Month: February 2007

Categories
Music Music Features

One-Man Bands

Recorded under the moniker Vending Machine, Robby Grant‘s latest, King Cobras Do, is scheduled for release this weekend. On Saturday, February 3rd, he’s having an album-release party at the Hi-Tone Café; the self-released CD is also available at Goner Records and Shangri-La Records.

With 12 songs and guests ranging from former Big Ass Truck bandmates Robert Barnett and Steve Selvidge to current Glitches bandmates Adam Woodard and Jared and Lori McStay, King Cobras Do runs the gamut from frenzied pop (“Babies,” the album’s opener) to blues rock (“44 Times”) and surreal space music (“Saturn National Anthem”).

The stylishly experimental, electronic-flavored music favored by artists such as Beck — and, closer to home, former Memphian Shelby Bryant — factors in on “Memories and Actions,” “Desert Sun Played,” and the aforementioned “Saturn National Anthem,” while “Yawp” shares the same sonic space as Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” transmogrified with, say, Southern Culture on the Skids’ “8 Piece Box.”

“Shelby has had a big effect on me,” Grant admits. “When Big Ass Truck was recording Kent at Ardent, he lived right across the street from the studio. Later, when I started doing a lot of four-track sessions at my house, he was the first person I collaborated with. Recently, we’ve been in touch, writing and collaborating on songs over the Internet.”

By now, Grant has bypassed the four-track machine for Sony Vegas, a program similar to ProTools — and on King Cobras Do, he partnered with an up-and-coming lyricist, his 7-year old son, Five.

“He does a lot of free association,” Grant says. “Sometimes I use his words as-is; other times, I’ll turn a phrase around or just build on something he said.

“Upstairs, in my home studio, I have a piano and an acoustic guitar. I’ll start with little ideas, just bits and pieces that I’ll build on until the songs become what they become. I go back, listen quite a bit, and do a lot of editing, then move onto the next song. It’s a constant revision,” he says, noting that the process to complete this album, his fourth CD in six years, took 28 months.

“On ‘Saturn National Anthem,’ I had the song and the lyrics, but I felt like it needed something else,” Grant explains. “I extended the first part of the song, but it still needed a solo, and it popped into my head that Steve [Selvidge] could do a spacey, wicked guitar part. I gave him the files, and he recorded it. In the case of Robert [Barnett], a lot of times I have ideas in my head that I can’t play. He’s such a creative drummer, and I’m a more keep-the-beat kind of guy.”

When Vending Machine plays at the Hi-Tone this Saturday night, the band will be a five-piece, with Grant’s brother Grayson Grant on bass, guitarist Quinn Powers, and two drummers, Barnett and John Argroves. For more information, visit Vending Machine’s Web site at ChocolateGuitars.com.

Johnny Lowebow, the alter ego of Xanadu Music owner John Lowe, will also be celebrating with a CD-release party this weekend. His latest album, the nine-song Gonerfest III, was cut by Kyle Johnson and Robin Pack, the duo behind Rocket Science Productions, at The Buccaneer last fall; now Lowe’s returning to the Midtown bar for a performance Friday, February 2nd.

The night will be a veritable one-man-band festival, as Lowe, Florida musician Ben Prestage (who got his start on Beale Street), and Oregonian Rollie Tussing channel their inner Hasil Adkins on homemade cigar-box guitars.

“Ben and Rollie are both coming in for the International Blues Challenge,” Lowe explains. “There’s gonna be a bunch of talent in town, so I’m trying to give the one-man bands a showcase. It’s not at all a contest — it’s more like a cigar-box festival, which is usually just bonded by the instrument, with music coming from all different genres.”

Other highlights of the IBC weekend: the Friday and Saturday night Wordie Perkins Blues Jam at Orange Mound juke joint The Blue Worm and a rare local appearance from Grammy Award winner Alvin Youngblood Hart and his group Muscle Theory, slated to play the Buccaneer on Sunday, February 4th.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Crazy Love

Kyle Hatley, the talented young director behind Germantown Community Theatre’s revisionist production of Romeo and Juliet, doesn’t think Shakespeare’s famous love story is really about love. Fair enough. Taken in full measure, Romeo and Juliet is an evergreen tragedy about the wars old men start and the babies who die finishing them. But there can be no denying that this play, a grim, unlikely paragon of perfect romance and youthful ardor, is driven by impatient hormonal urges compounded by repression, end-of-the-world desperation, and the allure of forbidden fruit. Desire is the gas in Shakespeare’s hot rod, and it’s the missing element in Hatley’s otherwise gorgeous, thought-provoking take on the world’s most celebrated double suicide.

