Tag: Boo Mitchell

Categories
Music Music Blog

Remembering Hi Records Star Syl Johnson

Syl Johnson performing at the Royal Studios 60th Anniversary Celebration in 2017 (Credit: Ronnie Booze).

“When I was growing up, Syl was one of my favorites. It was him and Al Green.” So says Boo Mitchell, co-owner of Royal Studios, when reminiscing about Syl Johnson, the electrifying soul singer who passed away this Sunday, February 6th, at the age of 85. And of course, Mitchell was likely the first kid on his block to hear Johnson’s recordings, as it was his late father Willie who produced the singer’s biggest hits.

For that reason, Johnson, who lived in Chicago for most of his life, is often associated with Memphis. And he’s often compared to Al Green, primarily because they were both backed by the Hi Rhythm Section on their records. But careful listeners focus more on what distinguished him from his better-known label mate. If Green was certainly sensual, a few listens to Johnson reveal a singer who is decidedly more carnal than the Reverend-to-be.

As Mitchell puts it, “That voice! You can’t compare him to Al Green; it’s just apples and oranges. If you listen to his version of ‘Take Me to the River,’ his voice just went right through you. He’s a different kind of artist with a different kind of voice. It was a different kind of energy. It was raw.”

Even before connecting with Willie Mitchell, Johnson was distinguishing himself as a soul singer with his own particular edge, often more overtly political than many performers of his time. “He was a bit of an activist,” says Mitchell. “He had his own label before he signed with Hi Records. Twinight Records. Is It Because I’m Black was on that label.” Beyond the title track, that same album included titles like “Concrete Reservation,” “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” “I’m Talkin’ ‘Bout Freedom” and “Right On.”

As Johnson’s family noted when announcing his death, “He lived his life as a singer, musician, and entrepreneur who loved Black music. A fiery, fierce fighter, always standing for the pursuit of justice as it related to his music and sound, he will truly be missed by all who crossed his path.”

But his most enduring track may be “Different Strokes,” from his debut LP on Twinight. Clearly skewing more to the carnal side, various elements of the track have lived on through repeated sampling. The track’s horn parts were used by the Wu-Tang Clan, its vocals were used by Kanye West and Jay-Z, and other elements can be heard on De La Soul’s “The Magic Number,” Eric B & Rakim’s “I Know You Got Soul,” and Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.”

Though he released other material after he left Hi, Johnson focused much of his energy on his Chicago-based chain of restaurants, Solomon’s Fishery, through the ’80s and beyond.

As the current century dawned, he reappeared on the music scene once again. Part of that included his return to Memphis, to work at Royal once more. As Mitchell recalls, “He came to Memphis to record stuff with his daughter, Syleena. That was the first time I worked with him. He wanted Rev. Charles Hodges to put some organ on there. And then when [the 2015 film] Take Me to the River came out, we had a big concert at South by Southwest and Syl performed. He was hanging out backstage with Snoop Dogg and the banter was incredible!”

He was the main feature of another 2015 film, Syl Johnson: Any Way the Wind Blows, featured at the Indie Memphis Film Festival that year, complete with a performance by Johnson backed by the Bo-Keys.

His final performance in the Bluff City came shortly after that, in honor of the place where so many Hi artists had made history. Says Mitchell, “He performed at the Royal Studios 60th Anniversary Celebration in 2017. And his energy … he was on fire! He was about 80 then, but man, he brought it. And he’s one of the most underrated harmonica players of the time. He had his own style. It was more of an R&B approach than blues.”

Syl Johnson at the Royal Studios 60th Anniversary Celebration in 2017 (Credit: Ronnie Booze).

As Mitchell sees it, Johnson represented much more than just his own formidable talent as a singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist. He captured the spirits of the two great American cities with which he’s associated. “If ever there was a dual ambassador of Chicago and Memphis, it was Syl Johnson. He personified both cities. Otis Clay did too, in his own way, but Syl really captured the grit of both cities. He had a little Chicago in his Memphis and a little Memphis in his Chicago.”

Ultimately, Mitchell says, it was Johnson’s dynamic personality that people found so energizing. “Syl was hilarious, man. He was a funny cat. And he didn’t take no stuff from nobody!”

Categories
Music Music Features

The Royal Brothers Band: Bringing a Songwriter’s Dreams to Life

Boo Mitchell, Gary Bolen, Wendy Moten, and Richard Bolen (Photo: Maxene Harlow)

“Yeah, boy! We’ve got some material, man!” When Rev. Charles Hodges, organist with the Hi Rhythm Section, says that, you’d best give the material a listen. “I’m telling you: Gary’s a great writer.” High praise indeed from a keyboard virtuoso who worked so closely with Willie Mitchell, one of the greatest writers and producers in the history of popular music. The man Hodges speaks of is one Gary Bolen, not exactly a household name. And yet, though he’s in his golden years, there’s a good chance he could be before long, due to a project happening at Royal Studios now. Bolen’s songs are coming to life in a way he never could have imagined.

The songs Bolen has crafted over the years have prompted the formation of a supergroup of sorts, now in the final stages of recording three albums’ worth of material. The rhythm section features Steve Potts on drums and Jackie Clark on bass; the keyboards are handled by Rev. Hodges and longtime Hi Records arranger Lester Snell; and the guitarist is Bolen himself, with an assist from Memphis great Michael Toles III. The singers include Bobby Rush, Charlie Musselwhite, Wendy Moten, Jim Lauderdale, and Tower of Power’s Marcus Scott. And in the control room are Boo Mitchell and Gary’s older brother, Richard.

Richard had the organizational skill to make it all come together. Though he had a successful career in film production and marketing, music was always a great love of his. As he puts it, “It started when my brother was in his early twenties, and he started writing some of his first songs.” This would have been in the early ’70s. “I realized that my brother had some real talent. Even his first songs touched me, they had significant meaning. That caused me to stop everything and get ready for him, so I went out and bought a copy of This Business of Music. In 1975, I put a band together around my brother’s songs. Arista almost signed us, but it fell apart.”

Still, even as he took other work to survive, Gary kept writing. And the two brothers stayed close. “We both lived in Lake Tahoe — I could see out of my house into my brother’s — but we had to move to Clarksdale, Mississippi, because of our parents’ age. Now, because we were military kids, I left Clarksdale when I was 5 [years old], but my extended family has always lived here. The house I was born in has had four generations of my mother’s side of the family in it since my great grandparents. So that was always home.”

Gary, for his part, set up a studio in the old family home, and soon they were putting it to use, having recruited the old band from Austin to make demos. Still, the brothers were thinking bigger than that. A few years earlier, Richard had seen the musical documentary Take Me to the River, shot primarily at Royal Studios, and now those impressions fired his imagination.

“I really wanted to go to Royal to get this done. I even talked about it when we were doing the demos. Some of these guys from Austin just don’t play well enough for us to say we did the best we possibly could with this record,” Richard says. “Early on, we realized we needed another bass player and another drummer. So I interviewed Jackie Clark first, then Steve Potts. They heard those demos, and two stanzas into ‘Bad Alligator,’ they both said, ‘I’m in!’ They were very passionate.”

The new rhythm section in turn led the Bolen brothers to Royal Studios’ Boo Mitchell, and work has progressed steadily on making their dreams a reality ever since. The band, now called the Royal Brothers, is a songwriter’s dream team. “You get the right folks,” Gary says, “and you go, ‘Wow! Did I have anything to do with that? That sure sounds good!’”

“Once the nucleus of the band formed a year and a half ago,” Richard says, “the lineup hasn’t changed. There’s nobody there that’s wrong. And all of the people are basically Boo Mitchell’s extended musical family. Lifelong friends of Boo and his father. Gary and I can’t believe we’ve been invited into that family.”

Categories
Cover Feature News

Generation Jams: The Enduring Legacy of Memphis’ Great Musical Families

Cedric Burnside @ Royal Records

“The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going.” — George Carlin

The term “family values” is bandied about in political discourse a great deal, but what it really means is hard to pin down. While some bemoan the loss of the family life portrayed in Cold War textbooks, a look at the institution at street-level reveals a more complex picture. For many, leaving the family can have a liberating effect, as with countless alienated youths, be they counterculture or LGBTQ, who establish their own “family” of friends. And that’s not just a contemporary phenomenon. Memphis Minnie regularly ran away from the hard scrabble farming life of Walls, Mississippi, to play on Beale Street in the years before World War I, eventually staying gone for good while still in her teens. It all started when they gave her a guitar.

And yet families need not be so oppressive, as so many of us know. Indeed, families are a distinctive feature of this region’s musical heartbeat. The late Herman Green’s father played in W.C. Handy’s band, and his stepfather was a pastor whose church piano further sparked Green’s love of music. Phineas Newborn Sr. led a local orchestra that fostered the storied careers of his sons Calvin and “Junior,” the latter becoming one of the 20th century’s greatest pianists. Al Jackson Sr. fostered the talent of Al Jackson Jr., celebrated worldwide as the pulse behind Stax Records. From that same milieu arose Rufus Thomas, his daughters Carla and Vaneese destined to become celebrated singers, his son Marvell a distinguished soul pianist, composer, and arranger.

Though a full listing of contemporary performers with musical family roots would take a book, we highlight three such artists here whose kin inspired them. Once upon a time, people talked about the “generation gap,” with rock-and-roll marking the hard divide between young and old in the ’50s and ’60s. Now, in the 21st century, it’s all about the Generation Jams.

Meet the Burnsides

True, Cedric Burnside’s latest release, I Be Trying, might be seen as the culmination of his family’s story, grounded in the talent and guidance of his legendary blues-playing grandfather, R.L. Burnside. But Cedric’s latest, perhaps the greatest of his career so far, also represents the confluence of several families. Around here, when families befriend families, you wind up with a lot of kin.

The haunting collection of sparse blues, their unique aesthetic echoing African bluesman Ali Farka Touré at times, was produced by Boo Mitchell, himself the keeper of a family legacy. Willie Mitchell went from success to success as a band leader, then as a producer of megahits for Hi Records; he treated and taught the three musical Hodges brothers like family, and they became the Hi Rhythm Section. Along the way, Willie raised his grandson Boo as his son. “Every night he’d come home, I’d be messing around on the piano, and he’d come lean over my shoulder, those whiskers hitting me, and show me some stuff,” Boo recalls.

Now Boo co-manages Willie Mitchell’s Royal Studios, and working on Burnside’s album took on a uniquely cathartic aspect after Boo’s son fell victim to a vicious gun attack that left the Mitchells wondering if he’d ever walk again. “I didn’t know I Be Trying was going to become the soundtrack to my life,” Boo reflects. “When that thing went down with my son, all I kept hearing were Cedric’s songs. ‘The world can be so cold. …’ It was stuck in my head for a long while. Because he means that stuff. It is not an act.”

Cedric has inherited the gravitas and heartfelt approach to the blues of his grandfather. “I was born into this music,” Cedric says. “It was in my blood when I was birthed into this world. I have a very musical family. My Big Daddy [grandfather] and Big Mama [grandmother] had 13 children. Just about everybody turned to music, to have as their passion.

