Looks just like her daddy. Starts at 7:30. Only jerks park on Kenilworth. Don’t park on Kenilworth.
Tag: Memphis
Valerie June played the Tonight Show last night. She starts after the last hash mark in the video timeline. 37:42. You can see it if you watch a million commercials. Seriously, a million. You will watch 2 minutes 30 seconds of commercials; Xfinity seconds, not real seconds. It’s worth the wait. Compared to her David Letterman appearance, she seems more at home with her band and more comfortable in her role. She seems to be justifying all the recent publicity. All the best from Memphis.
Memphis rapper Juicy J teams up with The Bieb on the new video “Lolly” for Maejor Ali, who produced two songs for Beiber’s Believe album. Juicy J also helped Katy Perry on her latest track “Dark Horse.”
Between Juicy J and Elliot Ives, the stars of pop can’t do it without their Memphis.
Video Bonanza:
Beale Street mainstay and contender for TV’s The Voice Patrick Dodd is back in Memphis and recording tracks for a new EP of thematic songs at Ardent Studios. The dreadlocked blues guitar phenom is looking to explore a smaller form than the traditional album as an outlet for his trio and his meal ticket: his voice.
With his new burst of TV-derived notoriety, Dodd could easily have upped the ante with a full album and a larger-format band. But he seems confident and content to move in the opposite direction. Asked why he isn’t going for bigger things, Dodd looks at his career with a sense of humor born of relentless gigging on Beale and throughout the region.
“Everybody wants to get paid,” he joked, going on to mimic the lines he must have heard a million times. “It’ll be good exposure. I know you’re only 40.”
- Joe Boone
- Patrick Dodd relaxes after nailing his overdubs.
But in all seriousness, his band is in a better place than before his run on the popular NBC primetime singing contest in which he sang a convincing “Walking in Memphis” before his elimination.
“It absolutely helped,” said Landon Moore, Dodd’s bassist who with drummer Harry Peel rounds out the trio. “But I’m glad to be doing what we were doing before he left.”
What the trio does is provide a solid blues-rock foundation for Dodd’s gutsy, powerful voice. Dodd was recording a few overdubs and made quick work of them; his Paul Rogers-like voice needing very little fuss from engineer Jeff Powell.
Powell, longtime Ardent veteran, is a major proponent of the shorter-form approach and sees more clients opting to focus on fewer songs with more preparation beforehand. The trio was in the studio for one long day cutting two Dodd originals: “End of the Line” and “I’m Gone.”
“The one-day thing works if the band is ready to go. We’ll mix this tonight,” Powell said.
The songs mark a major development in Dodd’s songwriting and arranging since his last full-length recording, Future Blues. The new material has a wider breadth due to rolling chord changes that add harmonic richness to the recordings. Dodd hopes to a series of five-song concept recordings that are thematically woven together with lyrics and artwork. “I’m Gone” will serve as a single for the first new collection, which, at this pace, could be ready to go in as little as six weeks.
www.patrickdoddtrio.bandcamp.com
Memphis got a double dose of funk on Wednesday, when the Memphis Drum shop hosted drumming legends Clyde Stubblefield and John “Jabo” Starks. Both men played on James Brown’s essential funk hits of the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Both were in town for the Memphis Drum Shop’s “In-Store Clinic” series. I arrived as both were enjoying lunch from Soul Fish with shop owner Jim Pettit and store staff. Stubblefield was reticent in contrast to the loquacious Starks.
“This place is a museum,” Starks said of Memphis Drum Shop. “If you say ‘drum’ it’s in here. It’s the best-organized store I’ve ever been in, bar none. And I’m not greasing my friend Jim because he’s standing here.” I mentioned that I come to the store even though I’m a bassist. “You got no business at this store,” joked Starks, who kept the lunch lively throughout.
- Joe Boone
- Memphis Drum Shop owner Jim Pettit with Jabo Starks and Clyde Stubblefield
While the two frequently worked together with Brown, Stubblefield’s biggest hits are from the late ’60s (“Cold Sweat”, “There Was A Time”, “I Got The Feelin'”, “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud”, “Ain’t It Funky Now”, and “Mother Popcorn”) and Starks’ from the early ’70s (“The Payback”, “Sex Machine”, “Super Bad”, and “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing”). Brown was a legendary taskmaster to his players and had many bands before working with Stubblefield and Starks. Starks recalled the turmoil around the addition of Phelps brothers Bootsy and Phelps, who were much younger and often oblivious to the expectations of the demanding Godfather.
“The rhythm changed when Bootsy got there. I said, ‘Boy, you got to gel. Once you lock in, I don’t care what you do.’ He played different. It was a 360-degree turn. You see, James was declining. But with [Sex Machine], he shot right back up to the top.”
