Category: Music Features

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MonoNeon Gets His Quilt On

MonoNeon (Photo: Logan Schaal)

When I arranged to interview Dywane “MonoNeon” Thomas Jr., the Bluff City’s hardest working bass virtuoso since Duck Dunn, and an auteur in his own right, the plan was to talk about his latest album. “Okay,” I thought, “I’ll give it a listen,” and pulled up the latest release on Bandcamp: MonoNeon on Synthesizer. It’s fantastic! A tour de force of thick Moog sounds, chock-full of inventive harmonies and sonic textures that Tomita himself would envy. There was only one problem: We weren’t supposed to be talking about that new album; it was the other one, due to drop on July 26th, the one featuring both George Clinton and Mavis Staples. “Okay,” I thought, “that new album.”

It’s hard to keep up with such a prolific artist. Since 2010, he’s created at a furious pace, from his trademark YouTube videos wherein his bass mimics found spoken word clips, to one-off singles (like 2016’s “Ruff Enuff,” produced by Prince), to full-on albums — 29 of them, if you count EPs. And if some of those have a real “I built this in my bedroom” quality, the production standards and arrangements have steadily, inexorably evolved over the years.

Which brings us to Quilted Stereo, album number 30. It’s the ultimate expression of MonoNeon’s ongoing evolution and sophistication so far, without sacrificing any of his unpredictability and inventiveness. And several of the tracks have been out there already, including “Quilted,” his single featuring George Clinton.

As none other than IMAKEMADBEATS noted on social media when the track was released in March, “MonoNeon not only just dropped a song with goated funk legend George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, the whole song is MEMPHIS AF. The hook is literally ‘LOOK AT ME MANE.’ C’mon, bruh. Mane really brought George Clinton to US. THAT’S LEGENDARY. AF. People are really out here putting on for Memphis in innovative ways … both the mainstream and the alternative.”

When I caught up with MonoNeon last week, fresh off a European tour, he spoke of his working relationship with Clinton as a very organic, low-key phenomenon. “I met George two years ago, when I sat in with him at some music festival. And although our relationship is pretty new, I go down to Tallahassee a lot, to hang with him and his family. It wasn’t forced, it just happened in a casual fashion. He’s a pretty chill person.”

The song itself is a perfectly Clinton-esque ode to flying your sartorial freak flag high, even if that means wearing suits made of multicolored quilts. It’s a sentiment that Mr. “Get Dressed” himself can obviously relate to. And yet, as MonoNeon relates, the song, co-written with his longtime producer Davy Nathan and the rapper Wax, was practically an afterthought. 

As he explains, the tune is “about my whole aesthetic right now that I’m on, with my quilted clothes. And it came about when I was doing one of my videos, where I’m just acting up, you know, talking about how clean I am. A friend of Davy’s said, ‘That could be a song!’ His name is Wax; he’s a rapper. And we started writing the lyrics. My idea was to get George to do an intro for it and to feature him on the song.”

Nathan, as it turns out, is a key player in the MonoNeon universe. His home studio in Los Angeles is where MonoNeon does most of his recording these days, but their understanding goes deeper than your typical producer-artist relationship. “I usually always write my own songs,” says MonoNeon, “but when it comes to writing songs with other people, I usually go to him. He’s one of my best friends and a mentor, and I trust him with my vision. He understands me; he understands my little quirkiness. He’s really been helping me, seeing how he works and his way of writing — just being around him has really inspired me.”

Nathan also played a major role in MonoNeon’s collaboration with Mavis Staples on the song “Full Circle.” The title was apt, given the ties between the Staples family and MonoNeon’s own father. “I always wanted to do a song with Mavis, because I grew up listening to her, and she reminded me of my grandma, but also because my dad [Dywane Thomas Sr.] played bass with her and her father Pops Staples. So I’ve always been so in love with Mavis and her singing.

“Before this album, I told Davy, ‘I want to do a song with Mavis.’ I wasn’t sure if he was going to happen or not, but I told Davy, ‘Man, I’m going to let you have this, and I’m going to let you write a song, and hopefully me and Mavis can sing on it.’ So he sent me the song ‘Full Circle,’ and it was great. They sent it to Mavis and she loved it. She even told me that she prayed and prayed about it. And so it came to be. When we met in Chicago to record her vocals, I walked in the room and got butterflies.” 

The song, with its doo-wop-ish vocal bass riff evoking some gospel funk of the last century, is a stylistic home run, but that’s just one selection from an album as eclectic as any MonoNeon’s made. There’s the sing-along jam with Clinton, but also the chugging New Wave pop of “Church of Your Heart,” the jungle beat rap of “Segreghetto,” and what may just be the sparkling sizzler of the summer, “Jelly Roll,” full of glossy synth warbles and bass stabs, its video overflowing with extras seemingly right out of the Crystal Palace roller-skating scene of some years ago. Memphis AF.

It all has MonoNeon excited to be touring with new material, which he’ll soon be doing across the U.S. next month, culminating in his appearance at the Overton Park Shell on August 30th, followed by more European dates in the fall and winter. “I’m happy to be back home, but I’m ready to go back out,” he says. “I just want to be on stage and just continue evolving and continue to leave my little stamp down here before I get up out of this world. That’s all that matters to me.”

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Music Music Features

Elvis at the Shell

Elvis backstage at the Shell in 1955 (Photo: Robert Dye Sr. / Courtesy Overton pPark Shell Archives)

It seems like this should be national news — international, even. We’re talking about Elvis Presley, after all. And the 70th anniversary of his first great triumph as a live performer is fast approaching, although anyone who saw it advertised in the paper beforehand might have gotten his name wrong. Promoting the eighth annual Country Music Jamboree scheduled for July 30, 1954, an ad in the Memphis Press-Scimitar read, “In person, the SENSATIONAL radio-recording star, Slim Whitman, with Billy Walker, Ellis Presley and many others … Tonight at Shell, $1.25 reserved.”

