Tag: Music

On the Comeback Trail

Post author By Andria Lisle
Post date September 28, 2006

Bettye LaVette was just a kid when she first traveled to Memphis at the end of the 1960s to cut “At the Mercy of a Man” and “Love Made a Fool of Me” — two of the most incendiary slabs of hot-buttered soul music ever heard — yet she recalls the sessions like they were yesterday.

“I stayed at the Holiday Inn Rivermont and recorded at Sounds of Memphis. I had a great time in Memphis. I spent a tremendous amount of time there at the record company’s expense,” she says, and explains with a giggle: “I was in love with one of the Memphis Horns.”

At the time, LaVette was hot on the comeback trail after failing to record another chart-topper following her first big hit, “My Man — He’s a Loving Man,” which was released on Atlantic Records in 1963. The Michigan native bounced from Scepter Records to the tiny Calla imprint before Kenny Rogers happened upon her version of his song “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In).”

“Kenny thought it was the greatest version he’d ever heard,” LaVette says. “He called his brother Lelan, who signed me to his label, Silver Fox/SSS International.”

Lelan Rogers produced the Sounds of Memphis sessions (which yielded 13 tracks, released this year as Take Another Little Piece of My Heart), pairing LaVette with the Dixie Flyers, a local session group featuring organist Jim Dickinson, guitarist Charlie Freeman, drummer Sammy Creason, and bassist Tommy McClure. The studio, an old tobacco warehouse on Camilla Street, provided the perfect backdrop for the raspy-voiced soul singer and the white rhythm section, laying the groundwork for similar sessions the Dixie Flyers would do with Aretha Franklin at Miami’s Criteria Studio a few months later.

Franklin became a superstar, but LaVette nearly wound up a mere footnote in soul-music history.

She cut an abortive effort for Atlantic Records in Muscle Shoals and tried her hand at disco. She landed at Motown in the ’80s, long after that well had run dry. Over the last two decades, she more than earned her reputation as a stellar live performer and even won a W.C. Handy Award for 2003’s A Woman Like Me, but she was still one of the most underappreciated soul singers on the contemporary chitlin circuit.

Then, about 16 months ago, something incredible happened: Following in Solomon Burke’s footsteps, LaVette struck a deal with Anti- Records. By May 2005, she and producer Joe Henry were holed up in a recording studio, culling from a hundred potential tracks and choosing Sinead O’Connor’s “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” Lucinda Williams’ “Joy,” Joan Armatrading’s “Down to Zero,” and seven others. Backed by a mellow team of session musicians (including guitarist Doyle Bramhall II and Prince keyboardist Lisa Coleman), LaVette opened her mouth and let that magnificent voice roar.

The album, I’ve Got My Own Hell To Raise, puts Lady Soul’s previous effort, 2003’s So Damn Happy, to shame.

LaVette wrings every emotion from Rosanne Cash’s “On the Surface” and Fiona Apple’s “Sleep to Dream.” She injects Williams’ already fierce battle cry with her own gut-wrenching autobiographical material, hollering “Maybe in Memphis I’ll find joooyyyyy” over a bold tom-tom beat. She epitomizes the very meaning of soul on her jaunty cover of Aimee Mann’s “How Am I Different” and her thrillingly dark take on Dolly Parton’s “Little Sparrow.” She distills the bare essence of O’Connor’s love song into a thrillingly stark gospel number, eschewing instrumentation for an opportunity to show off her sandpapery vocals.

“People think there are genres of songs, but there are really genres of singers — a song is nothing but words on paper, and the melody is just a melody,” LaVette says of her ability to turn a pop or country tune into pure soul.

“I liked what [O’Connor] was saying, but she used too many words. I knew I could cut to the chase and make the song more poignant, because I’ve had these life experiences. The chord changes were what drew me to ‘Little Sparrow.’ The melodies always appeal to me first, then I go back and hope [the songwriter] had something good to say. With ‘Joy,’ that’s just the way I heard it. I wanted to say Detroit, New York, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals, all those places.”

At nearly 60 years old, LaVette has finally found that comeback she was looking for, as critical accolades rolled in and I’ve Got My Own Hell To Raise turned up on the Billboard charts. The best part of her success, she says, is “picking up my own tabs and paying my own bills.

“For the last 45 years, other people have done it,” LaVette says. “I never had a ‘real’ job. Last year, I was able to pay taxes, which was very exciting.”

There’s already talk about returning to the recording studio this winter, although LaVette refuses to divulge details, earthily explaining, “You know, sugar turns to shit so fast.

“Right now, I’m just looking forward to coming to Memphis,” she says. “It’s always wonderful to visit the scene of an early crime.”

