Many know Jeremy Scott through his work with the now-defunct Reigning Sound, but there’s a lot more to this rock-and-roll lifer’s music career than that. After leaving that band for the first time (before the original group re-formed and then split again in this decade), he went on to found The Wallendas (featuring guitar pyrotechnics from Jim Duckworth), followed by Toy Trucks, The Subtractions, and a million ad hoc projects like the all-star tribute to Doug Sahm that he organized last month. (Full disclosure, I played with him in some of these groups.) One common thread through all of these has been the presence of the gritty, indie rock energy he often showcases on his weekly radio show on WEVL, Out On the Side, marked by a close attention to vocal harmonies.
That was also true for the first album under his own name, 2022’s Bear Grease, which he pieced together with multi-instrumentalist/engineer Graham Burks Jr. through the magic of overdubs. As the Flyer observed at the time, “though he started with acoustic intentions, he couldn’t help but let his rock instincts take over.” And, as that unfolded, the album took on a hard-rocking edge that required a full band.
And thus were the Drip Edges born, as Scott added Noel Clark on guitar and Mitchell Manley on bass to create a team that could present the album in a live setting. Now, with the release of their new EP, Kicking the Tires on the Clown Car, the quartet has come into its own. I spoke to Scott last week to see how this release compares to his solo debut.
The new EP
Memphis Flyer: The song “Dirty Sound” on the new EP seems the most like Bear Grease, and it’s the only acoustic-driven song on the record. You’ve said this new release was recorded by the Drip Edges as a band, but is that true for “Dirty Sound”?
Jeremy Scott: That’s 97 percent me, and Graham helped with the percussion tracks.
So that’s the only track done in the manner of Bear Grease?
Yes, it is. I put all the harmonies on. And Graham’s got a Mellotron, and I was playing around with it. And I’m like, “Well, maybe you can put some of this on?” Because he put Mellotron on “Fred Neil Armstrong” on the first record. And then he was like, “Well, why don’t you just do it?” I’m like, “Are you sure? People could get hurt!” But it wound up sounding not awful. Then there are weird things in there that sound almost like a trombone in spots. That’s just me on the guitar, running it through this pedal called a Slow Engine. Sometimes it can make it sound a little bit like a backwards guitar. It’s a pretty cool device.
You’ve certainly leaned into the hard rock elements of Bear Grease on this new release, but they’re revved up more, played by a seasoned band. I hear a lot of Hüsker Dü’s influence on some of the tracks.
Yeah. Hüsker Dü was so formative for me. Okay, I heard the Replacements first, and I dug them, but I got really burned out on the Replacements, and now I don’t really feel like I ever need to listen to them. Ever. That’s not their problem, that’s mine. Hüsker Dü, I can listen to whenever. It all holds up. And the one that really bit me in the ass was [1985 album] New Day Rising. That was a great combination of power and melody. That whole run from Metal Circus through Zen Arcade is so amazing. But New Day Rising is probably my personal favorite.
What exactly has stayed with you from those records, as you’ve written your own songs?
Just the songwriting combined with that guitar sound. And I picked up some things here and there from Bob Mould’s guitar style. Like, I was listening to the intro to the first song of ours — “Everything’s Gonna Have to Be Alright” — and thinking it probably sounds a little bit more like Sugar [Mould’s post-Hüsker Dü band]. Even though I didn’t have that Rat [distortion] pedal and the other stuff he used.
The intro to another song, “Nobody Wants to Drive,” almost sounds like Ratt, the band. The crunch and darker chord changes are a little more metal.
That one actually is probably more influenced by Sugar. And that one is funny because that started off when I was still doing the Toy Trucks band. We tried playing that song, but it was more like a really energetic, forceful waltz. It was in 6/8, and the chorus was the same, but the verse was entirely different — different melody, different lyrics. And I came back to it with these guys, thought about a little bit, and I’m like, “What the hell am I doing here?” So I just decided to make it 4/4, to make it more of a straightforward thing.
The band seems to really relish playing an outright rocker.
It’s a testament to how these guys can put a song over, and it’s good playing with these younger guys that have that energy. I mean, nobody’s going to confuse me with a spring chicken at this point. I guess I’m a little bit more of a winter chicken.
The Drip Edges will play a record release show at the Lamplighter Lounge on Saturday, February 15th, at 3 p.m. Joecephus & The George Jonestown Massacre will open.
Stax salutes a fallen hero. (Photo: Courtesy
Stax Museum of American Soul)
Back during the initial flowering of Stax Records, as the label went from success to success in its first half-dozen years, and all its rooms buzzed with an ever-expanding staff trying to keep up with popular demand, one star in particular had a tendency to saunter away from the studio, where the action was, and take a detour down Stax’s back hallways from time to time. Deanie Parker, one of the label’s first office employees who soon became their lead publicist, remembers it well — that’s where she worked.
“Every now and then, he just walked in the door,” she recalls a little wistfully, “with little gifts for the girls in the office, little packages. That’s the kind of person he was.”
Now, scores of mourners will be sending flowers to that same soul singer, Sam Moore, the high tenor partner of Dave Prater in Stax super duo Sam & Dave, who died at the age of 89 on January 10th in Coral Gables, Florida, from post-surgery complications. This week, we pay tribute to the great Sam Moore by revisiting the pivotal role he played in the history of Stax and all soul music, as remembered by two who were right there with him: Deanie Parker and David Porter.
(Photo: Bill Carrier Jr. | Courtesy of The Concord API Stax Collection)
Sam Moore: The Stax Years
The quieting of one of soul music’s most expressive voices sent powerful shock waves throughout the music world — certainly among his late-career collaborators like Bruce Springsteen, but not least in Memphis, where Moore and Prater, singing the songs of Porter and Isaac Hayes, helped bring the Stax sound to its fullest fruition in the mid-’60s, becoming overnight sensations with hits like “Hold On, I’m Comin,’” “You Don’t Know Like I Know,” “I Thank You,” and “Soul Man.”
