Tag: Stax

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Music Music Features

Memphian Launches Beatles Calendar

CREDIT: Courtesy of Robert Johnson

When Robert Johnson — not that Robert Johnson, but stick with me — sent over a Beatles tribute project, I put it with all of the other Beatles projects that I don’t want to think ever existed. That was a mistake. Johnson has one of Memphis’ most colorful musical resumes, and his colorful 2014-2015 calendar features the work of Alan Aldridge, the illustrator of the Beatles’ 1969 illustrated lyric book and other iconic images, including the original Hard Rock Café logo. The package comes with a 45-rpm record of Beatles tunes produced by Johnson. You can order the calendar here.

Johnson’s background in Memphis music is something to behold in itself.

“I grew up with David Cartwright, whose son is Greg,” Johnson says of his remarkably musical childhood neighborhood on the west side of Frayser. “When I was about 13 or so, I had a band called the Castels at Westside High School. In summer and spring, we used to cut [Elvis’ bass player] Bill Black’s grass. He had Lyn-Lou Studio. But we had two or three years as kids just hanging out over at Bill Black’s house. His kids were my age. Then we had Roland Janes as a neighbor. He had Sonic Studio. We got started with him back in ’63 or something. It was next door to Audiomania.”

Westside High School was another fountain of musical culture.

“Near Westside’s ballpark in the back of the school there was a cotton patch and then an old house, and that’s where Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland lived,” Johnson says. “Ronny Scaife, who became a well-known songwriter in Nashville and wrote songs for Garth Brooks, Mongtomery-Gentry. Ronny was in the 1960s bands with us. It was a unique neighborhood.”

By the time John Fry opened Ardent Studios on National in 1966, Johnson was still a kid, but also a seasoned guitarist, who had already worked at Lin-Lou, Sonic, and Phillips Recording.

Courtesy of Robert Johnson

Robert Johnson

“We started hearing about Ardent,” Johnson says. “The first time I went, I met Terry Manning, probably about 1969. Terry Manning heard my band play at the Overton Park Shell and wanted to sign us to Ardent Productions. We started making an album there with a band called Country Funk. Then we opened up for Steppenwolf and the Byrds at the Coliseum. It was a sold-out place. After that, we were on Ardent’s roster. That’s where we got started working at Ardent. I went from there to a band called Alamo with Larry Raspberry, Richard Rosebrough and Ken Woodley. That’s where the whole pack started with [Alex] Chilton and Woodley. That’s kind of like the original little clique over there.”

Johnson also worked in the Stax mailroom alongside William Brown of the Mad Lads. That led to his recruitment to Isaac Hayes’ first band supporting the skyrocketing album Hot Buttered Soul.

“Hot Buttered Soul sold a million copies in 30 days,” Johnson says. “Then in six weeks it had gone platinum. He had a songwriting obligation, so he had to show up to write songs. So we could only go out and play on the weekends, which was good for me because I was still in high school.”

Hayes eventually formed the Isaac Hayes Movement, and the core of the old band — Johnson, bassist Roland Robinson, and drummer Jerry Norris — became Steel. After bouncing around for a spell and backing Ann Peebles with Alex Chilton, Johnson ended up in England, where he caught the attention of John Entwistle and became a member of John Entwistle’s Ox, the Who bassist’s solo project following Tommy. During that time, he recorded a record with the improbable personnel of Bill Bruford from Yes and King Crimson on drums, Entwistle on bass, and Stones pianist Nicky Hopkins on piano.

“Nicky came up to me at the sessions at Wessex Studios and said, ‘Hey, I was at the Rolling Stones office today. Mick Taylor quit the band.’ I actually learned about that the day it happened,” Johnsons says. “Around the fall of 1974. He said, ‘I’ll give your number to Mick Jagger if you want me to.’ Of course, I never thought a thing about it. A couple of weeks later, Jagger called my house in London. He asked me to come over to Rotterdam Holland to ‘have a play,’ as he said. So I went over there and spent four days with them and the mobile studio and Glynn Johns and everybody.”

