Month: August 2009

Flyer Flashback

Post author By John Branston
Post date August 6, 2009

“Can America’s Distribution Center make a profit on the
Internet?”

That was the question posed in a Flyer cover story on this
date 10 years ago.

The difficulty of answering that question is apparent in the opening
paragraphs of the story, which touted a hot new company called EveryCD.com as “the biggest music store in
Memphis.” The business sold compact discs from a catalog of 350,000
titles.

The iPod was a few years away, needless to say.

Memphis enjoyed a business boom as companies such as Toys ‘R’ Us,
Nike, Planet Rx, and Williams-Sonoma built or occupied warehouses in
Memphis to serve their online businesses.

An expert quoted in the article predicted that the distribution of
physical goods would drive local employment to ever higher heights for
years, thanks to the online economy. And a would-be entrepreneur cited
“the unexploited supply of tech workers in the area who can be hired at
a fraction of the salary they would demand in high-tech centers such as
New York or California."

The tech revolution left Memphis somewhat short of Silicon Valley.
Warehouses proved easier to build than to turn into long-term
businesses. Companies got millions of dollars in tax incentives for
promised jobs that never came. And the blight on roads such as Shelby
Drive, Holmes, and Lamar bears witness to that.

As the article noted, talk was cheap on the eve of the new
millennium.

“In May, Amazon.com, the nation’s
number-one online book retailer, scuttled plans at the last minute to
locate a major distibution center here that would have employed
hundreds.”

It wasn’t all hype, of course. Nike and other companies had staying
power, and the infrastructure of FedEx and Memphis International
Airport drives the local economy to this day and will, sooner or later,
lead Memphis out of the recession.

As for Planet Rx, we can’t for the life of us remember what all the
fuss was about.

Opinion

Six-Ticket Ride

Post author By John Branston
Post date August 6, 2009

Likening the next two and a half months in Memphis to an outdoor
carnival — and why not? — Beale Street club owner Bud
Chittom said, “It’s going to be a six-ticket ride.”

The last interim mayor of Memphis had the job for a couple of weeks.
Myron Lowery has it for nearly three months. He does not intend to sit
quietly in his room.

And why should he? Suppose somebody handed you the keys to a car you
wanted to drive all your adult life but told you to keep it in the
garage. Wouldn’t you look under the hood, start it up, and take it out
on the road to see what it can do?

So will Lowery, despite the attempts by the car’s previous driver to
disable some of the parts and tamp down the horsepower. The six-ticket
ride through the Memphis summer of 2009 includes:

Mayor Myron. Calming voice, procedural expert, media savvy,
with nearly 18 years experience in Memphis politics. Hard-minded in the
crunch and sets the facts straight in interviews like the one he did
Monday on Drake and Zeke’s radio show. Herenton gave him the keys and
Lowery intends to keep them.

A C Wharton. He has the campaign money, but Lowery has the
job until mid-October and the free publicity money can’t buy. Lowery
and freshly appointed CAO Jack Sammons will co-star in a black-white
buddy movie that will cut into Wharton’s support among white voters in
East Memphis.

Sammons, a Herenton enemy and former councilman, will be
counted on to find out where the bodies are buried and exhume them,
communicate with the council, and wrest a key vote or two. Which won’t
be easy with a council divided six whites and six blacks and every
member a potential tie-breaking vote.

The mayoral wannabes. Councilwoman Wanda Halbert beat the
Rev. Kenneth Whalum Jr. and Robert Spence in a school board election
and would like to be the first female mayor. Whalum got more than
83,000 votes in the 2006 school board race. Former Councilwoman Carol
Chumney got 35 percent of the vote and finished second in the 2007
mayoral election and would also like to be the first female mayor.
Campaign strategist Charles Carpenter, now candidate Carpenter, carries
the Herenton flame. Jerry Lawler, who got 12 percent of the vote in
1999, can play the outsider.

The city attorney sideshow. City attorney Elbert Jefferson
must not have gotten the memo. He resigned, but Herenton didn’t accept
it, knowing full well the value of having a pawn in the legal
department. Now he’s whining about being mistreated. Jefferson signed
off on the lucrative deals for Spence and Ricky Wilkins, turning the
office into their ATM card. If Jefferson insists on playing hardball,
Lowery could suspend him or assign him to count the seats in the
Liberty Bowl or some other drudge task. Lowery’s choice for the job is
Veronica Coleman Davis, a former United States attorney has the
toughness and integrity to end the shenanigans but needs council
approval.

