Month: June 2004

Categories
Music Music Features

Sound Advice

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.

Categories
Book Features Books

Up to Snuff?

Status Anxiety

By Alain de Botton

Pantheon, 293 pp., $24

hether you count yourself a “somebody” or a “nobody,” a winner in the sweepstakes for high status or a loser of the big, fat variety, what you think doesn’t count. What others think of you does. And it’s public opinion that can make your life a living hell, if you let it.

So: Worried where you stand in the universal pecking order? You’re not alone. It’s human nature. Welcome to the club. For company, see Status Anxiety, a love story. “Love” because, as essayist Alain de Botton points out, it’s attention (and its by-product, status) that all of us crave and not enough of us get. But right now, we’re in a real mess. Anxiety levels are at an all-time high. Competitiveness, envy, despair: ditto. It wasn’t always so.

Time was, people knew their place, and what a relief. In ancient Greece, you could be born a royal or prove yourself a warrior, both of which beat being a slave with rights to nothing, and there wasn’t much you could do about it. Time was, in medieval Europe, you could be born a nobleman or prove yourself a knight and earn all due respect, or you could settle for being a peasant, which was, despite the nonstop labor, no bar to the kingdom of heaven. But time was, beginning in the 18th-century, you could take advantage of the new democratic spirit, and the race was on: Men (white men; not women) were born free, and so too the idea of a meritocracy based on intelligence, talent, and hard work. Marry any absence of those qualities to the great goal of money-making, and you’ve got yourself a prescription for instant anguish, because: You’re not keeping up with the Joneses? You are a failure. Or you can think of sainthood as a solution, or, according to de Botton, any number of secular answers to the problem, among them:

1) Philosophy. Screw the movers and shakers. Become a Cynic. Diogenes said scram to Alexander the Great. Or become an enlightened misanthrope and take your cue from the logic of Voltaire: “The earth swarms with people who are not worth talking to.”

2) Art. Relieve your pain through Greek tragedy. Take comfort in Chardin’s subversive genre paintings. Join Matthew Arnold in his protest against the status quo. Read Jane Austen as an antidote to snobbery. For laughs, scan The New Yorker for cartoons.

3) Politics. Forget about becoming a contemporary version of the warrior, the knight, or the aristocratic gentleman. And above all, unlink the connection between happiness and money. See, for example, the writings of John Ruskin, who, according to de Botton, “wished to be wealthy in kindness, curiosity, sensitivity, humility, godliness and intelligence.” Nevermind that Ruskin was once labeled a “mad governess” and his theory of the good life nothing but “windy hysterics,” “absolute nonsense,” and “intolerable twaddle.”

4) Religion. Consider the death of Ivan Ilyich, the ruins of civilizations past, your own and everybody’s puniness in the face of awe-inspiring nature. Try turning the Earthly City into an approximation of the City of God. It beats everlasting torment in the afterlife, plus you and everyone else benefit in the here and now.

5) Bohemia. Wage war on bourgeois values by going against the grain. Suffer for your art, as the poet Thomas Chatterton did. (But don’t kill yourself, as Chatterton also did.) Adopt a lobster and take it for walks, as the poet Gérard de Nerval did. (But don’t kill yourself, as Nerval also did.) Or do as Thoreau, Courbet, and Flaubert did and live, trouble-makers all. Figures strictly from the past? Not necessarily. “To the role-models of the lawyer, the entrepreneur and the scientist,” de Botton concludes, “bohemia has added those of the poet, the traveller and the essayist. It has proposed that these characters, too, whatever their personal oddities and material shortfalls, may be worthy of an elevated status of their own.” Tell that to the Joneses.

Which brings us to Alain de Botton, who’s yet to produce a book of poetry but who has given us The Consolations of Philosophy, How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Art of Travel, and now Status Anxiety: a how-to, reader-friendly book on the topic of the well-lived life. It’s user-friendly too: a compact balance of text and design to balance that nagging suspicion, admit it, you’re not up to snuff.

Categories
Cover Feature News

The Third Man Theme

photo by Jackson Baker

Though it seems clear that Democrat John Kerry wishes he would go away, independent candidate Ralph Nader is once again, as he was four years ago, a factor in the presidential race. Nader was in Memphis last week, addressing students and faculty members at Rhodes College, where the legendary consumer advocate and reformer, author of Unsafe at Any Speed and many other influential publications, dilated on his views that big corporations control both major political parties. He defended his third-man candidacy as a means of bringing government back to the people and talked up issues ranging from electoral reform to health-care to environmentalism to a higher minimum wage.

