The Little Drummer Boy Grows Up?

Cowboy Mouth’s Fred LeBlanc celebrates being alive.

- Brett Milano

If you caught Cowboy Mouth at the 2015 Jazz Fest, you saw one of the best moments of Fred LeBlanc’s life. With the band preceding Jimmy Buffett at the Acura Stage—and thus playing to one of the largest crowds that Fest can hold—LeBlanc brought his five-year-old son Bash (Sebastian) onstage to hit some drums during the finale. You’ve seldom seen a dad grinning more proudly, and you’ve never seen a rock ’n’ roll wild man look more like an old softie.

“Having kids is obviously the best thing I ever did,” LeBlanc says. “That [Jazz Fest appearance] was totally unplanned, and he’d never seen me play before. I’d sing little songs around the house—‘Bash is taking a bath, la-la’—and he’d yell at me to stop. And I’d say hey, people pay good money to see me do this! So we were there before Buffett, there’s a hundred thousand people in front of us, and I bring my son out. We get the audience to shout his name, and we put some protective headphones on him. Ever since then his favorite game to play around the house is Jazz Fest, he’ll pick up a pair of sticks. And he can hang around with me now, because he knows what I do is cool.”

LeBlanc the dad has just released his first children’s book, Fred: The New Orleans Drummer Boy (with illustrator Marita Gentry). It’s his first venture outside the rock world—though not too far outside, since it’s the story of a pint-size drummer who dreams of getting onstage. Meanwhile Cowboy Mouth—the band he formed in 1990 with Paul Sanchez and original bassist Paul Clement, and with ex-Red Rockers guitarist John Thomas Griffith joining soon afterward—has rounded its twenty-fifth anniversary with no signs of slowing down or packing in.