The Mid-South Fairgrounds. Prospective developer Henry Turley
is still backed up near his own endzone after failing to connect on a
long one to Herenton. Housing and Community Development director Robert
Lipscomb could take the field as quarterback, in partnership with
former Councilman Tom Marshall, and run a play similar to Turley’s but
without a big-box store and with the city acting as developer.

Beale Street. Chittom and club owner Preston Lamm are
scheduled to meet with Lowery this week. An 11th-hour effort to
finalize the removal of John Elkington as manager of the historic
district failed, even though Herenton signed off on it. Among the
sticking points are Handy Park advertising revenue, payments to the
city under long-term agreement, a protracted trial starting as early as
next week, and the role of Wilkins and Lipscomb. Barring a trial,
attorney Marty Regan could take over for Wilkins in a post-Elkington
Beale, with merchants doing the marketing and the city providing
sanitation and security.

“Keeping It Real.” Herenton’s campaign and T-shirt slogan for
his 2010 congressional race, which Wilkins will manage. The Urban
Dictionary offers several definitions ranging from “staying true to
yourself” to “more or less a black-on-black racist expression.” Let’s
assume it doesn’t mean playing patty-cake with Steve Cohen.

All this plus the normal fight against crime and red ink and a new
school year that starts next week. A six-ticket ride for sure.

Politics Politics Feature

Senate Stuff

Post author By Jackson Baker
Post date August 6, 2009

It will soon be official, on Tuesday of next week, in fact. State
senator Jim Kyle of Memphis, who in recent years has been
serving as the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, will officially declare
his candidacy for governor in the course of a combination
announcement/rally at the McWherter Library at the University of
Memphis. Given the fact that Jackson businessman Mike McWherter,
son of former Governor Ned Ray McWherter, is one of Kyle’s
opponents for the Democratic nomination, and perhaps the most
formidable overall, Kyle’s choice of venue can hardly be regarded as
accidental.

A sample of what his website will look like was forwarded to the
Flyer, containing the candidate’s promise to stay in touch with
his would-be statewide constituents via Facebook, making for one more
high-tech vote in the candidate field of 2010. No less a conservative’s
conservative than U.S. representative Zach Wamp, a Chattanooga
Republican who also aspires to be governor, is a tweeter’s tweeter.

Kyle, too, is a devotee of Twitter. Indeed, it is by means of fairly
constant tweeting that he has kept journalists and supporters aware of
his intentions for the last several weeks.

• If modern technology is having its day in Tennessee politics,
so is conservative politics — be that fact, coincidental,
causative, ironic, or whatever.

Obscured in some of the schadenfreude experienced by Democrats
during the Republicans’ Paul Stanley debacle (see Editorial, p.
16) is the fact that Stanley’s replacement as the state senator from
District 31, one of the most conservative bailiwicks in the state, is
going to be at least as conservative as the down-the-line Republican
Stanley was, and possibly more so.

The main contenders in the Republican primary are state
representatives Brian Kelsey and Steve McManus and Shelby
County school board president David Pickler. The two legislators
have voting records that hew to the right of the political spectrum
quite as much as Stanley did, and Pickler, whose main concern for the
last few years has been the conversion of the Shelby County schools
into a special school district, is likely to go in that direction as
well.

Democrats will undoubtedly field a candidate but one with little
chance of winning.

• In the event that either Kelsey or McManus would win, the
legislature’s Republicans would find themselves with a bit of a problem
in the state House of Representatives, which, as of the 2008 elections,
has a Republican majority for the first time in history but only by a
tenuous 50-49 margin.

Should the special-election winner be Kelsey or McManus, there would
be a resultant vacancy in the state House. That would create a dead
heat — 49 Republicans, 49 Democrats — with control of the
House up for grabs going into the 2010 legislative session.

It is hard to imagine a more crucial turning-point issue. And who
gets to name the replacement for Kelsey, who has already announced for
Stanley’s seat, or some other House member? The Democratic-controlled
Shelby County Commission, numbering as of now eight Democrats and five
Republicans.