The oh-so-serious Nader also evidenced a playful streak at Rhodes, as when he lamented the apostasy this year of author/filmmaker Michael Moore, a former supporter, by playing on a Moore book title. “Hey dude, where’s my buddy?” Nader asked rhetorically. And he seemed captivated by the name of our city’s daily newspaper. “The Commercial Appeal: That’s the most accurate name for a newspaper I’ve ever seen! I have to congratulate the founder.”

Nader later sat down for an exclusive interview with the Flyer. What follows is an abridgment of that extensive conversation — leaving out such nuggets as his disparagement of erstwhile Democratic insurgent Howard Dean (“I don’t give Dean’s rhetoric that much credence. Right now, for example, he is a fierce loyalist for Kerry and against my candidacy”) and of the late President Ronald Reagan (“He demonstrated the power of words over deeds. He liked individuals, but his policies disliked humanity”). Nader ducked a question about who his vice-presidential running mate might be, but two days later he would designate for that role one Peter Camejo, a onetime Green Party presidential candidate. The choice underlined the apparent determination by Nader, the Greens’ 2002 presidential nominee, to gain the party’s endorsement at this weekend’s national Green Party convention in Milwaukee.

FLYER: Any number of political observers note that Democrats are fiercely resisting your candidacy, while Republicans are not. Why doesn’t this undermine your premise that you will take votes equally from both parties?

NADER: Because the shift has just begun. Most liberals have abandoned us — we can attest to that — and what’s happening now is the members of the party out of power, in this case the Democrats, come back to the fold in the next cycle. That’s historically what’s happened. But the independents who would have voted for Bush, or the conservatives who voted for Bush, a significant number are furious with him, over the Patriot Act, over the huge deficit, over their taxes going to corporate subsidies, over what they call the sovereignty-shrinking impact of the WTO and NAFTA. They don’t like Bush beating up on Taiwan and cuddling with Communist China. It’s churning out there. It’s hard to say how many of these people are revolting, but the fact that there is a revolt is pretty well documented, and so I think they’re either going to stay home, or they’re going to vote for a libertarian, or they’re going to vote for my independent candidacy.

But doesn’t the absence of Republican protests mean they don’t see you as a threat?

Right now, they don’t. You see, they’re looking at the polls right now, but in the last two weeks, three major polls show that I’m either taking more from Bush than Kerry, or it’s a wash. That’s a CNN poll, a Zogby poll, and I think an ABC poll. So the shift — you know, it’s five months until the election.

Gore supporters say you cost them Florida and New Hampshire. Guilty or not guilty?

Well, first of all, none of us are guilty, if we have equal rights to run for election. We’re all trying to get votes from one another, so why do they give a second-class citizenship to a third party? Second, and this is something the press constantly makes a mistake on: The exit polls in New Hampshire showed that I took more Republican votes than Democrat votes. And that’s not surprising, because, two-and-a-half months ago, there’s a poll from New Hampshire which had me at 8 percent. That was made up of 4 percent of Democrats’ votes, 9 percent of Republicans’, and 11 percent of independents’. So they’re completely wrong, even on their assumptions in New Hampshire.

In Florida, look at the bias. A quarter of a million Democrats in Florida voted for Bush. About 25,000 net Democrats voted for me. So who should they be worried about? Why are they always blaming the Green Party? Because they want it all for themselves. They don’t want any competition. They don’t want competition to grow in future years.

“The Commercial Appeal: That’s the most accurate name for a newspaper I’ve ever seen.! I have to congratulate the founder.”

How are you doing in the polls?

We’re coming in at 5, 6, and 7 percent. The last one came out with 7. We’re doing better than in 2000. My theory is, we’re doing better than 2000 even though we’re being abandoned by the liberal Democrats who supported us in 2000. So who’s making up the difference and more? More and more, we’re getting this anecdotal evidence, plus there are a couple of polls that are saying that a lot of people who voted for Bush in 2000 are furious with him.

First of all, I want to defeat Bush. That’s one of the principal reasons I’m running. And I think a two-front approach is better, because, look, I can raise issues and take apart the Bush administration in ways Kerry would never do. Because the Democrats would be too cautious, too indentured to the same commercial interests, or too unimaginative. And that’ll become clear when you compare Web sites, for instance.

Like: Is Bush being hammered by Kerry on being soft on corporate crime? Is he being hammered on the war in Iraq and the need to withdraw? Is he being hammered for what he’s doing to ignore a living wage in this country? Is he being hammered that Bush is anti-union and supports union-busting companies? And is he being hammered that WTO and NAFTA are just not working; they’re resulting in the export of huge industries and jobs from the U.S.?

