Month: May 2004

Categories
Music Music Features

Labors of Love

You may not know his name, but you know Harlan T. Bobo. You’ve seen him anyway. He’s a perennial sideman, best known as the bass player for Nick D. Ray’s Viva L’American Deathray Music. Now, after too many years of riding shotgun, he’s moved into the driver’s seat with Too Much Love, a beautiful collection songs about one man’s magnificent obsession.

If you’ve ever driven through Midtown, you’ve probably noticed Bobo walking down the sidewalk or riding some ramshackle bike. You’ve probably said to a traveling companion, “I wonder what that guy’s story is.” He’s a lean one, skinny to the point of being sunken with long arms dangling out of a grubby T-shirt, like Stanley Kowalski. He wore a cowboy hat so broken-down even Bob Dylan wouldn’t adopt it and a pencil-thin moustache that looked like he mugged John Waters and made off with the director’s personal grooming habits. If you’ve seen him traveling west, guitar in tow, you may have felt compelled to stop and offer a little advice: “Nashville’s the other way, buddy.”

Of course, Bobo, who began his musical career as a West Coast pedal-steel player, knows exactly where Nashville is, and he knows he doesn’t want to live there.

“I lived in Waynesboro for a while when Yvonne [Bobo] was doing an internship with these master woodworkers who live there in a place called Hippie Hollow. And we would go into Nashville, or we would come to Memphis for work. I worked at a steakhouse in Lawrenceburg back then for this guy named Beefy. He’d put his arm around me and call me ‘Little Buddy.’ He’d have me drive him around so he could shoot at mailboxes on the way to the private club to get drunk. I was fresh out of San Francisco and that was some kind of foreign to me. But we were looking for a city to move to, and Nashville is too much like a little L.A.”

Yvonne Bobo, a sculptor and installation artist, isn’t Harlan’s wife. She’s not his sister either. Right now, she is his boss. And there can be no denying she’s the muse fueling Too Much Love. Every hand-made cover (each one unique) bears a dada-inspired dedication, and the nine-song cycle tells the story of a difficult love affair. Difficult to describe anyway. It’s a personal yarn but never self-absorbed: revealing but never voyeuristic.

Harlan took Yvonne’s name as a “kind of unofficial wedding vow” after he met her in California. Everything that followed was, to hear him tell it, unofficial. It was also impossible to avoid.

“Her name is Bobo, how could I resist?” he says. “What a great name. When I met her I was living in a halfway house in San Francisco. They let me go out at night because playing music was my job. It was kind of weird for everybody else they kept there, because I’d come home smelling like booze and perfume.”

The San Francisco band Bobo played in was called Minnie Pearl Necklace, a punked up country-western burlesque extravaganza fronted by a drag queen.

“But not your every day drag queen,” Harlan points out.

Then along came Yvonne and an adventure that took Harlan from California to Brazil, from Brazil to Waynesboro, and from Waynesboro to Memphis.

“I can’t imagine a better place musically. I was able to go up to all of these guys like Greg Cartwright [of the Reigning Sound] and [Matador recording artist] Tim Prudhomme and ask them if they would help me record. To my surprise, they all said yes, and that’s where [Too Much Love] came from. All these guys would say, let’s try this, or let’s do that, and it worked out. I guess.”

Too Much Love is a folk-rock concept album cut from the same fabric as the Reigning Sound’s debut, Break Up, Break Down. As one might expect given the stellar cast of local talents (Prudhomme, Geoff Soule, Elizabeth Venable, Doug Easley, and Cartwright), it’s quality stuff. Musical content ranges from gentle Spanish guitar on the seductive Tom Waits-inspired opener “It’s Only Love” to the angular guitars riffs and manic ranting on “Too Much Love,” which call to mind “Psycho Street”-era Richard Thompson. The peculiar Billy Swan-ish vocals of “Left Your Door Unlocked,” perhaps the album’s finest cut, wrap themselves around the story of a reluctant stalker passing an ex’s house and knowing it’s temporarily unoccupied. He takes a look around just to see if things have changed and to pretend that nothing’s changed. The song is beautiful, heartbreaking, and maybe even a little creepy.

