Month: February 2004

Take no heed of what the publicists say: Not everything can be a smashing success. In its history, the Flyer has covered a number of flops, fizzles, flashes in the pan, and full-bore failures.

Here is a little game for you to play based on 15 years’ worth of these stories. Just as in the popular game show Jeopardy, all answers must be phrased in the form of a question, but with one slight difference: You must also include the word “stupid” in your answer.

Here’s an example:

In the mid-1990s this Mid-South newspaper hired Chris Davis. He eventually became a staff writer.

A: Why is the Memphis Flyer so stupid?

Got it? Good. Let’s play the game.

1) It Came from Canada (100 points): If you believed the “eh”-sayers, this northern import was going to be a miracle balm to soothe the pain and anguish of disheartened Memphis sports fans.

2) Fair Traders (200): A Flyer writer once described this fine chunk of real estate smack in the heart of Memphis as “abandoned, neglected, outdated, forgotten, low-rent,” and a “money loser — take your pick.”

3) “Houston, We Have a Problem” (300): When this sports franchise made a pitstop at the Liberty Bowl, the team’s lousy play and worse P.R. nearly caused a feud between the CA‘s Geoff Calkins and CVB president Kevin Kane.

4) “I Am a Rock” (400): Even Bud Boogie Beach couldn’t make this place thrive. Sidney Schlenker once proposed a makeover for it, beginning with this groovy new name.

5) The Fresh Prince (500): This short-lived downtown bar was not Prince Mongo’s Planet, but owners had a difficult time convincing the Alcoholic Beverages Commission that it wasn’t associated with the mad Zambodian.

6) Styling and Profiling (600): Pastor Kenneth Whalum Jr. accidentally set race relations back 10 years when he said that this abandoned commercial structure, once a mecca for consumers, could come back to life by targeting retailers who appeal to the African-American community. He then added that the facility should also include “a Memphis Police Department mini-precinct and a Shelby County Sheriff’s Department substation to address safety concerns.”

7) Food Fight (700): Everybody knew that this now-defunct addition to Memphis in May’s lineup would eventually get its just desserts. Everybody except for the folks at Memphis in May.

8) It’s time for a DAILY DOUBLE, so place your wager. The category is “Suds and Duds:” This pair of beverages began appearing on shelves in the 1990s and tapped into Memphis’ not-so-famous brewing heritage. Neither were produced anywhere near Memphis.

9) Country Ham (800): Not long ago, you could buy this 2003 mayoral hopeful’s used pacemaker on eBay. Some critics believe that he lost all chances of beating incumbent mayor W.W. Herenton when he appeared shirtless on the cover of the Flyer.

10) X-tra Bad (900): John Nadel, an AP sportswriter reporting from Los Angeles wrote this crash-and-burn: “The demise of —- —- came as a surprise and a disappointment to those who believed the new —- —- had a promising future.”

11) The Great Shakes (1,000): This classically minded theater troupe had no trouble attracting talent or audiences, but after three seasons in the mid-1990s it vanished with nary a trace. In one Flyer story a visiting artist from New York spent virtually the entire interview complaining about how unbearably bad the acoustics were in the group’s main performance space, the Tennessee Brewery.

12) Phatal Attraction (1,500): Before he made headlines for narcotics possession, businessman Kevin Hunter bet that this indoor NFL knockoff could survive in a market where others had failed.

13) Head of the Class (2,000): This special award for MLGW workers is most certainly a thing of the past. Grab one if you can. They are sure to become a collector’s item!

14) City of the Dead (2,500): We knew this tomb was doomed from the day they removed that eerie crystal skull from the rafters.

15) Ta-Ta (3,000): “I’m a boob guy,” an unnamed boob guy once told the Flyer, concerning this ill-fated downtown eatery. “And I’ve got to say,” he continued, “the bikini tops were small, but the bottoms were, like, really, really small.”