Whoever this “Ellis” Presley was, he shared the Overton Park Shell stage with some mighty respected company amongst country music fans. Pretty good for only the second or third public performance of his life.

As it happened, it was more than pretty good: It was earth-shattering. In Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, Peter Guralnick quotes Presley’s guitarist Scotty Moore as saying, “With those old loose britches that we wore, it made it look like all hell was going on under there. During the instrumental parts he would back off from the mic and be playing and shaking, and the crowd would just go wild, but he thought they were actually making fun of him.” They weren’t. After the show, dozens of teens rushed backstage for autographs from this new singer.

That validation was exactly what the young Presley needed, only 11 days after the release of his first single, “That’s All Right.” 

It’s a story that Cole Early knows well, being the content and archives manager of the Overton Park Shell, not to mention curator of the Shell’s excellent Connie Abston Archive & History Exhibition. That short set, Presley’s first live show with just his recording band of Moore and Bill Black, was akin to a big bang of pop music, in stark contrast to Presley’s one earlier attempt to sit in with a band unfamiliar with his style. 

“His first public performance ever was in a honky-tonk on Summer Avenue, and he wasn’t received well,” says Early of Presley’s previous experience. “The country music audience there at the club that night just saw this flashy kid wearing pink, and this was like a dive bar, a honky-tonk place.” Then came his appearance at the Country Music Jamboree.

Knowing that the Shell bore witness to one of rock-and-roll’s great moments, Early wanted to celebrate the memory of Elvis’ performance in style. Since the Shell already offers the Backstage Experience tour of the Connie Abston Archive, it was easy to imagine the Shell stage as the culmination of an even greater tour. What Elvis fan could resist seeing various key locations in The King’s ascension, working east from Downtown, then ending up at the very stage on which Elvis first made his mark, with music by a live band?

Done in partnership with Backbeat Tours and the Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum, the whole package, billed as The 70th Anniversary of Live Rock ‘n’ Roll, will be available one day only, on Saturday, July 27th. Early says the tour will “originate Downtown at the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum. Of course, they have amazing exhibits down there. Then it’s going to do an Elvis-centric tour of Memphis, though not Graceland.” Expect stops at Sun Studio, the Presley’s Lauderdale Courts apartment, Elvis’ high school, the original Lansky Bros. clothing store, and the like. “And then they’ll come here to the Shell for a custom Backstage History Experience tour with mostly the Elvis points, and then at the end, a live re-creation of that first show, right where it happened.”

Finley Watkins & His Blue Moon (of Missouri) Boys will be playing, and Early says they’re a perfect fit. “You know, Elvis was a teenager when he played at the Shell, he was 19,” he says. “So it’s great having Finley, who’s also a teenager. And yes, he will have a Scotty and a Bill with him as well. That will be super exciting because they’ll have an upright bass, like Bill Black played during the original show. The Shell’s acoustics pick up that slap back really well. So we’re really proud that the Shell is the one venue where that can be realistic, in such a way that it couldn’t be in any other room or venue.” 

For more details and tickets, see the “special events” at backbeattours.com.

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Music Music Features

The Twin Lives of Stephen M. Lee

Steve Lee (Photo: Darius Williams)

Though you may have read about Steve Lee in the Memphis Flyer before, none of those articles have really been about him. That’s the paradox of being an educator who devotes so much time to public service, as Lee has done since founding the Memphis Jazz Workshop (MJW), one of the city’s premier institutions in music education, in 2017. The scope and impact of that nonprofit have been so great that it’s easy to forget about Stephen M. Lee, the virtuoso jazz pianist and recording artist. He’s getting in two lifetimes’ worth of existence for the price of one.

A clue to the mystery of how Lee manages to accomplish so much in both worlds can be found in the title of his new album, In the Moment. That’s clearly where he lives, as one listen to his deft improvisations will tell you. Composing in the moment, on the spot, is at the heart of jazz, and jazz is at the heart of Steve Lee. But beyond the album itself, one senses that it’s been his ability to improvise as the director of MJW that’s led to its impressive staying power. “We’ve been at about seven locations in the last seven years,” he says. Yet the MJW not only survived the onset of Covid; it has thrived ever since. “We’ve averaged from 50 to 70 students for each session since 2020,” he adds, and those numbers are only half the story. 

While those individual and group lessons, taught to teens during spring, summer, and fall sessions every year, are at the core of what Lee’s nonprofit has accomplished, perhaps the greater indicator of MJW’s success has been the degree to which its students have been performing for live audiences. Case in point, this Friday, July 13th, the MJW students will command the stage at the The Grove at the Germantown Performing Arts Center (GPAC), featuring “the area’s most talented young jazz musicians in a variety of combos, ensembles, and even a big band,” as the GPAC site notes. 

“This will be our third year [at The Grove],” Lee says. “It’s a great location, and they pretty much donate the space to us. Paul [Chandler] and his staff are great — the only thing we have to do is show up. It’s a great opportunity for the organization.” Moreover, MJW players can be seen on the third Saturday of every month as the featured attraction at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (the next event being August 3rd, noon to 2 p.m.).

And this is where the two lives of Steve Lee begin to meet, as some MJW students distinguish themselves enough to finally play on the bill with the maestro himself. That too will be apparent this Sunday, the day after the GPAC show, when Steve Lee will headline at the Sunset Jazz Series at Court Square. 

