Author: Chris Herrington

Categories
Music Music Features

Sound Advice

Malaco recording artist and blues legend Little Milton will
bring his band to the Center for Southern Folklore on Saturday, May 12th.
Advance tickets are $20, $25 at the door. This is the most high-profile show
at the center since reopening at Peabody Place last year, and center regulars
The Fieldstones and The Daddy Mack Blues Band will open
the show to make it that much more special.

There’s more than enough in this issue about the Guided By Voices
show this week at Last Place on Earth. But openers Creeper Lagoon are a
damn good reason to show up early for the May 15th show. This San Francisco-
based alt-rock band released their sophomore album, Take Back the Universe
and Give Me Yesterday, a few weeks ago, and it finds impressively sunny
middleground between the noisy indie rock of Pavement and the spirited arena
rock of Everclear.– Chris Herrington

The names of the clubs have changed, but other than that it feels
exactly like 1995 all over again. The Clears’ eccentric geometrist Shelby
Bryant played the Hi-Tone Café last Sunday, and Bob Pollard, the pop
bard of beer, bongs, and imaginary avionics, is bringing the never-ending
Guided By Voices rockathon to Last Place on Earth on Tuesday, May 15th
(see feature, page 54). Situated in between shows by these bright lights from
the heyday of indie rock are The Grifters, who will be playing Last
Place on Earth, Saturday, May 12th, with Califone.

Now you might think that there is nothing that we can say about
this group of art rockers (with the emphasis on rockers) that hasn’t been said
both before and better by former Flyer scribe John Floyd during the
group’s most productive, volatile, and amazingly influential period. And up
until this particular point in time you would have been correct. But in
addition to playing hits like “Bronze Cast” and “Get Out of
That Spaceship and Fight Like a Man,” the Grifters will be using this
show to test out a whole new body of original material. Jared McStay, the
driving force behind the Simpletones (Simple Ones, Simple One, etc.), will be
joining the band on guitar, allowing co-front man Dave Shouse to take on
keyboard duty. In other words, if you didn’t think it was possible for the
Grifters sound to get any bigger, well, you’ve got another think coming.

If you are interested in seeing a group of truly inspired folk-
punks whose oeuvre owes much to the Clash but in the end makes those angry
Brits sound like a bunch of sullen fussbudgets, then This Bike Is a Pipe
Bomb is the band to see. The last time This Bike was in town the group
befriended the boys from Lucero and they ended up playing an impromptu show
together at the Buccaneer. This time around they’ll be at the Map Room, their
regular Memphis venue, on Thursday, May 10th, with Pezz. But that may
very well turn out to be merely the first show of this hard-working band’s
evening. — Chris Davis

Categories
News The Fly-By

Moment of Truth

Piston Honda is an alternative metal band — taking the heaviness of
metal and giving it more of a post-punk twist with weightier, more thoughtful
lyrics (judging from what little I could make out) and less visual and musical
excess. From their clean-cut looks to their lean, hard sound, Piston Honda is
atypical of the post-Korn brand of heavy bands, instead evoking more hardcore-
oriented, early-Nineties bands such as Helmet and Quicksand, bands that Honda
lead-singer/guitarist Jake Cook expresses admiration for.

According to Cook, the band formed in 1998 with the moniker
Further, changing to Piston Honda (the name of a Japanese competitor in the
video game Mike Tyson’s Punchout) in 1999. The band consists of Cook,
22, a Rhodes student; guitarist Jason Babin, 22, a CBU student; bassist
Patrick Umstad, 22, a U of M student; and 18-year-old drummer Austin Morlan.
The band has played out-of-town sparingly so far, which Cook says is a result
of the band members’ academic commitments. But they have been in the studio:
Piston Honda released their debut album, Paradigm Shift, last December.
It was recorded locally at Nustar by Robert Picon and Justin Short.

