Tag: Robert Gordon

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Blues Society: When Musical Worlds Collide

Bukka White and Jimmy Crosthwait onstage at the the Overton Park Shell in The Blues Society. (Photo: Randall Lyon | courtesy of The Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane)

For director Augusta Palmer, The Blues Society is a personal project.

Her father, music writer Robert Palmer, was a member of the group of hippies and weirdos who first brought Black blues artists from Memphis and Mississippi to the Overton Park Shell. They were among the first to acknowledge the deep debt that popular music owed to these artists. Robert Palmer went on to write the bestselling music tome Deep Blues in 1981.

Augusta Palmer’s film debuted at Indie Memphis 2023, when Memphis Flyer Music Editor Alex Greene interviewed her about the film and what it meant to her, the city, and the world. It went on to win awards at the Oxford Film Festival, and is now playing in limited engagements all over the country.

On Friday, May 31, The Blues Society opens in Memphis at Studio on the Square.. The opening weekend will feature a series of Q&A’s with the director and some Memphians involved in the project. On Friday, Grammy-winning author and filmmaker Robert Gordon will moderate a discussion with the director and musicians Jimmy Crosthwait and Chris Wimmer. On Friday, June 1, Indie Memphis executive director Kimel Fryer will moderate a discussion with director Palmer and editor Laura Jean Hocking. On Wednesday, June 5, Robert Gordon will return with Memphis radio legend Henry Nelson.

Here’s the trailer for The Blues Society.

Categories
Music Music Blog

Memphis Wins Big at 66th Annual Grammys

(L-R) Mason Williams, Michael Graves, Cheryl Pawelski, Deanie Parker, Michele Smith & Robert Gordon, winners of the "Best Historical Album" award at the 66th GRAMMY Awards.(Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)

As the 66th Annual Grammy Awards unfolded over the weekend, many names associated with Memphis and the Mid-South were among the winners, including musicians, songwriters, producers, engineers, and writers.

If award-winning music creators are already a well-established Bluff City tradition, the music writing being done here is quickly becoming another of the city’s music industry exports. In 2021, the Commercial Appeal‘s Bob Mehr won the Best Album Notes award for the writings he penned for Dead Man’s Pop, a collection of music by The Replacements, and scored another win last year for his notes in the deluxe edition of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, co-produced by Cheryl Pawelski of Omnivore Recordings.

This year, it was Robert Gordon’s and Deanie Parker’s turn to take home the Best Album Notes prize — for yet another Pawelski project, Written in their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos, Craft Recordings’ seven-CD collection offering a glimpse into the the rare songwriting demos of Stax Records in its heyday. Profiled in the Memphis Flyer last summer, the collection is an intimate portrait of the men and women who wrote the songs of the pioneering soul label. The same box set, produced by Gordon, Parker, Pawelski, Michele Smith, and Mason Williams, also won the award for Best Historical Album.

It’s a subject that’s been thoroughly researched by Gordon, who also won a Grammy in 2011 for notes accompanying Big Star’s Keep An Eye on the Sky box set before penning the book Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion in 2013. But if Gordon knows Stax, co-writer Parker outdid him with her eyewitness accounts, having worked at Stax through most of its existence and even serving as a songwriter there herself.

Over the past 20 years, Parker has also championed the creation of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, the Stax Music Academy, and the Soulsville Foundation, as celebrated in this 2023 Memphis Flyer story. Thus her Grammy win was an important tribute to one of the label’s key behind-the-scenes players, and as the co-producers of the set gathered onstage to receive the award, they naturally deferred to Parker to speak on their behalf.

Album note writers Deanie Parker and Robert Gordon on the jumbotron, accepting their Grammy Award. (Credit: Pat Rainer).

“Stax founders Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton gave the Stax songwriters a racially integrated paradise where they were encouraged to discover and develop their authentic talents by Al Bell,” Parker said while accepting the award. “This set highlights some of Stax’s and America’s most talented rhythm and blues songwriters: Eddie Floyd, William Bell, Steve Cropper, Homer Bates, Mack Rice, Bettye Crutcher, Bobby Manuel, and Henderson Thigpen.” After thanking the Recording Academy and her fellow co-producers, she also gave a nod to local artist Kerri Mahoney for designing the look and layout of the box set, before concluding with a warm acknowledgment of “the remarkable visionary and producer, Cheryl Pawelski.”

Another non-performing contributor to Grammy wins was Matt Ross-Spang, who engineered on Weathervanes, the Best Americana Album winner by Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit, and who co-produced and mixed Echoes Of The South, the Best Roots Gospel Album winner by the Blind Boys Of Alabama, at his Southern Grooves studio in the Crosstown Concourse.

Beyond the scribes, historical producers, and knob-twiddlers, musical artists from Memphis also made a strong showing at this year’s ceremony. While Memphis has always loved native daughter Julien Baker, it seems all the world loves boygenius, her band with fellow singer-songwriters Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. Their 2023 album The Record garnered six nominations, and ended up winning Best Alternative Music Album, with the group also scoring Best Rock Performance and Best Rock Song wins for the single “Not Strong Enough” — featured in this week’s Music Video Monday.

boygenius (Photo courtesy Chuffmedia)

When boygenius, decked out in matching white suits, accepted their second award, Baker wore her heart on her sleeve. “All I ever wanted to do in my life was be in a band,” she said, visibly shaken with emotion. “I feel like music is the language I used to find my family since I was a kid. I just wanted to say thank you to everybody who ever watched me play.”

Bobby Rush, based in Mississippi but with longstanding ties to Memphis (and awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humanities by Rhodes College), also saw his latest work celebrated, with his 2023 album All My Love For You winning Best Traditional Blues Album. He too was eloquent in his gratitude. “I treasure this, and honor Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Tyrone Davis, Johnnie Taylor, all the guys coming before me that I looked up to…thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Finally, while not winning as a performing artist, the legendary DJ Paul was a towering presence onstage as Killer Mike accepted awards for, Best Rap Album, Best Rap Performance, and Best Rap Song. He co-wrote his track, “SCIENTISTS & ENGINEERS,” with DJ Paul (aka Paul Beauregard), Andre Benjamin, James Blake, Tim Moore, and Dion Wilson. In winning the latter category, Killer Mike and his collaborators edged out another Memphis talent, producer Tay Keith, who was among the songwriters for the Grammy-nominated track “Rich Flex” by Drake and 21 Savage.

Right out of the gate, Killer Mike acknowledged his colleague from Memphis as they stood together at the podium. “I’m from the Southeast,” he said. “Like DJ Paul, I’m a Black man in America. And as a kid, I had a dream to become a part of music, and that nine-year-old is excitedly dancing inside of me right now… I want that thank everyone who dares to believe that art can change the world.”

DJ Paul, of course, has long been an integral player in the Oscar-winning Three 6 Mafia, and is an active solo artist and producer to this day, as profiled by the Memphis Flyer here. His old crew included the late Gangsta Boo, who was honored during the In Memoriam segment of the ceremony. Wayne Kramer of Detroit’s MC5, whose appearance on Joecephus & the George Jonestown Massacre’s Call Me Animal album was likely his last released recording before his death on February 2nd, was also remembered in the segment.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Music Video Monday: “Not Strong Enough” by boygenius (Plus Other Grammy Winners)

Memphis was well-represented at last night’s Grammy Awards. The album of long lost Stax demos, Written In Their Soul, won for Best Liner Notes, an award which was accepted by Stax’s PR person turned champion Deanie Parker and Memphis writer/director Robert Gordon.

