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.
Thomas Crivens (Photo courtesy of Beale Street Caravan)
Beale Street Caravan has become a formidable exporter: It’s the most widely distributed blues radio program in the world, attracting more than 2.4 million listeners each week. Produced here in Memphis, it regularly broadcasts, via nearly five hundred radio stations around the world, the live performances of artists from Memphis and the Mid-South, or inspired by the region. That’s quite an ascension for a show begun in 1997 with producer/executive director Sid Selvidge working under the auspices of the Blues Foundation.
In 2001, the program broke off to become an independent nonprofit. Having a talent as formidable as Selvidge as its first executive director set the bar high for Beale Street Caravan, but for the past two decades musician/producer Kevin Cubbins has excelled at the role, blending the professionalism of a studio engineer with the eclectic taste of an artist. Now he’s moving on and Thomas Crivens is stepping into the executive director role after four years of producing shows for the program.
“After almost 20 years, I think I’d been there plenty long enough,” says Cubbins. “I did feel like the end of the pandemic brought this moment where if we were ever going to have a leadership transition, now’s the time. I am excited for Thomas, and I support the board 100 percent as he steps into that role.”
Indeed, the transition takes place with Beale Street Caravan set to return to the airwaves this fall with its first new episodes since the pandemic. After the onset of Covid, the program remained on-air by broadcasting recordings from its extensive archives. Now, with pandemic restrictions lifting, show organizers are excited to get back on the road again.
“With live music shows coming back into our lives, it’s good to know that Beale Street Caravan will be under the steady hand and institutional knowledge of Thomas,” says the nonprofit’s outgoing board chair, Cynthia Ham. “We will once again be recording, preserving, broadcasting, and sharing worldwide the sounds of Memphis and the Delta region.”
In addition to being a show producer, Crivens, like Cubbins, is a guitarist of some note. He’s also a booking agent for local and national recording artists, and the first African American to lead the globally syndicated music program.
“Being a product of Memphis and its vibrant music scene, I’m excited at the chance to lead this showcase of the city’s musical talent and influence to the world,” says Crivens. “Through the continued promotion and celebration of Memphis music, Beale Street Caravan will continue to nurture pride in our city, while simultaneously increasing Memphis’ global visibility and recognition as a hub for music creation and performance.”
A native Memphian, Crivens is a graduate of White Station High School and Morehouse College in Atlanta, and holds an MBA from the Fogelman College of Business and Economics at the University of Memphis. He’s also served in executive positions at Memphis City Schools and Baptist Memorial Health Care Corporation.
Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from Bruce VanWyngarden’s new book, Everything That’s True, which is now out and available online and at Novel and Burke’s Books.
I moved to Memphis 20 years ago this spring. It was a new city to me, and I liked to wander around Downtown on my lunch hour. One day, I walked into Rod & Hank’s Vintage Guitars, a magical shop then located just across from the Peabody hotel on Second Street. I loved the smell and the feel of the place, and I loved all the classic old guitars hanging on the walls.
Rod Norwood and Hank Sable were friendly guys and would encourage you to take instruments down and play them until you found one that you had to have — as they knew you would, eventually. After a few visits, I fell in love with an old Gibson J-45 that sounded like thunder when you strummed it and whose high notes rang clear as water. I had to have it, and I dropped some serious jack to take it home.
“A J-45 is the guitar Sid Selvidge plays,” Hank said. “A lot of the old country blues singers wouldn’t play anything else.” I’d heard of Selvidge — mostly from reading Robert Gordon’s essential Memphis music and wrasslin’ book, It Came From Memphis — but hadn’t met him. When Hank told me Sid gave guitar lessons in the shop, I decided to give him a call. I wanted to learn country blues, and I wanted an excuse to keep hanging around Rod & Hank’s.
The next week, Sid and I — and our J-45s — met in the guitar shop’s upstairs room for my lesson.
“What do you want to learn?” he asked.
“Whatever you want to teach me,” I said.
Every Tuesday, for the next couple years, Sid taught me lots of nice licks and cool songs, but mostly he taught me about Memphis music. He had a million stories — about Furry Lewis, Mudboy and the Neutrons, Sam Phillips, the Memphis coffeehouse scene, you name it — and I loved to hear them. Sometimes, we’d talk more than we’d play.
After the “lesson,” we got in the habit of going downstairs and playing in the shop for a while. Soon, Hank started joining in on banjo and fiddle. Then, former Commercial Appeal music writer Larry Nager began dropping by with his mandolin. Then Sid’s marvelously talented son Steve began showing up and playing Dobro.
The impromptu “Second Street String Band” even played a few gigs, and it was a thrill for all of us to play behind Sid’s amazing voice. But all things come to an end. Rod and Hank closed the shop and took their business online. Sid got a full-time gig running the international radio show Beale Street Caravan. Nager moved to Cincinnati. I became the Flyer editor, and Tuesdays were never the same.
But Sid remained a friend, and he remains in my memory as one of the kindest, most generous people I ever met. His passing last week leaves an irreplaceable void in Memphis music. I still miss those Tuesdays, and, like a lot of folks around here, I’ll miss Sid Selvidge.
“The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going.” — George Carlin
The term “family values” is bandied about in political discourse a great deal, but what it really means is hard to pin down. While some bemoan the loss of the family life portrayed in Cold War textbooks, a look at the institution at street-level reveals a more complex picture. For many, leaving the family can have a liberating effect, as with countless alienated youths, be they counterculture or LGBTQ, who establish their own “family” of friends. And that’s not just a contemporary phenomenon. Memphis Minnie regularly ran away from the hard scrabble farming life of Walls, Mississippi, to play on Beale Street in the years before World War I, eventually staying gone for good while still in her teens. It all started when they gave her a guitar.
