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Tag: Memphis
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Recalling Roland
Last week, Memphis lost Roland Janes. The legendary guitarist and producer was famous for his work with Jerry Lee Lewis and for his studio work at Sam Phillips Recording. Janes’ records will endure. His legacy as a musical mentor is profound. Few people experienced Janes as a teacher more than Scott Bomar, a Grammy-winning film composer, who (like Memphis musicians) learned to record and produce from Janes. Bomar’s success and, more importantly, his demeanor reflect Janes’ influence. Below, Bomar shares his memories of learning from one of Memphis’ greatest talents. — Joe Boone
One of the most pivotal moments in my life was digging a funky, yellow-labeled 45-rpm single out of a stack of records at my grandmother’s house when I was around 13. It was Travis Wammack’s “Scratchy,” one of the wildest, most unhinged guitar instrumentals of all time. It was from the past and the future all at the same time. It was hard to tell if it was from 1962 or 2102. I became fascinated with the sound of the record, and it sent me on a pre-internet fact-finding mission to find out everything I could about its creators.
I eventually found out about the record’s producer, Roland Janes, who had cut the record in the ’60s at his Sonic recording studio in a strip mall in Midtown Memphis. I began to connect the dots and discovered that Roland had been the in-house studio guitarist for Sam Phillips at Sun Studio and had played on numerous Jerry Lee Lewis hits, Billy Lee Riley’s “Flyin’ Saucers Rock & Roll” (one of the lodestones of rock-and-roll guitar), “Raunchy” by Bill Justis, and Harold Dorman’s “Mountain of Love.” Roland had the magic touch.
My growing obsession with the Memphis instrumental sound of the ’50s and ’60s eventually led to the formation of 1990s band Impala. I was a band member. In the early ’90s, I was working at Select-O-Hits, the record distributor operated by the family of Sam Phillips’ brother Tom Phillips and was approached by Johnny Phillips to make a full-length Impala record. I knew that Johnny did all of his recording at Sam Phillips Recording on Madison (the ultra-swank studio Sam Phillips built after he sold Elvis’ contract to RCA), and Roland Janes was the in-house engineer. I couldn’t say yes fast enough.
Working with Roland was not only a dream come true but also the beginning of a life-changing mentorship and friendship that lasted until his passing. With Roland at the helm, I experienced my first album session (Impala, El Rancho Reverbo), my first experience making music for a film (Impala, Teenage Tupelo), and my first record as producer (Calvin Newborn, New Born).
Roland always had the best advice, the best answers, and the ability to get the best performances from both raw talent and seasoned pros. From Roland, I learned more about the psychological aspect of producing records than the technical, though I did glean some of his knowledge of the latter as well. Roland’s sense of humor and wit were unlike anyone I have ever known. Roland would have musicians laughing and quickly forgetting any anxieties or pressure they may have been feeling, and, before they knew it, they would be getting takes down. Roland Janes, like his former boss, Sam Phillips, had a divine ability to work with talent and capture the precise moment of inspiration on tape.
Up until the past few years, Roland had been reticent to do interviews and share the bottomless wealth of stories he had. But being the intuitive person he was, I believe he knew he was in the twilight of his life, and he had begun to share more of his stories and himself — he even had a Facebook page. Fortunately, Roland lived to receive accolades from the Memphis music community that he had given so much to.
In 2006, I had the honor along with Knox Phillips, Jon Hornyak, and Craig Brewer to present Roland with plaques from the Recording Academy for his participation in three Grammy Hall of Fame recordings.
Last month, it was announced he would be inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame and would be receiving a brass note on Beale Street. Roland was praised in numerous articles and online posts by a new generation of musicians and fans he had touched, and he was recently featured in a large cover story in the Sunday Commercial Appeal.
Roland Janes’ essence and legacy are captured in the past six decades and in the future of Memphis music. I will never forget the things he taught me, the advice he gave me, his stories, and, most of all, his generosity and kindness.
