The Memphis Botanic Garden recently announced the lineup for its 2025 Live at the Garden concert series at the scenic Radians Amphitheater. Spanning multiple genres and generations, the outdoor summer season kicks off on June 21st with ’90s alt-rock chart-toppers Third Eye Blind, followed by country singer-songwriter Parker McCollum on July 18th. Country celebrity Darius Rucker takes the stage on August 23rd, and then the series will conclude with two back-to-back Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees: Southern rockers ZZ Top on September 6th and classic rock legend Steve Miller Band on September 19th.
“We’re incredibly excited to celebrate the 25th season of Live at the Garden — a quarter-century of unforgettable music, memories, and magical nights under the stars at the Memphis Botanic Garden,” said Jamison Totten, director of Live at the Garden and Radians Amphitheater, in a statement last week. “We’re deeply grateful for the fans, past and present, who have made this series such a beloved tradition. We can’t wait to spend another summer surrounded by music and friends in this beautiful setting.”
Concertgoers are encouraged to bring lawn chairs, blankets, and coolers. Food trucks and bars will be available onsite preorder catering options. To enhance convenience, free shuttle service will be provided from Hilton Hotel Corporate Headquarters to the venue from 5 p.m. to midnight on each show night.
There are music festivals, and then there are Memphis music festivals. When artists big or small hear that the Bluff City is calling, it hits differently: The history here calls them as much as the prospect of playing to huge Mid-South crowds. And it’s striking just how many global artists have ties to this little corner of Tennessee, either through family or the city’s champion musicians playing in their bands — or simply a love of (sampling?) the city’s music.
That’s especially true for the RiverBeat Music Festival, happening from this Friday, May 2nd, through Sunday, May 4th, at Tom Lee Park. While it’s featuring headliners Missy Elliott, The Killers, and Anderson .Paak & the Free Nationals, the fest always starts with record numbers of local acts right out of the gate, built on a foundation of Memphis musicianship regardless of the marquee names. That’s especially true in the festival’s second year. Nearly 30 of the scheduled artists are local (and that’s not even counting all the students at the School of Rock).
But some of RiverBeat’s national touring acts not normally associated with the Bluff City also have strong ties here — none of them bigger than the hip-hop legends who first called on us to “Fight the Power,” who’ll be playing the prime time slot on Saturday night some 40 years after they started.
Public Enemy
It may seem absurd to associate the quintessential New York rappers of righteousness with Memphis, but it’s a deep connection that Public Enemy’s co-founder, Chuck D, is quick to point out. “I got roots in Memphis,” he says. “You know — with Stax. And I got roots in Memphis with Sun. I’m very knowledgeable about it, and Memphis has been great to me back in my past. You know, it’s like I had another lifetime in the Mid-South. Every time I step on that bluff, I mean, I feel like I’m like a cousin.”
He goes on to explain the city’s unique evolution as a distribution center and hub. “I’m a historian, and whenever you take geography and history away from a people, then you’ve got slavery all over again. So when I went into Memphis, I knew where I was going. I knew the history. I knew the history of the music, and I ended up learning even more. The music changed the world, from Beale Street down to Stax on McLemore, Sun Records with Sam Phillips and Elvis. My knowledge and appreciation and research is thorough and just doesn’t talk out of the side of my face, off the top of my head. It’s always with all due respect of my time in Memphis. My heroes are in Memphis.”
Astute readers will note that even Elvis Presley gets some respect, though Chuck D brought the King down a notch when he rapped that “he didn’t mean shit to me” in 1988’s “Fight the Power” — one of that era’s boldest lyrical moments.
“‘Fight the Power’ was a record that was made for the movie Do the Right Thing, which talked about the disparity of heroes. So therefore, in a half-joking type of way, in the third verse, I knock out American heroes like Elvis Presley and John Wayne, to say, like, ‘Hey, what the fuck? Move over,’ you know? I say, if you want to battle me on that, let’s battle. Once you’re going to rap and battle, make sure your words mean something.
