I live in uptown New Orleans, close to South Carrollton Ave. in an area of many restaurants. My house abuts the back area of a couple of those restaurants. For the longest time there were no sodium "fear" lights or fences. Then the guy who owned all this empty space cut down all the bushes and vegetation, leveled the vegetating dirt into a parking lot, put up a fence, and installed a towering and blistering bright light. Thankfully he left a vined tree standing that is in his province.

I guess the man was doing a reasonable thing but, despite the fear I sometimes lived in with this huge, open dark area our houses were adjacent to, living with high fences and a huge bright light at night is recognizably living in fear - It's announcement, advertisement.

Somehow my need to reconnect with my roots musically intersected with this castrating image of development. The image of Luigi's, where music as a way of life became a viable reality for me, a social reality, being flattened, planed, de-sexed, de-natured, turned into a parking space, became a cry that became a song.

Luigi's was a pizza joint that serviced a lot of people who attended, taught, and/or worked at the lakefront campus of the University of New Orleans. Wesley Schmitt was managing the place when he approached Clark Vreeland about having the band he was in, the Rhapsodizers, perform there on Wednesday nights for sixty bucks. Myself, Frank Bua, and Becky Kury were in the band then. We took the offer.

This was in 1974, during oil embargo, gas lines, truck driver strikes. Hippies that had cut their hair and gotten jobs were being laid-off - The American Dream was telling them "Sorry, we don't need you today." Unemployment comp kept these guys and gals in beer money and they spent it at Luigi's. I can't call it a renaissance but it was a period of breakdown that gave music a golden opportunity. People with time on their hands were partying to homegrown music while the government looked the other way.

Interestingly enough, while this was happening at the Lakefront, the gator people were staging parties at the 501 which was to become Tipitina's and Quint Davis and Allison Miner were starting to really take off with their Heritage Festival, moving to the fairgrounds.

Anyway, "Wrong Road" is a fantasy about trying to find my way back to those fertile, volatile times, to that special generative place. A generative place that was also a de-generative place. Where everybody is a derelict. And Michelle is the Queen of Hell. Nothing's "right", we're all gone to the dogs... but this is the place of soul, where the heart's medicine comes in the form of a sweet daimonic pill.

Some of the travelers have died, some are so derelict as to make one shudder, some have been saved by abstinence programs... and some still carry on and seem none the worse for wear in body, in spirit - the rare wonders to behold. Some struggle and temper the lusts of the body, such ripe sustenance for the soul, and remember in awe and gratitude those wonderful and savage nights!

© 1996 Ed Volker