On February 16, 1975, a curious story by James Knightly appeared in TheCommercial Appeal: “Lynyrd Skynyrd Proteges to Record,” ran the headline. With a fine-grained attention to the minutiae of the city’s recording industry that is rare today, the story explains how a thus-far unknown band “will arrive at Sonic Recording Studios at 1692 Madison to record an album.” News flash! It’s hard to imagine such a story making headlines now, but, as Knightly notes, the unknown band’s singer-guitarist “is the 20-year-old brother of Ronnie Van Zant, lead singer and guitarist for the outstanding Southern rock group, Lynyrd Skynyrd.”
That alone made them notable. And it was true, Van Zant’s kid brother Donnie and the band he’d co-founded only months before with fellow singer-guitarist Don Barnes — 38 Special — had a date with destiny. Though that Memphis session wasn’t their big break, they did release an album two years later, and by 1981 they had perfected a custom blend of Southern rock and arena rock that would keep them high in the charts for years, epitomized by hits like “Hold on Loosely” and “Caught Up in You,” both co-written and sung by Barnes.
To this day, the band is going strong, with Barnes alone at the helm since Donnie Van Zant’s retirement over a decade ago. In fact, on Saturday, October 19th, 38 Special will return to Memphis, where they were once so presciently heralded nearly 50 years ago. The band, which still plays a hundred shows a year, will cap off the seventh annual Fall Fest Memphis, a two-day event benefitting Room in the Inn. In anticipation of their appearance, I reached Barnes by phone to hear his thoughts on Memphis, the early days of the band, and the longevity of Southern rock.
Don Barnes (Photo: Carl Dunn )
Memphis Flyer: This story from 1975 really celebrates 38 Special coming to Memphis. How long had you been together at that point?
Don Barnes: We actually put the band together at the end of ’74 and then we got rehearsals started in ’75 so, you know, we’re just going to call 2025 our 50th year. And we’ve got a legacy package coming out with a double CD. One disc has all the greatest hits, and the second disc will have new music. So it should be out about March — great songs!
Whatever happened with those 1975 recordings?
That was the very first recording we ever did. We did our first demo here in Memphis, and, of course, the song never saw the light of day. But you know, that was our very first foray. I remember, we went through the snow and cold of the winter, piled in the van. And we played in a club that had Jerry Lee Lewis’ PA system in there. We all were so honored, you know, to be using his PA system! You know those early days, when you travel around, banging around in a van with an old, dirty mattress in the back, switching drivers and all that, trying to sleep. You start questioning, what about your future? I remember waking up in the van in the middle of Kansas, in a cornfield, thinking, ‘What am I doing with my life?’ But, sticking together like that as a group, it’s like a family. You kind of prop each other up and give each other encouragement.
What were the early days of the band like?
I’ve known Donnie since we were 14! We were playing around Jacksonville in all these little teen club bands and dance bands — about eight other bands before 38 Special. Still working day jobs. And Donnie called me and said, ‘Let’s try it one more time. We’ll get the people, the right people, who will show up and have the conviction to go all the way.’ So I said, ‘Oh, really, try again?’ Anyway, it worked out, but of course, you make all your mistakes in public, and you suffer and starve for what you want. People think ‘Hold on Loosely’ was on our first album, but it was our fourth album. So you went through a lot of self-examination, like, ‘What am I doing?’ Then, people think you get a record deal and you’ve made it. But they’re just giving you a chance to play in the big leagues. If you can’t come across with something then they’re gonna send you back down to the farm league and the clubs. So we had some desperate times there, but it finally worked out.
When Donnie retired, I said, ‘Well, your brother Ronnie would be so proud that you made it 40 years!’ I still talk to him. He’s still my partner — we own the trademark.
Speaking of Ronnie Van Zant, what kind of impact did he have on you guys as a band, before he died in that tragic plane crash in 1977?
I remember the things that Ronnie told us about: Put your truth in your song; put your light in it. Don’t just say, ‘Ooh baby, I love you, I miss you.’ You’ve got to find real truths from stories in your life. So ‘Caught Up in You’ was about a woman that I was dating at the time, and I happened to say, ‘You know, I can’t seem to get any work done; I’m just so caught up in you all the time.’ And it was just like a light bulb turned on. ‘That’s a pretty good element for a song.’
38 Special will appear at 7 p.m. on Saturday, October 19th, at Fall Fest Memphis, held this year at St. Brigid Catholic Church, 7801 Lowrance Rd. For tickets and other details, visit fallfestmemphis.org.
Last weekend, thousands flocked to the Radians Amphitheater at Memphis Botanic Garden for Mempho Fest. The Memphis Flyer‘s own Michael Donahue was on hand to take party pictures for his We Saw You column. I tagged along with a video camera to record the legendary newsman in action. But don’t take my word for it — watch him get swarmed by fans and charm the masses with his easygoing style.
It’s official: as of its closing moments this past Sunday, Gonerfest 21 has been successfully completed. Now it can drink in the state of Tennessee, the joke goes, and now it has fully embarked on its third decade. And, truth be told, it really did feel like our favorite fest had experienced some kind of growth spurt this year, even if some of its participants chose to go alcohol-free.
See interviews and more from the four-day weekend in this exclusive compilation on the Memphis Flyer YouTube channel.
In fact, the common sentiment seems to be, more than ever, an overwhelmingly head-spinning “What just happened?” Perhaps that vibe was amplified because Sunday, traditionally given over to Gonerfest’s rootsier, less distorted side, was instead dedicated to very much the opposite this year, as Oneida proceeded to forge a new approach to rock music before our eyes.
