It’s a good day, sun shining, and soon I’ll be grooving to Kid Eggplant & the Melatauns, a band of hard-working New Orleans musicians fronted by Kid Eggplant, AKA Robert Snow. Their music is like a variety of flavors and different blends that make you come back for more.
I sit in the back room of Euphorbia’s kava bar to learn about this band that’s had nine albums spanning funk, swing, blues, punk rock, and nearly everything in between. Kid Eggplant and Doctor Guitar (Sidney Snow) bring high energy to our conversation bouncing from war and peace to the pandemic. And then there’s Charles Manson.
Tell me about “War We Love It.”
Kid Eggplant: Most people think that it’s us glorifying it, but it’s really the antiwar thing.
Doctor Guitar: It’s a spoof.
Kid Eggplant: Also, it’s got to do with the previous record we did called “Peace, Love & Donuts.” The guy who has done the artwork on a couple of my records is Chris Marino. He’s a great comic book artist in New Orleans. He did the art on “Big Trouble in Little Chalmette,” and “Peace, Love & Donuts.” So, he was like, “You wanna call it ‘War Hating Beignets’” because we had “Peace, Love & Donuts.”
All these wars just keep kicking. It seems like we’re in a perpetual state of warfare with everybody else in the world. And I was like, no, man. It’s gotta be “War We Love It.” It’s kind of a play on what’s happening. You know?
Kid Eggplant: It starts real dark with “War We Love It,” and then it goes to “Blue Lights and Sirens.” Then, “King James Gold,” which is a tale about a poem I wrote when we were in Denmark.
I used to be in King James and the Special Men. And we went to Denmark, and we played the 1st year. They loved us and wanted us back the next year.
About your next single, “I Want to Be in the Sunshine,” It sounds completely different from “War We Love It.”
Well, like I said, we started out dark, and then as it gets to the end of the record, it lightens up a little bit. So, it’s not all bleak, you know?
“I Want to Be in the Sunshine” is one I wrote during the pandemic. I was coordinating with a guy out of England named Mark Abis.
He’s a singer-songwriter in London, and we’re both signed to a music library out of Liverpool called Pop Up Music UK. During the pandemic, they had like 24 artists and they would pair two of us together to write a song about the pandemic. I threw out “I Wanna Be in the Sunshine,” and he threw out the one “Blue Lights and Sirens,” which is the number two song.
So “Blue Lights and Sirens,” we co-wrote together over Zoom, believe it or not.
“I Wanna Be in the Sunshine,” is about getting outside and just trying to get back to normal life.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=lM_V0TCBskA&list=OLAK5uy_moxA36ZQcUpl_E4Vq5ydwlTgjcaSd-asQ
Doctor Guitar, I heard you came from an impoverished background. Tell me a little about that.
Granny and my mom lived through the depression. I was born in ‘42, right at the end of it. So, I still knew the depression waves.
In the mid-fifties, they came up with plastic baggies, and Grandma thought that was a miracle. She saved that plastic bag, and she’d wash it every day and we’d bring our lunch to school in our plastic bags. She’d throw them away at the end of the week. You know, we had appreciation for things. Like, before I was born when my mother was pregnant with my brother, we were so poor, she’d climb on the fence to get bananas and melatauns and pick Japanese plums. Food was hard to get, money was hard to get. So, you know I felt the Depression, and even into the ‘50s, Mom and the old timers didn’t waste anything.
You know, they’d save paper bags, paper towels, everything…
That’s rough.
He goes on to tell me about his first instrument, a baritone ukulele, and now a Fender guitar. Fascinating meetings with Tony Bennett and Raquel Welch. Then Kid Eggplant joins in with a name that catches me off guard.
Kid Eggplant: …and Little Freddie King, his drummer’s Wacko Wade. And him and Wacko played together. They both did a gig and backed up Charles Manson.
Wait, what?
Doctor Guitar: There was a place called The Gunga Den on Bourbon. There’s this guy named Chuck. Chuck did a show where he was Satan, and he dressed like the Devil, and he’d blow fire and dance. He couldn’t sing too good, but he wrote songs. Years later, Rick from Rick’s Cabaret, told me, “Did you know who that guy Chuck was?”
I said, “Yeah, he was just a nut.”
He says, “Yeah. He was the pigtail nut, Charles Manson.”
You play a lot of different genres. Do you have a favorite?
Kid Eggplant: I kind of like them all. When I write a song, whatever the song hits me as, I write it like that. If it hits me, in a jazz form, I’ll play it as jazz. If it hits me as a doo-wop…I’ll write it like that. If it hits me heavy metal, I’ll write it heavy metal.
You do heavy metal?
Kid Eggplant: We do it all. “War We Love It,” it’s almost a heavy metal song.
Where do you see the band going?
Kid Eggplant: The main thing is we’re kinda at an age where we’re not gonna be touring the world. I’m over that. My main idea is to license; to get the music done, get it out there to some TV shows. I’ve been picking up a few here and there, and it’s getting to be more and more. I just got two in a new Ewan McGregor movie that came out about two months ago called “Bleeding Love.”
I think that the future is just to keep playing when we can. Just keep putting on music. It’s good medicine. If everybody played music, the world would be at peace.
Contact Kid Eggplant at kideggplant@gmail.com