Tag: Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre

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Joecephus and The George Jonestown Massacre Pay Tribute to the MC5

Photo: Debi Ledoux

Before delving into Call Me Animal: A Tribute to the MC5, the latest album by Joecephus and The George Jonestown Massacre, I must disclose that I played piano on one track. But that’s not saying much, considering that half of this city’s musicians contributed to the album in one way or another. Indeed, that makes it not just a George Jonestown Massacre album, but a community statement, our Bluff City shout-out to Detroit rockers, the MC5, heroes to all who love riff rock, from punks to metalheads and beyond. 

Such tribute albums come naturally to Joey Killingsworth, aka Joecephus, and they all tend to honor riff-heavy ancestors like Black Oak Arkansas and Nazareth (the band’s rocked-up Johnny Cash tribute notwithstanding). Call Me Animal may be the ultimate expression of those tribute albums, all of which pledge their profits to charitable causes and feature a sprawling cast of celebrity cameos. This time, the charitable cause was easy to choose: The U.S. chapter of Jail Guitar Doors, a nonprofit founded by Billy Bragg to provide instruments to the incarcerated, was opened by original MC5 member Wayne Kramer, who also appears on the album.

“With all these records so far, we’ve managed to have at least one person from the original lineup,” Killingsworth says with a hint of pride. “Even on our Johnny Cash EP, we did all four songs with W.S. ‘Fluke’ Holland, who played drums on all that stuff back in the day.” For Call Me Animal, Kramer contributes to one of the group’s deeper cuts, “Human Being Lawnmower.” As Killingsworth puts it, “Wayne does the solo on that and just annihilates it.” Yet holding his own alongside Kramer’s guitar onslaught is Jello Biafra, whose manic vocals electrify the old MC5 song as if it was “Holiday in Cambodia.”

That’s just one star turn among many in this collection. Exploding right out of the gate, album opener “Ramblin’ Rose” features not only The Runaways’ Cherie Currie, but also bassist Mike Watt and guitarist J Mascis. There are also cameos like Lydia Lunch on “I Want You Right Now,” J.G. Thirlwell and Norman Westberg on “Call Me Animal,” and a version of “Kick Out the Jams” with Danko Jones and Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil. As it happened, meeting Thayil inspired Killingsworth to do the album in the first place.

“In 2018,” explains Killingsworth, “we opened for MC50,” an ad hoc group featuring both Kramer and Thayil that toured to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the album Kick Out the Jams. “I wore a Birthday Party shirt that night and Kim walked by — and he was all about the Birthday Party [Nick Cave’s early band].” Killingsworth pitched the idea of an MC5 tribute to Thayil, and “he was the first one on board.”

Backing up all this star power is the formidable rock engine of Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre, or JGJM. “It’s a collective at this point,” Killingsworth says of the band. “Dik LeDoux is my partner — he does almost all the recording and plays drums and bass. And Rudy Forster plays bass or guitar on the majority of it.” But many ensembles contributed, including Killingsworth’s other band, 1000 Lights, which also features Memphis Flyer film editor Chris McCoy. Some bands were ad hoc. “One song was made with me and Rudy with two of the Dirty Streets,” Killingsworth notes. “Some tracks were made with Weird Asteroid.” 

Other contributing Memphis musos include Robert Allen Parker, Gerald Stephens, Hope Clayburn, and others. Steve Selvidge contributes lead guitar to a searing version of “Thunder Express” sung by Jimbo Mathus, delivered with an offhand swagger that makes it an album highlight.  

Arguably the most luminary cameo comes from Alice Cooper, a onetime Motor City denizen himself, who told Uncut, “The MC5 were just pure Detroit.” Appropriately for one who knows that city’s pavement well, Cooper sings “Shakin’ Street.”

“It took a year to make that happen,” says Killingsworth of the Alice Cooper collaboration. “And he sent, like, 42 tracks — total bits and pieces and parts of his vocals. Dik LeDoux had to piece them together because there was just so much stuff.” Now, all such studio concerns behind them, Joecephus and the band are preparing for an 18-show tour that will include dates opening for Thor (another collaborator on the album) and an appearance at L.A.’s Whisky a Go Go with Cherie Currie. 

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Cover Feature News

We Will Rock You

Songwriter/guitarist Alicja Trout has long been a mainstay of Memphis’ rock scene. (Photo: Jamie Harmon)

There’s an epic tale unfolding in the Memphis music world these days. You might call it “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Rock Empire,” though it’s still not clear how much of a fall has been suffered. The local rock scene is a creative hotbed, as we’ll see, but that’s in the wider context of “rock music,” whatever that is, suffering an overall drop in popularity.

Six years ago, Salon noted that a Rubicon had been crossed in the music industry. “For the first time in Nielsen Music history, R&B/hip-hop has become the most consumed music genre in the United States,” wrote Taylor Link. “It’s a watershed moment for the Black-dominated genre. Former longtime volume leader rock … dropped to second with 23 percent of the total volume.” And only last year, Louder magazine decried, “There’s not one new rock/metal album among this year’s 200 best-selling albums in America.”

Such a sea change would have been unimaginable in the last century. Rock, aka “rawk,” the stepchild of rock-and-roll, arguably born with the opening power chords of The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” in 1964, marked a whole new approach to the electric guitar, trading on its capacity for noise. If British musos were inspired by American innovators like Bo Diddley and local hero Paul Burlison, a whole new sound was forged once Kink Dave Davies leaned into the metallic sound of his distorted guitar chords — loudly. Suddenly that lurching cousin of the blues, the rock riff, was selling records. Now, nearly 60 years on? Not so much.