Bobby Rush, now entering his ninth decade, won Best Traditional Blues Album for All Of My Love For You.

Supergroup boygenius—Pheobe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and former Memphis punk rocker Julien Baker—won three Grammys, including Best Alternative Album for The Record. “Not Strong Enough” won both Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance. Watch Baker get emotional while accepting the group’s third award of the evening.

The music video for “Not Strong Enough” was shot by the band themselves while hanging out in Southern California, and edited by Jackson Bridgers. The video shows off the group’s low-key appeal, which charmed the nation on the summer’s blockbuster tour which climaxed with a sold-out Halloween show at the Hollywood Bowl. The visuals may be unassuming, but the music is powerful.

You don’t have to win a Grammy to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday. All you have to do is email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.

Categories
Music Music Blog

A Talk with Don Nix, Memphis Music Maverick

Packy Axton, Don Nix, and Steve Cropper, ca. 1960 (Credit: Don Nix)

Take heart, juvenile delinquents everywhere: there walks among us one of your kind who parlayed his street savvy into nothing less than crafting a new Memphis Sound. You can learn all about that and more this Monday, October 16th at 7 p.m., when author Robert Gordon sits down to chat with Nix about his life in music. It’s part of Gordon’s ongoing series of listening parties at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, in which he curates playlists of songs by the likes of Steve Cropper, Al Kapone, IMAKEMADBEATS, Boo Mitchell, and others with the artists themselves, using the music as a jumping-off point for discussions of their craft.

Nix’s name may not be as familiar as those others to some, but he’s played a pivotal role in Memphis music ever since he was a student at Tech High School, “where the delinquents were transferred and taught a trade before they flunked out completely,” as Gordon writes in It Came from Memphis. That was when he played sax with a group that included Cropper, Duck Dunn, Charlie Freeman, and Packy Axton: The Royal Spades. Axton’s mother Estelle was busy starting up a new business called Satellite Records, and when she facilitated a recording session for the group, she prevailed upon them to change their name to the Mar-Keys.

That session would yield the instrumental track “Last Night,” which was a shot across the bow of pop music, an R&B smash hit by a bunch of white kids that would presage the integration championed by Satellite, as it soon morphed into Stax Records.

Packy Axton and Don Nix in their delinquent daze (Credit: Don Nix)

But Nix was destined to be more of a behind-the-scenes player. As he told Gordon in It Came from Memphis, “I didn’t play on any sessions after a certain point. Not after they got good musicians to play … Eventually, I was producing, and that’s all I ever wanted to do. I wanted to write and to put records together in the studio.”

He embraced that role with aplomb, eventually working as a producer, arranger, and musician for artists as diverse as Furry Lewis, Albert King, Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers, Jeff Beck, Brian May, Eric Clapton, and many others. His song, “Going Down,” originally recorded by the band Moloch in 1969, has become a rock standard covered by Freddie King, Jeff Beck, Deep Purple, JJ Cale, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Who, Led Zeppelin, and others. The Rolling Stones performed “Goin’ Down” as recently as 2012 on a televised live concert with John Mayer and Gary Clark, Jr.

Now 82, Nix has decades of stories to share. He was the one member of the Mar-Keys “who could draw the crowds because he was so completely entertaining to watch,” writes Gordon. That instinct for entertaining, and a story well-told, hasn’t left him.

Categories
Cover Feature News

The Winter Reading Issue: By the Book

Well, the weather outside is, if not exactly frightful, certainly shading toward cold, blustery, and gray. Time-tested local pastimes like porch drinkin’ and riverside running are getting a little less comfortable. The good news? Books exist, and Memphians, from Shelby Foote to Katori Hall, have a certifiable knack for storytelling.

Not to go all LeVar Burton’s Reading Rainbow on you, but a book really is the least expensive ticket to another world, a new perspective. In this issue, we’ve turned the page on eight new books by Bluff City authors. They each represent a chance to visit a new place, be it the Memphis music scene of yesteryear, the British Isles in World War II, a fictional dystopian future, or the life and times of a real rock-and-roll legend (a moral giant, if you will). So, whether you’re in search of a gift for the bookworm in your family or a cold-weather social-distancing activity for yourself, we’ve got you covered. Trust me; I’ve been social distancing since Scholastic Book Fair, 1992. Read on. — Jesse Davis

I Die Each Time I Hear the Sound

by Mike Doughty

Hachette Books, $17.99

I now know exactly what not to say to Mike Doughty, thanks to his new book.

I’ve seen him around. You probably have, too. He’s lived in Memphis now for a few years. I’ll see him occasionally at Fresh Market, and we stood in the same line to vote this year. I love his music, but it’s distasteful to brace a guy when he’s picking produce or a president.

In I Die Each Time I Hear the Sound, Doughty describes the unique unpleasantness of fans telling him how they discovered his old band, Soul Coughing. Many of those stories basically boil down to “my roommate had the CD.” Duly noted.

It’s an honest insight into a particular moment, unique to an internationally known musician who makes unique music that appeals to a unique audience. The book is filled with these distinctive insights, delivered with a lot of warmth and humor. But Doughty’s also nakedly honest about anxiety, depression, and shame. The mix of these gives I Die Each Time I Hear the Sound a fresh, broad appeal. It’s a rock-and-roll book about a real person.

For example: How would you feel if David Letterman complimented your guitar — not your music — on national television? What if you responded with snark and he walked away? What if you found out later that Letterman compliments a lot of people’s guitars on the show and was trying to be personable?

The book is filled with honest stories from the road, talking to Little Richard in a Los Angeles elevator, eating McDonald’s in Tokyo, meeting a drunken Evan Dando at Glastonbury, and arguing/not arguing with his estranged band over the liner notes of a compilation album.

But the book is most brilliant when Doughty describes music, drawing an incredibly accurate atlas of the sounds as he hears them.

Here’s how he describes Steven Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians on a drive through Washington State: “It was like those undulant marimbas rose from the yellow hills. The melodies change as if you’re passing them: a note materializes at the end, a note on the top disappears.”

Here’s Doughty on “These Arms of Mine”: “When Otis Redding sang the word mine — the second repetition, when the note gets higher — the word mine becomes a glowing flower, which expanded into the sky, then the sky opened into the cosmos beyond the cosmos.” — Toby Sells

Paper Bullets

by Jeffrey H. Jackson

Algonquin Books, $27.95

Rhodes professor Jeffrey H. Jackson couldn’t have known how timely a subject he picked when he began his research into French artists and romantic partners Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe for the book that would become Paper Bullets. Resistance, the key motif of Jackson’s just-released (and already lauded — Paper Bullets has been longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction) tome, has become something of the watchword of the contemporary era, certainly of the last four years, making Jackson’s telling of two lesbian artists who put all their considerable talents to use to resist the Nazi occupation of the English Channel island of Jersey a story well-suited to the cultural moment.

Known in the art world as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Lucy and Suzanne operated a covert campaign to demoralize the German occupying army, striking at their psyche with their “paper bullets” — notes hidden in magazines and surreptitiously slipped into pockets, photo collages, poems, anything that might make the invaders doubt the morality of their position.

Before their resistance in Jersey, their relationship made Lucy and Suzanne outlaws, of a sort. “Their relationship was not their only secret,” Jackson writes in Paper Bullets. “According to Jewish tradition, Lucy would not have been considered Jewish because her mother was not a Jew. However, Nazi racial law made no such distinction.”

