A Delta tour de force

ON the stage at Madison Square Garden, rocker John Fogerty was kicking off a rehearsal of the “From the Big Apple to the Big Easy” benefit concert last week by launching into the familiar opening riff of “Born on the Bayou,” his hit that’s an anthem down in those parts despite being fiction, given that Fogerty’s a Berkeley boy.

But when 68-year-old Clarence “Frogman” Henry got his rare turn on the big stage and did his signature “Ain’t Got No Home,” there was nothing fictional about the song he wrote a half-century ago and has performed since largely as a make-’em-smile novelty, a number that enables him to flip-flop between a high falsetto and his gravelly frog voice.

“It is true,” said co-producer Ken Ehrlich, who was backstage trying to get his bearings after an overnight flight from L.A., where he had just completed the minor chore of staging the Emmy Awards. “He ain’t got no home....It’s gone.”

Ehrlich’s partner in the latest show business extravaganza aiming to raise millions of dollars for victims of Hurricane Katrina is New Orleans-based impresario Quint Davis, another of the homeless these days. Davis faced a more trivial crisis at the moment: Garfunkel had arrived for a sound check. Where was Simon?

That’s when the real world intruded, in a call that sent Davis to a quieter greenroom so he could calm a distant, frantic voice. “All right, he’s got all the passes to get in,” Davis told the caller. “Let’s get him in now.”

The passes in question were not to get some VIP into the Garden show but were to get someone into a heavily flooded New Orleans neighborhood and into the house of Fats Domino.

The 77-year-old Rock and Roll Hall of Famer was originally penciled in to be the featured New Orleans performer here, having helped personify the events on the gulf for many Americans when he was among the missing for two days until being rescued by boat from his second-story balcony.

“He was coming,” Davis recalled. “When he heard about the benefit, he said, ‘Well, I’m gonna do that.’ ”

Then Davis rushed off again, for Paul Simon had arrived and it was time for the sound check of the reunited Simon and Garfunkel. As dozens of workmen adjusted cables and lights and soundboards about the cavernous arena, Art Garfunkel tilted his head up toward the empty grandstands and lifted his voice upward too, to sing the lilting “I will comfort you” line from “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” another song whose lyrics have taken on new poignancy.

Poised to join in, on his left, was not only Simon but Aaron Neville, the Neville Brother with the weightlifter’s body and gentle soul.

It was one of those mix-and-match pairings of artists they like to try at these galas, often teaming an A-list star with a local described as “legendary,” even if he/she is a stranger to much of the well-heeled audience shelling out up to $500 per ticket for the cause.

Neville has been doing a lot of such Katrina benefits, so many “It’s all a blur, you know,” he said. He tried to recall his recent appearances from Los Angeles to Nashville, for benefits staged by MTV and BET and the like, and one in Denver to help the Dave Matthews Band raise $2 million.

The last few days have been New York’s dizzying turn, with some of the New Orleans performers making homeboy Wynton Marsalis’ Saturday night Jazz at Lincoln Center fundraiser, followed by the next day’s brunch benefit featuring “Southern Nights” pianist-composer Allen Toussaint and then the double-header on Tuesday, when Matthews and others filled Radio City Music Hall, for up to $1,000 a ticket, at the same time Fogerty, Simon and Garfunkel, Jimmy Buffett and Elton John guaranteed a sellout at the Garden.

One distinction of the Garden benefit, the 64-year-old Neville said, was the abundance of New Orleans artists mixed with the marquee names. The show came together in a frantic hour of calls a week after the hurricane, when Ehrlich, L.A.’s 62-year-old master of the musical special, was desperately trying to find his old friend Davis, the 57-year-old who helped found the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 1970.

Davis, it turned out, was in Africa -- on a safari -- unaware of the tragedy until he flew back to New York to attend a funeral. Between Davis trying to determine the fate of his flooded house and of his parents, they had their “We’ve got to do something” moment, Ehrlich recalled.

Moments later, by chance, Ehrlich got a call from Cablevision President James L. Dolan, who also serves as chairman of Madison Square Garden and who wanted to do something -- a pay-per-view benefit -- and already had enlisted some of the stars. The producers then insisted that the music, as much as possible, be from the Delta and that the big names be paired with New Orleans artists. Davis said he wound up flying in 54 of them from “all over the place.”

One side benefit for many of those Crescent City musicians, Neville said, was distraction. He has not been home since the hurricane, but a neighbor told him “the waterline was well above the roof.” Two of his sons also lost their homes. They could sing about the place, or past tragedies, but it was different from being there.

