Author: Alex Greene

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Music Music Blog Music Features

SmokeSlam: It’s More Than Just BBQ

Southern Avenue (Photo: courtesy Alligator Records)

Even as many are eyeing their favorite bands in the three-day blow-out known as the RiverBeat Music Festival, another music fest is just over the horizon, perhaps obscured by the delicious clouds of barbecue that enshroud it. That would be SmokeSlam, aka “The World’s Ultimate BBQ Showdown,” yet another production by Mempho Presents.

This year, the festival at Tom Lee Park will be held May 15-17th. In addition to nearly 75 teams competing for the largest purse in BBQ competition history, SmokeSlam promises an immersive experience for the whole family, bringing together world-renowned pitmasters, carnival games and ferris wheel rides, fireworks shows, and electrifying music.

The three-day music experience will feature some celebrated musical guests on the Main Stage sponsored by ZYN:

  • Thursday: Headliner Shane Smith and The Saints, with performances by Waylon Wyatt and Mark Edgar Stuart
  • Friday: Headliner The Revivalists with performances by Southern Avenue, The MDs, and Jombi
  • Saturday: Country music giants Big & Rich close out the festival, with supporting acts Neon Mooners and Cyrena Wages

It will be an especially powerful homecoming for Southern Avenue, who will be celebrating the April 25th release of their Alligator Records debut album, Family. Known worldwide for their inclusive, message-driven songs fueled by hard-hitting grooves and electrifying guitar, the band’s new album is a very personal one for Southern Avenue, telling the band’s story via musical storytelling magic. With their unique blend of Hill Country Blues and Memphis stomp, the band is unlike any other on the scene today.

Southern Avenue announced, “Memphis is home, and every time we get to hit the stage here, it’s something special. We’re beyond excited to bring the energy to SmokeSlam and celebrate a night of raw, real, and soulful music – Memphis style!” 

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Music Music Blog

Billy F. Gibbons to Play Guitar He Had Made in Muddy Waters’ Name

Billy Gibbons (Photo: Blain Clausen)

It’s appropriate that when ZZ Top’s Billy F. Gibbons makes his appearance at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale this Wednesday, April 9th, he will be celebrating both the creation of the “Muddywood” guitar, in honor of Muddy Waters, and the longevity of the museum itself. His vision of commissioning a guitar paying tribute to Muddy Waters went hand-in-hand with his discovery of the museum some 37 years ago.

“One of my associates in Memphis came back from a sales run which allowed him to pass through Clarksdale,” Gibbons tells me, recollecting events from more than three decades ago. “And he spotted a tiny sign simply stating ‘Blues Museum,’ stuck in the grass next to the curb.”

That alone should indicate how long ago it was, for now the Delta Blues Museum is one of Clarksdale’s and the Delta’s crown jewels. It’s educational programs are the toast of Mississippi, inspiring young people such as Grammy-winner Christone “Kingfish” Ingram to throw themselves into the blues. But when the museum opened in 1979, it was merely a single room, and a little hard to find, even well into the ‘80s, when ZZ Top frequently worked at Ardent Studios, and Gibbons heard tell of the place from his associate.

“The following week,” he says, “we headed down to Clarksdale in search of this blues museum. For a good hour, we were stopping around town asking about it, but no luck. But right as we were about to give up, we were filling up on petrol, and the gas station attendant overheard us talking. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you must be talking about Sid Graves and his blues museum, which is located in the public library.’ And with that, we turned around, marched up the steps to the library, and sure enough, found the annex room where Sid Graves had made a place to park his personal collection of artifacts from that great American art form called the blues.”

But there was more afoot than seeing artifacts on the day that Gibbons and company showed up. Graves had his finger on the pulse of the whole Delta region and beyond, including a wide network of blues aficionados. On this day, Graves was consulting with a fellow scholar.

“Lo and behold, visiting Sid was none other than Jim O’Neill,” says Gibbons, “who was the founder of Living Blues magazine. I had met Jim on a couple of occasions. He and Sid had gathered to discuss their concern over a recent storm where the high winds had dislodged a few timbers in the cabin that Muddy Waters grew up in. And they said, ‘It’s just a few miles down the road next to Stovall Farm.’ And we said, ‘Yeah, we will go.’

Muddy Waters’ cabin (Photo: courtesy Delta Blues Museum)

“Sure enough, there was a pile of rubble that had been gathered up and placed next to the highway. We had a nice visit for a while, and on departure, Sid said, ‘Listen, they’re hauling this refuse away tomorrow. Why don’t you take a stick of this wood as a souvenir?’ And there was a big, big square timber, about six feet long, and we piled it in the trunk of the car. About halfway back to Memphis, my buddy said, ‘What are you going to do with this log?’ I thought for a minute and then I said, ‘Well, I know a guitar maker. We could probably saw this thing, and glue the planks together and cut a guitar out of it.’”

That guitar-maker was none other than Rick Rayburn, Gibbons explains, who owned Pyramid Guitars at the time. Others have identified the cabin plank as cypress wood, and Gibbons said it just happened to be perfect for its new purpose.

“Once it was all together in one piece, there was a bell-like resonance. It was just a match made in heaven, and it turned out to be a really resounding and very strident-sounding instrument.” Its basic shape was a design Gibbons had been toying with at the time. “I had outlined the perimeter of a guitar, and we had it in in a blueprint form. And I thought, ‘Gee, now’s the time to break it out!’ We handed it over to Rick, and he said, ‘How shall we finish it out?’ And I said, ‘Well, let’s give it a nice, bright coat.’ And then I said, ‘I’ve got a design for a graphic.’”

The paint job Gibbons had in mind spoke to the very muddy waters that the great bluesman (born McKinley Morganfield) had lived beside for so long. “The squiggle down through the body and down all the way down the neck is the Mississippi River,” Gibbons notes. “The two colors represent the water and the banks of the river. And it culminates in the headstock, which is kind of a deltoid shaped piece, representing the Mississippi Delta.”

Muddywood (Photo: courtesy Delta Blues Museum)

It came out better than anyone had dreamt possible. “We tagged it the Muddywood guitar,” says Gibbons, “and it was such a delightful instrument, we thought, ‘Gee whiz, this would make a nice addition to the collection that Sid Graves put together.’”

The rest is history, as that encounter led ZZ Top to contribute funds to the museum, which in turn spawned matching grants and an ambitious event in which Muddywood was added to the museum’s collection. John Lee Hooker even showed up. It was just the kickstart that the Delta Blues Museum needed, paving the way for its eventual move into a train depot in Clarksdale, which it still calls home today.

This Wednesday, the support that Gibbons and his band gave to what is now a Delta landmark will be honored in a full-circle moment, as the museum pays tribute to ZZ Top at a “Crossroads Connection” event, part of its annual Muddy Waters Month celebration. The program kicks off at 2:00 PM at the Delta Blues Museum Stage where local musicians, civic leaders, and state dignitaries will help the Museum thank Billy and ZZ Top for their long-time support of the blues and the culture of the Mississippi Delta. Live music will be provided by the award-winning Delta Museum Student Band, joined by Gibbons, who will play the Muddywood guitar for the occasion. That event in turn will serve as a lead up to the 2025 Juke Joint Festival that kicks off in Clarksdale this Saturday. 

At 3:00 PM, festivities will continue inside at a ticketed reception in honor of Gibbons and in support of the museum’s programs. There, Gibbons will be joined in conversation by the Delta Blues Museum’s “Blues Ambassador,” Charlie Musselwhite, a Delta native, Grammy winner, and Blues Hall of Fame and Memphis Music Hall of Fame inductee. The two will discuss the life and legacy of Muddy Waters and his enduring influence on music. Visit this link for tickets.

