pt at large

Marcia Ball, Louisiana R/B Bayou Queen of the Piano

Marcia Ball
Regattabar, Cambridge, MA
January 24, 2007

Heads in the crowd were bobbing, bodies shimmying to the beat, and patrons hooting and whistling after each song. This wasn’t Avalon, or even The Orpheum in Boston. It was the Regattabar in Cambridge. This, my friends, is not standard operating procedure for the staid jazz bar on the second floor of the Charles Hotel.

You might witness theatric behavior outside the hotel, say, in Harvard Square, where street jugglers, magicians, and itinerant musicians operate in extroverted bliss. But inside the Regattabar? I don’t think so.

The long-legged woman pounding the daylights out of the electric keyboard would have been right at home doing it outside where the action is fast and loose. But there she was on stage, Marcia Ball, dazzling a mostly middle-aged bunch of closet rockers out of their minds.

Marcia Ball is not a household name in these parts but apparently every household in which her name is known was attending this show. Or the next set or the two sets on Thursday because the place was packed and every show sold out. What’s the deal?

Ms. Ball is the real deal when it comes to Texas blues, Louisiana R&B and Gulf Coast swamp pop. If she hasn’t written the book about the genres, she’s been singing them for thirty years. If you saw her in the Harvard Coop, you’d assume that the prim looking, gray haired, ramrod straight, six-foot woman wearing the scoop necked jersey top and ankle length black skirt was managing a nearby library.

Uhn, Uhnn. What she was in charge of that night was a crack four-piece band that played a brand of honky-tonk and bluesy Texas/Louisiana music so hot the patrons in the front rows had their eyebrows singed.

If you’ve ever wondered how residents would recover after two fierce storms named Katrina and Rita beat down Louisiana and left it for dead, listening to Marcia Ball’s music would explain a lot.

The howling wind and surging water crushed dance halls, diners, restaurants, and theaters where the locals congregated. Entire neighborhoods disappeared. When the water receded, the first thing some of these people did was to dig barbecue pits and figure out a way to sing and dance again.

The predominant themes of Gulf Coast music are family, good food, and good lovin’. It must be said here that it’s often hard to distinguish exactly whether what’s cooking is gumbo or hormones.

Ball’s sous-chefs for the evening were Mike Keller (guitar), Chad Scott (saxophone), Cory Keller (percussion), and Don Bennett (bass).

“I Got My Red Beans Cookin’” got the audience loosened up with Ball’s honky-tonk piano, Scott's hard driving sax, and Keller's guitar solo. “Just Kiss Me Baby (“that’s all you have to do, and I’ll be satisfied)”was a satisfyingly standard bluesy number until young Mike Keller unleashed a slow, sensual guitar solo that made you realize that a kiss was just the beginning of what the lady had in mind. Keller fingered the strings with just the right rhythm for kissing and other activities then finished with a lightning lick that brought fans out of their seats. Judging from the audience’s raucous response, Keller’s bluesy frankness might have postponed many couples’ sleep for an hour or so when they got home.

Born in Orange, Texas, in 1949, Ball’s life was transformed after she heard blues legend Irma Thomas when she was 13. When Ball formed her first band, Thomas’s songs were on the playlist. Watch Ball's fingers and elbows roam up and down the keyboard you can even see a shade of Jerry Lee Lewis. She does everything but plunk her fanny on the keyboard as Lewis used to do.

The relatively small room, and ragingly devoted audience ignited a two-hour concert (titles below).

Up-tempo songs like “Gonna Forget About You” and Zydeco chugging “That’s Enough Of That Stuff” were setups for ballads like “Every Day Will Be A Holiday When My Baby Comes Home” and slow burners like a cover of Etta James’s “Good Rockin’ Daddy.”

By the time Ball joyously sang “The happiest I’ve ever been, is when my feet are on the road to sin,“ a refrain from swamp boogeying “La Ti Dah, " the steadily eroding façade of Brahmin reserve had completely broken down. People were boogeying in their seats, some while hugging their partners. “No matter how long you’ve been gone, we’re going to party till you come home,” she sang. Baton Rouge could have been just outside the door.

Ball often looked up from pounding the keyboard to smile broadly at the audience and easily filled a few minutes between several songs to tell tiny stories while the band took a breath. One that got a big laugh came before she sang about her youth in her home town in “Down The Road, ”- “The rules changed at the river” (border between TX and LA), she said. “You could drink legally in Louisiana at age 18, not 21 as in Texas, so on Saturday nights bunches of Baptists from Texas crossed the bridge and acted like Catholics.”