Museum Relics

That’s put in perspective with a visit to the Memphis Museum of Science & History (MoSH), where two current exhibits shed perspective on rock by looking at its chief tool and icon: the guitar. Both “America at the Crossroads: The Guitar and a Changing Nation,” curated by the National Guitar Museum, and MoSH’s own “Grind City Picks: The Music That Made Memphis” trace the instrument’s evolving design and cultural importance with more than 40 examples of the luthier’s craft on display. As Harvey Newquist of the National Guitar Museum notes, rock, hard rock, and metal were more than just a sound. They expressed the whole ethos of the counterculture.

Julien Baker’s guitar at MoSH. (Photo: Alex Greene)

“It was the first generation that had guitar sounds of its own,” he says. “And they were distorted guitar sounds. Post-British Invasion, the first insanely heavy guitar sounds in America came from people like Jimi Hendrix, who inspired later bands like Aerosmith and Van Halen. The rise of that sound was very much a reflection of American youth culture, more so than country-western and the blues and everything else because it was so very integrated with teen angst, as it were.”

Angst and good times, that is. “I want to rock and roll all night — and party every day!” as KISS sang. The rock riff captured the zeitgeist in all its contradictions. “Hard rock and metal, and the sound of a distorted overdriven guitar, was a sound that had never been heard before,” says Newquist. “Here was a generation that didn’t want saxophones and pianos and horns. They wanted something raw and powerful to represent them, and hard rock and metal fit the bill perfectly.”

In the exhibit, changes in the guitar’s sound are tracked visually, as the instruments come to embody either futuristic utopianism or pre-modern warfare. “The iconic, heavy rock guitarist was playing Les Paul,” Newquist explains. “But B.C. Rich created extraordinarily angular guitars that were embraced by bands like Slayer and Lita Ford because they were so aggressive looking. They’re all points and angles, which gives them kind of a lethal look.”

It was all happening in Memphis, as well. At the end of the nationally touring exhibit comes MoSH’s Memphis addition, “Grind City Picks,” where you can see, mixed in with blues, soul, funk, jazz, and rockabilly axes, signs of heavy rock taking up permanent residence on the Bluff.

Hear Rock City

One of those signs in “Grind City Picks” is Steve Selvidge’s Fender Stratocaster. That single artifact captures an entire genealogy of heavy guitar rock in Memphis, in part because Selvidge is “following in his father Sid Selvidge’s footsteps,” as the signage says. But it goes deeper than that. The Selvidges were especially close with fellow Mudboy & the Neutrons member Lee Baker, a local pioneer of heavy guitar. “Baker would be over at the house a lot, or we’d be over at Baker’s house,” Selvidge noted of his childhood in a 2021 interview. “He had a guitar … and I was just fascinated with the guitar, any guitar.”

Indeed, Baker was an innovator in the realm of loud, distorted riffs. The influence of the 1969 debut by his pre-Mudboy band, Moloch, was obvious three years later when Jeff Beck, cutting an album in Memphis, covered their version of “Going Down.” The song’s slow, sinking rock riff was the perfect transformation of the blues into a wholly new genre, and Beck kept it in his set for decades to come.

Today, Selvidge the younger, arguably the city’s biggest Moloch fan, has repeatedly distinguished himself in the rock riff department, sporadically in the ’90s funk/alt-rock band Big Ass Truck and today with The Hold Steady, a Brooklyn-based group combining a pile-driving rock sound with Craig Finn’s trenchant, literate lyrics, with whom Selvidge has played with since 2010.

But that’s just the tip of the hard rock iceberg in this town, where, despite national trends, the rawk sound marches on. Memphis has had its hand in that game for decades. Having played with classic rock-leaning Target in the ’70s, singer Jimi Jamison then led the band Cobra, which in turn led to his joining the mega-group Survivor combo in 1984 (after they’d already hit it big with “Eye of the Tiger”). Jamison helped keep them in the charts with hits like “I Can’t Hold Back” and “High on You.” Like the bigger hard rock bands in the charts, Survivor was a prime example of “Album Oriented Rock” (AOR), which mixed heavy guitar riffs with catchy choruses and sparkling production values. Meanwhile, a Memphian who’d previously dabbled in country rock, Jimmy Davis, adapted to the times and dove into AOR himself, fronting Jimmy Davis & Junction. Their debut, Kick the Wall, was produced by Jack Holder, who’d helped pen songs for Southern rock outfit 38 Special, and the title song became a minor hit.

Tora Tora in their heyday (Photo courtesy Anthony Corder)

Those artists in turn inspired many younger groups in their wake. Take Tora Tora, sometimes considered a “hair metal” band. Singer Anthony Corder recalls those times in the late ’80s when he and three other high schoolers were just learning their craft. “We were into older bands like Target, one of Jimi Jamison’s bands, who were on A&M [Records],” he says. “We won some local competition and the prize was a day at Ardent. And when we went in, the engineer happened to be Paul Ebersol.” As it happened, Ebersol was to become a key figure in the heavy rock coming out of Memphis, ultimately producing local angst-metal hitmakers Saliva in the early 2000s. “Paul just saw something in us that we didn’t even see,” says Corder.

Championed by Ebersol, Ardent took the band under its wing, and it was a particularly charmed era to be playing hair metal. “As we were coming up, the scene was exploding,” Corder notes. Before long, with Corder still in high school, Tora Tora was signed to A&M as well, and their debut album reached #47 on the charts. By the dawn of the ’90s, other Memphis groups, like Roxy Blue, Every Mother’s Nightmare, and Mother Station (featuring guitarist Gwin Spencer and singer/songwriter Susan Marshall), were also thriving, albeit not with the same success as Tora Tora. But even as Memphis metal was going big time, the seeds of its demise had already been sown.