“I didn’t even know it was about a stalker,” Harlan says, laughing. “Really, I was totally welcome in that house. My presence was almost required.”

Harlan wasn’t born Harlan any more than he was born Bobo, but that’s who he is today. Actually, he’s not entirely sure who he is today let alone what he’s becoming.

“When my mom writes me she writes ‘Dear Harlan,” he says. “She paid $125 to get my birth certificate legally changed to Harlan.” But what’s in a name, right? Gone these days are the crumpled cowboy hat, the pencil-thin mustache, the grubby T-shirt, and the ragged paint-spattered boots. All the visual tropes that made Harlan T. Bobo stand out in a crowd the way his name stands out on a page have been discarded like last year’s next big thing.

“I saw a picture of myself,” he explains with a shrug. “I guess I’ve been trying to market myself lately. I’ve been making all these one-sheets and taking pictures, stamping my name on every single cover: Harlan T. Bobo, Harlan T. Bobo. After a while it’s like, who is that guy Harlan T. Bobo? Tim Prudhomme says I have to imagine myself like a character on the stage. I used to try to write songs like that character in the cowboy hat. They just weren’t true. They just weren’t honest. They just weren’t me.” n

Harlan T. Bobo

Too Much Love record-release party

The Hi-Tone CafÇ

Saturday, May 22

Categories
Music Music Features

sound advice

A busy weekend of music downtown kicks off Friday, May 21st, with local appearances from two very different contemporary country singers. “Where’s the protest rally?” raconteur Steve Earle appears at the Memphis Arts Council’s Artrageous event in the South Main Arts District (see Steppin’ Out, page 19). Meanwhile, down at the other end of downtown, “Where’s the kegger?” party boy Kenny Chesney, perhaps the new king of country music, brings his When the Sun Goes Down Tour to The Pyramid (see Short Cuts, page 41). It’s hard to imagine Earle and Chesney having much in common, but this fan heartily recommends both.

Then, on Saturday, it might be impossible to walk more than a few blocks without hitting some choice live music. Things get started early back on South Main with the StranjBrew HooDoo Festival, which will claim four venues at the corner of Main Street and G.E. Patterson to host a bevy of local talents. The fest runs from 4 to about 9 p.m. At Earnestine & Hazel’s the lineup is: Hans Faulhaber, Sid & Steve Selvidge, Critical Path, and Cane Pole. At The Power House: Jim Dickinson, Don McGregor, Bert Stegall, and Mark Allen. At the Arcade: Amy & the Tramps, Thingamajig, Jeffrey Evans & Suzi Hendrix, Hank & Bedouin, and Bob Camp & Freddie Friction. At Harry’s Detour South Main: The Keep, Ripple, Nate Whitlock, and The Great War.

Later that night, folk legend John Prine performs at The Orpheum. A witty, sardonic songwriter with one of those distinct voices Bob Dylan made safe for pop music, Prine released a string of acclaimed albums in the Seventies, including Pink Cadillac, which he recorded in Memphis at Sam Phillips’ post-Sun studio. Prine’s Memphis connection continued with his affiliation with local songwriters Keith Sykes and Todd Snider, the later of whom recorded on Prine’s Oh Boy label and will open this week’s Memphis concert.

Meanwhile, over at the Mud Island Amphitheater, local booking company Snax puts on its biggest show ever with a blues-rock package headlined by The North Mississippi Allstars. The band will be making their first local appearance in quite a while after spending the last couple of months touring Europe. The Allstars will be joined on Mud Island by like-minded locals (or regionals) such as Alvin Youngblood Hart, Cary Hudson, and Duff Dorrough.