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Put Up Your Duke
“For my money, he’s the best American composer of all time, period,” Sam Shoup says of Duke Ellington. “Not just as a jazz composer, but you could make a case for best American composer.”
Shoup should know. He has arranged music for the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. He is a master upright bassist and teaches at the University of Memphis. Shoup and saxophonist Gary Topper run the Bluff City Jazz Project with the help of American music specialist and promoter David Less. The group will present “An Evening of Ellington” at the Germantown Performing Arts Center on Saturday, October 26th. Also present will be Ellington Orchestra alumnus Bill Easley.
“Bill Easley played in the Ellington band about a year after Ellington died,” says Topper, who has played on recordings for Al Green and Keith Richards. “Ellington’s son Mercer had taken over the band. Bill did it for about six months on the road, and they would call him back over the years. He’s a clarinet specialist. He played with the band off and on for about six years. He knows the music. We just had a rehearsal with the sax section. With the discussions he brought to the table, it was great.”
The performance will mark a couple of Memphis music firsts: The Bluff City Jazz Project is the first subscription-based offering by GPAC for a jazz series. Usually the model is used for the symphonic season. But Less thought the idea of a subscription would work for jazz too. It’s also the first time a local act will take the stage of the Duncan-Williams Performance Hall.
“David contacted Paul Chandler at GPAC about the idea, and he was very excited and immediately went for it,” Shoup says. “They’ve been doing this Jazz in the Box program for a long time. That’s been successful, but now it’s moving to the main stage. You’ve got to give him kudos for that. He’s saying there’s lots of tremendous local talent here; let’s showcase it. And I couldn’t be happier about him feeling that way.”
But it’s all about the music.
“Duke Ellington wrote more than 2,000 songs,” Shoup says. “We won’t be performing all of them. We have a 15-piece band. We’re trying to take a diverse approach that spans Ellington’s whole career. There’s some fascinating stuff to draw on. We’ve tried to draw from several different areas of his career. We have some stuff with smaller groups and some stuff with a big band.”
The band is composed of heavies: Shoup on bass [don’t believe him when he says he’s bringing a Marshall stack], Tom Lonardo on drums, Marc Franklin, Reed McCoy, and Scott Thompson on trumpet, and Topper on saxophone, to name a few.
The evening was originally planned as a tribute to Greenwood, Mississippi, native and University of Memphis alumnus Mulgrew Miller. But Miller died on May 29th of this year.
“He was actually in my theory class when I was here,” Shoup says of Miller. “Unfortunately, he passed away. We decided to go ahead with the project. But in the future, we want to try to feature an artist and bring someone in. There’s talk of doing a Miles Davis show. We even thought about doing a Frank Zappa show and bringing in [his son] Dweezil, if he’ll do it. But that’s how we want to set it up.”
Shoup is quick to point out that the U of M has a serious track record for producing jazz greats.
“Mulgrew Miller, Donald Brown, and James Williams all went to this university. They’ve all become jazz stars. I say to all of my students, ‘If you work hard, you can become a jazz star from this university. Because it’s been done. It’s been done three times.'”
While most of Ellington’s work is in the charts — the arranging of the instruments into harmony and rhythm — he was known as “the piano player,” a deferential joke in light of his unparalleled jazz compositions.
Alvie Givhan is on the piano bench this Saturday. He’s another U of M grad. Shoup adds:
“He studied with Gene Rush, and he played down on Beale Street at King’s Palace for 12 years. He’s a great player and is very enthusiastic about the show. The band is really the feature. Duke Ellington played solos, but there’s not even piano on some of the tunes we’re playing. It’s not even in the score for some of the suites. There’s plenty to play solo-wise, and different people are featured at different points.”
Shoup worked his way through the University of Memphis by writing and arranging for the school’s bands.
