Photo by Cheryl Gerber

Before scrounging for memories of the rock institution The Warehouse for this week’s cover story, I sat down with filmmaker Jessy Williamson (above in the white T-shirt), who, along his crew (also above), is producing a documentary about the gone-but-not-forgotten venue. Warehouse founder Bill Johnston (during a separate interview) explained, “We didn’t have it like Woodstock, which was such a big deal — they had so much footage. We had none of that stuff. I can’t wait myself to see creatively what these guys come up with.”

(Get in touch with Williamson if you have any photos, ticket stubs or memories to share.)

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I met with Bill Johnston at Le Bon Temps Roule one Saturday with the crew of A Warehouse on Tchoupitoulas. We gathered in the back room, standing on the bricks that once built the Warehouse, the music venue that dominated rock ‘n’ roll in ’70s New Orleans. It was another “creative meeting” for Johnston and the crew, as filmmaker Autumn Boh called it. A few beers, lots of memories, but this time, no cameras. Just as the Warehouse opened (and closed) relying on a little help here and there, so is the documentary. “We had no money,” Johnston said. “The analogy with the Warehouse and with what (the crew) is trying to do with this documentary is almost the same thing. They’re doing it the same way. No money, borrowing money, borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.”

Filmmaker Jessy Williamson explained that a big part of the production is Johnston’s reunion with the Warehouse crowd.

“All of a sudden people were just coming out of the wood work,” Johnston says. “Robin Tate and his brother Ed Crepps. We had a little publication, a monthly magazine, but who knows when it came out, it just came out when it came out. I was talking to Ed Crepps one day, and it was aggravating, a lot of groups that came in, didn’t get played on the radio, so I said ‘We have to start a publication,’ and called it In Your Ear!. One day Ed said to me, ‘Bill, here’s my younger brother here, can you give him a job?’ I said ‘Sure.’ We had a lighting tower, with one spotlight, so that’s what he did. At the age of 15. Now he’s a comedy promoter. I called him a couple times. One day we got him on the phone and said ‘You have to meet these guys.’ He donated some money. William Bryant, he was nicknamed Barnaby, he’s an artist. When he came down here, he knew what these guys were doing, and it was a kick because opening night, the police were in the place, the fire marshals were in the place, they wouldn’t allow us to open the door, until Barnaby finished putting the padding hardware on the doors. He donated some money. He said ‘From one starving artist to another starving artist.’

Then a strange thing happened. Almost immediately following the above quote, Williamson nudged the crew and smiled when Joe Cocker’s version of  “With a Little Help from My Friends” started on the jukebox.

Here’s the rest of the interview with Johnston from this week’s cover story: Read the rest of this entry »

The venerable Robert E. Lee Theater in Lakeview opened in 1965 and survived hurricanes, suburban flight and endless pot-fueled midnight shows of The Song Remains the Same, but it couldn’t survive the wrecking ball, which leveled the (semi)-historic structure last weekend. The exterior was never much to look at, but one feature of the theater was a landmark: the sign atop the building that spelled out ROBERT E. LEE in red riverboat-style letters.

Good news for preservationists: the sign’s been saved. The savior? Art collector and New Orleans Film Society past president Ellen Johnson.

“I’ve got the dot in my living room right now,” Johnson said this afternoon. “And it’s a foot and a half high.”

Johnson was driving past the shopping center at Robert E. Lee and West End boulevards when she saw deconstruction crews taking down the old rialto, which had sat dormant since the early 1990s and flooded badly after Hurricane Katrina. “So I went around to the back of the building where they were doing the demolition and asked about the sign. I wasn’t the first one,” Johnson says. “The man on the site said ‘You can’t have ‘em, lady, they’re gonna be sold for scrap metal.’”

Horrified, Johnson swung into action. “I talked to construction people. I had to go through lawyers. I talked to the daughter of the 94-year-old owner. I appealed to them that I was an arts lover and a preservationist, and told them the sign was part of neighborhood history.” Finally the owners made her an offer. Johnson made a counteroffer (which she declined to specify) and a deal was struck.

Then the work began. “It took three days,” Johnson says, during which each letter was carefully lowered to the ground and stacked on a flatbed truck. The 10 letters were too large to be stored at Johnson’s house, so she arranged for them to be taken to a storage facility … except for the dot, which went home with her.

What’s Johnson going to do with them now? “I don’t know!” she says. “Maybe they can be used for a film society gala, or we can find them a new home. I just couldn’t let them get used for scrap metal. I collect [letter] Es, and now I have four of them.

“I’ll be a good guardian for the letters,” she added. “And if we can’t find something to do with them … well, I’ll have some nice Es and Rs around the house.”