“My first instruments was the cans and buckets. We’d get done cooking, clean all the grease outta the jug, and I’d use that jug for a drum, you know? And my Big Daddy and my dad would play house parties around, and somehow I just found the courage to step up on the drums when they took a break. Instruments were all around me as a kid.”

Having been raised in his grandparents’ home, long before he mastered guitar, drumming for R.L. Burnside gigs at juke joints was an easy jump for Cedric. “It was fascinating, being that young, knowing I wasn’t supposed to be in the juke joints, me or my Uncle Garry. I was 10, he was 12, and we were in the juke joint! But there was something so special about that. Being kids that young, we’d know that we weren’t supposed to be there, but every grown-up in there welcomed us. They would hide us behind the beer coolers when the police came in because if we left, they didn’t have no band to play music! It was really, really cool, just knowing that you were one of the cool kids, at the juke joint with all grown-ups. It was scary, it was weird, and it would get your adrenaline pumping. You think of any scenario, and we probably went through all of those at that juke joint.”

Nowadays, Cedric is able to pay the tradition forward. “My youngest daughter, Portrika — she just turned 16 — sings on ‘I Be Trying.’ She always loved to sing, which makes me proud. And I’m just trying to feed her all I can give her, you know? While I’m here to do it.”

Direct descendants aside, for Cedric, “family” was never merely the classic nuclear arrangement, but an extended flock, some not even related by blood. Among the latter were Jim and Mary Lindsay Dickinson and sons. “With some musicians I play with, I have been around them for so long that they are like family to me. Like the North Mississippi Allstars. Luther and Cody Dickinson, we’ve been around each other since we were kids. Luther was the big brother of the group, the first one who could drive. That’s 30-plus years we’ve been knowing each other. So they are really like family to me. Even though we wasn’t blood. Just the closeness that we had made us family.” To this day, when Luther makes a cameo on Cedric’s album, you can hear the telepathy between them.

Sid and Steve Selvidge (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)

Meet the Selvidges

It turned out the Dickinsons weren’t the only family bonding with local geniuses of the blues and forging whole new family legacies. While Jim Dickinson was an early champion of under-recognized blues musicians of the area, he wasn’t alone. Standing right by his side at those first blues festivals of the ’60s was Sid Selvidge, whose family in Greenville, Mississippi, had not been particularly musical, but who nonetheless made his own way in the musical world of Memphis with the raw talent of his voice and fingers and his deep understanding of the blues and other song forms.

Today, Sid’s son Steve carries the tradition forward, best known as a guitarist in The Hold Steady. He says his early love of the guitar was sparked by his father’s encouragement — albeit with a light touch. “He was absolutely perfect,” recalls Steve. “Because he was not a stage dad. He was just so smart about it. He made everything available but didn’t push it on me or my brother. There was music around a lot, but all he offered was his enthusiasm.”

Showing young Steve a handful of chords was enough to get him started; from there, the son taught himself licks by rock gods like Led Zeppelin while the father looked on, adding only the occasional detail. “The biggest thing he showed me was open-G tuning and how to play ‘Cassie Jones’ and stuff. And while I played, he’d be shouting at me from downstairs, ‘It doesn’t go to the V chord!’ That’s literally something that happened,” laughs Steve.

Perhaps more than the technical niceties, Steve picked up a unique feeling for the blues via his father’s friends, namely the composer of “Cassie Jones” himself, the great Furry Lewis. “I only got fully hip to North Mississippi when Luther started digging deep down in there. My dad knew who R.L. Burnside was, but we hung out with Furry because they were friends. I have lots of memories of going over there and sitting on Furry’s bed and him being really sweet and really cool. And as he got older, the visits fell off a little bit. And I got into other things. I was still in single digits when he died.”

But there were other friends to learn from. As it turned out, Sid Selvidge, Jim Dickinson, Lee Baker, and Jimmy Crosthwait had a little band known as Mud Boy and the Neutrons. They were mostly local heroes but, by forging their own brand of heavy roots rock, have become highly regarded in hindsight. And the band itself was a kind of family. “They were still holdling on to the ethos of the counterculture,” muses Steve. “Even though they were middle-aged men by that point, there was still that ‘don’t trust anyone over 30’ vibe. I remember the smell of marijuana, and it was all very attractive. It was all connected with fun.”

Sons of Mudboy (Credit: Stevan Lazich)

Indeed, for young Steve, the visceral elements of musicianship were as alluring as the actual playing. “I can remember on Sundays, or after the weekend, I would open my dad’s guitar case, and this almost visible plume of aroma would come out, a cigarette smell, basically. Which is not that great, but it was really intoxicating as a kid. I would open it up and you could almost see the vapors, the smell of the bar. I was like, ‘Wow, man!’ I wasn’t even able to put it into words, but it was like, ‘This is a working musician’s instrument. He did something. And now he’s done for the weekend.’ It was like battle scars and it took on its own energy. It was almost like a living thing.”

Today, with Crosthwait the only Mud Boy member still living, Steve, Luther and Cody, and Ben Baker carry on that living thing as Sons of Mudboy, playing their fathers’ classic repertoire at free-ranging gigs that often include an extended family of other players. As he continues playing his father’s songs, Steve’s appreciation for what he achieved only grows. “Later, I got hip to how intricate and deep my dad’s self-accompaniment on guitar was. Originally I was looking for flash and guitar solos and crazy stuff,” Steve recalls, “but later I realized his whole playing and singing by himself was so hard to do. I can remember being in the first grade and being asked what your parents do. I said my dad was a magician. And maybe that was true, after all.”

MonoNeon (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)

Meet the Thomases

Steve and Sid Selvidge came to play together, including the time Steve accompanied his father at Carnegie Hall at age 19. Luther and Cody also joined their father Jim starting in their teens, Jim often dubbing the Dickinson family outfit the Hardly Can Playboys. But one local virtuoso didn’t have a chance to do that until very recently. Dywane Thomas Jr. bears the name of his father but mainly admired him from afar as a kid. “My dad, the bassist Dywane Thomas, is my first music hero,” writes the son in an email. To clear up any confusion, the son goes by a different name: You likely know him as MonoNeon, also a bassist, so renowned for his jazz, funk, and soul chops that he even played with Prince in the Purple One’s final days.

“Even though my dad moved to Europe when I was young,” MonoNeon writes, “his influence was just in me (the blues, funk, Southern-soul). Till this day I’m always searching for records my dad played on. I actually found an old vinyl record my dad played bass on with J. Blackfoot, entitled Physical Attraction (1984).”

Searching for records involving his family has been a long-time obsession for the bass wunderkind, for the family ear for music goes beyond his father. “My grandfather, Charles Thomas, a jazz pianist, was a later influence on me. I became aware of who my granddad was musically in my early teens. My granddad played with Ron Carter and Billy Higgins on the album called The Finishing Touch! by the Charles Thomas All Star Trio. I used to listen to those recordings a lot during high school wishing I had a chance to play with my granddad Charles.”

Grandma Liz with MonoNeon (Photo: Courtesy MonoNeon)

More recently, MonoNeon has taken to celebrating his grandmother Liz as well. It’s most obvious in the song “Grandma’s House,” on his 2021 album Supermane, a Funkadelic-tinged celebration of piling into the car to visit his grandmother and eat her fine cooking. “I’ve always just wanted to play some music with Grandma Liz,” he reflects. “I used to go to choir rehearsal with her with my bass and play. The whole thang with me and my grandma jammin’ together started when my mom brought her over to come hang and I told my grandma, ‘Let’s do a quick jam thang’ on a song she use to sing in church, ‘Oh, When I Come to the End of My Journey.’ Since I’ve started singing more, I’ve noticed I kinda sound like my grandma. My early gospel influence comes from going to the Baptist church with my grandma and aunties. Now I’ve just taken all those influences and made it neon I guess.”

As MonoNeon has become more celebrated, he seems to value family more than ever in his work, and recently he too was able to accomplish what the Selvidges and the Dickinsons did: create music with his father, keeping the cycle of family influences ebbing and flowing — “a living thing,” in the words of Steve Selvidge. As MonoNeon relates, “Me and my dad had a chance to record and jam recently at Niko Lyras’ Cotton Row Studio, with Steve Potts on drums. That was a dream I had to bring to realization in some way.”

Cedric Burnside plays an album release party, featuring Luther Dickinson, at B.B. King’s Blues Club, Wednesday, August 25th, 7 p.m. $20. He plays the 2021 Memphis Country Blues Festival at the Levitt Shell Thursday, October 7th, 7 p.m. $35.

Steve Selvidge plays with Big Ass Truck at the Levitt Shell, Saturday, September 11th, 7 p.m. Free.

MonoNeon plays Railgarten, Wednesday, September 1st, 8 p.m. $10.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Sound Traditions: Matt Ross-Spang Builds a Studio in Crosstown Concourse

Photo: Jamie Harmon

Memphis is rightly known as a city of musicians’ musicians. Whether they stay planted here, like MonoNeon, or move to the coasts where the music industry and its stars are based, they bring a feel and a groove that few others can match. But the city also attracts brilliant players from elsewhere, in search of that Memphis sound. More than any formula or ingredient, like our much-touted horn players, there’s an elusive ambience, a holistic character, that emerges when one works in this city. And one element of that is simple: It’s in the rooms.

That doesn’t mean our well-appointed lodgings, but rather the classic studios that have dotted the city for over half a century. But it wasn’t always thus. At the dawn of the 2000s, digital technology led many to retreat into the safety and economy of home studios, to such an extent that many studio owners wondered if they’d go the way of the dinosaurs. Was there any money in the studio business?

In recent years, that question is being answered with a definite maybe. The pendulum has swung back to the advantages that only dedicated studios can offer, especially larger rooms, classic gear, and efficient engineering. As Boo Mitchell, co-owner of Royal Studios, one of the oldest continuously operated spaces of its kind in the world, recently noted, “It’s shifting back to the way it used to be, when we were a recording destination.”

All such history is new again, as many artists and producers clamor for a sound that some call retro and others call classic. One indication came in 2019, when what was once unthinkable came to be: A new studio opened in town. And the classic sound was crucial to it. As Memphis Magnetic Recording Co. co-owner Bob Suffolk reflected, “Our studio is brand-spanking new, although it’s done in what I call a purpose-built vintage style.”

Matt Ross-Spang (Photo: Jamie Harmon)

Memphis Sounds, Southern Grooves

Now, a new “purpose-built vintage” recording space is opening with an even more local provenance. Matt Ross-Spang, who distinguished himself first at Sun Studio and then as a Grammy-winning engineer and producer based at the renowned Sam C. Phillips Recording Studio and elsewhere, is custom-designing a new room, to be called Southern Grooves, in what was once the Sears cafeteria on the second floor of Crosstown Concourse. As he puts on the finishing touches, it’s clear that this one project embodies all Ross-Spang has learned from multiple studios around Memphis for over a decade, a distillation of the city’s legendary history of recorded music.

“On these walls, we used a polyurethane paint. And that doubled the length of the room,” Ross-Spang says. When you get a tour of a studio, you hear such absurdities regularly. Wait a minute, I think, the paint alone can double the length of the room? That’s when I realize he’s talking about the length of the room’s echo. In a studio, what matters is how your ears measure a room, not your eyes or your yardstick.