“They still play some of my charts, and I can hear all of my mistakes. When I was in the band, we got to go to the Final Four when Finch and Robinson played against Bill Walton. I was under the goal. I’m in all of the pictures, because I was ringside. I love the Pep Band. I’ve got these mutton-chop sideburns. I’ve been to two championship games, and we’ve lost both of them. If we win again, I’m not going.”
Being at that game is one big-time Memphis credential. Calling courtside “ringside” makes you seventh-level Memphian. And I’m not even sure how to handle this last Memphis credential: Shoup was a founding member of the Dog Police.
The Bluff City Jazz Project presents “An Evening with Ellington” at GPAC on Saturday, October 26th, at
8 p.m. Tickets start at $25; available at www.gpacweb.com.
Las Rosas, Toxie, Clear Plastic Masks, Warm Girls Wednesday night over to the Hi-Tone.
Check out Las Rosas’ story of a dude and a cat, in song:
It’s freakin’ Octubafest. Yeah, I know, TUBULAR!
It runs from Wednesday through Saturday, Oct. 23-26, at 5:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. University of Memphis, Harris Auditorium.
Fuzzy, psychedelic folk is all the rage these days. Nobody’s complaining. Who wouldn’t like pensive lyrics, fuzzed-out guitars, and galaxy-size reverb halls? At some point, young bands stopped gently hitting xylophones and baby-whispering (think every commercial c. 2010-12) and just got plain-old freaky. This is a good development.
It would be easy to link them all back to Syd Barrett and Marc Bolan. And, sure, the bearded vanguard would cite them as influences. But there were steps along the way. One of those touchstones is Neutral Milk Hotel. Before Tame Impala and Unknown Mortal Orchestra, there was Neutral Milk Hotel.
Members of the scene associated with the Elephant 6 Recording Company, the band formed in the 1990s around the peripatetic lifestyle and cassette aesthetic of Jeff Mangum. Mangum’s experimental mixtapes gained notoriety and led to the band’s first LP, On Avery Island in 1996. 1998’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was based on the life of Anne Frank.
The band went on hiatus in 1998 and returned to live performance in April of this year. Over the decade-and-a-half of inactivity, their music was covered by Bon Iver and Mountain Goats. — Joe Boone
Neutral Milk Hotel with Elf Power at Minglewood Hall on Friday, October 18th, at 9 p.m.
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Hell on Himself
Prolific is the type of word reserved for someone like Richard Hell. Born Richard Meyers, Hell dropped out of high school and moved to New York at the age of 17, had his poems published by Rolling Stone and New Directions before he was 21, then grew tired of the whole aspiring-writer thing and became one of the founders of the New York punk scene.
After putting down the typewriter and picking up the bass, Hell played some of the first punk shows on the CBGB stage and released iconic records with his bands the Neon Boys (later Television), the Heartbreakers (featuring Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan), and finally Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Hell isn’t on tour supporting his new autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, but he will be speaking and doing a book signing at the Brooks Museum of Art this Thursday evening. The Flyer caught up with him to ask some questions about his latest project.
Memphis Flyer: You started writing the autobiography in 2006. How did you approach writing it, did you turn to old journals or is it mostly from memory?
Richard Hell: I am lucky that I have a lot of background material to reference. Not only was I publishing writing as a teenager but there was a fair amount of coverage in magazines and papers that was really useful. Plus my mother is a pack rat; she’s kept boxes and boxes of things from my childhood. The homemade pamphlet from when I was eight years that supplied the title for the book came from her. I’m almost neurotically serious about being as accurate as I possibly can, and since the publication of the book I’ve discovered one or two things I’ve got wrong and I fixed them for the paperback. As far as the process of writing, I just winged it and went with the flow. When it came to me reaching back to the earliest days, there was no system or organization, I just trusted that the stuff that I remembered would be relevant.
Was there anything that you’d forgotten that came back to you once you started writing?