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Music Music Features

All the King’s Heroes

If there’s one thing Preston Lauterbach excels at, it’s creating an almost novelistic sense of place in which his thoroughly researched histories can play out. It’s something many noted about his ambitious surveys of Memphis in the 19th and 20th centuries, Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis and Bluff City: The Secret Life of Photographer Ernest Withers, which conjure up scenes of a city buzzing on every corner, before zooming in to the subjects at hand.

That also applies to his latest work, Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King. True to its title, Lauterbach, who proclaims from the start that “Elvis Presley is the most important musician in American history,” delves into the stories of those geniuses of 20th-century Black culture who inspired Presley and made him what he was, offering a deep appreciation of their music and their lives as he does so. But he also evokes the sea in which they all swam, as waves of disparate cultures crashed on the bluffs of Memphis at the time. 

“The city in the years between 1948, when the Presleys moved there from Tupelo, Mississippi, and 1954, when Elvis recorded his hit debut single,” Lauterbach writes, “was the type of furnace in which great people are forged, fundamentally American in its devastating hostility and uplifting creative energy. Elvis came of age in a revolutionary atmosphere.”

And yet Lauterbach’s first deep dive is, counterintuitively, into the Nashville scene of the ’40s and ’50s. The revolution in radio going on there may have been the Big Bang of rock-and-roll itself, and a hitherto unappreciated element of Presley’s exposure to African-American music in Tupelo, as the 50,000 watt signal of Nashville’s WLAC carried it “from middle Tennessee to the Caribbean and Canada.” When pioneering DJ Gene Nobles broke precedent and began playing African-American jazz, R&B, and blues, he “cracked the dam of conservative white American culture,” and that included Tupelo, a full two years before the Presleys moved to Memphis. 

This, Lauterbach posits, was the most likely way a young Elvis would have heard Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right,” prior to making his own version a hit some years later. It had already been a hit for Crudup, who very likely did not play in Tupelo, as Presley later claimed. And from there, Lauterbach begins his fine-grained appreciation of Crudup’s life and career, including the ascent of “That’s All Right” up the charts in the ’40s, fueled in part by its spins on WLAC. 

Zooming out for context, cutting to close-ups of Black artists’ lived experiences, and periodically panning over to how young Presley soaked it all in are what make this book a tour de force of both history and storytelling. A host of African-American innovators are celebrated along the way: Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton and her “Hound Dog,” Herman “Little Junior” Parker and his “Mystery Train.” But lesser knowns also receive their due. The influence of guitarist Calvin Newborn’s performance style, and brother Phineas Newborn Jr. along the way, is thoroughly explored, with Newborn’s anecdotes of Presley’s presence on both Beale Street and the family dinner table. And we read the tale of Rev. W. Herbert Brewster, the African-American minister at East Trigg Baptist Church, who not only composed classic gospel songs, but pioneered multiracial services in the Jim Crow era. One direct result of that was Presley’s regular attendance there. But Brewster’s story also reveals how mercenary the music publishing game was, as Mahalia Jackson and her accompanist Theodore Frye claimed at least one of Brewster’s compositions as their own.

Lauterbach does not shy away from the matters of song theft or cultural appropriation that continue to haunt Presley’s legacy. But he notes that Jackson’s usurpation of Brewster’s rights to his own song “was a theft as bold as anything Elvis Presley has been accused of and worse than anything Presley actually did.”

Tellingly, Lauterbach reminds us of the courage it took to blur color lines that seem so hard and fast to many Americans, and for many African Americans this was seen as a positive change. In the final pages, we return to Calvin Newborn’s assessment, who harbored no bitterness over his protégé’s success: “He was a soulful dude.” 

Preston Lauterbach will discuss his new book with Robert Gordon at the Memphis Listening Lab on Friday, April 4th, 6 p.m.

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Fun Stuff Music Music Blog

KrafTwerk Stuns With Their Buns

Kraftwerk at the Overton Park Shell last Tuesday (Photo: Alex Greene)

Last week, the Overton Park Shell hosted a remarkable show by the band Kraftwerk as part of its Shell Yeah! benefit concert series. The group has long been hailed as pioneers of electronic dance music, but, more than that, as world-building conceptual artists in their unyielding pursuit of a vision. That vision was on full display last Tuesday, and clearly touched a wide swath of the Memphis music community, who had turned out in force. “I think everyone I’ve ever met in Midtown is at this Kraftwerk concert right now,” quipped one music fan on social media. “It’s like a family reunion with synthesizers.”

Yet, while there was much moving and grooving in front of the Shell stage, there was a disappointing lack of the very style of dance that the German synthesists have doggedly promoted throughout their career, even in their choice of a band name. Of course, I’m talking about Twerking.

As with much music aimed at a popular dance, from the Twist to the Pony, it’s difficult to say if Kraftwerk actually invented twerking or were merely inspired by what they saw in the discotheques of 1970s Düsseldorf. But the dance has been associated with them ever since they celebrated it in their very name, which was originally rendered as KRAF-Twerk.

Founders Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider soon found that name either too obvious or too obscure, depending on the source, and quickly settled on the simpler spelling. But early demos, unreleased at the time, have made it clear that KRAF was an acronym denoting “Kinetic, Repetitive Ass Flexing.”

On the demo, an unused track titled “Twerk-Tanz Automatisch” from the Autobahn sessions, thus far only available on bootlegs, a voice intones, with deep gravitas, first the words “Mit gebeugten Knien tanzen” (dance with bent knees), then “das Gesäß betonend!” (emphasizing the buttocks!), before initiating a vocoder-steeped chant in English of “Kinetic! Repetitive! Ass! Flexing!”

Clearly the group was onto something, and the video above, from Detroit circa 1981, reveals how their trademark dance craze was soon being adopted internationally.

And it still is overwhelmingly popular in Germany and across the world to this day, as seen in this video with nearly 848.5 million views:

Yet there was little evidence of twerking at Kraftwerk’s triumphant Shell appearance. That’s not say it wasn’t going on at all, however. The dance is fully incorporated into the band’s method, just as surely as cycling, programming, and 3D projections. As Hütter himself revealed in a rare interview with Der Spiegel, “Diese Tanzmethode ist entscheidend für unsere künstlerische Praxis” (This dance method is crucial to our artistic practice). “Wir twerken immer still hinter unseren Podien” (We’re always twerking silently behind our podiums).

Kraftwerk behind their podiums (Photo: Alex Greene)

Visit this link on the Overton Park Shell website to learn about future concerts in the Shell Yeah! benefit concert series.

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Music Music Blog

Terry Manning, Producer/Engineer at Ardent and Beyond, has Died

Terry Manning at an exhibit of his photography in Boston (Photo: Josh Reynolds)

Terry Manning, the pioneering producer, musician, and photographer who was the first staff engineer at Ardent Studios and worked with many of their greatest artists, from Big Star to Led Zeppelin to ZZ Top and beyond, died yesterday, March 25th. Musician Robert Johnson, a friend of both Manning and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, informed the Memphis Flyer that Gibbons had shared news from Manning’s wife that Manning suffered a sudden, fatal fall in the early hours of the morning at his home in El Paso, Texas. An official cause of death has not been made public at this time. He was 77.

This comes only two months after Manning released his latest album, Red and Black, the latest in a series of strong efforts from a very active career in music. He was also physically active all his life, according to the bio on his website, captaining the soccer team at then-Memphis State University in his youth, and running marathons and coaching racquetball later in life. His passing has come as a shock to his friends and colleagues.

