August 2009. Creative fire lights up the lounge at La Fonda.

The general consensus about the creative spirit is that it is for the young. To keep its fires lit it requires the energy, the unbridled ego, the desire to hear one’s own voice, that are the hallmarks of youth. Once the focus of one’s life turns to paying bills, raising a family, maintaining a job, even dealing with the bothersome mechanics of one’s mortality, the creative life hardly stands a chance. But every once in a while, you find a small pocket of souls that defy the pragmatism of life and something interesting happens.

On Wednesday nights, one of those pockets is the paneled bar in the back of La Fonda’s.Any longtime Baton Rouge resident has memories of the venerable Mexican restaurant out on Airline—they had a prom dinner there or a family reunion; they went there after church. The sign on the road that declares it a Restaurant and Lounge has seen better days, but the red-orange script on the building itself seems defiant against the lackluster industrial realities of Airline highway today.

On Wednesday nights, a loose crew of singer-songwriters who at first glance seem too old for the gig scene, plug their guitars into the PA system in La Fonda’s back lounge and let their creative spirits fly. It is not a rare thing to find older, more seasoned musicians playing in a Mexican restaurant for the patrons; the difference here is that they are playing for themselves.

I arrived just as Dorothy LeBlanc started her set. Dorothy is better known around town at Miss Dorothy, the Shaky Egg Lady, Baton Rouge’s most indefatigable children’s musician, or as a member of The Buskers, performing bluegrass and folk favorites at the Farmer’s Market and Whole Foods. Tonight, we see another side of Dorothy. She took the stage with a resonator guitar, sheepishly admitting that she was new to playing in bars, and appropriately opened with “The Brass Rail,” a song about “drinking quarter shots of bourbon” with a boyfriend at the long-lost LSU watering hole. Dorothy has a well-honed stage charm and an unsinkable ego when she gets on stage, opening up her life through her songs. In one about her parents’ death, she offers “It was easy to clear out that old house/Not so easy to clear out my mind.”

My crawfish quesadilla arrived as the Darold Dixie band, a five-member bluegrass outfit took the stage for their thirty-minute set, opening with “Sittin' on Top of the World.” I spied a musician I know from local rock bands, and joked about how it took them just a few minutes to set up and start playing, in contrast to the arduous setup routine one must endure for most rock acts. The group controlled dynamics effortlessly, moving from solo to ensemble moments like they’d been playing these songs forever, which I guess, they have. What separated this from other bluegrass shows I’ve seen is a marked informality. These guys just love this music and love to play it.

I’ll get to my favorite performer of the night in just a second, but first I must attempt to paint a picture of the evening’s host Louis Lipinski. Lipinski fills the gaps during set-ups with a banter falling somewhere between standup comedian, monologist and beat poet. Normally, an emcee tries for seamless transitions, but Lipinski takes a markedly and delightfully idiosyncratic tack. More on that later.

My favorite segment of the night was Kevin Johnson’s set of old time Blues from the era of race records, things like Willie Brown’s 1930 song “M&O Blues” and what Johnson’s coyly called a “half-ass approximation of Reverend Gary Davis’ ‘Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning.’” There is nothing half-ass about the jazzy yet reverent air Johnson breathes into these songs. He brought Bill Tidwell and his harmonica to the stage to perform Brownie McGhee’s “Blood Red River,” one the many the duos performed on Johnson’s CD Vintage Bread and Blues.

The genteel delicacy of Johnson’s set contrasted with that of Baton Rouge attorney and singer-songwriter Steve Judice, who belts out bawdy heartland tunes not dissimilar to those by James McMurtry. During one Springsteen-esque trucker ballad, the protagonist invited his girl back home to “Light a candle if you want/If it will put you in the mood/Don’t do it on my account/I’m already haulin’ wood.” This, and a requested number about Monica Lewinski that pivots on the line “Next time wear a white blouse when you come to the White House” help set this singer-songwriter night apart from the more staid affairs I’ve been to. These are people being sweet, being funny, being sincere, and in the case of the final act, a little weird.

Lipinski assembled an armada of three electric guitars, bass and drum machine under the moniker MelVin LipScoe as he read off a stream-of-consciousness poem thanking everyone for coming and La Fonda’s for having them, and then kicked into a set of covers where he less sang than acted out the parts of Van Morrison, Buck Owens, and Bo Diddley, among others. The open mic warhorse “Brown Eyed Girl” took on a different air under Lipinski’s exaggerated growl, and instead of being just a song everyone knows, it was transformed into a canvas on which personalities are depicted, egos are allowed to blossom, and most of all, interesting things can happen.

Details. Details. Details.

La Fonda’s singer-songwriter night, every Wednesday 5 pm–9 pm.
7838 Airline Highway Baton Rouge, La
(225) 927-2535
Steve Judice’s music: www.myspace.com/stevejudice
Kevin Johnson’s music: http://earthstar.newlibertyvillage.com/
Dorothy LeBlanc’s music: www.dorothyleblanc.com/

Alex V. Cook is a Baton Rouge-based music critic and author. He listens to everything and writes about most of it. The full effect can be had at www.alexvcook.com.

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