First and foremost, Robert Allen Parker wants you to know he is a musician, not a director. Even so, for the better part of a decade, Parker found himself consumed in making a documentary on music in Memphis. That film — Meanwhile in Memphis: The Sound of a Revolution — premiered at the Indie Memphis Film Festival in 2013, and now it’s returning to the big screen for a special 10th anniversary screening at Malco Studio on the Square.
Meanwhile in Memphis, Parker explains, is an “overview of the modern Memphis music community from the late ’70s to roughly 2008. There’s all the old history — with Elvis, the blues, and B.B. King — that’s well-documented, but there’s not much on what’s happened since then. It was a big undertaking, but I had the drive and the ambition. That was kind of a risk and a gamble because I had never done anything film-related before.”
After a meeting by happenstance, Parker enlisted videographer Nan Hackman as co-director. “We were both wanting to promote the music scene and try to get out and do something,” he says. “She had the technical perspective to make it happen. She really made this happen.”
Together, Hackman, who has since passed, and Parker interviewed over a dozen artists and bands, including, among others, Jim Dickinson, Al Kapone, Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, Alicja-pop, and Mud Boy and the Neutrons. “We just wanted to tell the story of a couple of musicians, but of course then it grew bigger and bigger as we interviewed more people,” Parker says. “It basically expanded to a point to where it was really overwhelming. … And it became more of a historical document.”
With so much to work with, the direction of the film could have gone in a number of ways, Parker says, but ultimately, the through line that the filmmakers landed on was the “DIY mind” of Memphis musicians. “It doesn’t matter what genre of music they’re doing, just the fact of them being in Memphis and creating something here has an extra magical force to it. Whether it’s rap, garage, rock, blues, alternative, whatever, it’s a certain amount of DIY, like a raw passion. It’s not so much commercially driven. It’s just from the heart and soul. It’s something that you know it when you hear it and see it. … I got a new perspective on everything. It inspired me as musician.”
Because Hackman and Parker had so much footage, they ended up making a series of short films on a few of the artists interviewed, including one on Jim Dickinson which will accompany the Meanwhile in Memphis screening on Thursday. In between the short film and feature, Jimmy Crosthwait, the last living member of Mud Boy and the Neutrons, will perform with Parker and others backing him.
“When we made the documentary,” Parker reflects, “I wanted it to be made in a way where someone could watch it 10 or 20 years from then and for it to still be relevant.” So far, at the 10-year mark, the musician has found this to hold true.