Author: Jesse Davis

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Music Music Blog

Madjack Records: 20 Years of Homespun Magic

Pawtuckets

In the early ’90s Mark Edgar Stuart, then a college student on an orchestra scholarship, picked up a copy of the Flyer, read an ad, and joined a band. “I was reading the Memphis Flyer one day, and there was an ad in the classifieds, ‘bass player wanted,’” Stuart says. “I never in a million years would I have answered a bass player wanted ad, except it said ‘influences — the Band and Blue Mountain.’” Stuart, who had expected to see a list of cheesy metal bands, says his interest was piqued. The ’90s alt-country movement hadn’t really gotten off the ground yet, but Blue Mountain was making some waves in Oxford — and of course Stuart knew the Band. “I called the number” Stuart says. “I wasn’t even interested in being in a band. It’s just one of those serendipitous things.” Thus began the career of the Pawtuckets, who will reunite after 18 years this Saturday to headline the Madjack Records 20th anniversary concert at Railgarten.

The beginnings of the Pawtuckets are relevant (beyond providing proof of the merits of regularly checking out the Flyer) because the Pawtuckets, and Stuart, are inextricably tied to the history of Madjack Records.

“Around 1998, with our second record, [Rest of Our Days], we decided to start a record label,” Stuart says. “It didn’t really mean much at the time. … It was just a vehicle to put out the Pawtuckets record.” With Stuart on bass and Kevin Cubbins handling guitar and pedal steel duties, the Pawtuckets were helmed by the dual songwriting talents of guitarist Mark McKinney and pianist/guitarist Andy Grooms. Percussion was handled by a rotating cast of drummers. “McKinney had a dog named Madison, and Andy Grooms had a dog named Jackpot,” Stuart remembers. “So we said let’s just name the label Madjack after the two dogs.”

Jamie Harmon

Mark Edgar Stuart

Though Stuart confesses to being more interested, at the time, in playing bass and drinking beer than in business, he says McKinney had bigger ideas and took a more serious interest in Madjack. Before too long, Madjack had signed Cory Branan and Lucero, a band the Pawtuckets often shared bills with. Co-owner Ronny Russell joined the Madjack scene to help McKinney with the business side of things. Says Stuart, “It just sprouted wings after that.”
Joshua Black-Wilkins

Cory Branan

Eventually the Pawtuckets disbanded, but Madjack soldiered on. The label continued to grow and to represent Memphis talent, through the CD boom, after the advent of the downloadable mp3, into the age of online streaming. “We definitely had to evolve,” Russell says. And still Madjack has signed Memphis artists like James and the Ultrasounds, Susan Marshall, and Jana Misener, up to and including Stuart’s recently released third album, Mad at Love, recorded in part at Scott Bomar’s Electraphonic Recording studio in Memphis and in part with Bruce Watson of Fat Possum in Mississippi.

Susan Marshall

 Stuart, who began his Memphis music career playing upright bass in an orchestra pit, has transformed again in the past few years with the growth of an unexpected singer/songwriter career. “I just started the singer/songwriter thing about six years ago,” Stuart says. “Up until that point I was just a bass player. I played for the Pawtuckets and Cory [Branan], Alvin Youngblood Hart, and just whoever needed a bass player,” Stuart says, listing an impressive curriculum vitae. He adds two more Memphis heavy hitters: Jack Oblivian and John Paul Keith.

“If you’d told me 10 years ago I’d be doing what I’m doing now, I would have told you you were crazy,” Stuart says. “Then in about 2011, I got cancer and lost my dad and it just inspired me to try to do something different.” Stuart says he felt like he had something to write about and a more mature viewpoint to bring to his craft. Around this time, with his 2013 debut solo LP, Blues for Lou, Stuart first pinged my radar. I remember hearing “Remote Control” on the radio, and pulling over to the side of the road to listen. I imagine I’m not the only one who’s been so affected by Stuart’s powerful songwriting. Stuart will perform his solo material at the anniversary show in two sets — a full band set and a stripped-down songwriter set — as well as joining Jana Misener and Krista Wroten-Combest and the Pawtuckets on bass. 

James & the Ultrasounds

“I never thought [the Pawtuckets] would get back together, but this seemed like the perfect moment,” Stuart says of the Pawtuckets reunion show set to close out the festivities at the Madjack anniversary shindig Saturday. “We haven’t played together since 2000, and we haven’t played with the original drummer since 1998, so it has been 20 years since we played with the original lineup.” With the Pawtuckets reunion concert and brand-new and soon-to-be-released albums from several of the artists in the Madjack arsenal, the anniversary show should present a mix of old and new sounds from the Memphis label.

Madjack Records celebrates 20 years at Railgarten Saturday, October 20th, at 1 p.m. Free.

Lineup:
Wampus Cats – Outdoor Stage – 1:00 – 2:00p
Jed Zimmerman – Outdoor Stage – 2:00 – 2:45p
Corduroy & the Cottonwoods – Pong Bar – 2:45 – 3:30p
Keith Sykes – Outdoor Stage – 3:00 – 3:45p
Delta Joe Sanders – Pong Bar – 3:45 – 4:30p
Mark Edgar Stuart (solo) – Outdoor Stage – 4:00 – 4:45p
Rob Jungklas – Pong Bar – 4:45 – 5:30p
James & the Ultrasounds – Outdoor Stage – 5:00 – 5:45p
Eric & Andy – Pong Bar – 5:45 – 6:30p
Susan Marshall – Outdoor Stage – 6:00 – 6:45p
TN Boltsmokers – Pong Bar – 6:30 – 7:15p
McKenna Bray – Outdoor Stage – 6:45 – 7:30p
Mark Edgar Stuart (band) – Pong Bar – 7:45 – 8:45p
Jana & Krista of Memphis Dawls – Outdoor Stage – 8:00 – 8:45p
Cory Branan – Outdoor Stage – 9:00 – 10:00p
Pawtuckets – Pong Bar – 10:00 – 11:00p

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Blurb Books

Hampton Sides’ Latest Book

A small peninsula jutting out of Asia into the Pacific Ocean, separating the Yellow Sea on the west from the Sea of Japan on the east, Korea has been much in the news of late. Or rather, North Korea has, with talks of the looming denuclearization and occasional reminders of President Trump’s abiding infatuation with Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un lobbed into the Twitter-verse. But North Korea as a separate entity from its half to the south is a relatively new development, dating only to the end of World War II, when the world’s two newest superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, split the country at the 38th parallel. Thus, after some 35 years under the rule of Japan, one nation became two, governed from communist Pyongyang in the north and the U.S.-backed Seoul in the south.