And the commission’s 8-5 split — a change from the previous
lineup favoring Democrats 7-6 — exists because the body’s
Democratic majority exercised its numerical edge to vote in Matt
Kuhn, a Democrat, to succeed David Lillard, who had resigned
to become state treasurer.

The Kuhn vote was the result of significant pressure from local
Democrats. But the degree of pressure would magnify enormously when the
issue becomes that of controlling the state House of
Representatives.

Commission chair Deidre Malone, a Democrat, acknowledged that
circumstance when asked last week about her potential vote to fill a
state House vacancy. “Wow!” said Malone, who had previously indicated
she would support a Republican if the commission were asked to fill
Stanley’s Senate seat in a body with a comfortable GOP majority. But
the House vacancy was clearly another matter. “I’d have to listen to
the advice and wishes of other Democrats. I’m a good Democratic
soldier,” she said.

Of course, if Kelsey or another Republican House member should win
the special election for Stanley’s seat late this year, Governor
Phil Bredesen (a Democrat, coincidentally, who took his lumps
from the majority-GOP legislature in 2009) would then be asked to call
another special election for the open House seat. Crucially, he would
have up to 20 days to do so. After that, the Shelby County Election
Commission could not schedule a special-election primary for another 55
days. Another 55 days would have to elapse before a general election
could be scheduled in the House district.

Altogether, that’s 130 days — a little more than four months,
or the length of the average legislative session. In practice, the
permanent succession would await resolution in the regular 2010
election cycle.

Looking at that prospect of Democratic control of the House for an
entire legislative session, some Republicans might come to wish they
hadn’t arm-twisted the wounded Stanley into resigning. Meanwhile,
Pickler would be sure to point the succession problem out to Republican
voters as a factor weighing in his favor.

• The arm-twisting came later, but it came. By the end of last
week, it had become irresistible.

The first tip-off that Stanley’s days were numbered came when Shelby
County Republican chairman Lang Wiseman, contending that “the
time has come for this spectacle to end,” issued a press release
calling for the scandal-plagued Stanley to resign his seat, even if
that opens the way to an immediate Democratic successor.

The next name Republican to call for Stanley to step down was state
senator Mark Norris of Collierville, the Senate’s majority
leader.

And Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey completed the trifecta.
Eliminating any doubt as to whether he had helped Stanley make up his
mind about resigning, Ramsey, the Blountville Republican who presides
over that body and had secured Stanley’s resignation from his Commerce
Committee chairmanship the week before, said in Memphis last Wednesday
that he had communicated repeatedly with the reluctant Stanley on
Monday and Tuesday of that week, urging that the senator vacate his
seat altogether.

Ramsey said Stanley had offered some resistance to the idea: “He had
a few reasons why he wanted to wait a day or two before he he
resigned.”

Ramsey was in Memphis at the Grove Grill in East Memphis for an
Associated Builders and Contractors meet-and-greet affair, where he
appeared along with two fellow gubernatorial candidates, District
Attorney General Bill Gibbons of Memphis and Knoxville mayor
Bill Haslam.

Answering questions after the ABC affair, Ramsey said that, after
his initial verbal approaches, he had continued to insist that Stanley
resign via text messages to the Germantown Republican. Stanley would
eventually announce his resignation from the Senate late Tuesday
afternoon.

Ramsey said, “I’m not sure Mark Norris ever talked to him, from what
I’ve heard, but I talked to him about three times. … I am relieved
that it’s over. I was very upset with Paul at the time over what he
did. I didn’t condone what he did. As a matter of fact, I condemned
what he did.”

Meanwhile, said Ramsey, he was “looking forward” to the forthcoming
special election to fill Stanley’s District 31 seat. The Shelby County
Election Commission met this week to set the date at October 15th for
both it and the special mayoral election.

Editorial Opinion

Making Amends

Post author By Flyer Staff
Post date August 6, 2009

Although Paul Stanley, having finally responded to mounting pressure
that he resign, was slated to cease being the state senator for
District 31 on Monday, August 10th, his shadow still hangs over the
Tennessee General Assembly, in general,

and — some would say — over the moralistic wing of the
Republican Party, in particular.