In Paris, before the war, surrounded by artists and entrepreneurs who were anything but stereotypical and enmeshed in radical politics, Lucy and Suzanne were at the cutting edge of a convention-defying moment in art history, in a Paris still reeling from the heavy losses sustained in the first World War. It was the perfect training ground.

As women working in a male-driven field, as women who loved each other, Lucy and Suzanne had practice viewing the world from a different perspective — and often having to fight for their right to participate. Lucy, too, suffered from chronic illnesses that set her apart from many of her fellows. Their status as unconventional artists working with Dadaists and Surrealists taught them the power of art as a way to subvert expectations.

The bulk of the action in Paper Bullets takes place on the island of Jersey, as Suzanne and Lucy begin to fight back against the occupation, steadily employing more sophisticated methods in their two-woman PSYOPS campaign. This is no dry history; rather, Paper Bullets almost hums with the tension of a tightly plotted thriller. Jackson deftly balances the narrative, though, giving the reader a taste of the romance that fueled the resistors’ relationship, the art scene that honed their skills, and the war that compelled them to find a way to fight. Paper Bullets has it all — it’s a tale of romance in spite of the odds, a slice of art history, and an inspirational World War II story. It is, simply put, nearly impossible to put down. — JD

The Ballad of Ami Miles

by Kristy Dallas Alley

Macmillan Books, $17.99

The more things change, the more they stay the same. While the world as we know it is broken in Kristy Dallas Alley’s debut novel, The Ballad of Ami Miles, many issues that plague our current society are all too rampant. Sixteen-year-old heroine Ami Miles has grown up in relative safety at her family’s survival compound, but when she receives a clue about her long-vanished mother’s whereabouts, she sets out to learn more about herself, and the world outside the compound.

Ami grows up at Heavenly Shepherd, a survival compound run by her grandfather, Solomon Miles. The America she knows has drifted into a post-apocalyptic collection of small communities after a virus rendered most of the population infertile. Any woman who does have the ability to bear children is quickly gobbled up by government “C-PAF” agents.

That fear prompted Ami’s mother to flee when she was a child, leaving her daughter to fend for herself in Solomon’s controlling environment. And her grandfather, the worst kind of bigoted evangelical, sees Ami as nothing more than a vessel to continue on the Miles lineage. When he invites a man to the compound to impregnate Ami, all bets are off. Her aunt provides her with directions to her mom’s last known location and sends Ami on her way with supplies.

While Ami Miles might have the YA label, Alley doesn’t treat her readers with kid gloves. A post-apocalyptic America doesn’t mean societal issues have gone away, and Ami tackles racism, homophobia, and plenty of other prevalent social issues for the first time after escaping Heavenly Shepherd. And it’s not all smooth sailing for the good-natured protagonist; Alley expertly weaves in a constant thread of deprogramming along Ami’s journey. Having basically grown up in a cult, it’s hard for Ami to jettison the thoughts and “values” that have been pounded into her since day one. Even as she learns more about the world, even as she makes new friends, and even as another young woman catches her eye, her grandfather’s directive to find a man and make a baby sits uncomfortably in the back of her mind.

The Ballad of Ami Miles is an ode to many things: self-growth, finding new experiences, welcoming in ideas that aren’t your own. Every step of her journey, Ami is up for the tough challenges that lay in her path. Reading from 2020’s perspective, where so many are insulated in their thought bubbles by algorithms, social media, and the like, Ami Miles is the perfect tonic. With a brave face, there’s always room for growth and new experiences.

I’m not sure I’m the target demographic for The Ballad of Ami Miles, but Alley’s electric pacing kept me hooked until the last page; ultimately, I blazed through in just two sittings. Through Ami, Alley never puts a foot wrong while crafting her narrative. Hard to believe this is a debut. — Samuel X. Cicci

It Came From Memphis

by Robert Gordon

Third Man Books, $19.95

Robert Gordon’s 1995 opus, It Came From Memphis, quietly but quickly grew into a cult classic, a must-read for any music aficionado wanting learn about the gritty, Black and white roots of rock-and-roll in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s — and the city where they were planted. Gordon’s cast of characters was as wild and eccentric as the river town that made them: Dewey Phillips, Sputnik Monroe, Sam Phillips, Furry Lewis, Mud Boy and the Neutrons, Bill Eggleston, Booker T., Tav Falco. Not to mention a supporting cast of midget wrestlers, motorcycle gangs, and all-around weirdos.

Iconic Memphis musician and Zelig-like guru Jim Dickinson knew many of the characters and their backstories, and he is a primal force in ICFM. His insights, along with Gordon’s extensive research, many invaluable interviews, and avid storytelling, give the book its authentic juice, chapter after chapter. There are plentiful you-are-there tales from the city’s iconic music studios — Stax, Ardent, Sun. There are long nights, inspired bouts of musical brilliance, booze and blunts and pills, bizarre escapades, and more than a little madness.

Now there’s a new 25th anniversary edition of It Came From Memphis, published by Jack White’s Third Man Books (the imprint that earlier this year published Memphian Sheree Renée Thomas’ Nine Bar Blues). And better yet, it’s not just a reprint. Much has been added: all-new photos, updated stories and interviews, and fresh opinions and perspectives from Gordon and others, including Peter Guralnick.

The original classic book is still there. It’s just been enhanced — and beautifully so. As Gordon admits in his preface, the original was something of “a guy book,” so he has brought more women’s voices and influences into this version. It’s a seamless and welcome addition.

As the cover blurb notes: “Vienna in the 1880s. Paris in the 1920s. Memphis in the 1950s. These are the paradigm shifts of modern culture. … Memphis embraced black culture when dominant society ignored or abhorred it. The effect rocked the world.”

That it did. It Came From Memphis is essential reading for anyone who wants to deepen their understanding of this city and its musical history. — Bruce VanWyngarden

Baron of Love: Moral Giant

by Ross Johnson

Spacecase Records, $15

Like the author himself (a friend and erstwhile bandmate of mine), this slim memoir (published by Spacecase Records) is a pulsating mass of contradictions that somehow self-assemble into a sentient whole. As such, it captures the way most of us live in fits and starts, and with good humor; but in Ross’ case, the fits and starts happened between the buccaneering world of rock-and-roll and the library shelves, first landing you backstage with Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls, then sending you “collapsing into a spiral of self-contempt and regret.”

The common thread is Ross’ keen eye, sharpened from an early age. With echoes of his father, a journalist in Little Rock, this book is bursting with vivid, keenly observed moments. The memories unfold in a chaotic jumble of brief vignettes, so the evocative tales of rock writing and rock drumming, with which the author made his name and honed his taste, rub shoulders uneasily with snapshots (both literal and figurative) of Ross’ youth and the dramas of adulthood. All are rendered in the clean prose of a reporter turning his investigative eye inward as well as outward. And some turns of phrase, be it “toilet club” or “mental patient rock,” are sheer poetry.

Without prejudice, Ross objectively notes the brazen racism of his Arkansas childhood, his ex-girlfriend’s career as a groupie, the fascistic roots of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the size of Iggy Pop’s schlong. Every chapter title might be a line from “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” as our hero rattles off the wonders and horrors he’s seen: “Who’s Alex Chilton?,” “Roland Janes,” “Creem Magazine Saved My Life,” “Swerve Into Perv,” “Charlie Feathers,” “The Klitz,” “Guiltabilly.” Through it all, his time with the Panther Burns, the band he co-founded with Chilton and Tav Falco, weaves in and out of the narrative like a tipsy driver you just can’t shake.

