Categories
Music Music Features

We Prefer The Blues


Various Artists
Beale Street Saturday Night (Omnivore)

Originally released in 1978, Beale Street Saturday Night was produced by Jim Dickinson in an attempt to take back the reputation of the downtown street as the place where both the blues and rock-and-roll originated. Dickinson gathered up past and present Beale Street legends for the recordings, and everyone from Furry Lewis and Teenie Hodges to Sid Selvidge and Mud Boy and the Neutrons (Dickinson’s own group) got in on the action.

Recorded in artists’ homes, Ardent Studios, and even the Orpheum Theatre, Beale Street Saturday Night was originally created as a fund-raiser for the Memphis Development Foundation to help restore the Orpheum. This reissue serves a similar purpose, as a portion of the proceeds will go to the Beale Street Caravan radio program.

The reissue of Beale Street Saturday Night was approved by the Dickinson family and features a cover photo by William Eggleston, plus all new liner notes from producer Jim Lancaster who worked on the original release. In his new notes, Lancaster recalls what the Furry Lewis recording session was like:

“It was bitter and cold in 1977 when we went into the Orpheum on Main and Beale with our trusted group of soldiers. In 1890, the Grand Opera Palace was built on this site, the classiest joint outside of New York City! Vaudeville shows were the main attraction there until it burned down in 1923. The building we are in now was built in 1928 with the addition of the mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ. It had been sitting empty overlooking the decay and decline, but today we went to record Furry Lewis for the Beale Street Saturday Night project. Furry had performed in this building, on this stage in the 1930s. The Orpheum, just recently purchased by the Memphis Development Foundation, had no heat either. Poor ole Furry in his 70s was cold, sipping on a pint, and explaining that you couldn’t hardly tune a guitar when it was cold. When he exhaled, you could see and feel his breath. Furry had worked out a way to sip whiskey and smoke a cigarette while playing “Furry’s Blues” and keep a running joke all the while.”

That’s just one of many amazing stories inside the first official reissue of Beale Street Saturday Night, out April 14th on Omnivore records. A limited version on clear vinyl will also be for sale.

Leo Bud Welch I don’t Prefer No Blues (Big Legal Mess)

I Don’t Prefer No Blues is the follow-up to last year’s Sabougla Voices, a gospel album that marked Welch’s debut as both a recording artist and a songwriter. “I don’t prefer no blues” is apparently what the preacher at Welch’s church said when he found out the 82-year-old guitarist was making a blues album. Up until last year, Welch had only performed in church and at big tent spirituals, but after signing with Big Legal Mess and releasing the acclaimed Sabougla Voices, Welch has performed all over the United States and ventured into Europe. He’s also playing this year’s Beale Street Music Fest.

When label owner Bruce Watson first signed Welch, the two agreed that the first album they made together would be a gospel album and the second would be a blues album. While it certainly is a blues record, there’s more than a little bit of rock-and-roll going on in I Don’t Prefer No Blues. From the opening track “Poor Boy” (produced by Jimbo Mathus) to the buzz saw riffs on “Too Much Wine,” it’s evident that Welch’s time in church sure didn’t spoil his ability to drag a song through the Mississippi mud.

By not recording his first album until he was over 80 years old, the Sabougla, Mississippi, native still has plenty of stories left to tell on I Don’t Prefer No Blues. Welch’s long history as a blue collar worker (he worked as a farmer and a logger for 35 years) is recalled on “So Many Turnrows,” a song about plowing behind a mule in the hot Mississippi sun. Even when he’s doing blues classics like “Sweet Black Angel” and “Cadillac Baby,” Welch has a way of playing them as if his listeners were hearing the songs for the first time. I Dont Prefer No Blues is available now.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Meanwhile At Indie Memphis

What: A four-day multimedia event with dozens of film screenings, entertainment and technology panels and discussions, parties, live music shows, and food programs.

When: Thursday, October 31st, through Sunday, November 3rd

Where: Numerous Overton Square venues, including Playhouse on the Square, Malco’s Studio on the Square, The Circuit Playhouse, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, and Local Gastropub; and downtown sites, including Earnestine & Hazel’s and The Warehouse

Full schedule: IndieMemphis.com

The 2013 Indie Memphis film festival kicks off not with a movie but with food. At 5 p.m. on Thursday, October 31st, the “Best Bites” reception at Playhouse on the Square features selections from winners of this year’s Memphis Flyer “Best of Memphis” poll (shameless plug). For the rest of the evening, you have your pick of the horror films (this being Halloween night) Escape from Tomorrow, James Whale’s classic Frankenstein, and Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, the TV pilot to Fox’s J.J. Abrams-produced Almost Human (which won’t air for a few more weeks), Touchy Feely, a buzzy ensemble drama starring Rosemarie DeWitt and Ellen Page, and local indie-pop group Star & Micey, who are starring (and Micey-ing) at an after-party concert at Earnestine & Hazel’s.

Thus, Indie Memphis in a nutshell: killer movies that haven’t opened here, classic films you can’t usually see on the big screen, the best of local music and food, and scores of filmmakers (note: Polanski will not be in attendance), performers, patrons, and scenesters all ambling between a diverse set of venues magnetized to Overton Square.

When Indie Memphis wraps up Sunday evening with an awards show and encore screenings of the fest’s best, it will have presented 50 feature films, 82 shorts, 13 panels, conversations, and seminars, and 11 parties and social events. It’s fiercely local — see our significant artistic talent on display in short films such as I Wanted To Make a Movie About a Beautiful and Tragic Memphis — but notably national, with Memphis premieres of major, Oscar-contending films (August: Osage County, Nebraska, and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom), indie behemoths (Drinking Buddies, As I Lay Dying, Zero Charisma, The Sacrament), critical darlings (Short Term 12, Touchy Feely, Computer Chess), and diverse documentaries (Hit & Stay and The Great Chicken Wing Hunt).