“These were moving battles related to the film. How come there ain’t no brothers on the wall? If you never saw the movie, then you’re gonna miss the point of the third verse, where I talk about Elvis. One of the things that the song talks about is like, ‘Okay, no more than Elvis. No more than John Wayne.’ We’ve had other heroes, especially in Memphis. Sun Records starts out with a Black roster with Sam Phillips. What? I mean, what does the average person know until they learn some of these things? They need to teach the culture in the school systems. And that’s a beautiful thing about going over to the Stax [Music] Academy, which I intend to visit. Those are my people over there, and a big up and salute to Ms. Deanie Parker, as always. And my people over at Sun. I was over at Sun one time with some engineers — and Rufus Thomas. Also a big up to Boo Mitchell over at Royal.”
The rapper celebrates some of these Memphis icons in his latest “naphic grovel” (a play on “graphic novel”), Interficial ARTelligence: The Moments That Met Me on Akashic Books, in which he illustrates his encounter with several Stax legends during a panel discussion of the Wattstax film. “I’m part of the newer generation speaking up for them,” he writes.
It turns out that Chuck D admires some lesser-known hometown luminaries as well, including the rapper/producer Memphis Jelks, who’s announced that he’ll be making a cameo with the group this Saturday, and local bassist/guitarist Khari Wynn, who’s worked with Public Enemy since 2001. “There’s nothing like Khari Wynn,” says Chuck D. “He was our band leader for 20 years! And he still works on sessions. He plays on Public Enemy records when he’s called up and plays guitar on many songs, and has written a few songs.
“We moved away from the band concept when DJ Lord went to Cypress Hill and Khari went back home to Memphis,” Chuck D explains, “and now we have a more DJ-oriented sort of combination, but Khari’s been doing great things with his band in Memphis.”
When I speak to Wynn, who typically plays bass in (full disclosure) a band we’re both in, I ask him about his guitar work. “I kind of bounce back and forth between bass and guitar,” he says. “Most of the time I play bass, but I did do a lot of guitar work with Energy Disciples [another band Wynn founded]. And there’s actually an Energy Disciples record that Chuck added spoken word to, a track called ‘Eternity’s Promise.’”
Asked if Wynn might join Public Enemy at RiverBeat this weekend, Chuck D offers that it’s a distinct possibility. “We don’t have an open- or a closed-door policy,” he says. “We have a no-door policy. So if Khari wants to get up there with his guitar and play, you know we’re gonna be there.”
Bobby Rush (Photo: Laura Carbone )
Bobby Rush
One RiverBeat appearance that’s guaranteed to have plenty of guitars will be the “Royal Studios Blues Experience” showcase on Friday night, which will bring together different generations of players who bear the blues deep in their bones: Duwayne, Garry, and Kent Burnside of the late R.L. Burnside’s extended family; Kinney Kimbrough, the late Junior Kimbrough’s son; and elder statesman of the blues Bobby Rush.
Originally from Arkansas, Rush now resides in Jackson, Mississippi, yet vividly recalls how all blues players were drawn to Memphis as he was getting started, including R.L. Burnside. “R.L., I knew him well from way back, the first time in 1954, I believe,” he says. “We were all just out there, eating what we could, when we could make $2 or $3 here and there, just playing music, man. He was a farmer, a country boy like myself. We both were young at the time, and I don’t know who was the oldest, me or him, but we were around the same age.
“I was from Arkansas, but we were all music players, looking for a place to eat, drink, and stay with some lady because you couldn’t go into a hotel. That’s when I first started coming through that area, even coming to Memphis, Tennessee. Now, you could go on Beale Street, but you couldn’t go on Peabody Street as a Black man. It just wouldn’t happen, man. Me and Rufus Thomas were working on Beale Street. I was doing what I had to do. Me and B.B. King were down in Helena, Arkansas, and I thought to come to Beale Street because of him and Rufus Thomas.”
