Month: June 2004

After years of traveling, Dan Montgomery is finally home. “I feel more comfortable here than where I grew up [in Pennsauken, New Jersey],” the musician says, reflecting on the two years that have passed since he moved to the Bluff City. “There’s such a great local music scene with so many good bands,” Montgomery says. “People here are so nice, and there’s a different pace. I feel like I fit in here.”

Montgomery spent the last decade in search of that feeling, relocating from New Jersey to Michigan, then Arizona and California, before deciding to move south. He’d passed through Memphis dozens of times as Ben Vaughn‘s soundman, and after a brief visit here a few years ago, he decided to stay. Or, as he puts it, “I fell in love with a girl [photographer Stephanie Sweda], and I fell in love with the town.”

Montgomery’s latest solo album, Man From Out of State (released on his own Fantastic Yes label), looks back on that journey. “It don’t matter where he’s been/He ain’t from around these ways,” he sings on the title track. When prodded, Montgomery merely says that his lyrics “distill 10 years of traveling. When I was out in the desert, I just started writing songs and pulled others together. They cover what I refer to as 10 years, 3,000 miles, and almost as many sleepless nights.”

Once he moved to Memphis, Montgomery recorded the tracks at Easley-McCain Studios with a full band, including Vaughn, steel guitarist John McDuffie, and accordion player Gus Cordovox. It’s a fuller sound than Montgomery’s fans, used to his solo acoustic gigs at Murphy’s and Kudzu’s, might expect. “It’s funny,” he says. “For years back home, I was always the singer in loud rock bands, but when I started moving around I had to shift to doing everything solo. I fit in with [the singer-songwriter genre] fine, but I forget that’s how people perceive me.”

Admitting that his biggest problem is “trying to describe what I do,” Montgomery asks, “Am I a singer-songwriter, or Americana, or Triple-A?” He places his style “somewhere between Dave Alvin and Alejandro Escovedo.” Laughingly noting that most singer-songwriters are “lazy bastards” who play sitting down before a (hopefully) rapt audience, Montgomery claims that his job is “just to entertain.” But with his subtle musicianship and flair for storytelling, he’s clearly raised the bar for local performers.

Don’t miss Montgomery’s CD-release party at Earnestine & Hazel’s this Friday, June 25th. He’ll be fronting his new band, which includes bassist Maggie Vesey and drummer Angela Horton. Special guests Holly Cole, Okraboy, The Ruffin Brown Band, Melissa Dunn, and Harlan T. Bobo will also perform. The show starts at 8:30 p.m.

Drink up, because the next round is on Stout: The local-band-turned-road-warriors is making a hometown pit stop at Young Avenue Deli this Friday night. “We’ve had a mad string of gigs,” drummer Robert Kamm says, calling from a hotel room in East Tennessee. “For only being in this game for a short while, the accolades are coming fast and furious.”

Last spring, the Southern-rock jam band was one of a handful of Memphis groups tapped to play the prestigious South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas. “We already had everything in place with our tour, because we figured we wouldn’t get invited,” Kamm says. “We got the call for a big gig [at SXSW], playing after the High Times party, but we had to turn it down. Things got a little tense, but they rescheduled us. We stuck to our original plan, played a smaller show in Austin, and then went on to Oklahoma City.”

Stout was chosen for the festival before their debut album, On the Rocks, was even recorded. “We didn’t have anyone pushing us,” Kamm says. “Somebody happened to really like us.”

Even before recording On the Rocks at Young Avenue Sound, Kamm, vocalist/guitarist Matthew Oliver, keyboard player/vocalist Craig Schuster, bassist Rory Gardner, and percussionist Tony Walsh decided to devote themselves to the band full-time. They quit their day jobs, hired a manager, and hit the road. “We realized that there’s no way to build anything [touring] Thursday to Saturday, so we lowered our living standards and committed ourselves to the band a hundred percent,” Kamm explains.

Originally, Kamm handled booking and publicity duties, while the band wrote its own record contract, negotiating $3,000 off their studio fee by painting a room at Young Avenue Sound. Now, Kamm says, “[our manager] J.D. Dehart is the key to the whole operation. He’s definitely the sixth member of Stout.”

When the conversation shifts to their upcoming gig, Kamm is off and running. “We’ve got Jack Ashford [from The Funk Brothers] coming out with us,” he says. “We really dig his vibe, and he gets a kick out of these white boys trying to lay it out.”

Catch Stout — and Jack Ashford — at the Young Avenue Deli on Friday, June 25th. n

E-mail: localbeat@memphisflyer.com

by ANDRIA LISLE

Dan Montgomery

A rising force on the local scene that leapt from sardine-packed shows at their homebase of Automatic Slim’s to some of the city’s most high-profile gigs, Free Sol knew what they wanted when they won a local Grammy showcase last November at the New Daisy Theatre (where they beat out six other finalists from Memphis, St. Louis, and New Orleans).

“We wanted to be like Saliva!” says Christopher “Free Sol” Anderson, the frontman and namesake of the seven-piece band. Saliva parlayed a win the last time the local Grammy chapter put on a regional showcase into national prominence. But Free Sol is trying to be a little more realistic.