And “Baron of Love,” the inspired song/seance he cut with Chilton in 1978, hangs over the highway like a harvest moon.

What saves the book from being mere barstool boasting is Ross’ reflective instinct. Dollops of cultural studies and politics inform his musings on the ethics of the sexism, racism, and rockism at play in every scene. It may be more of a moral microscope, but if this be gossip, it’s gossip with a heart, and gossip with a brain. — Alex Greene

LGBTQ+ Revolution 2.0

by Jill Fredenburg

New Degree Press, $16.99

With the craziness and hopelessness some have felt in the last four years, it can be easy to forget how far we have come as a country in terms of social issues. In just 50 years, we have gone from segregating people based on the color of their skin to allowing true freedom of marriage. Reflecting on this can be astounding.

Jill Fredenburg’s LGBTQ+ Revolution 2.0, to me, is a product of the successes that we have made as a country in recent years. The book, which is structured as a collection of narratives sharing experiences and stories from people on different spots of the LGBTQ+ spectrum, tells the struggles, triumphs, and day-to-day lives of those who are in the LGBTQ+ community. Over 21 chapters, Fredenburg discusses all permutations of the LGBTQ community.

It’s not an easy read. At times I found myself angry and frustrated by the injustices faced by those that Fredenburg wrote about. Other times I felt hopeless to help. Fredenburg creates a connection between the reader and those featured in the book so that you can truly understand their lives, and the effect is immediate and intense. For all the sad stories and times of struggle there are also stories of triumph. But in that work Fredenburg also finds hope and strength in the knowledge that the LGBTQ movement is stronger than ever.

“I started writing this book with the hope that the process would help me understand how experiences like Cassandra’s and my own fit into the larger movement surrounding LGBTQ+ identity,” Fredenburg writes in her introduction. “What I discovered has made me excited for the next wave of LGBTQ+ rights.”

Fredenburg’s book LGBTQ+ Revolution 2.0 is not an easy read, but it’s a needed one. She speaks for the silent other who is often ignored and left out of the conversation, showing the good and the bad, then inviting others into the conversation. Her work is important reading for everyone, and she ends her book with a reminder that I think all people can live and learn by: “Who will you be, who and how will you love, without shame?” — Matthew J. Harris

Emergence

by Shira Shiloah

Salty Air Publishing, $15.99

Dr. Shira Shiloah is a local anesthesiologist who decided she’d get into the world of writing medical thrillers. Her debut novel is Emergence, set in Memphis and with ample description of familiar sights in and around Downtown. Shiloah also gives us a strong female anesthesiologist (beautiful, highly competent, owns a dog, touched by personal tragedy), a suitably wicked surgeon (an arrogant platinum blonde, owns no dogs, coked-up misogynist), and a sensitive resident doctor (thoughtful, supportive, easy on the eyes, owns a dog).

And there is plenty of lab-coat-ripping romance slathered throughout like a medical grade lubricant. In fact, Emergence rocks back and forth between incisions and intercourse, blending romance and thriller genres.

Allow these excerpts to speak for themselves:

“She could make out the silhouette of his muscular torso. His jeans were as loose as his smile. There were no blood or drapes between them tonight, just clear skin and healthy hormones. His gaze took her in.”

And: “He took the knife and expertly sliced him at the level of the jugular vein. The man screamed and struggled to get away, but with one sweep of his hand D.K. stabbed his cricoid, his voice box, so he’d be silent.”

If those passages appeal to you, then it must be just what the doctor ordered. — Jon W. Sparks

Memphis Mayhem

by David A. Less

ECW Press, $16.95

If the title Memphis Mayhem sounds like it could be describing either a crime wave or a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude or an era of public turbulence, the new book by Memphis music historian David Less concerns all of those things, but mainly it is history and memoir of the various strains of music that have percolated out of Memphis and defined the river city in its seminal relationship with the outer world.

As the author himself, a writer and archivist and third-generation Memphian, describes his work, “It is a story of a city and a culture and fosters independent thinking in the midst of a strict, conservative society. There is a spirit of self reliance in Memphis. It is born of the poverty and oppression shared by Blacks and whites here, who have nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

Parts of Less’ narrative are familiar from other sources, but Less does not content himself with a roster of luminaries and a catalogue of styles. His treatment of Memphis’ early blues masters, for example, is against a backdrop of the gambling, desperate chance-taking, and crazy optimism that characterized Beale Street and its antecedent neighborhoods. He tells his tale in an episodic style that at first seems somewhat disjointed but is more accurately revealed to be the mosaic that it is.

Almost in the manner of a jig-saw puzzle, the pieces ultimately fit together — Yellow Fever; the band rivalry between two Black high schools, Manassas and Booker T. Washington, and the dispersing into the world of the innovative results; the laboratory of Black and white music sources that was Sam Phillips’ Sun Studio; and the serendipity of a second commercial-music wave stemming as much from the self-seeking curiosity of white Messick High students like Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn as anything else.

Less explains why it is that Memphis music tends to be “behind the beat,” and he notes the importance of landmarks — like West Memphis’ Plantation Inn, where white Memphis high-schoolers learned their musical ABCs from innovative Black performers, and the Lorraine Motel, important as a honing place for white and Black musicians before it became a site of infamy and a shrine to the great MLK.

It’s all here — the jazz masters of the Crump-ordered “clean-up” period, Daddy-O Dewey, Ardent Studios, Chips Moman, Willie Mitchell, Al Green. And all of it pegged to the hard-boiled but generous local populations that lived in ever-treacherous and sometimes ominous times. (It is surely no accident, by the way, that much of the narrative of Less’ book derives from interviews with veterans of the Memphis music wars now living in the plusher confines of Nashville, which has a kind of finishing-school or retirement-home relationship to the dangerous but lively city on the Mississippi.) — Jackson Baker

Categories
Music Music Blog

Remembering Jim Blake, Trailblazer of the ’70s Memphis Music Underground

CREDIT: Pat Rainer

Pat Rainer

Jim Blake

Barbarian Records was a beacon of hope in the chaotic music scene of the ’70s in Memphis, when the idealism of the ’60s opened minds and ears to sounds decidedly more freakish, a precursor to what would later be called punk. The label was launched in 1974 by the owner of Yellow Submarine Records, Jim Blake, who passed away yesterday at the Regional One Medical Center while recovering from complications related to a pelvic injury sustained last Friday. He was 75. 

Blake was at the center of a scene that included Jim Dickinson, Sid Selvidge, Lee Baker, Jimmy Crossthwait, Alex Chilton, Ardent’s John Fry, Knox Phillips, William Eggleston, and Tav Falco, among others. By his side through much of the decade was Pat Rainer, who exhibited her photographs from the era two years ago at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.

Yesterday I spoke with Rainer, who now lives in California, about Blake’s importance to the scene and his legendary archive of recorded works by the likes of Dickinson, Lesa Aldridge, the Klitz, and wrestler Jerry Lawler, complemented by his formidable library of LPs, comics and books by others. 

Memphis Flyer: What happened? Was Jim Blake in ill health?

