Starting this week, the outside world gets an up-close look at the
Memphis music scene — or at least one version of it —
as Craig Brewer’s 15-part series $5 Cover debuts simultaneously
online and on MTV. The city also will see itself through Brewer’s lens
in a more dramatic fashion than ever before. $5 Cover presents a
detailed, wide-ranging portrait of the people, places, and sounds that
make up the city’s Midtown-based music scene. Is Memphis ready for its
close-up?
Shot last August with an entirely local cast and crew, $5
Cover has been in gestation for nearly a decade, first as a planned
series of local indie films. Some cast members of $5 Cover, such
as folk/blues singers Jason Freeman and Valerie June, participated in
an aborted early shoot for what was then dubbed Bluff City
Chronicles. Others, such as versatile roots-pop singer Amy LaVere
and Makeshift Music founder/Snowglobe singer Brad Postlethwaite, were
early inspirations. And others, most notably Two Way Radio singer Kate
Crowder, came later to the story.
Ben Nichols
By the time Brewer launched the project last year, it had morphed
into a web-based series of short films, rechristened $5 Cover,
and backed by MTV New Media, whose lead executive David Gale had worked
with Brewer when MTV Films purchased Brewer’s breakthrough film,
Hustle & Flow.
Gale says that when he took over MTV New Media, Brewer, who has
specialized in music-centered filmmaking, was the first person he
contacted. And Brewer took advantage of the opportunity by reimagining
his pet project for the web, a medium whose interactivity proved to be
a better fit for promoting the series’ musicians.
What emerged was a series of 15 “webisodes,” short films of roughly
five to seven minutes each and starring a handpicked selection of
Memphis musicians playing fictionalized versions of themselves. The
interconnected stories play out against a backdrop of real and
fictional Memphis settings — nightclubs, coffee shops,
recording studios, etc. Helping fill out the story are a handful of
local actors — most notably Brewer regulars Claire Grant, Jeff
Pope, and Claude Phillips — playing entirely fictional
characters.
Some of the featured musicians — LaVere, Postle-thwaite,
Crowder, June, rapper Al Kapone, rap-rock oddity Muck Sticky, and
Lucero frontman Ben Nichols — have significant, acting-intensive
roles. Others (Harlan T. Bobo, the Tearjerkers’ Jack Oblivian) just
perform. Others, like Alicja Trout of the hard-rocking River City
Tanlines, occupy middle ground, appearing in a scene or two and
performing.
When $5 Cover was being filmed last summer, no one, including
Brewer, had any notion that the little web series — budgeted at a
miniscule $350,000 — would wind up on television. But when
executives at MTV got a look at $5 Cover, that changed.
On the left: Jack Oblivian
“They were saying they’ve never had anything [on MTV] that
cinematic,” Brewer says of the corporate reaction. “They’re looking at
their balance sheet, and they can’t believe it. This whole series cost
what one half-hour episode of their television usually costs, give or
take.”
“I’ve shown it to people who had no idea what they were going to
watch and aren’t even in the [target] demographic, and they couldn’t
stop watching,” Gale says of the reaction to the finished project. “We
have 15 episodes, and I thought they’re going to tell me to stop, and
they said, ‘No, I want to watch the next one, and the next one.'”
For MTV, what Brewer and his Memphis collaborators provided was
something that united the network’s past — a focus on music
— with its present reality-based, youth-oriented
programming.
“A majority of their [current] programming is not related to music,”
Brewer says. “But the same guys who started MTV are still there, and
they want to keep reinventing themselves and want to get back to the
music. I think that $5 Cover gave them a little of what they
already have in terms of semi-Hills-like drama every once in a
while. But they really loved the music pieces.”
Even though $5 Cover is making the unexpected leap to
television — the full series will air, at least once, in
five multi-episode, half-hour installments on MTV at 11 p.m. each
Friday in May, while individual episodes, or “tracks” as they’re
dubbed, will be broadcast on MTV2 in some capacity — it is
still seen as primarily a web-based entity.
