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Jimmy Hart Keeps on Dancing

Treadwell students Jerry Williams, Jimmy Hart, and Jerry Lawler at what is now Treadwell Middle School. (Photo: Michael Donahue)

Jimmy Hart has worn many hats during his career, but he prefers one type of jacket. Something from Lansky Bros. in Memphis.

Hart wore jackets from the legendary men’s store over the years as a  wrestling manager for Jerry Lawler, Hulk Hogan, and others.

But he wore his first Lansky jacket (along with Beatle boots) when his band, The Gentrys, performed on TV’s Ted Mack & The Original Amateur Hour.

Hart will wear a special Lansky Bros. jacket tonight, September 27th, when The Gentrys are inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame at the Cannon Center for the Performing Arts.

Hart talked about the origin of The Gentrys, whose song “Keep on Dancing” sold a million copies worldwide and rose to number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1965.

“It’s hard to kill a memory,” Hart says.

Born in Jackson, Mississippi, Hart grew up around music. His mother, Sadie Hart, who wrote under the name “Sadie Sallas,” penned “Enclosed, One Broken Heart,” for singer Eddy Arnold in the 1950s. 

Col. Tom Parker, Elvis’ manager, also managed Arnold. Parker asked Hart’s mother if Arnold could record it.

Hart was a student at Treadwell High School when he got a call from Larry Raspberry, who told him he was putting a band together and was looking for some singers. “I went over and I auditioned and that’s it.”

The group, which was known at first as The Gents, originally included Raspberry on guitar, Bruce Bowles and Hart on vocals, Larry Wall on drums, Pat Neal on bass, and Bobby Fisher and Jimmy Johnson on keyboards and horns.

They played at sock hops and other gigs for “spending money” at local spots. “Bruce Bowles kind of looked like John Lennon. We had that Beatles effect back then.”

Things began taking off after they met TV/radio personality George Klein at the old Berretta’s BBQ Drive In. Klein, who was host of the local TV show Talent Party, told them record producer Chips Moman was opening a brand-new studio, American Recording Studio, in Memphis. “He said, ‘Look. If you guys want to, Chips will, absolutely free, let you go to the studio and cut a little song. And I’ll put you on Talent Party.’”

Hart and his band mates cut a cover of the Rolling Stones song, “Time is On My Side.” “The next thing you know, everything took off. It was crazy.”

They entered and came in first place in the Mid-South Fair Youth Talent Contest. As the winner, the band got to audition for Ted Mack’s national TV show in Miami, Florida. “We get on the show and he introduces us, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Memphis, Tennessee’s answer to the Beatles.”

Hart and his band performed “Do You Love Me.” Their Lansky Bros. outfit included jackets with a “little bitty” checkered print and velour lapels and pockets. “We had the little Beatle boots and tight black pants and the turtle neck sweaters.” 

And, he says, “Mr. Lansky gave us such a great deal since we were a struggling little group from Treadwell.”

They ended up winning round one of the show, which meant they could compete in round two.

The group returned to Miami and performed on the show. “Guess what? We won again.”

That meant they were eligible to perform on the third show. But in the meantime, the group cut “Keep on Dancing,” which became a “smash hit” after getting airplay on radio stations across the country. 

That disqualified them from competing on the third Ted Mack show because they were now professionals. But the band still got to appear on the show.

They didn’t write “Keep on Dancing,” Hart says. It was another band’s song. But, Hart says, “They did it real slow. We just took it and speeded it up.”

Life suddenly changed for Hart and his fellow band members. “We’re in high school with a big hit record.”

They put out three albums on the MGM Records label. Their songs included “Spread It on Thick” and “Everyday I Have To Cry.” And, later on, The Gentrys recorded two chart toppers — “Why Should I Cry” and “Cinnamon Girl” — at Sun Records. “Cinnamon Girl” was written by Neil Young, who will also be at the Memphis Music Hall of Fame ceremony.

“We did tours with The Beach Boys, Chicago, and Steppenwolf, The Grass Roots, and Jerry Lee Lewis.”

They toured with Dick Clark’s “Caravan of Stars” and appeared on TV’s American Bandstand, Hullabaloo, Shindig, and Where the Action Is.

The band was in the 1967 beach movie It’s a Bikini World, which starred Deborah Walley and Tommy Kirk.

