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The voice on the phone pleaded for help, for reassurance, for rescue. It was Barry Cowsill, calling his sister Susan, a fellow New Orleanian, and leaving one message after another, saying “This is (bleeped) up, they’re shooting, they’re looting, I’m holed up in a warehouse and please, please, please come get me.”
But Susan Cowsill, staying with friends on a farm outside Nashville, Tenn., couldn’t pick up. Her cell phone had been dead since Hurricane Katrina swept through the Gulf coast and the levees of New Orleans gave way last August, filling the bowl-shaped city with noxious floodwater and turning it into a dangerous and alien landscape. Three days later, the phone came ringing to life, and Susan heard her brother’s increasingly desperate cries.
“He was freaked out,” she remembers. “I got three more messages, all in a row. It was so strange – no one else was able to get through to my phone. And the messages got worse and worse.
“Thursday at 2 a.ml, the last one came in. He was calling from a land line somewhere and was saying, “I love you all. I’ll call you in the morning.’ I sat by the side of the road for hours waiting for that call. I changed the message on my phone to say ‘Go to our house, there’ water and supplies and just wait for us, we’ll come get you as soon as we can.’ But that’s not what happened.”
Susan Cowsill is eating a midday breakfast of toast, sausage and poached eggs at the South City Diner on South Grand Boulevard. The singer; 47, was a child star with her family band, the Cowsills, and went on to play with rocker Dwight Twilley, roots-pop outfit the Continental Drifters and others. The night before, she had performed a rapturous 2 ½ hour house concert before 75 fans at the Clayton home of Rick and Nancy Wood.
Just before hitting he diner, she and her band, which includes her husband, drummer Russ Broussard, had dropped by community radio station KDHX-FM (88.1) to record a handful of songs to be played on the air at the station’s discretion.
There are many good things happening in Cowsill’s life right now: Her marriage to Broussard is still fairly recent; she’s been out promoting her debut solo album, “Just Believe It,” which was released last fall, and her eggs arrived slightly runny, just the way she likes them. But any serious conversation with her inevitably will begin with Katrina and its aftermath.
Cowsill’s first trip back to the transformed city came three weeks after the hurricane. She begged a U.S. marshal leading a small expedition searching for survivors to let her come along.
“It was one of the most sobering, science fiction, surrealistic visions I’ve ever seen,” she says. “It was a nuclear war vibe: very quiet and very dead except for the National Guard and cops.”
When she reached her house, a two –story shotgun-style structure in the middle fo the city, she found it standing but ravaged by floodwater 6 feet deep.
“Downstairs were all our family heirlooms,” Cowsill says. “Russ’ grandparents’ things, all of my grandparents’ and great-grandparent’s tables, chairs, you name it, were gone.
“All of my Cowsills phots, family and otherwise; all of our equipment, all of our merchandise, which we had just restocked, all of our paperwork. Everything gone, just like that.”
Cowsill says she doesn’t mind losing the heirlooms so much.
“We needed to clean that stuff out anyway,” she said. “So consider it clean.”
The photos and more personal items were tougher to lose. Yet, she sayd, “At some point you say look, it’s just stuff. We have our family and everybody’s alive, and that’s the good news. And then January rolled around, and it turned out not so much to be the case.”
Indeed, Barry Cowsill, a troubled soul for years, who had stayed in the city in part because he was about to enter a rehab program and didn’t want to change his travel plans, gambled by ignoring evacuation orders. He paid for that decision with his life. No one knows exactly what happened to him, but he was missing after Katrina. His body was found in January and identified by dental records.
And if one tragedy wasn’t enough, Barry’s death was compounded by the news – on the day of Barry’s memorial service – that another brother, Bill Cowsill, had lost his battle with a variety of illnesses, including emphysema and extreme osteoporosis.
“It’s been an unbelievable year,” Susan Cowsill says, admitting that it’s been tough to keep her burgeoning career on track in the face of all the personal travails. “When the record came out, I didn’t even know what day it was. My publicist called me to congratulate me, and I didn’t even know what she was talking about. I just felt so removed from everything.”
