“‘Baby Teeth’ was written and produced before ‘The Rope’ and before the concept of 325i was fully a thing,” he said. “We were trying different sounds based on the things I was feeling at the time. I wasn’t in a deal yet, but I knew it was highly likely. I was angry. I’m still angry. That’ll be a recurring theme for a few years.”
The multi-hyphenate artist directed “Baby Teeth,” with frequent collaborators Studio One Four Three producing. Sam Leathers, who has lensed for the Don in the past, is the cinematographer. The truly impressive production design and makeup is by Ahmad George; the spooky masks were created by D. D. Issac.
“For the video I wanted to create something that represented the alchemical process I’m physically and spiritually going through,” Don Lifted says. “I’ve been living through very violent transitions and growth processes for the last few years. Many of the lessons I’ve needed to learn I haven’t due to my own human weakness and doubt systems around me. These moments second guessing my path caused truths to be revealed to me in ways that left scars instead of me being able to elevate without the physical and emotional pain. Sacrifice is always required but it doesn’t always involve suffering. I’m closer to learning that lesson. This visual is me trying to represent those stages and all the parts within me operating at their maximized selves through loneliness, trauma, ostracism. … Each absorbing and changing their physical presentation toward a new form of enlightened self.”
If you would like to see your music video on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
It’s no secret that vinyl is resurgent. After being eclipsed first by CDs in the 1990s and then by streamed digital music, records were nigh impossible to find in mainstream stores for many years, until around 2008, when the manufacture and sales of vinyl albums and singles began to grow again. Since then, the trend has only accelerated, with market analyses predicting continued annual growth between 8 percent-15 percent for vinyl musical products over the next five to six years.
What fewer people realize is how every step of the process that makes records possible can be found in Memphis. “The Memphis Sound … where everything is everything,” ran the old Stax Records ad copy, and that’s especially true in the vinyl domain: All the elements are within reach. Johnny Phillips, co-owner of local record distributor Select-O-Hits, says “There’s not very many cities that can offer everything we offer right here. From recording to distribution, from inception to the very end. Everything you need, you have right here. Memphis is like a one-stop shop for vinyl right now.”
From the musicians themselves to the final product you take home on Record Store Day, here are the 10 pillars upon which our Kingdom of Vinyl rests, 10 domains which thrive in Memphis as in no other city.
Take Out Vinyl’s Jeff Powell (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Mastering
A lacquer master, freshly cut on a lathe, offers a level of high fidelity that most listeners, even record aficionados, almost never hear. But Take Out Vinyl, run by Jeff Powell and Lucas Peterson from a room in Sam Phillips Recording, is that rare beast, a vinyl mastering lab, where raw audio from tape or a computer is first transferred to plastic and one can sometimes hear a lacquer playback. It’s not meant to be listened to. The discs cut here would typically be used to create the metal discs that stamp the grooves onto the records we buy, but the lacquer itself is too soft for repeated plays. And yet, for those who’ve heard a playback from a freshly cut lacquer, the quality is haunting.
That was the idea behind the one-off Bob Dylan record auctioned at Christie’s last month for $1.78 million. Spearheaded by producer T Bone Burnett, a new recording of Dylan performing “Blowin’ in the Wind” was cut onto a single lacquer disc, never to be duplicated or mass-produced.
Producer T Bone Burnett (Photo: Jason Myers)
To help make it a reality, Burnett enlisted Powell, one of the world’s most respected mastering engineers. “Lacquers are very soft,” says Powell. “We can’t play these things after I cut them or it destroys the groove. You lose a little high-end every time you play it. T Bone’s idea was to try to capture that sound of a fresh cut lacquer, but one that you could play over and over again, even up to a thousand times, with no degradation to the sound. And that’s what we have accomplished.”
The trick was finding a way to protectively coat the lacquer after it had been cut, and after years of R&D, the labs enlisted by Burnett found the right compound. “T Bone says the coating is only 90 atoms thick,” says Powell. “A human hair is about 300,000 atoms thick — that’s how thin the coating is. It was derived from a protective material used on satellites.”
Ultimately, says Powell, the goal was to reassert the value of vinyl records over digital media. “The purpose of this was not to see how much money could be made,” says Powell, “but to show how music has been devalued to next to nothing. T Bone wanted to establish that a recording like this should be considered fine art.”
Memphis Record Pressing (Justin Fox Burks)
Manufacturing
The notion of a vinyl record as fine art is not so alien to legions of collectors who curate their own personal galleries of albums and singles. But even the rarest of records were mass-produced at one time, and Memphis has that department covered as well. For decades, nearly all of the records recorded in Memphis were made at Plastic Products on Chelsea Avenue. Such was the pressing plant’s impact that an historical plaque now marks where it once stood. But in recent years, a new business has taken up the torch of vinyl manufacturing.
In 2015, the Memphis Flyer alerted readers to the fledgling Memphis Record Pressing (MRP), which arose from a partnership between Brandon Seavers and Mark Yoshida, whose AudioGraphic Masterworks specialized in CD and DVD production, and Fat Possum Records, whose co-owner Bruce Watson first suggested that they move into vinyl production. Now, it’s in the hands of Seavers and Yoshida and GZ Media, the largest vinyl record manufacturer in the world, and the Memphis company is expanding dramatically.
