Tag: Memphis

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Valerie June Comes Home

Valerie June announced her return with “Shakedown,” a hill-country drone textured with keys and handclaps over a minimal, driving beat. The song stays coiled like a spring until the bridge, where the band cuts loose for a few wailing bars before settling back into the swing.

The Valerie June who is sporting glamorous polka dot slacks and a gold, low-slung electric guitar is very different from the woman who, only a few short years ago, was strumming an acoustic and singing her tunes in Midtown’s Java Cabana. But she says the songs she sings on her new album, The Order of Time, have their roots in the Bluff City. “I wrote the songs over the course of 10 or 12 years. Some when I was living in Memphis, some when I was on the road, some when I was in Brooklyn, and some when I was off in different places. That was about a decade of my life. It all takes time.”

Valerie June

Her songs emerge intuitively, bubbling up from her subconscious. “Normally, I just write by hanging out and being around. As I’m living my life, I hear voices. The voices come and they sing me the songs, and I sing you the songs. I sing what I hear.”

“Astral Plane” highlights a new confidence in her voice, which ranges from thin and ethereal to a soaring mezzo-soprano. She says during the six-month recording process for The Order of Time, which ranged from Vermont to Brooklyn to her parents’ living room in Humboldt, Tennessee, she found her footing as a bandleader.

“I had a lot more confidence in the studio than I did with Pushing Against a Stone. That was my first record, so I was still in a place of learning what being in the studio was really supposed to be like. I learned from some pros. So by the time I hit the studio this time, I was like ‘Yeah! I’m ready! Let’s go! I’m going to express myself, say what’s on my mind, dance, and have fun.’ Before I was more quiet and reserved. So it’s two very different approaches.
“On this record, you hear the musicians learning how I speak. I don’t read or write music, so I just have to tell them in colors and feelings and ideas, kind of getting them in the places where they can really absorb the songs. When I get the songs, I go to places. They take me places. I wrote my favorite songs in Memphis, and some of them are on this record. Some of them were in dream states, some were in waking states. These are beautiful places where the songs take me, and I have to take the musicians there with me in order to be able to get them to feel it so much that they can work with me.”

Valerie June recently kicked off a year on the road with sold-out shows in London and Paris, but the excitement of the new record is tempered with loss. On the same day, she lost both her father, music promoter Emerson Hockett (“He was amazing. He was so good, and he encouraged me all the time. He would run down to Memphis just to be with me.”) and one of her musical mentors, soul legend Sharon Jones. “It’s been a lot of loss in the last couple of months.”

On Friday, Feb. 17th, Valerie June will return to Memphis with a show at the Hi-Tone. “Please just tell Memphis that I love them. I love them very much, and I wouldn’t be who I am and where I am today without Memphis.”

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Music Video Monday: Pillow Talk

Find a friend and settle in for Music Video Monday.

To soften the blow of the post-Super Bowl Monday morning, here’s “Ferris and Effie”, the first video from Memphis dream rockers Pillow Talk. Directed by lead singer Joshua Cannon—who, it just so happens, is a Flyer staffer— with Sam Leathers and Nate Packard shooting and editing, “Ferris and Effie” is all about hanging around with that special someone, even if she’s inanimate. Pillow Talk will celebrate the release of their new LP This Is All Pretend at the Hi Tone on Friday, March 31.

Music Video Monday: Pillow Talk

If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Million Dollar Quartet Gets New Name, Premiere Date

The CMT series filmed in Memphis under the name Million Dollar Quartet will premiere on Feb. 23, 2017—but it won’t be called Million Dollar Quartet.

The eight-episode series is based on the 2010, Tony Award-winning jukebox musical by Floyd Mutrux and Colin Escott. Today’s announcement of the premiere date was accompanied by the news that the show will now be called Sun Records. No reason was given for the name change.

