Just catchin' up with this London Review Book review of Hoodoo Man. I don't know much about Francis Gooding, but the review is a wonder - and like most reviews in the LRB, has a very intermittent relationship with the book it is reviewing. The object is as much on Dr. John. A NOLA figure, even back when I was there in the eighties. But I had no idea of the backstory, nor of this album, one in the great line of the Creole avant garde - like Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal.
And to think, this was all made possible by Sonny and Cher's I got you babe! Which I am leaving here as a riddle - read the review of the book.
Toop’s narrative is far from straightforward. No opportunity for pareidolic digression, oblique observation or canny aside is wasted: every character’s strange history comes to light, every thread is teased out until it thins to invisibility. Toop’s own past, his own history of ideas and connections and sonic epiphanies, is also always in the mix. Two-Headed Doctor is in some ways an experiment in just how much close examination a single object – in this case, an album – will bear. It takes a similar approach to the idea of history, and the writing of it: any object or fact or event is just one node in a vast web of connections; the historian chooses a route through it, picks up some characters and leaves others behind, and produces a new story. A complex object like Gris-Gris is the precipitate of multiple pasts, all of which hold a space within it. Toop has invited all the ghosts to speak, and at this point in the story, as Rebennack and Battiste decide to make a record together, they all begin to clamour at once.
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