At a recent show at Last Place on Earth, the band was a mixed
bag. Honda proved to be a tight, unflashy hard-rock band whose music seemed to
be based on emotional commitment rather than commercial calculation, and they
employed stop-start dynamics to nice effect. The standout this night was
Morlan, who is a powerhouse of a drummer. Unfortunately, the band’s songs
tended to run together, lacking both strong melodies and hooks and the grab-
you-by-your-throat aggression of the best punk and hardcore — though I guess
I could make the same complaint about the genre itself. It may have been an
off night, but though Piston Honda came off as a serious and solid band, an
already sparse crowd just got sparser as the set wound down. — Chris
Herrington

To schedule your group’s Moment of Truth, call Chris
Herrington at 575-9428 or e-mail him at herrington@memphisflyer.com.

Categories
News News Feature

KICKING BACK

What a weekend, right? Here is some fresh prose commemorating it, of special interest to us Memphians:

“There’s only one Bob Dylan. “The singular place in history of the great folk-rock singer-songwriter, who’s riding a crest of popularity as he nears his 60th birthday, was one of the driving forces behind last night’s huge turnout at the. . .

“Nashville River Stages festival.”?!

Nope, no misprint. During the same three days that Memphis was engaging in its annual three-day riverfront music festival, Nashville was engaging in its three-day riverfront music festival. There may be only one Bob Dylan, but there were two places for him to hang out and stretch his legend over the last weekend.

In Nashville on Saturday night, as writer Thomas Goldsmith in The Tennessean notes, Dylan made sure to do songs from 1969’s Nashville Skyline (and a selection from Roy Acuff as well). In Memphis on Sunday night, Dylan made sure to do “Memphis Blues Again.” No problem: like Walt Whitman, Bob Dylan is large. He contains multitudes. There’s enough of him to go around.

But why should Tennessee’s two major cities be competing on this brand new front? I mean, two concurrent fully-fledged festivals, awreddy!

Or is this to be regarded more as the proverbial embarassment of riches? The Beale Street Festival, as we know, was sold out for its three-day run and set attendance records. And we have Thomas Goldsmith’s word for it that the turnout in Nashville was “huge.”

Sporadically, over the years and over the past few weeks, especially, as Memphis seemed about to gather its political and civic wits in an effort to Draw Even with Nashville on the big-league sports front (as if the NBA could hold a candle to the vaunted NFL, huh, Phil?), I have observed the unusual sense of rivalry that seems to exist between the two Tennessee towns.

Rivalry, hell! Sometimes it looks like pure detestation, as when my friend Larry Daughtrey, a distinguished political writer for The Tennessean and normally the very model of analytical decorum, got off some roundhouse shots at Memphis a few weeks back. (I have previously quoted these a place or two; not to overdo, he used terms like “perpetual inferiority complex,” “simmering mess,” “racial conflicts,” “nagging poverty,” “substandard schools,” and “sweltering August heat” by way of characterizing our town and its alleged envy of, and hatred for, Nashville.

A word a propos (which I have also uttered before, more or less): Memphis does not “envy” Nashville, much less “hate” said catch-up sister city, and any resentment that comes along with the relationship is better characterized as a kind of annoyance with the fact that Nashvillians seem to expect some sort of envy as their due.

Does the boogie “envy” the two-step? Give me a break!

As for that Tennessean sportswriter who characterized Memphis as “Newark” to Nashville’s “Manhattan” a few seasons back Ñ one A.S. (for “Social”) Climber, as I recall Ñ we’ll take our North Mississippi All-Stars (William Faulkner, Shelby Foote et al.) over your Fugitives (Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and company), our Esperians and Piazzas over your Dinah Shores, and our Mississippi over your Cumberland. Just for starters. As for impact on popular culture, music, especially, c’mon. Music Row’s is a mile wide; Sun/Stax/Volt’s is a mile deep. (And where do you think legendary producer/performer Jack Clement, -ex of Sun, learned to do his mesmerizing version of Hamlet’s soliloquy?)

But I rove.

Needs not these back-alley measuring contests. There are treasures in both towns. Ask Bob. As for the eternal question Ñ Aw, Mama, could this really be the end? Ñ the answer to that one sort of depends on which town you’re stuck in on a given weekend night. And which way you’re headed next on I-40.

(Jackson Baker KICKS BACK whenever the mood strikes on whatever topic interests him. In other words, watch this space.)