Hart got into wrestling when Lawler called him and asked him to help him with a “wrestling album” with vocals by Lawler. Hart then spent six years as Lawler’s manager.

His big break, he says, was when former WWE CEO Vince McMahon called him. Hart, who says DJ Ron Olson gave him the nickname “Mouth of the South,” began managing WWE wrestlers and, along with Cyndi Lauper and David Wolff, began writing entrance themes for wrestlers.

Former Memphian and photographer Pat Rainer will introduce The Gentrys at the Memphis Music Hall of Fame ceremony. “Pat Rainer was president of our fan club back then.”

Rainer, who put the fan club together, made sure the members came to their shows and voted for them, Hart says. “Pat Rainer was our secret weapon.”

Describing his Lansky’s jacket for the Memphis Music Hall of Fame ceremony, Hart says, “Lansky made that for me special.”

The jacket is “kind of a grayish blackish color, but it’s got little skulls on it. The inside of the jacket has pictures of my past in there. Me and The Gentrys. Me and Hulk Hogan. Me and Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler. All kinds of different pictures.”

Jerry Williams, founder/owner of Trans Maximus Studios and TMI Records, was the business manager and organizer of another teen band, The Guilloteens, during the time Hart’s band was performing. The Gentrys were “doing rock-and-roll at that time in a very unique way,” Williams says. “Their sound and their playability and their approach was just different.”

Also, he says, “They were all good-looking kids. You knew they were a band. They were built to be a band.”

In addition to being talented, The Gentrys also acted like professionals. “When they got on stage, they were dressed like a band. And it was always neat and they put on a fabulous show.”

A lot led up to The Gentrys receiving the Memphis Music Hall of Fame. “We were just in high school having fun going to class. And all of a sudden we’re playing sock hops around Memphis and then on the road with Dick Clark.”

And now Hart will be on stage in his Lansky Bros. jacket as The Gentrys are inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame. “We’ve been so blessed.”

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Music Music Features

The Equals Endure!

Derv Gordon with So What (Photo: Lily Chou)

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.

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Neil Young to Appear at Memphis Music Hall of Fame Ceremony

Neil Young in Oslo, Norway, 2009. (Photo: Per Ole Hagen)

The 2024 Memphis Music Hall of Fame (MMHOF) Induction Ceremony this Friday, September 27th, was already going to be lit. With the likes of garage boppers The Gentrys, soul men supreme James Carr and Wilson Pickett, and hip-hop producer/rapper Jazze Pha being saluted, the music was guaranteed to be stellar.

But at a ceremony of such historical importance, it’s not just about the performances. Simply having the honorees together in the Cannon Center for the Performing Arts is significant, especially if they are expressing their mutual admiration. And it’s in that spirit that Friday night will suddenly be a lot more stellar, as Neil Young has announced that he’ll be there to induct a legendary player he’s worked with for decades: Dewey “Spooner” Lindon Oldham Jr.

Singer, keyboardist, and songwriter Oldham performed with Young at this weekend’s Farm Aid, but his association with the Canadian folk rock innovator goes back much further than that. He played on Young’s celebrated 1992 album Harvest Moon, appeared in the concert film Neil Young: Heart of Gold, and joined Crosby Stills Nash & Young on their 2006 Freedom of Speech tour. He’s also played in two of Young’s occasional touring bands, The Stray Gators and the Prairie Wind Band.

Oldham’s track record, of course, goes way beyond that. Known for his command of the organ and the Wurlitzer electric piano, he recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, at FAME Studios as part of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section in his early years, playing on such legendary tracks as Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman”, Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally,” and Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).” Later Oldham followed Dan Penn to Memphis, working at American Sound Studios as well as in Muscle Shoals, and co-writing hits by the Box Tops, James and Bobby Purify, and Percy Sledge with Penn.

In all, The Memphis Music Hall of Fame will be inducting and honoring nine inductees this year, who will thus expand the Hall of Fame roster to over 100 world-changing Memphis music icons. In addition to Oldham, this year’s inductees include Carr, Pickett, Jazze Pha, and The Gentrys, as well as operatic soprano Kallen Esperian, background singers Rhodes/Chalmers/Rhodes, Memphis Tourism CEO Kevin Kane, and Jack Soden, CEO of Graceland for more than 40 years.

The 2024 Memphis Music Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony will be held Friday, September 27th, at the Cannon Center for the Performing Arts at 7 p.m. Tickets are available at Ticketmaster (ticketmaster.com) and the Cannon Center box office.