The Democrats have been losing for the last 10 years to the worst of the Republican Party. Why should we trust that they’re going to win this time, when they haven’t changed any of their game plan, and they’re still dialing for the same dollars? Now, if Bush self-destructs, it doesn’t matter. But assuming he doesn’t self-destruct, I don’t trust the Democrats to be able to beat him on their own.

What did you think of Kerry’s efforts to recruit John McCain as his running mate?

It’s easy to say it would have been a winning ticket. But, you know, sometimes the vice presidents fade. And then it’s all about the presidential candidate. And then to see McCain in his subdued situation would lead to the press probing differences about pro-life, pro-choice — you did this, you did that. So for weeks, the Kerry-McCain ticket would have been pursued by “Well, you voted this way, Kerry voted that way. Why are you buckling under?” And McCain doesn’t have that kind of temperament to be a me-too person. And that’s why he’s smart to have said no. The better choice would be John Edwards. That’s the majority preference by the Democrats in recent polls. He’s been vetted. He has a very good five-minute speech on the “two Americas,” and he can help them in the South. I think the main problem with Kerry is, “Will John Edwards outshine him?” Because Kerry isn’t as good a speaker.

Edwards was impressive rhetorically. His Senate career was unimpressive. Even on his principal issue of civil justice, he never took any leadership. Which is sad. I think he made a mistake running this time. It was a little too early, unless he becomes vice president.

Did any of the Democratic candidates really impress you?

Well, I think [Rep. Dennis] Kucinich has a 30-year track record. It’s not rhetoric. And I worked with him when he was mayor of Cleveland, taking on the corporate barons, and he’s got a very good platform, and it’s not rhetoric.

Would you have run if he were the nominee?

Probably not. But I would have waited to see if he would have moderated or changed in his positions. You know, once you get up there, they start coming in on you.

Do you agree with Eric Alterman, whose book, What Liberal Media?, argues that the media either parrot the conservative line or don’t resist it?

Yes. First of all, the publishers of the newspapers are overwhelmingly Republican, as are the owners of TV stations. The columnists are overwhelmingly dominated by conservatives — George Will, etc. The Sunday talk shows are overwhelmingly dominated by conservatives. What they call liberal is Morton Kondracke. And extreme right-wingers have radio programs. There are no extreme left-wingers who have radio programs.

And they say, “Well, it’s because the audience likes it.” Nonsense. Conservative talk-show hosts attack government, which doesn’t advertise. Liberal talk-show hosts tweak corporations, who do advertise. That’s the big difference in radio. You go after, as a radio talk-show host, car dealers in a certain metropolitan area, and they’ve been known to pull their ads off. That’s a lot of money. So once you go into consumer fraud, you go into corporate crime, you go into living wage, you’re going to alienate a lot of the advertisers. The right-wing broadcasters say, “Well, we’re just better at it. We’ve got a sense of humor. We’re market-driven.” Well, sure! You ever see Limbaugh go after corporations?

What about the liberal “antidote,” Air America?

It’s already collapsing. It first started out with grants, and the grantors apparently didn’t fulfill all their grants. They didn’t have enough money for a transition period. And, second, they’re trying to mimic the style of the conservatives. Over-talking, shouting, being outrageous. That’s not going to make it. And, seriously, the radio talk-show audience has already been screened out. It’s overwhelmingly conservative. And so they have to get new listeners. It’s hard.

You’re best known for your anticorporate positions. What are some of your positions on the so-called social issues?

I’m against capital punishment. First of all, it doesn’t deter [crime]. Second, it discriminates against the poor. Third, it kills innocent people. Fourth, a life sentence is cheaper, actually, than prosecuting a capital case. On abortion, I’m pro-choice. I don’t think the government should tell a woman either to have children or not to have children. On gay rights, full equality. Marriage is what’s complicated, because the state laws use the word “marriage” as the predicate for certain joint rights. Now, if they were revised and just used the word “marriage” for a man and a woman and used the words “civil union” for gays and lesbians, the linguistic barrier would disappear. More people would be for civil union than for gay marriage. And the important thing is not the word “marriage.” The important thing is equal rights. So I think the Republicans are readying a major visibility for that issue to swing the five open Senate seats in the South.

Some “moral-majority” Republican voters will tell you privately that they might vote Democratic if it weren’t for the social issues. Your thoughts?

That’s exactly my point. The moment the Democrats took the economic issues off the table, starting about 20 or 25 years ago, when they started dialing for dollars, they left a vacuum. And the Republicans moved in with these social issues. If the Democrats used a living wage, serious health-care, cracking down on drug-price gouging, the need to pour money into public works … Who’s against public works? If they stood up for labor, in terms of union rights, and so on, they would fill this vacuum. A few months ago, Senator Imhof of Oklahoma was asked, “Why do Republicans keep wining?” He said, “It’s simple: God, gays, and guns.”

