Month: December 2007

Categories
Music Music Features

Reigning Sound Returns

Reigning Sound ringleader Greg Cartwright played an impromptu acoustic set at Goner Records Friday, November 30th, in part to celebrate the completion of the band’s most recent album. The former Memphian, now comfortably ensconced in Asheville, North Carolina (asked before his set if he were tempted to move back, he charitably responded that he loves visiting Memphis), played with his band at the Gibson Beale Street Showcase over Thanksgiving weekend, then spent the following week holed up at Ardent‘s Studio C, with Doug Easley engineering.

The newly bearded Cartwright said during his Goner set that the new album would be released via the In the Red label in late spring. After spending time in the past year backing up (and, in Cartwright’s case, producing and writing for) former Shangri-Las singer Mary Weiss and keeping the Reigning Sound section of record-store racks stocked with outtakes (Home for Orphans) and live (Live at Goner, Live at Maxwell’s) discs, this will be the band’s first album of new material since 2004’s Too Much Guitar.

The Reigning Sound isn’t the only high-profile Memphis-connected band that’s been in the studio working on an early-2008 release. The North Mississippi Allstars have announced that their next album, titled Hernando, will be released on January 22nd. The band’s first studio album since 2005’s Electric Blue Watermelon, Hernando will also be the first released on the band’s own label, Sounds of the South. The album was produced by Jim Dickinson in September at his Zebra Ranch studio.

If you missed ambitious local rock band The Third Man‘s record-release party for its new album Among the Wolves at the Hi-Tone Café, you can make up for it this week, when the band plays an early-evening set at Shangri-La Records. The Third Man is set to play at 6 p.m. Friday, December 7th, and it’ll be interesting to see how the band’s epic, guitar-heavy sound translates to a more intimate setting.

The Memphis Roller Derby will take over the Hi-Tone Café Saturday, December 8th, for their second annual “Memphis Roller Derby Ho Ho Ho Burlesque Show.” In addition to skits featuring the Derby gals, there will be plenty of musical entertainment as well. Longtime local-scene drummer/commentator Ross Johnson, fresh off the release of his “career”-spanning Goner compilation Make It Stop: The Most of Ross Johnson, will be backed by an “all-star” band he’s dubbed the Play Pretteez. Johnson also will retreat back behind the drum kit alongside Jeff Golightly, Lamar Sorrento, and Jeremy Scott in a British-invasion style band called Jeffrey & the Pacemakers. Rounding out the music will be electronic dance act Shortwave Dahlia and DJ Steve Anne. Doors open at 9 p.m. Admission is $10.

Australian Idol winner and MemphisFlyer.com celebrity Guy Sebastian has released his Ardent Studios-recorded debut The Memphis Album, crafted with MGs Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn headlining a terrific Memphis studio band. Sebastian clearly loves Memphis soul, but his take on the genre is too respectful and too unadventurous for his own good. He sings only the most identifiable hits (“Soul Man,” “In the Midnight Hour,” “Let’s Stay Together,” etc.) and mimics the original recordings too closely. Still, it’s a better Memphis tribute than actor Peter Gallagher’s. Sebastian will be taking the core of his Memphis band — Cropper and Dunn along with drummer Steve Potts and keyboardist Lester Snell — on an Australian tour starting in February.

The Stax Music Academy‘s SNAP! After School Winter Concert will take place at 7 p.m. Saturday, December 8th, at the Michael D. Rose Theatre at the University of Memphis. Stax Music Academy artist-in-residence Kirk Whalum will be performing alongside the kids, as will soul singer Glenn Jones. Tickets to the SNAP! concert are $5 and are available through the Soulsville Foundation development office. Call 946-2535 for details.