In fact, Brewer and Gale both see the television component as
essentially a marketing tool for FiveDollarCover.com, where users can
not only watch the “tracks” but dig into a rich collection of
additional content, including: a series of gorgeous artist
documentaries directed by Memphis photographer/filmmaker Alan Spearman
(who co-directed the Indie Memphis award-winning film Nobody); a
large group of “Flipside Memphis” documentaries on various cultural
topics from the Live From Memphis crew; music videos; artist
interviews; and links to purchase music from $5 Cover stars.
It may well be that, as the television broadcast is essentially an
advertisement for the FiveDollarCover.com site, the $5
Cover series itself is essentially an advertisement for the artists
and places it features.
Brad Postlethwaite of Snowglobe
“Craig’s intention was to say, ‘This is the show, but here’s also
the reality of what’s going on,'” Postlethwaite says. “The goal is to
push what’s really here.”
Real People, A Real Place
$5 Cover isn’t the only new web-based music series with
high-profile backing. Like mall-cop movies and presidents Bush, these
things apparently come in pairs. Beating $5 Cover to the web is
Rockville, CA, produced for the television network the WB by
The O.C. and Gossip Girl creator Josh Schwartz.
Two-thirds of the way through its web-only run, Rockville, CA
is set almost entirely inside a fictional Los Angeles rock club and
features professional actors playing fans and music-biz types in
mini-dramas that play out in each episode against the backdrop of a
visiting real-life band. Featuring copious demo-specific cultural
references and what amounts to a blog-rock band of the week,
Rockville, CA is artificial, trendy, and pretty much dated on
contact. It makes for a highly instructional comparison to $5
Cover.
“There’s the feeling that if you can somehow integrate new music
into whatever project you’re doing, you have a better chance of it
being successful, or at least functional to the consumer, because [the
entertainment industry] is trying to figure out new ways for people to
discover music,” Brewer says of the two projects appearing at the same
time. “But we don’t have any of that in $5 Cover
— the music-business stuff — except the one part
where two people are talking about starting a label. Otherwise, we’re
not getting into that because it’s the antithesis of what we want this
show to be.”
If Rockville, CA‘s true subject is a very specific
— and very limited — cultural moment, $5
Cover‘s subject is a city, or at least a portion of it.
“The thing that I loved the most about $5 Cover was that here
was a filmmaker who came with a vision, and not only that but an
experience — a personal understanding of this music scene,” Gale
says. “I think that $5 Cover, from its start, was meant to
really give the viewer an experience of being a musician.”
As anyone who’s seen Brewer’s previous work, particularly Hustle
& Flow, knows, the filmmaker loves and respects music. And he
appreciates it not just as art but as work — often collaborative
work. The lone bluesman model may dominate south of the city, but in
Memphis collaborative creation is at the very foundation of its
cultural story. Memphians know, for instance, that “That’s All Right”
isn’t just about Elvis Presley’s genius. It’s about Sam Phillips
coaxing out the performance. It’s about Scotty Moore’s guitar line.
Craig Brewer
$5 Cover understands this too, and the vision of Memphis
music that $5 Cover presents to the world — in stark
contrast to the white, twentysomething, indie-rock-only world of
Rockville, CA — is one of diversity. Young and old.
Black and white. Men and women. Rockers, rappers, folk singers:
everybody living together, working together, creating together. It’s
what Memphis looks like.
“I got some flak early on from people who said, well, the music is
too different,” Gale says. “It’s not all hip-hop or all rock, and
that’s hard for people to get their heads around. It’s got to be one
kind of music or another. And my response was, that’s not the way any
city’s music is. Any place you go that has a music scene has a diverse
music scene. And that’s the point: to experience the Memphis music
scene.”
Fittingly, the best parts of $5 Cover are the episodes and
moments that get closest to the art and lives of the musicians
involved, an intimacy that required a considerable degree of closeness
and trust.
“We all knew each other,” Brewer says. “There really weren’t any
question marks hanging in the air with anybody. We all felt like we
were just hanging out together and working really hard. We’d quit
filming and we’d all go to Huey’s.”
Though $5 Cover was not tightly scripted, Brewer developed
storylines and characters inspired by the featured music and what he
knew of the artists’ lives.
