Tag: Memphis Recording Studios

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Elvis Costello & The Imposters Get Magnetized in Memphis

Elvis Costello (Photo: Mark Seliger)

Having our hands full with new Memphis releases, we don’t often write up non-Memphians’ albums here at the Memphis Flyer. But let no one claim that Elvis Costello hasn’t earned some Memphis bona fides, having deeply connected with the city whilst recording 2004’s The Delivery Man at Sweet Tea Studio in Oxford, Mississippi. The DVD Club Date: Live in Memphis, filmed at the Hi Tone, captured his first Memphis ramble well.

In the nearly 20 years since, Costello’s concerts here have often been peppered with covers of deep cuts from Memphis history, and he’s sometimes lingered before or after those shows. Now, he’s released an album made on two such stops here, recorded at the “purpose-built vintage” Memphis Magnetic Recording Company, profiled in the Flyer upon its opening in 2019.

Sharing a title with this past January’s Grammy-nominated The Boy Named If, the new album gets more specific: The Boy Named If (Alive at Memphis Magnetic). And it’s on the latter that Costello and The Imposters really shine as a live band. For while the original studio album version was recorded long-distance during the pandemic, each player overdubbing their parts in isolation, it was not until gathering in Memphis to rehearse months later that the group played the material face to face.

Luckily for them, they chose to rehearse at Memphis Magnetic. And, as a bonus, the usual lineup of the group was supplemented by the guitar artistry of Charlie Sexton, erstwhile Dylan sideman and the brother of Memphian Will Sexton.

This new album features live-in-the studio renditions of songs from The Boy Named If, a slower, soulful version of Costello’s “Every Day I Write the Book,” numbers by The Rolling Stones, Nick Lowe, The Byrds, and Paul McCartney, and a new remix by the Japanese duo chelmico.

Recorded live in the studio during tour rehearsals in October 2021 and May 2022, the album captures the band playing, as Costello puts it in a press release, “Some of our favorite songs while negotiating with any tricky angles in our new tunes.”

The band’s performances during their Memphis stint are the perfect blend of loose and on-point. This was clearly a band gearing up for a major national tour. The harmonies and arrangements are spirited yet precise. By the time someone hit the record button, they knew the songs well enough to get playful with them, even as they drove them home. See the full track sequence below, and marvel at the choice selection of covers.

Nonetheless, the first song to be released is the sole track not recorded in Memphis, a new remix of “Magnificent Hurt” by Japanese female rap duo chelmico, who Costello first heard performing the theme to the anime show Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!  (Watch HERE)

In a public statement, chelmico noted that they “can’t believe we did a collab with Elvis Costello & The Imposters!! Who knew this could happen in real life!? When we were talking on a Zoom call, Elvis said we can do whatever we want so we just did! Please enjoy our interpretation of the world of Magnificent Hurt. The beats by ryo takahashi is just a perfection! We’re all HAPPY that Elvis is happy with the track!”

Appropriate to the Beatle-y spirit of the cover versions, The Boy Named If (Alive at Memphis Magnetic) is released on EMI, with Capitol Records as the release partner in the U.S. — just like the Fabs.

The Boy Named If (Alive at Memphis Magnetic) track listing:

Magnificent Hurt (Costello)
Truth Drug (Nick Lowe)
Penelope Halfpenny (Costello)
So You Want To Be A Rock & Roll Star (McGuinn/Hillman)
What If I Can’t Give You Anything But Love? (Costello)
The Boy Named If (Costello)
Let Me Roll It (Paul McCartney/Linda McCartney)
Every Day I Write The Book (Costello)
Out Of Time (Jagger/Richards)
Here, There and Everywhere (Lennon/McCartney)
Magnificent Hurt remix (Costello/chelmico)

Finally, Costello himself wrote out his thoughts on this unique project:

THE BOY NAMED IF (ALIVE AT MEMPHIS MAGNETIC)
By Elvis Costello

When The Imposters and I entered Memphis Magnetic studio in October 2021 it was the first time we’d been face-to-face or side-by-side while playing the songs from The Boy Named If.

That album had been recorded over “electrical wire” in late 2020 from our respective lairs and cupboards under the stairs but now we were in Memphis on pretext of rehearsing for our first full tour ever since the world ended in March 2020. Now we were three days from opening on the Soundstage at Graceland but what better way to prepare than playing some of your favourite songs while negotiating with the trickier angles in our new tunes.

In the summer of 2021, we’d invited Charlie Sexton to join us on the guitar when we were unable to obtain Steve Nieve’s “Letters Of Transit” from France to play a couple of shows and liked the outcome so much that we all agreed to proceed as a quintet.

