Chris Bickford

Last night it was bedlam in New Orleans.  I was hanging out at a Super Bowl party at an apartment on Frenchmen Street when the late-game interception pretty much clinched the game for the Saints.   I decided to go down on to the streets to see what the action was like.  I wandered into the Maison Bar, where a packed house full of college-age kids and twenty-somethings was going wild with hysteria, while the Young Fellas Brass Band played New Orleans fight songs and the game was being projected against the wall.  As the clock ran out, the band stepped off the stage and stepped on to the street, and the whole bar emptied out to join them in a spontaneous street parade.  We marched down Frenchmen Street, up Royal and into the Quarter, up to Bourbon Street, where the crowd was so thick at times it was impossible to move….we headed south somewhere around St Peter, then wended our way back down to Decatur and back into the Marigny, singing, dancing, shouting “Who Dat!”, high-fiving passers-by from the other direction.  Cars on the street were honking their horns and drivers and passengers alike were extending their arms out for high-fives…There were umbrella dancers and flag wavers, people tossing beads off of balconies, confetti in the air…a few folks were even dancing on the tops of cars…

It was a little piece of history, and one of the coolest parties I’ve ever attended–made all the more special because up until the fourth quarter we were all biting our nails wondering whether it was even going to happen.   Had the Saints lost, I imagine things would have been a wee bit more quiet on the streets.   But it definitely has to go down in history as one of the largest–and definitely one of the most significant–spontaneous street parades in the history of New Orleans.   And the Young Fellas parade was only one of, no doubt, dozens of second-lines crawling through the city last night.

I’ll expand this post later, with a few more pics, but I wanted to get this one up at a reasonable hour in the day, for all you east coasters who are an hour ahead.   Check back in for more.

History is in the making today. The town of New Orleans, having risen from the tragedy of Katrina, is on a comeback roll, and tonight it will celebrate as its home team makes its first ever appearance defending the NFC championship. Having hosted 7 Super Bowls in its home stadium, New Orleans has never played in one. Until tonight.

Last Wednesday I was sitting in Buzzard’s Hall, the collective man-cave of New Orleans’ oldest Mardi Gras marching society, drinking beer and eating fried flounder with some of the Buzzards. One of the guys, decked out in a Saints T-shirt, a Saints Jacket, and a Saints medallion, was saying to me, “Do you feel what’s going on here? Do you get how huge this is?” I told him, yeah, there’s a huge buzz in the air, everybody’s running around yelling “who dat!”…But he kept going, he was on a roll. “This isn’t just about football, my friend. And it’s not just about Katrina either. This is about this town. This is about this town coming together like never before. The whites, the blacks, the gays, everybody’s together on this one. This is about all of us, man, the pride we’ve always had, but now the whole world can see what we can do!”

Later he added, “Man, I wish the Colts would just give us this one, you know? Because it means so much to us.”

And it’s true. The Town that Care forgot is having its moment in the sun, and everybody–EVERYBODY–is waving the black and gold and greeting each other with the Saints’ battle cry. “Who Dat!”

Even people who don’t give a rat’s ass about football are joining in the spirit. The Mistick Krewe of Satyricon, a gay carnival society, moved the date of its annual Mardi Gras ball back from Sunday to Friday, because, as the emcee, in drag, said, “If we held it on Super Bowl Sunday, I don’t think anybody would show up. Hell, I wouldn’t even be here…and, well, you know I don’t exactly follow football…”

Well, today is the day, my friends. In the entire history of the New Orleans Saints’ franchise, the team has never even had a winning season. And today, after rampaging nearly undefeated through the NFC lineup, they are gearing up for their first Super Bowl ever. And they’ve got the Pride of New Orleans squarely behind them…many are making the trek to Miami to spook the Colts with their infamous stadium-shaking “Who Dat” chant, which, the more you hear it, sounds like some ancient African battle cry…the rest will be watching all over town at Super Bowl parties, or downtown where a large outdoor screen will be set up for public viewing, or at their favorite bar with all their neighborhood friends. Make no mistake, the soft swampy ground of New Orleans will be trembling tonight, and if the Saints win, there will be mayhem in the streets.

Win or lose, the Saints will return home as heroes, and on Tuesday there will be a victory parade, win or lose, through the streets. For a town that loves a parade, its’ only natural.

Following are a few snapshots from around town of Saints’ pride…I’m trying to get them up as fast as I can so I can go out and enjoy the festivities myself…and find a good spot to watch the game.

‘Cause it’s not just about football, right? It’s about history being made. GO SAINTS!!!!

Oh, and please don’t tell the NFL about the title of this post…I can’t afford to get sued:)

New Orleans holds a particular place in the history and legacy of marching bands. When the Spanish took control of Lousiana from the French in the eighteenth century, marching bands were a strictly military affair, and the primitiveness of instrument technology at the time limited the bands to the old-time fife-and-drum corps, which we all know too well from one too many re-enactments of the Revolutionary War. The Spanish, with a much more progressive attitude towards slaves and Free People of Color than the French, conscripted all free blacks to join in the militia, and put the fife and drum in their hands. In short order the free blacks were moonlighting at balls and dances as well, in addition to generally keeping up morale within the ranks with their tunes.

In those days, being a musician was no great honor to a white man, but to a black man it was both a source of extra income and a means of expression, as well as a deep part of his cultural heritage. People of color took to European instruments–be it the fiddle, the piano, or the new reed instruments–like white on rice, and in that swampy stew of cultural influences, the seeds of dixieland and jazz were born and grew like kudzu.