Metal Meets Punk

Even before Tora Tora’s ascent, an alternative approach to hard rocking sounds had been gestating in the legendary Antenna Club, originally known as The Well. While some punk was morphing into what’s now called hardcore, played at a frenetic pace and with little melodic content, others, like the Modifiers, played metal-inspired music that retained a punk attitude. “The Modifiers poured their sweat and souls into every performance, breaking ground and opening doors for every original punk/alternative band in this town,” wrote J.D. Reager in the Memphis Flyer after the band’s guitarist, Bob Holmes, died in 2019.

Reager quotes Memphis native David Catching, who, after playing with the Modifiers for 10 years, went on to be a producer and guitarist for the Eagles of Death Metal and Queens of the Stone Age: “I’ll never forget meeting Bob at the Well,” says Catching. “He and Alex Chilton were my first guitar heroes I could actually talk to.”

While the Modifiers never dented the charts, to some extent they prefigured Nirvana’s breakthrough smash Nevermind in 1991, which spelled the end of hair metal’s dominance. The so-called grunge movement proffered “seventies-influenced, slowed-down punk music,” as producer Jack Endino told Rolling Stone in 1992. Like the heavier bands at the Antenna, grunge bands rejected the more pop elements of glam metal but kept the riffs, and their audiences followed suit. Ironically, by 1995 the Antenna Club had closed its doors. But a new hybrid hard rock was just getting started.

One unique Memphis group from that era was Son of Slam, whose album Trailer Parks, Politics & God was released in 1994. According to LastFm.com, they “spit in the face of pretty boy glam bands” and “found legions of loyal fans in cities throughout the South and the Midwest.” Fronted by the flamboyantly unhinged Chris Scott, the group also featured guitar virtuoso Eric Lewis and the rhythm section of Terrence “T-Money” Bishop (bass) and John “Bubba” Bonds (drums). All four, especially the latter two holding down the rhythm, continue to impact the scene today.

Only slightly later, other artists fond of killer riffs were getting their start. Local bluesy punks the Oblivians inspired young James Lee Lindsey Jr. to begin a career of his own that, like the Modifiers before him, would sometimes straddle the line between punk and metal.

Taking the name Jay Reatard, Lindsey began firmly in the punk camp, yet as the century turned, he partnered with Memphis songwriter/guitarist Alicja Trout to form the Lost Sounds, slowing the tempo slightly and adding synths to their guitar crunch. Beginning in the early 2000s, long after hair metal’s star had fallen, the Lost Sounds and other Goner-affiliated bands kept the torch of hard rock riffs burning. Hard rock was already giving way to hip-hop and electronic music on the charts, but it still percolated in Memphis with a fierce, rebellious energy.

Lost Sounds ca. early 2000s (Photo: Dan Ball)

“We were trying to challenge ourselves,” Trout says today of the Lost Sounds’ debut, Black-Wave. “It was not quite prog rock because there weren’t any jam-out moments there. We called it Black-Wave because we were trying to mix black metal and new wave.”

The Lost Sounds challenged listeners’ preconceptions as well, not least because a woman playing heavy guitar riffs was not a common sight. “When I started playing, it was novel to have a woman playing guitar and playing heavy,” Trout says. “Now, it’s no longer a novelty to be a female playing guitar in a band, although I feel like rock is still mainly dude territory.”

Trout ultimately parted ways with Lindsey, who carried on as Jay Reatard, eventually releasing the popular punk/metal hybrid albums Blood Visions and Watch Me Fall in 2009. Tragically, the next year a likely overdose took his life, a loss that the city still mourns. But Trout had already struck out on her own years before, recruiting Bishop and Bonds to found the River City Tanlines in 2004.

“I think the River City Tanlines is the most rock-and-roll band of any band I’ve ever been in,” Trout says today. “The Lost Sounds were just getting further and further from conventional songwriting, getting into time changes and epic outros and noise intros and all these layered keyboards. It really came down to me thinking, ‘Man, I just want to do something simple and fun.’ Going back to basic songwriting with a good verse or chorus riff. And then Terrence and Bubba put their rock experience twist on it.”

The Son of Slam rhythm section was perfect for Trout, for whom the “punk” label never was quite appropriate. “Whenever I’m put in with punk,” she notes, “the only thing I can think of is the Ramones, Blondie, and maybe The Velvet Underground — the New York definition of that word. Other than that, I only like smatterings of punk. It’s not me at all.”

We Will, We Will Rock Us

Despite all labels and market trends, artists like Selvidge and Trout epitomize hard rock’s staying power. The River City Tanlines still play today, as does Trout’s other group, Sweet Knives. That band’s 2022 album Spritzerita is a masterful punk/hard rock hybrid not unlike the Lost Sounds and, as Trout explains, that’s no accident. “I formed Sweet Knives to play all the Lost Sounds songs that had been put to sleep,” she says. “But it wasn’t long until [original Lost Sounds drummer] Rich Crook and I started writing songs together.” Now they continue with an evolving lineup.

Other bands that began in the ’90s have enjoyed similar longevity. The 30-year-old band Pezz, who, according to the Flyer’s Chris McCoy, has always had “a melodic streak that endeared them to pop-punk fans,” continues to play today and is featured in the MoSH exhibit. And the Subteens, who also feature Bonds on drums, have soldiered on for nearly as long, releasing what is perhaps their greatest work, Vol. 4: Dashed Hopes & Good Intentions, only last year. It’s full of “propulsive anthems, driving riffs, and soaring solos that offer portraits of an underground community teetering between hope, exultation, rage, and despair,” as noted in the Flyer.

