Month: September 2006

On the Comeback Trail

Post author By Andria Lisle
Post date September 28, 2006

Bettye LaVette was just a kid when she first traveled to Memphis at the end of the 1960s to cut “At the Mercy of a Man” and “Love Made a Fool of Me” — two of the most incendiary slabs of hot-buttered soul music ever heard — yet she recalls the sessions like they were yesterday.

“I stayed at the Holiday Inn Rivermont and recorded at Sounds of Memphis. I had a great time in Memphis. I spent a tremendous amount of time there at the record company’s expense,” she says, and explains with a giggle: “I was in love with one of the Memphis Horns.”

At the time, LaVette was hot on the comeback trail after failing to record another chart-topper following her first big hit, “My Man — He’s a Loving Man,” which was released on Atlantic Records in 1963. The Michigan native bounced from Scepter Records to the tiny Calla imprint before Kenny Rogers happened upon her version of his song “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In).”

“Kenny thought it was the greatest version he’d ever heard,” LaVette says. “He called his brother Lelan, who signed me to his label, Silver Fox/SSS International.”

Lelan Rogers produced the Sounds of Memphis sessions (which yielded 13 tracks, released this year as Take Another Little Piece of My Heart), pairing LaVette with the Dixie Flyers, a local session group featuring organist Jim Dickinson, guitarist Charlie Freeman, drummer Sammy Creason, and bassist Tommy McClure. The studio, an old tobacco warehouse on Camilla Street, provided the perfect backdrop for the raspy-voiced soul singer and the white rhythm section, laying the groundwork for similar sessions the Dixie Flyers would do with Aretha Franklin at Miami’s Criteria Studio a few months later.

Franklin became a superstar, but LaVette nearly wound up a mere footnote in soul-music history.

She cut an abortive effort for Atlantic Records in Muscle Shoals and tried her hand at disco. She landed at Motown in the ’80s, long after that well had run dry. Over the last two decades, she more than earned her reputation as a stellar live performer and even won a W.C. Handy Award for 2003’s A Woman Like Me, but she was still one of the most underappreciated soul singers on the contemporary chitlin circuit.

Then, about 16 months ago, something incredible happened: Following in Solomon Burke’s footsteps, LaVette struck a deal with Anti- Records. By May 2005, she and producer Joe Henry were holed up in a recording studio, culling from a hundred potential tracks and choosing Sinead O’Connor’s “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” Lucinda Williams’ “Joy,” Joan Armatrading’s “Down to Zero,” and seven others. Backed by a mellow team of session musicians (including guitarist Doyle Bramhall II and Prince keyboardist Lisa Coleman), LaVette opened her mouth and let that magnificent voice roar.

The album, I’ve Got My Own Hell To Raise, puts Lady Soul’s previous effort, 2003’s So Damn Happy, to shame.

LaVette wrings every emotion from Rosanne Cash’s “On the Surface” and Fiona Apple’s “Sleep to Dream.” She injects Williams’ already fierce battle cry with her own gut-wrenching autobiographical material, hollering “Maybe in Memphis I’ll find joooyyyyy” over a bold tom-tom beat. She epitomizes the very meaning of soul on her jaunty cover of Aimee Mann’s “How Am I Different” and her thrillingly dark take on Dolly Parton’s “Little Sparrow.” She distills the bare essence of O’Connor’s love song into a thrillingly stark gospel number, eschewing instrumentation for an opportunity to show off her sandpapery vocals.

“People think there are genres of songs, but there are really genres of singers — a song is nothing but words on paper, and the melody is just a melody,” LaVette says of her ability to turn a pop or country tune into pure soul.

“I liked what [O’Connor] was saying, but she used too many words. I knew I could cut to the chase and make the song more poignant, because I’ve had these life experiences. The chord changes were what drew me to ‘Little Sparrow.’ The melodies always appeal to me first, then I go back and hope [the songwriter] had something good to say. With ‘Joy,’ that’s just the way I heard it. I wanted to say Detroit, New York, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals, all those places.”

At nearly 60 years old, LaVette has finally found that comeback she was looking for, as critical accolades rolled in and I’ve Got My Own Hell To Raise turned up on the Billboard charts. The best part of her success, she says, is “picking up my own tabs and paying my own bills.

“For the last 45 years, other people have done it,” LaVette says. “I never had a ‘real’ job. Last year, I was able to pay taxes, which was very exciting.”

