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Music Music Features

Alix Brown: DJ With Memphis Connections Makes Good in NYC

Make no mistake, Memphis is a town of vinyl lovers, as was evidenced by the fine new and vintage music being played between bands at Gonerfest 16. It turns out that many who thrive in our local DJ scene go on to make a name for themselves elsewhere. Case in point: Alix Brown, who lived here for three years over a decade ago. She’s now established herself as a top-tier DJ in New York, with her eclectic tastes helping her build followings in many international venues. But Brown still holds Memphis close to her heart and can still be heard DJing here, holding court at Bar DKDC or other local dance floors.

“I try to come to Memphis once or twice a year,” Brown told me when I caught up with her in New York’s Tompkins Square Park this summer. “I usually drive down with my mom. She loves Gus’s Fried Chicken, and she loves Karen Carrier. We always stay with her.” Indeed, Carrier was a major influence on Brown when the music-obsessed Atlanta native began living here. “I was working at the Beauty Shop and Dó restaurant with Karen, and we got along so well. I loved hanging out there. That felt like my home. I waited tables. I loved getting dressed up. And that was the first time I’d ever gone blonde, like the Brigitte Bardot look.”

Kristin Gallegos

Alix Brown

That was significant on multiple levels, for this music lover also happens to be glamorous: She’s now a featured model in a Maybelline campaign that can be seen in drugstores nationwide. “I was never that girly until then; I kinda morphed into this ’60s character in Memphis. That’s when Jay said I changed.”

“Jay” would be the late Jay Reatard, who was the whole reason Brown moved to Memphis, back in the day. “I met Jay in Memphis because I was on tour with the Black Lips. I was 18 at the time. Jay and I were kind of flirting, and the guys in the Black Lips were very protective of me. I was like the little sister and kind of a tomboy. But later, when we got home, Jay left me a message and said he needed a break from Memphis. He wanted to come and check out Atlanta. And I was like, ‘Okay, cool.'”

Ultimately, Reatard would single-handedly record one of his greatest albums, Blood Visions, in Brown’s Atlanta apartment. “I used to have his rough demos for Blood Visions on a cassette,” she recalls. “He just knew how to record himself. It was amazing watching him work. He was like, ‘Always record drums on tape. You can do everything else digitally.’ So he went to a studio and cut all the drums. Then he’d take those tracks home and add layers of guitars. And I’m actually the only musician credited on Blood Visions. I played bass on one song, and I sang. And Jay played everything else.”

Even as she and Jay Reatard moved here, then broke up, Brown was cultivating a new look and sharpening her skills as a DJ. “I never took it seriously. Then I came up to New York, and I was working at a record store. Little by little, I started getting more DJ gigs. And then I met Tennessee. Her dad is Pete Thomas, the drummer for Elvis Costello. She’s actually named Tennessee because he loves Tennessee so much. She was DJing for several hotels. The Soho Grand, and what’s now the Roxy Hotel, which used to be the Tribeca Grand.”

That’s now where Brown can be heard most any weekend in New York. “I do all their music. I make all the playlists, I book bands and all the other DJs, and do their social media.” Beyond that, Brown is now expanding into music supervision for film soundtracks.

While she caught a rising wave in the Big Apple, Memphis holds a special place in her heart. “I don’t think I really appreciated Memphis until I moved away. When I moved there for Jay, I really wanted to move to New Orleans. That was literally two weeks before Hurricane Katrina. But that’s life, right? You never realize how cool something is when it’s happening.”

Hear Alix Brown DJ at Bar DKDC on October 10, after the Lorette Velvette Band.

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Music Music Features

Ruby Vroom: Mike Doughty Recreates His Seminal First Album

CREDIT: Ben Staley

This year marks the 25th anniversary of a breakthrough album, one that, by bringing sampling up front and into a live context, came to redefine what a typical indie band could do. Soul Coughing’s debut, Ruby Vroom, came at a time when hip-hop sampling had reached new levels of versatility, incorporating everything from jazz breaks to cinematic soundtracks. Yet the New York-based group was doing something entirely different: a mash-up of jazz-derived grooves, eclectic samples, and the juxtaposed meanings of lyricist/singer Mike Doughty. Though they evolved as the 1990s wore on, their trademark sound was signaled from their first release. And so it’s entirely appropriate to celebrate the debut’s quarter-century mark with a tour that recreates the album in its entirety. I spoke to Doughty, now happily ensconced in Memphis, about the tour and its upcoming stop at Bar DKDC on Sunday.

Ben Staley

Mike Doughty

Memphis Flyer: Have you revisited the Soul Coughing material much since you went solo in the early 2000s?

