Tag: Hard Rock

Categories
Music Music Blog

Put the Pedal to the Metal: Where to Rock in Memphis

Joecephus & the George Jonestown Massacre (Credit: Steve Hatley)

We’ve had a great reader response to this week’s cover story on the more metal edge of Memphis music, still thriving even as hip hop and indie pop have come to rule the charts in recent years. And with that have come questions, especially this one: Where can I rock out in Memphis?

Certain venues favor that sweet spot where rock takes on a harder edge without adopting the frenetic pace of punk. Call it hard rock, hair metal, or rawk, chances are you know the sound, and you can be sure to find some at clubs that have long catered to that sound. Minglewood Hall and Graceland Soundstage sometimes book major hard rock acts for that “go big or go home” experience — Tora Tora had a triumphant show at Mingelwood in April, and Cheap Trick just played Graceland. The Hi-Tone Cafe, Growlers, B-Side Memphis, and Railgarten are perfect for that medium rock show vibe, while smaller spaces like the Lamplighter Lounge and Bar DKDC might sometimes host metal-leaning acts with a special intimacy that may require you to wear ear protection.

Of these, the Hi-Tone arguably rocks out the most reliably and consistently. Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre, who are about to drop a star-studded tribute to the MC5, Call Me Animal, will be playing there on October 8th.

Cover subject Steve Selvidge will be leading his own band at Railgarten this Friday, September 15th. While his solo shows offer an eclectic mix of styles, this ace guitarist has so internalized Jimmy Page and other heavy music trailblazers that plenty of rock energy is sure to permeate the evening. Note also that Big Ass Truck (of which this author is a founding member), while one of the most eclectic bands of the past 30 years, does rock out righteously at times and features Selvidge as lead axe man; they’re playing Minglewood Hall on October 14.

Gonerfest 20 revs up next week, and can certainly be counted on to bring hard-rocking bands. But lately the festival’s lineup has favored groups beyond category, not quite punk and not quite metal. “We have more post-punkers this year,” says Eric Friedl of Goner Records, before adding that “Poison Ruin from Philadelphia is ‘dungeon metal,’ on Relapse Records, a traditionally metal label. And we just added Drew Owen’s Evil Tree to the Saturday lineup. They are heavy metal from New Orleans.”

Yet the Gonerfest afterparties are just as lit as the festival itself, and that’s where you can see Alicja Trout and Sweet Knives on Thursday, September 28th at Bar DKDC. If you can’t wait that long for that cozy, hard rock experience, consider taking in the guitar artistry of Tamar Love and Mama Honey at Bar DKDC this Friday, September 15th.

Speaking of festivals, the Mempho Music Festival is just around the corner. Such festivals are where that big, heavy riff rock sound lives on, and Mempho is no different, with this year’s lineup featuring the Black Crowes and Dinosaur Jr., representing opposite ends of the Church of the Distorted Guitar.

That instrument, of course, figures heavily into this week’s feature, as it’s being celebrated in twin exhibits at the Museum of Science and History (MoSH), running through October 22nd. What’s not as well known are the musical performances and workshops MoSH is hosting during this time. The next event is Saturday, September 16th: The Way They Play, with Gerald Harris, is a series that spotlights special guest musicians through discussions and demonstrations of their iconic styles, tricks, and techniques. Next month, on October 21st, they’ll host Laser Live: School of Rock, where the three area School of Rock locations (Memphis, Wolfchase, and Germantown), will collaborate, accompanied by a full laser light show.  

Finally, don’t forget about that champion of local live music, the Overton Park Shell. The Orion Free Concert Series there will present the Dirty Streets this Friday, September 15th. The following week, on September 23rd, hear some heavy blues rock when both the North Mississippi Allstars and Alvin Youngblood Hart play the Shell’s Country Blues Festival.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Dirty Streets Live Platter Takes You Back to Pounding ’70s Riffs

Don’t sleep on the Streets! Good advice in any context, but in this case it means keep Dirty Streets, the band, on your radar. Because if you need a fix of slamming old school hard rawk, they deliver it and then some on this year’s release, Rough and Tumble (Alive Naturalsound).

They’ve honed their sound for over a decade on the Memphis scene, to the point where this live album has an offhand power and precision bespeaking years on the stage. In this case, the room was the sound stage at Ditty TV, the internet broadcast studio on South Main that mixes live performances with a steady feed of music videos. It’s ostensibly Americana-oriented, but the diversity of their programming makes it clear how inclusive that genre has come to be.

Whenever a band performs on Ditty TV, they receive a video of the moment that they can use any way they see fit. This also goes for the multi-track recording, often engineered by the great Doug Easley.  That’s exactly how it went down when Dirty Streets performed there, and this album is the result.

For that very reason, it may be the least rowdy live album ever recorded. Performances at Ditty TV typically have few if any audience members — certainly, there are none to be heard on this album. Indeed, the performances are so tight that many may not realize it was recorded live. Nonetheless, that setting of a live taping for broadcast seems to have brought out in the band a focused energy and drive that rarely comes out in purely studio-based recordings. These songs were slammed out one after the other in real time, with no overdubs after the fact. And the consistency of this album is a tribute to how together this band really is.

What they deliver is a wide ranging set from their catalog, brimming over with hard rock nuggets that might have had them touring with Free or Nazareth back in the day. Justin Toland, the power trio’s singer and guitarist, has the classic voice of the soulful rocker, well suited to shouting tunefully over pounding guitar riffs. Indeed, when they try their hand at not one, but two songs by the classic writer Joe South, the rock/R&B hybrid that emerges evokes the similar aesthetic of Detroit’s Scott Morgan.