Memphis Record Pressing (Justin Fox Burks)
As Seavers points out, the world of vinyl has evolved as well. “When we started, we searched the world for record presses, which was really a challenge. Back in 2014, there were no new machines being built. You had to scour the corners of the earth to find ancient machinery and bring it back to life. Fast-forward to 2018, when a few companies emerged around the world that invested in building new machines. We started bringing in these brand-new, computer-controlled machines that were very different from our old machines. And that started the process of expansion. Through 2018-2021, we replaced our aging equipment bit by bit, and in September of last year, we replaced the last of our old machines.”
The pandemic was actually a boon to the young company. “We reopened in May of 2020, and by June our orders had skyrocketed. We were overwhelmed. And by the first five weeks of 2021, we booked three-and-a-half months’ worth of work in five weeks. So to say it overwhelmed us is an understatement. Now we’re sitting on a quarter-million units’ worth of open orders. So, it’s insane to see the demand grow. Before Covid, we had reduced our lead time to eight weeks. Now, it’s frustrating to quote nine months of lead time to new customers because that amount of time is life and death three times over for some artists. That’s why we’re so intent on expanding as quickly as possible.” Construction of additional facilities, expected to be operational in October, is now underway.
Distribution
Once the records are made, where do they go? Thanks to the decades-old Select-O-Hits, the answer is “across the globe.” Johnny Phillips reckons it’s the oldest distribution service in the world, and it may be one of the oldest businesses in Memphis, period. “In 1960, my dad, Tom Phillips, was Jerry Lee Lewis’ road manager. When Jerry Lee married his 13-year-old cousin, he couldn’t be booked anywhere. My daddy put all of his money into promoting Jerry Lee, and he lost it all. So, he came up from Mobile, Alabama, to Memphis and went to work with my uncle Sam, taking back unsold returns: 45s, 78s, and a few albums. We gradually grew into one of the largest one-stops in the South, supplying all labels to smaller retail stores. There used to be over 25 retail stores in Memphis, believe it or not. And then in the early ’70s, we started distributing nationwide. My dad retired, and my brother Sam and I bought him out.”
Over the years, Select-O-Hits has seen every ebb and flow of the vinyl market, including a major uptick after the advent of hip-hop. “We were the first distributor for Rapper’s Delight by The Sugar Hill Gang in 1979,” notes Phillips. That tradition continues today. “We’ve released about half of Three 6 Mafia’s catalog that we control in the last two years, on colored vinyl. And we distribute it all over the world.” And if the distribution numbers are not what they used to be before CDs and then streaming took over, they are climbing steadily. “Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, we were selling half a million vinyl records. But now we’re doing 5,000, 15,000. Still, last year was our biggest vinyl year ever [since CDs became dominant], and this year is looking just as good.”
Shangri-La’s Jared McStay (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Record Stores and Record Labels
If Select-O-Hits is moving the product around the world, it needs to land somewhere, and in Memphis that means record stores. Though we no longer have 25 retail outlets for vinyl, there are several places to buy records here. The granddaddy of them all is Shangri-La Records, founded by Sherman Willmott in 1988, then taken over in 1999 by Jared McStay, who now co-owns the shop with John Miller.
“The first couple of years,” says McStay, “I had to bet on vinyl because I couldn’t compete with the CD stores, like Best Buy or whatever. I was getting crushed, until I realized I could never compete with them. In the early 2000s, they were phasing out vinyl, and even stereo manufacturers stopped putting phono jacks on their stereos. But I had tons of records.”
Around the same time, Eric Friedl was running a small indie label, Goner, which ultimately became the Goner Records shop when Zac Ives joined forces with Friedl in 2004. They too leaned into vinyl from the very start. “I think Eric had done maybe two CDs at most when we joined forces and started expanding the label in 2004,” says Ives. “Out of his 10 or 11 releases, I think only The Reatards had a CD release. The rest were only on vinyl. There was no giant resurgence of vinyl for us. Those things came up around our industry, but we never left that model. And that’s how it was for most smaller, independent labels, especially in punk and underground realms.”
Combining a record shop with a record label is a time-honored tradition in Memphis, going back to Stax’s Satellite Records, and it carries on today through Shangri-La and Goner, which have both been named among the country’s best record stores by Rolling Stone. Both stores’ dedication to vinyl relates to their investment in live bands. Gonerfest, which brings bands, DJs, and record-shoppers from around the world, will be enjoying its 19th year next month, and Shangri-La has hosted miniature versions of that for years.
“We’re having Sweatfest on August 13th,” says McStay, “and we haven’t had one in three years because of the pandemic. There are going to be thousands of bargain records. We’ve been hoarding them for three years!” Meanwhile, local bands will perform in the parking lot, a pre-Covid mainstay of Shangri-La for most of its existence.
Though Goner boasts its own label, and Shangri-La has spawned at least three (Shangri-La Projects, plus the loosely affiliated Misspent Records and Blast Habit Records), not all stores do so. River City Records opened last year and, along with Memphis Music and A. Schwab, is already doing a brisk vinyl business in the Downtown area. Meanwhile, the city has several vinyl-friendly labels untethered to any retail outlet, namely Back to the Light, Big Legal Mess/Bible & Tire, Black and Wyatt, Madjack, and Peabody Records. These local imprints and the bands they sign, in turn, feed into the doggedly local support that the above mastering, manufacturing, and distribution businesses offer. As Powell says, “Anybody local, I’ll always try to move heaven and earth to get them ahead of the line a little bit and treat them special. Because you know, it’s Memphis, man!”