In this instance, the room is basically a closet, but it’s a closet designed to always remain empty: another absurdity. “This is what I’m most proud of, our echo chamber. Steve [Durr] designed it. Here’s what it sounds like,” says Ross-Spang as he claps a single time. “It’s about four seconds. Of course, our bodies are soaking up some of the sound.” When in use, the room will have only speakers, playing audio from the control room, and microphones to record how those sounds bounce off the walls. To build such a room, Ross-Spang and Durr studied Phillips Recording intensely. “Phillips has three chambers. The one behind the pink door at the end of the hall there is the greatest echo chamber I’ve ever heard. It’s about six seconds. I didn’t have that much space, but we had height.”

Ross-Spang is one of the few to have seen the Phillips chambers in detail. As Jerry Phillips, son of the late Sam Phillips, says, “We’ve got some of the greatest echo chambers in the world in that building. And we keep them kind of a secret. We don’t let anybody take pictures in there. It’s proprietary. We have three different sizes. And the combination can really give you a great sound. You cannot duplicate it in any kind of digital process.”

That’s true of all such physical spaces, be they echo chambers or the large rooms in which bands record. Stepping into the tracking room at Southern Grooves is like stepping back in time, both sonically and visually. Wood panels alternate with orange fabric on the walls; a wooden chair rail runs along the room’s perimeter; linoleum floor tiles sport geometric patterns here and there; perforated light fixtures, reminiscent of the Summer Drive-In, hang from a ceiling with similarly perforated panels, arranged in an uneven sawtooth pattern. All of it seems to invite a band to set up and record in the old-school way, all together, playing live in the room that time forgot.

A session at Phillips Recording, with (l-r) Rev. Charles Hodges, Matt Ross-Spang,
William Bell (behind piano), Leroy Hodges, Ken Coomer, and David Cousar (Photo: Jamie Harmon)
Southern Grooves, the new recording studio in Crosstown Concourse (Photo: Jamie Harmon)

Memphis Soul Stew, or Ingredients of a Sound Studio

“I kinda stole from all my Memphis heroes. At Sun, the V-shapes on the ceiling went long ways, and at Phillips they go like this. And then Chips Moman’s thing was latticework,” Ross-Spang explains, referring to the producer/engineer who helped found both Stax and American Sound Studio. “So the ceilings here are about 15 feet high; the panels drop down and are angled, but the sound goes through the perforated metal, and then there’s insulation so it stops before it comes back down. So you still get the big room, but you don’t have the parallel surfaces. You never want parallel surfaces.” Such surfaces cause sounds to bounce around too much. “That was another big Sam [Phillips] thing. The angles throw off the flatness of the floor.”

And yet some bounce is desirable. Take the linoleum floor, also a design element from Sun (actually known as the Memphis Recording Service in its heyday). Those floors have often been celebrated as being critical to the roomy sound of early Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis, and Jerry Lee Lewis recordings. As musician Mark Edgar Stuart notes, one story among his fellow tour guides at Sun Studio is that once Bob Dylan himself walked in on a tour, looked at the floor, said, “Ahh, tile,” then walked back out.

As Jerry Phillips says of his father, “Memphis Recording Service was his baby, of course. And Marion Keisker helped him a lot. They laid the floor tiles. He would clap his hands and hear how the echo sounded in the room. How alive or dead it was. He wanted a combination of live sound and controllable sound. And he just built the acoustics in that studio by experimenting.”

Jerry Phillips at the bar in Sam C. Phillips Recording Studio (Photo:Jamie Harmon)

As Ross-Spang envisioned it, having such a “live” tracking room, with some echo (as opposed to a “dead,” echoless room) was critical. “In the ’60s, all the rooms were really reverberant,” he explains. “And then in the late ’60s, early ’70s, when they got 16 track machines and could put mics closer on stuff, they started to deaden stuff with burlap. And then they went so far, they would just really deaden it. So I wanted to have a ’60s room that just started putting up burlap. I always thought that was the coolest balance. ’Cause you can always deaden something more. I can always put more shag rugs down; I can put in baffles. But it’s hard to make stuff livelier. And I just love the old tile floor. Ever since Sun, I’ve always loved that sound.”

The wood and burlap on the walls, on the other hand, are inspired by the second location of Ardent Studios, built in 1972, where Big Star (and many others) made legendary albums. Once again, Ross-Spang leaned on his design collaborator for much of those details. “Steve Durr was really good friends with Welton Jetton, who built all the equipment for Stax and Ardent and helped John Fry [and Terry Manning and Rick Ireland] design the original acoustics at Ardent. So Ardent Studio A had these kinds of reflectors and absorbers. That was a Welton Jetton design. I brought that back because I always thought that was a great look, and they sound amazing.”

Yet there are some elements of Southern Groove’s acoustics that are completely unique, unrelated to the studios of yore. “You always want limitations, and I had the limitations of the columns,” Ross-Spang explains. He’s speaking of the huge concrete columns that pepper the entire Crosstown Concourse structure. There was no possibility of removing or moving them, but Ross-Spang was okay with that. “Acoustically, the columns are interesting because they’re three-foot-thick concrete, they’re smooth, and sound will bounce off that randomly every time. There’s no way to mathematically account for that, acoustically. You play guitar from here, you move and inch, and it’ll bounce differently. I think it’ll be interesting when we get mics in here because it will randomize the room a lot.”

For Ross-Spang, the randomness was a bonus. “A lot of acousticians have one design that they go for every time, but Steve [Durr]knows I wanted something weird and not necessarily correct. Because all the Memphis studios aren’t correct, but they’re cool. I didn’t want a perfect studio; I wanted a weird studio.”

As we move into the control room, where two electricians are painstakingly working, it becomes clear that weirdness is literally wired into the entire space, thanks in part to Ross-Spang’s forethought. Pointing to the electricians, he says, “They’re pulling 30,000 feet of cable, and we’ve got conduits and troughs running to all the rooms. I wanted to wire every room for sound ’cause sometimes you want something to sound perfect, and sometimes you want it to sound like it’s in a garage. The hallways and every other little room are wired. Sometimes a guitar in the main tracking room sounds too good. So you put it in the hallway and it sounds like Tom Waits, and that’s what you need, you know? I do that a lot. At both Sun and Phillips, I would use that front lobby all the time. So I wanted to keep that here. All the wiring is running through the floor in troughs, and the cables will come up into these old school ’60s one-fourth-inch patchbays.”

Ultimately, the wires will converge on a mixing board that, among all the design features, will make Ross-Spang’s commitment to classic Memphis studios more apparent than ever. “I actually have John Fry’s original board from the original Ardent on National Street, where they did the first Big Star stuff. It’s getting fixed up, and it’ll be the main board. It was built in Memphis by Welton Jetton. And I also have a later board that Welton built for Stax, when they upgraded to the bigger boards. We’re putting the Ardent console in the original Stax frame, this cool white Formica top thing.”

The influence of Jetton on the studios of Memphis is hard to overstate. As Terry Manning, the first engineer at Ardent and now a distinguished producer, says, “Welton was a genius. He was the chief engineer at Pepper [Sound] Studios, which at the time was the biggest jingle recording company in the world and had several studios that Welton had put in. Pepper was huge, and Welton was a prime part of that. And later he started his own company making consoles, which became the Spectrasonics consoles that Stax and Ardent had. Later he changed that to Auditronics, and they were used all over the world. It was all Welton and his crew — acoustic design, electronic design, building the consoles. ‘Hey, we need a direct box! What’s a direct box? I don’t know, but Welton will build it!’ It was an amazing time, where you made your own gear and recorded your way.”

Finally, aside from the collection of other vintage gear that Ross-Spang has amassed in his current home base at Phillips, there will be vintage amps and instruments, including a Hammond A-100 organ and one thing most home studios and even many professional ones simply do not have these days: a grand piano.

For that, Ross-Spang received some sage advice from one of the pillars of Memphis’ golden era of recording. “I brought one of my heroes, Dan Penn, over here, and out of nowhere he said, ‘What kind of piano are you gonna get?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to get anything too big.’ And he said, ‘You need to get the biggest durned piano you can buy. Them little pianos, the sound don’t wanna come out of them. But them big pianos, they can’t wait to be recorded. They jump out the speakers.’ So I’m going to have a Baldwin from 1965 in here. It’s a 7-footer. It was really cool to get it from Amro Music ’cause it’s their 100th year of serving Memphis.”

James Taylor, Peter Asher, and Terry Manning at Ardent Studio in 1971, using the mixing board Matt Ross-Spang has acquired. (Photo: Courtesy Terry Manning)

I’ll Take You There, or Setting is Everything

And yet, despite all of Ross-Spang’s committment to the designs and instruments and gear of yesteryear, there’s another element that he may value over all others. As we wrap up the tour, he reflects a bit more on the simple fact of where Southern Grooves will live. The name screams out “Memphis,” of course, but there’s more to it than that. Something unique.

“Never has a studio been in such an ecosystem like Crosstown,” he says. “That was one of the biggest selling points to me. Think about with Ardent and other places with multiple rooms and who you might run into. You might be doing an overdub, but then Jack Oblivian’s in Studio A, and you’re like, ‘Hey, will you come play real quick?’ And that’s kinda gone now with home studios and one-studio facilities.

“But at Crosstown — like, we just ran into Craig Brewer! It’s kinda like having Jerry Phillips come visit Phillips Recording. Here, you can go next door to the Memphis Listening Lab and remember why we’re doing this in the first place. Crosstown is a million-and-a-half-square-foot lounge, essentially, filled with creative people. And I don’t think any other studio has had that opportunity. That’s what I feed off of: other people’s energy. If you put me in here by myself, I couldn’t create anything. But when I have the people here, I’ll go two days without sleeping because I’m so jacked, you know?”

Matt Ross-Spang plans to have Southern Grooves fully operational this August.

Categories
Music Music Blog

Cedric Burnside Named NEA National Heritage Fellow

Cedric Burnside (Credit: Abraham Rowe)

Long ago, North Mississippi Hill Country was overlooked in standard perspectives on the blues. While the Delta Blues had been a buzzword in music circles for generations, the variation to the east and north of the flatlands was little-recognized until artists like R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, Robert Belfour, Calvin Jackson, and Sid Hemphill gradually came to be known outside of the region.

Then the documentary Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads, released 30 years ago, featured Burnside, Kimbrough, Othar Turner, and Jessie Mae Hemphill. Fat Possum Records began releasing works by these and other artists shortly thereafter. And of course, the North Mississippi Allstars did much to further popularize the sound, albeit in a more hybridized form.

What they all shared in common was an emphasis on droning, hypnotic guitar riffs played over a driving, insistent beat. And the guitar sounds are unapologetically electrified and distorted, in a heavier and more stripped-down manner than the electrified urban blues guitar that came to prominence in the ’50s.

Since then, the sound’s reach has only seemed to grow. And this week, a new milestone was passed when R.L. Burnside’s grandson, Cedric Burnside, who began drumming for R.L. in his teens but grew into a songwriter and guitarist in his own right, was recognized as a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts’ Folk and Traditional Arts program.