Pat Rainer: He fell while he was going into his house Friday evening, and a neighbor got an ambulance to take him to a hospital in Wynne, Arkansas. And people there figured out he had a fractured pelvis. The next morning they helicoptered him over to [Regional One], and he’d been there since Saturday. But then this afternoon he became unresponsive. They couldn’t revive him.

All because of a fractured pelvis?

You know, he had had heart bypass surgery in the fall of last year. And he had done pretty well since then. But in the past month or so, he’d been complaining about having problems with his balance, and having vertigo. On Friday, he was trying to carry a bunch of stuff in his house and he fell. I assume he was carrying comic books or records. Or both. I mean, it’s pretty poetic if that’s what he was carrying, but for all I know he was carrying groceries.

  courtesy Mesmery Blake

Jim Blake and daughter Mesmery

This was at his home near Wynne, Arkansas?

Yes. Jim’s mother moved to Arkansas because her family was there. She was from Cherry Valley. Jim moved there when he left L.A. in the late 80s to take care of his mom when she was in failing health. Then his older brother bought a place there later.

You may have worked with Jim Blake longer than anyone in Memphis from that time.

I’ve known Blake since ’68 maybe? ’67 or ’68. I worked for him at Atlantis, which opened in ’68. I don’t know what you know about Atlantis, but it was a trip. That was the predecessor to the Yellow Submarine record shop. It was a house on Poplar, an old brick bungalow. And every room was devoted to a different kind of retail store. There was a record store, a comics store, Mike Ladd had a guitar shop, and there was, of course, a head shop. And somebody built a big light organ and hooked it up to a stereo, and we had all these headphone posts in there. You could sit in there and put the headphones on and watch the light show.

courtesy Pat Rainer

Pat Rainer at Graceland the day after Elvis died

He published an Atlantis newspaper, and he promoted a concert with Spirit at the auditorium, and then he did another one with Donovan. Atlantis preceded Yellow Submarine. In the interim, we had a falling out for a minute because I left him and went to work at Poplar Tunes. How dare I leave him! That’s the story of my life with him. Periods of being estranged because you didn’t do what Jim thought you ought to do, because that’s just the way it was. Then I went back to work for him and Nancy (his ex-wife) at Yellow Submarine. That was when he had what was first called Tennessee Roc newspaper, and then after that it was the Strawberry Fields newspaper.

He had pretty strong opinions. Kind of a firebrand, it seems?

Yeah. We were very passionate about music. That was our main thing. And he did what he could do to spread the word about stuff we heard and thought was important. Everything from David Bowie to Lou Reed to Rod Stewart. With the help of our friend Grover, he got Bowie to do a live interview on FM 100 with Jon Scott, and that really did break Bowie in America. We were into Bowie, let me tell ya. I loved Bowie, but Blake and Grover were cuckoo for coco puffs over him!

So Barbarian Records began while you were working at Yellow Submarine, when Blake decided to put out a record by Jerry Lawler, the wrestler?

Jim Dickinson really gave Blake the confidence and the idea that he could take Lawler into a studio and he could make a record. Dickinson said, “You know, you could make a record on Lawler and sell them at the matches,” and you could see the light go off over Jim’s head. He and I used to take Lawler’s records to the Coliseum and sell ’em in the stands, just walk up and down the aisle and sell them. When Lawler was a bad guy, they would buy ’em and break ’em! And when he became a good guy, they would take ’em and try and get ’em autographed.

I think working with Lawler meant the most to him. But he was really thrilled to work with my friend Randy Romano, who we called Sabu La Teuse. He was a gay white man who sounded like a young Black woman. And I think just being in the studio was what he loved, you know? All the musicians that would come work for him, it was just a blast.
Pat Rainer

Jim Blake smokes a joint while musicians prepare for a recording session, 1970s.

In addition to the handful of records he put out in the ’70s, he had a lot of unreleased recordings, didn’t he?

Yes, and I’d been working with him really hard for the past four or five years to get him to get those tapes out, so we could reissue all the Barbarian stuff on Omnivore Recordings. And he would always start the conversation with, “But I’ve got all these unfinished tracks on Alex Chilton and Sabu and Dickinson!” I’m going, “Jim, can we reissue the stuff that’s already been released? That”s been mixed and mastered? Then we can look at other stuff.” But there was always some reason why he couldn’t get to it.

Just the mindset of thinking he would go in and tweak something from 40 years ago, it’s mind-boggling.

Uh, yeah, like, “I’ve just gotta finish that track, get that one guitar overdub.” [laughs]
courtesy Mesmery Blake

Jim and Mesmery Blake

Robert Gordon went over there and helped him get the door open to the storage trailer where he had all the Barbarian masters. His and Nancy’s daughter Mesmery and I have been trying to get out there and get into it. Then he had to have that heart surgery. And then the pandemic. Robert sent me some shots he took, of piles and piles of stuff in his trailer. It looks very familiar to me. I lived through that for so many years with him. It started off small, and then when he relocated from his small house over there by Memphis State, he moved to a bigger home out there in Raleigh. And he built wall to wall record shelves, where he had to walk through there like a maze. You had to walk sideways. After that, he and I kind of fell out again, so I haven’t seen any of it over there in Arkansas.

It sounds like an amazing library, not just of Barbarian material, but in general.

He collected records and comics and never got rid of any of ’em. He collected books and posters and artwork.

Did he live alone out by Cherry Valley?

Yeah. He’s been living alone out there for a while. He has a cousin that lives down the road. His brother passed away a while ago. For years and years, we’ve called Mesmery the Barbarian Heiress. She’s his only daughter. Jim said when he first looked at her he was mesmerized, so she’s named Mesmery.  She moved to Oregon to work in the wine industry and she’s done very well for herself there.

Of all the stuff he worked on, what meant the most to him?

I think anything he worked on with Dickinson. Dickinson was his mentor, like he was mine.

Did Jim Blake do much into the ’80s?

He moved out to LA in the early 80’s to work with Jon Scott, who was doing independent record promotion. Jim and Jon put out a tip sheet for radio called “Scott’s Tissue” with news about new music that went to radio programmers around the country. They also worked with a band called DFX2. They got them signed to MCA and had a record come out that was quite good.

Then he kinda transitioned, and he was working for Jerry Lawler for quite some time. He was driving to Memphis from Cherry Valley three or four days a week, to work for Lawler. Even recently. In fact, Lawler fixed up a place for him to stay at his house, after he got out of the hospital from having that heart surgery. You know, when Jerry was just a kid, Blake would pay him for his artwork. Jerry would draw stuff for our newspapers; he painted the front of the Yellow Submarine with a scene from a comic book. Jim always tried to encourage Jerry. We used to call him the human Xerox machine. Lawler could look at anything and reproduce it. And making those records, Jim was really ahead of his time doing that.

A memorial service in celebration of Jim Blake’s life will be held in Memphis in the near future, according to Mesmery Blake.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

The Real Stuff: William Eggleston’s Stranded In Canton Screens at Crosstown Arts

Furry Lewis in Stranded In Canton

Telling folks about their past, their cultural heritage, the artists who shaped how we think today, is usually the job of people like me. But writers and documentarians, no matter how hard we try to tell the whole story, are always doomed to tell only part of the tale. We decide what’s most important (which describes what our job entails in a nutshell) and edit out the rest. Rarely do general audiences get to see the unfiltered stuff, the raw material out of which cultural history is made.