Johnson, who worked closely with Manning by way of his music career and continued to be in touch in recent years, says, “He was the epitome of health. I remember him being a vegetarian early on, and he never smoked and never drank. He never partied. He always just worked.”

And work he did, chalking up nearly 200 credits as a producer and even more as an engineer since the 1960s. Over more than half a century, he worked with Booker T. & the MG’s, Shakira, Isaac Hayes, Otis Redding, Iron Maiden, Bryan Adams, the Tragically Hip, Johnny Winter, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Jason and the Scorchers, the Staple Singers, Molly Hatchet, George Thorogood, Al Green, Widespread Panic, Shania Twain, Joe Cocker, Joe Walsh, Lenny Kravitz, and many others.

After moving to Memphis from Texas, he attended Memphis State and played keyboards for the band Lawson & Four More. That was when Johnson first met him, and the two soon became close. When I spoke to Manning in 2018, he said of Johnson, “We’re good friends. I worked with Robert quite a bit. Quite a character. Someone I just love dearly.”

“The first time we really locked horns,” Johnson recalls, “was at the Battle of the Bands at the T. Walker Lewis Community Center. One band would be under one basketball net, and the other band would be under the other. And so you’d play a set, and then all the kids would just move back and forth. At the end of the night, they’d all put their ticket into the hat and vote. Every time, we’d always lose to Terry Manning’s band. Lawson & Four More were a good band, and they had the world record of winning the Battle of the Bands at that little place. All their fan base was in that neighborhood.”

Even then, Manning was prone to experimenting to take the music further. “He had this little trick with the organ. It was a Doric, a German off-beat organ. And he would take Mercury dimes, these really thin 10 cent pieces, and make a chord, and he would stick the dimes between the keys, and they would just hold down this chord. His amp would have all this distortion, and he would take his hands and move and spin around. I mean, it was almost like seeing Jimi Hendrix playing the organ. It was just totally incredible. You thought the organ was playing itself.”

Before long, Manning began working as the first staff engineer at the fledgling Ardent Studios, engineering sessions for Stax Records when their main studios were overbooked, and both working the board and playing when the studio supported local rock bands, including Chris Bell’s Icewater and Rock City, which went on to become Big Star after Alex Chilton joined them. Manning was also deeply involved in Chilton’s solo recordings just before the Big Star era, as the singer-songwriter sought to define his sound after leaving the Box Tops, ultimately released on the retrospective 1970 album. And Manning masterminded his own solo psychedelic album, Home Sweet Home, at the time — now widely celebrated.

Terry Manning in the early days of Ardent Studios (Photo: Chris King)

Earlier, while playing with Lawson & Four More, Manning befriended Jimmy Page as he was touring with the Yardbirds, leading Page to work with Manning years later during the mixing of Led Zeppelin III, as detailed in this Memphis Magazine story.

Perhaps his greatest success was with the band ZZ Top, who recorded several albums at Ardent. “When ZZ Top started making ‘Gimme All Your Lovin” and those other Top 10 songs,” Johnson says, “those sounds were all Terry on the Oberheim keyboard and drum machine, programming drums and keys. He was MIDI-ing up the bass and coming up with those drum turnarounds. Of course, Billy Gibbons is a good drummer and probably did some of that programming down in in Texas, but then Terry came in and totally took it to the next level.”

Manning later moved to London and worked at Abbey Road Studios, then moved to the Bahamas as Chris Blackwell’s partner at Compass Point Studios, where he worked for over 20 years.

Terry Manning (right) at Ardent Studios with James Taylor and Peter Asher (Photo: Courtesy Terry Manning)

In more recent years, Manning leaned into making his own music again, releasing the albums West Texas Skyline: A Tribute to Bobby Fuller (2013), Heaven Knows (2015), Planets (2016), and Playin’ in Elvis’ House (2019), recorded live in the former home of Elvis Presley on Audubon Drive.

He was also a highly respected photographer, publishing two books of his work. In 2016, his work was featured in the Stax Museum of American Soul Music’s exhibit, “Scientific Evidence of Life on Earth During Two Millennia.” The exhibit showcased both Manning’s urban landscapes and his portraits of luminaries ranging from British singer Dusty Springfield to civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr.

But his studio wizardry, informed by his highly musical ears, was arguably his greatest accomplishment. As Johnson notes, “I’m sure Terry learned a lot of things from [Ardent’s] John Fry, because Fry was a little older than Terry, and was more of a mechanical nerd with the tape machines and compressors and all that, but Terry soon surpassed everybody. It didn’t take long before he was probably the number one guy in town. Other engineers just didn’t have that sparkle that he had. I’ve worked with great engineers, like Glyn Johns and Bill Price, but I’ve got to tell you, my favorite engineer of all time is really Terry Manning. He taught me so much about audio electronics and all of John Fry’s techniques. And he just really opened my mind to a world of creativity that I didn’t have. He just flat out knew how to make a record, you know?”

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Cover Feature News

Beale Street Bound

“All roads led to Memphis”: the Rock ‘n’ Soul museum today (Photo: Alex Greene)

“Would you like to take a look inside?” asks Josh Harper of the Memphis Music Hall of Fame, as I stare at the white and pink letters on a black door, spelling out some of the most revered words in the annals of rock-and-roll fashion: Lansky Bros., Memphis, Since 1946. That’s an offer no inquisitive journalist can refuse, and when Harper turns the key, it’s as if he’s opened a portal into the past. The brick walls of the clothier’s longtime location at 126 Beale Street, now vacated in favor of the newer Lansky at the Peabody boutique, exude an aura of living, breathing history, dating back to the structure’s incarnation as Burke’s Carriages in the early days of Beale.

“The building used to be two buildings that were bricked together,” says John Doyle, executive director of both the Memphis Music Hall of Fame (MMHOF) and the Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum. “On the second floor, they shoed horses. There was a ramp on the outside of the building where they walked the horses up there. A saloon was on the first floor. And the original hardwood floors are still there; the original beams are still there.”

Doyle has every reason to savor the history of the location, beyond the fact that the MMHOF museum was sandwiched between Lansky’s and the Hard Rock Cafe there for nearly a decade. Helming a museum makes one partial to the legacy of any building, especially when it’s destined to be the home of the very exhibitions you manage. And that’s precisely what’s in store for the Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum. 


Artists’ renderings of the future J.W. and Kathy Gibson Center for Music  
Photos: (top) Courtesy Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum; (bottom) Courtesy Mike Curb Family Foundation

A Movable Feast

The move was made public one year ago at a press conference outside the building that featured Doyle, businessman J.W. Gibson, and host Priscilla Presley, where it was announced that Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Inc., the nonprofit that operates both the museum and MMHOF, had purchased 126 Beale from Lansky’s for $5 million with funding from Gibson, Mike Curb, and other benefactors. The highlight of the event was the unveiling of a sign marking the address as the new “J.W. and Kathy Gibson Center for Music” that will include MMHOF, Rock ‘n’ Soul, and the Mike & Linda Curb Music Center.

As reported at the time by Bob Mehr in the Commercial Appeal, Gibson, who is chairman of the museum’s foundation board, said, “It’s Memphis music that I’m committed to, and that I think is sorely missing tremendous opportunities year after year. Since I’ve been on the board, I’ve been preaching the notion that we need to take advantage of the talent that Memphis has and the history we have. Memphis music is substantial to the music industry internationally. However, locally, what are we doing to uplift that industry, to support that industry? We saw an opportunity here.”