This award recognizes individuals who “sustain cultural traditions for future generations,” and Cedric Burnside could not be more illustrative of that quality. While he was long recognized primarily as a drummer, winning Blues Music Awards as an instrumentalist in that field multiple times, he has also grown as a gifted guitarist and composer. He was nominated for Grammy Awards in 2016, for his album Descendants of Hill Country, and in 2019 for his album, Benton County Relic.

Burnside is not the first artist with Memphis and Mid-South roots to be recognized by the NEA. William Bell received the same fellowship last year, as the Memphis Flyer reported at the time.

In a biographical essay on the NEA’s website, onetime Rhodes College associate professor Zandria Robinson, now an associate professor of African American Studies at Georgetown University, writes:

As an architect of the second generation of the Hill Country blues, Burnside has spent his career tending to the legacy of the genre by expanding the next, electric generation of the North Mississippi sound. In Burnside’s care, the sound leads with extended riffs that become sentences, pleas, or exclamations, rendering the guitar like its West African antecedent, the talking drum. These riffs fuse with Burnside’s voice, like the convergence of hill and horizon in the distance, carrying listeners to a deep well of Mississippi history whose waters reflect the present and the future of the state and the nation.

On June 25, Single Lock Records will release Burnside’s latest album, I Be Trying, recorded at Royal Studios. The album’s first single, “Step In,” was released in April.

Categories
Music Music Blog

Memphis Music Community Rallies to Aid Boo Mitchell’s Family

CREDIT: courtesy Boo Mitchell

courtesy Boo Mitchell

Elijah and Boo Mitchell

Boo Mitchell and family, keepers of producer Willie Mitchell’s legacy and the ongoing musical productions at Royal Studios, are currently in the throes of tragedy, as they hope and pray for the recovery of Boo and Tanya Lewis Mitchell’s eldest son, Elijah. Friends and colleagues across the world were shocked to read a social media post by Boo on August 16th:

This is the most difficult thing for me to post. Please excuse me if I’m a little scattered. Yesterday our oldest son Elijah Mitchell (Elijah Lewis) was taken to Regional One Health for a gun shot wound to the back, broken ribs and other injuries. Suspect, his girlfriend’s ex lover, broke in her house and waited for him, shot him in the back then beat him after he was down. His front teeth were all beaten out. Unfortunately the bullet went through his spinal cord and he has lost all of the feeling in his legs. Suspect has been arrested and is in custody. We are grateful and thankful that Elijah is alive. We have a lot of work ahead of us. This is the most devastating [thing] that has ever happened to me or my family. We are thankful for the amazing team of doctors and nurses at Regional One Health; they have been nothing less than angels through this. Please keep Elijah and my family in your thoughts and prayers. We know that God is in charge and we are praying and hopeful that one day he will fully recover.

As a testament to the tragic situation — and the good will Boo and family have inspired throughout Memphis — hundreds have stepped up to help. Elijah, at 26, can no longer be covered by his parent’s insurance and has none of his own. Accordingly, the Memphis community has risen to the occasion. Yesterday, Vicki Loveland, a Memphis music veteran, launched a GoFundMe campaign, Elijah Mitchell Medical Emergency Fund, to assist the family with the coming onslaught of medical bills.

courtesy Boo Mitchell

Elijah Mitchell

Today, the campaign has gathered roughly 20 percent of its fundraising goal of $50,000. The fund is steadily growing thanks to contributors from all walks of life, but of course the Mitchell family’s importance to music is reflected in the list. Indeed, the importance of music to so many is evoked in Loveland’s statement on the campaign page:

Music lovers all over the world, and certainly the Memphis music community, know the beautiful history of Royal Studios. We have lived our lives listening to hits from Al Green to Bruno Mars. But the biggest reason Royal has continued to be so vitally important to this world is because of the Mitchell family and the love and kindness they show, not only for Memphis but for people everywhere. Now, they need all of us to reciprocate and show them what we all can do to lift them up from a horrible tragedy that has stricken their family.

Her words reflect the deep connection between music and community, but it’s the last word, family, that best expresses the heart of the matter. For what parent has not imagined what a crushing blow such events would be?

As of today, there have been no updates on Elijah’s condition, but Loveland did add this postscript to the GoFundMe page: “Just want to say THANK YOU once again for keeping the love train rolling around the world. It really does matter.”

Categories
Music Music Features

Spaceman Arrives: Michael Graber Debuts New Original Tracks

CREDIT: Photographs courtesy of Michael Graber

Michael Graber has built a career outside of music, but he’s a fixture on the local scene. Back in the ’90s, he helped found Prof. Elixir’s Southern Troubadours; more recently, we’ve heard his work with the Bluff City Backsliders, who have mined similar territory, or with the group Damfool, who are harder to pin down.

Now, another of his groups, Graber Gryass, is stepping to the fore, and, as the name implies, it’s more focused on his own songwriting than any of his earlier projects. That’s partly due to the realities of life during the coronavirus.

Photographs courtesy of Michael Graber

Michael Graber with son Leo and Graber Gryass

“When Amy LaVere and Will Sexton were on tour in March, and suddenly every gig they had was canceled, I thought, ‘Shit, what can I do?'” he explains. “So I started that Microdose series [on Facebook every Saturday at 1:30 p.m.], where I do two originals and one cover, to raise money for full-time working musicians. And I raised over $1,000 dollars, just to give away to all my musical brethren and sistren. But by the fourth one, I ran out of songs that I had written. I had to start writing songs pretty quickly just to keep up because there was more interest than I thought there would be. I challenged myself to do more songwriting, and after I had about 24 of them, I thought, ‘Hmm, some of ’em fit into a mold, some of them are way out, but we should record all of them.'”

Graber booked a couple days with Boo Mitchell at Royal Studios, and, fully masked, the band cut one song after another, mostly live in the tracking room. The players were so prolific and inventive that Graber is sorting the final tracks into two batches, to be released under different names. (An Indiegogo campaign under the name of Graber Gryass has been launched to fund the releases.)

Michael Graber w daughter Rowan Gratz & grandson Ellery with Graber Gryass

Sometime next year, he’ll release the most left-field compositions, which developed as the band grew more and more uninhibited in the studio. “The one with the weirder songs, I’m gonna call Spaceman’s Wonderbox. In one band I play in, called Damfool, they started calling me Spaceman. And they’ll never tell me why. It just kinda stuck. You can’t really fight it, right?” Moreover, the name is a good fit with the material itself, which Graber describes as “this mix of shamanic spoken word and ecstatic love poetry, and everybody’s playing behind me.”

While the songs were written in the downtime of shelter-in-place, Graber notes that they apply to life more generally. “There may be some emotional truth, but there’s no topical or literal way of talking about this time of quarantine. These songs run the gamut of the emotions, everything from jumping into a river to turning into light. It’s crazy stuff. It’s really more like a celebration of living fully, no matter what. Just flourishing. It’s springtime!”

Meanwhile, the other batch is already being released online. These are more traditional numbers, in a folk/bluegrass/country vein, albeit touched with Graber’s own old world-inspired lyrical imagination. These celebrate living fully as well, but in a different way. The first single, which dropped in late June, is simply titled “Marijuana.” “An ancient herbal brew, it could take care of you too,” he sings. Other tracks have dropped since, such as “Drinkin’ Forties,” celebrating another ancient brew, and “When the Water’s This Low,” which begins, “Now Daddy and Red been drinking since dawn and now the sun’s waning low. Twilight crept in like a ghost as we rode through a cypress grove.”

These first releases, which will emerge on a Graber Gryass album in August, are especially meaningful to Graber. “I’m gonna call [the first album] Late Bloom. I’m 50 and this’ll be the first thing ever released under my name, other than the Backsliders, 611, Prof. Elixir, all that stuff. It’s taken a while. It’s a way to say, ‘Hey, it’s never too late to create. We can always blossom, we can always flourish.'”

Categories
Cover Feature News

COVID Blues: Al Kapone is Back With a New Album and a New Name

CREDIT: Photographs courtesy of Al Kapone

Al Kapone wrote “COVID Blues” and “Hustle Up” shortly after the quarantine began a few months ago. But as time progressed, Kapone, 48, wasn’t sure the songs would fit his new album, Hip Hop Blues, which he will release June 24th.

“I wrote those while we were really in the thick of it,” Kapone says. “I’d say mid-May. I wrote them based on what was going on from the time it hit to that point. A lot has evolved since then. In a way, those songs are dated. They’re not as current as where we are now.”

Photographs courtesy of Al Kapone

Both songs — which didn’t make the cut but are slated to be used in upcoming films — are “basically talking about when it literally started taking off. About how one moment we were hearing about it overseas and the next moment, ‘Holy shit! It’s coming to us. It’s here.’ And it happened so fast nobody was really ready.”

The message in both songs is, “Through it all, we gotta hustle our way back into society. Fight the pandemic. Get finances together. We’re going through all this. We got to fight back.”

But, he says, “After I wrote those two songs I started revisiting some of the blues hip-hop songs I’d already done.”

“Blues hip-hop” is a song with “super heavy blues guitar rhythms.” But it can be diverse. It could be “blues hip-hop” or “rock hip-hop,” he says. “I like all styles of music. I tend to create different styles of music through hip-hop.” 

Among the songs on the new album are “Drunk as a Skunk” — about “getting drunk as hell” — that he wrote with Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi All-Stars.

 “Rock Me Baby” is a remake of the Melissa Etheridge song. “She had given me the blessing to use it. And with Uriah Mitchell, we reworked it and made sure it had that hip-hop feel.”

“Dead and Gone,” a collaboration with Eric Gales, is “basically saying you need to right your wrongs before you’re dead and gone.” 

Photographs courtesy of Al Kapone

Al Kapone, Craig Brewer circa $5 Cover

During his long career, Kapone has written more than 1,000 songs, including, “Whoop That Trick,” which was in the Oscar-winning soundtrack of the 2005 made-in-Memphis movie, Hustle & Flow, directed by Craig Brewer.

He’s using “AK Bailey” as his name on the album. “With the blues project, I’m trying to carve out a different brand.” Kapone, whose real name is “Al Bailey,” is going back to his roots, in a way.

Music was his first creative expression, says Kapone, who was born in Memphis. “My grandmama and mama said it came in when I was a kid, before I even remember. When I was 2 years old, I’d say I was doing James Brown moves and singing songs like ‘Shoeshine Boy’ by Eddie Kendricks.”

Kapone moved with his mom to Bakersfield, California, when he was in the third grade. That’s where he began writing — but it wasn’t songs: “The elementary school I went to encouraged us to write a story. They said, ‘You can write whatever story you want to write.’ I remember writing this story. Something about being in the ocean. Something about a fish. It was something crazy, but I got really into the story and it hit me then that I was into characters.”

About a year and a half later,  Kapone moved back to Memphis, where he joined the newspaper staff at Lauderdale Elementary. “I was into the school newspaper. And I started learning more about the craft of writing. I was a little reporter and didn’t realize it. I was into story writing, just telling the story. Just a cool story people can read and get caught up in.”

Kapone later translated the basics of writing a news story to performing. “When I’m on stage, it’s a story. ‘Cause you got the beginning — it has to grab you. Then you got to take the audience into the journey in the middle. And it has to end with the right ending.”