Categories
News News Feature

INVESTIGATION CONTINUES IN DOWNTOWN STABBING

An ongoing police investigation has yet to reveal why Robin Elizabeth Yevick was stabbed to death in downtown Memphis on Sunday, April 29th. According to officer LaTanya Able, the public information officer for the Memphis Police Department, investigators are “working diligently to solve the case but no new information has been discovered.”

Yevick, a 38-year-old resident of Hot Springs, Arkansas, was found dead just before 3 p.m., lying on Gayoso Avenue between Wagner Place and Front Street. She had apparently been stabbed in the throat several times. She had with her a black travel bag containing makeup and two small plastic bags.

On Tuesday, Memphis police were looking for a female suspect described as being a heavyset black woman with shoulder-length hair, standing about 5’7” to 5’9” and last seen wearing a blue shirt, blue pants, and white tennis shoes. Police were also looking for a man who may have witnessed the crime, but no description of the man was available.

Anyone with information on this crime is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 529-CASH.

Categories
Art Art Feature

DUTCH TREAT

Most European countries have long, rich film traditions. But while nations such as France, Germany, and even Denmark have made formidable contributions to world cinema, the Low Countries’ role has been more sketchy. According to Robert Sklar’s Film: An International History of the Medium, however, one of the most important proto-cinematic innovations has roots in the Netherlands, this year’s Memphis in May honored country. In the mid-17th century, Dutch inventors devised a way to project painted images through a lens using light (either the sun or candlelight). This development led to the first self-contained projectors — Magic Lanterns — which included a light source, image, and lens all in one apparatus.

But since that crucial contribution to cinema’s prehistory, discussion of Dutch film is usually limited to two names — Joris Ivens and Paul Verhoeven. Ivens was an early political documentarian with roots in the Soviet style who, despite his own roots, made films all over the world, including the U.S. and China. Likewise, Verhoeven left the Netherlands for work elsewhere. Most Americans are familiar with his extreme (if often misunderstood) blockbusters RoboCop and Starship Troopers, but Verhoeven made many well-regarded films in his native Netherlands during the ‘70s and early ‘80s, including Soldier of Orange and The Fourth Man.

But the Netherlands’ film scene also gained a bit of international exposure a few years ago when director Mike van Diem’s severe but emotional Karakter (Character in the U.S.) won the 1998 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Karakter will be shown this week at Malco’s Bartlett Cinema Ten as part of Memphis in May.

Visually, Karakter is a harsh but striking blend of black, brown, and white — black suits, brown offices, and white snow. Set in Rotterdam during the early 1900s, the film opens with an aging court bailiff, Dreverhaven (Jan Decleir), found dead and a young lawyer held under suspicion of murder. The film is told in flashbacks as Katadreuffe (Fedja Van Huet), the lawyer, defends his innocence and describes to the police his relationship with Dreverhaven.

Dreverhaven, it turns out, is a vicious, heartless official who takes joy in ruthlessly evicting poor families. Katadreuffe, who we learn is Dreverhaven’s illegitimate son, describes him as “law without compassion, the curse of the poor.” Katadreuffe is conceived when Dreverhaven forces himself on his servant Joba (Betty Schuurman). Joba decides to flee rather than accept Dreverhaven’s marriage proposal and raises Katadreuffe in poverty. Katadreuffe grows up taunted by schoolmates as a bastard and, after learning the identity of his father, develops a hardened hatred for him.

But Dreverhaven watches his son’s growth from afar, inflicting what may be cruelty and what may be tough love. “Why don’t you leave our boy in peace,” Joba asks Dreverhaven during one of their rare meetings. “I’ll strangle him for nine-tenths, and the last tenth will make him strong,” the old man responds.

Karakter is based on a 1938 novel by Ferdinand Bordwijk that was a major bestseller in the Netherlands, and the film has a Dickensian feel. It is essentially a dark, spite-driven Horatio Alger tale: Poor Katadreuffe learns English (and much more) from an incomplete set of encyclopedias he finds abandoned in a new apartment his mother rents and works his way through bankruptcy to become a lawyer. But his largely unspoken family feud is never far from the surface of his life, culminating in the dramatic confrontation that bookends the film.

