Tag: live music

Categories
Music Music Features

Ruckus Restart

Eldorado Del Rey, aka Mic Walker, the mutton-chopped leader of The Ruckus, likes living downtown. He likes the pedestrian life. He likes buying his groceries at funky markets along the Main Street mall. But mostly, the longtime Sun Studio employee likes the fact that he’s still living in the city that rock built.

“I’d just gotten to this point when I really thought it might be time for me to find another city,” Del Rey says, his resigned voice heavy with the unmistakable tone of hard luck, Memphis-style.

“And then I moved downtown,” he says, “and it was like I was living in a completely different city.”

The singer, songwriter, and guitar player takes off his black, gold-trimmed sunglasses and replaces them with a pair of black gold-trimmed prescription glasses. “I have some rules,” he says. “I don’t go out [downtown] on the weekends … too many people mess with me.”

There can be no doubt, Eldorado Del Rey stands out in a crowd. Gangly, hairy, dressed in the immaculately considered wardrobe of a garage-rock hero, and riding a pimped-out single-speed bike with ape hangers and flames, he looks like a cross between Viva L’American Death Ray‘s Nick Diablo and a Mojo Nixon impersonator: charming, self-effacing, and self-consciously absurd.

“I know why you’re here,” says an old codger entering The Green Beetle, a sports bar on South Main, and making a beeline for our table. “You’re here for Elvis week, ain’tcha?”

“No, I live here,” Del Rey answers politely, grinning and shaking his head as if to say, “See what I mean?”

In 2003, it was Del Rey’s fusion of Delta blues and indie rock that caught the ear of Joe Perry. The Aerosmith guitar player was attracted to Del Rey’s bluesy grit and signed The Porch Ghouls, Del Rey’s pre-Ruckus group, to be the first band on his new Roman Records label. Unfortunately, the Ghouls’ album, Bluff City Ruckus, didn’t perform particularly well, and while on tour with Kiss and Aerosmith, the Porch Ghouls fell to pieces. Shortly thereafter, much of Del Rey’s life followed suit. His marriage dissolved and old friends wouldn’t give him the time of day. Since then, he’s been tinkering with his sound, trying to keep a band together, and moving further and further from the blues.

“I’ve always just wanted to play rock-and-roll,” he says in defense of the Ruckus’ latest, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which reaches back to the Delta for a few numbers but is built around electronic beats and futuristic lyrics.

After the Porch Ghouls broke up, Del Rey recorded the first Ruckus album, Planet of the Vampires, backed by The Immortal Lee County Killers. It was Del Rey’s trashiest, raunchiest effort to date, more in the spirit of The Oblivians than the Porch Ghouls. But the Killers had other gigs to play and couldn’t get too tied up in a side project.

Del Rey started jamming with natural-born bluesman Jason Freeman, who cut his teeth fronting The Bluff City Backsliders.

“We were working together at Sun, so we started talking, and we were both into the exact same music,” Del Rey says. But after playing for a while with the Ruckus, Freeman joined up with Amy LaVere in Amy & the Tramps.

Today, the Ruckus is a three-piece featuring the inventive guitar leads of a youngster who calls himself Matt Danger and beats dropped by DJ Natty Batty.

“I was always having trouble finding a drummer, and I always thought it would be cool to have a pretty girl up there with us cueing samples,” Del Rey says.

As one might expect, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? sounds like a record made by an artist in transition. It lacks the aggression of Del Rey’s previous roots efforts, but it never quite embraces its gothic potential either. However, the band has never been tighter or more original, Del Rey’s voice has never sounded more confident, and fans of Phillip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard will certainly appreciate this homage to the masters of smart sci-fi.

“I like transitions,” Del Rey says. “A lot of times, it’s the transitions that really stand out, like with the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and Revolver. I’m not comparing myself to the Beatles. I’m just saying that sometimes transitions can be a good thing.”

El Dorado & the Ruckus play a CD-release party for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Friday, August 25th, at the Hi-Tone Café. Doors open at 9 p.m.; admission is $5.

Categories
Music Music Features

Justify Your Love?

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

I had multiple conversations about Justin Timberlake with friends, co-workers, and acquaintances in the week leading up to his local concert Saturday, August 19th. And in nearly every case the very notion of taking Timberlake seriously was broached with some hesitation, caveat, or apologetic tone. While the generalist in me finds it preposterous that people would so readily resist acknowledging the worth of such good music, it isn’t really surprising.