In New Orleans, the link between marching bands and jazz is still as strong as ever, as the city’s hundreds of brass bands perform in local clubs and on the national circuit, and front the Carnival Parades and Second Line processions that fill the city with the sounds of tubas, trombones, trumpets, saxophones, and of course, drums. Nearly every day of the year, there is a brass band marching somewhere in the streets of New Orleans.

For this reason, no other town in the country takes its high school marching bands more seriously. Playing in “band” here is serious business, and the competition between bands is just as ferocious as it is between the sports teams they represent. Many of these kids will go on to be the jazz greats of tomorrow, as have their predecessors.

Around Carnival time, the ante is upped a notch as high school bands are asked to march with the dozens of krewes and sub-krewes in their Mardi Gras parades. We were lucky to catch a couple of them in action as they ratchet up their rigorous practice schedules for the Mardi Gras season. Thanks to the members of the St Augustine High School and McDonogh 35 bands for letting us follow them through the streets.

You can check out more photos from my assistant Federica Valabrega on her blog. She got some good ones.

Last August the float warehouse of the Krewe de Vieux–a satirical Mardi Gras society who lays sole claim to having permit to parade through the night streets of the French Quarter during the Carnival season–caught fire, causing irreparable damage to a number of their floats. In true New Orleanian fashion, the Krewe turned loss into creativity by declaring “All Fired Up!” as the theme for their 2010 parade. The theme has taken on greater meaning in the past week, as the New Orleans Saints begin their own march towards the Super Bowl for the first time in history. Indeed, alongside the flame-haired revelers in red tights marched the corpses of Peyton Manning and other targets of the Saints’ rampage as they journey towards the bright lights of Miami. And, just as ubiquitous as the brass bands blowing out “When the Saints go Marching in” were the chants from the crowd all along the parade route of “Who dat?! Who dat?! Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?!

We had arrived in New Orleans the night before under a full moon, and spent Saturday getting our bearings and scoping out the best spot for the perfect shot of the parade. In the end, in true New Orleanian spirit, all our planning was cast to the winds, as we were swept along in the energy of the parade. Having begun at the corner of St Peter and Royal in the French Quarter, against the backdrop of a beautiful Quarter Maison and what we hoped was going to be a shiny moon, we found ourselves in short order in the Marigny, the home turf of the Krewe de Vieux, where the Krewe decamped for their post-parade party and all the rest of New Orleans’ bohemians, creatives, and street urchins danced the night away to dj music oustide the taco truck.

And that “perfect shot” we had spent the day scoping out? Well, right now, it’s lying somewhere in the middle of a trash-heap, or more optimistically in the hands of some eagle-eyed parade watcher, who just hasn’t yet figured out how to return to me the 16 gb Compact Flash card they found lying on the streets amid the empty beer cups, beads, matchbooks, puddles of vomit, and cigarette butts, somewhere along the parade route. I suppose it’s my own sacrifice to the gods of Carnival, my own throw to the fire of abandonment that warms revelers in the chilly months of the Carnival season. Unfortunately, the card also contained some video documentation of our epic haul from the OBX to NOLA, plus some truly sick photos of our arrival at our digs in the Tremé, with the full moon sneaking out from the clouds and throwing streaks of god-light down upon my rear-window-shattered Cherokee stallion, as I stood on the back bumper, raising my arm to the sky…see, you’d have to actually see the photo to know what the f–k I’m talking about, and only then would you say, dude, that is SICK!…but my assistant Fede and I are determined to re-create the photo next full moon, along with staging a Storyville-inspired bordello shoot around the grounds of the 150-year-old house we are renting.

As for the rest of the night, here are some highlights:

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Tomorrow begins the big road trip down to New Orleans to cover the Carnival and Mardi Gras celebrations, leg #2 of The Carnival Project, which began over the last couple of years with my coverage of Carnival in Venice.  It’s a 17-hour drive, but my co-pilot and assistant Federica Valabrega will be sharing driving duties with me and we hope to make it down and be settled in to our apartment in the Tremé in time to cover the Saturday night parade of the Krewe de Vieux, the only night-time parade through the French Quarter during the Carnival season.   This year the King of the Krewe de Vieux will be the venerable Dr. John, one of the great living legends of New Orleans music.   I can’t wait to see the old man in his crazy king outfit and his long beard rolling through the Quarter, laying down the benediction of funk and gumbo upon the revelers along the parade route.

Because of my last-minute trip out to California, whose post seems to have gotten partially deleted for some strange reason, we will be arriving a little late to the festivities.   But with the Saints having won a historic victory in the Superdome in sudden-death overtime last Sunday night, spirits in the Crescent City are high–the sad memory of the Superdome post-Katrina has been replaced by the elation of a resilient city whose spirited football team led their franchise to its first Super Bowl in its history–and with such auspicious beginnings this Carnival season proves to be epic and historic in many ways, weather permitting.

We plan to provide updates as often as possible over the next couple of weeks leading up to Mardi Gras, provided we don’t get so sucked into the spirit of the street symphony that we forget to blog and tweet and facebook…at the very least I’ll keep making my silly iPhone camera updates on Facebook, so if you want to see what’s going on, join me on Facebook…I’m the Chris Bickford in the “Virginia Beach/Norfolk” network…

I’ll save my ramblings on the interest and significance of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras in the pantheon of great Carnival traditions for a later time.   Right now I need to pack up, gear up, and get a little  rest.  Stay tuned…