John Cale – Memphis Flyer

On Sunday, July 14th, the Premiere Palace hosted a memorial service for the late Sturgis Nikides, best known locally as the virtuoso blues guitarist in the Low Society, who passed away last April. Gone far too young, he managed to pack several lifetimes of experience into his 66 years, growing up in Brooklyn, New Jersey, and Staten Island, then ultimately falling in with Manhattan’s alternative music scene. Those familiar with the film Who Killed Nancy?, about Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, may recall Nikides’ on-camera recollections of his days living in the Chelsea Hotel on the same floor as Vicious in 1978, including the night of Spungen’s murder.

During that era, by the time he was only 19, Nikides distinguished himself as a guitarist for John Cale, who’d long moved on to a solo career after his time with the Velvet Underground. At last Sunday’s memorial, that era of Nikides’ life was well-represented by the singer-songwriter deerfrance, who played a short set with a band that included her bassist Kai Eric (erstwhile member of Tav Falco’s Panther Burns) and two local players (Lynn Greer on drums and myself on guitar and keyboards).

During the set, deerfrance spoke wistfully of getting to know Nikides when they both played in Cale’s band from 1979-1981. Indeed, the guitarist was nicknamed “Hellcat” in the credits to Cale’s 1981 album, Honi Soit. That album was Cale’s greatest commercial success, making it into the Billboard 200 that year.

Yet the bulk of those in attendance were Nikides’ Memphis fans and friends, who were most familiar with Low Society, the dynamic band he and his wife Mandy Lemons formed in 2009. Jeff Janovetz, DJ for the online Radio Memphis, gave a heartfelt remembrance of his encounters with Nikides, followed by Brad Dunn, who recalled the power of hearing Low Society for the first time and his efforts to book the band at American Recording Studio. This ultimately led to the band’s second album, released by Icehouse Records/Select-O-Hits in 2014, You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down.

Mandy Lemons and Sturgis Nikides perform as Low Society at the 2018 Western Maryland Blues Festival. (Photo: Alan Grossman)

That made it all the more powerful when Lemons joined deerfrance’s band for a passionate rendition of Tom Waits’ “Way Down in the Hole.” In what was clearly a cathartic moment for the singer, she had the audience spellbound. Afterwards, I caught up with Lemons to learn more of her and her husband’s story.

Memphis Flyer: How did you and Sturgis meet?

Mandy Lemons: It was in October of 2008, in New York. A good friend of mine had known Sturgis for thirty years or so, and he was already trying to hook us up musically. Like, ‘Oh, you need to meet this guitar player!’ and telling him, ‘You need to meet this singer!’ So he had a party at his house and we met and I was just like, swept away immediately. But I had to play it cool for a while. You know what I mean? He had no idea that I was that in love with him! Then, after playing music for a year, we got to know each other and became friends. And then we dated for a year, and then we got married.

How did you two wind up in Memphis?

We had our first European tour at the end of 2012. And after that, I wanted to go down south and roll around a little bit, you know, and take him down there and get into Texas blues. Everyone’s a badass down there, you know, and I’m originally from Houston. So we went down to Texas and kicked around for like four months, but we just couldn’t find a place to live, we couldn’t find a good drummer or bass player. And then we played the Juke Joint Festival [in Clarksdale, Mississippi], as a duo.

My friend, who was kind of like our patron at the time, said, ‘You know, Memphis is right around the corner. You guys should go check it out.’ And we were like, ‘Oh, we didn’t think about that. Really?’ So he put us up for a week here, in an AirBnB, and everything just went right. So we got our stuff in Texas and came back here and have been in the same apartment ever since.

And you connected with the scene here rather quickly, it seems.

On our first night here, we saw Earl the Pearl play at Huey’s. And we were just like, ‘What?’ Like, ‘We’re home. We’re in the right place.’ And the next night, there was an open blues jam at Kudzu’s. So we went over there, and of course they made us wait till the very last, because we looked like a couple of New York freaks, which is what we are! They were like, ‘These people are either gonna really suck or they’re going to be great.’ So we did our best, and everyone loved it. People came up to shake Sturgis’ hand immediately. Me and Dr. Herman Green connected, and we played on Beale Street the next night, which had been a dream of mine since I was 12. And I just was blown away.

Low Society was so well regarded after that point, and many fondly recall your residency at the fabled Buccaneer Lounge back in the day. You made your second album at American Recording, and released a third album as well. Are there any unreleased tracks by Low Society that you were working on while Sturgis’ health was failing?

Well, you know, he started having health issues when Covid started, and had open heart surgery last summer, and that’s when it started getting scary serious. Then he got this crazy, aggressive, super fast cancer that killed him in two months.

