But the strip clubs settings were typically dingy, and the dancing artless. Strippers disrobed while walking arhthymically across the stage, embellishing the stroll with bumps and grinds. B-girls and prostitutes worked the dark, ill-smelling rooms, soliciting watered-down drinks and sometimes rolling hapless customers (i.e., robbing them after drugging or clobbering them). A variety of narcotics was available, and they took their toll on musicians, entertainers, and prostitutes.
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The French Quarter clubs of the early postwar years were almost exclusively for white audiences, and white musicians had most of the jobs at strip clubs. Some exceptions were recalled by bassist Richard Payne and drummer Earl Palmer. Payne, who played with early greats like Ed Blackwell, James Black, Ellis Marsalis, Nat Perrilliat, and others, remembers trumpeter Thomas Jefferson’s description of a strip gig. The black band had to play for strippers from behind a curtain, invisible to the white audience.
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