In the second half of our conversation with George Porter, Jr. we get deeper into the Meters, Earl King, Professor Longhair, The Wild Tchoupitoulas, sampling, and more. Part one is available here.

PostGenre: Of course, with the Meters, you played bass and built most of your career around that instrument. Do you ever wish you had focused more on the guitar? 

George Porter, Jr.: No, no. I could have divided my time more equally between the two instruments, but I never really stopped playing guitar. I have three or four of them. Anders Osborne [recently] gave me a beautiful acoustic guitar. I told him I wanted to start playing again and needed a guitar that allows for a big-handed bass player to fit his hands on the guitar neck, and he thought he had a Yamaha that was perfect for that. It is a very beautiful instrument, sounds great, and fits my fingers. But, yeah, I’ve never really stopped playing guitar. I just didn’t spend as much time with it as the bass. 

PG: Earlier, you mentioned how the Blues changed your musical trajectory. You have recorded with many Blues musicians throughout your career – Albert King, Walter “Wolfman” Washington, Taj Mahal…

GP: Earl King [laughing]

PG: Yeah, Earl King too. Do you feel your early experiences with the Blues later shaped how you play bass in those types of situations?

GP: I would think so. All the other musicians you mentioned I had played with in recording sessions. For Earl King, we did gigs before I ever got to do a session with him. I think the first recording I did with Earl was Street Parade (Charly, 1982), which sat in a box for a very long time before it was discovered and released many years later. 

PG: New Orleans also has its own unique version of the Blues, which is piano-based. One of the best of such pianists was Professor Longhair, who you had also worked with. How did you get connected with him?

GP: My very first experience with Fess was in 1972 when [New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival producer] Quint Davis hired me for the very first year that JazzFest moved to the Fair Grounds [Race Course]. He had asked Zig[aboo Modeliste] and me to play with Fess’ band. Before the performance, Zig and I were supposed to rehearse with Fess at Fess’ home.

I am always an early guy. I hate it when people are late. So, the day of the rehearsal, I got to Fess’ house about twenty minutes early. I think I was supposed to be there for 3:00 PM and I got there around 2:40 PM. I knocked on the door, and Fess asked who was there. I said, “Oh, I’m George Porter, Jr. Quint Davis sent me to rehearse with you today.” He opened the door, looked at me, said, “You’re early,” and closed the door on me. [laughing]. So, I just sat on the steps and waited. Zig showed up about ten minutes later, and I told him, “Don’t knock on the door man. Don’t knock.” [laughing]. And then Fess opened the door right at 3:00  and said to us, “Hey boys, how are y’all doing?” [laughing].

PG: [Laughing]. So, besides the Blues, another early influence was the Social Aid and Pleasure Club second lines, which tie directly into brass bands. But was tribal culture much of your upbringing? 

GP: No, not at all. I was not into Indian tribal culture. One Mardi Gras, either 1961 or 1962, my dad took us down to see the Indians, and we saw an outright massacre. It was horrible. They weren’t shooting each other with guns either; they were attacking each other with hatchets and homemade weapons. Guys were getting chopped up. It was not pretty. So, even today, I don’t go to Indian things. The Indians have gotten far more hospitable towards each other. Their members no longer try to kill one another. Today, they’re here to look good, have fun, and play some music. It has gotten a lot better over the years, but I still don’t go to those functions because I remember seeing bodies on the ground. It was scary, man. I wanted no part in that thing.

PG: The hesitancy is understandable based on what you saw, but it also did not keep you from being open to exploring tribal music with The Wild Tchoupitoulas (Mango, 1976). 

GP: When the Meters did The Wild Tchoupitoulas, the Nevilles’ uncle came into the studio and did his chants, and the band wrote music to fit those chants. We didn’t get the credit for doing that, but it is not uncommon for the Meters to be overlooked. It also happened with the Robert Palmer record we did [ed note: Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley (Island, 1974)]. We pretty much wrote the music for that recording session, and he didn’t even mention our names. 

PG: Do you feel part of the reason the Meters have been overlooked so often is that it was difficult to categorize the band? Sure, it was built around funk, but the group incorporated a lot of different sounds and didn’t fit nicely into a box. 

GP: You know, I still have a problem with the category thing and what genre they want to stick your music in. When people ask me what I play, I tell them that I play music. If you wanna call it something, that’s on you. To me, this new Runnin’ Pardners record [Porter’s Pocket (Color Red, 2025)] is less jazzy than I was hoping but more jazzy than the Meters. The record fits somewhere in the middle. But a few people have reviewed the record and have said the music is very reminiscent of the Meters. 

PG: Do you think they draw those connections to the Meters solely because that’s your background? Or is it actually something they are hearing? 

GP: I don’t know. You know, when I listen to the record, I don’t hear the Meters’ influence at all. But maybe it’s because I’ve shut off that part of my brain. It also may just be me. I made a statement to one of the first interviewers I talked to about the record that the process we followed when we recorded was very similar to how the Meters used to record back in the sixties, in terms of everybody being in one room. We could almost touch each other and were playing off each other in real time. And maybe that’s how it was carried on to being a development on the Meters or something.

