As #901Day becomes more and more established as a Mid-South tradition, it’s increasingly clear that music plays a central role in celebrating what Memphis is about. This year, September 1st falls on a Thursday, making it the perfect kickoff to an entire weekend of touting the Bluff City’s greatness. And if you’re hip to the unique sounds of our local musicians, this weekend is for you.
The most obvious starting point is the proudly Memphis-centric weekend at Railgarten, aka 901 Fest. The second annual staging of the festival, which runs from the 1st to the 4th of September, brings back a few familiar faces from last year, along with some newcomers. Lord T & Eloise, the Dead Soldiers, and the Lucky 7 Brass Band were featured last year. Now, the first two headline again, along with Star & Micey and North Mississippi’s recent Grammy-winner, Cedric Burnside. The Lucky 7 Brass Band, Marcella & Her Lovers, Neighborhood Texture Jam, Devil Train, and the Wilkins Sisters fill out the festival’s lineup.
It’s a powerful reminder of the diversity and eclecticism of the talent that thrives in this region. And the same could be said for the music and beats that will emanate from the Overton Park Shell as it begins its fall seasons of the Orion Free Music Series and the Shell Yeah! Benefit Concerts. While not technically starting on September 1st, the Don Ramon show kicking off the season on the 2nd dovetails neatly with other music reverberating through the weekend. And on Saturday, September 3rd, the past, present, and future vibes of Memphis soul will be in full effect with the WLOK Stone Soul Picnic, created in partnership with the Gilliam Foundation.
The picnic’s lineup highlights groups that often don’t get the attention they deserve: O’Livya Walker, The Spiritual Soldiers, Vincent Tharp & Kenosis, Charisse’, Stevenson Clark, The Mellowtones, MBMC, Annie & the Caldwell Singers, Melodic Truth, Uncle Richard’s Puppets, Roney Strong & the Strong Family, Josh Bracy & Power Anointed, the Sensational Wells Brothers, and Zacardi Cortez.
Finally, with September 4th’s Occupy The Shell event, a festival celebrating Black Memphis artists and creatives, local heroes Al Kapone & Don Trip will headline at the Shell. Of course, there’s no one more “901” than Kapone, whose “Whoop That Trick” is practically the Memphis city anthem, at least during Grizzlies games.
And perhaps Bar DKDC‘s September 3rd birthday bash for Frank McLellan, seen in the Sheiks, the Tennessee Screamers, and Model Zero, will be the most Memphis event of all, bringing that big family vibe to the fore in honor of one of the city’s most prolific musicians. The Obruni Dance Band, specializing in West African highlife music, further ramps up the diversity ante the night before.
And if recorded music is your bag, Memphis has you covered. Shangri-La Records and River City Records will both offer discounts on records by Memphis artists past and present this Thursday. And the Memphis Listening Lab will partner with WYXR 91.7 FM on a record swap and zine fest on September 3rd and 4th. While not necessarily Memphis-focused, there are sure to be some local gems buried in those stacks.
September 1st will clearly be a time to get out there and start vibrating to the local grooves. The sound waves will reverberate throughout the 901 all weekend.
This week’s cover story, The Vinyl Countdown, came out just as the city was reeling from the news of John King’s death at the age of 78. Sherman Willmott, who knew King well and helped create the Memphis Listening Lab last year on the strength of King’s thousands of records, CDs, and music-themed books, wrote on Facebook at the time:
Not going to lie. This one hurts. I’ve met so many great people in the music biz, but John King is Tops of the Pops. Huge loss for Memphis and a big loss personally. One of a kind person, always funny and so anti-cool, he’s too cool. Truly the Spirit of Memphis like Bowlegs Miller or Jim Spake — guys who get stuff done behind the scenes in a quality way and aren’t superstars but make things shake, rattle, & roll … defining exactly what people actually love about Memphis. Godspeed to the King of Memphis!
Indeed, King was a pivotal player in the city during its musical zenith, as a promoter, program director, and studio owner, having initially co-founded Ardent Studios with fellow teens John Fry and Fred Smith in 1959. I reached out to Willmott to hear more of his thoughts on the King of Memphis, the man who collected it all, John King.
John Fry and John King, experimenting with studio design as teens (Photo courtesy Memphis Listening Lab).
Memphis Flyer:John’s career was multi-faceted. He saw the Memphis music business from a lot of sides, wouldn’t you say?
Sherman Willmott: Oh definitely. From the little stories he would tell, his whole life was fascinating from the beginning, when they were kids, getting into rock and roll just as it was starting. He grew up with rock and roll, chasing the records. Whether it was him taking the bus downtown to Home of the Blues record shop on Beale, or later with Terry Manning and their buddies getting on the phone to call in mail orders of Beatles records from England. He was very aggressive and determined to get whatever it was he was searching for. And that paid off with his incredible collection.
His work as a record promoter also fed into that.
To me, some of the most interesting tales he would tell were from when he went on the road with the Stax PR people, or the radio people, and they’d go into mostly African American stations. John of course was the token white guy, pushing the rock and roll stuff, but he loved all the music. He particularly loved the hustle and working with the DJs and A&R guys and promo men. That to me is fascinating. It’s like that book, Hit Men. About how you actually got records played. John lived that life. And he lived a life of no regrets.
And one reason he did it was that [Stax president] Al Bell really took him under his wing. So he had an entrée into that world, because of Stax and their muscle. The Stax promotional team was great, with Deanie Parker and those folks. John may have not had an office at Stax, but he certainly knew everyone there. They were friends. There was a lot of overlap between John, Stax, and Ardent.