Stanley’s resignation letter to Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey last week
was as formally bare bones as his subsequent letter to his constituents
in Germantown, Cordova, and East Memphis was inflected with sentiment.
In the latter, Stanley said most of the things that needed to be said,
among them this: “I humbly ask your forgiveness for my indiscretion.
The public criticism I have received thus far is well deserved. Even
before these matters became public, I have been concentrating my
efforts on rebuilding and repairing the damage I have done to my wife
and two great children. They (and not me) are the victims in this
situation, and I am to blame. I recognize that it is my actions that
have brought this embarrassment on my family.”

All well and good. And, after promising to “make amends” and asking
his constituents “to respect my wife and children’s privacy” to spare
them “the humiliation or embarrassment for my wrong doing and
indiscretion,” Stanley went on to say, “Admitting failure is difficult
but necessary if one expects to ever better themselves by allowing God
to work His will in their life.”

We do not propose to be cynical about this situation, nor judgmental
about further revelations concerning Stanley, which even now are
proliferating in the Nashville media and depict him as not merely
guilty of misconduct with his legislative intern and of taking the
explicit photographs that led to his being blackmailed. It would almost
seem from the reports now surfacing that the bashful-seeming Stanley
had been determined while serving in Nashville to transform himself
from Ichabod Crane to Brahm Bones, the manly stud who was that poor
schoolteacher’s persecutor. As he ascended in power, becoming chairman
of the Senate Commerce Committee, Stanley yielded more and more to
temptation — and to a measure of hypocrisy that may, to give the
stricken legislator his due, have been less premeditated than
unconscious.

Yet the hypocrisy was there. Stanley was evidently lecturing a
representative of Planned Parenthood on the virtue of abstinence and
the sanctity of marriage on the very eve, last April, of his
confrontation with the blackmailer who is charged with demanding
$10,000 as the price of allowing Stanley to keep his indiscretions
secret.

We hope that Paul Stanley’s moral redemption continues apace, but we
would suggest that his redemption — and that of the enablers
among his legislative mates — should extend not merely to the
realm of personal conduct and to the concerns of family but to the
secular issues that legislators must concern themselves with. As long
as a repentant Stanley chooses to invoke the Deity, let us remind his
legislative colleagues of that line of Scripture that commands concern
for “the least among these, my brethren.”

The breach of that principle has, after all, been the true sin of
the increasingly hard-edged, self-serving General Assembly in recent
years.

Opinion Viewpoint

Against Hate-Crime Laws

Post author By Richard Cohen
Post date August 6, 2009

James von Brunn, alleged to have opened fire and killed a guard at
the Holocaust Memorial Museum, is apparently a consummate bigot. His
former wife said that his hatred of blacks and Jews “ate him alive like
a cancer,” so it might seem appropriate that in addition to having been
indicted last week for murder and gun-law violations, he was also
charged with hate crimes. At age 89, he proves that you are never too
old to hate.

He also proves the stupidity of hate-crime laws. A prime
justification for such laws is that some crimes affect a class of
people. The hate-crimes bill recently passed by the Senate puts it this
way: “A prominent characteristic of a violent crime motivated by bias
is that it devastates not just the actual victim … but frequently
savages the community sharing the traits that caused the victim to be
selected.” No doubt. But how is this crime different from most other
crimes?

First, let us consider the question of which “community” von Brunn
was allegedly attempting to devastate. He rushed the Holocaust museum,
which memorializes the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis and their
enablers. There could be no more poignant symbol for the Jewish
community. Yet von Brunn killed not a Jew but an African American
— security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns.

So which community was affected by this weird, virtually suicidal
act? Was it the Jewish community or the black community? Since von
Brunn hated both, you could argue that it does not matter. But since I
would guess that neither community now gives the incident much thought,
the answer might well be “neither one.” So what is the point of piling
on hate crimes to what von Brunn has allegedly done? Beats me. He
already faces — at age 89, remember — a life sentence and,
possibly, the death penalty.

The real purpose of hate-crime laws is to reassure politically
significant groups — blacks, Hispanics, Jews, gays, etc. —
that someone cares about them and takes their fears seriously. That’s
nice. It does not change the fact, though, that what’s being punished
is thought or speech. Johns is dead no matter what von Brunn believes.
The penalty for murder is severe, so it’s not as if the crime is not
being punished. The added “late hit” of a hate crime is without any
real consequence, except as a precedent for the punishment of belief or
speech. Slippery slopes are supposedly all around us, I know, but this
one is the real McCoy.