In 1976, Memphian William Eggleston was the subject of a blockbuster exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Until that time, color photography was not held in high esteem in academic and “serious” art circles. Eggleston’s haunting, egalitarian photos of the Mid South changed that forever.

At the time, Eggleston had been seriously pursuing photography since the mid-1960s. While he was being feted in the highest circles for his ravishing prints, his interest had turned to video. Sony had just released a brand new video camera that taped to an open-reel deck. It was portable, but just barely. Eggleston got his hands on one and started obsessively shooting anything that was in front of him.

For years, the tapes lay dormant until they were assembled into a film called Stranded in Canton by director Robert Gordon. Today, even the press releases supporting the film refer to it as “infamous”. This is not a work with a narrative arc. It is more like being a fly on the wall at a particularly strange time and place. Memphis attracts eccentrics, and Eggleston hung out with the best of them. And by “best” I mean “weirdest”. Eggleston’s friends included Furry Lewis, Alex Chilton, Tav Falco, and a host of other hard partying artists. The photographer catches them with their guard down—if, indeed they had guards to drop in the first place. Much has been written about that time in Memphis cultural history, but this film puts you in the room with the people who were making that history, warts and all. Imagine Salvador Dali’s home movies, and you have the beginning of a sense of what Stranded in Canton is like

The film will screen tonight (Thursday, May 23rd) as part of the Crosstown Arts weekly film series. After the film, The Alex Chilton Revue Band featuring Ross Johnson and The Klitz will perform period-appropriate music at The Green Room. You can get tickets here at the Crosstown Arts website. 

The Real Stuff: William Eggleston’s Stranded In Canton Screens at Crosstown Arts

Categories
News News Blog

Report: Incentives Have Helped Tennessee Film Industry Grow

CREDIT: Photographs Courtesy of CMT

Photographs Courtesy of CMT

Kevin Fonteyne as Johnny Cash, Drake Milligan as Elvis Presley, and Christian Lees as Jerry Lee Lewis

State officials have given film companies $69.1 million in reimbursements or rebates for 68 production projects in Tennessee since 2007, according to a recent report, a move that has yielded $73.2 million in new tax revenues.

The Tennessee Entertainment Commission’s (TEC) February report said the “production industry continues to play a key role in the Tennessee economy.” Incentives have helped that sector grow, the report said, and the motion picture and video industry is set to grow in the state by 41 percent over the next five years.

The sector employs 6,016 in Tennessee, ranking the state sixth among all states in overall employment in the film-production sector. The film sector has added 2,400 new jobs in the state over the last five years. In that time, the sector as a whole grew by 135 percent.
[pullquote-1] Most of the state’s film jobs (4,441) are in Nashville, the report said. Memphis is not mentioned in the TEC report.

The productions generate spin-off revenue, too. Over the last nine years, the reports says production projects purchased $171.9 million in goods and services from about 10,400 Tennessee vendors.

The report estimates $419.5 million in new incomes were generated for Tennessee workers from those 68 incentivized projects. In total, incentivized film projects here yielded $655.6 million in total economic output for the state since 2007, according to the report. The report did not break down figures by regions or cities.
[pullquote-2] In January, MovieMaker magazine ranked Memphis (for the sixth year in a row) in the top 20 places to shoot in the country. Emmy and Grammy-winning writer and moviemaker Robert Gordon told the magazine that the 1990s-era John Grisham films laid down the tracks for the movie industry here.

Here’s Gordon’s description in the magazine of shooting in Memphis:

“Memphis is a great place to shoot,” Gordon said. “As a location, you can find streets to match most any era, and most any condition.

“Also, the crews are skilled, eager, and flexible. People I’ve worked with (on non-union shoots) are ready to do what’s needed, even if it means duties not normally assigned. They’re innovative and ready to try, and if you treat people right, they’ll go the extra mile, delivering you images you’d never have imagined.

“A friend of mine says, ‘Memphis is the town where nothing happens but the impossible always does.’”

Tennessee offers production companies a 25 percent cash refund on certain costs. Wages for in-state crew qualify for the rebate, for example, while wages for out-of-state workers don’t. But not all projects are approved and the approval process (run by the TEC) isn’t objective.

“Tennessee’s state production incentive program has limited funding and therefore is not ’first come, first served,’” according to the Memphis and Shelby County Film and Television Commission website. “Projects are approved based on merit and the ’best interests’ of the state.”

The commission offers film companies discounts on Memphis Police Department rates and hotel rates, according to the website.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Seventh Heaven

CREDIT: Christian Patterson

Now that Beale Street has been renovated, and neon warms its coldest nights, it’s hard to conjure up the feeling that must have greeted 37-year-old Calvin Newborn when he returned there after making his name in the jazz world.

“I came back to Memphis in 1970,” he told author Robert Gordon. “Beale Street was being torn down. I couldn’t find no place to play. … [I was] playing with Hank Crawford every six months in California. And when I came back to Memphis, I would stay inebriated. It broke my heart, you know, to come on Beale Street and it wasn’t there. So I just went to the liquor store. When they finally tore it completely down, I thought that was the end of Beale Street, you know. But they started to rebuilding, you know, slowly.”

Christian Patterson

Calvin Newborn

Newborn had dealt with heartbreak before, over the years, in many forms. Happily, he did eventually resume his rightful place as one of Beale’s star attractions. Now the heartbreak’s all ours, since he passed away on December 1st in his adopted home of Jacksonville, Florida. And for lovers of music history, his death marks the loss of more than one man and musician, great enough in his own right. Calvin was the last of the epoch-defining Phineas Newborn Family Showband.

Photo Courtesy of Jadene King

Herman Green

Family Ties

“When I hear stories about Elvis going and hearing [Calvin’s] dad’s band in the Flamingo Room, and borrowing Calvin’s guitar and sitting in with their family band, I think that Elvis probably got a lot of his feel from their family band. I can see how that was an influence on Elvis,” reflects musician and producer Scott Bomar, who worked with Calvin. “It was quite a band. I think Calvin and his family are that missing link between Sun Records and Stax. They were playing on Sun sessions, and you look at all the people that came through that band. William Bell, George Coleman, Honeymoon Garner, Fred Ford, Charles Lloyd, Booker Little. That whole Newborn Family Band was a cornerstone of Memphis music. It’s a chapter that I don’t think has gotten its due.”

Saxophone legend Charles Lloyd recently tried to give the Newborns their credit, when asked to recall his formative years in Memphis. “I was also blessed that Phineas Newborn discovered me early and took me to the great Irvin Reason for alto lessons. Phineas put me in his father — Phineas Senior’s — band. Together with Junior and his brother, Calvin, we played at the Plantation Inn which was in West Memphis. Phineas became an important mentor and planted the piano seed in me. To this day he still informs me.”

Photo Courtesy of Jadene King

Calvin with brass note on Beale honoring the Newborn family.

Of course, Phineas Newborn Jr., or just “Junior,” was Calvin’s older sibling, who some would later call “the greatest living jazz pianist.” Their parents, Phineas Sr., or “Finas,” and Mama Rose Newborn, raised them to love and play music, always hoping to carry on as a family band (with Finas on drums). And, for a time, they did. But, ultimately, Junior was too much of a genius on the ivories to be contained by such ambitions. Indeed, Calvin grew up in the shadow of Junior’s gift, something he apparently did not mind one bit. Though the brothers won their first talent show early on as a piano duo, that moment also brought home Junior’s genius to Calvin, who soon after began guitar lessons on an instrument that B.B. King helped him pick out.