And he was like a kid in a candy shop. They had worked in radio as teenagers, but to visit stations in a city like Philadelphia was a whole other level. He was pushing records, but I’m sure it wasn’t “pushing” to him; he was just talking passionately about some record they were promoting. Of course, he also would have a tip sheet, and that was another way he had a reciprocal relationship. He would promote other people’s records, and that was a way for him to stay on top of things and get more records for himself, which was a perk.
His collecting covered a lot of genres, didn’t it?
He liked everything, and he had really good taste. So he was getting other people’s new releases, at a time when there was so much great music coming out in every genre. His timing in life couldn’t have been better, I think.
What had he been doing in more recent years?
He always had his hand in the music business. But once the Ardent label went on the shelf for a while (because it never really shut down completely), and Stax went out of business, people in the music business here either went to L.A. or Nashville, generally. Or they fought over the scraps that were left, in the “Disco Duck” era, when studios weren’t as busy. From 1967 to the early ’70s, when American and Stax were going, and Elvis was recording in town, and everyone from Paul Revere and the Raiders to Ronny Milsap to Dan Penn was here, Memphis was on top of its game. If you were there for that, and the rug got pulled out from under you around 1975, it’s like being at the club at three in the morning when the lights come on. It’s time to go somewhere else. I think there was a lot of that in general. And I think John moved around a bit, but he never completely got out of music promoting. It was his passion. He never stopped collecting.
In his collection, there’s a lot of stuff from the ’80s on 12″, when hip hop and dance music was starting to take off. And you wouldn’t think he’d be a big dance music guy, so that was a weird part of the collection. But I think he took whatever was happening in the music business.
I think the big turn for him was in 2000, or the late ’90s, when he started getting into internet radio. I think at that point he was formulating a game plan for what to do with his collection, and that was to make programs for this station, Tiger Radio. And he collected all these yearbooks and phone books and old radio clips and ads. What he wanted to do was make each internet radio show focus on a specific date. Like, April, 1967. And he wanted to pick out people in the yearbooks and talk about them going to a specific dance to see a band. That’s how into it he was. He would play the ads from that year along with the songs. When I met John, that’s what he was into. He basically had his own massive radio station and library, and all the things you needed to do an old school radio show.
So he’d sit there with selections from his collection and digitally record internet radio shows?
Yep, he was one of the first into broadcasting music online. And he had all formats: records, CDs, cassettes, everything. But when I walked into his office the first time, it was like walking into a 1960s radio station. He had shelves and shelves of ’45s that are now in the listening lab.
Are those shows still archived online?
I don’t think they are. It was tigerradio.net. Obviously named after the University of Memphis. He was a big fan.
How did John end up giving his entire collection to the fledgling Memphis Listening Lab?
We’ll call it the collection, but I call it his life’s work. But it wasn’t about him, it was about placing that collection into the best situation possible. He was searching for the proper place for it to end up, where it would get the most public use. He wanted it to be used in the best possible way. And he and I would talk about various opportunities out there, and how much they were or were not what he was looking for. Inevitably each one was a disappointment.
And that’s why the Crosstown opportunity was so appealing to him. Before that, he had resigned himself to the fact that his collection was going to live somewhere outside of Memphis. And that would have been bad for Memphis, a missed opportunity, but also, he was concerned it would be put in the back of some university collection somewhere. One archive I visited had some amazing records, all stuck behind a cage. There was no interaction with the collection by the public. Everything was done by appointment. It was more like the records were in archival prison. At universities who take in collections, there’s usually a hierarchy. Your stuff gets put in the back because some other dude’s collection comes in. Things get lost in the university shuffle. At least in the Memphis Listening Lab, you can come in and see everything that’s available. Those records and CDs are there to be used.
You can have a ton of stuff, it doesn’t matter what stuff you have, but if no one gets to see it and the passion you put into it, what’s the point? John’s collection is really well curated stuff. It’s in great shape, and it’s also really eclectic. There was a method to his madness, and only people who go really deep into it will see that.
When we opened the MLL, he was very pleased. He took great satisfaction in seeing how it finally got built, how much care was put into the design of the space, just like he put into the design of the collection. One thing he said was, “They’re thanking me — but I’m thanking them!” Seeing him in there and enjoying the space was very positive. The last time I saw him was at the listening lab. We had a ball, sitting around listening to music, and he was at peace. The best thing was, he and his friend Tim Riley, who’d worked in promotions at Stax, went over there about a month ago. Attendance has been picking up more and more since Covid subsided. Saturdays can get pretty busy over there. So John and Tim got to see the full-on appreciation and usage of the collection. That’s the ultimate, from my point of view. That’s what really made him happy. He wanted the collection to be enjoyed by the public, with the radio station nearby and the space and the programming. It’s fulfilling the mission he desired, and he got to see it in action. That’s the payoff.
It’s no secret that vinyl is resurgent. After being eclipsed first by CDs in the 1990s and then by streamed digital music, records were nigh impossible to find in mainstream stores for many years, until around 2008, when the manufacture and sales of vinyl albums and singles began to grow again. Since then, the trend has only accelerated, with market analyses predicting continued annual growth between 8 percent-15 percent for vinyl musical products over the next five to six years.
What fewer people realize is how every step of the process that makes records possible can be found in Memphis. “The Memphis Sound … where everything is everything,” ran the old Stax Records ad copy, and that’s especially true in the vinyl domain: All the elements are within reach. Johnny Phillips, co-owner of local record distributor Select-O-Hits, says “There’s not very many cities that can offer everything we offer right here. From recording to distribution, from inception to the very end. Everything you need, you have right here. Memphis is like a one-stop shop for vinyl right now.”