Still more groups straddling punk and hard rock have sprouted up in the past decade and a half, including the Dirty Streets, whose rocking guitar sound harks back to the Faces or The Rolling Stones; HEELS, who combined Clash-like politics with up-tempo riffs in last year’s masterpiece, Pop Songs for a Dying Planet; Opossums, who skew towards pop punk melodicism in their latest, Bite; and the duo Turnstyles, who’ve perfected the rock sound in its most minimalist expression: a guitarist and a drummer, both of whom sing.

Simultaneously, some masterful guitarists are keeping the classic rock spirit alive here. The originals on Robert Allen Parker’s recent double album, The River’s Invitation, mine a classic mash-up of Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and the Allman Brothers. Mama Honey, a trio led by guitarist Tamar Love, relies on her Hendrix-inspired, unabashedly rock-and-funk-fueled riffs.

And no group tours more regularly than Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre, the brainchild of guitarist Joey Killingsworth, who’s specialized in masterminding charity albums that draw on cameos from the metal, rock, and punk worlds (such as J.D. Pinkus from the Butthole Surfers), often in tributes to classic ’70s rockers like Black Oak Arkansas and Nazareth (with an MC5 tribute to be released later this year). Killingsworth is also the axe man behind A Thousand Lights, who started as a Stooges cover band but soon morphed into an original goth rock band in their own right.

Perhaps the clearest sign that hard rock is rooted here for good is the revival Tora Tora has enjoyed in recent years, having released an album of all new material, Bastards of Beale, in 2019 — still with the original four members that met in high school. “There’s still an audience here that I’m playing to, and they’re like super fans,” says Corder. “They’re super passionate. We jumped on the Monsters of Rock Cruise for the first time back in 2017, and man it was the most awesome experience. We’ve rediscovered our heavy metal tribe.”

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: “Voices” by Joecephus and The George Jonestown Massacre

Credit: Joecephus and The George Jonestown Massacre (YouTube)

Today’s Music Video Monday takes a troubling, high-energy, color-saturated trip into the minds of Joecephus and The George Jonestown Massacre. “Voices” is a riff-heavy banger about, well … maybe about being your own best friend?

“No one ever calls one me,” Josephus sings. “That’s OK cuz I’ve got voices in my head.”

Well, maybe it’s a bit more sinister than that. 

“Voices that talk to me all through the night/Voices that tell me everything’s alright/Voices that tell me things untrue/Voices that tell me everything about you.”  

The band tapped Memphis director (and the Flyer’s own film and TV editor) Chris McCoy to capture the anxiety and paranoia of it all. And McCoy did it all, too — producing, directing, shooting, and editing, with some help from his wife and Memphis film editor Laura Jean Hocking for finishing touches. 

The finished product is a dizzying, dazzling display of disquieting imagery. Silent-movie-era Satan, fairies, and a guy spitting up … coins? 

“Since I was doing everything myself, I tried to keep it simple,” McCoy said. “I was going in an entirely different direction with it until I showed [singer Joey Killingsworth] the first cut. 

“He introduced me to the films of Segundo de Chomón, a Spanish filmmaker from the very early silent era who was kind of a proto-Surrealist. So, I threw away what I had and started over, remixing Chomón’s images with the band’s performance.” 

If you’d like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.

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Music Record Reviews

In the Land of the Snowblind, Joecephus is King

Trapped in the house with icicles glittering all through my window, the slick street throwing sunbeams back in my face, the day’s listening material practically screams out to be played: Joecephus & the George Jonestown Massacre’s Snowblind in the Rising Sun. As the early days of the pandemic taught us, being housebound is the absolute best time to get your choogle on. And this is the group to do it with.

The success this group’s had with staging all-star charity tribute albums (Heirs of the Dog: A Tribute to Nazareth, Five Minutes To Live: A Tribute To Johnny Cash, and Mutants Of The Monster: A Tribute to Black Oak Arkansas) might cause casual listeners to forget that they’ve put six albums out over more than a dozen years’ time, all crammed with quality originals. They not only know their way around a riff, they can forge it into a song. And that’s exactly what they do on their latest outing, released last fall.

There could be no better album kickoff than “Voices,” a boogie riff that won’t stop, except when it does, allowing singer Joey Killingsworth to toss out “All by myself, always the same/Stare into the the lie, it’s always a game,” as one verse goes, perhaps making sure we know the “voices in my head” are nothing to worry about.

A spirit of rollicking, rocking fun permeates every minute of this album, even when the chords are laden with doom. And the plainspoken, everyman voice of Killingworth underscores the good times, placing the group squarely in the Mid-South with a refreshing lack of affectation that’s all too rare in this genre.

As for what kind of fun they’re celebrating, the band is quite up front about what makes for their good times, tagging themselves as “country rock,” “hard rock,” and “stoner rock.” And the lyrics pull no punches when it comes to calling out their favorite substances. “Summer of ’93” seems to make references to “windowpane,” and one can assume that someone took a heavy trip thirty odd years ago; the title track sings of being “snowblind in the House of the Rising Sun, on the lam and on the run,” suggesting the involvement of snow-like contraband; and “The Border” offers some sage advice to a galloping beat that recalls the early days of cow punk: “Don’t take weed across the border, or you might get patted down.” Quick on its heels comes “Nothing to Lose,” an ode to “a wake and bake morning, come on stop snoring, get your ass in here and get out of bed/Pack yourself a bong, come on sing along, follow ‘long to the words in my head.”