It is a multimedia, multisensory extravaganza, arguably (or maybe definitively) the Mid-South’s annual cultural high-water mark.

What follows is a list, admittedly subjective, of some of the highlights. You can sleep on Monday.

Greg Akers

Meanwhile in Memphis directors Nan Hackman and Robert Allen Parker

Meanwhile in Memphis: The Sound of a Revolution

Saturday, 6 p.m., The Circuit Playhouse, with a filmmaker Q&A after the screening

Would you like to see Tav Falco take a circular saw to his guitar while onstage with Mudboy & the Neutrons? Or tug on the narrative thread connecting Furry Lewis to contemporary Memphis rap and indie rock? Or would you just like to hear an amazingly powerful, sometimes terrifyingly aggressive collage of sounds that prove without question that the music didn’t leave Memphis when the music industry did?

Fans of modern Memphis music, especially those who were drawn to Chris McCoy’s Antenna documentary, a hit at the 2012 Indie Memphis film festival, will want to check out Meanwhile in Memphis: The Sound of a Revolution, an exhaustive look at the Bluff City’s underground music scene in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, directed by Mid-South musician Robert Allen Parker and videographer Nan Hackman. The film features engaging and insightful interviews with Falco, Jim Dickinson, Sid Selvidge, DJ Spanish Fly, Monsieur Jeffrey Evans, DJ Squeeky, members of the Oblivians, the Grifters, and the Klitz, and numerous other scene-shaping performers. While Antenna captured the essence of Memphis’ punk and DIY culture as it coalesced in the ’80s and ’90s, Meanwhile in Memphis looks far beyond the iconic Midtown venue to consider the music itself, the musicians, and the not always evident connectedness between generations and genres, which makes the scene seem like a sprawling, occasionally dysfunctional family.

Meanwhile in Memphis introduces viewers to a city in decay: Stax is closed and American Recording is boarded up. But there’s life in the ruins. Weeds spring up in abandoned lots, and the musicians who came of age in Memphis in the ensuing decades were every bit as hearty as wild grass.

Meanwhile in Memphis, Jim Dickinson

It’s the first feature film for both Parker and Hackman and was shot over a period of seven years. Like the subject at hand, what’s missing in terms of polish is more than made up for in smarts and substance.

“I really wanted these musicians to tell their story,” says Parker who, when not working his day job selling records at the Memphis Music store on Beale, plays guitar in three area bands.

The film tells the story of two distinct scenes with common roots, evolving alongside one another and sometimes converging in surprising ways: the predominantly white Midtown/downtown rock scene as defined by artists ranging from Alex Chilton to Alicja Trout and the buck-and-crunk scene that blew up in North Memphis and Orange Mound.

Meanwhile in Memphis, The Grifters

Fascinating interviews capture the essence of contemporary artists like Harlan T. Bobo and the North Mississippi Allstars, with supporting commentary from Boo Mitchell of Royal Studios, Shangri-La founder Sherman Willmott, and music writer Robert Gordon.

Oblivians/Reigning Sound frontman Greg Cartwright defines both the film and its cast when he attempts to describe the feeling you get when you realize you’re part of a legacy and connected to something much bigger than you could have ever imagined. Meanwhile in Memphis isn’t about famous people. It ignores revolutionary figures like Elvis Presley and Otis Redding and, in doing so, makes a strong case that the revolution continues. — Chris Davis

Orange Mound, Tennessee director Emmanuel Amido

Orange Mound, Tennessee: America’s Community

Saturday, 10:45 a.m., Playhouse on the Square, with a filmmaker Q&A after the screening

Fans of local history will appreciate the documentary about a Memphis neighborhood, Orange Mound, Tennessee: America’s Community. Filmmaker Emmanuel Amido captures the testimonies of past and present residents of Orange Mound regarding the struggles it’s endured, its many successes, and the unprecedented events that took place there.

Orange Mound, Tennessee: America’s Community begins with an a cappella performance of “My Soul’s Been Anchored” by the Melrose High School choir. This is followed by a visual history lesson on the neighborhood.

The area was once a plantation owned by John Deaderick in the 1820s. In the mid-1890s, real estate developer Elzey Eugene Meacham purchased the land and divided it into small, narrow lots and marketed them exclusively to African Americans.

The area became the first African-American neighborhood in the United States to also be built by African Americans; residents constructed shotgun-style houses on the lots that were sold to them by Meacham. These homes would go on to house generations of families. And many of these families built and owned their own properties, churches, and schools in Orange Mound.

Other facts, such as how the neighborhood earned the moniker Orange Mound, are highlighted in the documentary. (The area boasted countless Osage orange trees during its early days.)

Grammy Award-winning jazz saxophonist Kirk Whalum, National Civil Rights Museum president Beverly Robertson, and University of Memphis professor Charles Williams are among those who make appearances in Orange Mound, Tennessee: America’s Community.

Amido makes sure to not only focus on the positive attributes of Orange Mound but also the less fortunate characteristics as well. The documentary explores how the neighborhood went from being one of Memphis’ most thriving areas economically to one of its most impoverished and crime-ridden. This is largely attributed to many of its residents migrating to other areas of the city during the civil rights era, which left a void in the sense of community that Orange Mound once enjoyed.

A solid effort to say the least, Amido does an excellent job of capturing the meat and potatoes of what the documentary form can entail and the message that’s most significant: Orange Mound is an area with a rich history, unique culture, and strong sense of community. — Louis Goggans

Being Awesome

Being Awesome

Sunday, 12:30 p.m., The Circuit Playhouse, with a filmmaker Q&A after the screening

This feature from Memphis director Allen C. Gardner stars Drew Smith as Lloyd, a divorced art teacher who’s lost his passion for life, and Gardner as Teddy, the lovable basketball jock who still thinks of high school as the glory days. At their high school reunion, the pair connect over their unhappiness with the way life turned out. Idealist Teddy suggests the two stop being depressed and just be awesome.