From the musicians themselves to the final product you take home on Record Store Day, here are the 10 pillars upon which our Kingdom of Vinyl rests, 10 domains which thrive in Memphis as in no other city.
Take Out Vinyl’s Jeff Powell (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Mastering
A lacquer master, freshly cut on a lathe, offers a level of high fidelity that most listeners, even record aficionados, almost never hear. But Take Out Vinyl, run by Jeff Powell and Lucas Peterson from a room in Sam Phillips Recording, is that rare beast, a vinyl mastering lab, where raw audio from tape or a computer is first transferred to plastic and one can sometimes hear a lacquer playback. It’s not meant to be listened to. The discs cut here would typically be used to create the metal discs that stamp the grooves onto the records we buy, but the lacquer itself is too soft for repeated plays. And yet, for those who’ve heard a playback from a freshly cut lacquer, the quality is haunting.
That was the idea behind the one-off Bob Dylan record auctioned at Christie’s last month for $1.78 million. Spearheaded by producer T Bone Burnett, a new recording of Dylan performing “Blowin’ in the Wind” was cut onto a single lacquer disc, never to be duplicated or mass-produced.
Producer T Bone Burnett (Photo: Jason Myers)
To help make it a reality, Burnett enlisted Powell, one of the world’s most respected mastering engineers. “Lacquers are very soft,” says Powell. “We can’t play these things after I cut them or it destroys the groove. You lose a little high-end every time you play it. T Bone’s idea was to try to capture that sound of a fresh cut lacquer, but one that you could play over and over again, even up to a thousand times, with no degradation to the sound. And that’s what we have accomplished.”
The trick was finding a way to protectively coat the lacquer after it had been cut, and after years of R&D, the labs enlisted by Burnett found the right compound. “T Bone says the coating is only 90 atoms thick,” says Powell. “A human hair is about 300,000 atoms thick — that’s how thin the coating is. It was derived from a protective material used on satellites.”
Ultimately, says Powell, the goal was to reassert the value of vinyl records over digital media. “The purpose of this was not to see how much money could be made,” says Powell, “but to show how music has been devalued to next to nothing. T Bone wanted to establish that a recording like this should be considered fine art.”
Memphis Record Pressing (Justin Fox Burks)
Manufacturing
The notion of a vinyl record as fine art is not so alien to legions of collectors who curate their own personal galleries of albums and singles. But even the rarest of records were mass-produced at one time, and Memphis has that department covered as well. For decades, nearly all of the records recorded in Memphis were made at Plastic Products on Chelsea Avenue. Such was the pressing plant’s impact that an historical plaque now marks where it once stood. But in recent years, a new business has taken up the torch of vinyl manufacturing.
In 2015, the Memphis Flyer alerted readers to the fledgling Memphis Record Pressing (MRP), which arose from a partnership between Brandon Seavers and Mark Yoshida, whose AudioGraphic Masterworks specialized in CD and DVD production, and Fat Possum Records, whose co-owner Bruce Watson first suggested that they move into vinyl production. Now, it’s in the hands of Seavers and Yoshida and GZ Media, the largest vinyl record manufacturer in the world, and the Memphis company is expanding dramatically.
Memphis Record Pressing (Justin Fox Burks)
As Seavers points out, the world of vinyl has evolved as well. “When we started, we searched the world for record presses, which was really a challenge. Back in 2014, there were no new machines being built. You had to scour the corners of the earth to find ancient machinery and bring it back to life. Fast-forward to 2018, when a few companies emerged around the world that invested in building new machines. We started bringing in these brand-new, computer-controlled machines that were very different from our old machines. And that started the process of expansion. Through 2018-2021, we replaced our aging equipment bit by bit, and in September of last year, we replaced the last of our old machines.”
The pandemic was actually a boon to the young company. “We reopened in May of 2020, and by June our orders had skyrocketed. We were overwhelmed. And by the first five weeks of 2021, we booked three-and-a-half months’ worth of work in five weeks. So to say it overwhelmed us is an understatement. Now we’re sitting on a quarter-million units’ worth of open orders. So, it’s insane to see the demand grow. Before Covid, we had reduced our lead time to eight weeks. Now, it’s frustrating to quote nine months of lead time to new customers because that amount of time is life and death three times over for some artists. That’s why we’re so intent on expanding as quickly as possible.” Construction of additional facilities, expected to be operational in October, is now underway.
Distribution
Once the records are made, where do they go? Thanks to the decades-old Select-O-Hits, the answer is “across the globe.” Johnny Phillips reckons it’s the oldest distribution service in the world, and it may be one of the oldest businesses in Memphis, period. “In 1960, my dad, Tom Phillips, was Jerry Lee Lewis’ road manager. When Jerry Lee married his 13-year-old cousin, he couldn’t be booked anywhere. My daddy put all of his money into promoting Jerry Lee, and he lost it all. So, he came up from Mobile, Alabama, to Memphis and went to work with my uncle Sam, taking back unsold returns: 45s, 78s, and a few albums. We gradually grew into one of the largest one-stops in the South, supplying all labels to smaller retail stores. There used to be over 25 retail stores in Memphis, believe it or not. And then in the early ’70s, we started distributing nationwide. My dad retired, and my brother Sam and I bought him out.”
Over the years, Select-O-Hits has seen every ebb and flow of the vinyl market, including a major uptick after the advent of hip-hop. “We were the first distributor for Rapper’s Delight by The Sugar Hill Gang in 1979,” notes Phillips. That tradition continues today. “We’ve released about half of Three 6 Mafia’s catalog that we control in the last two years, on colored vinyl. And we distribute it all over the world.” And if the distribution numbers are not what they used to be before CDs and then streaming took over, they are climbing steadily. “Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, we were selling half a million vinyl records. But now we’re doing 5,000, 15,000. Still, last year was our biggest vinyl year ever [since CDs became dominant], and this year is looking just as good.”