Even then, “Sam Moore got along especially well with the administrative staff,” says Parker, recalling those spontaneous gifts. “He was the most gregarious of the duo. He was a great conversationalist and very personable. Dave was rather laid-back, kind of quiet.
“Keep in mind, now, that I was not in the studio with him all the time because I was in administration,” Parker goes on. “But because of our proximity to each other, it gave me an opportunity to get up and, when the record light was not on in Studio A, go in and observe and listen — not only to their rehearsals, but to the final takes and the playback.”
Surely anyone at Stax was rushing down the hall to hear the hot new duo’s latest, once the hits were hitting, for they were taking the Stax recipe to a whole new level of artistry. Yet while those songs are now part of the Stax canon, the definitive statements of the Memphis Sound, the success of two newcomers named Sam & Dave was not a foregone conclusion when they arrived.
Deanie Parker heading up the publicity desk at Stax (Photo: Courtesy Bill Carrier Jr. | The Concord API Stax Collection)
Newcomers
“There was no one interested in Sam & Dave,” songwriter David Porter told Rob Bowman in the liner notes for The Complete Stax/Volt Singles: 1959-1968. “It was like a throwaway kind of situation [to] see if anything could happen with them.” Indeed, it seemed no one at Atlantic Records, who had a distribution deal with Stax, knew what to do with this singing duo from Florida, who’d had little luck with their scattered singles on the Marlin, Alston, and Roulette labels. Despite this, said Porter, “I was very much interested in Sam & Dave.”
But were Sam & Dave interested in Memphis? Atlantic had “loaned” the duo to the smaller label that was showing so much promise, but in 1965 Stax was hardly a household name. Moore’s reaction, according to Parker, was, “Who wants to go to Memphis?” Moore had his sights set on crossover pop stardom in the Big Apple, not moving to what seemed like a backwater. “He really did not have a positive impression about Memphis,” Parker says. “And apparently he was not all that familiar with Stax, which stands to reason, because when Sam & Dave got here, we only had a couple of stars. We just had Rufus and Carla, Booker T. and the M.G.’s, the Mar-Keys, and Otis [Redding]. I don’t know that we had more than those in the category of the top stars.”
Moore himself described the situation hilariously in his acceptance speech for Sam & Dave’s induction into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame in October 2015. “When Dave and I first came to Memphis,” Moore recalled, “the first person I saw was David Porter. He had on a small hat, a big sweater, and his pants looked like pedal pushers. Water came into my eyes.” Moore paused for laughter with impeccable comic timing. “Then it got worse: I saw Isaac. Isaac had on a green shirt with a low-cut neck, like that, a white belt, chartreuse pants, pink socks, and white shoes. I started crying harder. I wanted to go home.”
There must have been more than a little truth to that, for, as Moore went on to explain, “I had in mind to sing like Jackie Wilson, James Brown, Wilson Pickett … but then they introduced us to these two guys and we went inside and they introduced us to the songs. And they didn’t sound nothing like Jackie Wilson and all these people! And then I turned to Dave … and he was trying to get a phone number to get to the airport.
“Being the new kids on the block, we had nothing to say. So we had to go on in there.”
In fact, they were walking into the Stax brain trust, which had always dared to be different. When Sam & Dave’s pre-Stax singles tried to emulate the more polished soul of Wilson or Sam Cooke, albeit without their orchestral flourishes, the results came off as rather corny. Now it was 1965, and pop music was getting edgier, from Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” to the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Even James Brown, whose biggest hits had been ballads like “Try Me,” was cooking up material like “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.”
Porter and Hayes mapping out the next Sam & Dave hit (Photo: Courtesy Bill Carrier Jr. | The Concord API Stax Collection)
Dream Team
David Porter, who saw their potential early on, inched them toward a rawer take on soul music when he penned the shuffling, feel-good “A Place Nobody Can Find” for them, though the B-side, written by Porter and Steve Cropper, was a more tender ballad, with sassy horns thrown in for good measure. Unlike their later hits, Prater was given the lead vocal, though Moore’s upper register parts hinted at the harmonies that were to come. It wasn’t until their next single that Porter and Hayes teamed up to produce the duo, and their nascent songwriting partnership blossomed. And they gelled not only in the substance of the songs, with Porter crafting lyrics for Hayes’ music, but in the strategy they mapped out for the two new kids on the block.
Reflecting on that strategy today, Porter says that Sam & Dave “didn’t have a concept as far as the artistic direction that they needed to go. That’s why Jerry Wexler, the president of Atlantic Records, brought them to Memphis, in hopes of finding whatever that was — he didn’t know what it was. But we had our concept of what we wanted to do, and that was to bring it out of the church, the spirituality out of the church, and have the music emphasize what we called the low end of it, the bass, drums, and guitar, and the underlying chord progressions in the low end, paired with the gospel persona of it, the spirituality of the church.”
And yet, as with Ray Charles and so much of the finest soul music, the gospel underpinnings supported very secular, worldly sentiments. Lyrically, Porter paired the world of the bluesman with the spirit of church. And that came as a shock to the singers, who had both grown up singing in church choirs.
“David Porter and Sam could clash,” Parker recalls, “but it wasn’t hostile, and it didn’t last but a few minutes. It was like they were sparring, you know? Of course, Isaac’s thing was the keyboard, he was the melody man, and Porter was the lyricist. And sometimes Porter had to stop and help both of the guys understand what he meant when he wrote, ‘Coming to you on a dusty road.’ You know what I’m saying? Because this was not Sam & Dave’s environment. This was David Porter’s environment from the area around Millington, Tennessee.”
And so a great foursome was born, beginning with the single “I Take What I Want,” which, as Bowman notes, “was to provide the model for the majority of Sam & Dave’s Stax 45s.” By the time “Hold On, I’m Comin’” dropped in March of 1966, topping the R&B charts and reaching number 21 on the pop charts, that model was locked in. After crafting a song and a sound, Porter and Hayes would only need to give the duo a brief rundown before they got it. Porter can still picture it today: “I’m standing there with them, and I’m looking at them as I give them the lyric sheet. We go through the melody at the piano, and then by the time they get on the microphone, they go into another world. They made it their own, and that’s when you know you’ve got something special.”
