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Dolemite Is My Name: Craig Brewer and Eddie Murphy Pay Tribute to a Blacksploitation Hero

It’s July 2018, and the Orpheum Theatre in Downtown Los Angeles is teeming with activity. The old movie palace’s basement is packed with background actors getting dressed and made up in ’70s finery — bell bottoms, afros, and clashing patterns — to appear in Dolemite Is My Name.

On one side of the cavernous lobby is “video village,” where technicians, producers, and crew huddle around monitors, adjust controls, and clutch headphones to their ears, watching the action onscreen. On the other side of the lobby, director Craig Brewer and cinematographer Eric Steelberg are setting up a tracking shot with a pair of stand-ins. Once they’re satisfied that the complex choreography of camera, lighting, and extras is right, a call goes out from the assistant director. “Clear the set.”

Eddie Murphy as Rudy Ray Moore

Eddie Murphy is ready for his close-up.

You Can’t Remake Dolemite

A year later, Brewer is on the phone in Brooklyn, where, the day before, he shot scenes for Coming 2 America with James Earl Jones. Dolemite Is My Name has just had a triumphant premiere at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival, with the first audiences raving about Murphy’s performance. I ask Brewer how he came to helm the film for Netflix.

“I had heard that there were rumblings that they were trying to remake Dolemite. As much as my mind always tries to go to a place of, ‘How can Dolemite be remade?’ There’s the basic story of a man who’s in prison, who, for whatever reason, is let out, now into a different world, where everything he had is now under the control of somebody else … then I thought, ‘Craig. Stop. Footloose, maybe. Some other movies, maybe. But Dolemite is special because it’s funny.’ You can’t just do an action drama out of Dolemite. It’s beautiful because of its production flaws, and that’s why — especially among independent filmmakers — we love it so much. Of all the blaxploitation movies, it’s perhaps the most incredulous and head-scratching. I can’t even think about doing a Dolemite remake.

“Then my agent called me a year later and said, ‘We have the script called Dolemite Is My Name, and I think you should read it.’ I don’t think I’m the guy for it because I just don’t think that it can be redone. He said, ‘Wait a minute. This is a script from Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander. It’s about Rudy Ray Moore making Dolemite, and Eddie Murphy’s going to play him.’ And I said YES! He said, ‘Well I think you should read the script first, and I think you should talk to the producers …’ And I was like, ‘Of course, but if you’re looking for my response, I’m in.'”

Craig Brewer, Scott Alexander, and Larry Karaszewski at the Los Angeles premiere of Dolemite Is My Name

Everything
Falls Apart

Rudy Ray Moore grew up the son of a sharecropper in Fort Smith, Arkansas. As soon as he was old enough, he moved to Los Angeles to try to make it in show business. He tried first as a singer, then as a comedian, then a combination of both, before he created the character of Dolemite, a big-talking street pimp whose rhyming braggadocio translated into a series of hit “party records” — comedy routines often backed by slinky soul music, packed with dirty words, street wisdom, and transgressive situations. After a series of unlikely, underground hits (which included a Dolemite Christmas album), he leveraged his fame in the African-American community into making an independent movie based on the character. At the time, the term for films aimed at the inner city markets was “blaxploitation.”

“What makes Dolemite so special is that it’s one of a kind,” says Karaszewski. “A lot of the blaxploitation movies are trying to be sort of generic action pictures with African-American leads. That made them special and cool because you hadn’t seen African Americans in those roles before, where they were tough cops. But Rudy’s movie goes to another level on top of that. He’s making fun of the genre, while also trying to be the genre at the same time. He’s a comedian. They were meant to be laughed at. But they were also meant to be, ‘Look at that! It’s a cool car chase!'”

Karaszewski and his writing partner Alexander met in film school and have been working together for more than two decades. They often finish each other’s thoughts. “Shaft, Superfly, Black Caesar are kind of urban action films,” Alexander says. “They’re taking their leading men seriously. They’re cool, they’re good-looking, they’ve got good-looking chicks, the gun, and the suit. Rudy is a doughy comic who is not an actor, and he cannot do kung fu. But he was making the movie he wanted to see. He wanted to have kung fu and ladies and car chases. …”

“… and he made it through sheer force of personality,” says Karaszewski. “It comes out on the screen.”

Alexander and Karaszewski wrote the 1994 classic, Ed Wood. Directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp as the real-life “worst director ever,” the film earned an Academy Award for Martin Landau’s portrayal of the original Dracula, Bela Lugosi. “When we meet big-time, successful directors, a lot of times they’ll pull us aside and say, ‘I feel just like Ed Wood.’ That’s the whole point of the Orson Welles scene toward the end of the movie. It doesn’t matter if you’re the best filmmaker of all time or the worst filmmaker of all time, you still have the same problems,” says Karaszewski.

Among the fans of Ed Wood was one Eddie Murphy. When the man who saved Saturday Night Live, the star of Beverly Hills Cop, Trading Places, and Coming to America, saw the film in the mid-1990s, he called up Alexander and Karaszewski with a proposition. A week later, the three of them were in a room with Rudy Ray Moore. “He told us what he would like to see in a movie about his life and that Eddie would be perfect for the part,” says Alexander. “We thought, ‘Oh my god, this is going to be the greatest movie of all time!’ And then it just fell to pieces. That’s what happens in Hollywood — you get excited, and nine times out of 10, nothing happens.”

(l-r) Craig Robinson, Keegan-Michael Key, Eddie Murphy, Tituss Burgess, and Mike Epps

Stuck in Turnaround

Craig Brewer knows that feeling. He’s been riding the Hollywood roller coaster since 2005, when Hustle & Flow became a breakout hit at the Sundance Film Festival. The film, which Brewer fought for years to get financed before producer John Singleton rode to the rescue, set a record when it was bought by Paramount for $9 million in a late-night, Park City, Utah, bidding war. It went on to win an Academy Award for Three 6 Mafia’s “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” and earn a Best Actor nomination for its star, Terrence Howard.