For a while, Lloyd has a bit of a harder time finding his artistic muse than Teddy, who seems to jump headfirst into something meaningful. Being Awesome‘s emotional dialogue, the real meat of the film, sometimes is all too real — awkwardness and all. It’s a charm that leaves you to cheer on Teddy and Lloyd during this coming-of-middle-age story. — Alexandra Pusateri

What I Love About Concrete

What I Love About Concrete

Saturday, 1:30 p.m., The Circuit Playhouse, with filmmaker Q&A after the screening

A young girl gets out of a stranger’s bed in a house where she’s never been before. She’s covered in downy white feathers. She pulls back the covers and finds a dead bird.

Ah, the perils of being a teenager! Which is exactly the premise of What I Love About Concrete, the debut feature from local filmmakers Katherine Dohan and Alanna Stewart. The lovingly made, sweet bildungsroman finds Molly (Morgan Rose Stewart), a junior at Black Swanson High School (fictional, alas), who is struggling to make sense of her body’s changes and her burgeoning sexuality. The film swaps the horror-repulsion of adolescence in Carrie for the magical unrealism of seeing but not understanding what it means to transform into an adult.

What I Love About Concrete does a lot with a little budget, including some inspired human-sized bird costumes. The film also features hilarious supporting turns from local talent including Markus Seaberry, Bill Baker, Kimberly Baker, Sara Chiego, and The Commercial Appeal‘s John Beifuss (swoon!).

Greg Akers

I Am Soul, Tonya Dyson

I Am Soul

Saturday, 3:30 p.m., Playhouse on the Square, with live music by Tonya Dyson before the screening and a filmmaker Q&A after the screening

I Am Soul poses the question “What is soul music?” then attempts to answer that question by spotlighting one Memphis soul artist — Tonya Dyson, a singer/songwriter from Covington — introducing us to her family, church, and other aspects of her life that have influenced her music, and culminating with Dyson’s first Beale Street gig at B.B. King’s Blues Club. I Am Soul is a touching story of a talented, homegrown artist navigating her way through a city with a renowned musical legacy.

Alternating between Dyson’s story and the story of Memphis’ rich music history, I Am Soul shows that it takes more than just talent to make it in Memphis. In the film, Dyson calls Memphis a “music mecca” and says, “If you’re dedicated, and you’re focused, and you’re smart about how you do things, you can get a lot done in Memphis.” Her perseverance through life’s difficulties supports that assertion and shows that the artist is really what makes the music when it comes to soul.

Hannah Anderson

“Secret Screening”

Saturday, 1:45 p.m., Studio on the Square, with audience and filmmaker discussion after the screening

I can’t say what the subject of the secret screening on Saturday will be. But, based on what I know, I will be there sight unseen, and if you are in any way interested in history related to Memphis, civil rights, and/or black power, consider taking the plunge with me. The audience will be the first to see a cut of a new documentary, produced by Craig Brewer, and to participate in a discussion about what you have seen. — Greg Akers

Escape from Tomorrow

Thursday, 7 p.m., Playhouse on the Square, with live music by John Lowe before and an actor Q&A after the screening

Few sights evoke more middle-class existential dread than that of a family trying to enjoy itself at a theme park. But that image is the linchpin of writer-director Randy Moore’s Escape From Tomorrow, which was secretly shot without permits at Walt Disney World in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.

Moore’s film begins inauspiciously: Family man Jim (Roy Abramsohn) is fired via telephone while on vacation with his wife and two kids. Suddenly, the tram Jim and his family must ride to reach the Magic Kingdom feels like a train headed somewhere far more sinister — a corporate-sponsored, all-ages concentration camp where bands of bored, diseased humanity trudge around mindlessly trying to survive in Mouseschwitz, frittering away the hours by waiting in line for rides and attractions that can turn threatening at any moment.

As Jim and his family try desperately to enjoy their time together, Escape From Tomorrow starts to look and feel like a lost or missing episode of Louie. Jim’s deep ambivalence about marriage, fatherhood, and basic human interaction (and his frequent, mournful sex daydreams about a pair of underage French girls he keeps seeing at the park) further underscore the film’s debt to the rhythms and ideas of Louis C.K.’s innovative, unpredictable TV series.

The opening 50 minutes of Escape From Tomorrow effectively and repeatedly prove that the Most Magical Place on Earth is as awful and alienating as Anytown, USA. But Moore loses steam after an eerie nighttime sequence set near Epcot. Yet the film’s uneven, increasingly paranoid and nonsensical final third includes a grim fairy tale about a former Disney worker driven mad from faking happiness all day long. When Mickey, Donald, and Pluto finally appear, they look as creepy as something conjured up on Bald Mountain. And after the film’s final image, you’ll never look at Tinker Bell in the same way again. — Addison Engelking

August: Osage County

August: Osage County

Friday, 6:15 p.m., Playhouse on the Square

I’ll risk the hyperbole. In its original dramatic form, Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County stands up alongside the works of playwrights like Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard, and Arthur Miller. It is one of the greatest American family tragedies ever written, with a little something guaranteed to offend everybody: marital infidelity, incest, child molestation, Eric Clapton records, fibs, lies, falsehoods, etc. In spite of the unsavory ingredients, this dish comes together like apple pie — crusty, sweet at the center, and full of spice.

