Into the night

MALCOLM 'Mac' Rebennack – better known to the world as Dr John, The Night Tripper – is in the middle of a mammoth three-hour tour of every nebulous nook and cranny of his episodic life when the transatlantic telephone line cuts out. Rebennack seems so lost in what he calls his "reminiscences and remembrances" that he just carries on, ten to the dozen, blissfully unaware that he has been talking to nobody but himself for several minutes.

When we are eventually reconnected, New Orleans's most infamous son is still chatting away in his distinctive, deadpan drawl, a rich New Orleans accent that's as thick as treacle.

I rejoin him halfway through a convoluted tale about how he abandoned his original plan of becoming a Jesuit priest and, instead, started shooting up heroin when he was 13, becoming a jobbing musician on the New Orleans R&B scene of the 1950s, working on sessions for the likes of Little Richard and Professor Longhair.

Rebennack was forced to give up his dreams of becoming a professional guitarist and switched to the piano in 1960, when he had the end of the fourth finger on his left hand shot off in a fight with a motel manager: "Yeah, this guy was pistol-whipping my buddy, Ronnie Barron, who'd caught Ronnie with his old lady," he splutters. "I was freaked, 'cos Ronnie's mother told me she was gonna chop my cojones off with a butcher's knife if anything happened to her son. Next thing I know, I'm trying to get the gun out of the guy's hand; I thought my hand was over the handle, but it was over the barrel… and pop. That was that.

"I didn't get paid too much money in the early days, and then later it was lawyers who took the money or the record companies would stiff us easy because you're junkies. You left yourself open to get f***ed. In order to survive, you might be selling narcotics or doing stuff that can either put your ass in jail or in hell. Bing bang boom. When you're in the game and you're strung out, whatever morals, scruples and principles you're born with disappear from your life. To be quite frank, I don't remember it ever hitting a lowest point. It just kept sinking."

Rebennack eventually left New Orleans and moved to Los Angeles to escape the seemingly endless trail of trouble that followed his every move. He renamed himself Dr John – The Night Tripper, an outrageous, mystical persona he had loosely based on a 19th-century Louisiana voodoo man called John Montaigne. His unique psychedelic bitches' brew of lysergic blues, New Orleans R&B, jazz, funk and voodoo mysticism landed him a deal with Atlantic Records in 1968, although the label's legendary head-honcho, Ahmet Ertegun, wasn't exactly confident of Dr John's future as a viable commercial proposition. "It was in the middle of this Bobby Darin session – I think we were cutting If I Were a Carpenter – and Ahmet walks in and says: 'What is this boogaloo crap you're tryin' to f***ing stick me with?' I didn't even know what it meant, but it actually means river people. When I heard the president of the record company saying that, I was shocked to hell that they even put the record out," he laughs. "I wasn't thinking about the impact that record would have on my career, because I really didn't want a career in that direction at all… I wanted to be producing records."

More than being an artist? "More than? I had no thought of being an artist at that time. There aren't many artists that I've worked with that I've found were really cool people – like Dolly Parton or Keith Richards – very cool people. To be quite frank, most artists I had to work with were a bunch of pains in the ass, aggravating kinda people, whoever the hell they were.

"I wanted to make records for the people of New Orleans so that we didn't lose a piece of our culture that was disappearing. There was a whole bunch of us from New Orleans stranded in California, all missing home and trying to keep something alive. New Orleans is such a spirit city that when you get enough of the people together in one place, it's just like you brought that spirit into the room. I wouldn't say we did any particular voodoo rituals in the studio, but the spirit kinda took over at times, and that's what music is supposed to do."

Rebennack recorded a run of groundbreaking albums over the next few years, but when he wasn't playing music, his hedonistic lifestyle often disrupted his career, resulting in several spells in prisons and high-security psychiatric institutions: "Yeah, my business managers said they were gonna help me with my drug problem while we were recording my third album, Remedies, so they put me in a psych ward and had me declared incompetent, but, really, it was a scam to screw me out of some money. Anyway, I wasn't in for that long, maybe a week or something like that. I escaped from there and went to Florida, which is where I ran into some other people – and then I got into another bunch of mess."

Did he jump the wall? "Nah, I just walked right out the door," Rebennack replies with the matter-of-fact air of a man whose life has been the very embodiment of rock'n'roll's live-fast credo. "I had one of my old ladies put some gum in the door so that it didn't lock, and I told her to get my shit together and wait in the car for me, and then we split." Somewhere in the middle of all the madness, he somehow found the time to cut numerous sessions for legendary figures, including Phil Spector, Van Morrison, Marvin Gaye and Bob Dylan. His unique talents can also be heard all over John Lennon's Rock 'N' Roll album as well as the Stones' Exile On Main St. His biggest hit, Right Place Wrong Time, featured the immortal hook-line – "I'm on the right trip, but I'm in the wrong car" – which may have been written for him by Dylan, although the Dr could not have summed up his own life any better himself.

While he has spent his entire career ensuring that New Orleans' rich musical past has a future, Rebennack's work has taken on a renewed sense of importance since Hurricane Katrina devastated his hometown in 2005. City That Care Forgot is an album he felt compelled to make so he could articulate his anger at the man-made tragedy that unravelled in the aftermath of the disaster.

"I really couldn't live with myself if I didn't do this record," he sighs. "I'm very upset with the government, top to bottom – Feds, State and City. It's pathetic. Unless it's making big money for the oil and chemical companies, the politicians don't do anything. There's still so many people living under the freeway in tents, because they have nowhere to go back to.

"They still don't know if their families are alive or dead, a lot of it sounds like something from a Cecil B DeMille epic movie of horrors."

At the age of 67, Rebennack says he tries his best to look forwards these days, although after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, he can't help dreaming of happier times in New Orleans: "I try to live in the present, but most of us from New Orleans reflect on the old days because we don't have a good present. We still have dreams of the future, but when you look at the present, it's harder and harder to see any of them becoming something real. You can't lose sight of your dreams just because they're slow, I suppose. Nothing good comes overnight."

Would he say he is as passionate about music as he ever was? "Yeah, if I wasn't, I wouldn't do this. That's what it's all about. I was sitting here about three hours ago, writing a song down the telephone with Bobby Charles, and that's something that makes me feel good. I couldn't explain it for shit, but we do it all the time," he chuckles. "I hate travelling on the road and flying and all of that shit, but I love playing music, and, as long as I got the music to look forward to, I don't see no reason to quit."

• Dr John plays the Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, tomorrow. His latest album City That Care Forgot is out now.