Memphis Listening Lab has thousands of LPs. (Photo: Jamie Harmon)
Archives, Audio Technology, Community Radio, and DJs
A wide swath of this town’s music lovers are brazenly vinyl-centric, and that demographic has a ripple effect in other domains. The Stax Museum of American Soul Music, for example, boasts the huge archive of Bob Abrahamian, a DJ at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, with more than 35,000 singles and LPs, now being cataloged by a full-time archivist, Stax collections manager Leila Hamdan.
Then there’s the Memphis Listening Lab (MLL), founded last year on the strength of the music collection of John King, a collector’s collector if there ever was one. As a promoter, program director, and studio owner, he’s collected music all his life. Now, his roughly 30,000 45s, 12,000 LPs, 20,000 CDs, and 1,000 music books reside in the public archive of the MLL, free for the listening and even free to record. Further, MLL has hosted countless public events where classic or obscure albums are played and discussed in depth.
The listening lab also benefits from a less-recognized aspect of vinyl culture in Memphis: the technology. Being outfitted with high-end, locally made EgglestonWorks speakers enhances the listening experience at MLL considerably. And the city is also home to George Merrill’s GEM Dandy Products Inc., which markets his highly respected audiophile-grade turntables (one of which MLL hopes to acquire).
Another archive boasting EgglestonWorks speakers is the Eight & Sand bar in The Central Station Hotel. The private bar was envisioned as a place to celebrate Memphis music history, and its dual turntables are duly backed by a huge vinyl library of mostly local music. “Chad Weekley, the music curator, is doing an incredible job there,” says Ives. The bar now plays host to the DJs who enliven Gonerfest’s opening ceremonies, and the hotel has even offered package deals combining room reservations with gift certificates to the Goner shop.
And let’s face it, this town is crawling with great DJs. In a sense, they are the ultimate vinyl record consumers, and thus help to drive all the other institutions. “It’s similar to a band,” says Ives, “because you’re taking your knowledge of music and putting it back out into the world in some way. I love hearing somebody’s personality coming through their radio program or DJ event. … Sometimes at venues like Eight & Sand, sometimes on community radio.”
The latter is clearly fertile ground for those who favor the sound of vinyl. Both WEVL and WYXR sport turntables in their on-air studio rooms, not to mention their own vinyl libraries. As WYXR program manager Jared Boyd says, “I’m a record collector myself, and for a time I was DJ-ing at Eight & Sand and using those turntables. So, when we started the radio station, we wanted people to be able to have that experience without having to go down to Central Station. We wanted these people who collect deeply to broadcast these really unique finds. I particularly wanted to cater to people who use records.”
The Music
And so we come full circle, following vinyl’s great chain of existence back to the reason we all want it in the first place: music. And it’s undeniable that the music this city produces fits our predilection for vinyl — from Jerry Lee Lewis’ piano swipes to the guitar/organ growl of “Green Onions,” from the choogling riffs of power pop to the crunching, distorted damage of punk, the sounds of this city lend themselves to the weight and warmth of music’s greatest medium. Just drop a needle on your favorite band and you’ll hear the truth in Brandon Seavers’ words: “Memphis is the grit to Nashville’s glitz,” he says. “And grit sounds a lot better on vinyl.”
Turning a corner, producer/engineer Matt Ross-Spang had no idea what he was walking into. None of us did back in late November 2019, though that marked the birth of a certain spiked virus that would change all of us. That was a world away when Ross-Spang heard the murmurs from a show already in progress, and he walked in. “The Green Room in Crosstown Concourse has caused me to see a lot more live music, with how easy it is to sneak over there after work. So I walked in and was immediately blown away. A string quartet was out in front, and the singer was behind them, hiding a little bit. There was a light projector and two or three screens with video going on. There was this amazing visual aspect to the show, and he was using two different vocal microphones with different effects for certain parts of the song. I immediately was struck by the cinematic and genre-bending music and lyrics I was hearing. And I noticed the crowd. Every walk of life was in there: old, young, Black, white.”
The singer in question was Lawrence Matthews III, but the artist on the bill was Don Lifted. They’re one and the same, of course, or are they? After all, there were two microphones, two voices. And at that point, having already self-released two albums, Matthews didn’t know if Don Lifted would be around much longer. “I was putting out the energy that I was not going to continue doing what I was doing,” Matthews muses in his soft-spoken manner, as we sit in the hushed environs of the Memphis Listening Lab. “I felt like I was at the end of what that body of work was. I was just not where I wanted to be.”
Nonetheless, he booked a modest national tour, a last hurrah perhaps, with The Green Room show right in the middle of it. “And I had this moment where I was like, ‘Damn, I’m halfway through this tour and nothing’s happening.’ I went on the tour to close the Don Lifted thing down, but also 50 percent of you is like, ‘I would love for something to happen.’ I’m traveling across the U.S., driving to San Francisco, going to L.A., going to New York. I would like for something to happen if this is going to continue being a thing.”
