22. It Ain't No Use

The Meters: Rejuvenation (Reprise, 1974); composed by Art Neville, George Porter, Jr., Joseph Modeliste, and Leo Nocentelli

The easiest quick description of the Meters is that they were to New Orleans in the ‘60s what the M.G.’s were to Memphis: the premier backing band for the star acts of their respective scenes, who also made their own records. The M.G.’s had national hits on Stax with a few of their danceable instrumentals, while the Meters had local ones on Josie, like “Cissy Strut,” but those are magical tunes – winding and snaky grooves animated by Ziggy Modeliste playing drums like each of his brain hemispheres had its own extra stick and foot pedal. When the Meters and Allen Toussaint got deals with Warner Bros. in the ‘70s, they adapted what the Meters had been doing on singles to albums and album lengths. First try on Cabbage Alley in 1972 was a mixed bag with an odd taste in covers, but second time was the charm with all original material: eight personable and often prickly tunes with Arthur’s vocals on top surrounding this twelve-minute workout that opens with a fairly standard love-gone-wrong prologue and proceeds to a long quartet interplay that unassumingly smokes along as though second line was an atom you could split and run civilization on forever.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).