By the time Randy Newman’s “Louisiana, 1927” was over you could smell the gumbo in the pot, hear mothers calling their kids home for dinner, and feel homesick for a state a thousand miles away that you’ve never set foot in.

The set ended with the Bayou anthem “Crawfishin’”. “Bring cousins by the dozen and tell them to bring some wine, we’ll go crawfishin’ and we’ll have a real good time.”

I’ve already packed my bags.

For more about Marcia Ball, click http://www.rosebudus.com/ball/index.html

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Playlist of first set at Regattabar, January 24, 2007

“Rockin’ Is Our Business”
“Red Beans”
“Just Kiss Me Baby”
“Gonna Forget About You”
“That’s Enough Of That Stuff”
“Every Day Will Be A Holiday When My Baby Comes Home”
“Good Rockin’ Daddy”
“La Ti Dah”
“Buck Town”
“Yeah Baby I’m a Red Hot”
“Mama’s Cookin’”
“Mobile (AL)”
“It’s A Miracle”
“Down the road”
“Sing It”
“I Love You Baby”
“Louisiana 1927”
“Crawfishin’”

Encores - three of ‘em
“Louella”
“She’s So Innocent”
I was so busy clapping that I didn’t write it down

Playing in Pucon, Chile

“I don’t want to frighten you but some of what I’m going to tell you might sound scary. What I’m going to tell you are not probabilities but possibilities. There are some dangers in river rafting. The more closely you listen to what I’m going to tell you, the better the chances are you’ll have a good experience. You probably wont fall out of the raft but if you do, you’ll end up with a story you can enjoy telling for a long time.”

The short, sturdy young man with a beard and reddish brown hair falling in ringlets to his shoulders has called us to order on the bank of the Trancura River, nine miles from Pucon.

At this moment, I wondered whether it might not have been a better idea to sign up for the Class 3 rapids rather than the Class 4 version flexing its blue muscles behind us.

One of us did fall out of the boat. And yes, we have recounted that story about fifty times since it happened on the Trancura River in Pucon, Chile a few days ago (see map below).

pt was at large again in the southern hemisphere. Dominated by the nearly 10,000 foot snow capped spectacle of broad shouldered Mount Villarrica, an active volcano that vents sulphurous steam daily, Pucon has become a destination for Chileans searching for a summer playground. The place is drop dead beautiful, still quaint with a small town feel. For now.

Developers see dollar signs all over the mountain and lake strewn district of nature preserves, rapids, waterfalls, thermal pools, and volcanic black sand beaches. If I return in a few years, much of the local charm may have been swallowed by commerce but in the meantime, you can walk around this tiny hamlet in less than an hour.

And that’s exactly where we four gringos found the Trancura Raft Company. And ended up wearing wet suits, helmets, and listening to a river guide calmly describe how to save our lives if we fall out of the raft in the downdraft of a whitewater rapids.

Jordan is a certifiable river rat. He gleefully recounts stories of the startled look in airline employees’ eyes as he plops his banged up 6’6” orange kayak onto their baggage check platforms. He’s floated like a cork on some of the world’s more cantankerous rivers, ones that would swallow rookies like us and not even burp after the effort. This particular Class 4 rapids is a stroll for Jordan. For us, it’s a test of our mettle.

His blue eyes coolly survey us to calculate how his speech is registering and probably estimate which one of us is most likely to fall overboard. Jordan states facts much like a surgeon. He says what he intends to do, what the possible dangers are - all of them in unvarnished matter of fact tones - and finishes with saying “in all likelihood, it’s going to turn out fine”. Right.

During his dissertation, a little voice in my mind, the one that values survival, is nattering, “Do you need to do this?” And in spite of fear, I really want to dance on the edge of safety, to feel the rush of fear-fueled adrenaline, to feel more alive because I’m closer to death.

Like “Proud Mary”, we were about to go ‘rollin’ down the river’ - except a lot faster, a lot wetter, and a lot closer to the water.

Finished with his introduction, Jordan turns us over to young Capitan Raul. We drag the raft into mountain-fed river and immediately grasp the wisdom of wet suits. Now that Jordan has trained us how to hold the paddles, Raul tells us what to do with them.

For the next hour, my entire nervous system will be poised to follow commands of  “Forward!”“Fast Forward!” “Back!””Down!” “High Side Left”“High Side Right”. Immediately.

Our crew of six is made up of me, my three Chilean friends in front, plus two guides in training and Raul steering the raft from the stern. And several kayakers whose job is to ride herd on the raft, pick up any of us who fall out and can’t make it back to the raft, and paddle ahead on the lookout for anything that might impede our safety. Plus have fun by barrel rolling their little one man kayaks 360 degrees, doing a fine impression of frolicking seals, water shedding off their sleek kayaks, wet suits and helmets as they resurface after a bracing rollover.

