Tag: Chris Bell

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‘I Am the Cosmos’ at 50

Photo: David Bell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Remembering Led Zeppelin III: Generations of Memphians Affected by Album

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Ah, to settle into these idyllic fall days, with Led Zeppelin ringing in the air. October 5th marked the 50th anniversary of the release of Led Zeppelin III, mixed and mastered at Ardent Recordings, prompting many to reminisce about the impact of the album and the band on the Bluff City. Many a muso has dusted off an old copy with the spinning-wheel cartoon cover sleeve, so at odds with the album’s very autumnal mood, all bracing shrieks and riffs and crackling acoustics ’round the fire.

Terry Manning was the engineer for some of the album’s overdubs, and all its mixing and mastering, and when we spoke, he shared too many memories to fit in one article. Most of the tale can be read in Memphis magazine’s November cover story, taking you all the way from the Yardbirds in Kentucky to Jimmy Page having Manning inscribe messages onto the vinyl’s inner groove. But space did not allow for one bit of our conversation, concerning the interest in Led Zeppelin expressed by one Chris Bell. The founder of Big Star was himself a great fan, even known to spontaneously break out into the entire guitar solo of their song “Heartbreaker” (as described in Rich Tupica’s Bell bio, There was a Light).

When I spoke to Manning about mixing the album and the band playing in Memphis, he brought up Chris Bell:

Memphis Flyer: Did it create quite a stir around town, the fact that Jimmy Page was in town?

Terry Manning: You’d think it would create a stir like that, but it didn’t really. Jimmy wanted it kept quiet and we had work to do. There wasn’t any partying and meeting people and things. John Fry was not even there. He didn’t come for the session in any way. He stayed out. Once we were there, I locked the door and other people didn’t come in. It was very under the table. Kept quiet.  courtesy Terry Manning

Terry Manning at the Ardent mixing board, 1971

Now, Chris Bell did know about it, and I think he came in for a second once. But I know later, when they were on tour, and Zeppelin played in Memphis, Chris came over to my house. Because Jimmy and his then-girlfriend Charlotte came to my house for dinner after the Led Zeppelin concert. And I’d had an Indian meal catered by an Indian restaurant, which you couldn’t get in the U.S. on tour very much then. So I’d told Chris to stay away, but he couldn’t help it. He came by sheepishly, with a bottle of wine. So we let him in, and Jimmy and Chris and I hung out. We listened to Gimmer Nicholson all night. And Ali Akbar Khan.

Josh Reynolds

Terry Manning

I told him, do not come. And this was after the concert, not during the recordings. But he just couldn’t help it. And I can’t blame him. Of course not! Now, years later, I’m so glad he did. It’s a wonderful memory, to be thinking of, two o’clock in the morning, Jimmy Page, Chris Bell, and me sitting on the floor, listening to Ali Akbar Khan and Gimmer Nicholson. Acoustic and Indian music, mostly.

Another renowned Memphis guitarist, a generation or so removed from Chris Bell, also noted his connection to Led Zeppelin III last month. On October 5th, guitarist Steve Selvidge (The Hold Steady, Big Ass Truck) celebrated his wedding anniversary with an online post and noted they had married on “the 32nd anniversary of the release of Led Zeppelin III.” An auspicious day, indeed, and it prompted Selvidge to recall the profound effect the band (and guitarist Jimmy Page) had on his musicianship.

And the very different effect they had on his father, the late Sid Selvidge.  Rich Tarbell

Steve Selvidge

Memphis Flyer: Do you still have your old copy of the album?

Steve Selvidge: If you’re talking about Led Zeppelin III, that’s a piece of vinyl that I purchased when I was young. I think it was in fifth grade when it first seeped deep into me. I had just started playing guitar. Certainly by sixth grade, I was definitely way into it. I remember a friend’s older brother had The Song Remains the Same [the live soundtrack album of the film of the same name], and I remember playing that. Someone once said, “Zeppelin is nothing if not older brother rock.” I had lost my copy of Led Zeppelin III for years, but my brother was moving and found it. I bought it at Pop Tunes. Talk about the opposite of 180 gram vinyl pressing, this was just the floppiest disc. It did have the sleeve with the spinning wheel! And it had the Crowley quote, too [inscribed on the vinyl].

Do you think it holds up?

I’ve read all the press. I can almost see the words on the page, I’ve read it so many times. And I think they were unjustly criticized at the time, Oh yeah, Crosby Stills & Nash and Joni Mitchell had hits, so they jumped on that bandwagon. And Jimmy Page was like, ‘This acoustic music’s on all of our records. It’s not like we picked up acoustic guitars out of nowhere.’ I mean, ‘Ramble On,’ man! But the first two were released at the beginning and end of 1969. They’re companion pieces. One was born out of Jimmy Page’s initial plan, and one was born out of the road. But I do agree that III was where Plant was able to emerge more fully formed. And honestly I think that’s also when he had more of a sense of job security.