For a movie made on a shoestring budget in Memphis, Hustle has had an extraordinary cultural impact, becoming a staple on cable television and inspiring Memphis Grizzlies fans to adopt “Whoop That Trick” as an unofficial fight song. The scenes of Howard, Taraji P. Henson, DJ Qualls, and Anthony Anderson creating music in a North Memphis shotgun house have been copied endlessly by filmmakers looking to create inspirational moments.

Brewer’s controversial next film, Black Snake Moan, gave Samuel L. Jackson one of the best roles of his long career and introduced the phrase “chained to the radiator” into the lexicon. Brewer gained a reputation as an excellent script doctor, and, in 2011, he was tapped by Paramount Pictures to remake their seminal 1984 dance movie Footloose. The next year, he stepped in as executive producer to save the troubled Katie Perry movie Part of Me, and it became the seventh-highest grossing documentary of all time. He was clearly Memphis’ most successful filmmaker and had an enviable career by any Hollywood standards.

After Footloose, Brewer was attached to write and direct The Legend of Tarzan for Warner Brothers. It was to be his introduction into the exclusive club of directors trusted with $100-million budgets. He wrote a screenplay that turned heads in Hollywood, but studio politics tore the production apart, and, amid spiraling budget estimates and executive turmoil, the project was shelved. When The Legend of Tarzan was eventually completed in 2016, Brewer’s script formed the backbone of the picture, but he still had to fight for his screenwriting credit.

What the public didn’t see were the dozens of projects that never got off the ground. There was Maggie Lynn, a music epic Brewer wrote about a country singer rocketing to fame; there was Mother Trucker, a script about the infamous Tennessee inmate who broke out of jail and stole Crystal Gayle’s tour bus in an effort to visit his dying mother. He pitched a Star Wars movie to Lucasfilm honcho Kathleen Kennedy and a reboot of The Creature From the Black Lagoon to Universal. Nothing gained any traction.

At the same time, his long marriage to wife Jodi Brewer was on the rocks. The pair eventually separated but did not divorce. Brewer felt like his life was falling apart. “I bought a big house,” he says. “I bought into a lot of the trappings of being a successful filmmaker. And then suddenly, some of those things began to dry up, and I got very scared. … Movies have been going through such a change, and I was beginning to get really bitter about it. Tarzan and that whole developments situation was not ideal, and I had been trying to get these other movies going with the studio system, any way I could, and it just wasn’t happening.”

It was friends from his past who brought him back. In 2015, Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson, whom Brewer made stars in Hustle & Flow, became the lead actors on Empire, a wildly successful Fox show created by Lee Daniels. “I would say it’s quite true that if John Singleton helped start my career,” says Brewer, “Lee Daniels helped bring me back.”

Daniels hired Brewer for the second season of Empire. “I wanted to be in a room working with a bunch of other writers. I wanted to be on set filming somebody else’s vision. I’d like to just be a director and just be a writer for a while and help the product be the best it can be and hopefully bring my best to it. It was just so fortunate that I got to do Empire. I loved the show so much, and I loved what Lee had created: his beautifully subversive, outlandish antics that I think break down walls, not just with race, with culture, with class, but just what people would think is appropriate.”

Brewer worked in the Empire writer’s room for three seasons, directing 10 episodes. Brewer says he found his joy “just writing scripts, being in a room with a bunch of creative people, and learning to listen, trying to not perform all the time.”

Dolemite has a star-studded cast — Snoop Dogg (top) plays a radio DJ; Craig Robinson (below) plays Ben Taylor in Dolemite Is My Name.

“Does Eddie Really Want to Do This?”

In 1996, Alexander and Karaszewski wrote The People vs. Larry Flynt. “We had such a good time shooting that movie in Memphis,” says Alexander. “We got to know D’Army Bailey. He was a blast. As soon as [director] Milos Forman met him, he said, ‘Let’s turn him into an actor.'”

Later, Karaszewski would become a regular at the Indie Memphis Film Festival, serving on juries and just coming back to have fun and watch movies. In 2016, Alexander and Karaszewski wrote and produced the 10-episode miniseries The People vs. O.J. Simpson for the FX anthology show American Crime Story. It became a ratings sensation and was nominated for 22 Emmy Awards, ultimately winning nine, including Outstanding Limited Series and awards for actors Sterling K. Brown, Sarah Paulson, and Courtney B. Vance.

“After we did the O.J. thing, a lot of people wanted to do projects with us,” says Karaszewski. The writing partners decided to use the opportunity to revisit some dream projects that had failed to launch, like the Rudy Ray Moore story. “We had producers John Davis and John Fox contact Eddie to see if he was still into this idea. Not only was he ready, he was eager. That’s how we got to Netflix.”

Murphy, who was semi-retired, wowed the Netflix executives at the pitch meeting. “Eddie is very open about this,” says Alexander. “He says, ‘I was just enjoying sitting on my couch, playing with my kids, and hanging out.’ He has a whole brood. Coming in to Netflix, they said, ‘Does Eddie really want to do this?’ So Eddie showed up at the Netflix meeting and summoned his superpowers. He turned into Rudy and started doing ‘Signifying Monkey.’ The Netflix people were like, ‘Holy shit! This is for real!’ Larry and I barely opened our mouths in that pitch meeting. You got Eddie in the room doing it. What more do you want?”

Karaszewski suggested they talk to Brewer for the director slot. “It was my first time meeting Craig, and I was blown away,” says Alexander. “He said, ‘It’s a movie about duality’, and no one else had actually said that out loud.”

The Man Who Was Fearless

Once word of Murphy’s commitment to the project got out, Keegan-Michael Key signed on as Jerry Jones, the playwright Moore enlists to script his dream project. Chris Rock and Snoop Dogg got cameos as DJs who helped Moore in his career. Mike Epps and Craig Robinson became members of Moore’s entourage. But the biggest get was Wesley Snipes as D’Urville Martin, the blaxploitation star who appeared in Black Caesar and whom Moore cajoled into directing Dolemite.

