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Not going back
Peter Holsapple doesn't fit the profile of the typical New Orleans musician, but he has lived there since the early 1990s. A native of Winston-Salem, Holsapple co-founded the dB's, one of the great obscure bands of early-'80s new wave. Along with making his own records, Holsapple's primary occupation nowadays is sideman in the South Carolina rock band Hootie & the Blowfish.
In New Orleans, Holsapple played with Bangles guitarist Vicki Peterson and his ex-wife, Susan Cowsill, in the Continental Drifters, whose elegant roots rock was closer to The Band than the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. All the same, Holsapple loved living in New Orleans. You could see great live music seven nights a week, and the cost of living was cheap.
"I was able to buy a house there," Holsapple marvels, "something a cheap-assed musician like myself couldn't do in almost any other place."
But then came Katrina. Holsapple lost everything in the floodwaters, including several years worth of recordings and journals. He has relocated to Pennsylvania for now, near his current wife's family. After the insurance claims get sorted out, Holsapple plans to move back to Winston-Salem, where his parents still live.
"We had actually planned to move back," he says. "This just sped it up. I do feel I owe a great deal to New Orleans, the music I got from it and that I got to play there. It was a tumultuous way to end, especially since I was on the road when the storm went down. There's almost a sense of suspended disbelief, even having seen the place."
Holsapple has taken one trip back to the shattered remains of his old house, to try to recover what he could. The trip did not go well.
"There was not much to grab, to be perfectly honest," he says. "It was a strange, otherworldly situation to go down there and see this house we'd lived in for years, which was covered in several inches of toxic sludge with a smell you just wouldn't believe. Between the smell and the emotion of losing almost everything, it took us a long time to get through it, even though there was not much we were able to save; a few pieces of jewelry, little knick-knacks, things like that."
Still missing
At least everyone in Holsapple's family is safe and sound. The same cannot be said for the family of his former wife, Susan Cowsill.
Barry Cowsill, Susan's brother and long-ago band mate in the late-'60s pop band the Cowsills, remains missing after more than three months. Like Holsapple, Susan was on the road when Katrina hit, and she also lost everything in her house. But Cowsill has vowed to move back to New Orleans someday, somehow.
"We're going to rebuild our town and have bigger and better festivals, barbecues and parties," she declared soon after the storm.
Cowsill sounds a similar note of hopeful pluck with "Crescent City Snow," a song she played at Raleigh's Pour House nightclub on Sept. 23. An elegant love letter to New Orleans, "Crescent City Snow" starts as a ballad before building into a riotous second-line raveup on the outro. "Crescent City Snow" could speak for every displaced New Orleans refugee longing for home:
When the saints go marching in
I'll be walking to New Orleans
Eating beignets at Du Monde...
Man, I can't wait to go home.
Our precious hearts are all shattered
Scattered across the land
But I know that I am going back
To the place where I know who I am.
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