And if all that’s not enough, Beale Street is sure to be hopping this weekend, with musical options including: Kirk Smithhart at Alfred’s, Ruby Wilson and Preston Shannon at B.B. King’s, The Masqueraders at Blues City CafÇ, Charlie Wood at King’s Palace, Barbara Blue at O’Sullivan’s, and James Govan at Rum Boogie CafÇ. n

—

Categories
Music Music Features

Bubba and the Beast

Look around. There’s doctors down on Wall Street sharpenin’ their scalpels and tryin’ to cut a deal. Meanwhile, back at the hospital we got accountants playin’ God and countin’ out the pills

Yeah, I know, that sucks — that your HMO ain’t doin’ what you thought it would do

But everybody’s gotta die sometime and we can’t save everybody. It’s the best that we can do. — “Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)” by Steve Earle

“It is never, ever unpatriotic or un-American to question anything in a democracy, no matter what anybody else says what an insult it is,” the ever controversial Steve Earle recently told a New Zealand reporter.

Earle had made the list: The New York Post‘s now-infamous list of traitors who dare to disagree with our infallible president.

“I just wasn’t raised as an artist to believe that you censor yourself because of being afraid of offending someone,” he says.

Earle is nothing if not an artist. But the descriptions author, activist, poet, actor, and troubadour also fit. As a musician, he’s always been impossible to categorize by trend or genre. Is he the proud papa of alt-country or the last of the real Texas Outlaws? When Earle and Randy Travis made the Nashville scene in the mid-1980s, the industry coined the term new country just for them.

Earle’s earliest recordings flirt with classic rockabilly, but his earliest releases drew comparisons to Springsteen. Over the years since his 1986 debut Guitar Town alerted critics (if not the public) to a new light shining in the forest of American roots music, Earle has recorded classic rock, country, Celtic, folk, and bluegrass. He’s harmonized with Emmylou Harris and Sheryl Crowe. He’s gotten down in the gutter with the Pogues. He’s become a genuine workingman’s hero with serious academic appeal.

At age 49 Earle’s name is still occasionally linked to Springsteen or John Mellencamp. When he sang “Shadowlands” on the politically charged album Jerusalem, he fomented his ties to Hank Williams and the heart of Honky Tonk.

Way out yonder, where the wild wind blows

There’s a place where lonely fools can go

Where if you hold your money, it’ll burn your hand

So you buy you a ticket to the shadowland.

More and more frequently, however, Earle’s name is paired with cultural icons and cult heroes like Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard, and Townes Van Zandt, Earle’s wayward mentor.

“Good teacher, bad role model.” That’s Earle’s standard description of “Pancho and Lefty” songwriter Van Zandt. He was an incorrigible drunk who Earle, while still in his teens, once tied to a tree to keep him sober. Of course, we’re going “behind the music” here, and naturally Earle follows in Van Zandt’s footsteps. While writers at Rolling Stone penned a glowing “Country Album of the Year” review for Guitar Town, Earle was cruising the streets of south Nashville looking for a fix. He’s blamed a few of his many failed marriages on “mutual interest in drug abuse,” and he did a few months jail time in the early 1990s. But that was then.

If there is an artist who Earle may be rightly compared, it’s the Man in Black: Johnny Cash. He’s been a mean-eyed cat, sampled all the best sins, and come through all the better. His tireless campaign to end the death penalty has made him a hero of the left while his redneck anthems have made him the darling of gun-rights-Republicans. For almost 20 years his songs have redefined traditions and defied trends. Through it all Earle has never been a man to beg for mercy. Justice has been his chief concern.

Bubba and the Beast are the two fictional personas Earle assumes when he writes his songs. Bubba’s a redneck. He’s the guy wailing, “I learned a thing or two from Charlie don’t you know. You better stay away from Copperhead Road.” The Beast is a malevolent spirit that draws down depression like lightning. It’s the voice of “Shadowlands,” and “John Walker’s Blues,” a sympathetic look at the young American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh.