Brewer says he came to identify deeply with his subject. “Rudy Ray Moore made his own records. He forged his own path. I couldn’t help but feel a connection to it. There were many times that I thought, I know that because of the material that I’m drawn to and even the mentors in my life, like John Singleton and Stephanie Allain, and more recently Lee Daniels, I know that there’s a lot of material that I have that has predominantly African-American stories, and I did begin to second-guess whether or not I’m a person to tell this story. But I couldn’t help but see all of my connections to it. I couldn’t help but see a guy in Los Angeles from the South with doors slamming in his face, basically turning to a rag-tag group of friends and saying, ‘Well, what if we just did it anyway?'”

Brewer came to see the duality of the character was central to the story’s appeal. “I think it’s important for all the artists that I’ve had in my life. I get excited thinking about Rudy Ray Moore through the lens of Al Kapone and Harlan T. Bobo. I think I have a side of me that wants things to be larger than life — big music that hits right on an edit. But there is another side of me that’s at times insecure and wanting reassurance from friends and family around me.”

Without his Dolemite costume, Moore “just looks like a normal, nice guy. Then you put on that wig, that hat, that jacket, and that cane, and the idea that he could escape into this man who was fearless ultimately helps that man who has fear,” Brewer says. “There are times that the whole ‘fake it till you make it’ is a healthy program when you’re trying to begin something.

“It’s also something I see in Eddie’s work. I wouldn’t say there are two personalities, but there are definitely two sides of the same coin. It’s there in The Nutty Professor, in Coming to America, definitely in Trading Places. It’s also in Eddie’s personal manner. He’s a very real, intellectual, soft-spoken man who doesn’t feel a need to perform for everybody in the room until it’s time for him to perform. Then this iconic entertainer suddenly emerges, and you’re like, ‘Wow! Where did this come from?'”

Karaszewski says Brewer’s direction was integral to the final product. “I remember one of the first days on the set, we were filming one of the scenes from the chitlin’ circuit montage. I was standing there with Scott and said, ‘Thank god we actually got someone who knows what it looks like.’ Craig has been to these places. He knows that the signs with the booze specials have half the letters missing. He knows that there’s a smoker out in the back parking lot smoking some ribs and brisket. It has that lived-in feel. That was always our fear, that someone would take the script and make the superficial version of the story. It is very easy to make fun of the fact that Rudy is making a bad movie. What Craig did was add that realness that gave the movie a humanity.”

Alexander says the production had a joy to it that is rare in the high-pressure Hollywood world. “Being on his set was a blast. Craig created such a positive environment, it was a total joy to be on the set each day. Sometimes, actors who weren’t even working were just kind of hanging around. When we were shooting the closing shot of the movie, which is a big, elaborate crane shot, Craig had a little boom box where he would play music and sync it up. Eddie would do the take, then everyone would huddle around the monitor and Craig would say, ‘Let’s do playback!’ And he would do it with the music. It was like we were getting to watch the movie in real time! It was just so fun.”

For Brewer, who had set so many of his films in Memphis, getting to shoot in L.A. was a dream come true. “We’re in Griffith Park, up in the mountains, and doing a ’70s car chase scene, where a police car is chasing Dolemite’s car, sirens blaring, everything. I call action, and we’ve got two cameras going, and the car’s tires are squealing around the corner. I yelled ‘cut’ and just started going ‘Whoo hoo! Yes!’ I turned to the crew and said, ‘I’m sure y’all have probably filmed thousands of car chases. That was my first, and it couldn’t have been better!'”

A Dream Picture

Coming 13 years after being nominated for Best Supporting Actor in Dreamgirls, Eddie Murphy’s performance in Dolemite Is My Name is a revelation. He’s funny, of course — Murphy and his late brother Charlie were doing Dolemite routines while they were pre-teens — but he is also vulnerable, as in the opening scene when he’s trying to get a DJ, played by Snoop Dogg, to spin his lame R&B records.

The script is the spiritual successor to Ed Wood, telling the story of Moore’s transformation from a record store clerk and flailing nightclub comic to a comedy legend. Not only is Murphy good, but the deep cast of Moore’s collaborators all have fleshed-out characters to play. Snipes is perfection as the drunk director who bolts at the first hint that something better is coming along. Da’Vine Joy Randolph is a big discovery as Lady Reed, Dolemite’s partner in crime. Keegan-Michael Key gets laughs as the intellectual straight man to Moore’s outlandish street performer. Memphian Claude Phillips, who has been in every Brewer movie since Hustle & Flow, cameos as a hobo who teaches Moore the rhyming cadence that would eventually make him known as one of the godfathers of rap. Scott Bomar, Memphis musician and producer, composed the soulful score, which was recorded in Memphis.

“We were trying to make a fun, entertaining movie,” says Karaszewski. “We didn’t realize how audiences would take it as inspirational. They look at the can-do spirit of Rudy Ray Moore. If someone closes a door in his face, he will open up another door. There’s so much comedy in the movie, but the inspiration is played sincere and played honest, so audiences come away with that.”

Brewer says Murphy’s performance was the key to getting the film’s tone exactly right. “I am sure it’s possible to make a Martin Scorsese-style, darker examination of Rudy Ray Moore. I just don’t know if that’s really the spirit of Rudy Ray Moore. He was really happy. He was about entertainment and fun, but I think we have the appropriate amount of vulnerability in the movie. Eddie is not just in it for the yucks. He’s portraying a very real character and somebody who means a lot to him because he was a huge fan. It’s been a dream of his to make this movie for more than a decade.”

For Karaszewski, Craig’s background as a scrappy indie filmmaker who broke into the Hollywood system made him the perfect person to helm Dolemite Is My Name. “No one was going to hand Craig Brewer or Rudy Ray Moore a bunch of money to go make their dreams come true, so they had to do it themselves.”

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Music Music Blog

Beale Street Music Festival Friday: Whether Through Soul, Rock, Blues or Hip-Hop, the 2017 BSMF Delivers.