Any artist would feel such ambivalence if their first two albums matched the quality of Don Lifted’s. Rooted in hip hop’s rhythmic rhyming, but including elements of shoegaze rock and even smooth R&B, both revealed the artist’s fine sonic craftsmanship, limning the growing pains of his late teens/early twenties with equal parts hindsight and poetic furor. In both Alero and Contour, named for the respective cars he drove in those pivotal moments of his life, he crafted subtle, moody soundscapes over which his lyrics flowed like incantations. And from the start, he took great care with the presentation of his music. As he told the Memphis Flyer in 2017 when performing his Alero material with Blueshift Ensemble at the Continuum Music Festival, “I graduated with a painting degree [from the University of Memphis]. But I also did photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, ceramics. I don’t do shows unless I can do a self-curated event in an alternative space. And I try to completely transform the space. So you might come into a space and see three projections, all in sync with the music. I’m just trying to curate a whole experience.”
When Ross-Spang walked into his show two years later, he was still at it, with much critical acclaim but only middling sales and no record deal. “After The Green Room show, I literally had just had that thought of, ‘Damn, something has to happen between San Francisco and L.A.’ Those were the next two stops on my tour. ‘Something’s gotta happen, dawg.’ And then my phone started going ping ping ping ping! I looked, and it said, ‘Fat Possum [Records] has followed you.’ And then I got an email from my manager saying, ‘They want to meet with you.’ And I was just like, crying in the car.”
Lawrence Matthews, filming his music video for his single, “Lost In Orion” (Photo: Courtesy Lawrence Matthews)
“Pick How I’m Moving”
Matt Ross-Spang, it turned out, was beginning to spread the word. “I thought I would be remiss if I didn’t tell my friend Bruce Watson about him,” he recalls of his talk with the co-owner of Fat Possum. “The very next day after the show, I called Bruce. I never do that, really, but I was pretty blown away. So I told him, you should check this guy out. He doesn’t sound like anybody; he’s hard to pigeonhole. He’s really young, but he’s already figured so much out, and he’s working his butt off. And he checks all the boxes of what you’re looking for in an artist.”
After that, Matthews recalls, “The higher-ups at Fat Possum and I had a meeting that was dope. They all had different goals in the conversation, and I was trying to balance it. As someone who has not talked to record label people regularly, I was like, ‘What’s happening?’ They wanted to know, like, ‘You haven’t released anything since 2018, what are you up to?’ So I wrote and recorded ‘Golden (The Wait)’ that week and gave it to them. And the energy I have in that first verse is like, ‘This is who I am. And this is why I am here. Fuck with me.’ And they were like, all right, let’s do it.”
Pick how I’m moving
Pick who I’m choosing
The product is soothing
I pray to God that he Fluid
Flow how the way I be moving
Cut to 2021, and the imminent release of Don Lifted’s new album on the label. It’s an apotheosis of sorts, not only solidifying the artist’s reputation as a performer with staying power, but Fat Possum’s ongoing reputation as a home for music that is beyond category. While the Mississippi-based imprint has featured other hip hop-leaning artists like MellowHype, Patrick Paige II, and El-P, it appealed to Matthews precisely because of its eclecticism.
“My approach with Fat Possum has been very much like, ‘Let’s not treat me like a hip hop artist.’ I’m liable to put out some of anything, so I try not to go through some of those traditional hip hop outlets, as I navigate the music industry. It’s still weird. I’ve been called alternative, indie rock, rap, even R&B from one publication. Everybody wants to genre you. I don’t know what it is, to be honest [laughs]. I was trying to get them to just call it a pop record.”
Indeed, that may be the most apt way to describe the album 325i, to be released October 22nd. Once again named after the car he drove during events that inspired the songs, it’s notable that a BMW 325i is Matthews’ current ride, carrying him through recent times. This marks a new territory for the songwriter: the here and now.
In the Moment
“My previous works were built on reflection,” says Matthews. “Alero and Contour were both me going back five years, seven years, to reflect about a time, to build it and put it together and create a narrative and a timeline. This one feels more evolving throughout because I’m changing as life is changing me. I’ve had very large transformative changes working on that project, but also how I see the world, how I see myself within the world, how I see everything. Everything is completely changed. By the end of the record, I’m a completely different person with a completely different perspective and style than I had when I wrote ‘Golden.’”
Of course, one reason for that is the timing. “Golden (The Wait),” which kicks off the new album, was the only track written in the relatively innocent last weeks of 2019. “Fat Possum liked the record,” Matthews recalls. “And they had me come down to Oxford and I signed in March 2020. A week before the shutdown.”
Even for those who survived the spread of Covid-19, the isolation and anxiety of 2020 was a long, dark night of the soul. It was no different for Matthews, and, as he describes it, 325i, recorded in his home over those months, is the ultimate chronicle of that interior journey. “There were points where my anxiety was so crazy because of Covid, the election, the shootings. Everything that was happening,” he says. “I thought, ‘I may not make it to the end of this record.’ That was a serious anxiety of mine. I just stayed in the house, not just because of Covid, but because I didn’t want to end up dead.
“A lot of people died. I think that’s something we don’t really want to talk about. So I had a lot of anxiety, and you can hear it in the record. You can hear a lot of fear and unsureness in the record. But by the end, there’s also this realization of some kind of peace within the thing. So you work however many years, you receive this thing that allows you to pursue your art at a level you haven’t done before. This hasn’t been an opportunity provided to most folks from the scene that I came from. Anybody who’s transitioned on to higher aspirations has moved. I stayed. I got this deal. A week later, the world goes insane and stays insane.”