“Before we started, I took everyone out to dinner individually,”
Brewer says. “They had to allow themselves to trust me, because we got
personal.”
It was that level of trust that made $5 Cover‘s complicated
mix of real and fictional possible. Most of the musicians interviewed
for this piece said they would have been apprehensive about doing the
same project with an out-of-town MTV crew. And LaVere — as
much the series’ lead player as anyone and perhaps the featured
performer most reticent about “playing herself” — says that would
have been a deal-breaker for her.
“It wouldn’t have happened. I wouldn’t have done it,” LaVere says.
“I would never have done it if it wasn’t for Craig. I trusted
Craig.”
Claire Grant
“Whenever anyone approaches you with something like this, there’s
the knowledge that it could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending
on how it’s received,” Postlethwaite says. “But I’ve always liked what
Craig’s done. I figured even if it didn’t turn out well, I’d be happy
to be a part of it because his intention was good.”
Players’ Ball
$5 Cover starts and ends with LaVere, who takes center stage
in the lead “track,” “A New Drummer,” an episode about a cheating
bandmate/boyfriend (a fictional character played by camera operator
Brent Shrewsbury) that culminates in a studio performance of LaVere’s
“Killing Him.” (The “new drummer” is Paul Taylor, LaVere’s real-life
drummer/boyfriend, who gets his own showcase in a later episode with a
spellbinding display of his “multi-instrumental” talents.) It is
LaVere’s character who has the most involved storyline about the
tension between day job and creative life (a recurring motif) and who
also carries, alongside Grant, much of the series’ romantic drama.
LaVere’s character shares a house with roommates that include Grant
and June, a traditional folk/blues singer who plays mostly a sidekick
role until she sings a song in a later episode dedicated to deceased
blues singer Jessie Mae Hemphill.
If any of the Memphis musicians in $5 Cover are likely to get
a boost — nationally or locally — from the
project, June and Crowder are good bets. A hidden gem locally, June is
a striking figure both in look, with mountainous dreadlocks spilling
over her lean frame, and sound, with a pure, gentle style that evokes
the Carter Family and Mississippi John Hurt. And Crowder, who plays one
of June’s co-workers at Cooper-Young coffee shop Java Cabana, has one
of the most engaging personalities and most compelling storylines in
the series.
An elementary school teacher and married mother of two, Crowder is
an unlikely player on the local music scene as frontwoman of the
underdog indie-pop band Two Way Radio. Brewer roots Crowder’s character
in this personal past as a scene outsider making a tentative entry.
“They didn’t sound like anyone else in Memphis,” Brewer says of
seeing Two Way Radio for the first time and becoming intrigued by
Crowder. “When I went to see the show, I didn’t know what Kate Crowder
looked like. And here’s this pretty, delightful woman sitting behind
this keyboard at the Hi-Tone with about five people in the audience.
For every Kate, I know there are 20 women who say, ‘Damn it, if I had
any balls, I would do what she’s doing.'”
Crowder says she and Brewer didn’t really talk about her character,
who begins the series estranged from a husband uncertain about her
musical ambitions and ends up in a flirtatious friendship with Muck
Sticky.
“The character is pretty much like me. I think [Craig] got me,”
Crowder says. “Clearly in the show my character has problems that I
don’t, but they’re universal enough that I didn’t feel uncomfortable
doing it.”
The big difference is Crowder’s husband, the real-life version of
which, Corey Crowder, isn’t at all reluctant about his wife’s budding
music career: He shares it as Two Way Radio’s bassist. With Brewer
wanting to write in a domestic dispute over Kate’s music, Corey had to
choose only one of his real-life roles: husband or bandmate. He chose
the bass.
“They asked if I knew anyone who I wanted to be my husband. I
thought about that for about a week and then called [producer] Erin
[Hagee] and told her I didn’t want to worry about the implications of
that,” Crowder says with a laugh.
Alicja Trout, with the River City Tanlines
With LaVere, June, and Crowder joined by the Tanlines’
guitar-shredding frontwoman Trout, $5 Cover‘s vision of the
Memphis music scene is probably more gender-balanced than the real
thing. In this instance, hopefully $5 Cover can serve to impact
reality as much as document it.
