THE METERS
The New Orleans funk pioneers thrived on telepathy and fell out over business. Now lost music from their midst is a reminder of their bewitching genius.
From the hardscrabble streets of New Orleans, The Meters summoned a magical groove that entranced the ’70s rock elite. As long-lost music emerges from their midst, Alison Fensterstock tunes in to the 60-year saga of your favourite band’s favourite band: “When we got together and played,” they tell her, “it was like telepathy…” Photograph: Gilles Petard.
IT’S AFTERNOON IN NEW ORLEANS in the late 1950s, and a little boy about 12 years old is sick with a cold but out riding his bicycle in the streets anyway. He’s pedalling slowly through the Irish Channel, an uptown working-class neighbourhood close to the Mississippi River levee, with, as the song says, no particular place to go. He pulls over to the side when a long black limousine comes up behind him and starts to slow down, assuming it wants to pass. But the big car stops, and there’s a big man riding inside.
“I rode my bike up to the window. He rolled the window down and said, ‘We’re looking for a local guy named Leo.’ I said, ‘I’m Leo.’ Imagine how I was looking: snot coming out of my nose, dried up on my face, dirt all over my face and my clothes and everything. He looked in the back of the car and said, ‘OK, we can’t take this little guy on the road.’” Leo Nocentelli pauses before he delivers the kicker. “That guy in the back,” he says, “that was Fats Domino.’”
Fats’s factotum is correct, obviously. Leo’s father Jack, a former ragtime banjo player, has been taking his son around the local clubs to show off his precocious guitar skills – but he’s a few years away from hopping on a tour bus. He’ll be all of 14 when he does, backing a young Otis Redding.
It’s a portentous meeting between the present of New Orleans R&B, and its future. A decade on, 1969 saw the debut album of Nocentelli’s band The Meters, a quartet schooled as nightclub and studio workhorses, but with the musical charisma of headliners. Their eight studio albums released between 1969 and ’77, showcasing a brand of funk uniquely shaped by New Orleans-style polyrhythms and the jazzy melodic interplay of bass and guitar, would make Nocentelli – guitarist and primary songwriter – bassist George Porter Jr, drummer Joseph ‘Zigaboo’ Modeliste, big-brother figure Art ‘Poppa Funk’ Neville on keyboards and, later, Cyril Neville on vocals and percussion, names to drop among admirers and collaborators, from Bootsy Collins to Paul McCartney.
“I think it was a magical thing that happened where the powers that be got these particular four guys together,” Nocentelli tells MOJO on a recent summer afternoon, his eight-year-old granddaughter’s guitar propped up behind him. “When we got together and played these songs, it was like telepathy. Even though I wrote the songs, those songs could not have happened if it were Tom, Dick or Harry. It had to happen with George, Ziggy and Art.”
JUST A COUPLE OF MILES UPTOWN from where young Nocentelli’s path crossed with Fats Domino, Valence Street in the 13th Ward was the Neville family’s home base, with its gaggle of musical offspring that included Cyril; sax player Charles; Aaron, of course, with the ethereal voice; and Athelgra, who’d eventually join the girl group The Dixie Cups. Art, the oldest Neville sibling, was a decade Leo Nocentelli’s senior and already making a name for himself in the clubs.
Art’s R&B group The Hawketts had a hit in 1955 with Mardi Gras Mambo, a rollicking
Caribbean-inflected number that remains a carnival staple in New Orleans. He also recorded for the Los Angeles-based label Specialty, and after a stint in the Navy signed with the local Instant Records. Instant had a rising young producer and songwriter on its roster named Allen Toussaint, and in 1961 he wrote Neville’s next solo classic, the tender love song All These Things.
Art and Aaron Neville were adults, but lived close to the family home where Cyril, the youngest sibling, still lived with their parents. “Art Neville and Aaron and all those guys, they were like senior citizens,” explains Meters bassist George Porter Jr. “They were the big guys, so they didn’t hang with none of us.” But he and Zigaboo Modeliste, whose families were close enough that the two were raised “as cousins”, were the same age as Cyril, and when the Porter and Modeliste families moved into the Nevilles’ neighbourhood, all three boys wound up attending Samuel L. Green junior high school.