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Answers: 1. What were the stupid Mad Dogs? 2. What are the stupid Mid-South Fairgrounds? 3. Were the Oilers stupid or what? 4. What kind of stupid name is Rakopolis? (That’s “Shlenker”) 5. How stupid was “Not Prince Mongo’s Planet”? 6. What was the stupid Mall of Memphis? 7. Who was the stupid person who came up with the Great Southern Food Festival? 8. Why were Memphis Brown and Goldcrest so stupid? 9. Who died and left John Willingham stupid? 10. Has there ever been anything more stupid than the XFL? 11. Was the River City Shakespeare Festival totally stupid? 12. Why were the Pharaohs so darn stupid? 13. What is the stupid Herman Morris bobblehead. 14. What’s not stupid about the stupid Pyramid? 15. Remember how stupid Silk and Lace was?

Score:

• 10,000 to 19,500: You are the King of Rock-and-Roll.

• 7,000 to 9,999: You are a Big Muddy Maniac.

• 3,000 to 6,999: You are Bluff Buff.

• 0 to 2,999: You are stupid.

 

How in the world has it been 15 years since the first issue of The Memphis Flyer? How has that much time gone by so quickly? And how does one sum up something like this? A decade and a half? It’s hard to fathom.

Back in the old days, when I had to walk six miles to work in the snow and edit the Flyer by candlelight (actually, I think I was driving a 10-year-old Mazda with shag carpet and a horrible gas leak), I spent much of my time talking with people in the public about the paper. No, I wasn’t calling around asking people their opinions or holding focus groups. As editor, I was fielding about 100 calls a day from every lunatic in the city who had two cents to throw in. This started two months before the first issue ever came out, with lots of people telling me what was wrong with the Flyer, even though it didn’t exist yet. And once it did exist, the floodgates opened. We were too liberal. We were too conservative. We were too positive. We were too negative. We were original. We were copycats. We were loved. We were hated.

But much more time-consuming than handling the criticisms was the fact that when your name is on the masthead of a newspaper as its editor and you try to do some fairly outrageous things, people with dire psychological problems tend to think you think the same way they do, and they want to become your best friend. Like the S&M prostitute who began calling about, oh, nine times a day from prison to let me know she really related to me and to inform me that she was being held there illegally just because she cracked the sink in her cell with her cellmate’s head. Nice, huh? She even sent me her prison ID card in the mail along with the name of someone in the police department to give it to so he could rescue her from this unwarranted peril. Once out of jail, she appeared at the Flyer offices with reams of documents so we could write and publish her life story — along with some very, uh, interesting photographs that involved a lot of safety pins and leather. Not sure what ever happened to her, but hopefully she found happiness.

Then there was the elderly man who sent letter after letter, asking us to publish his story, “The Persecution of the Small Penis.” It seems that he lived in his sister’s closet and sold ironing-board covers for a living and really wanted to get into journalism — or at least address that one point. Not sure what ever happened to him either, but hopefully he found a forum somewhere for his prose.

There were many calls from one man, who claimed that an anti-Semitic organized crime bunch kept chasing him into gay bars because he had figured out the ingredients in Coca-Cola, and they wanted to tap his brain. There was also the guy who came into the office and threatened to beat the crap out of me because of some comments I made about those duck bus things that drove around on the streets and also floated. He later apologized, and we got a good laugh out of it.

Those are just some of the Flyer fans from the old days who come to mind immediately. Well, nothing comes to my mind immediately anymore, but they are standouts.