Shangri-La’s Jared McStay (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Record Stores and Record Labels
If Select-O-Hits is moving the product around the world, it needs to land somewhere, and in Memphis that means record stores. Though we no longer have 25 retail outlets for vinyl, there are several places to buy records here. The granddaddy of them all is Shangri-La Records, founded by Sherman Willmott in 1988, then taken over in 1999 by Jared McStay, who now co-owns the shop with John Miller.
“The first couple of years,” says McStay, “I had to bet on vinyl because I couldn’t compete with the CD stores, like Best Buy or whatever. I was getting crushed, until I realized I could never compete with them. In the early 2000s, they were phasing out vinyl, and even stereo manufacturers stopped putting phono jacks on their stereos. But I had tons of records.”
Around the same time, Eric Friedl was running a small indie label, Goner, which ultimately became the Goner Records shop when Zac Ives joined forces with Friedl in 2004. They too leaned into vinyl from the very start. “I think Eric had done maybe two CDs at most when we joined forces and started expanding the label in 2004,” says Ives. “Out of his 10 or 11 releases, I think only The Reatards had a CD release. The rest were only on vinyl. There was no giant resurgence of vinyl for us. Those things came up around our industry, but we never left that model. And that’s how it was for most smaller, independent labels, especially in punk and underground realms.”
Combining a record shop with a record label is a time-honored tradition in Memphis, going back to Stax’s Satellite Records, and it carries on today through Shangri-La and Goner, which have both been named among the country’s best record stores by Rolling Stone. Both stores’ dedication to vinyl relates to their investment in live bands. Gonerfest, which brings bands, DJs, and record-shoppers from around the world, will be enjoying its 19th year next month, and Shangri-La has hosted miniature versions of that for years.
“We’re having Sweatfest on August 13th,” says McStay, “and we haven’t had one in three years because of the pandemic. There are going to be thousands of bargain records. We’ve been hoarding them for three years!” Meanwhile, local bands will perform in the parking lot, a pre-Covid mainstay of Shangri-La for most of its existence.
Though Goner boasts its own label, and Shangri-La has spawned at least three (Shangri-La Projects, plus the loosely affiliated Misspent Records and Blast Habit Records), not all stores do so. River City Records opened last year and, along with Memphis Music and A. Schwab, is already doing a brisk vinyl business in the Downtown area. Meanwhile, the city has several vinyl-friendly labels untethered to any retail outlet, namely Back to the Light, Big Legal Mess/Bible & Tire, Black and Wyatt, Madjack, and Peabody Records. These local imprints and the bands they sign, in turn, feed into the doggedly local support that the above mastering, manufacturing, and distribution businesses offer. As Powell says, “Anybody local, I’ll always try to move heaven and earth to get them ahead of the line a little bit and treat them special. Because you know, it’s Memphis, man!”
Memphis Listening Lab has thousands of LPs. (Photo: Jamie Harmon)
Archives, Audio Technology, Community Radio, and DJs
A wide swath of this town’s music lovers are brazenly vinyl-centric, and that demographic has a ripple effect in other domains. The Stax Museum of American Soul Music, for example, boasts the huge archive of Bob Abrahamian, a DJ at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, with more than 35,000 singles and LPs, now being cataloged by a full-time archivist, Stax collections manager Leila Hamdan.
Then there’s the Memphis Listening Lab (MLL), founded last year on the strength of the music collection of John King, a collector’s collector if there ever was one. As a promoter, program director, and studio owner, he’s collected music all his life. Now, his roughly 30,000 45s, 12,000 LPs, 20,000 CDs, and 1,000 music books reside in the public archive of the MLL, free for the listening and even free to record. Further, MLL has hosted countless public events where classic or obscure albums are played and discussed in depth.
The listening lab also benefits from a less-recognized aspect of vinyl culture in Memphis: the technology. Being outfitted with high-end, locally made EgglestonWorks speakers enhances the listening experience at MLL considerably. And the city is also home to George Merrill’s GEM Dandy Products Inc., which markets his highly respected audiophile-grade turntables (one of which MLL hopes to acquire).
Another archive boasting EgglestonWorks speakers is the Eight & Sand bar in The Central Station Hotel. The private bar was envisioned as a place to celebrate Memphis music history, and its dual turntables are duly backed by a huge vinyl library of mostly local music. “Chad Weekley, the music curator, is doing an incredible job there,” says Ives. The bar now plays host to the DJs who enliven Gonerfest’s opening ceremonies, and the hotel has even offered package deals combining room reservations with gift certificates to the Goner shop.
And let’s face it, this town is crawling with great DJs. In a sense, they are the ultimate vinyl record consumers, and thus help to drive all the other institutions. “It’s similar to a band,” says Ives, “because you’re taking your knowledge of music and putting it back out into the world in some way. I love hearing somebody’s personality coming through their radio program or DJ event. … Sometimes at venues like Eight & Sand, sometimes on community radio.”
The latter is clearly fertile ground for those who favor the sound of vinyl. Both WEVL and WYXR sport turntables in their on-air studio rooms, not to mention their own vinyl libraries. As WYXR program manager Jared Boyd says, “I’m a record collector myself, and for a time I was DJ-ing at Eight & Sand and using those turntables. So, when we started the radio station, we wanted people to be able to have that experience without having to go down to Central Station. We wanted these people who collect deeply to broadcast these really unique finds. I particularly wanted to cater to people who use records.”
