GIVE ME BACK MY LOVING

BY BRETT MILANO

There’s one side of Leo Nocentelli that everybody knows. That would be the funk cornerstones he laid down as a member of the Meters, songs that one band or another will inevitably play at Jazz Fest. At this point you barely need to mention the titles: “Cissy Strut,” “Fire on the Bayou,” “Africa,” “People Say,” “Hey Pocky Way.” The Jazz Fest and New Orleans music would be a lot poorer without these songs. So would your life and mine.

But there’s also another side—specifically, there’s Another Side. That’s the name of the solo album that Nocentelli quietly recorded while the Meters were on hiatus in 1971, then shelved when the band signed to Warner/Reprise the following year. Few Meters fans were aware that the album even existed—until a remarkable turn of events led to its being rediscovered and released by the specialty Light in the Attic label in late 2021. And suddenly Nocentelli’s got a cult classic on his hands—and since this is one of very few releases under his own name, the resonance for him is especially strong.

“What happened to me is not of this earth, man. It has to be spiritual. It’s like an oxymoron, a brand new 50-year-old record. That just doesn’t happen to people in the music industry. I am just touched by it, because why did the Creator pick this to happen to me? He could have picked anybody, but He said, ‘Let’s have this happen to this little guy named Leo Nocentelli.’ The only thing I can think of is that I must have been doing something right in this life.”

Granted, it’s not completely unheard-of in this day and age for a lost ’60s or ’70s music artifact to get unearthed. The real mystery about Another Side is why it was shelved in the first place, since it’s got some of Nocentelli’s best work. It’s also the biggest step any of the band ever took away from the Meters groove, even though three-quarters of the original lineup is on it (Art Neville is absent but drummer Zigaboo Modeliste and bassist George Porter Jr. both appear, plus James Black sharing drums and Allen Toussaint playing keys). He plays mainly acoustic guitar, and the sound is stripped-down and soulful. Comparisons to Bill Withers and Polydor-era Link Wray haven’t been amiss, but there’s a warmth here that draws from the early ’70s singer-songwriter movement (the one cover is a joyful version of Elton John’s “Your Song,” not yet an overplayed tune at the time). Nocentelli proves he can craft a memorable melodic hook, with most of the tunes airing softer emotions than would usually fit into a Meters song.

They did however fit well with the music he was discovering at the time. “I picked up a couple of James Taylor albums—Sweet Baby James, Mud Slide Slim. I was writing a lot of instrumentals in the Meters, not really experiencing lyrics. So, when I heard James, he was doing great turns of phrase that I never heard used before. And that got me thinking I could not only do music—I could tell stories. I went and bought a gut string acoustic guitar, and when I sat down, I started writing lyrics to chord progressions I’d never used before.” Some of the songs were undoubtedly personal and considering the Meters’ first label Josie had just gone belly-up and the future was uncertain, that would likely explain a song called “Getting Nowhere.”

“I would have to say so, yeah, that one could be autobiographical. But sometimes I’d just put myself in other peoples’ predicament and write about that situation. ‘Riverfront’ I wrote for Aaron Neville. We used to run together, and he told me about working on a riverboat, carrying bananas and so on, and I just thought about the things a guy in that situation would have to do.”

Amusingly, one review has singled out the track “You’ve Become a Habit” as the album’s New Orleans slice of life—fair enough, since it seems to concern one guy’s love for a lady of the evening (Nocentelli would later play on the most famous song on that topic, Labelle’s “Lady Marmalade”). But the real inspiration was not the French Quarter, but France—the setting of the classic 1963 movie Irma la Douce. “Shirley MacLaine was a lady of the street—they couldn’t call her a prostitute in the movie, but the audience would know it—and Jack Lemmon loved her and called her Fancy. So that’s completely not personal experience, I didn’t do that.”