People are more self-conscious about pop music than other forms of cultural production. More so than books, movies, or television shows, the music you consume seems to define who you are. People — especially youngish people and more especially people who like to think of themselves as hipper than the norm — use their musical taste to establish or advertise a cultural identity. And, for a lot of people, a former Mickey Mouse Club member who made his fame with the ridiculously named (gasp!) boy band *NSync doesn’t fit comfortably into that self-image. This is a powerful force — it has to be to cause someone to risk denying his or herself a record as great as “Rock Your Body.”

And if you think this self-consciousness doesn’t extend to Timberlake himself, you obviously weren’t at the New Daisy Theatre Saturday. Playing a “hometown” date on his month-long SexyBack club tour, Timberlake divided his 12-song set evenly between selections from his 2002 solo debut Justified and the long-time-coming September follow-up Future Sex/Love Sounds. Despite being a full-fledged star and grown-ass man of 25 (or is it now 26?), Timberlake is still a little skittish about his teen-pop past. In recent years, both Timberlake and his “people” have discouraged the use of the word “pop” to describe him. And onstage at the Daisy, his attempts to make his demeanor more “adult” were often transparent and a little desperate. Timberlake seemed too proud of himself when he’d cup his hands and thrust his hips in imitation of rear-entry sex, utter a profanity, take a swig from a bottle of beer, or make a marijuana reference.

While playing up this supposedly transgressive content only ratifies the hesitation his doubters have about him, it’s also indicative of a boyishness that, however unintentional, is still one of Timberlake’s great strengths.

Part of what made Justified so charming was the way the residual sweetness of Timberlake’s boy-band period cut against the sex-symbol striving of his career makeover. This was but one of many reasons the record reminded so many people of Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, another young pop star/producer collaboration that had a similar energy. And regardless of whether this dynamic will fuel Future Sex/Love Sounds, it most definitely still fuels Timberlake’s live performance.

Leading an 11-piece, all African-American band somehow made Timberlake look like a kid, especially since everyone in the band seemed older than him. And though the racial contrast could have been a turnoff, it wasn’t. Timberlake’s boyishness came through in his call-and-response crowd request on “Senorita,” the way he beat-boxed like a 13-year-old who just discovered Biz Markie, and the way he jumped up and down like a teenager in front of the bedroom mirror while lacing the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” riff into his own “Like I Love You.”

And yet, in full-on seduction mode, Timberlake was never less than believable. Issuing the sexual threat “If that’s your girl, better watch your back” on a show-closing performance of his current hit “SexyBack,” Timberlake evoked the coltish come-on that opens Justified: “Gentlemen, good night. Ladies, good mornin’.” Making age-appropriate sexuality seem precocious was part of the appeal that made Michael Jackson a superstar, back in the distantly remembered days before he became (or was revealed to be) a weirdo. Timberlake’s combination of cuteness and carnality — if not, of course, his perfectly acceptable voice — isn’t too far from Al Green himself.

And that isn’t the only aspect of Timberlake’s performance that evoked a Memphis legend: When Timberlake straps on an acoustic guitar, it seems nearly as pointless as when Elvis Presley did.

Joking aside, Timberlake’s presumed plasticity also contrasts with his status as a Memphis artist, since so much of the best Memphis music tends to be defined and extolled in terms of authenticity and purity: Elvis at Sun vs. Elvis post-Sun; Stax vs. Motown; hill-country blues vs. modern bar-band blooze, etc.

Despite claims made for or by him, Timberlake’s music has nothing to do with Memphis tradition. It’s a disco/hip-hop/chart-pop synthesis that’s rooted in his showbiz-kid training in Orlando but is otherwise placeless. That didn’t stop Timberlake from the hard-sell last weekend: “I travel too much. I gotta come home more often,” he said early on. More to the point, Timberlake introduced the new “Until the End of Time” with a “Let’s go back to Soulsville tonight. Back to the days of Stax.” The result, unsurprisingly, was a lot more Philly or late-period Motown. (Bringing Three 6 Mafia on stage for their collaboration “Chop Me Up,” Timberlake seemed more comfortably Memphis.)

Fronting a full band and taking his turns behind a piano or with that acoustic guitar, Timberlake is exchanging Jackson-style pop star for Prince-style bandleader, an evolution the very Prince-like title of his upcoming album suggests. And Timberlake’s show did have some of the feel of Prince’s more R&B-oriented, post-Purple Rain period (Parade, Sign O’ the Times).

But Timberlake’s certainly no Prince — or even D’Angelo — as a bandleader. Planting himself at the piano for half a show denies the physicality that is part of his appeal. The guitar did lead to the one album-to-concert improvement, where Timberlake fronted a three-acoustic-guitar attack through a propulsive reading of the Justified standout “Like I Love You,” stripping the Neptunes track down and pushing the song forward. I’ll take Timberlake’s acoustic soul over India.Arie’s any day.

