“Bunny Matthews—your cartoons are the best depictions yet of life in ‘N’awlins…’ But, Bunny, who the hell are you trying to impress with all the confusing shit you write?” —Disgruntled Figaro reader (1980)
Bunny Matthews was heavy on my mind as I hauled around copies of the August ANTIGRAVITY for monthly distro. A major tome about his prolific contributions to New Orleans culture was about to drop, titled Bunny Matthews: His Life, Art, and Obsessions. Clocking in at 300-plus pages and nearly five pounds, the book is equal parts deep dive biography and vivid display of artwork and ephemera. I had been tearing through an advance copy in preparation for an interview with authors Alison Fensterstock and Michael Tisserand. Bunny’s story, meticulously researched by Alison and Michael and with the backing of The Historic New Orleans Collection [an ANTIGRAVITY advertiser], reaches centuries into the past to Bunny’s Confederate ancestors, through his childhood in the suburbs of New Orleans, into formative years as a contributor to his high school’s newspaper (with side quests into amateur film documentation), and then onto having his hand in just about every regional media outlet that has existed in the past half century, from alt rag predecessors such as Figaro and Wavelength, through his tumultuous years at OffBeat, The Times-Picayune, Gambit, and even some failed forays into television and animation. Bunny’s story also weaves its way through the founding years of historic institutions like Tipitina’s and WWOZ, and his close relationships with beloved yet troubled icons like Professor Longhair and James Booker. The book is rife with cameos and astounding trivia, from Bunny sharing scoutmaster duties with Ellis Marsalis to mentions of his favorite pen (the Rapidograph). With his unique visual style, Bunny’s commentary spanned everything from the rise and fall of white nationalist David Duke to Civil Rights icon Dorothy Mae Taylor—often to mixed results that frustrated editors and readers alike. The authors do a great deal of sensitive treading in these areas, while also displaying the works, some of which were overlooked in their time or never made it to publication. The multitudes contained in this book, both of Bunny’s rich and complicated life—including his descent later in life into sloppy and troubling Facebook posts—as well as the histories that radiate out and around him, is enough to make your head swim if you’ve lived for any serious time in New Orleans. Doubly so if you’ve been entrenched in the New Orleans media community. As Nietzsche says about the abyss, gaze upon Bunny Matthews’ work, and it gazes back into you.
As I pulled into the parking lot of the New Orleans Food Co-op to drop our latest issue, wondering where even to begin a conversation about such an epic project, there it was in all its glory—a Leidenheimer bakery truck decked out top-to-bottom with Bunny’s signature barb-trading duo, Vic and Nat’ly, chomping on a giant poboy from each end. I had to laugh. Even after his death, and now especially with this major retrospective being released, Bunny still haunts New Orleans.
Later that week, on an overbearingly sunny August day, I made my way to Alison’s house to discuss the book with her, co-author Michael, and Bunny’s son Jude (Jude’s brother Noah was also a key source for the book, but he does not live in New Orleans). Both authors come from deep and varied experience in media both national and local, and both knew Bunny personally and through varying levels of his career and life (real-world and online), which ended in 2021 when he succumbed to brain cancer. Jude in his own right is a New Orleans notable, and despite a tumultuous relationship with his father, has helmed the Bunny Matthews Archive (which is now part of the ANTIGRAVITY monthly comic assortment). Over the plaintive whines of Ziggy the Siberian husky, we talked about the process of delving into such a complicated person, where the research took them both physically and mentally, and even uncovered a few more gems from Bunny’s strange and daring life.
Michael and Alison, how did you two meet?
Michael Tisserand: I remember it very clearly. I was sitting innocently in my editor’s office at Gambit and David Lee Simmons, the Arts editor at the time, walked Alison in and said, you should meet her. Alison came in, and David Lee was raving about you. And Alison was exactly the kind of alt-weekly writer I was hoping to bring into Gambit.
Alison Fensterstock: That would have been right after I graduated in 2000, so it would have been somewhere between 2000 and Katrina.