And yet families need not be so oppressive, as so many of us know. Indeed, families are a distinctive feature of this region’s musical heartbeat. The late Herman Green’s father played in W.C. Handy’s band, and his stepfather was a pastor whose church piano further sparked Green’s love of music. Phineas Newborn Sr. led a local orchestra that fostered the storied careers of his sons Calvin and “Junior,” the latter becoming one of the 20th century’s greatest pianists. Al Jackson Sr. fostered the talent of Al Jackson Jr., celebrated worldwide as the pulse behind Stax Records. From that same milieu arose Rufus Thomas, his daughters Carla and Vaneese destined to become celebrated singers, his son Marvell a distinguished soul pianist, composer, and arranger.
Though a full listing of contemporary performers with musical family roots would take a book, we highlight three such artists here whose kin inspired them. Once upon a time, people talked about the “generation gap,” with rock-and-roll marking the hard divide between young and old in the ’50s and ’60s. Now, in the 21st century, it’s all about the Generation Jams.
Meet the Burnsides
True, Cedric Burnside’s latest release, I Be Trying, might be seen as the culmination of his family’s story, grounded in the talent and guidance of his legendary blues-playing grandfather, R.L. Burnside. But Cedric’s latest, perhaps the greatest of his career so far, also represents the confluence of several families. Around here, when families befriend families, you wind up with a lot of kin.
The haunting collection of sparse blues, their unique aesthetic echoing African bluesman Ali Farka Touré at times, was produced by Boo Mitchell, himself the keeper of a family legacy. Willie Mitchell went from success to success as a band leader, then as a producer of megahits for Hi Records; he treated and taught the three musical Hodges brothers like family, and they became the Hi Rhythm Section. Along the way, Willie raised his grandson Boo as his son. “Every night he’d come home, I’d be messing around on the piano, and he’d come lean over my shoulder, those whiskers hitting me, and show me some stuff,” Boo recalls.
Now Boo co-manages Willie Mitchell’s Royal Studios, and working on Burnside’s album took on a uniquely cathartic aspect after Boo’s son fell victim to a vicious gun attack that left the Mitchells wondering if he’d ever walk again. “I didn’t know I Be Trying was going to become the soundtrack to my life,” Boo reflects. “When that thing went down with my son, all I kept hearing were Cedric’s songs. ‘The world can be so cold. …’ It was stuck in my head for a long while. Because he means that stuff. It is not an act.”
Cedric has inherited the gravitas and heartfelt approach to the blues of his grandfather. “I was born into this music,” Cedric says. “It was in my blood when I was birthed into this world. I have a very musical family. My Big Daddy [grandfather] and Big Mama [grandmother] had 13 children. Just about everybody turned to music, to have as their passion.
“My first instruments was the cans and buckets. We’d get done cooking, clean all the grease outta the jug, and I’d use that jug for a drum, you know? And my Big Daddy and my dad would play house parties around, and somehow I just found the courage to step up on the drums when they took a break. Instruments were all around me as a kid.”
Having been raised in his grandparents’ home, long before he mastered guitar, drumming for R.L. Burnside gigs at juke joints was an easy jump for Cedric. “It was fascinating, being that young, knowing I wasn’t supposed to be in the juke joints, me or my Uncle Garry. I was 10, he was 12, and we were in the juke joint! But there was something so special about that. Being kids that young, we’d know that we weren’t supposed to be there, but every grown-up in there welcomed us. They would hide us behind the beer coolers when the police came in because if we left, they didn’t have no band to play music! It was really, really cool, just knowing that you were one of the cool kids, at the juke joint with all grown-ups. It was scary, it was weird, and it would get your adrenaline pumping. You think of any scenario, and we probably went through all of those at that juke joint.”
Nowadays, Cedric is able to pay the tradition forward. “My youngest daughter, Portrika — she just turned 16 — sings on ‘I Be Trying.’ She always loved to sing, which makes me proud. And I’m just trying to feed her all I can give her, you know? While I’m here to do it.”
Direct descendants aside, for Cedric, “family” was never merely the classic nuclear arrangement, but an extended flock, some not even related by blood. Among the latter were Jim and Mary Lindsay Dickinson and sons. “With some musicians I play with, I have been around them for so long that they are like family to me. Like the North Mississippi Allstars. Luther and Cody Dickinson, we’ve been around each other since we were kids. Luther was the big brother of the group, the first one who could drive. That’s 30-plus years we’ve been knowing each other. So they are really like family to me. Even though we wasn’t blood. Just the closeness that we had made us family.” To this day, when Luther makes a cameo on Cedric’s album, you can hear the telepathy between them.
Sid and Steve Selvidge (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Meet the Selvidges
It turned out the Dickinsons weren’t the only family bonding with local geniuses of the blues and forging whole new family legacies. While Jim Dickinson was an early champion of under-recognized blues musicians of the area, he wasn’t alone. Standing right by his side at those first blues festivals of the ’60s was Sid Selvidge, whose family in Greenville, Mississippi, had not been particularly musical, but who nonetheless made his own way in the musical world of Memphis with the raw talent of his voice and fingers and his deep understanding of the blues and other song forms.