The Music
And so we come full circle, following vinyl’s great chain of existence back to the reason we all want it in the first place: music. And it’s undeniable that the music this city produces fits our predilection for vinyl — from Jerry Lee Lewis’ piano swipes to the guitar/organ growl of “Green Onions,” from the choogling riffs of power pop to the crunching, distorted damage of punk, the sounds of this city lend themselves to the weight and warmth of music’s greatest medium. Just drop a needle on your favorite band and you’ll hear the truth in Brandon Seavers’ words: “Memphis is the grit to Nashville’s glitz,” he says. “And grit sounds a lot better on vinyl.”
Anyone who dives into Stax Records’ 1960s catalog is sure to revel in the silky sounds of the Mad Lads. Though not household names on the level of Otis Redding or Carla Thomas, they were no less at the heart and soul of Stax. Indeed, they broadened the label’s appeal, carrying the torch for a mellower vocal group sound.
Backed by friends and classmates Julius E. Green, Robert Phillips and William C. Brown III, the lead singer of the Mad Lads was John Gary Williams. And their first singles showed great promise, with the track above even breaking into the R&B charts’ top 20 of 1966.
That same year, the Vietnam War and the draft pulled both Brown and Williams out of circulation. But years later, upon Williams’ return to the group, The Mad Lads had one last chart hit with their cover of “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” in 1969.
By 1973, both John Gary Williams and Stax were considerably more politicized than the time of their first hits. In 1972, the label staged the Black Liberation-themed WattStax concert in Los Angeles, and Williams released his self-titled debut LP the next year, a changed man. His songs were about more than shopping for girlfriends. As he sang on the album’s closing track:
I believe that the whole damn world is going crazy Look at the world, there’s not a sign of peace nowhere (I believe that the whole damn world is going crazy) And does anybody care? Yes, love folks do (I believe that the whole damn world is going crazy) All the hate, all the discrimination (I believe that the whole damn world is going crazy) In the Holy, Holy, Holy Land, oh, there’s a man with a gun in his hand (I believe that the whole damn world is going crazy) It’s something I can’t understand, love should be in demand (I believe that the whole damn world is going crazy)
Though Stax folded in 1976, Williams continued performing through at least early 2018. But throat cancer claimed his voice soon thereafter, and, in 2019, his life.
And yet his 1973 masterpiece lives on, and only gains in reputation. Without a doubt, it’s a prime slice of the late-period Stax sound and its more ambitious string and funk arrangements — on par with works by Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye from the same period.
That album, and Williams’ remarkable life immersed in early soul music, civil rights, and the war, will be the topic of the night this Wednesday, July 13, 6-8 p.m. at the Memphis Listening Lab. The space at the Crosstown Concourse has been ramping up their listening events, often featuring in-depth discussions of how historic albums were made, and this WYXR Stereo Session is no different.
The album’s producer, Willie Hall, who drummed on many Stax albums between 1968-1977, will lead the listening session and discussion, so there are sure to be many first hand accounts of what was going down on and off tape. While the event is free, the Memphis Listening Lab requests that attendees RSVP for the event.
This year’s Zine Fest has a new component — the Memphis Listening Lab/WYXR inaugural Record Swap. According to Zine Fest curator Erica Qualy, this is such a perfect pairing because the birth of zines as we know them today was started as a response to the punk music culture in the 1970s, when copiers were made available commercially. People started creating fanzines and raising awareness in a way they hadn’t been able to before.
Qualy remembers hopping on the zine scene more than a few years later. “My friend and I first found out about zines in high school while browsing at the local library. We came across the book Zine Scene: The Do It Yourself Guide to Zines by Francesca Lia Block. We were entranced.”
She says they immediately went home and started brainstorming. They pulled an all-nighter until their first zine was born. Nearly 20 years later, Qualy is curating Zine Fest 6.
“Funny how seemingly small instances in your life can be the building blocks for a future,” says Qualy, inviting the public to join the revolution. “You don’t need to wait for anyone else to publish your stack of poems, your short stories about alien invasions, your comic about the dog and cat duo that saved the world. You can do it yourself. Make a zine today.”
Zine Fest 6 will be held in the upstairs Central Atrium of Crosstown Concourse, with DIY zine-making stations and vendor booth spaces.
The record swap will take place on the bottom floor of the Central Atrium. The Memphis Listening Lab, outside vendors, and the radio station inside Crosstown Concourse, WYXR 91.7 FM, will be selling music and merchandise.
Memphis is rightly known as a city of musicians’ musicians. Whether they stay planted here, like MonoNeon, or move to the coasts where the music industry and its stars are based, they bring a feel and a groove that few others can match. But the city also attracts brilliant players from elsewhere, in search of that Memphis sound. More than any formula or ingredient, like our much-touted horn players, there’s an elusive ambience, a holistic character, that emerges when one works in this city. And one element of that is simple: It’s in the rooms.
That doesn’t mean our well-appointed lodgings, but rather the classic studios that have dotted the city for over half a century. But it wasn’t always thus. At the dawn of the 2000s, digital technology led many to retreat into the safety and economy of home studios, to such an extent that many studio owners wondered if they’d go the way of the dinosaurs. Was there any money in the studio business?
In recent years, that question is being answered with a definite maybe. The pendulum has swung back to the advantages that only dedicated studios can offer, especially larger rooms, classic gear, and efficient engineering. As Boo Mitchell, co-owner of Royal Studios, one of the oldest continuously operated spaces of its kind in the world, recently noted, “It’s shifting back to the way it used to be, when we were a recording destination.”
All such history is new again, as many artists and producers clamor for a sound that some call retro and others call classic. One indication came in 2019, when what was once unthinkable came to be: A new studio opened in town. And the classic sound was crucial to it. As Memphis Magnetic Recording Co. co-owner Bob Suffolk reflected, “Our studio is brand-spanking new, although it’s done in what I call a purpose-built vintage style.”
Matt Ross-Spang (Photo: Jamie Harmon)
Memphis Sounds, Southern Grooves
Now, a new “purpose-built vintage” recording space is opening with an even more local provenance. Matt Ross-Spang, who distinguished himself first at Sun Studio and then as a Grammy-winning engineer and producer based at the renowned Sam C. Phillips Recording Studio and elsewhere, is custom-designing a new room, to be called Southern Grooves, in what was once the Sears cafeteria on the second floor of Crosstown Concourse. As he puts on the finishing touches, it’s clear that this one project embodies all Ross-Spang has learned from multiple studios around Memphis for over a decade, a distillation of the city’s legendary history of recorded music.
“On these walls, we used a polyurethane paint. And that doubled the length of the room,” Ross-Spang says. When you get a tour of a studio, you hear such absurdities regularly. Wait a minute, I think, the paint alone can double the length of the room? That’s when I realize he’s talking about the length of the room’s echo. In a studio, what matters is how your ears measure a room, not your eyes or your yardstick.
In this instance, the room is basically a closet, but it’s a closet designed to always remain empty: another absurdity. “This is what I’m most proud of, our echo chamber. Steve [Durr] designed it. Here’s what it sounds like,” says Ross-Spang as he claps a single time. “It’s about four seconds. Of course, our bodies are soaking up some of the sound.” When in use, the room will have only speakers, playing audio from the control room, and microphones to record how those sounds bounce off the walls. To build such a room, Ross-Spang and Durr studied Phillips Recording intensely. “Phillips has three chambers. The one behind the pink door at the end of the hall there is the greatest echo chamber I’ve ever heard. It’s about six seconds. I didn’t have that much space, but we had height.”
Ross-Spang is one of the few to have seen the Phillips chambers in detail. As Jerry Phillips, son of the late Sam Phillips, says, “We’ve got some of the greatest echo chambers in the world in that building. And we keep them kind of a secret. We don’t let anybody take pictures in there. It’s proprietary. We have three different sizes. And the combination can really give you a great sound. You cannot duplicate it in any kind of digital process.”
That’s true of all such physical spaces, be they echo chambers or the large rooms in which bands record. Stepping into the tracking room at Southern Grooves is like stepping back in time, both sonically and visually. Wood panels alternate with orange fabric on the walls; a wooden chair rail runs along the room’s perimeter; linoleum floor tiles sport geometric patterns here and there; perforated light fixtures, reminiscent of the Summer Drive-In, hang from a ceiling with similarly perforated panels, arranged in an uneven sawtooth pattern. All of it seems to invite a band to set up and record in the old-school way, all together, playing live in the room that time forgot.
A session at Phillips Recording, with (l-r) Rev. Charles Hodges, Matt Ross-Spang, William Bell (behind piano), Leroy Hodges, Ken Coomer, and David Cousar (Photo: Jamie Harmon)Southern Grooves, the new recording studio in Crosstown Concourse (Photo: Jamie Harmon)
Memphis Soul Stew, or Ingredients of a Sound Studio
“I kinda stole from all my Memphis heroes. At Sun, the V-shapes on the ceiling went long ways, and at Phillips they go like this. And then Chips Moman’s thing was latticework,” Ross-Spang explains, referring to the producer/engineer who helped found both Stax and American Sound Studio. “So the ceilings here are about 15 feet high; the panels drop down and are angled, but the sound goes through the perforated metal, and then there’s insulation so it stops before it comes back down. So you still get the big room, but you don’t have the parallel surfaces. You never want parallel surfaces.” Such surfaces cause sounds to bounce around too much. “That was another big Sam [Phillips] thing. The angles throw off the flatness of the floor.”
And yet some bounce is desirable. Take the linoleum floor, also a design element from Sun (actually known as the Memphis Recording Service in its heyday). Those floors have often been celebrated as being critical to the roomy sound of early Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis, and Jerry Lee Lewis recordings. As musician Mark Edgar Stuart notes, one story among his fellow tour guides at Sun Studio is that once Bob Dylan himself walked in on a tour, looked at the floor, said, “Ahh, tile,” then walked back out.
As Jerry Phillips says of his father, “Memphis Recording Service was his baby, of course. And Marion Keisker helped him a lot. They laid the floor tiles. He would clap his hands and hear how the echo sounded in the room. How alive or dead it was. He wanted a combination of live sound and controllable sound. And he just built the acoustics in that studio by experimenting.”
Jerry Phillips at the bar in Sam C. Phillips Recording Studio (Photo:Jamie Harmon)
As Ross-Spang envisioned it, having such a “live” tracking room, with some echo (as opposed to a “dead,” echoless room) was critical. “In the ’60s, all the rooms were really reverberant,” he explains. “And then in the late ’60s, early ’70s, when they got 16 track machines and could put mics closer on stuff, they started to deaden stuff with burlap. And then they went so far, they would just really deaden it. So I wanted to have a ’60s room that just started putting up burlap. I always thought that was the coolest balance. ’Cause you can always deaden something more. I can always put more shag rugs down; I can put in baffles. But it’s hard to make stuff livelier. And I just love the old tile floor. Ever since Sun, I’ve always loved that sound.”
The wood and burlap on the walls, on the other hand, are inspired by the second location of Ardent Studios, built in 1972, where Big Star (and many others) made legendary albums. Once again, Ross-Spang leaned on his design collaborator for much of those details. “Steve Durr was really good friends with Welton Jetton, who built all the equipment for Stax and Ardent and helped John Fry [and Terry Manning and Rick Ireland] design the original acoustics at Ardent. So Ardent Studio A had these kinds of reflectors and absorbers. That was a Welton Jetton design. I brought that back because I always thought that was a great look, and they sound amazing.”
Yet there are some elements of Southern Groove’s acoustics that are completely unique, unrelated to the studios of yore. “You always want limitations, and I had the limitations of the columns,” Ross-Spang explains. He’s speaking of the huge concrete columns that pepper the entire Crosstown Concourse structure. There was no possibility of removing or moving them, but Ross-Spang was okay with that. “Acoustically, the columns are interesting because they’re three-foot-thick concrete, they’re smooth, and sound will bounce off that randomly every time. There’s no way to mathematically account for that, acoustically. You play guitar from here, you move and inch, and it’ll bounce differently. I think it’ll be interesting when we get mics in here because it will randomize the room a lot.”
For Ross-Spang, the randomness was a bonus. “A lot of acousticians have one design that they go for every time, but Steve [Durr]knows I wanted something weird and not necessarily correct. Because all the Memphis studios aren’t correct, but they’re cool. I didn’t want a perfect studio; I wanted a weird studio.”
As we move into the control room, where two electricians are painstakingly working, it becomes clear that weirdness is literally wired into the entire space, thanks in part to Ross-Spang’s forethought. Pointing to the electricians, he says, “They’re pulling 30,000 feet of cable, and we’ve got conduits and troughs running to all the rooms. I wanted to wire every room for sound ’cause sometimes you want something to sound perfect, and sometimes you want it to sound like it’s in a garage. The hallways and every other little room are wired. Sometimes a guitar in the main tracking room sounds too good. So you put it in the hallway and it sounds like Tom Waits, and that’s what you need, you know? I do that a lot. At both Sun and Phillips, I would use that front lobby all the time. So I wanted to keep that here. All the wiring is running through the floor in troughs, and the cables will come up into these old school ’60s one-fourth-inch patchbays.”
Ultimately, the wires will converge on a mixing board that, among all the design features, will make Ross-Spang’s commitment to classic Memphis studios more apparent than ever. “I actually have John Fry’s original board from the original Ardent on National Street, where they did the first Big Star stuff. It’s getting fixed up, and it’ll be the main board. It was built in Memphis by Welton Jetton. And I also have a later board that Welton built for Stax, when they upgraded to the bigger boards. We’re putting the Ardent console in the original Stax frame, this cool white Formica top thing.”
The influence of Jetton on the studios of Memphis is hard to overstate. As Terry Manning, the first engineer at Ardent and now a distinguished producer, says, “Welton was a genius. He was the chief engineer at Pepper [Sound] Studios, which at the time was the biggest jingle recording company in the world and had several studios that Welton had put in. Pepper was huge, and Welton was a prime part of that. And later he started his own company making consoles, which became the Spectrasonics consoles that Stax and Ardent had. Later he changed that to Auditronics, and they were used all over the world. It was all Welton and his crew — acoustic design, electronic design, building the consoles. ‘Hey, we need a direct box! What’s a direct box? I don’t know, but Welton will build it!’ It was an amazing time, where you made your own gear and recorded your way.”
Finally, aside from the collection of other vintage gear that Ross-Spang has amassed in his current home base at Phillips, there will be vintage amps and instruments, including a Hammond A-100 organ and one thing most home studios and even many professional ones simply do not have these days: a grand piano.
For that, Ross-Spang received some sage advice from one of the pillars of Memphis’ golden era of recording. “I brought one of my heroes, Dan Penn, over here, and out of nowhere he said, ‘What kind of piano are you gonna get?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to get anything too big.’ And he said, ‘You need to get the biggest durned piano you can buy. Them little pianos, the sound don’t wanna come out of them. But them big pianos, they can’t wait to be recorded. They jump out the speakers.’ So I’m going to have a Baldwin from 1965 in here. It’s a 7-footer. It was really cool to get it from Amro Music ’cause it’s their 100th year of serving Memphis.”
James Taylor, Peter Asher, and Terry Manning at Ardent Studio in 1971, using the mixing board Matt Ross-Spang has acquired. (Photo: Courtesy Terry Manning)
I’ll Take You There, or Setting is Everything
And yet, despite all of Ross-Spang’s committment to the designs and instruments and gear of yesteryear, there’s another element that he may value over all others. As we wrap up the tour, he reflects a bit more on the simple fact of where Southern Grooves will live. The name screams out “Memphis,” of course, but there’s more to it than that. Something unique.
“Never has a studio been in such an ecosystem like Crosstown,” he says. “That was one of the biggest selling points to me. Think about with Ardent and other places with multiple rooms and who you might run into. You might be doing an overdub, but then Jack Oblivian’s in Studio A, and you’re like, ‘Hey, will you come play real quick?’ And that’s kinda gone now with home studios and one-studio facilities.
“But at Crosstown — like, we just ran into Craig Brewer! It’s kinda like having Jerry Phillips come visit Phillips Recording. Here, you can go next door to the Memphis Listening Lab and remember why we’re doing this in the first place. Crosstown is a million-and-a-half-square-foot lounge, essentially, filled with creative people. And I don’t think any other studio has had that opportunity. That’s what I feed off of: other people’s energy. If you put me in here by myself, I couldn’t create anything. But when I have the people here, I’ll go two days without sleeping because I’m so jacked, you know?”