MT: Yep. Overeducated, underemployed. That’s what we were looking for. [And] more than anything else, [someone who] takes cultural reporting and cultural writing seriously. That’s, I think, the main hallmark of alt-weeklies, in addition to those that took on investigative reporting. But they treated cultural writing and cultural reporting as serious topics of investigation and analysis, and celebration. And I think Alison brought that in with her writing, instantly.
AF: And Gambit was amazing then… In the ‘90s when I was in college, that was a heyday of the alt-weekly. I grew up in New York reading The [Village] Voice and New York Press, and Gambit was totally on par with those. Katy Reckdahl was doing these 4,000-word investigative stories that actually changed laws.
And so y’all developed a working relationship over at Gambit, and now you’re co-authors. I’m curious about your working relationship and the two-author system.
MT: Very intimate, very intimate.
AF: Yeah, co-authoring is a surprisingly intimate experience.
MT: Like, when somebody’s married and the hallmark of the marriage is, you start to finish each other’s sentences. Well, we’ve done that literally now for 80,000 words or whatever it is… We started talking about Bunny pretty early on. That was sort of a thing we would talk about when we would get together was: How’s Bunny doing, and why hasn’t he ever really gotten the due that we thought his work deserved?
AF: And there was a period when I was getting calls, it was kind of after he retired but while he still had all his marbles, in the mid 20-teens, and he was on the internet a lot and was emailing a lot and messaging. He would always invite everyone to come visit him in Abita Springs. He kept telling me that I should come and help him write his memoirs. And I never did. And then there was a point when I realized he was not mentally in a position to tell me the story of his life anymore.
MT: Did you think about it? Did you ever consider doing that invitation?
AF: Yeah! I think I would’ve enjoyed it. I think that was when I was still working at The Times-Picayune, which was an especially demanding time, so I didn’t have a lot of side projects. And also, I’m scared of driving over the Causeway by myself. I really wish I had, but it would’ve been so different. It would’ve been easier in a lot of ways. It probably would have been harder more than it would’ve been easier. Like, we would have answered some questions that are now never gonna be answered. But I’m sure we would have stopped being friends or had some kind of giant fight.
Jude Matthews: Yeah, he probably would’ve quit talking to y’all at some point.
MT: It would’ve been a power struggle at a certain point.
Did you ever work with him or edit him with Gambit?
MT: Yeah, I brought Bunny back into Gambit. He had done stuff at Gambit before, amazing stuff that I had not seen until I started working on this project, [such as] his not very long-lasting political work. [When] I brought him in, at that point, I personally thought Vic and Nat’ly were kinda played out. So he did full pages about life on the Northshore and things like that that I thought were really fresh and funny and good. And then he did some illustrations and covers. But yeah, I was very happy to bring him back in.
I guess you didn’t have any of that contentious relationship that he had with other editors throughout his career?
MT: No, we never did. There was never an issue.
I wonder if it helped ’cause you didn’t really have history with him, right?
MT: Right, I was fresh.
And Alison, what was your introduction to Bunny?
AF: I think we were in the same social circle in the early 2000s.
JM: Yeah, I think that we met first.
AF: Yeah [to Jude], we definitely met first, ’cause you were hanging out with a similar friend group.
JM: Yeah. I was going to Circle Bar.
AF: I remember going to OffBeat to hang out with Bunny in his office. I cannot remember who introduced me. I think it must’ve been one of those New Orleans ways where you just sort of know somebody because all the music writers that get free tickets are always seated in the same row and stuff.
Poster for “Women’s Week” at Tipitina’s (1980), by Bunny Matthews. (Courtesy of Tipitina’s)
And you didn’t grow up with Bunny Matthews, so you have kind of an interesting perspective. What was your early impression?
AF: I was just trying to learn about New Orleans. By the time I was in college, he was in every OffBeat, ’cause I was at Tulane from ’96 to 2000, and he started doing the monthly cartoons in OffBeat in ’94. So he was the cartoonist for years before he was the editor and wreaked havoc that way. And I just really liked the cartoons. I liked the style. You can read them on a lot of different levels too. They’re little puzzles about New Orleans. They always have something poetic or intellectual or philosophical hidden in them. My favorite was those little epigrams that he would put on top of every OffBeat cartoon, and there would be a quote from Balzac and then from Iggy Pop.