Today, Sid’s son Steve carries the tradition forward, best known as a guitarist in The Hold Steady. He says his early love of the guitar was sparked by his father’s encouragement — albeit with a light touch. “He was absolutely perfect,” recalls Steve. “Because he was not a stage dad. He was just so smart about it. He made everything available but didn’t push it on me or my brother. There was music around a lot, but all he offered was his enthusiasm.”
Showing young Steve a handful of chords was enough to get him started; from there, the son taught himself licks by rock gods like Led Zeppelin while the father looked on, adding only the occasional detail. “The biggest thing he showed me was open-G tuning and how to play ‘Cassie Jones’ and stuff. And while I played, he’d be shouting at me from downstairs, ‘It doesn’t go to the V chord!’ That’s literally something that happened,” laughs Steve.
Perhaps more than the technical niceties, Steve picked up a unique feeling for the blues via his father’s friends, namely the composer of “Cassie Jones” himself, the great Furry Lewis. “I only got fully hip to North Mississippi when Luther started digging deep down in there. My dad knew who R.L. Burnside was, but we hung out with Furry because they were friends. I have lots of memories of going over there and sitting on Furry’s bed and him being really sweet and really cool. And as he got older, the visits fell off a little bit. And I got into other things. I was still in single digits when he died.”
But there were other friends to learn from. As it turned out, Sid Selvidge, Jim Dickinson, Lee Baker, and Jimmy Crosthwait had a little band known as Mud Boy and the Neutrons. They were mostly local heroes but, by forging their own brand of heavy roots rock, have become highly regarded in hindsight. And the band itself was a kind of family. “They were still holdling on to the ethos of the counterculture,” muses Steve. “Even though they were middle-aged men by that point, there was still that ‘don’t trust anyone over 30’ vibe. I remember the smell of marijuana, and it was all very attractive. It was all connected with fun.”
Sons of Mudboy (Credit: Stevan Lazich)
Indeed, for young Steve, the visceral elements of musicianship were as alluring as the actual playing. “I can remember on Sundays, or after the weekend, I would open my dad’s guitar case, and this almost visible plume of aroma would come out, a cigarette smell, basically. Which is not that great, but it was really intoxicating as a kid. I would open it up and you could almost see the vapors, the smell of the bar. I was like, ‘Wow, man!’ I wasn’t even able to put it into words, but it was like, ‘This is a working musician’s instrument. He did something. And now he’s done for the weekend.’ It was like battle scars and it took on its own energy. It was almost like a living thing.”
Today, with Crosthwait the only Mud Boy member still living, Steve, Luther and Cody, and Ben Baker carry on that living thing as Sons of Mudboy, playing their fathers’ classic repertoire at free-ranging gigs that often include an extended family of other players. As he continues playing his father’s songs, Steve’s appreciation for what he achieved only grows. “Later, I got hip to how intricate and deep my dad’s self-accompaniment on guitar was. Originally I was looking for flash and guitar solos and crazy stuff,” Steve recalls, “but later I realized his whole playing and singing by himself was so hard to do. I can remember being in the first grade and being asked what your parents do. I said my dad was a magician. And maybe that was true, after all.”
MonoNeon (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Meet the Thomases
Steve and Sid Selvidge came to play together, including the time Steve accompanied his father at Carnegie Hall at age 19. Luther and Cody also joined their father Jim starting in their teens, Jim often dubbing the Dickinson family outfit the Hardly Can Playboys. But one local virtuoso didn’t have a chance to do that until very recently. Dywane Thomas Jr. bears the name of his father but mainly admired him from afar as a kid. “My dad, the bassist Dywane Thomas, is my first music hero,” writes the son in an email. To clear up any confusion, the son goes by a different name: You likely know him as MonoNeon, also a bassist, so renowned for his jazz, funk, and soul chops that he even played with Prince in the Purple One’s final days.
“Even though my dad moved to Europe when I was young,” MonoNeon writes, “his influence was just in me (the blues, funk, Southern-soul). Till this day I’m always searching for records my dad played on. I actually found an old vinyl record my dad played bass on with J. Blackfoot, entitled Physical Attraction (1984).”
Searching for records involving his family has been a long-time obsession for the bass wunderkind, for the family ear for music goes beyond his father. “My grandfather, Charles Thomas, a jazz pianist, was a later influence on me. I became aware of who my granddad was musically in my early teens. My granddad played with Ron Carter and Billy Higgins on the album called The Finishing Touch! by the Charles Thomas All Star Trio. I used to listen to those recordings a lot during high school wishing I had a chance to play with my granddad Charles.”
Grandma Liz with MonoNeon (Photo: Courtesy MonoNeon)
More recently, MonoNeon has taken to celebrating his grandmother Liz as well. It’s most obvious in the song “Grandma’s House,” on his 2021 album Supermane, a Funkadelic-tinged celebration of piling into the car to visit his grandmother and eat her fine cooking. “I’ve always just wanted to play some music with Grandma Liz,” he reflects. “I used to go to choir rehearsal with her with my bass and play. The whole thang with me and my grandma jammin’ together started when my mom brought her over to come hang and I told my grandma, ‘Let’s do a quick jam thang’ on a song she use to sing in church, ‘Oh, When I Come to the End of My Journey.’ Since I’ve started singing more, I’ve noticed I kinda sound like my grandma. My early gospel influence comes from going to the Baptist church with my grandma and aunties. Now I’ve just taken all those influences and made it neon I guess.”
As MonoNeon has become more celebrated, he seems to value family more than ever in his work, and recently he too was able to accomplish what the Selvidges and the Dickinsons did: create music with his father, keeping the cycle of family influences ebbing and flowing — “a living thing,” in the words of Steve Selvidge. As MonoNeon relates, “Me and my dad had a chance to record and jam recently at Niko Lyras’ Cotton Row Studio, with Steve Potts on drums. That was a dream I had to bring to realization in some way.”
Cedric Burnside plays an album release party, featuring Luther Dickinson, at B.B. King’s Blues Club, Wednesday, August 25th, 7 p.m. $20. He plays the 2021 Memphis Country Blues Festival at the Levitt Shell Thursday, October 7th, 7 p.m. $35.
Steve Selvidge plays with Big Ass Truck at the Levitt Shell, Saturday, September 11th, 7 p.m. Free.
MonoNeon plays Railgarten, Wednesday, September 1st, 8 p.m. $10.
Ah, to settle into these idyllic fall days, with Led Zeppelin ringing in the air. October 5th marked the 50th anniversary of the release of Led Zeppelin III, mixed and mastered at Ardent Recordings, prompting many to reminisce about the impact of the album and the band on the Bluff City. Many a muso has dusted off an old copy with the spinning-wheel cartoon cover sleeve, so at odds with the album’s very autumnal mood, all bracing shrieks and riffs and crackling acoustics ’round the fire.
Terry Manning was the engineer for some of the album’s overdubs, and all its mixing and mastering, and when we spoke, he shared too many memories to fit in one article. Most of the tale can be read in Memphis magazine’s November cover story, taking you all the way from the Yardbirds in Kentucky to Jimmy Page having Manning inscribe messages onto the vinyl’s inner groove. But space did not allow for one bit of our conversation, concerning the interest in Led Zeppelin expressed by one Chris Bell. The founder of Big Star was himself a great fan, even known to spontaneously break out into the entire guitar solo of their song “Heartbreaker” (as described in Rich Tupica’s Bell bio, There was a Light).
When I spoke to Manning about mixing the album and the band playing in Memphis, he brought up Chris Bell:
Memphis Flyer:Did it create quite a stir around town, the fact that Jimmy Page was in town?
Terry Manning: You’d think it would create a stir like that, but it didn’t really. Jimmy wanted it kept quiet and we had work to do. There wasn’t any partying and meeting people and things. John Fry was not even there. He didn’t come for the session in any way. He stayed out. Once we were there, I locked the door and other people didn’t come in. It was very under the table. Kept quiet. courtesy Terry Manning
Terry Manning at the Ardent mixing board, 1971
Now, Chris Bell did know about it, and I think he came in for a second once. But I know later, when they were on tour, and Zeppelin played in Memphis, Chris came over to my house. Because Jimmy and his then-girlfriend Charlotte came to my house for dinner after the Led Zeppelin concert. And I’d had an Indian meal catered by an Indian restaurant, which you couldn’t get in the U.S. on tour very much then. So I’d told Chris to stay away, but he couldn’t help it. He came by sheepishly, with a bottle of wine. So we let him in, and Jimmy and Chris and I hung out. We listened to Gimmer Nicholson all night. And Ali Akbar Khan.
Josh Reynolds
Terry Manning
I told him, do not come. And this was after the concert, not during the recordings. But he just couldn’t help it. And I can’t blame him. Of course not! Now, years later, I’m so glad he did. It’s a wonderful memory, to be thinking of, two o’clock in the morning, Jimmy Page, Chris Bell, and me sitting on the floor, listening to Ali Akbar Khan and Gimmer Nicholson. Acoustic and Indian music, mostly.
Another renowned Memphis guitarist, a generation or so removed from Chris Bell, also noted his connection to Led Zeppelin III last month. On October 5th, guitarist Steve Selvidge (The Hold Steady, Big Ass Truck) celebrated his wedding anniversary with an online post and noted they had married on “the 32nd anniversary of the release of Led Zeppelin III.” An auspicious day, indeed, and it prompted Selvidge to recall the profound effect the band (and guitarist Jimmy Page) had on his musicianship.
And the very different effect they had on his father, the late Sid Selvidge. Rich Tarbell
Steve Selvidge
Memphis Flyer: Do you still have your old copy of the album?
Steve Selvidge: If you’re talking about Led Zeppelin III, that’s a piece of vinyl that I purchased when I was young. I think it was in fifth grade when it first seeped deep into me. I had just started playing guitar. Certainly by sixth grade, I was definitely way into it. I remember a friend’s older brother had The Song Remains the Same [the live soundtrack album of the film of the same name], and I remember playing that. Someone once said, “Zeppelin is nothing if not older brother rock.” I had lost my copy of Led Zeppelin III for years, but my brother was moving and found it. I bought it at Pop Tunes. Talk about the opposite of 180 gram vinyl pressing, this was just the floppiest disc. It did have the sleeve with the spinning wheel! And it had the Crowley quote, too [inscribed on the vinyl].
Do you think it holds up?
I’ve read all the press. I can almost see the words on the page, I’ve read it so many times. And I think they were unjustly criticized at the time, Oh yeah, Crosby Stills & Nash and Joni Mitchell had hits, so they jumped on that bandwagon. And Jimmy Page was like, ‘This acoustic music’s on all of our records. It’s not like we picked up acoustic guitars out of nowhere.’ I mean, ‘Ramble On,’ man! But the first two were released at the beginning and end of 1969. They’re companion pieces. One was born out of Jimmy Page’s initial plan, and one was born out of the road. But I do agree that III was where Plant was able to emerge more fully formed. And honestly I think that’s also when he had more of a sense of job security.