Set in Oklahoma during a blazing hot summer just before and after the drowning suicide of the Weston family patriarch, Letts’ drama plays out like a middle-class King Lear but with a stronger focus on the female characters and the legacies of dysfunctional relationships. The story gets darker and darker at every turn, but Letts’ breezy dialogue and his ability to find screwball humor and unforced slapstick in crisis and ensuing chaos is what makes him such an exciting voice for the theater and film.

The much-buzzed film adaptation was helmed by producer/director John Wells, with Letts adapting his own script. It features an all-star cast that includes Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Benedict Cumberbatch, Juliette Lewis, Dermot Mulroney, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, and the aforementioned Shepard. — Chris Davis

Short Term 12

Short Term 12

Saturday, 6:15 p.m., Playhouse on the Square, with live music by Mark Allen before and a filmmaker and actor Q&A along with reps from Youth Villages after the screening

No matter how many self-deprecating anecdotes they share — or how many self-inflicted physical scars they show — the youthful but wary optimists of Destin Daniel Cretton’s Short Term 12 are never sure how much they’ve actually helped the deeply damaged teens and tweens in their care. That’s because the kids they work with have been hurt so deeply and so often that they automatically distrust anyone who peddles any form of “I’m your buddy” BS.

But Grace (Brie Larson) and her colleagues at the titular foster-care facility keep trying anyway. Cretton follows Grace as she tries to separate the chaos of her work life from some unexpected developments involving her co-worker and live-in boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr. in a sweetly lower-case performance).

Mason, who tells two stories that serve to open and close the film, is not as passionate and reckless as Grace. But he’s still very good at his job. The long scene where he provides the beat while a young man (Keith Stanfield) shares his anxiety about leaving through some brutally personal hip-hop lyrics is one of the film’s many emotionally complex high points.

Grace remains the focus of Short Term 12, though. Larson’s layered, unpredictable acting here should garner plenty of accolades. However, Kaitlyn Dever, who plays Jayden, a cagey, raccoon-eyed girl determined not to play nice, is also superb. The relationship that develops between the two women further articulates Cretton’s belief in the power and necessity of unconditional love. Which is not to say that there’s no darkness before the light: The long scene that unfolds on Jayden’s birthday, for example, was one of several that brought me to tears.

Tender, tragic, and ultimately overflowing with compassion, Short Term 12 is more than a highlight of Indie Memphis. It’s one of the year’s best films.

Addison Engelking

For full coverage of Indie Memphis, including reviews of dozens of narrative, documentary, and short films updated daily through Sunday, go to the Flyer’s entertainment blog, Sing All Kinds.

Categories
Music Music Features

Remembering the ‘Mats

Roughly 22 years ago, local producer Jim Dickinson holed up in Ardent Studios with a trio of notorious rock-and-roll troublemakers — the three surviving members of Minneapolis’ Replacements — to make a record.

The album that resulted, Pleased To Meet Me, arguably rivals the White Stripes’ White Blood Cells as the best made-in-Memphis album by a nonlocal artist. It wasn’t the commercial hit the band’s major-label overlords anticipated, but it was an artistic triumph.

This week, Rhino Records will reissue the album (and the rest of the band’s output for Sire Records), with bonus tracks and new liner notes. To commemorate the occasion, Dickinson took the Flyer on a trip down memory lane.

Flyer: How did you get the assignment to work on Pleased To Meet Me?

Dickinson: Through their management. I don’t think the Replacements knew who I was. What bass player Tommy Stinson told me later — they’d just fired lead guitarist Bob Stinson [Tommy’s brother] — was that they’d come to Memphis to break up. They’d had it planned that they were going to kind of theatrically combust. But we got to cutting demos, and it started working. They had never played as a trio, but it seemed to work, and so we started the project.

Tommy articulated it better than [lead singer Paul] Westerberg. He said they wanted to make an adult record without compromising. I’ve always viewed rock-and-roll as children’s music anyway, and I guess that’s what they thought they were doing. They were pure punk aesthetic. Westerberg told me as we started that he wasn’t going to give me 100 percent, because I didn’t deserve it. I’d heard that notion expressed by black R&B artists, but I’d never encountered it myself, so I took it as a challenge.

Did their reputation precede them?

Oh yeah. They were notorious drunks. To their credit, they tried to play sober, and they could not do it. They had learned to play drunk as kids. Westerberg was about to get married and kind of semi-sober up. His world was about to radically change. But I got the tail end of the real Paul Westerberg. His voice changed after that.

This was the first record without Bob Stinson. How much was his absence noted or acknowledged?

It was a constant issue. I wanted to call the record Where’s Bob?, but nobody thought that was funny. I told the management, bring him on. I want Bob. They would just make the sign of the cross and leave the room.

There’s a linear, melodic thing on the Replacements’ earlier records. That is Bob. That’s nowhere on my record. That’s my regret. That and the fact that [Westerberg] didn’t give me an anthem. There’s no “Bastards of Young.” I got some real good songs, but I got no anthem.

Were they hard to control outside the studio, or was that not your concern?

Well, they didn’t have driver’s licenses. When we were done, they would stagger off into the night, and I never knew if they were going to show up the next morning.

You’ve got about eight blocks from Ardent to the former Holiday Inn on Union at McLean.

Yeah, and they could get in trouble in those eight blocks, believe me! They could score dope before they were out of the parking lot. They were amazing. You know that line in “Can’t Hardly Wait”: “Lights that flash in the evening/through a hole in the drapes”? That’s about that hotel.

“Nightclub Jitters” and “Can’t Hardly Wait,” in particular, have what were unusual arrangements for them at the time.

The saxophone on “Nightclub Jitters” is Prince Gabe Kirby, who worked over at the dog track and had been a salesman at Lansky Brothers. He also had a band on Beale Street. The horns were a real touchy subject. I had been dictated by the [record] company that “Can’t Hardly Wait” was going to be the big song. Everybody knew it. I had gotten a telegram — that’s how long ago it was — the first day (and which one of the guys at Ardent was stupid enough to deliver to me in front of Westerberg), saying, “This is the big song, blah blah blah. What about the Memphis Horns?”