Practice over. The voyage begins. The two men in front and the two women in the middle get real quiet.

I can see the first white water from my perch on the front right side of the raft. More impressively, I can hear it. I swallow hard and take a deep breath. I feel like a foot soldier waiting for his commander to order me up and over the top of the trench.

“Forward!” Then, “Fast Forward” shouts Raul.  The image of accelerating a car and then heading for a bridge abutment comes to mind. Rock outcroppings, churning water, flash by. The bow abruptly dips, plows into blue water and pops to the surface. Yeeeeeaaaaahhhhhhh! Was that my voice?

“Paddles Up!” (the victory salute after we negotiate each of the rapids), shouts Raul. It’s amazing how much energy you can put in a shout when it's fifty percent excitement and fifty percent relief that you're still alive. We’re rockin’.

The totally incongruous hard paddling right into the rapids begins to make sense. Raul is lining the raft up for the best entry and we’re the propellers. He’s also a thrill provider. Just when we think we’ve become masters of the river, he heads us into white water sideways, then once backwards. And when he shouts, “Down!” (crew slide off the sides and onto the floor of the raft) you’ve never seen a bunch of AARP members move so fast. None of us wants to learn how much pain a boulder could inflict on a body liberated from the raft involuntarily after an unexpected lurch.

Halfway down the rapids we head for shore for one short portage, a short vertical climb over hardened magma, through dense underbrush full of roots, then re-board the raft after a steep ten foot rock climb down.

The portage is around a constricted set of falls with only two narrow ways through between rock outcroppings. The drop creates nasty “hydraulics”, as Jordan calls them, capable of sucking kayaks and people down under the surface and keeping them there, and rocks that would cause severe damage to a human body or a kayak.

Raul and others tied the raft to a line and tethered it through the falls.

The next stretch includes the biggest drop of rapids, presided over by a huge boulder in the middle. The gringos had become a cocky bunch, ready to take the plunge. Until Raul shouts “Fast Forward!” and seems to steer directly for the impassive giant. Adrenaline rules. Raul shouts commands - white water churning, frothing, hissing, the raft closing on the boulder and the drop, and the crew paddling furiously right into it. It was twenty seconds to eternity.

The bow rams the boulder, stalls for a moment then with a lurch, pitches abruptly down at a 45 degree angle. One moment I’m in daylight, the next I’m encased in a dark blue cocoon of solid water. The world goes silent for two seconds. I nearly gag on the water that’s been driven up my nose and down my throat during the drop.

That’s where we lost Susan.

As water sluices out of the raft, I look back. There is no one was where she was sitting half a lifetime ago. Silence.

Up rockets her yellow helmeted head a few feet from the raft. One split second later, her husband Ricardo springs to the side of the raft, reaches over, yanks her up by her life jacket, and lands her inside like a tuna.  Cheers. Laughter. Relief.

The coiling rapids behind us are morphing into stories we’ll tell for days.

Capitan Raul asks if we want to jump overboard to float last few hundred yards on our own.  I’m in. As instructed, I’m on my back, feet facing downstream, my life vest giving me buoyancy. My outstretched arms steer toward the shore of the river a few hundred feet from the same place we’d donned our raft gear a couple of hours earlier.

We chatter like school children after a wild ride on the roller coaster. We’ve conquered the unknown. Today.

Being alive means more than just breathing. Can we exist without testing our limits? In the past, we would have been the foot soldiers of history, crossing prairies, oceans, or deserts, risking danger to find our promised lands. Today, we sat in a tough-hided rubber raft to ride the rapids because we wanted to find something within ourselves.

Passing the test today doesn’t mean we’ll be able to pass it again. But we know it will be waiting for us. Tomorrow.

IF YOU GO:
The Trancura River Class IV rapids are located 14 kilometres east from Pucón. It is ideal for the most daring and adventure-seeking who will encounter  turbulence and strong rapids. For safety the raft will be guarded by a safety Kayak during the whole adventure.
USD 50 fee includes guide, transportation, insurance, wet suit and shoes, wind-jacket, safety helmet, paddle, life jacket and towel.

Pucon is 789 kilometers/493 miles from the capital, Santiago de Chile. TurBus Company offers ten hour overnight service to Pucon via the North PanAmerican Highway, a wide asphalt road in very good condition. Dinner and breakfast included. Buses are quiet, air conditioned, with reasonably comfortable reclining seats and clean lavatories.

Geography:
Pucon is south of Santiago (and  east of Villarrica, shown on map). Both Villarrica and Pucon are in the "Lake District" of Chile.