Aaron Neville's Amazing Grace

The club is crowded, but people automatically step out of the way to let him pass. He's a big man--massive, barrel-chested, ominous--and he walks with a deliberate and slightly threatening strut. If he crossed the street while you were stopped at a light, you'd instinctively lock your car doors.

His enormous bare arms are covered with street flash--a chunky gold watch on one wrist, a thick silver bracelet on the other--and crude tattoos. It says MOM on his left forearm, and above that there's a heart, above that a cross, above that his name. Covering most of his right forearm is a larger, more intricate, somewhat mysterious design; above it are the ragged, faint outlines of others. The tattoos are faded, but you can tell that he got them not from a pro but in a dingy back room somewhere. They must have been painful, but then again, this doesn't look like a man who'd be much bothered by pain.

Finally, he climbs onto the small stage, settles his bulk onto a stool and nods to the crowd. He doesn't smile; not now, not for the next hour. His face, expressionless, gives nothing away and lets no one in. There's a gentleness in that face, but you have to look hard to find it--past another tattoo, a curved dagger covering his left cheek, and past a large, dark mole over his right eye. You can see why Taylor Hackford cast him in Everybody's All-American as "Man with Gun," the scariest inhabitant of the black slum where Dennis Quaid goes to test his mettle. He hardly needs a gun. Armed with only a microphone, he looks dangerous.

And then Aaron Neville leans forward, opens his mouth and sings in the voice of an angel.

Or maybe this is the voice that the angels would like to have: pure, tremulous, fluttering into a tender falsetto and almost impossibly beautiful. Years ago, when Bette Midler went to a New Orleans club and heard it, she slid out of her chair and melted onto the floor. Among his other fans and friends are Keith Richards, Dennis Quaid, Bonnie Raitt, John Goodman, Tim Reid--and Linda Ronstadt, who enlisted him to sing four duets on her Cry like a Rainstorm, Howl like the Wind album and, in the process, kicked off a career resurgence that found him appearing on Saturday Night Live and the Grammy Awards (where he won two awards), singing the national anthem at this year's Super Bowl and winning Rolling Stone magazine's critics' poll as the year's best male singer.

At the age of 49, it seems that Neville is finally hot. He has been one of American music's finest and most distinctive singers for most of three decades, both on his own and with his family in the Neville Brothers, New Orleans' first family of rock and roll. But, strangely, he has made his living as a singer for only a fraction of that time.

He had his first big hit, Tell It like It Is, back in 1966, but he made no money from it. That pretty much was the story of his career--he had a legendary voice and bad luck. He was cheated and bilked, making records but not money. His life spiraled downward into drugs and crime, his music was unreleased or unheard, his mistakes and frustrations mixing together to destroy everything except that unmistakable voice. But the voice sustained him. When he was in jail, he sang like an angel. When he was broke, on drugs and angry, he sang like an angel. And now that he's on the charts again, he's still singing like an angel.

So that's what he does tonight at Snug Harbor, a jazz club on the fringes of New Orleans' Vieux Carre. The piano player, who's his only accompanist, is a bit heavy-handed, and Neville's repertoire is odd: He'll sing a classic Fifties tune such as Pledging My Love or Earth Angel, then a standard such as Stardust or Danny Boy, then a tune as overexposed and schmaltzy as Billy Joel's Just the Way You Are. And it doesn't matter--not the pianist's shortcomings, not the spotty song selection--because in his voice, everything sounds sublime.

"He just loves to sing," says Daniel Lanois, who produced the last Neville Brothers album. "Aaron sees music as, 'Oh, I love this country song, and I like that Bob Dylan song, and I'll happily sing a syrupy ballad.' There doesn't seem to be a difference in his mind. He's still innocent."

At the end of the night, this unlikely innocent launches into Tell It like It Is, and the crowd sings along to a classic ballad that sounds as pure and unsullied (continued on page 160)Aaron Neville(continued from page 112) as ever. Then he goes back a little further. " 'Now it's time to say goodbye/To all our company,' " he sings, caressing the lyrics so tenderly that even though you know what's next, you can't really believe it. " 'M-I-C-K-E-Y ... M-O-U-S-E.' "

It doesn't make sense. In fact, it's downright silly. But still, the goose bumps come. But it raises a question: If Aaron Neville can break your heart by singing the theme to The Mickey Mouse Club, isn't it a trick, not a response to genuine emotion but simply a weird reflex to his vocal acrobatics?

And then you realize it's a stupid question. This is a man who can break your heart by singing the theme to "The Mickey Mouse Club." And that, as he and Linda Ronstadt sing, is all you need to know.