Mike Doughty: Sure, I’ve definitely been playing individual songs in different formats — with bands, with just a cello player, or solo, absolutely. But not a whole album. I don’t understand why bands didn’t start doing this years ago. It’s really fun to be inside this longer piece of music. You can really feel yourself in the lake of it, you know?

It must be different when you’re revisiting your own work.

Not really. You sort of forget about that part. I guess I’m very in the moment when I’m doing it.

I always thought your lyrics were semi-extemporaneous.

Not really. A lot of them were written based on the sound of the words. So I guess that’s why it sounds improvisatory. My bands in Memphis — MOTICOS and Spooky Party — who I play at DKDC with, those are entirely improvised bands. So I’m plenty into improvisation. On this tour, I have a system of hand signals that I use to cue people to start and stop and get louder and quieter. So there’s almost live remixing going on in the middle of the tunes. I’m encouraging the players to improvise, but I’m not doing vocal improvisations.

What kind of band do you have on this tour?

It’s a quintet: me, Scrap [Livingston] on upright bass, and then guitar, drums, and sampler. And it includes three members of Wheatus, who are also on the bill on the tour. They’re not at DKDC because there’s three backing singers in that band and an additional keyboard player [Memphian and Dixie Dicks member Brandon Ticer]. So Wheatus is a bit large for that little nook.

I expect you’ll bring new arrangements to the old songs?

Yeah. A lot of it is similar, but also, it’s just the nature of how I play music that things are sliced and diced.

The samples, I suppose, will offer a lot of room for experimentation.

Yeah, that’s different. Just by the nature of it, that’s more improvisatory. And I play sampler, as well as Matthew Milligan. Sometimes I’m singing, sometimes I’m playing the sampler and not singing. It’s all live-triggered. It’s not like we just click on a thing and a loop plays.

Will Sunday’s show carry extra meaning, bringing the tour to your adopted home?

Yeah. I’m really excited to do it in Memphis. I absolutely love living here. I had the dumb idea of moving to Nashville when I was leaving New York, and a friend said, ‘You know, I’ve always wanted to move to Memphis.’ And I had never even considered it. So during my exploratory Nashville trip, I drove over and literally got an apartment in Midtown, just having visited for a couple days. I was like, ‘I’m sold!’ There’s something that feels really mystical about Memphis to me. There’s something magical about it. I just immediately felt at home. It’s been four years for me, and I bought a house two years ago. I live in Cooper-Young, so I’ll just walk home after the show.

Mike Doughty brings his 25th Anniversary Tribute to Ruby Vroom to Bar DKDC on Sunday, March 31st, at 8 p.m. $10.

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Music Music Features

Harlan T. Bobo Returns to Memphis With a New Record

Harlan T. Bobo feels like pure Memphis to a lot music fans. His shows this week feel like a homecoming for many, including Harlan himself, though he’s not from Memphis, and he’s spent the past six years living in Perpignan, France, raising his son as his marriage gradually fell apart. Perhaps Memphis feels like home because this is where his voice was born, that wry perspective on love and self-sabotage that his first three albums convey so well.

His new LP on Goner Records, A History of Violence, is somewhat of a departure. What strikes the listener first is the band, now rocking harder, with a more sinister edge. His singing, while still seemingly perched on one’s ear in a confessional tone, is now addressing a world swirling around him more than the romantic entanglements of his earlier work. I sat down with him recently to try to understand these changes.

Memphis Flyer: It’s a pretty bleak bunch of songs. But I also sense an empathy there for down-on-their-luck characters. Which was almost a relief after seeing the cover.

Harlan T. Bobo: The cover picture’s of a woman in a band I travel with now and then, from Bordeaux. I thought the picture was so arresting. For me it captured the feel of the record really well. It was one of those old glass plate photographs, and the glass had broken. Nobody did that, the cracks were already there. I actually asked my ex-wife’s permission to use it. I said, “People are gonna think this is you.” People will automatically assume that it’s about her, but it’s not. Sure, a lot of the aggression and the frustration that was happening during the breakup is in there. But I only sing about her specifically twice.

The fact is, the record has very little to do my marriage. A couple songs are about that, but the rest of it is addressing something that’s disturbed me since childhood, and it’s that aggression wins, you know? It wins out on top of consideration for people, diplomacy, because all those things are very boring compared to the visceral excitation of aggression and violence. Even as a little kid, I just could not figure out why it is. And the place I live in now, it’s not violent like anything in America, but it’s very aggressive. and the way people raise their children and treat each other is really disturbing to me.

I can see how those questions have taken on a new urgency, raising your son and thinking about how aggression flows through generations.