Taking in all their work as a whole, Oneida excels at musical world-building, blending synth sounds with their chugging rock band foundation in an approach that’s both sonic and harmonic, noise-laden and sing-song. And they bashed out one textured tune after another. “I wanna hold your hand/Between my teeth/I won’t draw blood/Don’t wanna stain the sheets,” as one song went. But it was their finale, “Sheets of Easter,” that really took the audience to a different plane.
Bobby Matador of Oneida (Photo: Tad Lauritzen Wright)
Kicking off with the phrase, “You’ve got to look into the LIGHT,” the song then consists of the band relentlessly, mercilessly repeating the last word, mantra-like, along with a single chord hammered out in eighth notes for approximately 19 minutes. “Light, light, light, light, light…” they sang, though the syllables began to morph after a while. Live stream viewers may have refreshed their connections, thinking the video was glitching. It wasn’t! Naïfs like me, unfamiliar with the song, were bewildered, amused, or offended, not knowing how or when it would end. Was it performance art? An MK-ULTRA-like experiment in which we, the audience, were lab rats? A sophomoric prank? Personally, I went through something not unlike the five stages of grief as I listened, from denial to anger, bargaining, depression, and, finally, acceptance.
It was truly one of the most surreal experiences I have had at any festival. As Zac Ives, co-owner of Goner Records, explains, the “song” is an old favorite by the band. “I don’t know how often they do it now, because it was on a record that they did 20 years ago, but it’s always insane. There’s not really much like it. Some listeners are horrified, and others are like, ‘Thank you for playing this amazing song.’ So yeah, it’s very divisive.”
Yet there weren’t many grumblers after it was done. Everyone, the band included, was too raw from the hypnotic onslaught. Finally, Eric Friedl, Goner’s founder, announced, “This concludes Gonerfest 21! After Oneida there is only light…go out into that light! Thanks to everyone who made this happen, the sound crew, the video crew. We made it through the rain, we made it through the not-rain.” And with that simple summation, the four-day roller coaster ride was over.
Looking back, then, one might well ask, “What just happened?” With too many bands to give every one of them a fair shake, one is left with only the most incendiary moments, burned into one’s brain.
The Pull Chains, a new collaboration between Greg Cartwright, Jesse Smith, Joseph Plunkett, and Eliza Hill, marked a refreshing return to harder rock territory for Cartwright, with echoes of the old Reigning Sound, but with all new material. And, as Cartwright notes, nearly every song was “a full four-way co-write from scratch, and they still seem to resonate with a single storyteller perspective. Such a joy to write songs with good people!”
Okmoniks (Photo: Anton Jackson)
Later that day, Okmoniks singer Helene Grotans was on a tear, perhaps trying to outdo the hurricane with which she shared a name, delighting the crowd with her Category 4 vocals and frenzied-yet-precise work on the Farfisa organ. “I usually play an Acetone,” she quipped, but nonetheless praised the beauty of the onstage instrument provided by Goner with an assist from Graham Winchester. Later, she raved about the Pull Chains, saying, “The Reigning Sound is my favorite band! Well, them and the Mummies!”
Revealing her classical training, Helene of Okmoniks demonstrated deft derrière technique on the Farfisa. (Photo: Alex Greene)
Regarding the opening night’s closer, local muso Jeremy Scott posted on social media that Derv Gordon and So What “killed it, just like they did seven years ago.” While the heavier, almost glam sound of So What contrasts with the old records by The Equals, they supplied solid backing for Gordon’s rich vocals, and, despite any audio issues Gordon encountered, had the crowd bouncing for the whole set.
Derv Gordon and So What (Photo: Alex Greene)
It’s Raining, It’s Streaming Friday was marked by near-constant rainfall, but that did not slow down Gonerfest 21. As Ives notes of the move from the outdoor to the indoor stage, “We were able to deal with the rain really well on Friday, because of the team that we have with us, and GM Jeremy over at Railgarten and his staff. It took a whole lot of work from a bunch of people to be able to make all that stuff happen and pull it all off. And the community that we’re able to bring in, everybody just almost wills this thing to work well, you know? I think we’re really lucky that that it works that way.”
Railgarten, with both an outdoor and an indoor stage, offered a uniquely adaptable venue for such contingencies. And fans could also stay at home, given the reliability of the live streamed video, co-directed by Brent Shrewsbury and Alik Mackintire and executed by a crew of camera operators and other techs.
Availing myself of that option, I found the clarity of the videography and the brilliant online mix to be excellent, especially when running it through big speakers. Surprisingly, Ives himself watched some of the livestream on Sunday.
“I couldn’t be there [due to a mild case of Covid], and I was sort of crestfallen that I couldn’t. But the fact that I could sit there and watch from my quarantined house meant everything. I sent an email to Brent and Alik afterwards saying, ‘You completely saved my day.’ And not only that, that stream is an unbelievable way to watch everything. It is just on a different level now. They’re directing and cutting that stuff real time on a multi-camera shoot. The sound is unbelievable. The video is unbelievable. The real time editing is great. And then all of the in-between stuff that they’ve added in production this year, with Chris McCoy and Ryan [Haley] doing these interviews [see them in this exclusive compilation on the Memphis Flyer YouTube channel], and then taking footage that we’ve collected from the archive over the years and putting that all in, it’s amazing. It was the first time I’ve ever sat at home and watched that way. And I was completely blown away by our team.”
