This Saturday, December 2nd, the mighty walls of Crosstown Concourse will be reverberating like a mighty, brick Jeep parked on Cleveland Avenue, shaking with bass hits, shimmering with delicate highs.
If that sounds like a bit of poetic license, it is. But it captures a basic truth: from 1 p.m. – 11 p.m., the towering monument to the arts will be echoing with music, thanks to community radio station WYXR and their festival partner, Mempho.
The Raised By Sound Fest honors Memphis music, new and old, across multiple genres, with WYXR DJs and live bands set up in various areas of the Crosstown Concourse campus, including the Central Atrium, WYXR studio, WYXR HQ, Crosstown Brewing Co., and Crosstown Theater.
From 1 p.m.-7 p.m. during the day, entry to each concert site will be free to the public, culminating in two ticketed musical performances: Cat Power‘s stage show in Crosstown Theater and an afterparty featuring DJ Alix Brown in the Green Room at Crosstown Arts.
Naturally, Cat Power’s appearance has garnered the most buzz, and rightly so. Chan Marshall, Cat Power’s auteur, is turning heads once more with her idiosyncratic approach to Bob Dylan’s 1966 Royal Albert Hall concert on her latest album, Cat Power Sings Dylan.
Memphis is one of the few cities to enjoy a Cat Power concert this year, well ahead of the North American tour she’s officially starting in February, 2024. Having hosted a stellar tribute to Big Star last year, WYXR’s Raised By Sound Fest continues its winning streak in scoring Cat Power for 2023’s celebration. Appropriately enough, Marshall has deep connections to this city, having recorded two albums here: 1996’s What Would the Community Think? and 2006’s The Greatest. For the latter, Robert Gordon filmed the video for her single “Lived in Bars,” at the Lamplighter Lounge.
Although general admission tickets to Saturday’s Cat Power concert are sold out, VIP seats are available here for $268.61. That’s what many pay for standard concert tickets to see big name starts these days, but those shows aren’t even assisting local radio. WYXR program manager Jared Boyd emphasizes the station’s great luck in landing Cat Power in Memphis just as this annual celebration was scheduled.
“This concert of Cat Power playing Dylan covers was miraculous in how it came together. It was happening right around the time we started inquiring about availability for the festival,” he says.
That in turn led WYXR to do what it does best, embracing Cat Power’s show as a teachable moment.
“We put together an event [at the Memphis Listening Lab on Wednesday, November 29th] to honor that history of Dylan going electric, with a small, intimate, listening session featuring some of the bootlegs from the 1966 Dylan tours, to give people some context about what Cat Power was doing and why it was an important moment in rock and roll history. So, it’s been an interesting opportunity to bring a lot of different parts of our stations ecosystem into the fold, and it’s really been a testament to the type of collaborations that have been fostered through this experience over the last three years now.”
The other ticketed event, the post-Cat Power afterparty, features a similarly world-class artist that also has deep Memphis roots. DJ Alix Brown, profiled in the Memphis Flyer in 2019, first started spinning records while living here, sometimes while playing music with Jay Reatard, before moving on to New York and, more recently, Los Angeles. Now a Maybelline model, a globe-trotting DJ, and a music supervisor for films, she’s proof positive of this city’s aesthetic ties to the wider world, and another fitting tribute to WYXR’s global reach.
But this festival is local as well as global, and the free music flowing through the day around the concourse will be a powerful reminder of that. The earlier portion of the festival, free to the public, will best capture the diversity of the station and the creativity it helps to foster.
One musician who’s an unsung hero of sorts in the local scene is MadameFraankie, known by many as the marketing director of the nonprofit Tone and as an exhibited fine art photographer. She’s also a stellar guitarist, bringing her delicate and imaginative parts to countless sessions in local studios, “Golden (The Wait)” by Don Lifted being one example.
“Fraankie, is more than just what she does with her guitar,” says Boyd. “She does incredible work with Tone, going back to when they were The Collective. So, she’s a visual artist, and she’s someone who has always played a role in the background that I think has been interesting whether it be as a musician or whether it be with a visual arts programing space.
“Fraankie backs up Lawrence Matthews when he does Don Lifted performances. Fraankie backs up Talibah Safiya fairly often as well. And she co-writes with them and collaborates on arrangements with them. But MadameFraankie is an incredible guitarist and an incredible musical artist on her own and I thought that Raised By Sound Fest would be a great opportunity to highlight that. This is a Black, queer woman that is one of the most in-demand performers in the city, and she represents the future of what’s happening with this instrument, and, I think, is on the cutting edge of what’s happening in music right now.”
Other bands will be playing throughout the day as well (see schedule below), and the diversity on display is a powerful reminder of WYXR’s commitment to community. And it goes beyond the day’s featured artists, as Boyd notes.
“Outside of the people who are performing on the actual lineup, several of our DJs will be playing music in the VIP lounge, and we’ve got tons of incredible partners from the community who are going to be providing food and drinks. There will be a lot of other stories and threads, and even our interns really stepped up to be to have a presence at the festival.”
Raised By Sound Fest schedule:
1 p.m. – Univ. of Memphis Blue Tom Revue
2 p.m. – MadameFraankie
2:40 p.m. – Rosey
3 p.m. – Rod Smoth
4:20 p.m. – AJ Haynes
5:10 p.m. – Bass Drum of Death
6:30 p.m. – Doors Open for Cat Power
9 p.m. – DJ After Party with Alix Brown