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Music Music Features

Jeremy Stanfill’s New Sound

Jeremy Stanfill (Photo: Jamie Harmon | Amurica)

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. 

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Music Music Features

Alice Hasen’s Dream of Rain

Alice Hasen (Photo: Amurica | Jamie Harmon)

“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.”

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Celebrating Donald Brown

Donald Brown (Photos: Courtesy Donald Brown)

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.” 

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Matthew Sweet Tops Saturday’s PowerPop Bill

Matthew Sweet (Photo: Henry Diltz)

Matthew Sweet is the perfect choice to headline the Memphis PowerPop Festival, happening at the Overton Park Shell at 5 p.m. this Saturday, August 31st. Being younger than the likes of the Who, the Raspberries, or Big Star, he’s nevertheless an actively performing link to the originators of the genre — first as a fan. The direct result of the first wave of “power pop” filtering down to younger denizens of the 1970s via radio and funky little record shops, he can well remember the thrill of discovering key LPs back when power pop gems were rare.

Sweet, of course, came to define power pop for a whole new generation after his third album, Girlfriend, blew up in 1991, not coincidentally featuring band members — Richard Lloyd, Robert Quine — who’d appeared on the very records he bought in high school. From the ’90s on, he’s been a reliably rocking and intriguing artist, and continues to mine the power pop vein today, with one album dropping during Covid and another on the way. A common thread through all of his music, as a both fan and an artist, is his love of melody, often paired with rock’s grit. And that, in a nutshell is what power pop is. Naturally, the topic of melody was where my recent conversation with him soon headed.

Memphis Flyer: As it turns out, you and I were growing up in eastern Nebraska at the same time [much discussion of this ensues]. I imagine you were a frequent patron of Dirt Cheap Records in Lincoln?

Matthew Sweet: Most of the records that found their way to me were from my older brother, or from someone recommending them to me at Dirt Cheap. People at Dirt Cheap knew all about everything. So you’d get to know a guy at a record store and he sort of knew what you liked. I remember going in Dirt Cheap one day and seeing one of the 45s that ended up on Singles Going Steady, by the Buzzcocks. That record was one that I really loved, because they were really melodic, but also very new wave.

I think of it as a British Invasion, that kind of new wave, punk, and everything, and it’s interesting, because my concern at the time was, How can I be like an American person, from a new generation or whatever, and do that kind of thing? And that’s why it was so, so critical for me to find [records by] the dBs or Big Star, because they became my American role models. Like on #1 Record, the voices were so pristine and beautiful sounding. The guitars were so incredible. It was everything I loved really melodic stuff that really hit me emotionally. Melody was always really important to me. It’s kind of what I heard first, even before lyrics. Even when the lyrics were important, it was the melodies that I really felt like I had, you know, inside me or something.

There was a lot of surprise in discovering the music then. And now I realize what a special time it was. I love the internet, and I love being able to find out instantly about anything I’m interested in, but back then, records were very special, at least to me and people I knew at the time. A record was this thing that was really personal.

It seems like those melodic records also led you to the South, in a way. The dB’s and Mitch Easter coming out of the North Carolina scene, and Big Star being from Memphis. Were you already into those bands when you moved to Athens, Georgia?

I had all these records in high school. I got into the dBs, and they were the gateway for me to find Big Star. As far as I was concerned, Alex Chilton was, you know, John Lennon, or something. He reminded me so much of Lennon, and does now even, because what I admired about John Lennon was the breadth of emotional things in his songs. He could write very beautiful, tender music that showed he really had a heart, and he could do more edgy stuff that was sort of sassy. And that was also such an Alex thing. From the soft and beautiful to the crazy and weird and electric. And I just loved those records as I was preparing to leave Nebraska, when I got out of high school. I guess that  would have been May of ’83. I just told my parents, like, ‘I have to go to college in Athens, Georgia.’

The scene there was still really kind of going, and there was just kind of a magic. Growing up in Nebraska was so different from that Southern Gothic kind of feeling [in Athens]. It was a place that had a much longer history than we had in Lincoln or Omaha, you know. So it really felt kind of heavy and mysterious and kind of magical to me, as an 18 or 19 year old. Yeah, it was amazing.