“A few students will be playing on July 14th with me,” he says with a hint of pride. “The drummer, Kurtis Gray, is just 18. He just graduated from high school.” Flyer readers will know his name from our story on the Jazz Ensemble of Memphis, produced by David Less in emulation of the classic 1959 album, Young Men from Memphis: Down Home Reunion. “And the bass player’s also one of my former students, the drummer’s brother, Kem Gray Jr.,” Lee adds. “And then the sax player, Michael Price, just graduated from UT-Knoxville. He’s about to go to [grad school] at Rutgers.”

When Price was just a junior at UT, he shared some thoughts with the MJW Instagram page that may stand as the greatest endorsement of the program to date, saying, “The life skills that I gained from the Memphis Jazz Workshop were discipline, communication, honesty, support, love, mentorship, and community. … Understanding the intricacy of these different skills and their relationship to music is vital and you need to have all of these qualities in order to seriously pursue music, and I’d go as far as to say to succeed in life.”

In a way, it harks back to the glory days of Manassas High School, which trained generations of jazz greats here, starting in 1927 with educator Jimmie Lunceford, who polished his school band into a nationally recognized recording group, the Chickasaw Syncopators. “I think [MJW] is a continuation of what he was doing,” Lee told me in 2018, speaking of Lunceford. “But Memphis never had a jazz workshop like the workshops we have now. They always had jazz in the schools.” Today, Lee is forging that culture of excellence on his own, outside of any infrastructure, finding venues to hold classes anywhere he can, albeit now much more recognized by funding institutions, and always recruiting his faculty from among the city’s best jazz players. 

He benefited from local greatness himself, when he studied under the great Memphis pianist Donald Brown (on the faculty at UT-Knoxville for many years), which in turn led to Lee’s years in New York City, prior to his return to Memphis. All that may explain the dedication and determination with which he’s thrown himself into leading the MJW. And the organization’s success has reflected well on both Lee and the city, a fact that was commemorated this past April when Lee received the Memphis Symphony Orchestra’s (MSO) Eddy Award, recognizing him as community leader in music.

“As chair of the Eddy Award selection committee, we agreed that Steve Lee embodies the award’s meaning as his incredible career has brought young people from all backgrounds, races, and life experiences together through the power of jazz music,” said Jocie Wurzburg in a statement on behalf of the MSO. Now, this weekend will show off both the MJW and Lee in their best light. 

And, as he explains, his two skills feed each other, though balancing them has been demanding. “I have to be the teacher, the principal, the janitor, all of it,” he laughs. “I’m not one of those executive directors who just lets other people do it. Because, you know, it helps me. I don’t really have a lot of time to practice. So showing information to these students, that’s a part of practicing because I still have to sit at the piano and show them what I want them play. So it helps. That’s why I enjoy doing it. Because it is a form of practice, and you know, the students motivate me.” 

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Happie Hoffman Leans Into Love

Happie Hoffman (Photo: Dave Creaney)

When imagining a musician on tour, a series of stock images probably go through your mind: a scruffy van loaded with gear, T-shirts in bad need of a laundromat, fast food wrappers stuffed in the back of an amp. But in reality, musicians have their antennas out for any venue that works, traveling not only by road, but by rails, air, and even on the high seas. Take Memphis native Happie Hoffman, aka Happie, a singer/songwriter in the indie-pop-folk vein who recently played a cruise ship. That alone isn’t that novel — there are many musically themed cruises of the Caribbean — but this one left from Tromsø, Norway, bound for the Arctic Circle. 

If that sounds like a dream vacation to any Memphian oppressed by the current heat wave, there was far more to it than that, and it’s emblematic of Hoffman’s unique commitment to community. She describes her fellow passengers not as fans or patrons to be entertained, but as “about 150 friends, friends of friends, and creative entrepreneurs.”

Uniting all these friends was a desire to heal the world in multiple ways. The many friends on the tour came together under a few organizations that approach the issues of our day in complementary ways. “The cruise,” says Hoffman, “was in partnership with a morning dance company called Daybreaker, the Pachamama Alliance that’s working on saving the Amazon and the rain forest, and the Belong Center. Their mission is to help end loneliness.”

The Daybreaker organization may be unknown to some, though word of their unique mission — “to dance with reckless abandon at daybreak, sans substances, turning nightlife on its head” — has rapidly spread over the past decade. And it’s evolved beyond dancing, with multiple global destinations and “immersive expeditions to the most tender parts of the planet … raising millions of dollars for climate initiatives,” as their website explains. Along the way, co-founder Radha Agrawal wrote the book Belong: Find Your People, Create Community, and Live a More Connected Life and founded the Belong Center. 

And, given that the poles are indeed some of the “most tender parts of the planet” in this age of climate change, Hoffman’s journey makes more sense. “I have played on four voyages to Antarctica over the past two and a half years, that started with this group of friends traveling, and this was our first time going to the Arctic,” she says.

It all dovetails nicely with Hoffman’s concern for community in all its manifestations. As detailed in our 2022 feature on her, her melodious voice first found an outlet at Temple Israel, eventually leading to her being named cantorial soloist there. “I’m a fully integrated part of the clergy team at Temple Israel,” she said at the time. “My aim is to move people spiritually, and my mode of doing that is music.” 

She now lives full-time in New York City and is no longer as involved in Temple Israel services, singing mainly during the High Holy Days here, but the quest to move people spiritually has remained. Lately, her approach to that has not been through Jewish spiritual music or protest songs about the petroleum-based economy, but through her own observations about love. 

Happie Hoffman as a child with her father (Photo: Ann Margaret Hedges)

Indeed, her latest songs, dropping as singles throughout this summer and ultimately culminating in an EP this fall, focus solely on love. Still, that leaves a lot of emotional territory for her to explore as she travels and performs, single-mindedly pursuing her secular music career. The first single, for example, which dropped last month, is all about her father. 