Matt Ross-Spang plans to have Southern Grooves fully operational this August.
Sherman Willmott, Jim Cole and Matt Ross-Spang of the Memphis Listening Lab
(Photo by Alex Greene)
Back in the ’50s and ’60s, John King was already a collector’s collector. Even as he went on to distinguish himself as a promoter, program director, and studio owner (having initially co-founded Ardent Studios with fellow teens John Fry and Fred Smith in 1959), he continued collecting all the while. But for years he pondered the question of where to safeguard that collection for posterity.
Teenagers John Fry (L) and John King (R) shared a fascination with radio, recording and records. (Photo courtesy Memphis Listening Lab).
Enter King’s kindred spirits and fellow music devotees, the folks at the Memphis Listening Lab. The newly minted nonprofit, launched on the strength of King’s donated collection, has taken up residence in a custom-built space on the second floor of Crosstown Concourse, and is set to open on June 15.
Listening room in the Memphis Music Lab. Art exhibits, such as the current display of photography by Pat Rainer, will rotate through the space. (Photo by Jamie Harmon)
“Open” is a good word for it, for the lab is reimagining King’s collection as a vast public archive, complete with listening stations, event rooms with state of the art speakers and turntables, and a podcast-friendly editing studio.
John King’s collection has become legendary in Memphis music circles. A recent talk with producer Terry Manning brought King’s collecting acumen to the fore. As Manning said, “In the very early Ardent days on National Street, and then later on Madison, we loved the Beatles. Not just the Beatles, but all of the British Invasion bands, the Animals and the Kinks, not so much the Stones, but especially the Beatles. The Hollies. I loved it, John Fry loved it, John King loved it.
“John King also loved radio, and he and John Fry went over to Arkansas and were working with a guy that owned a radio station there. John King started sending letters out to record companies in the name of this radio station, saying ‘please send the records to this P.O. Box in Memphis.’ So all the record companies, big and small, would send their records to the P.O. Box. We didn’t put ’em on the radio, we’d just sit and listen to ’em. We got free records!
“And we started ordering the English records from the John Lever Record Shop in Northampton, England. We would get it all before it was even released [in the U.S.].”
All of which underscores that King’s phenomenal collection — roughly 30,000 45s, 12,000 LPs, 20,000 CDs, and 1,000 music books — is not solely focused on Memphis. As board member Sherman Willmott notes, the collection includes “a lot of Beatles. Some really strangely rare Beatles stuff. Because they would mail order. They’d pick up the phone and mail order from shops in England, and have them shipped here, before there were record imports.”
But the collection is also strong on psychedelia. “Probably the most surprising thing he has, that you wouldn’t expect, is psych,” says Willmott. “I don’t know what got him into it. It’s as if Dr. Demento grew up in Memphis and was into soul and psych. It’s very eclectic.”
Individual turntables with headphones grace the largest room, also slated for educational events. (Photo by Jamie Harmon)
Librarian and archivist Jim Cole, adds, “There are a lot of late ’60s, early ’70s promo copies that were probably mailed to him, and some of those are so obscure, they probably never went past the promo stage.”
Nonetheless, the collection’s relevance to Memphis should not be understated, especially regarding one studio in particular. As Willmott points out, “The Ardent archives in this collection are pretty extensive. It’s like John was the curator of the Ardent’s history. Especially the early stuff. There’s enough stuff to do whatever you’d want to do with it. Books, documentaries, or just casual fandom.”
Cole pulls out some boxes of Ardent artifacts: “We’ve got all the early Ardent 45s and other oddball things.”
Early Ardent singles from the Memphis Listening Lab (Photo by Jamie Harmon)
And it goes far beyond Ardent, as Willmott points out. “John’s got so much Memphis stuff in this collection. I mean, he’s deep catalog Memphis, ’cause what he didn’t collect back in the day, he went back and found on eBay or at the store. He’s got all kinds of obscure Memphis 45s, plus all the [CD] box sets that came out. He’s got it covered on so many levels.”
Indeed, the shelves promise hours and days and years of researching and listening to music. Soon there will be ladders as in floor-to-ceiling libraries of yore, not to mention lecture series and listening events where attendees can hear the various media on Memphis’ own high-end audio standard bearer, Egglestonworks.
Egglestonworks Loudspeakers at the Memphis Listening Lab (Photo by Alex Greene)
Amid the towering shelves of musical gems and speakers, it’s easy to miss the small door off to the side. As Cole explains, “We’ve got an editing room here. The public can come in and use it for free. It can be used for podcasting. The computer has Pro Tools and Logic, and we have good microphones. And we’re going to work with WYXR, so people who are trying to get shows can come up here and do a demo show on the podcasting station. Or the WYXR programmers can even pre-record a show, if they’re going be out of town or something.”
The editing room at the Memphis Listening Lab (Photo by Jamie Harmon)
While not all of the audio equipment is yet installed, it will be by July 10, when the lab will host its inaugural event, a tribute to John King. The man who made it all possible will be in attendance. Eventually other collections will be added, but for now, the staff and volunteers at the Memphis Listening Lab have their work cut out for them, as they begin to catalog King’s holdings.
As Cole reflects, “John started collecting in the ’50s, and never got rid of anything. And they started Ardent in ’59, when he was 15, he and John Fry and Fred Smith. And John King went on to work in radio. He wrote a radio programming guide for many years, and got tons of promos. So he got a little bit of everything, and he kept it all. Most people collect one thing. They collect blues or rockabilly. But John collected a little bit of everything. So it’s a great collection. From the most well-known to the most obscure stuff you’ve ever heard of.”