“I don’t like Kid Rock, and I’m not trying to impress Charlie Daniels and Hank Williams Jr. or any of those people,” Earle told the New Zealand press. “[I have] some friends I think are really politically aware and are scared, but I wouldn’t name any names. But they are terrified about the effect [that speaking out against the government] would have on their careers And the government has capitalized on that.”

Bubba, the Beast, rebel rocker, country torchbearer, political shack-shaker, social activist, uncompromising artist not to be missed, ladies and gentlemen, Steve Earle. n

Steve Earle headlines Artrageous, a fund-raiser for the Greater Memphis Arts Council on Friday, May 21st at United Warehouse, 138 St. Paul Ave. (one block east of S. Main’sCentral Train Station). In addition to Earle, Artrageous will showcase a variety of visual and performing artists. Tickets are available through Ticketmaster.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

At the Heart

TOPEKA — It is no exaggeration to say, as various notables did on Monday, with very little variance from speaker to speaker, that Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was the most important legal decision of the 20th century.

It is also something of an understatement to add, as most of them did — from Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry at one event to President Bush at another — that “more needs to be done” to eradicate the separate and unequal situation of the races in America today.

The late Oliver Brown of Topeka, who filed the epochal school desegregation suit on behalf of his daughter Linda, got his due — as did Thurgood Marshall, later a Supreme Court Justice and in 1954 the able young NAACP lawyer who successfully pressed the landmark case.

Topeka itself was, paradoxically, both an odd and an appropriate site for the history commemorated Monday. Its desegregation suit was one of five being heard by the Supreme Court in 1954, and, in fact, the city’s schools had been quietly integrated shortly after the suit was filed. It was picked as the title case of the “separate-but-equal” issue to minimize controversy, since the city harbored little to no racial animosity. Topeka had been home base to John Brown, the antislavery patriarch whose raid on far-off Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, was one of the precipitating acts of the Civil War.

In the 1850s, Topeka was also the focus of settlers’ resistance to the expansion of slavery and became the “free-state” capital (arrayed against the slavers’ capital in nearby Lecompton) in the runup to the war that would see the territory aptly characterized as “Bleeding Kansas.”

In short, this middling-sized Middle American state capital, which is situated at the exact geographical center of the continental United States — at the heart of the heart of the country, as it were — was a far piece from Mississippi, where, some 10 years after Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights workers, both black and white, were still laying down their lives in desperate efforts to break down the racial barriers.

A personal note, if I might: My own parents — born, as it happens, in Mississippi — are buried in Topeka. At a time in the late ’60s when none of their offspring were still living in Memphis (I was in Arkansas), they migrated to Topeka to be near my sister, the wife of a Topeka lawyer. I developed my own relationship to the city later on, when for a longish spell I was associated with a cadre of consciousness researchers at the Menninger Foundation, then one of the nation’s preeminent psychiatric institutions.

The Menninger Foundation has since decamped, and, among other signs of urban decline, the city zoo has, for budgetary and other reasons, said goodbye to its reptile building and its striped tigers. Like other American cities — and for no “white-flight” reason, since its black and Hispanic populations are both small — it has suffered inner-city blight, with concentric rings of progressively newer and shinier malls marking the transfer of the middle class ever outward.

At their separate-but-equal photo ops, neither Kerry — who appeared at a proclamation of the anniversary at the State Capitol — nor Bush — who formally dedicated Monroe School, focus of the Brown suit, as a national historic site — said anything memorable. Kerry managed a shot at the administration’s No Child Left Behind initiative, and Bush included a somewhat oblique defense of the program in his own remarks.

A solitary anti-Bush picketer was turned away at the Monroe School grounds, and two members of the ragtag Phelps family, a fanatical local antiabortion clan, were led away in handcuffs, shouting “God Hates America!”