In retrospect, the weather for Gonerfest 21 was perfect. There was just enough bad weather to make comrades of us all, thankful we were spared the worst of it. No doubt the storm’s impact on festival-goers’ own kith and kin in the Carolinas, Georgia, and elsewhere was being felt, but Memphians were largely subject to mere rain (and the odd dead limb crashing down here and there).
L’Afrique, C’est Chic Oneida wasn’t the only act to leave heads spinning. One of the festival’s most unpredictable moments was the triumphant return to Memphis of Niger’s finest Afro-beat groove band, Etran de L’Aïr. When Goner brought them here for the first time last summer, their show at Growlers was the talk of the town for weeks. This time around, they exceeded even those rave reviews.
Etran de L’Aïr (Photo: Anton Jackson)
While the two-guitar, bass, and drum lineup was conventional, the sounds that emerged as they layered cascades of electric notes over galloping rhythms were nigh otherworldly. Something about the weaving guitar arpeggios created a whole greater than the sum of the parts. After a while, the various overlapping overtones created a kind of aural illusion of other sounds, something several listeners commented on. “I thought I heard harmonicas,” exclaimed one friend, and I did too. Most importantly, the sweep of sound and rhythm proved irresistible to the crowd, who collectively threw their hands up after each tune and gave perhaps the weekend’s loudest roars of approval.
With Etran de L’Aïr not being your typical Goner band (is there such a thing?), Ives was relieved to see them win over the crowd. “After seeing them completely destroy that Growlers stage, I was super excited to see what would happen,” he says. “And then when everybody just completely embraced it and was completely into it, it rejuvenated my whole sense of why we do this thing and how great the audience is at Gonerfest. And I had a whole funny conversation with with a friend about that, about how he was not a ‘world music’ fan. Now, he’s open to it. This was the first world music band that he likes.”
Ladies’ Night Without any particular agenda in mind, many festival-goers independently singled out the amazing women in the various Gonerfest bands this year. It was a notable, if low-key, contrast to other festivals’ less diverse lineups. Many raved about Py Py‘s co-vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, Annie-Claude Deschênes, whose magnetic presence drew the crowd under her spell, especially when she had fans hold her mic cable aloft as she made her way from the stage to the bar and back.
Tube Alloys (Photo: Sean Davis)
There was also the charismatic charm of Okmoniks’ Helene, noted above. And one friend raved about “that woman playing the Guild SG [guitar]” in Tube Alloys, an L.A. band named after the U.K.’s secret World War II nuclear weapons development program. Given their mastery of fuzz/crunch, the name is appropriate, fueled by their co-ed lineup.
Meanwhile, Angel Face, Japan’s latest purveyors of classic punk sneer-and-shout riffs, were powered by the unrelenting attack of their female drummer, Reiko. With punk/D.I.Y./indie attitudes seemingly more inclusive than ever, strong women players would appear to be par for the course in today’s Gonerfest universe.
Angel Face (Photo: Sean Davis)
All this barely scratches the surface, of course. In answer to the query, “What just happened?” the best answer is likely, “You had to be there…” And, as Ives notes, right there at Railgarten is likely where Gonerfest will be for the foreseeable future. “We were slightly up in terms of ticket sales this year,” he says, “but there’s not really any room to grow. I think we’re basically at capacity for the space. But that feels like a good spot to be in. We were still able to offer day passes for all three nights. So it didn’t feel like we were leaving anybody out, but it also felt like we were maximizing the space and, you know, maximizing the good feelings from everybody there.”
The traditional Gonerfest “alley photo” was moved to Railgarten this year. (Photo: Sean Davis)
It’s a hopeful tale for any aspiring singer-songwriters out there, one that starts as any typical troubadour’s would: “I was doing a lot of shows at the P&H Cafe, and those Flying Saucer songwriter nights.” A couple of decades ago, that was Drew Holcomb’s life, pounding the pavement, chasing gigs, and honing his craft. Soon, this being Memphis, he was rubbing shoulders with like-minded artists. “Cory Branan was incredibly gracious to me,” Holcomb says, “and sort of invited me into his world a little bit and let me open up a bunch of his shows. Then later the Hi Tone was kind of my home for a lot of years.”
As he recruited bands to perform his songs, Holcomb hit it off with one local player in particular. “His name is Nathan Dugger. He was in his senior year at Houston High School when he started playing with me,” Holcomb recalls. “Then he moved to Nashville to go to Belmont and stayed with me on the weekends when he was playing around town.”
The fact that Dugger is still playing with Holcomb over 20 years later is proof positive that they had stumbled onto some great musical chemistry. So is the musical legacy of Holcomb, Dugger, and Rich Brinsfield, the core of the band that eventually coalesced as Holcomb too made the leap to Nashville.
Holcomb’s mixed feelings about moving to the “Athens of the South” revealed his Bluff City roots. “As a Memphian,” he confesses, “I felt very reluctant to move to Nashville. I felt like I was sort of a traitor, in a way. But I married a Nashville woman, and this was where she wanted to live.” Put another way, in “I Like to Be With Me When I’m With You,” Holcomb sings, “If I could live on the moon, I would rather stay in Tennessee with you.”
“So we were looking for neighborhoods 20 years ago,” he goes on, “and I came to East Nashville. It’s the only neighborhood in Nashville that reminded me of home, you know? It had this sort of loyalty culture, and it was a little gritty. It was, like, hardworking. It had a chip on its shoulder about the rest of the city. And I was like, ‘Yeah, this is my spot. These are my people.’”