“It’s one people, it’s one culture, it’s one language. It should never have been separated” says Hampton Sides, Memphis native, award-winning author, editor-at-large of Outside magazine, and author of the just-released On Desperate Ground (Doubleday). “That tragedy lives on today.”

Sides is currently on a book tour for On Desperate Ground, his riveting account of the U.S. intervention in Korea, specifically the Marines’ battle at Chosin Reservoir, where U.S. troops were ambushed by wave after wave of Chinese soldiers. Sides called me from his hotel room to discuss his new narrative history, squeezing our conversation in between a delayed flight and a booksigning later that night. Sides book tour will land him in Memphis, Monday, Oct. 8th, for a talk and booksigning at Novel.

“I have historical ADD,” Sides says when I ask him what drew his attention to the conflict at Chosin. “I have to move around or I stagnate.” Sides’ far-ranging interests are evident in the diverse subject matter of his previous novels. Though his PEN Award-winning Ghost Soldiers, a WWII account of the an Allied prison camp raid, is not far off in tone from On Desperate Ground, his other books run the historical gamut, with perhaps one common thread: “A lot of my stories focus on human endurance and survival and what happens when people are confronted with extreme circumstances.”

During a book signing in Virginia, Sides was approached by a “grizzled old man” who suggested the author should cover the Chosin Reservoir. Sides noticed the man’s hand when the old timer handed him a business card — the man, a veteran of the conflict at Chosin, had missing digits; he’d lost them to frostbite while in the mountains of North Korea. During the conflict, temperatures dropped to 35 degrees below zero, and 85% of the men involved suffered from frostbite: “A lot of them say they’re still trying to get the cold out of their bones.”

Throughout On Desperate Ground, Sides pays attention, not only to star players like General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. President Harry Truman, and Chinese leader Chairman Mao Zedong, but also to civilians and the grunts on the ground. “The lifeblood of this book was interviews with these guys,” Sides says, referring to the soldiers who lost pieces of themselves to cold and Chinese bullets on a mountain range in North Korea. The author spent almost four years on research for the book, much of it consisting of interviews with veterans whose voices have been hitherto unheard, who were not followed by a coterie of journalists, as was MacArthur. “I wanted to cut back and forth between the guys on the ground and the decision makers,” Sides says.

Those decision makers make up the primary “protagonists” and “antagonists” of the book. Marine General Oliver P. Smith, the evident protagonist, led the U.S. intervention in Korea, first the liberation of South Korea from North Korean encroachment, and then a push into North Korea to throw off the communist yoke and unite the country under U.S.-influenced rule. The invasion of the north was instigated by MacArthur, who had come to believe his own press after his successes in the Philippines in WWII, and by MacArthur’s favored lieutenant, Army General Edward Almond. Whereas Smith believed intelligence about Chinese troops who had infiltrated North Korea in secret to support their communist allies, and took measures to slow the break-neck march north and save as many of his troops as possible, MacArthur and Almond denied the reports and, in doing so, spent the lives of their men recklessly.

If there is an antagonist to Sides’ book, he says it is MacArthur and his yeasaying staff. “MacArthur never spent a single night on the ground in the entire Korean War,” Sides reports. And so, leading from Tokyo, where he supervised the occupation of Japan, MacArthur vastly underestimated the resistance his troops would face. Almond was MacArthur’s man on the ground in Korea, and he pushed the advance with little concern for potential consequences. Though “quite brave,” Sides says, Almond was “almost criminally out of touch.” Sides went on: “I think he has a lot of blood on his hands. He and MacArthur both.”

But the generals and presidents are not the only subject matter of On Desperate Ground. Most riveting to my mind was the story of one civilian, a transplanted North Korean living in Seoul, who survived the siege and liberation of Seoul only to volunteer to accompany U.S. troops into North Korea as a translator. “Part of the book I’m most proud of is the story of the North Korean civilian Dr. Lee [Bae-suk],” Sides says, emphasizing Lee’s importance as a way of gaining perspective on the conflict. “We forget that there are civilians on the ground who experience [war] in such tangible ways.”

Forgetful, though, is not a charge one could level at Sides. The Memphis native takes great care to give background and context to the trials American troops faced at Chosin. And this attention to detail serves to bring into greater focus the horrors of the Battle of Chosin, from frostbite to miscommunication to waves of Chinese soldiers. The vista crystalizes in the mind’s eye, a frozen hell.

“There’s a lot of unfinished business,” Sides says, pointing out that there was an armistice to end the Korean War but no actual peace treaty. “The DMZ [Demilitarized Zone] is one of the most militarized places on Earth.” And whatever the news brings, whatever uncertain future exists for the two neighboring nations, with On Desperate Ground, Sides gives readers a crystal-clear and compelling glimpse into the past.

Hampton Sides signs On Desperate Ground at Novel, Monday, October 8th, at 6 p.m.

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Music Music Blog

Gonerfest 15: Friday

CREDIT: Jesse Davis

Day two of Gonerfest 15, the annual celebration of punk, garage, and other off-kilter forms of rock, took place in two locations: at Memphis Made Brewing, during the afternoon hours, and Hi Tone on Cleveland late into the night. The daylong festivities featured a songwriter session from Harlan T. Bobo, psych-blues-punk from Chicken Snake, the dark and deranged disco extravaganza of Cobra Man, and a breakout performance from indie-pop band En Attendant Anna. 