•

April 1986. New Orleans.

This is not the New Orleans of the tourist brochures, of intricate wrought-iron balconies, sweet alcoholic drinks in hurricane glasses, professionally seedy strip clubs, Mississippi River steamboats and brass bands playing When the Saints Go Marching In.

This is Uptown. And this part of Uptown is not where out-of-towners go to play; it's where people without a lot of money live. It's a funky, dusty, largely black neighborhood 20 minutes west of the tourist haunts, past the glitzy debauchery of the French Quarter and the fading stateliness of the Garden District. If the French Quarter is where good limes are a profitable, thriving commercial enterprise, Uptown is where the pace is slower and where good times are serious business. "Just because somebody has more money than you," says Cyril Neville, Aaron's younger brother, defiantly, "doesn't mean they can party any heartier."

In the middle of Uptown, running north from the Mississippi River, is Valence Street. This is the Neville Brothers' home turf. Around the corner is Tipitina's, a long, high-ceilinged night club named for a song by legendary pianist Professor Longhair; it's the first place the Neville Brothers ever performed as a band. Closer, on Valence Street itself, is Benny's Bar, a ramshackle house where there's no cover charge, where the audience watches the band through holes knocked in the walls and where various Nevilles often perform.

And a few doors down from Benny's is Aaron's house. It's a long, narrow wooden A frame, in Southern parlance a "shotgun shack." This is the New Orleans version of a duplex: two doors open off a small front porch and two long, thin rooms run from those doors to the back of the house. Cyril and his family live in one of those rooms; Aaron, his wife and at least one of their four children live in the other.

The house, one of two Valence Street dwellings that he and his brothers have inherited, is modest, and so are the furnishings. The walls are cluttered with paintings, posters and paraphernalia, most of it religious but some career-oriented. There's a picture of the Virgin Mary here, a snapshot of Neville on stage in the Sixties there.

Neville goes to the stereo and puts on some music on this muggy afternoon. He plays songs that he has recorded but that have never been released. He starts with a version of the Hoagy Carmichael standard Stardust: There's a single bass guitar, Neville's lead vocal and what sounds like dozens of voices--all his--making up an ethereal chorus. It's gorgeous. He recorded it with bassist Rob Wasserman, he says, for an album that may be out soon. He doesn't know when.

Then he puts on another tape. This one is a version of Franz Schubert's sublime setting of the Ave Maria. The only instrumentation is a synthesizer imitating a string section. The song is the voice of an angel singing the song of the angels. But it has never been released, and Neville doesn't think it will be.

On the wall near his front door, there's a framed 45-rpm single, a gold record for Tell It like It Is. It isn't an authentic gold record.

"Some friends of mine took a record, painted it gold and gave it to me," he says, betraying just a touch of hurt. "Never did get my real gold record."

Neville grew up nearby, surrounded by songs: His grandmother would rock him on her knee while listening to spirituals, his father collected Nat "King" Cole records, his mother, Amelia, and her brother, George Landry, had been professional dancers; and at the movies, Neville watched the singing cowboys and tried to yodel the way they did.

And when he put away his stick pony, music took over. He loved singers with high, clear voices: Sonny Til of the Orioles, Clyde McPhatter and Sam Cooke. "He really turned me on to the spirituals," Neville says of Cooke. " 'Cause a lotta other groups would do a lotta screamin' and hol-lerin', and Sam would just sing so pure and pretty. Man, he touched the soul, you know? I'd go see him, and he'd just run chills through me."

Neville's eldest brother, Art, formed a doo-wop group: "Either you sang or you were with one of the gangs," Art says. "We were the gang that sang." Frequently, his little brother would tag along and sing along; by the time Aaron was in junior high, he was singled out by a high schoolteacher who ran several local bands, all of them dubbed the Avalons.

There was a detour in 1958: Then 17, Neville served a six-month jail sentence for stealing a car. In jail, he once said, "There was nothing to do but sing and fight." He preferred to sing, using the Nat "King" Cole song Mona Lisa to keep himself sane. He also wrote a song called Every Day while behind bars, and when he got out, he got married and signed a deal with a local record label.

It was a great time for rock and roll in New Orleans. Rock was in its infancy, drawing much of its drive from the salacious rhythm-and-blues songs that Southern blacks had been singing for years; not only was the Crescent City a rich source for blues and R&B songs but local musicians added a rollicking, jazz-derived, horn-driven spirit that resulted in such hits as Rockiri Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu, Sea Cruise, Fortune Teller, Mother-in-Law and Working in a Coal Mine.

