Tag: Live From Memphis

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Music Music Blog

Rock-n-Romp Rides Again

Above Jupiter (Credit: Graham Burks)

For a good decade or more, this city offered a brilliant solution to music-loving parents who couldn’t take their young kids to see great indie bands in the bars that featured them: Memphis Rock-n-Romp. Founded by Stacey Greenberg in 2005, the loose-knit organization was active for 10 years, staging afternoon shows by local bands in backyards and other kid-friendly spaces. And, because the music wasn’t typical children’s fare, younger parents too overworked to frequent the club scene flocked to the events, kids in tow. I know I did.

All the sense of discovery that one finds in the club experience was still present in the Rock-n-Romp shows, and there was even good beer to be had (for the adults). I’ll long remember seeing The Barbaras in all their glory at one such event on the grounds of the Metal Museum. There I was, a dedicated parent, discovering a new band! With their multi-voiced harmonies and pop hooks and hint of madness, The Barbaras were a revelation in more ways than one, and the kids liked it too.

Now, after a long hiatus with only occasional revival shows over the years, Memphis Rock-n-Romp is back in full swing. And with it comes another revival, the beloved Live from Memphis platform, which helped pioneer live-streamed music concerts in the early 2000s, including some of the Rock-n-Romps, before going into hibernation itself for some time.

This Saturday, October 28th, Live from Memphis presents a special Halloween Rock-n-Romp from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Ravine, which many Memphis Flyer readers know from our recent Best of Memphis party. Entry is $5 per adult, but children are admitted free of charge. Adults must have a child with them to attend. (Click here for details).

Bands include KittyPool, Above Jupiter, and Tamar Love (from Mama Honey). While Love is the wisest, oldest, and biggest name on the bill, some of the other players were avidly taking in the music of the original wave of Rock-n-Romps, even playing together as kids at the Rock-n-Romp summer camp more than a decade ago. Their interest thus piqued, they’re still cooking up sounds of their own today.

One often saw the Davis family at the original events; now Josie Davis will be performing in KittyPool. And she’s not alone. As Live From Memphis co-founder Christopher Reyes notes in a statement, “When Mati was a baby, we took her to one of those classic Rock-n-Romps at Mud Island, but she doesn’t remember. She and her sister are now at the perfect age to really appreciate it, so for me, it made a lot of sense to bring it back. Once we started planning, we were all like, ‘Hell yeah,’ and everyone we told about it pretty much had the same response.”

Board member Graham Burks has long been deeply involved in the organization, including as a player, and now it’s time for his son, Graham Burks III, to take the stage in Above Jupiter. Memphis Flyer readers may recall our review of Graham-the-Younger’s band The Becomers two years ago. Above Jupiter began around that same time, and all of the band members attend Stax Music Academy together.

As Graham-the-Elder explains, “An early version of Above Jupiter opened up for the Becomers at the Time Warp Drive. Graham (III) and keyboardist Desmond Coppin have been playing together since they were three, and played a Rock-n-Romp 10 years ago at age four. Bassist Noah Hand and Graham met in elementary school and started plotting this band as an extension of Noah’s visual art. They call the music ‘art pop’ and Noah designs their shirts and art. Noah recently had an animated short in the Indie Memphis Youth Film Fest. He is currently animating their first music video for their first single ‘Details,’ which combines his animation with live footage shot by my brother Justin Burks and edited by Noah.”

And, as Burks notes, Above Jupiter will clearly be in the Halloween spirit this Saturday. “They’ll be in costume as Gorillaz,” he says, “and they’ll be performing live on WREG Live at 9 a.m. on Friday morning.”

The Art Project will also lead Halloween arts and crafts activities for the kids at Saturday’s event, and there will be a Halloween costume contest with prizes awarded.

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Cover Feature News

Into the Multiverse: How Christopher Reyes Created an Alternate World

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The moto crawler has crashed on a moon in an obscure corner of the multiverse. Its pilot and creator, Baron Von Opperbean, is missing. A towering volcano spews smoke and dribbles lava. Mysterious caves beckon you to enter. Maybe the Baron went this way. But then you remember the warning from Louise, the helpful A.I. who guided you here — “Don’t go near the anomaly.”

It sounds like a scene from a sci-fi blockbuster or a role-playing game. But it’s not. Walk into Off The Walls gallery, a warehouse space near Downtown, and you’re in Baron Von Opperbean’s Exploratorium of Magic, Science, and the Multiverse, a 2,000-square-foot art installation that is the brainchild of multimedia artist Christopher Reyes.

