That’s one of the battle cries of the new post-K New Orleans, seen on T-shirts and bumper stickers in a town that still seems traumatized nine months later. “The Big Empty” I heard one DJ call it and downtown at night it can seem that way: what happened to the people? Oh, yeah, right. Except for the tens of thousands at the fairgrounds for JazzFest the streets are most deserted.

The sense of tramua and recovery is still in the air and in a lot of the music. At a benefit for the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic at the Old Point Bar in Algiers Friday night, local singers including Shannon McNally and Arlee Leonard sang songs and read poetry about wading in the water and surviving for another day. “A Change Is Gonna Come” was the theme and the song itself was covered by the amazing sacred-steel band, the Campbell Brothers. That’s gospel funk played on steel guitars, in this case by a quartet of African-American guys from Rochester, NY.

The musical gumbo you find here can’t be diluted, no matter how much water you add. We dashed from Algiers back to to the Maple Leaf to catch local heroes Papa Grows Funk and found the fellow doing the fabulous chikcen-scratch rhythm guitar and Santana like leads was from Japan, while one of the best local blues players, Anders Osbourne, was from Norway. They all found a home in NO: they came, they played, they stayed and ain’t no hurricane going to drive them away.

At Domilise’s Cafe on Saturday, having inhaled a few seafood po’ boys, my friend Jeffrey stopped to say hi to the proprietess, Dot Domilise, 80 something and still going strong. They share a mutual friend in the music business who once, in payback for all the great food he enjoyed when he was living there, wrangled a few connections to get Dot a gold-record that had once belonged to her musical hero, Englebert Humperdinck. (She doesn’t hang it in the cafe anymore, afraid that someone might steal it.) Though she really knew neither of us, Dot was solicitous and happy to learn we had come to town to hear music. “Y’all got a place to stay?” she asked and I’m sure if we had said no she would have found a place in her little house adjacent to cafe, right below the solid gold record.

It is now safe to say that this last season of the Sopranos is the worst. There was a lot of speculation before the season began in March that things might not go out with a bang, if not a bada-bing: David Chase was reluctant to return, some principal cast members had other interests. But like Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone in the final, flabby Godfather III, HBO dragged them back in. A big pile of money will do that.

The dilemma may prove resonant, especially to historians of the show: if there is an overarching theme this time out it is corruption, and part of my disppointment might simply stem from seeing Tony et al, having grown fat and complacent, go through the motions of violence and degradation with little discernible enthusiasm for the tasks at hand. Like the tired lap dancers at the Bing, most of the characters seem to be on autopilot, shooting and fucking and stealing because they don’t know anything better. (Actually, is there anything better?)

What gave the early seasons their tang though was the tension that existed between Tony’s waking life and the other reality he sensed in dreams and in therapy. That even as events, and family history, compelled him toward mob bossdom, he knew that part of him flew with the geese that migrated over his swimming pool every year. “My heart goes where the wild geese goes,” as he Holy Modal Rounders used to sing. “No one knows where the wild geese go.”

But in the real world of New Jersey mobsters, wild geese go to Florida — or die trying (see Episode I of this season). And yes, having Tony brought back from the dead, against much of what is left of his will, was a pretty clear statement of the creator’s own position: enough already. But as the following episodes have dragged on we see the continuting moral decay of characters who once seemed conflicted and shrug. Last night Christopher fell off the wagon again, in rather spectacular fashion: doing blow off the ass of some Hollywood hooker, all while dreaming of the swag room Ben Kingsley gave him a glimpse of. Artie lost his shit, not for the first time, falling for some new girl and beating up some soldier in Tony’s army (none too convincingly).

Some of it was good (I agreed with Christopher’s assessment of the hooker’s tits), some of it was bogus (how the hell did Lauren Bacall get snookered into that cameo?) but none of it was new. At this rate the show will have to work hard to make us care if the whole bunch of them gets whacked. At least that way they’d take off a few pounds.

In my imagination, the Beatles killed Gene Pitney. And Roy Orbison, and Lou Christie and all those big emotional voices with the Phil Spector-sized ambitions for their sound. (Not altogether true, of course; Christie had a huge hit with “Lighting Striking Again” after the British invaded, and Roy and Gene kept recording. But the bell was tolling for them, and it had a Mersey beat.)