And yet, 325i is not a “news of the world” experience. The upshot of quarantine, for Matthews, was living in close quarters with those nearest and dearest to him. “I was spending a lot of time in the house with my loved ones and writing about very personal, intimate experiences. There’s so much going on in the world right now, but I didn’t want to put a protest album out. I wanted to challenge myself: How do I write about how bad things are right now without directly telling you how bad things are right now? I want you to feel how bad it is out here.”
Lawrence Matthews and film crew on set for “Brain Fluid” music video (Photo: Courtesy Lawrence Matthews)
Reach Out from the Inside
And by “out here,” Matthews actually means “in here.” The album comes across as a very interior journey, between contradictory impulses to have loved ones see your full self, even as you fear to reveal it. “In what scenario are you longing for a person you can’t interact with?” Matthews asks. “Lockdown. You’re closed in with a person. You have an issue. You have to work through that. You’re in it together. In the past, when you could run from it, you maybe wouldn’t want to dig into certain insecurities and fears you might have with a partner. But this is the time. If we don’t deal with it now, we’ll never deal with it. So those moments inform that body of work, and there is this overall dread of that in the background.”
Yet it’s a dread mixed with the determination to unpack one’s self. As Matthews notes, “There’s a series of lines on ‘Darla’ which essentially say, ‘I don’t know how to do this.’ A lot of us are products of divorce and failed marriages and weird family things, and now, getting older, I’ve realized, ‘Wow, I don’t have any proper examples of this stuff.’ You really have to relearn how to love somebody, not based on how you’ve been taught to love folks. ’Cause I’ve got a whole series of lines that go: ‘I don’t know no way, so I can’t make my own.’ Basically, ‘I’ve never seen nobody do this right, so I don’t know how to do it. Nobody ever held my hand, so I can’t hold no hand.’”
In the restless imagination of Matthews, all these interior reflections ultimately lead back to the world at large. He began with a challenge: How can an artist evoke the spirit of troubled times without simply describing the world as it is right now? And even now, he keeps returning to the political within the personal, the soul as an expression of the world’s corruption. It’s a natural extension of his art in general, both in his photographic work, grappling with topics as diverse as Black masculinity or gentrification, or his work with the Black arts nonprofit Tone, for whom he is the gallery director. An awareness of the wider forces around us informs even the most intimate moments of 325i.
“I have to make my own way,” he muses. “Everything I was taught about going to college or getting married, or doing this or that, wasn’t working. I think of 2020 as a year of ‘Yeah, all this stuff we’ve been taught does not work.’ It’s a complete travesty. It’s collapsing around us. Everything that’s dealing with humans is crumbling in front of our face and we see how sorry our infrastructure is. And people just think about that as a government or politics thing, or a healthcare thing. It’s all of that and how we are taught to love each other. How we are taught to show up for each other. ’Cause last year we saw the most insane selfishness, and still are seeing it to this day. People don’t really give a shit about other people. And we’re finding that out in real time, watching history unfold in front of our eyes, and seeing people making conscious choices not to take care of their grandparents, their children, folks around them, their loved ones, to risk things, to literally risk death to … go eat at Chili’s. See what I’m saying? It was like, ‘Oh wow! We don’t know nothing!’”
Taking a breath, he turns his eye inward. “Hey, I myself have not been taught this stuff. I need love, I want love, but sometimes it feels like I’m not capable of giving it. And here are all the reasons why — I need you to work with me. That’s a tough thing to admit. A lot of guys, a lot of people, just try to pretend that they’re like some hard-shelled individual, closed off from other people. The reality is, you wanna be loved just like everybody else. You’re just scared of what that means.”
“Just Leg It” sounds like slang somebody made up in the ’30s or ’40s.
It’s not. It’s the title of a new album produced, mixed, and recorded by Bruce Watson of Fat Possum and Big Legal Mess Records.
“It’s a term for dancing I made up,” says Watson. “When people hear the record, I hope they ‘just leg it.’”
The album includes 19 party instrumentals from Memphis and North Mississippi artists, including Matt Ross-Spang, Jimbo Mathus, Will Sexton, Jack Oblivian, and Memphis Flyer’s Alex Greene.
There was “really no idea” behind the album, which Watson began working on nine years ago. “It was an excuse for a bunch of friends and musicians to get together and hang out. And make up songs, basically.
“I would come in with old records and say, ‘Okay. Let’s kind of build something inspired by this.’ Someone would come up with a riff and we could record it on one-inch eight-track tape.”
Watson began recording with a few musicians at Dial Back Sound, a recording studio he owned in Water Valley, Mississippi.
He recorded nine tracks and then put the album away for a while. “I sold that studio and moved to Memphis five years ago,” he says. “I put a little studio in a building in Memphis and started working with guys like Matt Ross-Spang, Will Sexton, George Sluppick, Jack [Oblivian] Yarber, Mark Edgar Stuart. We would just kind of hang out and do the same thing. So, that’s how the whole thing came together. There wasn’t any big plan.”
Also, he says, “I had been in production for about 10 years and hadn’t been engineering. I used this as an excuse to get my engineering chops back. It was really to go back in the studio and twist some knobs and do the engineering thing.”