And so, even if “Sam was the dominant one,” as Parker recalls, and more prone to pushback, both Sam and Dave were consummate professionals. “We had to go on in there,” as Moore recalled, and they did.
Porter says, “There never was a comment like, ‘Well, I don’t want to do that song. I don’t like that song.’ Because we produced the albums, even when we were doing a song by some other writer, and on occasion we would do that, they still didn’t object. They would bring their own spirit and commitment to wanting to make it as good as it could possibly be. And they did that.”
The Key to the Speedboat
The foursome’s recipe for success not only gave Sam & Dave’s career a boost; it solidified Stax’s standing as a label. As Robert Gordon writes in Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, “their album Hold On, I’m Comin’ proved to be the breakthrough for Stax’s album sales. In all the company’s years through 1965, they’d released only eight albums. … In 1966 alone they released eleven albums and Sam & Dave’s Hold On went to number one on the R&B album sales chart. Albums were good business.”
Parker likens it to the fledgling label acquiring a sleek new machine. “They reminded me of a speedboat,” she says. “A boat that nobody was 100 percent familiar with because they were not on the water in the speedboat every day. They had to figure out a lot of things mechanically, and they had to become acquainted with each other. And I’m talking about Sam and Dave and David and Isaac. Once Sam and Dave found their groove with David and Isaac, it was like they had found the key to speedboat. They then began to realize that they had more going for them with their new producers than they’d ever imagined.”
If the speedboat was designed by the producers, Porter makes it clear that Sam & Dave supplied the spark of ignition. “You, as a creator, can create something that you know is strong and good, but when you have an artist that’s able to create their own individuality through the spirit of what you’ve done, then you’ve got something special. That’s the thing that made Sam Moore such a special talent, as well as Dave: They would go into the ownership of the message. I would tell them where the vibe was, and they would have to live the spirit of the message. That’s where true artistry comes in. And the more songs we wrote for them, the more comfortable they would get into doing it.”
Or, as Porter wrote on social media after Moore’s death, Sam & Dave “were always filled with passion, purity, individuality, and believability, grounded in soul.”
The road grew dustier and rockier as the years rolled on, with Atlantic claiming ownership of all Stax masters prior to 1968, and taking Sam & Dave away from Memphis. The duo never reached the heights of their Stax records again, and split apart as Moore struggled with addiction through the ’70s. Yet, with the help of his wife Joyce MacRae, whom he wed in 1982 and who now survives him, he kicked drugs (coming to support several GOP candidates along the way) and revived his career without Prater (who died in a car crash in 1988).
By the time he spoke to the Memphis Music Hall of Fame 10 years ago, Sam Moore had fully embraced his Stax past. “Coming from a humble beginning, with no formal training in singing or anything, we were just two guys who got out there and took the church with us, like Al Green did. … I’m going to say this to you: Thank you Memphis people, the band, the friends that Dave and I met all those years. …They believed in us. They stuck with us. Every record company that we had been with just didn’t know what to do with us. Sixty years later, I’ve been doing this. I’m blessed.”
Sam Moore knew he’d helped build something for the ages. As David Porter reflects now, “The music that was done by the four of us together will live on forever. There’s no doubt in my mind.”
My previous piece in 2018 on my friend Stanley Booth, whom I knew for 64 of his 82-plus years, had concluded with his revelation to me that he’d become a Catholic, achieving what he called “the greatest pleasure of my life … a complete redesign.”
It was surely appropriate, then, for Stanley’s funeral to be a Roman Catholic mass, which took place at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on Central Avenue on Saturday, December 28th, more than a week after his death at Harbor View Nursing Facility on North Second Street.
The attending group of communicants was smaller than I would have anticipated and scattered throughout the venerable high-ceilinged Midtown church. A mass was a mass, after all, and this one kept pretty much to the standard litany, without allowances for the kind of open memorial that people of consequence so often receive these days.
And Stanley Booth was very much a person of consequence. His authorship of The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Outlaw Band (published in 1984 as Dance With the Devil after years of dedicated effort and familiarity with the band) was arguably the War and Peace of the rock era. There were other notable books, like Rythm Oil, a compilation of shorter pieces about the people, places, and things of that era, which, after all, is still very much with us. (The purposely misspelled title was typical Boothian waggishness.)
My favorite single piece of Stanley’s, a brief review of a Janis Joplin concert in Memphis during the mid-’60s, a failure through no fault of the singer’s own, somehow manages to encompass all the rights, wrongs, misadventures, and pretensions of the time.
A memorial for Stanley will be scheduled for later on, or so promises our mutual friend David Less (no slouch as an author himself), who had made a point of looking in on Stanley in his last days. According to David, Stanley had been lonely and depressed at the nursing home, where he had grown progressively more physically incapacitated, even as his mind strained, as writers’ minds do, toward articulation and purpose.
All that striving had ceased mere days earlier, as Stanley, after consultations between David and Stanley’s daughter Ruby, was entered into hospice care per se. He had become mute and incommunicative, hovering on the edge of vegetative.
Very regrettably, I had not gotten around to seeing Stanley as he neared his end. Many reasons for that, including a newly acquired auto that couldn’t be depended on to start and resisted all efforts to fix. The basic reason, though, was that our relationship, like the car, famously had its fits and starts.
A few years ago, after a reasonably longish period of keeping close company (which meant, significantly, carting Stanley around and making sure he had things — e.g., wheelchair, TV, what-have-you — and passing on periodic feelers from music media types trying to connect with him), we’d had a bizarre interruption. Out of the proverbial blue, he’d asked me why, some 60 years earlier, I’d referred to his girlfriend of that time as “simian.”
I remembered no such shocking incivility toward a lady whom I had in fact admired and, reasonably enough, therefore, could offer no explanation. Many protests and back-and-forths later, there had been an exchange of over-the-edge remarks between us, resulting in a breach. Inevitably, there would have been a healing, something we’d gone through more than once during those aforesaid 60-odd years, but — time ran out.
Sadly, this kind of thing was not atypical for Stanley. His persona, like his sense of language, filled all the obvious, and most of the imaginable, spaces. Though he had reservoirs of charm, many of his relationships ran into stormy weather. Long on talent and short of stature, he had his share of the Napoleon syndrome. He could be modest, but never exactly humble. Or maybe that should be stated the other way around. His earliest literary model had been Ernest Hemingway, that paragon of basic English and exact phraseology.
At a public function some years ago, the late George Klein introduced him, molto con brio, as a celebrated music writer. No, Stanley objected, for better or for worse, he was a writer, pure and simple. This was an echo of Hemingway’s famous late-career admonition to his overly self-concerned contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald, “You see, Bo, you’re not a tragic character. Neither am I. All we are is writers.”
Over the years, I’ve known numerous highly talented individuals whose abilities transcended various categories of the usually recognized earthly disciplines. Even as we speak, I could name you a handful, right here in Mempho. Would-be Renaissance men (and women).
Though he was not without a generous amount of self-regard (as the high proportion of references to himself in all his work indicates), Stanley Booth was not among these across-the-board pretenders. A writer is all he was. No scatterer of loose energy across the lines. No diluter of his essential being.
And for that he deserves to be called a Master.
I did not mean to confer, earlier in this article, any slight upon the reach and scope of the Roman Catholic litany. Its very universality and subordination to a (lowercase) catholic whole may have been the aspect of the religion that most appealed to Stanley and caused him to embrace it.
“I am not after any pie in the sky,” he would tell me, by way of an awkward attempt to account for his conversion. In this piece, I have not listed any of the earthly honors conferred upon him, and there were many, including a lifetime achievement award from the Smithsonian Institute. But as Stanley once said, wistfully, “You can’t eat reputation. If I had a nickel for every good review I’ve had …” letting that sentence fade out rhetorically.
As the aforesaid litany notes, “we know partially, and we prophesy partially.” But it holds forth the idea for the striver of attaining the company of the saints, and that ain’t hay.
The first words of Marcella Simien’s new album, To Bend to the Will of a Dream That’s Being Fulfilled, are the perfect introduction to the journey that awaits listeners: “May I heal this family bloodline, forwards and backwards through time.” It’s an incantation of sorts, delivered with a devotional energy that sets the tone for what’s to come. Musically, it’s a departure from Simien’s previous recorded work by way of its minimalism, her main accompaniment for this song being a piano, so evocative of New Orleans and Louisiana. That region, of course, is where the Simiens have been for generations, and where any journey into the singer’s family bloodline must take her.
But while that’s zydeco country (her father Terrance being one of the most celebrated artists of that genre), this is not a zydeco album. Nor is it “swamp soul,” as the rootsy-yet-eclectic sound of Marcella Simien’s band has come to be called. For this most personal of journeys, she’s playing nearly all the instruments, crafting a setting in a kind of synthetic world-building, evoking the sweep of generations with the sweep of electronic filters.
With the new sound comes a new performance style, as Simien will unveil on Saturday, November 23rd, at Off the Walls Arts. “Yvonne [Bobo] built this structure out of metal,” Simien says, “with a screen on the front, and Graham [Burks] will be projecting visuals on this cylinder. It’s gonna be this really interesting experience for the audience, something new.”
Yet the electronic approach itself is not especially new to Simien. “I don’t even know where to begin with my love for synths, from Kraftwerk to Gary Numan to Gorillaz,” she says. “I always wanted to explore that more. Then we finally invested in a Korg recently.” With the new album, that investment has come to fruition, but in a subtle way. This sculpted audio universe doesn’t wear its synths and drum machines on its sleeve, yet it doesn’t shy away from them, either.
Other, rootsier sounds do make an appearance. Speaking of a song honoring her late great-grandmother, Simien says, “With the song ‘Lelia’ in particular, which was the guiding light for the whole idea, I intentionally used instruments that Lelia would have heard in her life and in the 1930s, when she was young and building her family.” Lelia is a centerpiece of the album, and the track bearing her name begins with the sounds of crickets in a field at night, then Simien saying, “Recently I’ve been writing with my great-grandmother.” Indeed, listening to the album, it feels as though Lelia is sitting in the room with us, though Simien never met her.
Nor did her father, Lelia having died when he was an infant. Yet Simien felt a deep bond with her father’s grandmother, and the small town where she helped raise him. “I spent a lot of time in Mallet, Louisiana, a very small community outside of Opelousas,” she says. “And I feel this deep, deep connection to the Simiens. I spent so much of my time around them there, where our family goes as far back as the early 1700s, when they settled on that land.” Simien recalls imagining Lelia when visiting the old family house, where “there was this old photo of her when she was 15, taken on the day she got married. And you can see this beautiful Creole woman with long, dark hair, and these hands of hers reminded me of my hands. I would just stare at that picture, and I think she became a deeper part of me, beyond the DNA.”
Paradoxically, the first word of “Lelia” is “hydrated,” probably not a word used much in Mallet back in the day. Yet that’s also a clue to the power Simien finds in her family past: She came to it through her yogic practice, as a source of strength when she herself was navigating some dark days of her own. It was a time when she struggled with pharmacological dependence. “After a decade of being prescribed Adderall,” she confides, “I decided to get off it. It’s been over three years now, and I don’t miss it at all, but it was scary because I really didn’t trust myself for so much of my 20s, you know?”