So the Democrats did it to themselves.

Where will you be percentage-wise on November 2nd?

Clairvoyant I’m not. We’re trying for a three-way race, which means we’ve got to break 10 percent and break into 14, 15. And then the media becomes more daily [in coverage]. The important thing is daily media.

Do you have a ghost of a chance?

Yes. Oh, yeah. If I get on the debates, and the polls show 14 or 15 percent, and [I get] daily media on the debates, you’ve got a three-way race.

Is there a realistic chance of getting into the debates?

On the old debate commission, probably not, because they control the deck. But the new debate commission may be making connections with one or two networks, radio talk-show syndicates, whatever. There’s a possibility.

Does it bother you when Democrats call you a spoiler?

The more I hear that, the more I know the Democrats are decadent and the more need there is to go after them and make them shape up or ship out, because they have eight million voters deserting them every four years, 35 percent of labor-union members deserting them. And what are they worried about? The fraction of that that is going to the Green Party.

They’re very decadent. They don’t change their game plan. They lose and lose at the local, state, and national level. California has a Republican governor, New York has a Republican governor. Connecticut, Massachusetts. There are city mayors that are Republican. They’ve lost the House and the Senate. They’ve lost more state legislatures. They lost an election they won in 2000 — the presidential outcome. [laughs] So the more they scapegoat and lie, the more decadent they are, the more necessary it is to form a third political force to move in on them.

Just now, there’s a lot of skepticism about President Bush’s reasons for going into Iraq. What do you think they were?

The real reasons were, number one, oil. That’s the third-biggest oil pool in the world. I mean, can you imagine [Bush’s] oil buddies? They can spend 20 years exploring around the world and they wouldn’t come close to those reserves. And oil always is mixed in not just with economic greed but with geopolitical power in that whole region.

The second reason is personal. He’s a messianic militarist. Somehow, deep in his psyche, he persuaded himself that he was going to be a liberator, that he was an instrument of providence, that he was following God’s will. You wonder now why some of the Islamic peoples of the world think that this is a religious war or a crusade?

And, third, it politically suited him, because he saw that the more he focused on Iraq and connected it implicitly with 9/11 and the safety of the American people and terrorism, the more he went up in the polls, the more he chilled the Democratic Party, the more he stifled dissent, the more he distracted attention from the necessities here at home. It’s a big plus for him to be able to distract attention from all these areas where he’s weak and unpopular. And he made his corporate buddies happy with all these contracts. Halliburton, and so on.

So, if you’re sitting in the Oval Office and you’ve got a line through the page and you say, Here are the plusses and here are the minuses [of war], they’re all plusses, from his point of view. They’re not in the American people’s interest, but from his selfish, political, corporate, ideological, messianic, distracting point of view, it works. But the resistance in Iraq is changing this entire equation. He plunged the nation into an unconstitutional war based on a platform of bogus fabrications, deceptions, lies. And the vice president is a chronic prevaricator. It’s all coming out now.

All this is beginning to sour. [People are] getting tired. Every time they see the president, it’s Iraq, it’s terrorism. It’s “stay the course.” When is he ever going to talk about all these other issues? Occupational health? Living wage? Universal health-care? Rebuilding America? It’s beginning to wear thin. Let’s put it this way: He peaked too early. And with increasing resistance and increasing casualties and the fact that now Iraq is a magnet for terrorism … The fact is that, by fighting terrorism in the wrong way, he’s producing more terrorists. He’s turning the country against him.

So what do we do? We’ve got two futures for the people of Iraq. One is permanent military and corporate occupation with a puppet regime. The other is, by the end of the year, we’re out of there. We’re out of their oil industry, and we have installed a democratically elected regime with proper recognition of autonomy for the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. We have to stay in a phased withdrawal until the end of the year, and we phase into international peacekeeping troops. There’ll be less need for them, because there won’t be anything worth fighting over. What are the insurgents going to be fighting over? The U.S. announced they’re out. Oh, they’ll have skirmishes here and there, but if there’s any chance of cooler heads prevailing among mainstream Iraqis, it’s going to occur without U.S. occupation more than with it.

What about the seemingly intractable dispute between Israelis and Palestinians?

We’ve got huge leverage. We’ve supplied billions of dollars of military and economic aid to Israel. We’ve got a choice: If we want peace, we side with the broad and deep Israeli peace moment that draws on many influential currents — political, military, local politics in the Israeli society. What’s the accord? The two-state solution. Bush has already recognized there should be an independent Palestinian state. But it’s just rhetoric. He’s basically supporting Sharon all the way.