They also became musical confrères, with raucous jam sessions in the backyard that neighbours failed to appreciate. “I had an acoustic guitar,” says Porter. “And we used to go in Zig’s backyard, and we would be jamming and stuff, beating on cans and boxes. And the lady on the other side of the fence obviously didn’t like music and she called the police on us one day. We kind of scattered once we heard the police was coming – and I left my guitar in the backyard and the police stomped it and broke it, destroyed the guitar. It was years before I got another instrument.”
AROUND THE SAME time, the teenage Leo Nocentelli was picking up his first session work with Allen Toussaint, playing on early-’60s hits like Lee Dorsey’s Ya Ya – his first studio job, at age 14 – and Ernie K-Doe’s Mother-In-Law. Cyril and Ziggy, slightly younger, were still thick as thieves on Valence Street, practising together on the drum kit Ziggy’s parents had bought him, which came in handy when they got the chance to split a gig with Art’s band.
“Art hired me, asked my mom if I could do the gig because I was underage,” Modeliste told the New Orleans music monthly Offbeat in 2005. “Cyril would play some of the set and I’d play some of it.” These were frat party shows, where they’d perform Chuck Berry and Little Richard covers for the college kids alongside Art’s songs. “I was making money,” said Modeliste, “and I was polishing up my game.”
George Porter Jr, now playing bass, was doing the same thing with the R&B act Irving Bannister And The All-Stars, playing the same kinds of small clubs where Nocentelli’s dad had showed off his son’s talent.
“Art used to hang hard with a few of the older, wellknown musicians, Benny Spellman [of Fortune Teller and Lipstick Traces fame] and those kinds of guys, at a club on the corner of Galvez and Washington Avenue,” says Porter. “The name of the club was Charlie’s Corner and it was like a key club, but it didn’t have a key. You would knock on the door and the guy would slide a little window open, and if he recognised you, you got in.”
Irving Bannister’s All-Stars would play a club across the street, which became an after-party destination for the older players hanging out at
Charlie’s. “Fats used to come over there all the time. Once he really souped up across the street, he would come over, always about a half an hour before the band was getting ready to get off, at about two o’clock in the morning. He would come over and want to sit in.”
Needless to say, nobody was going to say no to Fats Domino. Porter and the All-Stars would back the star till 3am or later – until he was satisfied.
A year or two earlier Porter, still playing guitar at that point, had picked up a gig with Art Neville’s band and – playing only rhythm parts, declining to solo – left the older man unimpressed with his skills. But he got his second chance. “This one particular night,” says Porter, “Art Neville followed Fats across the street, and Art and Fats came in together. And at the end of the night, Art came over to me and said, ‘Now that’s the instrument you ought to be playing.’”
In 1966, Art Neville returned from a tour with brother Aaron promoting the hit Tell It Like It Is, ready to regroup. He rounded up Porter, Modeliste and Nocentelli, as well as brothers Aaron and Cyril for vocals, plus a sax player, for a regular gig at the Nitecap Lounge on Louisiana Avenue. Initially, the band was christened the Neville Sounds – the work of Jack the Cat, the popular local DJ who MC’d. “He used to introduce us with the song Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey,” remembers Porter. “He would sing, ‘Won’t you come home, Art Neville, and bring that Neville sound.’”
After about a year at the Nitecap, Art Neville landed a gig at the Ivanhoe club in the French Quarter, on Bourbon Street. Cyril and Aaron had peeled off for now, as well as sax player Gary Brown. Now it was an instrumental quartet, on a strict schedule. “That’s what really got the band tight, the Ivanhoe,” Modeliste told Offbeat. “Because we would play six nights a week, from 10 o’clock until two in the morning. You do that six nights a week, you’re bound to get tight.”
During hour-long set breaks, Porter would run up the street to make extra cash playing behind pole dancers. “And when that gig wasn’t happening,” he remembers, “I’d go across the street and make money shooting pool. Leo was really good, too – Leo had a really good pool hand.”
In New Orleans, like the rest of the American South, racial integration became law only in 1964. Even then, it was slow to reach Bourbon Street.
“Playing clubs on Bourbon Street, we couldn’t mingle with the audience,” explains Nocentelli. “The Ivanhoe was a corner bar and our music was so R&B that it attracted a lot of black people – we’d look out the window and there’s about 200, 300 people. They couldn’t stop blacks from going on Bourbon Street, but they could stop them from going in the clubs. They were standing out there, and there was more audience outside than they would have inside. It kind of leaves an almost indelible scar on your brain,” he says. “You remember that. You remember how you were treated.”
