JF (musician): I started going down to Frenchmen around 1990, so it was pretty different. The scene at Café Brasil was a lot fun. There were some great bands, but it was also just a great hang. Very interesting people. Sometimes it was a lot of people, sometimes it wasn’t, but it was always interesting. A lot of artists, a lot of good talkers… You know, a lot of characters.
On bars as art projects:
Adé [Salgado] had this particular thing going with Café Brasil. Everything was always some sort of multicultural affair. The reason the whole thing took off was the guy had an incredible sense of aesthetics, in both the people that he hired and how he ran the place. How he kept changing it up—in ways that would totally drive you crazy, honestly—but it was his own personal art project.
That’s the difference, I think. Back then, the joints were a few people’s personal art projects, and now they’re bars. Now, bars are bar businesses, and everybody’s a business person, and everybody’s very serious about things. I think that’s the shift. It’s that dullness that takes over when you start approaching things with a business-first mentality. Things used to happen in a much more interesting way when people were inventing stuff, trying things out, creating something.
Music in the ’90s:
The Iguanas played at Café Brasil on the weekends—that was a fixture there. Always a great show, always packed with people dancing. There was Tribe Nunzio, the reggae band, there was Pedro Cruz, Mas Mamones, Los Babies Del Merengue… Tons of others. There was so much Latin music on Frenchmen. A lot of Brasilian music. That went on for years and years.
Then there were the things that were going on Snug Harbor. There weren’t really a lot of places back then—just those two, really, and Café Istanbul. Suleyman [Aydin] owned Café Istanbul, then he sold it there, and now he’s gotten out of it over here too. [Café Istanbul is currently located in the New Orleans Healing Center, not too far from Flora’s Cafe, where we’ve met up.]
There was a lot of live jazz on Frenchmen, a lot of improvised jazz, a lot of that kind of stuff. Oh, and there was music down at Checkpoint’s too. That end was kind of separate.
I had a weekly gig at Café Brasil with the Klezmer All-Stars on Tuesday nights. That was a lot of fun. It would be mobbed, people dancing… Eventually, it meant a lot of the people we all associate around, we were going down there to hang around and drink every night. We’d catch the early show, catch the late show, one after the other… You could do that then, just go from show to show. Part of that was that it was a lot cheaper back then.
[Read Ben Schenk’s memories of the Klezmer All-Stars here.]
Hanging around outside, coffee, bugs…
Frenchmen wasn’t really an entertainment street then. A lot of coffeeshops, with people just people hanging around outside. This is what it looked like! [Gestures outside to the artist folks sitting around the cafe, the people smoking on the curbs outside Big Daddy’s and Mimi’s, etc.]
Look into the bar across the street—well, there’s two bars across the street—like, what are those people doing? Frenchmen was like that, with an international crowd and good prices. Everyone was some kind of photographer or artist or painter or musician, or else they owned the bar.
Adé would support everybody… if they wanted a drink, he would give them this incredibly powerful, clear Brazilian liquor that was just like… It would knock you out. Of course, we’re all young, so we’re doing endless shots of this stuff that he would pour, or whatever else he was pouring.
I remember one day, he got all this wine— like, suddenly there was all this wine, and it was really good wine—and I was there for some show, and he gave me a glass, and just as I raised it to my mouth, a huge cockroach flew into my mouth. I opened my mouth and— it was incredible timing—AHHH. It was like a Dracula movie. I just spit the whole—I spit so forcefully that the cockroach, all the wine, everything just spews all over the floor.
Adé thought it was hilarious. He’s smacking the bar cracking up, runs out with his broom, and just starts sweeping it up. He didn’t even care.
Business, piracy, Daniel Lanois…
Adé was funny because he used to sort of make fun of all the bands that played there. The thing about it was that everyone got a terrible deal, but it was somehow still better than any amount of deal you get now. It’s weird. Apparently there’s big, big business on Frenchmen now, but it’s this sort of flat fee where most of the money ends up going to these places—these glitzy new places—and you walk away at the end of a three-hour gig with sixty-five dollars.
Before, it was more of an open piracy. You know, you walked in, you ran your own shit, and if it worked for you it was good, and if it didn’t, it wasn’t. Plus the thing is, music worked really differently then. I mean they’d say ‘yes’ to anybody that wanted to play. Now, they check on you: “What have you done? Where is your website? Where did you do this?” We were walking in like, “Oh, I’ve got a band, can I have a gig?” and they’d like whip out the calendar.
But there were some really killer people playing there. I mean, Daniel Lanois had his studio around the corner [Kingsway studio, at Chartres and Esplanade] and sometimes he’d do gigs in the afternoon at Café Brasil with whoever he happened to be recording. So you’d go in there, and it would be, like, Emmy Lou Harris. Playing for five people, just trying out new material and stuff.