Because, from what I’ve read, even through the second record and touring, it was like, this is Jimmy’s band. Peter Grant’s laying down the law, like, ‘Dude, don’t think you can get comfortable.’ But with III, Robert started to assume this thing of the front man. The center piece, the Golden God. It was a crazy time. That was back when a guitar player could be famous just for being a guitar player. Not just famous, but people who weren’t musicians knew who he was, because they’d tracked his progress in the Yardbirds. It was this burgeoning underground scene. So there were people who knew Led Zeppelin because of Jimmy Page. But then Robert transitioned into that pop consciousness. And it was years, for me, before I realized that the average person takes a band on its front man. I was like, ‘Wait, there are people who know Led Zeppelin and don’t know who Jimmy Page is? Every guitarist in every band is just as important as the singer, right??’ It turns out I was mistaken about that..

And this is speaking to my middle-aged-ness, but I think that’s probably their best nighttime record. With technology these days, streaming music is daytime whatever, just put on something that’s rockin,’ get the dishes done. But for me, vinyl is the nighttime thing. It’s the kids have gone to bed, decompressing and talking about the events of the day, and what are we gonna put on? Zeppelin III is good cranked up, and it’s also good at low volumes.

‘Friends’ was the first time they used a tuning not based on British whatever folk traditions. It was more of a nod to Indian music. And Page was really into Indian music well before the Beatles were. He tells the story of going to hear Indian music and it was him and a bunch of old people. He was the only young person there. So, ‘Friends’ is a big one in terms of that.

The vocal on ‘That’s the Way’ is so gorgeous. As a lifelong Page disciple, as I get older, I get more and more fascinated by Robert Plant. Some say that his wail on ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ is when he started to lose his voice. His voice changed radically, because they toured so much. He didn’t have a vocal coach. He was just smoking and drinking and shouting. So by ’72 his voice had changed. And some say that shriek on ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ is the swan song, if you will.

It took me a long time to come to terms with that recorded version of ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You.’ ’Cause I was such a disciple of the movie, the Song Remains the Same, and that version of the song from ’73 at Madison Square Garden, I just loved it so much. It’s super stoney. For whatever reason, John Paul Jones didn’t have a [Hammond] B3 [organ] with him. On the ’73 tour, it was all Fender Rhodes [electric piano] with foot pedals. You know, the B3 is like, I’m gonna put you in a specific place right now. And for the longest time, I didn’t want to hear it. Because I was so in love with the Rhodes and the stoney vibe of Madison Square Garden. But now I’ve come to respect it for what it is.

And the guitar solo on that [album version]. That song is one of Zeppelin’s greatest moments. Plant will tell you that. That guitar solo is one of Page’s greatest moments for sure. And that’s what brought me back to that version. It’s the perfect mixture of his technique, which also changed, and his emotion. Of all the big three guitarists in his class, he wrought the most emotion. And that is right there.

Did Lee Baker ever talk about Led Zeppelin?

I probably brought it up some. I knew that Lee Baker played a Sunburst Les Paul from the ’50s. A 1958-60 Les Paul Sun Standard … the significance of it. That’s what Jimmy Page was playing, and Lee Baker had the same kind of guitar. And it was rare. I know he knew Page was bad, but he was into other things.

Justin Fox Burks

The late Sid Selvidge, with son, Steve

Your dad, Sid Selvidge, was a pioneering performer of the blues, among other things. Did you listen to Zeppelin with him?

I played a lot of Led Zeppelin at my house when I was a kid. And my dad happened to be a pretty proficient singer in his own right, with pretty strong opinions about other singers. And he did not like Robert Plant at all! His thing was, ‘I know he can sing! I’ve heard him, he can sing! He just does all that puke music, man!’ That’s what he called it, ‘Puke Music.’ Like he’s straining so hard he’s gonna puke, you know?

But the final nail in the coffin was when it got to the last song, ‘Hat’s Off to (Roy) Harper,’ which is just Fred McDowell, ‘Shake ’Em On Down.’ And man, would that make him mad! He was just like, ‘This British motherf*cker!’ He was just mad about it, man! I remember him specifically zeroing in on it. I remember exactly where I was sitting, in front of the turntable, looking at this old decorative lamp. And he was just so pissed off at the way they were interpreting Fred McDowell. ‘Lee Baker could just smoke this kid!’ They were just defiling Mississippi Fred McDowell. I think it was the histrionics of Robert Plant that really did that. That’s just how he sings.

