How is it that the most unique lyrics end up the most universal, as inscrutable as they are?

It’s an interesting question. It struck me as a very useful phrase, a whiter shade of pale. I mean people now use it all the time. I was just reading an article in the New York Times and they were talking about a drink called absinthe and they called the absinthe a lighter shade of green. It went into the Oxford Book of Quotations as a phrase, so it reverberates. I think the reason is really because it’s kind of something which is impressionistic, so people never really get to the bottom of it. So it has some kind of mystery to it like a painting, you can always find new levels of meaning. So in answer to your question why can something inscrutable be so popular, you can just kind of sit back and look at it endlessly.

When “A Whiter Shade of Pale” hit Number 1, did you expect it to stay in the rock and roll pantheon for decades?

The answer to that is absolutely not. Ringo Starr’s famous quote is, ‘I was going to open a hairdressing salon. Who knew any of this would last?’ I never gave it a moment’s thought really, but am very happy for it to have survived.

What would you tell a young songwriter about the business that you wish someone had told you 41 years ago?

What people told me was, forget it. I was taking my stuff around, knocking on doors, going to see everybody. I was turned down so many times. Afterwards some people said, ‘I don’t know how I missed it.’ We even made a recording similar to the final track and played it for people and they still passed on it. I think even the record company at the time wasn’t sure about it. They decided to give it a shot, played it on the radio and it’s that cliche – the phones just lit up.

Ultimately you just have to keep pushing through, and don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t. They sure told me I couldn’t.

And they were wrong.

But I lived to the the tale.

What inspired you for The Keith Reid Project CD, The Common Thread? You’ve mentioned that moving to New York helped bring about a different tone.

I moved to New York in ’86, had basically worked with Procol Harum and just decided to meet different musicians, singers and songwriters, started to explore avenues of writing and the kind of music I wanted to do. Later I started compiling tapes and putting stuff together. A tape found its way to a producer in Germany. He said, “This sounds like a record, why don’t you do some more work on it?” I was very happy to do that (Singers include Chris Thompson, John Waite, Southside Johnny, Terry Reid and Steve Booker).

How can aspiring songwriters take back the reigns of control for their product?

These days it’s really easy to do because you don’t have to sign with publishing company or record companies. You just do you own thing and put it on youtube or put it on my space and people pick up on it. When I started out unless the establishment let you in, it was very difficult. Now it’s wide open, essentially anybody can do it from their bedroom.

That applies to writing too, there’s more content out there but also far more venues.

It’s available to everybody and therefore it’s hard to get your head and shoulders above everybody. I think it’s a better problem to have. Getting in the front door was even more difficult.

There is no more front door.

Right, you can just do it yourself. There’s no reason to sign your publishing to the big bad wolf or sign your record to the bad wolf. You can be the big bad wolf yourself.

Dr. John talks about what happened to many New Orleans musicians when they went to LA in the ’60s – so many artists were taken advantage of, but now the control can be back in the hands of the songwriters.

That’s true, I hear about such and such a person who made a record and stuck it on youtube and half a million people see it and suddenly everyone’s calling them up. That’s fantastic. I’m envious.

Me too. Just one last shot in the dark, As the Miller Told his Tale – is that line inspired by Chaucer?

Not at all.

Really? That was my ringer question.

No way. I had never read the Miller’s Tale. I knew who Chaucer was but can’t say I read him. It’s not a quote in any way whatsoever. People said, ‘You’re very into the Miller’s Tale by Chaucer,’ but I can’t say I was that bookish.

That’s going to shock the hell out of fellow English lit majors.

I used my imagination.

* * *

The talk turned to songwriting by musicians here in New Orleans, and Reid described Procol Harum in their early days playing bills with Dr. John and the Night Trippers in New York.

I first saw him with Chris Wood from Traffic. He was playing guitar then. I’m a huge fan of his music – we were friendly with The Band and they turned us onto his album, Dr. John the Night Tripper. We were very into it.”