Rush, for his part, is delighted to be playing with the “youngsters,” all middle-aged men themselves, and all hailing from North Mississippi. “I relate to them through the father and grandfather, and we’ve made good friends. I did a few things with them in the past. I make it happen, man. They’ve got everything to gain from being with me. I don’t have that much to gain with them, rather than being a friend with their parents. And I want to do something with them because it makes them look good. I’m like the grandfather now.”
Though all these bluesmen hail from Mississippi, their respective approaches to the blues actually contrast sharply. The showcase will be mashing up two different flavors of blues. Rush, rooted in an Arkansas Delta style, yet heavily influenced by his many decades on the electrified Chicago scene, notes the differences between his take on the blues and what’s found in the North Mississippi hill country. “They know about what they were taught in the area because most of them don’t play with changes. It’s just one straight beat. But they got a good beat, and it’s a style. That’s what they know. And it’s an old Mississippi style. I don’t think too many people know about this style, but it’s a good thing to keep it going, you know. It’s a good thing they’re doing it because not many guys around are still doing it.”
Cage the Elephant (Photo: Cassilyn Anderson)
Cage the Elephant
At first glance, the ties between the indie rock hitmakers Cage the Elephant and Memphis may not be obvious. Some have compared their sound, justifiably, to the Pixies or other bands of that era, but really their approach has always been to break out from any one style. As guitarist and producer Brad Shultz notes, “We will always go into a record trying to really come to the table with a mindset of genre-blending, pulling different things from different genres that don’t necessarily go together. When you smash them together, something special happens.”
Aside from the band’s reverence for the eclecticism of both the first and second “British Invasions,” from the Beatles to Blur, Shultz says, “We attribute that to our ADHD, which I think is more of a blessing than a curse. It’s always suited us well to have our minds go in five different directions.”
Speaking of the British, that culture has always figured heavily into the band’s evolution, especially when all the members moved en masse from their hometown of Bowling Green, Kentucky, to London, England, around 2008. “It was a big eye-opening and learning experience for us,” Shultz says. But before that, Memphis loomed large in their world.
“Memphis definitely had a big kind of blues influence on us, especially very early in our career,” he notes. “And Memphis was in our regional tours. We would play a show in Nashville, one in our hometown of Bowling Green, one in Memphis, one in Chattanooga, one in Knoxville, and in Louisville as well. We would pick a week out and just hit every one of those spots. So, you know, it’s another full-circle moment to go back to Memphis, where we played tiny, tiny clubs and come back and do these festivals.”
The sounds of the Bluff City also impacted the band, Shultz says. “We were always big fans of Otis Redding — our father kind of raised us on that. And Bill Withers [produced by Booker T. Jones], who I don’t think was a Stax artist but definitely had a huge impact on us.”
This will be a watershed year for the band, as they’ll be connecting with their influences from both sides of the Atlantic, playing in Memphis and then opening on the American leg of the Oasis reunion tour this summer. “It’s such an incredible honor,” says Shultz. “You know, they’re a band that had a huge influence on us, so it’s just kind of crazy that we’re opening up for them. A real full-circle moment.”
DJ Zirk
Perhaps RiverBeat’s ultimate full-circle moment will come when seven rap innovators from the 1990s will take to the stage Friday evening as the “Memphis Rap OGz,” featuring La Chat, Crunchy Black, Al Kapone, Skinny Pimp, DJ Zirk, Gangsta Pat, and DJ Spanish Fly. While Al Kapone has kept up a steady supply of releases in over the years, lately melding his unique rap style with some heavy blues flavors, others on the bill have not had such a high profile. DJ Zirk, for one, bowed out of the spotlight in favor of doing production work for years, before resuming his release of new material around 2018.
“I was very honored that I was one of the ones that was picked,” says Zirk. “I mean, I would have done it for free. I really want to do it for my city, my hometown, and, you know, just let them experience the Memphis sound.”
