My Life in the Fast Lane

When I married Parker Dinkins in 1972, he, Allison Miner, and Quint Davis were working together like sled dogs to resurrect the career of Henry Roeland Byrd a/k/a Professor Longhair a/k/a Fess a/k/a Byrd. A friend, recently asked me how this came about. I don't recall who it was exactly who stumbled across Byrd sweeping floors in a record shop on Dryades Street (I think). I do remember a lot.

Professor wearing the first licensed NOJHF t-shirt, 1974.
Design by moi.

Parker, Allison, and Quint became friends in the sixties when they hung out at the Tulane Jazz Archive. All were passionate music scholars. Allison and Quint were a gorgeous, charismatic couple. Both loved to perform and did at various times with various bands. Allison sang. Quint played tambourine. Parker, on the other hand, was a classic introvert of the Asperger’s variety. He was phobic about drawing attention. (We have a brilliant, handsome son with a similar temperament.) I was a fly on the wall and can say with confidence Parker was the steady hand in all that follows. 

Allison and Quint did lots of drugs and disparaged capitalist pigs. Call them the hippy faction. Parker was quiet, technically brilliant, a self-educated audio engineer. Plus, Parker entered Tulane Law School specifically to acquire expertise in intellectual property law. He had no interest in practicing law. Call Parker — and later me — the capitalist faction.

In the sixties, Parker built his own field recording equipment that he and childhood friend Fred Weinstein took to remote places in Louisiana and Mississippi to tape obscure blues musicians. Their label, Ahura Mazda, was a modest success, particularly in the UK and Scandinavia. Fred went off to med school in Mexico, and Parker stayed home and entered law school. Parker bought Fred’s share of Ahura Mazda. 

In 1970 I had been dating Fred, whom I’d met at LSU, when I moved from Baton Rouge to New Orleans to work as the PR chick for Charity Hospital. Fred introduced Parker and me. Unbeknownst to me, Fred was Parker’s yenta. Fred proudly called ours a marriage made in heaven. In a thousand ways it was. In a thousand other ways, it wasn’t. Parker’s a shy introvert; I’m a shy extrovert. 

Parker and I spent eight years on the road with Byrd, driving him and his band to gigs, working the door at out-of-the-way dives and then at the 501 Napoleon Club, which morphed into Tipitina’s. We spent a week in the Library of Congress sorting out Byrd’s intellectual property rights. I designed and made press packets. When Byrd’s rehearsal studio in Central City burned down in the middle of the 1974 festival, the gang hastily organized a benefit concert at the Warehouse on Tchoupitoulas Street. In a single manic day, I designed and had printed a t-shirt to sell at the benefit. My t-shirt, which I slept in, ended up on Linda McCartney’s back years later. It’s a long story. 

Our first child, Matthew Byrd Dinkins, was named after Byrd who died a few weeks before Matt was born in 1980. Byrd died the very day his best, most important album released. Byrd had spent the day driving around town showing the album off. It was a peak life moment for him.

Shortly after Parker and I married in 1972 (we divorced in 1989), we took Byrd to a party at Cosimo Matassa’s studio where Ahmet Ertegun (Atlantic Records) sought out Byrd’s manager, my husband. Ertegun had produced some hits with Byrd in the forties and fifties. Ertegun asked Parker if Byrd needed help. “Yes,” Parker said, “He needs work.” Sure enough, a bit later Ertegun called Parker to offer Byrd a gig — in London — at some posh debutante ball. 

Allison, Quint, Parker, the Professor Longhair band, an elderly musician (whose name escapes me), and Henry Hildebrand headed to the London Ritz. Note I was not part of the entourage. I have never taken kindly to being the invisible handmaiden. Needless to say, this pissed me off. Henry Hildebrand? Quint’s dope buddy from next-door? WTF? Parker was too timid to get my ticket aboard this spare-no-expense joy ride. That was the kind of humiliating othering I endured for well over a decade.

I’ll never forget Snooks Eaglin arriving at Moisant Airport with his belongings in a Schwegmann’s bag. “Dee fixed me up real good this morning,” Snooks sighed contentedly. (It wasn’t because Dee had packed his Schwegmann’s bag either.) Parker, Allison, and I had scrambled to get Fess ready for the trip. Fess didn’t have a birth certificate, and he’d long left a first marriage that was technically still a thing. We had to clean up all that mess before Fess could get a passport.