“This album is about different cases of love in our lives, whether they be romantic, or dear friends, or familial,” she says, adding, “and familial love is a beautiful aspect of that, a very real one.” It’s evoked beautifully by the album’s title track, “Shooting Star,” a meditation on how fleeting our lives are, even as the love between a parent and a child endures. The video for the song is being released on Wednesday, July 3rd, and it’s a work that comes very much from the heart. 

“I wrote the song when I was home for the holidays, in a songwriting session with one of my best friends and cowriters, Ori Rakib. And as we began to write the chorus, he did a thing that people writing music often do. He said, ‘This song is about your dad.’ And I immediately started crying. And then the song poured out of us.”

Songs that pour out from that emotional place are what Happie Hoffman is all about, and these days, with the world in turmoil and climate disasters looming, she may well have found the key to the higher sense of community that we’re capable of, one that can span the globe: the many faces of love. 

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Lina Beach Rising

Lina Beach live in Australia (Photo: Bianca Holderness)

Growing up in Franklin, Tennessee, Lina Beach came to love playing music, but she never imagined that her playing would go as far and as fast as it did once she moved to Memphis. “Since I was born, both my parents sat me at the piano, and my dad started teaching the violin at 5 years old,” she says, “and I wanted to be around that however I could. But when I got to college, I didn’t necessarily believe in myself enough to pursue a career as an artist and musician.” These days, all that has changed.

As a teenager learning guitar, Beach knew what she liked: Joe Walsh, U2, classic rock, Stevie Wonder, The Beatles. Then one day a new sound seized her imagination. “I was out eating lunch at a hot chicken place in Franklin and they played ‘I’m Still in Love with You’ on the speaker. And it literally stopped me and my friend mid-conversation and we got out our phones and Shazam’d it.

“That became one of my all-time favorite songs. I found the vinyl LP in a shop in Downtown Franklin and that was a heavily rotated album for me. When I got to Rhodes, I made that Memphis connection and I started to learn that that’s where that music was made. This was before I knew about the Hi Rhythm Section. I just knew I was in Memphis.”

That changed in the spring of 2021 when she landed an internship at Royal Studios, where Al Green and other Hi Records artists had recorded with the Hi Rhythm Section. Suddenly she was working directly with Boo Mitchell, whose father had produced those hits for Hi.

“When I got to Royal I was soaking it all in: how to make records, learning the engineering side, and watching Boo work,” she recalls. “Boo allowed me to get my hands dirty, wrapping cables, learning how to match the mic to the channel in the [mixing] board. And he let me sit at the board and learn commands in Pro Tools, and I just felt so empowered. I took that back to Rhodes and would help lead the live sound events all over campus, and helped teach other students, too.”

About six months into her time at Royal, a fellow intern had brought an acoustic guitar to the studio and Beach started idly playing it. “I’d been inspired to soak up all I could at the studio and go home and learn the guitar riffs. I was playing a lot at home. But it wasn’t until halfway through the summer that Boo first heard me play guitar in the lobby. He came in and asked, ‘Who’s playing that guitar?’ That was a life changing moment. Boo said, ‘Okay, I didn’t know you could do all that.’ And then he looked kind of puzzled and said, ‘It doesn’t make sense. I’m looking at this girl, and she sounds like a 70-year-old Black man!’”

Mitchell began incorporating Beach’s playing into sessions, most notably on his son Uriah’s track “Exotic Love,” released last year. And then came a game changer: Beach received a grant from the Rhodes Institute for Regional Studies, which contributes $3,000 to each fellow for summer projects and research. Beach, who had just begun writing her own songs, decided that her “research” would be recording an album, and Mitchell was all for doing it at Royal.

For the past two years, that’s been at the center of Beach’s life. The songs began to pour out of her, and, in another watershed moment, her backing band for some of those sessions turned out to be the Hi Rhythm Section. That group still includes brothers Rev. Charles Hodges and Leroy “Flic” Hodges, plus Archie “Hubbie” Turner, who all played on Hi’s hits half a century ago, not to mention Steve Potts on drums, cousin to original Hi drummer Al Jackson Jr. And until his death 10 years ago this month, Mabon “Teenie” Hodges, with his uniquely stinging guitar lines, was also central to the group.

To this day, Hi Rhythm remains in demand, especially as the core band in the musical documentary series Take Me to the River, and as the touring group representing the film on the road for the past 10 years. “When I was in the studio with them recording my album, it was a dream come true,” says Beach. But by 2023, fate was about to give her another undreamt-of boost.

“I think it was in May, right after I graduated,” she recalls. “The guitar player that was filling in [for Teenie Hodges] moved out of town right before this big Hi Rhythm show and Boo was like, ‘Uh, Lina, do you think you could learn these 20-plus songs in the next two weeks?’ From that point on, I was listening to the songs in all my free time. I listened to all those Teenie parts — really studied them. And I don’t even think Boo told the band that I was the guitarist! I just showed up at sound check with my guitar and I had to kind of breathe in my car for a second before I went inside. Then I walked in and they saw me and were like, ‘Lina! Are you going to be playing with us today?’ I was like, ‘Apparently so, yeah.’ So I get up there and plug in, and Charles is playing Al Green’s ‘It Ain’t No Fun to Me.’ As Charles was playing the organ, I jumped in and he was like, ‘Oh man, that’s amazing!’ He said, ‘I can feel that!’ All my nerves melted away then; it was a huge validation from the band themselves.”

The rest, as they say, is history, as Beach has proved herself a worthy addition to this legendary group. As Boo Mitchell noted before their appearance at the RiverBeat Music Festival, “Hi Rhythm features Lina Beach, who is officially filling in the Teenie Hodges guitar spot. The band has adopted her as their sister. She’s the official guitarist and she’s also an artist.”