Hatley’s staging is sexy and dangerous, but from the top of Act I, Dylan Hunter’s Romeo is too confused and depressed to get out of his own bed, let alone into anyone else’s. And Ashley Davis’ Juliet is entirely too mature, detached, and self-satisfied. But between the beautifully integrated video projection and the superb ensemble acting, these seemingly unforgivable errors become negligible.

In GCT’s production, Benvolio (Jane Kilgore), Mercutio (Bob Arnold), and the Nurse (Lindsey Patrick) are the stars; Friar Lawrence (Matt Nelson) and Capulet (Ralph Hatley) are the outstanding and often surprising ensemble players. The title characters become little more than an excuse to give the secondary players a new life and an opportunity to shine.

The musical cast provides their own soundtrack by banging out swinging rhythms on the piano and blowing lonesome chords on the harmonica. That, along with the video, helps to make this R&J an especially sensual experience for the audience. In spite (or maybe because) of its one glaring error, this show is highly recommended. And Hatley is clearly a director to watch.

Through February 4th at Germantown Community Theatre

There was a time in the early ’70s when you couldn’t turn on the television without encountering a variety show with Bob Hope or some other aging Hollywood hipster dressed up like a hippie doing pot jokes and cracking wise about the hidden costs of free love. Even then the jokes were past due and a little embarrassing. Neil Simon’s Last of the Red Hot Lovers aims to be a sophisticated look at the clash of generational values during the Vietnam era, in the mold of the wonderful Jack Lemmon film Save the Tiger. But it plays out like Bob Hope making a peace sign.

After a thrilling debut with Samm Art Williams’ Home, the Hattiloo Theatre has hit something of an artistic speed bump. As they say, you can’t put lipstick on a pig, and no matter how hard the cast works, they can’t overcome the fact that their material hasn’t aged well at all.

Lovers tells the story of Barney Cashman (the wonderful Tony Anderson), a good husband, father, and business owner who doesn’t want to die without knowing what it feels like to be bad. Unfortunately, the poor guy doesn’t have what it takes to have an affair — even with his own wife. Anderson is performance anxiety personified as he spars with a libidinous, coughing nymphomaniac, a stoned mental case, and a sweet, injured lady, who prompts him to lash out in anger and frustration.

Lovers has its moments and (for those patient enough to wait for act three) contains some of Simon’s best writing. But overall, it’s like watching a “TV Land” salute to ’70s sitcoms without the laugh track.

Through February 4th at Hattiloo Theatre

Categories
Art Art Feature

The Look

“Artspace,” a 5-by-6-foot wallboard at the P&H Café, is one of the world’s smallest galleries. It flanks a small stage where bands play bluegrass and rock music. Beyond the stage, artists and writers gather for late-night probings into the human condition. Emily Walls’ exhibition “Are You Still Holding?” is a perfect fit for such a place.

With small, untitled ink drawings, smaller scraps of Naugahyde, and even smaller pieces of unfired polymer clay, Walls creates poignant, passionate, ever-hopeful bits of life. Walls packs a lot into a small installation in which each stroke of pen and twist of clay feels sentient.

A thumbnail-sized sculpture with a Cornish hen body and a head that looks like a bright-red sexual organ sits on top of a piece of wood proclaiming, “Good times are coming.” In an untitled drawing, a little black-and-white mutt inside a tiny wire pen invites us to play. A discarded Christmas tree drawn on a piece of plywood (so delicately rendered we can almost feel its soft needles) hangs above a Naugahyde snake that coils out of the wall and sniffs us with its felt-tipped nose. And bits of clay scattered across a dollhouse-size mantel look like sections of an earthworm, that rudimentary but remarkable creature capable of regenerating itself after it has been cut in two.

At the P&H Café through February 2nd

The sculpture in “Nancy White: New Ceramic Images” at the University of Memphis’ Jones Hall Gallery reveals another ceramic artist working at the top of her form. What comes across strongest is White’s deep love for the earth and its creatures. With smoked clay, chloride, glazes, and a finesse that comes only with years of experience, White creates an exquisite series of impressionist scenes of a sunny afternoon on Audubon Lake. Umber and off-white bodies of a flock of Canadian geese blur into sunspots, into light dancing on water, into a complex mosaic of blue-green-ochre that colors the grassy waters where the geese feed.