Through the struggle, Lelia and others in her family lore were guiding lights. “I started to think about just how challenging her life was,” Simien says. “Giving birth to 15 children, living off the land, making your own stuff, and building a life with next to nothing — I couldn’t comprehend it, but I always thought, ‘If she could handle that, I can handle whatever I’m going through.’ She was tough, and it showed me that there’s so much I can learn from these women. And I want to honor them any way that I can.”
Amber Rae Dunn with The Royal Blues Band at “A Tribute to the King” (Photos: Michael Donahue)
If you heard Amber Rae Dunn sing for the first time at the recent “A Tribute to the King,” you might want to know more about her.
The captivating singer filled the stage of Lafayette’s Music Room with her voice and personality at the event held August 11th, featuring headliner Ronnie McDowell as well as The Royal Blues Band with Wyly Bigger on keyboards.
“I am from Schererville, Arkansas,” Dunn says. “I grew up with six siblings and my dad was just a barber and my mom was a stay-at-home mom who took care of all of us. There was not a lot to do, but we had a three-acre garden. Just about every memory of my life, I have it in the garden. My favorite animal is a turtle, and I loved that I got to collect worms off tomato plants to feed to my turtle.”
Dunn also sang. “All the time. Everywhere around the house. I was definitely the loudest kid my parents have.”
Dunn with Leon Griffin
If she wasn’t singing “This Little Light of Mine” in church, Dunn was listening to her mother’s Al Green, Michael Jackson, and Prince albums and her dad’s ’90s country music. “So, I’m sure I was singing those songs as well.”
Like she still does, Dunn worked at her dad’s barbershop, Larry’s Hair Design, in West Memphis, Arkansas. She learned how to cut and style hair when she was in high school. “Other kids go to soccer practice or others take acting. I enrolled in hair school.”
She began singing on stage while attending Memphis College of Art for a degree in sculpture. Yubu Kazungu, a fellow student, invited her to join him at an open mic. She asked Kazungu, who heads Yubu and the Africans, why he thought she could sing. She says he told her, “I can hear you humming in the sculpture room working on a pot. You hum on key, and I feel like you can sing on key.”
Dunn joined Kazungu’s band and appeared with the group at open mics around town.
Kazungu “had been pestering” her to write a song, so Dunn came up with “Arkansas Line.” After some persuading from Kazungu one night at a soul food restaurant, Dunn sang the song in front of an audience while keeping the beat by snapping her fingers.
People at the show told her she was really good, but that she needed to go to Nashville because “that’s not really the type of music we have in Memphis.”
So Dunn got a job at Wayne’s Unisex, a Nashville barbershop. She went to clubs at night to “work tips for the band.” She did whatever she could, whether it was “do handstands” or “pinch cheeks,” to get customers to put money in the tip jars. “Then, finally, at the end of the night when everyone was good and drunk and half the people were gone, they would let me get up and sing two or three songs at 3 in the morning.”
Dunn was realistic about living in Nashville. “My plan was five years. If nothing happened, I was like, ‘Okay, I guess this isn’t the path I’m supposed to get on.’”
But nine months after she got to Nashville, one of her brothers was killed in a motorcycle accident, so she returned home to comfort her parents. “I’m a sucker for family.”
Starting at an open mic at Earnestine & Hazel’s, Dunn thought, “I need to meet people. If you build it, they’ll come.”
Mark Parsell stopped in one night and invited Dunn to check out his venue, South Main Sounds. Singing at one of Parsell’s Friday night shows, Dunn met Andrew Cabigao, who helped her get a job as social media representative at Mark Goodman’s MGP The Studio. While there, Dunn recorded her first album, Arkansas Line. Attending a songwriters workshop at Visible Music College, Dunn met Billy Smiley, founding member of White Heart, a Dove Award-nominated Christian rock group. He invited her to come to Nashville and maybe do an album at his studio, Sound Kitchen Studios.
She was two songs into the album when Covid hit. She released a couple of singles, but the album, I Guess That’s Life, wasn’t released until March 2023.
One of those songs, her popular “Barbershop,” is “just kind of talking about my dad’s barbershop and the type of customers we have. It’s just nostalgic.”
She also began going to workshops in and outside of Memphis in addition to bartending on Friday nights at South Main Sounds and performing with her band, Amber Rae Dunn and the Mulberries.
Dunn is thinking about a new album, but it might go in another direction. “Vocally, there’s a lot of soul and blues to my voice. But there’s also a lot of country. So, I don’t know. I feel like there’s a way to navigate the two.”
She’d like to mix “a Memphis sound” with her “traditional country sound.”
When she’s not cutting records or cutting hair, Dunn, who is married to Justin Craven, is performing with her band around town. She’s also a guest host with Leon Griffin on Memphis Sounds on WYPL.
Not forgetting her visual art chops, Dunn, who recently got into mosaics, currently is working on a mural at the Super 8 motel in West Memphis.
But Dunn is primarily sticking with songwriting, which she decided at 25 was going to be her journey. She told herself, “I don’t know what the outcome is, but I’m going to give it my all.”
See Amber Rae Dunn live at Momma’s, 855 Kentucky Street, Wednesday, August 28th, 7 p.m., with Mario Monterosso.
Some artists ponder making albums, wondering if they have enough material, enough musicians, or enough money. But when you’re a player on the level of bassist Mark Edgar Stuart, always staying busy with one project or another and forever mingling with other musos at gigs and in studios, albums sometimes just fall together. One recording session here, another there, and eventually the whole thing snowballs.
That’s how Stuart’s latest release, Never Far Behind, came about, as the singer-songwriter himself admits. “I didn’t really mean to put out another record,” he says. “I thought I was done for a little bit. And then this record just sort of happened.”
Things like that tend to occur when you’re part of a crack studio band, as Stuart is — in this case at Bruce Watson’s Delta-Sonic Sound studio, where Stuart, as a member of the Sacred Soul Sound Section, plays bass behind artists like Elizabeth King on the Bible & Tire Recording Co. He can also be heard on secular Watson-related projects, some of which end up on Big Legal Mess Records. There’s always music cooking over at Delta-Sonic. And at times Stuart would show up only to find his own material on the menu.
“Over the past two years, my buddies and I would get in the studio — Will [Sexton] and Bruce and that whole crew. We just slowly recorded tracks,” Stuart says. “I kind of felt like the universe produced it, you know? Will was the official producer, but every session was just last minute. Will would say, ‘Hey, what are you doing tomorrow? Bruce is in town, I’m here, let’s record some songs!’ And I’m on the phone going, ‘Well, who’s going to be the band?’ So it was pretty much whoever was available at any given moment. Then three months would go by, and Will would go, ‘Hey, we’re in the studio now working on your record! What are you doing?’ I’d say, ‘Oh, shit, I guess I’d better get down there!’”
That approach made Never Far Behind one of Stuart’s most collaborative efforts, including songs he co-wrote with Sexton, Jed Zimmerman, and, perhaps most strikingly, Greg Cartwright. “That loose approach made for some cool combinations,” says Stuart, “like when we recorded a song that me and Greg wrote together [‘We Better Call It a Day’]. I was like, ‘Greg, you in town?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Come over!’ So he played guitar, and Amy [LaVere] played bass, and Krista [Wroten] played on it, and Shawn Zorn, and Will played the keyboards. In the studio, it wound up becoming a duet. It was just real loose and cool. Amy was going to sing backup, and all of a sudden she sang the first verse and it was like, ‘Fuck it, a duet it is! Keep rolling!’”
That track draws on the wit and musicality of Stuart and Cartwright, two of the city’s finest songwriters, to create a kind of Eastern European lament over a failed romance, made all the more haunting by LaVere’s and Stuart’s swapped vocal lines, wistful mandolin, and atmospheric, Tom Waits-esque percussion.
Yet another track, “The Ballad of Jerry Phillips,” grew from a would-be collaboration between Stuart and the song’s titular hero, son of Sun Records’ Sam Phillips. “I was hanging out with Jerry about a year and a half ago,” says Stuart, “and he said, ‘Man we’re gonna write a song together, and it’s gonna be called “Don’t Block Your Blessings.”’
“You know, we’re always blocking our blessings,” explains Stuart. “It’s like God’s trying to bless us, but we get in our own way. We fuck it up sometimes! Sometimes you’ve just got to let it be and just open yourself up to all the goodness. And Jerry and I were supposed to write that song together, but we couldn’t get anywhere with it. So I just turned around and wrote him a silly song about his own biography, and used the blocked blessings idea for the chorus. It came out perfect, you know?” The party atmosphere of the track, a Memphis cousin to “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” captures Phillips’ rock-and-roll spirit and epitomizes the loose recording style that shaped the entire album.
After many months of such hilarity, an album coalesced. As Stuart describes the process, “A year and a half later, Will was like, ‘Well, we’ve got 15 songs here. … Are you going to put a record out?’ And I was like, ‘I guess we should.’ It was really friendly, you know, and that was cool. I’m really happy with it, probably more so than anything I’ve done in a long time. Nothing against anything else I’ve done, but it’s just that cool! I think this could be it for a while. I think after this I’m just going to get into other things.” Could Stuart really mean it this time? We’ll believe it when we see it.
Hear Mark Edgar Stuart at the 8750’ Barbecue and Music Festival in New Mexico on August 16th; the Fishstock Music Series in Wisconsin on August 25th; Thacker Mountain Radio Hour in Oxford, Mississippi, on September 5th; the Memphis Songwriter Series at the Halloran Centre in Memphis on September 12th; and the Mempho Music Festival on October 4th.
When we sent our latest cover story, “Sonic Sisters,” to print on Tuesday, we knew we weren’t done with it yet. If you haven’t read it, we won’t judge you — let me rephrase, most of us won’t judge you. Seriously, read it. We worked hard on it, but not as hard as the women in music we talk about in the story. They are producing some amazing stuff at an amazing rate.
That being said, we made a playlist full of music by just some of our favorite women in the scene, and because the Flyer is God’s gift to man, we figured we’d share it. No need to thank us.
Remember, this is only a sampling. A chaotic sampling to be sure. There are so many genres jammed in here, but that’s to be expected.
As Miz Stefani, founder of Women in Memphis Music (WiMM) showcase series at B-Side, said, “Girls are everywhere here. They’re in reggae, Americana, jazz, hardcore, punk, rock, and hip-hop. And there are some doing genres that I don’t even have names for. … We’re all over the map, and it’s unbelievable. We can’t be pigeonholed.”
When I arranged to interview Dywane “MonoNeon” Thomas Jr., the Bluff City’s hardest working bass virtuoso since Duck Dunn, and an auteur in his own right, the plan was to talk about his latest album. “Okay,” I thought, “I’ll give it a listen,” and pulled up the latest release on Bandcamp: MonoNeon on Synthesizer. It’s fantastic! A tour de force of thick Moog sounds, chock-full of inventive harmonies and sonic textures that Tomita himself would envy. There was only one problem: We weren’t supposed to be talking about that new album; it was the other one, due to drop on July 26th, the one featuring both George Clinton and Mavis Staples. “Okay,” I thought, “that new album.”
It’s hard to keep up with such a prolific artist. Since 2010, he’s created at a furious pace, from his trademark YouTube videos wherein his bass mimics found spoken word clips, to one-off singles (like 2016’s “Ruff Enuff,” produced by Prince), to full-on albums — 29 of them, if you count EPs. And if some of those have a real “I built this in my bedroom” quality, the production standards and arrangements have steadily, inexorably evolved over the years.
Which brings us to Quilted Stereo, album number 30. It’s the ultimate expression of MonoNeon’s ongoing evolution and sophistication so far, without sacrificing any of his unpredictability and inventiveness. And several of the tracks have been out there already, including “Quilted,” his single featuring George Clinton.
As none other than IMAKEMADBEATS noted on social media when the track was released in March, “MonoNeon not only just dropped a song with goated funk legend George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, the whole song is MEMPHIS AF. The hook is literally ‘LOOK AT ME MANE.’ C’mon, bruh. Mane really brought George Clinton to US. THAT’S LEGENDARY. AF. People are really out here putting on for Memphis in innovative ways … both the mainstream and the alternative.”
When I caught up with MonoNeon last week, fresh off a European tour, he spoke of his working relationship with Clinton as a very organic, low-key phenomenon. “I met George two years ago, when I sat in with him at some music festival. And although our relationship is pretty new, I go down to Tallahassee a lot, to hang with him and his family. It wasn’t forced, it just happened in a casual fashion. He’s a pretty chill person.”
The song itself is a perfectly Clinton-esque ode to flying your sartorial freak flag high, even if that means wearing suits made of multicolored quilts. It’s a sentiment that Mr. “Get Dressed” himself can obviously relate to. And yet, as MonoNeon relates, the song, co-written with his longtime producer Davy Nathan and the rapper Wax, was practically an afterthought.
As he explains, the tune is “about my whole aesthetic right now that I’m on, with my quilted clothes. And it came about when I was doing one of my videos, where I’m just acting up, you know, talking about how clean I am. A friend of Davy’s said, ‘That could be a song!’ His name is Wax; he’s a rapper. And we started writing the lyrics. My idea was to get George to do an intro for it and to feature him on the song.”
Nathan, as it turns out, is a key player in the MonoNeon universe. His home studio in Los Angeles is where MonoNeon does most of his recording these days, but their understanding goes deeper than your typical producer-artist relationship. “I usually always write my own songs,” says MonoNeon, “but when it comes to writing songs with other people, I usually go to him. He’s one of my best friends and a mentor, and I trust him with my vision. He understands me; he understands my little quirkiness. He’s really been helping me, seeing how he works and his way of writing — just being around him has really inspired me.”
Nathan also played a major role in MonoNeon’s collaboration with Mavis Staples on the song “Full Circle.” The title was apt, given the ties between the Staples family and MonoNeon’s own father. “I always wanted to do a song with Mavis, because I grew up listening to her, and she reminded me of my grandma, but also because my dad [Dywane Thomas Sr.] played bass with her and her father Pops Staples. So I’ve always been so in love with Mavis and her singing.
“Before this album, I told Davy, ‘I want to do a song with Mavis.’ I wasn’t sure if he was going to happen or not, but I told Davy, ‘Man, I’m going to let you have this, and I’m going to let you write a song, and hopefully me and Mavis can sing on it.’ So he sent me the song ‘Full Circle,’ and it was great. They sent it to Mavis and she loved it. She even told me that she prayed and prayed about it. And so it came to be. When we met in Chicago to record her vocals, I walked in the room and got butterflies.”
The song, with its doo-wop-ish vocal bass riff evoking some gospel funk of the last century, is a stylistic home run, but that’s just one selection from an album as eclectic as any MonoNeon’s made. There’s the sing-along jam with Clinton, but also the chugging New Wave pop of “Church of Your Heart,” the jungle beat rap of “Segreghetto,” and what may just be the sparkling sizzler of the summer, “Jelly Roll,” full of glossy synth warbles and bass stabs, its video overflowing with extras seemingly right out of the Crystal Palace roller-skating scene of some years ago. Memphis AF.
It all has MonoNeon excited to be touring with new material, which he’ll soon be doing across the U.S. next month, culminating in his appearance at the Overton Park Shell on August 30th, followed by more European dates in the fall and winter. “I’m happy to be back home, but I’m ready to go back out,” he says. “I just want to be on stage and just continue evolving and continue to leave my little stamp down here before I get up out of this world. That’s all that matters to me.”
Elvis backstage at the
Shell in 1955 (Photo: Robert Dye Sr. / Courtesy
Overton pPark Shell Archives)
It seems like this should be national news — international, even. We’re talking about Elvis Presley, after all. And the 70th anniversary of his first great triumph as a live performer is fast approaching, although anyone who saw it advertised in the paper beforehand might have gotten his name wrong. Promoting the eighth annual Country Music Jamboree scheduled for July 30, 1954, an ad in the Memphis Press-Scimitar read, “In person, the SENSATIONAL radio-recording star, Slim Whitman, with Billy Walker, Ellis Presley and many others … Tonight at Shell, $1.25 reserved.”
Whoever this “Ellis” Presley was, he shared the Overton Park Shell stage with some mighty respected company amongst country music fans. Pretty good for only the second or third public performance of his life.
As it happened, it was more than pretty good: It was earth-shattering. In Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, Peter Guralnick quotes Presley’s guitarist Scotty Moore as saying, “With those old loose britches that we wore, it made it look like all hell was going on under there. During the instrumental parts he would back off from the mic and be playing and shaking, and the crowd would just go wild, but he thought they were actually making fun of him.” They weren’t. After the show, dozens of teens rushed backstage for autographs from this new singer.
That validation was exactly what the young Presley needed, only 11 days after the release of his first single, “That’s All Right.”
It’s a story that Cole Early knows well, being the content and archives manager of the Overton Park Shell, not to mention curator of the Shell’s excellent Connie Abston Archive & History Exhibition. That short set, Presley’s first live show with just his recording band of Moore and Bill Black, was akin to a big bang of pop music, in stark contrast to Presley’s one earlier attempt to sit in with a band unfamiliar with his style.
“His first public performance ever was in a honky-tonk on Summer Avenue, and he wasn’t received well,” says Early of Presley’s previous experience. “The country music audience there at the club that night just saw this flashy kid wearing pink, and this was like a dive bar, a honky-tonk place.” Then came his appearance at the Country Music Jamboree.
Knowing that the Shell bore witness to one of rock-and-roll’s great moments, Early wanted to celebrate the memory of Elvis’ performance in style. Since the Shell already offers the Backstage Experience tour of the Connie Abston Archive, it was easy to imagine the Shell stage as the culmination of an even greater tour. What Elvis fan could resist seeing various key locations in The King’s ascension, working east from Downtown, then ending up at the very stage on which Elvis first made his mark, with music by a live band?
Done in partnership with Backbeat Tours and the Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum, the whole package, billed as The 70th Anniversary of Live Rock ‘n’ Roll, will be available one day only, on Saturday, July 27th. Early says the tour will “originate Downtown at the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum. Of course, they have amazing exhibits down there. Then it’s going to do an Elvis-centric tour of Memphis, though not Graceland.” Expect stops at Sun Studio, the Presley’s Lauderdale Courts apartment, Elvis’ high school, the original Lansky Bros. clothing store, and the like. “And then they’ll come here to the Shell for a custom Backstage History Experience tour with mostly the Elvis points, and then at the end, a live re-creation of that first show, right where it happened.”
Finley Watkins & His Blue Moon (of Missouri) Boys will be playing, and Early says they’re a perfect fit. “You know, Elvis was a teenager when he played at the Shell, he was 19,” he says. “So it’s great having Finley, who’s also a teenager. And yes, he will have a Scotty and a Bill with him as well. That will be super exciting because they’ll have an upright bass, like Bill Black played during the original show. The Shell’s acoustics pick up that slap back really well. So we’re really proud that the Shell is the one venue where that can be realistic, in such a way that it couldn’t be in any other room or venue.”
For more details and tickets, see the “special events” at backbeattours.com.
Where the Downtown skyline overlooks the Wolf River harbor and the Mississippi River, cosmic sounds will soon reverberate from the Maria Montessori School Amphitheater, where local musicians will come together to perform the songs of the late Chris Bell at the school’s ongoing River Series. Bell, the mastermind behind Big Star and his posthumous solo record, I Am the Cosmos, was born and raised in Memphis. While he saw little commercial success in his lifetime, neither his still-growing international cult fanbase nor his family have forgotten about his acclaimed body of work.
One of those carrying the torch for Bell is Brittain Wells, whose mother, Cindy Bell Coleman, is Bell’s younger sister. Wells now helps manage the school’s River Series concerts and wanted to honor the 50th anniversary of Bell recording the song “I Am the Cosmos,” the title track of Bell’s lone solo album. “Maria Montessori School is where our 3-year-old son attends,” Wells says. “How sweet that we can celebrate 50 years of this magical music as a family, a school family, and a Memphis community, while also raising money for Chris’ great-nephew’s school.”
The concert, set for Saturday, June 8th, at 5 p.m., will feature Big Star drummer Jody Stephens, Van Duren, Greg Cartwright, Adam Hill, Alex Greene, Krista Wroten, and more. The Turnstyles open the show.
A post-Big Star era Chris Bell performs an outdoor show in 1975 in London. His brother and then-manager David Bell funded the promotional trip to England. (Photo: David Bell)
Wells, 38, was born years after Bell was tragically killed at age 27 following a 1978 car wreck on Poplar Avenue. “It’s amazing. I never knew him, but I feel him all the time through his music and his fans,” Wells says. “Seeing how many people are devoted to his legacy and music makes me happy. I’m thrilled he can live on in so many ways.”
Along with “I Am the Cosmos,” Bell will also forever be entwined with the brick hallways of Ardent Studios in Memphis. That’s where the guitarist/vocalist spent countless nights co-engineering his band’s now-classic 1972 debut, Big Star’s #1 Record (Ardent/Stax Records). On that disc, the original Big Star lineup, which comprised Jody Stephens and the late Alex Chilton and Andy Hummel, crafted pristine power-pop standards like “In the Street,” “Feel,” and “Thirteen.”
After the LP failed commercially, a distraught Bell tumultuously exited the band and even quit music for a year. But from that dark period came inspiration, and a born-again Bell ultimately landed on his feet inside Shoe Productions, where he tracked “Cosmos,” his melancholy magnum opus. It all started at Huey’s on Madison Avenue, where Bell happened to sit next to sound engineer Warren Wagner, who’d just co-founded Shoe.
“We were sitting at the bar talking, and Chris said he liked what I put together over at Shoe,” Wagner told me while I was researching my book, There Was a Light: The Cosmic History of Chris Bell and the Rise of Big Star. “Within the next day or two, Chris calls, and we end up in the studio one night with just him and me. … He made some acoustic recordings, and then we got a band over there with him. We ended up doing ‘I Am the Cosmos’ in one night. We probably didn’t do more than two takes.”
For the “Cosmos” session, Bell enlisted drummer Richard Rosebrough and bassist/keyboardist Ken Woodley of the band Alamo. Though both have since passed away, they were interviewed for There Was a Light and shared vivid memories of recording “I Am the Cosmos.”
“Chris was fun to work with at Shoe,” the late Rosebrough recalled in 2013, two years before his death. “He always had a smile on his face, a kind of evil grin. The ‘cat that just ate the canary’ expression, but he wouldn’t talk a lot. He was this shining star over in the corner of the room. He was excited to be in a different studio with different people, playing his own songs.”
Woodley, who died last year at 74, also recalled an eccentric, witty Bell. “He was quiet and could sometimes look a bit stern. He could also be a perfectionist,” Woodley said in 2017. “He’d say, ‘I know you can do better than that.’ I’d be like, ‘Chris, I just learned it!’ But we always got along great. I wasn’t a part of the Big Star clique, the people he’d grown up with, so we were friends on a different level.”
Though often described as introverted in daily life, he was anything but quiet in the studio, especially while tracking “I Am the Cosmos.” “Chris would turn it up just as loud as he could,” Rosebrough recalled. “He’d get this piercingly bright, brilliant sound. It’s all distorting and melting down, but it’s just a dynamite sound.”
The song still powerfully resonates for many, including Jody Stephens, who will play drums on “I Got Kinda Lost” and “Get Away” at the River Series concert. “It just comes in so heavy. Not as people define ‘heavy’ these days, but emotionally heavy — and instrumentally, too.”
