You Better Come Home with Me by John Lawson

For a year or two, it was at Barrister’s Gallery on Royal Street in the French Quarter. A month or two later they told me, ‘It’s just getting beat up here.’ I traded two cypress doors that I had done carvings on for the piano. “Around 1997 Dave and Dez Crawford bought it for the Spanish Moon bar in Baton Rouge. The piano is better traveled than some people. To complete Temptation, Lawson spent three months in the summer of 1997 working nine or ten hours a day in a rented warehouse in Central City, meticulously gluing hundreds of thousands of beads onto the piano with a glue gun filled with airplane glue. After hauling the bags up three flights of stairs, he washed the beads in the bathtub, then sorted them by color. Charles, where he was renting an apartment on the third floor. He’d fit as many bags as he could into the shopping cart and push them to the Audubon Hotel on St. He stuffed each bag with beads grabbed from the street, stashed them in the yard of a friend, and returned later to collect the bags. Each year, after Carnival ended, he would grab a shopping cart and a bunch of contractor bags and roam the St. Lawson collected Mardi Gras beads for more than two decades.

They offered it to Lawson because they knew he had already decorated a piano with beads. Friends bought the bar but didn’t want the piano. The instrument, which Lawson dates to around 1910, is what he calls a “honky tonk” piano, an upright that was in a New Orleans bar until 1997. Lawson’s beaded piano Temptation is currently in residence at Cocha Restaurant in Baton Rouge.

Anything one hundred years old has its own energy, so I’d let the piano dictate the design.” I’d make drawings and then draw the design onto the piano with Sharpie markers. Lawson said, “You really have to start from the center and work your way out. To completely cover a piano with beads, artist John K. Lawson and his beaded piano, 'Temptation.'

You Better Come Home with Me by John Lawson