So there was that element too, this really interesting stuff going on at a really high level, people just experimenting down there. And then we’d be laughing over the experience, because no one was very worshipful back then. I mean, I think everyone was a lot less worshipful of that kind of fame.
French Quarter: bohemian haven vs tourist mecca
A lot of it was also—now, here’s the flavor. This is really what seals it. Frenchmen was right by the French Quarter, and at that point, the French Quarter was all apartments. Cheap apartments; all those buildings were at maximum occupancy.
So, it’s thousands of people living in the French Quarter in a fairly bohemian way, because it was really, really cheap to have an apartment there—I paid two hundred and thirty dollars a month, I even had a pool, and that was a completely normal situation— all residential, no tourists. I mean, there were some, but tourism was I think something like 20% of the size that it is now then.
And that’s why Frenchmen is the way it is now; there’s all that for these businesses to exploit. Back then, it was just people hanging out. You knew them; it wasn’t like a passing crowd that you met. You were there. They were there. Everyone was going to be there again. They were always gonna be there.
The modern condition…
I think that’s the other big alteration, that Frenchmen isn’t really a social scene anymore. It’s a place where people are gawking, and they’re looking for something. They’re perpetually looking for something. They’re on their phones, they have to go from this place to the next place to see what’s going on.
You didn’t have to do that back then. You’d go down there and you’d sit around, because you liked the other people that were sitting around. That was the scene. There was no “scene”. You kind of just were the scene.
All of these bars now are such late-comers. All the places down there—except for Snug Harbor—they’re all there for another purpose. Now it’s just—I don’t know, it’s turned into Bourbon Street or something. Tourists come to New Orleans and they’ve been told they should go to Frenchmen, so they go. What surprises me, though, is that there are hardly any places where anybody just goes to hang around anymore.
LD: Where do you like playing these days? Is there anywhere off Frenchnmen you think kind of captures that old vibe?
JF: I’m playing mostly at the Sidebar, the Zeitgeist, and Saturn Bar. All the kind of out of the way places. Oh, and Bywater Bakery. I like my solo gig there.
I have a predisposition to want to play at the out of the way places. I have a very low threshold for fakery. So with these places on Frenchmen, it’s like, yeah, you can make a living, but you’re doing something that’s unbelievably non-musical, unbelievably non-communicative. Not to be a moaner, but I like to maximize communication. I’m not making a fortune out of it anyway, so…
LD: …you might as well do it the way you want to do it.
JF: Exactly. I’d rather play some place where I feel like I can connect with people. Even if I can just connect with one person. I don’t want to be the wallpaper for the New Orleans experience. It really kind of dulls my brain.
… Unless it pays a lot. Occasionally that makes it worth it. But the thing about it here is, the things that pay better are usually the private gigs anyways.
Sidebar, Zeitgeist, Starlight, Hi-Ho…
Here’s a kind of cool thing that’s changing now: I do notice that there’s a whole set of musicians, mostly new musicians, who are sort of zealously looking after places where they might be able to do their thing for a while. Sidebar, Zeitgeist, Starlight, maybe the Hi-Ho… There’s still some opportunity to do your thing, and I’ve noticed that the musicians are interested in supporting those places, trying their best to keep that alive. I didn’t think it really worked that way before.
The Zeitgeist [on St. Claude in Arabi], for example, is a great place. They show old films, documentaries, different kinds of art… Every night people are playing there. It’s not a huge put-on, and the films are really special. Places like these are really worth supporting.
I think people are trying to look after places like that as best as possible, which, in an urban environment, is hard. Like I said, people are always on the move looking for the next thing. There are so many tourists, and everything is sensationalized. People don’t just go to loaf around the way that they did. I mean, it’s also a lot more expensive now to loaf around around. People don’t have nearly as much money as we did back then.
It was really a different world. People weren’t mobile, they weren’t always trying to go somewhere else, to the next place the internet told them to go. They were just there. Hanging around. And every night on Frenchmen had some different, cool—really cool—music. Usually international music.
–Laura DeFazio
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For some related content, see this piece I wrote on Jonathan for OffBeat Magazine in 2015. His recollection of Adé telling him why he’d eventually shut down Café Brasil:
“He said, ‘People don’t want it.’ No one was more right. These people don’t want it. In fact, they’re too ignorant to know their lives never contained actually having unregulated fun… They want regulation. They want someone in control. They want to know where they’re supposed to go, how they’re supposed to act, what time they’re supposed to be home. Who’s gonna be there.“
(I’m sure this has stuck with me because I’ve always had profound distaste for prescribed “fun”. Nothing was more confusing to me as a child than children who liked summer camp, for instance. Or children who wanted cell phones…)