“What we were really excited about was getting to play Memphis in May,” says Anderson’s vocal counterpart, Candace Ashir. “Everything else was just icing on the cake. We had no idea that so many things would follow.”

It wasn’t the first time Anderson had stepped onto the Daisy stage to compete in a Recording Academy event. Anderson was a member of the hip-hop act Sol Katz, which performed at an Urban Music Showcase a couple of years ago in a straightforward rap style that evoked Outkast and Goodie Mob.

That group didn’t work out, Anderson says. The roots of Free Sol were planted soon after that Sol Katz performance, with Anderson meeting drummer James “Kickman Teddy” Thomas at the Midtown Applebee’s while hawking solo CDs. Over the next few months, the group filled out to its current lineup, which, in addition to Anderson, Ashir, and Thomas, now includes keyboardist Daniel “Premo” Dangerfield, guitarist Elliott “E-Ness” Ives, trombonist Prentice “Print Dog” Wulff-Woesten, and DJ Torrence “Tee Brice” Brice.

“It’s something that I thought was important, especially for hip-hop,” Anderson says of his decision to form a live band. “It’s our way of bringing all these different kinds of music together. And there’s a certain feeling that you get from live music that you just can’t get from a track. It’s hip-hop, but it’s live and in your face.”

Doing hip-hop as a full band doesn’t make Free Sol unique. After all, Philadelphia’s Roots beat them to that concept by a decade. But Free Sol isn’t just hip-hop. The band expands the vocabulary of hip-hop. This is how Anderson describes the sound on the relaxed, boastful “Loc’d Out,” from the band’s recently released debut, 11:11: “Do a lot of things but I love hip-hop/Mix it with soul and funk and rock/Add a little jazz and what do you got?/Hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot.”

You can hear this confident mix on 11:11 songs such as “Possibility,” which opens with some Steve Cropper-style guitar before giving way to punching horns. The description evokes Stax, but the result is a little softer –more ’70s, more jazzlike. And the skill of the vocal arrangement stands out, with Ashir’s, Anderson’s, and Brice’s cut-in samples engaged in a tumbling conversation. And that’s followed a couple of tracks later by “All Night,” which is aggressive enough to pass for (nü-)metal. Other ear-catching sonic departures include “To Keep From Crying,” a spare piano ballad reminiscent of Prince (one of Anderson’s professed musical heroes) and “Take That,” which recalls Outkast’s percussion detonation, “B.O.B.”

But as varied as the band’s musical playbook is, it all comes back to hip-hop, where Free Sol is attempting to break new ground on a local scene that has long seemed one-dimensional.

“I remember when no one listened to anything but Memphis rap,” Anderson says. “If you were black in this city, you were weird if you liked not only alternative music but even East Coast rappers. I even remember when Tupac wasn’t that accepted in Memphis. This city was all about Al Kapone, Three 6 Mafia, which is cool, but there was a time when that was it.”

But as different as Free Sol’s sound may be locally, Anderson sees plenty of kindred spirits in the scene nationally: “If Outkast wasn’t around, I don’t think we’d even have a shot,” he confesses. “They’ve really opened some minds, especially for Southern hip-hop. Even people like David Banner are opening up doors all through the South. The Black-Eyed Peas with their new success. And Kanye West. This is a good time for hip-hop, and the idea that we could be a part of that feels great.”

Free Sol’s sound has come at the right time for a growing Memphis audience starved for something different. It’s no accident that Free Sol’s rise has coincided with that of Tha Movement, the neo-soul-oriented concert series soon to celebrate its second anniversary.

“The young professional demographic has really grown in Memphis, and they’re looking for something exciting, something edgy, but also sophisticated,” Ashir says.

This new audience is responding not only to new sounds but new ideas. Though the sexually up-front tone of songs such as “No Need To Lie” and “U Damn Right” is nothing new, Anderson’s willingness to take on organized religion is rare in hip-hop and R&B (Public Enemy comes to mind) and pretty much unheard of in church-heavy Memphis. But the band is pretty direct on the subject in “I Don’t Give a Damn,” which peaks with this lyrical attack: “Quit that bullshit/Fingers in my face pointing to the pulpit/And why the preacher got the bullwhip?/’Don’t do this’/And on Sunday, bring the full tithe.” The topical “Mr. President” links a personal experience of religious hypocrisy (“The preachers misleading/They don’t give to the needy/We give to the greedy/Instead of helping Ma with an extra twenty dollars/He droppin’ it in the offering plate/The preacher poppin’ collars”) to America’s recent global misadventures.

Anderson doesn’t shy away from this controversial content. “My experience with religion is that it’s a business,” he explains. “There are spiritual people in every religion who are searching for truth and I don’t have a single problem with [that]. I do have a problem with some preachers. They take the opportunity to knock other people down, whether it’s hip-hop or homosexuals or alcoholics or adulterers or whatever they’re attacking at the moment. They do it in a way where they claim to be doing God’s work, and they make their work seem so, so more important and closer to God than you are. And I just think that’s bullshit. To call them on their bullshit is to attack their money, and I hope to attack a lot of their money. I hope to get some of their money.”

