THE RAITT WAY
Kansas City Star, 10/6/05
by Timothy Finn
Blues guitarist wants to do all she can for music-rich region ravaged by hurricane
After Katrina turned New Orleans into Atlantis for a few weeks last month, Bonnie Raitt didn’t need to be coaxed into stirring up some aid and relief.
Raitt is a native of Los Angeles, but she is a practitioner of soul music, R&B and the blues and a devotee of the regions that produced them. She is also close friends with many colleagues from New Orleans, including John Cleary, the guitar player in her band, who lost his home in the flood. So rebuilding the city, she thinks, is an obvious and absolute necessity, as long as the right places are rebuilt in the proper ways.
“My connection to that whole part of the country is deep,” she said. “It has been so important to me and my music and the musicians I’ve played with. It was only natural that musicians would step up to do as much as we can. We’ve already done some benefits, and we’ll be donating some income from this upcoming tour to help.”
Raitt’s personal and professional connections to the Gulf Coast and New Orleans go back to her years with Warner Bros. records, home of the Meters and Allen Toussaint, who collaborated with Raitt on “Motion,” released in 1978. She also appears on the brand-new “Make It Funky,” a concert DVD filmed in April of this year that also features Toussaint, Irma Thomas, Keith Richards and Lloyd Price.
“(Allen) and I did a real funky remake of a song of his we did in 1974, ‘What Is Success,’?” she said. “This was all planned long before the hurricane.” However, producers of the film are using “Make It Funky” as a way to raise money via the MusicCares Hurricane Relief Fund (visit www.bonnieraitt.com ). According to Raitt, all of this charity is well worth the time and effort, as long as the money is spent properly.
“You can’t overstate the importance of New Orleans and Mississippi to rock and soul and the blues,” she said. “We owe so much to that region. Pardon the cliché, but it is truly a cultural gumbo, and that’s what needs to be preserved. Rebuilding should not be just about redevelopment so that you can have some McMardi Gras or make another tourist center for gambling.
“The Ninth Ward is the heart and soul of New Orleans. That’s where so many cultures mixed and where so much of the music came from. The creativity there was incredible. It’s too late to tell whether the same people will move back. Without that mix of people and influences, it won’t be the same. We need to make sure they have a place to return to. We need to subsidize what they need to get homes and re-create their neighborhoods or all that will be lost. ”
Raitt has long been an advocate for several political causes, and last year she joined the Vote for Change Tour, which was implicitly candid about which presidential candidate it wanted its audience to vote for. Raitt says she won’t get political or preach on this tour, but she does connect a few political dots that link Hurricane Katrina with a lot of other issues in the news today: the war in Iraq, gasoline dependency, and poverty and race in America.
“People closed their eyes to the poverty,” she said. “What we need most right now is a new commitment to look at the strong lessons of poverty and race and what has been ignored. We have so much to do to rectify what has happened. We must be conscientious right now.”
Raitt is touring behind her “Souls Alike” album, which, coincidentally, includes a song called “Deep Water.” When her tour buses roll in for tonight’s show, however, they won’t be running on your average blend of petrol. An avowed friend of the environment, Raitt has equipped her vehicles with the means to run on biodiesel, a cleaner-burning fuel made from natural resources like soybean and other vegetable oils. The need for alternative forms of fuel, she said, whether it’s solar, wind or fuels like biodiesel, has become even more apparent in the wake of two powerful hurricanes that disabled oil refineries in the Gulf.
“It’s all connected,” she said, “terrorism, global warming, Category 5 hurricanes, our dependence on oil. We’re over in the Middle East trying to ‘bring democracy to the rest of the world’ at an incredible cost in money and human lives. We need to clean our own house and get our democracy focused on things like education and health care and jobs and get ourselves off the oil teat and onto alternative forms of energy.”
That’s all big-picture, long-term stuff, though. For now she’d be happy to see some streets and street corners in New Orleans alive again with the kinds of music and revelry that caught the fancy of a California girl more than 40 years ago.