That would be the new Memphis sound, the sound of crunk, that’s been ruling the airwaves for the past 20 years, from Three 6 Mafia to Yo Gotti to the late Young Dolph. It all began with the mixtapes created by the OGs back in the ’90s, a Southern alternative to the dominant West Coast or East Coast hip-hop of the time.
“When me and DJ Squeeky came out,” says Zirk, speaking of the pioneering producer of 8Ball & MJG and Young Dolph, “we had a totally different, unique sound. You know what I’m saying? We were driven by bass, you know? It’s Boom Boom in the trunk! All our stuff had that bass in it. But people loved it! And we came up in the age of hip-hop, where hip-hop wasn’t about bass. So we got so much criticism, you know, because Memphis was hip-hop at a certain point in time.”
Zirk’s enthusiasm is contagious as he recalls those years. “We were like, ‘We’ve gotta invent ourselves,’ and that’s when we started producing and doing more records together. And since then, our music has never stopped. The only time we had it on hold was somewhere in the late ’90s, really, or maybe 2000, because it was like everybody was taking a piece of our sound. When we were starting it, nobody was really doing what we were doing.”
In Zirk’s reckoning, the challenges to hip-hop’s sound taking place in the South weren’t uniform by any means. But the power of the Memphis sound was undeniable. “When we went to places like Mississippi, Texas, or Georgia, people would look at us and be like, ‘Who are they?’” he says. “Nobody had that sound. And think about it: It was dark; it was funk; it was bass-y. It wasn’t like Miami or people in Atlanta. And in Texas, they would take somebody else’s record and slow it down, right? With the Squeeky thing, we were producing our own stuff. And our style was deep and slow. So when people heard us, it was like, ‘Wow, that’s it!’ Because you can DJ, you can play it in the club, and people will dance off it. It’s like people that got a whiff of this sound and, man, it was like, copied, copied, copied, re-copied. Now it’ll turn into funk; it’ll turn into trap; it’ll turn into a lot of different stuff. And that’s the thing: Now it means we can sit and talk and say, ‘Wow, what we did transformed so many styles.’”
David Less and Robert Gordon are no strangers to the Memphis Listening Lab (MLL), being scholars of music from Memphis and elsewhere. During their appearances at MLL listening events, they’ve premiered, willy-nilly, their share of unreleased, just-released, or little-known tracks on the lab’s hi-fi stereo system. But now they’re about to make a regular thing of it with a new listening series, Echoes in the Room: Unreleased Recordings & the Stories They Left Behind, slated to premiere this Saturday.
Curating a listening experience of raw, unreleased recordings comes naturally to Less and Gordon — and to the music insider guests they’ll be hosting. Saturday’s inaugural event will feature one such guest, who’s been heavily invested in some of the deepest music of our times: John Snyder. Having played in bands through the ’60s, then rising quickly to produce jazz sessions from the ’70s on, Snyder has decades of experience heading up projects at labels as diverse as CTI, A&M, Atlantic, and RCA.
Reaching him by phone in Athens, Georgia, I ask Snyder what we could expect in the way of unreleased tracks from artists he’s worked with. Would there be sonic treasures by, say, Chet Baker, Etta James, or Dave Brubeck? Surprisingly, the first audio gems he thinks of are not artists’ outtakes from studio sessions, but even rarer gems: audio interviews.
“I have a lot of spoken word Ornette [Coleman],” Snyder notes, “because every time I would talk to him about his business stuff, he was so opaque in his speech and his syntax that I couldn’t really understand him. Trying to make legal sense out of it was impossible. So I said, ‘Tell me what you’re actually talking about,’ routinely, with the tape machine sitting right in front of him. Just hearing his speech is kind of instructional because it’s a lot like his playing. You can have some difficulty in understanding it until you get used to it.”