As it turned out, the entire band, including Holcomb’s wife Ellie (who’s since gone on to a solo career) wound up in East Nashville, and thus settled on the name Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors. That moniker is especially apt given Holcomb’s songs, which so often address the ties that bind, the friends we lean on, and the embrace of family, conveyed with a soulful, folk-infused pop sensibility. The inclusive message, bolstered by inclusive music, capped off by the disarming frankness of Holcomb’s heartfelt voice, has since resonated with millions, and the band’s trajectory is an object lesson in the rewards of simply honing your craft and staying true to your vision without selling out. That certainly holds true for last year’s Strangers No More and the new Strangers No More, Vol. 2.
“With both of these records,” he says, “if anybody wants to hear a band having fun in the studio, they can listen to these records. We had the time of our lives. We weren’t worried about commercial stuff. We weren’t worried about the radio. We just were like, ‘Hey, we love making music as a band.’
“I’ve got to be myself,” adds Holcomb. “That’s what I learned from the music I loved growing up in Memphis — you know, bands like Lucero, who are just so incredibly original. It was important for me to be my own version of that. But, I mean, I was influenced as much by U2 as I was by Bob Dylan or Bob Seger or Tom Petty, so some of my songwriting has a sort of broad universality to it, like a U2 song, and I’ve grown to embrace that instead of apologizing for it. And I think that that’s part of the Memphis in me, too: being unapologetically myself and not trying to be somebody I’m not.”
Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors perform at the Mempho Music Festival Sunday, October 6th, at 4:30 p.m. on the Bud Light Stage. For details and a full schedule of bands, visit memphofest.com.
While Gonerfest is known for bringing cutting-edge bands to Memphis, one can’t forget the keen sense of history that also informs their bookings. This week’s Gonerfest 21 is a good reminder of that, with the opening night’s headliner being Oakland’s So What fronted by Derv Gordon, the original lead singer of The Equals, a band founded in 1965. They could have hit it big in America like so many during the British Invasion, had they ever bothered to invade. But, being one of the first multiracial beat combos ever, they had mixed feelings about that.
“We didn’t want to tour the U.S. because we wouldn’t have been able to cope with this ‘no Blacks’ business and not being able to stay in certain hotels or whatever,” Gordon recalls today, speaking from his home in England. “Still, ‘Baby, Come Back’ made the Top 40.” But with no U.S. touring, they never made it big here.
Though The Equals’ blend of freakbeat, soul, ska, and bubblegum rock was plenty cutting-edge (and plenty infectious) at the time, having a group with both Black and white players pushed the envelope even further. Booker T. and the MG’s may have been the only such small combo to precede them. But The Equals were more of a rock band, paving the way for later groups like The Foundations, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Love. And while they did find greater success in Europe and Asia, race still factored into everyday London life. Harassment by the cops was a regular feature of life for Black Londoners, and that in turn led to the creation of one of The Equals’ most enduring songs, “Police on My Back.”
“I left the guys at rehearsal and went to a main railway station to get some cans of drinks,” Gordon recalls, “and as I walked into the station, two huge men, one on each side, picked me up, lifted me off the floor, and said, ‘You’re nicked.’ I said, ‘I’m what? Why am I nicked?’ They just said, ‘You’ll find out,’ and they took me across the street to the police station. I was there for what seemed like forever. I gave them all my information, then said, ‘Excuse me, can you tell me why this is happening to me?’ A policeman says, ‘You resemble someone who murdered his girlfriend.’”
Gordon cleared things up only after requesting that his band be brought in to vouch for him. As they entered, “I could see them coming in with big grins on their face,” Gordon recalls. “Bastards!” Humor aside, the incident was a wake-up call for them. Soon Eddy Grant, The Equals’ lead guitarist and main songwriter (who later gained worldwide fame with his solo hit, “Electric Avenue”), would pen arguably the best song about being on the lam, later made famous via a cover version by The Clash, with its heartfelt cry, “What have I done?” And Gordon’s voice brought the phrase to life.
The band had other politically charged songs, including 1970’s anti-war “Black Skin Blue-Eyed Boys,” but their primary focus was on fun and groove, with charging rock riffs paired with infectious beats and Gordon’s fiery, soulful vocals, often portraying whimsical characters: “Soul Brother Clifford,” “Michael and His Slipper Tree,” “Viva Bobby Joe.” And while their sound got heavier and funkier by the late ’60s and ’70s, The Equals always kept things short and sweet. “I don’t think Eddy enjoyed doing long guitar solos,” quips Gordon now.
That makes The Equals’ music perfectly suited to the D.I.Y., short-and-sharp vibe of so many Gonerfest bands. And that’s an aesthetic shared by retro-stomp rockers So What, with whom Gordon first played in 2017, including an incendiary performance at Gonerfest 14 that year. Gordon feels they’re the perfect group to play Equals songs: true to that original stripped-down spirit, but with their own self-described “junkshop glam/bubblegum/proto-punk insanity.” Gordon notes that So What’s bassist, Sean M. Lennon (not the son of a Beatle), “is the only bass player I’ve ever heard actually do all the bass runs in ‘Police on My Back.’ And Jason [Duncan, singer and guitarist] actually knows more about Equals songs than I do!”
Gonerfest 21 runs from Thursday, Sept. 26th, through Sunday, Sept. 29th, at Railgarten, featuring dozens of bands. Visit goner-records.com for more information. So What takes the stage at 9:30 p.m. on Thursday, and Derv Gordon joins them at 10 p.m.