And yet there’s a more serious side to these voices in Killingsworth’s head: “Life falls apart in the blink of an eye,” he sings on “Life of the Party,” which alternates between a nervous, scratchy riff and a thunderous power-chord chorus. “Company Man” is a portrait of a man who “wants to go out on the town” with a sardonic twist that skewers anyone that “lives for the company” even as twin guitars in perfect Allman Brothers-like harmony kick in with an intoxicating hook. “Cities will crumble, burn to the ground” goes the opening line of “Bleed the Day” which combines a Black Sabbath mood with a Metallica-like crunch. And “Change the Channel” celebrates our ability to snap out of an apocalyptic rut, with Gerald Stephens’ John Lord-like organ wailing through the intro.

One thing that the many excellent records of 2022 prove, from the Subteens to the Drip Edges to HEELS, is that Memphis rocks, and this offering from Joecephus & the George Jonestown Massacre is Exhibit A. The pounding chords and solos of this album are irresistible, and sure to knock any case of blindness right out of you.

Joecephus & the George Jonestown Massacre open for The Supersuckers at the Hi Tone Cafe, Saturday, February 4, 8 p.m.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: “Please Don’t Judas Me” by Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre

Music Video Monday is doing it for a good cause.

Memphis guitar hero Joey Killingsworth’s Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre has been laying down the heavy sound for years. In addition to a prolific output of original material, Killingsworth has a long-running side project of doing tribute albums for charity, beginning with Mutants of the Monster: A Tribute to Black Oak Arkansas. The latest album benefits the FSHD Society, dedicated to finding a cure for facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, which took the life of beloved Memphis music supporter and FSHD poster girl Jonelle Spicer in 2018. Heirs of the Dog is a recreation of Nazareth’s 1975 Brit metal classic Hair of the Dog, featuring an amazing lineup of guest performers, including J.D. Pinkus of the Butthole Surfers, Luther Dickinson, and Nazareth’s own Manny Charlton.

For “Please Don’t Judas Me”, Neil Fallon of stoner rock legends Clutch takes the lead vocal duties. The video is another spectacular creation by Memphis animator and tattoo artist Nathan Parten, whose work for Louise Page earned him Music Video Monday’s Best Music Video of 2019. This one takes an appropriately gothic tone, and incorporates live action into the mix to send his menacing creatures stalking the streets of the Bluff City.

If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.

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Music Music Features

Heirs of the Dog: George Jonestown Massacre’s Riffs Raise Money and Awareness

Daryl Stephens, Brian Costner, and Joey Killingsworth (Photo: Debi LeDoux)

Hearing Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre rock a heavy groove, you might feel compelled to exclaim, “Righteous!” And for once this assessment would be spot-on. For these purveyors of Southern rock laced with metal and a dollop of punk have combined righteousness with their pounding riffs for some time now. In fact, it’s their specialty.

The core trio, led by founder Joey “Joecephus” Killingsworth with Brian Costner on bass and Daryl Stephens on drums, has excelled at the tribute album, wherein the works of a beloved artist or band are recut with a 21st century urgency and celebrity cameos, with the profits earmarked for charity. Previous star-studded outings have included Mutants of the Monster: A Tribute to Black Oak Arkansas and Five Minutes to Live: A Tribute to Johnny Cash. Now they’ve dropped what may be their best tribute yet, Heirs of the Dog: A Tribute to Nazareth (Saustex Records). This time, they focus their tribute spotlight on one album in particular, the iconic Hair of the Dog, recreated track by track and bursting with cameos that read like a Who’s Who of heavy alt-rock. Recently, Joecephus filled me in on the details.

Memphis Flyer: What does Nazareth mean to you?

Joey Killingsworth: When I was 13 or 14, my cousin played me Hair of the Dog and Alice Cooper’s greatest hits. And both of those really stuck. One night, I had had a couple of margaritas, then came home and had a beer. I heard a Nazareth song on the radio, and I immediately called [co-producer] Dik Ledoux and said, “Hey, man, I’ve got an idea. We’ll do Hair of the Dog all the way through!” So we went to his studio and knocked out all the basic tracks in one day back in 2019. Then we started getting the guests.

Once I get one guest locked in, we’ve got a record. Fast forward a couple of months, I was talking to Ruyter Suys of Nashville Pussy about it. She said, “I’m in, and Blaine [Cartwright, also of Nashville Pussy] calls ‘Hair of the Dog.’ He wants that song.” So I called up Dik and said, “We got two guests, we got an album!”

Did you ever dream you’d get Nazareth guitarist Manny Charlton on there?

No! That was a surprise. But on each charity album, we try to get one member of the original band we’re doing a tribute to. And getting Neil Fallon was a big shocker. I’ve been a Clutch fan forever, so when he got on board, that was a whole other ball game right there.

The roster is impressive. You also recruited J.D. Pinkus of Butthole Surfers and Luther Dickinson. And there’s a cameo by Eddie Spaghetti of the Supersuckers.

He had helped us before on the Black Oak Arkansas record. Then I sent our version of “Love Hurts,” which features Eddie’s vocals and Eric Lewis’ steel guitar, to Ruyter, and she was like, “I never cared for that song much, but I love that steel. And I love Eddie. Ask him about me singing a duet with him.” Eddie just said, “Fuck yeah!” It’s got a little Gram/Emmylou thing going on. Sounds like they’re a little hungover. And Eric Lewis knocked his part out of the park.

The album’s profits will go to the FSHD Society for research into facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, which took the life of Jonelle Spicer in 2018. Tell me about her.

She was a big Memphis music supporter, and so motivational. She would always come out to the shows. We’d been buddies with her and her partner Rudy [Forster] for a while. He was in Blackbone back in the day. So I told Rudy, “Let’s do this record in her honor. And Rudy, we gotta get you playing on here, man.” It’s all about helping Jonelle and the spirit of her.