Naturally, migrating the museum into the space will take some time, but the institution has long had patience on its side. Now in its 25th year, Rock ‘n’ Soul occupies a unique niche in the local museum ecosystem. For one thing, it was launched by the Smithsonian Institution, the first of that venerable organization’s exhibitions to be located outside the Washington, D.C., area. Moreover, Rock ‘n’ Soul was uniquely peripatetic even before it opened, with its origins rooted in a traveling exhibition. 

As Doyle explains, “When the Smithsonian was celebrating their 150th anniversary as a museum system, they decided to get some of their stuff out in the world and did an exhibit that toured the country. It included the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hat, and other things, but the centerpiece of it was an exhibit about the origins of America’s music. It featured the quote that ‘In the quest to identify the roots of rock-and-roll, all roads led to Memphis.’ And they actually tapped some Memphians to do some of the research. David Less, here in Memphis, who has been head of the Blues Foundation and is a record producer and author, conducted over 60 oral history interviews with Memphis musicians who were still alive at the time.”

That ultimately led to siting the brick-and-mortar Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum in the Gibson Guitar Factory, a block south of Beale Street, in 2000. But though Gibson was not destined to keep that facility in operation in perpetuity, the museum had already migrated by the time it closed. As it turned out, Gibson wasn’t the only business interested in having a music museum in its corridors. The Grizzlies were coming.

Doyle explains that the NBA team “wanted a music museum to be part of the FedExForum campus because they were theming the basketball arena with a Memphis music thing. Anyone who’s come to a Grizzlies game recognizes that Memphis music is pretty prevalent through there. It was wise on the Grizzlies’ part to really embrace that aspect of the city’s culture. So they wanted a music museum to be part of the campus, and the Rock ‘n’ Soul board and staff preceding me raised, I think, $1.3 million to convert what was going to be a three story building into a four story building, so that Rock ‘n’ Soul would encompass the first floor.”

And that’s where it has stood since 2004, when the FedExForum opened. “We can never say enough about the Memphis Grizzlies. To have a nonprofit museum developed by the Smithsonian Institution, that pays no lease, is pretty unheard of. We’re the envy of most of the nonprofits in the city, and that’s out of the graciousness of the Grizzlies.” Indeed, the museum has thrived there for 20-odd years, and only last month, USA Today included Rock ‘n’ Soul among the top 10 music museums in the country as part of their 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards series. That puts it in the company of the Johnny Cash Museum, the Patsy Cline Museum, and the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville; the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland; the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix; the Museum at Bethel Woods in Bethel, NY; the Motown Museum in Detroit; the Birthplace of Country Music Museum in Bristol, Virginia; and the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

A Weird Coincidence

Thriving as it is in its current location, one might well ask why Rock ‘n’ Soul would move at all. And at one time, several of the museum’s board members were asking the same question. But at least one of them was inclined to think big.

“We had a strategic planning session a few years ago,” Doyle says, “and we were talking about things like improvements to the museum exhibits, expanded programming, and starting an endowment for the longevity of the organization. And then one board member threw up their hand and said, ‘What if we dreamed about having our own building, and both museums being under one roof?’ And another board member said, ‘Are you crazy? We pay no lease at FedExForum, thanks to the Memphis Grizzlies. Over at the Memphis Music Hall of Fame, we pay no lease, thanks to the Hard Rock Cafe [the anchor tenant in Lansky’s building, serving as MMHOF’s landlord]. We would be stupid to do something like that!’”

But even as they spoke, events were coalescing to nudge them out of their comfort zone. As Doyle explains, “It wasn’t two months later that Hal Lansky came into the lobby of Rock ‘n’ Soul and said, ‘I need to talk to you about something. The Hard Rock Cafe is leaving Memphis.’ This was in June of 2023. And I said, ‘When are they leaving?’ He said, ‘Thirty days from now.’ And I said, ‘Are y’all going to get another tenant in there who can serve as landlord for the Memphis Music Hall of Fame?’ And he said, ‘No, probably not. We’re probably going to put the building up for sale.’

“So I went to our board and said, ‘Remember that idea that some of us said was the stupidest idea anyone had ever come up with at a strategic planning session? It looks like it’s coming true.’ And so, with a very visionary board of directors, our soon-to-be board chairman J.W. Gibson donated a million dollars towards the purchase of the building. Then we wrote a grant, and the Assisi Foundation of Memphis graciously donated a million dollars. And then Mike Curb with Curb Records, who owns Elvis’ home on Audubon and funded the [Mike Curb Institute for Music] at Rhodes College, stepped up with $2.5 million, and in eight months, we purchased the building.”

That was just the beginning, of course. Expanding and creating new spaces for public engagement will incur costs far beyond the purchase of the building itself. “We then started a capital campaign to raise another $15 million to renovate the building, to do upgrades to both museums’ exhibits, to make them bigger and better, to have a performance space, so that we can assist musicians, to have a studio, so that we can assist students, and grow the gift shop. And now we have that underway. It’s kind of a surreal moment.”

Furthermore, both Rock ‘n’ Soul and MMHOF will live together in a space that’s undeniably, inherently historical. As Doyle points out, that’s something that other Memphis music tourist destinations have that Rock ‘n’ Soul has never possessed. “There’s only one place where you can have Sun Studio. The Stax Museum [of American Soul Music], even though the building was demolished, they rebuilt a replica on the same site. And then obviously, you can’t move Graceland. The fact that we tell the complete Memphis music story separates us somewhat from our other partners in the field of music here, around Memphis.” Yet that has also meant that Rock ‘n’ Soul has lacked any obvious, charmed location. But that’s about to change. 


John Doyle and Priscilla Presley (Photo: Courtesy Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum)

Keith Richards at 2015 MMHOF Induction Ceremony (Photo: Courtesy Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum)

Sacred Ground

Although Rock ‘n’ Soul won’t move for another year or two, the upcoming location is already spurring on a new groundswell of support for the museum. As it turns out, there’s nothing like having a Beale Street address. “Priscilla Presley is very engaged about what we’re doing,” says Doyle. “She’s obviously engaged because Elvis was tied to that building. But she also considers Memphis home, despite the fact that she lives in Los Angeles — as she’s said, she lived at Graceland longer than she lived anywhere in her life, being a military brat. And so she’s gone with me twice to the State Capitol to talk to legislators and the governor about how important this is, not just for the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum, but for Memphis music and for the future of Beale Street, the safety of Beale Street: to have daytime and family-friendly programming, to enhance what the clubs and restaurants are doing. We’re looking forward to working with the Beale Street merchants, to be a good partner there, even though we’re on the other side of Second Street from the Beale Street Historic District.”

Mike Curb, for his part, also sees the move as potentially creating a critical mass around Beale Street. “We’re kind of hoping to do on Beale Street what we did in Nashville’s Music Row, where we bought quite a few buildings. … We’re going to do something really special.”

A whole new world of possibilities is opening up, in part because of a significant increase in square footage, but also because of what the Hard Rock Cafe left in its wake. “Fortunately, when Hard Rock Cafe left town,” says Doyle, “they left every plate, every fork and spoon, the most incredible kitchen equipment you’ve ever seen, and a stage with full sound equipment, full lights. Everything was left for us. I guess it was a housewarming gift. And we have great space in the building, double the space that we currently have for our two museums’ exhibits, so we could make room for a performance space, a larger gift shop, a recording studio to help students with podcasts, and host Beale Street Caravan, that sort of thing. We can have summer camps for kids, music performances, private facility rentals, anything that you want in that space, and still keep the museums running. This building is going to afford that.” 

Naturally, putting the museums at the head of the entertainment district will make them both more visible, and, together under one roof, able to attract more visitors. Most of all, they will be both on and of Beale, the old carriage shop’s brick walls, where a saloon’s rowdy crowd once fought, courted, and raised toasts, exuding the street’s spirit. Within those walls, Rock ‘n’ Soul and MMHOF will embody the very history they celebrate. As Doyle puts it, “Those are the things that make us sacred. We are moving into sacred ground.” 