So, to introduce the horns as an issue, I brought in Prince Gabe. They loved him right away. In fact, you hear the applause at the end of “Nightclub Jitters”? That’s them applauding for him as he’s walking back into the control room. It just stuck to the tape, and it sounded right.

But the day I was going to do the Memphis Horns [on “Can’t Hardly Wait”], Westerberg and Tommy got on a plane and flew home. Westerberg’s still pissed off about the strings. But you know, when he would reference Alex Chilton, he was referencing Big Star. I wanted to take it all the way back to the Box Tops. That’s what those strings were to me.

Your son Luther of the North Mississippi Allstars plays guitar on “Shooting Dirty Pool.” How old was he, 14?

Yep. 14. When I was doing the movie Crossroads with Steve Vai, Luther had learned a lot of those Steve Vai tricks. The laughing thing. I can’t remember what they all were. Luther had names for them. He said, “Well, what do you want me to do, Daddy?” I said just make the Steve Vai sounds. And that’s what he did.

What did the band think about that?

Westerberg loved it. It was just off the wall enough for him. In fact, the line in the song “You’re the coolest guy I ever did smell” … he’s talking about Luther. Luther was wearing aftershave lotion. He didn’t know you weren’t supposed to wear it in the studio. He came in smelling, and Westerberg nailed him!

Categories
Music Music Features

Dickinson To Be Honored with Lifetime Achievement Award

Tonight at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, Jim Dickinson will be honored with a lifetime achievement award by the American Music Association for his work as a music producer.

“It actually means a lot to me to get any recognition outside of Memphis,” he told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger

Dickinson has had a long career as both a musician and producer. He recorded on the Sun label and played piano on the Rolling Stones’ Wild Horses. As a producer, he’s worked with Ry Cooder, The Replacements, and others.

To read the rest of the story, go here.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Is There an Echo in Here?

Editor’s note: The Flyer received many letters from Memphis musicians in response to our September 13th cover story, “Standing at the Crossroads,” which detailed the revival of the Memphis Music Commission and Music Foundation. Among the responses was this one from legendary Memphis producer Jim Dickinson.

Yeah, that’s just what we need: “a multi-Grammy-winning producer coming to town to build a studio.”

Tell that to multi-Grammy-winning producer Norbert Putnam of the sadly flawed and failed Cadre studio.

Does the name Chips Moman mean anything? The Moman-return scenario was tragic for everybody concerned and all but ended the career of the most successful producer in the history of Memphis music.  

House of Blues studios A, B, and C stand empty. The Three Alarm and 315 Beale studios are gone. Easley Recording is in ashes. Posey Hedges shut his studio down.

Other Memphis studios teeter on the brink of extinction: Knox Phillips will keep Phillips Recording open until it falls over in a heap. Willie Mitchell is going nowhere, thank God. Stax is a museum and a label destined to fail, owned by out-of-towners. John Fry at Ardent has enough money to burn a wet mule. Ward Archer is in the process of renovating the old Sounds Unreel studio into what will be the most modern, world-class studio in a 200-mile radius. God only knows why.

As anyone with any knowledge of the music business knows, studios are going toes up all over the country.

The new ideas touted by the new music “leaders” are just as unrealistic, though not as self-serving, as former commission head Rey Fleming’s.

I’ve seen them come and go — the saviors of Memphis music. And we the musicians will be here when the latest bunch is gone. We will have to live with the fallout and clean up the mess.

Memphis’ musical strength is not in studios or venues or festivals. Our strength is our musicians. In the years since the self-destruction of Stax, many a deserving artist has slipped through the cracks: Kevin Paige, Wendy Moten, and Eric Gales, to name three. The great O’Landa Draper was on his way to true superstardom when he suddenly died, far too young.

Music is a business where how good you are doesn’t necessarily matter, and sometimes even genius is not enough.

Phineas Newborn Jr. and Shawn Lane both died in relative obscurity and financial distress. How many others have there been? They give up or move away or struggle along against impossible odds.

Witness the success of Cat Power — a mediocre talent who came to town, recorded a successful record with great Memphis musicians, and toured with the recording band. So much of it is dumb luck. Getting a job at Tater Red’s on Beale Street will do more good for musicians than a tax break for rich folks with investment capital.

Don’t take it personally, Memphis. It’s not happening just to us. It’s just happening. Studios on Music Row in Nashville are standing empty. The best studio in the state recently went out of business. Artists make recordings at home. Mick Jagger records on a laptop.

I have a near-religious faith in Memphis music. Our music endures. Pop culture is disposable, designed to become obsolete and create a demand for more and more. Art is for the ages.

On a recent trip to New York to play Carnegie Hall with my sons, we had a meeting in the Sony Tower. After the meeting, we rode the high-security elevator down — past six empty floors that used to be the once-mighty R.C.A.

Things are tough all over. Hang on, Memphis. Suck it up and tough it out. As the late, great Charlie Freeman once said, “They don’t call it the Bluff City for nothing.”

I applaud Three 6 Mafia. I applaud Saliva. Getting out of town is no easy task, but it is necessary. Our music has power worldwide. Once upon a time there was this teen-age truck driver from Tupelo …

Jim Dickinson has been playing, recording, and producing music in Memphis since the late 1960s.

Categories
Music Music Features

Musical Abundance

Near the top of the list of dos and don’ts that all music-industry professionals should adhere to should be this: Don’t sit on a panel with Memphis producer Jim Dickinson. Unless, of course, you want to blend into the background. Saturday afternoon at the 19th Annual International Folk Alliance Conference, held at the downtown Marriott hotel and Cook Convention Center, Dickinson sat in on a panel called “Meet the Producers.”