Let us assume that the “community” is really affected by what we
call a hate crime. I am Jewish. But even with von Brunn’s attack, I am
more affected by a mugging in my neighborhood that might keep me from
taking a walk at night than I am by a shooting at the Holocaust museum.
If there’s a murder in a park, I’ll stay out of it for months. If
there’s a rape, women will stay out of the park. If there’s another and
another, women will know that a real hater is loose. Rape, though, is
not a hate crime. Why not?

I doubt that any group of drunken toughs is going to hesitate in
their pummeling of a gay individual or an African American or a Jew on
account of it being a hate crime. If they are not already deterred by
the conventional penalties — prison, etc. — then why would
additional penalties deter them? And if, in fact, they kept their
mouths shut, refrained from the N-word or the F-word or the K-word and
simply made the beating or the killing seem one triggered by dissing or
some other reason, then they would not be accused of hate —
merely of murder or some such trifle. If, though, they gave vent to
their thoughts, they would be in for real trouble.

For the most part, hate-crime legislation is just a sop for
politically influential interest groups — yet another area in
which liberals, traditionally sensitive to civil liberties issues, have
chosen to mollify an entire population at the expense of the individual
and endorse discredited reasoning about deterrence.

In von Brunn’s case, the hate-crime counts are an obscenity. To
suggest that the effects of this attack were felt only by the Jewish or
the black communities — and not, for instance, by your average
Washington tourist — ghettoizes both its real and purported
victims. It’s a consequence that von Brunn himself might applaud.

Music Music Features

For the Benefit of Mr. Dickinson

Post author By Andria Lisle
Post date August 6, 2009

Last week, Memphis-based and world-renowned producer/musical
raconteur Jim Dickinson sat at his keyboard and plunked out the notes
of Furry Lewis’ “Kassie Jones.” It was a heroic moment, considering the
rocky road Dickinson has traveled the past few months.

“In May, Dad had stents put in his heart, and he felt really good,”
recounts Dickinson’s son Luther, a well-known musician in his own
right. “Then he suffered from gastrointestinal bleeding, went back to
the hospital, and had a massive heart attack. He got better and came
home to recuperate before going in for bypass surgery. His heart
stopped, but they brought him back. It’s been a slow but steady
recovery since then.”

Friends and family, including Dickinson’s wife, Mary Lindsay, and
his younger son, Cody, are encouraged by the 68-year-old musician’s
determination to play music so soon afterward.

“At one point, he had a Sharpie in his hand and he was holding a
notepad, composing, which was just the sweetest thing. His memory and
personality are all completely there, and he’s getting his creative
process together, you know?” Luther says.

Even so, it will be a long while before Dickinson has the strength
to reenter the recording studio and command the control board, as he
has for artists such as the Replacements, Pete “Sonic Boom” Kember,
Toots Hibbert, John Hiatt, and Mudhoney — which is why his
friends hastened to stage a benefit concert, which is slated for the
Peabody Skyway Saturday, August 8th.

Hiatt will headline the sold-out event, along with Dickinson’s sons’
band, the North Mississippi Allstars, his longtime bandmate Sid
Selvidge, and Big Star drummer Jody Stephens. Also appearing are Jimmy
Davis, Shannon McNally, Amy LaVere, Jimbo Mathus, the
Yallabushwhackers, and Sons of Mudboy — all musicians who have
benefited from an association with Dickinson.

“It’s going to be a great night of music, but that’s almost beside
the point,” says event organizer David Less, who heads Memphis
International Records, the label behind Dickinson’s past three solo
albums, including Dinosaurs Run in Circles, which was released
in May.

“Memphis music would not sound the same without Jim in the world,”
Less says. “The people he has mentored and influenced on the local
scene have made a difference across musical genres, and the entire
community owes a debt to him.”

Despite the fact that a benefit was held in Oxford, Mississippi,
last weekend and another event is on the books for San Francisco later
this year, hundreds of supporters have already stepped up, donating
time and money to the cause.