Rabbit Proof Fence? explores our complex relationship with a creature we adore, abuse, and consume. In this sculpted wall hanging, White’s smoked clay becomes the soft fur of three rabbits pressed against a barbed-wire fence. An actual strand of barbed-wire stretches across the rabbits’ bodies and attaches to the ceramic frame that surrounds the scene like a burnished altar to the beauty/danger that characterizes much of the natural world.

At Jones Hall Gallery through

February 16th

Nancy White’s Rabbit Proof Fence?

Another accomplished Memphis sculptor, Andrea Holmes Lugar, has mounted “Mixed Media,” an impressive exhibition of clay and bronze sculpture at the Levy Gallery in the Buckman Performing and Fine Arts Center. Some of the show’s strongest works are large bronzes. These are not polished monuments to the powerful and famous — Lugar is after something more personal and poignant.

Vissi d’Arte — Vissi d’Amore (“I lived for art, I lived for love”) looks like a ripe brown melon that has been peeled in one seamless motion, its golden pulp scooped out. This large bronze pulls us into its nearly empty shell, unwinds our point of view, and thrusts us back into the gallery. Art and love, Lugar suggests in this ingenious metaphor, are a ripening of feelings that sometimes comforts and shelters, sometimes reams us out, and almost always spins us off in new directions.

Lyre with Woven Landscape begs to be played. You may experience a strong desire to cradle the sounding board that looks like a scarred torso, to pull your fingers through the silken strings, and to imagine you have struck some soft, low notes that, like the artworks in Walls’ and White’s exhibitions, tell us about the world’s fragile and resilient beauty.

At the Levy Gallery through February 9th

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Meals on Wheels

Memphians Kwame and Kcbena Cash formed their grocery-delivery business K+K Deliveries almost a year ago but didn’t put their business plan into action until last fall. “We’ve toyed with the idea for a long time,” says Kwame, who gave up his career as employee benefit adviser at the U.S. Department of Labor to dedicate all his time and energy to the business. “You don’t walk away from a great job on a notion,” Kwame says. “We envied some of the great metropolitan cities that offer and can support a grocery-delivery service, and we just knew that Memphis can do the same. We wanted this city to be up there with those other cities.”

Although the brothers think of their shopping and delivery service as a lifestyle solution, the wealthy, too-busy-to-shop market wasn’t the first one they thought about when developing their business.

“My brother is a Memphis police officer, and he patrols in South and North Memphis,” Kwame says. “One day, when he passed a bus stop, he noticed people loaded down with bags full of groceries. We took that cue to make sure our service is affordable enough to reach people for whom grocery shopping is a difficult task, like the elderly or people who typically take the bus and therefore can only get limited amounts of groceries.”

Currently, K+K Deliveries has working agreements with several local grocery stores, and the business is still young enough that special requests are often granted. Orders have to be placed by 10 p.m. either by phone or via e-mail to be ready for delivery the following day at 8 a.m. Standard deliveries are $15 and discounted deliveries are $10.

“We typically walk our customers through a basic grocery list to make sure they don’t forget anything,” Kwame explains. “Once we have a customer in our database, the whole process becomes a little easier. We have fairly accurate amounts for all the grocery items so our customers know how much they’ll spend before we fill the order.”

The next step for the Cashes is to create a Web site for online grocery shopping.

K+K Deliveries, e-mail address: kkdelivery@midsouth.rr.com (473-1595)

Mark your calendar for two special

Jeffrey Dunham

events at The Grove Grille. Chef/owner Jeffrey Dunham and Scott Smith of The Wine Market will offer a wine luncheon on Saturday, February 3rd. The three-course meal starts with dry chili and roast tomato tortilla soup. Spinach, pine nut, and pancetta-stuffed flounder with sweet potato purée, braised leeks, and lemon cream is followed by pear tart Tatin with cinnamon simple syrup. The price with wine pairing is $25 per person, plus tax and gratuity.

On February 7th, Dunham invites diners to the chef’s table for a “Dinner in the Kitchen.” The six-course meal includes wine pairings and dishes such as Maine lobster spring roll, sautéed Atlantic bass with black Thai rice and ponzu beurre blanc, and warm chocolate cake with vanilla anglaise and fresh raspberries. The price for the dinner is $75 per person, plus tax and gratuity.

