Malcolm John Rebennack Jr., the New Orleans musician who became Dr. John and the real-life inspiration for the Muppets’ Dr. Teeth, was born in 1941, though he listed 1940 for decades to sneak into nightclubs as a teenager. His education began in his father’s East End appliance shop, a distribution hub for records by King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, and in local studios where he watched Little Richard and Guitar Slim work. At about 13 he met Professor Longhair, whose rumba boogie piano and showman persona became his blueprint. Expelled from Jesuit high school in 1954 for gigging too much, he was producing for Ace Records by 16, until a gunshot to his left ring finger in Jacksonville, Florida, around 1960 ended his guitar career and pushed him to bass and then piano.

This episode follows his descent into heroin addiction, drug dealing, and running a brothel, his two-year federal sentence in Fort Worth, Texas, and his 1965 move to Los Angeles, where session work for Sonny and Cher and Frank Zappa proved his worth. It explains how homesickness led him to build an act around a 19th-century New Orleans voodoo figure named Dr. John, how singer Ronnie Barron passed on fronting it, and how the reluctant frontman released Gris-Gris in January 1968, winning fans like Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger. It covers the stripped-back Dr. John’s Gumbo, the 1973 album In the Right Place with Allen Toussaint and The Meters that delivered a top-10 Billboard hit, the Desitively Bonnaroo album that named a festival, more than 115 songs co-written with Doc Pomus, the Curious George theme, The Last Waltz, and Blues Brothers 2000, his December 1989 recovery through Narcotics Anonymous, his 2011 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, and the Grammy-winning 2012 album Locked Down produced by Dan Auerbach.

• How an appliance shop and studio visits with rock and roll pioneers served as a New Orleans master class
• Why a gunshot wound to a guitarist’s fretting hand launched a legendary piano career
• How the psychedelic voodoo persona worked as a Trojan horse to smuggle New Orleans tradition onto national radio
• Why the Dr. John character evolved rather than disappeared when he pivoted to pure funk in the 1970s
• How getting clean in 1989 turned a wild child into a reliable cultural institution for another 30 years