Quintron (part two): Memories of a Spellcaster visit

As a follow-up to the recent entry about Quintron and his Drum Buddy, I offer the following reminiscence. It’s largely adapted from something that appeared in the second issue of the print zine version of Letters from New Orleans — but I’m guessing you haven’t read that.

Quintron, as noted previously, lives in the Lower Ninth Ward, where he and his posse conducted a variety of impromptu parades around the neighborhood. He’s a musician, and his wife, a puppeteer, is called Miss Pussycat. When they got married, it made the paper; the couple claimed to be first cousins.

And back when we lived in New Orleans, at least, he was also the proprietor — if that’s the right word — of the Spellcaster Lounge. This was a bar and a performance venue but, as I understood it, it held none of the requisite licenses required for such businesses. So it wasn’t in the listings in the local alt weekly, or the phone book. It was unmarked. It was, actually, in the bottom of his house. You just had to sort of hear about what was going on there, via word of mouth or perhaps the college radio station.

For a long time I wanted to go but was out of the loop. Then my friend Shawn told me I should try to catch a band called Adult, and on the relevant web site, I saw that they were playing at the Spellcaster Lounge during Jazz Fest. No phone number or address was listed, but my friend Marc, who is a more adept Web searcher than I am, found the address. And so we went.

Once we identified the correct block it was easy to guess which house it was: There was a red light bulb burning outside. Still, it was on a very dark and deserted-looking strip, and we had to walk down an alley behind the house to figure out if we had the right place. We did. We paid a cover, $5 or $10, and went in. It certainly looked like a legit club — there was a reasonably well-stocked bar, several rooms, and all kinds of Quintron memorabilia. Also, rash of hipsters. I think maybe because of Jazz Fest, there must have been a lot of out-of-towners in the crowd of 100 or more — many were more fashion-forward than typical New Orleans bohos.

As it turns out, we didn’t actually make it to the Adult set. We were there a long time, though, and sat through a little bit of another band, who basically stood at one end of the room and wailed through a wall of samples and shouting. A Drum Buddy sat by the organ at the other end of the room. Quintron and Miss Pussycat flitted about. Marc struck up a conversation with a guy who turned out to be a musician from San Francisco. It was sort of like being in someone’s tricked-out rec room.

Actually, it was exactly like that.

Actually, it was that.