Beautiful Allison Miner

Quint Davis and Professor Longhair back in the day

While Parker was in law school, still running Ahura Mazda and managing Byrd, Allison and Quint hooked up with Newport Jazz Festival producer George Wein. Big Daddy Wein, with two fanatically energetic young volunteer jazz scholars, stood up the first New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1970. The trio depended on sponsorship from a beer distributor and a cash infusion from Quint’s father, Arthur Davis of Curtis and Davis, architects of the Super Dome. Thus was Wein’s mad respect for Quint set forever in concrete.

By 1974 Parker was out of law school and Allison and Quint asked him to manage food booth sales at the Fair Grounds, a larger, new venue for the festival. The festival was a money pit. Quint and Allison had no expectation of turning a profit — ever. Until Parker came along, they’d had no desire and no idea how to monetize the event. Parker, on the other hand, was an equally respected music scholar, a lawyer, and descended from a long line of New Orleans capitalist pigs. Before Parker came aboard, the Festival actually paid Mignon Faget to make Festival t-shirts. Food booths were a mere $150, then $300 a pop. 

Amid howls of protest from the hippy faction, Parker raised the cost of food booths to $3000 (I think), and booths sold out as quickly as before. He insisted anyone proposing to sell NOJHF-branded merch compete for a license. In fact, it was Parker who first thought to register the brand. He purchased rain insurance. What a concept! Quint and Allison ridiculed capitalist pig Buddy Brimberg, Parker’s friend from law school, when Buddy proposed the outré concept of granting him a license to publish NOJHF posters. I’d done the art for the 1974 poster. I asked nothing for it, but Allison insisted on paying me $150 (I think). I also did the 1975 commercial poster. It was terrible. I couldn't top myself. In 1975, I lent Buddy my 1974 t-shirt drawing so he could produce what became the first limited-edition New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival poster. By the time Parker finished selling food booths and licensing deals, NOJHF had all the start-up cash it needed. The money rolled in. Beer distributor, kiss my ass! Big Daddy Davis, ta-ta for now.

My 1974 Poster

My 1974 T-shirt and Tote Bag Art

1975 Adaptation of My 1974 Art
(I hated the colors and Art Nouveau vibe.)

Meanwhile Allison and Quint broke up. Allison moved to New York to work for George Wein, then Sarah Lawrence College. Allison married Andy Kaslow, a musician and Columbia ethnomusicology doctoral candidate. Once Andy had only his dissertation to complete, he and Allison moved back to New Orleans and started a family. Andy played sax with the Professor Longhair Band and became road manager.

After the split from Allison, Quint went into a prolonged tailspin. Quint was stoned and mostly missing in action from 1976 through 1977. Parker took over all Fair Ground operations from 1975 to 1977. It was a nerve-wracking period. Parker and I had to climb up to peek through windows and pound on doors merely to learn whether Quint was alive. Big Daddy Wein up in New York had no idea what was going on down in New Orleans because Quint invariably appeared out of thin air whenever there was a camera or a journalist around. As far as Big Daddy knew or cared, it was Quint who had the Midas touch.

George Wein was fat and happy after the 1977 festival and decided to take the NOJHF show on the road to Hawaii. We couldn’t give tickets away. In Hawaii, in an Elysian field of sublime music, there was nary a festival goer in sight. Pure folly. Plus, Quint was at his lowest ebb. He holed up in the Honolulu Hyatt randomly sending women plane tickets to Hawaii. One woman he flew in overdosed right there on the festival grounds and was hauled off on a stretcher. 

Understand this: For Parker, it was a life of total immersion. It was that for me, plus a life of fending off groupies with zero support from a distracted, walled-off husband. I worked for nothing save the glory of being Parker’s handmaiden. Neither of us was paid to babysit Quint, for sure. The whole thing started to piss me off*, especially after NOJHF started raking in residuals and Quint scored a full-time job with George Wein. We needed income. We needed to start a family. I made a fuss. Sure enough, Wein left timid ole Parker and invisible ole me twisting, twisting in the wind. And Quint — the man who called us his best friends — said nada, zip, zilch. Quint Davis has never ask me to forgive him. Until he does, I don’t.

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* As my marines used to say when I worked for USMC, “Don’t make Ms. Dymond say the F word.”