I will say, Robert Plant’s voice did change. And I kinda liked it, because, as a connoisseur of bootleg recordings, he had the power, and he wasn’t always judicial with it. So there’s a lot of him going over the top, screaming, getting super high, and wailing and stuff. That’s why, for me, ’73 is the peak year. His voice has changed, and he can’t just go high all the time. So it forced him to get creative with the melodies, and kind of lay his shit back a little bit. Which I like. ’Cause I do like it when he croons. And Jimmy Page’s tone was at its apex, and his playing had changed. He laid off some of his go-to things, and was stretching out a little bit more. Then by ’75 it just all goes to shit, in my opinion. But Plant’s another polarizing one. I don’t know, I’ll sit through a lot of bad singers to hear the guitar that I want.

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The Story of Shoe Productions’ Many Hits, Brought to Life on Film

CREDIT: courtesy Andy Black

courtesy Andy Black

Bobby Manuel, Rick Dees, Wareen Wagner, and a Disco Duck.

Memphis is one of the greatest studio towns of all time. Sun, Phillips, Stax, American, and Ardent are just a few of the more well-known names, but a plethora of others helped capture the amazing music being made here over the years. One of them, Shoe Productions, was especially shy of the limelight in its heyday of the ’70s and ’80s, but cut some of the most memorable records of that era.

The studio was started by Wayne Crook and Warren Wagner in 1971, and Andy Black joined soon after. In 1977, Jim Stewart (the co-founder of Stax) and Bobby Manuel set up their Daily Planet Productions in the same building. Many decades later, Black went looking for whatever history of his old business might exist, and came up with nothing. So he and his son Nathan, already with years of experience in audio/visual production, set about making the documentary: Shoe: A Memphis Music Legacy. It screens Monday, October 26th, 6:30 p.m. at the Malco Summer Drive-In as part of the Indie Memphis Film Festival.

A quick chat with Andy and Nathan Black revealed that their documentary is just the tip of the iceberg. Shoe was buzzing with activity for over a decade, and the stories and recorded tracks are impressive.

Memphis Flyer: Memphis was really hopping as a recording city back in the ’70s.

Andy Black: Well it was. And I think part of that was, our undoing was because, we had the studio over there, and we were a bunch of kids trying to build things, and do everything ourselves with very little money. And Jim Stewart and Bobby Manuel came down. Stax had just folded and they needed to cut some stuff. And they were looking for a place to do it. So they cut there and loved the place. It was similar to Stax in the way it felt. They called their company the Daily Planet, right across the hall from Shoe. And we wound up building a second studio.

Jim used his connections with Atlantic and they bought part of the equipment. We got a brand new console, an MCI. And it worked out real well. On the Shoe side, we were doing everything ourselves. We built a console from the ground up. I mean, we etched the circuit boards and put every little component in every board in that console and soldered it together. There were about five or six of us working on it. It became such a unique sounding board, especially on the low end.

Then it got to where Jim and Bobby would come over to our studio and cut basic tracks, because they loved the way the bass and bass drum sounded. And we would go over to their side, ’cause that’s the side you wanna put the horns and the vocals on, ’cause it’s cleaner. So it became a back and forth thing. We were more or less rock and roll and pop, and when Jim and Bobby came in, a lot of people started coming over because of them, like Steve Cropper, or other people from Stax, or from Isaac Hayes’ band. So all the pop guys were going, “Wow, that’s really good. They’re good!” So we all learned from each other. Shoe was about the people and it became a learning place. We taught each other by bouncing ideas off each other.

And we kept a real low profile. Jim asked us to do that, because he didn’t want to deal with the media. Stax had just folded. He didn’t want to be bothered. And everyone thought he went “into hiding,” so to speak, and got out of the business, when really he was over there at our studio, and we were cutting every day. It turned into a real good working relationship. We kept it low-key. In this process, Nathan and I did “Take Me to the River,” and I had done a Stax documentary, just the audio. So Nathan shot everything.
courtesy Andy Black

The control room at Shoe Productions

I was over at Sun Studios, and killing time with the kid that was running it. And we got to talking about Shoe, and I told him all about it, and he said, ‘Man, I thought I knew everything about Memphis music back in the ’70s and ’80s, but I have not heard these stories.’ Well it turned out that that kid was [Grammy Award-winning producer and engineer] Matt Ross-Spang.

I went home and Googled “Shoe” and got nothing. It was just like we didn’t exist. I said, ‘Damn, we kept such a low profile, we’re getting left out of history.’ So I talked to Nathan and said, what do you think about us going in on this project together? Nathan was practically raised there. I used to take him to the studio with me all the time, as a young child. So he’s well aware of the story.