Because, from what I’ve read, even through the second record and touring, it was like, this is Jimmy’s band. Peter Grant’s laying down the law, like, ‘Dude, don’t think you can get comfortable.’ But with III, Robert started to assume this thing of the front man. The center piece, the Golden God. It was a crazy time. That was back when a guitar player could be famous just for being a guitar player. Not just famous, but people who weren’t musicians knew who he was, because they’d tracked his progress in the Yardbirds. It was this burgeoning underground scene. So there were people who knew Led Zeppelin because of Jimmy Page. But then Robert transitioned into that pop consciousness. And it was years, for me, before I realized that the average person takes a band on its front man. I was like, ‘Wait, there are people who know Led Zeppelin and don’t know who Jimmy Page is? Every guitarist in every band is just as important as the singer, right??’ It turns out I was mistaken about that..
And this is speaking to my middle-aged-ness, but I think that’s probably their best nighttime record. With technology these days, streaming music is daytime whatever, just put on something that’s rockin,’ get the dishes done. But for me, vinyl is the nighttime thing. It’s the kids have gone to bed, decompressing and talking about the events of the day, and what are we gonna put on? Zeppelin III is good cranked up, and it’s also good at low volumes.
‘Friends’ was the first time they used a tuning not based on British whatever folk traditions. It was more of a nod to Indian music. And Page was really into Indian music well before the Beatles were. He tells the story of going to hear Indian music and it was him and a bunch of old people. He was the only young person there. So, ‘Friends’ is a big one in terms of that.
The vocal on ‘That’s the Way’ is so gorgeous. As a lifelong Page disciple, as I get older, I get more and more fascinated by Robert Plant. Some say that his wail on ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ is when he started to lose his voice. His voice changed radically, because they toured so much. He didn’t have a vocal coach. He was just smoking and drinking and shouting. So by ’72 his voice had changed. And some say that shriek on ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ is the swan song, if you will.
It took me a long time to come to terms with that recorded version of ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You.’ ’Cause I was such a disciple of the movie, the Song Remains the Same, and that version of the song from ’73 at Madison Square Garden, I just loved it so much. It’s super stoney. For whatever reason, John Paul Jones didn’t have a [Hammond] B3 [organ] with him. On the ’73 tour, it was all Fender Rhodes [electric piano] with foot pedals. You know, the B3 is like, I’m gonna put you in a specific place right now. And for the longest time, I didn’t want to hear it. Because I was so in love with the Rhodes and the stoney vibe of Madison Square Garden. But now I’ve come to respect it for what it is.
And the guitar solo on that [album version]. That song is one of Zeppelin’s greatest moments. Plant will tell you that. That guitar solo is one of Page’s greatest moments for sure. And that’s what brought me back to that version. It’s the perfect mixture of his technique, which also changed, and his emotion. Of all the big three guitarists in his class, he wrought the most emotion. And that is right there.
Did Lee Baker ever talk about Led Zeppelin?
I probably brought it up some. I knew that Lee Baker played a Sunburst Les Paul from the ’50s. A 1958-60 Les Paul Sun Standard … the significance of it. That’s what Jimmy Page was playing, and Lee Baker had the same kind of guitar. And it was rare. I know he knew Page was bad, but he was into other things.
Justin Fox Burks
The late Sid Selvidge, with son, Steve
Your dad, Sid Selvidge, was a pioneering performer of the blues, among other things. Did you listen to Zeppelin with him?
I played a lot of Led Zeppelin at my house when I was a kid. And my dad happened to be a pretty proficient singer in his own right, with pretty strong opinions about other singers. And he did not like Robert Plant at all! His thing was, ‘I know he can sing! I’ve heard him, he can sing! He just does all that puke music, man!’ That’s what he called it, ‘Puke Music.’ Like he’s straining so hard he’s gonna puke, you know?
But the final nail in the coffin was when it got to the last song, ‘Hat’s Off to (Roy) Harper,’ which is just Fred McDowell, ‘Shake ’Em On Down.’ And man, would that make him mad! He was just like, ‘This British motherf*cker!’ He was just mad about it, man! I remember him specifically zeroing in on it. I remember exactly where I was sitting, in front of the turntable, looking at this old decorative lamp. And he was just so pissed off at the way they were interpreting Fred McDowell. ‘Lee Baker could just smoke this kid!’ They were just defiling Mississippi Fred McDowell. I think it was the histrionics of Robert Plant that really did that. That’s just how he sings.
I will say, Robert Plant’s voice did change. And I kinda liked it, because, as a connoisseur of bootleg recordings, he had the power, and he wasn’t always judicial with it. So there’s a lot of him going over the top, screaming, getting super high, and wailing and stuff. That’s why, for me, ’73 is the peak year. His voice has changed, and he can’t just go high all the time. So it forced him to get creative with the melodies, and kind of lay his shit back a little bit. Which I like. ’Cause I do like it when he croons. And Jimmy Page’s tone was at its apex, and his playing had changed. He laid off some of his go-to things, and was stretching out a little bit more. Then by ’75 it just all goes to shit, in my opinion. But Plant’s another polarizing one. I don’t know, I’ll sit through a lot of bad singers to hear the guitar that I want.
For many Americans, the death of Elvis Presley in 1977 marked the end of an age of innocence in rock-and-roll. But it had more significance in Memphis, a capstone on a series of events that decimated the musical momentum the city had gathered in previous decades.