MT: I came across Bunny when I first moved to New Orleans in ’84, and I was like, who is this amazing woman cartoonist whose cartoons are on everybody’s refrigerator? I think for at least a couple years, I thought Bunny was a woman.
JM: Yeah, that happened a lot.
I wanted to get back to the two-author dynamic. Can y’all describe the structure that you used? Because that’s like two chefs in the kitchen or two directors on a movie.
MT: The mantra was: We’re not gonna try to be each other’s editor. ‘Cause an editor is a power position. It’s not a collaboration. We would approach each other’s pieces of the writing in discussion but always making sure that one person wasn’t being pushy.
AF: We managed somehow to be surprisingly egalitarian. No one fell into the role of: I am the boss of the book. The funny thing was, we did wind up being each other’s editor, ’cause we wound up trusting each other enough to make suggestions, [but] there wasn’t a lot of insisting.
MT: It worked out more easily than I thought it was gonna work out. Like all friendships and marriages and relationships, I think sharing a same sense of humor is very key.
AF: Yeah, that was very important.
MT: But from the beginning that was the first discussion, was: How are we gonna divvy this up? And it went pretty smoothly.
AF: It happened kinda organically, ’cause we just dove in. I remember [The Historic New Orleans Collection] agreed to publish the book and you came to New Orleans for the first research trip, and we just went out to UNO library with our notebooks to be like, let’s see how we’re gonna find out about Bunny. We did all that research and interviewing together, without dividing up topics or chronology or anything at the beginning. And then we naturally fell into the way we divided up the writing, which was in chronological chunks. And I think that was just because you had gotten a really good vein of information about his early life. So we were like, OK, why don’t you draft birth to college, and then I’ll take the next part. And it took shape from there.
MT: And you developed an infatuation with Figaro which continues to this day.
AF: Yes, I was kind of in love with Figaro and the whole ‘70s New Orleans scene.
MT: And then I’m in love with the Dixie magazine era of Bunny Matthews, Vic and Nat’ly. So I was really happy to jump into that, and then we just went back and forth. We ping-ponged through his life that way.
AF: Yeah. And then that period at the end of his life was actually when I knew him the most, and knew the people he was engaging with, so I wrote the end, the Facebook years.
Right. We’ll get to that. Let’s talk about the amount of data you had to sift through. Bunny was prolific.
AF: [to Jude] You can talk about that. It was all in your garage.
JM: Yeah, I had to move everything out of my dad’s house after he died ’cause I wanted to sell the house and I ended up moving everything to my garage, which, it’s been a years-long process of putting things together. I found all this artwork up in my dad’s attic that had been sitting there for 30 years and you can tell that it was kind of cooking up there. And I found the Jimi Hendrix Super 8s the last day of cleaning out the house. And I was like, oh my god! He’s been telling me about this for my entire life! And I finally found it. And I gave it to the HNOC and they converted it—
MT: It’s in the exhibit.
JM: Yeah, it’s in the exhibit now.
It’s footage that Bunny shot of Hendrix.
JM: Yeah. At City Park. He lights his guitar on fire.
MT: But there’s other Super 8s that still have not been digitized, right? ‘Cause Bunny shot film when he was in high school. He made little movies, so there’s still discoveries to be made… One example is the Tammany Toons, I don’t think anybody remembers those.
JM: Nobody, yeah. People on the Northshore.
MT: You know, it’s a beautiful series, I think maybe his sort of most realized version of being a steady newspaper cartoonist.
AF: And that the technique he used—he was doing real botanical illustrations of the flora of Abita Springs and animals.
JM: Yeah, I guess he did the Tammany Toons for almost 10 years? And almost every week.
MT: And as opposed to most of his other newspaper situations, it actually ended nicely and respectfully when the editors said: We’re gonna have to end this now. And they gave him a chance to write a farewell cartoon.
Right, ’cause he didn’t always get that, right?