When New Orleans wants to knock something down, it can really spit on its hands and get ‘er done.

Workers spent the day knocking down the old Robert Fresh Market (previously Canal Villere) at Canal and Carrollton Boulevards. This morning, only part of the wall was down. By tonight:

On my way to work this morning, I snapped this (suboptimal) photo of the demolition of the old Robert Fresh Market at Canal and Carrollton in Mid-City.

It hadn’t reopened since Katrina; before that, it was a link in the now-defunct Canal Villere supermarket chain.

There was a second line for Michael Jackson yesterday in the Marigny/Treme area and it was everything you’d expect from a New Orleans second line. We’re working on getting all the footage cut and edited, but I wanted to give y’all a taste of the action.

Noah Bonaparte Pais‘ wonderful cover story this week about the rebirth of the Roosevelt Hotel seems to have stirred up a lot of memories for locals (and check out his extended interview with David Cuthbert, who practically grew up there, Eloise-style).

The other night I was in a United Cab and the driver spun me a great story about taking his first formal date to the Roosevelt’s Blue Room to see Dean Martin. “It cost $26, which was a fortune for me,” he said. “But I thought I was really hot stuff!”

On our Facebook page, Katy Moran shared:

Ah, yes, the Blue Room! Jimmy and I rarely missed a Saturday night there during the ’60s. After dinner at Moran’s we’d take a pile of friends there to dance to Leon Kelner, later to Dick Stabile, then read about our antics in Tommy Griffin’s column the next week. Especially memorable acts were Jerry Vale, Sergio Franchi, Sonny and Cher (we fed them at Moran’s when they first began), Tony Martin (always with Cyd)….

I figure some of y’all probably have memories of the Roosevelt, the Blue Room, the Sazerac Bar, the angel-hair lobby — why not share ‘em here? We’d love to read them.

Sazeracs and gumbo parties all around:

La Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans) was founded May 7, 1718, by the French Mississippi Company, under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, on land inhabited by the Chitimacha. It was named for Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, who was Regent of France at the time. … The site was selected because it was a rare bit of natural high ground along the flood-prone banks of the lower Mississippi, and was adjacent to the trading route and portage between the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain via Bayou St. John. It was, from this founding, intended to be an important colonial city. The city was named in honor of the then Regent of France, Philip II, Duke of Orléans. The priest-chronicler Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix described it in 1721 as a place of a hundred wretched hovels in a malarious wet thicket of willows and dwarf palmettos, infested by serpents and alligators; he seems to have been the first, however, to predict for it an imperial future. In 1722 Nouvelle-Orléans was made the capital of French Louisiana, replacing Biloxi in that role.

An amazingly apt description that still holds up today — subbing out “serpents and alligators” for “corrupt politicians and stinging caterpillars,” natch.

“I’m the healthiest 55-year-old you ever seen! Hey, I play golf every weekend!”

The last time the world faced a swine flu pandemic (1976), it was successfully neutralized by these two amazing public service announcements that showed swine flu spares absolutely no one — not nice elderly ladies on their porches, not hoops-shooting teenagers with righteous Afros, and not even healthy 55-year-old bankers who play golf every weekend (and bear a striking resemblance to Errol Laborde).

The second PSA is even creepier: “Joe brought it home from the office … and he gave it to his wife Betty … and to one of his kids … and to Betty’s mother …” Hey, Joe! Keep your swine flu to YOURSELF!

I see Alison has posted the old Seafood City commercial, so I thought I’d thrust and parry with this vintage (and obviously pre-K) ad for Frankie & Johnnie’s furniture on St. Claude Avenue.

This is perfect in nearly every way except two: they don’t brag about their “bedroom suits,” and they have the New Special Man, because the Original Special Man had already died. Nothing against the New Special Man, but anyone can tell you there was only one true Special Man. But everything else is great, especially the promise of a 10-piece Chicken Box if you spent $1000 on one of their plastic-wrapped couches or lacquered “bedroom suits.”

F&J was always a big part of my life before the storm; I lived just a few blocks away and would often see the Special Man coming up the street in his big black cowboy hat with about 12 huge cigars weighing down his pocket. By coincidence, my phone number was one digit off from Frankie & Johnnie’s, and since their commercials ran all night I’d often get angry or drunken misdialed calls on my answering machine from people looking for the Special Man or telling me off for running so many commercials. My favorite was the soused Uptown-sounding lady who left a long gin-fueled message: “I just wanted to tell you that your dahncing is ridiculous. I taught dahhhnce for years. And you are ridiculous.”

Here’s another one with the original Special Man: