As anyone reading this week’s music feature about MEM_MODS might have gathered, Peabody Records, the boutique imprint label founded in 1976 by the late singer/songwriter Sid Selvidge, is once again releasing albums after a decades-long hibernation. Naturally, this revival is being guided by Sid’s son, Steve Selvidge, the guitarist extraordinaire best known for his work with The Hold Steady and, more locally, Sons of Mudboy and Big Ass Truck.
Recently, the Memphis Flyer and the younger Selvidge took a deep dive into the ongoing vinyl revival during a 2022 interview centered on the vagaries of the small label game. Peabody has always been the epitome of the Memphis specialty record company, offering but a few releases that nonetheless had a global impact in their day. In that sense, the humble label that Sid Selvidge launched 47 years ago, with it’s oddball duck logo reinforcing the “Peabody” connection (and echoing the classic Bluebird Records label of the 1930s), is the grandfather of today’s many independent imprints like Goner, Black & Wyatt, Blast Habit, Back to the Light, and others.
“Peabody was always a bespoke, curated label,” says Steve Selvidge. “A ‘we’re not going to worry about what you look like or how many units you’re going to shift’ kind of thing. It was just what piqued my dad’s interest.”
That philosophy led Peabody to release some very unconventional material indeed, most famously Alex Chilton’s trash-rock masterpiece Like Flies on Sherbert. During the label’s ten year heyday on vinyl, other releases included Sid Selvidge’s The Cold Of The Morning, Waiting On A Train, and Live LPs, Crawpatch’s Trailer Park Weekend, Cybill Shepherd’s Vanilla, and Paul Craft Warnings! by — you guessed it — Paul Craft.
And there’s one album that the younger Selvidge is particularly proud of: “Peabody had the first vinyl release of Christopher Idylls by Gimmer Nicholson. Well before Light in the Attic or anyone else put anything out. My understanding was that Terry [Manning] and Gimmer cut that stuff in the ’60s, and it never found a home. So when my dad was up and rolling with Peabody, he was like, ‘Well, I’ve got the machine in place. I’ll put it out.'”
Later, Steve Selvidge-related projects like Big Ass Truck and Secret Service were released on CD, as were reissues of Like Flies on Sherbert. But MEM_MODS Vol. 1 marks the label’s first vinyl product since 1986. And, according to Selvidge, the two projects — the label and the ad hoc band — went hand in hand.
After he’d mixed tracks that he’d recorded during quarantine with Luther Dickinson (North Mississippi Allstars) and Paul Taylor (New Memphis Colorways), Selvidge says “we realized, ‘We’ve got a record!’ And we were very enthusiastic about it. But trying to see who could put it out became an endless conversation that was going nowhere, until I finally said, ‘You know what? I’ll just end this conversation and put it out. I’ll take it from here.'”
Getting back to the nuts and bolts of vinyl production and distribution came naturally. “It turns out, I do know some things,” says Selvidge, “and I’ve got the stuff together. We didn’t spend any money on the recording; we just did it ourselves. And once I had a project to do, that got the ball rolling with Peabody. Before that, I was always like, ‘Man, I should do that.’ Getting started was the hardest part; the inertia was so great. But the enthusiasm for MEM_MODS became a catalyst to get the whole label moving, finally. I was intrigued by the idea of, rather than saying, ‘Hey, I started up the label, here’s my dad’s records!’ saying instead, ‘Hey, we’re coming back with something new.'”
Now that the ball is rolling, or the duck is flying, as the case may be, look for reissues from deep within the Peabody catalog, and what Selvidge calls “other projects that I’ve been putting off.” Given his famously far-flung collaborations, those projects could be very interesting indeed.