So the U.S. government has got to stand up, think for itself, stop being a puppet to the puppeteer from Tel Aviv. And basically say: This conflict is resolvable. You can live in peace together. You can have a viable Palestinian state in control of air, water, boundaries, with East Jerusalem the capital. [You offer] some compensation for lost, seized properties and dismantling the colonies. You cannot have Israeli-owned highways carving up this little West Bank with Israeli colonies. So that’s the general outline of the proposal. And it’s really interesting that 1,300 Israeli military combat personnel have signed a pledge that they will not fight in the West Bank or Gaza, beyond the 1967 borders. And in that pledge they said that the colonies have, in effect, to be evacuated. n

NADER ON …

After our interview, Nader had a scheduled stop in Little Rock. But, first, he did what so many visitors to Memphis before him have done. He toured Graceland! He described his reaction to this and other local subjects via cell phone from his car.

ELVIS: Graceland was very impressive. They certainly have the artifacts there. Elvis was very generous. He gave to charities and he never deducted because he wanted it all to be his charity. And all the gold and platinum records. And his downstairs living quarters. You know, most shrines are not as full of people!

I liked his music, like almost everyone else. He was a standard for bringing joy to millions of Americans. I want to set the standard for bringing justice to millions of Americans. He helped a lot of people individually, caring for children. You asked him for help, and he would give. Obviously, he was a man of the people. Glory to the people. Justice to the people. It makes a nice couplet for the quality of living.

SEN. BILL FRIST: I’m very much against his cruel support of legislation that would tie the hands of state judges and juries in serious medical malpractice cases. It would limit in a variety of ways how much a brain-damaged child or a quadriplegic teenager or an adult who was [victimized] by a bad doctor — how much they could get for their pain and suffering. So it’s really quite amazing how relentless he’s been in trying to allow bad doctors to escape their full responsibility in a court of law.

THE FEDEXFORUM: That has soaked up a quarter of a billion dollars, while Memphis schools, clinics, the drinking water system, public transit, and many other public works deteriorate for lack of repair money. It’s going on in ballparks all over the country. It’s one of the most egregious forms of corporate welfare: taxpayer giveaways to billion-dollar professional sports franchises while cities cannot meet the legitimate needs of its people — including amateur recreation facilities for youngsters and adults. The taxpayers are forced to turn into spectators rather than participants. It was not put to a referendum when it should have been. It’s like that in city after city — although there’s growing resistance to it, and it’s not going to be that easy in the future for sports teams to freeload on the taxpayers’ backs.

As president I’d put all public contracts online: city, county, state, and federal government. The Office of Management and Budget has agreed with us on principle. I’m committed. When it comes to sports appeals, the proposal should be put online, so the people can have an input and examine it before the vote. There should be a forum with plenty of time for taxpayers to examine the issue.

Categories
Music Music Features

Free Your Mind

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

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

[City Beat] The Long Goodbye

What’s harder to get rid of than a stubborn stain or a bad smell? Old corruption cases involving Shelby County government insiders.

The files are still open on three criminal cases involving four former prominent county officials — top mayoral aide Tom Jones, County Commission chief administrator Calvin Williams, and Juvenile Court clerk and former commissioner Shep Wilbun and his top aide, Darrell Catron — suggesting that more indictments could be forthcoming. On top of that, an audit of personal spending and credit card use by members of the Shelby County Commission is still hanging.

Jones, an adviser to three county mayors for 26 years, pleaded guilty last year to federal charges involving misuse of county credit cards and was sentenced in January to 12 months and a day in prison. He was first ordered to report to the federal prison camp in Millington in March, then May, then June. Two weeks ago, his report date was changed once again, to August 16th. Al Harvey, Jones’ attorney, said the extensions were requested because of a family medical problem and were sealed to avoid publicity.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim DiScenza, who is handling the case, said that, generally speaking, there are “a large number of reasons” for putting documents under seal, including the health of the defendant or someone in the defendant’s family. But Dan Clancy, a former colleague of DiScenza in the Memphis office of the U.S. Attorney, said “it is unusual” to have sealed documents filed after a defendant has been found guilty and sentenced. And he questioned whether someone’s health would be sufficient cause.

“I don’t know how they would justify keeping it secret,” said Clancy, who is now a defense attorney in Jackson, Tennessee. He is not involved in any of the Shelby County cases. He said secrecy is generally requested “to prevent harm to a defendant or witness or to prevent disclosure of information that might compromise an ongoing investigation.”

In the last month of his term in 2002, former Shelby County mayor Jim Rout suspended Jones. Jones has said he paid for Rout’s charges when they took trips together and that there was a “culture of entitlement” in county government. Questions have also been raised about Rout’s personal investment with an adviser to the county pension fund.