MT: He didn’t always get that, yeah. Exactly. It exploded on one end or the other, and he definitely was not innocent.
I think it’s worth pointing out that Bunny was very egalitarian with his art. It doesn’t seem like he was too good for anything. Like the Tammany Toons, or even the cover of ANTIGRAVITY when we were six years old. And he wouldn’t even charge us for it.
AF: I think of all the private collection stuff we found… ’cause the volume of published stuff from someone who had at least a weekly cartoon for decades, like that was so much to get through. And then everyone has a Bunny thing at home. I went to get my hand x-rayed at the Hand Center in Metairie, and I went into the radiology room and there was a Bunny poster of the radiologist that says: Dr. Smith is da best at da x-rays. [everyone laughs]
MT: And more than everybody has Bunny art is, everyone has a Bunny story. So we could have kept researching for another year. We could have talked to another year’s worth of people.
ANTIGRAVITY June 2010 issue
The research took y’all a lot of places, right? What was one research victory? Were there any other settings or special treasure chests you uncovered?
MT: Yeah, my favorite research victory was going to East Jeff High School and finding that they had boxes of the student newspaper [the Tom-Tom].
AF: And I remember, at the time, I was telling Michael not to bother.
MT: Yeah, I was driving to Lafayette for some reason.
AF: And he was like: I’m just gonna stop at the high school on the way. And I was like: You can’t just go into a high school in 2026! But yeah, you just walked in.
MT: And they brought me to the library, and the librarian said, “There’s a box up here on the top shelf in the library.” At that point, I just set them all out and photographed them. And it’s really amazing work. I mean, turning the East Jefferson Tom-Tom into a Los Angeles alternative weekly. And he would tell stories about being told he can’t put a Black man’s picture in the paper, so I could find the stories that were actually being run there.
AF: Yeah, ’cause we had heard versions of that story. I think he had posted about it on Facebook and put it in several OffBeat pieces over the years, about how he got in trouble for putting Jimi Hendrix in the school paper. And then we actually saw the paper. But as it turned out, the HNOC was gonna go back and do proper photographs of all the pages. And some water main had broken and all those papers were destroyed.
AF: So if Michael hadn’t happened to just decide to pop in to East Jefferson…
MT: Yeah, the cell phone shots were all we got of those. Can I prompt Alison to have an answer about the treasure trove? I’m gonna prompt you, because this is your story. We also found a human treasure trove.
AF: Oh yeah! Jon Newlin.
JM: Jon Newlin needs to have a book about himself.
AF: Yeah, he was Bunny’s mentor. Most significantly just from the point of view of this project, Bunny would not have been who he was without Newlin, going back to high school. It’s extraordinary.
JM: Newlin was, I think, three or four years older than him, and he graduated from East Jeff.
AF: And they didn’t know each other in high school. They met when Newlin came back to talk to the staff of the Tom-Tom as an alumnus.
MT: Because Bunny begged him to.
AF: Yeah! ‘Cause I think he had heard the legend of this guy.
JM: They had a teacher who was the head of the Tom-Tom. And she said something to my dad about how he annoyed her as much as Jon Newlin did. So my dad wrote Jon Newlin a letter saying: Hey, can you come speak at the school?
AF: Yeah, ’cause [Newlin] had gone to UNO and was writing for the Driftwood. So then by the time Bunny got to UNO, Newlin kind of roped him into writing there, and then he did the same thing with Figaro after they had graduated.
MT: But that’s a person that, when we would talk to somebody like Peggy Scott Laborde, she’d be like, oh my god, Jon Newlin!
Clovis and Bennie Martin, Inventors of the Po-boy, Published November 29, 1981, in Dixie.
Courtesy of the Bunny Matthews Archive
You interviewed dozens of people, and in the book you say not all of the conversations were easy ones. Because Bunny was a difficult person. He had these opinions and he was kind of weird sexually and with women, and also was professionally combative. So how did you approach these conversations, knowing what you knew about Bunny and having to talk to people who maybe still hold grudges or have unresolved issues?
MT: Or still have hurt feelings.