Somehow, amid all that, we managed to get a paper out each week. And, looking back, I’m not really sure if I know what to say, other than we were very ambitious. In the first issue of the Flyer, we came out of the dugout to save the local environment, taking on the Velsicol chemical plant with our debut cover story, David Lyons’ “Poison for Profit.” Our first movie review found Cynthia Sutter taking a look at the same-sex union of two men in Torch Song Trilogy. Belinda Killough recommended listening to the music of Toots Hibbert, Rufus Thomas, and Etta James. Cory Dugan reviewed the paintings of Robert Fichter, saying that his works reminded him of a “black velvet painter on acid.” In addition to his cover story, David Lyons also reported to us as the “Nighthawk,” writing about a club on Beale Street that, at least one night of the week, forgot the blues and offered up Cabaret Voltaire and the Clitz. The first installament of News of the Weird in Memphis told us about the losers in a Miss Thailand beauty contest breaking into the winner’s hotel room and stuffing her cape and scepter into the toilet. Our “Rumor Mill” had it that the driver of Dennis Quaid, while in town filming Great Balls of Fire, stole a stash of napkins, sacks, and straws from a local Dairy Queen and sold them on the black market as the star’s “personal paper supplies.” Tom Prestigiacomo’s “Let Them Eat Cake” wished Happy Birthday that week to an array of characters from Sonny Bono and Sidney Poitier to Cybill Shepherd and Edna St. Vincent Millay. And in our “After Dark” dark listings, you could read what was going on at the likes of the Bombay Bicycle Club, the Antenna club, and the Vapors/Bad Bob’s. Now how old do you feel?

One of my favorite things was the column “One Night Stands,” in which we reviewed rental movies. I don’t even know why we did this other than we liked to watch movies. In the beginning, most of these were penned by myself and by Ed Weathers, then manuscripts editor for the Flyer‘s sister publication Memphis magazine. Ed explored such artful and meaningful films as My Life As a Dog, The Tin Drum, and Never Cry Wolf. I, on the other hand, saw this as a blatant opportunity to write about every sick, bad, campy B-movie I could get my hands on, including such classics as Polyester, Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (what other movie starred Cher and Karen Black, who played a transsexual?), Sunset Boulevard, Mommie Dearest, and The Women.

Our Los Angeles correspondent, Bill Givens, took the world of cinema a step further with a cover story on the Oscars, which he attended and reported on during those first few weeks of publication. In “A Night at the Oscars,” he told us about aging porn star Edie Williams, who strolled up the red carpet at the Academy Awards each year only to be turned away. And Edie wasn’t getting any younger, Givens told us, writing, “Each year the square inch-age of fabric she wears is in inverse ratio to her advancing age. Edie’s starting to sag a bit these days, sort of taking on the appearance of an Austrian drape. Not a pretty sight. More like ten pounds of hockey pucks in a five-pound bag.” What were we thinking?

No one remembers exactly how this came about, but by the third issue of the Flyer, there was a weekly column by yours truly called We Recommend. This started out as a straightforward “best bets” kind of thing, listing various events of interest taking place around town each week. I honestly don’t know how it morphed into the juvenile ranting it became and continues to be, but somehow it did and, boy, did it make some people mad. One caller said I should be put to death, others wrote hate mail, and some people actually liked it. You would think I would have just gone away by now, but hey, somebody has to pipe up every week and say that George W. Bush is the worst president in history. And to think I’ve actually had not one but two Bush presidents to deal with on that page.

One final thing. I also wrote a lot on that page about my cat, even using her photograph from time to time alongside mentions of cat shows in town. When we started the Flyer, she was 2 years old and I was 29. Today, I am 44 and she is 17, still alive and well and still sitting here beside me as I write, having clawed me awake to feed her at 4 a.m. and then curling up and looking like an angel once full of her breakfast of Fancy Feast and half-and-half. It’s kind of comforting to know that in this crazy world, some things are meant to be and don’t change. I just hope none of you laid money on the bet that we would still be around and making it without adult diapers. I know I wouldn’t have.

I left as editor of the Flyer after four years to move across the newsroom as editor of Memphis magazine for the next five, and then to my current job at Carpenter/Sullivan Advertising. Ironically, my office is a block away from the Flyer‘s. But I still feel close to the paper more than just in physical distance. And to those of you who were there in the beginning, reading this paper and still picking it up now and then, all I can say is thanks for hanging in there. We may not have always hit the mark back in the beginning, but I can honestly say we tried. And all in all, it’s been a pretty fun ride.

No Bandwagons, No Sacred Cows

15 years of looking at the news a little differently.

by John Branston

Here’s the point of alternative newspapers. Call us underground papers, hippie papers, liberal rags, whatever you like. But at our best, we’re alternative sources of news and views. It’s as simple as that.