Nathan Black: It was interesting for me because one of the first things we did was get the old group back together. There’s a recording session in it. So that was the first time a lot of those guys had been there in 30 years, and going back into the space, and it was the first time I’d been in there in 30 years too. And the Daily Planet side is exactly the same way it was back then. It’s still a working studio, and everything’s the same, down to the carpet. It was like walking back in a time warp. I spent a lot of time there, but I was young, probably 8 or 10 years old. So I knew all the people, but I didn’t really know the stories. So it was interesting to me, hearing all those stories from people I knew and had been around all the time. I was just a kid going to work with my dad. I remember making little forts up under the grand piano, playing with my GI Joes.

AB: Jimmy Griffin was co-founder of Bread with David Gates. And he’s a Memphis boy. He was from Memphis and went out to L.A. and they formed Bread. And had many, many hits. And he came back and we became friends. He was out jogging one day, and came in and introduced himself. He and I and two other guys had a writing group. We wrote songs all the time. And we wound up cutting an album with Terry Sylvester of the Hollies.

Was that one of the first things you did there?

AB: It was an early thing. Actually, one of the first things we did was Jimmy himself, because Jimmy was such a good singer. And we had some writers, so we decided that Shoe needed to start a label, and we used Jimmy as our first artist on Shoe Records. It’s funny because the records have turned up a couple times on eBay, and they’re selling for between $50-$100 a piece — for a ’45! And I’m like, ‘Damn, I’ve got probably 75 of these things.’

There’s a whole section on “Disco Duck” and how that came to be. It was originally on Estelle Axton’s label, Fretone Records. [Celebrity DJ] Rick Dees had gone to her with the idea of doing a disco song. She connected him with Bobby Manuel and they finished it, and Bobby cut it, and RSO Records bought it. And they wanted an album right away. So we cut an album in two weeks. Every day, all day long.

NB: There is a whole section of the film about the Dog Police. I remember my dad taking me to the studio where they were shooting it. I even brought home some of the dog masks.

AB: They were doing jingles, because they were three of the finest jazz musicians in town. They’d go over the Media General and crank out those jingles like crazy. Shoe also did jingles, but so we could support our creativity in songs and records. So Tony [Thomas] and them came over and I wound up cutting two jazz albums with them, and both of them got shot down. They didn’t get a deal and they were so bummed out. So they said, We’re gonna do something REAL different. Whatever you want to do, Andy, it’s total freedom. And we didn’t have a lot of electronic gear back then, so I took a microphone and stuck it in the end of a vacuum cleaner hose and gave Tom Lonardo the other end and said ‘Here, sing into this.’

I remember when I was young and used to sing through the vacuum hose and it sounded so cool! So we did all kind of crazy things. And Wayne and Warren heard all this going on through the walls, and they became really interested in it. Wayne was getting into video at that time. MTV was starting to get pretty big. So it just married together. We actually did a whole album. 

Still from ‘Dog Police’ video


NB: The video won MTV’s Basement Tapes, hosted by Weird Al Yankovic. I think it was NBC that picked it up and did an actual pilot, they were planning on making it a show. You can see it on YouTube. The pilot has Adam Sandler in it, and Jeremy Piven.

It seems like there was a cool experimental environment at Shoe. I noticed the Scruffs cut their debut there.

AB: Yeah! They used to come in and pull the night shift after everybody else had gone home to bed. The Scruffs would come in and cut til the wee hours of the morning. And then other people would show up in the morning and they would leave. We had two studios that were just pumping out projects all the time. I produced Joyce Cobb. We had a hit song with her, “Dig the Gold,” that went up to #42 in the nation on Billboard. And we had Rick Christian, who got a deal with Mercury records, and one of his songs got picked up by Kenny Rogers and he had a #1 hit with it. And we had Shirley Brown coming over there. We had Levon Helm coming over there. It became a very active place. And that’s why it puzzled me that no one knew anything about it. Then it dawned on me why.

That low profile.

AB: Yeah, it’ll get ya every time!

The first time I heard about Shoe was reading that Chris Bell cut some of “I Am the Cosmos” there. Were you in on that?

AB: I wasn’t in on that session. Warren did. They were friends, so Warren invited him and Ken Woodley to come down and Richard Rosebrough down to Shoe, and they came in late, ’cause that was the only time slot they could fit in there. They cut “I Am the Cosmos” and one or two others. And people are still interested in Big Star and Chris Bell. One day on Facebook, I saw where people were taking pictures through the windows and saying, “Look, I think this is the room where ‘I Am the Cosmos’ was cut.” And I looked at it and went, ‘No, that’s the bathroom!’

That track was actually cut on the other side of the building. We occupied both sides of this really great building. It was supposed to be a basement for a church. So the bottom floor was 16″-18″ of packed concrete and partly underground. So it was super quiet.