CREDIT: Brian Anderson

Brian Anderson

Charles Bradley exhorting the Friday crowd at Beale Street Music Festival 2017.

By the time it’s 5pm on Friday the first weekend in May, both ends of Riverside Drive are filled in with people clamoring to attend the annual Beale Street Music Festival. This year’s festival is expected to attract something around 100,000 people over the course of three days & the weather looks like it’s going to hold out for a change. Traditionally, “Memphis in Mud” notoriously produces unpredictable weather events. Although remnants of a Thursday and early Friday cold/wet front remain in the form of mud tracts throughout Tom Lee Park, it’s not nearly as bad as it could’ve been. Based on the mud levels throughout the park on Friday night, you may still want to wear your mudding clothes for Saturday. But as for the rain? This year, it appears the weather will favor us.

Things you should remember when hitting the park:

  1. Bring Cash Yes, there are ATMs, but you can expect long lines and ATM fees that can start to get a bit expensive.
  2. Wear Sunscreen Do I have to explain this? Just do it.
  3. Hydrate You’re gonna wish you’d consumed a bit more water before you leave the house if you don’t.
  4. Bring Earplugs Look, I know music is loud, but you want your hearing later. Wear some earplugs?
  5. Bring your ID No ID, no drinkie-poo for you.
  6. Wear Something You Don’t Mind Getting Muddy You’re not leaving clean, pal.
  7. Surge Pricing Takes A Toll Unless you’re independently wealthy, don’t bother taking Uber or Lyft. The word is out that ridesharing services can get you there safely. But leaving the park last night at 1am, I found the surging costs of Uber and Lyft between Downtown and Midtown began at $53.00 and went up from there.
  8. If You Don’t Want To Pay $53 For A Rideshare, Don’t Catch a Ride With a Random Stranger Just trust me on this one.

So, how was the music on the first night? There was so much that needed to be seen and heard, I had to trudge from one end of the park to the other and pace myself.
Brian Anderson

Charles Bradley and His Extraordinaires

For the critically-lauded and fan-loved soul singer Charles Bradley, pacing yourself doesn’t seem to be something he’s familiar with. Despite a diagnosis of stomach cancer in October of 2016, Charles and his band,The Extraordinaires, maintained a grueling touring schedule. And to look at Charles’s commanding presence and vocal acrobatics on the River Stage tonight, the average spectator might not know anything was even wrong.

Belting out nearly a dozen songs from his collected works, Charles delivered the kind of performance he has become known for, one as stirring as any soul music legend that ever made a record or graced a stage in this town. Sincere, honest, emotional and filled with love, Bradley and his band mesmerized an eager early-evening crowd.

“We’re Jimmy Eat World,” the voice cried out, “a professional rock band from Mesa, Arizona, and this one’s for all-a y’all.” Making themselves at home here in Memphis, the band ran through a litany of their most popular songs & also came with a few from their 2016 offering, the consistently well-reviewed Integrity Blues. Twenty-five years into their music career, the group, led by vocalist & guitarist Jim Adkins, have not lost their boyish charm, their good looks or their musicianship. Tonight’s performance offered attendees an opportunity to experience the breadth of their songcraft in all its nuanced glory.

Though undoubtedly the biggest drawing act of the night was Snoop Dogg, I opted to stick with MGMT to close out the night. Music fans, including me, have witnessed the many incarnations of Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden’s id through meteoric success and experimentation. Though at times dogged by the grandeur of their imperfections, each segment of MGMT’s musical evolution seems to prove as fascinating as the last.

E. J. Friedman

MGMT debuted new songs at Beale Street Music Festival 2017.

And tonight, performing together as a five-piece for the first time in 2.5 years in front of an adoring Memphis crowd, you could not tell that any time had passed. With equal parts shock and surprise, the band opened their set with one of their most well-known songs, “Time To Pretend”, perhaps alluding (in this setting) to that thinnest veil behind which rock superstardom hides. Inching towards a tenth anniversary, the band’s album Oracular Spectacular remains an influential stalwart classic of modern psychedelic pop-rock. To the delight of the crowd, their expansive set included 7 songs from that collection. But of particular interest and note, MGMT also treated us to a total of five new songs from a yet-to-be-completed album, including a well-received cover of the song “Goodbye Horses” by Q Lazzarus from the Silence of the Lambs movie soundtrack.

E. J. Friedman

Nashville visitors Andrew Gonzalez and Drew Thomas hug it out.

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Cover Feature News

Beale Street Music Festival: Legends Old and New

Snoop Dogg’s America

Reflections on hip-hop’s amabassador to the world

On the 5th of May at 11:15 p.m., a legend will appear on the FedEx Stage, bathed in lights, voice booming over Beale Street and beyond. When he appears, you’ll see more than a mortal. You’ll see the Snoop Dogg of the mind. With Snoop planted into our collective consciousness, it’s hard to deny the message of “Legend,” the lead track from his 2016 release, Coolaid. “I can die right now/Still a legend!” The album captures our zeitgeist: angry, absurd, lurid, ridiculous. The “Lavender” video depicts a land of rampant, clownish brutality, culminating with a “BANG!” flag pistol fired squarely at a Donald Trump-like figure. And while not all of the album is so political, Coolaid clearly struck a nerve, reaching number five on the R&B/hip-hop album charts.

Snoop is everywhere now, ascended to ubiquity with all of his bluntness and flow — and his contradictions — intact. He’s the rapper with the cute name on the morning show; he’s the guy in the weed video with Willie Nelson; he’s the guy who quotes The Art of War, relishing the power of his weaponry, then exhorts people to love themselves; the guy who speaks of Martha Stewart’s warmth and humanity, then reminds listeners that “rap come from the streets, so we can never lose that mentality.” A vocal Hillary supporter, he’ll exclaim that we desperately need a female president, then launch a rap of sexual humiliation and domination that would make Trump blush. Like Walt Whitman, he contains multitudes.