Karakter is a fine film, but viewers shouldn’t read too much into that Oscar win. The Best Foreign Language Film Oscar rarely rewards the most exciting international cinema. And it’s hard to say how much the period piece has to say about life in the Netherlands today. But quibbles aside, Karakter is still an accomplished film that’s worthy of this week’s big-screen showcase.

Categories
Art Art Feature

A BEAST OF A BOOK

Monstruary

by Julian Rios

Knopf, 225 pp., $25

Imagine for a moment that through some strange rift in reality you have been physically transported to the absurd, unnatural, and harrowing world of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, but you’re blindfolded. What you hear is disquieting. What you smell is nauseating. Since you can’t see, providing narration for every terrible and nonsensical sight encountered is your disturbingly alliterative and alarmingly articulate guide Julian Rios, author of Monstruary.

Rios’ most recent book, masterfully translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, is nigh Joycean in its labyrinthine linguistic complexity, though you most likely can decipher its prose — unlike some of Joyce’s — albeit a bit dense and breathless.

Monstruary is the tale of Emil, our writer/artist/narrator, and his exceptionally gifted cadre of friends and acquaintances, who are all caught up in a world of high-octane art and bad-luck love. The title of the book comes from Emil’s friend Mons’ painting-series-in-progress, a number of works with many different recurring themes but one thing in common: chilling imagery, which Emil is all too happy to relate to his audience in horrific detail.

It seems Mons must first have a drunken nightmarish vision a la Bosch before his brush touches canvas:

The trampling angel with the body of curling clouds who plunges

ahead on petrified pillar legs that shoot fire like muskets and

make the earth tremble to the rhythm of a pile driver.

Ill-assorted multitudes of human figures with the heads of animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, and all kinds of beasts and insects

with the heads of men and women and mutants, semihuman masses

that swarm like ant colonies, surge like cresting waves, spill

like avalanches into chasms of darkness. …

A giant starling straddled by a naked Lilliputian. …

A tightrope walker with the head of a goldfinch.

A carp with the head of a duck.

A beetle with the gaunt, dissipated face of a young man.

Fish with human arms, men and women with fishtails …

Admittedly, this is a very odd book. While we learn the details of the characters’ lives and loves, we’re intermittently taken on descriptive roller-coaster rides regarding paintings and sculptures, the life of the mind of several artists, mysterious journals full of automatic writing penned by unaware mediums of dead wives (each almost indecipherable phrase rife with possible meanings), et cetera. And this roller coaster starts on page one.

Somewhat pretentious is the narrator’s ubiquitous plays on words, obscure puns, and alliterative phrases — that poor exhausted translator! — of which there have to be at least 20 on every single page. (Every character is a latent linguist.) No phrase is left unskewed by double entendre, no pun is left unpunned, and rarely is a sentence left in which every word does not echo another with the same sound or series of letters. Chew on this: “That delirious architecture seemed to spring from the opium visions of De Quincey and Coleridge, semisymmetries in a chaotic kaleidoscope where dromedary domes rose beneath the cupola of night, mad truncated caracole staircases against unsalvageable walls, lofty basalt rising over the abyss, pilasters soaring to the stars and splintered plinths and prostrate rostrate columns, the sharp beaked peaks of their rostrums earthbound, and alligators astride astragals in the black sun of melancholy.”

For many readers this will be too much to deal with. They’ll lose interest immediately, or, if intrigued, will simply be worn out by the sentence strata they have to constantly dig through to get at meaning. But there are plenty of masochist members of the intelligentsia who relish a very challenging book like this, obstinately difficult in its narrative bent. You just have to be a word junkie. You have to enjoy it like others enjoy puzzles. The meaning’s there, but you’ve got to know what to look for to get it.

Don’t get me wrong. I recommend Monstruary, especially if you love art and literature. But don’t eat too many pronto pups and cotton candy before you get on the ride, and for God’s sake keep your hands inside the car at all times.

Categories
News News Feature

JAMBALAYA

GETTING IT RIGHT

Herb Kosten is a giant in the history of the Memphis sports market. From his days at Central High School in the Fifties through his years with the University of Alabama baseball team through the period in which he was a respected umpire on the pro tennis circuit, Kosten has been someone that all Memphians could point to with pride.