But if the records were successful, most of the musicians were not: The town was full of great singers and players who lived a typically (for New Orleans) easygoing life and paid scant attention to business. One by one, they were exploited by the folks who ran the record labels. "You got paid for the session, and that was about it," says Neville. "You could go down and get advances, a hundred dollars or two hundred dollars. But other than that. . . ." No royalties? "No. They'd always give you a state-ment saying you owed them so much.

"I got married young," he adds, "so I had to take care of family. I had jobs like longshoreman, truck driver, house painter. You name it, I done it, and sang on the weekends. I figured we ought to be able to get a big record out, but we never really did--at least that's what the record company told us. Later, Keith Richards told me, 'I've been listening to you since the early Sixties.' And I said, 'They told me my records weren't gettin' no further than Baton Rouge.' "

He recorded one song,Tell It like It Is, that reached number two on the pop charts and gave Neville the status to play Harlem's historic Apollo Theater, but because of a bad contract, he didn't earn any royalties. The summer after his hit, he was unloading ships on the New Orleans docks. He didn't abandon music, playing in a succession of bands with brothers Art, Charles and Cyril.

But nothing caught on. During the late Sixties and early Seventies, Neville recorded with noted local producer Allen Tous-saint, turning in some remarkable vocal performances that were released only locally, if at all. Once more, one of the finest singers in the country was making music that few people heard and doing other things to support himself. "I was working at a club," he says, "and doing longshoreman work on the side."

Drugs were one way to ignore the frustration of having a remarkable voice that few people ever heard--but drugs didn't bring in money; they cost money. There were times, Neville says, when he was "out on the streets," hungry and dead broke; there were long stretches when he gave up singing professionally. "I had to take care of the family," he says, "but I wasn't making no money singing. So at times, that's all I would do: painting houses or working on boats or driving a truck or something. But always, I'd sing to myself."

In 1976, the four brothers came together to back their uncle, George Landry, on an infectious record called The Wild Tchoupitoulas. And shortly afterward, when they were able to escape their restrictive contracts, the Neville Brothers were formed. "After that," says Aaron, "I didn't do no other kinda work, 'cause we were making enough to make ends meet."

Looking back on the years during which his music was rarely heard or even released, Neville swears he's not bitter--even though his old songs are now available on packages for which he receives no royalties. "As long as I could sing," he says, "I felt blessed. I figured, I'm rich. And I figured, one day, everybody will hear it."

Art Neville, on the other hand, figures that his brother must have suffered. "I'm sure he had to be frustrated," he says. "It was frustrating for me to watch it."

And during one conversation with producer Joel Dorn, Aaron admitted just how bad it had been. "We were walking someplace, talking about hard times and scuffling and stuff," remembers Dorn. "And he said that at one time, the only thing he owned was his walk."

•

January 1990. New Orleans.

The suburbs, east of the city and near the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, where they're building new ranch-style houses and advertising good deals for those who've been able to save money despite southern Louisiana's depressed oil-based economy, is where Neville lives now. His new home is a good-sized single-story brick house at the end of a cul-de-sac; there's a big yard strewn with bicycles and toys, a two-car garage and a red Bronco in the driveway.

His living room is furnished sparsely: a few pieces of bamboo furniture, two cabinets for china and curios and an upright piano with an open hymnal. The coffee table sports a Don't Know Much dictionary that bears the same picture as the one on the cover of the Ronstadt album that has earned him a real gold record.

He seems relaxed today, dropping some of the guard that had been up during previous meetings and laughing frequently as a steady stream of relatives troops through the room, from his wife and mother-in-law to his two grandchildren to his 18-year-old son, Jason, the youngest of his four kids. (The eldest, Ivan, is also making records.)

As Neville did almost four years earlier, he plays tapes. He starts with another un-released song; the difference between this one and the tapes he played in 1986 is that this song, a version of Leonard Cohen's Bird on a Wire, cut earlier in the week by the Neville Brothers, will be the title track to a major Mel Gibson/Goldie Hawn movie out this summer. Then he plays Stardust again--but this is the video to Stardust, which was released to some acclaim in 1988 and will soon be part of a video collection. The video tape keeps running, and on the big-screen TV set, Neville sings a tender but steamy duet with Ronstadt.

"This video started a lotta rumors," he says with a chuckle, watching as a chorus ends in an embrace. He grins; Joel, his wife of 31 years, walks by with barely a glance at the screen. "But Linda and I, we're just friends."

Don't Know Much, of course, did more than start rumors of a romance: It also kicked Neville's career into high gear. But it took more than a duet to turn that trick. It also took, he says, divine intervention.