NB: Apparently the pastor of the church ran off with the money, so they only built the basement. That’s all that exists! You walk through the front door and you immediately have to go downstairs. So everything was underground. No ground floor, no windows.

AB: It’s really bizarre. We only had one little sign by the front door and that was it. It was just kinda word of mouth. Elvin Bishop came over. Dr. John. I could go on and on. We had to leave out a lot. In fact, there’s enough stories for us to do a Shoe 2!

The Story of Shoe Productions’ Many Hits, Brought to Life on Film

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Music Music Blog

With Those Pretty Wrongs, Jody Stephens Does Everything Pretty Right

Those Pretty Wrongs

One of Jody Stephens’ most treasured possessions is a guitar once owned by Chris Bell, dating back to their years playing alongside Alex Chilton and Andy Hummel in Big Star. If you find yourself at Ardent Studios, the unassuming acoustic is easy to spot: it’s the only guitar repaired with electrical tape.

Chris Bell’s acoustic guitar

As Stephens explains, “Andy and Chris had a fight while we were practicing at Alex’s house, and Chris picked up Andy’s Thunderbird bass and broke it into three pieces. So Andy stalked Chris. When Chris parked his car in a friend’s driveway, Andy went up, opened the case and poked holes in it. So Andy wound up with the guitar, and then gave it to me. It’s on the song ‘Thirteen,’ and it’s an awesome sounding guitar. We used it with Those Pretty Wrongs in the studio. Back in the 70s, my brother covered the holes with electrical tape. Now I won’t take it off.”

It’s entirely appropriate that the guitar’s rich sound lives on in the new record by Those Pretty Wrongs, the folk/pop/rock duo comprised of Stephens and Luther Russell, onetime member of the Freewheelers and a solo artist in his own right. While the band’s latest, Zed for Zulu (Burger Records), is its own beast, the echoes of Big Star’s quieter moments are undeniable. Foregrounding acoustic guitar textures with the crisply recorded approach that has become a hallmark of Ardent Studios, Stephen’s vocals, surrounded by Russell’s lush background harmonies, carry that unmistakable blend of innocence and bookish enunciaciation that has marked his singing ever since the Big Star days.

With the new album released, the duo is now launching a series of tours, beginning with last week’s appearance at Americanafest, and headed soon to England and Scotland. Before they leave, they’ll have a special show with guest performers at the Green Room at Crosstown Arts on Saturday, September 21st. I spoke with Stephens recently about this, the duo’s second album, and the ways it echoes his past work at Ardent.

Memphis Flyer: Was your appearance at AmericanaFest the debut of material from the new record?

Jody Stephens: We actually debuted the new album live in Los Angeles for a autism benefit, for the Wild Honey Foundation. It was a smaller backyard thing for a great cause.

Do you guys assemble a band for your tours?

No, that’s unaffordable. We’re just a duo. Our load in is an acoustic 12 string guitar. Luther is an amazing guitar player. An acoustic 12 string and Luther is all it takes. He’s really good, and fun and playful. The record was, to an extent, recorded as a duo on stage. Even if I played drums on a song, I wouldn’t try to play like I was in a band, but just play to support the song.

When you do play them, you have a signature power to your drumming.

Thanks. I try to play in a real definite way. Sometimes kinda loose, but if I make a mistake, it’s gonna be with such authority that nobody’s gonna notice. And we’re lucky to have Mike Wilson as our engineer, and all the great gear we have here at Ardent. Great mics, and the studio rooms sound incredible. And then Luther and Jason Hiller mixed this stuff. And I think they did a brilliant job of it. Listening to those mixes, there’s a brightness to them. I’m excited about the new record.

I’m assuming that the arrangements came together when Luther did overdubs in LA. Is that how it evolved?

Pretty much, except for when we used Chris Bell’s 335. On ‘You and Me.’ That was here at Ardent: Chris’ guitar run through a Hi Watt amp that belonged to Big Star. It was either Andy’s or Alex’s. And there are some organ parts that he did here. Most of the arrangements are his, but I would say things like, ‘Do you have a synthesizer for “Hurricane of Love?”‘ He said ‘No, but I could use the bass pedals on an organ.’ Then I came up with using clarinet and brought Jim Spake in. And what he did was so far beyond what I’d hoped for. Just so incredible. You can picture a butterfly tossed around by the wind. But all those guitar lines ad solos, the guitar tones, most of the arrangements, are all by Luther.

I’m primarily the lyricist and write a lot of melody lines, though Luther does contribute some pretty brilliant lines as well. Like on ‘Hurricane of Love,’ Luther came up with those chords and that was so haunting. He’s great at cool changes.