We set up with stage monitors, a plan that Pete Thomas and Steve Nieve would have recognized from the Blood & Chocolate sessions only without all the sulking and sniping.

Now, Pete Thomas once vaulted over a fence to retrieve a brick from the demolition site of the original Stax Studios building. He told any musicians with a faltering groove in his own basement studio – Bonaparte Rooms East – “That brick has heard, “(Sittin’ On) the Dock Of The Bay”.

We celebrated our return to the city by Pete and Davey Faragher putting a little Memphis magnificence into “Every day I Write The Book” with Steve leading us on the Hammond and Charlie filling in around my voice, one of a number of repertoire songs that we re-arranged for the tour.

The album, The Boy Named If, set out to be an antidote to our mutual isolation. Now with my co-producer Sebastian Krys and his assistant Daniel Galindo in the Memphis Magnetic booth and our road crew tight to the walls of the studio or in the hallway outside, we put on the red light and began finding our way around these new numbers in the same room and at the same time, and shaking off a little dust by tearing through songs like Nick Lowe’s 1976 Dutch release, “Truth Drug”.

Having played our first appearance of 2022 at JazzFest in New Orleans before celebrating the opening of the Bob Dylan Centre in Tulsa and even working up an encore of “Like A Rolling Stone” in the dressing room of “Cain’s Ballroom”, we had now returned to Memphis Magnetic to rehearse for upcoming U.K. and European dates and while we let The Imposters and Charlie loose on the Hey Clockface numbers that I’d recorded alone in Helsinki but would now earn their place in the coming shows before lighting “Indoor Fireworks” with a different match and finding a minor mood in “Brilliant Mistake” and filed them away for a future collection called, “King Of America & Other Realms”.

It seems we remained in a freewheeling mood as we cut, “Out Of Time”, the Jagger/Richards tune that I first learned from Chris Farlowe’s Immediate Records release, to which I later added, tambourine, maracas, a second piano and a few other tricks and diversions, after all, we were in a recording studio.

We certainly got the sense of where a tune like, “What If I Can’t Give You Anything But Love?” might be headed from night to night, when Charlie opened up on his guitar solo.

In the evening I returned to my room at the Peabody Hotel and over the next three nights, I heard seven new songs ringing ‘round the walls but that’s a tale for another day…

At the October 2021 sessions, we’d crashed out of “Penelope Halfpenny” into The Byrds, “So You Want To Be A Rock & Roll Star”, now we did something similar, as Paul McCartney’s “Let Me Roll It” emerged from “The Boy Named If” title song. At the end of the final session, we turned off the monitors entirely and recorded a hushed birthday card serenade of “Here, There & Everywhere”.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, chelmico had been working away on a complete re-model and re-fit of “Magnificent Hurt”. Over the last few years we’ve presented some of my songs in other languages on the album “Spanish Model” and the French language E.P. La Face de Pendule à Coucou but this track is something of an entirely different stripe.

One of the gifts of the recent interlude from the traveling life has been the time gathered around the family jukebox, a stack of vinyl or the comic book world of film entertainment.

While, his brother and mother were elsewhere working on their own schemes, my son Frank and I worked our way through the entire anime series, “Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!”, an ingenious look at every aspect of animation from storyboarding to the final cut, through the eyes and escapades of three young Japanese students. Each episode kicks off with the chelmico track, “Easy Breezy”, a cool flow of verses and rhymes over a beatbox and some slide guitar.

A couple of calls later and I found myself on a video conference to Tokyo with Mamiko and Rachel and was delighted that they agreed to work up their own version of “Magnificent Hurt”. My only directions were, “You can do anything you want. Cut it up. Turn it round. Wipe it out. Say anything you want. You can’t be wrong”.

As you will hear, the song is now an entirely different story in both words and music, re-harmonizing my interjections between their verses and it is this new Japanese model of the song that closes the storybook on The Boy Named If (Alive At Memphis Magnetic).

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The Story of Shoe Productions’ Many Hits, Brought to Life on Film

CREDIT: courtesy Andy Black

courtesy Andy Black

Bobby Manuel, Rick Dees, Wareen Wagner, and a Disco Duck.

Memphis is one of the greatest studio towns of all time. Sun, Phillips, Stax, American, and Ardent are just a few of the more well-known names, but a plethora of others helped capture the amazing music being made here over the years. One of them, Shoe Productions, was especially shy of the limelight in its heyday of the ’70s and ’80s, but cut some of the most memorable records of that era.