For those who love live Memphis music, Jeremy Stanfill has been a familiar presence for over a decade, often as a drummer for either Star & Micey or James & the Ultrasounds, or, in more recent years, as a singer-songwriter. And Stanfill, sporting a denim jacket, looking a little weathered, toting an acoustic guitar, fits the latter role perfectly. His words, his voice, and a few strummed chords are all he needs to put the songs over in a room. But if you’ve only heard Stanfill in solitary troubadour mode, you’re in for a surprise.
Over the course of the summer, he’s quietly been releasing another side of his sound, and it reveals just how expansive his musical imagination is. Don’t be surprised if you hear him on the radio one day soon. With three singles dropping on streaming services this year (so far), Stanfill has unveiled a new, confident approach that is unquestionably pop. July’s “4403 (Time Machine)” sports a slow disco beat, percolating synths, and the singer’s plaintive falsetto; the crunchy classic rock guitar underpinning last month’s “Wild Heart” spins a moody vibe for Stanfill’s tough/tender vocals; and the most recent, “Moving Day,” starts with his solo voice, then gives way to keyboard flourishes and stacked harmonies, complete with subtle pitch-correct effects.
But unlike some rookies hungering for stardom, Stanfill came to this glossy soundscape organically. At heart, he’s a deeply personal songwriter, and that has not changed even as he’s upped his production game. Even those recordings were the result of his long-standing friendships with fellow Memphians Elliott Ives and Scott Hardin, both studio-savvy engineers/producers/musicians who’ve worked in the big leagues (Ives with Justin Timberlake, Hardin with bands like Drew Holcomb, Saliva, and Drivin N Cryin).
“We’ve all been friends forever,” says Stanfill of the trio, “and we’ve always wanted to work together. We just haven’t had the time or it just didn’t work out until now, but we have so much love and respect for each other. We were connected to Elliott through Young Avenue Sound because Star & Micey were connected to Young Avenue Sound early on.”
Young Avenue Sound, in turn, was where they made the magic happen. But it wasn’t all fun and games. Stanfill was still reeling from a series of hits his life had taken after 2015. “I had a lot of things happen,” he says. “I got really bad off with drinking, then ended up getting sober. My mom passed away. I was in a long-term relationship that was falling apart just as I got a small record deal. I ended up making the record, but then chose to walk away from it. I thought it was the best thing for me as an artist — I just wasn’t happy with it. But I was still thinking, ‘I want to make something.’ So I called Scott and Elliott.”
Stanfill’s old friends knew he’d abandoned one album already. “They were like, ‘Do you want to re-record what you just did, and make it sound really good? Or would you like to throw caution to the wind and just see what we can come up with and be creative?’ I was like, ‘I want to do that: be creative, and feel like I did when I was a kid, and be excited about music again.’”
From there, “we started building these songs together. ‘Wild Heart’ was already written, but the other ones were built from scratch. We weren’t trying to make a record or anything at the time. I just wanted to make something different, and I just wanted to change the gears. And immediately there was this magical chemistry.”
In the finished products, Stanfill’s sincere folk disposition becomes larger than life through the trio’s collaboration. And, he says, there’s more on the way. For now, there are the online singles, with two of them (“4403” and “Wild Heart”) slated for a vinyl 45 release on October 30th. That will be celebrated with a Memphis Listening Lab premiere party on the day of release. Meanwhile, Stanfill carries on in troubadour mode, playing Music Export Memphis’ Tambourine Bash at the Overton Park Shell on October 10th, and opening for Bailey Bigger at The Green Room at Crosstown Arts on Halloween.
“I guess I learned from Covid what anxiety and depression really were.” Alice Hasen is recalling the genesis of her latest release some years ago, when cabin fever’s creeping trepidation was not only a personal matter, but a generalized fear for all of humanity. All of us went through similar emotions, but Hasen, being a classically-trained violinist and composer, and well-seasoned on the stages of the Mid-South, confronted them through her music. Hearing her EP Dream of Rain now, it’s clear that the stress helped her to produce the most powerful music of her career.
But if the Covid lockdown era jump-started the musical project, it quickly grew beyond that, thematically. That’s made clear in “Temperature Rising,” the EP’s opener. As she explains, there are multiple dimensions to both the global and the personal stress she’s confronting, and the opening track is about “all of the different ways the temperatures were rising around us. Primarily, the EP is mostly about climate change, wildfires, and the mental response to that. But it’s also definitely a product of the pandemic because our internal temperatures were rising and the political temperature was rising, too. So it’s a musical embodiment of all of those anxieties, for me, coming together and needing to find a way to be expressed.”
Hasen, of course, wouldn’t be the first artist to respond to end-of-the-world angst. Local rock band Heels, for example, released Pop Songs for a Dying Planet a couple of years ago, and that title says it all. But Heels’ “pop songs” were punk-infused barn burners reminiscent of, say, the Clash — exactly what you’d expect from apocalyptic rage. Hasen, on the other hand, takes a subtler approach. While she’s dabbled in funk, classic rock, and other genres in her previous solo work (and in the work of Blackwater Trio, her more collaborative band), this EP reflects a more introspective approach and a lush beauty all its own. Facing up to such anguish, it turns out, can be a very delicate thing.