There’s already talk about returning to the recording studio this winter, although LaVette refuses to divulge details, earthily explaining, “You know, sugar turns to shit so fast.

“Right now, I’m just looking forward to coming to Memphis,” she says. “It’s always wonderful to visit the scene of an early crime.”

BettyeLaVette.com

Bettye LaVette

Gibson Lounge

Thursday, September 28th

Showtime at 9 p.m.; tickets $20

Tags Bettye Lavette, Music, Review

Opinion Viewpoint

How Did America Come to This?

Post author By Molly Ivins
Post date September 28, 2006

Some country is about to have a Senate debate on a bill to legalize torture. How weird is that?

I’d like to thank Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham — a former military lawyer — and John Warner of Virginia. I will always think fondly of John Warner for this one reason: Forty years ago, this country was involved in an unprovoked and unnecessary war. It ended so badly the vets finally had to hold their own homecoming parade, years after they came home. The only member of Congress who attended was John Warner.

A debate on torture. I don’t know — what do you think? I guess we have to define it first. The White House has already specified “water boarding” — making the prisoner think he’s drowning for long periods — as a perfectly good interrogation technique. Maybe, but it was also a great favorite of the Gestapo and has been described and condemned in thousands of memoirs and novels in highly unpleasant terms.

I don’t think we can give it a good name again, and I personally kind of don’t like being identified with the Gestapo. (Somewhere inside me, a small voice is shrieking, “Are we insane?”)

The safe position is, “Torture doesn’t work.”

Well, actually, it works to this extent: Anybody can be tortured into telling anything that’s true and anything that’s not true. The more people are tortured, the more they make up to please the torturer. Then the torturer has to figure out when the victim started lying. Since our torturers are, in George Bush’s immortal phrase, “professionals” and this whole legislative fight is over making torture legal so the “professionals” can’t later be charged with breaking the Geneva Conventions, Bush has vowed to end “the program” completely if he doesn’t get what he wants. (The same small voice is shrieking, “Professional torturers trained with my tax money?”)

Bush’s problem is that despite repeated warnings, he went ahead with “the program” without waiting for Congress to provide a fig leaf of legality. Actually, we have been torturing prisoners at Gitmo and, via CIA rendition, in prisons in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan for years.

Since only seven of the several hundred prisoners at Gitmo have ever been charged with anything, we face the unhappy prospect that the rest of them are innocent. And will sue. That’s going to be quite an expensive settlement. The Canadian upon whom we practiced rendition, sending him to Syria for 10 months of torture, will doubtlessly be first on the legal docket. I wonder how high up the chain of command a civil suit can go. Any old war criminals wandering around?

I was interested to find that the Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition is so in favor of torture he told McCain that the senator either supports the torture bill or he can forget about the evangelical Christian vote. I’d like to see an evangelical vote on that one. I don’t know how Sheldon defines traditional values, but deliberately inflicting terrible physical pain or stress on someone who is completely helpless strikes me as … well, torture. And, um, wrong. And I’ve smoked dope! Boy, everything those conservatives tell us about the terrible moral values of us liberals must be true after all.

Now, in addition to the slightly surreal awakening to find we live in a country that’s having a serious debate on a torture bill, can we do anything about it? The answer is: We better. We better do something about it. Now. Right away. What do we do? The answer is: anything. Phone, fax, e-mail, mail, demonstrate. Go stand outside their offices or the nearest federal building in the cold and sing hymns or shout rude slogans, chant or make a speech, or start attacking federal property, like a postal box, so they have to arrest you. Gather peacefully and make a lot of noise. Get publicity.

How will you feel if you didn’t do something and torture becomes the official policy of your country? (“Well, honey, when the United States decided to adopt torture as an official policy, I was dipping the dog for ticks.”)

As Ann Richards used to say, “I don’t want my tombstone to read: ‘She kept a clean house.'”

Tags Politics, torture

Sports Sports Feature

Camping with the Griz

Post author By John Branston
Post date September 28, 2006

Sports Illustrated’s Marty Burns is taking a look at NBA training camps, division by division. Check out Burns’ take on what he feels is the best division in the NBA, the Southwest. And read why a certain “mouse” may be key to the Grizzlies’ fortunes this season.