Why did it take nine years to complete? “We did two songs, and then we wouldn’t do anything for six months. There was no urgency. I was producing and recording a lot of other records, running Fat Possum Records.
“About two years ago I said, ‘Well, I’ve got all these songs. Why don’t I do something with it?’ So, I reached out to Kerri Mahoney, a graphic designer, and said, ‘Let’s come up with a concept. I’ve got this idea — Just Leg It. People dancing on the front. And just a fun party record.’ So she came up with the design.”
The cover and selections evoke the ’60s, Watson says. “And it also ties into a whole tradition of instrumental music. It was really inspired by the Hi Records catalog of instrumental records.”
Watson didn’t just make up the album title. “All the titles on the record I just made up. Man, when I would go on trips — especially driving around small towns — I would see stuff to give me inspiration for a name and I’d jot it down. When I was putting it all together, I had a list of about 100 names, and I’d pick one and assign it to a song.
“I can’t remember if I was in the Arkansas Delta or Mississippi Delta, but I saw a pawn shop that said, ‘We have machine guns.’ I thought, ‘That’s a good name for a song: Delta Machine Gun.’”
Watson currently is involved in recording gospel music at his Bible & Tire Recording Co. in Memphis. “We are approaching sacred soul or gospel music kind of in the way it would have been recorded in the ’60s and sounded in the ’60s — pretty stripped down, pretty raw.”
Meanwhile, Watson is pleased with Just Leg It. “There’s something about improvising a song on the spot, capturing it in one or two takes, and that’s it.”
Then there’s “the party aspect,” he says. “Something you can put on and not really think too much about it. It’s fun. You don’t have to sit there and analyze lyrics. You don’t have to think about this.
“The songs are happy. A couple are dark, but for the most part, it’s a pretty happy and upbeat record.”
While much of the music made in Memphis over the decades has been rightly celebrated, public awareness of it has skewed toward the secular. But many of the local rock-and-roll, soul, jazz, and pop performers that have won renown grew up playing in churches, and there are more still who never left gospel in the first place. As Bruce Watson, head honcho at Fat Possum and Big Legal Mess Records, began discovering rich veins of religious music in the area’s history, an idea began to germinate: Why not create a new label, so all of that material could have a home?
“One of my jobs is collecting old masters and buying old labels and stuff,” Watson tells me. “And that gospel stuff from the 1960s and 1970s was always just so amazing. I just didn’t hear that in modern gospel music. So basically I wanted to create a Memphis-based label that concentrated on recording gospel music and trying to make it sound like it was recorded in the 1960s and 1970s, but could also reissue stuff.”
The result of that idea is the newly minted Bible & Tire Recording Company, the latest label in the Fat Possum family, which officially announces its debut this Saturday at the Crosstown Theater. The two flagship releases being debuted also happen to capture the twin missions of the new imprint: recording new tracks with a vintage vibe and reissuing gems from back in the day. The former approach is embodied in the new record, The Sensational Barnes Brothers, and the latter in the new collection, Elizabeth King & the Gospel Souls’ The D-Vine Spirituals Recordings.
Bill Reynolds
The Sensational Barnes Brothers
“I guess it all started for me 15 or 16 years ago, when I found my first Designer Records stuff,” says Watson of his discovery of one decades-old catalog of gospel material. “And I was like, man, this stuff rocks so hard! And that started me researching who Designer Records was, and how do I put this stuff out? So that put me down the path of really appreciating deep soul gospel stuff.”
The first result of that discovery was The Soul of Designer Records, a box set of the old label’s best material, released by Big Legal Mess. But the Designer catalog lives on in Watson’s new imprint as well, supplying the material reinterpreted by the Barnes Brothers on their debut. “The first time I used the Barnes Brothers was on a Robert Finley record I did at Scott Bomar’s studio. They sang background vocals, and I was blown away.”
While brothers Chris and Courtney Barnes came up singing gospel with their parents and their siblings, bringing the two brothers to the fore as a headliner act in their own right was initiated for this new record. “All the songs on the new Barnes Brothers record were songs that artists on the Designer Records catalog had done. Basically, they came in, I used my studio musicians, and we made that record.”
One song from over 40 years ago resonated with the brothers. “We were listening to the song, and the guy on the recording sounded just like my daddy,” says Chris Barnes. “I was like, ‘We gotta do this song!’ And the message really stuck out to us.”
“You can hear all the conversations he used to have with you through that one piece of music,” adds brother Courtney. It’s a poignant moment, for only three months after the brothers invited him to sing on their album, Duke Barnes passed away.
Meanwhile, the vintage tracks by Elizabeth King and company reflect another label from that era, D-Vine Spirituals. One key player in unearthing that catalog was Michael Hurtt, best known as a member of the Royal Pendletons. “Mike’s really the one who saved these recordings. Clyde Leopard was an early Sun musician who started the Tempo Recording Service, where Pastor Juan Shipp, who owned D-Vine Spirituals, produced and recorded all the D-vine tracks. And the tapes were being stored in Leopard’s recording studio in his house,” Watson says.
Hurtt then saw to it that they were properly stored until Watson was able to acquire them. More of the vintage tracks will be released as Bible & Tire grows. Meanwhile, Saturday’s show will also feature Gary “Lucky” Smith, The Vaughn Sisters, the D-Vine Spiritualettes, and Elder Jack Ward — all artists from the heyday of the D-Vine Spirituals label. As Watson has noted elsewhere, “It’s soul without the sex.”