The EP’s title song is a prime example. “Dream of Rain” begins quietly, Hasen’s violin meandering pleasantly before the subtle rhythm kicks in and, with Hasen’s conversational musings melodiously unfolding in the verse, it resembles nothing so much as Joni Mitchell. Clearly this is a world where beauty and fear come in equal measures. As Hasen reflects, “Part of me wants to let people interpret it for themselves, but for me, that song is about denialism and being invited into this world where nothing is wrong. It’s not real; it’s not a real world. So there’s extreme beauty and comfort, but also there’s something off about it that you can’t quite place. Yet there’s also sort of a hope that we can just dream of rain. Like in the bridge, where it kind of breaks down and turns into spoken word: If you can dream of rain, pray for rain, sing for rain, and dance for rain, then we can magically manifest it.”
Such magic is therapeutic in a world that seems to be falling apart. As Hasen notes, the vast scale and inexorable march of climate change “makes me feel trapped. But there is some hope in the album, too. Like, ‘Dream of Rain’ is an optimistic song for me because we’re trying to manifest rain to go to the places it needs to go.”
The fine line between hope and despair comes through loud and clear as the song unfolds:
“For generations this has been our home,” she sings, “our hiding place/But now we’re running where we used to play, all burned away/No fire escape, all burned away/Have you heard the news?/Where we’re going there is no more pain, no yesterday/Worrying or arguing on how to play the game/Funny how those words of peace and anger sound the same/When you’re the one in the flames.”
The grim imagery continues through other songs on the EP as well. “Goodnight Moon,” far from an homage to the popular children’s book, describes humanity as “coming in hot/Caught victim by our firelust,” as we become mere “victors of dust, prizes of rust.” But the first single off the EP, “Hold Still,” which drops September 20th, offers a kind of balm to this collective anxiety. Over some of the most delicate music of her career, Hasen sings some sage advice: “Hold still, this won’t hurt a bit/Finding the heartbeat, keeping the magic/Hold still, the world is an eggshell/We’re on the inside, nothing is tragic.”
Leaning into the fragility of the tune, Hasen also plays flute on it, a flourish that complements her arrangements for string ensemble throughout the EP. While she overdubbed herself for the latter effect during recording (with Estefan Perez on cello), she’s looking forward to featuring a live string ensemble and a flutist when she celebrates the EP’s release at The Green Room at Crosstown Arts on October 4th. And, she notes of the Green Room performance, “this will probably be the only show where I do the entire EP front to back, ever. Because this project, being full of emotions and a definite darkness, has been very laborious and emotionally taxing.”
Yet, on the flip side, Hasen’s looking forward to having fun while playing live this season. The first gig on the horizon will be the Mighty Roots Music Festival in Stovall, Mississippi (near Clarksdale), this Friday and Saturday, September 13th and 14th, with Hasen and band appearing Saturday at 2:15 p.m.
“I’m really excited about that,” says Hasen. “I spent four years in Clarksdale, and that was sort of where I was born as an artist, I think, because that was the first place I really got to experience playing non-classical music. And of course, it’s such a musically rich part of the world, I think it really influenced me and the way that I sound, and my particular voice on the violin, my songwriting voice.”
She pauses a moment, then adds, “And Stovall is an amazing place because it’s the birthplace of Muddy Waters. When I was looking in Clarksdale, I used to ride my bike over to Stovall and just sit under a pecan tree and look out over the fields for a little bit before going home.”
This coming weekend brings some overdue recognition to one of the city’s true jazz giants, Donald Brown. The pianist was born in Mississippi but raised in Memphis before going on to study at Memphis State (now the University of Memphis), where he was one of the “Memphis Three,” the trio of genius-level ivory-ticklers who emerged in the 1970s that also included James Williams and Mulgrew Miller. Of the three, Brown was arguably the most eclectic, ranging from classic straight-ahead jazz piano to more funk-influenced recordings over the course of 18 studio albums, plus appearances on records by the likes of Donald Byrd and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Through most of that time, he was a much-loved educator at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville from 1988-2020.
This Friday, September 6th, at 7 p.m., he’ll receive a Beale Street Brass Note and a tribute to his life in music at the Museum of Science & History (MoSH), complete with a concert by the Memphis Jazz Workshop (led by Steve Lee, one of Brown’s former students). And Saturday, September 7th, at 6 p.m., the Scheidt Family Performing Arts Center will host a reading by Valeria Z. Nollan from her upcoming biography of Brown. It’s a pair of events befitting a career as distinguished as Brown’s, and yet the cruel irony is that he won’t be playing at any of them.
That’s due in part to his aging. “I’ve been having problems with my hands, so I haven’t really performed for the last seven years, so it’s been kinda rough,” he says with some resignation. Yet, at 70, his mind is as sharp as ever, which bodes well for Nollan’s biography, slated for release in 2025.
Brown’s life since college has been single-mindedly focused on his mastery of the piano, but it wasn’t always thus. “I came to jazz kind of late,” he says. “Originally, I was a drummer, and then I played tuba in the marching band, baritone horn in the concert band, and trumpet in the ROTC band. Through high school [at South Side High School], even though I was playing trumpet and drums, I still knew enough about piano and harmony that I was arranging for my high school marching band. Playing trumpet probably influenced my writing more than my improvising, but playing drums definitely influenced me more as a pianist.”
And then there were the keyboardists who showed him the way, influences that came pouring out once Brown took to the piano as his main instrument when starting college. “All the great players that were in Memphis at the time just made me want to play the instrument. Booker T. [Jones] was a big influence. Marvell Thomas, Sidney Kirk, and other guys that were contemporaries of mine.” Like most Stax-affiliated players, these were virtuosos who were equally at home in jazz or pop settings. And that was true of Brown, too, as he progressed through college and began working more steadily.