BettyeLaVette.com

Bettye LaVette

Gibson Lounge

Thursday, September 28th

Showtime at 9 p.m.; tickets $20

Tags Bettye Lavette, Music, Review

Music Music Features

Return Engagement

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date September 21, 2006

After a six-month hiatus, local rockers the Coach and Four are back. The band, which formed in 2002 and released a fine debut album, Unlimited Symmetry, on the Makeshift label in 2004, put things on hold last March when singer/guitarist Brad Stanfill went on a personal sabbatical to Hawaii.

According to Luke White, who shares songwriting and guitar duties with Stanfill, the band had always planned to push forward and began recording their second record, the seven-song, 27-minute The Great Escape, in the days before Stanfill’s departure.

“We did basic tracking and Brad’s parts before he left. He had his plane ticket and was on a deadline,” White says. “The plan was to finish the record and, when we got done, Brad would come back [and the band would move forward].”

Unfortunately for White and his bandmates, an unexpected delay occurred when the band’s studio, Unclaimed Recordings, was forced to move.

“Right after [Brad] left, Unclaimed moved. I had to wait four months to get into the studio to finish my stuff,” White says.

But now the record is done, and the Coach and Four will celebrate their rebirth this weekend with a record-release party at Young Avenue Deli.

When the band — which included Daniel Farris on drums, Tony Dixon on bass, and J.D. Lovelace on keyboards — emerged on the local rock scene a few years ago, they were a refreshing change of pace, their crisp, bracing, yet poppy guitar sound setting them apart from other local bands.

“We’d heard a lot of instrumental bands like Tristeza that would play these instrumentals that seemed boring to me,” White says of his band’s origins. “The songs didn’t seem like they went anywhere. We wrote our instrumentals as if they were pop songs. There had to be a melody there, and they were about three minutes long — just catchy, instrumental songs. On the first record, there were four songs Brad sang on, four I sang on, and four instrumentals. It had a good balance to it, and that’s become our sound, really.”

The Great Escape opens like old times, with Stanfill’s “Hello Destroyer,” White’s “Hearts & Arrows” (re-recorded after appearing on the Makeshift #4 sampler earlier this year), and the instrumental “Sleep Skirt” picking up where Unlimited Symmetry left off.

But the band also pushes in some new directions. The instrumental “HH” has a bluesy, Southern-rock feel. Another departure is White’s “Girl Arms Redux,” a remixed version of a techno-soul song that also appeared on Makeshift #4.

“I really had a good time doing that song,” White says of “Girl Arms,” with its programmed beats and falsetto soul undercurrents. “I bought a drum machine and was trying to figure out how to use it and was just messing around with it. I think I’d been listening to Prince or something. I got to try some stuff I hadn’t done before, like layering vocals.”

White credits his participation in the “supergroup” cover band the Pirates for encouraging him to try new things musically:

“In the Pirates, I learned a whole lot playing different kinds of music. It was the first band I’d ever been in where we played for three hours. We played country and soul music and kinds of music that really lend themselves to singing. The Coach and Four was the first band I’d ever sung in, so it was nice to have a way to practice that.

Though Unlimited Symmetry did well, selling through its initial run of 1,000 discs and getting picked up for shows on both XM and Sirius satellite radio, White thinks the band is in much better position to promote The Great Escape.

“We’re looking forward to playing shows and doing the kind of support we didn’t get to do with the other record,” White says.

With Robertson replacing Dixon on bass, the band recently returned from a two-week tour and hopes to head out again after their local release show.

Tags Coach and Four, Local, Music, Review

Music Music Features

This Is Who I Am

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date August 17, 2006

It’s hard to imagine Bobby Rush as anything other than an energetic blur of bling and bawdy shenanigans, stalking the stage like a funky tiger, shirtless but wearing a brightly colored suit trimmed out in spangles and sequins and singing about the myriad pleasures and the untold difficulties of making love to a big, fat woman. It’s almost impossible to think of him as a grandfather.

“Okay, you can put away your calculator now,” Rush says from his home in Jackson, Mississippi. He’s been talking about his 6-year-old grandson who knows he can get that $130 baseball bat if he tells his grandfather he’s the best grandfather in the world.

“I can sense that you’re sitting there punching the buttons trying to figure out how old I am,” says Rush whose career stretches back to the very beginning of the rock-and-roll era. “Well, I can tell you this: I’m not 75. I am over 70 though.”

For Rush, 2006 marks 51 years of putting the fun in funk and keeping the blues blue.

“A hit record introduces you to your audience,” Rush explains, “but a hit show gives you staying power.” And there can be no denying that the eternally virile bluesman knows a little something about the nature of hit records and the power of solid-gold entertainment.

Rush got his start when he was a teenager. He would paint a fake mustache on his face to make himself look older and fib his way into adults-only clubs. At a time when James Brown was earning his reputation as the hardest-working man in show business, Rush was working circles around him, playing several clubs a night and snagging a little extra work as an emcee when he could get it. Over the years, Rush’s show has evolved in the direction of vaudeville as he added dancers, back-up singers, and comedy sketches. His band has featured such stellar players as Freddy King and the great Elmore James.