* * *

Songs by the late Barry Cowsill, whose work is represented by the same promotional firm as Reid’s, will debut in New Orleans on Saturday (16th), in a CD release party forUS1, recorded the summer before Barry was lost to Hurricane Katrina.

Here’s to undeniable talent that finally finds its way through the door, and thank you to Keith Reid for A Whiter Shade of Pale:

We skipped the light fandango

turned cartwheels ‘cross the floor

I was feeling kind of seasick

but the crowd called out for more

The room was humming harder

as the ceiling flew away

When we called out for another drink

the waiter brought a tray

And so it was that later

as the miller told his tale

that her face at first just ghostly

turned a whiter shade of pale

She said, ‘There is no reason

and the truth is plain to see.’

But I wandered through my playing cards

and would not let her be

one of sixteen vestal virgins

who were leaving for the coast

and although my eyes were open

they might have just as well be closed

And so it was that later

as the miller told his tale

that her face, at first just ghostly

turned a whiter shade of pale

Here are a few examples of comments that have stayed with me in four years of blogging the post-Katrina journey. In Making their Stand: The Gulf Coast Food Fight,” I wrote about officials trying to keep taco stands from operating. “Early on you could see them lined up outside Western Union on payday wiring their salaries somewhere else. They lined up in the Rock ‘n Bowl parking lot getting fast food and most probably made a mental note to start taco stands. Many were housed in a tent village at City Park.”

A reader then commented: “If tacos are outlawed, only outlaws will have tacos.”

During the cultural diaspora after Hurricane Katrina, I wrote “I’m Still Not There” about the perpetual whisper of “Whenyacoming back,” SCMagnolia answered:

“Whenya get back is whenya should. New Orleans will always be inya! Though not Louisiana born, nor bred, I fell in love with your city at first, “volunteer gut” so I can only imagine how you feel. I’ll keep you and your mominem in my prayers.”

Turning a print journalism background into blogging was a way to describe the rough road home for many musicians, including the senseless killing of band leader Dinerral Shavers in “Every Single Life”.

His sister commented, “Dinerral was my baby brother. He was a great young man with bright future. My family had Thanksgiving dinner at my Aunt Candy’s house and all of my mother’s children and grandchildren were there. After dinner, Dinerral played his demo CD for me and I really enjoyed listening to a song he wrote with my sister Marjorica singing background vocals. The lyrics sent a powerful message about the pain and struggles families are still enduring after Hurricane Katrina.”

And our readers don’t just comment, they interact. Julie Powell’s fans sent in ingredients and PayPal donations to fund her cooking. I’m astonished by the generosity of readers — this week 60 band uniforms are on their way to the New Orleans Musicians Relief Fund from New Jersey so a school can have its first marching band as part of the ReDefine 8/29 project.

The dizzying journey from the interwebs to action is in every element of Julie & Julia. Powell blogs about Julia Child, the New York Times writes about Julie’s blog, the blog becomes a book, book becomes a Nora Ephron movie and a trending topic on Twitter. It’s still an unlikely journey for most writers. Transitioning from a blog to a book is a dicey pitch with agents asking, “Why would readers buy a compilation that’s already been published?” The same could have been said for books compiled from columns by Royko, Thurber, Bombeck, and Ivins, but publishing is still in Beta.

No matter what twists we see in Publishing 2.0, a love story running through Julie & Julia is that sometimes, after the solitary act of writing, the world writes you back.

With a mountain of newsboy hats already thrown into the how-to-save-publishing ring, here’s another. The collective naval-gazing of reporters and publishers far exceeds the outcry when free downloads upended the music industry and streaming video tanked television ratings, because when a crisis hits the writers it’s what we write about.