The studio was started by Wayne Crook and Warren Wagner in 1971, and Andy Black joined soon after. In 1977, Jim Stewart (the co-founder of Stax) and Bobby Manuel set up their Daily Planet Productions in the same building. Many decades later, Black went looking for whatever history of his old business might exist, and came up with nothing. So he and his son Nathan, already with years of experience in audio/visual production, set about making the documentary: Shoe: A Memphis Music Legacy. It screens Monday, October 26th, 6:30 p.m. at the Malco Summer Drive-In as part of the Indie Memphis Film Festival.

A quick chat with Andy and Nathan Black revealed that their documentary is just the tip of the iceberg. Shoe was buzzing with activity for over a decade, and the stories and recorded tracks are impressive.

Memphis Flyer: Memphis was really hopping as a recording city back in the ’70s.

Andy Black: Well it was. And I think part of that was, our undoing was because, we had the studio over there, and we were a bunch of kids trying to build things, and do everything ourselves with very little money. And Jim Stewart and Bobby Manuel came down. Stax had just folded and they needed to cut some stuff. And they were looking for a place to do it. So they cut there and loved the place. It was similar to Stax in the way it felt. They called their company the Daily Planet, right across the hall from Shoe. And we wound up building a second studio.

Jim used his connections with Atlantic and they bought part of the equipment. We got a brand new console, an MCI. And it worked out real well. On the Shoe side, we were doing everything ourselves. We built a console from the ground up. I mean, we etched the circuit boards and put every little component in every board in that console and soldered it together. There were about five or six of us working on it. It became such a unique sounding board, especially on the low end.

Then it got to where Jim and Bobby would come over to our studio and cut basic tracks, because they loved the way the bass and bass drum sounded. And we would go over to their side, ’cause that’s the side you wanna put the horns and the vocals on, ’cause it’s cleaner. So it became a back and forth thing. We were more or less rock and roll and pop, and when Jim and Bobby came in, a lot of people started coming over because of them, like Steve Cropper, or other people from Stax, or from Isaac Hayes’ band. So all the pop guys were going, “Wow, that’s really good. They’re good!” So we all learned from each other. Shoe was about the people and it became a learning place. We taught each other by bouncing ideas off each other.

And we kept a real low profile. Jim asked us to do that, because he didn’t want to deal with the media. Stax had just folded. He didn’t want to be bothered. And everyone thought he went “into hiding,” so to speak, and got out of the business, when really he was over there at our studio, and we were cutting every day. It turned into a real good working relationship. We kept it low-key. In this process, Nathan and I did “Take Me to the River,” and I had done a Stax documentary, just the audio. So Nathan shot everything.
courtesy Andy Black

The control room at Shoe Productions

I was over at Sun Studios, and killing time with the kid that was running it. And we got to talking about Shoe, and I told him all about it, and he said, ‘Man, I thought I knew everything about Memphis music back in the ’70s and ’80s, but I have not heard these stories.’ Well it turned out that that kid was [Grammy Award-winning producer and engineer] Matt Ross-Spang.

I went home and Googled “Shoe” and got nothing. It was just like we didn’t exist. I said, ‘Damn, we kept such a low profile, we’re getting left out of history.’ So I talked to Nathan and said, what do you think about us going in on this project together? Nathan was practically raised there. I used to take him to the studio with me all the time, as a young child. So he’s well aware of the story.

Nathan Black: It was interesting for me because one of the first things we did was get the old group back together. There’s a recording session in it. So that was the first time a lot of those guys had been there in 30 years, and going back into the space, and it was the first time I’d been in there in 30 years too. And the Daily Planet side is exactly the same way it was back then. It’s still a working studio, and everything’s the same, down to the carpet. It was like walking back in a time warp. I spent a lot of time there, but I was young, probably 8 or 10 years old. So I knew all the people, but I didn’t really know the stories. So it was interesting to me, hearing all those stories from people I knew and had been around all the time. I was just a kid going to work with my dad. I remember making little forts up under the grand piano, playing with my GI Joes.

AB: Jimmy Griffin was co-founder of Bread with David Gates. And he’s a Memphis boy. He was from Memphis and went out to L.A. and they formed Bread. And had many, many hits. And he came back and we became friends. He was out jogging one day, and came in and introduced himself. He and I and two other guys had a writing group. We wrote songs all the time. And we wound up cutting an album with Terry Sylvester of the Hollies.

Was that one of the first things you did there?