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Cover Feature News

R&B Royalty

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Elmo Lee Thomas has worked his band, Elmo and the Shades, around Memphis for more than 30 years. You’ve seen the name a million times in weekly music listings and probably thought, “Ah, another bar band.” What you likely don’t know is that this band has a musical pedigree that will blow your mind. Elmo and the Shades features musicians who changed the way we listen to music and buy records.

Ben Cauley, the original Bar-Kays trumpeter and a survivor of the plane crash that killed Otis Redding, is a regular. Other members played with Isaac Hayes, Jimi Hendrix, Little Richard, and George Clinton’s Funkadelic. The drummer played for James Brown. They played parties for Elvis. The trumpet player helped Hayes negotiate with Mayor Henry Loeb following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Most were part of the legendary later years at Stax Records. They have more great stories than you have time to listen to.

Justin Fox Burks

Elmo and the Shades

Some bar band.

You may be surprised to learn that you can see this band for no cover charge at least once a week. Welcome to Memphis.

Let’s introduce the band.

Justin Fox Burks

Harold Beane

Harold Beane

“I went to Hamilton [High School],” says guitarist Harold Beane. “I ended up on guitar from my neighbor Larry Lee, who played with Jimi Hendrix [at Woodstock]. So that’s my mentor. This was 1963, because he went off to college to Tennessee State. I couldn’t wait until he got back from college to show him that I could play a barre chord. That’s how it all started.”

Beane’s band auditioned to record at Stax, but the label didn’t want the guitarist.

“They said, ‘We like your group, but we don’t need a guitar player. We’ve got Steve Cropper.’ So I ended up working in the Satellite record shop. Ms. Axton hired me. I sold 45 records. I eventually ended up learning three or four chords, and William Bell came and took me on the road. I was just out of high school.”

Beane, like the others in this story, was part of a later generation of musicians at Stax. When early bands like the Mar-Keys or the MGs began to tour, younger musicians — notably the Bar-Kays — filled in during the arc of Stax’s success that preceded the Redding plane crash in December of 1967. The label’s next phase brought Hayes’ hits and the second coming of Rufus Thomas in the early 1970s. These musicians not only backed the hits of that era, they played with some of the most important talents of their time.

“I came to the recording studio one day, and Pat Lewis of Hot Buttered Soul, which was Isaac Hayes’ background singers, asked me if I wanted to play guitar for George Clinton,” Beane says. “They had done background for Isaac, George Clinton, Jackie Wilson, Aretha Franklin … I can go on and on. So she called George. I met George in Cincinnati, and the rest is history.”

Beane spent five years in Clinton’s Funkadelic and played on America Eats Its Young in 1972. He also played for Little Richard. Eventually, he had a son and settled in Atlanta, working with longtime collaborator William Bell. Beane went to work for IBM and stayed in Atlanta until three years ago. When he would come home to Memphis to visit his mother, he looked for Larry Lee, who was playing with Elmo and the Shades.

Justin Fox Burks

Tommy Lee Williams

Tommy Lee Williams

“Harold [Beane] was playing with us in the first band I was in,” saxophonist Tommy Lee Wiliams says. “Willie Mitchell started us rehearsing at his house. But my first big thing was in college at Tennessee State in Nashville. I was playing with Jimi Hendrix — me and another older guy playing saxophone. It was wild. We were playing at the Del Morocco to lots of Tennessee State students. He stayed upstairs over the club.”

Hendrix left the Army in 1963 and moved to Clarkesville, Tennessee, before moving to Nashville. Those years in Hendrix’s life are often glazed over as the “chitlin-circuit years,” but the scene around the club was part of Nashville’s unheralded African-American music scene of the 1960s. Hendrix lived with lifelong friend Billy Cox, who allegedly owned, and did not get along with, a pet monkey, according to Steven Roby’s Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southern Crossroads to Psychedelic London, the Untold Story of a Musical Genius. That band, the King Kasuals was the launching pad for Hendrix’s work with Little Richard, Don Covay, and the Isley Brothers. Later, after his Experience years, Hendrix returned to this group of people, building Band of Gypsies around Cox and Buddy Miles, who met Hendrix during this time. Larry Lee joined Hendrix onstage at Woodstock, trading solos like they had done back in Nashville.

Williams’ involvement with Willie Mitchell led to gigs at some of the most legendary parties in Memphis history. Elvis hosted a string of New Year’s Eve parties at the Manhattan Club throughout the early 1960s. Although in those days, it was not a welcoming experience for everybody.