I know all of that. But somehow in a story about Kosten’s involvement with the ABA Memphis Pros this week in the Flyer, I got his name mixed up. To say that I misspelled it, would be giving me the benefit of the doubt. I screwed up. Royally.

People often talk about something or the other being the First Rule of Journalism. Well, if there is such a thing as the First Rule of Journalism it should be this: Spell the names right.

There is something permanent about the printed word, even in a free alternative weekly. If you make a mistake on radio or TV, you correct it and go on. In the weekly newspaper biz we have to live with our mistakes for at least a week.

I called Kosten to apologize as soon as I realized my mistake. He was gracious and kind. I think it might have been easier for me if he had been angry, but that would not have been Herb Kosten’s style.

Kosten was a two-sport star at Central High School. A hard-hitting shortstop and second baseman, he made the all-city team three times and twice led Memphis high schools in batting. He was also all-city in basketball two years, leading the Warriors to a runner-up spot in the state tournament. He won a baseball scholarship to Alabama, where he was twice voted to the all-SEC team as a third basemen. Later he was selected to the All-Century Alabama baseball team. He calls it is his “greatest honor in athletics.”

Kosten has also had been among the top amateur tennis players in the region. His daughters, Julie and Lori, were both ranked junior players. And today, Kosten owns Little Miss Tennis, one of the top makers of children tennis wear in the country.

But it was his involvement with the Memphis ABA team in the early ‘70s that drew my interest this week. As one of several businessmen that kept the Pros (later the TAMs and Sounds) in Memphis for five years, Kosten played a major role in the development of pro sports in this city.

Kosten is a long-time Tiger basketball fan, having owned season tickets for 39-consecutive years — dating back to the days at the Fieldhouse. In fact, he wonders how Memphis basketball fans will handle the adjustment to the pro game.

“In the college game, you come out to root for your team every game,” says Kosten who frequently attends NBA games out of town. “With the pros, you come out to watch the best players in the world, and root for the home team. There is a difference.”

And he still laments the fact that he and his partners were unable to come up with a local owner for the ABA team. If they had, Kosten believes, Memphis might have made it into the NBA when the two leagues merged in 1977.

But they didn’t and now Memphis stands at the threshold of being in the big leagues. Kosten thinks we have already been there. “I contend that the ABA franchise that we had here was the only major-league team we have had here because that league merged with the NBA,” he says, pointing out that 11 of the 20 players who participated in the first NBA all-star game after the merger came from the ABA.

Who will argue the point? Certainly not me. I’m not feeling very argumentative after the week I’ve had.

PLAYING ROAD SAGE

Once upon a time, before there were many people living and working downtown and before Tom Lee Park was expanded, it may have been smart to close Riverside Drive for the entire month of May. But it makes no sense at all today. It creates extreme traffic congestion on Front and other downtown streets. disrupts businesses, and makes it difficult to get from I-55 to I-40. It’s time to say no to MIM. Close Riverside for the big events, like this weekend’s music fest, but the rest of the week keep it open to through traffic.

YOUR SERVE, NOLAN

John Calipari has made no secret of his dislike for the attention the area SEC teams get in Memphis. Like refusing to call the University of Mississippi by its preferred nickname, Ole Miss. By saying that he may not continue playing the Rebs and Arkansas. And by saying that his critics on talk radio are “just SEC fans.”

So it was only appropriate, on the day of Jim Rome’s “Smack-Off,” a story appeared in The Commercial Appeal in which Calipari talked a little smack of his own.

“We don’t need Arkansas to fill our building,” Cal told Zack McMillin. “Now, they might need us to fill theirs.”

Bet Arkansas coach Nolan Richardson,no shrinking violet himself, will have a comeback.

Quote Of The Week

“I think some of those same people, who were naysayers about our project are now coming to the ballpark and enjoying every minute of it. I think it will be that way with the NBA arena, you’ll have people who will be converted very easily.” — Redbirds co-owner Kristi Jernigan.