Music Music Features

Goner Goes International

Post author By Andria Lisle
Post date September 28, 2006

With France’s Cheveu, England’s Hipshakes, Japan’s Rockin’ Enocky one-man band, German guitarist Roman Aul (who will front a Memphis-meets-Oxford, Mississippi supergroup called The Brand New Love Affairs), and Canadian duo The Leather Uppers (who made their debut on Goner Records with the release of their Bright Lights album in June), this weekend’s Goner Fest 3 is shaping up as a garage-rock world summit.

“The stars aligned, and a few of these foreign bands were able to make it, which has got us really excited,” says Goner Records co-owner Zac Ives, who booked the three-day music festival along with the label and retail store’s founder, Eric Friedl.

Rockin’ Enocky — a member of the Japanese rockabilly trio Jackie & the Cedrics and a friend of Friedl’s for more than a decade — is traveling the farthest, some 6,600 miles from Tokyo to Memphis. Yet it’s his second trip to the Bluff City in less than six months — he turned up at the Ponderosa Stomp last May.

Experimental French rockers Cheveu are traveling 4,500 miles to get here, which barely beats out Sheffield, England, trio the Hipshakes. But Cheveu has a three-week stateside tour planned, while the Hipshakes are flying 8,600 miles round-trip to play just one set in Memphis.

“We were surprised and happy to get the Goner Fest invitation. It’s given us a lot of energy,” says Cheveu’s Olivier, who explains that they’ve booked shows in other cites before and after their Gonerfest appearance.

“It’s worked out great,” says Friedl. “I think Cheveu wanted to tour the U.S., and [Goner Fest] gave them a good excuse to do it.

“The Hipshakes are crazy. There’s no reason for them to come over for one show, other than the fact that they’re young and they want to do it,” he adds.

Although he’d be the last to admit it, Friedl is the number-one reason that these musicians are traveling so far. His former group The Oblivians (which also featured Jack Yarber and Greg Cartwright) are a “mythic band” in Europe, says Olivier, who lists Memphians like Yarber and Jeffrey Evans along with local bands Viva L’American Death Ray Music and The Cool Jerks among his favorite performers.

“We first heard the Oblivians on a compilation in a crap metal magazine [that] had been put together by The Hives,” says Hipshakes bassist Andrew Anderson, who cites the Memphis band as a major influence.

While they performed at Chicago’s Horizontal Action Blackout Fest last May, the Oblivians aren’t on the roster for Goner Fest 3. The band, which officially called it quits at the end of the 1990s after releasing six albums, last played in Memphis on Halloween 2003; today, Cartwright lives in Asheville, North Carolina, which makes odds for an impromptu reunion highly unlikely.

“In a way, that Oblivians reunion was the start of all this,” says Friedl. “After we booked that Halloween show at the Hi-Tone, we realized that all of these people were coming to town, so another night [of entertainment] was added, with The Final Solutions and a bunch of other bands. It was so much fun that we decided to set up a legitimate festival.”

“It also has a lot to do with the Goner Records Web site and message board, which really fosters a community,” Ives says. “We’re constantly surprised by the gung-ho attitudes of Goners around the world.”

More than 300 people a night packed the Hi-Tone Café for Goner Fest 2 last September; this weekend, Goner Records, Live From Memphis, and Rocket Science Audio are releasing a DVD of that experience.

“People come because there are so many bands on the bill they want to see,” Ives says. “It’s about the crew you go with and meeting friends at the shows. Spending three days in Memphis, you get to do Stax and Sun, eat barbecue and fried chicken, and hopefully get a little more out of it than getting your head kicked in by a bunch of bands.”

According to Olivier, Cheveu plan to eat plenty of barbecue, tour Graceland, and visit Al Green’s church during their weekend in Memphis. The Hipshakes’ Anderson says simply, “We’ll have to have the most fun ever — there’s no choice.”

Goner Fest 3 kicks off with a performance from the King Louie One Man Band at Goner Records on Thursday, September 28th. Other events will be held at the Hi-Tone Café, the Buccaneer, and Sun Studio. For a complete line-up, go to www.Goner-Records.com/Gonerfest.html.

Tags festival, Goner, Goner Fest

Music Music Features

No MercyMe!

Post author By
Post date September 28, 2006

Christian rock group MercyMe has had to cancel tonight’s concert at the DeSoto Civic Center due the illness of lead singer Bart Millard.

The show will tentatively be rescheduled for spring ’07.