And so, even as she still puts the finishing touches on her debut album, Beach has ascended to the heights of Memphis soul royalty, holding her own with Hi Rhythm, even leading them through her own songs as they’ve toured Australia, England, and the U.S. this year, not to mention accompanying the likes of William Bell at England’s Red Rooster Festival. Not bad for a 23-year-old (who sounds like a 70-year-old Black man).

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Chris Milam Goes Back to the Future

Chris Milam (Photo: Andrew Trent Fleming)

You can trace the shifts in Chris Milam’s songwriting style through the type of guitar he’s opted to play over the course of his three albums. And music fans who’ve come to appreciate the more sparse Americana of his first two albums, Kids These Days and Meanwhile, will hear the change immediately when they play his latest album, Orchid South. The songs mine an anthemic, power pop vein that he’s hinted at before, but never embraced to this degree. And of course, with power pop comes the sound of electric guitars. In this case, the triple guitar team of Milam, Steve Selvidge, and Luke White.

Electric guitar has always been in Milam’s toolbox, but never in quite this way. “In the lead up to making Kids These Days, and then touring that album in 2017, I was playing solo electric. There’s a lot of acoustic guitar on there, too, but the main guitar you hear me playing on that album is a hollow body, Gibson-sounding, reverbed-out electric. So yeah, there was a couple years there where I was doing a fair amount of electric playing — in solo shows. But then I shifted to acoustic surrounding Meanwhile.”

Chris Milam (Photo: Lisa Mac)

That sophomore effort, released in 2020, was a sparse masterpiece of which Milam said at the time, “I inadvertently wrote a good album for quarantine, honestly. It’s basically 10 different versions of how we deal with loss, or survive being in limbo.” Along with that pensive mood came pensive music, with acoustic guitar at its foundation.

Now that’s all changed.

“For this one, I don’t know, maybe this is impolitic to say,” he says, “but I’ve just been bored to tears by so many singer-songwriter albums” with acoustic guitar at their heart. “I just was like, I think that you can discuss weighty topics and still make an album that is fun and dynamic and that people actually want to listen to.”

And that’s a fair description of Orchid South, which seems custom-made to burst from radio speakers while blasting down the highway on a hot summer night. “I’ve always been a big fan of power pop from the 1970s and alt-rock of the 1990s,” he says. “That was the stuff that I was listening to when I first picked up a guitar and when I first really fell in love with music. That was really the soundtrack of my adolescence.”

Yet it wasn’t until recently that Milam, now 40, felt he could address those years with the proper tone and voice. And the tone, he knew, would have to be full of jangle and crunch. Who better to bring that sound than Selvidge and White?

“Most of the lead guitar is Steve, and all the 12-string Rickenbacker guitar is Luke, kind of on the left channel. With Steve on the right. I added rhythm guitar, for the most part.” Moreover, the album gains its immediacy and energy by virtue of having largely been tracked live, with the players all in the same room. “At the heart of the album, the core band was Shawn Zorn on drums, Mark Stuart on bass, and then me and Luke. And then Steve came in for an overdub day, and the horns [Art Edmaiston and Marc Franklin] did an overdub day. And that was pretty much it.”

The end product is a big, radio-friendly sound that conjures up the longings and impulsiveness of adolescence. And ironically, though Meanwhile came out during the onset of Covid, this album is even more of a product of that time. “A good chunk of the album was written during quarantine,” Milam says. “And I was probably going a little stir crazy and wanting to be loud and kick out the jams.”

Yet he was also applying his more finely-honed writerly chops to an earlier version of himself, the young man listening to alternative radio in the ’90s. “When I was a teenager, growing up in Memphis, I was listening to 96X [FM],” he recalls. ““Hey Jealousy’ was one of the first songs I learned on guitar, and there’s a lot of Gin Blossoms influence on this album.” But there was more to evoking his youth than turning his amp up to 11.

“My earlier stuff had been more in the Americana or folk realm, and so the lyrics were a little bit more of that narrative style,” reflects Milam. “But when I was a teenager, I didn’t really experience things in that way. It was all very heightened emotions, very amplified feelings, and everything was just evocative and impressionist. That was the type of writing I did when I was that age and I wanted to get back to that again, but hopefully do a better job on it. Instead of narrative lyrics, I wanted stuff that had more freshness, or was a little bit more evocative. That makes emotional sense, even though it doesn’t necessarily make literal sense.”

Chris Milam is in the midst of a national solo tour now, but will celebrate the release of Orchid South with a full band at Railgarten on Saturday, August 10th, with Alexis Grace opening.

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The Subteens Level Up

The Subteens (Photo: Chris Reyes)

The resurgence of vinyl records has not only brought a plethora of new material sporting colorful platters and beautiful cover art, it’s given a second life to albums that were originally released when CDs were king. The vagaries of time having winnowed the wheat from the chaff, albums from decades past that have only taken on more artistic value can now be elevated to a more perfect medium: vinyl.

None are more deserving than the Subteens’ 1999 CD-only debut, Burn Your Cardigan, freshly reissued on wax by Back to the Light Records last month. Recorded just after seminal punk/indie drummer John “Bubba” Bonds joined the group, it revealed what a perfect complement he was to the visions of co-founders Mark Akin (guitar and vocals) and Jay Hines (bass), and established the Subteens, with their mastery of adrenaline-charged pop-punk originals, as one of the best Memphis groups at the turn of the 21st century.

Yet, as Hines relates today, Bonds was nervous about the sessions. On the first day of recording, Hines says, “We had to go find him, and it was raining really hard. He was down at the South End or somewhere, and we had to go get him, get his drums, and then go by Buster’s to get him a fifth of Jack or something. Then we went back to the studio and got busy.”