Finally, congratulations to the New Daisy Theatre‘s Mike Glenn, who is the only Memphian receiving a Keeping the Blues Alive award from the International Blues Foundation this year. The awards will be presented February 2nd during International Blues Challenge weekend.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Leftover Tuna

Some people (and for reasons that boggle the mind) can’t get enough of A Tuna Christmas. Take, for example, the young lady who sat behind me at Playhouse on the Square Sunday night. She said all the punchlines moments before the actors could deliver them, then repeated particularly funny lines, laughed until she snorted, and laughed again at her own snorting. She wasn’t the only person having a good time, though she was certainly the most obnoxious.

A Tuna Christmas is a small-town and smaller-stakes soap opera built on the unfortunately accurate premise that an audience will always laugh at chubby men in dresses and pee their pants at the mere mention of a Frito-pie.

Yes indeed, it is a treat to watch gifted character actors Andrew Moore and Michael Gravois transform before our very eyes into all the oddball inhabitants of Texas’ third-smallest town. True enough, the actors have an infectious good time showing off their mighty arsenal of silly, whistling voices and strange, spit-laden dialects. But in spite of their populist appeal, all three of the Tuna plays (Greater Tuna, A Tuna Christmas, and the Independence Day thigh-slapper Red, White, and Tuna) are snarlingly superior and steadfastly middle-brow. What these protracted skits about big-hearted half-wits from hicktown lack in mere humanity, they more than make up for in sight gags, gross sentiment, and casual racism. (Midget Mexicans, anyone?)

The Tuna plays are all about making fun of culturally and economically challenged peckerwoods with big butts, bad hair, and tacky outfits. And they’re also about getting misty when these poor inbred fashion disasters find sloppy love over a bottle of whiskey and a Floyd Cramer tune.

Oh well. After the box-office disappointment of Jerry Springer — the Opera (a far more daring take on the trailer-park set), Playhouse deserves a few full houses. It’s been a blissful five years since POTS’ last visit to Tuna, the dysfunctional trailer-park community where the locals tune into radio station WKKK (hyuck!) for up-to-the-minute reports on the annual holiday lawn-display contest. (Yeehaw!) Playhouse could drag out this crowd-pleasing garbage every year but doesn’t. Astonishing! Praiseworthy, even.

Through January 6th

While Playhouse on the Square is busy dishing out the old and familiar, Hattiloo Theatre is attempting box-office suicide by presenting a monstrously depressing original script during the one time of the year when most of the city’s theaters can actually fill seats and stock their treasure chests.

Written and directed by Hattiloo’s artistic director Ekundayo Bandele, Forget Me Not Christmas is Sophocles’ Antigone reimagined and set in the poorest place imaginable. It tells the story of recently freed slaves grieving over a monstrous tragedy, shaking off their ghosts, and sacrificing their identity to please the gods of their former captors.

Bandele is an exceptional writer, though sometimes he can go on like a politician in love with the sound of his own voice. At this point in his promising play’s development, every line hangs heavy with dark matters and thundering self-importance.

Never let it be said that Bandele doesn’t have a gift for developing epic metaphors. In the center of his set (and at the heart of his play), there is a massive wood-burning furnace that saved an entire community one particularly nasty winter. Sixteen members of that community were subsequently burned in the furnace when the original owner took his revenge for the theft, and the survivors are forced to decide if the man who stole the furnace was a Christ figure or a common thief who brought a curse down on his people.

Bandele’s direction lacks the crispness his wordy play needs to move it along at a tolerable clip, and the actors often seem uncertain of their lines and blocking. Still, its flaws and overeager nods to playwrights like August Wilson and Suzan Lori Parks aside, there is something to it all.

Repetitive and seemingly unfinished, Forget Me Not Christmas is a holiday downer that needs someone other than the playwright to edit and stage it. That said, there is no reason to believe that Bandele’s writing won’t astound us all some day.

Through December 23rd

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Christmas Spirit

Jeff Guinn is a man who created a world around Santa Claus. Where most of us see a mythical gift-giving saint (or, for the more cynical, a way-overdone marketing scheme), Guinn saw an amazing story as well as a career path.