AB: It was an early thing. Actually, one of the first things we did was Jimmy himself, because Jimmy was such a good singer. And we had some writers, so we decided that Shoe needed to start a label, and we used Jimmy as our first artist on Shoe Records. It’s funny because the records have turned up a couple times on eBay, and they’re selling for between $50-$100 a piece — for a ’45! And I’m like, ‘Damn, I’ve got probably 75 of these things.’

There’s a whole section on “Disco Duck” and how that came to be. It was originally on Estelle Axton’s label, Fretone Records. [Celebrity DJ] Rick Dees had gone to her with the idea of doing a disco song. She connected him with Bobby Manuel and they finished it, and Bobby cut it, and RSO Records bought it. And they wanted an album right away. So we cut an album in two weeks. Every day, all day long.

NB: There is a whole section of the film about the Dog Police. I remember my dad taking me to the studio where they were shooting it. I even brought home some of the dog masks.

AB: They were doing jingles, because they were three of the finest jazz musicians in town. They’d go over the Media General and crank out those jingles like crazy. Shoe also did jingles, but so we could support our creativity in songs and records. So Tony [Thomas] and them came over and I wound up cutting two jazz albums with them, and both of them got shot down. They didn’t get a deal and they were so bummed out. So they said, We’re gonna do something REAL different. Whatever you want to do, Andy, it’s total freedom. And we didn’t have a lot of electronic gear back then, so I took a microphone and stuck it in the end of a vacuum cleaner hose and gave Tom Lonardo the other end and said ‘Here, sing into this.’

I remember when I was young and used to sing through the vacuum hose and it sounded so cool! So we did all kind of crazy things. And Wayne and Warren heard all this going on through the walls, and they became really interested in it. Wayne was getting into video at that time. MTV was starting to get pretty big. So it just married together. We actually did a whole album. 

Still from ‘Dog Police’ video


NB: The video won MTV’s Basement Tapes, hosted by Weird Al Yankovic. I think it was NBC that picked it up and did an actual pilot, they were planning on making it a show. You can see it on YouTube. The pilot has Adam Sandler in it, and Jeremy Piven.

It seems like there was a cool experimental environment at Shoe. I noticed the Scruffs cut their debut there.

AB: Yeah! They used to come in and pull the night shift after everybody else had gone home to bed. The Scruffs would come in and cut til the wee hours of the morning. And then other people would show up in the morning and they would leave. We had two studios that were just pumping out projects all the time. I produced Joyce Cobb. We had a hit song with her, “Dig the Gold,” that went up to #42 in the nation on Billboard. And we had Rick Christian, who got a deal with Mercury records, and one of his songs got picked up by Kenny Rogers and he had a #1 hit with it. And we had Shirley Brown coming over there. We had Levon Helm coming over there. It became a very active place. And that’s why it puzzled me that no one knew anything about it. Then it dawned on me why.

That low profile.

AB: Yeah, it’ll get ya every time!

The first time I heard about Shoe was reading that Chris Bell cut some of “I Am the Cosmos” there. Were you in on that?

AB: I wasn’t in on that session. Warren did. They were friends, so Warren invited him and Ken Woodley to come down and Richard Rosebrough down to Shoe, and they came in late, ’cause that was the only time slot they could fit in there. They cut “I Am the Cosmos” and one or two others. And people are still interested in Big Star and Chris Bell. One day on Facebook, I saw where people were taking pictures through the windows and saying, “Look, I think this is the room where ‘I Am the Cosmos’ was cut.” And I looked at it and went, ‘No, that’s the bathroom!’

That track was actually cut on the other side of the building. We occupied both sides of this really great building. It was supposed to be a basement for a church. So the bottom floor was 16″-18″ of packed concrete and partly underground. So it was super quiet.

NB: Apparently the pastor of the church ran off with the money, so they only built the basement. That’s all that exists! You walk through the front door and you immediately have to go downstairs. So everything was underground. No ground floor, no windows.

AB: It’s really bizarre. We only had one little sign by the front door and that was it. It was just kinda word of mouth. Elvin Bishop came over. Dr. John. I could go on and on. We had to leave out a lot. In fact, there’s enough stories for us to do a Shoe 2!

The Story of Shoe Productions’ Many Hits, Brought to Life on Film

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Down at Five and Dime

CREDIT: J.D. Reager

Local musician Harry Koniditsiotis has been a staple of the underground music scene in Memphis for more than 13 years, leading punk and post-punk influenced acts like the Angel Sluts, the Switchblade Kid, Twin Pilot and the Turn-It-Offs to both general and critical acclaim. But in between all that, he’s also been running a successful recording studio, 5 and Dime Recording, mostly on the strength of his clients’ recommendations.