Too many years of frustration, too many years of being cheated had done something to Neville and his brothers. "Growing up in the South in the Forties and Fifties," says Charles, two years older than Aaron, "the prospects were not that bright for a black person. I guess a lotta people from our generation got into that 'Society's against me, so I may as well be against society' We all had that attitude. We were all, like, gangsters." He stops and reconsiders this. "Or thugs."

And for years, that scared away much of the record industry. "Every place I went," says one insider who tried to stir up interest in the Nevilles, "people said, 'Hey, listen, I ain't messing with these guys. They'll kill me!' The record industry was full of people who were afraid of them."

The reputation for drug abuse and a threatening, confrontational style hurt their career. After a lackluster debut album in 1978 and a masterful 1981 release titled Fiyo on the Bayou, major record labels turned their backs. Only small, independent companies were willing to run the risk of dealing with musicians whose drug habits made them unreliable; who were for years managed, in the words of one former associate, "by a fairly loose aggregation of people without much business sense"; who, on more than one occasion, the associate adds, were caught trying to cheat promoters and agents, as they themselves had been cheated. "These are street-wise, tough motherfuckers," Joel Dorn says flatly. "These ain't cats you can walk up to and say, 'Hi, fellas, I wanna produce you. I'm a genius' and expect them to say, 'Oh, please, hurry by our side and save us, white man.' They'd been fucked from here to the equator and back, and they'd heard the same story from five hundred guys, seven hundred ways."

Darryl Johnson, a local musician who played with the Neville Brothers for seven years, saw the roughest period firsthand. He was good friends with Neville's son Ivan. Aaron today, he says, is "totally the opposite" from what he saw in the Seventies and early Eighties. Back then, he says, there were drugs and violence. "I guess you would say Aaron was a hoodlum. Vicious, kinda. You name it--I mean, real gangster shit--and he done it."

During the worst times, he still had music. "No matter what, boy, he could sing," Dorn marvels. "And even in the darkest times, he always respected his talent. I'm talking about when things were really bad, even when it looked like he didn't, he knew what he had. And he held on to it."

Adds Cyril, "Aaron constantly said that we were put here for a reason, that God had something He wanted us to do and we weren't gonna leave this earth until we did it. But, speaking for myself, drugs almost took me out. I can truthfully say I've been dead twice, when we were dealing with the drugs and the alcohol and everything. And Aaron can tell you about that, too, you know?"

Except that Neville doesn't want to tell you about that. When those days are mentioned, his face hardens. "Everybody had their own individual thing, you know?" he says. "Like, I've dabbled into it. Sometimes I'd just feel like I wasn't getting my due or whatever I was supposed to be getting, singing-wise. And there was a time when I was separated from my wife. I don't know where my mind was at the time, because I had been married since I was, like, seventeen, and all of a sudden, I was on my own." He frowns. "But I don't talk about it. That's something gone, you know?"

During the Eighties, Neville kicked drugs, as did his brothers. "You gotta get past the point where you're looking at all the disappointments and letting that take you out," says Art. "One disappointment after another--if you ain't really strong, if you ain't praying, if you don't believe iii God, you're gonna be in bad shape."

Things began to improve in the early Eighties, when praise from bands such as the Rolling Stones and tours with the Stones and Huey Lewis spread the Nevilles' name outside New Orleans. The clubs got a little bigger, the money a little better and the frustrations a little smaller--and when legendary rock impresario Bill Graham saw that the Nevilles were losing their unsavory reputation, his company took over their management. Better gigs followed, as did a deal with EMI Records--and while the resulting album was the disappointing Uptown, A&M Records subsequently became interested in the band it had signed once before. When producer Daniel Lanois also expressed interest in the Nevilles, A&M signed them and sent them into the studio with Lanois. It was an ideal match: Lanois, dedicated to capturing the spirit of the Nevilles rather than getting them on the radio, draped his control room with Spanish moss and drew from them Yellow Moon, an album that brilliantly summarizes the Neville Brothers' social concerns and musical strengths.

"When you meet those guys, they're kinda spooky, you know?" says Lanois, who made his name working with the likes of U2, Peter Gabriel and Robbie Robertson. "My initial impression was of these quite heavy characters, and I could hardly understand anything they said." He laughs. "But Aaron's just a Teddy bear, you know? Or at least he is now. Ten years ago, it might have been something different."

The change, Neville says, comes from religion. "I guess my spirituality brought me through a lotta times in life when I guess the average person might have gotten frustrated," he muses, and then mentions one particular song that made a difference. "When I was in school," he says, "I was fascinated by the Ave Maria. I didn't know the words, but the music was so intriguing. It used to, like, cleanse me, just to be able to sing that. That song, just being in my heart, brought me through a lotta hard times. Knowing I could sing it gave me a lotta inspiration, you know?"