This sentiment might seem at odds with a band many of whose members come from gospel backgrounds, but Ashir, herself a sometime gospel singer, elaborates on the stance: “Your religious experience and your relationship with God should be personal. For someone to tell you that wearing pants or wearing makeup is wrong according to God I mean, really? Am I going to get thrown out of heaven because of that? I don’t think so. I’m a very devout Christian, but a lot of traditionalists have really messed things up.”

The independent streak reflected in Anderson’s willingness to take on the religious establishment is also reflected in the band’s business choices. After winning the Grammy showcase, Free Sol could have shopped a demo to labels and waited for something to happen but instead chose a path more common to indie-rock bands than their particular style of soul and hip-hop: releasing an album on a local label (Memphis Records, offshoot of local studio Young Avenue Sound, where the album was recorded) and hitting the road.

“If you base a career on trying to get a deal and that deal fails, then you have to start all over again,” Anderson explains. “I want to make this a career, so I stopped worrying about getting a big deal. What scares me most is being told I can’t do this. That’s primarily why we didn’t want to do a demo. We wanted to put an album out and hit the road to make some money and make a name for ourselves.”

This meant canceling a scheduled May record-release party at downtown’s Cadre Building and instead hitting the local club scene harder — a string of Tuesday night gigs at Newby’s and shows at Young Avenue Deli and the New Daisy Theatre — and beginning to tour regionally.

“We wanted to make sure that we used our resources correctly. There are a lot of things we need to do before it’s time to celebrate. What we’ve been doing is preparing ourselves to hit the road with summer and fall tours,” Anderson says.

But this doesn’t mean Free Sol doesn’t plan on making the kind of national splash that Saliva has. They’ve just put their career on a more realistic, deliberate path. 11:11 has been serviced to college radio stations around the country and is being prepped for a national release.

“We’re in conversation with local distributors right now to take it national,” says band manager Raheem Baraka. “We just wanted to get a little traction first.” n

E-mail: herrington@memphisflyer.com

If VH-1’s Best Week Ever did a Memphis music episode, then this week the Hi-Tone Café would clearly be having the best week ever, with four compelling, disparate touring shows to choose from.

Thursday, June 24th, sweet-voiced indie-folk troubadour Mary Lou Lord hits the club. To these ears, Lord has never topped her mid-’90s debut single for the Kill Rock Stars label, “Some Jingle Jangle Morning (When I’m Straight),” but she’s also never made a bum move, as attested by her lovely new studio album, Baby Blue. Lord will be performing the great Bob Dylan outtake “Up to Me” at a Blood on the Tracks tribute concert in New York at the end of the month. Hopefully, she’ll give local audiences a sneak preview. Jeff Klein and E.J. Friedman open.

The next night –Friday, June 25th — the club will be invaded by Rancid side-project Lars Frederiksen & The Bastards. I haven’t heard the band’s new album, Viking, which is due at the end of the month, but the band’s eponymous debut was one of my favorites from 2001 and holds up great –anthemic, class-conscious gutter-punk with nostalgic undercurrents and Frederiksen’s marble-mouthed roar leading the way. The Horrorpops open.

Following Frederiksen Saturday night is Yellowman, one of the key figures in Jamaica’s post-Bob Marley transition from reggae to the more aggressive, hip-hop-oriented sounds of dancehall.

Finally, on Wednesday, June 30th, Austin’s Spoon hit the club. Driven by percussion (drums, keyboards, piano, and tambourine), chalk-dry guitars, and the calculated catch in lead singer Britt Daniel’s voice, the band’s last album, 2002’s Kill the Moonlight, is the rare indie-rock record that swings. Can they duplicate the effect live? Only one way to find out. Garage-rockers Thee Shams, newly signed to Fat Possum Records, open the show. — Chris Herrington

The first rule about Shabbadoo is that nobody talks about Shabbadoo. Or something like that. For several years now, some of the smartest, mellowest, most bittersweet pop to come out of Memphis has been available only to those lucky few who knew how to find a mystery man who goes by the name Joey Jo-Jo Jr. Mini-Van Records’ Joey Pegram began playing music in Memphis with hippie-punks 611, the first band to record for Shangri-La. He’s since played with the Bum Notes, Apocolax, the Bottom Feeders, Professor Elixir’s Southern Troubadours, the Joint Chiefs, and the Paper Plates. Blending melancholy keyboard soundscapes, fuzzy electric guitars, and sharp, introspective lyrics, Pegram’s longtime recording project — Shabbadoo — sounds nothing like any of his previous bands. It’s a gently psychedelic tonic custom-made for rainy days or long drunken nights that accidentally spill over into morning. Until now, there was only one way to hear Shabbadoo. You had to run into Pegram during the Christmas holidays when he hands out homemade discs as gifts to anyone who wants to listen. But on Sunday, June 27th, at the Hi-Tone Café, some of Memphis’ finest musicians will take the stage with Pegram, and Shabbadoo will be a real band at last. It’s about time.