It’s always cool to get a flash of recollection of something really vivid that you hadn’t remembered, no matter what it is. When you write something like this you realize that you do kind of just naturally create this narrative of your life as you go along. You know how when you’re first starting to fall in love or something like that, you and the person you’re falling in love with tend to gradually reveal to each other the stories of your past and your life? It was like that. Things you’re proud of, or find amusing, or sometimes ashamed of, they all get revealed when you become close to someone. There’s this whole repertoire of the things that you’ve been through that you remember gradually.
So if you moved to New York City to be a writer, when and why did you pick up the bass?
It was a conjunction of things. When I came to New York at 17 I started to get frustrated, it just seemed really isolated, there wasn’t much audience for young writers. It’s a specialized acquired taste, poetry. It washard to imagine where (being a writer) would lead because I didn’t like having jobs, I sure didn’t want to go to school, and I didn’t want to become a teacher even if I did qualify. I just couldn’t see how to make my life as a poet work, and I wanted my work to be my life. I wanted it to be interchangeable, and at the same time my best friend (>>>>>)was an aspiring professional musician, he was in a similar position and didn’t know where to get started. But anyway, this was when the New York Dolls were just starting, they were an example of these kids who just decided to put themselves out there. They felt like they were just being themselves, not adhering to a pre-established audience, and they were really popular but not about being commercial. They served as an example of how it was possible to get out there and do what excited you and make it work. All of those things taken into account, we got the idea to start a band and so I picked up a bass and started coming up with a way to express how things looked to us in songs, using whatever writing skills I had already developed.
There’s been a lot of talk that most of what’s published in the book on NYC punk Please Kill Me is either embellished or just completely made up. What’s your take on that book?
There’s a lot of like inaccuracy, some of which coming from people twisting stories to serve their own purpose. There’s no fact checking. That being said, being true to the spirit of what went on, in terms of just conveying what it was like it to be there, it’s by far the best picture and the most accurate. There are specific things that aren’t true, overall the whole impression of what went down is really on the mark. I like the book, there are a lot of books about that time and place that are just silly and stupid, and they get credence and stuff gets perpetuated in the press that is just wrong, but Please Kill Me is a great book.
Did you see your autobiography as a way to give a different take on what those parts of your life were really like?
Not really, it came very low on the list of my incentives to write the book. It was good to have the chance here and there to correct false stories that had been distorted and had been reported. The main reason I wrote the book was because I was curious to see what it would add up to if I put this whole sequence side by side. I wanted to see what the picture ended up looking like; I wanted to find out for myself. At any moment you have this perception of who you are and what you’ve been through, you have this vague idea of what the whole picture is like but it just happens in little fragments moment to moment. I wanted to see what it looked like if I made it all into one object.
How is writing different for you, does it provide a spark that playing music didn’t?
I mean the thing for me about writing is that it’s a relief from life and music. Music entails all this other peripheral stuff, touring and being a public figure and having to make a lot of money. It’s not easy to survive as a writer but it’s sure not as expensive as making records. I mean you’ve gotta be conscience of your popularity all the time in music. There are a lot more peripheral demands in music. The thing that I really liked about music was making records, writing songs and making records, but there is so much else you have to do, including feeding all these mouths. It’s not just expensive to finance a music career, you have to work really hard to sell a lot of records to make it feasible. Writing is so much simpler; I’ve always loved writing and loved books. It wasn’t much of a sacrifice to move on, I do sometimes get wistful about all the songs I could have written, but I don’t really have any regrets.
How difficult was it writing an autobiography compared to the works of fiction that you’ve published? Was there anything that was intentionally left out?