Gonerbraü by Memphis Made

Memphis Made produced a limited cream ale, the Gonerbraü, to commemorate this year’s festival. The light, fizzy beer seems like the best bet to help get into the Gonerfest spirit, so, Gonerbraü in hand, I weave my way through the crowd to the small stage on the back patio of the Cooper-Young-area brewery and catch Harlan T. Bobo’s acoustic set.

“I wonder if there are many people who get engaged at Gonerfest,” Bobo muses. “Or get divorced at Gonerfest — or at least because of Gonerfest.” The crowd laughs, and Bobo begins playing “I’m Your Man,” a love song from his 2007 album of the same name. Gone is the demented showman who, backed up by a full band, closed out the festivities sometime after 2 a.m. the night before, and in his place is an indulgent father, a humorist, and a day-drinking, guitar-wielding teller of truths.

Bobo jokingly tries to calm a crying child hiding beneath the wooden stairs, tossing a rolled-up T-shirt down to the kid in an attempt to distract him. Then he brings guitarist Jeff “Bunny” Dutton onstage to add commentary to a song Bobo wrote about Dutton, who so ably backed him up on lead guitar the night before. “He don’t drink water and he don’t eat. He lives off alcohol and nicotine,” Bobo sings as Bunny smiles and nods, unable to contest his bandleader’s claims. The crowd laughs, and the kid beneath the stairs is busying himself dragging a plastic chain around. Later, the same little boy will run haphazardly up and down the loading ramp in front of the venue, narrowly avoiding spilling my Gonerbraü.

Out front, New Orleans-based Chicken Snake take the stage, ripping into a swampy, blues-inspired punk set. The drummer sports a goth-glam mane as she attacks the drums with a frenzy. Sneering, strutting guitar licks call to mind the pioneering work of The Sonics or Roky Erickson. “Baby, don’t you give me them walkin’ blues,” the singer implores.

Jesse Davis

Cobra Man

Later, back at the Hi Tone, L.A. synth duo Cobra Man blends seemingly disparate elements of punk and disco, crafting a spooky dance atmosphere. Their sequined jackets flash in the green lights. During the rising energy of the repeated line, “I want it all,” audience members begin crowd surfing. By the time the singer begins chanting, “I’ve been living in hell with you,” Goner fans are taking turns clambering aboard a large wooden plank and riding it like a surf board across the waves of outstretched hands. The lights change to red, and the rhythm shifts into cut time. The Goner fans dance, revelers in a disco of the damned. Cobra Man’s set is wild and dramatic, and I hope the next band can top it.

French indie-rockers En Attendant Ana follow the depraved rave that is Cobra Man, and far from being overshadowed by the L.A. disco duo, the Parisian quintet make their set look easy. Their Gonerfest performance marks the end of a two-and-half-week U.S. tour in support of the band’s debut album Lost and Found, out on Trouble in Mind. Their tour has taken them through Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Boston, landing them on the main stage at the Hi Tone. They begin, and a wave of jangly guitars and trumpet blasts washes over the crowd, prompting an immediate reaction, as the collected bodies begin to move to the beat. The young indie-rockers ride the wave, all clean guitars, synths, and breathy, urgent vocals, before crashing to a halt.  

Jesse Davis

Margaux Bouchaudon of En Attendant Ana

A smile tugs at the corners of singer and guitarist Margoux Bouchaudon’s lips as the crowd cheers their support. Grinning, she ducks her head as lead guitarist Romain Meaulard introduces the next tune in a thick French accent. En Attendant Ana’s music sounds like euphoria feels. It’s bright and optimistic, like the ideal soundtrack to kick off a road trip. The clean guitars, trumpet, and dreamy rhythms call to mind Belle & Sebastian or Camera Obscura, but there’s a punk urgency that adds an edge the Scottish indie-pop legends lack. The Parisian quintet’s set seems to pass in an instant of pop nirvana. “This could be the end, oh, this could be the end,” Bouchadon sings on “This Could Be,” backed up by Meaulard and by vocalist/guitarist/trumpet player Camille Fréchou. The song is insistent and anthemic, and I don’t want the lyrics to be true. I hate for the set to end.

I catch three or four songs by New York-based Surfbort, a pure punk explosion, all alcohol-sweat and frantic guitar wrapped in a revealing bodysuit. They’re Gonerfest gold, but I can’t get En Attendant Ana out of my head, so I make tracks toward the merchandise room to find the band and ask them about their tour. I find Fréchou and Bouchadon, who are game for a quick interview.

“We’ve been [in Memphis] for six or seven hours, but tomorrow we stay all day long,” Bouchaudon says. She’s wearing a flowing red coat she bought on tour, and she and Fréchou lean close and speak into my recorder. “This will be the first town in which we can relax and visit. We want to go to Sun Records,” Bouchaudon says. “I would like to go to Graceland,” Camille Fréchou adds, “But I don’t think we are going to.” “Non,” Bouchaudon interjects emphatically. “I will go to Graceland, and you will come with me.” The nearly three-weeks-long tour marks the band’s first time in the U.S. “Every day was like, ‘I’m going to move here,’” says Fréchou, who assures me that Americans have been “really friendly.”

Jesse Davis

En Attendant Ana

En Attendant Ana recorded an EP to tape two years ago, releasing a limited run on cassette, which caught the attention of Canadian label Nominal Records. “[They] asked us if we were okay to release the EP on vinyl, and we said ‘Yes!’” Bouchaudon says, emphasizing the affirmative. The group then recorded their full-length debut, Lost and Found, which they released on Trouble in Mind. After a successful tour with label-mates (and fellow Gonerfest 15 performers) Ethers and a day and a night spent being “the best tourists ever,” Bouchaudon says the band will “go back to France, [and] go back to work.” She says they will spend some time playing in the West of France before getting down to the business of a follow up to Lost and Found. “And then we’ll have some time to make new songs,” she says. “And a new record. And another, and another,” Fréchou chimes in. Personally, I hope Fréchou is right. After only one concert and a brief conversation in the alley behind the Hi Tone, I’m already looking forward to the band’s next release and U.S. tour. Gonerfest 16, maybe? We can only hope.