The rest of the set is a stroll through their originals, which, like the White Stripes, can feel like a tour of ’70s riffs without the cringe-worthy sexism that usually goes with the music of that era. For my money, the highlight is “Take a Walk,” where Toland breaks out the wah-wah pedal to great effect. 

Categories
Music Music Features

Wolfmother returns to Memphis

In 2005, Sidney, Australia’s, Wolfmother arrived when one rock heyday was in its 11th hour and another underground metal-originated movement was just about to find wider-scale popularity. This fortuitous timing and combining of influences from both movements brought quick success to the power-trio, which was sustained until after the release of its second album Cosmic Egg in 2009. The past five years have seen some ups and downs for the festival-favoring, hard-rock/’70s-metal endeavor of founder Andrew Stockdale and different backing lineups, but it looks like the recently released Victorious might help return at least some of the spotlight the band enjoyed earlier in its career.

There’s no doubt that the 2000-2005 era was one defined by near or full-on mass acceptance of guitar bands offering up their version of a style that was already well-established by whatever underground movement happened to respectively birth and develop it over the preceding years. This gave us the Strokes and Interpol, plus brought the White Stripes and the Hives up from their more grassroots origins. A ton of other bands and factors played into this as well, but by mid-decade it had given way to a widespread re-embracing of heavier fare, thus giving different modicums of higher exposure and success to Dead Meadow, Queens of the Stone Age, the Sword, Sweden’s Witchcraft, and, in some indirect manner, this helped contribute to the blindsiding mega-success of the far more commercially viable Wolfmother.

Guitarist/vocalist/principle songwriter Andrew Stockdale, bassist/keyboardist Chris Ross, and drummer Myles Heskett cherry-picked the right characteristics from both the former “new rock” era and the latter “retro-metal” salad days, and the Wolfmother name came not long before playing their first live show in spring of 2004. Signed to Australian major-label imprint Modular Recordings by August of that same year, the trio released their debut four-song, self-titled EP a month later, and it gained respectable purchase on the ARIA Australian Singles Chart. The EP was recorded in Detroit by Dirtbombs bassist Jim Diamond, best known for recording the first two White Stripes albums then suing the post-fame version of the duo over crediting disputes (Jack and Meg won the dispute).

Wolfmother toured for months in support of the EP and signed an international record deal with Modular parent label Universal Music Group. The trio’s self-titled, full-length debut was released in Australia at the end of October 2005 and elsewhere around the world on subsequent dates. Recorded by in-demand, hard-rock/metal producer Dave Sardy, the album was certified 5x platinum in Australia as well as gold in the U.K. and U.S. by 2007, where it peaked at No. 22 on the Billboard 200. Much of the stateside success was due to the 2006 mega-hit “Woman” (the fourth single released from the album), which took the 2007 Grammy award for “Best Hard Rock Performance.”

Wolfmother is a deft, hard-rock repurposing of the White Stripes, is stuffed to the gills with Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin riffs, and is presented as a more melodic, less “scary,” and much more commercially viable stoner-metal package than what the Sword or High on Fire had to offer. Tall, skinny, well-dressed, and coifed somewhere between Grand Funk Railroad’s Don Brewer and the MC5’s Rob Tyner, Stockdale added the appropriate guitar moves and cut a figure built for the festival stage. Once the debut broke in the U.K. and U.S. by mid-2006, Wolfmother was soon assuming prime slots at festivals around the world. The band followed up the album with the four-song Dimensions EP in 2006, then a live video album titled Please Experience Wolfmother Live in 2007 and contributed the song “Pleased to Meet You” to the Spider-Man 3 soundtrack that same year.

In early 2008, Wolfmother’s label announced via press release that “irreconcilable personal and musical differences” had ended the band. However, Wolfmother’s sophomore follow-up album was already in the works, and after a brief spell with the Raconteurs drummer, Patrick Keeler, Stockdale reassembled what he called “Wolfmother Phase II,” a quartet with Ian Peres on bass/keyboards, Aidan Nemeth on second guitar, and Dave Atkins on drums. The lineup was made official by January of 2009, and, later that year, the longer, heavier, and all-around bigger Cosmic Egg appeared and peaked at No. 16 on the Billboard 200 and sold boatloads in Australia.

As a sign of the changing musical landscape, the next few years were not as commercially fruitful for Wolfmother, and Stockdale had to steer the band through more lineup turmoil and other challenges. He released what was to be the band’s third album, 2013’s Keep Moving, under his own name, then two months later resurrected the Wolfmother moniker for a string of live dates. In March of 2014, Wolfmother’s third proper full-length, New Crown, was released out of nowhere as a digital download on Bandcamp. Self-produced and self-released without any promotion, the album still sold well in Australia and cracked the Billboard 200 at No. 160. Signaling a return to the band’s earlier years, this month the fourth Wolfmother album, Victorious, was released by Universal Music Enterprises (or UMe). It was recorded by noted producer Brendan O’Brien (also former vice president of Epic Records) at Henson Recording in Hollywood. Stockdale wrote everything on the album and performed all of the vocals, guitars, and bass himself, with keyboards contributed by regular touring bassist Peres and drums handled by Josh Freese and Joey Waronker.

The tour that brings Wolfmother to Memphis is known as the “Gypsy Caravan Tour” and will feature a trio configuration of the band with Peres on bass and Alex Carapetis on drums.