One way Snoop can cover so much territory is by keeping it lighthearted. Devin Steel of K97 FM says, “You can’t really take what Snoop says seriously; he just makes fun party music. You take it more like, ‘I wonder, what is he gonna say?’ or listen for the word play. It’s fun. Nothing too serious. And he still has the art of storytelling in his lyrics.”

Perhaps this balancing act between the ridiculous and the sublime comes down to Snoop’s uncanny knack for improvisation. He’s always been master of freestyle, the branch of rap that plays out like verbal jazz. Rap created on the spot, live before an audience, was perfected on the West Coast, with Los Angeles’ Freestyle Fellowship arguably the masters of the style as it gained traction in the 1990s. This was the young Snoop’s milieu.

His improvisational powers remain formidable. Boo Mitchell, producer and engineer at Royal Studios, worked with Snoop when collaborating with William Bell and other Hi/Stax Records alums for the 2014 film, Take Me to the River.

“He wrote his rap in 10 minutes,” says Mitchell. “I sat and watched him do it.”

Mitchell recalls a moment when “…we were rehearsing for a concert after the film’s debut. We had a big band, four horns and all that stuff. [Snoop] came in while we were playing, and it blew him away. He started dancing and went into a freestyle as we played.” Mitchell, Bell, Snoop, and Cody Dickinson did more sessions earlier this year at Snoop’s Mothership Studio — their contribution to Take Me to the River’s sequel. Now in production, the sequel will be based in New Orleans, once again pairing eclectic artists from different eras. As Mitchell points out, the early California rappers like Snoop had a special fondness for old-school Memphis soul: Rufus Thomas’ “The Breakdown (Pt. II)” was used by N.W.A., for example. Devin Steel agrees: “In the evolution of Southern hip-hop, in the late ’80s, what drew people, especially hip-hop artists, in the South to the West Coast was the use of live bass and sampling a lot of Stax, a lot of the Memphis sound. We were drawn to that more than to the East Coast, and that’s what married the West Coast and the South together.”

For Snoop Dogg, this connection has always had a personal dimension. “I interviewed him backstage recently,” Steel remembers, “and it was all these city officials and groupies and a lot of weed smoke there all in the same place. It was a very weird situation — and Snoop was playing Al Green’s greatest hits! His family is from Mississippi; that’s what he grew up on.”

Snoop’s father is from Magnolia, and his mother is from McComb. “Even on his stuff with Dr. Dre and ‘Nuthin’ but a G Thang’, sampling Leon Haywood,” says Steel, “A lot of that stuff is old soul, borderline blues, and it was perfect for him and his flow and his personality and where he came from.”

And as for the show, Steel says, “You have to say you saw him at least once in your lifetime. Because he has so many hits, through the span of two and a half generations, and his show is really, really good. So you kinda say, ‘Oh, damn, I forgot about that! Oh, damn, I forgot about that!’ He’s perfect for Memphis; he’s got Isaac Hayes samples and all that. It lights a part of your brain from the feelgood era of hip-hop, where everybody knows the lyrics.”

– Alex Greene

Booker T. Jones

Booker T. Jones Comes Home

The architect of Memphis soul reflects on 55 years in the spotlight.

Memphis is a place that has produced more than its share of musical geniuses, but the title of first among equals must belong to Booker T. Jones. He started working as a staff musician at Stax at age 16. In 1962, his song “Green Onions” was a huge hit for the label. It became the landmark instrumental of the rock and soul era. The song bore all the hallmarks of the sound he would help create for Stax: an instantly hummable hook, a groove that is somehow both urgent and laid back, and a deceptive complexity that remains as fresh on the thousandth listen as on the first.

Jones was a child prodigy, and he says it was the musical education he got growing up in 1950s Memphis that propelled him to greatness. “My grandmother taught piano. I had Chopin, Brahms, and Liszt in my home over there on Edith Street. My mother played piano, and her mother taught her to play. I had a Hammond organ teacher who … I haven’t run into any teachers who could come close to her. She was right around the corner over there on Orleans, teaching me how to play how I play now. Her name was Elmertha Cole, and somehow they were able to buy a very expensive Hammond B3 organ and get it into their house. I was very fortunate. I have no idea where I could have found that otherwise. She was something special. She had an understanding and was exacting, and she cared a lot. It was just the right person at the right time.”

He says he is immensely proud of the Stax Music Academy, and he remains a tireless advocate for music education at a time when many public schools are dropping programs. “I think a lot of legislators just don’t realize all of the things that are subconsciously taught by music. All of the math, the psychology that you learn by playing an instrument. It is taught very subtly. When kids learn piano at a young age or they pick up a flute or a saxophone, at first they entertain themselves. They’re engaged … In our society, we use music for everything. We use music when we feel good; we use it when we feel bad; we use it when we get married; we use it when somebody dies. It’s the fabric of our society, and it needs to be taught early.”

Music teaches creative collaboration, and very few people have collaborated with as wide an array of artists as Jones. With William Bell, he co-wrote “Born Under a Bad Sign” for Albert King; 50 years later he co-wrote songs for Valerie June’s debut album. He played with Ray Charles and backed up everyone from Neil Young to Rancid. People backing him up have included the Drive-By Truckers, Questlove, Lou Reed, and Sharon Jones. In 1977, he produced Willie Nelson’s album Stardust. “We realized we had grown up playing the same songs. ‘Stardust,’ ‘Georgia on My Mind’ … those are the songs he got to do as a young man playing clubs in Texas, and they were the same ones I had done in Memphis with Puff Beane and Willie Mitchell. So we wanted to make a record together, but it was tough to get the record company to let us make that record.”

Stardust went triple Platinum and made Willie Nelson a household name.