Editorial Opinion

Welcoming Mr. Bush

Post author By Flyer Staff
Post date September 28, 2006

As we go to press, President George W. Bush is due for an imminent set-down in Memphis, his second such visit this year. The first occasion was the president’s journey to Graceland, back in June, in tandem with the Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, a well-known Elvis fan. That was Mr. Bush at his best — accommodating, gracious, and rendering a public service — both to Koizumi and to our fair city, which, let us not deny, benefited from the publicity.

This week’s visit is designed to assist former Chattanooga mayor Bob Corker, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate and a candidate who is struggling just now. The president appeared with Corker in Nashville some weeks ago, and this Memphis reprise, for a fund-raiser, confirms what we had begun to fear: namely, that Corker, whom we had invested some hope in as a political moderate, has chosen to stay the course he charted during the Republican primary as a faux right-winger whose attacks on “liberal” Harold Ford Jr., his Democratic opponent, derive from the unscrupulous school of veteran Bush-meister Karl Rove.

We concur with former Congressman Harold Ford Sr. that his son, now surging ahead of Corker in the polls, profits to the degree that Corker is caught in this unholy embrace and only lament that the younger Ford himself feels compelled — no doubt for strategic reasons in red-state Tennessee — to keep professing affection for “my president.”

Like everybody else, we have to buy gasoline and have noticed the recent decline in prices at the pump. Cynically, we can’t help wondering if that isn’t the result of some pre-election collusion between the administration and the oil companies. If so, and if that’s the best Rove and Bush can do by way of an October Surprise, then we suspect that the real surprise on November 7th will be all theirs, and it won’t be a pleasant one for them.

We wonder, too, if the recent forthrightness shown by individuals as diverse as former President Bill Clinton and TV commentator Keith Olbermann isn’t a truer indication of a revised national mood than anything the polls might say. Did we enjoy Clinton’s recent trashing of Fox News anchor Chris Wallace for attempting “a nice little conservative hit job” on the president’s efforts against al-Qaeda? We did. Did we further enjoy the resulting commentary by Olbermann in which the MSNBC sage (a miraculous blend of Edward R. Murrow, David Letterman, and Cicero) accused Bush of attempting to “hide your failures by blaming your predecessor”?

Oh, we did, we did. And, above all, we enjoyed Olbermann’s climactic statement, in which, we believe, he spoke for the emerging American majority: “The ‘free pass’ has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush.” We could only hope that our two senatorial hopefuls come to see that as clearly as have Clinton and Olbermann.

Politics Politics Feature

WWH: ‘More Taxes for More Cops”

Post author By John Branston
Post date September 28, 2006

Mayor Willie Herenton says the city needs 650 more police officers and a 50-cent increase in the property tax to pay for them.

Herenton met with reporters Thursday to respond to an increase in violent crime in the Memphis area that he called “unacceptable.” He said it will take at least two years to hire and train the new officers, and he urged members of the Memphis City Council to support his request for a tax increase even though 2007 is an election year.

Herenton also wants to join with businesses in creating 5,000 new summer jobs for Memphis youth, add nine new police mini-precincts, increase police overtime, and relax hiring requirements for new officers as far as college education and Memphis residency.

The mayor gave his police director, Larry Godwin, a vote of confidence, but he added “we need more manpower.” The needs include 500 patrolmen and 150 officers to work in the Memphis City Schools, which have seen sporadic incidents of violence this year. Godwin said there have been 540,000 calls for service between January and September and 46,000 arrests including 8,000 felonies. There has also been an increase in the number of crimes committed by females, Godwin said. The police director said there is no evidence of a New Orleans factor in the crime reports.
Herenton’s goal is to put Memphis in the upper half of urban areas as far as officers per 1,000 citizens. Currently Memphis has 3.0 officers per 1,000, and with the increase the ratio would be 3.75 per 1,000.

The proposal will cost $47.7 million by 2010, according to figures passed out by the mayor’s staff.

Herenton said he was driven to act by statistical reports and personal conversations with Godwin and rank-and-file police officers in the field.

Best of Memphis Special Sections

Best of Memphis/The Photographic Evidence

Post author By John Branston
Post date September 28, 2006

The Flyer’s annual Best of Memphis party was held last week at “the
warehouse” on G.E. Patterson Boulevard. With music by the Jumpin’ Chi Chis,
the Glass, and Secret Service, and delicious food from many of Memphis
“Best” restaurants, the joint was packed with a veritable Memphis “who’s
who.” Check out all the party pics here:
Partypics.com

Art Art Feature

That’s Life

Post author By Carol Knowles
Post date September 28, 2006

Many of the paintings in “Vacate Now!” Bobby Spillman’s exhibition at L Ross Gallery, roil with energy. Fires flash, lightning bolts, and toy airplanes blast across the surface of his canvases.