Categories
Music Music Blog

Gonerfest 22 Rears its Giant Fish Head, Announces Lineup

W.I.T.C.H. (Photo: Izzie Austin)

Rising up from the murk and mud of the underground, Gonerfest 22 has emerged in the form of a gigantic bipedal fish to announce what will be in store this fall, from Thursday, September 25th, through Sunday, September 28th, 2025. And with many puzzling over the apparent closure of Railgarten, Gonerfest’s host since 2021, it comes as a relief to hear that this year’s festival has found a new home at Wiseacre Brewery on Broad Avenue.

The big news, of course, is that the fest will be headlined by “Zamrock” legends W.I.T.C.H. (purveying Zambia’s unique blend of traditional African sounds and psychedelic rock) and Missoula/Seattle indie rockers Silkworm. Also included in the initial list of confirmed bands are Sydney, Australia’s (via L.A.) “egg punks” Tee Vee Repairmann; Athens, Georgia’s rockers Pylon Reenactment Society; Auckland, New Zealand’s post-punks Guardian Singles; Sydney’s garage punks Itchy & the Nits; and up-and-coming Chicago popsters Sharp Pins.

Part of a rich flowering of edgy psychedelic rock in Zambia, W.I.T.C.H. (an acronym for “We Intend To Cause Havoc”) were formed during that country’s golden post-independence days, headed by lead vocalist Emanuel “Jagari” Chanda, and were soon embraced as one of the greatest “Zamrock” bands of the 1970s. With the economy collapsing at the end of that decade, and facing increased government authoritarianism, W.I.T.C.H., like most Zamrock bands, were reduced to playing daytime shows to avoid the curfews, then faded away. Cut to 2012, when Chanda was invited to the U.S. to perform. In 2013, “New Witch” began touring again with a lineup including Chanda and new members from the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland. The band’s previous discography has also been re-released.

Silkworm, meanwhile, formed in 1987 and released nine influential albums and many singles, EPs, and compilations over an 18-year period, as well as touring worldwide in North America, Europe, and Asia, notably playing every state in the continental U.S. (except Delaware, for some reason). The group recently played together as a dual-guitar quartet, for the first time in thirty years, at Steve Albini’s memorial in 2024, and the experience was so rewarding that they began to discuss regrouping for some additional events — which now will bring them to Gonerfest.

Silkworm (Photo courtesy Goner Records)

Early Bird Gonerfest 22 golden passes go on sale March 19th at 10 a.m. CDT. They are $150 each for entry into all official shows. Single-day passes will be available at the door, according to venue capacity. For more info and tickets, click here.

Categories
News Politics Politics Feature We Recommend

Timothy Snyder’s Call to Action

Timothy Snyder (Photo: Merlin.anthwares)

Leading up to the last election, millions of Americans were aware of the creeping fascism of the Republican Party, who’ve fallen in line behind a power-hungry authoritarian kingpin like a Russian duma. Yet many of us have felt blindsided by the rapid evisceration of government services, the warrantless apprehensions of immigrants, and the further flouting of law, treaties, and decency that have ensued since Inauguration Day. How are we to make sense of it all?

Timothy Snyder is more than a teacher, and more than the Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University: He has been a reliable public voice of reason, critique, and perspective since the first Trump administration. His 2017 book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, quickly became a bestselling guide to navigating what he’s called “America’s turn towards authoritarianism.”

Now, his latest work, On Freedom, approaches the same issues from a perspective that’s both more personal and more philosophical. In anticipation of his upcoming appearance at Rhodes College on Sunday, March 30th, Snyder took some time to speak with the Memphis Flyer about his thoughts on democracy and freedom, and how they might apply to our city in particular.

Memphis Flyer: In your new book, you speak of the “labor of freedom,” the ongoing work we must put in if we want to see democratic principles made real. I wonder how you see that in relation to what Neil Postman called “amusing ourselves to death,” the deep immersion in entertainment media that Americans seem to crave. Is it hobbling our ability to stay engaged as citizens?

Timothy Snyder: You’re absolutely right. Freedom is something that you have to work for. It can’t be given. If it’s given, it’s not freedom. And this does run against our intuitions. We’d like to think that freedom can be given to us by, you know, the ancestors, the Constitution, capitalism, American exceptionalism, history. But if it’s given, it’s not freedom. And worse, anybody who tells you a story about how it’s given is drawing you into authoritarianism, because if you believe that something’s going to give you freedom, then that means that you’re being taught not to act for yourself.

And that’s because, second point, freedom has to depend upon the unpredictable, eccentric combinations of things that each individual cares about and their ability to realize those things, those values in the real world. And so freedom isn’t just an absence of constraints. It’s not just being able to do what your impulses tell you to a given moment, freedom is something much bigger. It’s about becoming yourself. It’s about acting as the unpredictable, unique person you are, and changing the world in a way that only you can change it.

Which leads to a third point: Freedom always has to be something that we do together. We can’t achieve things by ourselves, because some of the basic elements that will need to be free, unpredictable people can only be built over generations working together, and those are very simple things like roads or schools or health care, or the rule of law, or whatever it might be.

And so it follows that if we train our brains to be stimulated all the time, to be entertained all the time, then we’re not training ourselves for freedom. We’re training ourselves to think that everything’s going to come to us, right? The stimulation all comes from the outside. We’re not questioning the frameworks. We’re putting our heads inside a framework. And also, we’re using up all the time next to the screen. We’re not getting our bodies out into the world, which is also very important. So when Postman was writing, we didn’t have the internet. The internet makes that point, unfortunately, ten times more applicable than it was before.

Your point almost echoes Plato positing that we have to build the perfect republic in our own mind, in the individual, for the Republic to exist in the world. It has to start with this interior initiative. Is that why On Freedom includes such personal, autobiographical passages?

The main reason I use so much personal material was to show that I have made a lot of mistakes [laughs]. And this is, I think, very important for a book about freedom, because a person who says they’re always right can’t possibly be a free person. The only way to be right all the time is to be living inside a story which you just modify no matter what you do so it turns out that you were right. And this is one of the things that’s very troubling about our Vice President, for example, is that no matter what happens, he’s yelling at other people, I mean quite literally, that they’re wrong and he’s right. He has this need to say that all the time to people who actually know what they’re talking about, in situations where you know, to put it gently, he isn’t completely correct or knowledgeable or an expert. And so freedom has to be a matter of accepting that you make mistakes, and moving on from them.

And also, another point is, I don’t think freedom can be written about point by point, the way that Plato was trying to write. I don’t think you can do it kind of paragraph by paragraph, building up a case. I think you have to accept that freedom is somewhere between people, and so you have to work in the writing to find ways to communicate to other people. So I share things about myself, about being young, about being sick, about being a parent and so on, as a way to reach out to the other person. Because it is a movement, but it’s not just an interior movement. I mean, it has to be a movement from the inside of yourself out to the inside of another person. Empathy, as I see it, is very central to freedom.

And this is a way that my book is different from other books. Usually, we start in the U.S. from the idea that we can be completely alone and we can be completely isolated, and we can just rebel against stuff around us, and that’s going to make us free. And I just think that’s completely wrong. If you’re completely alone and isolated, you’re going to be alienated and unhappy, and you’re going to make bad decisions, and you’re not going to be free. You’re also not going to be self-critical, or know when you’ve made mistakes. Freedom has to start from recognizing that other people are in the same predicament that we are in, learning to see yourself also from their point of view, and thereby becoming more knowledgeable about yourself. I think that’s a necessary condition for becoming a free person.