Yeah, there’s a lot about raising children and passing this thing on. And it can be a sort of battle, between how much a kid’s gonna take from an aggressive side of the family, that’s addictive and exciting, and how much he’s gonna take from a parent talking to him, and the boring things.

This album’s less about you. You’re casting your eye out to other characters.

I think it’s just that I made enough records about my personal life. And maybe it’s just being a parent, it directs your attention outside yourself. That’s something I didn’t consciously do, but I did notice it after everything was coming together. I was like, “Oh, you’re not so freaking self absorbed on this one.” There’s actually social commentary on this one. So that’s progress, I think.

It’s hard to imagine replicating the sound of the band you use on the record (including players familiar to most Memphians, Jeff “Bunny” Dutton, Jeffery Bouck, Steve Selvidge, and Brendan Spengler), if you were to tour Europe.

Yeah. I don’t know what the difference is between rock-and-roll players in France compared to here, but it’s entirely different. You know, there are French bands that I like, and I’ve tried to play with these guys, but whatever I do has a very American feel to it. Like swing. I’ve noticed how loose some of these songs are. They sort of whip around. Those guys in France play a straight beat and it’s maddening. It loses its power.

With these Memphis guys, we only had two rehearsals before recording that record. But we’ve all played together in various other bands. It’s sort of my dream band. I actually tried recording this album in France. I had a band, we played together for a couple years. And they were fine replicating the older stuff. That’s kinda why I met them. But I knew what I wanted and I was not getting anywhere close with them. So I just eventually had to ditch it. They’re sending me emails now that they see the record’s out. [laughs]

Harlan T. Bobo and the Psychotic Lovers play Friday, June 15, at Bar DKDC, and Sunday, June 17, at the Levitt Shell.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

The Moscow Mule: Freeze, Copper!

CREDIT: Annapustynnikova | Dreamstime.com

Around midnight one recent Saturday, I found myself standing in line for a drink at Cooper-Young’s DKDC, waiting for the bartender’s attention so that I could order a Moscow Mule. I gave up most vodka-based cocktails after a high school bonding experience that involved sipping the clear liquor from a hairspray bottle. Yet here I was nearly three decades later, so sweaty that I eschewed my normal gin and tonic to cup my hands around a cold copper mug and let the vodka, ginger beer, and lime juice — the main ingredients in a Mule — course through my small intestine. Never mind that alcohol is a diuretic that actually heats up the body instead of cooling it down — the combination of the cold liquids, aromatic mint, and the insulating effect of the chilly copper mug felt instantly refreshing.

The cocktail, invented 75 years ago by ginger beer purveyor Jack Morgan and Smirnoff distributor John G. Martin, was birthed in Manhattan’s Chatham Hotel but found its sea legs at Morgan’s Cock ‘n Bull restaurant in Los Angeles. Served over cracked ice, the Moscow Mule combined two poor sellers (and utilized an overstock of Russian copper mugs) to create an instant hit at the Cock ‘n Bull, which was a celebrity-heavy establishment on the Sunset Strip. Despite a Cold War boycott led by a group of patriotic New York bartenders, the American-born Moscow Mule survived. And in recent years, as ginger beer has benefitted from the resurgence of the craft beer and cider markets, the drink has once again become a mainstay on bar menus.

Annapustynnikova | Dreamstime.com

Locally, you can find the Moscow Mule on menus all over town, from Beale Street to Overton Square to Collierville. South of Beale makes theirs with Tito’s vodka; the varietal Orange Mule at Bar Louie features Absolut Mandarin; while at the Cove, bartenders use vodka, crème de cassis, lime, and soda water to make a Memphis Mule, served in a copper mug for $8.

Karen Carrier, the restaurateur behind DKDC, the Beauty Shop, Mollie Fontaine Lounge, and Another Roadside Attraction catering, says that the popularity of the Moscow Mule, a traditional blend of Tito’s, Gosling’s Ginger Beer, lime, and mint, has stayed strong over the past few summers.

DKDC bartender Christine Farris says, “When it’s 100 degrees outside, and I can drink something that tastes this refreshing, I’d drink it.” She attributes the ascendance of the Moscow Mule on Carrier’s menus to her boss’ acumen when it comes to quality ingredients.

“Karen is always a step ahead of the game. We use good liquors, fresh herbs, and fresh-squeezed juices,” Farris says. “Whether you’re making one at home or drinking at a bar, the biggest thing that will make a Mule taste better is using fresh-squeezed fruit. Rose’s Sweetened Lime Juice makes the drink taste too sweet, which actually reduces the freshness. You also want to use a ginger beer that’s very gingery, without too much high fructose corn syrup.”