AudioGraphic Masterworks (AGMW) began in 1997 as a project of Brandon Seavers and his partner, Mark Yoshida. The company was located on Summer Avenue in a 500-square-foot office, where Yoshida and Seavers would first begin their journey into multi-media productions. Seavers and Yoshida were the only employees.
The company later relocated to Midtown, before building its current facility in Bartlett,
in 2008.
Through the years, AGMW developed a strong relationship with Oxford, Mississippi-based label Fat Possum Records (the Black Keys, Wavves, Iggy and the Stooges), manufacturing most of the label’s CDs for more than a decade. At the end of 2013, Fat Possum manager Bruce Watson approached Seavers about what he knew about pressing vinyl records. Vinyl sales were booming, and Watson needed a place close to home to produce his records.
“If you know anything about the vinyl industry, you know that it takes forever to get anything done,” Seavers said.
“The industry has grown to the point where it takes four to six months to get a record pressed and shipped back to you.”
Watson knew this all too well. In 2013, Fat Possum had thousands of Modest Mouse records held in customs in the Czech Republic, costing the label thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
“We had gone through places like United Records in Nashville and Pirates Press, but we couldn’t wait six months for a record anymore, especially since we took on the Modest Mouse catalog and the Hi Records stuff,” Watson said.
“We already knew Mark and Brandon had manufacturing experience, and they were seeing the CD side of things going downhill, so this provided a new opportunity for them as well.”
Vinyl record-making machinery isn’t exactly the type of stuff you find on eBay. Most record presses are nearly 50 years old and are powered by steam. With vinyl’s increasing popularity among audiophiles and music fans, those in possession of a pressing machine know the kind of power they hold.
A few months into their search, Seavers and Watson got lucky. They learned about an old pressing plant in Brooklyn that had shut down — most of the equipment still intact and being stored in New Jersey. They contacted the owner, who said he would only sell if the buyer bought everything, down to the last bolt.
“We started looking for the equipment at the end of 2013, and by the spring of 2014 we were buying this whole pressing plant,” Seavers said. “My wife had a baby in late 2013, so my head was exploding with all this stuff going on. I remember Bruce calling me, and my response was just like, ‘Wow, really? You want to do
this now?'”
“We didn’t ever think we would find the equipment in one place, and the guy who owned all this stuff before us looked at it all like it was his pet. He wanted all the parts to go to one family, and he wanted to make sure it was going to people who would take care of it. He was very involved from the beginning.”
The equipment arrived at the AGMW warehouse in May 2014, 10 steam-powered machines total. The Memphis Record Pressing team spent the next six months setting up their first machine, rebuilding valves, and nearly rewiring the entire thing. Anything susceptible to malfunction was replaced before the machine was used.
“You’re looking at 40- to 50-year-old machines. You put power and steam and pressure on those things, and something is bound to pop,” Seavers said.
“No one really knows what’s going to happen until you fire them up.”
Josh Miller
A worker at Memphis Record Pressing inspects a record before sending it to the listening station
The Vinyl Guru
When you’re dealing with machines that have been around for nearly half a century, finding the right mechanic can be just as hard as finding the machine for him to work on. Record Products for America is the only company in the country that supplies replacement parts for a record press, and when they can’t accommodate, Memphis Record Pressing has to have their parts custom-made. But what about everyday malfunctions that arise when working with these ancient machines?
Enter Donny Eastland, affectionately known as the “Vinyl Guru.” Eastland worked for Southern Machine and Tool Corp (SMT) in the late 1970s, a Nashville-based company that manufactured some of the machines that Memphis Record Pressing uses. In addition to building record presses at SMT, Eastland installed them and got them up and running in pressing plants all over the world.
Seavers said that after a long search, he was able to track down Eastland — who is in his 60s and nearing retirement — and ask him if he would be interested in making records again.
“Donny was the [potential] deal-breaker. We knew that if we couldn’t get an experienced mechanic that we’d never get this off the ground,” Seavers said.
“It took a little bit of persistence to get Donny on board, but he agreed to commute from Nashville to work for us and to teach all of our mechanics everything he knows.”
With Eastland on board, Memphis Record Pressing is able to run an average of three record presses a day. They are capable of pressing records at 120, 130, and 180 grams. Even with the Vinyl Guru at the helm, Watson said everyone is still learning as they go.
“We were pretty naive going into this. Nothing about it has been easy, and everything has cost twice as much as we thought it would,” Watson said. “I don’t think we were so naive as to think this whole thing would be easy, but it’s been a lot more difficult than we imagined.”
Josh Miller
Three of the Hamilton Machines at Memphis Record Pressing
A New Press in Town
Since entering the vinyl business, Seavers has doubled his work staff, going from 13 employees to more than 30 — two shifts of workers, whose jobs range from listening to and inspecting each record for flaws to shrink-wrapping and packaging records for FedEx to pick up. Everything is done in-house; even the drop cards (a card inside each record that features a download code) are printed at AGMW.
“The guys that are making these records are artists. It’s definitely an art form because there are so many things that can go wrong during this process,” Seavers said.