1) Style. The inverted pyramid AP-style story is obsolete. It existed to accommodate print limitations when there was a good chance your last three paragraphs would be cut at the print shop, but there are no space limitations in web journalism. The good news? More writers will be afforded the big finish that was previously only guaranteed to top columnists like Ben Hecht. The legendary journalist took the traditional route from crime reporter to columnist to novelist to Hollywood screenwriter. I once interviewed his daughter about what home life was like with one of the greatest crime reporters of all time and she recalled him coming home at night and sitting at the kitchen table, head in hands, repeating over and over, “What they did to that girl.” The stories stay with you. Hecht didn’t just write The Front Page, he wrote the original Scarface at the height of ’20s excess. And he did not just cover the police beat, he helped unravel true crime stories. Much hand-wringing is going on over the potential loss of investigative reporters, but they’re not going anywhere with journalism school enrollment at an all-time high. Journalism jobs are at an all-time low and that’s a recipe for innovation even if it involves each reporter becoming the publisher of his or her own web site. Traffic will rise or fall on the relevance of the story to each reading community. Even if no ads materialize, see Ben Hecht. Back when top journalists were valued, they went on to publish books. The books were optioned by Hollywood and we ended up watching The Sun Also Rises. Ernest Hemingway would have been a standout on Twitter — his work came pre-edited.

2) Sources. It’s no longer enough for reporters to write what they know, it has become necessary to write what they live. If I’m doing an article on veterans for peace, I can interview Paul Rieckhoff, head of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. But Rieckhoff doesn’t need me to write his story — he writes about these issues himself on the Huffington Post and probably receives more traffic than the Washington Post or the New York Times based on a recent survey. Much has been made of the NYT home and garden story picked up by Yahoo and spiking the New York Times‘ traffic to 9 million page views. When Yahoo News picked up my last Huffington Post piece, 17,000 other blogs did too. So it’s not big news that Yahoo News is big, but it is big news that the relationship, still symbiotic, has flipped to the point that the aggregator now helps the daily reach a wider audience. But neither the aggregator, publishing a paragraph and a link, nor the newspaper is profiting off the sinkhole that the advertising industry has become in this economy. Advertising is the elephant in the room, and it’s not even buying ads for peanuts. Mirroring Tivo, Adblock can keep ads off an Internet page entirely. And readership data mining for profit is not only in its infancy, it’s creepy. Product placement wedged into a Twitter stream is also dubious — shilling for an advertiser in 140 characters or less will only get a writer’s stream blocked. So how to monetize?

3) Advertorial. Following a small town newspaper’s example, all roads lead to the dreaded advertorial section. Weddings, recipes — we acted like it was the end of the world to write for an insert. That’s why the sales department hated the newsroom, but we took our terrible attitudes to the small, local shop and wrote seasonal articles. The shop would often call to say thanks for the writeup (reporter inwardly seething: “it’s not a writeup, it’s an ad”), then clip it and frame it for placement behind their checkout stand. We would mourn our wasted journalism degree and go back to writing the next feature that was going to change the world. In online publishing, advertorial is going to have to translate into a section of articles, written by actual journalists, about products that they don’t hate. Soap operas used to be sponsored by soap. Today’s writers may have to solicit manufacturers about product placement. James Thurber once wrote a satirical column on this very premise, a sponsored post on a family crisis saved by a product such as delicious biscuits. Literary patrons predated this, and you notice no writers trashed the Medicis until well into the 1500′s. Some in the mommy blogger community are facing a backlash after writing about sponsored products, but feature sections have always been buried with products mailed in by optimistic publicists. We didn’t write about them, but we didn’t send them back. I once wrote a glowing article about a local beer company’s product, but in my defense I was drunk. The reading public is smart enough to know that if a product is featured in a story, someone either bought an ad or sent in a sample. With an online advertorial section, the sponsor can be clearly indicated in an article about, say, delicious buttermilk biscuits.

