urban bicycle journeys

I love “The Hammond Song.”

I used to read Rolling Stone religiously and in 1979 when I was living in Houston TX I bought, on the magazine’s recommendation, the then-new debut album The Roches by three sisters from New Jersey. When I moved to New Orleans in my Renault Le Car in September 1981 I brought along that album as part of my three or four feet wide record collection and moved into a rental house at 913 Second Street in the Irish Channel with friends Slice and Tom who were Tulane law students. I went looking for a job in air freight. I met my to-be-wife Tootie just a month or so later. All of us enjoyed listening to The Roches, especially the best song on the album “The Hammond Song.“ I once walked into our house at one o’clock in the morning, and my roommate Tom was asleep, sitting upright in a chair, with headphones on so loud you could still hear that song blasting through. It starts with an organ note.

If you go down to Hammond; you’ll never come back. I did not put much thought into where this Hammond was. I assumed it was Hammond, Indiana. A couple of years later we saw The Roches in concert in a much-smaller-than-McAlister-Auditorium venue at Tulane University and Suzzy Roche specifically said that “The Hammond Song” was about “a town near here.” Another clue: the second-best song on that album is “The Married Men” in which the Maggie Roche reminisces about sleeping around with, uh, married men, and the song opens with the line One from Louisiana. This is from German television in 1982.

Never would have had a good time again if it wasn’t for the married men.

That was more than forty years ago and I still had never been to Hammond LA; sixty miles up I-55 from New Orleans. It seemed a good idea to cycle around Hammond, see what the town is like, and somehow play that song! On the last warm day before an upcoming cold spell I loaded my fat tired bicycle in the back of our Ford Escape Hybrid drove up there one Friday morning. Much of the drive is on causeways across wetlands.

Hammond’s current population is 21,000. Driving through its suburban periphery I noticed more than one gun shop advertising silencers, suppressors, and ammo. You do not see this type of store in New Orleans. I found a place to park at something called Tangipahoa Parish Technology Center and pulled the bicycle out. I had brought the ukulele along and I could carry it in the back rack.

I cycled toward downtown. The neighborhoods to the south and west seemed less than prosperous.

I had not had breakfast. Luma Coffee occupies a former drug store on a key intersection in downtown Hammond.

They had offerings like avocado toast but the two plastic bins at the hostess’s feet somehow clued me that their croissant might indeed be special. In my ongoing coverage of Croissants at Coffeehouses in America, Luma Coffee in Hammond LA should stand tall. The young woman at the counter said a woman at her nearby home-based bakery makes the dough the night before then bakes croissants in the early morning hours. This one was supremely fresh and flaky. Delicious.

I spent the next couple of hours cycling around Hammond and its periphery. The downtown, at least by American standards, seems thriving.

Hammond is on the main rail line of the what used to be called the Illinois Central running from Chicago to New Orleans. The Amtrak train City of New Orleans stops here.

Mid-Century Modern architecture in public buildings is disappearing in America but small town churches still stand out.

The north side of town is attractive and prosperous looking.

It was time for lunch.

Cate Street Seafood Station seems the classic south Louisiana bar-restaurant in a former railroad building in downtown Hammond. The book I was reading on my Kindle is Paul Freedman’s Ten Restaurants That Changed America. (Antoine’s in New Orleans is one of them.) His key point is how public tastes in food change over the years. I remember in the early 1980’s first learning of a Japanese dish called sushi. Now it is everywhere. Furthermore, until about the year 2018 I had never heard of that Hawaiian preparation called poké.

This day in 2026 in small town Louisiana even though there was menu full of gumbo, po-boys, and fried seafood they had a sushi section at one end of the bar. Furthermore, using those same sushi ingredients of avocado, rice, and raw tuna they offered “Poke Stack” as the daily special. Chopsticks were sitting on the bar. Poké and beer was a delicious and seemingly healthy lunch.

I topped it off with a cup of Louisiana style seafood gumbo.

I returned to cycling around Hammond and again thinking about “The Hammond Song” performed in 1979 by those three sisters The Roches. AI and social media have unlocked all sorts of minutia. A simple Google search brought up a Facebook post Terre Roche made in about 2012. Artists rarely explain their work.

(In about 1976) we (the two older Roche sisters who had just made an unsuccessful record album) were exhausted and intimidated by the demands of the music business. We left our home in New York City and retreated to a town in rural Louisiana named Hammond, where we got waitress jobs and lived in a Kung Fu temple, studying the Eastern art of Tai Chi, yoga, and meditation.

During our time at the Kung Fu temple, Maggie and I hardly ever played music. But she wrote one song “The Hammond Song” while we were living that life.

Eventually we moved back to New York and formed a trio with our younger sister which became The Roches. “The Hammond Song” was the first song in our repertoire as a trio. It went on the become the most popular Roches’ song with many people covering it over the years.

I had to play this song once, in Hammond, even if just for myself. Before I biked back to the car and drove home, I found a spot in Hammond’s Zemurray Park.

On this chilly weekday afternoon no one was around. I am clearly not The Roches, but you can listen if you like.