At age 72, Jones is still a road warrior. In the last month alone, he played three nights in Tokyo, the massive Byron Bay Bluesfest in New South Wales, Australia, and shows in Sydney and Melbourne. I caught up with him resting in Lake Tahoe, California, before he heads off to England and Ireland. Then he will return to Memphis to close out Beale Street Music Festival’s Blues Tent, Sunday night at 8:35 p.m. “It’s going to be a look into what made me who I am today, musically. It’s going to be my favorite music I’ve been involved with as a player and as a songwriter and sideman. ‘Green Onions’ is still my favorite song. I still love to play the Booker T. and the MGs music. I like to get up and play guitar. I started doing that in Memphis, but of course, I didn’t get the job at Stax as a guitar player. I play some songs that influenced me to be a musician, blues songs in particular. It’s my life in music up to today. That encompasses a wide range of music, because I’ve played with a lot of different people. That’s what I do on stage. It’s a little bit unpredictable, but it usually includes four or five songs by Booker T. and the MGs and music that I’ve written for other people, like Bill Withers. I might even do a Wilson Pickett song or something I did with Bob Dylan or a Beatles song … I have a lot of musical influences. On stage, I just enjoy myself, and hopefully the audience goes with me.”

– Chris McCoy

Dead soldiers

Dead Soldiers Throw Down

Don’t call these Memphians “country.”

Before I interviewed Ben Aviotti and Michael Jasud about the new Dead Soldiers album The Great Emptiness, I had resolved not to ask them the dreaded “genre question.” The band, who made a name for themselves in Memphis with scorching live sets, freely crosses styles. Their songcraft bears the stamp of classic rock and outlaw country. Their blistering instrumental workouts skirt the bluegrass line, and rollicking jams sometimes resemble Gogol Bordello’s punky gypsy jazz. The Soldiers cut their teeth as a whiskey-soaked bar band, yet they routinely conjure moments of orchestral beauty. They can twang, but they have a soul horn section. They follow Memphis tradition of smashing together any and all musical influences that float down the river. But that means that they are tired of being asked “What are you?” by people whose jobs it is to put labels on things.

For the record, they brought it up. “People thought we were a country band, which was wrong. We’re not a country band,” says Jasud.

“That’s insulting both ways,” says Aviotti.

“It’s a huge insult to country music, and it’s an insult to us,” says Jasud.

“It’s the worst when you actually have to fill it out for the publishing,” says Aviotti. “I’m like, acoustic Christian contemporary has its own subgenre …”

“… That’s the worst one …” injects Jasud.

“… Then it’s just, are you rock or are you country? Are you post-punk shoe gaze, or are you rock or country? Maybe Americana?” says Aviotti.

“So, we decided we are going to call ourselves City Music,” says Jasud.

The band formed in 2011, but Jasud says their roots go back farther than that. “Ben’s like five or six years older than I. I was this punk-ass 14-year-old kid hanging out around older, wilder music folks. That’s when I met Ben.”

An eight-piece lineup recorded The Great Emptiness with Toby Vest and Pete Matthews at High/Low Recording last year: Jasud and Aviotti on guitars and vocals (with occasional banjo), Clay Qualls on bass (with occasional mandolin), multi-instrumentalists Nathan Raab and Krista Wroten-Combest providing whatever the song needs, Paul Gilliam on drums, and Nashon Benford and Victor Sawyer blowing trumpet and trombone, respectively. The big-band approach is the key to their slippery sound on new songs like “Teddy Bears” and “Prophets of Doom,” which evolved with input from the entire crew. “There are various approaches to music with this band. Nobody has the same perspective. When we go into a song, we’re never on the same page,” says Aviotti. “We just try everybody’s ideas. Nothing is sacred. When everybody agrees that it’s good, then it’s done.”

The group dynamic did not appear overnight. “Our process is, we got really good at arguing with each other,” says Jasud. “It was bloody and prolonged and painful, but we slowly figured out how to argue with each other to where it really became just about the ideas. They’re not arguments any more. It’s just, ‘Let’s try it!'”

While they can sound ramshackle and jammy, Dead Soldiers sweats the details. Wroten-Combest and Benford played together in Memphis Dawls and brought their experience at creating lush soundscapes to the band. “Krista, to her eternal credit, has played with orchestras and writes scores,” says Aviotti. “She’s extremely good at orchestration.”

The orchestral sound is evident in the closing moments of The Great Emptiness, as the closing tones of “Cheap Magic” modulate upwards toward heaven, as the melody from “The Entertainer” floats through the ether. It’s a beautiful moment, but maybe not what you would call heartfelt. “That’s a sarcastic modulation,” says Aviotti.

“We were writing lyrics that were sarcastic, and we were trying to make the music do that, too,” says Jasud.

The lyrics of “Georgia Tann” touch on a dark bit of Memphis history. “Georgia Tann was the head of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, an adoption agency here during E.H. Crump’s reign … They would steal children from their homes and low income schools and whatnot and adopt them to rich people for money. In some cases, it was indentured servitude. There are all sorts of horror stories about torture and kids dying in her care. She died a free woman, but there was a pending case against her for hundreds of counts of wrongful deaths.”

Dead Soldiers will bring songs from The Great Emptiness to the River Stage on Saturday afternoon at 2:20 p.m. “Some of these songs are the first songs we wrote as a band, five or six years ago. We’re just now finally figuring out how they are supposed to go together,” says Aviotti. “But some of them are brand new, hot off the pan!”

– Chris McCoy

Categories
Music Music Blog

Bruce Sudano at Minglewood and Stax

You might not know Bruce Sudano by name, but chances are you’ve heard his songs. Having featured as a writer for platinum-selling songs by Jermaine & Michael Jackson, Dolly Parton, Reba McEntire, Snoop Dogg, and several for his late wife, Donna Summer, Sudano will be performing material from his solo albums on Friday Night, March 31st at Minglewood Hall opening for popular folk duo Johnnyswim.

Of particular interest to musicians and songwriters, Mr. Sudano will be leading a songwriting master class the following day, Saturday April 1st at 12 Noon. In this workshop, which is open to the public, Memphians have a rare opportunity to learn technique directly from Mr. Sudano which will allow attendees to delve deeper into the art behind song craft. Saturday’s workshop takes place at the Memphis Slim Collboratory, 115 College Street, directly adjacent to the Stax Museum. The workshop is free to members and $10 for the general public.