The panel was moderated by folk artist/producer Wendy Waldman and included renowned producer Joe Boyd (a featured guest at the conference and famous for his work with Brit folkies Fairport Convention and Nick Drake, among others), two well-mannered pros from Nashville, and Dickinson, who arrived late, banging on the side door with Memphis International label owner David Less in tow. Dickinson waddled up to the table, took his seat, and proceeded to do what he always does: dominate and delight without effort.

He spouted music-biz aphorisms (“An engineer makes a recording; a producer makes a record”), took unpredictable turns (“Analog purists are kidding themselves. You’re making a CD. It’s going to be digitized. I like to digitize it as soon as possible so I’ll know how bad it sounds”), and provoked guffaws (asked about producing his sons, Dickinson’s heart-warming reply: “It’s perfectly hellish”).

I started to feel bad for the other panelists, minus Boyd, who emerged as Dickinson’s suave, erudite partner in crime. Not long after Waldman talked about her dedication to “pre-production,” including, she said, three years of pre-production for an album by ex-New Grass Revival member John Cowan, Dickinson scoffed, gently and without malice: “I don’t believe in pre-production. It’s like pre-sex. It is or it isn’t.” Meanwhile, one of the Nashville cats on the panel was talking about how he likes to see the “goal structure” artists have planned for their next five years before he’ll work with them and said, in complete monotone, that, for him, it’s “all about the passion.”

Asked about the importance of a “comfortable” relationship between producer and artist, Dickinson hooted: “I don’t care if I can have dinner with them or not. Comfortable? They should have looked Sam Phillips in the face!”

A Sam Phillips acolyte, Dickinson was basically giving the conference attendees in the room a taste of the colorful, contrary flavor of Memphis — a dynamic that emerged as a happy development as the Folk Alliance held its first conference in Memphis since relocating to the city last year. The conference will return to Memphis for the next three years, at least, before potentially moving to Canada for a year.

The Folk Alliance conference is, in part, a self-contained event that brings a couple thousand musicians and industry types together to showcase their wares, but over the course of the five-day conference, it also emerged as a showcase for the Memphis music community.

Most Memphians attending the event seemed to marvel at it and what it could mean for the city’s own scene. Mark McKinney, of MADJACK Records and the folk/bluegrass Tennessee Boltsmokers, was manning a booth in the exhibit hall, prepared after attending the conference last year in Austin at the behest of Folk Alliance director Louis Jay Meyers.

McKinney recounted having a discussion at the MADJACK booth with Canadian duo Twilight Hotel about the prospect of recording in Memphis when Ardent studio manager Jody Stephens happened to stroll buy. McKinney made an introduction, and, moments later, the Canadian duo had booked some studio time.

Hooking up visiting musicians with local studios and other industry resources was something Meyers pressed before the event, and last weekend seemed to be the first step of what could emerge as a major symbiotic relationship.

“Sun was booked every night, I believe,” Meyers said after the festival wrapped on Sunday. “We ended up doing a studio tour and took people around. We’ll really expand on that for next year. All it’ll take next year is one e-mail to artists with numbers and contacts for local producers [to get that relationship going].”

Justin Fox Burks

Memphis was well represented in the exhibit hall, with Goner Records, MADJACK, the Blues Foundation, the Recording Academy, WEVL, Soulsville, the Beale Street Merchants Association, and local songwriter Keith Sykes, among others, manning booths. During the day, Shangri-La Projects’ Sherman Willmott could be seen ferrying attendees in his Rock ‘n’ Roll Tours van, while other trips were arranged for attendees to Graceland and the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.

Some attendees even got a special dose of local culture. At the producers’ panel, Boyd cited his meeting with Hi Records producer Willie Mitchell at his Royal Studio as a high point of the trip after passing up a chance to go to Sun or Stax. “That’s what I want to do,” Boyd said about the option of meeting Mitchell. “That’s not a museum. It was like meeting the pope or Buddha.”

Meanwhile, over at the convention center, plenty of Memphians were making the rounds as performers and attendees. “It’s been fabulous,” Susan Marshall said of the conference. “But it’s going to be even better next year. We’ll be prepared for it.”

James Manning, who books folk and roots-music acts at Otherlands Coffee Bar in Midtown, was devouring it all, with a cheat-sheet of acts he wanted to see. Manning said he had plans to book many of the festival’s acts for subsequent visits to Memphis.

Manning had also teamed with McKinney and others to produce an 18-track showcase CD of local songwriters performing at the conference. Among these was Valerie June, who performed as part of a Memphis showcase Saturday night.

“There’s a bunch of awesome folks playing tonight, and they’re all tucked away in these rooms,” June said before she started playing. “If you’re lucky, you’ll be in the right place at the right time to hear something good.”

And it turned out that June herself was something good that some conference attendees lucked into, with a captivating first song that incorporated elements of the spiritual “This Little Light of Mine” and referenced folk matriarch Maybelle Carter.

There were plenty of Memphians making waves Saturday night: Sid Selvidge playing “The Long Black Veil”; Holly Cole referencing Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine”; Ron Franklin picking through “Lula Walls”; Alvin Youngblood Hart joining Colorado bluesman Otis Taylor for a set called “Recapturing the Banjo.”

Hart has apparently joined Taylor and other blues players (Corey Harris, Keb’ Mo’, Guy Davis, Don Vappie) for an upcoming banjo record. Earlier in the day, Hart shook his head and said: “Man, if I never have to play the banjo again, it’ll be too soon.” And he extended his cheerfully sour mood to the stage that night, joking about how “somebody broke into my van and left two banjos.”

Hart played slide guitar instead, with Taylor and Vappie on banjo, Taylor’s daughter on bass, and a young man on some kind of hand-held percussion. Collectively, they worked up a deep, delicate groove that was a highlight of the night.

