Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.01.2006, Blaðsíða 41
there are swimming pools everywhere. It’s a city of blue tarps”;
“We were listening to a woman talking about her return home,
a feel good story, and she gets to her front door, looks at her
second-story bedroom, and there’s a fish in the blinds,” to the
essential change in the city: “Tourism will never recover. This
city, you used to have every hotel staffed with minimum wage
talent. Where are those people going to live? Why are they
going to come? Not for the girls. This is like Alaska now, one
girl for every 12 guys. And for businesses, even for hotels, when
you have a few months with absolutely no business, you’re gone.
The only hope is to stay closed and hope your insurance holds
out, but that’s only for so long.”
Stu and the bartender, and, truthfully, anyone else who has
been involved in tourism, can list the damage for hours. The
business owners of the city of New Orleans will likely never wit-
ness a recovery—if it recovers, it will be to the benefit of outside
investors, and it will be a completely different city.
He tells us one amusing story, he feels, about a man driving
just outside New Orleans, and calling a radio station to report
that an enormous casino had simply disappeared during the
hurricane. Another caller phoned in immediately after and said
he’s found the casino – it had been blown across the interstate
and a mile down it.
With his why did the casino cross the road comment
complete, he wished us well and told us how to get to the worst
of the housing, and then warned us about the three-hour traffic
jam we would hit. We headed off toward the housing, but were
sidetracked by the chance to see the Superdome. Easy enough
to pull into, the Superdome vaguely resembles a nuclear reactor.
There, the clean-up has almost been completed, and it now
looks hygienic. The employees working there, dressed in prison
orange overalls, obviously knew the recent history of the build-
ing. Silent, and often looking at their own feet, spending 20
minutes among them suggested the gravity of recent events.
With sunset, we were told that visiting the worst hit neigh-
bourhoods would not be a safe decision, and we were warned
again of the traffic. We decided to leave, spending the next
three hours bumper to bumper with the now displaced workers
of New Orleans.
“We Don’t Need No Hurricane to Have Hard Times”
Two days later, we are sitting down to a blues jam at Morgan
Freeman’s Ground Zero club in Clarksdale, Mississippi. An ag-
ing blues musician who goes by the name Razorblade has come
by to sell me his CD for $20. When I refuse he drops the price
to $10, explaining the price break as a deal if it will help him
leave Clarksdale.
“You’re from Iceland and you can help Razorblade get out
and see the world. You know, people hear my voice and they
ask me why I’m not a millionaire. And I have to tell them that I
just don’t know. But I’m an old man, I’m 60 years old, and I’m
ready. And it doesn’t matter how long or how far away you need
me to go, I’m ready.”
I politely refuse, offering as an excuse that I spent money in
New Orleans trying to promote tourism.
“We don’t need no hurricane to have hard times in Missis-
sippi. You’re in the Delta, there’s plenty of places here to spend
money and help people out.”
He gets up a few minutes later and sings a stone cold cool
Chicago blues style number that he had written, and that pre-
sumably had been on his CD, called “Can you loan me $2.”
When he comes by after his performance, he now refuses to
sell me the CD because he doesn’t believe I know how good he is.
“I’ll bring my CD by tomorrow night. You’re going to see
the show at Red’s? I’ll bring it there.”
The show, unadvertised and unannounced, is a T-Model
Ford concert, played at one of the biggest dives in Clarksdale,
on the “wrong side of the tracks” from Ground Zero. T-Model
is the last of the great trio of bad-ass bluesmen who built
the record label Fat Possum – he has filled clubs throughout
America and Europe. He is playing tomorrow, without his
record label’s knowledge, because he will be allowed to keep the
$5 entry fees of the juke joint, which even with the wildest fire
code violations could not hold more than 50 people.
We cancel all our other reservations and settle into Clarks-
dale to meet the living incarnation of the blues.
(In Part Two: an extended interview with T-Model Ford and
Lightning Malcolm, and the Mississippi Delta.)
Mentioned in this piece:
92 ZEW Radio, Mobile: www.92zew.net (Featuring weekly blues
and roots music 10-3 am local time Sundays.)
The Gambit Weekly: www.bestofneworleans.com.
Fat Possum Records: www.fatpossum.com
“You know, people hear my voice and they ask me why I’m not a millionaire. And I have to tell them that I just don’t know.”
Sesselja Kristjánsdóttir M Garðar Thór Cortes
Bergþór Pálsson M Davíð Ólafsson
Hlín Pétursdóttir M Anna Margrét Óskarsdóttir
Einar Th. Guðmundsson
Kór og hljómsveit Íslensku óperunnar
Hljómsveitarstjóri: Kurt Kopecky M Leikstjóri: Paul Suter
Leikmynd og búningar: Season Chiu M Lýsing: Jóhann Bjarni Pálmason
Mið
asa
la, s
. 511
420
0
mid
asa
la@
ope
ra.is
www
.op
era
.is
Aðeins sýnd í febrúar og mars
ATH! 25 ára og yngri fá 50%
afslátt af miðaverði í sal
Frumsýning 5. febrúar 2006
F
A
B
R
I
K
A
N