urban bicycle journeys

In my previous post I had bemoaned over-enthusiasm towards the most famous musical talents while not appreciating the lesser known. Susan Cowsill? Taylor Swift she is not. The youngest member of the 1960’s family band The Cowsills, she has been a performer for nearly sixty years. She has played with her five older brothers, alone, and with others. In 1996 she co-founded the semi-successful band Continental Drifters, which includes Vicky Peterson of The Bangles and former DB and R.E.M. backup Peter Holsapple, who is originally from Winston-Salem NC. For a while she was married to Holsapple, with whom she has a daughter.

She has lived in New Orleans for more than twenty years and is now married to New Orleanian and Continental Drifters drummer Russ Broussard.

The creepiest Susan Cowsill YouTube video is from a 1969 TV show, singing with Dean Martin. These days someone would have had him arrested.

Susan occasionally still performs with two or three of her surviving brothers. Does anyone remember this song? The sibs The Cowsills here are singing their 1967 hit at a California event in early 2024. As far as I can tell, this is all a-capella except for one acoustic guitar.

Tootie and I had seen Susan Cowsill as a solo act a year ago at the French Quarter Festival. We found her a fetching and accomplished singer. We bought tickets to a concert this November at a New Orleans Mid-City venue called Broadside.

Parts of Mid-City are indeed upscale but most is block after block of working class late nineteenth century wooden shotgun houses. Hipness creeps in. My current fave podcaster on national politics Tim Miller lives somewhere in Mid-City. The only Mid-City-ites in our New Orleans pickle ball group are Chris and Marsha. I was pleased to notify them a few months ago that I found some online magazine called Timeout.com that had “Mid City New Orleans” on its list of “The Forty Coolest Neighborhoods in the World.”

The Lafitte Greenway runs from the French Quarter straight up into Mid-City. From our Lower Garden District condo to the concert at the Broadside, for example, it would be an easy three and a half mile bike ride, about half of that on a separate bike trail.

The night of the concert it was cold and dark outside. If I REALLY wanted to, Tootie said she would bicycle to this show, but can’t we just take the car? If I was alone of course I would have cycled, but why press the issue?

Driving our car to the concert through sketchy neighborhoods, I realized that because I bicycle around New Orleans so much, driving a car in the city, to me, is stressful. Our plan was to arrive Broadside early and eat from their food-truck-like vendor. On arrival we discovered their food window was closed that evening!

I cannot skip dinner. There was still about an hour before the show. I Googled Mapped “restaurant.”

Only four blocks away and seven minutes on foot in the darkness through a less than upscale neighborhood we discovered a gem: Gabrielle, at 2441 Orleans Avenue.

On this Friday night at 7:00 PM we found seats at the bar. We had time for one dish each. Tootie ordered seafood gumbo; me “traiteur fish,” heavily seasoned trout filet on top of a crab cake.

Both dishes were delicious. I had not had New Orleans restaurant cuisine this heavily spiced in a while. I was reminded that much of the world associates New Orleans with cayenne pepper and dishes like blackened redfish. Many use the word Cajun to describe New Orleans. Both impressions are misplaced. While many New Orleanians would describe themselves as Creole, very very few New Orleanians consider themselves Cajun. The Cajuns are a separate rural people based one hundred fifty miles west of New Orleans around Lafayette LA. It is the Cajuns that mostly originated Louisiana pepper-heavy cooking. Blackened redfish and blackening in general were only invented in the 1970’s by the late Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme for his famous but now-defunct New Orleans restaurant K-Paul’s. Our bartender here at Gabrielle told us their chef had been associated with Prudhomme.

It had been a superb but brief meal. We walked back to the concert at Broadside. I had attended outdoor shows here but did not know they have a smaller indoor venue. There were fewer than fifty people watching this show. Susan commanded the stage, backed by her band of local musicians. She tells funny stories and sings her heart out. She played a few 1960-70’s standards. Twenty second video.

She is also a decent songwriter. This nine second video is a piece of one of her originals.

She played a little over two hours. A good time was had by all.