I’ve always struck by Ralph Nader’s idea of the “citizens toolbox,” calling for more town hall-style meetings, and other ways to participate in groups. In your travels and your historical thinking, can you point to any really strong examples of people building democracy from the ground up again?

That’s, that’s a wonderful question, because democracy, of course, can’t be built by a bunch of individuals who are alone in their houses, staring at screens. The thing that you should be doing is trying to organize people to do things that are beyond the screen. And I think that’s kind of the big trick of 21st century organizing. Of course, you have to spend time on social media, but you need to spend time on social media getting other people out to do things in the real world, because human contact is really special. It’s not depressing, it’s encouraging. It allows you to break the cycle of just reacting to everything that’s going around you emotionally, and allows you to act sensibly and in a way which also ends up improving your overall emotional state.

As far as examples, all the recoveries of democracy in the late 19th, late 20th, and early 21st century have to do with some kind of movement, some kind of mass movement, which goes beyond political parties, and goes beyond the existing framework. And I want to just make a little footnote to that: a lot of folks are saying, ‘Well, the Democrats should do more.’ And no doubt, the Democrats should do more, no doubt individual elected officials could do more, but there’s a certain way in which asking elected officials to do more is missing the point, because it’s really down to the citizens. It’s down to the citizens to organize creatively, to create more opportunities for elected officials. Because if we’re not out there building some kind of a movement, if we’re not literally creating a scene for them, then they can’t really act in that scene. If we don’t build up that civil society, we are, in effect, keeping them in their traditional role and not giving them anywhere else to go, right?

 So what I worry about is that when people say, ‘Oh, the Democrats should be doing more,’ it’s like you’re kind of repeating the mistake. I mean, sure they should be doing more, but we also have to do more.

You ask for specific examples. So the one that comes to my mind an awful lot lately is Solidarity in Poland, which was a labor movement, which you can’t really classify as being either left or right, which involved workers even though at the beginning most of its members were not workers, which was outside the normal rules of the game, and which didn’t fit into people’s preoccupations about what was possible in in a given moment. But that was in 1980-81. Since then, in the intervening 45 years, pretty much all the examples that I can think of, of democracies being recovered, have involved some kind of mass movement which went beyond a political party. At the end of the day, a political party might be helped by it and join with it or overlap with it, but the movement is the key.

So part of your point is, it’s up to local actors to invent these forms, these movements. I appreciate that in your book, there’s an emphasis on improvisation, or adaptability. And that that’s part of what makes democracies and freedom in general, more resilient. Is that a fair statement?

Yeah, yeah. No, I love that. That’s really good. Democracy is not like a car, right? Like, I have this feeling that a lot of people think democracy is like a car, you know, and it runs one day and it runs the next day, but then on the third day it stops running. And so what do you do? You get out and you start kicking the tires. But democracy is not like a car. It’s not something which is meant to run on its own. If it exists at all, democracy is always the result of people doing the things they care about together. It’s not a machine that either runs or breaks down.

[Automated voice breaks in]: ANNOUNCEMENT 19: WE’RE SORRY. THE NUMBER YOU HAVE DIALED HAS CALLING RESTRICTIONS THAT HAVE PREVENTED THE COMPLETION OF YOUR CALL. [Phone disconnects].

[I call Snyder back]: Sorry, that was very Orwellian.

I hope that makes it into your article!

Let’s switch metaphors. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig talks about how there are two kinds of people who ride motorcycles. There are the ones who just want to go, and then there are the ones who like to tinker. And if you want to have democracy, you have to be a tinkerer, which isn’t to say you have to know how everything works, but you have to know how something works, or how to try to figure out how something works —whether that’s the school board, or the city council, or the public library, you have to know how something works, and you have to be active at some level. I think the mistake people make is to say, ‘Well, either we’re going to have democracy or not, and that’s all going to be decided in Washington by big people who are far away.’ And that’s not it at all, right? Although big people who are far away are going to do their best to make you think that, because if you think that, you’re not going to do anything.

It seems like the implication is that so much of this has to happen on the local level, in those face-to-face encounters. I’m wondering if you have any case studies that might apply to Memphis, as we’re currently coping with Elon Musk’s Colossus supercomputer, and there’s this tension between the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce and City Hall rolling out the red carpet for him, with almost no public debate, despite the grave doubts of everyday citizens and environmental activists in Memphis. Have you seen case studies dealing with similar oligarchs who are squatting down in the middle of communities, and how those communities can push back?

I can’t claim any personal familiarity with the situation in Memphis, so I’m going to limit myself to just a couple of general points. The first is that Musk is an extreme case of people who look for unregulated environments where they’ll be able to do whatever they want. Different companies are better and worse about this, right? But he’s an extreme case of someone who seeks out an environment where he’s going to be completely at liberty to do whatever he wants.

The second point is that his record can be checked in other cities, in other places where he’s done business, like Texas. And the third thing, which is worth noting, is that his businesses are tanking. He has a big name and a big reputation and all that, but pretty much all of his businesses are tanking right now. And so the idea that this is some kind of sure-fire investment, I think, is unclear.

And that’s related the fourth point, which is that this is a person who’s assisting in a drastic attempt to carry out regime change in the United States. I don’t think one can just ignore that basic fact, because you’re then choosing to bring to Memphis all of the consequences of that, right? The guy has hundreds of billions of dollars, and he’s trying to change the entire structure the United States. And so if you decide to bring him to your county or your city, you’re bringing that too, with all the consequences of that, forever.

That’s a great point: We have to keep the big picture in mind, even as we act locally.

Yeah, and there’s always going to be the thought that outside investment is good. Our community needs investment. And then it’s up to local people to say, ‘Well, wait a minute. Who are the investors? What is their record? What are the positives and negatives on balance. What does this do to our community?’ So of course, the role the Chamber of Commerce is going to be the role the Chamber of Commerce. And it’s a legitimate role. I would say that’s not the only argument. People have to rise up, explain, creatively protest, and make all of the arguments, rather than treat this as something which just has to automatically happen, because ‘investment’s always good.’ Not all investment is good.

It seems that the left, or progressives, or whatever you want to call the current anti-fascists, could take a page out of the Republican playbook in as far as we should be leaning into local offices: school boards, city councils, that sort of thing. Have you seen that happening in response to the national political climate?

Yeah. First of all, I just want to agree with the premise that people should be running for office at all levels. From township trustee, or whatever you call it in Tennessee, through governor, through senator, people should be running for office, and especially for local office. There are too many races that are unopposed, and you’re right that the Republicans have done well by caring about that. And in my view, the Democrats hurt themselves with the notion that we have the more charismatic dynasties and we’re in control of the presidency forever. That didn’t turn out to be true. It was a bad, bad premise, because in the end, it’s what happens in the states that, over the long term, is going to determine who’s president, and not not the other way around. The funnel goes from the local to the state to the federal, and not the other way around. In the short term, the federal government can do lots of things, but in the long term, as you say, the Republicans are right about this: the funnel of historical action is from local to state and then ultimately to the federal.

Finally, I wanted to ask about your thoughts on the politics of race and how entrenched they seem now. I’m an anthropologist by training, and learned early on that race is an absolute fiction in the biological sense, even if it is, you know, imprinted on bodies, culturally, and so forth. Yet it’s a political force that seems to dovetail with your concepts of “sadopopulism” and “the politics of eternity.” Could you elaborate on those terms with regard to the politics of race?

