Tag: Peabody Records

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Peabody Records Flies Again

Steve Selvidge with copies of Peabody Records' latest release and first release, 47 years apart. (Photo courtesy Steve Selvidge)

As anyone reading this week’s music feature about MEM_MODS might have gathered, Peabody Records, the boutique imprint label founded in 1976 by the late singer/songwriter Sid Selvidge, is once again releasing albums after a decades-long hibernation. Naturally, this revival is being guided by Sid’s son, Steve Selvidge, the guitarist extraordinaire best known for his work with The Hold Steady and, more locally, Sons of Mudboy and Big Ass Truck.

Recently, the Memphis Flyer and the younger Selvidge took a deep dive into the ongoing vinyl revival during a 2022 interview centered on the vagaries of the small label game. Peabody has always been the epitome of the Memphis specialty record company, offering but a few releases that nonetheless had a global impact in their day. In that sense, the humble label that Sid Selvidge launched 47 years ago, with it’s oddball duck logo reinforcing the “Peabody” connection (and echoing the classic Bluebird Records label of the 1930s), is the grandfather of today’s many independent imprints like Goner, Black & Wyatt, Blast Habit, Back to the Light, and others.

“Peabody was always a bespoke, curated label,” says Steve Selvidge. “A ‘we’re not going to worry about what you look like or how many units you’re going to shift’ kind of thing. It was just what piqued my dad’s interest.”

That philosophy led Peabody to release some very unconventional material indeed, most famously Alex Chilton’s trash-rock masterpiece Like Flies on Sherbert. During the label’s ten year heyday on vinyl, other releases included Sid Selvidge’s The Cold Of The Morning, Waiting On A Train, and Live LPs, Crawpatch’s Trailer Park Weekend, Cybill Shepherd’s Vanilla, and Paul Craft Warnings! by — you guessed it — Paul Craft.

And there’s one album that the younger Selvidge is particularly proud of: “Peabody had the first vinyl release of Christopher Idylls by Gimmer Nicholson. Well before Light in the Attic or anyone else put anything out. My understanding was that Terry [Manning] and Gimmer cut that stuff in the ’60s, and it never found a home. So when my dad was up and rolling with Peabody, he was like, ‘Well, I’ve got the machine in place. I’ll put it out.'”

Later, Steve Selvidge-related projects like Big Ass Truck and Secret Service were released on CD, as were reissues of Like Flies on Sherbert. But MEM_MODS Vol. 1 marks the label’s first vinyl product since 1986. And, according to Selvidge, the two projects — the label and the ad hoc band — went hand in hand.

After he’d mixed tracks that he’d recorded during quarantine with Luther Dickinson (North Mississippi Allstars) and Paul Taylor (New Memphis Colorways), Selvidge says “we realized, ‘We’ve got a record!’ And we were very enthusiastic about it. But trying to see who could put it out became an endless conversation that was going nowhere, until I finally said, ‘You know what? I’ll just end this conversation and put it out. I’ll take it from here.'”

Getting back to the nuts and bolts of vinyl production and distribution came naturally. “It turns out, I do know some things,” says Selvidge, “and I’ve got the stuff together. We didn’t spend any money on the recording; we just did it ourselves. And once I had a project to do, that got the ball rolling with Peabody. Before that, I was always like, ‘Man, I should do that.’ Getting started was the hardest part; the inertia was so great. But the enthusiasm for MEM_MODS became a catalyst to get the whole label moving, finally. I was intrigued by the idea of, rather than saying, ‘Hey, I started up the label, here’s my dad’s records!’ saying instead, ‘Hey, we’re coming back with something new.'”

Now that the ball is rolling, or the duck is flying, as the case may be, look for reissues from deep within the Peabody catalog, and what Selvidge calls “other projects that I’ve been putting off.” Given his famously far-flung collaborations, those projects could be very interesting indeed.

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MEM_MODS

From the days of lockdown (Photo: Courtesy Peabody Records)

Creative thinking is often spurred on by a sudden change: There’s nothing like having the rug pulled out from under you to get you thinking on your feet. And, to hear Steve Selvidge tell it, that’s exactly what happened nearly three years ago when he, Luther Dickinson, and Paul Taylor began work on what’s now the freshly released album, MEM_MODS Vol. 1 (Peabody Records). Of course, that was a time when the whole world was caught off guard, not the least these three musicians who’ve thrived on live performance for decades.

“We were all reeling,” Selvidge recalls. But then a ray of hope appeared. “I got an email from Luther saying, ‘Paul and I have been messing around with some stuff, do you want to put some guitar on it?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t have anything else to do!’” It was within the first month of the pandemic’s lockdown, so Dickinson and Taylor had not been playing together in person; they’d been swapping tracks over the internet. And that in itself was not unusual for any of them.

“We all had some sort of digital audio workstation of some sort in our homes,” says Selvidge. “And I’d been doing a bunch of remote recording pre-pandemic, anyway. It’s not uncommon for me to do guitar overdubs here in my home studio.” That might even include the odd overdub on a Hold Steady track, he notes. “Mostly last little pickup bits right at the end,” he explains. “But for that last Bash & Pop record [by Tommy Stinson], we cut half of it live at Tommy’s place, and the other half was stuff written after the fact. So I did a lot of my guitars and all of my vocals here at my place on that album.”