AT THE END OF THE ’60s, THE NEVILLE SOUND group took the opportunity to record with Allen Toussaint – a move that proved fateful in many ways. With his business partner, Marshall Sehorn, the producer chose a new name for the quartet that evoked their mastery of rhythm and timing: The Meters. Their eponymous first album on the Josie label launched their greasy, gritty instrumental sound, with two Nocentelli compositions, Cissy Strut and Sophisticated Cissy, landing them Top 10 R&B hits in 1969.
To George Porter Jr, the pleasures of commercial success were conflicted. “When we were playing at the Nitecap, I was focused on that this was a band,” he says. “But when we became a recording band, I started realising this thing isn’t necessarily all about a band. It was sometimes more me, me, who writes the better songs and who gets to choose which songs get recorded?
“I was more into The Meters’ early days than the latter days,” he says. “Those first three albums, we weren’t competing with anybody. Once we got into being a production thing, once we started adding horns and background singers and all that kind of stuff, we just became like all the other bands.”
Few would ever call The Meters “just like other bands”. But to Porter, the group’s rise also marked a kind of loss of creative innocence.
In 1972, managed by Sehorn and Toussaint (who also owned half their publishing rights), The Meters became the house band at Sea-Saint Studios, the brand-new space in the Gentilly neighbourhood where Toussaint’s producing skills would lure acts including Labelle and Robert Palmer. After switching to Warner subsidiary Reprise, a deal that tied them to Toussaint and Sehorn more knottily when Josie’s parent company, Jubilee Records, went bankrupt, The Meters hit the R&B charts again in 1974 with Hey Pocky A-Way, a distillation of Mardi Gras Indian chants mixed with their own scorching funk. The Meters also began their secondary, accidental career as your favourite musician’s favourite musicians. They hung out with Led Zeppelin, played the record release party for Wings’ Venus And Mars album, backed Dr. John on his Atco albums Desitively Bonnaroo and In The Right Place, and opened for The Rolling Stones in 1975 and 1976.
And yet, within the band, all was not bonnaroo. “They threw me out of the group,” Art Neville told Offbeat in 2005. He’d wanted to sign with Allman Brothers manager Phil Walden, but his bandmates and the hometown team of Toussaint and Sehorn disagreed. (“How can you throw out the guy that starts the group? Hey, that’s what I asked,” Neville said.) Art returned to the fold, though, and during the Reprise period, so did Cyril, who shone on 1975’s sizzling Fire
On The Bayou and as a de facto frontman on the Stones tour – an experience The Meters describe as eye-opening in several ways.
“When I saw [The Rolling Stones] it completely blew my ➢
“I left my guitar in the backyard and the police stomped it and broke it. It was years before I got another instrument.” George Porter, Jr
mind, because I had never seen entertainers on that level – doing what they were doing, living the way they wanted to live, playing the music they wanted to play, and getting paid to do it,” Ziggy Modeliste told Wax Poetics in 2020. “I thought the music we were playing was just as good, if not better, and I always wanted to know, ‘What are they doing that we’re not doing?’ I never knew… They have longevity, which is what it takes, good management and good people behind you. Power.”
Porter agrees that empowerment was the missing ingredient. “I think the front office wanted us to be the band that played Allen Toussaint’s sessions,” he says. “The problem was that we just didn’t have a front office that promoted us like those other bands. We were out there on the road playing with those other bands and killing them every night. We were massacring these guys, these big bands, but we didn’t have a team that promoted us. We missed the boat.”
Cyril Neville, though, was adding a new spark to The Meters, and Modeliste was flexing fresh muscles as well, emerging as a confident and powerful songwriter. But external tensions were only mounting, and wearing away at the group’s tight creative bond. In 1976, The Meters joined Neville brothers Charles and Aaron in the studio with the Nevilles’ uncle George ‘Big Chief Jolly’ Landry to make the landmark, Toussaint-produced Mardi Gras Indian funk album The Wild Tchoupitoulas – the first time all four Neville brothers recorded together.
It was the beginning of that iconic New Orleans outfit, spelling the end of the one that preceded it. All of The Meters, particularly Art Neville, were frustrated with a new road manager, Rupert Surcouf, installed by Sehorn – who had also just put out Trick Bag, a collection of demos and random Meters cuts that the band hadn’t approved. After the release of the ironically titled New
Directions, on Warner Bros, in 1977, The Meters were left directionless. They called it quits.