He began performing in funk groups when he was in the fourth grade. “We used to have these little dance groups. You’d be out in your front yard. Once you get the routine down, you’d perform it in the neighborhood. People were so happy to see these little kids doing these dance routines.”

Later, Kapone was impressed with some provocative dance groups. “They were always men. They’d do all the provocative moves and the women would scream. I’d watch them: ‘Man, I want to do that.’ But I didn’t know how to dance.

“By the time I got into hip-hop, it wasn’t just being a rapper or getting on stage with a mic and rapping, walking back and forth and rapping, you’ve got to put on a performance. That’s always been part of my makeup.”

Kapone was introduced to hip-hop through the music of LL Cool J and Run-D.M.C. “I knew hip-hop was the right thing for me ’cause I couldn’t sing. I always wanted to perform, but I can’t sing. So hip-hop was like, ‘Oh, shit. I can do this. I can be an artist because it’s not about singing. It’s about telling cool stories and the rhymes. I could tell cool stories and I could perform them. I could do this in rhythm and rhyme.'”

And, he says, “I fell in love with the culture. The breakdancing. The deejaying. Graffiti. The way hip-hop people dress. I was into all of that. I was engulfed in the hip-hop culture. If it wasn’t for hip-hop, I’d probably never have been a performer.”

He joined the Peewee Emcees when he was in the sixth grade. “We all delivered groceries at Lauderdale Sundry. That was the first time I officially became a rapper.”

In junior high, Kapone joined a rap group called Jam Inc. Leno Reyes, a former drummer for Rick James who had moved from New York to Memphis and started a funk group, “kind of took us under his wings.”

Reyes gave them a valuable piece of advice: “You go on stage, you are controlling the crowd.”

“He said it in a way where I really felt it. It was like he translated power to me when he said it. ‘When you go on the stage, you are the master.’ And it felt so powerful that whenever I went on stage from that point I knew I’m in control. I’m the master.

 “I don’t need the audience to give me the energy. I give them the energy. I’m going to take the audience on a journey with me. And my goal is to outperform anybody that’s going to perform that day.

“I built up my name. I’d go up on stage and perform almost like a rock star. And that resonated with the audience.”

He was “one of the first rappers to perform in rock venues” at the age of 16. “Even though I was hip-hop, I had that rock star mentality.”

Kapone joined a group called Men of the Hour, which performed with “other up-and-coming rappers,” including DJ Spanish Fly and 8Ball & MJG, at the 21st Century Youth Club.

They recorded at OTS Records in Orange Mound. “That’s where Gangsta Pat had blown up. Me and 8Ball would record songs trying to outdo each other. We were developing the Memphis rap sound at that time. That was the genesis of it.”

Photographs courtesy of Al Kapone

“Lyrical Drive By” days

Kapone became a solo artist after Men of the Hour broke up. “That’s where I literally became Al Kapone, and everybody knew who I was ’cause I had this song, ‘Lyrical Drive By,’ which blew up in Memphis and regionally. I was doing shows in Memphis, Mississippi, Arkansas, and experiencing the real fans.”

But, he says, “To this day, I never really wanted to be a solo artist.”

That’s when he said, “I need a cool solo rap name.”

He was watching the 1932 movie, Scarface, based on mobster Al Capone. “I said, ‘That’s my name.’ It just grabbed my attention. That name is the shit. My name is Al anyway.”

Kapone went by Scarface Al until he discovered the Ghetto Boys had a group member named Scarface. 

So, he became Al Kapone, but he says, “Of course, Al Capone is associated with gangsters, the whole gangster world. At some point I’m still just a songwriter, a guy from the projects and the hood.”

Kapone says now that he didn’t want to be pigeonholed into just writing gangsta songs. “I wanted to write different types of songs. Not just stuff that goes on in the streets, in the hood. I’m a writer. I can write about anything.

“I used to piss audiences off. My songs had nothing to do with being a gangsta on the street. It was human life struggles. Black struggle shit.

“People were like, ‘I want to hear “Drive By,” dammit, and you’re talking about struggling as a black man. What the fuck. I want to hear some shooting and stuff. You’re talking about trying to better yourself.’ That name got in the way.”

But, he says, “I could never come up with anything. I was already known at this point.”

Kapone had been an independent performer for 14 years and says he had become “stagnant” when Hustle & Flow came along. “When Craig gave me the opportunity to do my music, and once they accepted me and the movie came out and blew up and everybody talked about the music in the movie, it gave me a whole other level of attention.”

Hustle & Flow put Kapone “in a situation to write more songs for other artists. Writing songs for different movies. And labels were calling me for a lot of songwriting and stuff like that, but at some point it became like an assembly line. It’s not fun anymore. It becomes robotic. And I was like, ‘This is not how you write songs.’ You write songs from a feeling of creativity. Not someone throwing you something and saying, ‘Write. Write. Write.’ I kind of shied away from the music business for a while ’cause I wasn’t feeling like that.”

Photographs courtesy of Al Kapone

Eric Gales (left) collaborated with Al Kapone on “Dead and Gone.”

But, he says, “When I stopped being a part of the music business, I started listening to music as a fan again. The same way I did when I was in elementary school when I became a fan.”

Kapone knew he wasn’t going to quit show business. That “reassured me to not leave it. ‘Cause I felt the good feeling I felt from being creative again.

“I’m blessed with a level of creativity and blessed with being able to express it. And blessed to put it out when it feels good to me. Not because I have to.” 

During the quarantine, Kapone discovered that a video made by Running Pony using his rendition of “Eye of the Tiger” had won the No. 1 intro in the country by National Association of Collegiate Directors of Marketing (NACMA). He recorded it with the University of Memphis’ Mighty Sounds of the South band at Royal Studios. “Uriah Mitchell did vocals with me, and we made it happen.”

Photographs courtesy of Al Kapone

Al Kapone (left) and Isaac Hayes

The win was “a ray of light in a way,” he says. “It gave everybody a sense of pride when they heard about that news.  I feel that pride was much-needed, especially in Memphis, going through what we’re going through. It lifted a lot of people’s spirits. Memphis — we’re still out here making noise in spite of everything. Know what I’m saying? We’re David beating Goliath still.”

Royal Studios owner Lawrence “Boo” Mitchell says Kapone “always manages to stay current throughout his creative process.”

He stays relevant, “pushing himself as an artist and doing something cutting-edge that nobody else has done before.”

Stax co-owner/record producer and songwriter Al Bell says Kapone is “very aware of the shoulders on which he stands: the veteran Memphis musicians from Stax Records, Hi Records, and others who helped create ‘The Memphis Sound.’ Those musical roots are very important to him, and I think that’s one of the factors that make his style so entertaining.”

And, Bell says, Kapone “has proven that he can move from the underground status younger audiences tend to follow, to more mainstream works that often tend to celebrate Memphis in various ways. He was born in Memphis, lives in Memphis, and loves Memphis. Al is Memphis.”

To hear Hip Hop Blues, go to akmemphis.com.

Categories
Cover Feature News

VENT! Nine Memphians Let It All Hang Out

CREDIT: Joey Miller

Times are tough. We’re stuck inside a lot. And when we go out, we’re either walking the dog or making quick trips to stores while wearing masks. We can’t shake hands. We can’t hug. We can’t hang in bars like we used to. Restaurant servers and bartenders are wearing masks and gloves. There are no sports. The parks are controlled. Not to mention, the president seems to get loonier every day. Everything is just … screwed up.

Sooo … we asked nine Memphians to just let it out. Vent. Spill it. Doesn’t matter what you want to rant about, just do it — and send it to us. They did. And below are the results. Enjoy!

Kemba Ford
Politician/Consultant
For the last several years, I have had opportunities to work in Texas and California, often traveling for many months away from the city I call home. 

Kemba Ford

I tend to believe that I returned with fresh eyes and a bit more objectivity with which to view all things Memphis. After spending the first half of 2017 in Houston, I returned home to a small bit of fanfare: reuniting with family, a well-attended cocktail party at the Grawemeyer Estate in Midtown, and lunch and dinner invitations with friends — many of whom amazed I returned at all. 

So, I linked up with a friend for lunch Downtown on a beautiful weekday afternoon in late May of that year. I absolutely love Memphis during the month of May. The mild weather and only a 30 percent chance of mosquitoes create a great vibe along the riverfront, and after lunch I walked along Main Street to chill at my friend’s condo with a divine view of the river. 

A glass of wine later, we were watching some random golf tournament on TV, when suddenly: Breaking News! Apparently, several people tried to rob the front desk/check-in of the Sheraton Hotel Downtown and shots were fired in the lobby. The suspects fled the scene on foot; one guy was said to have on a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt and a female suspect was said to have on flip-flops. Downtown was on lockdown. Wow!

My immediate reaction: Who robs a hotel front desk that really doesn’t do cash business? At 2 p.m. in broad daylight, two blocks from 201 Poplar? In flip-flops and a Cowboys shirt? Were they just riding around, passing the Sheraton, and decided this would be a good come-up? My mind was melting, and the only conclusion I could come up with is they must not “GAF” (give a fuck).  And I needed more wine.

I have played around with this idea or mindset called “IDGAF” (I don’t give a fuck) or “I have Zero (fucks) to give” for a while now. I pitched the idea of a radio show called “GAF” to debate the notion, kind of like a TED Talk but not. My position being that — yeah — it may be cool being unconcerned or unbothered about many things, but there’s too much crazy, stupid mess that happens because errbody has an “IDGAF” attitude.

Let’s pretend we are privy to the conversation these folks had in the car five minutes before they pulled up to that hotel. Anybody GAF that the police headquarters and city jail is a literal stone’s throw away? Anybody GAF that they are not dressed for this? I mean flip-flops, REALLY? Clearly, no one GAF or a thought as to whether the front desk of a hotel would even have cash. Some straight-up tomfoolery here, I thought. If just one person in that car GAF, just one single solitary F, then maybe some unnecessary mess could be deterred. My opinion, just VENTing.

I’m in my mid-40s these days, and surprisingly it’s been a good time. When I tell people my age, they often don’t believe me and ask what I do to look “not old,” I guess. I say, GAF. You gotta GAF, approximately 2 Fs at this age: moving your body and the food you eat. Neither of these is easy when you begin integrating them into your lifestyle, but the reward is there. And it gets easier the more you do it. Finding an activity, you enjoy doing and some green vegetables you can learn to like has helped me tremendously. Thank you, kale, celery, and red bell peppers!

Main point: It is 2020. This is an election year like no other in my lifetime. While it most certainly is not my lane to tell anyone how to vote, I will tell you it is no time for the “IDGAF” attitude. The United States is in the throes of a global pandemic while record unemployment, economic uncertainty, and class and racial divisions openly scar our society. At this moment COVID-19 has taken 90,000 American lives in less than three months. Yeah, mane. … It is time to GAF!

I need you to do me a favor, though. Vote on November 3, 2020.

Joshua McLane
Drummer, HEELS
I’m in a band called HEELS. I miss my band. Before all this bullshit started, we were in a good place. We were on top of our finances and in the middle of writing our next record, and waiting to go on the three tours we had booked over the next two months.

Joshua McLane

Next thing you know, the two biggest things in my life happen: The pandemic was announced and then I found out I was going to be a father. Since I’m not a moron, I want to keep my wife and prodigy (progeny? who cares?) safe from all the dipshits I spent my teens with, the ones who think the virus is some phony libtard conspiracy.