Dickinson and Taylor had similar home studios, though Selvidge’s home in Memphis tended to be where it all came together. “After a while, it was easier for me to be the guy running everything in Pro Tools, with everybody sending me files,” Selvidge adds. “And so it kept growing.”

As it turned out, the three began to thrive on the collaboration in unexpected ways. After the first track, says Selvidge, “I was like, ‘We made this! I love it! And it’s something to keep myself occupied.’ So that turned into another track, and then we realized we had kind of a workflow. And we exploded with this creativity. Paul might start with drums, and either Luther or I would add a bass line, creating a song out of raw drums. And I started messing with old drum machines and wrote a tune to that. There were ideas flying everywhere! So much so that we had a brief storage crisis, the music piled up so quickly.”

The result is that rare bird in the indie music world, an instrumental album. While that might be somewhat familiar in the jam band world, MEM_MODS doesn’t really fit that tag. The tracks hit more like a lost ’70s soundtrack, evoking everything from Augustus Pablo-like dub to funk bangers to smoldering Isaac Hayes-like ballads. Tasty, ear-catching synth sounds abound. Indeed, the trio leaned into their multi-instrumental talents, with Dickinson not even contributing his first instrument, guitar. Instead, he played bass and various keyboards; Selvidge played guitar, bass, Rhodes piano, and drum machine; and Taylor contributed drums, percussion, omnichord, bass, fretless bass, washtub bass, synth pedals, and “soundscapes.”

Over these elements sit some of the finest horn parts to come out of Memphis in recent years, courtesy arranger and trumpeter Marc Franklin and saxophonist Art Edmaiston. Ranging from pitch-perfect pads to nimble, jazz influenced fills, the horns (and a flute cameo) pair with warm drums, bass, and guitar to ground the album in an earthy, Memphis vibe.

It makes sense, given how far back the three musicians go, all from famed musical families. “We’ve been making music together for 30 odd years,” says Selvidge. “So everything we’ve done together and apart came to the table when we did this. We know each other’s instincts, even as our lives have changed, getting married, having children. Losing our fathers. There’s a depth there with us. And that depth has gone into our playing.”

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Music Record Reviews

Autumn Almanac: Paul Taylor’s Old Forest LP

The Old Forest Trail, half of this year's double-EP release by New Memphis Colorways

With the Memphis Zoo now backpedaling on their ostensible commitment to avoid using the Overton Park Greensward as a parking lot, everything old is new again, and that includes a renewed appreciation of Overton Park by we, the people. How timely, then, to revisit some music inspired by that great green space. In this case, it’s two EPs by Memphis native Paul “Snowflake” Taylor, aka New Memphis Colorways, which were paired together earlier this year as a single LP in glorious vinyl.

One side of Paul Taylor’s double-EP release (Credit: Paul Taylor)

Memphis Flyer readers already know Old Forest Loop, a groovy, rollicking EP of instrumentals, which Andria Lisle profiled on its release in 2018. All riffs, beats, and changing gears, Taylor conceived of it as “homemade and light-hearted, and I see it as kind of a start-over for me. This is music I deliberately made for people to take summertime drives to — they can grill to it or swim to it.”

And yet, it somehow matches the elation Memphians feel at the return of cool weather as well. It’s an active record, an up record, and fits that impulse to get out of the house for some hiking, biking, or more. Having taken it on a test run while cooking out in the backyard, I can attest to the truth of Taylor’s claim that it pairs well with grilling.

Another side of Paul Taylor’s double-EP release (Credit: Paul Taylor)

If that’s one side of fall, the beauty of these twin EPs being brought together is that the older work, 2015’s The Old Forest Trail, perfectly matches autumn’s air of melancholy and reflection. A largely acoustic outing, it is, in Taylor’s words, “An homage to a sacred natural space in the middle of Memphis TN — the Old Forest Arboretum located in Overton Park.” The somewhat more wistful sound also matches what Taylor was going through in the year of its release, and he notes: “Also lovingly dedicated to the memory of my father, Pat Taylor 1949-2015.”

As he told Lisle, “When my dad [Memphis musician Pat Taylor, a veteran of numerous bands including the Breaks and the Village Sound] was sick, I was playing acoustic guitar by his bedside, and when he passed in early 2015, I was spending a lot of time in the Old Forest in Overton Park.” The peace of wild things, as poet Wendell Berry put it, is thus very much present in this set of songs, which sometimes echo Nick Drake’s application of a folk picking style to unexpected chords.

Another aspect of this album that is uniquely Memphis is the label: It’s the first release in many years by the great Peabody Records, founded by the late Sid Selvidge, now kept afloat by his son Steve. As Taylor points out in the notes, Old Forest Loop/The Old Forest Trail is “a joint venture between Peabody Records and The Owl Jackson Jr. Record Company.”

Ultimately, a refreshingly holistic view of Overton Park comes across with this album: a place of rambunctious activity and a place of solace. Delve into both with this multifaceted work by one of this city’s greatest players.