The wine luncheon and “Dinner in the Kitchen” occur every two weeks. Reservations are required. For more information, call the Grove Grill at 818-9951.

The Grove Grill, 4550 Poplar

Chez Philippe at The Peabody hotel celebrates its 25th anniversary with a special dinner menu this week. During its 25 years, Chez Philippe has only seen three chefs — Michael Harper, Jose Gutierrez, and now Reinaldo Alfonso.

The six-course menu was created by Alfonso with the help of Harper. Dishes include seared scallops with roasted garlic purée, basil coulis, and Chablis reduction; rainbow trout en papillote with porcini mushrooms, roasted root vegetables, French tarragon, and Sauvignon Blanc; and veal tenderloin with seared goose foie gras, black truffle/potato purée, and Tennessee whiskey mushroom jus.

Chez Philippe opened in January 1982, just a few months after The Peabody reopened by Belz Enterprises. The hotel’s marching ducks extend their influence to Chez Philippe’s menu. In 1981, Gary Belz wrote a note to general manager Charles Rosemann regarding a duck dish proposed for the restaurant’s menu. “I’m extremely sensitive to the serving of duck from this menu,” Belz noted. Rosemann’s reply: “There will be no dead ducks at The Peabody!” And today, Chez Philippe might be the only French restaurant that doesn’t serve duck.

The 25th anniversary dinner is available through February 3rd. Cost for the six-course dinner is $80 per person, plus tax and gratuity. Wine pairing is available for $46 per person.

Chez Philippe at The Peabody, 149 Union (529-4188)

siba@gmx.com

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Old Joy

Good news about Venus, Roger Michell’s new film about the curious relationship that develops between aging actor Maurice (Peter O’Toole) and young provincial woman Jessie (Jodie Whittaker): It is, thank God, not as prim or polite as it seems.

To its credit — and the credit of Hanif Kureishi, its bold and skillful screenwriter — Venus is more direct and provocative about elderly lechery and sexual brinkmanship than its estimable kissing cousins, 2003’s Lost in Translation and the 2005 HBO film The Girl in the Café. Both of those films are tasteful, sensitive portrayals of lonely, fiftysomething men whose drab lives are brightened by serendipitous encounters with lonely, twentysomething women. Both films also go to great lengths to depict their leading men as jaded but discreet and even chivalrous; getting the girl was fine, but getting into the girl’s pants was faintly indecent.

For Maurice, getting into the girl’s pants is the prime objective, impotence and catheters be damned. His other retired actor friends know it, too: When he proclaims that he is “a scientist of the female heart,” his friend Donald (Richard Griffiths) amends the statement by proclaiming Maurice “the professor of pussy.” Maurice’s dogged, cheerfully vulgar pursuit of Jessie — and the way this pursuit affects his friendship with Ian (Leslie Phillips), who has taken Jessie in as a caretaker — comprise the film’s modest narrative.

As Maurice, O’Toole has found the perfect valedictory role. Even though his once-dashing face has slipped and sagged, he still commands the most insouciant voice of any living English actor. I always think of O’Toole caressing the sentence “I think it would be fun” in Lawrence of Arabia; four decades later, he is still a magnificent linguistic masseur who curls and purrs his words with feline intuition.

As Jessie, Whittaker’s performance strengthens as her character parries Maurice’s advances. Maurice strikes a chord with her, but she’s never entirely softened by his charms or bedazzled by his recitations. Yet she continues to offer pieces of herself to him, first as an expression of affection but later as a way to take advantage of his age and infirmity.

The film is largely about this awkward dance between Jessie and Maurice, but it’s also about being old. It is attentive to the everyday medical debasements that come with old age. Maurice and Ian are first shown in a shabby café, scrabbling over pills as though they were doubloons from El Dorado. Maurice’s estranged wife (a sharp Vanessa Redgrave) limps around with a cane. And Maurice’s attempts to seduce his feminine ideal often seem like disguised attempts to simply find some companionship. Venus becomes a film as much about solitude and community as it is about elderly male wish-fulfillment.

In his 2005 novella Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Gabriel García Márquez wrote, “It occurred to me that among the charms of old age are the provocations our young female friends permit themselves because they think we are out of commission.” Venus is a deft, moving addendum to Márquez’s statement.

Venus

Opening Friday, February 2nd

Ridgeway Four

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Renée Zellweger miscast in daffy biopic.