First, there was Guinn’s book The Autobiography of Santa Claus, which traces the reality of Saint Nicholas (born 280 AD) and the development of the legend surrounding him. Next up was How Mrs. Claus Saved Christmas, which fictionalizes actual events of 17th-century England, when peasants marched to save Christmas from the Puritans, who had deemed it sinfully pagan. In that tome, Guinn turns a great literary trick, combining the origins of the candy cane and Oliver Cromwell in the same book.

And finally there was The Great Santa Search, in which Saint Nick descends from the North Pole to defend Christmas from the tide of commercialism.

Guinn, a native of Fort Worth, Texas, and author of several non-Christmas books, says that since food was always part of Christmas, his books always included some fabulous feasts — and readers wanted the recipes. This led Guinn on another research trip.

“It became obvious that to really understand Christmas history all over the world, you should look at the traditional foods people use to celebrate,” he says. The result is Santa’s North Pole Cookbook (Tacher), which Guinn will be touring to publicize this month. He’ll be at Davis-Kidd on Tuesday, December 11th.

Guinn confesses he had no idea what he was getting into with a cookbook.

“I started out wondering if I could find two dozen Christmas recipes from around the world,” he says. “I wound up with just under 400 of them. We had some huge tasting parties over the last two years.”

He settled on 75 recipes, and he’s brought the formula from his “Christmas Chronicles” into the kitchen: do the research then lay out stories and facts to expand your knowledge of Christmas. He says 85 percent of the recipes are taken straight from traditions of specific countries, while a chef friend, who appears as Santa’s private chef Lars, has created some “North Pole specialties.”

“I don’t claim to be in any sense a gourmet chef,” Guinn says, “but I am one of those people who enjoys getting into kitchen and trying to make things. We have a good mix of recipes to challenge world-class chefs and also to be fun for families to prepare together. I wanted to make sure everything in the book could be done at home.”

Among the five breakfasts, six breads, nine appetizers, 16 entrées, nine sides, six drinks, and over a dozen desserts, you’ll find little historical notes like where the word “Christmas” comes from and how turkeys get their name.

Some recipes didn’t make it. “Some things, after four or five tries, we finally decided that’s just the way it tastes,” Guinn admits.

Much of what made it won’t strike you as traditional Christmas fare, unless you’ve done Christmas in, say, Italy.

“In Italy, a lot of people were poor and seafood was readily available, so a lot of Christmas dishes feature some kind of seafood,” Guinn says. He’s given us a recipe for capitone fritto, or fried eel.

Can’t find eel in town? There’s also doro wat, an Ehtiopian chicken stew with cardamom, nutmeg, and ginger root. And there’s the Greek christopsomo (Christ’s bread), a raisin-walnut concoction that kids decorate. From Egypt, there are sweet cookies also enjoyed by Muslims.

There is — gasp! — a fruitcake recipe, as well as the story of fruitcake.

“Fruitcake was originally a road food for armies that would could keep forever,” Guinn explains. “Egyptian pharaohs loved it so much that for a while it was illegal for common people to eat it.”

His book has a recipe for “Black Christmas Fruitcake” from Trinidad and Tobago, whose complicated preparation is part of the festivities.

You’ll also find out that there are no plums in plum pudding; rather, the name comes from putting all the ingredients in a bag and boiling them until they expanded to “plum fill” the bag. Guinn’s recipe has 14 ingredients.

And you’ll learn that “palascinta,” or lemony Hungarian pancakes, were thought to be flown in by Jesus and a band of angels.

“I want to expand your Christmas knowledge while expanding your waistline,” Guinn jokes. “The most wonderful thing for me is realizing Christmas really is global. The means by which Saint Nick delivers his presents change, but everybody at some point sits down to the table and has a big feast.”

Jeff Guinn and “Lars” talk cooking, sign copies of Santa’s North Pole Cookbook, and offer baked goods at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on Tuesday, December 11th, at 5:30 p.m.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Serving Up Sunday

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

For those of you whose idea of a perfect Sunday doesn’t include cooking, here are a few new options:

At Sweet, the Exquisite Desserterie, brunch isn’t the usual eggs and pancakes.

