Big Easy: Here and Now--and Then

In New Orleans, memories of the dead are not far below the surface. In fact, the dead themselves aren’t below the surface.

Much of the city’s great jazz and rhythm and blues tradition developed from funeral parades that both mourn the dead and celebrate their souls’ presumed ascension to eternal life. And when the dearly departed are dropped off at the cemetery, they are planted not six feet under in a dug-out grave, but atop the ground in crypts or vaults of stone, lest they be submerged by the low-lying region’s high water table.

The subdudes play a distinctly New Orleans-flavored blend of blues, rock, soul and R&B; and, not surprisingly, they are keeping alive the New Orleans tradition of playing music to memorialize their dead. “Primitive Streak,” the band’s strong new album, adds to a subdudes’ tradition of writing soulful elegies for their dead and of respecting the claim of the past on the present.

Tommy Malone, the band’s lead singer and guitarist, says he learned from his father, William, the importance of not neglecting the dead. Each summer, he recalled last week from a tour stop in Denver, his father would take him to the country churchyard near Edgard, La., where he grew up, and they would tend the ancestors’ grave sites.

“It was one of my jobs as a kid,” recalled Malone, who will front the subdudes (the lowercase spelling is the band’s idea) at the Coach House on Friday night. “I had to paint the letters on the tombstones with gilded paint. There were quite a few names there; it would be an all-day job. It was creepy in a way, but I loved to draw, so I kind of dug it. It had to be done really cleanly and clearly.”

Last year, Malone buried his father in the 18th century churchyard. He noticed that the letters on the family tombstones weren’t as cleanly painted as in the old days: “[My father] was the last to do it, oddly enough. He did a real sloppy job, I might add,” Malone said with a chuckle. “Maybe I will go and paint his [tombstone] in gold, just for the record.”

But Malone already has painted a lovely memorial in the best way he knew how: The new album features “Carved in Stone,” a sweet, sad meditation inspired by the sight of his father’s grave marker.

Besides Malone’s song, the album includes “Don’t Let ‘Em,” a remembrance of one of bassist Johnny Ray Allen’s Mississippi ancestors, whose last wish was that the family homestead be preserved, and “Sarita,” a sprightly, funky tune that sprang from sadness: An associate of the band wrote it after learning about the death of an old girlfriend. The subdudes’ 1994 album, “Annunciation,” included “Angel to Be,” a memorial to Allen’s mother.

Of course, enjoying the present is as big a part of the New Orleans way as remembering the past. Malone covered that base with “All the Time in the World,” a funky, Little Feat-style number in which the Big Easy approach to life is expressed in a humorously hangdog vocal that gives it depth beyond a mere call to party:

Just move along, not too fast.

Try to make the good times last.

I got all the time in the world.

“It was written from a conversation with my girlfriend in L.A.,” Malone said. “It was about the two of us getting together to live together,” a move that he says continues to be put off. “One of us, I can’t remember which, said, ‘That’s OK, I’ve got all the time in the world.’ We’re still working on it.”

Most people seem to latch onto the catch-phrase’s take-life-easy message, rather than the song’s thornier undercurrent, Malone said. “It’s sort of come to be that, so I’m going to let it be that.” After all, the Big Easy approach is a part of his philosophy: “Things happen the way they’re supposed to, and to push it is just wasted energy. I just try to move along and follow the path of least resistance.”

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As a musician, Malone, 38, has followed a path heavily influenced by family. His first guitar tutor was Dave Malone, an older brother who plays in the long-running New Orleans bar band the Radiators. Malone joined Dave, Dave’s then wife and another older brother, John, in one of his first bands, playing country-rock in bars on Bourbon Street.

The subdudes started out playing highly amplified R&B; as the Continental Drifters (a band that still exists, but with a completely different lineup that includes pop-rockers Peter Holsapple, Susan Cowsill and ex-Bangle Vicki Peterson). In 1987 Malone, Allen, accordionist-keyboards player John Magnie and percussionist Steve Amedee decided to take a quieter, folksier approach.

“At our first rehearsal, I had a funky old tambourine with a skin on it, and Steve started tapping on it with a kitchen spoon, just to keep time,” recalled Malone. Hence was born the subdudes’ unorthodox rhythm approach, in which Amedee supplies the beat mainly by whacking a tambourine with a plastic stick, generating a surprisingly full sound with the help of amplification.

Soon after they formed, the subdudes moved to Magnie’s old hometown, Ft. Collins, Colo., on the theory that they could live more cheaply and develop more rapidly away from music-clogged New Orleans.

It worked: The band scored a major label deal with EastWest Records, where it released two albums before switching to the independent Windham Hill affiliate, High Street, for “Annunciation” and “Primitive Streak.” Guitarist Willie Williams, a veteran of the New Orleans gospel group the Zion Harmonizers, signed on as an adjunct subdude during the “Annunciation” sessions.

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Malone and Allen have returned to New Orleans--Malone says he came back about three years ago because he missed his hometown and needed to be closer to his aging parents, who both had become ill with cancer. Magnie and Amedee remain in Colorado. “Primitive Streak” was a deliberate return to a traditional New Orleans sound, fleshed out by gospel harmonies and horns.

“We wanted to get primitive again. We recorded in the Egyptian Room, a big studio in the old Masonic Temple building in New Orleans,” Malone said. “It had a real strange vibe, an enormous room with marble floors and real high ceilings. Most of the tracks we cut with [band members] in a circle, pretty much playing to one another.” Bonnie Raitt, who befriended the subdudes when they toured together in 1994, gives her stamp of approval by singing backing vocals and playing slide guitar on “Too Soon to Tell.”

“Annunciation” sold respectably--about 175,000 copies, according to Malone--and he says “Primitive Streak” so far is doing at least as well. To boost its fortunes, the band was hoping to land an opening slot on Hootie and the Blowfish’s tour but couldn’t reel it in. In fact, “Primitive Streak,” with its catchy writing, could be a fruitful place for Hootie’s hordes to turn if they want to sample something melodically savory but closer to the soul and R&B; traditions that Hootie loosely borrows.

Malone’s high, reedy singing voice often is compared to Steve Winwood’s, but on “Primitive Streak” he sounds more flexible and varied, with traces of Otis Redding’s soul grit and Eric Clapton’s bluesy tone.

“I’ve gotten that [Winwood comparison] many times,” Malone said. “I liked him coming up, especially his Traffic period, but I can’t say he was someone I tried to emulate. I just sing the best way I know how. I listened to a lot of Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke and those [soul] guys. Beatles stuff, too, and George Jones and Hank Williams. It was a blend of all that, I guess, but I like soul singers best.”

Touring with the reunited Traffic last summer, Malone didn’t get to know Winwood well, but he did make him an offer that the once brilliant, now slickly dull rock hero might do well to heed:

“I told him, if he wanted to do something completely different, he should hire us to back him up on a record. He just chuckled politely, but maybe he’ll get a wild hair and give us a call.”

* The subdudes, August Burning and the Dave Canedo Band play Friday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $15-$17. (714) 496-8930.