In retrospect, George Porter Jr wonders if better communication between band members could have protected them from the business stresses that were battering his group. “As a bass player and as a person that was smoking lots of pot and taking acid,” he says, “I kind of gave up on trying to be part of the power struggle in the band. But I think now, removing myself might have shortened the band’s existence, because I eliminated a voice from the discussion.”
It was a band that “didn’t have a real band leader,” he continues, “although Neville on paper was pretty much the band leader, and everybody respected Art, because it was him that put us in the same room together.” The personality vibes were badly matched, too. “Three Capricorns in the studio at the same time. And we were bumping heads.”
“On a business level, we was four separate guys going four separate ways,” says Leo Nocentelli. “It wasn’t going to change for nobody. So that led to the downfall of the business aspect of The Meters. But musically, we was always able to communicate.”
UNTIL ART NEVILLE’S DEATH AT AGE 81 IN JULY 2019, those channels of communication were periodically reopened. There were regular reunions, notably in 2000 in San Francisco, in New Orleans at the last New Orleans Jazz And Heritage Festival before Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and in Manchester, Tennessee at the Bonnaroo Festival in 2011 with Allen Toussaint and Dr. John. The same year, their superfans the Red Hot Chili Peppers convinced The Meters to join them on-stage at the Voodoo Experience festival in New Orleans. Line-ups entitled The Funky Meters, The Meters Experience and The Meter Men – featuring different equations that always totalled less than all four – have taken the stage over the past 40-odd years.
“Since Art is gone there can never again be a Meters or a Funky Meters,” Porter says now. “He was an integral part of what made both bands. It’s been a little more than two years since my friend has gone home, and I still feel his spirit in my dreams. For a while it bothered me, but now I look forward to those visits; sometimes I wake up with a smile on my face. We can always get a keyboard
Meters’ running: (above, from left) Modeliste, C Neville, Porter, Nocentelli, A Neville; (insets from top right) backing Dr. John, ’70s; The Wild Tchoupitoulas, 1980; with Keith Richards and Ron Wood in The New Barbarians, 1979; (right) The Meters still ticking over in 2000 (from left) Nocentelli, Porter, A Neville, Modeliste.
player, but we could never get the magic that is Art.”
Meanwhile, Porter’s love for improvisation has found him embraced by the Grateful Dead-adjacent jam band world, particularly with his longstanding project, Runnin’ Pardners. “And with a lot of these old instrumental songs, there’s so much room in the jam community for expansion,” he says. “Because it was just these two-minute 30-second songs that were just wide open for bigger things to happen.”
Beyond The Neville Brothers, Cyril Neville has lent his rhythms to acts such as Willie Nelson, Ani DiFranco and Bob Dylan, records as a solo artist, and about a decade ago partnered up with Devon Allman to form the Royal Southern Brotherhood blues-rock outfit. In 1979, Ziggy Modeliste joined old tourmates Keith Richards and Ron Wood in The New Barbarians, and went on to record several solo albums for his own label, as well as racking up composer credits for his oft-sampled rhythms.
It’s a unique sound The Meters soaked up from the musicians in their neighbourhood. Modeliste had internalised ‘Smokey’ Johnson,
whose syncopated pop and clatter propelled iconic tunes like Professor Longhair’s Big Chief and Earl King’s Trick Bag.
Nocentelli had been in Cosimo Matassa’s studio when guitarists like Edgar Blanchard and Roy Montrell were helping to shape rock’n’roll at its dawn.
“Leo’s in that iconic New Orleans guitar lineage,” says Quint Davis, who caught The Meters live in the Nitecap Lounge days and, as soon as he got the chance, booked them at the very first New Orleans Jazz And Heritage Festival, which he has directed since 1970. “He’s very sophisticated musically, but he’ll go into those riffs that go back to Papoose and Earl King and Snooks Eaglin.”
But, as Davis acknowledges, The Meters innovated, adding a special sauce of their own.
“The Meters really brought a rock sensibility to funk, and a funk sensibility to rock,” he says. “People got knocked on the head by them. They got into the middle of a song and turned it into a different song. They were like mercury.”
“It was what we did individually as musicians and how we played it off of each other that made ever ybody take a real interest in what we were doing,” says George Porter Jr. “It wasn’t a single person in the band that stood out, in other words. We functioned together.”
“We were out there on the road massacring these guys, these big bands, but we didn’t have a team that promoted us. We missed the boat.” George Porter, Jr