The series, which was filmed in Memphis in the spring and summer of 2016, stars Chad Michael Murray as Sam Phillips, comedian Billy Gardell as Colonel Tom Parker, Drake Milligan as Elvis Presley, Kevin Fonteyne as Johnny Cash, Christian Lees as Jerry Lee Lewis, Jonah Lees as Jimmy Swaggart, Trevor Donovan as Eddy Arnold, Keir O’Donnell as Dewey Phillips, Jennifer Holland as Becky Phillips, Margaret Anne Florence as Marion Keisker, Kerry Holliday as Ike Turner, and Dustin Ingram as Carl Perkins.

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Music Video Monday: Richard James

Music Video Monday gonna slow it down a little this week.

Richard James’ reputation as one of Memphis’ punk wild men is well deserved. By the end of his raucous garage sets, he can end up singing from atop the bar, or preaching punk aphorisms while prone on the floor. But his song “Children of the Dust” shows a much chiller side of the Special Rider—an echoy slab of one-man bedroom psychedelia.

“The song came out of watching movies late at night,” he says. “It is named after the 1995 movie that starred Sidney Poitier and inspired by classic, European, horror films like Tombs of The Blind Dead. ”

For the video, Memphis filmmaker George Hancock captured footage of James on the banks of the Mississippi, and then layered on altered landscapes to create a dreamscape.

Music Video Monday: Richard James

If you would like to see your music video on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com

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Danny Says Reveals Untold Story of the Punk Revolution

To a lot of America in the 1970s, it seemed like punk rock just appeared out of nowhere to challenge the content mediocrity of the status quo. But that’s not really how it happened. Punk did not spring forth fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. It was shaped and midwifed by a series of writers, hucksters, and hustlers, the most prominent of whom was a New York promoter named Danny Fields.

Fields is the subject of Danny Says, a new documentary directed by Brenden Toller, that will have a free screening at Studio on the Square on Tuesday, November 22 at 7:30 PM. The film explores the lasting impact the hype man had on American music, from his promotion of The Doors to his careful shaping of the rough public images of artists like Iggy Pop and The Ramones, whose song about Fields gives the film its name. Goner Records and Magnolia Pictures are sponsoring the screening, which, although it is free, does require a ticket to get in. Passes are available at Goner Records while supplies last.

Danny Says Reveals Untold Story of the Punk Revolution

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Morgan Jon Fox’s Series Feral Celebrates National Premiere With Local Screening

CREDIT: Breezy Lucia

Thursday night sees the long-awaited national debut of Morgan Jon Fox’s streaming series Feral.

“It’s been almost exactly two years since we wrapped filming,” says Fox, the pioneering Memphis director whose films like This Is What Love In Action Looks Like and Blue Citrus Hearts have been attracting acclaim for more than a decade.

Seth Daniel in Feral

Feral is the flagship original series of a new streaming service called Dekkoo, which will bring LBGT themed films and series to a national audience. It was originally scheduled for release last summer, when I wrote this in-depth Memphis Flyer cover feature about the show. “I’m so excited for it to finally come out, but there were some moments there, when we had so many supposed release dates, that I was a little worried, to be honest. You hear nightmare stories about projects that never end up being released, for whatever complications. But as it tuns out, it’s just that it’s a brand new company that took a lot longer than they planned to get their footing.”

The Dekkoo app is available on Roku and Apple TV, or through Google Play and iTunes, and boasts “the largest streaming collection of gay-centric entertainment available boasting a larger selection than Netflix or Amazon Video.”

Here’s an exclusive clip from Feral: 

FERAL – Exclusive Clip – 2 from Morgan Jon Fox on Vimeo.