That exception merely underscored Timberlake’s biggest problem as a live performer: translating his very studio-bound music to the stage. Timberlake has the same problem as a lot of hip-hop artists do, and for good reason: All his tracks are the creation of hip-hop producers (Timbaland, Neptunes), not of live bands. On Justified, Timbaland’s “Cry Me a River” is a maelstrom — it engulfs you. Live, in a harder, more rock-oriented, less nimble version, it merely comes at you. The Neptunes’ “Rock Your Body” is a dance-floor megaton bomb. On stage at the Daisy, it sounded distressingly ordinary.

That Timberlake’s great studio pop doesn’t always translate to the stage shouldn’t be considered an indictment of his artistry. This is a problem that his music shares with an awful lot of the best pop music. But I suspect most of the fans already resistant to him would take it that way. Real music is live music, right? Not always. Timberlake proved a viable live performer and bandleader last week. But I’m betting the record sounds even better.

Categories
Music Music Features

Let’s Have A Party

In 1955, when the sounds of Memphis rock-and-roll were first starting to reverberate around the nation, Wanda Jackson was in the middle of it all. The throaty singer and guitar picker had been discovered by country star Hank Thompson as a teenager and was making hits before she’d graduated high school. But everything changed in the summer of ’55 when she first met Elvis Presley, whom she would briefly date. Presley persuaded the singer to get with the youth revolution and “get real, real gone.”

“So when I put out new records, one side would be country, one side would be rock-and-roll,” Jackson says from her home in Oklahoma.

Jackson was young and innocent, but her voice was mature, worldly, and wild. If Elvis’ songs were suggestive, Jackson’s “Let’s Have a Party” and the atomic rocker “Fujiyama Mama” were downright lascivious. “Riot in Cell Block # 9” made “Jailhouse Rock” sound like a showtune, and “Funnel of Love” is the single best recording made by a female recording artist from rockabilly’s first wave. Of course, it helps that Jackson is really the only female artist from rockabilly’s first wave.

When the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line was released in 2005, Jackson was portrayed by Memphis roots rocker Amy LaVere, a dead ringer for a young Wanda. The two will meet and play together for the first time at the Hi Tone Cafe on Saturday, August 12th.

Flyer: So why isn’t the first female rocker in the [Rock and Roll] Hall of Fame?

Wanda Jackson: Well, from what I’m told, getting into the Hall of Fame is a very complicated process. But I understand that I’m always nominated, and I’ve made the final ballot. But there are so many young people who just haven’t been exposed to rockabilly or “’50’s rock,'” as I prefer to call it. They’re not as familiar with my body of work. … But I do think [my connection with Elvis] has helped. … Besides, last year I received the National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellowship and that’s the highest award an artist can receive from the country.

There weren’t a lot of female honky-tonk stars when you were growing up. Kitty Wells and nobody else. Where did you find your role models?

Kitty really opened up the doors. I guess I was the third female. It was Kitty, Jean Shepard, and me. My dad had a little band, but then the Depression came and World War II. He married my mother, and then I came along. He was never really able to pursue his dream, so I guess — like a lot of parents — he wanted to live through me.

So your dad was the inspiration.

Yes, mostly. Daddy put a guitar in my hand when I was six or seven. He showed me some chords, and it didn’t take long before I was playing along. Daddy played the fiddle, and he’d take Mama and me to all the big dances in the Los Angeles area, in all of the big beautiful ballrooms, and we’d watch groups like Spade Cooley, Bob Wills, Hank Penny. My parents said they never had to worry about me when we were at the dances because they always knew exactly where I’d be — standing right in front of the bandstand.

And I always especially liked the girl singers they would have because they always got to wear pretty outfits, and they all knew how to yodel. I wanted to learn how to yodel.

You started learning early, and you started gigging early as well.

When I got my first Decca contract I was still a junior in high school. In ’55 I was touring and had a couple of songs on the Billboard Top 10. Mom kept working, but Daddy quit his job and started booking me. The first time we played with Elvis was 1955.

Most parents were afraid of Elvis. Was your dad?

Elvis explained to me how it used to be our parents who bought all the records. He told us kids were buying records now. He was the first person to explain that, and he suggested that I try playing in a more rock-and-roll style. He was so nice and encouraging, and my dad thought he was nice too.

Early rock-and-roll was a boy’s club. Were you intimidated by Elvis, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis?

Those guys were just my buddies. Amazingly enough, I led a pretty sheltered life, even on the road. Daddy was there to make sure my reputation remained intact. And let me tell you, he kept me on a pretty short leash.

Wanda Jackson & Amy LaVere

Hi Tone Cafe

Saturday, August 12th

Doors open at 9 p.m, tickets are $15