Jesse Davis

Oblivians

I make it back inside in time to catch The Oblivians, Gonerfest royalty, who deliver their raunchy garage-rock excellence to a packed mass of sweaty music fans. After two days of nearly nonstop music, I settle in to enjoy the show. The rhythm section is tight and powerful. The guitar tones are crunchy and snarling, as befits a late-night set helmed by Jack Oblivian, star of Memphis filmmaker Mike McCarthy’s psychedelic punk odyssey, The Sore Losers, screening Sunday afternoon at Studio on the Square. With two days of Gonerfest memories fresh in my mind, I relax, thankful for the 15-year-old festival that brings so many diverse and distant musical experimenters to the Bluff City.

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Music Music Blog

Gonerfest 15: Thursday

A week ago, the man in the chainmail and shimmering cape would have been broiling in the Memphis heat, but rain swept in on cooler winds, and the first night of Gonerfest 15 is just cool enough for the assembled punks, rockers, and music fans to break out their denim jackets — or, in some cases, chainmail.

The emcee takes the Hi-Tone stage just after 9 p.m., wearing sunglasses and leather, and says a few kind words about Chris Beck, Goner’s “Muddy Spear,” who recently passed away from brain cancer. Members of the crowd shouted that they wished Beck could be there, displaying a communal spirit central to the festival.

Music fans come from the world over for Gonerfest, and there always seems to be a happy reunion happening in the parking lot or by the bathrooms. Then the emcee kicks off the night’s festivities, introducing the “King of the Gras,” who “tours in a cage on wheels … just take it  — Bênní!” Then the man in the chainmail hood smiles and steps onstage and up to a stack of keyboards and synthesizers. And he conjures magic.

Allison Green

BÊNNÍ, master of analog synths

Bênní’s set is dark and hypnotic, but there’s a touch of humor in his deadpan stage patter delivery as he sets up each synthesized swirl of sound. He speaks (and sings) into a talk box, explaining that the diamond man character was a vision that haunted him until he put it in a song: “This is who I am — a diamond man.”

The New Orleans-based musician plays an instrumental song in 6/8 time. It sounds at once sinister and rising, like an old-school video game theme played on a church organ at the bottom of a well. “I haven’t played that one in a while,” Bênní says casually. His delivery is wry, as if to nudge the audience and say, “You know we’re just getting started, right?”

Between sets, the garage-rock true believers slip outside to smoke cigarettes or scarf down barbecue from a smoker pulled behind an RV. Cincinnati-based Bummer’s Eve take the stage after a quick turnover, summoning the crowds with violently strummed guitar. The band is raucous and bopping, fuzzed-out punk. They crash into a noise breakdown, a wall of feedback and distortion, before plunging seamlessly back into the rhythm of the song. Where Bênní’s set pulsed, Bummer’s Eve shakes and rattles. Their set seemed to end far too soon.

The Hi Tone, already crowded for opening sets on a Thursday night, swells with the addition of late arrivals. There is a constant sense of rising energy throughout the night, a shared knowledge that this is only the first night of the festival. Conversations buzz and grow louder as the ever-growing mounds of beer cans in the trash continue to rise, and people fight to be heard over each other and the ringing in their ears. People dance and bop, and Memphis-based Aquarian Blood and Tampa party-rockers Gino & the Goons continue to escalate the energy. Aquarian Blood wails, frenetically running chromatic scales up their fret boards, urging the party to a wilder pitch.

Aquarian Blood

Aquarian Blood build a bomb, and Gino & the Goons light the fuse. They’re party punk, solid songs punctuated by grunts of “ooh!” and “uh!” The Florida-based band plays on as the singer shouts from onstage, “You’re not dancing, we’re not stopping!” Then the rhythm changes, and the singer rips into a chorus of “hip-hip-hypnotic” before everything crashes to a stop with a squall of feedback. Lydia Lunch Retrovirus is up next.

Lydia Lunch, backed by a band so tight they seem telepathic, is the penultimate performer on the opening night of Gonerfest. Dressed in black and laughing, she warns the crowd of her band’s “nasty,” “raunchy” ways. Her guitarist strikes a deft balance between crunchy, palm-muted riffs and wild, dissonant squeals of noise. The rhythm section is locked in, propelling the performance forward through moments of angry, brittle complexity and explosive breakdowns. Red and green lights seem to drip from the Hi Tone sign above the stage. Lunch’s voice floats above it all, singing, screaming, and crooning. Local singer and multi-instrumentalist Luke White leans in to shout in my ear, “She’s pretty badass” before admiring the guitar and bass tones.

Jasmine Hirst

Lydia Lunch

White is waiting to go onstage with Harlan T. Bobo, who is closing out night one of the festival. Lunch’s vocals rise, casting a dark spell, while the band pulses with barely restrained energy and she chants, “There’s something witchy in the air.” The music rises to a final crescendo, and Lunch, a master performer, relinquishes the stage with a shouted, “Start the disco!”

Harlan T. Bobo’s set is magnetic, hypnotic. He looks like a man possessed, his eyes going wide as he sings, his smile like Conrad Veidt’s in The Man Who Laughs. He has the strangely compelling charisma of someone who hears holy voices.

His band crafts a dark atmosphere, making them a perfect bookend to Bênní’s darkly filmic opening set, a complement to the eclectic lineup. Frank McLallen’s bass lines are expert, a framework on which to hang the keyboard swells and whine of a slide guitar.

Bobo’s second song is “Human,” the simmering opening track from his new A History of Violence. The song builds to an electric instrumental ending, setting a fevered energy level that the band maintains for several songs, before Bobo pulls out a harmonica and eases up on the gas slightly, giving the captive audience a moment to catch its breath.

It’s the briefest of moments, though, before Bobo starts up a swinging, country-inflected song. It’s an inspired performance, and a fitting end to the opening day of the festival.

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Book Features Books

Grady Hendrix’ We Sold Our Souls

Grady Hendrix, the author of Horrorstör and My Best Friend’s Exorcism, is an animated speaker. It’s easy to picture him sitting near an open window in his home in New York, leaning forward as he tells me over the phone about the guitar lessons, the solo speaking engagements, and the rewrites that went into his newest novel, We Sold Our Souls (Quirk Books).