Christopher Reyes

Ahead of His Time

Reyes was born in Northern California. His grandfather helped found a martial arts discipline known as Kajukenbo. “It started in the 1940s in Hawaii, so technically it’s the first mixed martial art in the country, but it’s not well-recognized,” Reyes says.

Growing up, Reyes learned Kajukenbo with his father, Grandmaster Alan Reyes. “I still train almost every morning, just for a bit, to wake up and get the flow going.”

After his parents’ divorce, he moved to Memphis in 1986, where his mother, Vernie Kuglin, was based as a pilot for FedEx. Reyes’ artistic skills got him accepted into Memphis College of Art, on the cusp of the digital age. He discovered a new passion in the college’s tiny computer lab and began to use digital tools in his graphic design work. “I was the only one using the computers,” he says.

He got a job at Ardent Studios exploring the fledgling world of interactive entertainment. “We were working on enhanced CDs and CD ROMs. They weren’t called that yet because no one had a name for them. That’s where I cut my teeth. I had access to computers and video editors. We had one of the first Avids in the city, I’m sure. That’s where I learned how to video edit.”

His nights were spent in Memphis’ electronic music scene. “I don’t know if I’d call myself a musician,” he says, “but I can sequence the hell out of some electronic music.”

It was around this time, in the early 1990s, that he approached Downtown real estate mogul Henry Turley about buying an empty warehouse space at 1 S. Main. At the time, Downtown Memphis was nearly abandoned. An artist with a well-paying tech job was the ideal person to revitalize the space. But Reyes couldn’t get a loan to cover the entire building, so Turley proposed a solution: He would create a condominium association for 1 S. Main and sell Reyes the cavernous upper story of the building, while retaining control of the ground floor, which was rented to a small restaurant.

Accessible only through a rickety metal staircase in an alley, the artist’s loft became Reyes’ home. For years, Reyes had to go downstairs to use the bathroom. But as the ’90s wore on, he paid off the first mortgage and took out a second one to finance renovations. Eventually, he built a second floor in the loft, expanding from 4,000 to 6,000 square feet, with two bathrooms and plenty of space for offices and the kind of big art projects he favored.

In 1999, with the internet spreading rapidly, Reyes realized he was surrounded by great music that no one outside Memphis was privy to. “The idea was to stream music because Memphis musicians were so isolated,” he says. “With no record labels here, no distribution at that time, no infrastructure, no industry at all, they just had no outlets.” By 2001, he had taught himself enough web design to create a website to host his recordings. It was called Live From Memphis, and it quickly grew in scope and ambition. Before Facebook, or even Myspace, Reyes created the first online directory of Memphis musicians. “It was weird because I thought I knew a lot about Memphis music. Then when I did that project, I realized, I didn’t know Jack about it. There were all these silos of different types of music all over the city.”

Soon, other types of artists had their own listings on Live From Memphis — LFM for short. “I was trying to provide resources to them, and I figured, here’s a graphic designer, here’s a filmmaker. I had two directories going and I was like, ‘This is stupid. I need to just put these directories together, and they’ll find each other.'”

The LFM creatives directory eventually had more than 5,000 entries. It became the premiere tool for creative networking in the Bluff City.

Reyes was also tied into the Memphis film scene, creating animation and music videos. LFM sponsored the first music video showcases at Indie Memphis and eventually spun the program off as a music video festival. LFM fielded camera crews to document Gonerfest for a decade, producing two DVD concert films. (Note: I worked with LFM as a co-creator from 2009-2013.)

Reyes experimented with streaming video, but it wasn’t until YouTube came on the scene in 2005 that it became practical to put LFM’s video creations on the web. “Flipside” was a series of short documentaries on Memphis artists that accompanied Craig Brewer’s pioneering webseries $5 Cover. “Get Down” was produced with the Downtown Memphis Commission to promote the newly flourishing neighborhoods around 1 S. Main.

Live From Memphis was ahead of its time, but the world caught up. Reyes never sold advertising, and eventually grants and donations dried up. Facebook’s global spread made the directory redundant. LFM shut down in January 2013.

“I see people over and over trying to do a music directory or a music thing that’s gonna change Memphis music. It always ends up petering out because what they’re thinking about is just music,” Reyes says. “You need an ecosystem.”

Fish and Foul

“For a couple of years, I was just kind of floundering,” Reyes recalls. “It was really hard to get out and shake that off because Live From Memphis was my identity. It was how I saw myself, and when I didn’t have that anymore, I was like, who the hell am I? What am I doing?”

Reyes became fascinated with projection mapping, a new technology that allowed precise control of projected digital images that can make surfaces appear to come alive. “VR [virtual reality] is cool, but when you can bring the weird stuff into your world, that’s cooler. You’re actually in something, and it’s happening around you.”