Album Cover Artwork: Mike McCarthy

Not that any of them were plastered as they recorded. They took the album very seriously. “We were just trying to get him to relax a little bit,” says Hines. “He didn’t get sloppy or anything — he played to a click track on a lot of that. But that made him nervous. Also, he had just joined the group. We had had maybe one practice and maybe one show with him at that point. But he just nailed it. Most of those [songs] were done in one or two takes. So miraculous!”

Also seemingly miraculous at the time was the studio’s proximity to cheap eats. The sessions were booked at Robbie Pickens’ Nu-Star Studio, not a well-known recording destination even then. “It was over off Summer behind Sonic. You could literally walk out of the studio, climb over his back fence, and be at Sonic. So that was amazing,” Akin recalls today.

“Robbie was not a typical person that a Midtown fan would seek for help producing a record, you know?” notes Akin. “I can’t remember why we ended up with him. Maybe he was just cheap. But for whatever reason, the stars aligned. Robbie really understood the punk that we were coming from. But I think he also understood that we wanted a little bit of gloss on it, a little bit of pop sensibility. Robbie was able to have a foot in both of those worlds and bring it together. I just can’t overstate enough how helpful Robbie was.”

Surprisingly, for a band that seems to have had great guitar sounds dialed in from the start, the crunchy riffs of Burn Your Cardigan came down to Pickens’ production skills. “I could not get the guitar sound right,” says Akin. “And finally, Robbie was like, ‘Mark, leave. Go to Sonic! I’m going to get your guitar sound.’ Later, he calls me to come back in and listen to it, but he won’t let me see what he’s done. And it sounds fantastic. Then he said, ‘Okay, let me show you how I got it.’ He had put a really small amp, like a Pignose, in this tiny closet, and had somehow gotten this magical guitar tone out of it.”

The end result was indeed a perfect blend of noisy punk attitude and the band’s unmistakable pop instincts. “Even our favorite punk bands are really pop bands at heart, or at least my favorite punk bands,” says Akin. “The Sex Pistols, the Ramones … And Jay’s really into the Buzzcocks, Sham 69. I’m really an AC/DC [fan]. That’s all hooky pop, just with harder rock guitar tones and different tempos. And every single one of those songs are arranged with a purpose and they’re arranged in a sensible, linear way.”

The ultimate statement of this approach may be Side One’s closer, Billy Joel’s “You May Be Right,” thrashed out with complete sincerity as if it were the latest track by the Clash. There’s a defiance to the track that helps one understand the band’s historical context. The late ’90s were trending away from the punk/pop axis, toward more introspective, watery styles like “shoegaze.” Shoegaze bands, it must be said, often ditched the rock-and-roll threads of jeans and a T-shirt in favor of … sweaters.

“The title of the album was totally Mark,” says Hines. “This was back when he was working at the Memphis Pizza Café, and I came in and he had this funny look on his face. He said, ‘What would you think about …’ — and he sort of hesitated, I guess because he thought I would laugh at it — ‘Burn Your Cardigan?’ And once I realized where he was coming from, I thought it was perfect.”

No shoegazing was going on with these guys. As Akin remembers, “When we first came out, we weren’t super well received. I feel like people didn’t quite know what to make of us at first because we wrote songs with beginnings, middles, and ends. We tried to have a chorus that got in your head and we tried to make the songs short. We would just go to play 10 songs and get the hell offstage. But then when that record came out, I think it really represented what we were all about. ‘This is what we are!’ And we started getting more people at the shows, and that never stopped. It’s always fun to have people come and watch you play.”

The Subteens cap off the Record Fair at Soul & Spirits Brewery on Saturday, June 15th, and will celebrate the reissue of Burn Your Cardigan with the River City Tanlines at Bar DKDC on Saturday, July 6th.

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Music Music Features

‘I Am the Cosmos’ at 50

Photo: David Bell

Where the Downtown skyline overlooks the Wolf River harbor and the Mississippi River, cosmic sounds will soon reverberate from the Maria Montessori School Amphitheater, where local musicians will come together to perform the songs of the late Chris Bell at the school’s ongoing River Series. Bell, the mastermind behind Big Star and his posthumous solo record, I Am the Cosmos, was born and raised in Memphis. While he saw little commercial success in his lifetime, neither his still-growing international cult fanbase nor his family have forgotten about his acclaimed body of work. 

One of those carrying the torch for Bell is Brittain Wells, whose mother, Cindy Bell Coleman, is Bell’s younger sister. Wells now helps manage the school’s River Series concerts and wanted to honor the 50th anniversary of Bell recording the song “I Am the Cosmos,” the title track of Bell’s lone solo album. “Maria Montessori School is where our 3-year-old son attends,” Wells says. “How sweet that we can celebrate 50 years of this magical music as a family, a school family, and a Memphis community, while also raising money for Chris’ great-nephew’s school.” 

The concert, set for Saturday, June 8th, at 5 p.m., will feature Big Star drummer Jody Stephens, Van Duren, Greg Cartwright, Adam Hill, Alex Greene, Krista Wroten, and more. The Turnstyles open the show. 

A post-Big Star era Chris Bell performs an outdoor show in 1975 in London. His brother and then-manager David Bell funded the promotional trip to England. (Photo: David Bell)

Wells, 38, was born years after Bell was tragically killed at age 27 following a 1978 car wreck on Poplar Avenue. “It’s amazing. I never knew him, but I feel him all the time through his music and his fans,” Wells says. “Seeing how many people are devoted to his legacy and music makes me happy. I’m thrilled he can live on in so many ways.”