Standout Tracks
If the women — including Grant’s fictional Muck Sticky
dancer/Hi-Tone bartender/roller-derby daredevil/serial boyfriend
changer — are at the forefront of $5 Cover, the two
best individual tracks may be ones that focus on a couple of very
different male performers: longtime indie-scene fixture
Postlethwaite and local gangsta-rap icon Kapone.
Postlethwaite, who is currently in his third year of medical school
at UT-Memphis, plays a character strongly rooted in his own bio, with a
side job as an employee at the fictional “Packy’s Recording” studio the
only change. In his featured track, “Heart and Soul,” Postlethwaite has
to step in during a Snowglobe recording session when the studio’s
landlord (Claude Phillips) collapses in the control room.
The episode had Postlethwaite and Packy’s Jeff Pope doing a dialogue
scene en route to a hospital with Postlethwaite having to ad-lib
medical lingo.
“Craig wanted me to list off a differential diagnosis of what this
guy’s problem may have been. But it was all on the cardiovascular
system, and it was about two weeks before we were going to cover that
in school, so I had to read ahead and try to do my best not to screw up
the medicine. And I just completely botched it.”
Not many viewers will be aware of the faulty diagnosis, of course.
“Unfortunately,” Postlethwaite says, “it’s going to be all the people
who are going to be giving me grades for the next year.”
The Kapone-centered track, “Skills of the Father,” is the one that
really sold MTV on the series’ television-worthy quality, Brewer says.
In it, Kapone wakes up his real-life teen son (and aspiring rapper) AJ
and makes the kid tag along on a (fictional) day job delivering
mattresses before a post-work trip to Packy’s studio.
“I knew that Al was wanting to do a lot with AJ,” Brewer says. “I
knew that that episode needed to be about a man laying it down for his
son and being kind of hard on him. His son wants to be a rapper, but I
think there’s this attitude among young people that that’s an easy
route — music. Every time I see Al, he’s working his ass
off.”
Harlan T. Bobo
What likely impressed the suits about the episode is the effortless,
virtuosic degree to which it moves back and forth across time in the
course of an uninterrupted recording session of the Kapone song
“Gettin’ Mine,” integrating Kapone’s work and home life with his music
in a way that sums up so much of what $5 Cover is about.
Afterlife
Even before $5 Cover began shooting, Brewer talked about it
as a template for a new franchise — sort of a web-based,
music-scene-specific, quasi-scripted answer to MTV’s signature Real
World series.
And now, even before $5 Cover: Memphis has gone public, the
franchising of the concept appears likely, with Brewer as executive
producer of any future $5 Cover projects.
“We are in the early stages of exploring other cities,” Gale says.
“We’ve looked at Seattle, New Orleans, Austin. We’ve talked to some of
our international people. We need filmmakers from those cities, and we
have to make sure it’s a scene that has interesting characters. I think
almost any city that has a thriving music scene has a filmmaking scene
as well. We just have to find the right combination.”
“There are people who play every weekend. They do what they can to
record an album and get it in the record stores in their city,” Brewer
says. “They want people to hear their music, and they’d like to be able
to pay their rent by doing what they do. I don’t think that’s unique to
Memphis. And that’s more of what the $5 Cover attitude needs to
be — celebrate the people who are deciding to stay in their
community and play for their community.”
Beyond $5 Cover‘s future as a franchise, the biggest question
for Memphis is what kind of impact it will have locally. On the film
side of the equation, that’s easier to answer: It’s proven that a
relatively serious, high-profile production can be done with fully
local talent.
“In Memphis, we had this incredible collaboration with the film
commissions, where they helped to subsidize training for people who
hadn’t done some of these jobs before,” Gale says. “It’s almost the
model of a stimulus plan, if you ask me. We had a local filmmaker with
a great concept and he ended up hiring everybody local even if they
weren’t yet at the level where they’d done that job before, because he
convinced everyone to cooperate. As a result, we ended up training a
lot of people to do jobs that I hope they will continue to be able to
do. And all the money — all the money that came in from the
outside, which was from us — stayed in Memphis.”