Meanwhile, Reyes and his longtime girlfriend and business partner, Sarah Fleming, had two children together. In 2016, he and Fleming and filmmaker Laura Jean Hocking collaborated on a breakthrough project called Fish. “They wanted to do a film, Laura Jean and Sarah, and I said, ‘Well, why don’t we do it like you’re inside the film?'”

Fish combined video, some of which was shot at the Memphis Zoo aquarium, with murals and projection mapping to create an immersive underwater world. It was the first big exhibition at Crosstown Arts. Mounted before the opening of the Crosstown Concourse, it legitimized the fledgling arts organization in the minds of Memphis. “Fish is the most magical thing I have seen in Memphis probably ever,” wrote Commercial Appeal art critic Fredric Koeppel.

But the triumph would be short-lived. In the early 2000s, Turley sold his interest in 1 S. Main to the owners of the Madison Hotel. In 2016, Aparium Hotel Group bought the Madison, and a share of 1 S. Main with it. The building had been under a PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) program since before Reyes bought his condo. When the PILOT expired in 2016, the new owners exploited a loophole in the program:

Technically, any building under a PILOT is owned by the Downtown Memphis Commission; the “beneficial owners” only lease it, with an option to buy at the end of the term. When the PILOT expired on 1 S. Main, Aparium claimed the building’s title and sued Reyes to take control of his condo. A bruising court battle ensued. Reyes and Fleming appealed for help to the Downtown Memphis Commission, whom they had worked with for years branding Downtown, but were rebuffed. The artistic community Live From Memphis had nurtured rallied around Reyes and Fleming, organizing street protests outside city hall. Broke, and fearing for the future of his children, Reyes was eventually pressured to settle with Aparium. Stung by the negative publicity, Aparium changed the name of the Madison Hotel to the un-Googleable Hu. The terms of the settlement are secret. When asked about 1 S. Main, Reyes declined to comment.

Making A World

Reyes was adrift. To make matters worse, his father passed away in 2019. “I was going into my own world.” Reyes says. “I needed to do something. I was talking about this idea I had about Baron Von Opperbean a lot. Then my partner [Fleming] and I split up. It was really difficult because it was breaking up the family. I immersed myself in my project. Fortunately, Yvonne Bobo had just bought this building from the state and was fixing it up. She was really excited about it and wanted me to come look at it and said, ‘Hey, let’s do this project together.'”

Baron Von Opperbean’s Exploratorium of Magic, Science, and the Multiverse is the culmination of all of Reyes’ skills. It combines sculpture, murals, projection mapping, sound design, and music to create an immersive experience. “I’m making a world. I just need to make all these elements that make my world exist.”

Reyes’ creation is an example of what he calls experiential art. While researching the project, he visited the City Museum in St. Louis and Meow Wolf in Santa Fe. “When I saw my kids running around experiencing that joy at City Museum, I was like, that’s it. Whatever I make has to give people joy. It has to give them the sense that they’ve walked away from their problems, their troubles, and the reality of the world, and give them a new reality.”

Reyes started work on the project in 2019, with the goal of opening in March 2020. “I had no money and no materials when I started. All I had was this space that Off The Walls had given me. So I just put it out there to the community. The money came in slow, but the materials came in pretty fast.”

The maze-like installation is made almost entirely of creatively reused materials — including a bundle of old Memphis Flyers transformed into a papier-mâché landscape. The University of Memphis supplied projectors for the ever-changing videos that combine with murals and sculpture to create an immersive environment. Donated sound systems provide each area with a unique soundscape. School children helped create alien flowers out of plastic bottles.

Reyes worked feverishly to finish the massive project, set to open on March 28, 2020. “I was doing 24-hour sessions to get it done, and then COVID hit. I was just like, ah, man, it’s over. I just can’t do it anymore. Then I was like, well, actually I could make the videos better. I could make the sound better.” Reyes finished the project largely by himself, with final help from filmmaker John Pickle. The results are stunning — mysterious and immersive.

A Portal

The premise: Baron Von Opperbean is a scientist/magician who travels space and time collecting technology and artifacts that catch his fancy. But the Baron has gone missing, and it’s up to visitors to solve the mystery of his disappearance by following his trail through a series of portals to different worlds. Or, you can just enjoy the ride, Reyes says. “We tried to pack as much as I could into this space. It’s multilayered to make it feel like you don’t know which direction you are going. I don’t want to explain it to people. I just want them to experience it.”

Before the pandemic, Reyes had wanted the Multiverse to be a communal experience, but for now, it’s open on an appointment-only basis. Groups of up to 16 can book trips. “They have to be people you’re comfortable being around. I didn’t want strangers bumping into each other because in a portal, you’d be in a tight space. I’m losing money with only two people in there, but I don’t care.”