I miss my best friend. HEELS hasn’t been able to practice since this started, and since [HEELS guitarist Brennan Whalen’s] bosses are making him go back to the office, we won’t be anytime soon either. He’s the only person I’ve ever met that instills legitimate hope in me, and I’m in need of some of that shit.

One of the best parts of being in HEELS is that there are only two of us. So, touring is a breeze. Mainly because we both love talking shit. I miss talking shit with the only person who keeps his mouth shut.

I miss listening to podcasts on the road. Now, all podcasts have to be called in and let’s be honest … they fucking suck like that (see also: most stand-up comedy now). I miss all the food. The best part of being on the road is meeting new people and eating their food. It’s cheesy (pun intended), but it’s what makes this country as awesome as it is. I MISS OTHER PLACES.
       
I love this town and I love this country, but I also like not being sick. So, I haven’t gone anywhere but to meet my weed dealer for the last three months. Even that is a cluster-fuck of baggies and gloves and not getting arrested because we live in a backward state. So, I don’t go anywhere.

I don’t need things to be open or for people to go back to work at the fucking mall, though. I have a soul and care for others and, since I’m going to be a father, I can’t chance it. I have to admit that it’s been great with my wife working from home. We’re extremely fortunate that way.

The only thing I truly can’t stand are all the goddamn, mother-fucking dog walkers that are just staring at their goddamn, mother-fucking phones as they drag their tiny, mother-fucking dogs down the goddamn street. Those poor dogs don’t want to be walked, you $80,000-a-year dickhead. What’s worse is when they have some loud-ass conversation on their phone and just yell into the wind. FUCK THAT AND FUCK YOU for doing it. Yeah, I’ve been known to “sing” along with my music when I walk, but at least I feel some shame about it.
     
I do miss hugs. Not as much as many, but more than I did. I enjoy not being touched, though, a lot. Also, I like being able to give someone the proper stink eye when they get too fucking close to me. I think I’m gonna take a nap. End of rant. Be good to each other.

Boo Mitchell
Music Producer
I try not to vent much, but something that really gets under my skin is the lack of courtesy people show each other. Although, I could talk about this in several aspects of our daily lives, today the topic is parking lots. 
Joey Miller

Boo Mitchell

Have you ever been trying to pull into a parking space only to find that someone has left their basket in the middle of the space? The one that really gets me is when someone has parked over the line and taken up two spaces. These actions cause negative effects. Besides being a huge inconvenience, the person gets called a few choice adjectives and nouns. And even though they are long gone and have no idea the tongue lashing they are getting, that negative energy and bad karma is going out into the world.

So, when I’m in a parking lot, I try to build up some blessings of good karma by returning my basket to the basket bin area. It only takes an extra minute or so. And I also make sure to park between the lines.

Small acts of anonymous kindness go a long way. It reminds me of a great philosophical mantra from the guru of comedy, George Carlin: “Don’t Be an Asshole.”

Meghan Stuthard
Writer
Facebook sucks and the Messenger app sucks even more, but it did yield a delightful message from the Flyer’s own Bruce VanWyngarden the other day, asking me if I’d like to bitch about something. How much time you got, Bruce?

If there’s anything to be gained from this quarantine besides retention of one’s health and proof of one’s intelligence, it’s the myriad ways I’ve found to be even more pissed off and tormented than usual.

Meghan Stuthard and friends

It was borne of “quarantini” jokes and escalated with each whiny post from a shitty parent that “we can’t do this sort of psychological damage to our kids! Let them attend a water park with 50 million other snot-nosed brats, because — sans nanny — I am woefully unprepared to raise my own children!” So thanks for the bullhorn, Flyer. It’s from these digital pages that “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Like Whitman, I am unconstrained, into dudes, and like wine.

I think the obvious choice is to ridicule the dong-bags protesting stay-at-home orders, mock-coughing on grandmas at Kroger, and posting asinine bullshit all over their social media accounts, but they’re too easy of a target. They’re so ignorantly stupid they won’t be able to point their browser to this website anyway, and I figure that anyone reading this is squarely on my side even if their father-in-law isn’t.

But they’re not the only item on my list of things that I want to bitch about. Literally everything pisses me off, and everything that pisses me off is now served up to me in grand quantities while staying at home. TV volume over 16, TV volume on any odd number, washing and folding laundry, waiting on things to microwave or boil, and the fact that I’ve sat outside my house for 60 straight nights and my recently departed neighbor’s (RIP) cats, Pussyfoot and Pussy Willow, still won’t let me pet them. Like, I’m an actual living person who wants to pet them, which is a hell of a lot more than they’re working with currently, and they want no part of it.

Speaking of animals, here’s something. Midtown is full of owls, something that absolutely does not piss me off. I’m so enchanted by the owls that I googled which owls are native to our area and found the Barred Owl, whose hoot sounds like, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?” That’s a real thing. It was on allaboutbirds.org. And that’s what my neighborhood owls’ hoots sound like.

My roommate, upon hearing this, says, “That’s not a thing, and it’s probably a barn owl.” It was on allaboutbirds.org, David. A fucking bird expert wrote that, I repeated it, and I’m such a dim-witted dolt that I can’t possibly discern a barn owl’s “hoot-hoot!” from “WHO COOKS FOR YOU? WHO COOKS FOR US ALL”?

And then this guy, again, bearing in mind that he corrected me, because, again, he thinks I’m the idiot, is outside a few nights later trying to attract an owl by — get this — wrapping a piece of deli turkey around an old cat toy shaped like a mouse.

The same species, sex, and race that brought you star-spangled pants, truck nutz, and white pride tiki torches now thinks that he is superior to the owl and can attract it with sandwich meat and cat toys, forgetting that the owl, a stone-cold killing machine, has been honing its ability to differentiate a live mouse from a fake mouse for eons. We caved and bought a remote-controlled mouse. Upping our game.

Outside of the purchases I’ve made online, shopping has been sullied for me by our friendly neighborhood Kroger. People are strolling along and pawing every box of Wheat Thins like they can tell from feeling the outside of the box if Nabisco made that batch extra-wheaty. Peep the bestial behavior that has ravaged the meat section. Note the fact that the frozen pizza aisle looks like the firebombing of Dresden, but the produce section, brimming with vitamins, is as untouched as a pack of masks in the White House. Kroger shoppers’ only redeeming quality is their love of boxed red wine. This I know because it’s never there and I have to buy Pinot Grigio and drink it over ice like some sort of Arkansan.

I’m excited to get through this and come out on the other side. I look forward to rolling my eyes in public at bars again, leaving mean-ass notes on the windshields of the small-wienered dipshits who double-park, and loudly defending Mötley Crüe to anyone with a pulse. Bitching into the void isn’t as fun and an audience whose reaction I can’t gauge makes me wonder if there’s even a point in bitching. HAH! Dumb-ass question. Bitching is always a pleasure. Yawp!

Leon Gray
Administrator, Juvenile Court
Now that I’m over 60, I sometimes long for the days of my youth, when everything was simpler — at least to me. Being a native Memphian, I have some fond — and some not so fond — memories of growing up in the Bluff City. Ironically, one of the biggest news events of the late 1960s, the sanitation strike which ultimately led to the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., taught us very little about the value of clean streets and neighborhoods in the 21st century.

Leon Gray

I am rarely angered by little things, but seeing a motorist toss a cup complete with lid and straw out their car window and onto our streets makes me want to scream out my car window at them. And that’s just the beginning. Whole bags of fast food remains get tossed or just laid down outside the vehicle in a retail store parking lot — with trash cans just feet away. What has happened to these people? And why is MY CITY their dumping ground??

Speaking of dumping, many of our neighbors have made the sides of lesser traveled roads and spaces behind closed commercial buildings dump-sites for everything from unwanted furniture and appliances to worn tires and automobile parts. This has got to STOP!!!

Where are the days of the Memphis City Beautiful Commission? When was the last time Memphis could claim the Cleanest City in America award? Where is our hometown pride — or at least decency? And why aren’t more citizens and elected officials angry about this trash on streets problem, like I am?

On its face, the solution seems simple: Get people to discard their trash in the appropriate places. So how do we get there, and where would getting there be prioritized in the midst of a pandemic? It should be right up there near the top. How about using a marketing campaign? Messaging is everything, and like Corey B. Trotz, when you start putting the message out there, you can’t stop.

People are generally followers, so our leaders must set the tone that promotes the steps for them to follow. “I’m Memphis Proud” would be a great theme! “Don’t Trash Our Streets” would be another. Solid messaging creates bonds to all kinds of products. Why wouldn’t we be able to create a positive bond between our city and its residents?

We live in an age where media platforms dominate the communication connections between most everyone. So let’s tell everybody that Memphis Pride is “a thing,” and it should be their thing. Let’s solicit help from all of our 700 thousand or so neighbors not to trash our city — and add teeth with citations and fines.

I’m sick of this filth, but I’m also just as sick of watching nobody do anything about it. So, if by chance you read this, join me in this crusade to try and clean up our city and restore the pride in our neighbors. Write your elected officials and tell them this is a priority. Finally, let’s teach our kids to always try and leave our shared spaces better than we found them.

Katrina Coleman
Comedian
Dear Reader,
Today I come to you full of righteous fury. I am not the type of fellow to feel righteousness at hatred of a kind or at differences from my own morals. I cannot come to you with some wide and deep mythos of which to beat you down with my fervor.

Katrina Coleman

No, dear reader, I have but one anger to speak of. Babies don’t need shoes.

Firstly, we have to define baby. In the Southern sense, babies are all humans younger or dumber than you perceive yourself to be. For this discourse, babies are the non-bipedal, pre-toddling, lumps-of-reflex-and-occasional-gassy-smiles.

Secondly, we must define shoes. House slippers are not shoes unless you are a patron of a “no shoes, no shirt, no service” establishment. Shoes are not socks with rubber bottoms. Shoes are not and will never be the end points of footie pajamas. Shoes are soled enclosures of a foot.

Now that that is established, we must get into the argument. Babies do not need shoes. Stop doing it.

Child abuse takes many forms, and on a scale of one to Mommie Dearest, shoes on babies is a three. At a five, Child Protective Services  is called to evaluate your home. That means if I see your baby in shoes and also being lightly pinched (two on the scale), I will absolutely be making that phone call.

Imagine if you will, being a small baby without the ability to walk. Imagine the proctors of your care strapping weights with adorable buckles to the feet that literally only exist to kick. Imaging for one moment being tickled pink over a ceiling fan and having your ability to enjoy it hampered by great, laced anchors. You are left to impotently twitch your lower extremities and hope upon hope that your upper extremities can flail in the appropriate joyfulness to express how much you love watching that magical, spinny wonder do its thing.

Add the prospect that no baby fully understands walking until it happens. Therefore, they are unable to consent to the indignity. If I had thought that walking would involve the tight and heavy nonsense of shoes, I would still be begging to be picked up to this day.

Shoes are a prison that modern humans have built to give themselves the illusion of security and status. I, myself, only bind myself with the strictures of those podal corsets when society demands. For what end does society demand? Basic etiquette or flat classism?