Yet another interview from his archives may be even more fantastical. “I have some Sun Ra talking about interstellar travel,” says Snyder, “and his opinions on this planet in comparison to others. And that has a story, too. When I signed Sun Ra back in the ’80s, he objected to the contract that was ‘for the universe’ because he wanted the rights to Saturn. He wasn’t kidding. So when the lawyer said A&M wouldn’t let me do it, my question to the president of A&M was, ‘Who’s crazier, your lawyers or Sun Ra? Because Sun Ra is for real. You guys are just making shit up.’ They didn’t need the rights to Saturn. They could give up Saturn. Sunny [Blount, aka Sun Ra] was … different.” Moreover, in the audio interview, “you can hear him talk, you can hear that voice.”
Snyder pauses to marvel a minute at the echoes of souls he’s encountered over his decades of work in music production, promotion, and education. And then he mentions some music that might be unearthed on Saturday: Chet Baker or the last recordings of Ornette Coleman’s original quartet. Snyder clearly takes delight at the thought of sharing them. “It’s fun because you see so much of the history of how things were done.”
The Stax Music Academy band will cap off a summer of free music at Overton Park Shell (Photo: Andrea Zucker)
Summer will begin in earnest on May 17th, when the Orion Financial Free Concert Series at the Overton Park Shell fires up its engines. Local psych-rockers Arc of Quasar will kick off the season, signaling the series’ commitment to fostering Memphis talent as well as national touring acts, but from there, the artists featured will span a multitude of genres — classic country, New Orleans street music, indie rock, new-grass, hip-hop, pop, R&B, and soul, to name a few.
Some notable highlights will be appearances by New Breed Brass Band, featuring Trombone Shorty on May 31st, the BoDeans on June 14th, and Alejandro Escovedo on June 20th. Meanwhile, the Memphis Symphony Orchestra will continue its longstanding “Sunset Symphony” tradition on May 25th.
Orion Financial, for its part, is clearly committed to keeping this series stable through the chaos engulfing the nation now — a reassuring sign. “The Overton Park Shell has always been a gathering place for Memphis—a space where music brings us together,” Ashley McDurmon, Orion Financial CEO, noted in a statement. “Orion Financial is proud to support the Free Concert Series, continuing the rich tradition of making live music accessible to all.”
The 2025 series will be presented over 32 nights in its entirety, but the artists announcement for the fall season, taking place from August to October, will happen Monday, July 7th. For now, get those camping chairs ready for these upcoming balmy evenings in Overton Park.
● Saturday, May 17th: Arc of Quasar ● Sunday, May 18th: DreamFest ● Sunday, May 25th: Sunset Symphony ● Thursday, May 29th: Chaparelle ● Friday, May 30th: Parker Millsap ● Saturday, May 31st: New Breed Brass Band ft. Trombone Shorty ● Thursday, June 5th: Steve Poltz ● Friday, June 6th: Saaneah ● Saturday, June 7th: Corey Lou & Da Village + Savannah Brister ● Thursday, June 12th: Eddie 9V ● Friday, June 13th: East Nash Grass ● Saturday, June 14th: BoDeans ● Thursday, June 19th: Pell ● Friday, June 20th: Alejandro Escovedo ● Saturday, June 21st: LadyCouch ● Thursday, June 26th: Eggy ● Friday, June 27th: Mak Ro ● Saturday June 28th: Annual Stax Music Academy Summer Showcase
Chad Marriott, Erin Amlicke, and
Austin Hanna (Photo: Joey Miller)
The opening scenes of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, the latest production by Tennessee Shakespeare Company, may be disarmingly light for some theatergoers. Many of us, myself included, tend to imagine the story of Joan of Arc in the direst possible terms — we all know it ends with her being burned alive, after all. And the first few minutes of the play depict just that, as if to remind us what’s at stake before the narrative begins in earnest.