JM: Yeah. Lotsa hurt feelings. He was a very difficult man. I can say that. He was my father and we did not get along for lots of times.
I want to get there. But from a journalist’s perspective, this book must’ve been crazy for y’all because you’re not just journalists, you’re not objective. You knew Bunny. You were friends with him, you live here in New Orleans amongst all these people that knew him, loved him, hated him. What was your approach in talking to people who maybe didn’t want to talk about Bunny or maybe had terrible things to say? ‘Cause you did it together, right?
AF: We did some together, I mean, only a few out of that whole, like, hundred though. When we approached the interviewing, we didn’t divide it up by category. We each just went into the list of people and asked them about their particular interaction or era of overlap with Bunny. And we also often would each call, if somebody had a very long or involved relationship with Bunny, like Newlin or [photographer] Jim Scheurich, we would each call them multiple times. And Jude we called, like, five million times. [laughs]
JM: Yeah!
MT: I think just try to communicate that you want to hear what they have to say, as much as possible. We’re not talking to Bunny. So you have to kind of figure out: Is this someone else’s agenda?
AF: Also, people who were willing to talk to us, I think that was a self-selecting, leaning toward pro-Bunny group. Those were the people who felt warmly enough to participate. ‘Cause there were also several people, mostly online, who were just like, why would you write a book about him? And then those would be people who would not want to talk to you ’cause they thought the whole idea was stupid.
MT: But I would say that if we didn’t talk to somebody or if we talked to them and didn’t include what they had to say in the book, we were very comfortable that we got the full range of reactions to Bunny and experiences that people had with Bunny with what we’ve got in there.
AF: Mm-hmm, yeah.
How did you navigate your multidimensional relationships, ’cause you’re not researchers coming from some faraway place to interview these people.
AF: Oh yeah, half the time it’s someone we’re already friends with.
MT: Well, I moved to Minnesota just to get away from potential blowback, so that was my solution.
AF: [laughs] One thing that I think that worked well was, there were people that we knew, like socially or professionally from different angles in New Orleans. I don’t think James O’Byrne would’ve talked to me as frankly as he talked to you [Michael]. I think he thought of you as more of a peer as an old Times-Picayune editor.
MT: Yeah, I was really appreciative that he told that story [of] Bunny getting fired fromTV Focus, which Bunny would complain about a lot.
AF: And they fired him by just stopping running [his cartoons]—
MT: To see if readers would notice, and see if anybody wrote in. And nobody did.
AF: Which is just such a dick move. There are [also] people like Clancy and Margo [DuBos, former publishers and editors of Gambit]. They spoke to you with the comfort of this long relationship.
MT: People like Steve Armbruster. He was a person that disassociated from Wavelength when he became uncomfortable with what Bunny had done in that magazine. And again, Steve has Bunny work on his walls.
AF: I think it’s one of the biggest collections.
MT: So I think he’s an example of someone—I would say most people fall under this category—that could still appreciate Bunny, [by] acknowledging the complexities of Bunny.
Also, I’m interested in the moments you’re interviewing these people and as a journalist, you need to get things out of people, right? But you’re pulling trauma out, so I’m curious what your approach to that is. Or if somebody was reading this and they wanted to be an investigative journalist, or have difficult conversations with people for the sake of a book or something like it, how do you approach that?
MT: I think just try not to get obsessed with the tape recorder or whatever you’re using and actually try to be human in that moment. We’ve both experienced that with other projects.
AF: Yeah, I think with interviews, you just need to listen and let things wander if they start to wander.
MT: Yeah, don’t put too tight of a rein on the conversation. That’s the difference between what we do and maybe a daily reporter, or a TV reporter especially, that’s gotta get in there and get an answer right away.
This is how I would describe this book: four-fifths of it would make a great movie, because the settings are amazing, like the early Tipitina’s days when the Radiators aren’t even the Radiators yet—
AF: The Rhapsodizers—
And there’s these newspaper rooms that are smoky and full of people clacking away on typewriters. But then the last part of it is just brutal, ’cause it’s the Facebook era, which is just not cinematic at all. It’s Bunny at his worst. But I get why you had to put it in there because especially in this day and age the omission would’ve been the crime.