“I grew up listening to Louis Jordan,” he says. “And I loved how he could write a serious song in a funny sort of a way. I loved that his words always had more than one meaning.”

The song Rush uses to illustrate his point is “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” which was a hit for several artists, including Jordan and Nat King Cole.

“It was about a buzzard who gave a monkey a ride,” Rush says. “Well, the buzzard played a trick on the monkey, and so the monkey puts his tail around the buzzard’s neck and chokes up on him a little and says, ‘You better fly right.'” The song’s humor was its selling point to white audiences, but for blacks before the civil rights era, it was a morality tale about overcoming deception and fighting back.

“That’s how I knew I wanted to write songs that were funny and that could mean more than one thing.”

Like Jordan, whose song “Saturday Night Fish Fry” is a strong contender for the first rock-and-roll song, Rush has developed a large audience of both black and white fans, and he’s done so on his own terms.

“I like to say I crossed over without crossing out,” Rush says.

But even a successful artist can burn out after touring for half a century.

“I’ve had some moments when I just didn’t think I could do it anymore,” Rush says. “You start having doubts about yourself. I’ll be tired of the rat race. I’ll be tired of singing the same old songs and seeing the same old faces. And that’s when I ask God to help me to be enthused about my music. And that’s when I remember back in 1966 going in a club where Little Milton was playing, and there were 200 people at that show. I remember thinking then, If I can ever draw 200 people, I’ll be happy.

“Now sometimes I play in front of 2,000 people. Or 40,000 people,” Rush says. “But sometimes I play for 500 people too. I still love playing the small clubs.”

Small clubs are where Rush earned his audience by touring relentlessly in the ’70s and ’80s, and he refuses to forget the people who helped him get where he is today.

“I remember thinking that if I was ever successful I’d always bring it back to the places where I started,” he says. “Sure, I work the big venues, but I take it back to the juke joints and the chicken shacks too. Sometimes I make $20,000, and sometimes I make $2,000, and [promoters] tell me, ‘It’s a problem when you work one club for $2,000 and another for $20,000.’ I tell them, ‘That’s your dilemma.'”

Whether he’s singing about “Sue,” a young lady of intriguing dimensions or about the life of a “Henpecked Man,” Rush knows how to connect with his audience. He plans to spend the next several years giving his fans even more than they ever bargained for.

“I’d like to be able to do four, five, maybe even six CDs a year,” Rush says. He intends to reissue his back catalog, including many previously unreleased songs.

“Good, bad, indifferent, I want to put it all out there,” he says. “This is Bobby Rush talking to you now, and it doesn’t matter if I’m talking to you on the phone or backstage at a show. This is Bobby Rush. This is who I am.”

Bobby Rush

The Tri-State Blues Festival, with Bobby “Blue” Bland, J. Blackfoot, Shirley Brown, and others

Desoto Civic Center

Saturday, August 19th

6:30 p.m., tickets $29-$40

Tags Bobby Rush, Music

Music Music Features

Alone Again, Or …

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date July 19, 2006

In May 2005, at the Hi-Tone Café, Brad Postlethwaite supposedly played his last show with Snowglobe, the popular local band he’d founded years before. But this week he’ll be back at the Hi-Tone playing a CD-release show for a new “Snowglobe” album, Oxytocin. Except the show isn’t being billed as a Snowglobe show but as a Brad Postlethwaite solo show. Confused? That’s okay.

“It’s still confusing to me too,” says Postlethwaite, who, at 27, is juggling making his own music with helping run the Makeshift record label he co-founded six years ago and preparing to start medical school in the fall of 2007.

“One thing that was weird about the me-quitting-Snowglobe thing was that I never wanted to quit Snowglobe or stop recording music,” Postlethwaite says. “I wanted to stop the crazy touring we were doing.”

Ultimately, differing goals and ambitions between Postlethwaite and the band’s other primary songwriter, Tim Regan, seem to have sidetracked one of the city’s most popular and promising bands. When Postlethwaite takes the stage at the Hi-Tone this weekend, Regan — who has moved to Knoxville and now fronts his own band, Antenna Shoes — will be the only member of Snowglobe not also taking the stage in some capacity.

“As of right now, Tim’s not in the band,” Postlethwaite says, “but we don’t want him to not be in the band. … He didn’t want this to happen. He didn’t want this record to come out under ‘Snowglobe,’ and he thought us all doing solo records was a bad idea.”