Though the tapes were thought to be lost, they were in fact sitting in Allen Toussaint and Marshall Sehorn’s Sea-Saint studio for decades. But with the Meters moving into their second act, Nocentelli had no interest in going after them and getting the album released. Toussaint himself said after Katrina that any tapes stored there had been washed away—but ten years later, a pile of Sea-Saint tapes mysteriously turned up at an open-air market in Los Angeles County. They were bought by Mike Nishita, a DJ who recognized the imprint—he worked for Quincy Jones Productions and is the brother of Beastie Boys collaborator Money Mark. Another Side is the first and so far, the only part of that collection to see the light of day, but there have to be many more treasures in there, and Nocentelli likely appears on plenty of them. One photo shows the master of the soundtrack Black Samson, scored by Toussaint and played by the Meters.

Nocentelli recalls getting a call out of nowhere from Nishita. “He calls me and says: ‘I just bought a bunch of tapes, and one of them is yours.’ Really? He started mentioning the titles and it blew me away. I didn’t remember the chords, the lyrics, nothing. It was completely gone from my mind, but I still knew the titles. I’ve never heard of something like this happening. You wouldn’t have Count Basie or Duke Ellington putting out a record they did 50 years ago.”

When the Meters regrouped in 1972, it was with a different attitude and a new sound. Songs got longer, vocals were now upfront, and Cyril

Neville joined as percussionist and sometime lead singer. Nocentelli’s own playing, mostly spare and slinky in the Josie years, now got into heavier Hendrix and P-Funk territory. An epic jam like the 12-minute “It Ain’t No Use” (on Rejuvenation) was quite a few miles from the Josie era. “When I started playing, I was listening to guys like Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell, Charlie Christian, jazz players. I always wanted to picture myself on the cover of an album playing a big hollow body. And all that [Josie] stuff was on the Gibson ES-175, a hollow body known for playing jazz. After I learned how I could pull a string and make it bend, I started putting a little overdrive on it, and I got progressively better at that.”

He never really returned to the sound of Another Side, and you won’t hear much acoustic guitar or James Taylor influence on anything he’s played since (the exception being the instrumental cover of Taylor’s “Suite for 20G” that the Meters did on Trick Bag). But he does credit the solo experience for opening him up as a songwriter— and though the Meters’ classic songs are largely credited to the full band, it’s acknowledged that Nocentelli was doing most of the driving. “When we were in the studio there was one focus, one guy that people would listen to and hear what this guy has to say. In the Meters that guy was me. When we went about living our lives, there was never one guy. But when it was about getting together and creating some great music, everyone was looking at me to come up with the idea.”

The album he calls a personal peak also happens to be the Meters’ best one. “That Rejuvenation album, I put my whole heart and soul into that one. If there’s anything that reflects where I was musically, it would be that record. When we played the sessions at night, I’d be the last one to leave, I’d be there ’till 3 a.m. when everyone was gone. That’s the love I had for the music and for what I was doing at that time. And another integral person at that time was Zigaboo. Out of all the other guys, I thought Zig was a plus in the writing for the Meters. I would have to say he was a very clever guy with the words, more clever than I was. ‘People Say,’ he came up with the lyrics for that. And ‘Just Kissed My Baby’—I’m the only one who could have written that musically, but I could never have come up with anything like those lyrics.”

Collecting Nocentelli’s solo work post-Meters hasn’t been easy, since there’s precious little of it. His one prior studio album was Rhythm & Rhymes Part 1 (2009), whose release was extremely limited (my copy is a CD-R that he was selling at the Louisiana Music Factory). There was a funky 45 in the late ’80s, “We Put the Rock in Your Roll,” which included Ivan Neville and future Dumpstaphunk bassist Nick Daniels; then a ’90s live album which included Modeliste and featured fresh workouts on Meters tunes. On the other hand, his credits as a session man are wide ranging, including albums by Peter Gabriel, Etta James, Robbie Robertson and Sarah MacLachlan, plus a host of New Orleans-related albums.