One of his solos in the Garden show was “A Change Is Gonna Come,” the Sam Cooke song. “Soul Queen” Irma Thomas, whose New Orleans tavern, the Lion’s Den, is no more, was paired with Lenny Kravitz and Ry Cooder on a 1937 Bessie Smith song, “Backwater Blues,” about another era’s flood: “I stood up and watched my city fill / And my people ain’t got nowhere to go.”

Jazz, of course, on the bill

AFTER Simon and Garfunkel, the rehearsal moved on to the jazz portion of the program, in which New Orleans’ Dirty Dozen Brass Band was paired with a transatlantic musical couple, British hipster Elvis Costello and jazz pianist-singer Diana Krall. Krall volunteered to do the Fats hit “I’m Walkin,’ ” a song she often uses to close her shows, and she quickly won over the motley crew of horn players.

But for at least a minute or two, no millionaire musician was going to steal the scene from the New Orleans group’s squat Efrem Towns, who can lift two horns to his mouth at once, a trumpet and a flugelhorn, to “get the whole chord thing workin’,” he explained.

He and the Dirty Dozen were playing a fairground in Bean Blossom, Ind., of all places, when the storm hit their hometown.

Towns said he called his wife to say he was on his way home and she told him “I don’t think so.” Still, he was “one of the lucky ones,” his house being on the S-shaped ridge that winds through New Orleans. The group’s two sax players, the trombonist and the other trumpet player were not as fortunate.

After the hurricane, the Dirty Dozen was asked to do a radio program Towns had only vaguely heard of: “The show on the prairie,” he said, the one with that Garrison fellow who has a dry sense of humor, and sings a song with guests too.

Suddenly, Towns and the others were at the Garden and there was talk of mounting a national tour of New Orleans acts, especially those who normally count on tourists who come to town to catch them in the clubs or on the streets.

That was the unreality of this disaster -- it took your house but got you gigs, on big stages, and provided a chance to remind the nation what New Orleans music, beyond Louis Armstrong, means to the culture, like how you can dance, and rejoice, at a funeral.

Costello sang one rowdy old number with the band, “The Monkey,” then watched them rehearse from a seat on the Garden floor. His other solo was “On the Way Down,” which warns that you’d better not misuse people on the way up -- you might meet them again when you tumble. But “you can’t have everything be a loaded statement,” he said.

His schedule for Tuesday night had him doing his songs at the Garden, shuttling down to Greenwich Village to perform with Deborah Harry, then return for the pay-per-view benefit’s finale.

The producers did not have to ponder long how to end the show.

“That’s a fairly easy one,” Davis said, given how their jazz festival back home always ends with the Neville Brothers -- Aaron singing “Amazing Grace” and then Cyril and band picking it up with “Down by the Riverside” and capped, of course, by “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

Here they decided to have two brass bands on the floor of the Garden, Davis said, “because the music of New Orleans lives in the street.”

But they also hoped to have a guest artist, a sax player from the leafy suburb of Chappaqua, N.Y., one William Jefferson Clinton.

Clinton was a natural for the event, given his co-chairmanship, with another former president, of the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, one of the night’s prime beneficiaries. But what would he do?

“The first thing I said was he better bring his ax [instrument] so he can play on ‘The Saints,’ ” Davis recalled.

“I asked him to prepare some remarks,” Ehrlich said. “I want him to bring the ax too, but we’ll see.”

So on show night Clinton came, but in his suit and tie, no ax, just to introduce Fogerty, the California boy who adopted the bayou and who sped through his songs, with maybe only one or two “rollin’ on the rivers” thrown in.

The biggest Katrina benefit yet went five hours-plus with only a little political speechifying, from Bette Midler, and at 12:15 a.m., the producers even got a little TV time themselves, celebrating onstage while the brass bands wound through the floor doing “Saints.”

Then it was time for many to go home and survey the reality on the ground, or still under water, then think about the concert that will count more than this one, or any so far -- the one next April, when the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival would normally take place.

“That’s where the unknowable meets the unknown,” Davis said when asked where and how they’ll do it. But Fats should be able to make it and they’re sure to invite some big names from last week’s shows, and others, and how could they say no?

Efrem Towns, the man who can blow two horns at once, figures they should have written some new songs by then too, to go along with the New Orleans classics and the local hits from the ‘50s and the other eras’ laments about high waters.

“After the hurricane, that’s the perfect time,” he said, “because this is fresh in everybody’s mind. Sure everybody got stories, ideas. If you can’t come up with songs right now, you’ll never do it.”