The liner notes to Oxytocin assert that it’s the “first in a series of solo-directed projects by members of Snowglobe.” Postlethwaite says that bassist Brandon Robertson has a “Snowglobe” record near completion, with horn player Nahshon Benford and drummer Jeff Hulett hopefully to follow. Robertson, Benford, and Hulett all play on Oxytocin, along with a handful of other local musicians.

The idea of doing solo records under the aegis of the band was Postlethwaite’s solution to creative tensions. “It was a really hard decision for me to make, and I still wonder if it was a good one,” he says.

“I think it’s a typical thing for bands with two songwriters, that things get polarized,” Postlethwaite says. “And our songs were heading in that direction. So many people told me that the last Snowglobe record sounded like two records, mine and Tim’s.”

Another problem was likely increasingly divergent career goals between the two songwriters, who have remained friends.

“I think that’s been a problem, yeah,” Postlethwaite says. “I liked the idea of sticking to the indie route, and [Regan] was always thinking bigger. Now that he’s kind of on his own, I think it’ll be easier for him to follow his ambitions. I think that if he doesn’t end up playing with Snowglobe again, it’ll probably be because he’ll have realized that we were holding him back in a way.

“School is now a higher priority to me than [touring with] Snowglobe,” Postlethwaite says of his initial “departure” from the band. “I looked at what I had to do to get into medical school and realized if I put this off any longer I’m going to be thirty-something when I start and 40 when I get out. I feel like lots of bands would have sat down and talked about it and figured out how the whole thing could have worked, but that conversation never happened. The next thing I knew people were talking about a show being my last with the band.”

The idea of labeling what is essentially a solo record with the band’s name might seem odd, but it makes sense when you listen to the album. Musically, despite the absence of Regan, Oxytocin sounds much closer to Snowglobe albums Our Land Brains and Doing the Distance than to Postlethwaite’s previous solo album, 2003’s Welcome to the Occupation. It has the layered, communal, near-orchestral sound that has made Snowglobe such a unique presence on the local scene.

“There were so many factors that, for me, pointed toward this being under ‘Snowglobe,'” Postlethwaite says. “These are all songs I would have donated to a Snowglobe record. Usually, songs I put on a solo CD are [written for that purpose], more personal opinions, a more stripped-down sound. These songs are poppier and more Snowglobe.”

In making the record, Postlethwaite recorded basic tracks at home, and members of Snowglobe and other musicians would add to the songs. Postlethwaite’s creative control came in the final mix, deciding what to keep and what to take out.

At this week’s release show, Postlethwaite, Robertson, and Benford will be joined by Coach and Four guitarist Luke White and drummer Aaron Sayers, a longtime Postlethwaite collaborator. Snowglobe drummer Hulett will open the show with his own band, Jeffrey James & the Haul.

As for Snowglobe, Postlethwaite hopes gambling on a looser structure can pay off. “I feel like if we want to keep any semblance of this band together, it needs to be loose enough for us to live in different places and still work together,” Postlethwaite says. “Not so loose that it doesn’t mean anything, but not that traditional band sense of four guys who live together in a warehouse and tour around the country.”

Instead of a full-time touring musician, Postlethwaite’s ideal is to be a doctor who still makes records on the side and performs in whatever city he lands in.

“Yeah,” he says. “That kind of sounds awesome.”

Oxytocin CD-Release Show

Brad Postlethwaite, with Jeffrey James & the Haul

The Hi-Tone Café

Friday, July 21st

Doors open at 9 p.m.

Tags Brad Postlethwaite, Music, Review

We Recommend We Recommend

To the ‘Roo

Post author By Greg Akers
Post date June 14, 2006

Since we’re dispensing road-trip ideas in this issue, here’s another one to consider: Manchester, Tennessee. The Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival is back, running from Thursday, June 15th to Sunday, June 18th, and, for those days anyway, Manchester isn’t just the place to be in all of Tennessee but, for music lovers, the place to be in all of North America.

The festival’s music lineup is impressive, ranging from headliners Radiohead and Beck (pictured) to Cat Power and the Memphis Rhythm Band (who recorded at Memphis’ Ardent Studios last year), Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, My Morning Jacket, and even Brazilian Seu Jorge (who sang Bowie songs in Portuguese in The Life Aquatic).

If you O.D. on music, you can always head over to the “air-conditioned cinema tent” to catch films like The Shining, This is Spinal Tap, and Real Genius or watch sporting events such as the NBA Finals and the World Cup. You can also see comedians Lewis Black and Patton Oswalt at the comedy tent, or visit the Solar Stage, which will feature everything from buskers to break dancers to speakers on global warming.

There’s a campsite, so take your sleeping bags and tents (or RV if you have one). Just gauge your threshold for a weekend’s cohabitation with 90,000 grubby folks, and if you can stomach it, you could do a lot worse than spending your weekend in Manchester.

Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, June 15th to June 18th. Tickets are $184.50. www.bonnaroo.com

Tags Bonnaroo, Music