The Memphis presence also helped expand the notion of “folk” even further. One Saturday-night showcase, organized by the Center for Southern Folklore’s Judy Peiser, began with the Millennium Madness Drill Team and Drum Line, whose raucous beats and colorful moves lit up the convention hall.

All of this Memphis activity fit in nicely with an event that would have been over-flowing with music anywhere. In addition to the dozens of official showcases around the convention center and hotel each night and private showcases in hotel rooms, there were impromptu jam sessions, day and night: in hotel lounges, hallways, street corners. Saturday night, four young bearded guys (pictured, page 27) with two acoustic guitars, an upright bass, and mandolin commanded the Marriott’s second-floor lounge for much of the night.

As if the conference itself didn’t provide colorful enough people-watching, one happy accident of the weekend was that the conference shared hotel and convention-center space with the “World Wide Spirit Association Cheer & Dance Event,” which made for the amusing spectacle of 13-year-old girls in cheerleader outfits milling about the folk conference amid bearded aging hippies hauling acoustic guitars.

Saturday’s featured concert came from New York sister act the Roches, whose eponymous 1979 debut album is widely considered a modern folk classic. Looking sassy and girly in a sparkly black hat, black miniskirt, and black tights, Suzzy, the youngest of the sisters, said, “This conference is amazing. Everyone you run into is from the same planet as you.”

Then, Suzzy and her sisters gave the audience a taste of what life on that planet might be like with a set that was irreverent, pleasingly vulgar, and totally charming, highlighted by a couple of songs from their latest album, Moonswept.

After the Roches’ set, I wandered upon a group that seemed to be the Roches’ spiritual younger sisters, a Los Angeles four-piece band called Raining Jane, who played funny, friendly folk rock on guitar, acoustic bass, cello, and a big wooden box.

At one point, the drummer announced they were going to play “folk gone freaky,” and the band leapt into a rendition of Missy Elliott’s ribald hip-hop hit “Work It.” What made it work was that the band didn’t seem overly pleased with themselves for doing a folk version of hip-hop. They were playing Missy Elliott because they really like Missy Elliott and, well, why wouldn’t they? Toward the end of the song, in an oh-so-happy coincidence, some of the kids from the Millennium Madness group started singing along at probably the only song they heard all week at the conference that they actually knew.

Other highlights of the night included the aforementioned Twilight Hotel with their blend of accordion and spaghetti-western guitars, and Uncle Monk, a bluegrass duo led by Tommy Ramone on mandolin.

Recovering Monday morning from his first Memphis-held conference, Meyers was pleased at the results and even happier that a permanent home will give him a chance to make improvements.

“It was beyond my expectations in about 90 percent [of the conference] and under my expectations in 10 percent,” Meyers says. “We’ll have the ability to fix [any problems] next year. Most conference veterans told us it was the best one they’ve been to.”

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Record Reviews

Jungle Jim and the Voodoo Tiger

James Luther Dickinson

(Memphis International)

Jim Dickinson’s “family band” forges magnificent musical melting pot.

Jungle Jim and the Voodoo Tiger is to Dickinson’s 2002 Free Beer Tomorrow what Bob Dylan’s “Love & Theft” was to its celebrated predecessor, Time Out of Mind: The earlier record is too worried-over in retrospect. But the looser new record is a modest little sneak attack, with music and humor and humanity bursting at the seams.

Recorded on the quick at Dickinson’s North Mississippi home studio, Jungle Jim and the Voodoo Tiger is an accidental melting-pot manifesto about what “country” music might mean, with honky-tonk and jug bands and juke-joint blues melding into folk-rock and Southern soul and rockabilly boogie. You could simply call it “Americana” if Dickinson didn’t end the record with Brazilian instrumental “Samba de Orfeo.”

That all these genres mix with such laid-back grace is a tribute to Dickinson’s formal audacity but also to the utter ease of the great band he’s assembled, with his North Mississippi Allstar sons Luther and Cody Dickinson at the core and a tight cadre of first-rate local musicians filling out the lineup.

This is not a touring band, but the easy intimacy Dickinson coaxes out of them is reminiscent of Willie Nelson’s “family band.” Some players get a chance to step out and shine: violinist Tommy Burroughs, appropriately, on “Violin Bums,” saxophonist Jim Spake on “Out of Blue,” and, most of all, Luther Dickinson on “Samba de Orfeo,” where he launches into an impossibly delicate guitar run that is far removed from the rock and blues he’s made his career with and that immediately certifies a side-project waiting to happen.

But mostly it’s the rootsy, communal mood of the record that hits so deep. And it helps that Dickinson gives the group such great songs to play. As wonderful as it is to hear Dickinson and his ace band ripping into standards like “Truck Drivin’ Man” and “Hadacol Boogie,” Jungle Jim is perhaps more compelling for the equally worthy obscurities Dickinson unearths. The album opens with “Red Neck, Blue Collar,” a rousing, stomping, growling class-conscious anthem recently written and barely released by old Dickinson pal Bob Frank. Elsewhere, Dickinson rescues great songs by obscure songwriters (Collin Wade Monk, Greg Spradlin) from the dustbin of history. — Chris Herrington

Grade: A

Fishing With Charlie (And Other Selected Readings)

Jim Dickinson

(Birdman)

Ten selections in 40 minutes of producer/raconteur Dickinson reading poetry, fiction, nonfiction, etc. The choices — Langston Hughes, Nick Tosches, Tennessee Williams, John Brown’s Body, Kerouac — sum up Dickinson’s underdog beatnik-Americana aesthetic, but his immense personality, unique smarts, and earthy, infectious sense of humor can’t be captured by other peoples’ words, only by his own. (Or, right, by other peoples’ songs.) I could listen to Dickinson talk forever. My patience for listening to him read is far more limited. But let it be noted that this record exists. — CH