“I asked customers and friends what they would like to see for brunch,” says Paula Pulido, the restaurant’s chef and owner. “Everybody wanted something different from the standard eggs Benedict, French toast, and Belgian waffles.”

Sweet’s “something different” includes an antipasti buffet to start and a dessert buffet to finish. In between, diners can nibble on fresh popovers with potato/leek soup, followed by a baby-greens salad, a mimosa “intermezzo,” and a choice of beef or vegetable en croute, all for $21.

Sunday brunch at Sweet is available from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Sweet, 938 S. Cooper (726-4300)

Currents, a fine-dining restaurant at the River Inn of Harbor Town, also recently started offering Sunday brunch. The more traditional items include cinnamon French toast, Monte Cristo with vanilla-stewed berries, Golden Apple pancakes, and a chèvre omelet with roasted mushrooms, artichokes, and heirloom tomatoes. Other dishes are pan-roasted Tasmanian salmon, grilled Nyman Ranch pork loin, saffron risotto with lobster, and grilled filet of beef.

Sunday brunch at Currents is available from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Currents, 50 Harbor Town Square
(260-3300)

If you want to grab a couple of friends for a relaxed, end-of-weekend dinner, try the Majestic Grille’s Sunday Suppers. One supper, served family-style, feeds four.

“This is something we have wanted to do for a while, and we thought the holidays would be a perfect time to try it out,” says Deni Reilly, who owns the restaurant with her husband Patrick, the Majestic’s chef.

The menu changes every week and typically includes home-cooking favorites with a twist, such as braised pork loin with roasted apples and cider and mashed root vegetables. The Sunday suppers are served during regular dinner hours and cost $60.

The Majestic Grille, 145 S. Main
(522-8555)

The Flying Fish is offering a “Preacher’s Special” to all oyster lovers. Every Sunday, all day, you can satisfy your oyster craving for 25 cents per oyster. If oysters aren’t your thing, the restaurant offers plenty of other seafood dishes, such as catfish, tilapia, snapper, salmon, and crawfish.

The Flying Fish, 105 S. Second
(522-8228)

Need a dash of culinary inspiration for your holiday cooking? Stop by Williams-Sonoma this month for free demonstrations, technique classes, and a taste of some of the store’s holiday favorites.

On Sunday, December 9th, discover the secrets to throwing an elegant holiday cocktail party. Demonstrations about the best cup of cocoa, holiday confections, easy desserts, gifts for the cook, festive drinks, super stocking stuffers, and more are offered almost every day throughout December from 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Call the store for a detailed scheduled.

Williams-Sonoma, 7615 W. Farmington (737-9990)

You have until Saturday, December 15th, to cast your vote in support of a local farmer, chef, restaurant, or food-related business or person for the Edible Communities 2007 Reader’s Choice Local Hero Award.

Edible Memphis, a quarterly magazine that debuted last spring, is one of 30 “Edible Community” publications around the United States that focus on local foods and farmers.

Each Edible Community will vote on its heroes, and the winners will be announced in January at the Edible Communities annual publisher’s dinner in Charleston, South Carolina. Winners will then appear in the spring 2008 issues.

Eligible locally for the award are the places and people featured in Edible Memphis throughout the year: Downing Hollow Farms (Lori Greene), Neola Farms (Michael Lenagar), Whitton Farms (Jill and Keith Forrester), Delta Grind (Georgeanne Ross), Tripp Country Ham (Charlie Tripp), Magevney Kitchen Garden, the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, Tom Singarella (baker), Jose Gutierrez (Encore), Karen Carrier (Automatic Slim’s, Beauty Shop), and Nancy Kistler (Entourage catering).

Go to ediblememphis.com to cast your vote.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Failed Fantasy

I’ve read all seven Harry Potter books. I’ve been up one side of Mount Doom and down the other with Tolkien. I’ve chased (and finally caught) Stephen King’s Dark Tower since prepubescence. And I’m here to tell you that love them all though I do, none of them can hold a candle to Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy.