Although he’s unable to attend, Elvis Costello purchased a table for
Saturday’s concert, to be auctioned later this week. The Peabody hotel
offered space, and the staffs at Ardent Records and at Beale Street
Caravan are handling ticket sales and donations. Less credits industry
insiders Bob Merlis and Bill Bentley for petitioning major labels and
recording artists — ranging from Aretha Franklin and Arlo Guthrie
to Ry Cooder and the Rolling Stones — to relinquish recording
rights for a limited-edition CD of songs Dickinson either produced or
played on, which will be distributed at the event.

“Jim’s got Medicare, so fortunately, we’re not needing to raise a
half-million dollars. He hasn’t worked since May, so we just want to
make sure he doesn’t go broke. People shouldn’t go bankrupt if they get
sick,” Less says.

With a forced layoff of two months, Dickinson can use the help.

Luther says, “Everyone is so financially fragile right now, but
being my parents’ ages and not having a stable future is really scary.
I think retirement is a mirage.”

Throughout the whole process, Dickinson has reminded his sons to
“take care of your mom and play your gigs.”

Both Luther and Cody have taken the advice to heart, substituting
for their father at what was supposed to be his May 31st CD-release
party at Huey’s and forging ahead with their respective groups, which
include the Black Crowes and Hill Country Revue.

“Music is what’s always held our family together,” Luther says.
“This [experience] is just one of those things that has made me
reevaluate what I want to do with my band. It’s proved to me how
important music is in making the world go around and how important it
is to the strength and continuation of my family.

“Waking up every morning is a blessing, and lifting your arm and
feeding yourself is a blessing,” Luther says, reiterating the words of
his late friend and frequent music collaborator, bluesman Otha
Turner.

“I pray that Dad is through the worst of it. Once he gets his
strength back, you’d better watch out.”

Music Music Features

10-Year Itch

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date August 6, 2009

CREDIT: Shannon Bangham Dixon

After a decade-long break from recording, Memphis’ eclectic popsters
Kitchens & Bathrooms are about to release Eternal In
Between, a polished, 12-song collection showcasing the group’s
ability to fuse Memphis soul, classic rock, and steel-laden country
into thoughtful power-pop with beautiful melodies, complex storylines,
and irresistibly warm guitar sounds.

Kitchens and Bathrooms didn’t break up in 1999. After drummer
Wally Peterson moved to North Carolina to be closer to his
family, the popular band, which was as comfortable playing punk clubs
like the Antenna and Barristers as it was playing Neil’s or the Hard
Rock Cafe on Beale Street, simply stopped gigging and went into a state
of suspended animation. The old friends from Rhodes College were
growing up and plunging headlong into careers that had nothing to do
with playing music in bars.

“Life intervened,” says Clay Combs, the band’s bass player
and principal songwriter. “We were a little tired of it all too. We’re
all married. There are kids. And the shorter answer is that there was
also a lot of laziness involved. We liked getting together on Thursday
nights and rocking, but we also just liked hanging out.”

Other distractions had nothing to do with laziness. Combs works as
an independent IT consultant, drummer Steve Willett is the
business manager of an IT company, and guitarist Chris Wood is
on the faculty at the UT College of Pharmacy.

Even when they aren’t recording or gigging regularly, Kitchens &
Bathrooms is a busy band. But business and pleasure do blend
occasionally, and Combs, who works on the back end of Archer
Records‘ website, struck a deal with his client to become one of
the first artists to record in Archer’s newly renovated Midtown studio
in April of last year.

“We don’t believe you have to do a lot of stuff to get a really good
sound,” Wood says of his band’s no-nonsense approach to recording. “We
think if you play real instruments through real tube amps, you’re
always going to get a great sound.”

That’s the philosophy the band took into Archer.

After the basic tracks were finished, including a pair of
outstanding guest spots by Al Gamble on keyboards and John
Whittemore on baritone and pedal-steel guitars, the band took
advantage of a family connection to indulge in a little rock-star
fantasy. They hopped on a plane and spent three days working on
overdubs at Fantasy Studio in Berkeley.

“My uncle Jeffrey Wood runs that studio,” Wood says. “We’d always
wanted to do this, and finally we did.”

Willett recalls with horror a moment when the head of a maraca he
was shaking came flying off and headed toward the control-room window
in a studio that has recorded Lenny Bruce, Santana, and Dave Brubeck.
Fortunately, no damage was done.