“Each job in the process is important. There are people who do nothing but listen to each record and make sure there are no audible mistakes. Then there are our assembly guys, maintenance techs, shipping managers, and customer service representatives. There’s a lot going on in this small workspace.”
Most of the orders Memphis Record Pressing takes on are from Fat Possum and Sony RED, a subsidiary of Sony Records that represents more than 60 independent labels. Between the demands of those two entities, Memphis Record Pressing stays busy, turning out thousands of records a day. Seavers said they aren’t currently taking on any new clients.
“We don’t want to do what the other plants have done, which is to take on more work than what they are actually capable of doing,” Seavers said. “Your quality drops, your reputation drops, and you lose your ability to turn things out quickly. Since the word got out that we bought the equipment, we get calls every single day from people all around the world wanting to send us work, because they can’t get it done anywhere else.”
Seavers said they are hoping to take on new orders by late summer, but the labels they have worked with in the past and local labels such as Goner Records and Madjack Records will still take priority.
Josh Miller
After a record is pressed, the excess must be trimmed before moving on to the inspection station
Let the Fat Possum Eat
While Sony RED might be keeping the press operators busy at Memphis Record Pressing, Fat Possum Records has also reaped the benefits of having a pressing plant at their disposal. Watson said that Fat Possum moved 300,000 vinyl units last year and that he hopes to be able to move at least 600,000 units this year. In addition to being able to double the company’s vinyl sales, Watson said the pressing plant helps attract bands to his label.
“It’s definitely a selling point when we are trying to sign a band. Everyone is so into vinyl now that it’s become a part of the record deal when we work with someone,” Watson said.
“It’s nice to be able to tell a band that we have our own pressing plant and they wont have to worry about delay. There are so many releases now, where the album comes out, and then the vinyl comes out two months later. That kills a release. Unless you’re a huge act, you have one shot at your release date. That first week is so important because that’s when you usually sell the most records; that’s when the limited editions come out and you start registering on sound scans. If you have to wait two and a half months for your vinyl, you’ve lost all of your momentum on that release.”
Courtesy of Memphis Record Pressing
A stack of finished LP’s awaits inspection
The Vinyl Ripple Effect
Fat Possum isn’t the only local label to benefit from Memphis Record Pressing. Goner and Madjack have also tapped Memphis Record Pressing to churn out their releases; meaning local bands of all kinds are also getting in on the action. Madjack recording artist James Godwin said he remembered hearing about a pressing plant coming to Memphis, but he wasn’t sure when and if the rumors would come true.
“I remember hearing about it and thinking that it could end up helping out a lot of local musicians, but to be honest, I thought it was one of those things that might end up happening 10 years from now,” Godwin said.
After cutting Bad To Be Here, Godwin’s first full-length as James and the Ultrasounds, Madjack expressed interest in signing the band and releasing the album on vinyl. According to Godwin, Madjack first contacted United Record Pressing in Nashville and was told that it would be months before the record came out.
“I was planning on touring around the release, and I had the dates already booked. I was told we wouldn’t even have my records when we got back from the tour,” Godwin said.
Instead, MadjackRecords worked up a deal with Memphis Record Pressing, and the single was done in a month. Godwin called Memphis Record Pressing “one of the last missing pieces of the puzzle” for Memphis music.
“I think it’s really important to have a local pressing plant in Memphis. When you go on the road and take a box of CDs with you, chances are you’re coming home with that box of CDs. If you have vinyl on the merch table, people buy it, because they know it’s limited,” Godwin said.
“There are also a lot of things that can go wrong in the process of making a record. I’ve looked at the forms you have to fill out at United, and I remember thinking, ‘Man, I’m not trying to get a job here. I just want a record put out.’ Having something this close to home really makes a difference, it makes you feel more connected to what’s going on with your music.”
Goner Records has already had two singles (“Giorgio Murderer” and “Aquarian Blood”) and an LP (a repress of Nobunny’s First Blood) manufactured at Memphis Record Pressing, with a Nots single and a reissue of a Reatards album currently in production. The Midtown label has had a deal with AGMW regarding the production of its CDs for some time, so it made sense to label co-owner Zac Ives to let Seavers handle the label’s vinyl needs as well.
“The biggest deal is that those guys are really good with managing projects. If you give them a date that you need to have something done by, they do everything they can to make it happen. That’s just not the case with everyone else,” Ives said.
With less wait time in between record releases, Ives said that the label isn’t locked into a certain process dictated by the pressing plant.
“We can go out and listen to a test press and approve it and it’s ready to go, instead of waiting for a test press in the mail. You’ve also got more input on what you’re listening to. The overall hands-on experience is a major improvement from what we’re used to dealing with.”
Goner still has ties with United Record Pressing, where most of the record jackets and labels from their earlier releases remain. But even with the relationship between Goner and United, Ives said the more releases they can give to Memphis Record Pressing, the better it is for all parties involved.
“Anything that we can do [at Goner] to help other local businesses stay afloat, we want to do,” Ives said.
“The local music industry used to be one of the biggest things in Memphis, and now it’s slowly building back up again. The pressing plant makes the local music infrastructure more complete, and I think everyone from show-goers, to local PR people, to the venues where bands play will feel the ripple effect.”
Bill Reynolds 
Josh Miller 
Josh Miller 
Josh Miller 
Courtesy of Memphis Record Pressing