Atlantic City Weekly

Although Mardi Gras came to a bead-strewn halt in New Orleans last Wednesday at midnight, the Creole vibe will be coming up to Ventnor this Saturday night, Feb. 27, for a very special fundraiser featuring New Orleans music legend Cyril Neville. (Scroll down for interview with Neville).

We’re talking the entire vibe: authentic Cajun and Creole cuisine, beads, New Orleans rum punch — and other specialty drinks — and Neville Brother Cyril and his solo project band Tribe 13.

The event, a Tony Mart’s Presents fundraiser for Somers Point-based charity organization Access One, starts at 5pm at the St. James Parish Hall (Atlantic and Newport avenues) in Ventnor.

“This could be the best Mardi Gras celebration ever in this county by the time we get done with this,” says Carmen Marotta, organizer of the event. “The food is going to be outrageous for one thing. I made shrimp Creole yesterday, [and all I can say is], ‘Oh my.’” Marotta and local chef Richard Sperlock are cooking all of the food for the Mardi Gras celebration, fundraiser and New Orleans Saints victory party.

“We’re doing all of it,” says Marotta. “The food’s going to be worth the trip all on its own.”

Then there’s the music. Neville Brother Cyril Neville, with his own band Tribe 13, will perform two one-hour sets during the evening — one at 7:30pm and then a second at 9pm. Tribe 13 will be making a tour stop here after a successful set of shows with the band Galactic. Although Neville hasn’t put out a new album with the Neville Brothers in a while, he’s been busy of late. Touring with his new band. Getting praise for his 2009 solo album. Working on a new Neville Brothers studio album. He’s also getting ready for a special appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! March 4 with Galactic and New Orleans soul legend Allen Toussaint. All while traveling back and forth from New Orleans to fix up his storm-battered home left in the wake of Katrina.

Still, Neville is playing the music he loves and just took in the Mardi Gras festivities down in NOLA.

“We’re bringing Mardi Gras with us,” Neville tells Atlantic City Weekly during a phone call from the road. “Through all the snow and ice and everything, we’re bringing it. So tell all the people to bring their dancing shoes and come ready to second line with us.”

Marotta’s Tony Mart’s Presents held its first fundraiser for Access One last February with music guest the Billy Walton Band. The event raised $5,000 for Access One, which provides a one-stop service center for locals living with HIV and AIDS. Janine Golden, of Access One, says the entire organization is looking forward to this Saturday’s extravaganza with a major headliner in tow. She adds that it would be nice to double last year’s funds raised.

The story of how Access One and Tony Mart’s Presents (and ultimately Saturday’s fundraiser) came together is an interesting one in itself. The charity organization had some fundraisers in the past, but stopped doing them because they weren’t very successful in terms of bringing in funds. “Now we have the help of Carmen and it’s become much more successful,” she says.

According to Golden, because Access One operates off grants, they’re required to supplement their income by having fundraisers. “Plus it gives Access One the opportunity to outreach to the community and let people know about the services that we provide,” Golden adds.

Access One is run out of the offices of Dr. Christopher Lucasti in Somers Point. “His mother, Rita Lucasti, is my sister’s godmother,” says Marotta. “They go way back with us — I think to the 1940s. Because his father used to work at the 500 Club then came over to start working at [the former Somers Point club] Tony Mart’s and the Somers Point joints in the late 1940s, early ’50s. That’s the history between the Lucasti and the Marotta families.”

Marotta got hooked up again with the Lucasti family a couple years ago.

“One of the girls at Access One, Kathy, is my phlebotomist there and she takes my blood,” says Marotta. “And we started talking one day and she was telling me how Access One has such a hard time raising any money because of the AIDS stigma. She tells me, ‘Nobody wants to give us any money.’ So I said, ‘Well, that’s your first problem, [drop] the AIDS and let’s rock and roll!’”

That led to Tony Mart’s first fundraiser for Access One last February.

Marotta says this Saturday night will be a New Orleans Saints Super Bowl party too.

“We’re going to have a second line,” says Marotta. “We’re going to focus on the Saints victory in the broader sense that it’s a victory for the city of New Orleans — a sort of renaissance after the Katrina disaster.It was so much more than just a football game.”

Aside from the sounds of Neville and Tribe 13, the Mardi Gras theme will prevalent. They’ll be giving away a lot of beads and a king cake is being baked for the event.

“The bottom line is with the real Creole food and Cyril Neville, it’s a great night out for $25 and for a great cause,” says Marotta. “And the tickets are tax deductible so people can pay by cash or check and write it off because it’s a bona fide 501-c3.”

Established in 1998, Access One, based in Somers Point, is a non-profit, multi-service AIDS organization. The main goal is to provide comprehensive medical care for people living with HIV or AIDS who don’t have insurance. And it offers full medical-care services.

“So if somebody needs to see a dermatologist, a surgeon, labs, radiology, we cover the full spectrum of medical care,” says Golden. “We also provide free medical care for people living with HIV and AIDS [in Atlantic, Cape May and Cumberland counties] and social services and support groups as well.”