But then the story launches on a disarmingly light note, with the broad, jocular acting of a comedy. Two characters blow raspberries at each other. It’s a jolly romp, as local big shot Robert de Baudricourt (Austin Hanna) blusters about the lack of eggs from his hens, which, his underlings insinuate, is likely caused by the slightly touched-in-the-head farm maiden Joan (Erin Amlicke). She’s unfazed by the generalized buffoonery, her face uplifted, radiating joy, embodying the chipper, plucky optimism of a naïf.
In a sharp disconnect from the romp, Joan insists that she hears voices, and that Saint Catherine, Saint Margaret, and Saint Michael all have instructed her to lead troops against the British at Orléans. There’s an undaunted quality in Joan’s convictions (and Amlicke’s performance) that wins over the men of power, and ultimately they are swayed to send her off to an audience with the Dauphin, aka Charles II, France’s as-yet uncrowned heir apparent.
Tennessee Shakespeare Company is nothing if not resourceful, and it casts the eight actors in this production as different characters as the changing scenes demand. Thus, the Dauphin is also played by Hanna, the broad bluster of Baudricourt replaced by his effeminate take on poor little rich boy Charles. This continues the somewhat farcical tone of the opening scene, even as graver characters, like the Archbishop of Rheims (Chad Marriott), enter the narrative. Another man of power, the Duke la Trémouille, also enters the story here, yet, in the fine Shakespearean tradition of gender-swapping roles (done in Elizabethan times because women were not allowed to perform), la Trémouille is played by Sarah Sakaan.
Indeed, several women take on the visage of powerful men in this production, and none more powerfully than Lauren Gunn, who plays several characters here, most impressively the English Earl of Warwick. She brings an undeniable gravitas to her performances that at last seems appropriate to what is ultimately a tragedy.
Then, as the play proceeds, farce recedes and the entire cast rises to the occasion of the story’s inherent drama. As Joan is put on trial for heresy, we see some of the show’s finest performances, including finely wrought characterizations by Hanna as the Inquisitor and Sakaan as Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais. And Amlicke’s distress in the finale is all the more powerful in contrast with her unflappably jaunty take on Joan in earlier scenes.
Indeed, that may be a key to this intriguing staging of the play, as the lighthearted gives way to the tragic. The powerful ending is underscored by way of contrast with the early scenes. And, speaking of underscoring, the sound design and musical compositions by Joe Johnson foreshadow the tragedy to come. That in turn is capped off with a coda wherein a visitor from the 20th century reads the official statement of Joan’s canonization in 1920, and all the key characters step out of time to consider their role in it.
The contrasts in tone, as director Sarah Hankins astutely conveys here, are ultimately what Shaw envisioned when writing the play. As he noted in the play’s preface, “There are no villains in the piece. … It is what men do at their best, with good intentions, and what normal men and women find that they must and will do in spite of their intentions, that really concern us.”
Tennessee Shakespeare’s final two performances of Saint Joan are on Friday, April 18th, at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, April 19th, at 3 p.m. Visit tnshakespeare.org for details.
CAKE will always be with us. I’ve gleaned this insight after more than 30 years of listening to the band, ever since my days in Dixon, California, when they were merely regional favorites, not international headliners. One indication of their longevity is the simple fact that the interview I conducted with lead singer/songwriter John McCrea for a Graceland Soundstage concert scheduled for five years ago still holds just as true today as it did then. After our chat, a little thing called Covid happened, and the show never took place. Yet here we are: CAKE will finally make their Mid-South appearance by kicking off this year’s season of concerts at the BankPlus Amphitheater at Snowden Grove on Friday, April 18th.
Shockingly, things have only gone from bad to worse since 2020, pandemics aside, but that’s kept the band’s outspoken political activism more relevant than ever. The landing page of their website sports the Turkish proverb, “When a clown enters a palace, he does not become a king, the palace becomes a circus,” and their Facebook page is dotted with exhortations to “never forget who Trump really is.” But they also take their activism in a more positive direction.
