That’s What Friends Are For

Reflecting on decades of friendship with some Louisiana zydeco aces. Terrance Simien and his original Mallet Playboys were great buddies. So good to be back in touch.

I’ve written before how working and hanging out at Ann Arbor’s Rick’s American Café from 1984-87 was hugely influential in terms of my love of live music, blues especially. I saw and interacted with many amazing acts, including Koko Talor, Son Seals, Robert Cray, Albert Collins, NRBQ, Fishbone, 10,000 Maniacs, Johnny Copeland and Buddy Guy, as well as many great local and regional acts, including Cleveland reggae bands Ital and First Light.

I enjoyed meeting many of them and became the de facto musician’s waiter, which deepened my interest and helped me realize just how much fun these guys could be talk to, and that it was easy for me to do so. I really liked them and treated them with great respect, which made a big difference. I’ll aways have Koko calling me “honey” and bringing soft drinks to her husband Pops Taylor.

Most of those artists were at least a generation older than me. Terrance Simien and the Mallet Playboys were different -a zydeco band from Lafayette, Louisiana and environs who were my age. I was already into Buckwheat Zydeco and some others when I first saw the Playboys and took an immediate liking to them as a band and as people. It was so exciting to have peers up there kicking ass on that basement stage and I met up with them in San Francisco during my brief time out there as well. Zydeco is a super fun music that basically mixes Cajun and blues/r&b. It’s regional to Western Louisiana, and it can’t help but make you feel good.

I became friendly with Terrance and the guys on their first visit and over the next three or four years really good friends. The band morphed and by the time they were at the Blind Pig in 1987 or 88, they were not only a fun, party time zydeco band, but a truly great blues band as well. Terrance, wild man washboard player Earl Sally and bassist Popp Esprite were the same, but they had a fantastic new drummer Chubby Carrier and an unbelievable guitarist Sherman Robertson, who was almost 20 years older than us and already well established down in Louisiana having played with zydeco king Clifton Chenier for five years, though I didn’t know that.

I just knew that he was fantastic and the band of my friends, whom I had always loved, had now rounded into a legitimately great group. Chubby would also go on to have his own career as a zydeco frontman. It turns out he was only 17 when we met, several years younger than the rest of us, and he was at least third generation zydeco bandleader.

Took these photos att he Blind Pig, 1988.

We would often go out to eat after their shows and once at Denny’s at three am, I learned about eating when Black when we were accused of some kind of nonsense or another. The details are foggy all these years later, but I do remember being appalled and upset and the other guys laughing at me about that. But this time in 1988, Sherman – the only true adult amongst us – said, “We’ve been on the road a long time. What I’d really like to do cook a meal.” So we piled into my Chevy Celebrity and drove down to a 24-hour Kroger, where we got pork chops, peppers and onions and headed over to my cramped basement apartment and its galley kitchen, where I had mostly prepared such college delicacies as Ramen noodles, boiled potatoes and Steak-Um sandwiches. Sherman took over and showed me how to cook smothered pork chops. They were delicious.

Sherman was probably too good and too big of a personality to last long as a sideman, even though Terrance gave him tons of space, including opening every set with a few songs and he was gone a few years later, though I saw him with the group at least one or two more times. Sherman eventually had a very nice career, especially in Europe, before passing away in 2021, though I sadly never saw him again. RIP Sherman, a great talent. I still make a variation of those smothered pork chops, by the way.

Digging back into his solo albums now and I am pretty amazed that “Victim of Circumstance,” the first song on the album Here & Now was co-written by Gregg Allman and Allen Woody, and the title track was written by Jack Pearson, Hmmm. How’d I miss this in real time?

Terrance and the band remained friends of mine and I’d see them whenever I could, including at the great Skipper’s Smokehouse in Tampa, and in 1989 when Rebecca and I went to the New Orleans Jazz Fest, I got in touch with Popp about visiting him afterwards at his home in Opelousas. When I reached him from a pay phone from somewhere on the road, I was shocked and saddened to hear that he had left Terrance’s band and the whole group had splintered. He was home in Ospelousas, living with his sister and he invited us to visit. We spent the night in her double wide trailer on a dirt road, and he gave us a great tour of the area, driving us by zydeco and blues roadhouses, enticing me to try boudin at a roadside stand, buying buckets of crawfish. The next morning, our car – my father-in-law-to-be’s brand new Volkswagen Vanagon wouldn’t start, and he had a mechanic relative come over to look at it. He was convinced that it just needed some epoxy to secure the spark plug, a repair that lasted for the long life of the van. He refused payment. We were so touched by all of their kindness.

Me and Popp, JazzFest 2016

Before long, Popp was playing with another young zydeco master, Geno Delafose and he’s been a member of French Rocking Boogie for decades now, and we’ve seen each other a few times over the ensuing decades, including a visit at the 2016 New Orleans Jazz Fest, and remained in touch.

I had not seen Terrance in decades, however, until I showed up side stage of his performance last Sunday at the excellent Michael Arnone’s Crawfish Festival in New Jersey and tapped him on the shoulder. He looked at me blankly for a second, I gave him a small reminder and he screamed, “Ann Arbor Alan!” and wrapped me in a bear hug. I loved his high energy set and introducing him to my son Eli and saying hi to keyboardist Danny Williams, who’s been with him almost since those very early days, the only current band member I knew at all. Terrance has had a long and fruitful career, with his band long since renamed the Zydeco Experience, winning a couple of Grammies and collaborating with a wide range of artists.

These relationships and experiences were essential to me, a big part of who I am now. I value keeping them alive and reconnecting as necessary. I suggest you think about the people who’ve meant a lot to you and pick someone to re-connect with. It’s good for the soul.

Me ant Terrance, June 1, 2025

The paperback edition of my fourth book, Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s, was recently released by St. Martin’s Press. It was the third consecutive one to debut in the New York Times Non-Fiction Hardcover Bestsellers List, following Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan and One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band. My first book, Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing, about my experiences raising a family in Beijing and touring China with a popular original blues band, was optioned for a movie by Ivan Reitman’s Montecito Productions. I am also a guitarist and singer with two bands, Big in China and Friends of the Brothers, the premier celebration of the Allman Brothers Band.