Rout is president of Jack Morris Auto Glass. Asked this week if he had been asked to meet with grand jurors or investigators, Rout said, “I haven’t heard anything.”

Two other county corruption cases are unfolding slowly. In both cases, the defendants are experts in political infighting and the behind-the-scenes workings of local government. Wilbun, Williams, and James Sellers were indicted last October on state charges of misusing public funds to cover up a sexual assault. All have pleaded not guilty. The indictment alleged that the cover-up was supposed to protect Catron. Wilbun, Williams, and Sellers were originally scheduled to go on trial in criminal court on May 17th, but the trial was postponed until September 27th.

Wilbun is a former member of the Shelby County Commission, the Memphis City Council, and candidate for city mayor. Williams came under scrutiny when the commission bumped his salary to $101,856 for handling their travel expenses and various requests. He lost his job last year in the midst of a conflict-of-interest inquiry and a state audit. In a memo to commissioners, he has vowed to “retaliate to the fullest.”

Catron, meanwhile, pleaded guilty in February 2003 to federal charges of embezzlement. DiScenza is also prosecuting that case. In open court, the prosecutor said Catron was a key player in an ongoing investigation of a county contractor who was paying kickbacks to various public officials. Fourteen months later, the contractor and the public officials have still not been indicted or named. Nor has Catron been sentenced, indicating prosecutors are not through with him. Sentencing, originally set for May 2003, then reset for March 2004, is now scheduled for July 14th. As in the Jones case, several sealed documents were filed in the Catron case last year and earlier this year. The offenses occurred in 2000 and 2001.

It’s understandable that the wheels of justice would grind slowly in public corruption cases in Memphis, where former congressman Harold Ford Sr. was acquitted on federal charges in 1993 and former county mayor Bill Morris was indicted and unindicted on state charges in 1994. It is especially hard to identify criminal acts involving credit cards and political favors because of the “everyone-does-it” defense. But the interconnections of the defendants, the bad blood, the sealed documents, the repeated delays, DiScenza’s hints, and Clancy’s analysis lead to this conclusion: There’s more news to come.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Sevenfold

The crowded field of candidates to succeed outgoing state representative Joe Kent in House district 83 (Southeast Memphis, Germantown) have made a series of appearances together lately.

Seven candidates are seeking the seat. They include six Republicans — Chuck Bates, Brian Kelsey, Mark White, Stan Peppenhorst, Pat Collins, and Charles McDonald — and Democrat Julian Prewitt.

As is usually the case in legislative races — particularly within primaries — differences of opinion tend to be subtle and shaded. Even so, the candidates can be distinguished from each other on the basis of their stated priorities.

Bates, for example, is a less-government conservative with a background in financial management. He advocates a lower sales tax and even more cost-cutting than Governor Phil Bredesen has pursued. An abortion opponent, he emphasizes social and moral issues more than the others. Having opposed Kent two years ago, he was first in the race this year.

Collins, a retiree, accordingly professes a primary interest in issues affecting senior citizens, stressing tax, health-care, and crime issues. He is especially interested, he says, in efforts to freeze or reduce property-tax levels for seniors.

Kelsey, a lawyer and a Republican activist of long standing, is another by-the-book conservative, calling for state surplus funds to be returned to strapped local governments and viewing with alarm such expenditures as those for planting wildflowers along the interstate.

McDonald, another lawyer with a background in college teaching, is the “angry” candidate, taking special issue with what he considers the “poor quality” of government services across the board.

Peppenhorst, a career teacher, emphasizes health-care and education and aspires, he says, to supplant former state representative Carol Chumney, now a City Council member, as an exponent of child-care.

White, a businessman and another former teacher, decries “taxes, taxes, taxes” and favors incentives for small businesses. He says that, as a young man, he took the advice of the late Mayor Henry Loeb to delay his advent in politics until he had built a career in the private sector.

Prewitt, who also has a background in both business and education, is newly de

clared as a Democrat and considers economic development his primary goal. He says he wants to see “the invisible hand” of the economy at work.

Discussions between the candidates have so far been gentlemanly; that could change as the August 5th primary approaches.

Crosstalk

The long-running feud between Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen and state senator Steve Cohen, both Democrats, continues to simmer. Speaking at a recent fund-raiser for the local Democratic Party at the New Daisy on Beale, Cohen clearly had Bredesen in his sights when, by way of extolling presidential candidate John Kerry, he delivered this blast: “If you want a manager, get a Reagan or a Bush! If you want a leader, get a Democrat. John Kerry is a leader.”