JM: Yeah. Exactly.
AF: That was one of my sections. I remember thinking that this is really a lot of time to spend on the Facebook era. But he really was there, constantly, for like 10 years. And I remember the fun part of it where he did the music game and stuff. There was definitely a fun part of semi-retired Bunny constantly being online. And then it just slowly started to turn as he lost more and more mental capacity.
I vaguely remember that era. I was Facebook friends with him so, in the abstract, I remember him being off the rails on Facebook. And I was thinking to myself: I, for the purposes of this feature, am not going back and reliving all that. I’m not gonna go dig into Bunny’s Facebook. But you did!
AF: Yeah, we did. [laughs]
MT: Well, some of it, because some of the accounts were suspended. He kept getting booted.
AF: Yeah. And unfortunately, the stuff that was there was his last account, so it was like, the wackiest. It was the very end. He couldn’t be sharp.
MT: He would just peel one layer of the onion and put it on Facebook, instead of giving you the chance to go through the whole onion.
AF: And then he had this whole audience of people that were not familiar with the way he was. They just thought he was a weird old Facebook guy. Like, saying disjointed things about Confederate flags. And like I wrote in the book—and we talked about this a lot—how much he was interrogating things he had been taught, at this point in his life. He was really struggling to think about: what made me me. Which was something he did for his whole life: just think about what made New Orleans New Orleans. And then what he and his friends had done in the ‘70s to do all this music and culture preservation. And, finally at the end of his life, he was sort of like: Every Mardi Gras ball I’ve ever been to has been all white people being served by Black people, with a Black band, and the white people aren’t even listening to the music. And he would leave that there.
MT: And then his tag line was: This was our culture, we thought it would go on forever. That’s a gem.
AF: And I always read that as him being like, New Orleans is fucked up. Some of our traditions are really fucked up and racist, and this is something we all sort of portray as charming. But it has this indelible stain, which is also something he loved—pointing out what was fucked up in something that you loved. He has this great article about Jazz Fest from like, 1978, and he was like: People go to Jazz Fest to look at Black people like it’s a zoo. And you’re just like, ooh. Oh. ‘Cause that was even before they had Congo Square.
MT: Loving something deeply means being highly critical of it. And that was Bunny’s mantra, and not everybody accepts that.
AF: No, and that’s the way we saw him.
That’s the other thing about this book that’s so maddening. I imagine from your perspective as the writers, one day you’re in Arthur Roger Gallery looking at beautiful, one-of-a-kind prints and then the next day you’re on Facebook deep digging. Did this book drive you crazy? It seems like writing something like this, you couldn’t not be affected by it.
AF: Yeah, I mean it was frustrating in a lot of ways. The big frustration is really wanting to make sure you do it right when someone is this complicated, ’cause there are so many unpleasant and offensive things about him. Obviously we wanted to write a book about him because we feel that he is worthy of book-length consideration. And yeah, I feel like we did a lot of worrying about making sure we were incredibly specific in explaining what his whole deal was.
MT: And for Bunny, I think any creative person that watches other people scale the heights of fame and success, and something has kept that person from becoming—
AF: Like Matt Groening or something. Because he is an icon, and he was very aware of that.
JM: Yeah, he really wanted to be famous. That was one of his goals in life.
AF: Yeah, ’cause you [Michael] had that section of his life where he almost made it. And he had a [television animation] development deal. It was real.
MT: I think that’s the moment that I felt my heartstrings were pulled in a certain way. Because I think he made a turn to bitterness. After that [failed development deal], the last chance for that kind of faded away.
That’s one tough thing about this book. It’s like Bunny just takes his place in a pantheon of tragic New Orleans icons, whose stories don’t end well, mostly.
MT: Blanche DuBois and Bunny Matthews.
AF: And James Booker.
How were you at the end of this book? It must’ve been traumatic, on some level, to have to dig up these stories and have these difficult conversations. As writers, how were you able to decompress or how do you feel now that it’s over, moreso than just the relief of completing a deadline?