Beale Street held a fascination for the whole family, who would initially make the long trek on foot from Orange Mound just to be there, until they moved closer. Finas turned down opportunities to tour with Lionel Hampton and Jimmie Lunceford just to be near his family and the promise of playing music with them. At that time, a flair for music was often a strong familial force. Dr. Herman Green, master of the saxophone and flute, went to Booker T. Washington High School with Calvin. “We grew up together. We been knowing each other since we were babies,” Green says. “The Newborn family, and the Green family, and then the Steinberg family. We had a lot of families together at that time that were musicians, you know? So we came up together, ’cause we had to go to the same school.”

Steve Roberts

Calvin Newborn, Chuck Sullivan, Richard Cushing, Robert Barnett (back). Dr. Herman Green & Willie Waldman (front) in FreeWorld. ca. 1990.

Though both brothers were soon proficient enough to tour with established acts (as when Calvin hit the road with Roy Milton’s band), by 1948, their father landed the family group a residency at the Plantation Inn in West Memphis. Green, too, joined the band, as did a young trombonist named Wanda Jones. For a time, Finas’ dream flourished. “Oh, we all was good, man!” recalls Green. “We was playing with his daddy. We had some good singers, like Ma Rainey.” Before long, they moved to the Flamingo Room in Downtown Memphis, and then collectively hit the road with Jackie Brenson, who was touring behind his hit record, “Rocket 88,” recorded (with Ike Turner’s band) by Sam Phillips.

If the family band was tight, Calvin and Wanda were getting even tighter. As Green remembers it, “Wanda, yeah — I’m the one that put ’em together. She was the vocalist with Willie Mitchell. I heard her, and I told Finas Sr. about her. And then we ended up using her for quite a while there. Now, Calvin was my right-hand buddy, man. Junior was in and out of there, you know, but me and Calvin were very close. He told me he was getting ready to get married to Wanda. I said, ‘Well, congratulations.’ He said, ‘Well, you ain’t heard the rest.’ I said, ‘Well, what is it?’ He said, ‘I want you to be my best man.’ And then we lived together in my daddy’s house, when he got married.”

The Phineas Newborn Family Showband was the toast of Memphis, with a plethora of future jazz and soul greats rotating through. And Calvin was distinguishing himself with a talent that his gifted brother did not have: showmanship. As Calvin told author Stanley Booth, “You’d have guitar players to come in and battle me, like Pee Wee Crayton and Gatemouth Brown, and I was battlin’ out there, tearin’ they behind up, ’cause I was dancin’, playin’, puttin’ on a show, slide’ across the flo’.” And flying, as captured in an iconic photo of Calvin in mid-air, his eyes fixed with fierce determination on his fretboard, his legs angled high in a mighty leap.

The Elvis Connection

As their reputation grew, the family band began to notice a young white kid at their shows, watching Calvin’s moves like a hawk. As Calvin recalled to Gordon, “I would see him everywhere, he used to come over to the Plantation Inn Club when we was over there.” That kid was Elvis Presley.

“Elvis used to be there, show up every Wednesday and Friday night to see me do Calvin’s Boogie and Junior’s Jive. I’ll be flyin’ and slidin’ across the dance floor [laughs] and I think that’s when he … started to flyin’, too.” Almost as a footnote, Calvin adds, “but he went on and made all that money, made millions of dollars, and I went to the jazz mountaintop and almost starved to death.”

But through it all, Presley remained close to the Newborns. It went far beyond studying their moves and their sounds at the club, as Calvin’s daughter, Jadene King, tells it. In describing her father’s prolific writings, she notes that he penned an as-yet unpublished volume with “a lot of the history between him and Elvis in it.” Titled Rock ‘n Roll: Triumph Over Chaos, “there’s an enormous amount of unspoken-of history of my dad and Elvis’ relationship. Actually, Elvis’ relationship with my entire family,” King says. “A lot of people think he was a prejudiced kind of human being, and from a very bigoted family, but that’s not true. He spent a lot of his life with my father and my uncle, at my grandmother’s home. They were very close. He ate many meals with my dad and my uncle, and my dad was the one that was responsible for a lot of his moves and a lot of his musical talent, as far as teaching him a lot of what he knew. They were very close.”

The Jazz Mountaintop

Family and Elvis aside, Calvin was more concerned with climbing to the jazz mountaintop, especially once the extent of Junior’s deep genius on the piano became widely known. After brief stints in college and the army, Junior was back in Memphis when Count Basie and the great talent scout John Hammond happened to visit, and heard him play. In that moment, the ring of opportunity became the death knell for Finas’ dream of a family band. By 1956, Junior and Calvin had moved to New York, playing in a quartet with two legends-to-be, Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke, and recording for Atlantic and RCA.

Before long, Junior would go his own way, and deal with his own demons, leaving Calvin to deal with his. At first, the jazz mountaintop offered an escape from the South’s rampant racism. “I think that’s the main reason why I left Memphis, you know,” he told Gordon, “to play jazz. Because jazz seemed to have put it on an even keel, because a lot of white people respected jazz. And that was the bebop era, you know, and I admired Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday and all the jazz artists, so I was, that’s one reason I was so glad to get away from Memphis.”

But he also fell into the traps of bebop life, as did Wanda. As Booth writes, “Calvin began working with Lionel Hampton, then joined Earl Hines. His wife, who had become a narcotics addict, had convulsions and died in her sleep, and Calvin began using heroin himself.” And yet, he managed his addictions well enough to keep playing, building his reputation every step of the way. As the 1960s wore on, Calvin ended up working with Jimmy Forrest, Wild Bill Davis, Al Grey, Freddie Roach, Booker Little, George Coleman, Ray Charles, Count Basie, Hank Crawford, and David “Fathead” Newman.

Meanwhile, Junior’s eccentricities were turning into full-blown mental anguish, and he spent time here and there in mental institutions, recovering from his alcoholism in hospitals, or simply convalescing in the family home. Still, he would perform and record.

In 1965, Finas, now suffering from heart problems in spite of his then-clean living, ignored his doctor’s warnings against performing and joined his eldest son onstage in Los Angeles. It was the closest he’d come to recapturing the Newborn family band’s glory days. And he died of a heart attack as soon as he walked off stage. Still, Mama Rose kept her home in Memphis, and Junior stayed there more and more.

Thus was the state of his life and his family when Calvin returned to see Beale Street in ruins. He was once again based in Memphis, but toured often. As his daughter recalls: “The first thing I remember as a little girl was him being in the Bubbling Brown Sugar tour. That had him over in Europe for several years, and he lived in Holland, London, Paris.”

King, whose mother was an Italian immigrant whom Calvin met at Coney Island, but who grew up in Jacksonville, goes on: “That’s my first memory of daddy being gone for a long period of time. That was in the mid-1970s. And he did that for a while. He was constantly gigging and touring during most of my childhood, but he would always come to Jacksonville to see me, or I would go to Memphis and spend time with him at my grandmother’s house. Mama Rose’s.”

Staying at the family home or on his own, Calvin would help with Junior’s care and began playing more with his old classmate, Herman Green. The quartet recordings they made as the Green Machine still stand as some of the finest jazz that Memphis has produced. As the 1980s went on, Calvin joined Alcoholics Anonymous, cleaned up his act, made the occasional solo album, and began working with younger musicians. When Green fell in with the funk/rock/improv group FreeWorld, Calvin was not far behind. “Calvin was a member of FreeWorld for about two years, and his guitar virtuosity brought us all up several levels, musically speaking,” says FreeWorld founder Richard Cushing. “Herman and Calvin would occasionally start playing off each other in the middle of a song, pushing each other, cutting heads as only two old-school masters can do.”