Categories
Music Music Blog

Beale Street Music Fest Announces 2017 Lineup

Kings of Leon

The Beale Street Music Festival has announced its lineup for 2017. Headliners include Snoop Dogg, Soundgarden, Widespread Panic, Wiz Khalifa, MGMT, Kings of Leon, Sturgill Simpson, and Death Cab for Cutie.

For a complete list of performers and times, check out the BSMF lineup page.

Categories
Music Music Blog

Last Night at the Memphis Music Hall of Fame

CREDIT: Cole Wheeler

Snoop Dogg and William Bell cutting up at the Cannon Center.

Last night six inductees entered the Memphis Music Hall of Fame. Local Photographer Cole Wheeler was at the Cannon Center for Performing Arts  to capture some of the action as Marguerite Piazza, John Lee Hooker, William Bell, Charles Lloyd, the Hi Rhythm Section, and Sam “The Sham” Samudio were all inducted.

Overall the ceremony had a much different feel that last year’s event which included guest appearances by Keith Richards and Jimmy Fallon. While this year boasted big names like Snoop Dogg and Cat Power, the local talent of The Sheiks, the North Mississippi Allstars, and the Hi Rhythm Section stole the show.

Perhaps the most captivating performance of the whole night should go to Chelsea Miller of Opera Memphis, who nearly brought the house down when she paid tribute to Marguerite Piazza. Check out some balcony shots from Cole Wheeler below. We’re anxiously anticipating next years nominess, perhaps the Oblivians will make the cut?
Cole Wheeler

All inductees were honored with a short film montage before their songs were covered by a mix of A-list musicians and some of the best local talent Memphis has to offer.

Cole Wheeler

Sam ‘The Sham’ Samudio accepting his induction into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame.

Cole Wheeler

Jack Oblivian and the Sheiks covering the Sam the Sham classic ‘Wooly Bully.’

Cole Wheeler

The Sheiks covering Sam The Sham’s ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’

Cole Wheeler

John Lee Hooker, Jr. paying homage to the blues classic ‘boom boom boom boom.’

Cole Wheeler

John Lee Hooker, Jr. and the North Mississippi Allstars.

Cole Wheeler

William Bell with surprise guest Snoop Dogg performing ‘I Forgot to be your Lover.’

Cole Wheeler

Snoop Dogg with some impressive dance moves while performing with William Bell.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Popstar: Never Stop Stopping

In 2005, Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone, collectively known as Lonely Island, were the right guys in the right place at the right time. The second comedy short they produced for Saturday Night Live, a parodic rap video called “Lazy Sunday,” came along just a few months after YouTube’s debut signaled the beginning of the web video era. When people started getting the hang of uploading and sharing videos, “Lazy Sunday” was among the first links passed around, making the Lonely Island guys the template for YouTube celebrity.

The group’s latest venture into cinematic comedy, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, is true to the group’s roots in that it features a passel of new, funny, pop hip-hop songs performed by Samberg as Conner Friel, aka Conner4Real, the former boy band frontman who has gone solo and blown up to Justin Bieber levels of celebrity. But the film also sees Lonely Island acknowledging their influences. Popstar is a mockumentary that applies the Spinal Tap equation to the contemporary music biz.

And I’ll have to say, it’s about time somebody did this. The Biebers and Kanyes and Katy Perrys of the world long ago elevated themselves to the same level of mockable self-importance as arena rockers circa 1983. That was when first-time director Rob Reiner gathered some former sitcom stars, including Michael McKean from Laverne & Shirley and SNL member Harry Shearer, to make a real-seeming documentary about a fake band. This Is Spinal Tap was not hugely successful upon release (partially because people, including Ozzy Osbourne, weren’t clear that it was fake), but it became a cult classic that inspired a generation of comedians. The improvisational style pioneered by Reiner and later perfected by Tap member Christopher Guest in Best In Show, has been hugely influential on modern comedies, including those created by Popstar executive producer Judd Apatow.

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping starring Andy Samberg

Handing Lonely Island $20 million and unleashing them onto the pop music landscape is a no-miss proposition. As you would expect from the guys who put Justin Timberlake’s dick in a box, they have the setting and references down cold. Conner starts off as a member of a trio called the Style Boyz who look a lot like the Beastie Boys. But fame goes to their heads, and a dispute over the authorship of a verse leads to Lawrence “Kid Brain” Dunn (Schaffer) leaving the group and retreating into seclusion at a Colorado farm. Owen “Kid Contact” Dunn stays on as Conner’s DJ, whose job is reduced to pressing play on the iPod while Conner preens in front of an arena full of screaming girls.

Following the Tap template, Conner’s new album is not good, despite the fact that he hired more than a hundred producers to make it for him, and what was envisioned as a triumphant world tour is slowly smothered under a blanket of public fiascos. But that’s where the Spinal Tap comparisons cease to be useful, because where Reiner’s film was a strictly vérité affair with only minimal scripting, Popstar‘s screenplay has clearly been honed through several drafts. Spinal Tap plays out like a D.A. Pennebaker documentary, with long, single takes producing laughs by revealing character quirks. Popstar is a more conventional comedy, resorting to over-the-shoulder dialog shots and a throw-it-all-against-the-wall approach to gag delivery.

The supporting cast is a who’s who of comedy in 2016. Sarah Silverman nails the Fran Drescher role of put-upon publicist, while SNL legend Tim Meadows is Conner’s conniving manager. Imogen Poots and Bill Hader both create memorable characters as Conner’s girlfriend and roadie, but there’s not enough time to get to know them amid a flurry of cameos. The movie’s first big laugh comes courtesy of a bit of effortless schtick from none other than Ringo Starr, who leads a cast of musical luminaries including Questlove, Snoop Dogg, Mariah Carey, Pink, RZA, and Seal, who steals the show when he is attacked by wolves.