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Cover Feature News

Memphis Musicians’ Worst Gigs Ever II

On any given day, dozens of Memphis musicians are crisscrossing the country, bringing the diverse sounds of our city to audiences large and small. It’s a fun life, but things don’t always go as planned. It’s a tradition for musicians to swap stories of disaster, humiliation, and stiffed payments. Here are some prime cuts from Memphis musicians who were willing to go on the record about their worst gig experiences.

Dead Soldiers

Krista Wroten Combest — Dead Soldiers

We were on our way from Asbury Park to Brooklyn, and then to Staten Island. The guy at the toll booth told us the wheel on our trailer was smoking. This wasn’t surprising to us, because on our last tour, the wheel had fallen off as we were attempting to leave Sister Bay, Wisconsin.

That’s why we weren’t surprised when it happened again in New York. We pulled over and called a bunch of auto places, but no one was open, so we decided to take it easy and just get to the show. We limped into New York and somehow made it through the Staten Island tunnel, which is more than a little terrifying when you’re hauling a broken trailer behind a conversion van.

We finally made it to the venue and had a great time and got to party with a bunch of our Memphis transplant friends. Loading out after the show, Clay [Qualls] accidentally broke the key off in the lock on our trailer. It ended up being easier to just tear the trailer door off rather than deal with the locks and load all our stuff into the U-Haul we rented for the rest of the tour. All the while we were being harassed by a junkie who looked like an extra from The Nightmare Before Christmas. We had to make the tough choice to abandon our trailer there in the Big Apple. Another victim of the road. R.I.P. trailer, I hope you’ve finally found peace in some scenic New York junkyard — or as a Brooklyn hipster’s apartment.  

Joey Killingsworth — Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre

I got so many bad stories…

We drive to the middle of Georgia to play a car show. And to get there, you had to get walkie-talkied in. One car at a time on this little gravel road in the middle of nowhere. Once you got down to it, there was a field with all of these cars and stage in front of a dirt track. We start talking to people, and these rednecks are scary even for white folks. Dave said, “You took me to a Klan rally where they don’t bother to wear hoods.” These motherfuckers were crazy. These guys were showing us their gun wounds, their knife wounds. I was like, this is a little too much for us.

There was a guy in a blue gorilla suit playing upright bass, doing ‘White Wedding”, and some ‘80s songs. He was cool. But then we got on stage, and the wind started blowing towards the stage. Whenever the cars would drive behind us, the dirt would blow up on us. It was covering my pedals, my guitar, everything.

As soon as we got done, we were like, we gotta get paid and get the hell outta here. But they were like, hang on, we have an emergency. Somebody broke their foot. We’re waiting on a helicopter. We were like, why don’t you just get the ambulance? No, he was some drunk redneck on a quad runner, and his foot actually broke off, like, it came off. So they had to airlift him out. And that was Dave Wade’s first show with us. He said, ‘That was the day I said, ‘I’m never going to do this again.’ That was six years ago.

My personal worst was the Hogrock festival in Illinois. It’s in the middle of a field that they used to use for the Gathering of the Juggalos. There are three big stages. You gotta follow trails in the middle of nowhere to get to them.

At first it was awesome, but it turned out that was the night the cicadas came out. Like, they were literally emerging from the ground. We were in an open area in the middle of the woods. Me and Brian [Costner] were not wearing shirts, and Daryl [Stephens] from Another Society was playing drums. The cicadas were swarming all over us. They stayed on us the whole time. They were swinging on the bill of my cap, hanging off of my guitar. It was like somebody throwing softballs at you. I would kick a bunch of ’em out of the way to get to a pedal. Daryl said he was just playing and cringing, watching these cicadas climb on our backs. We did an hour and a half set. It was like that the whole time.

Marco Pavé

Marco Pavé

I was 15 years old and auditioning for a talent show in the Frayser High Gymnasium. I had downloaded the beats from a site called Soundclick, and at the beginning of the beat, there was an audio tag that said I didn’t purchase the beat. I downloaded it from the internet so I could perform! I was 15 years old! I didn’t know!

So I came, I had my songs ready, I performed them, I rocked the songs. Then the guy was like, “Yeah, man, you had the tag on your beat. That means you’re not serious. We would have picked you if you had used a professional beat or a beat that you owned.” Basically, they took my $50 submission fee as a 15-year-old and told me to go home.

Booker T. Jones

Booker T. Jones

I drove from Memphis to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, not long after we had recorded “Green Onions.” I think they told the people that I needed an organ, so they went to the church and got a pipe organ. They didn’t tell them it needed to be a Hammond B3 Organ. It was a simulated pipe organ with stops — a spinet. It was like a church organ — the notes didn’t make a sound right away. It wouldn’t work. I ended up trying to play “Green Onions” on a pipe organ in this club in Baton Rouge. That’s got to be the weirdest sound I’ve ever heard.

Richard Dumas

Lorette Velvette

Lorette Velvette — Tav Falco’s Panther Burns

It was 1986. We’d been up in NYC. “The Starvation Tour.” Bob [Fordyce] would just write “FOOOOOD” in his sketch book. So we were crowded in the car, and we had no money. George [Reinecke] was sent into a country store somewhere along the way, and he bought white bread and some head cheese nobody else would touch. So all I was eating was white bread.

We went down to the Metroplex in Atlanta. We started our show, and I was on stage playing tambourine. During “Tina the Go Go Queen,” two policemen came up and told me to come off stage. And I said, “No! Wait till the end of the song!”

Then I went off stage into this other room with them. The Panther Burns kept playing. And so the policeman wrote me up and said, “I’m giving you this ticket for playing tambourine without a permit.”