As of June 2009, in Atlantic County there are approximately 1,856 people living with HIV; in Cape May County the number of people is 283.

Access One, which works with the South Jersey AIDS Alliance, holds fundraisers like the one Saturday night to pay for services that its grant doesn’t cover.

“The funds raised from this event will go to services that aren’t covered by Access One’s grant,” says Golden. For example, one of the programs that we offer that is not covered is our Co-Pay Assistance Program, which is for people who have health insurance. We pay their co-pays.”

Free parking, funky music, Creole cooking and a Mardi Gras atmosphere — all for a tax-deductible $25; where else can you find that near Atlantic City?

Mardi Gras AC w/ Cyril Neville
Where: St. James Parish Hall, Ventnor
When: Sat., Feb. 27, 5pm
How Much: $25 (tax deductable)

Complete interview with Cyril Neville:

Where were you when the Saints won the Super Bowl?
We were on tour [with Galactic], playing in Brooklyn. It was weird being in Brooklyn and not in New Orleans, watching the game on these big-screen TV sets with everybody in the audience dressed in Saints gear.

How about a new Neville Brothers album? It’s been a while.
I’m glad you asked that because we got something coming out at [New Orleans] Jazz Fest [in April]. We put together something that’s going to be the beginning of a series. It’s called The Neville Brothers: From the Beginning, Vol. 1. It’s live from 1977. And we’re packaging it ourselves. And we’re working on a studio record with none other than Allen Toussaint ... that will probably come out late summer/early fall. 

How long has your solo project Tribe 13 been together?
Actually, we had just started right before Katrina. And then got scattered all over. Some of the cats got scattered to other places so we picked up a couple of people from Austin [Texas, where he now lives]. We did a tour in 2007 in Europe.

How does it feel to be a displaced resident of your home?
Man, it’s really hard to describe. Just about every emotion you can imagine, you go through them on a daily basis. Anything — like seeing what went on in Haiti — [brings] it all back. I’m in between Austin and New Orleans now since last October so I have a first-hand look at what’s been done and what’s not been done. It’s really depressing. And to see what’s been coming out in the press, how New Orleans has made it’s “complete comeback,” you know, and the French Quarter [doing well] and this kind of stuff, if you really drive around that city where my culture came from, the neighborhoods, those little villages are gone. The storm chased people out and the bureaucracy and the political bullshit that’s been going on ever since has been playing havoc on people’s lives. I mean people’s rents have gone up from $400 to $800. They’ve raised the property taxes three or four times since Katrina.

Are you planning to go back?
People always ask me if I’m planning to go back to live there and at this point it’s really harder [to live in New Orleans] than it was before the storm.

That’s hard to imagine. It’s awful.
And there’s no way to correctly convey what that feels like to be abandoned by your government. Everybody who had obligations to help out didn’t.

What have you learned about America since the disaster of Katrina?
Man, that there’s a lot to be said … I’ll put it [like this]: As far as America’s concerned, what America wants to bring to pass in other [countries], America has to bring to pass in this country first. It’s not like you can dispense something that you don’t even have yourself. How can you go all around the world bringing democracy when you haven’t really finished your own experiment? The scenes you saw of people standing outside the Convention Center in New Orleans, I thought that was Haiti when I saw it. It’s an ongoing agony. And the people of the United States were scattered around the country to every state except Hawaii. And you’re talking about people who lived in neighborhoods that never had to worry about daycare because they had the mechanism in their neighborhoods where the elders looked out for the kids while people worked. And some of the jobs of the people were as homeowners, property owners. And it’s like at this point, even for me, to get back to the way you were living without having the means of doing it. The cost of living has gone up and quality of living has gone down. … There are just so many games still being played on the people of New Orleans. It’s a very sad situation. And almost five years [after] your nerves and emotions and everything continue to get more and more raw [sic]. And there’s more fuel for your fire because there are injustices after injustices after injustices still going on.

And the Wetlands are still being lost.
Just in [the last two years] think about how much of the Wetlands have disappeared. And like [fellow New Orleans musician and Wetlands activist Tab Benoit] is always saying, ‘It’s a man-made problem so the solution is going to have to come from man.’ But as long as that’s not happening, that situation will continue to be the way it is. And I find it very strange that the American government can see to it that the wetlands in Iraq were restored, but they couldn’t build proper levees — and I’m talking about the same people, the Army Corps of Engineers, who finally admitted about two months ago that they had been using improper materials and everything else, which was common knowledge in New Orleans amongst the people, but when you start talking to the politicians you always get a different story. But hey, New Orleans is important to the rest of the country. When Katrina happened and that port shut down — that’s a major port.