4) Lifecasting. In one more example of the small town paper’s potential relevance, welcome to lifecasting. Otherwise known as, everything is interesting if it’s happening to you. Andy Warhol was right, in the future everyone will be famous but instead of 15 minutes it’s been whittled down to 15 seconds. The most popular feature in our suburban newspaper was the birth announcements, followed by weddings. Then obituaries. One in 100 Americans now has a web site, so you can easily announce your own milestones, but there’s still power in a printed product. Something to clip, frame or tuck away in a scrapbook. If micro news can help save print journalism, that still leaves the question of what’s to become of national newspaper reporters. We used to wistfully watch the dailies pick up our small town news stories and catapult local characters like Vlasta the Polka Queen straight to the David Letterman show. But reporting in the major leagues meant following jobs around the country, and many top writers now being laid off have sacrificed their families’ stability to an industry in crisis.

I am hopeful that if any old dog can learn a new trick, it’s the American journalist. From Hecht to Hemingway, Dorothy Dix to Molly Ivins it is a spectacular act to follow. We may lose publishers, we may lose editors but the writers will continue to write. I hope we don’t lose editors — without them I once misspelled Senator Al Franken’s name. And I hope we don’t lose publishers as I would like to someday complain about having to go to my own book signing. Ten years ago I left my newspaper editing job to move to New Orleans and write. Four years ago I quit my clerical job the Friday before Hurricane Katrina hit, complete with a going away party making me one of the only evacuees with closure. This doesn’t make me an expert on anything but impending disaster, but sometimes it’s easy to feel which way the wind is blowing. Why bring any of these ideas into the mix? I have plenty of time on my hands.

Politico echoed this, quoting Bryan Rogers who had been McCain’s spokesman saying, “HuffPo and [Talking Points Memo] really are the assignment editors for many in the Washington press corps — particularly the cables. That’s not just a Republican hack saying it — that’s speaking as a press guy fielding calls and e-mails daily from the MSM that start with, ‘Did you see this thing on Huffington Post?’ They were effective and they wasted a lot of our time.”

You’re welcome. Oil of Delay, McCain Cancels Louisiana Trip after Barge Spill described the 1/2 million gallon oil spill that kept McCain from visiting v.p. contender Bobby Jindal on an oil rig, and Rocky Road: Time Defends McCain’s New Orleans Gaffe covered McCain’s ‘tear it down or whatever’ reference to the 9th Ward and the Time reporter who called foul because apparently you can’t quote someone on an ice cream run. Ickies’ Breakey Heart as the Fight Winds Down called the race for Barack Obama while Hillary Clinton’s surrogates wrangled over the final delegates. Clinton’s seizing on Mayhill Fowler’s Guns, God and Religion Obama post (and its 6,000 comments) is an infamous example of the Internet driving campaigns. Candidate responses were the gifts that kept on giving, and I was tempted to float a test balloon to see if advisers were actually charting their course with punditry. The test? Whether John McCain would rock a full-on Will Ferrell style perm.

First headline: “Why Does McCain Refuse to Get a Perm?”

Followup stories would have included:

“John McCain Still Spurning Perm: Affront to His Base?”

“V.P. Pick Palin: Pro Perm or Lock Blocker?”

“Beltway Beauticians Ponder: Is McCain Curl-Worthy?”

“Clowns Weigh In on Curlgate”

And finally,

“Mainstream Media Scoops Up Permanent Campaign”

We’ll never know if Rogers could have talked his candidate into curly locks, but to quote Hemingway, isn’t it pretty to think so? The McCains are a web savvy family – Megan McCain is taking on Ann Coulter through the Daily Beast and Cindy could still mix it up with Whoopi Goldberg on Wowowow if they’re into Cindy’s musings.

But Huffington Post remains the golden mean with over 20 million unique visits per month. Politico confirms that the right wing is now jumping through whatever flaming hoops it can for exposure here since RedState’s approach no longer plays in Peoria.

Speaking of which, have you gotten a good look at Republican Congressman and Huffington blogger Aaron Schock’s hair lately? It’s like he thinks he’s too cool for curls.