Categories
Book Features Books

A BEAST OF A BOOK

Monstruary

by Julian Rios

Knopf, 225 pp., $25

Imagine for a moment that through some strange rift in reality you have been physically transported to the absurd, unnatural, and harrowing world of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, but youÕre blindfolded. What you hear is disquieting. What you smell is nauseating. Since you canÕt see, providing narration for every terrible and nonsensical sight encountered is your disturbingly alliterative and alarmingly articulate guide Julian Rios, author of Monstruary.

RiosÕ most recent book, masterfully translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, is nigh Joycean in its labyrinthine linguistic complexity, though you most likely can decipher its prose — unlike some of JoyceÕs — albeit a bit dense and breathless.

Monstruary is the tale of Emil, our writer/artist/narrator, and his exceptionally gifted cadre of friends and acquaintances, who are all caught up in a world of high-octane art and bad-luck love. The title of the book comes from EmilÕs friend MonsÕ painting-series-in-progress, a number of works with many different recurring themes but one thing in common: chilling imagery, which Emil is all too happy to relate to his audience in horrific detail.

It seems Mons must first have a drunken nightmarish vision a la Bosch before his brush touches canvas:

The trampling angel with the body of curling clouds who plunges

ahead on petrified pillar legs that shoot fire like muskets and

make the earth tremble to the rhythm of a pile driver.

Ill-assorted multitudes of human figures with the heads of animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, and all kinds of beasts and insects

with the heads of men and women and mutants, semihuman masses

that swarm like ant colonies, surge like cresting waves, spill

like avalanches into chasms of darkness. …

A giant starling straddled by a naked Lilliputian. …

A tightrope walker with the head of a goldfinch.

A carp with the head of a duck.

A beetle with the gaunt, dissipated face of a young man.

Fish with human arms, men and women with fishtails …

Admittedly, this is a very odd book. While we learn the details of the charactersÕ lives and loves, weÕre intermittently taken on descriptive roller-coaster rides regarding paintings and sculptures, the life of the mind of several artists, mysterious journals full of automatic writing penned by unaware mediums of dead wives (each almost indecipherable phrase rife with possible meanings), et cetera. And this roller coaster starts on page one.

Somewhat pretentious is the narratorÕs ubiquitous plays on words, obscure puns, and alliterative phrases — that poor exhausted translator! — of which there have to be at least 20 on every single page. (Every character is a latent linguist.) No phrase is left unskewed by double entendre, no pun is left unpunned, and rarely is a sentence left in which every word does not echo another with the same sound or series of letters. Chew on this: ÒThat delirious architecture seemed to spring from the opium visions of De Quincey and Coleridge, semisymmetries in a chaotic kaleidoscope where dromedary domes rose beneath the cupola of night, mad truncated caracole staircases against unsalvageable walls, lofty basalt rising over the abyss, pilasters soaring to the stars and splintered plinths and prostrate rostrate columns, the sharp beaked peaks of their rostrums earthbound, and alligators astride astragals in the black sun of melancholy.Ó

For many readers this will be too much to deal with. TheyÕll lose interest immediately, or, if intrigued, will simply be worn out by the sentence strata they have to constantly dig through to get at meaning. But there are plenty of masochist members of the intelligentsia who relish a very challenging book like this, obstinately difficult in its narrative bent. You just have to be a word junkie. You have to enjoy it like others enjoy puzzles. The meaningÕs there, but youÕve got to know what to look for to get it.

DonÕt get me wrong. I recommend Monstruary, especially if you love art and literature. But donÕt eat too many pronto pups and cotton candy before you get on the ride, and for GodÕs sake keep your hands inside the car at all times.

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

XPLORERS DROP 5th STRAIGHT

In the game of Arena2 Football, offense is king and defense is well, offensive. But despite that, the Mid-South/Memphis Xplorers could only gain a total of 4 yards in offense in the first quarter against the Arkansas Twisters. The Xplorers never recovered from the slow start and lost its 5th straight game, 49-28 in front of a crowd of 2,078.

Xplorers (0-5) QB Matt Lefever couldn’t live up to his name and stayed ice-cold throughout the game, throwing 35 times for only 172 yards and 1 touchdown.

