticity and authorship, Toop’s way of listening involves the drift of musical material across borders and history. He takes more interest in soundscapes than in discrete songs, and foregrounds demiurge figures like club DJs or genre-agnostic record producers over individual composers or performers (though he still attends lovingly to plenty of those, too). These ways of thinking about music may be exemplified by his influential 1995 book Ocean of Sound, which captures a moment when underground ravers, hip-hop auteurs, archive-diggers, newly Internet-charged file downloaders, and other indefatigable experimentalists helped loosen Anglophone rock and roll’s grip on musical culture—and especially music criticism.

In the late 1990s to peruse the records and CDs in a store like Other Music in downtown New York or Amoeba in San Francisco or Honest Jon’s in London—with bins full of forgotten reggae, Ethiopian jazz, Japanese noise, obscure French Ye-Ye, minor Krautrock offshoots, and of course all the multifarious variants of electronic music, from its early practitioners like the French musique concrète composers and Karlheinz Stockhausen to the dizzying varieties of drum and bass, techno, house, and ambient music—was to enter a Toopian zone. When Toop made New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments in 1975, with rare exceptions like AMM’s performance at the Roundhouse, experimental music was something that happened in art schools, classical conservatories, and state-sponsored laboratories like IRCAM in Paris. Today an experimental music festival is more likely to resemble a dance club than a chamber music recital. The people who enacted this shift—musicians, concert curators, label owners, and critics—were reading Ocean of Sound.

Among Toop’s long-standing interests has been the cluster of musical genres that go under the name “exotica.” His 1999 book of that name is a storm of fiction and fact, personal history, criticism, and speculation, all spiraling around Toop’s pursuit of sound and music—live, imaginary, or in that in-between state: constructed, preserved, and sold in recordings. Exotica LPs like Martin Denny’s Quiet Village or Arthur Lyman’s Taboo—with their lurid Pacific Island covers and percussion-heavy arrangements alluding to Latin American, Asian, and African music without a hint of cultural sensitivity—were big sellers in Fifties and Sixties America. A few decades later they lurked deep in the cheap and disreputable corners of used record stores, the easy listening bins, waiting for a new generation of listeners.¹

Les Baxter, who exemplified the style on dozens of records like Ritual of the Savage and Jungle Jazz as well as on scores for films like X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes and How To Stuff a Wild Bikini, is a central figure in Exotica. Though to many listeners Baxter was a hack and a schlockmeister, for Toop his work exemplifies how blatantly commercial music built on raw cultural appropriation and fetishism can take on deeper resonance as it finds listeners attuned to its hedonic aura and kaleidoscopic global vulgarity. “As is the case with many musicians whose commercial instincts do daily battle with an innocent need to be regarded as serious, his work was a crucible for unique skills, fabulous inventions and chronic lapses of judgement,” Toop tells us.

Baxter synthesised many exoticas rich in their own troubled histories—Afro-Cuban, Polynesian, South-East Asian, Japanese and Chinese, African, Brazilian, Central and South American, Caribbean—channelling them through a typically cool-school jazz schizophrenia of exquisitely sensitive textural detail undermined or flattened by brashness. The synthesis culminated in a fabricated exotica without boundaries or sovereignty, a place where hybridisation met its final destiny as pure fantasy.

That synthesis flows through Two-Headed Doctor, which concerns the hybridized creation of another Hollywood-based musician known for his “unique skills, fabulous inventions and chronic lapses of judgement.” Toop’s study of Gris-Gris is on one level an effort to clear away the dense fog of self-mythologizing that surrounds the record’s presentation of its creator. “Mac Rebennack” appears nowhere on the album’s cover; instead the album is credited to “Dr. John, the night tripper,” with songwriting credit going to “Dr. John Creaux.” The persona—assumed for the album in jest, according to Battiste—ended up becoming Rebennack’s identity for the rest of his career.

Toop goes to great lengths to document the reality behind Rebennack’s references, reconstructing his actual history, tracking down the sources for his lyrics, fact-checking his statements to the press, and venturing into frequent digressions on the rich history of New Orleans culture and related topics. There was, as it happens, a real Dr. John. According to Toop, Rebennack claimed family connections to a man of that name who is mentioned in “The Last of the Voudoos,” an 1885 Harper’s essay by Lafcadio Hearn. “My great-great-great grandpa Wayne was busted with this guy for runnin’ a voodoo operations [sic] in a whorehouse in 1860,” Rebennack said in an old interview. Toop can’t document this connection, but he does prove that Rebennack’s claims that he adapted songs he learned in voodoo churches are spurious. Many of the lyrics on Gris-Gris were copied from books about New Orleans music so obvious that Toop already had them on his shelf in England in 1968. The words of “I Walk on Guilded Splinters” were copied almost verbatim from a song quoted in the 1946 book Voodoo in New Orleans, by Robert Tallant, with more lines cribbed from the Louisiana Writers’ Project 1945 book Gumbo Ya-Ya.