To subject an innocent child to such strictures would be to insist a babe in arms could utter ”please“ and ”thank you” before “Mama.” It is a show of means, not unlike a Romani coin belt. A baby shod is much like a prized horse sored, only to show the wealth and breeding of their steward. How dare we hobble our young like rebellious horses? How dare we dress them as small adults before they have even considered the mystery of the potty?

And, finally, if all these arguments fall short for you, dear reader, how dare you deprive me of the joy of seeing those scrumptious little toes? I think your baby is loud and weird and could easily be thrown in the river if it annoys me. You would block that perfect defense of tiny little feetsies? How dare you keep that from me, and how dare you leave your baby without the protection of cute widdle piggies that I’m going to nom nom nom and forget anything about rivers or baby throwing?

Don’t you love your child? Don’t make me throw your kid in the river. Babies don’t need shoes.

Sonya Mull
Activist
This ‘Rona has made many mundane areas of life more poignant, and, some, more grievous. Take, for example, spitting in public. When I was a wee child, Aunt Carrie told me to hold my breath and walk the other way when I saw sputum on the ground to avoid catching T.B. — or something. People used to think the story was hyperbole, but I’ve held to the practice and taught it to my kids. Now, COVID has made people a bit more appreciative of her public health announcements. (She was a nurse in a T.B. ward.)

Sonya Mull

Supposedly, this COVID-19 thingamajig has given all of us time to pause — to put the brakes on the speedy hustle and bustle. So, why wouldn’t I think Memphis drivers would emerge from this with a calmer approach? In the past few days, while I was driving around town searching for unusual trees, I discovered that Memphis drivers are shoddier than ever — too fast, too aggressive, and far less courteous.

A few years ago, I predicted that the conditions of transportation would become worse with the resurgence of muscle cars. Not to my surprise, I now hear drag racing just about every night in my neighborhood. Where are the police when you need them? (No, not all cops are bad cops, and I know a lot of great ones, but the bad ones can be horrendous and their bad deeds overshadow a lot of the good. I’ve had horrendous, Sandra Bland-type experiences with officers right here in Memphis. This is not that story, however.)

It’s kinda funny, but it seems that COVID has brought many of my pet peeves to a head all at once — things like people not washing their hands after using the restroom, and coughing and sneezing into the open air. These were always icky.

Many of those close to me have contracted the virus, and I have several family members in health professions, yet COVID has had its silver linings for me. It has afforded me time and space to BE. I wish that each of us on this planet would BE STILL and KNOW — learn to reconnect with the Divine — however we define it. By default, Mother Earth had begun to heal herself. Like the body, our kindred planet has the capacity of self-healing, if given time and space.

I am so frustrated that people are so anxious to rush back into the “rat race” — going nowhere. That sounds pretty disgusting to me. Haven’t you noticed the air is cleaner?

Meanwhile, some people want to spread their toxicity and pollute the town hall square while carrying guns. Here’s a thought: If you have to protest something, why not protest the government’s overreach in punishing black men, women, boys, and girls? In the protesters’ minds, it’s okay for the privacy and rights of black citizens to be obliterated and lives decimated by the police, but don’t dare stop these protesters from buying garden tools!

I’m not saying that people don’t have rights to protest, and honestly, I don’t really care that they want to protest about something so stupid. I’m just pointing out the hypocrisy of these people. Sure, the hypocrisy exists on both sides of the coin, but these neo-protesters’ anti-government sentiment only extends to the point where they are affected. Heck, I actually concur with them on some points. I am definitely opposed to big brother’s omnipresence and I don’t want to live some dystopian, Orwellian novel.

Chris Davis
Writer/Musician
I’ve got a big ol’ bone to pick with WREG, “News Channel 3,” their reporter Luke Jones, and his recent story about a massive uptick in opioid-related overdoses and deaths.

Chris Davis

“Almost 400 overdoses in 30 days,” Jones wrote in a tweet slugged NARCAN NEEDED, suggesting a shortage of Narcan/naloxone, a life-saving opioid antagonist with the ability to reverse respiratory depression. So far so good, right? Unfortunately the tweet wrapped with the most ignorant question possible: “Are stimulus checks at least partly to blame?”

Let me answer that question for you, Luke. No, the stimulus checks weren’t “partly to blame” for 400 overdoses and 56 resulting deaths. Also, hell no, and “Oh my God, I can’t believe you’d frame this kind of tragedy in such a harmful way when there’s so much good research delving into the root causes of abuse.”

In addition to obvious triggers like pain, depression, isolation, and the simple fact that both prescription and black market dope are often readily available, most studies also touch on the common theme of economic hardship, and the kind of hopelessness that goes hand-in-hand with poverty and unemployment.

For example, a 2017 paper published by The National Bureau of Economic Research indicated that for every one percentage point increase in a given county’s unemployment rate, “the opioid death rate per 100,000 rises by 3.6 percent.” This past January, a study published by JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, drew similar conclusions by looking at communities where automotive assembly plants were shut down. The study determined these communities had an 85 percent higher rate of death by overdose than similar communities with still-active automotive assembly plants.

Now, let’s see … Has anything happened recently that might have resulted in sudden, widespread job loss or increased anxiety and feelings of isolation and hopelessness? Could it possibly be COVID-19-related shutdown of the U.S. economy, and quarantine? Kinda sounds like a perfect match.

Now let me back up a bit. I should probably point out that while the tweet was unconscionable, and the write-up was nearly as bad, the full video package contained more detail and ultimately performed the public service of letting people know where to get help if they need it. Kudos. Also, the reporter in question didn’t just come up with the idea of blaming stimulus checks on his own. He was referring directly to a comment made by the Memphis Area Prevention Coalition’s overdose prevention specialist, Josh Well, whose organization is working hard to overcome the obstacle of “lockdown,” in order to get Narcan into the hands of people at risk. But, presuming Jones composes his own tweets, he’s the guy who made the relationship between stimulus checks and overdoses a troubling frame for a heartbreaking story that deserves considerably more context.

It’s conventional wisdom in some quarters that you can’t just give people money. Why? Because they’ll become dependent on handouts, obvs. They’ll spend every cent you give them on sex, booze, and drugs. Why did this become conventional wisdom? Because it makes such a fine, paternalistic excuse for paying poor people poverty wages. Because politicians representing moneyed interests that benefit directly from low-paying jobs tell us it’s the gospel truth every time somebody puts a mic in their hand. Because their words are so frequently repeated and amplified by concerned-looking members of the Fourth Estate, who nod right along.

This happens in spite of study after study showing that it’s all complete horse shit and the best way to help people in need is to provide cash with no strings attached. But we’ve all been conditioned to believe the opposite is true, and this false belief enabled the dismantling and disfigurement of our social safety nets. If anything, this backwards thinking is more to “blame” for the 400 overdoses and 56 deaths than one $1,200 stimulus check in the midst of international disaster.

On a related note, on May 8th — three days before WREG aired its story — a report offering guidance in the administration of life-saving Naloxone (Narcan) was generated by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), a branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“As the COVID-19 pandemic has spread throughout our country, SAMHSA has received reports that some first responders and law enforcement officers have been more reluctant to administer Naloxone due to fear of potentially contracting the coronavirus,” the report stated. “Further, SAMHSA has received reports that law enforcement and emergency services management has, in some cases, discontinued the carrying of Naloxone by responders.”

Did any of this figure into the 14 percent mortality rate? We don’t know because those questions either weren’t asked or weren’t reported. Instead we were treated to Mr. Well — who may very well have been quoted out of context — seeming to blame the responsible act of social distancing or “lockdown,” as he described Memphis’ “Safer At Home” order.

“We can’t train large groups of people anymore,” he said, “so less people are getting the Narcan (Naloxone).”

By the way, if the life-saving medication was “NEEDED,” as implied by the tweet that launched this rant, no part of the package touched on shortage. “You can get a free Narcan kit anytime by calling [The Memphis Area Prevention Coalition] at (901) 495-5103,” it concluded.

Look. Regardless of whether the daily infection numbers are down or even downward trending, a deadly and capricious virus continues to spread and a considerable number of U.S. citizens still seem to think it’s all a hoax. People are fighting about social distancing. Angry, sometimes-armed mobs are protesting because we’ve shut down all-you-can-eat buffets. Because they think the common courtesy of wearing protective masks limits their freedom somehow.

As easy as it might be to write these people off as idiots and dupes, I can’t blame them for being confused. Our 21st-century news thrives on conflict, and media consumers can get a different story every time they turn on the TV or pick up a newspaper, depending on the political orientation of whoever’s being interviewed at the moment, and whoever’s doing the editing.

That’s why every reporter needs to step up to make sure each piece of information they spread is the best and most accurate information possible, whether it’s directly related to COVID-19 or the result of our public response to the pandemic. If you’re not doing that, you’re contributing to the decades-long war on media credibility, and you’ve got blood on your ledger.

I’m looking at you WREG. You certainly aren’t the only news station allowing bad messages to slip through, intentionally or not. But you’re the one that pissed me off this week, and I really needed to vent.

Brennan Whalen
Guitarist, HEELS
I’m not a complicated man.

I derive joy from the usual things emotionally stunted drunks love: beer and playing music in an environment where I’m not going to catch a world-sieging virus. Sinking hours into video games made for children.

Brennan Whalen

During the day, however, I work in an office. I speak on the phone and email customers with technical support for the things they have or are going to purchase. It can be a slog, and many days the only thing that makes it all feel worth it is the hour I have for lunch.

I work in the Hickory Hill area, and around January, something I love deeply was taken from me. That thing was the last remaining Pizza Hut buffet on Winchester, across the street from the old Hickory Ridge Mall. With the decades-old framed posters on the walls, the plates that had to be shedding BPA into every slice, the parmesan containers that contained nothing resembling parmesan, it wasn’t somewhere you’d feel confident in your immune system. But God I loved it so much.

Every structure in this city is either shiny and new, a respected old building maintained beautifully, or a business crafted in the shell of an old one (my most-frequented pawn shop was obviously a Target from the ’90s). But dead center of all of this was that stupid, fucking roof that, for a fat Southern kid like me, was a shining beacon on a hill. And it’s gone. It will probably end up a cell phone store.
     
To this end, you may ask, “Come on, should a chain restaurant being frequented by one hungover asshole and a rotation of maybe 20 construction workers be kept open just to appease them, considering the costs of keeping such a business open?”

I answer this question with a resounding “Yes,”  because I fucking love that GD Pizza Hut and rational thought will not get in the way of that.

“You should frequent local businesses.” I absolutely do, but until you drop the quality of your food, it will not satisfy my lust for shit pizza that attacks me when my blood is half tequila at 11 a.m. I lived across the street from Dragon China Buffet on Belvedere, for Christ’s sake. I’ll put money into local businesses, but you gotta deliver low-quality fare for my big, stupid gullet.
       
I should be embarrassed that the closing of this establishment has hurt my heart the way it has, but I’m not. I’m a middle-brow neanderthal who yo-yo diets and has zero consistency in his health and well-being, and I want a pan pizza with a big, fucking hair right in the center. 

