Bunny Matthews And the Never-Ending Search for Cool
Bunny Matthews would be amused by his legacy. After 70 years as a burr under the saddle of New Orleans’ culture, he died in 2021 without any collected works in print. Anyone who wants to read his music and cultural criticism or see his cartoons has to do library archaeology. He lives on the side of Leidenheimer bread trucks, where his illustrations continue to drive through the streets.
Still, Bunny’s name has talismanic value for many New Orleanians, in large part because it’s Bunny. More importantly, he’s one more inductee into Da Krewe of Ain’t Dere No Mo’—a collection of figures, venues, stores, and happenings that represented something essential to the way people think about New Orleans.
Alison Fensterstock and Michael Tisserand do their best to pin down his complicated journey through New Orleans’ culture in their new book, Bunny Matthews: His Life, Art, and Obsessions. They never explicitly frame his life in these terms, but you can read between the lines and think of his life’s work as a smartass pursuit of an authentic culture. The New Orleans he came of age in already had Professor Longhair and James Booker as Exhibits A and B—musicians who couldn’t come from anywhere else. As a cartoonist, he thought the working class Nint’ Ward residents that inspired his characters Vic and Nat’ly and their lumpy friends displayed such a lack of self-consciousness that they too felt uncompromised by American mass culture.
Bunny made his name as the music critic for Figaro, a forerunner to Gambit in 1974, when music journalism at that time was a less domesticated beast than it has become today. The first generation of music journalists tried to match the music with what they considered the literary equivalent of rock’n’roll that they thought the music deserved. It was writing meant for the moment, not bothered by any concerns about legacy.
That’s the tradition Matthews jumped into, and the passages in the book from Matthews’ Figaro days show an obvious debt to Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson blurred the line between reporting and fiction with booze and drug-fueled tall tales that helped reveal truths about the counterculture and its relationship to mainstream culture. Fensterstock and Tisserand quote from Matthews’ first-person coverage of Professor Longhair: “when you’ve been out at the Fair Grounds for eight straight hours in the sunshine, and you’ve had a couple of six-packs of contraband Dixie, untold illicit mood elevators and it’s late in the day on the very last day of the entire Festival and you’ve got exactly one fat joint of prime Louisiana-grown sensimilla left which you have just stuck between your lips as Professor Longhair launches into ‘Tipitina’ at the exact moment you ignite the end of the gage with a match made in Kenner from willow trees grown along the banks of the Mississippi and you take that first long sweet draw of the burning herb and several thousand people are doing the best mambo they can do all about you, there is very little doubt who is New Orleans’ Numero Uno musician.”
Writing about Fess was an act of meta-criticism, not only because championing him required Bunny to advance aesthetic values that had long been rejected by the buyers whose favorite music topped the charts, but because Fess worked as a janitor. America was indicted by the fact that he was neglected while Tony Orlando and Dawn had the number one song in 1973 with “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree.”
When Bunny evangelized for Jazz Fest, it was a gathering of the people like him who heard something too pure for mainstream success in New Orleans music. He would become one of the festival’s most pronounced critics when uncool people found it too.
That experience raised questions all critics eventually have to ask themselves: Am I advocating for music that embodies a set of aesthetics and values, or am I rationalizing my position in the game of Cool Us vs.Uncool Them? Is my criticism real or a Three-Card Monte, with the masses never able to find the cool card because I palmed it?
Fensterstock and Tisserand never articulate a definitive answer for how Bunny dealt with those questions. They gesture toward the latter, which was how I felt when he was my editor at OffBeat. He was very supportive of me as a writer and drastically expanded my role in the magazine. I think he liked having someone who respected New Orleans’ music but hadn’t drunk the Kool-Aid, because OffBeat’s subscriber base was thick with people who flocked to Jazz Fest and Radiators shows and WWOZ’s Piano Night long after they stopped being magical for Bunny. He moved on to punk and new wave to plant the flag of Cool over there, at least for a while. While at OffBeat, he re-planted that flag in the Ninth Ward for Quintron and Miss Pussycat, The New Orleans Bingo! Show, Die Rötzz, and other garage punk bands active in that neighborhood. He was excited to play me an album by Señor Coconut—an electronic artist who transformed Kraftwerk songs into mambos.
I don’t think he was very happy at OffBeat. I assumed that he counted his bosses among the people he wanted to leave behind in his search for newer, cooler things. Fensterstock and Tisserand quote one of the few reviews that I remember from that time because it didn’t feel tainted by cynicism. He had written liner notes for a series of Meters reissues, and when he reviewed it he mentioned getting paid, then wrote, “my sole interest in these albums is missionary. I’m ambivalent about Jesus; the Meters are my saviors.”
People will have a lot of different responses to Bunny, and all of them are valid. He played recklessly with sexism and racism—to prove personal points, I assume—but his motives don’t excuse him. Bunny Matthews: His Life, Art, and Obsessions reveals his complicated journey through New Orleans, and it’s safe to say that its cultural landscape would be very different without him.
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