Reyes says the reactions have been “overwhelming.” At first, kids are reluctant to explore, but once they get comfortable, they start to ramble all over the maze-like space. “It was really fun. Lots of crawling,” says Mike Pleasants, who recently visited with his wife, Virginia, and daughter, Vera. “There were so many little details. It was really cool how many parts are all coherently pulled together.”

Reyes says this version is a prototype. He hopes to eventually create a permanent attraction on the scale of City Museum, which attracts a million visitors per year. “I’d like to put a giant multiverse in the Coliseum,” he says. “Hopefully there’ll be people who recognize the potential that exists with immersive spaces. People want it, and with COVID even more so because they’ve been cooped up, and this makes them stop thinking about all the bad stuff in their lives.”

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

This Week At The Cinema: Barack Obama and Live From Memphis

It’s a busy week in Memphis film land.

The Final Year

Everybody’s turning out for Avengers: Infinity War, but if you’re in the mood for something more serious, check out The Final Year at Studio on the Square. In 2016, director Greg Barker got unprecedented access to Barack Obama and his foreign policy team. Maybe they calculated that it would be an uneventful time, so a camera wouldn’t capture much, but they calculated wrong. Check out the trailer for this unique political documentary.

This Week At The Cinema: Barack Obama and Live From Memphis

Across Midtown, the Indie Memphis Shoot & Splice series moves to a new space: the Crosstown Arts atrium. There, Memphis’s own LensRentals.com will give a demonstration of some of their newest gear. The demo begins at 7 PM, and there’s free beverages!

Wednesday at Crosstown Arts, Indie Memphis’ Microcinema series presents a retrospective of the pioneering web video work by Live From Memphis. For eleven years, LFM, based at 1 S. Main in Downtown Memphis, was devoted to the arts, music, film, and culture of the Bluff City. During that time, Christopher Reyes, Sarah Fleming and many other Memphis artistic types produced hundreds of hours of video of all kinds. This retrospective program, which will see LFM’s principle creators giving behind the scenes stories of a decade of Memphis creative life, will be a pay what you can affair with all proceeds going to the legal defense fund to help Reyes and Fleming fight eviction from 1 S. Main by the Aparium Hotel Group, owners of the Madison Hotel. For more details on that ongoing fight, see the Memphis Flyer’s coverage here (part 1) and here (part 2).

Here’s just one Live From Memphis video: New Orleans musical wizards Quintron and Miss Pussycat tear the roof off GonerFest 5.

This Week At The Cinema: Barack Obama and Live From Memphis (2)

See you at the movies!

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday Special Edition: Live From Memphis

Today we bring you a very special episode of Music Video Monday featuring the work of Christopher Reyes and Live From Memphis.

For eleven years, from 2002-2013, Live From Memphis shone a light on the endless creativity of Memphis’ music, art, and film communities. At once a website, a media outlet, and a community organization, LFM was run out of Christopher Reyes’ loft at 1 S. Main, which became a meeting place and hub for Bluff City creatives. Reyes was a pioneer of web video production, and Live From Memphis’ YouTube channel features thousands of videos spanning a decade of Memphis art.

One of Reyes’ highest visibility projects was recording Gonerfest every year. His videos, often shot under less than ideal circumstances, helped raise the music festival’s profile into national prominence. Here’s a clip of Memphis garage lords The Oblivians reuniting at Gonerfest 9.

Music Video Monday Special Edition: Live From Memphis (3)

One of LFM’s most popular features were the pop up art festivals the organization ran in Downtown and Midtown. The Ink Off pitted two artists against each other to create different halves of one canvas.

Music Video Monday Special Edition: Live From Memphis (2)

Another long running LFM feature was 60 Seconds, where Memphians were given one minute on video to do whatever they would like. This web video series was eventually copied first by music review site Pitchfork, then by NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts. Here’s Memphis reggae stalwarts Chinese Connection Dub Embassy laying down a fat, one-minute groove.

Music Video Monday Special Edition: Live From Memphis (5)

Reyes is also a bicycle enthusiast who builds his own bikes. One of his creations was the Mobile Music Machine, which he used to pedal musicians around town for moving concerts. Here’s Memphis’ own Valerie June on the MMM:

Music Video Monday Special Edition: Live From Memphis (4)

And here’s Paul Taylor’s experimental electronic act Interrobang cruising around a pre-revitalization Crosstown Sears Building.

