Two-Headed Doctor: Listening For Ghosts In Dr John's Gris Gris by David Toop

A forensic investigation into a single LP: Dr. John, the night tripper's Gris-gris.

Paperback, 264 pages

Biographical Note:
David Toop is a musician, curator and Emeritus Professor at University of the Arts London, and the author of acclaimed books such as Rap Attack, Ocean of Sound, Sinister Resonance, and Into the Maelstrom.

Commendation Quotes:
"An extraordinary LP begets an extraordinary book. Two-Headed Doctor is about spectral America, the porosity of identity, racial drag, syncretic spirituality, nocturnal transmissions, fantastical fabulation. No one listens more deeply--or more hemispherically--than David Toop; no music writer is more entrancing or contagious."
--Sukhdev Sandhu

"At once a densely researched blend of cultural history, ethno/musicology and memoir of listening, Two-Headed Doctor is also a personal accounting of the occult pathways of the African Diaspora and its gloriously convoluted impact on music, culture and identity."
--Louis Chude-Sokei

"Ostensibly about an album I barely know and had little interest in, I burned through this book, which raises the ghosts of twentieth-century culture, to ask questions about the very stuff our musical histories are made from."
--Jennifer Lucy Allen

"Dr John might have come into being just so David Toop could unravel his mysteries.There are marshmallow sandwiches and musical bones, frogs, and tambourines. Joseph Conrad and Merle Haggard meet on the same burial ground. Baron Samedi is snapped on a beach in Sussex. The dead among the living. All fictional, all real..."
--Ian Penman

"A double headfirst plunge into the murk of American performance and states of "dreamed-up being", David Toop reverse engineers the Night Tripper mythology, listening as a way to question our own mediumship."
--Dave Tompkins

Publisher Marketing:
A forensic investigation into a single LP: Dr. John, the night tripper's Gris-gris.

Two-Headed Doctor is a forensic investigation into a single LP: Dr. John, the night tripper's Gris-gris. Though released in 1968 to poor sales and a minimum of critical attention, Gris-gris has accumulated legendary status over subsequent decades for its strangeness, hybridity, and innovative production. It formed the launch pad for Dr. John's image and lengthy career and the ghostly presence of its so-called voodoo atmosphere hovers over numerous cover versions, samples, and re-invocations. Despite the respect given to the record, its making is shrouded in mystery, misunderstandings, and false conclusions. The persona of Dr. John, loosely based on dubious literary accounts of a notorious voodooist and freed slave, a nineteenth-century New Orleans resident known as Doctor John, provided Malcolm "Mac" Rebennack with a lifelong mask through which to transform himself from session musician in order to construct a solo career.

Somewhere between puzzle, experimental rhythm, blues disguised as rock, and elaborate hoax, Gris-gris was a collaborative project between Rebennack and producer/arranger Harold Battiste (at the time musical director for Sonny & Cher). A few brief sessions held at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles brought together many of New Orleans' finest musicians, including Shirley Goodman, John Boudreaux, Plas Johnson, Jessie Hill, Ernest McLean, and Tami Lynn. Along with their complex histories, the cast of characters implicated in the story includes Ornette Coleman, Lafcadio Hearn, Zora Neale Hurston, Cher, Sonny Bono, Sam Cooke, Ishmael Reed, Black Herman, Prince La La, and many others. The story details in discursive style the historical context of the music, how it came together, its literary sources, production and arrangements, and the nature of the recording studio as dream state, but also examines as a disturbing undercurrent the volatile issue of race in twentieth-century music, the way in which it doomed relationships and ambitious projects, exploited great talents, and distorted the cultural landscape.