The advent of the Beatles was, for me like many my age, the beginning of my relationship with rock and roll. I was probably nine when I brought my copy of A Hard Day’s Night over to John and Mark Moritson’s house, I remember listening to “Tell Me Why” and the reaction we had when they got to the bridge

Well I’m begging on my bended knees
If you’ll only listen to my please
If there’s anything I can do —

and on that line John and Paul hit a falsetto note that may not have held a candle to anything Gene or Roy or Lou could do, but they did it in unison with a jumpy ascending guitar part and it THRILLED us. “Play it again!” someone yelled. And we put the needle back, again and again, reveling in the joy and the abandon, until Mrs. Moritson said we would ruin the record if we didn’t stop.

A year or so later, my sister Pat came home with the new Beatles album, Rubber Soul. It was overcast, as it usually was in Crescent City. My father had already left and things stunk at home, in every sense. There was something wrong with the record, too. The Beatles’ faces were strangely elongated on the cover, they were wearing brown suede jackets and black turtlenecks and no one was smiling. They looked like they were at a funeral, looking into my casket. The pictures on the back of the LP were all black and white, too, and they were doing adult things like smoking.

Strangest of all was the sound. Though the first number was a la-la song from Paul (“I’ve Just Seen a Face”) which would have made sense on Help! (and was, I learned later, on the British import), Norwegian Wood was a downer. What did it mean? What was Norwegian Wood? Why did John have to crawl off and sleep in the bath? I knew that there was a gulf between the Beatles’ experience and mine, that adulthood loomed and it would be filled with grey skies and wood smoke, people leaving or sleeping in the bath. I did not identify the feeling as depression then but I do remember leaving before the first side had finished.

“Hey, where are you going?” my sister said. “The album’s not over.”

I was saddened to hear of Gene Pitney’s passing; he died Wednesday after performing in Cardiff, of all places, at the age of 65. He supposedly died quietly in his sleep but to those who remember him, it is hard to imagine him doing anything quietly. He had one of those voices — a great, gulping adolescent voice that could slip into a soprano almost as easily as Roy Orbison’s or into something that sounded like crying (shades of Johnny Ray).

To me he meant the world before the Beatles: It was my sister Pat who had the Beatle albums that we played ad infinitum but before them she had some Pitney and I dug hearing that slippery vocal echo around the house. “Town without Pity” would float my boat but I think I loved “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” even more, being still a child and having not put away childish things. Like guns and John Wayne fixations. (For those who remember the movie, the Duke played the man who really shot the bad LV, played by Lee Marvin, while Jimmy Stewart took the credit.)

I heard the other day that Gene was in the studio recording Liberty Valance when Burt Bacharach, who had written it, came in to say that the studio had released the movie before the song was finished. That didn’t stop the song from being a hit just as the British Invasion didn’t stop Pitney from recording. He famously campaigned to get himself into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and made it just under the wire. He kept singing until he died on the road.

Cardiff was the site of one of history’s great hoaxes but Pitney was the real deal, a survivor in a business that eats most people alive. No giant, maybe, but no fluke either.

Condi Rice visited Blackburn, Lancashire and all we got was this stupid T-shirt. It seems that since Jack Straw visited Rice’s hometown of Buttfuck, Alabama, Rice promised to do the same for him the next time she was in the UK. While she was there she decided to ask Beatles’ biographer Hunter Davies what the line “4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire” in the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” meant.

It means Condi is a square. Even Davies, who was never the hippest of the Fab Four’s chroniclers, thought her question too lame to be answered straight. (Lennon, legend has it, had read a newspaper article about the number of potholes in Blackburn and was no doubt amazed that someone had bothered to count them all, all the more amazed having been no doubt on acid at the time.) Why not listen to the pretty sound of the protestors instead?

For as Rice lamely admitted that mistakes were made in Iraq, she defended the rationale of the war — and was greeted by a chorus of boos wherever she went. “Four Thousand No’s in Blackburn, Lancashire” was how the protest was billed and as the Times reported, friendly faces were in short supply. “Shame on you!” they chanted, while some wore T-shirts that read, “No torture. No compromise.”

Quite a few of the hostiles were Muslims, hand-picked by Straw’s advance team. When Bush’s people select a crowd to greet the president or any of his henchpeople, no dissent is allowed. Everybody stays in line. In England it seems some care more about the holes that have been shot through Iraqui citizens in the growing civil war, a conflict Rice had a hand in creating.

The other article Lennon read that day was about the Guiness heir who killed himself in his car. The juxtaposition of the stories — the hole in the man, the holes in the road — made for a kind of art and a commentary on life’s more futile aspect.

I’d love to turn her on.