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August 17, 2020
Iris Martin Cohen's Playlist for Her Novel "Last Call on Decatur Street"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Iris Martin Cohen's novel Last Call on Decatur Street compellingly brings pre-Katrina New Orleans to life.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Cohen pens an eloquent love letter to New Orleans and captures her protagonist with succinct descriptions. Cohen also aces the difficult feat of crafting a credible narrator who has blind spots. The lush language, fully realized characters, and tight storytelling make this a winner."
In her own words, here is Iris Martin Cohen's Book Notes music playlist for her novel Last Call on Decatur Street:
I was so excited to do this because music is such an important part of my novel. The book takes place in New Orleans, which is already a town that is so associated with its music, but I wrote about a subculture of burlesque dancers, bartenders and punks of twenty years ago, a New Orleans scene that is less well known to non-locals but has its own very distinctive soundtrack. The characters in my novel spend most of their time in bars discussing, dancing, or fighting about music, the songs and artists they listen to are a self-referential badge of identity. Because so many songs and bands are referenced in the book, this is a nice opportunity for readers to hear some less famous but still great New Orleans bands.
Ash Wednesday – The Happy Talk Band
If one band could sum up the world of my book, it would be Happy Talk. They sing beautiful raggedy songs that distill the ethos and experience of a certain New Orleans type: broke, often broken-hearted but in love with the city. My book takes place on the first night of Carnival season and this song is about the last day of Carnival, so it felt like a nice bookend.
Back That Ass Up – Juvenile
If you were alive and young in New Orleans in 2000, you danced to this song. A lot of my book is about the difficulty of race in New Orleans and the two friends, Rosemary, who is white, and Gaby who is black, starting the book dancing together to this song just kind of articulated the awkwardness and discomfort but also the joy and intimacy of their cross-racial friendship.
Agile, Mobile, Hostile – Andre Williams
A different Andre Williams song is in the book, but I love this one because it conveys the sexy, dangerous, looking-for-trouble spirit that Rosemary imagines as the background to her night. She’s going to drink too much, break some hearts and see where the city takes her. Also, this album, Silky, was very popular then, and Williams went on to collaborate with the Morning 40 Federation who are later on this list. All part of the same down and dirty spirit.
Tombstone Blues – Ronnie Magri and his New Orleans Jazz Band
Rosemary is a burlesque dancer and performs in an early chapter. This was the backing band for the Shim Shamettes, a group of dancers who started the neo-burlesque revival in New Orleans in 1999. The Shim Shamettes and the bar they performed at, The Shim Sham, were inspirations for this book, so it seemed fitting to include their band.
Rawhide – Link Wray and his Wraymen
Early in the book, Rosemary goes home with a rockabilly guy. In the late nineties, the burlesque, vintage, and rockabilly scenes all had a lot of overlap and Link Wray really is the king of rockabilly. He was also Native American, and Rosemary thinks of him as she starts trying to parse through some of the more uncomfortable racial elements of the culture she is a part of.
Live the Life – The Oblivians with Mr. Quintron
A bartender in the book makes a joke about a different Oblivians song, Five Hour Man, but I wanted to include this one from an amazing album they did with Quintron on the organ, who shows up later on this list. One of the best garage bands ever, The Oblivians are from Memphis and the two Delta cities share many influences and performers.
The Streets of Laredo – Johnny Cash
In the middle of an uncomfortable sexual encounter, Rosemary starts to disassociate while staring at a poster of Johnny Cash and she thinks of this song. Mostly I find Johnny Cash’s voice so consoling, like he knows and feels all your sorrows.
I Was A Teenage Werewolf – The Cramps
The Cramps with their fifties b-movie horror punk are the benevolent deities of the seedy, retro punk milieu of this book. They are the best and I have wonderful memories of dancing on top of the bar of a disgusting, wonderful New Orleans dive bar to this particular song. Rosemary has a similar response to it in the book.
Sorry Mom – Morning 40 Federation
Another New Orleans band that is an institution for a certain kind of self-destructive, Bywater neighborhood dwelling weirdo, like those in my book. I have had trouble convincing people from out of town to appreciate the raw, joyful mess that is this band, but seen live, for example at the end of a long Mardi Gras day when your friends have to hold you up and the whole room is bellowing the dumb lyrics as a single ecstatic human mass—well, it’s great.
Tango til They’re Sore - Tom Waits
So, this song actually mentions New Orleans, but I blame the whole album Rain Dogs for inventing the persona that everyone thereafter moved to New Orleans to inhabit. Was Tom Waits as a whiskey-drinking, stripper-loving, deadbeat musician influenced by New Orleans or did all the pork pie hat-wearing gutter-dwelling stripper-loving New Orleanians decide they wanted to live in a Tom Waits song? Either way, the two became kind of interchangeable at some point. I love them both.
Danger (Been So Long) – Mystikal
Let’s Get Ready was another just seminal New Orleans album of this era. It was always playing on the radio and I have never heard it without wanting to move. This song in particular has the same sexy, dirty, dangerous vibe that a wild night can have in that town.
Jamskate – Quintron
Quintron and his puppeteer wife Miss Pussycat have been the lodestar of Bywater hipsters in New Orleans for twenty years. Whether raw, fuzzed, garage rock organ or delirious electronic chaos, Quintron is always playing at 4am somewhere without enough air-conditioning, and he’s drenched in sweat and the audience is drenched in sweat and Miss Pussycat is playing maracas and everyone has lost their minds like a deranged revival meeting.
Careless Love – Preservation Hall Jazz Band
I had to put one traditional New Orleans song on here, and in truth I love Preservation Hall. They play traditional New Orleans jazz of the twenties and thirties in a beautiful old space in the Quarter near where I grew up. They do a lot of education and outreach and have kind of bridged the gap between older New Orleans musicians and a younger weirder audience, which brings me to my last band.
Mid City Baby - The New Orleans Bingo! Show
The first line of this song is When I’ve had too much Decatur Street which is basically the title of my book. Bingo! as a band brings all the threads of this New Orleans 9th Ward scene together. They share a vocalist with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band above, they look and sound like Tom Waits run through a Kurt Veil vaudeville circus and perform with a burlesque dancer. I used to sneak out to see them as a teenager in the back room of a classic New Orleans dump of a restaurant just blocks from my house in the French Quarter where they actually ran a bingo game. Ten years later they ended up on stage at the Kennedy Center. They really feel like my New Orleans and the New Orleans I wanted to capture in this book.
Iris Martin Cohen’s first novel, The Little Clan, was published in 2018 by Park Row Books and her second, Last Call on Decatur Street, about a burlesque dancer, will be published August 2020. She has covered theater for The New York Sun and The Austin Chronicle and her work has appeared in Bookforum, LitHub, CrimeReads and 64 Parishes.
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