Yeah, of course. So, by sadopopulism I mean a politics which is trading not in goods, but in pain. A populist might make promises. They might need to be unreasonable promises, but a populist is saying the government can do something for you. A sadopopulist is saying the government won’t really do anything for you, but our inaction is going to hurt other people more than it’s going to hurt you. And I think that captures a lot of American life. And it goes back to the to the question of what freedom actually is. Because it’s true: If we don’t do anything, if we’re inactive, if we just make the government small, or we don’t want the government to do anything, it’s always true that somebody else is going to suffer more. And in the U.S., very often white people are being told, implicitly or explicitly, that it’s the Black people who are going to suffer more. It’s the immigrants who are going to suffer more. That can become a kind of politics. You go from expecting the government to do things for everybody so that we’ll all have more opportunity, to thinking, ‘Okay, well, the government’s role is to tell me where I’m supposed to direct my gaze, to watch the people who are having a harder time than I am.’

That’s what I’m afraid the federal government is now up to. It’s pulling back things that the federal government could do to make us all free, and instead it’s creating a spectacle where we’re supposed to look at the deportation, we’re supposed to look at other people’s pain and think, ‘Oh, that’s not me,’ and be satisfied with that.

By the politics of eternity, I mean the idea that there isn’t really a future, and that therefore we should be concentrating on a time when the country was innocent. This is a very dominant way that authoritarians practice politics, from Russia to the United States: the idea that there was a time when we were great, when we were not flawed, when we were pure, before everyone else came and spoiled it for us. How does that connect to race? Well, in America, that’s a kind of white utopia. It’s the notion that 100 years ago, only the white people ran everything, and everything was better then, we weren’t troubled then, we didn’t have troubled consciences. We didn’t have to think about things then, and everything worked then. And of course, none of those propositions are actually true. The United States in 2024 was a much better country than the United States in 1924 in every conceivable respect, and a lot of it has to do with the merit of people who are not white, insofar as they were allowed to take part in the broader economy and the broader political system.

Then the racial utopia of [the politics of eternity] becomes racial politics, right? Where white guys who are less competent then get thrown into roles for which they’re clearly unprepared. You know, there are a whole bunch of cabinet secretaries now who fit this bill, and really the only thing that makes them vaguely look like they could be prepared is that they’re white guys and they can tie a tie. And that only seems plausible because of a kind of aesthetic, a nostalgic aesthetic, like, ‘This person looks like they should be a cabinet secretary, because they’re a middle-aged white guy who can tie a tie.’

And so that’s a way that the politics of eternity comes in, as opposed to thinking about our country in terms of its future, its better futures which it could have, in which all kinds of smart and talented people come in from all kinds of angles. You know, people who’ve been here for 15 generations, and people who’ve been here for one, people of European ancestry and people of Asian ancestry and African ancestry or whatever it might be. Instead of thinking of our country as having a billion possible futures that mix up the talents of all these people, we apply this false vision of when certain kind of person controlled everything and try to bring it back. So that’s a way that race connects to the politics of eternity.

I guess the great irony is, you know, people like Elon Musk are always going on about the future, but it’s this kind of pie in the sky, let’s colonize Mars type of thing, as opposed to the future of Americans living or not living, as the case may be, in the near future here on Earth.

Yeah, no, I think the notion of bringing apartheid to the whole solar system is probably not actually going to happen. But yeah, you’re exactly right. I mean, what they’ve done is they’ve basically colonized the future, right? Instead of there being a kind of everyday, all-American future, we have instead these stupid ideas: let’s go to Mars, let’s live forever, right? And those things are completely implausible, and they won’t happen, but they take up the space of the future. They’re like these polluted clouds that fill the air, so we can’t see our way to actually possible futures, which are out there.

Timothy Snyder will speak “On Freedom and Just Habits of Mind” at Rhodes College’s McNeill Concert Hall on Sunday, March 30th, at 3 p.m., sponsored by the Spence Wilson Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities. Registration required. Visit Rhodes.edu/wilson for details.

Categories
Music Music Features

The Glass Key Trio

The Glass Key Trio (Photo: Courtesy Jeremy Bleich)

A lot of bands can be described as “improvised music,” and that’s the beauty of the genre. Straight-ahead jazz has improvised solos built in, of course, yet generally that’s over a framework of complex chord changes. More rock-oriented groups will simply lay down a drone, grind out riffs, or rely on blues changes. I’ve been told the legendary Grifters would often facilitate freestyle moments in their live sets by having sheets of paper marked with chord names, like “C” or “A-flat,” laid out on the stage. They would wail for a while, and when one player wanted to shift gears, he would point to a new chord and the rest would follow suit. To audiences, it seemed like sheer telepathy. 

This Thursday, March 20th, the Lamplighter Lounge will present a case study in two approaches to improvised sonic adventure. The opener will be Turnt, who have enjoyed a Sunday residency at the Lamp for years now, often with a rotating cast of players. They’re not always strictly improvised, but that’s often the starting premise, and they arrive at it from a decidedly rockist orientation. The true “soloist,” as it were, is drummer Ross Johnson, who’s been globally celebrated for his off-the-cuff verbal rants since 1979’s “Baron of Love, Pt. II.”

Turnt (Photo: Courtesy Skyline Records)

That recording, of course, was made in cahoots with firebrand Alex Chilton, but more recently Turnt, too, have shown off Johnson to great effect. You can hear his magic on Bandcamp on such tunes as “Methadone Takeout Card,” “Twelve Hours on a Respirator,” or “Merry STD Baby,” where the verbal pugilist is backed by core Turnt members Scott Taylor (of Grifters fame), Bill Webb, and Hans Faulhaber. Though Taylor was sidelined by a stroke about a year ago, from which he’s now heroically fighting his way back, the band carries on. And while Johnson claims to have sworn off his ranting, we fans will believe it when we see it. 

After their set, some fresh faces will take the stage: The Glass Key Trio from Santa Fe, New Mexico. As Faulhaber quips with characteristic humility, “They can actually play!” 

Indeed, band leader and guitarist Jeremy Bleich studied composition at Cleveland State University, mostly playing bass and classical guitar at the time. And his trio’s debut album, Apocalypse Fatigue, led to two nominations in the 2023 New Mexico Music Awards, including Best Jazz Album and Best Instrumental Song. Yet when I note to Bleich that the Lamplighter Lounge doesn’t often play host to award-winning jazz groups, Bleich lets out a hearty laugh. “Actually, the thing that we’re not used to is playing in jazz rooms, to be honest,” he says.

“It’s interesting. The word jazz means different things to different people,” he goes on. “And I think the way that jazz is marketed or presented in certain venues can sometimes be codified in a way that we would definitely be excluded from. In my view — and I’ve played a lot of straight-ahead jazz in my life, too — I feel that jazz should be a living, breathing thing, and it always brings in different elements of music. A lot of the jazz that I’ve played has been influenced by so much music outside of bebop or straight-ahead jazz. Our music has a lot to do with other traditions, some of which are improvised, like Balkan music or bluegrass or American folk. I don’t really see much of a division between them. And a lot of the leading people that I’m listening to in jazz music are definitely interested in all of those different things, including punk rock.”

Although parts of Apocalypse Fatigue sound a bit like Bill Frisell if Frisell listened to more Wire, you won’t hear much punk per se on The Glass Key Trio’s album — yet it’s clearly in Bleich’s musical DNA. That goes back to his post-collegiate years in New York. “In the ’90s and the 2000s, the Downtown New York scene was kind of centered around the things that John Zorn was involved in, and his Tzadik label. I played with a group called Birth, and we did a lot of playing in New York at that time, with a lot of those guys who were on that label. They were all into, you know, klezmer music or Balkan music or Arabic music. I played the oud a lot, and that kind of came from that scene, which was reaching for something outside of straight-ahead jazz, for sure.”