Beatrix Potter is the best-selling children’s book author of all time, according to a tag at the end of Miss Potter, the new bio-pic about her. And yet, if you took the film’s word for everything, you’d also believe that Potter was potty — that she was a slightly insane artist and author of stories about bunnies, ducks, and hedgehogs, a woman who saw the animals as friends and really believed that her drawings of them came to life before her eyes and interacted with her. Or you’d believe that, short of madness, Potter was prone to hitting the laudanum.

Miss Potter opens in the early-20th-century London bedroom/studio of Beatrix. The camera shows the period paintbrushes, period paints, period paper, and period porcelain palette of an artist at work. And then the camera pulls back to reveal the very non-period Texan, Renée Zellweger. Just like that, as soon as Zellweger opens her clenched jaw to utter her first supposedly Brit-inflected syllables, the film suffers a mortal wound — and all those periods become question marks.

As the plot unfolds, Potter is already a 30-plus unmarried woman who lives in the attic of her parent’s house, an old maid and a bit of a shame to the family. She has not married despite her mother’s best efforts to match her with a suitably class-equivalent mate.

But Potter would much rather tend to her stories and paintings in her attic: tales about the naughty Peter Rabbit and other animal-kingdom rapscallions and daffy dos. She pitches a children’s book to Frederick Warne & Co. publishers, and the Warne brothers decide to foist her little bunny book upon their younger brother, Norman (Ewan McGregor), who wants a taste of the family business after years of playing housemaid for their infirm mother. A sister, Millie (Emily Watson), who is also unmarried and into her 30s, rounds out the Warne warren. The Potter/Warne union proves to be a highly successful venture, and soon enough Beatrix is amassing a fortune and Norman is falling in love.

McGregor seems willing to rise to the occasion, but Zellweger is just a mess, and the script regularly falters. McGregor is forced to smile bemusedly at Potter’s whimsical drawings and her dippy conversations with them, and no one could raise a line like “I find I love my heart more now, because that is where I can find you” from the dead.

The closest Miss Potter comes to interesting is in dealing with Potter as a feminist, refusing to be the model of wifedom by keeping a social calendar and running a home. The film touches on issues of domestic enslavement and childbearing, and it does suggest a proto-room-of-one’s-own theory of the woman as artist. But the feminism is only skin-deep, a period fancy with a conclusion that would probably rub period feminists a little raw, much less today’s.

Miss Potter does not contain a single child character other than Beatrix and her brother in flashback. The result, a film full of adults who laugh at the sight of a rabbit in a coat and a duck in a shawl, with nary a kid around, makes the characters all look a little loopy, even unseemly. Miss Potter is a portrait of an artist as a daft woman, and her lunacy is catching.

Miss Potter

Originally scheduled to open Friday, February 2nd, the release has been postponed to later in the month.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

I was really surprised by the lack of press coverage it got, but not really. And for selfish reasons, I’m rather glad it didn’t. I was in New York not long ago and was privileged to be invited to a memorial service for the late rhythm-and-blues singer Ruth Brown — the original female rhythm-and blues singer who was so popular in her day and sold so many records that her record company, Atlantic Records, was known as “The House That Ruth Built.” The service was held in the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, an absolutely exquisite 1920s structure with immense stained-glass windows and red-velvet-covered pews and hanging art-nouveau chandeliers. People filed into the church dressed to the nines, and the crowd was there not to see a spectacle but because they really wanted to honor Brown. There was no media circus, and no one was allowed to use flash photography. When the service began, the minister asked everyone to stand and cheer for Ruth Brown, which we did, and when the noise would die down a little, he had us cheer and clap even louder. It was amazing. I can’t write this without name-dropping, because Bonnie Raitt got up and spoke about how Brown had been like a mother to her. The First Lady of Motown and later Stax singer and lead singer for Ray Charles’ Raelettes, Mable John, got up and spoke about how, on the night of her first appearance at the Apollo theater, Brown took her home, opened her closet, and told her to pick out as many dresses as she liked, because if she was going to be performing at the Apollo she needed some new gowns. Little Jimmy Scott, at age 84, got up and sang one of Brown’s favorite hits, “So Long,” and sounded like solid gold. Others from Broadway and beyond sang, spoke, told happy stories and not-so-happy stories, including one about how Brown, having not received royalties for her music, had to work as a maid to put food on the table for her children and would hear her own songs on the radio in houses where she was mopping the floor. But then they spoke of how, in later years, she worked relentlessly to reform the music business to make sure this didn’t happen to anyone else. Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson were there. Paul Shaeffer was there, albeit late. Ben E. King was there. There’s no telling who else. The service lasted two-and-a-half hours, and when we left the church building, snow was falling in Harlem. There is indeed some kind of point to this. I know it sounds cheesy, but for those two-and-a-half hours, it was like being in a civilized world. For that period of time, there was no war in Iraq and no need to wonder why on earth there even is a war in Iraq. There were no insane plans by an insane man to send more young people over to that insane war. There were no presidential candidates shrieking about this or that. There was no poor little Miss U.S.A. going into rehab for drinking too much. There was no Orange Alert or Red Alert or protecting oil rigs or nonexistent weapons of mass destruction or bombs or kidnappings or lies for political gain or people eating cockroaches on television or commercials advertising crap no one really needs or computer viruses or Hummers or really bad singers making fools of themselves or people listening to Britney Spears. It was absolutely civilized. It made me wonder if people who don’t pay attention to what’s going on the world because it is just too depressing might not have the right idea. That used to drive me crazy, but somehow it’s starting to make sense. And it was great to see such a service for a real legend. The older I get, the more it seems like everything in American culture is totally fleeting, without any real merit, and usually just plain bad. I know I sound bitter, but when I think that someone like the aforementioned Britney Spears can sell millions of records while Ruth Brown mops floors, I get a little queasy. But hey, that’s just me.