Morgan Jon Fox’s Series Feral Celebrates National Premiere With Local Screening (2)

“I feel great about it,” he says. “A lot of things aligned perfectly in my head. I took some time off from my career to work on other, bigger productions. I worked with Craig Brewer on his projects, and I worked as a producer and assistant director on other projects all around the country. It was truly like going to film school. Everything aligned perfectly for crew members to help make it and edit it and actors to be in it. All of those things fell into place in a way I feel lucky and fortunate for. “

In the two years since filming completed, many of the show’s stars have seen their careers take an upward trajectory, such as singer/songwriter Julian Baker. “I saw her for the first time in my back yard at a going away party for my friend Ryan Azada. She played solo acoustic, just a few songs. I knew that she was in a band with some guys playing harder stuff, but this was the first time I had seen her. It was an incredible moment that I’ll never forget…the lights in the back yard, all these people there to say goodbye to a good friend of hours. It was a golden moment. I knew this person was going to be huge star. Her music was coming from an emotional, authentic space, and that was the space I was working out of to create Feral. She hadn’t even recorded anything except on her iPhone. The songs on her Soundcloud page had from 5-30 listens. By the time it got around to actually being released, I had to work with her publicist, who had to approve the way we mentioned her in our press releases. She had a team now. Memphis has always had a hotbed for music, but people like Julian Baker don’t come around all the time. She’s a rare being.”

The series other big music stars, the Midtown punk band Nots, just opened Gonerfest last weekend before embarking on a huge east coast tour. Female lead Leah Beth Bolton is now an on-air reporter for Fox 24 in Memphis. “She’s doing traffic, which I think is so cool. It’s perfect for her personality. She brought so much light to the project. Her character is essential, because there so much depressing shit happening, and dudes taking themselves very seriously. She inserts a necessary emotional perspective. ‘Stop being so self-absorbed, dudes!’”

Breezy Lucia

Leah Beth Bolton, Chase Brother, Seth Daneil, and Jordan Nichols in Feral.

Ryan Masson and Seth Daniel are now working actors in Los Angeles, and Jordan Nichols is a stage actor and director who, Fox says, “is acting and directing every play, and winning awards every year. He’s a dedicated actor who works very hard, but he has a natural inclination.”

“There are a lot of stereotypical gay characters presented in media. They tend to be comic relief, or stuck up fashion designers. There’s also stereotypes about the South: It’s backwards, the Bible Belt, all those things. I’ve dealt with those things in my previous work, and I didn’t have a desire or energy to continue to tackle those things.”

Breezy Lucia

Seth Daniel and director Morgan Jon Fox on the set of Feral

Fox says his goal for Feral was to present a different view of life in the South “I just wanted to reflect what it was like for me growing up in this Midtown community of artists, where everyone’s kind of smushed together. You go to the Cove, which isn’t a gay bar. You go to Otherlands, which isn’t a gay coffee shop. When you’re a Midtown artist, you’re a Midtown artist, whether you’re a queer artist or a straight artist. I love that about this community. The problems that affect me and young people in their 20s in Midtown are the same problems that anyone in our position would deal with. They’re universal. I just wanted them to be people in this situation who intermingle in a very regular way. I didn’t want them to be a community of wealth. I didn’t want them only going to gay bars or going gay things. I didn’t want them to be a part of a South that is hateful or pressing them…I wanted the fact that they’re gay to be unremarkable.”

Fox and Dekkoo will host a release party at Studio on the Square on Thursday, Oct. 6, where the first five episodes of the series will be shown on the big screen. Showtime will be at 7:30 PM. 

Morgan Jon Fox’s Series Feral Celebrates National Premiere With Local Screening

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Best of Enemies Premieres on WKNO Tonight

Best Of Enemies, the acclaimed political documentary with Memphis connections, makes its free TV premiere on WKNO tonight at 8 PM. 

William F. Buckley and Gore VIdal in Best of Enemies

The documentary, which premiered at Sundance 2015, had a successful theatrical run last year and garnered rave reviews from critics worldwide. It tells the story of the series of televised debates between conservative William F. Buckley and liberal Gore Vidal that aired on ABC during the 1968 Democratic and Republican national conventions. The film was co-directed by Memphis filmmaker Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville, who won an Academy Award in 2013 for 20 Feet From Stardom.