So that was on and off for the last four years. He would get better and then something else would happen. But in the good times, when he was feeling good, he definitely was playing guitar. I mean, it’s like being an athlete. You have to give back, because if you don’t consistently use it, you lose it. So he was practicing, and we had our fourth album in the works. He was producing that and mixing it and putting in his magic sauce and overdubs and all that stuff. And he finally finished it just a few months ago, and he said, ‘That’s it! It’s finished.’

All I’ve got to do is lay some vocals down and get it mastered and distributed and all that stuff.

Was it also cut at American Recording?

No, actually, we recorded all of it in Belgium. Our drummer and bass player live there. But it’s been like five years, since 2019, since Sturgis and I played a show. So thank you guys so much for having me up there [at the memorial] and allowing me to sing with y’all. That was really cool and very much needed. It’s been a long time. But…there’s more where that came from.

As producer Brian Eno once said, the Velvet Underground didn’t sell many records during their five-year run in the late 1960s, but everyone who bought one started a band.

They were abrasive, off-putting, and alienating — in other words, they were punk years before Lester Bangs coined the term to describe their descendants. One of the people who bought their records was a young English folk singer who performed under the name David Bowie. In 1971, he was playing the Velvets’ ode to methamphetamine “White Light/White Heat” to thousands of teenagers who were just there to hear Ziggy Stardust play “Space Oddity,” and continued to perform the song until his retirement in the early 2000s.

Clockwise from top left: Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Mo Tucker, and Nico

Despite their broad influence, the Velvet Underground is one of the last of the 1960s rock giants to get a career-spanning documentary. Now it seems that they were just waiting for the right person to come along to tell their story. They found that in experimental filmmaker Todd Haynes — an influential cult figure in his own right — whose infamous debut “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” was told using Barbie dolls to stand in for his subjects. In I’m Not There, he rendered incidents from Bob Dylan’s life using five different actors to portray the singer, including Cate Blanchett.

Despite the fact that they owed their careers to their discovery by Andy Warhol, very few people pointed cameras at Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Mo Tucker, and Nico. This is a problem if you’re trying to make a movie about them. Hayes blows straight past the problem by embracing the experimental film scene bubbling up in Manhattan at the same time as the Velvets’ reign of terror. While assembling the documentary Woodstock, editor Thelma Schoonmaker discovered that a great way to spice up marginally useful footage is to employ split screen. If one image of, say, a drummer playing, is boring, but it’s the only in-focus thing you have to use, pair it with another boring image and suddenly it’s interesting. Hayes takes it to the next level—at one point, I counted 12 simultaneous images in one frame. (Hayes recently told an interviewer that he licensed 2 1/2 hours of footage for the two-hour movie. The film’s list of media credits was so long it gave me a panic attack.)

A busy frame from Todd Haynes’ *The Velvet Underground*.

It all sounds disorienting, but the effect is evocative and clarifying. In the early going, you feel like you’re walking around the New York of the ’60s, looking everywhere for the strange art you heard about. By the time the Velvets hit the road with the Warhol’s revolutionary multimedia presentation, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, you feel like you’re on their wavelength, and the San Francisco hippies they shocked and appalled seem hopelessly square. Here, Haynes shows his knack for picking the perfect anecdote, such as the fact that Warhol would grab random people from the crowd to run the lights, and just before the band took the stage at San Francisco’s Fillmore theater, promoter Bob Graham hissed “I hope you bomb.” (“Then why did he book us?” wonders a still incredulous Mo Tucker.)

To say this is a “warts and all” story is an understatement. Early in the film, Lou Reed’s sister mounts an angry, pre-emptive defense against people who single out the songwriter for his legendarily copious drug use. This is the guy who wrote “Heroin,” after all. Reed grew up in an oppressive household, and when his parents discovered he was bisexual, they sent him for electroshock therapy. But nearly everyone interviewed comments on how difficult he was to work with, or just be around. Warhol’s Factory is described as being a terrible place for women, but it doesn’t seem like the snake pit of backbiting and out-of-control egos was a great place for anyone.

But without the Factory, Reed and Cale would have never been paired with Nico, the stunning German actress who gave voice to “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and “Femme Fatale.” To Haynes, every bit of it, good and bad and weird, contributed to the volatile mix that produced music that spoke to the outcasts, the gender nonconformists, and the depressive nerds who heard something of themselves in “Black Angel Death Song.” With Summer of Soul, The Sparks Brothers, and now The Velvet Underground, 2021 is shaping up to be a banner year for music documentaries.

The Velvet Underground is playing at Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grill.