Well in some ways it was easier because I had all the material, I didn’t have to wonder where things were going. But that’s the fun part of writing fiction is surprising yourself every day with where the story goes. The main difference is the weird challenges and problems created by writing about yourself. You have to be conscience of the temptations of anyone who has written an autobiography, to have everything you write be self-serving. But at the same time I didn’t want to misrepresent myself, I mean yeah I’m pretty egotistical so I didn’t want to be falsely humble but at the same time I didn’t want to misrepresent anything that happened, so that got a little tricky. It’s interesting to see the responses to the book, the way people react to what I wrote, but I basically feel like I pulled it off. I’m satisfied with how I dealt with that problem. I think the book is a fair representation of what happened and who I am. I said a lot of ugly things, one odd thing is that people sometimes talk about what I creep I am. Maybe not that word but it boils down to that, sometimes people actually do say creep, but often enough people don’t take into account that I chose what to say. They say that I am a creep because I’m calling myself a creep. It’s not that I’m calling myself ugly but I chose to say those things and to reveal those things about myself. I could have done it differently.
Do you think that people who don’t know you as someone who shaped American punk rock will still enjoy the book?
I will flatter myself and say that the ones who are literally minded will enjoy it, I think it’s a good book (laughs). Part of the motivation was to describe what a life like mine was like, what it was like to be an aspiring young artist in NYC in the 70s. A lot of the great works in history are about the young person coming to the city to create their life. It’s an inherently interesting subject. It is almost just incidental that it has to with music. I don’t even pick up the guitar until a third way through the book.
In the book you talk about how the Sex Pistols owe more than a little to you for your look that they adopted through there manager Malcolm McLaren. What are the differences between a statement like “I belong to the blank generation” as opposed to “Anarchy in the UK.”
I don’t really think about either of those things, I wrote that song and I put it out into the world, But I don’t really know how to answer because I’m not a student of the Sex Pistols.
Are you a fan of any rock and roll memoirs or autobiographies by musicians? Is there anyone from that New York Scene that you think needs to write a book?
I think please kill me is the best book easily. It’s true there are a lot of mistakes on it, I disagree with a lot of the emphasis, certain people get more attention than what is warranted, but still it’s by far the best if you’re looking for a fan literature.
An Evening With Richard Hell
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art
Thursday, October 17th, 7 p.m.
$6 museum members/$8 nonmembers
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Greyhounds on Ardent
“We’ve always wanted to do something in Memphis,” says Andrew Trube, half of the band Greyhounds.
Trube will have his chance, as Ardent Music has signed Greyhounds, adding to a growing roster and reflecting the ambition of new management at the label.
Trube and Anthony Farrell play guitar and organ in JJ Grey and Mofro.
“Anthony and I have been playing music for 15 years and touring hell’s half-acre — everywhere,” Trube says. “The sax player in Mofro, Art Edmaiston, is from Memphis. Over the years, I’ve become friends with people like Memphis musicians Scott Bomar and Howard Grimes. Just meeting them and hanging out, we knew we had to do something here.
“Reed hollered at us. But he had no idea how deep a connection we had with Memphis already. We’d already gone through Ardent a couple of times. It’s funny how it worked out. Serendipitous.”
“Reed” is Reed Turchi, label director since 2011 at Ardent Music, the secular label associated with Ardent Studios. The label has a venerable history and … a not so venerable history.
Ardent Records began through studio founder John Fry’s association with Stax Records in the late 1960s and ’70s. Stax was initially distributed through Atlantic Records but broke with them in 1968. In 1972, Stax president Al Bell signed a deal with Clive Davis and CBS records that lasted until 1977. Stax’s bankruptcy notice from January 26, 1977, lists the label’s assets, including five albums and eight singles under the Ardent imprint. Two of those albums, #1 Record and Radio City by Big Star, represented the apex of the label’s output.
In the early 1990s, Ardent Music was revived alongside a now-contemporary Christian-oriented label, Ardent Records. The Christian label was and remains a huge success, mainly through platinum-selling band Skillet. The secular side was something of a mess:
A solo Alex Chilton album felt exactly like a contract obligation. Ardent’s attempt to work with the genuine freaks Neighborhood Texture Jam belongs in the studio-lore hall of fame. Finally, the disaster known as Techno Squid Eats Parliament proved to be the camel-crushing straw, and the label was shuttered. (Unless you have a heart condition, go read the allmusic.com entry for Techno Squid Eats Parliament. Seriously.) The label was soon shuttered until 2008, when Jump Back Jake became the first release of the current incarnation of Ardent Music.