AF: I [wound] up being mad at him. I spent a lot of time, in the process of writing this book, just being really frustrated with him, or really pissed at him. Just being like: You could’ve just not been such a dick.
JM: Yeah, I mean, that’s how I felt most of my life. It’s like: Yeah, dad, just keep your mouth shut sometimes. You don’t need to say horrible things about people.
AF: But I feel satisfied that we made our case. And we made the case that he is really one of the most important 20th to 21st century people from New Orleans.
JM: I’m really glad that y’all did your due diligence and had to deal with very touchy shit.
And it’s important to point out that, you’re here today, Jude, but you didn’t approve the book, right? Like, this is not an authorized biography.
JM: No.
AF: Mm.
MT: No.
But you’re here, you support it, which I think is important to note. Because it’s not like you had a hand in the editing or the story itself.
JM: Yeah.
AF: Well also, I feel like we have such a debt to Jude for just being completely open.
MT: Right. Jude is probably not the only person in the world who has a complicated relationship with his father. But I would say the subset of people that could open up the way you did is a very narrow one. You really opened up about that in a very unique way, and that was really invaluable for the book.
Most people don’t have to have their relationship with their dad and their dad’s entire life made public. Jude, you had to share your dad with an entire city. What was that like, growing up under that? That seems tough.
JM: I just thought it was normal. I mean, if you go look at the Father’s Day Vic and Nat’ly show special that my brother and I are on, my dad, the first question he asks is, “What do you say to your dads on Fathers Day?” And I just go, [in a kid’s voice] I hate you! [laughs]
Jude, I want to give you a proverbial hug after reading this book.
JM: Yeah! [laughs]
And you have every right to not care about his legacy. So I’m curious where your head’s at, because now you are taking an active approach to his legacy, and I’m wondering what your reasoning is. Why are you doing this? For you? Or for your family?
JM: I want to do it for the city of New Orleans. All of this artwork that’s sitting in my garage, I want to share it with everybody. I love sharing. I would say my dad didn’t really like sharing.
So is this cathartic for you, this whole experience?
JM: Oh, yeah!
Left to right: Jude Matthews, Michael Tisserand, Alison Fensterstock
Photo by Dan Fox
I imagine with your kids, you’re probably actively trying to do things that your father didn’t do.
JM: Yes. I definitely learned a lot of what not to do with kids. Like, I’m never going to tell my kids: If you want to be an artist, don’t ever have children. Which I heard constantly. Which definitely had an effect on my brain. ‘Cause, yeah, I don’t really consider myself an artist.
What’s a creative outlet for you?
JM: I love playing noise music and electronic music and I don’t really consider myself a musician, but I do it and my daughter and I recorded an album last year. Maybe this next Halloween, we’ll put it out.
So Bunny’s difficulties are well established, but what’s something that you would carry into your fatherhood from Bunny? What’s something you would try to emulate of his, if anything?
JM: Providing access to so many different points of view and music. I play all sorts of totally weird things for my children all the time. I don’t know how many other three-year-olds love Coil. She used to really love this Philadelphia hardcore band called Soul Glo.
One thing that’s great about this book is, it’s like a history of New Orleans publishing, and Bunny epitomizes a certain time in music writing where there were critics. Like, people who were very comfortable being assholes, but they could back it up with erudite language and they weren’t just being mean. They knew what they were talking about. And in this day and age, you cannot find people to be like that—for better or for worse. We’ve kind of lost that mega-personality in culture writing.
JM: People are afraid of hurting other people’s feelings these days, I think.
AF: Well also, the jobs don’t really exist anymore. Like it’s unusual for someone to be in a place for a long [enough] time to develop a personal voice that’s recognizable. You have Rob Sheffield or Ann Powers. But these are people that are not as mercilessly critical as like, the Lester Bangs voice.
Right, it’s a little more academic. It’s all very good writing but reading the history of Figaro and Wavelength, and Bunny in particular, that just doesn’t exist anymore. And I always look for that, in a way.