“We had uniforms. Willie Mitchell mostly played for it. But this one time, Willie had to go out of town, and he put us in there. We had to come in the back door. Because [the front] was for high-class folks. The bandstand had a door. We’d go out that door and stand outside,” Williams says. “Anyway, [Elvis] would have these parties, and he’d have all these women. Man, I’m talking about some of the most gorgeous women you’d ever want to see. He’s sitting there like at the end of the table like he was the chairman of the board. Nothing but women, all the way down on both sides. He’s sitting up there cooling. I said, ‘Damn, this cat here is something else.'”

Williams and Beane were also members of the Isaac Hayes Movement, the band that toured and recorded with the enigmatic singer through his rise to greatness. Hayes’ greatness took several forms, all witnessed by Hayes’ lifelong friend and Shades trumpeter Mickey Gregory.

Justin Fox Burks

Mickey Gregory

Mickey Gregory

“I took Isaac on his first gig, when he was 18 years old,” Mickey Gregory said last week at the Shades’ weekly Wednesday night gig at Neil’s Music Room.

“We were both in the same shape,” Gregory says. “Sometimes, we would make a gig outside of the city. Dude would run off with the money. Sometimes you’d make a dollar. Buy a bottle of corn whiskey and a hamburger. Sleep on the food table of the counter ’til daytime, before you tried to get back to Memphis. [He stops to silently emphasize that it was a very dangerous time for black traveling musicians.] We went through some hard times. There is a Penthouse interview from 1972. [Isaac] explains a lot of that stuff. If you ever come by the house, I’ll let you see that magazine where he says that.”

On Friday, photographer Justin Fox Burks and I ring the doorbell and are greeted by Gregory, smoking a cigarette and wearing an electric red and black-trimmed bathrobe. My Southern Protestant upbringing had not prepared me for this. But no one I know has ever answered a door in such a badass way. In we go, and Gregory shows us the interview in which Hayes talks of himself and Gregory and sleeping on craps tables after gigs. The photo spread is strange enough to defy description, until …

“We called that ‘FFO,'” Gregory says, “for Far Fucking Out.”

“I think the bathrobe is awesome,” Burks says. “Do you want to put a shirt on for some pictures?”

“I’m Kool and the Gang,” Gregory says, meaning no.

Gregory’s friendship with the man he calls “Bubba Hayes” is the subject of a book he is writing. He reads the first chapter aloud and leaves us mesmerized with the story of driving to Hayes’ first gig.

I’ll leave that story and a trove of off-the-record delights for Gregory’s book.

Gregory was a source for Robert Gordon’s Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion. Reading Gordon’s book before going to see Elmo and the Shades turns the night into an immersive experience, perhaps akin to experiencing the National Civil Rights museum after reading Hampton Sides’ Hellhound On My Trail.

These musicians changed music: They broke the hold of the 45 single and kicked off long-play music that led the way for the expansive remix and electronic dance forms of the 1980s and 90s. Hayes and Gregory formed a symbiotic relationship, with Gregory assuming more responsibility and more favor as Hayes rose to power. He helped Hayes assemble the bands that would tour with him, record with him, and endure the mayhem of life at Stax in the late 1970s.

“We were hoping for a hit record with Isaac’s Hot Buttered Soul,” Gregory says. “In the interim, I was putting together a band, really for David Porter. Isaac began to break out real quick. Porter didn’t like it, and I don’t blame him. But he didn’t realize that I had a history with Isaac since he was about 12 or 13 years old. So I had to go. I had had some hard times, and he would more or less support me and my family. So I had to follow that thing. I took the guys from the band that I was putting together for David, The Soul Spacemen. He had bought uniforms and everything. But I had to do what I had to do. That was the first Isaac Hayes Movement.”