The supernatural thriller tells the story of washed-up metal band Dürt Würk from the point of view of lead guitarist Kris Pulaski. After two albums recorded on a shoestring budget and countless cross-country tours measurable only in gallons of gas burned and number of bottles smashed onstage, Dürt Würk crafts their magnum opus, a concept album called Troglodyte. Then, when Terry Hunt, the band’s vocalist, gets them kicked off a tour, he decides to bury Troglodyte deep in the vault, and he convinces the band to sign over their rights to the band and its albums, to unknowingly sell their souls.

Grady Hendrix

“In a modern-day context, what’s selling your soul?” Hendrix asks. “With the medieval idea, you sold it to Satan. That’s conspiracy theories now. It’s this idea that there’s a secret 1 percent who control the world, and if you get in league with them, they will overcome all obstacles and you’ll be successful, not because you’ve earned it, but because you paid some price to join this cabal.”

Hendrix spent time with the conspiracy community, which, he says, can feel as if “you were beaten by the secret forces that run this world before you got out of bed, before you were even born.” But Hendrix had the antidote to defeatism right in front of him: “Bands are the most hopeful thing in the world. Nine out of 10 bands know they’re never going to make it big, but they’re up there on these stages throwing messages in bottles out into the ocean. And they will never see the beaches those bottles wash up on.”

Troglodyte is that message in a bottle. It’s a key for deciphering the novel and the only weapon at Kris’ disposal. “A lot of times, we rescue ourselves from terrible situations, we just don’t realize it. You’re in the past firing a bullet into the future that saves you and kills the monster. I wanted Troglodyte to be that,” Hendrix says. “Kris, when she was really connected to what she was doing and just doing it for the love of it, she tapped into whatever this is — the collective unconscious, Black Iron Mountain — and encoded this message to herself in the future.”

The novel plays out as a dark riff on the reunion tour trope. More than a decade after Terry dissolved Dürt Würk and shelved Troglodyte, Kris tries to reunite her old band and to understand the importance of the album they never released — and of Black Iron Mountain, the shadowy force haunting the pages of the book, dogging Kris as she hurtles toward a reunion.

“The supernatural gives you a chance to literalize things that are hard to define but that are feelings everyone has,” Hendrix says. “Black Iron Mountain isn’t real, but as a metaphor, there are these forces that are bigger than we are and older than we are. They want us to not be weird and just be ashamed of ourselves, and I think it’s hard to resist them.”

Hendrix talks about social media influencers and branding in the entertainment industry, saying “you have to flatten yourself. You have to get rid of all the weird stuff, all the contradictory stuff that makes us people.” He thinks the pendulum is swinging the other way, though, that people crave authenticity.

Hendrix says his previous novel got the best response when he “cut closest to the bone” and was honest about his most embarrassing moments, which inspired him when writing We Sold Our Souls. “There is this emphasis on cool, but I prefer enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is hot. Sometimes it makes you get carried away and forget the social niceties, and you can look a little nuts. But cool is removed and remote. Life is hot; corpses are cool.”

We Sold Our Souls is a redemption song in a minor key. The reader can’t help but hope Kris can pull off one last tour, a final road trip to salvation. Hendrix conjures the anguish of betrayal and the frustration of powerlessness in this novel about what passion is worth and how long to keep fighting to keep it alive in a world of pragmatic cool.

More information about We Sold Our Souls at www.gradyhendrix.com.

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Music Music Features

Star & Micey Celebrate 10 Years

CREDIT: Samantha Smith

The members of Memphis folk-pop band Star & Micey radiate a solidarity that calls to mind a Southern Fab Four-era Beatles, an impression that was driven home for me when I met Josh Cosby and Nick Redmond, the main songwriting duo, for coffee. The two look like an odd couple, the scholar and the handyman, but they field interview questions like an Olympic volleyball team. Cosby sets up a joke, and Redmond spikes it, or vice versa, again and again, putting proof to the fact that the two have spent a decade leaning on and learning from each other on stages and in the studio.

All that hard work pays off, as this month, Star & Micey celebrate 10 years as a band, a mile marker few groups ever reach. The festivities kicked off two weeks ago with an anniversary show at Railgarten, and continue this weekend at the Levitt Shell with a long-awaited co-headlining concert with Memphis indie-pop heavyweights Snowglobe.

Samantha Smith

Star & Micey

“Jeff Hulett from Snowglobe is my neighbor,” Cosby says. “We’ve been throwing it around: ‘When are Snowglobe and Star & Micey going to play together?'”

The 10-year mark represents an unusual time in the life of Star & Micey. Having recently amiably ended a near-decade-long contract with Ardent, the band is in uncharted territory. Cosby and Redmond seem happy, open to the possibility of a new direction and pleased with a summer bookended by a spot on the Beale Street Music Fest lineup and a hometown blowout show at the Shell. But after six-and-a-half years of near-constant touring and almost a full decade with the same label, the band is taking stock. “For the first time in 10 years,” Redmond says, “we’re 100 percent free agents — and with a stack of material.”

But let’s back up. Redmond was already working at the famed Ardent Studios when Cosby and bassist Geoff Smith welcomed him into the band, so it was natural that they wound up at the Memphis label when the time came to sign a deal.

Star & Micey toured, released an EP and a full-length with Ardent, learned to play drums with their feet, toured some more, and added a drummer, Jeremy Stanfill. Their shows became more extravagant. “It was crazy. There was confetti; there were back flips,” Cosby says. They released a third record, Get ‘Em Next Time, in collaboration with Ardent and Thirty Tigers (who handled distribution), made a few laps around the U.S. and Canada, and went back to stomping their feet for a while. “In the meantime, we had recorded five records that just sat on the shelf,” Redmond says.

“Contractually, we had to stay,” Redmond says of the label entanglements that left them tied to the studio but unable to release their newest recordings. And after the deaths in 2014 of Ardent founder John Fry and John Hampton, one of the studio’s chief producers, there was no one to let the band go. “I don’t think there’s blame,” Redmond says. “We got lost in the cracks.”