It took some other kinds of prayer, too: Neville, who recites a lengthy prayer every morning while he's brushing his teeth and goes to a Catholic shrine where he walks up the steps on his knees, has for years thanked Saint Jude on every one of his albums. Saint Jude, as any Catholic can tell you, is the patron saint of lost causes. And did Neville consider himself a lost cause?

"At times." He smiles a bit sadly. "He was the saint of the impossible, and sometimes I needed some impossible things." He laughs and fingers a Saint Jude medallion hanging from his left ear, and another that hangs next to a crucifix around his neck. "He came through, you know?"

As he sits in his living room and talks about the salvation of his career and his life, Neville is making plans for a solo album that Ronstadt will produce after he finishes work on the next Neville Brothers record. He doesn't know for sure which songs will be on it. Narrowing songs down to just a handful is especially difficult: Eventually, he wants to record all the songs he loves. "I'd like to have enough money to have me a recording studio," he says, "where I can record anything I want, to be here for the world. I don't want to die with anything left in my heart. I wanna be able to sing it out."

For now, he knows one song that will definitely be on the record: the Ave Maria. It'll be similar, he says, to the version that he played four years ago in his old Valence Street house. This time, though, he'll use a real string section.

"I'm gonna do that one at George Lucas' ranch, where Linda did her album," he says. "In the big movie studio. You sing in there, you sound like you're in heaven."

Which, of course, is the proper place for an angel to sing.

•

Once more, Neville is in Uptown. Tonight, as they do a couple of times a month whenever they're home, the Neville Brothers are playing Tipitina's, the smoky club that sits next to a few dilapidated wooden houses on a corner just across from the railroad tracks and the Mississippi River. The crowd spills out of the club and onto the sidewalks, cabs drop off a steady stream of late-comers and a trash can outside is soon overflowing with empty cups left by locals taking advantage of the New Orleans ordinance that allows you to drink 24 hours a day on the street.

It's not tourist season, the Super Bowl is a couple of weeks away and there aren't any big conventions in town, so this is a hometown crowd. It's the second night of a two-night stand and there's an air of celebration here tonight: The Grammy nominations were just announced (Don't Know Much got two, a song from Yellow Moon, one), he and Ronstadt are getting saturation airplay, the coach of the New Orleans Saints has come down to see the show and, according to a rumor that sweeps the club, Ronstadt is here, too.

That rumor, it turns out, is true. And backstage, Aaron is in his glory, surrounded by friends and admirers, celebrities and old pals. While he sometimes seems ill at ease and guarded in public situations, tonight he's grinning constantly, working the small backstage room like a pro. He takes Joel over to say hello to Ronstadt, huddles with Quint Davis--who heads the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and books the Nevilles to close it every year--then runs to ask Ronstadt if she's familiar with a Leonard Cohen song someone said would be good for his album.

Finally, he and his brothers--introduced as "the heartbeat of the Crescent City" and "the Uptown rulers of the mighty Thirteenth Ward"--take the stage. Standing underneath a huge banner of Professor Longhair, they begin with their adaptation of the Mardi Gras Indian an-them Hey Pocky Way and rampage through two sets and three hours of sinuous Big Easy funk, pausing just long enough for Neville to sing a few ballads, including Tell It like It Is and Dobie Gray's Drift Away. Mostly, though, he whacks on a tambourine or a cowbell as the band cranks out an irresistible beat. It's music that takes the various strains of New Orleans music--from blues and R&B to Dixieland, carnival songs and tribal chants--and makes of them a gumbo so intoxicating and danceable that by the end of the night, tiles have been dislodged from the floor of the balcony.

Then, at 3:30 in the morning, Neville steps to the microphone. He takes a breath. Only Art is on stage, standing behind his keyboards; the rest of the musicians have dropped back.

And in hushed, ethereal tones, Neville begins to sing Amazing Grace. Some of the people in this room have heard him sing it countless times; others have watched him live it. "How sweet the sound," he sings, "that saved a wretch like me."

At the end of the first verse, the bass player steps out of the shadows to kick the band into Bob Marley's One Love, the way he usually does at this point in the show. But tonight, Neville stays at the microphone. "Twas faith that brought me safe this far," he sings, his voice cutting through the haze and quieting the crowd. "And grace shall lead me on."

Outside, the air is cold and New Orleans is sleeping. But inside this battered neighborhood bar, chills run up several hundred spines as Aaron Neville sings his song of redemption.

"Keith Richards told me, 'I've been listening to you since the early Sixties.' "