In honor of Earth Day and Arbor Day, the band will join forces with BankPlus Amphitheater, Mammoth Live, and Barbian Entertainment to plant a magnolia tree, Mississippi’s official state tree, on the venue grounds. The symbolic planting highlights CAKE’s decades-long commitment to environmental sustainability, including global reforestation efforts, clean energy innovation, and eco-conscious touring practices. The band also operates out of a 100 percent solar-powered recording studio in Sacramento, California, a facility that regularly generates more electricity than it uses. Now, in addition to the on-site planting, one lucky fan attending Friday night’s show will receive their very own magnolia tree to take home and plant.
Through all such efforts, a reliable constant has been the band’s musical aesthetic, yet it can’t be boiled down to any single genre. It’s more accurately characterized by its smallness and sparseness, as McCrea explained when I mentioned seeing the band at a festival of alt-rock superstars in the late ’90s. By then, the band had blown up, with their second album, Fashion Nugget, going platinum in 1997, but they weren’t always comfortable with other groups they were lumped in with at the time.
“It was a very strange experience for me,” said McCrea. “Everything was, like, big dumb rock, even ‘alternative’ was just about this big, sort of bulbous, wide-load sound, right? And we knew people were not gonna get it. I remember one critic called us ‘dinky beats,’ and that was meant to insult us. But for me, it was like, ‘Yes!’ I mean, obviously they didn’t get it, but it was good because I realized, ‘Okay, good. It’s sounding small.’”
Yet while the band’s sound was often sparse, it was expansive stylistically, with Vince DiFiore’s trumpet echoing everything from mariachi to jazz, McCrea’s dry delivery and richly allusive lyrics drawing on all walks of life, and a taste for scrappy, dirty instrumental sounds. It was — and remains — decidedly anti-trendy, right down to the fishing cap McCrea often sports and the beat-up acoustic guitar he plays through “a Fender Sidekick amplifier, the kind that they give away for free when you buy a Telecaster.”
It’s always been a sound that’s resolutely D.I.Y. and unpretentious. Yet McCrea has typically been reluctant to confine the band to any aesthetic, even a sparse one. “I don’t want to make ‘less is more’ sound like the main goal,” he said, “but I think ‘less is more’ in the service of providing musical narrative, I could say that’s our prime directive. It should be a means to an end.”
At the heart of the CAKE experience lie the songs, of course, and the unpredictable turns of phrase which can appear in them. Listing some of his greatest influences, McCrea noted some of the usual suspects: “I love Hank Williams Sr. for his economy, his ability to tell a story with very few words. I love Cole Porter for his cleverness and how he’s clever without being completely annoying. And then I guess Bob Dylan is similarly clever, you know, and mostly not annoying. I like Leonard Cohen a lot for his lyrics and vocal melody. I mean, all of these people write great melodies.”
Turning to his contemporaries, McCrea zeroed in on Stephen Malkmus of Pavement as a favorite. “I would definitely list him as one of my top songwriters, especially of the ’90s.” But he went on to emphasize that, while CAKE are unabashedly political in their practices and in their extra-musical communications, he avoids the vagaries of topical struggles in his craft as a tunesmith.
“I don’t enjoy songs that are sort of beating you over the head in any way,” McCrea said. “I do think it’s an emergency right now, like the humans are having a confusing time and we need to focus. And I don’t see why every part of our presence should be about music. I think I’d like to let the music be about music, and let our social media be about whatever the hell we want. But some part of me resists talking about music too much on our page. Somebody wanted to interview me for a book titled something like Rock Stars’ Inspirations, or something like that, and it sounded like a really fascinating book with lots of interesting artists, but I just didn’t want to do it because of the title. You know, ‘rock stars’ — there’s just so much baggage with that, and I’m against it. I’m ideologically opposed to that, you know? I don’t really want to be a celebrity. I don’t want to be talking about what I’m doing as necessarily more important than what anybody else is doing today.”
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!”
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.
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.
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)