A lot of New Orleans’ and America’s musical legacy was lost in the flood. What’s being done to preserve that legacy?
I lost 25 years of music, man. All of my reel-reel tapes, just a whole bunch of different stuff that I collected through the years. The same thing with a lot of people, man. Gatemouth Brown, his whole house almost blew away. Talking to musicians, you can hear story after story about how they lost basically everything. So, yeah, a lot of stuff has been lost, but when the people got scattered, like we were talking about — like when I moved to Austin, Texas, the gumbo spilled into the chili. And that means that everywhere people from New Orleans got to, the gumbo is now in all of those places too, so it’s like New Orleans’ culture is America’s culture now. We are everywhere. There’s gumbo being cooked in places where gumbo had never been cooked before. There are black Indians somewhere in the snow! You know? So, our culture has been spread all over the United States.

And the music too.
Exactly, that is the culture — the music and the food. And as far as New Orleans is concerned, it’s still thriving there — you know, what’s left of it. The people who are left, they’re the ones who are left there still trying to make a living. Not to say that there hasn’t been some progress made there, but in this society one man’s progress is another man’s disaster. You know, a lot [musicians] don’t have homes to come back to. Even if they wanted to, they can’t come home. Some people went to other places and are doing so much better than they were doing that they decided to stay where they went. So that also means that this 2010 census count is really going to be important to the people that are there. That’s going to determine the quality of life for them for the next 10 years. 

Are any of your brothers still in New Orleans?
Yeah, my brother Art has been living there since right after the storm.

And you’ve been back a few times.
Back and forth, back and forth, trying to fix my house. It’s still just sitting there in my neighborhood. Let me put it like this: My sister-in-law’s house, which I’ve been staying at off and on when I come back, it’s easier for her to drive across the lake [nearby] to go shopping than it is for her to drive all the way uptown to the one Walmart that they have there on Annunciation Street. It’s going to be a long time before the overall city itself is back to anywhere close that it used to be. Yes the French Quarter is there and they can build casinos anywhere they want now — they don’t have to go offshore. It seems like everything that was regulated before the storm now is deregulated. But having said all that, the music and the food and everything is alive and well in New Orleans. I was there for Mardi Gras. So the culture is still alive, but it needs help. The people still need help. 

We’re looking forward to you bringing some of that Mardi Gras culture up here.
We’re bringing Mardi Gras with us. Through all the snow and ice and everything, we’re bringing it. So tell all the people to bring their dancing shoes and come ready to second line with us.

OK, I’m going to name an album that you’ve appeared on and you just tell me what comes to mind.
Alright.

How about The Meters’ Cabbage Alley (1972)?
Oh wow! Cabbage Alley is one of my favorites — just simply one of the funkiest songs ever recorded. And the song “Chug-Chug-Chug-A-Lug” — there are two versions of it — but the version that’s on that record is also one of the funkiest of all. And the other thing about that album, there’s a song on there called [“You’ve Got to Change (You’ve Got to Reform)], and at that time that was one of the longest songs that the Meters had recorded. Being in the studio and getting a chance to watch that happen — I mean every time it looked like it was going to end something else would happen and intrigue the guys and they would just keep going with it and it wound up what it is, you know? Another one of the funkiest recordings ever! Cabbage Alley is a place in New Orleans where our dad used to live and that was a special thing getting the chance to sing that with my brother Art.

How about Oh Mercy! (1989)?
What’s that?

Oh Mercy!
I’m not familiar with that —

You’re on it! The Bob Dylan album.
Oh, that! Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a lot of fun. Anytime you get to work with somebody of that caliber it’s a learning experience and in my case it was working with [Dylan] and [producer] Daniel Lanois at the same time. I got to play on some pretty hip tunes.

That’s you playing the percussion leading off the track “Everything is Broken,” right?
Yep. I’ll tell you what, I got the opportunity to play on a record of other artists doing Bob Dylan’s songs and the song that was chosen for me was “I Want You.” And when I first saw it, I was like, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to get all these lyrics out?’ But I pulled it off and I really like it. I think that’s one of my favorite things that I’ve done sitting in with other people. That was one of my favorites.

How about Yellow Moon (1989)?
That whole record has a special place in my heart because that was with Daniel Lanois and the songs on there, “My Blood,” “Sister Rosa” and “Everybody’s Got to Wake Up,” which were written when I was with a band called the Uptown All-Stars, who later evolved into what I have now, which is [Tribe 13]. That whole era was something special and a lot of that stuff went into that record because Daniel heard the Uptown All-Stars playing at Denny’s Bar one night and that was the first time he heard us playing “Sister Rosa” and stuff like that and so that’s how it wound up on the record. It’s just got a special, special sound. I watched him and Brian Eno [who played on the album] in the studio together and they did some magical things with sound. And a lot of it is on that record. Some of it is like texturing that you feel it before you can hear it, you know? Their take on the recording process was just real, real interesting. You know, I picked up quite a few things from it so that whole session and the process of doing that record — Danny took a house down on St. Charles Avenue [in New Orleans] and turned it into a studio. And they he went to Audubon Park and got this Spanish moss out of the trees and put it in the whole studio and we used to call it “The Swamp.” And that was the atmosphere for that album, one of the best recording experiences of my life.