The Meters

Imagine the J.B.’s, Booker T. & The M.G.’s, and Sly & The Family Stone jamming together in a Bourbon Street barroom, and you might begin to approximate the funky majesty of the Meters. You know the New Orleans quartet’s music even if you’ve never heard their name — the white-hot grooves of “Cissy Strut” have turned up the temperature on countless movie and TV soundtracks, not to mention hip-hop samples. Tracks like “Fire On the Bayou” and “Hey Pocky A-way” have become Big Easy R&B standards, with the band’s own brand of Fat Tuesday funk finding its feet somewhere between street-parade second-line and James Brown on-the-one.

In Next Steps, the Meters find the funk in rock.

The Meters made their name with a molten mixture of funky grooves and Mardi Gras moves, but their succulent sound fits in all across the musical menu. Art Neville’s urgent organ jabs and Leo Nocentelli’s serpentine guitar licks transform Sly & The Family Stone’s “Sing a Simple Song” so completely that you’d swear the tune emerged straight from the minds of the Meters. The fearless foursome even finds a way to make Neil Young’s bittersweet ballad “Birds” their own, slowing down and sweetening up without losing a bit of their bite. They can kick into a Kingston rhythm, too, putting a little swamp in their skank on Bob Marley's "Stop That Train."

Being the funkiest band ever to come out of New Orleans is no small feat, but there’s never been another band quite like the Meters. Everybody knows the band’s killer keyboard man, Art Neville, as the driving force behind another Crescent City institution, the Neville Brothers, but his three Metermates have left equally funky footprints on the music world. Guitar demon Leo Nocentelli, bass ace George Porter, Jr., and drum daredevil Ziggy Modeliste are all spoken of in awed whispers wherever savvy musicians gather. The Meters are imitated so often, they should get royalties just for opening up their eyes in the morning, and they’ve been bringing the funk from the bayou to you since the ’60s (with the occasional hiatus). If you want to do the “Mardi Gras Mambo,” you’ve got to get in step with the fatback funk these four men throw down, and there’s no better way to do that than with our own guide to the Meters’ mightiest moves.