Blogfinger

Dr. John. If he don’t do it, nobody else will.

By Charles Layton

Now that we’ve been slammed hard by a hurricane, we have something in common with New Orleans.

We already shared a few common traits. Both our towns sit next to large bodies of water, and both have lots of gay people. In both towns, for some reason, people like to walk down the middle of the street.

But the contrasts are more striking. New Orleans doesn’t have a beach. Ocean Grove didn’t invent jazz. New Orleans is famous for masked Zulus in feathered headdresses riding on Mardi Gras floats. Ocean Grove has auditorium ushers marching in the 4th of July parade in sneakers and khaki shorts.

We Ocean Grovers call our town God’s Square Mile, whereas the people of New Orleans . . . well, they march to a different drummer.

The hurricane

New Orleans has a mixed drink called a “hurricane,” an industrial-strength amalgam of rum, fruit juice and who knows what else — grenadine or some such thing. You buy one of these in most any bar in the Vieux Carré and then you go carousing down Bourbon Street, openly and unregenerately slurping. When your big “hurricane glass” is empty, you just veer into another bar and say, “Fill ‘er up.” It’s not only legal to drink on the street in New Orleans, it’s pretty much encouraged. We Grovers do something similar, but with ice cream cones.

Here’s a song expressing the rakish, debauched attitude so commonly thought-of as New Orleanian. It is sung by the perfect ambassador for that delightfully dissolute city: Dr. John. The song, “Such a Night,” is based on a rather cute rationalization — “If I don’t do it somebody else will” — repeated over and over, as if the singer is trying to convince himself of its validity.