“You’ve got to understand, Steve was singing backing vocal tracks
into a $25,000 Neumann microphone from the 1950s that Ella Fitzgerald
and David Bowie had sung into,” Combs says. “They had Booker T.’s B3
organ in the next room. They wheeled in a piano for us to use … it
was Bill Evans’ piano. We were like kids in a candy store.”

“But I didn’t want to touch anything,” Willett interjects.

Combs and Woods, on the other hand, wanted to touch everything and
took advantage of the studio’s vast supply of old Taylor and Gibson
guitars to lay down acoustic tracks for Eternal In Between.

“I feel like we’re doing the same kind of stuff we were doing when
we were 20,” Combs says of the songwriting on Eternal In
Between, a narrative tale of difficult relationships, depression,
despair, and redemption.

Combs likes to be challenged. “Quirky songs are easy,” he says. “But
if I want to write a great song about a relationship between friends,
or lovers, the bar for excellence is set so high.”

Book Features Books

Dear Losers

Post author By Leonard Gill
Post date August 6, 2009

Take it from Pete Tarslaw: “Book reviewers are the most despicable,
loathsome order of swine that ever rooted about the earth. They are
sniveling, revolting creatures who feed their own appetites for bile by
gnawing apart other people’s work. They are human garbage.”

And if there’s one thing Pete Tarslaw knows, it’s garbage. He writes
it to earn barely a living at EssayAides, a business outside Boston
that ghostwrites college-application essays for students who are either
too dumb to write the essays themselves or too foreign-born to
understand basic English.

Pete Tarslaw’s also a loser of the overeducated variety: He’s smarmy
as hell, a real know-it-all. He drinks too much, broadcasts his
opinions on every subject in the book (including the subject of book
reviewers), plus he’s a failure in the romance department. But he gets
fired from EssayAides. And he learns that his successful ex-girlfriend
is getting married.

Time, then, for Tarslaw to get down to business, show that
ex-girlfriend, at her wedding reception, what real success looks like.
His goal: to get famous. And he does get famous by deliberately writing
a piece of garbage with bestseller written all over it. He calls it
The Tornado Ashes Club, and that’s the setup in Steve Hely’s
satire on the publishing industry called How I Became a Famous
Novelist (Black Cat).

Hely is a Harvard grad who went on to write for David Letterman and
the TV show American Dad, which makes him no slouch in the
smarmy department. These days, he’s a writer for 30 Rock. But do
you want yet another comic novel on the unfunny trials and tribulations
of successful slackerdom? How I Became a Famous Novelist will
have you feeding on your own appetite for bile.

For more on the subject of loserdom: Take it from a 25-year-old
musician. When make-or-break Sub Pop writes, you rejoice. As in:

“Dear Losers: This letter concerns your crummy demo tape. While it
leaves much to be desired, miraculously it isn’t as ear-piercingly
horrible as the other thousand we received that day. One song in
particular, ‘Black Smoke, No Pope,’ does not completely suck. Though we
can’t — for legal reasons — encourage you to continue
making music, this letter is intended to come infinitely close to that
point. Sincerely, Sub Pop Records.”

Bingo. Climactic scene and reason enough in It Feels So Good When
I Stop (Riverhead Books) for that 25-year-old musician to turn his
life around.

This is musician Joe Pernice’s debut novel, and it’s about, no
surprise, a slacker, but it’ll be news to readers to read that note
from Sub Pop five pages from finishing the book. Why? Because readers
will scarcely realize that the recipient of that note is a frustrated
musician.

What we do know is that the protagonist in It Feels So Good When
I Stop is hanging out during the off-season on Cape Cod, he’s been
roundly rejected by his girlfriend in Brooklyn, and he’s learning some
lessons in adulthood from the nephew he babysits. He’s learning more
lessons courtesy of an older woman with a dead child haunting her past.
This guy, true to form, also drinks a lot, and, true to form, his
personal hygiene leaves more than a lot to be desired.

What’s a musician with the talent of Joe Pernice doing writing about
such a predictable lowlife? And what’s a lyricist with the intelligence
of Joe Pernice doing writing dialogue that is just this side of
universally potty-mouthed?

I don’t know. But it’s making the idea of even opening Benjamin
Anastas’ 1998 novel, described by its paperback publisher, Dial Press,
as “corrosively funny,” about the last thing this piece of human
garbage wants to dig into. The book’s called An Underachiever’s
Diary.