Jazzfest in Hell

          For seculars, hell is a fantasy, and everyone has a different idea, a different gallery of images that collects across the mind when asked to imagine it.  Some of them are brutal.  The Dutch painter Heironymus Bosch depicted hell as being full of frog-headed demons eating and excreting sinners into its fiery bowels.  In one painting a musician and his lady audience ride a haywagon being pulled by these demons toward the underworld.  The lute-player is having such a good time serenading his woman that he doesn't realize where he's headed, that his love for music is about to score him an eternity of pain and fire.  But the imaginative process is made easier when you’re released from the notion that you’ll burn forever.  Still, I sometimes like to imagine if I do go to hell, what would I want it to be like without cheating its integral features of being hot and uncomfortable.  I would want it be fun, full of people who are there because they enjoyed living too much, people who drink and play music and dance and had a healthy appetite of earthly delights, even if they knew it would cost them in the afterlife.

            I would want my hell to look and be like Jazzfest.
 

            I live in the quiet neighborhood of Bayou Saint John, which began as a worker's camp that predates New Orleans.  It is residential and quiet.  In the spring the air is fragrant from the confederate jasmine that lines fences of blue and yellow French Colonial homes. Down the street is a park where you can play chess or read under the shade of palm trees.  Live oaks encircle our streets and avenues and turn them into shaded corridors all the way to City Park and its 1,600 acres of Louisiana natural beauty.  It all screams of peace and quiet resplendence.  People come here to see the quieter, greener part of the city.

            And then for two weeks in the year people come here to see Jazzfest.  A lot of people.  A healthy Saturday will bring more than 100,000 people into the fair grounds and community.  Half a million visitors will make the pilgrimage during the festival. And for good reason.  There are more than 70 bands daily, including both rock stars and local favorites.  My first year I went three days and when I could not find a ticket the last day I hung outside the fence on Gentilly Boulevard and watched The Preservation Hall Jazz Band from inside a set of hedges.

            This year I decided to leave the first weekend.  I found a ride with friends to the town of Lafayette, another proud city of Louisiana that works hard to preserve its Cajun and Creole culture and French tongue. On the way we stopped at a gas station in Gross Tete, which is French for “big head.”  The station was called “Truck Tiger Stop,” and next to the lot was a large cage with a tiger sleeping inside of it.  His name was Tony and he was 12 years old, a Bengal Tiger, bred, born and raised next to interstate 10.  

            I ate homemade jerky from the truck stop and watched him wag his tail in the heat.  Inside his spacious cage was a tin pool, some balls, a rubber tire strung up by rope, and a pair of concrete structures he could hide inside.

            A man stood next to me wearing a Bluetooth with a microphone extension.  He was bald and his head was sun-burned.  He kept hissing, and I thought he was talking into his bluetooth until I realized he was hissing at the tiger.  He wanted Tony to move; to play the part of the powerful jungle cat.

            “Let’s throw something at him,” he said to me.  Inside the fence in front of us was a sign that read, “This animal is federally protected.  Do not throw objects into its cage.”

            I took another bite of the jerky.  It was smoky and delicious. 

            “Throw that jerky in there.  That’ll get him up.”

            “No,” I said.  The man shrugged then walked away.    Parts of Tony's home were painted purple and gold to support the LSU Tigers, only a few miles away in Baton Rouge.  Tony rested on top of his home and continued to swat his tail at the air.  I went back inside to buy more jerky.  By the salad and fried chicken there was a stuffed white tiger named Salene that used to live there, too.

            International Festival was not Jazzfest.   It was free.  It was easy to get up to the front of the stage.  It was downtown and we danced on concrete instead of dirt.  The beer and food was affordable.  I ate a fried chicken caprese sandwich tucked between waffles.  We watched an all-female 12-piece Mariachi band, Acadian rockers in kilts and dreads play Celtic music, and a Jamaican reggae musician pluck a guitar with only one string, the bottom E.  But the music was not as good and there was some sense of excess missing.  Nobody except the black creole cowboys danced and most people appeared sober and rested.  It lacked the struggle and hearty endurance of Jazzfest.

            I slept in a tent in a friend’s backyard and when the first ride available got ready to leave I packed up and left too.

            The next weekend I was back at Jazz Festival.  It was hot, crowded, expensive, and the rain had turned everything into mud.  Because it was on a horse track the mud contained manure and everything stunk.  Run-off created deep, wet trenches that separated crowds and caused festival-goers to cross it as if fording a river.  At the Fleetwood Mac show a man in a straw hat got stuck in the mud.  Three people helped pull him out.  I looked around and saw thousands of festival-goers stretching back to the end of the track, all exposed to the sun and without shade.   The ritual of it began to dawn on me.  Everyone gathered, as if religiously, around the large stage and faced the musicians.  A group prayer. There were flags hoisted in the air.  Drunk people jumped and waved their hands back and forth and screamed.  Others sat and knelt in the mud.  A man danced with a fly swatter.  Stevie Nix changed her outfit three times and came out wearing a top hat for “Go Your Own Way."  Lindsay Buckingham played a 5 minute guitar solo and never closed his mouth.  A shirtless man in front me shed a layer of dry skin; the second layer was already red and peeling too, and it felt like we were all burning; we were all sinking into the mud and didn't know it.  This was Jazzfest.  This was hell.  The place we all go because we like to have a good time just a little too much, because we like to drink and dance and play and do things to excess.  This is our pilgrimage to pay tribute to those things that make us a little less wholesome, and a lot more fun.  We worship a good time. We worship the music.  And if you stop and look around you, you'll wonder when it was that you arrived, when did you start riding the haywagon and stopped reading books under the shade of palm trees, stopped being quiet and restrained on earth; when did you arrive in this hell, and why is it so crowded?
               But when I found dry ground and fell into the music of the Little Willies at the Fais Do-Do Stage I forgot all this.  I was drunk and hot and I had stumbled into that ecstatic tired state of worship where the ritual of live music seems to enter you intravenously and flood your nerves, and you forget about your discomforts.  Norah Jones sang and her band played soft country music and my girlfriend and I held each other and swayed back in forth in the mud and we didn’t care if we were burned or dehydrated; if this was hell, it was a good hell, even in spite of the smell of horseshit. 

            The next day I conducted surveys to earn free admission.  I went to the back of the track where groups of friends, young and old, sunk their lawn chairs into the mud, several hundred feet away from the main stage.  Everyone complained about the mud.  I asked them how long they have been going.  They said 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 42 years.   They all said they would be back next year, ritually, and every year after that, immersed in lakes of hut mud.  But they also asked me to record a complaint: that next year if it rains and makes the same mess, that someone puts some hay down to cover it.