Grade: B

The Northern Souljers Meet Hi-Rhythm

Various Artists

(Soul-Tay-Shus)

Like the Great Lounge Fad Fiasco of 1994, young white hipsters’ current love affair with vintage soul is an embrace of the colorful and “exotic” that discourages aesthetic discrimination. But unlike the Great Lounge Fad Fiasco of 1994, it’s a trend that’s unearthed or repopularized as many true hidden treasures as obscure-for-a-reasons, and maybe more. (And you’d better believe Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings trump Esquivel or Love Jones.) This most-definitely-marketed-to-indie-rockers collection of early-’60s soul sides cut in Memphis by Detroit artists working with producer Willie Mitchell has more hits than misses, and even the misses deserve an airing. Best discovery: Lee Rogers. (“Talkin’ About That Girl of Mine” — The Persians, “Cracked Up Over You” — Lee Rogers, “Cloudy Days” — Don Bryant) — CH

Grade: A-

Categories
Music Music Features

Sung or Spoken

He’s been lauded as a sage and a shaman, but when it comes down to it, Jim Dickinson finds solace in a surprising place: Tennessee Williams’ corpulent character Big Daddy.

“What does Big Daddy say?” Dickinson wonders, before succinctly delivering the line with all the relish that Burl Ives could muster: “Crap!”

“‘I detect the undeniable odor of mendacity in this room,'” Dickinson recites, dreamily adding, “You know, studying theater kept me from getting drafted.”

Dickinson studied theater at Baylor University in the early 1960s. “I really miss it,” he says. “If I could go back, one of the things I’d like to do is play Big Daddy in a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

It’s difficult to conjure the image of counterculture hero Dickinson taking a bow after portraying a dying Southern planter. Yet on two brand-new releases — Jungle Jim and the Voodoo Tiger (Memphis International Records) and the spoken-word album Fishing With Charlie (And Other Selected Readings) (Birdman Records) — Dickinson returns to his theatrical roots.

The former project, recorded with sons Luther and Cody Dickinson (on guitar and drums, respectively), guitarist Alvin Youngblood Hart, bassists Paul Taylor and Amy LaVere, fiddle player Tommy Burroughs, saxophonist Jim Spake, harmonica player Mark Sallings, and singers Jimmy Davis and Reba Russell at Dickinson’s own Zebra Ranch Studio in Coldwater, Mississippi, is a loose-knit collection of cover songs that was cut in 11 days. By comparison, Dickinson toiled over his last album, 2002’s Free Beer Tomorrow — itself a long-awaited follow-up to his 1972 solo debut Dixie Fried — for three-and-a-half years.

Jungle Jim is a purely Americana effort that elevates virtually unknown tunes like Collin Wade Monk’s eloquent “Violin Bums” and Greg Spradlin’s dirge-like “Out of Blue” to the same stature as, say, the classic blues swaggers “Hadacol Boogie” and “Rooster Blues.” Standards such as “Truck Drivin’ Man” and “White Silver Sands” get equal billing alongside Chuck Prophet’s “Down the Road” and Bob Frank’s “Red Neck, Blue Collar,” which parlays Luther Dickinson’s delicate banjo work into a flag-waving, beer-swilling anthem.

“I make my albums into little plays,” Dickinson explains. “There are no boundaries. It’s just music to me, songs I like.”

He’ll front the Jungle Jim musicians for a CD-release party at the New Daisy Theatre this weekend.

In recent weeks, many of the same session players have reunited at Young Avenue Sound, where Dickinson is producing a new album for New Orleans singer-songwriter Shannon McNally.

“Like my record, it’s gonna be all over the place, which will drive the blues Nazis and the Americana police crazy,” he chuckles, Big Daddy style.

As a producer — he’s worked with hundreds of acts, including the Replacements, Toots Hibbert, and his sons’ group, the North Mississippi Allstars — Dickinson draws on his theatrical experience, creating contrast between songs, keys, and notes.

He does that too when performing with the Yalobushwhackers, the house band for Oxford’s Thacker Mountain Radio, a show broadcast over Mississippi public radio.

“Just like live theater, there’s a thrill to broadcasting live that doesn’t come from anything else,” Dickinson notes of the program. “We’re never prepared, so we’re always on thin ice, and the audience is almost like church — blue-haired ladies sitting in the same chairs week after week and kids running up and down the aisles.”

The 10 spoken-word tracks that make up Fishing With Charlie might seem like a real anomaly, unless you factor in that theatrical background once more.

“I had no idea I was learning anything at Baylor,” Dickinson marvels, considering his recitations of Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo” and Johnny Kellogg’s speech from Ramsey Yellington’s Drama of the Alamo, which harken back to his college years.

“In those days,” he says, “when I was depressed, I used to play William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech back-to-back with Fred McDowell’s ‘Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning.'”

On Fishing With Charlie, a section of Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body gets a workout, as does an excerpt from Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, a fictional biography of jazzman Buddy Bolden.

Words penned by desolate literary angels Jack Kerouac and Larry Brown resonate in Dickinson’s gravelly voice, along with Langston Hughes’ “Weary Blues” and a broken fragment snatched from Stanley Booth’s Rythm Oil essays.

Near the end of the album, Dickinson lurches into a familiar piece of Tennessee Williams’ shattered prose.

The speech Dickinson performs is not a slice of wisdom from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, dispensed in Big Daddy’s basso voice. Instead, he’s chosen Tom Wingfield’s lonely meditations from The Glass Menagerie, delivered just before the curtain closes at the end of the play.

“‘The cities swept about me like dead leaves,'” Dickinson recites. “‘I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise.’

“‘Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass.'”