Stubblefield is of particular musicological interest as the most-sampled drummer in the history of hip-hop. He did not enjoy royalty income from his ubiquitous influence over hip-hip in the 80s and 90s, when his beat for “The Funky Drummer” proved irresistible to emcees and rappers who sampled that beat with its magical combination of rock-solidity and compelling liveliness. Users of the beat include Run DMC, Public Enemy, NWA, LL Cool J, and the Beastie Boys. It is a masterpiece for the ages, but it provided no remuneration to Stubblefield, who was profiled in a PBS documentary, Copyright Criminals.
Memphis’ Uptown Neighborhood is abuzz with the possibility that a brand new Family Dollar could be constructed at Chelsea and Thomas just across from another, still relatively new Family Dollar, also located at Chelsea and Thomas.
“Value is attractive to everybody, but some people just won’t cross the street for it,” says Earl Gray, the founding director of Solutionista, an innovation firm that advises management at large discount chains, showing CEOs worldwide why ideas that don’t seem to make any sense really do.
“As long as they put a sign in the window advertising ‘discount cigs,’ I’m confident that this Family Dollar will do every bit as well as the one across the street,” Gray says. “And, due to recent population shifts, it could potentially outperform the original within 3- to 5-years of opening.”
According to Gray, having the word “family” in its name is just one of many reasons why Family Dollar can build a new store across the street from a nearly new one.
“It makes you feel at home wherever you are. You know right off it’s a place where you can buy your discount cigs without having to worry about whether or not your children are being exposed to the wrong ‘As Seen on TV’ products,” he says.
Categories
Wizards and Warriors
Fourteen Memphis smoke shops were recently declared a public nuisance and shut down. Now this, from the future…
Day 53: I have survived another day. Madison doesn’t look the way it used to. There’s fewer of us left. I had to eat McDonald’s to get my fix. A Happy Meal doesn’t cut it. I got my other needs at a different place, but I need these.
Day 62: I found what I was looking for but I can’t get in! It’s boarded up with yellow tape and SIGNS. SIGNS FROM WHERE?!?!?? WHAT THE HELL??? I NEEEEEEEEEEEEED IT
Day 63: It is still there, still boarded up. I know they are in there. I know. I can smell them. Through the “potpourri” through the “spice” I can smell them. I found something like them, but not THEM.
Day 67: I got lost.
Day 72: I found it again. I clawed the boards until my fingers bled. I NEED THEM. THEY ARE CALLING ME. COME TO ME
DAY 96: IM TIRED OF WRITING THIS JOURNAL DAMMIT. I JUST NEED MY FIX. I JUST WANT TO HOLD THEM FOR A FEW MINUTES. I JUST WANT ONE TO TAKE. OPEN THE DAMN DOORS!!! WHY ME??????????
Day 102: Much calmer now. I got in. I found it. I found the one. I can’t leave. I can’t sleep. They will take it away again. I don’t care about the plastic baggies or the “vitamins” here, I just wanted this one little guy…
Let the bashing begin. The State Department of Education has released district-by-district achievement test scores.
Student performance on the 2012 Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program improved significantly in school districts across the state. Nearly all of the state’s 136 districts saw proficiently levels increase, and two-thirds improved in every subject of the 3-8 TCAP Achievement tests.
Memphis made improvements in math and reading at the high school and lower-grades levels. Shelby County made bigger improvements and had, as usual, higher numbers of students in the “proficient” and “advanced” categories.
District proficiency levels reveal major improvements in math skills. More than 50 districts saw double-digit growth over last year in Algebra I, with some reporting gains greater than 30 percentage points. Additionally, 23 districts saw double-digit growth in grades 3-8 math.
In Memphis, in grades 3-8, 27.6 percent of students were proficient or advanced in math and 29.2 percent were proficient or advanced in reading. In high school, 33.8 were in those categories in algebra 1 and 43.2 percent in English 1.
In Shelby County, in grades 3-8. 57.4 percent were proficient or advanced in math and 61.3 percent in reading. In high school, 60.2 percent were proficient or advanced in Algebra 1 and 74.3 percent in English 1.
In the future unified Shelby County Schools, the scores will be lumped together. But the outcome of the municipal schools issue will impact the results.
A short comic opera could probably be written about Opera Memphis‘s Tuesday night preview of Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus at the Clark Opera Center. The turnout was unexpectedly large but the caterer was in a wreck. Nobody was injured but the van was smashed up as was the food and there were many zombie-eyed guests wandering the lobby with a desperate “where’s the cheese tray” look. Fortunately the preview performances were as crisp and bubbly as the pre-show Champagne.
Here’s an audio sample of maestro Steven Osgood working with his cast on an ensemble passage and getting some great performances.
The preview performances were broadcast live by WKNO radio.
Die Fledermaus is at Germantown Performing Arts Center Jan 21 & 24, 2012
Levi Aron, the man strongly suspected of murdering and dismembering an 8-year-old Hasidic boy in Brooklyn, spent the last few years in Memphis. The Smoking Gun has the best rundown on Aron that I’ve been able to find.