I was so mad I snatched the ticket from his hand, but he didn’t let go. He held onto the ticket. I just turned away from him, just looking at the heavens, going, “God, this is bullshit!” Then he grabbed me from behind in a big bear hug and ran me out the door, several yards, onto the sidewalk.

By then, the Panther Burns had gotten out there. Tav was begging him to not arrest me, but they said I had “resisted arrest.” This was the police officer who had bear-hugged me and his senior sergeant. The two of them conferred: “Well, should I take her in?” And the sergeant said, “Well, you’ve already laid your hands on her.”

Immediately, the paddy wagon was there. Back doors open, I get shoved in. And Tav was begging him, he was like, “Please, please, don’t arrest her!” And before the doors shut he said, “She’s been eating white bread for a week!”

They took me to the downtown jail, and I had to stand in line. I was dressed in my pink vinyl miniskirt, with a black half top and go-go boots. They all thought I was a prostitute, so they put me in the cell with a bunch of other ladies. When I walked in, they all wanted my cigarettes, so I gave out my cigarettes to make friends. There was a telephone in the room, and they’d get on the telephone and call their husbands and tell them not to press charges. Like, these women had beaten up their husbands. Several of them.

My bail was $1,500. Around daybreak, the Panther Burns came and I was like, “How did you make bail?” It turned out, the people in the club had chipped in, the club had chipped in, and the pizza place at Little Five Points had chipped in a bunch, and they got the money together and got me out. I had to go to court literally the next day. A lot of people came from the club, saying, “They’ve been trying to shut us down for a long time.”

There was a lawyer assigned to me who said, “Let’s try to settle this out of court.” He made a deal, that they would drop the charge of resisting arrest — and I probably weighed 105 pounds — if I agreed not to sue them. Of course, I couldn’t, because we didn’t have any money. And I didn’t want to ever go back to Atlanta again.

Marcia Clifton — The Klitz

The worst one, probably, was the one that should have been the best, when we went to New York to open for the Mondo Video film. Remember Mr. Bill? And Michael O’Donoghue. He was a writer for Saturday Night Live. We opened for his movie, Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video. Sept. 23, 1979 at the Times Square Tango Palace. Elizabeth Johnson was a girl from Memphis who went to Harvard, and she got in, like, a cool crowd and suggested us to play for this. And of course they heard the name and they were like, “Oh yeah, the Klitz!” It was perfect.

And so we were just kinda like…we weren’t really tight, because we were nervous, and I think we had had too much to drink. Rolling Stone was there, and we got a review in Rolling Stone and it said, “The only thing worse than the Mondo Punch was the entertainment.” That was a quote from the actress Sylvia Miles, who appeared in Andy Warhol’s Heat. They flew us up there, put us in a hotel, we went to all the parties, and then, when it was time for the gig, we just kinda fell apart. It was kinda sad.

Stephen Sweet

The Grifters

Tripp Lamkins — The Grifters

I think it was 1992. We were on a month-long tour with Flaming Lips and Codeine. We were in Atlanta at a club called The Masquerade, which was split into three levels. You entered mid-level into Purgatory. The bands played upstairs in Heaven. The sub-level was a red-lit, S&M-themed bar called Hell. Of course, we went down to Hell.

The bar was just opening, and the only other person in there besides the bartender is a guy playing pinball. Shirtless, muscular, black leather pants, black boots, black policeman’s hat, handcuffs. We ask if he’s a regular. Bartender says, “No, that’s Frank, the bouncer.”

Later, we play our set. Good show — hard not to have a good show on that tour. It was the biggest crowds we’d played to up till then. We’re sitting backstage having after-show beers. There’s a knock on the door.

This guy peeks his head in and asks, “Grifters?” We’re like, “Yeah.”

He creeps in with two friends in tow. He tells us how glad they are we came back to Atlanta and that we killed it out there. Of course, we’re grateful and invite them to hang.

They sit down, and dude continues to blow smoke up our asses. “You guys are blowing up! Every song was killer! I bet you’re blowing Flaming Lips off the stage every night! Mind if we grab a beer?”

Dude grabs three beers, hands two off to his friends, and continues to ramble. “This new record man. It’s friggin killer!” Kills his beer. Grabs another one. “Man, you guys are gonna be fighting off the majors!” Kills that beer, grabs another.

Then I see him give a sideways glance to his friends and he asks, “Man, what’s the third song off of side two on the new record?” I say, “Encrusted?” He says “YEAH MAN! ‘ENCRUSTED’! The guitar solo on that song is friggin’ DOPE!”

I say, “Okay, this has been fun. Time for you guys to go,” and they leave. I turn around and Scott and Stan are like, “What’d you do that for?” and I’m like “There isn’t a guitar solo on ‘Encrusted’! We don’t have guitar solos on any of our songs!” And it sinks in. We’d been grifted for backstage beer.

Stan says, “We’re not gonna let him get away with this are we?” I say, “Hell no!”

The club was packed, and the Lips were raging loud. We didn’t know what we would do. After casing the place, we decided to wait by the men’s room. It worked. Almost immediately, dude walked right by us, swigging beer and laughing and — I’m not kidding — he actually says, “I stole this beer from the Grifters! Haw Haw Haw!”

So we’re thinking, “This guy’s going down!” But we only have moments to formulate a plan. We decide we would appear to be fighting each other when dude comes out of the bathroom, and then Stan would hurl me at him and I would either knock him down or knock the beer out of his hand.

Stan and I start shoving each other around and cussing at each other for what seemed like five minutes when finally the guy comes out of the men’s room. Stan grabs me by the lapels and throws me at the guy—who casually sidesteps me! As I’m falling backwards, I reach out and just knock his beer to the ground. It shatters on the floor, and he flies into a rage.