He doesn’t, we presume. But, on the strength of Monday’s goodhearted if somewhat tepid rhetoric at the heart of the heart of the country, coupled with the unsettling news from abroad, we might hope that He indulges us with some benign neglect. n

Jackson Baker is a Flyer senior editor.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

POLITICS: Main Men

MAIN MEN

Lt. Gov. John Wilder, the 82-year-old dean of the Tennessee General Assembly and the longtime Speaker of the state Senate, was dishing through a plate of salmon and stir-fried vegetables at the Cumberland Club last Thursday, sitting at a window seat overlooking the state Capitol building and reflecting on some things, both hither and thither, that concern him these days.

They included (in no particular order) his forthcoming race for reelection against Republican opponent Ron Stallings, his relations with other state leaders (notably House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh and Governor Phil Bredesen), the fate of some significant last-minute legislation, the fuss he has kicked up of late concerning his views on such subjects as abortion and affirmative action (“My constituents aren’t going to be bothered,” he said cagily), and the nature of the universe.

On the latter subject, he proclaimed that “the cosmos is eternal,” and dilated on such aspects of it as the oxidation/carbonation process that, paradoxically, underlies both life (as in the act of breathing) and death (as in the corrosion of surfaces). He inveighed against the excesses of environmentalists, pronouncing, “The solution to pollution is dilution,” and ridiculed attempts at creating synthetic fuels when, as he said, “all the fuel we need is already there, and it’s in the ground.”

Wilder is, somewhat famously, a nominal Democrat who prides himself on his bipartisanship (his perennial elections to head the Senate depends on reliable backing from senators in both parties, and he appoints both Democrats and Republicans to head committees). He is distressed therefore to find himself once again, as in 2002, the target of a Republican opponent..

Of course, Wilder will probably be supported, this year as four years ago, by most members of the senate, Republicans as well as Democrats. His problem so far has been the current Number one Democrat, Governor Bredesen. As Wilder observed, the governor has acquired an admirable level of public support by enacting Republican policy objectives (serious budget cuts coupled with reforms in such areas as workers’ comp, TennCare, and driver’s licenses) while performing fund-raising favors for Democrats.

“He’s got his favorites,” said Wilder about recipients of Bredesen’s fund-raising favors. “So far,” he added pontedly, “they haven’t included Senator [Steve] Cohen, and they haven’t included me.” He has hopes that the latter fact, at least, will change.

n One Senate Democrat who can almost certainly call on the governor for help is Memphis’ Roscoe Dixon, now a candidate for General Sessions Court clerk. Dixon received a thank-you call from the governor last Thursday, shortly after changing his mind (after abundant lobbying) and casting the decisive votes that allowed the governor’s workers’ comp legislation (opposed by organized labor, trial lawyers, and some key Democrats) to pass its final committee hurdle in the Senate.

  • Doubt that Bredesen is the political man of the hour? Benny Lendermon, president of ther Riverfront Development Corporation, last week cited the governor as a character reference of sorts for the RDC’s agenda, which is due for a crucial hearing this week at city council.

    According to Lendermon (who told the story on the night the RDC played cohost at the barbecue festival tent of Mayor Willie Herenton) the governor, while on a visit to the city last year, fell to wondering where might be a good place to each lunch with a good view of the river. Told that the number of restaurant venues was limited, the governor reportedly said, “What! You have an asset like this [the river], and you leave it undeveloped! Unbelievable!”(Or words to that effect.)

    The RDC would, in any case, probably have difficulty getting Bredesen to publicly endorse the riverfront project. With politics of his own to deal with, the governor has so far proved loath to get involved in local controversies of any sort.

  • Shelby County Mayor A C Wharton, who proved no political slouch in winning his own 2002 race with ease, is frequently asked to apply his skills to other people’s efforts Ð having served as campaign manager for two of Memphis Mayor Herenton ‘s reelection efforts and as Shelby County director for such statewide races as that of Democrat Jim Cooper for the U.S. Senate in 1994.

    Wharton, a native of Lebanon in middle Tennessee, was tapped this week to serve as keynote speaker at a West Tennessee Kerry-for-President rally in Jackson.

    Watch Out, Willie!