The remark came just after Cohen criticized recent legislation, backed by Bredesen, that reduced maximum benefits under state workers’ compensation codes, and the senator’s use of the word “manager” parroted one of the budget-cutting governor’s favorite self-descriptions.

Cohen and Bredesen were frequently at loggerheads during last year’s deliberations on the means of enacting and managing the state lottery, on behalf of which Cohen had labored 17 years.

· Shelby County commissioner Bruce Thompson argues that his posture in commission debate on county demolition projects was recently mischaracterized by Chairman Marilyn Loeffel. Loeffel had made a point of observing Thompson’s absence from the commission’s vote on the measure and suggested that he might have recused himself altogether — on the grounds that Thompson’s wife Jeni works for a high-tech company that would expand into one of the areas vacated by demolition.

Thompson noted that he had requested and received an opinion from county attorney Brian Kuhn advising him that the ordinance involved no potential conflict of interest on his part. Even so, said Thompson, he had abstained both from discussions of the measure and the final vote on it.

Thompson and Loeffel, both Republicans, have frequently clashed on matters of both style and substance.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Spoiled Ballots

In the 2000 presidential election, 1.9 million Americans cast ballots that no one counted. “Spoiled votes” is the technical term. About one million of them — half of the rejected ballots — were cast by African Americans, although black voters make up only 12 percent of the electorate.

This year, it could get worse. These ugly racial statistics are hidden in the appendices to reports coming out of the investigation of ballot-box monkey business in Florida from the last election.

How do you spoil two million ballots? Not by leaving them out of the fridge too long. A stray mark, a jammed machine, a punch card punched twice will do it. It’s easy to lose your vote, especially when some politicians want your vote lost.

Gadsden County has the highest percentage of black voters in Florida — and the highest spoilage rate. One in eight votes cast there in 2000 was never counted. Many voters wrote in “Al Gore.” Optical reading machines rejected these because “Al” is a “stray mark.”

By contrast, in neighboring Tallahassee, the capital, vote spoilage was nearly zip; every vote counted. The difference? In Tallahassee’s white-majority county, voters placed their ballots directly into optical scanners. If they added a stray mark, they received another ballot with instructions to correct it.

In the white county, make a mistake and get another ballot; in the black county, make a mistake, your ballot is tossed.

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission concluded that, of the 179,855 ballots invalidated by Florida officials, 53 percent were cast by black voters. In Florida, a black citizen was 10 times as likely to have a vote rejected as a white voter.

But let’s not get smug about Florida’s Jim Crow spoilage rate. Civil Rights Commissioner Christopher Edley took the Florida study nationwide. His team discovered the uncomfortable fact that Florida is typical of the nation.

Philip Klinkner, the statistician working on the Edley investigations, concluded, “It appears that about half of all ballots spoiled in the U.S.A. — about one million votes — were cast by nonwhite voters.”

This “no count,” as the Civil Rights Commission calls it, is no accident. In Florida, for example, I discovered that technicians had warned Governor Jeb Bush’s office well in advance of November 2000 of the racial bend in the vote-count procedures.

Given that more than 90 percent of the black electorate votes Democratic, had all the “spoiled” votes been tallied, Gore would have taken Florida in a walk.

The ballot-box blackout is not the monopoly of one party. Cook County, Illinois, has one of the nation’s worst spoilage rates. Boss Daley’s Democratic machine, now his son’s, survives by systematic disenfranchisement of Chicago’s black vote.

How can we fix it? First, let’s shed the convenient excuses for vote spoilage, such as a lack of voter education. One television network stated that Florida’s black voters, newly registered and lacking education, had difficulty with their ballots. In other words, these blacks were too dumb to vote.

This convenient racist excuse is dead wrong. After the disaster in Gadsden, public outcry forced the government to change that county’s procedures to match that of white counties. The result: near zero spoilage in the 2002 midterm election. Ballot design, machines, and procedure, says Klinkner, control spoilage.

So it’s clear, the vote counters, not the voters, are to blame.

It is about to get worse. The ill-named “Help America Vote Act,” signed by President Bush in 2002, is pushing computerization of the ballot box.

California decertified some of Diebold Corporation’s digital ballot boxes in response to fears that hackers could pick our next president. But computers, even with their software secure, are vulnerable to low-tech spoilage games: polls opening late, locked-in votes, votes lost in the ether.

And the history of computer-voting glitches also has a decidedly racial bias. Florida’s Broward County grandly shifted to touch-screen voting in 2002. In white precincts, all seemed to go well. In black precincts, hundreds of African Americans showed up at polls with machines down and votes that simply disappeared.