If there is a bandwagon, then there is no need for one more passenger. If all heads are nodding in agreement and pointing north, there must be something to be said for turning away and looking south. If someone or something is a sacred cow, who needs one more reporter paying their cheesy respects? If everyone loves the mayor or the home team or the new thing this year, you can bet that won’t be true next year. If nobody will touch a story, then maybe somebody should.

These stories were Flyer firsts and pretty good (whether or not anyone else in the media followed up on them).

* Jackson Baker’s weekly column, “Politics.” The first, best, and now the only.

* Our reports on the first sure signs of the broken Herenton/Ford alliance in 1993, just two years after the landmark election.

* Gerry House and her deal with ServiceMaster. The national Superintendent of the Year as corporate huckster.

* “A License To Print Money,” a 1992 look at profit margins and financials at The Commercial Appeal. Would you believe a profit of 36 percent?

* Medical Examiner O.C. Smith’s story doesn’t add up. For a year, only the Flyer said so.

* The corporate culture and energy futures buying at MLGW in 2001. Set the tone for what all media began reporting in 2004.

* “The Bucks Stop Here,” our first of three salary surveys of local nonprofits in 1995.

* “The Liberation of Harold Ford”: team coverage of the Ford trial in 1993.

* Our 1998 stories on special prosecutor Larry Parrish’s privately financed role in raids on local topless clubs. Two years later, the Tennessee Supreme Court threw out the indictments and disqualified Parrish and the entire staff of this district attorney’s office from pursuing the cases.

* The controversy around the Memphis Arts Council’s Education in the Schools program in 2003. Who knew art bureaucrats could stonewall so well?

* Our late-1990s coverage on continuing problems inside the Shelby County Jail.

* Tim Sampson and We Recommend. Can he say those things?

* “Fortunate Sons”: Richard Smith and Kerr Tigrett and their clash with the hallowed traditions of the University of Virginia.

* The Memphis Grizzlies. Repeat after us: The media are not supposed to be an extension of the Grizzlies marketing department.

* Willie Herenton tells us to “Go To Hell” and provides the Flyer with a cover story and headline. Hey City Council, school board, and MLGW: We feel your pain.

* Was President Bush AWOL in Alabama? We found the local angle that became national news.

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Big Scoops, Cherries on Top

Yes, we’re different; but we’re also pretty damn good at being the same old thing.

by Jackson Baker

In his “Bandwagon” notes, John Branston offers a list of stories for which the Flyer has provided illumination in areas that would otherwise have remained dark or but dimly lit. He has in a way preempted much of my previously chosen subject area — that of scoops — exclusives on subjects of the day or freshly unearthed material or timely disclosures so detailed and provocative that they redefined the way in which significant things had to be viewed.

The fact is, the Flyer — in a field of local news gatherers that includes a well-endowed daily paper and several enterprising broadcast stations — has more than held its own in the simple, traditional act of breaking news. Branston does not mention some of his own scoops, many of them concerning the courts or the boardrooms of the Mid-South.

He does indicate, without expressly acknowledging his own vital contribution, the tag-team coverage he and I did at the second trial, in 1993, of former U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Sr. for bank fraud. This is one that resulted in the longtime congressman’s final exculpation — or “liberation,” as we put it in a definitive concluding article, replete with analysis of evidence and interviews with jurors. (Bet you can’t tell which one of us wrote which part of that 3,500-word opus; at this remove, we can barely tell ourselves.)

There are some omissions from the above list, notably examples of the peerless coverage of local sports by our late editor Dennis Freeland, one of those rare journalistic types who could remain hard of nose and still be generally beloved. Not a coaching change occurred in local college ranks without its having been prefigured and explained in advance in a Freeland column. His intuition was utterly reliable, whether concerning the strategic weaknesses of good-guy University of Memphis football coach Rip Scherer or the bad-guy aspects (and strategic weaknesses) of Tiger basketball coach Tic Price.

Most of our scoops, and most of our solid coverage over the years has come from simply working the beat, doing the day-to-day, hour-to-hour grunt coverage that might result in, say, Mary Cashiola’s memorable member-by-member profile some months ago of the chaotically imploding Memphis school board. (Try merely attending one of those marathon school board sessions to see how hard a nose she has!)