Al Kapone
The impact $5 Cover could have on the local music scene is
harder to calculate. The obvious assumption is career boosts for the
artists involved, but Brewer has been trying to temper expectations in
that area and the artists involved seem to be of the same mind.
“I think that for some who were involved it will be a real positive
and will do exactly what they need it to do,” says LaVere, who tends to
court an older crowd with her own music than MTV usually draws. “And
for others, you know, it will have been a cool thing to have been
involved in. For myself, I don’t really know who watches MTV. I don’t
know that demographic.”
June similarly wonders if the show’s audience will coincide with her
own.
“I don’t have many expectations, because I’m a folk artist,” June
says. “I don’t expect to be Beyoncé. I work a lot of jobs and
wear many hats. But I have been getting a lot of contact from people
outside of Memphis — shows, press, and other offers —
because people know what’s happening and what’s about to happen. And
I’m very thankful for that. That’s more than I could hope for.
Everything else is a blessing.”
For Postlethwaite, whose band Snowglobe has had its share of tough
luck, dealing with expectations has been a direct challenge because the
band has a new EP coming out along with the series.
“It’s been really hard to plan for it,” Postlethwaite says. “It
could be one of those things where we aren’t prepared for the amount of
records we’re going to sell, and that would be bad. Or we could be
over-prepared and end up disappointed — just have tons of
records sitting around.” Postlethwaite says the band has tried to find
a middle ground.
“I’m worried that it being on MTV is going to put some unrealistic
expectations in some of their eyes … that, okay, well now the phone
will start ringing,” Brewer says of his musical cast. “But there are
people already on MTV waiting for the phone to start ringing. It’s bad
out there for musicians to some extent.”
Fittingly then, for a project so focused on Memphis, the biggest
local impact of $5 Cover may be internal.
“What I would like,” Brewer says, when asked what impact he hopes
$5 Cover will have on the city’s music scene, is for “more
people in Cordova or Bartlett to maybe come see these people. I’ve been
playing this to people who say, ‘I had no idea that that music was in
our city.’ I’ve played the series for people and they’ve said, ‘Where
is there a roller derby in Memphis?’ That makes me excited. Go to the
roller derby. And by the way, that’s the River City Tanlines. Click
here and buy their music.”
Valerie June
With all the focus on $5 Cover presenting Memphis to the rest
of the world, Brewer suggests that the biggest benefit could come from
promoting Memphis to itself.
Where to Watch:
$5 Cover‘s world premiere is Thursday,
April
30th, at Malco’s Paradiso theater.
The first three-episode installment of $5 Cover
debuts at 11 p.m. Friday, May 1st, on MTV. Four subsequent
installments will air each Friday in May.
Episodes online launch simultaneously with their television debut
at FiveDollarCover.com, which
also will feature all of the project’s ancillary content, including
“Flipside Memphis” documentaries and “$5 Cover Amplified” artist
profiles. (Much of this additional content also will be available at
LiveFromMemphis.com, MemphisTravel.com, and FiveDollarCoverAmplified.com.)
The week of Wednesday, May 4th, will be a
$5 Cover-themed week on MTV2.
For more on $5 Cover, including outtakes
from this story, a critical review of the series, coverage of Thursday
night’s premiere, and more, see Sing All Kinds, the
Flyer‘s new film/music/pop-culture blog at MemphisFlyer.com/Blogs/SingAllKinds.
Meet the Musicians
A rundown of $5 Cover’s featured players:
Harlan T. Bobo
The Skinny: The Midtown rock bard who appears — in full
“Man Who Laughs” makeup — during a performance at the Hi-Tone
Café in Track 3.
On Tap: Bobo’s third solo album for the local Goner label is
due this fall.
Cody Dickinson
The Skinny: North Mississippi Allstars drummer and Hill
Country Revue bandleader appears in an abbreviated Track 10 as one of
the Claire Grant character’s many musician boyfriends. The
not-for-television director’s cut concerns a vibrator, an electrical
cord, and Dickinson’s own amplified washboard. Look for that on the
eventual DVD release.
