Listen up, Memphis. The Subteens were playing pop-punk before pop-punk was a thing. They were on the scene to have fun in the ’90s when most other bands they shared stages with were serious to the point of depression. Front man Mark Akin was legendary for playing encores wearing nothing but a guitar. They called it quits in 2004; soon after, Akin got sober and became a successful personal trainer.
Now, singer/guitarist/songwriter Akin, bassist Jay Hines, and drummer John Bonds are back at it with the same blistering pace, newly introspective lyrics, and a promise to remain fully clothed. Produced by J.D. Reager and released on Back To The Light records, Vol. 4: Dashed Hopes & Good Intentions rocks as hard as anything in the ‘Teen’s extensive catalog.
The video for “Hard to Be Lonely Tonight” uses clips from The Last Man on Earth. Starring Vincent Price as the titular final dude, the 1964 horror was the first of three films based on Richard Matheson’s proto-zombie story I Am Legend. (Charlton Heston would reprise Price’s role seven years later in The Omega Man, and Will Smith got his turn in 2007.) The video transforms Price’s troubles with swarming vampire-zombies into a metaphor for staying in on a Friday night. Let the rock begin!
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
The Cold Blooded Three front man has a new album, Where Wasn’t I?, and his new single “Hate This” harkens back to Reager’s Memphis punk roots. The video is directed by David Stockwell.
“This is the second of three videos shot to green screen in Graham Burks’ (Loose Opinions) garage,” says Reager. “The director, David, really tried to match the frenetic energy of the song visually, and I think he nailed it. The song was written in a period of personal chaos and fractured friendship, the manic vibes really sell it. Yes, those are Ric Flair ‘woos’ in the chorus.”
Listen for me on an upcoming episode of Reager’s Back To The Light podcast. If you’d like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Memphis rock vet and Back To The Light podcast host J.D. Reager has a new album, Where Wasn’t I?
The song “Hammer Mannequin,” Reager says, “… is both a tribute to the great sports reporter Vince Cellini and a bit of a pep talk to myself. I might not ever be the star of the show, but I can be the engine that makes it go — and that’s got to be enough.”
The video was directed by Memphis’ Jack Alberson under the name J. Robot. “I love what Jack came up with for this video,” says Reager. “He combined footage he shot around Memphis with some phone videos I shot in my old neighborhood in Chicago, plus some other scraps we both dug up, and made something really fun and befitting of the song.”
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Though this latest is his third album, J.D. Reager’s latest, Where Wasn’t I?, leaps from the turntable like a sizzling, fresh-off-the-grill debut. After all, it’s been ten year since his last solo release. Yet perhaps we ought to celebrate third albums more, assuming OK Computer, London Calling, Electric Ladyland, and Led Zeppelin III qualify as milestone works. Let’s say Where Wasn’t I? (Back to the Light) is Reager’s own bid to enter that esteemed company.
The larger point is that this really hangs together as an album, a unified body of songs and moods, despite springing from a variety of disparate recording sessions and venturing in multiple stylistic directions — much like Led Zeppelin III, in fact. When kickoff “Diane” explodes from the speakers, it sets a standard for what’s to come: perfectly raw-yet-crafted pop gems. And, as gems go, “Diane” is a stomper, a soaring power pop steamroller given wings with seraphic background voices.
(Credit: album art by Jason Pulley; layout and design by Graham Burks)
Speaking of voices, Reager is in better voice than ever, keeping his trademark vulnerability but now adding a more determined tenor to it. “There’s no reason to shy away!” he cries out in track two. While unique, Reager’s voice might arguably be compared to Bob Mould’s, in terms of feeling equally at home (and authentic) in a soaring post-punk power pop anthem or a screaming punk rager like “Stop Staring.”
But keep listening, and soon the fourth track will summon echoes of Rick Danko. “I need help from a friend,” Reager sings with a quaver, and it may bring a chill to many a listener. “Through all we recover/The dead friends and lovers/What we discovered/Was that it meant everything.”