Pat Rainer, who documented those times in her photography, puts it this way: “Stax was bankrupt, Beale Street was boarded up, the major record labels had moved out, and it was like, ‘Wait a minute! We’re still here!’ Jim Dickinson coined the phrase that what we did was ‘guerrilla video’ or ‘guerrilla recording.’ I was his disciple, and I would have walked the fires of hell for him.”
Pat Rainer at Graceland the day after Elvis died
Rainer, a Memphis native who studied radio, TV, and film production at Memphis State University, was dissatisfied with academia and struck out on her own, working in record stores and falling in with a tight-knit community of bohemians and creators who came to define the post-Elvis era. She worked at the Yellow Submarine record shop on Poplar, whose owner, Jim Blake, would eventually start the maverick independent label, Barbarian Records. “Blake founded the company when Dickinson told him, ‘You know, you should make a record of Jerry Lawler and sell it at the wrestling matches.’ And I saw a light bulb go off over Blake’s head. The three of us kinda pitched in together, but Blake was the figurehead.”
The Lawler records sold, helping to fund hours of recording sessions by Dickinson, Lesa Aldridge, the Klitz, and others — mostly unreleased. The label was emblematic of a whole scene germinating through the 1970s. “It was a community of artists who all worked in concert with one another, whether it was the musicians or the sculptors or the painters or the photographers or whatever. Our little group of people included Dickinson, [Sid] Selvidge, Lee Baker, Mud Boy, Alex [Chilton], John Fry, Knox Phillips, Bill Eggleston, and Tav [Falco]. We all wanted to create art. I just kinda fell into photography.”
Now, we’re all the beneficiaries of Rainer’s chosen path, as the Stax Museum of American Soul Music opens Rainer’s exhibit, “Chaos and the Cosmos: Inside Memphis Music’s Lost Decade, 1977-1986,” this Friday.
Sam Phillips
“There’s great pictures of Sam Phillips,” Rainer says. “There’s pictures of Willie Mitchell and Al Green in the control room at Hi; Knox and Jerry in the control room at Phillips; Alex and Jim in the studio; Johnny Woods and Furry [Lewis] when we recorded the Beale Street record.”
That 1978 record marked a turning point, where the fringe took up the mantle as guardians of both past and future. “I mean, think of what would have happened if we hadn’t fought to keep them from letting the Orpheum be bought by the Jehovah’s Witnesses!” Rainer exclaims. “And there’s a big thanks due Jim, because he went down there to those guys at the Memphis Development Foundation and struck a deal to make this Beale Street Saturday Night record to raise money to restore the Orpheum.”
It was that concert that seemed to chart the course for independent music-makers in the city. While Mud Boy, Chilton, and Falco ultimately became guiding stars of the “guerrilla” music that has come to define 21st century Memphis, there was little inkling of such possibilities at the time. “Looking back on it,” says Rainer, “it still blows my mind.”
Furry Lewis’ birthday was March 6th. On March 11th, Omnivore Records will release Sid Selvidge’s album The Cold of the Morning — originally released in 1976 on his Peabody label. Selvidge’s son Steve recalls growing up with Lewis and his father’s admiration for Furry and his music.
Furry Lewis was a country blues legend. I almost killed him. Well, sort of, but we’ll get to that.
Born March 6, 1893, Walter “Furry” Lewis is a towering figure of the country blues world. Raised here in Memphis, he performed on Beale Street in its heyday. He played with W.C. Handy. He recorded crucial blues classics such as “Cassie Jones,” “John Henry,” “Billy Lyons and Stack-O-Lee,” and “Judge Harsh Blues” (also known as “Judge Bouché”). Furry had a finger picking style that was exquisite, complex, and downright funky. His slide playing was otherworldly; at times it would take over the vocal and sing for him. Years playing in medicine shows (where snake oil salesmen and the like would hawk their wares) gave him the chops of a vaudeville entertainer.
Furry’s recording career was over
by the 1930s. He took a job with the city of Memphis, working as a street sweeper. He did all this on a prosthetic leg. Years later, shortly after he retired from his street-sweeping job, he was one of the first of his generation of bluesmen to be “rediscovered” by young, white musicians caught up in the emerging folk scene of the early-mid 1960s.
Around this time is when my family enters the picture.
My dad, Sid Selvidge, first encountered Furry around 1964 at The Bitter Lemon in Memphis. Located on the corner of Humes and Poplar, The Bitter Lemon was the epicenter of the burgeoning folk/blues/coffee-house scene in town. Owned and operated by John McIntire, one of the city’s original beatnik artists, this was also where my dad, Jim Dickinson, Lee Baker, and Jimmy Crosthwait began to form their musical relationships.
It was in this environment that they found themselves in the unique position to learn firsthand from the masters of the music they were just discovering. Baker became a student of Furry’s, eventually backing him up on gigs. My dad, in addition to learning all his music, developed a bond with Furry that meant more to him than just the music and the scene.
While not exactly a father figure (my dad’s father died when my dad was a kid), Furry Lewis was one of the most significant men in his life. A graduate of Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes), my dad came from the typically homogeneous background of a white child who grew up in the Mississippi Delta. Furry opened his eyes and gave him a more graceful introduction into the integration that was happening all around him. Dad had many funny stories about Furry’s escapades and sayings. But behind all of that was a deep respect and an even deeper gratitude for helping him into a musical world that was more raceless than what he had known before. From then on, Furry loomed large in our house.