Those numbers by themselves might be a decent outing in outdoor football but for two things. The first is that Lefever also threw 5 interceptions. The second is that his numbers pale fairly in comparison to the numbers of Twisters’ (1-4) QB Herbert Ricky, who completed 18 of 32 for 282 yards, and 5 touchdowns.

The Xplorers did control the clock due to their insistence on

rushing the football, another rarity in the arena league. Unfortunately for Memphis, the team rushed 20 times for only 77 yards, showing why so few teams keep the ball on the ground.

The Xplorers next game is Saturday, May 12, 2001 at home against Louisville.

Categories
Music Music Features

BEALE STREET FRIDAY

O’Landa Draper’s Associates kicked off a sold-out Friday night at Memphis in May’s Beale Street Music Fest. Performing at 6:30 before a rather sparse audience on the Budweiser Stage, the gospel choir performed a capella or — rather disappointingly — over pre-recorded instrumental tracks. The Associates’ lackluster and poorly attended performance only confirmed the awkwardness of gospel music at an outdoor rock festival. The group ended its show by bringing out a teen group called the Cathedral Christian Steppers and a rapper and had the kids dance to a hip-hop gospel number called “All About Him.”

At 7:45 the North Mississippi Allstars performed before a huge crowd at the Autozone Stage, the event’s largest performance space. The crowd may have rivaled the sold-out Mid-South Coliseum shows the Allstars played last fall opening for Georgia jam band Widespread Panic as the largest hometown crowd the band has ever performed for. And the Allstars were in fine form. Bassist Chris Chew wore a bright red Cincinnati Reds baseball cap, its “C” logo fitting the man’s name. During the portion of the performance I saw, the band stuck to material from its only album to date, “Shake Hands With Shorty,” running through blues classics like “Sittin’ On Top Of The World” and a guitar-solo riddled “Po Black Maddie.” The Allstars then brought out R.L. Burnside’s grandson Gary for a spirited take on “Goin’ Down South.”

As I was leaving the Allstars show, they were launching into their version of the sly Furry Lewis classic “K.C. Jones” just as Keith Sykes was playing Blind Willie McTell’s “Broke Down Engine” on the Budweiser Stage. The blues, on this night, were in full effect even outside the blues tent.

Local metal-band-made-good Saliva took to the Budweiser Stage at around 9:00 after a ridiculously interminable set-up and a silly and mostly indecipherable taped intro. Lead singer Josey Scott was decked out in a white suit while the rest of the band wore black. Scott worked the crowd like a Vegas pro, introducing the song “Superstar” by saying to the hometown crowd, “I wanna thank you for making me . . . a superstar!” It was the exact same schtick he used at a New Daisy show earlier this year. The band opened their set with energetic takes on songs from their debut album, Every Six Seconds – “Click, Click, Boom,” “Superstar,” “The World is After Me.” Rhythm guitarist Chris Dabaldo bounded around the stage and Scott informed the hyped crowd that he’d turned 29 yesterday and had come home to have a big party.

It has been said that bands get the crowds they deserve. If that’s true then apparently Saliva deserved drunken frat-boys trying to slam dance and encouraging women to “show your tits” – some of whom were happy to oblige.

After a few Saliva songs I wondered back to the AutoZone Stage where the legendary Ike Turner was leading his 9-piece Kings of Rhythm and Blues though a few blues standards. Turner was playing guitar and wearing a black suit and hat. The crowd was large, but most of them seemed disinterested. They were likely staking out a spot for the next act on that stage, the Dave Matthews Band.

Turner sat down at the piano for a rollicking take on his trademark “Rocket 88” and after that climactic moment I decided it was a good time to head back to Budweiser to see what Saliva was up to. Walking away from Autozone into a swarm of people heading towards it for the Dave Matthews set, I was hit with déja vu. Then I remembered – it was just last years that I was walking away from the same stage as hordes of Widespread Panic fans were descending.

Back at Bud, Saliva’s Scott was introducing the band’s final song, the current hit single “Your Disease,” with the perhaps unwise, Limp Bizkit-like comment, “this is your last chance to break stuff.” After the song, Scott left the stage by saying, “Memphis, you fucking rock. We love you.”