Day 4

Today, the French Quarter! We likely walked something close to 10 miles on our daylong loop to Frenchmen Street and back. Since we started out by taking advantage of New Orleans’s liberal open-container law, filled with spirits matching the name of the city’s most-famous street, there’s a period in the middle where Rett’s memories are a bit foggier than she’d prefer. That also meant we toured less of the Quarter’s streets than I would have liked, but in exchange we got to sit and experience a lot more live music than I’d expected.

When we arrived to Bourbon Street, that most (in)famous street, it instantly reminded me of Hollywood Boulevard, and the thin layer of atmospheric slime and filth that exudes from those supposedly-bright shining stars. The fact that the streetscape and architecture were completely different than Los Angeles (and, physically, quite clean) just highlighted how powerful the atmospheric effects of hollowed-out tourism can be, regardless of setting.

Presumably there was once a genuine, vibrant heart beating in this historic neighborhood (perhaps less-true in Hollywood!), and that’s what attracted tourists and international fame. But as the community evolved to cater to those tourists, no one noticed that its living core was being eaten away and hollowed-out, leaving only the dead external shell of lowest-common-denominator attractions. Thus there are now literally four identical daiquiri + ($11) pizza-by-the-slice shops per block, and a guy with a sign reading “HUGE ASS BEERS” trying to lure customers into his empty bar named…”Huge Ass Beers”. Just catering to the absolutely-smallest-brain frat boys and girls who are incapable of conceiving an even-slightly more-creative way to have their inhibitions lowered. But it seems even those easy targets are wising up to the pointlessness of it all!

So, like in Hollywood, many of the humans lurking around the dried-out husk of this pedestrianized street were the most skeevy and opportunistic that we’ve seen in the city. Nothing explicitly dangerous, and mostly-harmless, but just exuding an air of grossness that maybe wouldn’t be quite so obvious if we were drunker and it wasn’t daylight?

But the majority of humans were people like us, taking a walk down Bourbon Street because…that’s what you’re supposed to do when you come to New Orleans? Everyone was walking at a strange mid-pace, because there was no specific place they were heading toward, but also no reason to stop anywhere. Generally it felt like everyone was waiting for something to happen, a something that was supposed to be spontaneously generated by the confluence of humans interacting in this space. But with everyone being a member of the observational shell, and no one being part of the long-gone generating core, it was a grown-up version of the high-school dance with bored kids ringing an empty dance floor.

Luckily, the fame of Bourbon Street (and its targets’ inability to think outside the narrow box) meant that its spiritual vacuousness remained tightly contained within that single stripe. Step just one block away, and the vibe completely flips. Every other segment of the French Quarter, while surprisingly quiet and empty, contained the same iconic architecture, but with a core that still provided material support for the structures.

So by the time we wandered by the Balcony Music Club, the music wafting out open their corner door that drew us inside proved that we’d finally found that storied cultural core that makes people wax poetic about New Orleans. “And yes, we could just pop into any bar at 5-o’clock on a Wednesday and there would be an excellent band playing!” is what every tourist gushes to their friends upon their return home from their New Orleans vacation, and their friends think “yeah, ok, I’m sure that’s a bit of an exaggeration, and the reality isn’t nearly as magical as you’re portraying it, but I’m glad you enjoyed your trip”. But it’s true! Or at least at the corner of Esplanade and Decatur on this late Wednesday afternoon, it felt true, and the feeling is what we’re all here for.

The band, whose existence might be so ephemeral that their name isn’t even findable anymore (a music listing archive has the name as “Spot-Holders”) was a young group playing an old-timey folk-y style, to a number of us in the bar not much larger than the number of them on-stage. The pink-haired saxophonist bandleader would give a brief set of instructions on key and tempo and feel when she had an idea for the next song, and the band would take off and run with it. A few songs in, a guy with a trombone walked in to join them, and not finding a chair to sit on, said “nevermind, I’ve got one in my car, I’ll be back in a second”, and dropped right in when he returned.

That’s how casual-cool the whole thing was, and I was again struck by the feeling that many of these young musicians came from elsewhere to New Orleans because they heard that this was a place with a deep culture of music, where they could pursue their passions, and possibly make a living. And compared to going to Los Angeles to become a movie star (or even to Nashville to become a musician), the prices in New Orleans (and this huge market for live music) makes that a far less-risky proposition. I just feel bad for all the hometowns that these musicians leave behind; how will they ever build up their own scenes of New Orleans drains all their talent?

Moving on to find some food, we turned up Frenchman Street and walked into the first place we found with a menu and a band (it didn’t take us long). The doorman stated a 1-drink-per-set minimum, and while we had no problem meeting that limit, I’m not actually sure how enforcement works on that handshake deal (at BMC there was not even a handshake deal for admission, though we also got drinks in addition to directly tipping the band).

Boardwalker and the 3-Finger Swingers are a regular band at Bamboula’s, and the closest thing that we saw to that professional, “this is our job, giving tourists what they want” band that I’d been somewhat trying to avoid. But they were still quite good and totally worth seeing! Most-entertaining was the extreme contrast between Boardwalker, their amphetamine-hopped singer/tap-dancer/emcee, and their catatonic clarinet player, who could not have been more bored and unhappy with his job (the rest of the band filled the more-comfortable middle-ground).

We didn’t really plan to stick around for the next band, but when The Queen (of “The Queen and Friendz”) started a bit of pre-show soundchecking with some Adele, we were stuck. Her stunning powerhouse voice extended to her personality (both belying her “just rolled out bed in the trailer park at 4pm” image), and she eventually even took turns on the guitar and drums. Much more “rock” than any band we’d seen thus far, and pleasingly 90s-focused (ranging from The Cranberries to a TLC-medley), it showed that mostly New Orleans supports talent in any form, and is less-restrictive toward jazzy genres than I’d been expecting.

We counted ourselves lucky for finding a spot with two very good bands, and, satisfied, began the long walk home. Only to pass literally six more places in the next two blocks of Frenchman Street that had bands playing in them. Were they as good? Probably! Maybe even better! But we restrained ourselves and kept moving, and then stumbled on the true New Orleans-music tell-friends-back-home scene: a second-line brass band just playing out on the street corner.