Composed of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, Pullman’s books are teenage-appropriate fantasy with an adults-only allegorical kicker. It’s a coming-of-age story about coming-of-age. Wondrous, ambitious, original, black, profound — the series exists, as far as I’m concerned, in a hyperbole-free zone.

Which does not mean that the new film adaptation of The Golden Compass is anywhere near as good. Directed and adapted by Chris Weitz (About a Boy, Down to Earth), the film is clunky in exposition — a forgivable sin, except it’s all exposition.

The missteps begin immediately, with a narrated prologue that spills the beans on some primary mysteries that the book withheld to build tension. It’s sickening. Imagine if the opening crawl in Star Wars bluntly stated what the Force was, that it was indisputably real, and that, oh yeah, Darth Vader is Luke’s dad: Obi-Wan would come off like a preening know-it-all, Luke like an imbecile, and Han Solo like a recalcitrant asshole. If The Golden Compass doesn’t guard its secrets jealously, why should anybody else be invested in it?

Skipping past some of the more frustrating revelations, Pullman’s world opens up: Jordan College, Oxford, England, something like the 1800s. Except there are fundamental differences from our own world: Primarily, each person has an animal-like creature companion, called a daemon, that is much more than just a friend — that is analogous, in a way, to the human soul.

At Jordan College lives Lyra Belacqua (the very convincing Dakota Blue Richards), the 11-year-old clever, wild child who is the protagonist of the story. The orphan Lyra rules the roost at Jordan, palling around with Gyptian children (an ethnic group similar to the Roma) and getting into trouble with her daemon, Pantalaimon (voiced by Freddie Highmore). She encounters her uncle, Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), a kind of English Richard Halliburton who has made a scientific discovery about the mysterious particle “Dust” in the Arctic and wants funding from Jordan College for an expedition.

After Asriel heads north, Lyra meets Mrs. Coulter (the perfectly rotten Nicole Kidman), another dignitary visiting Jordan. Attracted by her ethereal beauty and confidence, Lyra accepts Coulter’s invitation to go home with her to London. Before leaving, the college master gives Lyra an alethiometer to safeguard, a small, extremely rare device that is said to be able to tell the truth, but it doesn’t come with an instruction booklet. (This is the titular golden compass.)

In London, Lyra learns that Coulter may not be everything she seems, and, soon enough, she escapes to head north on a journey with the Gyptians. Oh, and lurking in the wings is the Magisterium, the ruling authority in this world, who have set themselves in opposition to Lord Asriel, the existence of Dust, the use of the alethiometer, and a laundry list of other things. But Dust, we learn from the prologue, is real. Therefore, the Magisterium, believing otherwise, is set up as the bad guys right away, and not very intelligent ones at that. Does it matter that the Magisterium will turn out to actually be the bad guys much later in the series? Only if you haven’t read the books.

Dakota Blue Richards in The Golden Compass

And then there are the witches, and the armored bears, and the prophecy, and … well, I could go on, but it’s just too much information — especially when the film tries to cram it all in about 20 minutes of screen time. The Golden Compass doesn’t take enough time to establish the ground rules for this familiar but fundamentally alien world. It acts as though it needs to do no work to gain the trust of the audience or to establish any credibility, or, for that matter, that there’s any doubt that the audience is going to buy any of this.

The film has garnered a lot of pre-release bother from some religious groups, who accuse it of having an atheist message. Inevitable questions about whether many of these protesters have even seen the film aside, the argument gains no traction. There’s no doubt that the Magisterium resembles the Catholic Church, just as there’s no doubt that in the books, especially The Amber Spyglass, certain key religious elements come under fire. As a fantasy, it’s the anti-Narnia.

But Pullman’s books — it remains to be seen how true it is of the films — don’t decry religious experience so much as the organization that traps it. If it’s atheistic, then I hate college football just because I detest the Bowl Championship Series.