Along with “I Am the Cosmos,” Bell will also forever be entwined with the brick hallways of Ardent Studios in Memphis. That’s where the guitarist/vocalist spent countless nights co-engineering his band’s now-classic 1972 debut, Big Star’s #1 Record (Ardent/Stax Records). On that disc, the original Big Star lineup, which comprised Jody Stephens and the late Alex Chilton and Andy Hummel, crafted pristine power-pop standards like “In the Street,” “Feel,” and “Thirteen.” 

After the LP failed commercially, a distraught Bell tumultuously exited the band and even quit music for a year. But from that dark period came inspiration, and a born-again Bell ultimately landed on his feet inside Shoe Productions, where he tracked “Cosmos,” his melancholy magnum opus. It all started at Huey’s on Madison Avenue, where Bell happened to sit next to sound engineer Warren Wagner, who’d just co-founded Shoe.  

“We were sitting at the bar talking, and Chris said he liked what I put together over at Shoe,” Wagner told me while I was researching my book, There Was a Light: The Cosmic History of Chris Bell and the Rise of Big Star. “Within the next day or two, Chris calls, and we end up in the studio one night with just him and me. … He made some acoustic recordings, and then we got a band over there with him. We ended up doing ‘I Am the Cosmos’ in one night. We probably didn’t do more than two takes.”

For the “Cosmos” session, Bell enlisted drummer Richard Rosebrough and bassist/keyboardist Ken Woodley of the band Alamo. Though both have since passed away, they were interviewed for There Was a Light and shared vivid memories of recording “I Am the Cosmos.” 

“Chris was fun to work with at Shoe,” the late Rosebrough recalled in 2013, two years before his death. “He always had a smile on his face, a kind of evil grin. The ‘cat that just ate the canary’ expression, but he wouldn’t talk a lot. He was this shining star over in the corner of the room. He was excited to be in a different studio with different people, playing his own songs.”

Woodley, who died last year at 74, also recalled an eccentric, witty Bell. “He was quiet and could sometimes look a bit stern. He could also be a perfectionist,” Woodley said in 2017. “He’d say, ‘I know you can do better than that.’ I’d be like, ‘Chris, I just learned it!’ But we always got along great. I wasn’t a part of the Big Star clique, the people he’d grown up with, so we were friends on a different level.” 

Though often described as introverted in daily life, he was anything but quiet in the studio, especially while tracking “I Am the Cosmos.” “Chris would turn it up just as loud as he could,” Rosebrough recalled. “He’d get this piercingly bright, brilliant sound. It’s all distorting and melting down, but it’s just a dynamite sound.”

The song still powerfully resonates for many, including Jody Stephens, who will play drums on “I Got Kinda Lost” and “Get Away” at the River Series concert. “It just comes in so heavy. Not as people define ‘heavy’ these days, but emotionally heavy — and instrumentally, too.” 

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Music Music Features

Piano Man

“Hello, Is That You?” music video (Photo: Courtesy Wyly Bigger | Youtube)

Wyly Bigger plays just about every notable piano in town in his video, “Hello, Is That You?”, from his recently-released album, Broken Telephone.

He tickles the ivories on the spinet at Earnestine & Hazel’s and at Sun Studio, and at the grand pianos at the Peabody Skyway and the Orpheum Theatre, to name a few.

The first piano he ever played, though, was a “just a little Fisher Price kid’s piano,” says Bigger, 26.

A native of Marion, Arkansas, Bigger began picking out songs on the piano by ear when he was three. The little piano was “just a plastic, bright, and colorful thing. It probably had 10 keys on it.”

It belonged to his sister, singer-songwriter Bailey Bigger, but “she didn’t take to it at all. She could care less about it. I kind of took it over.”

Wyly’s parents bought an old piano that their church wasn’t using and put Wyly in piano lessons.

He began taking Suzuki-method piano lessons when he was 4 at the University of Memphis. “I wasn’t a huge fan of it. Just because I wanted to play by ear and I wanted to do more. Even from a long time ago I loved Elvis and Jerry Lee. That kind of music.”

Wyly even adopted the Elvis look. “For Halloween in first grade I was Elvis. My grandma sewed me a gold suit to wear like Elvis.”

Wyly Bigger (Photos: Michael Donahue)

He also began wearing gel in his hair. “I think we even got some temporary black hair dye from the party store to make it really look like Elvis.”

His next teacher made him learn music, but he also encouraged him to play by ear.

Wyly’s first public performance was playing rock-and-roll on his keyboard at Big John’s Shake Shack (now Tacker’s Shake Shop) in Marion when he was 9 years old. He continued to play there every other week when he was in high school.

He began writing instrumentals when he was about 14. “South Side of Southern,” which was “about growing up in Marion,” was his first song with lyrics.

Wyly didn’t want to sing at first. “I was terrified to sing. I didn’t like it at all.”

His piano teacher encouraged him to start singing along while he played piano during lessons.“I kind of ripped the Band-Aid off.”

Wyly majored in marketing at Mississippi State University, but he continued to play piano at night at local watering holes.

After he graduated, Wyly went to work for a marketing agency and, later, at Marion’s Sultana Disaster Museum.

But he continued to play music in public. Last July, he decided to quit his job and do nothing but music.

He began playing piano in the lobby at the Peabody, where he still plays on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. “The Peabody is a lot of everything. Outside of rock-and-roll and ’50s soul and R&B stuff, I also really love the old jazz standards. Like Cole Porter and George Gershwin-type songs.”

In 2020, Wyly recorded a self-titled EP of his songs. “Back in Love” — “just a story of unrequited love.” — got the most streams.

He describes the EP, which he and Bailey produced, as a “rock-and-roll Fats Domino-swing-type of thing. I had drums, bass, keys, guitar, and sax.” He recorded the EP at Memphis Magnetic Recording Co. with Scott McEwen doing the engineering and mixing.