I was imagining you strumming Chris Bell’s acoustic guitar.

Luther is strumming it! It’s on pretty much everything except maybe ‘Time To Fly.’

Chris Stamey, who worked with Alex Chilton, and has participated in the Big Star Third concerts, arranged the strings on the first track. That’s a beautiful touch, with echoes of ‘For You’ from Sister Lovers.

Chris offered to do strings for us and we selected that song. It was so easy, ‘cos I knew he would put a lot of heart and care into it. And we both love those string arrangements. And he sent the arrangements to Jonathan Kirkscey, so we’ll have a string quartet at the Green Room this Saturday. And we’ll do ‘For You’ and ‘Blue Moon’ as well. Jonathan’s going to write string arrangements for songs that don’t have them already, possibly adding strings to more songs with drums. I’m thrilled about that. And Jenny Davis is a pretty remarkable flautist, and she’s gonna join us on ‘A Day at the Park.’

Just for the record, it is you singing lead on all the tracks?

It is, ‘cos I wouldn’t have anything else to do. Luther sings all the harmonies. Luther’s got his solo career. It started out with Luther saying, ‘Why don’t we get together and do some writing, and you could do a solo record.’ And the more we got into it, the more I realized how far from being a solo record it was. It’s such a collaborative effort.

Has your sound changed much since the debut?

They’re pretty sympathetic records. With this second one, we have a bit more of a sense of who we are and what we wanna do. Though that is pretty much defined by our musical influences. I think Luther’s talented enough to do anything, and adapt. But I’m not that clever, so whatever I do is what it is.

Luther and I are certainly like-minded in that we both like melodies. He would send me a message saying, This is what I did today, and it would be like a Christmas present, because I couldn’t imagine anything better, ‘cos he’s just that creative with sounds. On ‘The Carousel,’ that guitar break is like, Wow! The sound is kind of biting and digs in a little bit, without being rock.

I believe we are building an audience, and the more we play live the more we’ll be able to do that. At the end of the day, that’s what we’re in it for, the connection to people. Other than that, you’re just sitting around in your living room. 

With Those Pretty Wrongs, Jody Stephens Does Everything Pretty Right

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Music Music Features

No Waiting: The World Rediscovers Van Duren

“At last, all of a sudden, we stumbled into this thing. So it’s going to be interesting, to see how people react to that.”

Van Duren is reflecting on the corner his life and performing career have turned since he received a call a couple of years ago from Australia. It was from Wade Jackson, a musician based down under who had only recently discovered Duren’s debut album, Are You Serious?, long since out of print.

In 1977, when the record came out, its combination of Beatle-esque songwriting and hard-hitting hooks and harmonies stoked hopes for career-making acclaim. The interest expressed by Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones’ original manager, didn’t hurt either. But by then, disco had already nudged Duren’s type of music out of the limelight. While he’s made a decent career in music, it’s been more low-profile than he once hoped.

Van Duren

Cut to the current era, when Jackson’s discovery of the album led him to recruit Greg Carey as the co-director of a documentary about Duren. Their final product, titled Waiting: The Van Duren Story, had its world premiere at last year’s Indie Memphis Film Festival, where it won the Hometowner Feature award. Mixing contemporary footage of the filmmakers’ quest to find Duren with archival images that chronicle the making of the album, the film goes a long way in recreating the ’70s milieu of Memphis power pop.

“Jody Stephens and I were friends since 1970, before Big Star,” Duren recalls. “John Hampton and I went to high school together. I graduated with his older brother Randy, and the three of us had a band together for years, Malarky. Maybe the best band I’ve ever been in. Those two brothers, man — extremely talented and smart.” Malarky occupied Duren while Big Star’s fortunes rose and fell, after which he played for a time with Stephens and Big Star founder Chris Bell.

“Chris was no angel, but I enjoyed the short period of time I got to work with him. It was me and Jody and Chris and Randy Hampton. We called it the Baker Street Regulars. That lasted about 6 months.”

Van Duren in the 1970s

Duren continued to play around Memphis with others, culminating in his move to the New York/Connecticut area to record his debut and tour professionally in the Northeast. But with the musical tides shifting, his record failed to gain traction — a tale, with some twists and turns, detailed in the film. The music has lived on in increasingly rare reissues, and now, thanks to the new documentary, on this year’s Omnivore soundtrack compilation of the same name, which has several of the debut album’s tracks. Like Big Star, the Hot Dogs, and other Memphis bands defying all Southern rock expectations of the time, the songs are pure rock and pop magic.

“When Emitt Rhodes’ records came out, the thing about him playing all the instruments, including all the drums, fascinated me. And Todd Rundgren. Huge influence from the first Runt album. This is when I started really trying to figure out how to play piano. As a result, when we get to ’77 and cut the first album, about half the songs are piano-generated songs. So that was my path.”