Was anyone who lives with a cat who saw that study surprised? I have known women suffering through morning sickness open cans of stinky wet food for their cats. My theory is that, down deep, the cat and the human both know that if the size ratio was inverted, they would eat us. We love our cats, but we’re also appeasing them in case they suddenly have a huge growth spurt.

You talk about trying your hand at sitcom writing in Notes from the Underwire (Favorite quote: “That’s not just good, it’s Saved by the Bell good”). What kind of writing comes the most naturally to you?

That question just sent me off on a reverie about how totally sweet it would have been if my natural writing style was like Tom Clancy, only I developed this talent two years before Clancy wrote his first book. And then I made Clancy-money for decades and was writing this answer on my estate in Hawaii. Heck, I’d be writing it from my estate which was Hawaii. Anyway, I think my natural inclination is towards the quotidian and the ruminative. This is a fancy way of saying I like to think for a long time about an uncomfortable conversation I have had at the grocery store and then I like to write about it.

Your QCReport was picked as a top blog on Newsweek, how soon after that did the subsequent book deal with Hyperion come about?

Years later. Completely unrelated nice things which happened to me. Newsweek was alerted to my blog within three months of my starting to write it; the book came about because Abigail Breslin was nominated for an Academy Award. No, I’m not seeing patterns where none exist. Because a child was nominated, USA Today did an article about former nominees who were children. My story went something like “Didn’t go to jail, never went to rehab, created The Hiphugger, has a blog now.” An editor at Hyperion found the blog, read enough to think there was a book there, got the head of Hyperion and the marketing department to agree and came to me with an offer. If you have an MFA and a thick file of turndowns from agents for your really good book, I know that my story is very irritating. Sorry.

You’re currently on a blog book tour. Did you come up with that concept, and how cool is it to meet your readers without having to leave the house?

The Quinn Cummings Seemingly Endless Blog Book Tour of 2009 has been much more fun than I could have anticipated. First of all, there’s the part where you can do press without have to check your lip-gloss, which is a huge “Yeah!” in my book. Second, and I’m not sucking up to my readers, I promise, but the questions have been remarkably good. And the Q&A format works not unlike tennis, in that you’re more likely to hit the ball back hard and well if it’s hit hard and well to you. And the idea was offered to me by Sara J. Henry who will be using the blog book tour for her own page-turner of a novel very shortly. I wish I could say I thought of it, but I can take credit for having the sense to see a nearly perfect idea when it’s handed to me.

Speaking of coming up with concepts, what was your inspiration to invent the hip hugger? I don’t carry many babies lately, but it’s a brilliant design!

I had Carpal Tunnel Syndrome when I was pregnant, which went away the second the kid was born but left me with some nerve damage in my fingers. Nerve damage which was aggravated by holding my baby and then my toddler on my hip. I wanted something which displaced the weight of holding her there across my upper body and didn’t make my hands go numb. I mentioned this to a friend who had a design background. Nine months later, we had our first Hiphuggers in a store. One of the strange facts of my life is that my name is on a patent, which still strikes me as absurd; people with patents should be able to put together Ikea furniture without needing to take a sobbing break. But here I am.

I’ve been name dropping you shamelessly and friends are happy to hear about a writer who went from a childhood in the limelight to a happy home life. With all the Michael Jackson childhood stories coming to light, what advice would you give to the parents of a precocious child looking to break into life in the public eye?

I lucked out. I had parents who didn’t confuse me for an ATM and a certain psychic stability which allowed me to come through my childhood with only the usual amount of scars. Then again, there was no Internet when I was a kid, no cell-phone cameras, no Twitter, no Facebook. When I wasn’t in the public eye, I could hope to be anonymous. No one has that luxury anymore. And if you live even a small part of your life as an entertainer you have, in the eyes of a percentage of the population, given up all expectation of ever leading a regular life. And being a former child actor is a permanent state; unless I save the rain forest, my obit is going to be titled, “Quinn Cummings, former child star, dies of something avoidable.” Which is all my way of saying, if your kid likes acting and singing, there’s something called local theater.