Later, you’ll hear traces of Thunderclap Newman. But whatever the echoes, Reager’s uncanny ear for a rock arrangement ties the tracks together, backed by a host of A-list guest artists who always step in with the perfect part. Each pop gem fits together like clockwork.
Though Reager’s often been known to collaborate, he notes on his own Back to the Light podcast that the 2020 quarantine helped him take that to a new level. “I’ve always had a little home studio or project studio of some kind; previously, I would just invite folks over to the studio. But under quarantine, with everybody getting into home recording and file sharing, I caught the wave at exactly the right time, and everybody said yes.”
“The pandemic also created an availability for other people to work with me who normally wouldn’t have. I don’t know that nailing down people like Steve Selvidge [of the Hold Steady] or Dave Catching [of Eagles of Death Metal] would have been possible if everyone was as busy as they normally would be.” Beyond those players on the international stage, the LP hosts a legion of local luminaries, often grounded by the Midtown powerhouse, John Bonds, the drummer formally known as Bubba. Mark Edgar Stuart, John Whittemore, Paul Taylor, Jeff Hulett, Jeremy Stanfill, Jeremy Scott, and Graham Burks also make appearances.
Those players help bring a rock classicism to this project that gives the tracks a timeless feel. But while the guitars might channel a ’70s/’90s timewarp, and the synths the ’80s, this is most strikingly an album for now. Something in Reager’s frank delivery doesn’t let us forget that.
J.D. Reager (Credit: Jennifer Brown Reager)
That may be because the album grew out of a major time of struggle and growth for the artist. As he told Mehr last year, in 2019 “I finally got into therapy and quit drinking – now I’m over two years alcohol free. But then the pandemic hit and I lost my job. It came to where I didn’t have anything else to do but work on music and podcasts all day.”
Yet all backstory aside, coming to grips with his own personal demons seems to have pulled out some of the songwriter’s most emotional work. It shows in his delivery, but that’s taken up a notch by the delivery of another, one Ross Johnson, who makes two cameos on this LP. His trademark self-excoriating humor (is self-directed schadenfreude a thing?) proves to be a perfect foil for the slamming sounds of Reager’s band(s), especially on “Philanderer,” which hits like a pounding outtake from Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk (that’s a compliment). And Johnson touches a very personal nerve when ruminating on his father’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (“PTSD Story”), stemming from the World War II era — eerily reminiscent of what this author’s own father experienced.
As crazy-quilt as all this may seem, the best approach is just to listen. Listen to the well-crafted prose of Johnson the wordsmith, and the well-crafted power pop of Reager, and you’ll hear the album as a seamless whole, offering many flavors of regret, passion, and maybe even redemption.
“What does it mean to be a best friend?” Reager asks with childlike wonder in the album’s closer, “Wore Me Down.” But, as with most of the album, the raw nerves and sensibilities of youth are soon met with more adult concerns moments later in the song: “There are times when I can’t sleep next to you/And I thought about running ’round/But you wore me down.” From there, the song leaps along like a go-cart over the landfill: perfect power pop, complete with trash and shadows.
Songs from the new album and more can be heard at the Back to the Light Fall Turnout, Saturday, November 5 at 2 p.m., Wiseacre Brewing Company, featuring these bands: 2 pm – Loose Opinions 3 pm – Rosey 4 pm – J.D. Reager 5 pm – S p a c e r 6 pm – The Subteens
It’s quite appropriate that the return of the Subteens, via their first album in 18 years, is happening just as the Indie Memphis Film Festival celebrates the ten year anniversary of Antenna, the documentary on the famed club of the same name. But that’s not because the Subteens played there — they formed the same year the fabled venue was shuttered. It’s more because that group has perfected a sound that somehow defines not only the Antenna Club but the whole bedrock ethos of Midtown Memphis rock and roll.