Against the Wind, one of the show’s strongest works, is a rush of emotion and energy. The day after several tornadoes roared across the Mid-South and his father had a heart attack, Spillman loaded a brush with white, yellow, and pink oils. In one spontaneous, continuous gesture he swirled the paint diagonally across 72-by-66 inches of canvas and created a multi-hued whirlwind.

In the complex feat of design Vacate Now, Spillman simulates psychic space. Light-blue bubbles percolate through layers of earth-toned speech balloons. Green volts of electricity and orange and fuchsia accent the artist’s daydreams and internal dialogues.

Spillman can handle subtly modulated hues and shapes as well as blocks of color and blasts of energy. In a particularly beautiful passage in Daily Ritual, a blue-gray sky faintly mirrors billowing smoke and orange, red, and white-hot flames.

Daily Ritual by Bobby Spillman

“Bobby Spillman: Vacate Now!” at L Ross Gallery through September 30th

“Maysey Craddock: Unsaid,” at the David Lusk Gallery is, in large part, Craddock’s response to the devastation she witnessed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Buildings and bridges stripped to their girders and broken and leafless trees are Craddock’s subjects. Her canvases are torn and wrinkled paper bags.

White Passage is one of the smallest, most crumpled works in the show and also one of the most beautiful. Its lacy bridgework, its maroon-umber atmosphere, and its surface (a paper sack torn apart and stitched back together with silk thread) speak of fragility, putrefaction, and the

White Passage by Maysey Craddock

patchwork repair of the Gulf Coast cities. For the installation The Memory of Your Words Never Leaves Me, the artist ripped the keys and typebars out of an antique typewriter, painted them dark red, and hung them from the ceiling.

Many of Craddock’s artworks in previous shows were nostalgic and delicate. In this exhibition, the artist gets to the heart and guts of things; she lets her ideas go wherever memory and raw emotion take her. With edgy, urgent work in “Unsaid,” Craddock says more than she ever has before.

“Maysey Craddock: Unsaid” at David Lusk Gallery through September 30th

For her exhibition, “A Glimpse of Motion” at Perry Nicole, Anne Davey looked down into the pale aquas of chlorinated swimming pools and the purple-umber shadows of lakes and recorded bodies moving in water. Her most accomplished works suggest multiple layers. In Glide, a small oil on canvas, sunlight dapples the surface of a lake. Just beneath, rippling water refracts brightly colored swimwear into an Art Nouveau mosaic of yellows and blues. Deeper still, bare limbs gliding through shadows in the lake kaleidoscope into peaches and umbers.

The body is reduced to undulating light and shadow backdropped by white gessoed paper in three charcoals, Underwater I, II, and III. These particularly subtle and assured works evoke dreamscape and mindscape and remind us that the world and everything in it are shifting fields of energy.

“Anne Davey: A Glimpse of Motion” at Perry Nicole Fine Art through October 1st

In “Amy Pleasant: You Are Here,” at Clough-Hanson, Pleasant builds worlds out of thousands of tiny ink blots, smudges, and miniscule figures. Her figures cluster like bacteria in Petri dishes. They spiral like stars in a galaxy, engage in mundane activities, and play out scenes from thousands of lives lived simultaneously.

In a haunting mosaic of overlapping shadows (detail from an untitled ink work on paper), a boy sits on the grass looking back at his house, a teenager stares into the sky, and a man pauses at a street corner. In another untitled paperwork, two tiny figures push and strain and enjoy a sexual encounter. To their left, a little boy sleeps with his teddy bear.

Mouse ears, bird wings, and a flurry of cat fur tell a story of death as well as life in a detail from Drip, a large ink work drawn directly onto the gallery walls. In another section of Drip, three tiny figures dive into the white wall. The several inches of space surrounding them look vast, but the tiny specks unhesitatingly embrace the cosmos. What courage and chutzpah. What an apt metaphor for life on earth.

“Amy Pleasant: You Are Here” at Clough-Hanson Gallery through October 11th

rknowles@memphis.edu