After winning an Oscar nomination for The Goodbye Girl, you starred in series including “Family” and “Blossom” – What’s your favorite TV show theme song?

“The Wire.” First of all, best show EVER, so I have this Pavlovian response to hearing “When You Walk Through the Garden,” one of “YEAH! Best show EVER, about to start!” Second of all, I love how they did a new version every season and they were all great in different ways.

And there’s your full circle — New Orleans’ “Treme” is the next HBO series by the creators of “The Wire,” and I’m sitting in a New Orleans courtyard fretting over feline rage syndrome. If our kitten doesn’t have a panther sized growth spurt, kill and eat us I’m very much looking forward to reading your next book. Notes from the Underwire is available at Amazon.com (Here).

So we decided to go virtual with Jackson Squared(c). It’s just what it sounds like — Michael and Andrew Jackson riding into the sunset in Jackson Square as Michael waves his magic glove in front of ReDefine 8/29 and Hurricane Warning flags. New Orleans pop artist L. Steve Williams, Jr. finished it this morning, and it’s a thing of beauty.

Michael’s trademark band uniform is especially appropriate because 500 pounds worth of band uniforms made from a New Jersey band to a New Orleans school for its first marching band. In this economy, grass roots charities are more likely to receive repurposed items than financial donations but people give what they can and we find it a home. The Jackson Squared Campaign hoped, against all odds, to dovetail into coverage of the King of Pop with reports from the Cradle of Rock and Roll. And it worked, Media outlets from Reuters to Chris Rose covered the rollout.

Jackson Squared is now at Winky’s, More Fun Comics on Oak Street and Snake & Jake’s Christmas Club Lounge and is selling brisquely.  On 8/29, the Midsummer Mardi Gras Krewe of Oak’s theme was “Beat It.” Things are back to normal. The new normal.

In other good news, the family postponed Michael Jackson’s burial to September 6th.

In otherworldly news, Michael Jackson’s glove is now following me on Twitter.

I’m not worried about the music slipping away, I’m worried about the whole city slipping away. Look, if they don’t fix the wetlands, we won’t have a whole southern Louisiana in a few years. Even people from New Orleans don’t know how bad it is down south with the Army Corps of Engineers cutting canals everywhere . . . if they could just let the river roll the way it originally ran. But I know the city would hate that because it would cause shipping problems, so I’m trying to get the state government involved. Not that I trust them to do it right either. We’re trying to stomp over the tradition of Louisiana politics here, and that tradition is basically corruption.

Dr. John to Jed Gottlieb in the Boston Herald

These are the two tales of New Orleans recovery four years after Hurricane Katrina hit Mississippi and New Orleans levees imploded. What has been done and what is still undone. Past the stories of return and recovery, thousands of New Orleanians are still trying to cut through the red tape and jurisdictional turf wars the president describes. Individuals have been sharing their Katrina stories through Twitter hashtag #whereIwas4yearsago. There’s something healing about that.

Back in New Orleans for the Katrina Anniversary, we reflected at a Lakeside Cemetery memorial with over a thousand flags bearing the name of every fatality from the flood. Along Canal Street, the new Charity Hospital Cemetery Memorial, with its walkway in the shape of a hurricane, is a tribute to the bodies that remained unclaimed. And across from the cemetery is The Herb, a shop that flies its Brad Pitt for Mayor banner by L. Steve Williams, Jr. — in part a tribute to Pitt’s theoretical mayoral platform of legalized marijuana, no religion and gay marriage. Sacred and profane, sad and joyful — New Orleans has always married conflicting emotions artfully.

Across the canal in the 9th Ward, Pitt’s Make it Right homes for returning residents spring up. Not far from those are the home slabs that have become steps to nowhere. Someone changed the lettering on an abandoned church sign to “Who’s Your Daddy?” A nearby stop sign now reads Stop Trippin.

All photos by Jeff Beninato. All taken on 8/29.