Potterpalooza

June 1, 2007 | It was noon on a Friday at the end of May, and strangely dressed people drifted through the streets of New Orleans' French Quarter.

On Canal, a teenage girl in a shirt reading "Support Severus" stared goggle-eyed at a storefront displaying shirts with slogans like "FEMA Evacuation Plan: Run, bitch, run!" Around the corner at the Walgreen's, an adult woman in black robes was buying hair gel. "Congratulations," said a cashier. It was Tulane's graduation weekend. "Oh, I'm not graduating," said the woman. "I'm Hermione today."

It felt like the first chapter of the first Harry Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," in which wizards who usually hide their identities from the muggle (i.e., non-magical) population are in such a tizzy over the supposed demise of the Dark Lord Voldemort that they carelessly appear in public in their wizarding robes. Except this wasn't Little Whinging, the dreary suburb where J.K. Rowling's fictional orphan grows up before discovering his magical abilities; this was New Orleans, La., and it was 83 degrees out. Besides, there's no such thing as wizards.

But I didn't mention that to these Potter fans, who had come to the Crescent City for Phoenix Rising, a four-day conference with more than a thousand attendees. Organizers chose New Orleans because of the city's history of rising from ashes; phoenixes are crucial to Potter lore, and never more so than at this juncture. (Warning: This story is lousy with spoilers for the first six books, so if you don't want to know, turn back here.)

In two months, readers around the world will have in their hands the seventh and final of Rowling's Potter books, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," a book so long that it may need to be sold with its own sherpa, but which nevertheless must eventually -- after some noisy crying and maybe a quick reread -- end. With it will go the arresting world of witches, wizards, animagi, metamorphmagi and thestrals that Rowling has been doling out in hotly anticipated installments for a decade.

New Orleans, still reeling from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, seemed an appropriate setting for Phoenix Rising, since locals are very good at turning a funeral into a party. Potter-heads had come here to form a second line -- the group of musicians that follows mourners in a traditional New Orleans funeral -- to celebrate the books to which they were about to bid adieu.

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In the belly of the convention -- the Sheraton Hotel -- participants fluttered busily along corridors, sporting shirts that read things like "Ron + Hermione: Isn't It Obvious?" and "Voldemort Stole My T-shirt." Lots of people were also wearing buttons reading "Severus, please," which I initially read as a crowd-inappropriate parody of "Nigga, please," until I realized that these were, of course, the troublingly enigmatic last words of beloved headmaster Dumbledore in Book 6.

Most everyone was gearing up for that night's open-bar affair on Bourbon Street where four wizard rock groups would be playing.

Wizard rock is booming. The genre's ur-band, Harry and the Potters, began performing in 2002. Now dozens of acts, including the Moaning Myrtles, the Hinky Punks, Hollow Godric, and the Hermione Crookshanks Experience, play libraries all over the country. For wizard rockers, these late May days are the dawning of their Age of Aquarius, their Woodstock, their summer of love.

By 9:30, sloppy wizards and witches hung over the balcony, playing bead-toss with street-bound revelers, who were charmed to be getting attention from people in pointy hats.

Onstage, the Whomping Willows -- aka one guy named Matt Maggiacomo -- were playing to a crowd of screaming ladies. Behind him, the amp bore a sign: "Fight Evil: Read Books."

Many wizard bands perform as a Potter-themed persona. Maggiacomo often sings as "Whompy," his vision of the bellicose Whomping Willow into which Ron and Harry drive a flying car in Book 2. Maggiacomo's imagined Whompy yearns to take human form and become a wizard rock star; he also wants Harry's brainy friend Hermione to give him a call: "Five years it's been since we first met/ Now you're kicking it with house elves/ And you're every teacher's pet," sang Maggiacomo, a sturdy fellow in a grey pullover and a striped scarf. He continued, "Why don't you come and check out/ One of my rock shows/ I'll take you to the after-party/ And you can get familiar/ With my human body."

This tree-on-girl action was emblematic of wizard rock's broad view of human (and non-human) sexuality. It's not every day that you see a bunch of twenty-something musicians singing ambisexual songs while women bellow their lusty adoration. Maggiacomo also sang a duet with gangly heartthrob Alex Carpenter (aka the Remus Lupins, also on the evening's bill) in which the two men crooned at each other, "You touch me in my special place," and one ditty about mortal enemies Draco and Harry, "f-a-l-l-i-n-g in love." The crowd was also ambi-nerdy, and yelped its approval when the Whomping Willows mixed things up with a Tolkien tribute about "Tree-beard, the greatest tree who ever lived!"

The concert ended with a girl band, the Parselmouths, who play their roles as bratty teens in the Slytherin house to mane-tossing, eye-rolling, pouty perfection. They performed their hit "What Kind of Name Is Hermione?" and the crowd favorite "Not Half Bad" about the compensations of being sorted into Slytherin ("We get to wear green/ Are expected to be mean!").

The universe created by Potter fans is remarkable in part because of its distance from the texts in which it is rooted. Rowling's books are chock-full of adolescent angst and sexual confusion, sure. But aside from some werewolf-human lovin', they have been pretty hetero-normative. Fan imaginations and perhaps a healthy dose of transference have lent sexually omnivorous appetites to Rowling's creations.

Did she ever envision her texts being crafted into songs about arboreal embrace? Probably not. But authorial intention be damned, there was something refreshing about hearing a crowd of young people gathered at the nexus of the frat-boy universe, cheering equally for straight and gay matchups, for Rowling and for Tolkien. Perhaps you really can fight evil by reading books.

Next page: Harry Potter and the Goblet of ... Colonialism?