Furry’s music is some of the first I can remember. “Cassie Jones” in particular — hearing my dad, Baker, and Dickinson playing and singing that song. They would trade verse after verse, with Jimmy Crosthwait always behind the washboard, everyone showing what they learned from Furry. But even prior to that, I remember being really little, maybe two or three years old, and going over to just hang out at Furry’s house. He kept a couple of gerbils or hamsters; I forget which. We would bring cabbage for them and a pint of Ten High bourbon for Furry. I loved going over there. The whole atmosphere just seemed really laid back and fun, and he was always really nice to me.
My clearest memory of hanging out there started pretty much the same as any of our other visits. When he was home, Furry would leave his prosthetic leg off and just keep to his bed. So we came in, fed the gerbils (or hamsters), and gave Furry his Ten High, and I crawled up onto his bed to sit next to him like I always did. He kept a little cigar box on his bedside table that held his cigarettes and lighter. Next to that was a small glass for his whiskey. He would keep it covered when he was drinking for fear that a spider might drop in. But the first thing that I noticed when I sat on his bed that day was a pistol on that same bedside table. I don’t know if it was always there and I just hadn’t noticed it before, or if he had accidently left it there this time, but it definitely caught my eye.
I can clearly remember thinking that it would be funny to pick up that pistol and point it at Furry’s temple. Keep in mind; I’m of a generation brought up on Looney Tunes reruns: Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote, and such. This kind of joke seemed like fair play to me. So, my dad looked up to see his youngest son holding a gun to his good friend’s head.
Now, I doubt that I was big enough to really physically pull the trigger, but nonetheless, my dad was smart in that he didn’t shout or jump to me in any kind of panicked manner. He just calmly got up and asked if I would let him hold Furry’s pistol. So I did. Blues crisis averted.
Years later, Furry’s house caught fire, and he was pretty badly injured. He was hospitalized but quickly started to show signs of improvement. The last time my dad saw Furry, he was in the hospital room along with Lee Baker. Furry was in great spirits, laughing and clowning around. The three of them were going back and forth making up their own verses to “You Gonna Look Just Like a Monkey When You Get Old.” Dad said goodbye and left. Later that night Furry developed pneumonia. He died the next day. Dad recorded a version of “The Monkey Song” on his final album I Should Be Blue in 2010. The credits are listed as (W. Lewis, S. Selvidge, L. Baker).
These days, Furry Lewis means so many things to me. He’s a familiar voice that always puts me at ease. Musically, he’s a continuing inspiration to me, as well as a centering force. I guess most of all now, he just helps to keep me close to my dad’s memory. He was an important man in his life, and he influenced my dad and all of his close musical friends in a way that will continue to provide me with musical guidance and inspiration.
I always smile when I see or hear Furry Lewis. And I’m glad I didn’t kill him.
Thanks for Bruce VanWyngarden’s Editor’s Note about Sid Selvidge (May 9th issue). I had just moved to Memphis in 1993, as well, and I suppose I had a chip on my shoulder, having spent the previous six years in Nashville hoping to become a rich and famous songwriter.
Fortunately, for me, most everyone here in Memphis was pretty forgiving and did their best to make me feel welcome. Rod Norcross, my partner at Rod & Hank’s, was already a local celebrity, as was our part-time helper, Steve Selvidge. Ward Archer came in regularly, and before long, I was playing violin with Ward and Brenda Patterson in Cooley’s House. And being at Rod & Hank’s allowed me to meet a boatload of celebrities and musical luminaries — local, national, and international.
Bruce’s letter reminded me of those days when I had the pleasure of playing music with Sid Selvidge and just hanging out and looking forward to lunchtime on Tuesdays. What a pleasure to hear Sid sing and enjoy his humor and to share some of that “Memphis vibe.”
Life was simpler then, or so it seems 20 years later. I was blessed to call Sid my friend and to have been a part of his music. I’ve also had the honor of playing with Di Anne Price (another Memphis icon gone and sorely missed) and have been part of the Boscos brunch with Joyce Cobb for the past seven years.
Who would have thought a transplanted Philly boy would have had such a wonderful life here in Memphis music? Sid taught me what Memphis music was all about, and I will always be grateful.
Hank Sable
Memphis
Rush is Right
It’s pretty sad that the Flyer doesn’t care about the lies of cartoonist Jeff Danzinger when he gutter snipes at Rush Limbaugh. Rush is one really smart guy and speaks the truth 99.9 percent of the time, which makes the Danzinger cartoon offensive to heavy people and to the high-attention folks that know the truth. Sadly, low-attention folks seem to be your readers.
Obama has his foot on this economy and he isn’t pulling away, so we won’t see a return to 1980-2000 good times, with everybody having a job. If the private sector is not unleashed by this administration, at some point it’s going to be real grief. Most of the media is scared to challenge this administration.
J.C. Mitchell
Memphis
Teaching to the Test
Data, according to Tennessee’s commissioner of education, Kevin Huffman, is the only thing we should consider in determining how and what our students are taught and how our children’s teachers are paid, hired, and fired. If he and other school reformers, like his ex-wife, Michelle Rhee, who heads up StudentsFirst, would quit trying to feather their own nest and be honest about the mounds of data from research through the years, they wouldn’t continue to promote paying teachers for test scores.
If pay-for-performance were actually considered for its efficacy, like a drug study, it would have been halted long ago for the detrimental effects it has on the subjects involved in the study. Instead, Commissioner Huffman is trying to force a system that has repeatedly been shown since the 1950s by various major research studies not to work and can cause more harm than good. One of the largest and most recent was conducted by Vanderbilt University, and the data clearly demonstrated that, even if teachers are given large bonuses for raising student test scores, it just doesn’t work. Teachers are already working as hard as they can to help students succeed on testing.