    Two prominent Memphians who are meditating on a city mayor’s race for 2007 are entrepreneur/activist Carol Coletta and city council member Carol Chumney. Both, either directly or through surrogates, have begun to take soundings of possible support.

    Through each has other potential sources of support, each is clearly also counting on the gender factor which has propelled so many women, especially judicial candidates, to success in recent years.

    Chumney, who has experienced a good deal of difficulty with her council colleagues since taking office, last week revisited the state Capitol in Nashville, scene of her 13 years’ service in the state legislature. Members of the city’s African-American clergy report approaches from her about a potential mayor’s race.

  • Rematch? Another well-known political figure is planning a race in the near future. Ready?: Joe Cooper.

    The former county squire, veteran political operative, and frequent candidate says he wants to make another run at the District 5 count commission seat now held by Republican Bruce Thompson, who beat Cooper, then running as a Democrat, in 2002.

    • Categories
    News News Feature

    CITY BEAT

    LEADING LIBERAL

    At a time when Memphis is afflicted with watery ideas and partisan political in-fighting, if you only buy one book this summer, you could do worse than Lucius: Writings of Lucius Burch.

    Burch was a Memphis attorney and adventurer who died in 1996. An outspoken liberal, he fought against Boss Crump, defended Martin Luther King Jr., and befriended the NAACP. The “neophytes” who collected his writings and put out this book with publish-on-demand Cold Tree Press in Nashville Ñ Cissy Caldwell Akers, Shirley Caldwell-Patterson, Bill Coble, and John Noel Ñ did Burch and Memphis a service. At 425 pages, it may be a little too long, and the quality is uneven. But Burch had something to say. He led an incredibly full life. And he kept good notes and put his first-class education and wide reading to good use. His travel writings alone are worthy of Paul Theroux or Tim Cahill.

    As a lawyer, Burch made good money, but he didn’t spend it on box seats, fancy clothes, or a Destin condo. Practicing law, he wrote, “permits more freedom and is most conducive to living an expansive personal life.” To him that meant a private plane, a castle in Ireland, hunting and fishing and scuba diving anywhere he wanted to go, and backpacking by himself for weeks at a time. He reasoned that all human motion by whatever means involved risk, and it was just a matter of calculating the odds.

    There is a great story in this collection by Tom BeVier, a former reporter for The Commercial Appeal. It’s called “The Most of the Buffalo Snort,” the reference being to the Indian practice of getting everything out of the buffalo but the snort. When Burch crashed his private plane in a thunderstorm in Memphis in 1972, the city desk got a report that he was dead. BeVier was assigned to write his obituary. Burch survived, despite severe injuries, and he allowed BeVier to accompany him on a hike on the Appalachian Trail two years later. At the age of 62, Burch walked “the obituary writer” nearly to exhaustion and regaled him with stories. It’s a kind of local journalism that is nearly extinct.

    We can only hope that Burch’s type of man and civic leadership is not extinct, but you have to wonder. He was a self-described secular humanist who made no secret of his reliance on reason over religious doctrine. Today’s politicians and columnists who wear their Christianity like a badge would have no use for him, nor he for them.

    Burch never strayed from liberalism, but some of his best friends were conservatives. No “red staters” versus “blue staters” for him. He delighted in telling the story of a legal adversary who called him a “super-serviceable son-of-a-bitch” because “if you ordered a carload of sons of bitches and the railroad parked the boxcar at your factory and you opened the door and only he stepped out, you wouldn’t make a claim against the railroad for shortage.”

    A hardcore conservationist and namesake of the Wolf River nature preserve in Shelby Farms, he shot eagles for a bounty in Alaska as a young man. He did it not for sport but at the behest of the U.S. Biological Survey and the Territory of Alaska, which were being prodded by ranchers and fishermen who saw the eagle as a predator. What a shocker that would be to some of the less tolerant members of the Sierra Club. But Burch made no apology for it, and this book makes it clear that the range and depth of his youthful experience made him a better and wiser man.