Muck Sticky
On Tap: Dickinson pulls double-duty at Minglewood Hall
Friday, May 22nd, on a North Mississippi Allstars/Hill Country Revue
double-bill that will also serve as a CD-release party for Hill Country
Revue’s debut album, Make a Move.
Jason Freeman
The Skinny: Longtime Bluff City Backslider and blues/folk ace
appears briefly playing at a backyard barbecue/pool party in Track
13.
On Tap: In addition to a burgeoning partnership will fellow
$5 Cover mate Valerie June, Freeman has lately been showing off
a new band, the Midtown Lowdowns, featuring drummer Angela Horton,
guitarist Robert Allen Parker, and bassist Khari Wynn. The band plays
Earnestine & Hazel’s Saturday, May 2nd.
Jack O. & The Tearjerkers
The Skinny: Local garage-rock institution plays a scalding
set at Earnestine & Hazel’s in Track 6 as character drama unfolds
around the bar.
On Tap: The band’s latest album, The Disco Outlaw,
comes out on Goner Records Tuesday, May 5th, with a record-release show
at the Hi-Tone Saturday, May 9th.
Valerie June
The Skinny: Folk/blues singer plays Amy LaVere’s
roommate/friend before stepping into the spotlight with a performance
in Track 13.
On Tap: June plays every Sunday, 1-3 p.m., at Fresh Slices in
Midtown. She and Freeman will play a set of children’s music at the
Cooper-Young Night Out Thursday, May 7th.
Al Kapone
The Skinny: Local rap legend and Hustle & Flow
songwriter is featured alongside teen son AJ in standout Track 5.
On Tap: Kapone recently opened for Fall Out Boy and 50 Cent
in Baltimore and has other East Coast shows lined up in conjunction
with the $5 Cover launch. Look for a Young AJ mix tape scheduled
to hit the streets May 1st.
Amy LaVere
The Skinny: After a supporting role in Brewer’s Black
Snake Moan, bass-playing roots-pop singer LaVere has a leading role
here, taking center stage in Track 1 for an in-studio performance of
her song “Killing Him.”
On Tap: LaVere and band will miss the $5 Cover
premiere after heading out this week on their third Norwegian tour.
LaVere has a new EP, Died of Love, out now, and plans to be in
the studio in November to record her third full-length album.
Lucero
The Skinny: One of the city’s most successful rock-and-roll
bands, Lucero perform at Young Avenue Deli in Track 9, which features
frontman Ben Nichols taking Claire Grant on a motorcycle trip across
the bridge to his native Arkansas.
On Tap: The band has been at Ardent Studios recently working
on its major-label debut for Universal Records.
Muck Sticky
The Skinny: The rap-rock prankster/marijuana spokesman gives
a colorful New Daisy performance in Track 2 before falling for Two Way
Radio’s Kate Crowder.
On Tap: Muck Sticky plays the Memphis in May Beale Street
Music Fest on Saturday, May 2nd.
River City Tanlines
The Skinny: Riff-rocking trio fronted by Alicja Trout provides the soundtrack to a roller-derby melee in Track 11.
On Tap: The Tanlines play Murphy’s on Madison on Monday, May 4th.
Snowglobe
The Skinny: Perhaps the city’s signature indie-rock band for
most of the past decade, co-bandleader Brad Postlethwaite’s balance of
music and med school is the subject of Track 8.
On Tap: The band’s new EP, No Need To Light a Night Light
on a Night Like Tonight, is due out this month.
Paul Taylor
The Skinny: Multi-instrumental wonder shows up as Amy
LaVere’s “new drummer” in Track 1 but shows off his full array of
skills as the featured performer in Track 7.
On Tap: Taylor’s new album, Share It, is due May
26th.
Two Way Radio
The Skinny: Eight-piece indie-pop band is a sunny, orchestral
outlier on the local rock scene. Frontwoman Kate Crowder is a lead
player in $5 Cover, with Crowder and the band performing “Carrie
Rodgers” at Java Cabana in Track 4.
On Tap: The band is working with $5 Cover music
supervisor Scott Bomar for a full-length release on his Electraphonic
label, due out this summer. The band plays the “Bands Not Bombs”
benefit at the former Galloway Church in Cooper-Young May 9th.