The Golden Compass also struggles almost every minute with editing. This is a three-hour fatty crammed in a two-hour corset. The story is globetrotting in breadth, and there’s a lot of plot to put in play, especially since it’s based on a book that is all set up for the breathtaking last two installments.

Unfortunately, the big payoff in the book is remaindered by the movie for its presumed sequel. The Golden Compass ends exactly one sequence too soon and loses out on what could have been a saving grace. Herein is yet another basic flaw in the film: trusting that by playing off the audiences’ built-in fantasy-film expectations and desire for a happy ending, it will be enough to lure them back for a sequel. Instead, the movie is all empty calories. If my interest in the series weren’t rooted in the books, there’s no way this film would have me asking for more.

I can’t stand the idea that films have to be faithful to their source material, and I won’t respect myself in the morning for saying this (but I’ll respect Chris Weitz even less): would that The Golden Compass treated the book it’s based on like it was the gospel truth.

The Golden Compass

Opening Friday, December 7th

Multiple locations

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Here’s the thing about our friend Tim Sampson, who fills this space most weeks: He knows what he’s talking about. He reads all about the politicians, forms detailed opinions, then writes his columns secure in the knowledge that he is well informed. You’d think that’s a good thing, but the problem is so many of the rest of us are completely uninformed and therefore don’t fully understand what he’s talking about. Although I have figured out that he stays pretty pissed off.

Yes, I am one of the deliberately unaware. There may have been a time when the whole politics thing seemed groovy to me and I kept up to date, but those days ended sometime around President Clinton’s Hummer-Gate. All of those old white guys getting squeamish while trying to make political hay made me find other ways to keep entertained. I’ve been very busy deciphering the instructions to my new cappuccino-maker. Hours of my life have been filled laboring to teach my cats tricks. This is important work, people.

Still, I try to read Tim’s column because he’s an old friend. In fact, the dissolute misanthrope was once my boss. (Wrap your head around what that was like.) Now, I open the Flyer and wade my way through his screed, often baffled at who the players are and what their agenda may be. Tim knows his local politics, and there, I’ve got nothing. There are a whole lot of Fords, and they seem to get folks awfully riled up, but I don’t like getting riled up. We’ve had the same mayor for a really long time, and whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing isn’t for me to say.

On the national front, as far as I can determine, the Republicans are apparently going to run Fred Thompson, Rudolph Giuliani, or the Mormon guy who doesn’t want to always be referred to as the Mormon guy. I understand his wishes on this, but the only name I have for him is the Mormon guy. I will give him this: He has majestic hair. If we elected presidents solely on their sartorial splendor, he’d already be measuring for drapes. Or one of his wives would be. (It’s a joke, son.)

Giuliani seems pretty cool to me. What I love is that at one point while he was mayor of New York City, he was living in the mayor’s residence with both his soon-to-be ex-wife and his mistress. That’s not bad for a squirrelly guy with a bad comb-over.

I’ve met Fred Thompson, and he was very actorly. When you meet someone who is actorly, you know it. They’re very well spoken, have a practiced conspiratorial wink, and know how to wear makeup. Unfortunately, I can’t shake the fact that I know lot of actors and they’re, um, not that smart. They can memorize words really, really well, but you don’t want one doing your taxes.

On the Democrat side, they seem destined to run Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, or Barack Obama. There’s also that crazy little elf, Dennis Kucinich, but this country will never elect a President Dennis. Damn it.

John Edwards seems like a genuinely nice guy, but it’s hard to get past the whole fighting for the poor while having a house the size of an airport thing. Obama is a very charismatic guy. The few times I’ve seen him on TV, he’s come across as totally prepared to be president. You know who also seems totally prepared to be president? Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. Yeah, that’s not going to happen either.

Hillary. If you noticed that I saved her for last, it’s mainly because I’m afraid of her. We can quibble about whether her eight years of icily smiling at her husband while she was first lady qualifies as “experience” or whether it even makes sense that she’s a senator from a state she had never lived in before, but the truth is, most every American is scared of the woman. I don’t mean that we fear that she’ll do something crazy as president. I mean we’re afraid that if she got angry at one of us, she would personally kick our ass.