Mike Brown

Working in the studio.

New Born

Memphis musician and producer Scott Bomar also treasures his time with Calvin, first as pupil and then as the producer of his phenomenal album, New Born. “I had to put a band together to back Roscoe Gordon, and I asked Calvin to play guitar. That was the beginning of our friendship and the beginning of us doing gigs together. Some of the most amazing musical settings that I’ve had the good fortune to be part of were with Calvin. At one Ponderosa Stomp show, the Sun Ra Arkestra actually played with Calvin and me. That’s one of the most intense audience reactions I’ve ever seen at a concert. And every time I’d talk to Calvin, he would still talk about it. The last time I spoke to Calvin, he was still talking about that performance. It was a tune of his called ‘Seventh Heaven,’ and that was a very, very special performance.”

Even as the next century approached, Calvin had a flair for showmanship. Bomar goes on: “When he got on stage, he had this energy that not many people I’ve ever played with have. He was electric. He could hit his guitar in a way that got people’s attention. His tone — I love his rawness. Of course, he had this deep musical knowledge and was very melodic, but he also had this kind of raw, rock-and- roll edge to his tone and his playing. His tone was always on the edge of distortion.”

By 2003, there was less to keep Calvin here in Memphis. Junior and his mother, Mama Rose, had left this mortal coil behind. And so he settled in with his daughter, adapting to the Sunshine State and a more contemplative life. “My dad had various levels of spirituality, and he studied every religion known to man. He studied Islam, he studied Jehovah’s Witnesses, he studied Judaism, he studied Hinduism. My father was just a brilliant individual. He’s read the Koran three or four times. He’s read the Bible many times. He was just a very well-versed man, and I would say the last 10 years of his life he completely went over to Christianity.”

Calvin also continued to perform at the Jazzland Cafe and the World of Nations festival in Jacksonville, not to mention many area churches. And he remained as feverishly creative as ever. “He has several unpublished compositions that I have,” notes King. “I have several plays, several books, and tons of lyrics and scores for new music, new songs. He had just finished scoring a musical project that he wanted to take to New York and record.”

And then, in the spring of this year, romance came back into his life, in the form of one Marie Davis Brothers, who he had known for decades. “I’ve known her my whole life, for over 43 years,” says King. “Originally, they were together for 12 years, and they separated and were apart for 20 more years. In 2017, they started communicating again. They’d been talking over the phone for a little over a year, and then in April she moved here from Memphis. And in May they got married and they moved into their own apartment.”

Photo Courtesy of Jadene King

Calvin Newborn at the Memphis Music Hall of Fame induction of his brother Phineas.

The Final Chapter

No one expected Calvin Newborn to die this month. “He had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) from the years and years and years of smoking and drinking and just the jazz life, but he’d been sober and clean for over 35 years, and he was doing very very well,” says King. “Just in the beginning of November, his oxygen levels weren’t what they needed to be, but he just went from not having oxygen to wearing a little Inogen [portable oxygen] machine. And then toward the end of the month, that stopped giving him the levels that were needed, and here we are.”

Just before the end, he was still giving his daughter new writings to type up. “In my father’s last couple of months, he wrote a poem called ‘Seventh Heaven.’ It was based on a dream where he saw his great-granddaughter, who he called Bliss, looking out into what he called seventh heaven, and everyone was at peace. There was no more hatred, there was no more racial divide. There was no more poverty. Everything had been leveled out. It was a beautiful world. I guess if my father had an epitaph, it would be ‘Seventh Heaven: There’s no race, just the human race.'”

In Calvin Newborn’s heaven, there’s room enough for everyone to fly.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Indie Memphis 2018 Friday: MIA, Diana Ross, and Negro Terror

After a gala opening at the Halloran Centre Thursday night, Indie Memphis moves to Overton Square on Friday. The schedule is packed with great stuff beyond what I could fit into this week’s cover story about the festival. 

Madeline’s Madeline (1:10 PM, Studio on the Square) is an acclaimed, visually inventive film by director Josephine Decker, who won the Craig Brewer Emerging Filmmaker Award at Indie Memphis 2014.

Indie Memphis 2018 Friday: MIA, Diana Ross, and Negro Terror

She began as a refugee from Sri Lanka, and ended up playing on the world’s biggest stages. Matangi/Maya/MIA (3:40, Studio On The Square) is a documentary about the fascinating life of political dance pop musician M.I.A.

Indie Memphis 2018 Friday: MIA, Diana Ross, and Negro Terror (2)

The festival’s first world premiere is Diego Llorente’s Entrialgo, a beautiful vérité documentary about life in rural Spain.

Entrialgo || trailer from diego llorente on Vimeo.

Indie Memphis 2018 Friday: MIA, Diana Ross, and Negro Terror (3)

The second world premiere of the day is Shoot The Moon Right Between The Eyes (6:30, Studio on the Square). It’s a musical by Austin, Texas director Graham L. Carter that sets the music of John Prine amidst a story of a pair of small-time grifters who meet their match in a strong willed widow. It’s inventive, heartfelt, and a little rough around the edges, which is totally appropriate for a film that takes inspiration from Prine’s lyrics.

Shoot The Moon Right Between The Eyes [Official Trailer] from Graham L. Carter on Vimeo.

Indie Memphis 2018 Friday: MIA, Diana Ross, and Negro Terror (4)

At 6:30 at Playhouse on the Square, the Hometowner Documentary Shorts bloc features films from Memphis artists, including Lauren Ready, Jason Allen Lee, and Klari Farzley. Best of Enemies director Robert Gordon and producer Kim Bledsoe Lloyd’s film “Ginning Cotton at the Dockery” tracks down the men and women who worked at the last functioning cotton plantation in Mississippi. Memphis musician Robbie Grant makes his directorial debut with “Ben Siler Gives Ben Siler Advice,” in which Memphis filmmaker and Flyer film contributor Ben Siler meets a younger Memphian named Ben Siler and tells him how the world works. It pretty much does what it says on the box, in two hilariously depressing minutes.

At 9:10, there’s a genuine only-at-Indie Memphis moment. Mahogany is a 1975 star vehicle for Diana Ross, directed by Motown impresario Berry Gordy (and a couple of ringers). Also featuring a smoking turn from Billy Dee Williams in his prime, and a smash hit number one song from Ross as a theme, it’s a 70s classic. To illustrate the depth of the Mahogany cult, the film will be proceeded by “Mahogany Too,, a short film shot on Super 8 by Nigerian filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu that is a lighting retelling of Ross’ film, featuring Nollywood star Esosa E.

Indie Memphis 2018 Friday: MIA, Diana Ross, and Negro Terror (5)

At 9:10 on the big stage at Playhouse On The Square, an experimental documentary about Memphis’ most radical band makes its world premiere. In Negro Terror, director John Rash maintains a light touch, focusing on the sights and sounds of the hardcore punk band’s legendary stage show, and the words of the band’s three very different members, led by Omar Higgins, an anarchist Hari Krishna devotee who is a longtime member of Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP). In what is definitely a first for Indie Memphis and probably a first for just about anywhere, the band will provide a live soundtrack for the film about them as it premieres.