Categories
News

Former Republican leader/legislator Tre Hargett Leaves Memphis; Mentioned in “Waltz” Tapes

Former state representative and House Republican leader Tre Hargett is moving from Bartlett to Knoxville to be vice-president of Tennessee operations for Rural Metro corporation.

Nikki Gast, spokeswoman for Rural Metro, confirmed a report first published this week in the Knoxville weekly newspaper Metro Pulse. She said Hargett has been working in Knoxville “for a while” but also spends time in Memphis. His previous title was head of community affairs for Rural Metro.

Hargett, a University of Memphis graduate and former chairman of the Shelby County Young Republicans, was a star of the Republican Party, rising to a leadership position while he was in his mid-30s. His career took a turn, however, when his name came up in secretly recorded tapes made in 2004 in the Tennessee Waltz investigation.

Undercover FBI agent Joe Carroll, posing as “Joe Carson,” head of E-Cycle Management, appeared to be targeting Hargett in a conversation with former Hamilton County school board member Charles Love.

“I want to make sure Tre hasn’t got cold feet,” says ‘Carson.’ “I mean, we did something for Tre.”

On the tape, Love says the legislation favoring E-Cycle should be introduced by representative Chris Newton and Hargett. Love also says Hargett “has got a sweetheart deal with Shelby County” for ambulance service.

Love and Newton were subsequently indicted and convicted of bribery.

Hargett, who did not return calls seeking comment, has previously told The Commercial Appeal that he did nothing wrong and resented the use of his name by Love and FBI agents in the investigation.

In August of 2005, four months after Tennessee Waltz broke, Hargett announced that he was resigning to take a job as a lobbyist with Pfizer, a drug company that lobbies the Tennessee General Assembly. While serving in the legislature, Hargett sponsored legislation on disclosure of business interests, ethics reform, and combating fraud in Tenn-Care. His decision to go to work for Pfizer was criticized by Democrats and some Republicans as an example of “revolving-door” politics and poor decision making. Hargett changed his mind a few weeks later and decided to stay with Rural Metro.

Rural Metro is a publicly held corporation based in Scottsdale, Arizona. It provides ambulance transportation and fire protection to municipalities in several states, including more than 80 clients in Tennessee. Among them is Shelby County government.

Rural Metro is in the news in Memphis because Shelby County is trying to improve its ambulance response rate and keep Germantown and other suburbs from breaking away and negotiating their own ambulance deals. Shelby County Mayor A C Wharton told the Flyer that the renegotiations have nothing to do with Tennessee Waltz.

“We are coming up on the renewal date and, having tired of the overall complaints about EMS and the absence of performance-based measures in the existing contract, I felt it time to try to cure the matter once and for all,” he said in an e-mail. “If those concerns existed in any quarters they did not reach me. I could certainly understand how such concerns could ‘spook’ public officials, but that was not the case with me.”