The name Phil Campbell needs to be dragged in here; it was Campbell’s dogged and richly documented pursuit of mutual backscratching arrangements between Mayor Willie Herenton and consultant Robert L. Green in mid-1997 that still remains a template for such investigations.

As different as we are — and Branston has made a case for that — we are also no slouches at the same old thing that journalism has always been: getting the news, getting it right, and getting it first. We have been inconvenienced in this regard by being a weekly and having to wait days sometimes to tell what we know — but even that handicap has been whittled down somewhat in recent years by our ability to go 24/7 on the Flyer Web site: MemphisFlyer.com.

Surely somewhere else in this issue the numerous awards we’ve received over the years for newsgathering are touted up. If not, then count modesty as among our virtues. There are many things that we are — and many ways of defining us: The Second Coming of the Second Daily; the Time and Newsweek of our circulation area; and, as Branston suggests, the indispensable Alternate Take.

I would just add to that that we are, uncommonly often, the first — and best — take.

A SIMPLE PLAN

The team isn’t playing together. The fans are restless or apathetic. The coach has been there too long. The players aren’t listening. Most of them want another coach. Some of them think they should be coach.

If politics were sports, we would all know the next step in the brawl at City Hall. Mayor Willie “Coach'” Herenton would be fired or players would be traded.

But it isn’t, so that’s not an option. Still, something had to be done. So in the end, Herenton yielded to the cries of his constituents begging for peace and said that, for all practical purposes, he is calling off the war.

If the mayor didn’t hit all the right notes Tuesday, he hit a lot of them. He mentioned the Bible, his own stubbornness, the virtue of listening, and the importance of looking ahead and working harmoniously with Nashville and the Memphis business community.

There is still, however, some unfinished business and some possible stumbling blocks that could turn good mayor into bad mayor in the remaining three years and ten months of his fourth term.

There are three things the mayor and the council can do to permanently defuse the situation. Returning to the sports metaphor, they may not be able to do them without shaking up the coaching staff.

The mayor’s chief administrative officer, Keith McGee, must gain the respect of the council. The council’s attorney, Allan Wade, must regain the respect of the mayor. And the mayor and council must replace the entire board of Memphis Light Gas & Water and empower a new one to find a new MLGW president.

First, the chief administrative officer. The CAO is the link between the mayor and council. He — and it has always been a he — is the mayor’s man. The current CAO, McGee, is the mayor’s man. He didn’t come up through the ranks or head a division of city government like his predecessor Rick Masson did. For reasons not entirely his fault, McGee doesn’t have the ear of the council, largely because he is seen as Herenton’s man.

Second, Wade must get on the same page as the mayor, or vice versa. Despite or maybe because of his 12 years of government experience, Wade has become a stumbling block. He helped the city win some big, big cases, but lately he has been viewed by the mayor as a partisan player loyal to the council, not the city attorney.

The mayor said there is room for disagreement on how the City Charter is viewed. That is apt to be a continuing sore spot.

Third, the mayor should formally dismiss the current five-member board of MLGW. All of their terms have expired anyway. Thanks and goodbye and a hearty handshake for one and all. But it’s time for a new board and a new kind of board member.

Nobody’s going to get a building named after them, ala James Netters. Nobody’s going to do consulting or apply for a job with TVA on the side, ala Franketta Guinn. And nobody’s going to have this job because of their political connections to the mayor. One four-year term on the board and you’re out. Let past MLGW presidents Larry Papasan, David Hansen, Bill Crawford, and Herman Morris suggest nominees. They’re all civic-minded enough to know now is not the time for cronyism. Let Herenton make the formal nominations, and let the council formally approve them. This time they’re both taking one for the team. The board’s first order of business is to work with a search firm to find a new MLGW president within 60 days.

Resolve these three issues and the peace could last. Tempers will cool. Easy targets are gone. The media will have to find something else. Hard feelings will remain, but it’s a start. The alternative is more of the same.