Music Video Monday Special Edition: Live From Memphis

And finally, and most relevant to Music Video Monday, Live From Memphis produced the Music Video Showcase, a music video competition that was first associated with Indie Memphis, then became an independent festival that attracted video creators from all over the world. Here is a music video for Lord T. and Eloise directed by Reyes and featuring Memphian photographer Tommy Kha.

Music Video Monday Special Edition: Live From Memphis (6)

Today, Reyes, his partner Sarah Fleming, and their two small children are threatened with eviction from 1 S. Main by Aparium Hotel Group, a Chicago hotel company who recently bought the Madison Hotel. There will be a rally today in Civic Center Plaza protesting the eviction and the treatment of the artists who have been working for years to improve Memphis’ image.

If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, thank Christopher Reyes for his tireless work, and send an email to cmccoy@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Respect the Hustle

Memphis runs deep in my blood. The city gave me a life, a career, a passionate resolve, and a school-of-hard-knocks education in music and business. I learned what it means to hustle. And I learned quickly that those with no hustle are destined to fail — talent, contacts, and pedigree be damned. In the long run, it’s the strength of your hustle that separates the meek from the mighty!

I’ve been thinking a lot about Memphis music recently and trying to figure out the best way to share my unique insight and address the issues and opportunities surrounding the Memphis & Shelby County Music Commission (MSCMC). This not a personal attack on the staff, board, or leadership of the commission. It is an educated opinion from someone who is passionately committed to seeing Memphis succeed.

In 2003, I was recruited to run business development and community relations for the MSCMC.

It was my great honor and privilege to get asked to work on behalf of and advocate for the creative community. I was tasked with developing educational initiatives and cross-platform marketing programs to empower the community with a hands-on ethic for the business of music and to shine a light so the world could know about the second coming of Memphis music.

I don’t remember when I met Christopher Reyes, but I do recall thinking how lucky I was to have someone with that kind of award-winning creative chops, digital savvy, and passion to tell the story of Memphis’ local music scene. I recognized the artist in him early on and knew that harnessing that creative energy would take some time and finesse, but it was so worth it! In my estimation, there was not then, nor is there now, another creative force in Memphis like Reyes and the team at Live From Memphis (LFM). Their commitment to Memphis music should be seen as a model for entrepreneurial, creative, and civic engagement. Allowing LFM to shut its doors was Memphis’ biggest industry loss since Stax shut down. (Bold statement, I know.) But, tell me, who is telling — and selling — Memphis’ musical story now? Not the MSCMC, that’s for sure.

Have you seen the MSCMC website? Sweet placement on the MySpace link! You either still believe that’s relevant, or you haven’t updated your site since 2006. Not having some sort of relevant online presence in 2015 represents a huge failure by the MSCMC. Without a vibrant website, how effective can their programs be in creating awareness or revenue for local artists and music entrepreneurs? It’s going to take more than local showcases to move the needle.

I believe the commission should be an organization that: 1) works to provide meaningful and actionable insight and best practices for the business of music; 2) is a global advocate for Memphis’ creative community and music entrepreneurs; 3) is a strategic leader and business-development champion for Memphis’ creative community.

Memphis doesn’t need the commission to fix the local scene. Local musicians and music businesspeople are scrappy enough to figure things out on their own. If the commission would allocate resources to projects and initiatives that give local artists, entrepreneurs, and everyone else the opportunity to work smarter in their business and reap the benefits of a world-class marketing campaign, what a testament to the creative power of investing in a creative community that would be!

The commission needs to understand its effectiveness comes from empowering the community around them. Respect their hustle, and they will love you; disrespect it, and you no longer deserve to represent them.

If the choice were mine to make, I would remove ineffective programs like Memphis Music Monday, First Fridays Rock, Memphis Music Revealed TV, and Generation Next and reallocate those budgets (and additional operating capital) toward programs such as a music business educational initiative (monthly or quarterly); a Marketing Memphis Music campaign (a social and event-focused campaign to help support a “Memphis as a musical mecca” message); a “Gig Swap” initiative with sister music cities such as Austin, New Orleans, Chicago, Nashville, St. Louis, Oxford, and others.

I believe these simple changes could make a difference in the lives of this music community. I hope the MSCMC recognizes and embraces the hustle that’s right under their noses.

Wayne Leeloy is a former Memphian now living in Nashville. He is head of Brand Partnerships & Digital Strategy for G7 Entertainment Marketing.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Played Out

It has been obvious to anyone who takes a moment to look that funding the Memphis Music Commission has been a waste of money for some time.

The biggest problem with the commission is that it treats other Memphis music organizations like competition and duplicates their efforts in an attempt to appear relevant. The best example is the fact that they think they need to provide local musicians with performance opportunities. There are plenty of clubs, house shows, and organizations, such as Rocket Science Audio, Goner Records, Ardent Studios, Memphis Rap, and Ditty TV that are better equipped to accomplish that mission and have a greater reach.