Enter Turchi, who was a student at UNC-Chapel Hill when he first began releasing records.
“There’s an old lineage between Chapel Hill, Memphis, and north Mississippi,” Turchi says. “While I was at Chapel Hill, I worked a lot with Bill Ferris and on his Memphis, Oxford, Chapel Hill trajectory.
“While I was working with him, he let me know that he had these old recordings of Mississippi Fred McDowell that were sitting there in the archive at Chapel Hill. I was really into that stuff and still am. I asked him about putting it out, and he was game for it. The tapes were just collecting dust. We started a label called Devil Down, just to put that out into the world. That got more attention than I had ever expected. I’ve done eight releases on that. All of those were during my last two-and-a-half years in Chapel Hill, when I was spending a ton of time, almost every other weekend, in north Mississippi with Kenny Brown, the North Mississippi Hill-Country Picnic. Mary Lindsey Dickinson introduced me to John Fry. That was the summer of 2011, and it went better than anybody expected.”
The label has held on to the Big Star releases and to neo-folkies Star & Micey. Since Turchi’s arrival, the label has added two more acts: Greyhounds and Admirers. Admirers is the project of Mikey James, a producer with a penchant for finding engineers he admires and working with them, the latest being legendary Ardent Studios eminence John Hampton.
But Greyhounds seemed destined to be on Ardent and in Memphis. The partnership is interesting in the sense that Greyhounds has plans to use previously recorded material in addition to using the studio’s human and electronic assets.
“I met them a couple of years ago in passing,” Turchi says of Greyhounds. “The first thing I was doing at Ardent is to try and find bands that were a good fit. The label is not defined by a genre, so there wasn’t a sound that I was looking for as much as a band that we could work with and would benefit from us working with them. Obviously, the Ardent label is not going to be putting out bedroom recordings. We wanted to work with people who are interested in the unique things Ardent offers, which include the Memphis scene and obviously the studio. I started playing their music around the building and everything kept going positively. They were interested in working in Memphis and had talked seriously about doing a record here. The only reason they weren’t signed to a label is that they are spending a lot of time in JJ Grey and Mofro. Greyhounds was their thing before that, but since joining that band they haven’t had to pay rent with it. I read through their Facebook posts, and people want more Greyhounds. Now that we are helping them grow, they are really excited about getting the push. They were afraid it was getting pushed into a side project.”
Trube is excited about the opportunity to salvage earlier material and about the prospect of recording at Ardent with Memphis’ best talent.
“[The older material has] never been properly released,” Trube says. “So it lets us tell the story of what we’re about and then move forward with new stuff. Hoping to get a bunch of the old guys and not necessarily make a Memphis-sounding record, but hand them our tunes and say y’all play them however you interpret them. Sound like you.
“Ardent is sort of like the mortar. It’s the catalyst for all of this stuff to happen. To work with those people … We get to use that lathe in there. I mean, come on, that place is radical.”
This weekend marks the tenth anniversary of the passing of Shawn Lane. Lane was known the world over as a peerless guitarist. Newby’s is hosting a weekend-long festival of music to remember him. Below, his friend and student Paul Taylor remembers Lane as a mentor and considers Lane’s influence on his musical life.
Shawn Lane was a preternaturally gifted guitarist, who by the age of 14 had mastered his own techniques and speed on the guitar that to this day remain nonreplicable. To this day, the current guitar wizards all genuflect and marvel at his unparalleled speed, melodicism, and compositional skills.
When I was a boy, my father would take me to see Shawn, and I really couldn’t — I still can’t — understand how anyone could play that fast. At first, I made the common mistake of writing it off as finger-wiggling with no depth. My brain couldn’t process it. Many guitarists view Shawn this way at first. Maybe It’s a mechanism of jealousy, or all of our ears are just entirely too slow!
