Dr. John and the Importance of Making Groceries

Dr. John’s most enduring mode was translator of New Orleans. He covered a few careers’ worth of musical ground and was never simply anything, but after 1972’s Gumbo, that was his gig—to help the rest of the country understand his hometown. Its history, its reality, and its romance. That role resonated in a way that psychedelic explorer of the alternative spiritual planes didn’t, and it was a role that left him room to grow.

Dr. John's Spirit is Lacking

Dr. John’s Locked Down reasserted the potency of the Dr. John persona, a hipster freak shaman whose music is sly and subversively funky in any physical, social or spiritual realm. The album presented a vocally animated and engaged Dr. John, snaking around cross-cultural grooves, and some of the live performances he gave since then suggested that this return to his roots produced by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach might mark a new direction.