Toop also gives ample space to the stories of the musicians who, in some cases, played just as important a part in the record’s creation as Rebennack did, if not more: the tambourine player and vocalist Jessie Hill (whose “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” is a classic of New Orleans R&B), the percussionist Richard T. “Didimus” Washington, the backup vocalist Shirley Goodman, the guitar player Ernest McLean. Each of them pulls on another thread in the book’s tapestry of connections and histories. From Harold Battiste’s work with the drummer Ed Blackwell, Toop makes a quick connection to Ornette Coleman, a frequent presence in his books, and to Toop’s ear a major influence on some of the more jazz-like moments on Gris-Gris. Via the ubiquitous LA session woodwind player (and regular Les Baxter collaborator) Plas Johnson, he gets to talk about the rare Condor effect box that transformed some of the instruments on Gris-Gris into mysterious wails.

As Toop’s references accumulate, they map the vast network of cultural currents that he finds running through Gris-Gris. It makes perfect sense to go, over the course of just a few pages, from Sonny and Cher in the 1960s to Cher’s pioneering use of autotune in the late 1990s to how African ritual masks transform the voice of the wearer as well as the face, and from there to Zora Neale Hurston’s research on New Orleans Hoodoo traditions. At the beginning of a chapter called “Inventing New Orleans,” it takes Toop only one paragraph to go from Cosimo Matassa’s studio behind an appliance shop on Rampart Street to Hearn’s early obsessions with “the grotesque, the sensuous and the spectral.”

At the center of this dense weave of interconnected digressions, musical and otherwise, is the question of race and appropriation. Toop has long been preoccupied by, as he puts it here, “how music is created, who owns it, who can speak for it, how it is sold and how it inhabits human feelings, sense of identity, communality and conflict.” Gris-Gris is a particularly vivid case study for this preoccupation. Rebennack was hardly the only white recording artist in the late 1960s “ripping off Black music,” as Margo Jefferson titled her 1973 essay on the subject. Few of his peers, however, went so far as to appropriate a real person’s name and an entire African American religious practice, then repeatedly lie to—or at least misdirect—the press about it.

The Dr. John character was a mask that allowed Rebennack to bring his version of New Orleans culture into the psychedelic 1960s, and it made him a star. “His frequent muddying of the waters that surrounded him amounted to an insurance policy against accusations of appropriation,” Toop writes. “This amounted to a strategy—conscious or unconscious—of legerdemain that allowed him to sell stolen goods to a young, mostly white audience of rock fans and scribes lacking in the knowledge, experience and curiosity to challenge either their provenance or ethical substance.”

And yet even if Rebennack’s identity was “stolen,” to Toop’s ears the music he, Battiste, and their sidepeople recorded in 1968 still evokes the uncanny presence of ancestral forces—the ghosts Toop listens for. “Gris-gris, as a cultural object, and Dr. John as Rebennack’s construct, occupy an uncomfortable place between these two extremes, of deeply embedded traditions on the one hand, and exploitative fantasy on the other,” he writes.

Like an assistant in a Botanica or spiritual mini-market, Rebennack pulls signs and wonders out of the invisible world as if randomly taking poisons, philters and charms down from the shelves…. Every conjurer, sorcerer, medium masker, magician who makes the ancestors go away or doctor of the supernatural must be fluent in the vocabulary and grammar of disorientation. The art of magic is misdirection.

Toop’s research shows us how strongly these tensions between “tradition” and “exploitative fantasy” vibrate in the groove etched into the vinyl of Gris-Gris. Now that omnipresent digital sound flows through all our devices, it’s easy to forget that, not all that long ago, there was a kind of magic in the very fact that music could emerge from a machine. The artists Toop loves, like Rebennack and Battiste and Baxter and Sun Ra, all navigated the complex systems of fact and fiction, money and artistic vision, technical trickery and human virtuosity that defined the midcentury music business. By pulling his own set of cultural charms off the dusty shelves of history, Toop wants to show us how those systems could sometimes produce magic of their own. At the end of Gris-Gris, he writes, “instruments fade away, leaving only the night sounds of shapeshifters, the faintest whisper of ‘guilded splinters,’ an exhalation of breath. It is as if the spectres have taken over.”