PG: The interesting thing about saying it sounds like the Meters is that the statement assumes the sound of that band was fairly static. But it was not. Even the band’s membership changed over time, with the addition of Cyril Neville on Fire on the Bayou (Reprise, 1975), for one. Given that 2025 is the fiftieth anniversary of its release, do you have any recollection of the session behind that album? 

GP: Yeah. With Fire on the Bayou, we changed the way we recorded. Normally, we set up with Zig in an isolation booth. But for Fire on the Bayou, we took the windows out of the isolation booth, so we could hear his drums in the room. 

The song “Fire on the Bayou” was written at a gig where the Meters were opening for Dr. John. We were down in the dressing rooms. I was smoking pot. Lots of it. [laughing]. Everybody else [in the band] was too. Well, except Art. He never smoked. I don’t think I’d ever seen him take a hit off a joint.  But It was a real party atmosphere. We started playing cowbells and singing  “Fire on the Bayou” in the dressing rooms ’cause, typical of Louisiana, the place was down on the Bayou. In the back of this theater, there was actually a body of water running right under the building. And we just kept singing “Fire on the Bayou” as we walked out on stage, playing cowbells, and made up the lyrics right there on the spot on stage. 

PG: The choice to remove the windows to the isolation booth seems to reflect how the band had more and more freedom as time passed. For your first album [The Meters (Josie, 1969), you were not even allowed to name songs like “Cissy Strut,” and the label named them.

GP: Yeah, we didn’t get that freedom until the Cabbage Alley (Reprise, 1973) record. I believe that for Look-Ka Py Py (Josie, 1969) and Struttin (Josie, 1970), we named some of the songs but not the majority of them. Though [guitarist] Leo [Nocentelli] knew the names of all of the songs so he may have had some input on their titles I do know for a fact that on our first record nobody in the band had any input on any of the song titles. We recorded those songs and then almost immediately went on the road. While we were on the road, the record came out. When we were in Atlanta, a guy came up to us with the album and said “Hey guys, here’s your new record man.” We started looking at the song titles and said we needed to learn the names of the songs because we had no idea what they were. We definitely didn’t come up with the title “Cissy Strut.”

PG: Did those in the band feel, from not being able to name their own songs, that someone took away another aspect of your artistic expression?

GP: Absolutely, absolutely. Art was the oldest of us and was very familiar with not having any control over things. He had settled immensely and took the perspective that as long as long as he had his money coming, he was fine. But Zig and Leo were doing homework and stuff while I was just getting high. [laughing]. I didn’t care much about the business side. I didn’t even want to know about the business side. For instance, [the Meters’ producer] Marshall Sehorn told all of us one day to just make music and not to worry about its publishing [rights]. And it took us almost thirty years to get our publishing [rights] back. It was an unbelievable ordeal. Actually, we still have not gotten our publishing [rights] back. We just moved to a publisher that pays us. We weren’t paid before; we were told the sessions had gone over budget, so we needed to pay back a debt to the studio. We found out years and years later that Warner Bros had forgiven our budgeting. But Marshall Sehorn was still charging us regardless.

PG: Since you were already treated unfairly financially, did it sting a little less once you started hearing the Meters being sampled? You often hear about how, in the earlier days of hip-hop, artists found their music sampled and were upset because they were not paid for the sample. If you had no control over them, to begin with, was that sentiment tampered a little?

GP: Oh yeah. But I don’t listen to music much at all anyway. So when the hip-hop community came about, early on, I decided not to check any of that stuff out. Unbeknownst to me, probably about fifteen Meters songs turned into something like a hundred and thirty-some-odd samples.  

PG: Whosampled says there have now been six hundred and sixty-eight songs sampling the Meters.

GP: Wow. I know about a few. Queen Latifah’s “Wrath of my Madness” sampling our “Chicken Strut.” Heavy D [& The Boyz] “ Gyrlz, They Love Me” sampled our song “Thinking.” And our song, “Cardova” has been sampled almost twenty times. [laughing]. But, yeah, there’s so much of that stuff out there. And those are just the ones that we know about, not the ones sold out of the trunk of a car. 

PG: If you don’t listen to music much, are you ever concerned that you’re closing yourself out to other musical ideas out there? 

GP: No, not really. As I am trying to be a better songwriter, I don’t want to go after something that somebody else has already said and done. Sometimes, I’ll ask the other musicians in the band if they have previously heard something like what we are doing. If the guys say no, that is a sign to me that what we are doing is something worth pursuing further. In general, I do not try to absorb what other people are doing. I always want to find my own way.

‘Porter’s Pocket’ is available now on Color Red Records. It can be purchased through the label’s website. More information on George Porter, Jr. is available on his website.

Photo credit: Steve Rapport