Categories
Cover Feature News

Memphis: City of Song … and Songwriters

CREDIT: Chris Paul Thompson

Jocelyn “Jozzy” Donald is recalling her mother’s glory days in the recording industry. “She was a singer with Hi Records, with Willie Mitchell producing. She had a group called Janet and the Jays, back in the day. Boo Mitchell knows my whole family.”

It’s the kind of memory a family can treasure, a brush with greatness, a bit of immortality on vinyl. The group not only worked with a producer who became legendary, they recorded songs by writers like Don Bryant and William Bell, masters of their craft. They too have become legendary, though Janet and the Jays fans would only have seen their names in the very small print below the songs’ titles. That’s just how songwriters were credited. In the age of streaming, the people who composed the music are often completely unacknowledged (though the Sound Credit platform designed by Memphis’ own Soundways is trying to change that).

Chris Paul Thompson

Jocelyn “Jozzy” Donald

The lack of public credit given songwriters is all too apparent when I ask Boo Mitchell if he remembers Jozzy and her family. “Sure!” he says. “She writes music herself. I recorded some of her first stuff in the four-track room at Royal Studios.” It’s yet another moment in the big small town of Memphis, where everyone seems to know everyone else. But he’s not ready when I toss out another factoid: that a song she co-wrote is currently the No. 1 song in the nation — a little number called “Old Town Road.”

Matt White

Don Bryant

“Really?” he exclaims. “Good for her!”

It’s a Memphis thing. Great songwriters are crawling out of the woodwork, and most of us don’t even realize it.

Jamie Harmon

William Bell

In the case of Jozzy, it’s a tale many years in the making. “My brother became a recording artist but got locked up. So I pretty much took his whole love of music and just ran with it. That’s what happened with me falling in love with music. I started working at this studio called Traphouse, with DJ Larry Live. He’s actually Yo Gotti’s right-hand man now. He had a studio on Highland, right near the University of Memphis, and I used to go over there and write. That was where I got my start. I was still at Germantown High School then. All the rappers in the city knew me as the girl who wrote hooks. I was just the hook girl.”

Word of her prolific creativity got around, and before long she was working with famed producer Timbaland in Miami. Then came a move to Los Angeles and being signed to Columbia Records as an artist in her own right. It was then that her label mate, Lil Nas X, found he needed a hand supplementing a song he’d already written and released.

“Old Town Road,” his song of determination in the face of alienation, made use of the old pop trope of the African-American cowboy, which dates at least as far back as the Coasters or Jamaican dub legends the Upsetters. But having a banjo-driven track with Western themes wasn’t enough for the Nashville establishment to recognize the song as a legitimate entry on the country charts. So Lil Nas X upped the ante and actually featured a country star in a remix of the song. That’s where Jozzy came in to write an extra verse for the cameo.

“I just love that Billy Ray Cyrus really stood behind us,” says Jozzy of the star she ended up writing a passage for in the remix. “Because Billy Ray went through the same thing with ‘Achy Breaky Heart,’ which they also took off the country charts. So he could relate to it. And really, the controversy added to the greatness of the song, but I hate that the country music industry had to act like that. Still, new country artists like Keith Urban are supporting this song.”

Indeed, country fans even love it. When Cyrus brought Lil Nas X out for the song at the recent Country Music Association Music Festival, the crowd went crazy.

Now dropping her debut single as an artist, “Sucka Free,” featuring Lil Wayne, Jozzy is poised for something most songwriters never receive: public acclaim. It’s almost a tradition in Memphis, which does not always get the same credit as Nashville as a font of song creation. The absurdity of that is apparent if one simply reflects on the songwriting legacy of the Bluff City. Of course, Memphis looms large in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, where notable inductees include Al Green, Isaac Hayes, David Porter, Otis Redding, Maurice White, and W.C. Handy. Keith Sykes, now managing Ardent Recording Studios after a lifetime of songwriting for himself and other artists like Jimmy Buffett, recently attended this year’s induction ceremony for the New York-based institution and saw fellow Memphian Justin Timberlake receive the Contemporary Icon Award. “He also closed the show. Fantastic, man! And he gave a huge shout-out to Memphis, several times,” Sykes says. His friend and erstwhile collaborator John Prine, who is rightfully honored as the gold standard of songwriters, also was inducted, causing Sykes to ponder Prine’s longtime connection with Memphis.

Keith Sykes

“He did his first album here, with Don Nix at American,” recalls Sykes. “He did Common Sense here and Pink Cadillac here. He’s done a bunch of stuff in Memphis. And he loves it down here.” Beyond working in the city so often, Prine has influenced a whole crop of songwriters based here, who took his template of finely honed, detail-rich narratives to heart. The great John Kilzer, whose recent death is still being mourned, was one such practitioner of the narrative songwriter’s craft. “John Kilzer, I signed in 1986,” says Sykes. “His songs, you could just tell there was something there.”

Beyond his natural talents of observation, Kilzer studied creative writing at then-Memphis State University. It’s a path that other songwriting greats have taken as well, including local writer and performer Cory Branan, whose tightly woven tales are gems of song construction. (I should know; I sometimes play bass for the guy.) English hitmaker Frank Turner recently quipped, “The thing about Cory for me is, almost every songwriter I know is slightly embarrassed by his existence, in the sense that he’s just better than all of us. And should be more successful than any of us.”

Cory Branan

Branan says studying creative writing and literature can indeed enhance this approach to songwriting. “I didn’t write songs until I was 24 or so, but I wouldn’t be doing this if I hadn’t tested into the right classes when I was in school in Mississippi. My teacher, Ms. Evelyn Simms, went off the curriculum, let’s just say that. She would see what we were interested in and then steer us toward things that technically she couldn’t assign.”

From wider reading, Branan learned to take in the wider world. “Keats called it ‘negative capability.’ The idea of not having a persona or a personality, to be able to pursue another one. Basically, not getting your fingerprints all over shit.” (Playing with him and seeing rooms full of fans singing along to “The Prettiest Waitress in Memphis” and others attests to the power of evoking characters that may or may not reflect the songwriter himself.)

It’s an approach that befits almost any style of songwriting, revealing a basic attitude toward the craft that transcends any genre or timely trends. Producer IMAKEMADBEATS, reflecting on songs he’s cowritten with singer Cameron Bethany, puts it this way: “The thing about stepping out of the world of hip-hop, whether it’s for a Cameron Bethany record or an Aaron James record, is that you get to just shamelessly become somebody else. You get to really take on the perspectives of another person. And try to tell that story. With that, songwriting is fun to me because it becomes infinite. I’ve heard songs by people from the perspective of being a gun. I’ve heard songs from the perspecitve of what they thought it was like to be their parents. You can take on any and all perspectives.” Memphis native William Bell, one of the first hitmakers for Stax Records and a 2017 Grammy winner, would agree. “I started singing with the Phineas Newborn Orchestra when I was 14, and I was always a people watcher. At that age, I couldn’t go out in the club, so I had to sit backstage and peek out at the audience. And I would just watch people as they’d come into the club, and after a couple drinks, how they were acting. All of that stuff just kinda hit home, and I wrote about a lot of that just from observation.”

Catherine Elizabeth

Cameron Bethony

Don Bryant, who started in the same era and for a time put off his own performing career to become a staff writer for Hi Records (penning “I Can’t Stand the Rain” for wife Ann Peebles), is similarly inspired by the everyday tales he hears around him to this day. “I had six brothers,” Bryant recalls, “and they always came home with something, or I’d be out in the neighborhood and you hear little things. After a period of time, you visit back on those days and you see a whole lot of things. I pull stories from anywhere I can.”

While much younger than pioneers like Bell or Bryant, Greg Cartwright is universally admired in Memphis as a writer whose songs might have been written in their heyday. As such, his recorded work (on which I’ve played in the past) stands as a kind of bridge between the classic songwriting that emerged from studios like Stax, Royal, or American and the edgier, punk-infused style of bands like the Oblivians or the Reigning Sound.

Kyel Dean Reinford

Greg Cartwright

“I write about things that I’m familiar with,” he says, “so I can speak with authenticity when I say it. But that doesn’t mean necessarily that it happened to me. It just means that I can empathize with the idea. Even though it may not be purely autobiographical, it’s certainly something that I can understand and empathize with. I’m not saying it’s about me so much as to say, ‘I empathize with you if you feel this.'”

But if not autobiographical, Cartwright feels it’s imperative to find one’s authentic voice, something he did through a longtime bandmate. “When I met Jack [Oblivian], he was the first person I met who didn’t sound like anybody I’d ever heard. He wasn’t trying to sound like anybody I could put my finger on. Sure, he had lots of influences, and he would tell you right away what they were, but in my early 20s, most people were very taken with whatever the music of the time was or whatever their social scene was into. And he just seemed like he was just flying his own flag.” In the end, this willingness to buck prevailing trends and pursue a personal vision may be the hallmark of all the city’s great songwriters. “What I look for is something fresh and original,” says Sykes. “And I can never put my finger on what that is.” Some toil at length to build that quality into their songs. “I work hard at making things sound off the cuff,” Branan told one interviewer. Others, like Jo’zzy, take another route. “Your first mind is everything,” she says. “Your first melody that comes into your head, normally that’s the right melody. I tell my manager all the time, ‘Never play me a beat before I go in the studio.’ I’d much rather go freestyle.”

Yet another approach to forging individuality is to be overwhelmingly prolific. Kirby Dockery, a graduate of the Stax Music Academy, left Berklee College of Music to pursue her music career, but was having trouble getting recognition. Her resolve led her to post a song a day on YouTube — eventually culminating in 200 compositions and being signed to Jay-Z’s Roc Nation Publishing. There, she ascended to what is surely the songwriter’s mountaintop, co-writing “Only One” with Kanye West and Paul McCartney, and “FourFiveSeconds” with West, McCartney, and Rihanna.

Josiah Roberto

Kirby

Working under the name Kirby, she reflects on the role of the Stax legacy in her achievements. “The Stax Music Academy [SMA] was one of the first catalysts that helped me believe that songwriting wasn’t just a dream. It was there where I first heard my lyrics and melodies put to music. If it wasn’t for SMA I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of meeting my future publisher years before I even knew how to be signed as a songwriter. SMA planted seeds that are still blooming in my life today. I am forever grateful.”

To that end, she’s now giving back to the institution. As SMA executive director Pat Mitchell-Worley notes, “Kirby offered four scholarships to students in the program, based on the students creating original material. And she listened to every song that was offered. And not only did she pick the best ones, she gave them feedback on their songs. So her scholarship reinforced our songwriting focus.” In fact, the SMA is now promoting the importance of songwriting more than ever.

“For the upcoming regular school year,” says Mitchell-Worley, “we have a full songwriting track. Songwriting and music business. And the two go hand in hand. If you’re gonna pursue a career as an artist, you need to have every form of revenue that you can grasp, and songwriting is a very important part of how you get paid. Students have come to understand more that owning the material that they record and perform affects their revenue streams.” Beyond that, they’re thriving on the creativity that such an emphasis fosters.

Perhaps an old tune by Youmans, Rose, and Eliscu from 1929 puts it best, reeling off the reasons we should be grateful for the craft that has shaped the city’s history for so long:

Without a song, the day would never end

Without a song, the road would never bend

When things go wrong, a man ain’t got a friend …Without a song.