Categories
Music Music Features

International Blues Challenge Opens on Beale Street

The 2007 International Blues Challenge begins tonight on Beale Street. More than 150 acts will fill 16 venues Thursday and Friday nights. Winners will be announced at a Saturday brunch.

The number of competing acts in the competition has more than doubled in the past five years, from 69 acts in 2003 to 157 acts from 34 states and eight countries this year, including first-time entries from Finland and India as well as Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Taiwan, and the United States.

So head on down to Beale this weekend. If you haven’t heard Finnish blues, you ain’t heard nothin’. And the guys from India are no slouches either.

If you’ve never been to the IBC, you’ve missed one of the best things Memphis has to offer. Check it out.

Categories
Music Music Features

Vending Machine’s Robby Grant On Music, Family

I’ve known Robby Grant since the sixth grade. (We also went to religious school and high school together.) We always ran in the same circles, but didn’t really get to know each other until about a year ago when I cornered him at the Children’s Museum and convinced him to help me get a Rock-n-Romp started. Now Robby and I often call on each other for favors—me more than him—and meet up for lunch downtown when we have the time. I recently sat down with him (tape recorder in hand) at the Majestic to talk about music, parenting, and the intertwining of the two. — Stacey Greenberg

When did you start playing music?

Robby: I was in 7th grade, so age 12, no 13. I had piano lessons when I was really young. I sucked at sports for the most part. Music was always a part of my life. My mom had a lot of great old 45s, a lot of great records. She was a fan of music. I got to choose what I wanted to play. I chose an electric guitar. I bought one with my cousin—we split it, but he never played it.

That was a good deal for you.

Robby: Yeah.

Why the electric guitar?

It looked cool. We went in the music store and it was the coolest thing in there. It was an Electra Phoenix with a whammy bar and it cost $100. My dad was a singer and my uncle played drums. My dad passed when I was really young (5). But I saw him sing when I was really little. Once I had the guitar, I immediately formed a band in seventh grade with my friend, Tom Martin. It was just the two of us for the first two albums. I like to learn by doing so I bought a guitar, formed a band, and started recording music.

How did you record?

With a jambox, and a tape recorder so I could multi-track. (This was all prior to being able to afford a 4-track.) It sounds a lot fancier than it was. We had skits and songs. We played at my Bar Mitzvah. We tried out for my high-school talent show every year. In 10th grade we did Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire.” In 11th grade we did “Pinball Wizard” by the Who, which probably wasn’t a smart choice since my high school had such a big hearing-impaired program. In 12th grade I played drums and we played “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”

Did you ever win?

No.

So how did you go from not winning talent shows to being in the very successful band, Big Ass Truck?

It was a natural progression. We got a 4-track and did some recording with that. Then in college [The University of Memphis where Robby got a film degree] I got together with some friends [including Steve Selvidge] and started playing in a band called Thrill of Confusion. I spent a lot of time making videos too. TOC disintegrated and morphed into a band called Fester. Our drummer went away to UT, so we never practiced. We got together and just played noise for 45 minutes when we opened up for The Simple Ones and surprisingly Jared (the lead singer) liked it. However, I wasn’t interested in pursuing a noise band at that point. Steve got five friends together to open for the Simple Ones at the Antenna in 1991 and that was basically Big Ass Truck. We had a lot of friends and hung up a lot of flyers. We played frequently—once a month for four or five years. Then did more regional shows. Then we toured the U.S. for four years.

What was the band’s peak?

Our peak was the last record we made—we wrote it in the studio. It was the culmination of all the time we spent together. We were on some weird MTV show “Oddville.” We had a video—Robert Gordon shot it. It was on “120 Minutes” on VH-1. We had five CDs total.

Where in all this did you get married and start having kids?

Rachael and I dated as seniors in high school and have been together ever since. We got married when I was 24, so 1997. I was gone a lot during that time. I was on the road a lot. There was the whole “absence makes the heart grow fonder” thing going on. We had a lot of time to do our own things. I think that contributes to the fact that we are still married almost 10 years later. Five was born while I was still touring. I missed the whole first year of his life.

What was that like?

I missed being there—we were really busy—but having never been a father before I didn’t know what I was missing. We were the first ones of our friends to have kids.

Was Rachael like, “You suck?”

Not really. I’d be home for a few weeks at a time. I could never do it now. Five is seven now and he’d have like a million questions I couldn’t answer.