    There is not a word about organized sports in this volume, but Burch was a world-class sportsman in a different sense. He dove on shipwrecks in dangerous waters, rode horses on mountain trails above the timber line, and fly-fished for his dinner on solitary hikes in Switzerland. Our local society set grins from the covers of glamour magazines in their tuxedos and black dresses. Burch peers out from the cover of Lucius beneath a slouch hat and wearing an old coat.

    In interviews with newspaper reporters, he often said that Memphis had fallen behind Atlanta and Nashville largely because of a failure of leadership, by which he meant not only politicians but leading citizens such as Nashville’s “big mules.” He was as fallible as anyone, of course. In “Why I Am a Liberal,” he defended busing for school desegregation. Integrated schools, he believed, were essential if blacks and whites were to understand each other. “Few people now argue with the correctness of this concept,” he said in 1970. Four years later 34,000 white Memphians begged to differ.

    What a complicated, fascinating, vigorous man, and how lucky Memphis was to have him for so many years.

    Categories
    Theater Theater Feature

    Becoming Model Citizens

    After serving with the U.S. military in the Grenada conflict, Richard Haney moved home to Chicago. But like many before him, he turned to drugs to ease his post-war trauma and eventually had trouble keeping a job. In an effort to turn his life around, he moved his wife and five kids to Memphis.

    “I thought by changing our geographical location, things would be better,” Haney says. “But it didn’t work out that way. I ended up with the same problems I was having in Chicago — using and not keeping a job. Through our habit, we lost our children to the Department of Children’s Services [DCS].”

    DCS officials told Haney that he had a year to straighten up or he’d never regain custody of his children. After checking himself into the Veterans Administration hospital, he learned of Alpha Omega Veteran’s Services, a non-profit organization that specializes in helping veterans. He entered the program along with his wife and after extensive drug treatment and financial counseling, they were able to get their children back.

    While Haney was in recovery, he wrote a musical based on his experiences with addiction and treatment. Recovery, a three-act production that follows the course of one man’s struggle, will be shown at Crichton College on Friday and Saturday, May 21st and 22nd.

    “People always stereotype us as ‘once an addict, always an addict,’ and we can never get past that,” Haney says. “I thought if we allowed the community to come into our world and view things as we do, they might change how they think.”

    Money raised from ticket and concession sales will help fund construction of Alpha Omega’s 32-unit housing complex for homeless veterans. The complex, which will be located on Court Street near the intersection of McNeil in Midtown, will house veterans who have gone through the Alpha Omega program but don’t have permanent housing.

    Even exemplary veterans have problems staying sober without permanent housing, says Cordell Walker, executive director of Alpha Omega.

    “They end up having to recycle back through the program after falling off the wagon because when they got to the point of moving into permanent housing, everyone slammed doors in their faces. They’d only look at how bad of a person they were in the past,” Walker says.

    In addicton to providing basic food, shelter, and clothing, Alpha Omega offers services for homeless veterans, such as drug treatment, occupational therapy, and counseling. Currently, veterans can choose to stay for 30- or 90-day programs, or they can go into a dependent-living program or semi-permanent housing.

    The new complex will be the first permanent housing offered by Alpha Omega, and there is already a list to fill all 32 units. An on-site administration building will house counseling and treatment programs and will allow case workers to monitor residents. Walker says they also plan to offer cultural activities such as summer theater. Most of the actors in Recovery are Alpha Omega clients or graduates of the program.

    The estimated cost of the complex is $2.3 million. Although several housing-assistance programs and the City of Memphis are helping, the project needs additional funding.

    The need for veteran services is enormous, Walker says. Veterans comprise about 47 percent of the city’s homeless population, according to Alpha Omega statistics. Many are veterans of the Vietnam war who felt displaced when they returned home, Walker explains.

    Many of those who developed drug habits in the war continued using drugs when they returned home. Like Haney, many lose everything.