The commission’s amateurish performance videos have a very low number of views on YouTube, which are tangible, measurable stats for what these programs are contributing to Memphis music. They have no platform, fans, or following. Who do they think they are helping? 

To put it into perspective, my former organization, LiveFromMemphis.com, has been dormant for three years. In our time, we filmed and recorded thousands of Memphis music performances. The content we created is still generating views on our YouTube channel. Around 1.4 million views and counting. If Live From Memphis had been granted $250,000 a year (the Music Commission’s annual budget from the city), we could have more than quadrupled our output, as well as our reach. Can you imagine what would happen if MemphisRap.com, Goner Records, or RocketScienceAudio.com were similarly funded?

Then there was the not-for-profit Memphis Music Foundation, which, over four or five years, provided many of the same services as the Music Commission while blowing through somewhere around $4 million of private funds. Can anyone tell us what those funds did for the local music industry?

As for Councilman Jim Strickland’s proposal to fund Memphis Music Town, how will they be different? While I agree with Strickland that the Memphis Music Commission, in its current state of over-paid staff and lack of any measurable accountability, should not continue to receive funding, I fail to see how simply shifting tax dollars to a not-for-profit organization solves the problem. One glimpse at the Memphis Music Town web presence tells me that it’s a bureaucratic bad idea.

Why continue to provide educational resources to musicians when there’s no infrastructure for success? What’s the point of equipping musicians with industry knowledge when very few opportunities to put that knowledge to use exist? Without a focus on developing local industry, we are simply better preparing our musicians for when they eventually leave town in search of opportunity.

Memphis musicians don’t need another resource center that teaches them how to manage a MySpace account or to sign them up for antiquated organizations such as NARAS. Memphis certainly does not need to turn over its only source of music funds to an organization serving only one genre of music.

Memphis musicians need innovation. They need a way to be seen and heard beyond local showcases at the Hard Rock Cafe. They need an army of online content creators with as many avenues to get their music out to the world as possible. There are shows going on in all parts of the city. Go film them. Go record them. Help them get their stuff on the internet, where fans discover music today.

Don’t give millions of dollars to one organization. Instead, fund smaller, grassroots content creators, because you never know when one of those may blow up into something bigger. Maybe if Darius Benson (a 20-something content creator and the cover story subject of the Flyer’s May 7th issue) had received local funding or had an infrastructure to help move his career forward, he’d be staying in Memphis instead of heading to Los Angeles in search of greener pastures.

Fans don’t get behind an educational institution. They get behind artists, their favorite bloggers, records labels, studios, and TV/web shows. It takes a lot less capital to fund these kinds of style-curators and content producers and raises the community as a whole.

Please don’t throw money away on old industry or a not-for-profit educational model. Fund excellence, fund risk takers, fund innovators. The Music Commission, Music Foundation, Memphis Music Town or whatever they may call themselves in the future, are the old guard from a dying industry model. Getting rid of them is a no-brainer. Fold Memphis music and film into business and economic development and quit treating music like a charity case.

Instead, invest in its development by putting money in the hands of artists, content developers, and the infrastructure that directly supports them.

Categories
Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Saying Goodbye to Live From Memphis

In an announcement posted on the front page of their popular web site, the pioneering arts community organization Live From Memphis announced last week that it will be ceasing operation. “The bottom line is that our site has far outgrown our resources to run it,” the announcement reads in part. “We had the passion, just not the financial support.”

Livefrommemphis.com launched in 2001, but the roots of the organization go back to the late 1990s when Christopher Reyes, an avid electronic music fan, saw a performance of bluegrass band the Mudflaps at Murphy’s in Midtown. “They did this acoustic fucking jam of the century, and I was like, ‘Oh My god! This is amazing!’ There was only 20 people in the room. It changed my perspective on music,” Reyes said.

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Reyes recorded Memphis bands playing live — at first only audio, then later adding video to the mix — and posted them online. His goal was to connect the many talented artists of Memphis with a larger audience, and the project grew to include Memphis film, art, and culture as well as music. “Eventually — and I didn’t realize this right off the bat — it became about the interaction between the artist and audience. There had to be an event where the audience could really get together with the artist,” Reyes says.

One of Reyes’ earliest innovations was the Creative Directory, an online space where talented Memphians of all kinds could create profiles and post their credentials and resumes so people and business requiring their services could easily find them. In the days before MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn took social marketing mainstream, the directory proved to be a valuable asset to Memphis creatives.