Meanwhile, over at Thirty Tigers, the death of vice president and co-founder Bob Goldstone sent the company into a period of drastic change. Star & Micey was locked into a deal with Ardent with no one to handle distribution. Eventually, after years in a sort of limbo, the contract was dissolved.

Now it’s back to the band’s origins. “I jumped in the van, and we took off — for 10 years,” Redmond laughs. Those first tours built the band’s chops and taught them how to depend on each other, how to survive long days in a van, and how to roll with the punches.

“If something happens, we’ll all show up,” Redmond says, demonstrating the Get ‘Em Next Time ethos that so defines the band. “We’ve all decided, all four of us, this isn’t over,” Cosby says, putting words to a feeling that permeated the conversation from start to finish. Never for a moment did I doubt that, even after 10 years, Star & Micey have a lot more to give.

Star & Micey and Snowglobe play the Levitt Shell, Friday, September 14th,
7 p.m. Free.

Categories
Book Features Books

Christine Dalcher’s Vox

Sixteen-thousand words. That’s how many words, on average, most people speak in a day. Sixteen-thousand chances to say “I love you,” “I’m sorry,” or “Make your own damn sandwich.” Language, the ability to express oneself, is agency. So what do we become when language, our most human of characteristics, is taken away?

Such are the questions posed by the linguist and author Christine Dalcher, whose first novel, Vox (Penguin Random House), is set in a near-future America governed by the few for the few. In Vox‘s America, women have lost most of their rights. They can’t vote or carry passports, and they can speak no more than 100 words a day. All American women and girls have been fitted with a counter worn around the wrist, not unlike a Fitbit, that keeps track of the words they speak in a day. The counter resets at midnight. And if a woman uses more than her allotted 100 words, the counter administers a small electric shock. If she continues to speak, the shocks intensify.

The new measures were put into play as a part of the “Pure Movement,” a religious movement that advocates a return to a time when the country was “untroubled” by the political and social turmoil of recent years. That such a reading of history is dramatically flawed doesn’t stop the Pure Movement from gaining followers, primarily from the middle section of the country, mostly from people who feel overlooked and forgotten by an increasingly globalized economy and diversified workforce.

The narrative follows Dr. Jean McClellan, a scientist who was working on a cure for fluent aphasia, a condition leading to the deterioration of the speech centers in the brain. That is, she used to be called “Dr.” and she used to be working on a cure for fluent aphasia. She used to have her own lab. But that was before Reverend Carl Corbin and his Pure Movement began to gain ground. Before Corbin gave his blessing to presidential hopeful Sam Meyers, who won the presidency. Now Jean spends time at home, trying to occupy a mind used to wrestling with complex chemical equations. Now she doesn’t speak during the day, just turns over her thoughts, trying to dull the edge of her worry about her family. How can she teach her daughter to be strong and independent when she must also teach her to be silent at all costs? How can she teach her son fairness in a country that has chosen to hobble half its population?

That moral dilemma is at the center of Vox. It’s clear that, though the Pure Movement is buttressed by return-to-morals rhetoric, the movement is eroding whatever morality there is left in the country. Neighbors spy on neighbors, like something out of a Red Scare-era sci-fi flick. And Jean’s son, Steven, is being steadily seduced by the movement. What worries Jean even more, though, is her daughter Sonia, who hasn’t spoken in days and is proud to be a frontrunner in a Silent Game competition among the girls at her elementary school.

Patrick, Jean’s husband, is little help. He works in government, in D.C., and he’s got his hands full trying to scale back the extremity of new legislation. Alone in a bubble of silence, Jean thinks back to her undergraduate years, when she would decline her friend Jackie Juarez’s attempts to drag her to protests, when she first gave up her voice by choosing not to use it. Jackie warned Jean that history has a way of repeating itself — especially when your nose is buried too deeply in your own business to smell change on the wind.

And things may change, for the worse or the better, when President Meyers’ brother and trusted advisor takes a brutal fall while skiing, fracturing his skull and hurting his brain. Jean is offered a chance to get the counter off her wrist — and her daughter’s — if she will finish her work on her aphasia cure. Jean is torn, unsure whether the good she might do Sonia justifies any help she could give to a legitimately evil regime.

With a dash of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and a pinch of Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, Vox sits well among the ranks of feminist speculative fiction. It’s a literary contemplation of an America hijacked by fundamentalists who want to turn back the clock by 60 years. More than anything, Vox is a novel about the price of staying silent.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

James & the Ultrasounds: None of the Above and Then Some

“I never cared for the typical; I kind of like being difficult,” sings James Godwin of James and the Ultrasounds on “None of the Above,” the opening track of the new album of the same name. As a statement of ethos, it’s a fitting introduction to an album that won’t sit still long enough to be easily categorized. Still, the song kicks off the record with a flurry of electric guitars; there’s a hint of surf rock in the drums, a little bit of slap-back somewhere in the mix.

Godwin sounds soulful as hell and just shy of coming completely unwound. I can almost see his wide shirt collar and the sheen of sweat plastering hair to his forehead as David Johnson, the band’s gangly bassist, bops around onstage, feeling the bounce in the groove. The song sounds like rock-and-roll should, like it’s blasting out of a glowing jukebox in a crowded, smoky room, even though it’s just my computer and my headphones, played at a reasonable volume. It sounds like the same James and the Ultrasounds I’ve seen in at least half a dozen dives. But the Ultrasounds have done some growing, and as None of the Above keeps playing, it shows.

None of the Above, released by Madjack Records, is the Ultrasounds’ second full-length album, the follow-up to 2014’s excellent Bad to Be Here. Recorded at Electraphonic Recording and produced by Memphis songwriting and guitar-picking heavyweight John Paul Keith (whose Memphis Circa 3 a.m. is a personal favorite), None of the Above spools out a quick succession of tight tracks, seemingly effortlessly. There’s a definite swagger to the songs on the Ultrasounds’ newest release.