Between now and whenever we’re supposed to vote — which I think is probably sometime next fall — I’ll do some actual research. Or I’ll just keep reading Tim’s column. And do the exact opposite of whatever that lunatic advises. Like I said, I know the guy.

Dennis Phillippi is a Memphis writer, comedian, and radio host.

Categories
News

Bob Frank and John Murry Create Murder Ballads in Memphis This Week

The 62-year-old Bob Frank was born and raised in Memphis, where he attended East High School. He was also a cohort of Jim Dickinson and others on the city’s underground folk scene in the Sixties. After a high-profile eponymous album for Vanguard Records in 1972 went awry, Frank moved to Oakland, California, and basically retired from the record business, re-emerging with a few obscure, self-released albums earlier this decade.

The 27-year-old John Murry was raised in Tupelo, relocated to Memphis as a teenager, and made a name for himself on the local music scene via first-rate alt-country bands the Dillingers and his own John Murry Band. Murry was quickly recognized as a major talent but never lived up to his promise while in Memphis. He followed his new wife to San Francisco in 2003.

Though separated by a generation, these two musical underachievers and kindred spirits came together in California, making a mark this year with World Without End, an album of original murder ballads that received a positive notice in Rolling Stone and has garnered rave reviews, particularly, in British music magazines. This week, the duo returns home to perform songs from the album in Memphis for the first time.

Read the rest of Chris Herrington’s story about Frank and Murry in this week’s Flyer.

Categories
News

Timberlake One of Walters’ 10 Most Fascinating People

Justin Timberlake has been named one of Barbara Walters’ 10 Most Fascinating People of 2007. The program airs Thursday night.

Among those joining Timberlake on the list are David and Victoria Beckham, the founders of MySpace, and Hugo Chavez.

From the interview:

Walters: “Do you think you’re sexy?”

Timberlake: “I work with what I’ve got.”

Walters: “What you’ve got ain’t bad.”

Categories
News

Memphis Music Legend Ben Cauley Makes Friends in Wisconsin

CREDIT: TheDailyPage.com

From the Madison Isthmus Daily Page: Ben Cauley of The Bar-Kays returned to Madison for the first time in four decades for the Otis Redding memorial.

The Otis Redding tribute on Monday evening was a somber, respectful affair. Marking the 40th anniversary of the great soul singer’s death in the Lake Monona plane crash that also claimed the lives of all but one of the Bar-Kays, the event drew a large crowd to Monona Terrace and featured an appearance by the tragedy’s sole survivor, the trumpeter Ben Cauley, who was in Madison for the first time since that terrible night.

Opening with local guitarist Robert J. and harmonica virtuoso Westside Andy’s respectful cover of the Redding classic “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” the event was marked by Mayor Dave Cieslewicz’s reading of a memorial proclamation. But the highlight had to be Cauley’s appearance.

The trumpeter has gone on to become one of the cornerstones of the Memphis music scene. Dressed to the nines for his appearance at Monona Terrace, Cauley offered some brief reflections on the crash and its aftermath before he launched into an emotional cover of another Redding hit, “Try a Little Tenderness,” followed by a version of “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” that was downright heart-breaking.

Read it all at TheDailyPage.com.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Buddy McEwen Remembered

Buddy McEwen finished his final round at 67, which is five under par at his beloved Davy Crockett. There are a lot of us who wish his score could have been much higher.

McEwen died at 67 last week, after a four-year battle with throat cancer. He was a beautiful man, full of humor, spirit, and sass. I first met him in the early 1990s, when I began playing at Davy Crockett. He was the genial pro, more of a host, really. He’d greet you, chat you up about your life, the Tigers, your golf game, and sell you some used balls …

Read the rest of editor Bruce VanWyngarden’s column about Memphis golf legend Buddy McEwen.