“I played in a lot of top 40 bands and a lot of studio work,” Brown explains, “so I was influenced by the music of Motown and Philadelphia International, players like Bernie Worrell with Parliament-Funkadelic, Sly and the Family Stone, Prince. I was really into the group Yes and Rick Wakeman. So it was a very diverse amount of keyboard players and pianists that influenced me.”
A grounding in funk is reflected in some of Brown’s greatest jazz work, where strong left-handed bass figures can be key, as in two of his tributes to civil rights leaders, “A Poem for Martin” and “Theme for Malcolm.” Yet even those reveal Brown’s subtle mastery of classic jazz piano as well, which comes to the fore in his piece “Phineas,” a tribute to the greatest of all Memphis pianists, Phineas Newborn Jr.
Looking back on his storied life in jazz, Brown himself can hardly believe it. “I was blessed to have worked with so many other legends, like Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Donald Byrd, Toots Thielemans, and Johnny Griffin. But still, the highlight for me was playing with Art Blakey. I still have to pinch myself when I see recordings or videos and see that it actually happened. Even though I haven’t been there walking the streets with Bird and Bud Powell, I tell my students that that’s about as close as you can get to the source.”
You might think you know UNAPOLOGETIC. How could a Memphis music fan not know the likes of Cameron Bethany, AWFM, and PreauXX — or producers like C Major, Kid Maestro, and IMAKEMADBEATS? And yet there’s always more simmering below the collective’s surface than what its public-facing (or face-masking) side reveals. For example, at 10 p.m. this Friday, August 30th, at Bar DKDC, some talent whose faces may seem new to UNAPOLOGETIC fans will top the bill. And yet, paradoxically, they’ve been involved in the organization’s background for years, part of what’s always “simmering below the surface” there.
Take Nubia Yasin, whose first appearance on an Unapologetic release was in 2019, contributing to the track “Eve & Delilah” on the collective’s showcase album, Stuntarious, Vol. 4. It’s telling that her contribution to that track was, as she notes, “the poem at the end,” a spoken word passage, for that has been what her most public work has been centered on ever since … until now.
Moreover, her writing has been unflinchingly political, from her poetry to her more overtly activist work, including a stint as “chief storyteller” for the Black arts nonprofit Tone and her 2020 TEDx talk on gentrification. As she told Memphis Magazine in 2021, “Because I’m a Black woman, all the intersections that I exist in don’t allow me to be apolitical.” And her response to politics, and much of the world, has always been through the written word, which “informs everything,” as she said in 2021. “I’m multidisciplinary for sure. I do visual art, I do installation work, I do film, but the writing portion informs all of it. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to read. And I’ve been writing since I had the motor skills to hold a pencil.”
Nubia Yasin (Photo: A.C. Bullard)
And yet, ironically, her writing originally went hand in hand with her voice. “I was actually a songwriter before I was a poet,” she says now, “and I stepped away from singing because somewhere along the journey it just started feeling too audacious. Like, there’s something really bold about opening up and singing. So I stopped doing it when I was in my early teens, and pivoted more towards poetry because I felt more confident in that. It wasn’t until 2022 or 2023 when I worked as IMAKEMADBEATS’ assistant for a year, and I was just surrounded by music all day, every day, that my urge to do it just got bigger than my shame about not being perfect at it.”
Returning to music brought things full circle, in a sense. “When I was a kid, my first dream ever was to be a singer. I did choir, all those things. But I have a pretty unorthodox voice — it’s pretty deep for a woman vocalist. As I got older and deeper, I felt really, really insecure for a really long time about my singing. But over time I got prouder of how different I sound, and now I’m in a place where I’m really excited to share that with the world.”
Working with “MAD,” UNAPOLOGETIC’s founder and key producer, directly informed her return to singing, as the tracks that will be playing under her at Bar DKDC were collaboratively created by the two of them. The final product might surprise casual UNAPOLOGETIC fans, its reference points being more indie rock than hip hop. In truth, the label has always been eclectic, from Aaron James to Cameron Bethany, with many releases trading heavily on the poetry and wit of the lyrics. Yet Yasin follows her own star, her musings flowing over meandering melodies that might suggest The Smiths — if fronted by Nina Simone — or equally unpredictable destinations.
Speaking of long traditions at UNAPOLOGETIC, Eillo first showed up on my radar during my 2018 group interview at their old studio, when IMAKEMADBEATS quipped, “this young guy, 16 years old, he’s actually the son of Quinn McGowan, who is part of Iron Mic Coalition. He’s an intern here, and he’s amazingly talented.” By the following year, he was performing on the Stuntarious, Vol. 4 group project and was even name-checked in that album’s recurring comic book-like narration, where an arch villain decries, “And this child, Eillo, has continued to outwit you!”
Today, Eillo laughs at that moment and the talent who played the villain. “That was my dad on the vocal,” he chuckles. “He would be a super dope voice actor.”
Over five years later, Eillo is no longer the “child,” having proven himself on countless contributions to recording sessions. In 2021, he was listed, with MAD, as coproducer of “Depression and Redemption” on MAD Songs, Vol. 1. Later, the multi-instrumental parts he brought to Aaron James’ Nobody Really Makes Love Anymore were key elements of that album’s musicality, and his other flourishes, like the jazz piano outro to PreauXX’s “Regret” in 2022, could be breathtaking.