Going digital won’t fix the problem. Canada and Sweden vote on paper ballots with little spoilage and without suspicious counts. In America, a simple fix based on paper balloting is resisted because, unfortunately, too many politicians who understand the racial bias in the vote-spoilage game are its beneficiaries, with little incentive to find those missing one million black voters’ ballots. n

Greg Palast is the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, from which this article is taken.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Editorial

We are not going to pretend that we have yet read the 900-odd pages of the autobiography of former President Bill Clinton, titled self-absorbedly enough My Life. Nor are we likely to. A unique mix of the well-intentioned and the devious, Mr. Clinton was ever, for better or for worse, prolix, and advance reviews of the book have stressed the unevenness of the portions relating to his two-term presidency.

Yet we welcome the book and consider its appearance in the immediate aftermath of former President Ronald Reagan’s highly public funeral and in the lull before the political conventions of late summer to be both timely and auspicious. As the accolades bestowed on Reagan during his week of remembrance demonstrated, there is an enormous disposition on the part of the American people to forget and forgive or, at least, to forgive. Partisanship tends to be very much a present-tense state of mind. So should it be with Clinton, and it may well be, to judge by the praise bestowed on him by President Bush during the unveiling of the former president’s portrait in the White House last week. (Those interested in grace notes accorded a former adversary, by the way, could do worse than look up the speech delivered by Clinton at the funeral of former President Nixon in 1994.)

Once upon a time, the concept of a loyal opposition was alive and well in this country. It is worth remembering and even reviving as we head into a general election campaign that is almost certain to turn bitter and divisive with attack ads, radio ravings, and generalized intolerant nonsense buffeting voters on all sides.

Mr. Clinton has told us, in several interviews so far, that he has a dark side and a high side and that both are faithfully attested to in his book. The American electorate is similarly conflicted. In dealing with our political figures, it is useful to remember the wise old Hindu saying concerning the best way of beholding anything and everything outside oneself: Omne padme um. “I am that.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

MR. LEE’S GOT WHAT?

So the Fly s big question for The Commercial Appeal is who s editing the editors these days? In a June 17th editorial, Memphis finest daily newspaper reported [Joseph] Lee, the city s finance director, was con firmed as the new leader at MLGW by the City Council this week in a 7-5 vote after months of speculation, political infighting and Lee s on-again, off-again candidacy to run the nation s largest three-service pubic utility. A three-service PUBIC utility, huh? All we can say to that is, Walk with pride, Big Joe. Walk with pride.

Plante: How It Looks

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We Recommend We Recommend

thursday, 24

Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Yep, with the book and all we re going to be seeing quite a bit of him. Thank goodness. The funny thing is that when I did this with Ronald Reagan s name last week on this page, the spell checker when crazy, either not recognizing his name or freaking out because it was repeated so much. Not so with Bill Clinton. The spell check loves Bill Clinton. And so do I. And all of this leads to just one topic: hair. Yes, hair. Has anyone else noticed that our current president has finally done something about his hair? It all started with the recent unveiling of the presidential portraits of former president Bill Clinton and former first lady Hillary Clinton at the White House, an event at which the president almost appeared to remotely resemble a human being. I know, weird. Yep, little George actually had to be nice to Bill that day, and he did a fairly decent job of it, thanks, I m sure, to his speechwriters. But did you notice his hair? The Bush seems to have done something about, well, the bush. For almost four looooooooong- years, we have had to look at that Chia-head of his over and over and over. Like a Brillo pad. Split ends of surreal proportions. But something has happened. The day he hosted Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, when their portraits were unveiled, his hair was, for once, not sticking out in more directions than Madonna s spiritual life. And if you ask me (which I would hope you would not), it was all because he didn t want to look like a tumbleweed on steroids while standing next to the perfectly coifed Clinton, with that gorgeous shock of white hair atop his gorgeous head. Oh, about to throw up, you Clinton haters? Well, go puke but take a fresh look at Bush s hair. It s almost smooth. I would say that this is the work of his wife Laura, but day by day she is bearing more and more of a resemblance to Jack Nicholson in his role as the Joker in Batman. Bless her heart. She s saddled with that being married to a Texas blueblood, an oxymoron if ever there was one. And speaking of morons, take a look at the hair. He has applied some mousse or something to it. Maybe he finally figured out that the term conditioning is not solely relegated to the torture he allowed of the prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But now I m getting political and I just don t have time for all that, so here s a brief look at some of what s going on around town this week. At tonight s Sunset Atop the Madison Series party on the rooftop of the Madison Hotel, you can enjoy cocktails and live music by Yes, No, Maybe. There s a 1950s themed Sock Hop at the Arcade at the Arcade Restaurant with food, music, and period dress. And Mary Lou Lord and E.J. Friedman are at the Hi-Tone.