Befitting our current cultural condition, Popstar is brash and direct where Spinal Tap was sly and stealthy. It may not be groundbreaking, but it’s consistently funny, and it proves that in the music biz, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Pitch Perfect 2

Pitch Perfect 2 is more self-aware and self-consciously “edgy” than its not-entirely-wholesome predecessor. However, it shouldn’t surprise anyone if this hugely profitable sequel fails to engender the same levels of love and affection as the original film: the drop-off in quality is sad, and it too often replaces the joyful noises of group singing with the sickening thud of easy jokes falling flat.

Released in 2012, Pitch Perfect’s best qualities—its non-stop sass, its coy takes on college romance, and its generous female characterizations—were explicitly linked to unhip, old-fashioned notions of community, cooperation, solidarity and democracy. Whether they were squabbling or singing their hearts out, the all-girl Barden Bellas often looked and acted like a good group that just needed to get it together. Their all-for-one spirit was most visible in Pitch Perfect’s two defining musical numbers: a “riff-off” in a drained swimming pool that revives “No Diggity” as a modern American spiritual, and a final number that—and believe me, I wish this wasn’t true—brings tears of joy to my eyes every time I watch it.

Pitch Perfect bounces along like a great Lily Allen album; Pitch Perfect 2 stumbles along like a thrown-together collection of demos, outtakes and solo experiments from any pop star who wants to be taken seriously. This is a careless, placid, steer-like entertainment which bides its time and chews its cud as it awaits the online butchering that will give the masses shorter, tidier, easily consumable clips. Anna Kendrick will endure no matter what, though: she’s a sotto voce wiseacre who overcompensates for her tiny, sticklike stature—she’s always looking up at someone—by spitting lines at His Girl Friday speed until either she or whoever she’s talking to runs out of gas. But Rebel Wilson, a.k.a. Fat Amy, doesn’t escape as cleanly. Her natural deadpan and comic timing hint at vast reservoirs of mischief that lend her both grace and a certain wry dignity, but she constantly undercuts these traits every time she falls down or runs into something. (Which may be the joke, but it’s a dumb one.) Still, her Pat Benatar number is probably the musical highlight of the movie.

The rest of the wreckage—which includes David Cross, Clay Matthews, Keegan-Michael Key, the rest of the supporting cast, and a Snoop Dogg Christmas mash-up—is too dreary to contemplate. This disappointing musical reinforces an old, deeply-held conviction: whenever performers sing just to hear the sound of their own voice, they’re really obnoxious.

Grade: C

Categories
News News Feature

Drivin’ Ain’t Easy

Do you remember that episode of Starsky & Hutch when Hutch hired Huggy Bear to drive his elderly mom around and she freaked out because he was an irascible pimp but later they became best friends? Well, of course, you don’t, because it never happened. But if the notion sounds vaguely intriguing, Antonio Fargas, the Everybody Hates Chris actor who played the colorful informant Huggy Bear on Starsky & Hutch, is coming to Memphis to play Hoke in a touring production of Alfred Uhry’s acclaimed drama Driving Miss Daisy. The Cutural Development Foundation of Memphis is presenting the play, which runs from Friday through Sunday at The Orpheum.

Flyer: First things first: Who’s the real Huggy Bear? You or Snoop Dogg?

Antonio Fargas: Well, hopefully, he thinks he is. But I created the part, so I’m the original.

And now you’re doing Driving Miss Daisy with Karen Grassle, who played Ma Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie.

Driving Miss Daisy is the perfect opportunity to explore an American classic, at the perfect time in my life. I’ve been acting for 47 years now.

This isn’t the first time you’ve played Hoke in Driving Miss Daisy. What’s it like to return to a role over and over again?

I’ve done it four or five times. You know, every role you ever play keeps on growing and living inside of you even when you’re not performing it. So every time I reconnect, I find out that the character has grown.

Most people know you from your work in films like Foxy Brown or television shows like Starsky & Hutch, but you’re not just some ’70s actor attached to a touring show. You have a serious resume.

My first love is the theater. That’s where it all started, and without it, nothing else I’ve ever done would have been possible. If it wasn’t for the theater I don’t know what I would have done. Thank goodness for the arts for impaired people like me.

You were around for the startup in the late ’60s of the Negro Ensemble Company, which created shows like Day of Absence and A Soldier’s Play.

I was living in Chelsea and studying in Harlem when [NEC co-founder] Robert Hooks came to town. He wanted young black actors to do something for themselves. That group was really the nucleus for black actors at the time.

What was it like working on The Great White Hope with James Earl Jones?

It was incredible to watch a genius like James Earl Jones create his character. To watch all these great actors creating their characters. What I didn’t know then was that they were also watching me.

But even after these great breaks you had to hustle and work odd jobs.

I was too naive to know just how bad the odds were against me. I packed boxes, sold Christmas cards for UNICEF, and worked as an usher for CBS. But those times weren’t hard times because I was a dreamer who was willing to work. And I had a burning love for theater and for life.

And now you’re an archetype. If somebody refers to Huggy Bear from Starsky & Hutch, everybody knows what they are talking about.

Yeah, it’s pretty crazy when you start showing up in crossword puzzles and Jeopardy! questions. But I’m not somebody who’s going to complain about it. People are going to come to see Driving Miss Daisy to see Huggy Bear. That’s the power of TV. That’s the power of memory. Starsky & Hutch had everything you could want: It had swagger, it had hot young guys, a sexy car, clothes, and music that reflected the times.

Has the Huggy Bear image ever gotten in the way?

Not really. I may have wanted to play Hamlet on stage, but I never wanted to play James Bond. Look, I’ve played three different homosexual roles. I’ve played four pimps. Each one is different. Each one is a specific human being. And each one presents a unique set of challenges.

So who’s Miss Daisy’s real best friend, you or Morgan Freeman?

Morgan did it first, and you’ve got to give him respect for the impact he had. But then you have to go on. You just have to free yourself as an artist and go on.

Driving Miss Daisy with Antonio Fargas, Karen Grassle, and Cliff De Young is at The Orpheum (525-3000) Friday-Saturday, May 11th-12th, at 8 p.m., and a Sunday, May 13th, matinee at 3 p.m. Tickets are $16 to $40.