It all has flowed from Eillo’s fingers, who grew up in a creative, musical world. Not only is his father an especially savvy rapper; he drums and is a comic artist. His recently departed mother, Adrian Liggins, was a self-taught pianist and a well-respected soul singer under the stage name Mahogany. “She was an amazing singer songwriter,” Eillo says of her now, and credits much of his musicality to her support over the years.
This Friday, that musicality will be on full display as an attraction in its own right. “I want to do all the things that I love about music,” Eillo confides. “So I’m going to be doing some raps, doing some singing, some original songs, and doing some, just, playing — just playing and building a vibe. I’m a huge believer in having the music speak for itself. I’m not the best with words, like talking to people and stuff like that. But when it comes to music, that’s the stuff that I want to speak for me. I guess it’s the purest way I can express myself.”
Amber Rae Dunn with The Royal Blues Band at “A Tribute to the King” (Photos: Michael Donahue)
If you heard Amber Rae Dunn sing for the first time at the recent “A Tribute to the King,” you might want to know more about her.
The captivating singer filled the stage of Lafayette’s Music Room with her voice and personality at the event held August 11th, featuring headliner Ronnie McDowell as well as The Royal Blues Band with Wyly Bigger on keyboards.
“I am from Schererville, Arkansas,” Dunn says. “I grew up with six siblings and my dad was just a barber and my mom was a stay-at-home mom who took care of all of us. There was not a lot to do, but we had a three-acre garden. Just about every memory of my life, I have it in the garden. My favorite animal is a turtle, and I loved that I got to collect worms off tomato plants to feed to my turtle.”
Dunn also sang. “All the time. Everywhere around the house. I was definitely the loudest kid my parents have.”
Dunn with Leon Griffin
If she wasn’t singing “This Little Light of Mine” in church, Dunn was listening to her mother’s Al Green, Michael Jackson, and Prince albums and her dad’s ’90s country music. “So, I’m sure I was singing those songs as well.”
Like she still does, Dunn worked at her dad’s barbershop, Larry’s Hair Design, in West Memphis, Arkansas. She learned how to cut and style hair when she was in high school. “Other kids go to soccer practice or others take acting. I enrolled in hair school.”
She began singing on stage while attending Memphis College of Art for a degree in sculpture. Yubu Kazungu, a fellow student, invited her to join him at an open mic. She asked Kazungu, who heads Yubu and the Africans, why he thought she could sing. She says he told her, “I can hear you humming in the sculpture room working on a pot. You hum on key, and I feel like you can sing on key.”
Dunn joined Kazungu’s band and appeared with the group at open mics around town.
Kazungu “had been pestering” her to write a song, so Dunn came up with “Arkansas Line.” After some persuading from Kazungu one night at a soul food restaurant, Dunn sang the song in front of an audience while keeping the beat by snapping her fingers.
People at the show told her she was really good, but that she needed to go to Nashville because “that’s not really the type of music we have in Memphis.”
So Dunn got a job at Wayne’s Unisex, a Nashville barbershop. She went to clubs at night to “work tips for the band.” She did whatever she could, whether it was “do handstands” or “pinch cheeks,” to get customers to put money in the tip jars. “Then, finally, at the end of the night when everyone was good and drunk and half the people were gone, they would let me get up and sing two or three songs at 3 in the morning.”
Dunn was realistic about living in Nashville. “My plan was five years. If nothing happened, I was like, ‘Okay, I guess this isn’t the path I’m supposed to get on.’”
But nine months after she got to Nashville, one of her brothers was killed in a motorcycle accident, so she returned home to comfort her parents. “I’m a sucker for family.”
Starting at an open mic at Earnestine & Hazel’s, Dunn thought, “I need to meet people. If you build it, they’ll come.”
Mark Parsell stopped in one night and invited Dunn to check out his venue, South Main Sounds. Singing at one of Parsell’s Friday night shows, Dunn met Andrew Cabigao, who helped her get a job as social media representative at Mark Goodman’s MGP The Studio. While there, Dunn recorded her first album, Arkansas Line. Attending a songwriters workshop at Visible Music College, Dunn met Billy Smiley, founding member of White Heart, a Dove Award-nominated Christian rock group. He invited her to come to Nashville and maybe do an album at his studio, Sound Kitchen Studios.
She was two songs into the album when Covid hit. She released a couple of singles, but the album, I Guess That’s Life, wasn’t released until March 2023.
One of those songs, her popular “Barbershop,” is “just kind of talking about my dad’s barbershop and the type of customers we have. It’s just nostalgic.”
She also began going to workshops in and outside of Memphis in addition to bartending on Friday nights at South Main Sounds and performing with her band, Amber Rae Dunn and the Mulberries.
Dunn is thinking about a new album, but it might go in another direction. “Vocally, there’s a lot of soul and blues to my voice. But there’s also a lot of country. So, I don’t know. I feel like there’s a way to navigate the two.”
She’d like to mix “a Memphis sound” with her “traditional country sound.”
When she’s not cutting records or cutting hair, Dunn, who is married to Justin Craven, is performing with her band around town. She’s also a guest host with Leon Griffin on Memphis Sounds on WYPL.
Not forgetting her visual art chops, Dunn, who recently got into mosaics, currently is working on a mural at the Super 8 motel in West Memphis.
But Dunn is primarily sticking with songwriting, which she decided at 25 was going to be her journey. She told herself, “I don’t know what the outcome is, but I’m going to give it my all.”
See Amber Rae Dunn live at Momma’s, 855 Kentucky Street, Wednesday, August 28th, 7 p.m., with Mario Monterosso.