Categories
Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Live From Memphis Calls It Quits

Live From Memphis, the volunteer-supported film, music, and arts organization that has captured so many Memphis music moments and showcased them to the world, is calling an end to its 12-year run.

Founder Christopher Reyes posted a letter on livefrommemphis.com today letting fans know that the website has run its course.

From the letter:

“You may have noticed that livefrommemphis.com has been having some issues lately. The bottom line is that our site has far out grown our resources to run it. Over the last two years, I’ve been juggling content between servers to keep costs down. It’s finally come to that point where we just can’t do it anymore. We had the passion, just not the financial support.”

Reyes said, while it may not be the last we hear from Live From Memphis, today marks the end of the website as it has been for the last 12 years.

Reyes included some tough advice for his city at the end of his letter:

” To Memphis, demand more from your leadership. Stop celebrating mediocrity. Stop funding crappy advocacy groups and meaningless brand campaigns. The creatives of Memphis need more than just cheerleaders. Filling out the check box is no way to make change.”

Live From Memphis was responsible for many arts events and projects over the course of its run, but most notable are the Lil’ Film Fest (a quarterly theme-based film fest) and the Music Video Showcase (an annual round-up of local music videos run in conjunction with the Indie Memphis Film Festival.

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Categories
Music Music Features

Shaky Ground

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

In May 2002, the Flyer published a story about a fledgling local arts organization, Live From Memphis, that had recently emerged with a website (LiveFromMemphis.com) and a plan to help promote and unify the city’s diverse “creative” scene through a series of projects. While the organization has had many successes in the six years since that article was written, Live From Memphis has lately fallen on hard times.

Founded by film director and graphic designer Christopher Reyes, 38, Live From Memphis is well-known and respected in the Memphis music and arts community not only for the valuable networking and promotional resource that the website provides but for its involvement in countless other ventures, including Lil’ Film Fest, the Music Video Showcase at the IndieMemphis Film Festival, Gonerfest, and the My Memphis DVD project.

Reyes told the Flyer back in ’02 about his plans to expand Live From Memphis, which would eventually include working with Memphis’ industry establishment to organize festivals, record-label showcases, a recording studio for artists on a budget, and further developing the website as a promotional tool. However, building cooperative relationships with groups such as the Memphis Music Commission, Memphis Music Foundation, Memphis Tomorrow, and Arts Memphis proved to be harder than Reyes expected.

“I have no idea why it never worked out,” Reyes says. “I’ve tried and tried, and I’ve talked to everyone I could ever talk to about forming partnerships. We didn’t want to just go out there and do things by ourselves. That’s the whole idea of community — working together. But people don’t want to work together; they want their own little corner, their own piece of the pie. All these groups like Arts Memphis and the Memphis Music Foundation are working toward building sites that are practically identical to LiveFromMemphis.com. At some point it’s like, why are we doing this?”

Reyes pauses for a few seconds and then adds, “I think somewhere along the line I might have been blackballed.”

Reyes doesn’t deny having a contentious relationship with certain, notable members of the Memphis music industry, which has no doubt had an effect on his ability to realize his dreams of integrating Live From Memphis into other industry groups.

“People don’t like to hear that what they are doing is wrong,” Reyes says. “And people like me who are outspoken tend to become outcasts.”

Support for Reyes and Live From Memphis from within Memphis’ more grassroots community, however, is fairly unanimous.

“Every good idea that the Music [Commission or Foundation has had] they stole from Christopher. Nothing they’ve tried to do has ever had an effect on me as a musician,” says Mark Akin, of the local band the Subteens and a close friend of Reyes.

“With a minimal staff and totally self-funded, Live From Memphis is an exhaustive central location to listen to bands, find out about bands, buy music, and find out about events around town,” says Goner Records’ Eric Friedl. “That Chris can do this by himself is mind-blowing. It’s no wonder he looks exhausted all the time.”

“Organizations like Live From Memphis are the key to a cohesive and productive music scene and thus to putting Memphis back on the map for good current music,” says Brad Postlethwaite, of Makeshift Music and the local band Snowglobe. “For years, Christopher has been going out in the community and recording show after show, night after night, all for the simple goal of promoting the music and helping the artists. It is a thankless task, unfortunately, as is evidenced by the lack of funding for projects like Live From Memphis.”

Despite an inability to form relationships with the local industry or find any substantial outside funding, Live From Memphis has remained a fixture on the local music and film scene and continues to grow. Reyes recently moved Live From Memphis from its offices in Reyes’ downtown loft to a more publicly accessible space at the MeDiA Co-op in Midtown, launched a social networking component (called “Community”) at the website, and is developing a print publication due out later this year called Art Rag. This comes in spite of the fact that Reyes has been dealing with significant health problems since August that have seen him bedridden, in and out of hospitals, and severely in debt.