The timely documentary airs on WKNO as part of PBS’ Independent Lens series at 8 PM.  You can read much more about the film in this Memphis Flyer cover story from last August. 

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Music Music Blog

Gonerfest Friday: Woozy, Brutal, Beautiful

Gonerfesters got a running start on Friday with an afternoon superkegger at Memphis Made’s taproom on Cooper. Memphis Made created a pair of custom beers for this year’s festival: A tart saison IPA and Gonerbraü, a smooth creme ale. Both proved popular with the rockers assembled in the sun to watch a four-band bill. New Orlean’s Trampoline Team turned in the most turnt tunes of the afternoon.

Yes, I just wrote that sentence. I probably should have just deleted it, but I’ll leave it to show the effects 48 hours of pounding beats are having on my synapses.

Trampoline Team riles up the crowd at Memphis Made.

The eventful Hi Tone Friday night got rolling with Opposite Sex from Deundin, New Zealand. They led with an impressive one-two punch in bassist/screamer Lucy Hunter and guitar squealer Reg Norris, who is able to get an huge range of sounds from just a wah pedal and a souped up stomp box. (TurboRat represent!)

Opposite Sex

The Hi Tone was filling up quickly as Memphis family affair Aquarian Blood howled to life. The husband and wife duo of Memphis hardcore OG JB Horrell and Laurel Fernden, supported by drummer Bill Curry and Coletrane Duckworth (son of Memphis guitar legend Jim Duckworth), gets better every time I see them. Between Horrell trying his best to strangle his ax into submission and Fernden switching between a clean microphone and one with rubbery echo effects—sometimes within a single lyrical line—they sound like no one else.

Aquarian Blood

When I walked into the Hi Tone Big Room to see Power killing it, I briefly wondered if I had stepped back in time to 1974. Like their countrymen Wolfmother, the Melbourne, Australia trio have embraced butt rock, mullets and all. And the Gonerfest audience went right there with them.

Power and the crowd.

I have to admit I totally missed Buck Biloxi and the Fucks. I was visiting the food truck out front for a much needed gutbomb burger when the party (it may have been a hip hop show, I wasn’t clear on the details) across the street at the erupted into a shirt-ripping brawl. There was at least one shot fired, but no one was hurt, and cop cars quickly swarmed the area. It was a strange, tense scene: on one side of the street, an African American crowd rapidly dispersing as police arrived; on the other side of the street, sweaty, mostly white punks from all over the world watching with a combination of horror and fascination, wondering if we were going to be witnesses to some kind of racially charged incident that has dominated the news in 2016. Fortunately, the first wave of cops to arrive seemed focused on de-escalating the fighting, and the situation cleared up without further violence or—judging by the lack of ambulance—injury.

The Blind Shake demonstrates unorthodox guitar technique.

Flashing blue lights provided the background as The Blind Shake took the stage. The Minnesota brothers Jim and Mike Blaha, who describes themselves as an “extraterrestrial backyard surf party”, are Gonerfest regulars. This year, they topped themselves with the tightest, snarlingest set I’ve seen from them. “Shots fired next door,” Jim said from the stage. “It’s an old marketing ploy.”

Black Lips

When 1 AM rolled around, the wrung out crowd milled around, trying to catch our breath as Black Lips meandered onto stage. The original Gonerfest grew out of a Black Lips show, and the band represents something of a garage rock ideal. The sound they have been chasing for the last decade and a half is something like a drunken 60s girl group backup band practicing in the stairwell where John Bonham recorded “When The Levee Breaks”. This is the strain of punk rock that originated in Memphis with the immoral Panther Burns. With the addition of a new saxophonist, the Black Lips pushed ever closer to the Panther Burns party vibe, gathering steam with each woozy rocker until “Katrina”, their 2007 underground lament of New Orleans devastation sent the crowd into a frenzy from which we didn’t emerge until the lights came up.

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Reigning Sound Rule Gonerfest Thursday Night

If you want to get cheered up quick, try Gonerfest. 