I call it that “Bastards of Young” sound, after the classic Replacements song: big, broad, propulsive anthems, driving riffs, and soaring solos that offer portraits from an underground community teetering between hope, exultation, rage, and despair. It’s a huge, pounding rock sound carried on by diverse bands here, from those Antenna Club godfathers, the Modifiers, to the Psychic Plowboys, to Neighborhood Texture Jam, and beyond.
A band need not sound like the Replacements to capture that sound, as the Subteens demonstrate. Rather, they have a few extra dollops of the Damned or the Ramones, with those bands’ tighter focus and lack of drunken antics. The Subteens — Mark Akin, John Bonds, and Jay Hines — have a sound all their own, and it’s welcome news that their latest release, Vol. 4: Dashed Hopes & Good Intentions (Back to the Light), presents and preserves that sound in all its glory.
The Subteens (Credit: Back to the Light Records)
“You spend your free time running away/Now the loneliness is coming to stay, but/I believe in you/Even though you won’t hear me say it,” Mark Akin sings on side one’s closer, conjuring up a whole world of friends on the fringe, and what passes for affection among us.
There is much hard-won wisdom in these songs. “If we ever get out alive I’m going to tell you how I feel,” runs the title and first line of a personal favorite from the LP. Those awkward barriers to communication recur in this song, this time because “it’s hard to believe it’s real.” There’s a sense of leaning into one’s adulthood in these songs, despite the surreal quality of life. But here, that doesn’t sound like mellow country rock ballads. It sounds like someone stomping a hubcap back on a fixed flat and rolling on, gunning a rumbling engine of indomitable riffs.
The production is spot-on, a rock band in your face, stripped of most of the effects so readily available these days. Yet the songs are arranged with great care, the occasional background and doubled vocals helping choruses punch through. Overall, the mix favors parts that jump out with a bit of drama, as when a ripping guitar solo leaps from the speakers in “If We Ever Get Out Alive.” It’s a difficult trick to pull off without irritating the mastering engineer.
And it’s yet another sign that producer J.D. Reager is guaranteeing down to earth, imaginative, rocking good times under his Back to the Light imprint. That’s all the more true because this LP is being released alongside a solo album by Reager himself, Where Wasn’t I? But that’s another story.
Both albums will be celebrated at a double record release show at the Hi Tone, featuring the Subteens, J.D. Reager, and Seize & Desist, Friday, October 14, 9 p.m. $10.
Loose Opinions, that is. Graham Burks Jr., a Pezz alum who has played with everyone from Sweet Knives to Magic Kids, has a new solo project. Burkes played almost every instrument on Loose Opinions’ debut full-length Shadow of a Shadow.
“While I was fortunate enough to keep working during the pandemic, I had this overwhelming sense of disappointment in myself,” says Burks. “I was supposed to have all of this extra time on my hands to be creative, but instead all I felt was uninspired. Months later my friend and collaborator J.D. Reager broke out of his own rut and started Back to the Light, a creative collective consisting of a podcast network and record label. J.D.’s spark helped me find mine. For the first time in a long time, I felt connected to the world. Albeit, the connection I felt was based on frustrations that we were all feeling, from pandemic isolation to systemic racism, but we were feeling it together.”
You can read Memphis Flyer Music Editor Alex Greene’s take on the record at this link. After a weekend of back-to-back record release parties, here’s the first Loose Opinions music video, for “Yesterday Never Arrives.” Directed by Randy Innis of Outer Villain Studios, the video features swirling images of time’s passage. Prepare to enter the multi-Burks!
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
This week witnesses, among other things, the return of Flyer writer and Memphis-Chicago muso J.D. Reager, who will playing town in a variety of events, including next Wednesday’s full band show at B-Side. We also have big shows from Hernando’s Hide-a-way, not to mention the quiet, homey charms of other stalwart troubadours. Help them out with a bit of coin, if you appreciate good stay-at-home music!
ALL TIMES CDT
Thursday, June 3 7 p.m. Velvetina’s Blue Moon Revue — at Hernando’s Hide-a-way Website