“It’s always been word of mouth,” says Koniditsiotis. “A lot of the bands that record here have heard and like my records, or are in bands I’ve met on tour.”

Until recently, however, the studio has mostly taken a backseat to Koniditsiotis’ musical pursuits – chalk it up to an insanely busy touring and personal recording schedule. But for now, he’s putting the lion’s share of his energy into 5 and Dime.

“The summer is coming up and I hate the heat. I’m done with sweating my ass off playing,” Konidisiotis said.

Koniditsiotis first came to Memphis back in 2002. At the time, he was a New Orleans-expat looking to relocate to Chicago. But Koniditsiotis never got farther north than the Bluff City. He quickly found a job engineering at a local studio, Cotton Row Recording, and then formed the Angel Sluts. The band would play its first show the following year.

The Angel Sluts quickly attracted a loyal following on the strength of the band’s raucous live show and solid punk-pop hooks.

“We were very like-minded in wanting to do a rock-and-roll-type punk band,” Koniditsiotis says. “We thought a lot of bands were just boring live. The band really started because we realized we could get free bar tabs when we played and we would just let all our friends in for free to come party. So it was that kind of thinking.”

But Koniditsiotis wasn’t quite satisfied. From there, he branched out with more eclectic groups like Twin Pilot and the Turn-It-Offs and established himself as a versatile and dependable creative presence in Memphis music.

In 2004, Koniditsiotis purchased a house in the Cooper-Young neighborhood with a backyard garage and quickly decided it would be a suitable space for a recording studio. By 2006, he had grown weary of playing second banana at Cotton Row and wanted to launch his own endeavor; that endeavor would become 5 and Dime.

The studio started small – Koniditsiotis initially worked primarily on his own projects and those of his friends. But the positive word-of-mouth proved to be a strong endorsement, and he found himself attracting bands from around the country looking to record albums on a modest budget.

“Bands like coming to Memphis. We give them a place to stay,” Koniditsiotis says. “There’s kind of a B&B side to the studio. I’ve been told over and over by bands how it’s an incredibly relaxing recording environment. So that’s one of the attractive features for out-of-town groups. Bands generally like the gear that’s already in the studio so it makes everything super easy. Most of them will just bring in guitars and drum sticks.”

“The first word that comes to mind is comfortable,” says local singer-songwriter Tony Manard, who has recorded two albums at 5 and Dime. “It’s an eclectic mix of equipment and kitsch that’s a little worn around the edges and just feels right to me. 5 and Dime is a great room for recording a band together at once. There’s a collection of vintage tube amps and effects pedals. There’s also a nice drum kit, Hammond M3 and Fender Rhodes. The room is pretty live, and Harry knows where the sweet spots are.”

The year 2012 saw the demise of Koniditsiotis’ main project, the Angel Sluts (last week’s impromptu reunion show at the P&H notwithstanding), and he eventually decided to consolidate his various influences and inclinations into one unified project, the Switchblade Kid.

“The bad thing about being in the Angel Sluts was being stuck with the stigma. The joke of the name ran its course long ago and I was feeling very limited music-wise by it,” he says. “At the same time, I was playing in two other bands and after a while realized playing in three original bands at the same time was just stupid. I was running myself ragged and decided to combine the three.”

Not long thereafter, Koniditsiotis also married his longtime girlfriend and backing vocalist/percussionist in the Switchblade Kid, Jenny Hansom. Which brings us to the present, where the highly prolific Koniditsiotis is now “settled down” and focused on running 5 and Dime Recording as a fully fledged business.

“It’s nice to be focused on one person rather than a bunch of musicians. If anything, it’s made me realize the things I really want in life and for once it’s nice to have them,” Koniditsiotis says.

Koniditsiotis has registered the studio with the Cooper-Young Business Association and has taken out ads in numerous indie/punk music publications including Maximum Rock’n’Roll, Razorcake, and City Trash. He’s also made some improvements to the studio itself.

“There’s always trial and error with gear, but I think I’ve got a nice Barbarella/Warhol Factory vibe now,” Koniditsiotis says. “It went through a bunch of phases to get to this point though. I gutted it a few years ago and got more gear, so it’s just been an evolution. Most of the gear is from the ’60s and ’70s, but I record to Pro Tools. I like ribbon mics.

“One of the pluses is that [5 and Dime] also functions as my personal studio so everything is mic’d up and ready to go at a moment’s notice. Setup time is always a big killer for a band’s momentum so I try and keep it fast. I like to work quickly myself when I record so it’s easier to just leave everything set up and ready to go. There’s a convenience factor when you have a recording studio in your backyard that I love.”