Gosling’s ginger beer ranked third out of four on Bon Appétit‘s rankings, below competitors Barritt’s and Fever-Tree. Cock ‘n Bull brand ginger beer, which is available at selected Kroger stores and via Amazon.com, didn’t make the list. At home last week, I made a Hendrick’s Summer Mule, which consists of gin, lime juice, elderflower cordial, muddled cucumber, and ginger beer, garnished with fresh mint.

The botanical flavors of gin add substantially to the taste of a Mule, although, truth be told, this variation had more in common with a Pimm’s Cup than a Mule. The cucumber slice added to the after-effects of sipping it. The Summer Mule goes down like a soothing digestive, concocted specifically for Memphians trying to make it through August.

That said, make mine a traditional Moscow. Maybe it’s just the mental association, but any cocktail named for a city that fluctuates between 50 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit this month conjures up cooler days ahead.

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Music Music Features

Clay Otis and friends live at Bar DKDC

Clay Hardee (stage name Clay Otis) cranks out more new music than most of the active bands in Memphis, frequently collaborating with the Sheiks, the Vest brothers, and anyone else he can convince to join him in the recording studio. Over the years, Hardee has introduced us to his weird, sometimes inappropriate brand of dream pop with albums like The Overachiever (released on the fictitious F*ck Florida Records) and Citizen Clay, his latest masterpiece with comical song titles like “Friend on Crack” and “Pills at Night” that was released in early 2014. In between those releases, he also found time to record the single “Disco Werewolf” with the Dream Sheiks, a super group of sorts made up of members of local bands Dream Team and the Sheiks.

Clay Otis

Not one to be tied to one group of instrumentalists, Hardee will debut all new material this Friday at Bar DKDC with special guests Luke White (James and the Ultrasounds), Logan Hanna, Greg Faison (Dream Team), Dirk Kitterlin (Marcella & Her Lovers), and Graham Winchester (the Sheiks, Jack Oblivian, Maitre D’s). While all of the players previously mentioned definitely have a lot of gigging under their belts, don’t count on Friday’s show at DKDC to be business as usual. If we’ve learned anything from Hardee over the years, it’s to expect the unexpected. While Hardee didn’t start making music until he was in his 30s, his progression as a local musician has been interesting to watch. In an interview with the Flyer from 2014, Hardee admitted that he had no intention of playing music until a movie he was working on got turned down. As one of the most unpredictable musicians currently playing in Memphis, it’s fair to say that Hardee made the right decision.

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Music Music Features

Thelma and the Sleaze at Bar DKDC

Nashville pranksters Thelma and the Sleaze return to Memphis this Saturday night for a performance at Bar DKDC. Thelma and the Sleaze are no strangers to performing in Memphis, having already played at places like the Buccaneer, the Hi-Tone, and Black Lodge Video. The band seems to have found a home at Bar DKDC, as the Midtown establishment has hosted their recent local shows. No matter where they decide to play, the shock-rock that Thelma and the Sleaze deliver is worth the price of admission.

While most Nashville garage bands can be described as family-friendly, Thelma and the Sleaze take their live show to the limit, honoring past rock-and-roll troublemakers like the Runaways with revealing stage attire and provocative song content. Musically, they sound like the Pleasure Seekers covering Thin Lizzy, which means they could be tapped to appear in a Quentin Tarantino movie any day now. The band has a slew of EP’s under their belt and recently added a second guitarist to beef up their whiskey-soaked songs.

Also on the bill is long-time-running local band Data Drums, a project of the Oscars’ Chuck Vicious and Bobby Lee of the Manateees and Nervs. Though Lee lives in Oxford, Data Drums are increasing their local appearances this summer after a period of almost never playing live. Data Drums recently performed on the Rocket Science Audio variety show with Aquarian Blood, and frontman Chuck Vicious played a game of chess with an audience member in between (and during) his band’s fast-paced punk songs. While there might not be a chess match during Saturday’s show at Bar DKDC, the high-energy rock-and-roll should be enough to keep you entertained.

Thelma and the Sleaze and Data Drums, Saturday, July 11th, at Bar DKDC. Doors open at 9 p.m., and admission is $5.

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Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Invasion Chileño: Tomates Rocky y Rising Sun

Do you like rock from Chile? Jefe, you are in luck. Chilean rock band Tomates Rocky and their alter ego Rising Sun are at the Hi-Tone tonight (Jueves) and al DKDC on Sabado? Mire, debes rockearse a la moda Chileña.

Invasion Chileño: Tomates Rocky y Rising Sun