Bailey, who sang background vocals on the EP, performed with Wyly on occasion back in the day at their church and at the Shake Shack. They’re both on the Madjack Records label.

He began recording his new album in May of 2023. “It took a while just ’cause we hired a team of musicians and we had to work around their schedules.”

The album features Danny Banks on drums, Jim Spake on saxophone, Mark Edgar Stuart (who produced the album) on bass, and Matt Ross-Spang on guitar.

The idea to have Wyly playing pianos all over Memphis “was all Landon Moore. He filmed, directed, and edited the whole video. He’s a bass player in town. He plays with Cyrena Wages and Marcella [Simien].”

One of Wyly’s favorite pianos is the grand piano at the Peabody Skyway. “I love to play that piano and picture myself up in one of the live big band dances they had back in the ’40s.”

He knocked all those piano pedals while wearing his black-and-white Royal Wind spectator shoes. “I bought those things at a thrift store in Starkville when I was in college”

And, he says, “I tell you, they’re a conversation piece. I can’t wear them without somebody saying, ‘Man, where did you get those shoes? Those are amazing.’”

Wyly likes to wear the shoes at the Peabody. “It will turn heads and maybe get me tips. Anytime I dress up, I’m typically going to wear those.”

To view the “Hello, Is That You?” music video, go to tinyurl.com/yckwu33k. Wyly Bigger will perform Friday, May 31st,
7 p.m., at Hernando’s Hideaway.

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Music Music Features Uncategorized

Cyrena Wages’ Vanity Project: Coming Home to Memphis Soul

Cyrena Wages (Photo by Alysse Gafkjen)

Nashville, being a music industry city, draws a lot of talent, even from Memphis. Yet there often comes a moment of reckoning for that talent, when everything that makes an artist unique collides with all the factors that make the industry an industry — the assembly line, if you will. That, at least, was the trajectory of Memphis-born Cyrena Wages, a singer/songwriter equipped with such a rich, soulful alto that Nashville called out to her for most of the 2010s. There, her duo with her brother Houston, the Lost Wages, was courted by producers who’d worked with the likes of Frankie Ballard and Dolly Parton, leading to some of her first recording sessions. And that, in turn, was where it all went wrong. 

Whatever was created in those sessions just didn’t feel like her. Somehow, she felt she “hadn’t even started,” she says. “The stories that had lived in my mind since I was a little girl hadn’t even come to the surface yet.” Part of the problem, she realized, was personal: She needed to confront the young girl she had been to find her true, mature voice. “For whatever reason, some kids, often young women, absorb so many external narratives that our own essence and truth just gets totally washed away. That was me, and I lived in that checked-out space from age 9 until about 26.”

For Wages, the key to not being checked-out was coming home to “the country backroads between Millington and Shelby Forest” where she grew up. Here, she could have the space to develop her vision. And now this Friday, years after she returned to those backroads, that vision is coming into fruition with the release of her debut album, Vanity Project. 

Produced and mixed by Matt Ross-Spang at his Southern Grooves studio, the album has some of the rootsy, vintage elements of his previous acclaimed work with Margo Price or St. Paul & the Broken Bones, yet with more of the contemporary pop instincts once championed by one of Wages’ heroes, Amy Winehouse. Most of all, the sounds jump out of the speakers with the grit of a real band. 

That includes not only Ross-Spang himself but guitarist and songwriting collaborator Joe Restivo, whose experience with groups like the City Champs and the Bo-Keys brings a subtly cosmopolitan touch to the arrangements. Other A-list players from Memphis, including keyboardist Pat Fusco, bassist Landon Moore, and drummers Danny Banks, Ken Coomer, and Shawn Zorn, bring some heavy vibes and grooves. It’s abundantly clear this was not created “in the box” of a computer screen. This album has soul. 

Yet the real soul arises out of Wages’ liquid vocals and the very personal lyrics she has penned. There’s no small irony in the album’s title, as these songs confront her struggles with her own self-image and the double-edged sword of physical beauty. Having grown up competing on the Tennessee beauty pageant circuit, she was immersed in the mix of acclaim, cruelty, and infantilization that such a world cultivates. 

“I’ll die in therapy over it,” Wages says of those years, laughing. “Walking around in a swimsuit with a number on your waist like a show horse, all while a bunch of weird old guys give you a score of one to 10. … I subconsciously internalized that whole dynamic and it was in the driver’s seat for a lot of my life. I either bullied myself for not being ‘whatever’ enough, or I’ve been dismissed as ‘whatever’ — and not the smart one, not the creative one, not the artistically capable one.”

Living through all of that, and staring it in the face, lends the album its hard-won wisdom. “Am I a mess or a work of art?” she sings on “Back to the City.” 

“In my darkness I ruminate/I wonder if a lover will ever stay with my heavy heart/But the morning sun whispered, ‘You’re the most beautiful girl in the world when you fall apart’/My soul has lines on her face, I am much older than my time/But I’m comin’ up from the reverie and out of the corners of my mind/And I’m going back to the city/I’m going back to the old me/I got a new pair of dancing shoes and damn I feel pretty.”

Such insights into her own life, Wages suggests, couldn’t have come if she was still chasing the brass ring of music industry approval. That could only come from the back roads. “Memphis is part of the tapestry of my soul,” she says. “There’s something different about this place. It’s honest and … heavy. It’s where I can connect to the source, you know? It provided me enough openness to find myself, my real autonomous self, outside of all the voices. That was something I’d never done before. It’s like I had been asleep since I was five years old and then woke up and said, ‘Where have I been? What the hell happened to me?’” 

Cyrena Wages and band will celebrate the release of Vanity Project at Bar Ware on Thursday, May 30th.