These days, Reyes is getting around better and continues to work on Live From Memphis projects around his graphic design and film work. However, personal and organizational financial concerns have left him wondering how long he can keep it going.

“I think we get taken for granted, absolutely,” Reyes says. “We have only a handful of supporters. We are the same creatives who we’re trying to support. I’ve definitely thought, at times, about shutting it down.”

For now, though, Reyes is content to push forward with minimal assistance and the hope that someone will see the value of Live From Memphis and offer some substantial support. Until then, he continues to promote the music scene that he loves by whatever means available.

“As soon as Christopher was well enough to get out of bed, he was recording shows for free,” Akin says. “He has a genuine passion for Memphis music and puts his money where his mouth is. That’s something we need to save and support.”

Categories
Music Record Reviews

A great Memphis music festival captured in sight and sound on two impressive discs.

A collaboration between Goner Records and Live From Memphis — two do-it-yourself organizations that have done as much for Memphis music as anyone over the past few years — Gonerfest 2: Electric Goneroo DVD/CD is a really impressive two-disc, two-hour collection that captures the garage-rock and punk chaos that ensued when like-minded bands (and like-minded fans) from all over descended on Memphis last September for the multi-day, multi-venue music festival organized by the Cooper-Young record store.

The DVD contains 26 performances from 18 bands while the CD contains 27 performances from 27 bands — captured at the Hi-Tone Café, the Buccaneer, and the Goner store — with very little performance overlap between the two discs.

I’ve always been leery of live albums since, as pure aural art, they’re rarely as interesting or sound as good as the studio recordings of the same bands. They’re snapshots of an immediate experience with the immediacy removed. So, as good as the audio disc is, I’m more impressed by the DVD, which inherently brings you a step closer to the actual experience. And it helps that this concert film is so well put together.

The Gonerfest 2 DVD was directed, produced, and shot by Sarah Fleming and Christopher Reyes of Live From Memphis and edited by Reyes and Claudia Salzig. And it isn’t rooted in the stale, dim stationary camera visuals you might expect. The crew uses multiple hand-held cameras to capture different angles and perspectives on the same performances and bring you so close to the action you sometimes feel yourself heaving along with the crowds.

The editing is sharp and witty and frequently as dynamic as the music without ever being incoherently overactive. And, in a very smart move, the Live From Memphis crew veers into the crowd and outside the clubs (or the Goner store’s hot-dog cookout) between performances for a sort of Gonerfest version of Heavy Metal Parking Lot. The disc could have even used more of this material.

Musically, there are no outright weak links on either disc, but I’m pretty confident it’s not just a local bias that makes the Memphis (or Memphis-connected) bands stand out. The local bands are the ones most likely to push through the bare basics of noise and energy and attitude into something more substantial. (Biggest non-Memphis exception: Probably Killer’s Kiss, whose “Shine It” brings a Byrds-y vibe to the garage-rock template.)

Playing songs on both the DVD and CD with his band Knaughty Knights, former Oblivian Jack Yarber conveys a wisdom, sardonic sense of humor, and emotional depth few performers here can touch. And if it wasn’t already clear, Yarber’s old bandmate Greg Cartwright is some kind of rock-and-roll savant. Opening and closing the DVD with performances of “We Repel Each Other” and “Bad Man,” Cartwright’s the Reigning Sound is fierce and soulful, but they may the one band that’s even better on the audio disc: It’s almost unfair to the 24 bands who come before that they have to share disc space with the Reigning Sound blasting through the whiplash rock-and-roll of Too Much Guitar‘s “I’ll Cry.” On a collection that pays loving testament to a musical genre and cultural scene, this band transcends both.

Other Memphis-connected highlights abound: The Persuaders, with Memphian Scott Rogers on guitar, boast a seductive, menacing, bluesy low-end guitar roar, especially on “Hot Stix.” And though an onlooker raves about Jay Lindsey’s Reatards at the Hi-Tone (“the only real punk show I’ve seen in 10 years,” he proclaims, marveling that he got hit in the head with a full bottle of beer), his poppier band the Angry Angles are more impressive with an electric set at the Buccaneer. The Memphis band that relies the most on noise, energy, and attitude, the Final Solutions, also make the most of those qualities, barely holding together the anthemic “This Is Memphis Underground” and “I’m a Punk” before a surging, joyous crowd at the club.

Other Memphis acts here push the boundaries of the Goner musical continuum: Harlan T. Bobo’s more reserved songcraft and Impala’s instrumental, atmospheric movie music. (Both, sadly, are missing from the DVD.)

— Chris Herrington

Grade: A-