    “A lot of them end up in places they don’t need to be, like mental institutions or jail,” says Walker. “Where they need to be is in programs like this. Here, it’s all about fellowship and camaraderie, and we’re all the same. We’re all working through something, and we’re all trying to reintegrate into society.” n

    Recoverywill be shown at Crichton College (255 North Highland) on Friday and Saturday, May 21st and 22nd at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10. For more information, call 218-8785 or 726-5066.

    Categories
    News News Feature

    FROM MY SEAT

    SCATTERED THOUGHTS

    So many games . . . so little column space.

  • Need a player to root for at AutoZone Park this summer? Try Kevin Witt. Last month the Redbirds’ 28-year-old third-baseman became just the sixth active minor leaguer to hit 200 home runs. (Talk about a dubious career achievement.)

    Witt is the second player to reach 200 minor-league dingers as a Memphis Redbird. Ivan Cruz came to Memphis in 2002 with 199 round-trippers in the bushes (he had also hit 20 in Mexico, 14 in Japan, and one as a New York Yankee). The big first-baseman added 35 homers that season, a figure that led all of minor-league baseball.

  • At the annual media luncheon hosted by the University of Memphis last month, the most charming speaker was women’s basketball coach Joye Lee-McNelis. Having been in charge of the Lady Tigers for 13 years now, McNelis is in full command of her program and has an honest, gracious understanding of where her team sits in the local media’s pecking order. (Like a pro’s pro, she’s grateful for the coverage she gets . . . all the while seeking a little more.)

    When I asked McNelis about how she competes with the twin beasts of women’s college hoops — Connecticut and Tennessee — she was just as honest: “We can’t.” She nonetheless does her homework and is aggressive in pursuing international players who just might slip under the radar in Storrs and Knoxville. The energy she brings to this underrated program is invaluable to Memphis.

  • At the same luncheon, athletic director R.C. Johnson announced that 111 of 320 varsity athletes at the U of M carried a 3.0 GPA during the fall 2003 semester. Not a bad number at all . . . and room for improvement. Wouldn’t 50 percent be something?
  • Speaking of the Lady Vols — and to accentuate how different their world is from the rest of women’s basketball — Tennessee will welcome three of the five prep stars named to USA Today’s All-USA team: Sa’de Wiley-Gatewood, Alexis Hornbuckle, and the national player of the year, Candace (She Dunks) Parker. UConn is going to have their hands full in seaking a fourth straight national title.
  • It may be sacrilege to suggest this around here, but playoff hockey is simply more exciting than the NBA variety. The primary reason? Less down time. Take a stopwatch and count the minutes of your next NBA playoff game absorbed by commercial breaks, timeouts, and free throws. You could squeeze in two episodes of “Friends.” (By the way, did the “Friends” finale make you laugh . . . once? If so, share the scene.)
  • I can understand the over-the-top music blared from arena speakers to “accentuate” the atmosphere of an NBA game. But DURING play?! When will the NBA come to understand that relative silence can be a virtue. There’s no music during NFL, NHL, or major league baseball action. When the clock is running during an NBA game, turn the stereo off!
  • Remind me why the NBA expanded its first-round playoff series from best-of-five to best-of-seven. Seven of the eight series that opened this year’s postseason ended in four or five games. Mismatches everywhere.

    Oh, right. Television money.

  • The best story of the 2004 baseball season thus far is, hands down, the Texas Rangers. After three last-place finishes with Alex Rodriguez headlining, Buck Showalter’s club — minus Quarter-Billion Boy — is aiming to challenge Anaheim and Oakland for the AL West crown. With Rafael Palmeiro now an Oriole and Juan Gonzalez a Royal, the team is actually three Hall of Famers short of last year’s roster . . . and all the better for it.
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    sunday, 16

    Catfight concludes: The final game of the baseball series between the University of Memphis Tigers and the University of Cincinnati Bearcats will get underway at 1 p.m. at Nat Buring Stadium.