But added attitude isn’t the only difference. The band has undergone some lineup changes, with the departure of guitarist and backing vocalist Luke White. “I’m grateful for all of the musicians in my life,” Godwin says. “I’ve learned a lot from all of them.” To help flesh out the sound for the album, Godwin recruited Flyer music editor Alex Greene, a bandmate from a previous combo, to contribute organ and piano and some rhythm guitar. The organ riffs, plaintive and soul-drenched, would be right at home on a soul song cut over at Royal Studios. The instrument adds a layer to the Ultrasounds’ sound, especially on tracks like “Nowhere to Go” and “Drop the Act.”

None of the Above shows off a side of the Ultrasounds that’s sometimes eclipsed by the ferocity of their rock-and-roll cool. And the band is cool, cool as a Ramones movie or sweat on a bottle of beer, but they can be tender, too. At first glance, they’re all suit jackets and sunglasses at night, telecasters and stories of hard-partying Serbian concert promoters, but great performers know when to take off the shades and show a little vulnerability. James and the Ultrasounds’ second album slows down long enough to show off some Southern soul and old-school country that’s always been a part of the band’s musical make-up.

Godwin traces his tastes back to quiet moments in childhood, times when his grandmother would, if only for a little peace and quiet, tell him to sit still and just listen. “My earliest musical memories are sitting in my grandmother’s house when I was four or five. I would get into stuff, and she would tell me to sit there and be quiet and listen to her music,” Godwin remembers. “She was always playing Patsy Cline or Charlie Pride, always sad stuff. Day after day, I would hear it.

“The country influence has always been there,” Godwin says. “Touring with J.P. [Keith], we’d always listen to old country stuff in his van.” A veteran of a slew of Memphis bands, Godwin used to play bass for Keith. Bad to Be Here’s rollicking “Party Dracula” was inspired by a promoter Godwin met while on tour oversees with Keith’s bad. And perhaps some of the cohesion of None of the Above is a result of so many hours already spent together, a shared set of musical references. “John Paul told me one time ‘There’s one band in Memphis, and we’re all in it,’” Godwin laughs.

“I was his go-to bass player for a good handful of years. I’ve still to this day probably played more shows with him on stage than with anyone else,” says Godwin. “We’ve covered a lot of ground together, from Memphis to Serbia and everywhere in between.” Whatever the reason, there’s a confidence on display on None of the Above that hints at an easy connection between everyone involved. These songs are tight enough to make the listener suspect the musicians and producer shared a telepathic connection.

“I’ve got 27 different jobs, but I still don’t like my odds of getting my money back,” Godwin sings on “New Subtraction.” Drummer John Argroves’ tight tom work on and the doubled guitar lines during the song’s instrumental turnaround evoke a frantic energy that feels like being out of luck and out of gas on the baking asphalt of a Memphis street corner. “New Subtraction” is the Ultrasounds at their unrestrained best, but the band somehow manages to turn up the heat still more a little later in the record.

Keith brought in the award-winning Billy Gibson, aka the Mississippi Saxophone, to contribute his much-lauded harmonica skills to “Am I Crazy.” Gibson channels the mood of the song, ripping riffs from his harmonica that sound fearlessly deranged. Gibson’s wailing harmonica sits on a bed of bumping bass and crunchy guitars. There’s plenty on display here for any fans of Bad to Be Here’s reckless rock-and-roll energy. For all the added subtlety of the new record, the Ultrasounds still know how to crank up the amps and wake up the crowd. Now they just know how to do it with harmonica, too.

“Drop the Act” is a soulful, heart-wrenching song, with Godwin pleading for honesty over warbling organs in 6/8 time. A motif runs through the lyrics on None of the Above, and it’s on full display on this track. Lovers leave, lies are told, money is in short supply, and there are sleepless nights to spare. Tires go flat and need to be repaired. But if Godwin sounds like someone who knows how it feels to be locked out, shaken up, and shaken down, he seems to know when to laugh off his bad luck and when to shoot straight with the listener, to admit “I suppose that much of the blame is mine.” As a result, no matter how dark it gets on None of the Above, the problems never appear insurmountable, and Godwin never shades into the maudlin.

If Bad to Be Here is the Ultrasounds’ punk-tinged rock-and-roll record, then None of the Above is the band plunging deep into the country and soul that were rock’s first influences, its grandfathers. For all the instrumental energy on display, the band puts the 11 songs on None of the Above through their paces with cool grace, almost making it look easy. And the addition of organ adds a frequency to the Ultrasounds’ sonic spectrum, opening up new spaces for the band to explore. The result is a matured sound that feels like an evolution for a mainstay of the Memphis music scene.

James and the Ultrasounds play an album release show for None of the Above at Bar DKDC, Friday, August 24th, at 10 p.m.

Categories
Music Music Features

Cory Branan: Folk All Y’all and Lightning in a Bottle

CREDIT: Joshua Black-Wilkins

The first time I saw Cory Branan — solo at the Hi-Tone in its former location on Poplar — he performed an act of serious musical hypnotism. The crowd was quiet (for a Hi-Tone crowd), quiet enough that I could pick out every finger-plucked note. His lyrics ambled, getting there but not always taking the most obvious route. He had a country twang and a folky, John Prine-inflected delivery, but he played an electric guitar, a Gibson SG, if I remember correctly.

There has always been a little rock-and-roll in Branan’s country, a little folk in his poetry. He’s a musical amalgamation, and he’s set to play an intimate Memphis set this Saturday at Studio688 as part of the Folk All Y’all series.

Folk All Y’all concerts aim to match idiosyncratic musical acts with intimate, interesting venues to create a unique concert experience. And Branan is tailor-made for the musical experiment. His songs breathe with an authenticity that suggests something in possession of a life of its own. He speaks slowly and quietly, but when he sings, his lyrics don’t always conform to meter. That’s not to suggest he’s sloppy or out of time, rather that he’s counting his own time. Or that he knows the value of losing track of time every once in a while. “Keep up,” his songs seem to say.