Did having Five contribute to the band’s break up?

Not really. We quit when we all still liked each other. We’d been doing it for 10 years and it had just run its course.

So what did you do when Big Ass Truck broke up?

After Five was born, I started doing side work for Paul Ringger at Every CD and then later for Ringger Interactive. I took a laptop on the road and built Web sites while I was in the van. I didn’t have to wonder what I was going to do when we broke up. I just started going to work more. I had a desk at Paul’s house. I was always home every couple of weeks—it wasn’t like I was out of sight out mind for very long. Paul taught me a lot and gave me a lot of books to read. We built a lot of sites together and I just learned that way.

So Five is two, you have a day job, how do you express yourself musically at this point?

Three or four years before Big Ass Truck broke up, I was already doing my own thing—I released two solo records, one under the name Vending Machine. It actually gave me a chance to express myself without the constraints of being in the band When it’s just me it’s like, “I like the beat, let’s record it.” I also just wanted to play guitar and not necessarily write songs, so I started playing in Mouserocket with Robert Barnett (from Big Ass Truck).

Do you have like a whole in-house recording studio?

I’ve recorded all my records at home. I wouldn’t call it a recording studio, but I can go up at 5:30am and record what I want. I can’t schedule a whole session with other people—that’s hard to do. I like recording early morning, but no earlier than 5:30am.

When do you go to sleep?

Robby: I usually go to bed at 11pm or midnight. I’ve got bags under my eyes.

What about including Five in your music?

The record before this, he’d scream and I’d loop it. On the last one I hit a wall a couple of times when writing a song and I’d play it for Five and say, “What does this sound like to you?” On one of the faster ones, he was like, “It sounds like cobras.” It actually inspired me to name the album King Cobras Do. He even wrote the lyrics to the Saturn National Anthem. He was sort of free associating words. I rearranged them a bit, but they’re his words. We also do a lot of recording where he’ll come up and he’ll play drums or guitar or keyboards and just make some noise on the weekends. We’ll take turns being boss. He’s a hard boss. For the past three years we’ve done a holiday song as a family and sent it out to friends.

Is Sadie (Robby’s two-year-old) getting involved?

She’ll bang on the drums and do her thing. She inspired a new song called “Tell me the truth and I’ll stop Teasing You.”

How often do you play shows?

Once every other month. My other band, The Glitches, has a few gigs.

Ok, wait. You are in another band?

I saw Jared (from the Simple Ones) at a PTA meeting—our kids go to the same school—and the school and I said, “We need a band to play at the thing at the end of the year.” We hadn’t had a chance to play together so we formed the Glitches, which is a cover band, and now we’re good friends. We play a lot of the school functions and it’s fun. We’re currently looking to play private parties…you know if anyone is interested?

So what do you do when you have a late show? Does Rachael come?

Sadie is experiencing the terrible twos so it’s hard to find a babysitter. Rachael probably comes to every other show. But we practice at the house so she’s very aware of our set.

Do the kids ever get to see you play other than at Rock-n-Romp?

Yeah we did a show at the Shell and the Center for Southern Folklore. I got Sadie some big soundproof headphones so she could listen.

So is being in three bands now somehow easier than being in Big Ass Truck?

Big Ass Truck was a lifestyle commitment. We practiced two times a week, we had beers after practice, we toured, etc. Now I’m more focused on end goals, like finishing a record. I have a show next week and the band has practiced for the last month so we can do several shows now.

Do you go out and hear music very often?

I don’t go out near as much as I used to. But with the Internet I can keep up with music via Myspace, web sites, and various message boards. It’s a pretty good alternative to going out. I can get 10 firsthand accounts of any show sitting at my desk.

What are your musical ambitions at this point?

At this point, just to keep making music. Big Ass Truck did some shows with Ben Harper and he was touring with his family. They had a separate camper. I saw him kiss his daughter goodnight before going to a show. I could see us doing that in a few years (not quite at that scale). Rachael likes to travel. For now, music from my last two albums was featured on “The Real World” and I just released some new songs to “Pimp My Ride.” I’m interested in doing movies. I just scored Glenn Hopper’s movie—The Hanged Man.

Do you see yourself having a family band someday?

Five takes piano lessons. I see music as a way to express myself, and I hope Five has something like that. I want him to be happy and have something that he enjoys doing forever. I might get Sadie to take cello lessons. We need someone in the family to play a classical string instrument.