Dave Malone’s River Road Trip
“The five of us got together in January of 1978. It sounds like bullshit that somebody made up, but we jammed together for five hours in Ed Volker’s garage, at which point we were looking around at each other like, ‘Oh, shit, is it supposed to be this easy?’ We had all been in bands where it was not easy. We’d made good music, but it was difficult,” Dave Malone remarks, as he considers the origins of The Radiators. “But right there in Ed’s garage, we realized, ‘This is how it’s supposed to be. We’re very lucky we found each other.’ So here we are now, having our 47th anniversary with the same five guys. It’s insane.”
In 2011, the New Orleans based quintet briefly called it quits, mounting a final tour followed by a last weekend of shows back home at Tipitina’s. Malone, the group’s frontman and one of two guitarists, explains, “Ed had told me that not only did he not want to tour, he didn’t want to be in a band. He just wanted to play piano and write songs. He’s been writing songs every day of his life, since he was like 10 years old. I think he’s the best unknown songwriter in America. But he was tired of it all and I kind of thought that was it.”
Malone remembers that this changed after bassist Reggie Scanlan was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. “At some point, I said to Ed, ‘Reggie’s got serious health issues. I’ve played these songs with other people and nothing feels right except these five guys playing these songs, so we need to consider doing them while we can all still play and we’re all still alive.’ Then Ed came around and we started doing Jazz Fest again [in 2014]. He still doesn’t want to travel, and I’ve turned down some really great offers—actually, he turned them down, not me. I finally said to people: ‘Look, I’m not even bringing offers to Ed anymore for out-of-town stuff.’”
While the group regularly reconvenes in January at Tip’s to celebrate its birthday, Malone has long pursued other creative opportunities. He formed Raw Oyster Cult with fellow Rads Camile Baudoin and Frank Bua, Jr. on guitar and drums, respectively. He also has been a steady presence on the Last Waltz tours. Malone notes, “I just got back from a five-and-a-half-week tour with Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench, Jamey Johnson, Ryan Bingham, Don Was, John Medeski and a bunch of New Orleans guys. Five and a half weeks on a tour bus is hard for a 72-year-old guy, but the music was great and I’m glad I did it.”
He shares similar enthusiasm for a long-gestating project that was finally released last spring. One of Malone’s earliest songs, “Lucinda,” which is still in rotation with the Radiators, is a slice of life from Malone’s days growing up in a small town in Louisiana’s St. John the Baptist Parish. He recalls, “I was born in New Orleans, but we moved around because my dad was in the Air Force and we ended up in this little town on the river that only has one road called River Road, which follows the levee. The characters in that song are composites of people I knew along the river.”
Malone revisits this locale on The River Road Collective, an album featuring fellow musicians from St. John the Baptist Parish that began with a phone call in 2016. “Joe Tollus was a singer songwriter and guitar player from St. John Parish who was very verbal, fun and energetic,” Malone says. “He also worked at Daniel Lanois’ studio but, at some point, he moved to North Carolina with his wife, who’s also from the parish. One day, he called me up out of the blue with this idea of putting together some songs involving only musicians from St. John Parish. He named 20 people, and I said, ‘I’m very interested in this, but I’m not interested in starting a project with that many people because I can see that differences of opinion, right or wrong, will make everything kind of miserable and make it hard to decide things.’”
Eventually, the project coalesced around Malone, Tollus, drummer Kevin Aucoin and bass player Frank Girard. “I had a couple of songs already that were relevant to St. John Parish,” Malone recollects. “For a lot of the characters, I used these very colorful St. John the Baptist Parish names, but I didn’t make them up. These were all real people. So we started writing and recording stuff and, pretty soon, we had 12 songs. Then [in 2020], as we were getting around to finishing, Joe Tullos was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, just like Reggie. But Reggie is one of the 3% who have had successful treatment. Joe declined pretty quickly, then he died, and Frank Girard had a heart attack about six months after that and he died. So we put everything on the shelf.”
Three years later, Malone relistened to the recordings, reached out to Aucoin and they enlisted engineer/producer Jack Miele to complete the album, which came out in April 2024 on Big Sun Records.
As for performing the material live, Malone says, “A few days ago, Kevin and I were talking about needing to put a band together with me and him and other people to play the songs. Some of them have been played live by Raw Oyster Cult but not like the way they are on this record.”
A few of them were in consideration for the mid-January Tipitina’s dates, when The Radiators performed three shows, followed by a Raw Oyster Cult gig. “What happens is we’ll get together for two days earlier in the week,” he indicates. “Ed and I will have had a conversation to tell people, ‘This is what we’re going to learn.’ If there’s a new one, we’ll just hash it out at the rehearsals. Everybody’s on time, everybody comes prepared and we take this shit very seriously.”
While the group retains a tight focus on preparing the material, the songs themselves can wander from one genre to another. The Radiators were signed to Epic in the 1980s and when that label was purchased by Sony, Malone reveals, “They didn’t quite know what to do with us. We just wanted to make music, and they could never say what we were because you could listen to four different tracks and they’d sound completely different. Ed and I are the main songwriters, and I’ve always told people that George Jones and Hank Williams are every bit as soulful as Ray Charles and Otis Redding. Now, if you don’t hear it that way, I’m not going to argue with you. It took me a long time to quit trying to tell people why they should like a musical thing that I like because it’s a hopeless cause. I can’t really explain it any more than I can tell you why I like Brussels sprouts.”