Ultimately, Duren returned to Memphis and has been a fixture in the region for years, beginning with his band Good Question. “That band went for 17 years,” he recalls. “We did really well in the ’80s for a few years. And we played all the time. That was my re-connection to Memphis.”

Now, he and his longtime musical partner, singer Vicki Loveland, are set to explore wider horizons, as the film begins screening more widely. This Wednesday, it will be shown at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, and at London’s Soundscreen Festival on Friday. Soon after, a series of screenings in Australia will fuel some live shows there. “There’s quite a buzz in Australia. Several people have asked me, ‘Are you worried about playing these songs from 40 years ago?’, and I say, ‘Well, the truth is, I’ve been playing these songs all this time, but nobody’s been listening.’ That’s the only difference!”

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Book Features Books

The life and art of Chris Bell.

By now, the ever-growing fan frenzy for all things Big Star is a familiar riff in Memphis. Indeed, given that the band’s initial popularity was either overseas or among critics and collectors, the fact that they are actually popular in Memphis may be the final signpost in their march to immortality.

But the man who actually founded the band, having died in a car wreck in 1978, never had the time to retell his version of events. In the history of Big Star, the life of Chris Bell has long been a cipher of sorts. We heard tantalizing snippets of his story in the documentary, Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, but nothing as detailed as the reams of copy written on the diverse Alex Chilton catalogue. That’s changing, first with last year’s release of five LPs of pre- and post-Big Star material by Bell, and now with the publication of There Was a Light: The Cosmic History of Chris Bell and the Rise of Big Star by Rich Tupica.

A biography of an artist 40 years gone is a tall order. Tupica works around this by creating a Rashomon-like tapestry of quotes from those who knew him best. For those who are not already fans of Bell’s music, this can make for a challenging read, but it is a time-honored approach to the rock biography (cf. Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain). As sheer storytelling, it only works if you have a stack of records beside you to whet your appetite. But you owe it to yourself anyway.

Tupica, a Michigan-based entertainment writer who’s contributed to Record Collector, Uncut, and American Songwriter, has done his homework — and his legwork. Though he writes very little as an author, except a few explanatory notes to create the context, his five years of labor on this volume yielded interviews and archival quotes from dozens of people, requiring four pages to list them all at the end. The final product is an encyclopedic compendium of sorts, illuminating Bell’s life from a thousand angles. One byproduct of this is the light shed on the interviewees themselves, many of whom, like John Fry, John Hampton, and Richard Rosebrough, are now gone as well. As such, the book serves as a worthy remembrance of these musical luminaries, too.

Once the reader begins to connect the dots, what can we learn of Bell’s life? He was clearly a scion of his restaurateur father’s hard-won wealth, with a family beach house in the Caribbean and a sports car, but in some ways this made his life more troubled than his peers’. Inner conflict shaped most of his brief life: a rebellious soul who still sought acceptance; a bit of an airhead (e.g., repeatedly losing vintage gear to thieves when left in his car) who was nonetheless a meticulous musician, engineer, and photographer; a driven visionary who’s very art conveyed (at times inaccurately) his own fragility.

As for the persistent speculation about Bell being gay, the book addresses the topic more straightforwardly than previous histories of the band, but fails to arrive at anything definitive. If Chilton and others claim that “I never knew anything about his gayness,” others might say, “We all knew it but didn’t go on about it.” Rosebrough details Bell’s emotional heart-to-heart on the subject, but the only romantic interests from his life mentioned are women. Yet the very ambiguity of the topic speaks to the repressed nature of Southern culture at the time.

One definitive point is that Big Star was very much Bell’s project. Chilton himself notes that “I just sort of did what the original concept of their band was … I just tried to get with Chris’ stylistic approach as well as I could.” It’s ironic, as the association of Chilton with Big Star is so fixed in our minds that even this volume devotes whole chapters to his post-Big Star career.

And, despite speculation that Bell’s car wreck was a suicide, Tupica’s research reveals how unlikely this is. Though he still lived with the disappointment of Big Star’s initial failure, Bell seems to have worked through his worst demons by 1978 and was looking forward to new musical projects. Reading of John Fry bolting out of bed at 1:30 a.m., when the accident happened, or Jody Stephens driving by the crash scene, not knowing it was his friend, lends an eeriness to Bell’s death, evoking the thin thread from which life and art hang suspended.

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Music Music Features

Chris Bell’s Cosmos

This Friday, the Hi-Tone will host an all-star concert in tribute to one of Memphis’ most revered underground heroes, the late Chris Bell.