Huffman and the state board of education (which contains no educators) are totally ignoring an overwhelming abundance of scientific research data that shows merit pay, aka incentive pay, pay for performance, differentiated pay for teachers, pay for test scores, etc. are ineffective and can actually cause harm. We’ve seen the curriculum narrowed to only those things tested and teaching to the test. We’ve seen cheating among some educators in order to gain monetary bonuses and avoid losing their jobs, and we’ve seen our teaching staffs demoralized and no great improvement in test scores. Isn’t it time that Huffman and company were held accountable for ignoring the data?
I moved to Memphis 20 years ago this spring. It was a new city to me, and I liked to wander around downtown on my lunch hour. One day, I walked into Rod & Hank’s Vintage Guitars, a magical shop then located just across from the Peabody hotel on Second Street. I loved the smell and the feel of the place, and I loved all the classic old guitars hanging on the walls.
Rod Norwood and Hank Sable were friendly guys and would encourage you to take instruments down and play them until you found one that you had to have — as they knew you would, eventually. After a few visits, I fell in love with an old Gibson J-45 that sounded like thunder when you strummed it and whose high notes rang clear as mountain water. I had to have it, and I dropped some serious jack to take it home.
“A J-45 is the guitar Sid Selvidge plays,” Hank said. “A lot of the old country blues singers wouldn’t play anything else.” I’d heard of Selvidge — mostly from reading Robert Gordon’s essential Memphis music and wrasslin’ book, It Came From Memphis — but hadn’t met him. When Hank told me Sid gave guitar lessons in the shop, I decided to give him a call. I wanted to learn country blues, and I wanted an excuse to keep hanging around Rod & Hank’s.
The next week, Sid and I — and our J-45s — met in the guitar shop’s upstairs room for my lesson.
“What do you want to learn?” he asked.
“Whatever you want to teach me,” I said.
Every Tuesday, for the next couple years, Sid taught me lots of nice licks and cool songs, but mostly he taught me about Memphis music. He had a million stories — about Furry Lewis, Mudboy & the Neutrons, Sam Phillips, the Memphis coffeehouse scene, you name it — and I loved to hear them. Sometimes, we’d talk more than we’d play.
After the “lesson,” we got in the habit of going downstairs and playing in the shop for a while. Soon, Hank started joining in on banjo and fiddle. Then, former Commercial Appeal music writer Larry Nager began dropping by with his mandolin. Then Sid’s marvelously talented son Steve began showing up and playing Dobro.
The impromptu “Second Street String Band” even played a few gigs, and it was a thrill for all of us to back Sid’s amazing voice. But all things come to an end. Rod and Hank closed the shop and took their business online. Sid got a full-time gig running the international radio show Beale Street Caravan. Nager moved to Cincinnati. I became the Flyer editor, and Tuesdays were never the same.
But Sid remained a friend, and he remains in my memory as one of the kindest, most generous people I ever met. His passing last week leaves an irreplaceable void in Memphis music. I still miss those Tuesdays, and, like a lot of folks around here, I’ll miss Sid Selvidge.
A bittersweet accompaniment to having so many great artists in your city is the pain of losing them, and Memphis lost a major one yesterday with the passing of Sid Selvidge, who lost a lengthy battle with cancer on Thursday morning.
I didn’t really know Selvidge well, but had crossed paths with him several times over the past decade, first for a Flyer cover story on Beale Street Caravan, the made-in-Memphis but broadcast worldwide radio show Selvidge presided over. More recently for a Father’s Day-themed story in Memphis magazine, where I had the privilege of sitting with Selvidge and his musician son, Steve, and talking about his life — as a musician and as a father.
From that piece:
Sid Selvidge was raised in Greenville, Mississippi, the son of a laundry business operator. (“Greenville Steam Laundry, Sid says. “I always thought that would be a nice band name.”)
“There was no encouragement,” Sid says of his family’s view of a musical career. “If you got to be musical in my family, it was said to be a fine avocation. They were very practical people. They didn’t like the music business.”
Like so many in his generation, Selvidge wanted to be Elvis, and played around Greenville in a rock-and-roll cover band (go-to song: Sonny Burgess’ “Red-Headed Woman”).
It was after moving to Memphis to attend Rhodes College (then Southwestern) that Selvidge began to turn toward folk music.
“They made me take my Danelectro guitar and put it in the student center so I wouldn’t play electric guitar in my dorm room and bother everybody,” Selvidge remembers. “That’s how I got into acoustic guitar.”
For a while, Selvidge pursued a career in academia, doing graduate work in anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis and returning to Rhodes as an instructor. But, eventually, Selvidge devoted himself full-time to music.
“I was a better musician than I was an anthropology teacher,” he says.
Beyond his enormous musical talents and varied imprint on several decades of Memphis music — and the Commercial Appeal‘s Bob Mehr does a terrific job of recounting Selvidge’s career in his obituary today — I was always struck by what an exceedingly intelligent and decent man Selvidge was.
Selvidge leaves behind his wife of 47 years, Shirley Selvidge, and five children. In that Memphis magazine interview, he spoke with gratitude about his family:
“It’s difficult to be a musician without [a partner] that is solid and secure and has a lot of self-confidence, that can let somebody go out on the road for a long period of time,” Sid says. “I realize that now. I was a lucky guy. A great wife, a great family, and I got to go out and play music. I just thought it was great fun. Which it was.”
courtesy Terry Manning 
Josh Reynolds 
Rich Tarbell 
Justin Fox Burks 