Branan, a native of Southaven, spent a handful of years in Nashville, but the singer/songwriter has had an on-again, off-again relationship with Memphis, where he cut his teeth in metal and country bands and where he now lives with his wife Rebecca and son Clemens. (He also has a daughter, Jane, “from a different mama.”) The Branan family moved back to Memphis in February, and since then, the singer says he’s been enjoying home life.

“I’m kind of a hermit. My wife jokes that I went out five times in the five years we lived in Nashville,” says Branan. “When I’m off the road, I just wanna be home.”

The singer has been adapting to family life, learning how to write whenever he can steal the time. After the Folk All Y’all gig, Branan heads out in July in support of California punks Face to Face, who are releasing a record of acoustic versions of old material. In October, he’s set to play the second annual MEMPHO Fest with his full band. And then there are the plans for the new record.

“I’ve never been able to write on the road,” Branan says. He says he would collapse into a bed after a tour, still feeling the ground moving underneath him. But things are a little different now for Branan. “Now, when I come off the road, I just wanna look at the wife and kid.” So the blond songsmith has been teaching himself to write on the road.

Branan has a dozen new songs in the works for the follow-up to Adios, which was released in April 2017 on Bloodshot Records — and named one of the Memphis albums of the year by the Flyer. In contrast to Adios, one of the more polished of Branan’s five studio albums, the new material suggests a raw approach.

“I’m thinking about more of a 1970s-type songwriter record, where you can hear the room, and everybody’s doing it live,” Branan says, referencing Jackson Browne and “even Gordon Lightfoot” before hitting on his ideal example. “For me, it’s some of those Kinks records in the 1970s. You can hear ’em hitting their teeth on the microphone. It’s just so ragged and glorious.” If anyone can produce the Southern Muswell Hilbillies, it’s Branan, who says he plans to play some of the new material during his set this Saturday.

The singer says he plans to hunker down in late autumn or winter to record the new album. Branan’s already envisioning how the process will go. “That’s always been my choice: overqualified, underprepared musicians,” Branan says of his recording style. “Don’t give ’em too much of a heads-up about what’s gonna happen. Just surround yourself with the best people and do it fast and try to catch a little lightning in a bottle.”

Cory Branan at Folk All Y’all, Saturday, June 30th at 7:30 p.m., at Studio688
(688 S. Cox). $20.

Categories
News News Feature

Memphis Literary Arts Festival Launches

CREDIT: DBW Photography

If the prevailing stereotype of the

writer/reader is of a solitary individual, slaving away with bleary eyes, then the Center for Southern Literary Arts (CSLA) aims to challenge the traditional narrative. Because stories are inherently a means of communication and of reinforcing our connections — with each other, with the past, and with our cultures. To illustrate the communal aspect and intersectional nature of storytelling, in its many forms and genres, the CSLA is unveiling the inaugural Memphis Literary Arts Festival (MLAF) this Saturday, June 16th, in the Edge district.

“We founded the organization a little less than a year ago,” says Jamey Hatley, co-founder and creative director of the CSLA. In its not-quite-a-year in existence, along with planning the debut of the MLAF, the center has already brought some impressively mighty literary talent to Memphis. Last February, the nonprofit brought Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage, to the Orpheum for a reading and conversation with Hatley, who is a writer in her own right. “That event was the launch of our Main Stage series,” says Molly Quinn, co-founder and executive director of CSLA and a veteran of similar nonprofit literature festivals in New York and L.A. “We did two of those this year, and next year you’ll see somewhere between four and six.”

When Hatley and Quinn founded the CSLA (with co-founder/writer Zandria Robinson), Memphis did not seem quite as hospitable a place for practitioners of the literary arts. “When I was a young writer, I didn’t travel. My parents didn’t have a lot of money, and I traveled and experienced the world through books. We were at a point in Memphis where we weren’t sure if our big independent [bookstore] was going to stick around, the [Mid-South Book Festival] had stopped,” Hatley elaborates. “So I came back to Memphis into a situation that was more in peril than how I left it. As a working artist, that was very scary to me.” So, mindful of the importance of a space given over to the mingling of voices and ideas, Hatley, Quinn, and Robinson pulled together to create the CSLA.

DBW Photography

(l to r) Zandria Robinson, Jamey Hatley, and Molly Rose Quinn

MLAF is about connections, about creating new ones, and about celebrating existing connections that may go overlooked. “A lot of people might think that they have to go to New York to find mentors and people to inspire them, but we want people to know that that inspiration is right here in Memphis,” Hatley says. Hatley, a native Memphian whose work has appeared in the Oxford American, Callalloo, and the acclaimed Memphis Noir collection, knows the value of a space for writers to connect. She remembers waiting in a line at the now twice-rebranded Davis-Kidd bookstore to meet Crystal Wilkinson, an author with whom Hatley developed a friendship. Wilkinson will be in conversation with Hatley at MLAF, closing a circle that began when Hatley was a “baby writer … in the back of the line waiting to try to figure out something to say to the famous writer.”

Wilkinson will be just some of the talent on display at the MLAF. The festival is remarkable in its inclusion of different forms of storytelling. The lineup for the one-day festival includes Courtney Alexander, who made a tarot deck that engages with ideas about body image and archetypes, and Daniel Jose Older, a musician and author of a series of young-adult ghost noir books. There will also be journalists, muralists, musicians, and novelists. “We thought really hard about what kind of overlap and what kind of interdisciplinary spirit this lineup would have,” Quinn says. “In part because we believe that mixing those things together allows for the kind of accessibility Jamey is talking about.”

It’s fitting in Memphis, a city where some of the most illustrative storytellers haven’t even been literate, that accessibility is among the primary goals of the festival. Hatley explains that, with this goal in mind, they’re striving to marry the entertaining and the enriching, the highbrow and the whimsical. “We want to say that literature is the ‘then’ and the ‘now,’ and we want to make a bridge across to those communities,” Hatley says. “Voices need to be heard, and whatever route they can take, we want people to know all the ways. We want people’s voices to get out in a way that feels empowering for them.”

Memphis Literary Arts Festival is Saturday, June 16th, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Marshall Avenue between South Orleans and Monroe Extd.