Nor do the other two members of the trio limit their definitions of “jazz.” Drummer Milton Villarrubia III comes from a respected musical family in New Orleans. “He’s an old friend of mine,” says Bleich. “We’ve been collaborating on so many different styles of music and groups over the years. He ended up moving to Santa Fe the night of Hurricane Katrina, trying to get to the highest ground he could. And he’s an amazing drummer. He’s got this thing that only New Orleans drummers have, which is this deep, easy pocket that’s just so easy to play to. And then he can turn on a dime, and just play completely free.”

You can also file bassist Ben Wright under “free,” though he’s equally at home with more structured music. Many Memphians have enjoyed performances by his renowned father, saxophonist Jack Wright, whose Wrest trio was brought here by Goner Records, in a show at B-Side Bar. While Bleich’s music is clearly composed, he has an open approach to the band’s interpretation of his music, especially with newcomer Wright inheriting his father’s proclivities. “Ben can really go there,” Bleich enthuses. “He was raised in that [free] tradition. So, you know, The Glass Key Trio’s music is kind of taking on a whole new kind of life from the improv element. It’s a little freer. It’s a little more sound-based, and so I’m excited to explore those elements as well.”

Categories
Music Music Blog

Immersion + SUSS = Nanocluster

Immersion (Photo: Ben Newman); SUSS (Photo: Bob Krasner)

When Colin Newman and Malka Spigel started their synthesizer duo Immersion back in the 1990s, part of electronica’s appeal was the chance to reinvent oneself. “We were very into the electronic music when it started; it felt like a fresh movement.,” says Spigel. “It freed us from our past, and we could start fresh ourselves, without people’s expectations of what we did before.”

“Yeah, there was an element in a lot of dance music at the time of it didn’t really matter where it came from,” adds Newman. “It didn’t matter who the people were, what gender they were, what color they were, or what language they spoke, because it was instrumental music. So I think for the first time in the history of what you might call popular music, you lost that kind of axis of basically Britain and America — and in Britain, Jamaica — really having the majority of the markets. Suddenly you could really come from anywhere. And that really opened up the whole scene. Although the roots of techno were in Detroit, and roots of house were in Chicago, they were not adopted at the same level in America as they were in Europe. So Berlin and other places, you know, became centers of techno, and that was kind of interesting.”

Newman, of course, had already sought out and created alternatives to the usual pop fare with Wire, whose debut, Pink Flag, with its stop-start breakdowns, semi-spoken/shouted vocals, and angular riffs created a stir in the music world of 1977. For the band at the time, though, punk was already a cliche: They were rejecting both classic rock posturing and punk posturing at the same time. They were, perhaps, the first example of “post punk.”

And yet, as Newman pointed out years ago on The Guestlist podcast with Sean Cannon, “There was no such thing as post-punk. We were just ‘not punk.’ But we were not punk in a way that was familiar with punk already.” Wire was thus premised on reinvention. “Punks hated us … Our songs were too short or they were too slow. We were too weird. We were too arty. We looked wrong.”

By the 1980s, with Wire and his own solo albums, Newman was still questing for new, unique sounds, and in 1985 he came to produce an album for the Israeli synth band Minimal Compact, which included Spigel. They became a couple and eventually married, as both explored the potential of synthesizers in their separate projects. Ultimately, they formed Immersion and released Oscillating in 1995.

And reinventing themselves was part of the appeal of electronica at the time. As Spigel says now, “We liked how mysterious the artists were. Even the famous ones were kind of hiding, not really showing who they were. And the music, of course, was inspiring.”

Embracing the sonic world of synthesizers has served them well, and since 2021 they’ve expanded Immersion’s sound to include collaboration with other artists, under the umbrella term of Nanocluster. The debut Nanocluster album saw Immersion collaborate with Stereolab’s Lætitia Sadier, German post-rock duo Tarwater, and electronic musicians Ulrich Schnauss and Scanner. Released in June 2024, Nanocluster, Vol. 2 had guests Thor Harris — the charismatic percussion player from Swans and Cubzoa — and Jack Wolter from Penelope Isles. And this year has seen the release of Nanocluster, Vol. 3.

On the new album, the couple are collaborating with the American “ambient country” band SUSS, described by Uncut magazine as “Eno’s Apollo Atmospheres crash-landed in America’s Sonoran Desert,” and by Pitchfork as “Neither rawboned nor ramshackle … their elegantly composed brand of ambient country stands as tall and clean as a brand-new pair of cowboy boots.”

A trio of veteran musicians Pat Irwin (the B-52s, Raybeats, 8 Eyed Spy), Bob Holmes (numun, Rubber Rodeo), and Jonathan Gregg (the Combine, the Linemen), SUSS combine traditional instruments like pedal steel, National steel guitar, mandolin, harmonica, baritone guitar, and harmonium with synthesizers and loops to create their a spacious, cinematic sound.

This sense of adventure makes them perfect partners for the Nanocluster project. As SUSS’ Bob Holmes notes in a press release, “Collaboration is an important aspect of the type of music SUSS makes. Whether we are collaborating with each other, or with musicians and artists outside of the band, the exploration and discovery of the unknown is central to our creative process. When Colin & Malka approached us to collaborate with them on Nanocluster, it seemed like a perfect fit. Their use of rhythm, synthesizers, bass and atmospherics felt very complementary to our instrumentation. As expected, the results were unexpected and our music was taken to a place where we would not have gone otherwise.”

Unexpected results can be good or bad, as Spigel points out. “It’s risky. There’s always nervous moments where you think, ‘Is it gonna work? Do they get the concept? Do we find a common ground?’ But surprisingly, so far, we’ve found a really beautiful common ground with every artist we’ve worked with, and we end up being friends. So that’s good.”

A common thread runs through every Nanocluster project, in that every album is ultimately initiated and brought to a close by Immersion. As Newman notes, “The thing that all the collaborations have in common, certainly from the recording side, is that we always finish and mix it, just to give it some kind of sense of continuity, and we do that with absolute inclusion of everything that our collaborating artist has given us. And they can say anything they want about how it ought to be. I mean, SUSS’ way of mixing is very different to ours. We tend towards something which you can hear all the all the nuance on it. They tend to like mix a bit more like jazz.”

Spigel adds, “But they’re into space, which is one of the things that draw us to them.”

The modern miracle of file sharing has been critical to Nanocluster. “With SUSS, they would send us four or five tracks with sounds that we could play over, and we did the same for them, and we built what ended up being the album,” says Newman. “It was all done remotely — actually, before last week, we never met them. We met them for the first time in New York when we rehearsed.

“I think once they kind of realized and trusted us that we could actually finish this off and produce something that was really something that we could all be proud of, that was probably the hardest moment. Once we were past that moment, then we started going very much into their world, and then finding what we could do that was really out of SUSS’ aesthetic. One is vocals. ‘In the Far Away’ started off as almost a kind of neoclassical piece, with the cycling pianos and that kind of vibe. And then Malka was like, ‘I think I’ve got a vocal for this.’ And so we put the vocal on it, and sent it. And they were like, ‘We love it!’ Also, having drums, which are a thing that SUSS don’t have, but actually they were encouraging all of this to be harder, tougher.”

Finally, as Spigel points out, “I think we did what felt right, within the music. It’s about what’s right for the piece.”

The latest Nanocluster collaboration will appear at the Green Room at Crosstown Arts Tuesday, March 18, at 7:30 p.m., with each band performing their own set before joining together for a third set as Nanocluster.