My dad’s band was Shawn’s rhythm section, so I had access to bootleg tapes that would become his Warner Brother record Powers of Ten. I obsessively wore those tapes out. Slowly it began to sink in. This guy was playing very legitimate musical patterns at blinding Art-Tatum-does-triple-time speed. It was no B.S. And it was all on top of his beautiful compositions that had the rare ability to invoke deep feelings. That trait is so hard to come by in instrumental music. It was a rare gift.
Shawn did his best to teach others how to do what he did but always would say that his nervous system was just wired differently.
I had the good fortune of befriending Shawn and playing music with him in my late teens and early 20s. It was at this time that his true depth became clear to me. He was an avid reader, student of philosophy, science and culture; a film devotee; a lover of soundtrack music and classical music. He was a self-taught piano savant and a student of music from all over the world, especially qawwali (Sufi music of Southeast Asia) and Indian classical.
In the last 10 years of Shawn’s life he was able to tour the world in a trio with bassist Jonas Hellborg and master drummer Jeff Sipe. Shawn’s interest in Indian classical music was fulfilled as they toured India, and he made music and studied with many of his heroes. Shawn himself is still regarded as a hero all across Europe and the east.
Shawn languished in obscurity stateside and particularly in his hometown of Memphis. In a city that claims to be a music town, his is no new story: Original artist/innovator can’t buy a gig, while cover bands thrive on Beale and dance and garage bands fuel people’s weekends. Shawn led that double life many of us know well. His craft was recognized largely everywhere on earth except for this town.
After battling illness for most of his adult life and without health coverage, Shawn’s health took a drastic downward turn in 2003, and he died from a lung-related illness 10 years ago today.
Although his technical wizardry will always be that for which he is most known, Shawn’s legacy lies far more in his melodicism and his compositions than in his speed and literally unparalleled technical prowess on guitar (and piano). His soul shines through in his songs: in the singing bits of his guitar parts, the little inflections.
Still, for pure fire and an unworldly experience, watch footage of Shawn. It’s unholy. Actually, it’s totally holy!!
His friends and family sorely miss Shawn, but he isn’t going anywhere. He still sits atop the ever-clattering mountain of competing guitarists, laughing down at a rat race he never had to play a part in. He transcended. He transcends.
LONG LIVE SHAWN LANE!
— Paul Taylor
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Hard-Earned Homecoming
Even for those with proven greatness, the pursuit of stardom can be a cruel fate. For John Gary Williams — the singer for the Mad Lads, whose success on Stax’s Volt subsidiary was derailed when he was drafted in 1966 — the possibility of redemption is at hand. Thanks to the hard work of Williams, Emmy-winning producer John Hubbell, and Stax eminence Deanie Parker, Williams has another shot.
When Williams returned to the U.S., he was reinstated into the Mad Lads (against the wishes of his band mates) at the insistence of Stax founder Jim Stewart. A mix-up in 1968 involving the civil-rights-era agitators the Invaders landed him in prison. Upon his release, Williams recorded a long-missing 1973 self-titled solo album. Williams’ album was not released: a casualty of label mismanagement on a scale comparable to the period’s musical grandiosity. This is late-period Stax: Strings and a funky rhythm section combine for epic soul music.
This Saturday, he will perform in concert with Opus One and soul revivalists the Bo-Keys at the Levitt Shell. It’s the first performance of music from Williams’ album. Hubbell and Parker have worked for nearly a decade to locate the masters and negotiate their release, an effort still in the works. Hubbell and photographer Lance Murphey are also producing a documentary to tell Williams’ story. To watch the trailer, go to iseehopememphis.com and get on board with this Memphis homecoming.
John Gary Williams with Opus One and the Bo-Keys, Levitt Shell, Saturday, September 28th, 7:30 p.m. The concert is free.