He screams, “That was MY beer!” Stan jumps to my side and points in his face and says, “A beer you STOLE from the Grifters!” He looks all kinds of confused and then goes into a Three Stooges, Curly kind of wind-up. Stan and I plant ourselves, then suddenly Frank the S&M bouncer comes from behind us and hurls the guy into the wall and says, “GOD-DAMN-IT, BILLY! HOW MANY TIMES WE GOTTA DO THIS?”

Frank shoves the guy’s arm into his back and gets him in a headlock and then drags him backwards down the stairs literally kicking and screaming. We looked down over the banister and Stan yells, “This is what happens when you fuck with the Grifters!”

Herman Green — B.B. King

I played with B.B. King a couple years. He saved my life, man, ’cause he didn’t have a car, and I had a car. And so we’re coming back from Blytheville. They had those narrow bridges in Arkansas, and we was following this truck with a trailer. And he signaled, another one coming toward us, some kinda way they had a signal, and told them to come on, don’t stop. And it had been raining. I wasn’t driving, the piano player was. And he hit the brakes … no brakes. We hit that bridge and knocked up three concrete posts, and as fast as we were going, we couldn’t stop.

I felt something go across my chest, like someone was fighting me. It was B.B. and the way he did it, he took his left arm and went that way, and he balanced himself on the bench. So he wasn’t going no where. ‘Cause they didn’t have seat belts back then. That was back in the late ’40s, early ’50s. And he saved my life, because I’d a went through the windshield.

And then, you’ve heard of Ford Nelson at WDIA, haven’t you? He’s a disc jockey. He was with us. He weighed about 240 pounds, and after we hit those concrete posts, the car was laying right on the edge of the bank, teetering. Ford got out one way and the car went the other way. And we slid down and the hood got right in the mud down there. And I told Ford, I said, “Man, don’t you ever move! I don’t care where we at, just sit still!”

Kelley Anderson — Those Darlins

Those Darlins played the 2009 Americana Music Festival in Nashville and were scheduled to play before John Fogerty. Creedence Clearwater Revival was one of Jessi [Zazu]’s favorite bands, and she was excited to get to see him.

At the last minute, Fogerty decided he wanted to play earlier. The festival organizers accommodated his request (because he’s John freakin’ Fogerty) and shifted our scheduled time to be after his. All performers were supposed to play around 45 minutes, and he rocked for almost two hours. At one point, there were three guitars on stage — there were so many guitars.

After he completely rocked everyone’s faces off, we set up our ragtag equipment in front of theirs on the stage they just destroyed and basically played outro music for the waves of people filing out of the Mercy Lounge.

Their drums were still set up on a giant riser, so Linwood [Regensburg] set up his kit in front of theirs, and the rest of us kind of filled out to the side, with me playing behind a large column. With no soundcheck and a “Here goes nothing!” sigh, we took it in stride and played a good show for the 20 or 30 diehard Darlins fans who remained up front. So maybe it wasn’t the worst gig ever, but it was a little embarrassing to be playing to such a large room of people leaving. But hey, not everyone can say that John Fogerty opened up for their band!

The Reigning Sound

Jeremy Scott — Reigning Sound

The day after opening for the White Stripes at the White Blood Cells album release in Detroit, the Reigning Sound rolled into Columbus, Ohio, for a gig that night.  It was at Bernie’s Distillery, a long-running local institution. We were under the impression, probably from the guy who booked the tour, that Bernie’s had a kitchen. The key word here is “had.” In fact, the whole place looked like it had been closed for at least three years. (Bernie’s soldiered on until the end of 2015, incredibly.) When we asked to see a menu, the dude behind the bar said, “Um, our kitchen closed a few weeks ago, but hang on a sec,” and headed where we couldn’t see him.  When he returned, he informed us, “Well, there’s a whole ham back there. The top part is green, but I could shave off the bottom for you and make sandwiches.” We all looked at each other and said “Nah, we’re good.” Add in the thoroughly disgusting bathroom which gave ’70s-era CBGB a run for its money, and a bunch of out-of-place Ohio State grads, and you have a fairly disorienting experience. That’s life, though. One day you’re playing with the White Stripes, the next day a random bartender is trying to kill you.

The Masqueraders

Harold Thomas — The Masqueraders

[In 1968, the Masqueraders hit the road to support their hit “I Ain’t Gotta Love Nobody Else.”]

Our first engagement on that tour was at the Apollo Theater. This was the craziest experience we ever had in our life. We got up there, we were just ol’ country boys. We didn’t know. We really came from a capella, to the studio, and now we gotta have music. We didn’t know we needed charts!

We get to the Apollo Theater, and the bandleader goes, “All right, Masqueraders, let me have your charts.”

We go, “Charts? You know, we always just go, ‘Well, the music goes like this, dowmp dowmp dowmp!'”

They go, “Oh no, man … we need some charts.” Okay.

So one of those guys says, “Hey, I tell you what, I know the song. You all give me $50, and I’ll write the charts for ya. Tonight, when y’all come back, I’ll have ’em ready.”

That night, they call us, “Masqueraders, Masqueraders, you’re up next!”

We run out on the stage, waiting for them to play our song. They didn’t play nothing like it. It wasn’t nothing like it! We was looking at each other going, “What the … hell?”

And the people in the audience, they were starting to mumble, getting ready to throw tomatoes and eggs. You know how they did back in the day.

So one of our guys said, “Hold it, hold it, man, we don’t need no music! We don’t need no MUSIC. Stop right now!”

And then he headed out on that melody [a capella], “Up in the morning …” and we were like “Wooo-ooh.” “Out on the job … ”

When we got through singing that song, they were standing up, you hear me?