Original family band
Perhaps Susan is able to keep everything in perspective because she’s seen how fickle fame can be. She was only 7 years old when she joined her five brothers and their mother in the Cowsills, the prototypical family band that enjoyed a string of hits including “The Rain, the Park & Other Things,” “Indian Lake” and most indelibly, “Hair,” I the late 1960s.
“I thought it was what everybody did,” she says with a laugh. “Being in the Cowsills, we got to travel around, play music every day and see the country, which I enjoyed and still do. Playing state fairs was my favorite, because we could go ride rides in-between. What’s not to like about that?”
Cowsill didn’t share the frustration of her older brothers, who had ambitions of being serious rock musicians only to have their mother and their little sister thrust into the spotlight beside them.
“I don’t know whose idea it was,” Cowsill says. “Maybe my dad’s. I know it wasn’t my mom’s. She didn’t want to be a rock star.”
The Cowsills were an odd mix of musical influences. The bubblegum pop they were forced to perform by their record company clashed hard with the type of rock music the brothers wanted to do. And it all came to a head over “Hair,” which the family was asked to perform on a 1969 Carl Reiner-hosted special called “the Wonderful World of Pizzazz.”
“They thought it would be really funny and campy to have us do ‘Hair,’ “ Cowsill says. “We dressed in wigs, dressed as hippies. We went into the studio to record the song for the show, and it turned out to be a great record.
“My brothers took it to the record company and said, ‘Listen to this.’ Their reply was: ‘Not on your life. You are the Cowsills and this won’t fly.’ So, on tour, my brothers took it to a radio station in Chicago and asked them to play it. And the switchboard lit up. So the record company had no choice.”
The family act eventually came to an end, though not before they were nearly tapped for their own Television show. The Cowsills served as the prototype for what eventually became “The Partridge Family.”
“They had been creating it for two years and, by the time they got to us with it, we were older and were different people than they had been writing for and about,” Cowsill says. “Also they wanted a famous actress to play the mom. With that, my dad told them we weren’t doing it and to give us some money and change the story so we wouldn’t sue them.”
Cowsill recently found out that the network executives found her father so unpleasant to deal with that when the show finally aired, they had killed the husband-father character altogether.
At Drifters university
Susan Cowsill returned to the music business in the late 1970s, recording a couple of solo singles and performing occasionally reunion shows with the family. She joined Dwight Twilley’s band in the ‘80s and made her biggest splash in the 90’s with the Continental Drifters, which included her then-husband Peter Holsapple, future husband Broussard and Bangles guitarist Vicki Peterson – who is married to another Cowsill brother, John.
“The Continental Drifters was my school for everything,” Susan Cowsill says. “I hadn’t written songs till I met those guys. I didn’t play an instrument till I met those guys.” I was just a singer. It was like going to school and graduating and going out on my own.”
Some of the songs from her Drifters years remain in her repertoire, including “The Rain Song,” which she said at the house concert, “Will follow me to my grave.”
The band had a messy ending as Cowsill broke up with Holsapple nd took up with Broussard, who, at that point, she says, had been her best friend for a decade.
“You could say we pulled a Fleetwood (Mac),” she laughs, referring to that band’s shifting relationships.
After the Drifters, Cowsill and Broussard worked in a Cajun cover band on Bourbon Street, “The New Orleans version of getting a regular job,” she says. Eventually, she put together the batch of songs that make up “Just Believe It” and recorded the album, in part with funds raised by selling CD’s of demo versions to devoted fans.
The album hasn’t gotten the attentions she had hoped it would, but playing events like the house concert and the DKHX set can only help. And to bring herself out of the doldrums about her hometown, Cowsill recorded a gorgeous ode to New Orleans, “Crescent City Snow,” that is available on her We site (www.susancowsill.com) and on several benefit CD’s as well.
As the song begins, she’s feeling lost and bewildered at the changes the city has gone through. But she reminds herself of the food, the places and the people that make New Orleans a city like any other, and the rhythm picks up. So does her mood, to the point where the song mirrors, a New Orleans funeral procession: slow and mournful at first, and, in the end, a celebrations.
“That’s why I write songs to make myself feel better,” Cowsill says. “And even after everything that’s happened, I’ve got to believe that there’s still hope.”
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