Bell is best known as a founder of the legendary power-pop group Big Star, and one-half of the songwriting partnership (along with Alex Chilton) that spawned the outfit’s magnificent debut album #1 Record.

After its release in June of 1972, #1 Record garnered positive critical reviews but ultimately flopped from a sales perspective due in part to both shoddy distribution and promotion. This disappointment led to dissent in Big Star’s ranks, and Bell left the group – which would go on to record two more influential studio albums, Radio City and Third, in the ’70s.

After his departure from the band, Bell spent the next several years working on solo recordings during off hours at Ardent, the local studio/label that was also home to Chilton and Big Star. However, only two of those recordings would see the light of day in his lifetime. In December of ’78, Bell was tragically killed in a car accident, thus silencing one of Memphis’ most transcendent rock-and-roll voices.

After Chilton’s untimely death in 2010, Big Star’s status rose again, and there have since been numerous tribute concerts staged around the world to honor the band. Until now, none have been focused primarily on Bell, who is often overshadowed by his more famous counterpart. That changes on Friday when a powerhouse group of local musicians (Jody Stephens, Van Duren, Vicki Loveland, Keith Sykes, Rick Steff, Stephen Burns, Richard Rosebrough, Paul Taylor, and many more) organized by Michigan-based journalist Rich Tupica and Ardent producer/engineer Adam Hill will take to the Hi-Tone stage to celebrate the entire Bell catalog. We sat down with Tupica and Hill to find out more about the show this Friday.

Flyer: How did the idea for a Chris Bell tribute show come together?

Rich Tupica: The idea was hatched, I think in January or February 2015. I had been planning a May 2015 trip to Memphis for quite some time, and the original plan was to have John Fry (Big Star producer/Ardent founder) give me a tour of Memphis. Fry was going to show me locations vital to Big Star or places we’d discussed over the phone for the past couple of years. Then, as we all know, sadly John passed away. That’s when the idea for a Chris tribute came to mind. I figured if the John Fry tour wasn’t going to happen, I would somehow still make this a Bell-centered trip and honor a songwriter I’ve been heavily researching since May 2012, when I started the book. The concert is a way to bring together Chris’ fans, family, and friends. I’m really looking forward to it.

How did you put the band together?

Tupica: The musicians were chosen mostly by Adam. But we did decide early on to try and include friends of Chris Bell – musicians he actually played with at some point. There are other musicians I would have loved to have, but with a limited budget, we stuck close to Memphis for this one.

Adam Hill: Dan Shumake [drums/guitar], Chris Gafford [bass], and I had been playing with Stephen in the Scruffs, so I knew those were the guys to help me with this. Rick was a must as well. Is Chris Bell underappreciated within the legacy of Big Star?

Tupica: I think Chris Bell is usually a footnote in many of the magazine articles, and that’s due to the short amount of time he spent in Big Star. Bell may have founded the band and its sound, but he left after the first LP, which makes it easy to write him off early on. But, for me, Big Star’s fourth record is that I Am the Cosmos LP. That’s his post-Big Star body of work, and, no matter what, I think Chris was always intertwined in the Big Star saga. Chilton, Stephens, and [bassist Andy] Hummel were even featured on some of the Cosmos tracks – they were still palling around. Sadly, though, Bell died very early. I think him not being around to take advantage of the Big Star resurgence didn’t help matters. He died young.

Hill: Maybe so, Alex repeatedly stated that he joined Chris’ band.

What are you hoping to accomplish with Friday’s show?

Tupica: This show is an out-of-pocket, labor-of-love project. Both Adam and I are huge fans of Chris’ sonic abilities and also his life in general, so it’s been great to put together an event that will bring together like-minded fans.

Hill: We hope to do the material and Chris’ legacy justice. I’m honored to have gone from a fan of the music to actually sitting next to John Fry and remixing some of Chris’ work with him.

What songs are you most excited about hearing in a live setting?

Tupica: I am excited to see all of them live. There are no live recordings of Chris Bell’s solo material, only studio versions and the outtakes. I’ve always been curious about how much energy his songs would have on a stage. He played very few shows and most of them were acoustic. He did perform some of his solo material with the Baker Street Regulars (a mid-’70s Memphis band that featured Bell, Stephens, and Duren), but they never recorded any gigs. In fact, this tribute show will probably cover more of Bell’s catalog than he was able to do while he was on the planet. I hear the Bell family might attend, and I hope this set brings about happy memories for them.

Hill: All of them, this has never really been done before to my knowledge.

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Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Ardent Remasters Chris Bell’s “I Am the Cosmos”

They say observing politics is like watching sausage being made. Making records looks just dandy. Watch two masters master.

Ardent Remasters Chris Bell’s ‘I Am the Cosmos’