Memphis punks Nots open Gonerfest 13 in the Cooper Young Gazebo

I had had a pretty crappy Thursday, and was in a pretty foul mood as I headed to the corner of Cooper and Young for the kickoff of Gonerfest 13. The fresh air, idyllic weather, and flurry of faces, both familiar and unfamiliar, loosened me up a bit, and then Nots rocked away the remnants of my darkness. As Goner co-owner Zac Ives said in his brief introduction to the band, it’s been a real privelage watching this band of Memphis women grow and evolve from raw, explosive talent into the finely honed outfit that confidently kicked off the world’s greatest garage punk festival. Even more heartening was the gaggle of little girls who gathered transfixed before Nots frontwoman Natalie Hoffman. The rest of Gonerfest may not be kid-friendly, but for a few minutes yesterday afternoon some Midtown kids got a glimpse of what a powerful, talented, and determined bunch of women can do. 

The show moved to the considerably less kid-friendly environs of the Hi-Tone for the evening’s festivities, led off by Memphis newcomers Hash Redactors. Half the fun of Gonerfest (well, maybe not literally half) is discovering new acts, and between the psychedelic Redactors and Chook Race from Melbourne Australia, I had joined two new fandoms before 10 PM. As the night’s MC, the legendary Black Oak Arkansas frontman Jim Dandy, explained “Chook Race” is Aussie slang for chicken racing, which is apparently a thing in the Outback. But aside from their accents, the three piece didn’t sound like they were from down under. I got a distinct vibe of Athens, Georgia circa 1981 from the jangly sound and twisty songwriting. Some songs sounded like Pylon, while others could have been outtakes from REM’s first EP “Chronic Town”. 

Chook Race from Melbourne, Australia

The crowd shoehorned into the Hi Tone mingled all kinds of accents and looks. I noticed as I entered the show that passports were being offered as IDs as often as American driver’s licenses. Yes, people really come from outside the states to Gonerfest. Lots of them. 

Reigning Sound

The rest of the evening offered various shades of garage rock, from Ohioans Counter Intuits to the Gonerfest veterans now based in San Francisco Useless Eaters. Guitar heroes Fred and Toody—Oregonian legends who fronted Dead Moon and Pierced Arrows—played a noisy set to a reverent room. Then it was time for a return of some Memphis favorite sons, Reigning Sound. Greg Oblivian Cartwright formed the band in the early 2000s with Alex Greene on keys, Greg Roberson on drums, and Memphis import Jeremy Scott on bass and backup vocals. The original lineup stayed stable for two of the best records created in Memphis since the heyday of Stax, and their live shows are legendary. When the original lineup reunited, with the occasional addition of John Whittemore on pedal steel and guitar, they proved the legends true for those who didn’t get the opportunity to see it go down the first time. There wasn’t a bad band on the first night of Gonerfest 13, but the Reigning Sound were head and shoulders above the rest. No one else had the width and depth of Cartwright’s songwriting, or the telepathic group cohesion that can sound both haphazard and incredibly tight at the same time. These guys are, and have alway been, the real deal. 

Now to get rehydrated for today’s shows. 

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: Matt Lucas

It’s time to take a little trip with MVM. 

A couple of weeks ago, Memphis producer Matt Lucas dropped the first single for his new record Whiskey for Breakfast: A Day in the Life of Matt Lucas. “Ea$t Side Nights/Home” is a banging bit of post-Kanye hip hop. It’s full of contrasting sonic textures, leading with a pounding subwoofer beat before veering heavily towards chillwave at the climax. 

Directed by Rahimhotep Ishakarah, the video reflects the song’s 21st century schizoid nature. “This video tells the story of a young man who tries to escape his problems but cannot escape himself or his vices,” says Lucas. “He tries to envision a world beyond his own to face the harsh realities of his past and present to motivate himself to take on his future and control his destiny.”

Music Video Monday: Matt Lucas

If you would like to see your music video featured here on MVM, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com