Rolling Stones couldn’t get enough of Papa Funk’s soulful New Orleans sound
Life Story
One day in 1941 Art Neville’s grandmother was cleaning the Methodist church where the family worshipped in New Orleans and babysitting her 3-year-old grandson. ‘‘She was on one side of the altar and I was on the other side, where the organ was,’’ recalled Neville, who has died aged 81 after a long illness. ‘‘I seen this big old thing and something told me to turn it on. I hit one of the bass keys and it scared the daylights out of me. That was the first keyboard I played.’’
It was the start of a distinguished lifetime in music. As a founding member of the Meters and the Neville Brothers, he went on to become the funkiest keyboard player in popular music, feted by white rock’n’roll stars who wanted a taste of his ineffable groove.
When the Meters were hired as the support band by the Rolling Stones on their 1975 tour of America, they were instructed not to take the stage until Keith Richards and Mick Jagger had arrived at the venue each night. The Stones pair watched Neville and his band perform every night, looking for tips as they invariably blew up a storm.
Affectionately known as ‘‘Papa Funk’’, Neville had a syncopated style that epitomised the sound of New Orleans and was as economical as it was soulful. ‘‘Nobody don’t care if you can play a thousand notes in one bar. You have to play the right note at the right time,’’ he said.
Asked what made his sound special, Neville returned to his grandmother and her apple cobbler recipe, made memorable by a secret ingredient. ‘‘You could taste it, but you couldn’t identify what it was,’’ he said. ‘‘That’s the same thing we do with the music.’’
He was born Arthur Lanon Neville in 1937 in New Orleans, the son of Arthur Neville Sr and Amelia (nee Landry), and was joined by three younger brothers, Charles, Aaron and Cyril, all of whom would join his band.
There was no family piano, so he trawled around the homes of friends and relatives, playing at every opportunity the jazz, ragtime and swing music for which New Orleans was famous.
Later, as the music developed into rhythm and blues (R&B), he came under the spell of locally renowned pianists such as Fats Domino and Professor Longhair, forming his first group, the Hawketts, at the segregated all-black Walter S Cohen high school in 1953. He was just 17 when the next year he was the lead singer on the joyous Mardi Gras Mambo, a record that is still played every year at the New Orleans Mardi Gras carnival.
Called up to the US Navy in 1958, he spent four years in the service. On his discharge he formed Art Neville & the Neville Sounds, who played the clubs on Bourbon Street in New
Orleans and became the house band at the producer Allen Toussaint’s recording studio.
The group became the Meters in 1967 with a classic line-up of Neville on keyboards, Leo Nocentelli on guitar, George Porter Jr on bass and Joseph ‘‘Zigaboo’’ Modeliste on drums.
Two years later they scored their first R&B hits with the instrumentals Sophisticated Cissy and Cissy Strut, but until the mid-1970s, when the Meters found themselves lionised by the Rolling Stones, they played almost exclusively to black audiences. Porter recalled their first time in front of a white audience, in 1969: ‘‘When we got there, this old black guy opened the back door and said, ‘Oh, y’all bringing in the equipment for the band?’ When Art told him, ‘No, we are the band’, he called the owner of the club and the guy came by and said, ‘Well, they didn’t tell me y’all was black!’ ’’
After the Meters disbanded in the late 1970s, Neville teamed up with his three siblings. The Neville Brothers won a Grammy in 1989 for best pop instrumental performance and Art was given a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2018 for his work with the Meters.
Ahuge Star Trek fan, one of his trademarks on stage was to flash the Vulcan ‘‘live long and prosper’’
salute.
He lived all of his life in New Orleans, most of it on the same street. When his home was wrecked in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina, he moved a few doors down the road. After a career lasting more than 60 years he finally announced his retirement due to ill-health in 2018.
He is survived by his second wife, Lorraine, and by four children from his two marriages: Arthel, a Fox News presenter; Michael, a streetcar driver in New Orleans; Ian, a musician; and Amelia, who worked in a restaurant and as a child gave her father’s band a family nickname when she tried to say ‘‘the funky Meters’’ but said ‘‘the Monkey Feeders’’. His marriage to his first wife, Doris, ended in divorce.
‘‘I didn’t make a lot of money,’’ Neville once noted with equanimity. ‘‘Or maybe we did make it and didn’t get it. But it don’t matter. I’m happy and don’t worry about the other part.’’ – The Times
‘‘Nobody don’t care if you can play a thousand notes in one bar. You have to play the right note at the right time.’’ Art Neville