And now you’re calling me from Athens, where you really got your career going when R.E.M. and that scene was taking off, and where your current full band tour is taking you now, just before playing Memphis. And you’re living in Nebraska again. A lot of full-circle moments are happening these days! How does it feel to hear the new release, WXRT Live in Grant Park, Chicago, IL, July 4, 1993, documenting a live show you and your band played at the height of the Altered Beast era?

It feels so long ago, I wanted it to be called Matthew Sweet, Live in Chicago, 1893. I thought it was funny, but no one would implement it. But that was a really memorable show. The Jayhawks were there, and I love Gary [Louris]. And Chicago was always a great place for me, so I had a lot of support there, not just fans, but from radio. It was one of the places where everything sort of went right, you know? So it’s always been a little bit of a second home area around Chicago. I wasn’t, you know, living in Nebraska at the time, but it still felt closer to home. You know, it was just sort of cool, the big Midwestern city. But maybe the real reason I loved that show was that the next morning, there was a newspaper headline in Chicago that read: The Pope, the Bulls, and Matthew Sweet. My mother came from a giant Catholic family, and she was pretty religious and so, you know, there could be nothing more thrilling for her than me being mentioned in the same breath as the Pope.

And here you are, 1993 is in the far distant past, and you’re still touring with a full band.

And playing this power pop fest! I’ve never heard of such a thing, except maybe in Spain, right? Power pop is a thing there, and we toured there a lot, and did really well. But to think we are in America, at a power pop festival! I heard it may get moved out of the bandshell to an indoor venue, due to weather, but we really want to play the Shell. It’s one of the last bandshells, I think. There’s only a couple left. And, I mean, you know, we’ve all seen those photos of Elvis standing in the middle of that stage…

The Memphis PowerPop Festival, part of the Orion Free Concert Series, takes place at the Overton Park Shell this Saturday, August 31st at 5 p.m., and features Matthew Sweet with openers Abe Partridge and The Sonny Wilsons. An after-party featuring Your Academy, 40 Watt Moon, and Lately David starts at 9 p.m. at B-Side.

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Music Music Features

Nubia Yasin and Eillo

Eillo (Photo: JC Hendrix)

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.”

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Music Music Features

Amber Rae Dunn Is Giving It Her All

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.

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Music Music Blog

Isaac Hayes Estate Sues Trump Campaign

Isaac Hayes (Photo: Courtesy Stax Museum of American Soul Music)

The musical choices of Donald Trump’s handlers run the gamut these days, as the aging felon grasps at any cultural reference that will make him seem “hip.”

And the music is often counterintuitive — who could have foreseen that the venomously anti-LGBTQ candidate would pump up his rallies to the tune of “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People? Or that the campaign would provide it’s own elegy with the wildly unlikely “My Heart Will Go On,” Celine Dion’s tearjerker from…Titanic? As the AP’s Maria Sherman reported recently, Dion’s social media team immediately responded that “In no way is this use authorized, and Celine Dion does not endorse this or any similar use,” then added, “…And really, THAT song?”

Sherman goes on to detail a whole stack of such artists who, like Dion, were blindsided by the use of their music at rallies for Trump as early as 2020, including Bruce Springsteen, Rihanna, Phil Collins, Pharrell, John Fogerty, Neil Young, Eddy Grant, Panic! at the Disco, R.E.M., Guns N’ Roses, and the Rolling Stones.

You can also add some Stax to the stack.

On March 5th, the X account for Isaac Hayes Enterprises posted, “The estate and family of Isaac Hayes DID NOT approve the use of ‘Hold on I’m coming’ written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter by Donald Trump tonight at his Super Tuesday rally. We and our partners at @primarywave will be taking steps to stop the unauthorized use of this song.”

It seems they were ignored. This month they upped the ante when, on August 10th, Isaac Hayes III, son of the Stax artist, posted:

The next day, the X account representing Isaac Hayes Enterprises posted the following:

This August 20th, on what would have been the 82nd birthday of “Black Moses,” the Memphis Flyer is happy to report that even from beyond, Hayes continues to be a baaaad mother…but I’m talking ’bout Isaac! Meanwhile, what of the song’s co-writer, David Porter, now CEO of Made in Memphis Entertainment? Sherman’s article also hints at what Porter thinks of Trump, noting that in 2022, after learning that Trump used “Hold On, I’m Coming” at an NRA rally, he tweeted “Hell to the NO!”