AF: When he was in the Driftwood it’s just funny and it’s voicey and it’s really knowledgeable without being pretentious. And then eventually when he gets to OffBeat, when he was actually the editor of OffBeat and doing those columns and he’s writing… this might’ve been the tipping point for me to want to write this book, ’cause Bunny really wrote a contrarian history of New Orleans on the culture and music side. And no one could say, oh, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Like, if he’s needling the official magical story of New Orleans culture that’s held up by these pillars like Jazz Fest. And it’s like, he was there! And it doesn’t seem bitter, it just seems true. He was telling a different version of this story that everyone’s kind of smoothed down the edges of.
And he wasn’t afraid to go there. Which, that’s what I’m saying, I kind of miss that part of music culture writing. Would Bunny survive today?
MT: He barely survived in his day.
AF: Right.
MT: Also, I would not overlook how much he could beautifully enthuse about what he loved, too. What he loved was always surrounding his sharpest criticism. Even from college when he wrote about Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and that song “912 Greens” is the number? What he wrote about that song, that is the most beautiful love letter to a song that I can think of, and that carried through also. So you thought, this is not only a bitter crank.
AF: Yeah, that flip side is really important. ‘Cause it’s like, people who denounce the things they hate usually love the things they love with the same fervor. And I think you could read that in Bunny’s writing, that he could not stand people who were lukewarm about anything.
Leidenheimer truck, parked outside the New Orleans Food Co-op in August
Another thing reading the book is, you never get the sense that Bunny ever got sick of Vic and Nat’ly. Did y’all find that?
JM: There was definitely a point in time, but I think he was doing it more like an F U to the Picayune where he didn’t put Vic and Nat’ly. And he was just drawing these characters, like, two white people on the couch watching TV, ’cause he was like: I’m not putting Vic and Nat’ly in here for this amount of time.
AF: They told him not to, ’cause that was also when I think they had readers write in feeling offended that Vic and Nat’ly were insulting.
MT: And I think that whole conversation about, you know, is Vic and Nat’ly punching down, or is it a celebration of New Orleans vernacular culture? We get into that conversation, I think it’s kind of fascinating. He also changed up Vic and Nat’ly so much: sending them to the BP oil spill, having them go through Katrina. He did change them up quite a bit.
And the people critical of Vic and Nat’ly punching down, were they actual Y’ats, you know? For example, would [the famously cantankerous proprietor] O’Neil at Saturn Bar be offended? ‘Cause to me he was like the closest real life person to Vic.
AF: Yeah, and I feel like those people always seem to really like Vic and Nat’ly.
JM: My dad would always bring people by the Saturn Bar. I remember we picked up Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits and we drove down here. And my dad, I remember him going by the Saturn Bar, like, I was in the back seat. And then he just drove him around and was like: Y’all should go here later. And then we ended up getting back to the Royal Orleans, right by the courthouse in the Quarter. And we saw Eric Clapton come out, ’cause I guess they were on tour with him? And I think my dad yelled something at him, like: You suck!
AF: I’m sorry, that’s awesome.
I love that.
MT: Every time you sit down with Jude, you get more stories.
What is your best guess at what Bunny would think of this book?
MT: “Where’s my cut?”
AF: That’s too perfect.
JM: Yeah. He would definitely say that.
Bunny Matthews interviews James Brown at the Blue Room (now Roosevelt Hotel) in 1982 for Dixie. (photo by Jim Scheurich, courtesy of the Bunny Matthews Archive)
For more information on Bunny Matthews: His Life, Art, and Obsessions, including Bunny Day, a multimedia celebration for the book’s release on September 19, check out hnoc.org. There will also be an author discussion at Octavia Books on September 24. For more info, check out octaviabooks.com. For more of Bunny Matthews’ work, check out the archive at bunnymatthews.com.
Top: Map of New Orleans (1987) Historic New Orleans Collection, ©Mr. Bunny Matthews, 1992.39.16
Transcription by Michelle Pierce
Bunny Matthews interviews James Brown at the Blue Room (now Roosevelt Hotel) in 1982 for Dixie. (photo by Jim Scheurich, courtesy of the Bunny Matthews Archive)