One of his early ’80s gigs is a particularly bittersweet memory. Longtime Meters fan Jimmy Buffett called him in for a tour when his regular guitarist Josh Leo jumped ship to tour with Kim Carnes (riding high at that time with “Bette Davis Eyes.”) “I remember getting a tour jersey that said

Leo; I thought that was great until I realized they’d made it for the other guy. It was a great tour, and we were supposed to go to Europe next, I had the itinerary and was all ready. Then I found out that Josh Leo had asked Jimmy for his gig back and got it. That kind of knocked me out of the box and I dealt with that in different ways—and to be very candid here, the way I dealt with it might have upset Jimmy. So even up ’till this very day, he and I have very few things to say to each other. I was just looking forward to doing those shows, and what happened may have left a bad taste in his mouth. And in mine too.”

He took residence in Los Angeles soon after the Meters split in 1980 and has mixed feelings about his time as guitarist for hire. “I knew some people that lured me into the clique, so to speak. And it got pretty rough living out there. Even if they knew who I was, I was still the new guy on the block. LA is the kind of place where you can’t just go there—you have to belong there. That’s the difference, and I think I just about pulled it off.” What brought him back to New Orleans was partly the music and partly, of all things, the weather. “The redundancy of great weather got to me. Every day is a sunshiney day. I’m used to living in New Orleans where there is gloom and rain.”

With the release of Another Side, he has a few things he’s always craved: Recognition for his songwriting, a successful record under his own name, a few licensing deals (three songs have been licensed for film and TV so far)—and not incidentally, songwriting royalties he doesn’t need to share with anyone else. Not to mention some of the appreciation that he and the Meters had deserved for decades. “I get so many people emailing me now and telling me how this or that song affected them and made them a better person. It is amazing and gratifying to hear that. I always point to this quote that Maya Angelou said: ‘When you get, give. And when you learn, teach.’”

With Nocentelli hitting 77 next month, it’s all been a long time coming. “At this point, I’ve been doing it for 60 years. I love music, I love writing, but I don’t do a lot of live stuff anymore. To be honest with you, I’m not the same age anymore and the passion for that isn’t what it used to be. Whatever I do, I do at a high level, I don’t know no other way to do it. I’m always able to play above average every time I pick up the guitar. But this is the way I want to go now. I want to get more of my songs into movies and to get away from playing live music.”

There are endless stories of musicians who did landmark work without getting properly compensated. But Nocentelli says that story isn’t his: The Meters have been sampled everywhere, they’ve been honored by the industry (with a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2018) and financially he’s doing fine, thank you. “I basically live out of the mailbox; my royalties are the thing that sustains me. And I’m the most sampled guitarist ever, so I don’t have to take every gig that comes along. I know how to get paid; I know how to avoid getting ripped off. When it comes to that I’m the Bible—and I’m the Qur’an and the Jehovah’s Witness manual. So, whenever I hear somebody say that they know shit about this business I’ll say, ‘Shut up, man. Because you don’t know who you’re sitting next to.’”

He says the book on the Meters isn’t necessarily closed, though Art Neville’s death in 2019 closed the chapter on the original lineup. The original four last played in town at the Orpheum during Jazz Fest 2016, then played their final show on the 2017 Jam Cruise. But Nocentelli, Porter and Modeliste all played together as the Meter Men following Neville’s retirement, and all three are doing separate sets on the Fairgrounds this year. Which doesn’t mean that any surprise reunions are likely this year but well, maybe someday.

“There’s a certain magic, man. Even if I wrote those songs, they couldn’t have manifested themselves with Tom, Dick and Harry. It had to be Art, George and Zig. We always had different ways of thinking, but we always got together when it came to music. What I’d like is if they would come and sit in with me, that would be beautiful and a great thing to happen. But if there was any attempt to do that, it would probably disrupt a lot of things. Can you imagine the original Meters at Jazz Fest? There wouldn’t be nobody at the other stages.” O