Gregory was with Hayes when he was part of a negotiation with Mayor Henry Loeb in 1971, as tensions rose over a city-imposed curfew and a crucial benefit for a sick member of the African-American community. Rob Bowman, in his Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records, outlines the event, as Hayes is called to represent the black community with the legendarily recalcitrant mayor following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Henry was … we all know what he was,” Gregory says. “He used a lot of savoir-faire while talking to us. But he just started, and it was an exercise in futility. This one city councilman [Jerry Blanchard] — and I don’t have to say white because there were no blacks on the city council then. He had balls enough to go out with us. It was just me and Isaac and him. We went through the neighborhoods and quelled those riots. Our last trip was to Binghamton, and he got out of the limousine with us then. He had balls. But nobody was interested in anything but Isaac.”

Gregory and Williams were both in The Isaac Hayes Movement for the 1972 Watts Summer Festival concert that drew more than 100,000 people and became the film Wattstax. Williams, who played on Rufus Thomas’ hits from the early 1970s, including “Push & Pull” and “The Breakdown,” recalls the old man of Stax calming what might have been a volatile situation.

“What happened was, they were trying to get the people not to come out on the grass,” Williams says. “Rufus Thomas was already out, getting ready to do his show. He was trying to tell them, to talk to them real nice and not make them mad. I know he talked 30 minutes or more. Sure enough, everybody started walking up, going on back. We had ran out and got back on the bus and shit, we were scared. All them people, man? Dang. I just knew it was going to be a riot. Anyway, it wasn’t. Everything turned out all right. We did the show. Smart dude. That man was smart and kept it together.”

The fall of Stax engendered a lot of enmity among some of the participants, and the transition from world stage to normal life and the “golden years” has not always been easy.

“We had a ball out there. We were making money,” Williams says, noting the diminishing opportunities in today’s music industry. “The people have changed. It’s not like it was back in the day, when we were coming up. Everybody was more together. It’s kind of distant now. It’s not as tight as it used to be.”

Gregory holds a special enmity for Johnny Baylor, an alleged gangster from the north who cultivated his own locus of power in an increasingly dangerous and destructive way. You should read Gordon’s book if only for the whole story on Baylor and Gregory’s involvement in it.

“Those were some great days,” Gregory says. “But they turned into some bitter days. I mean bitter, bitter, bitter days. … I sat and watched that thing unravel under the hands of one person. I was just as crazy as he was. My pistol was just as big as his was. He knew that. We never had words. He whipped a lot of people at Stax. Pistol whipped a lot of people. A monster.”

Some people still don’t want to talk about Baylor.

“Nobody else ever had the balls to do it,” Gregory says. “Because, one, I’m still alive. So I don’t give a damn. Read my book.”

There’s a lot more history going on in Elmo and the Shades: Drummer Hubert Crawford Jr. played with James Brown and has been an essential element to the Eric Gales Band. Ben Cauley, the original Bar-Kay and survivor of the plane crash that took the life of Otis Redding, is a regular on trumpet and sings a few numbers. Drummer Brian Wells (John Paul Keith) also plays regularly.

“I knew Elmo from coming to Memphis and looking for Larry Lee,” Beane says. “That would be the first thing I would do while living in Atlanta. I’d come visit my mother, visit Memphis, and I’d look for Larry. Elmo had Mickey Gregory and Tommy Lee [Williams]. They knew me and said, ‘Why don’t you hire Harold?’ I went out and met him and have been playing with him for about two and a half years. I’ve enjoyed picking my guitar back up.”

“Cats come out here I hadn’t seen [in years],” Williams says. The goodwill among the old soulsters is something to behold. “Once they come out and see we’re out here, they come back and sit in with us. But we got a bad drummer man. Them other guys can’t touch our drummer. We let them play. But to go up behind him? He played with James Brown. You’ve got to be a bad drummer to play with James Brown.”

The members of Elmo and the Shades have impressive histories, but in a town with the kind of music legacy that Memphis has, they are not all that unusual. “Earl the Pearl” Banks plays weekly on Beale Street at Blues City Cafe and frequently at Huey’s. Banks was in early bands with Teenie and Leroy Hodges of the Hi Rhythm Section. Leroy Hodges and Hi-Rhythm keyboardist Archie Turner back him up every Tuesday at Blues City Cafe. Eddie Harrison and Tommy Burroughs are other examples of musicians with bands that have jaw-dropping back-stories.

Elmo Lee Thomas has been running his show since the first blues revival that followed the Blues Brothers and the rise of Beale Street in the early 1980s. Williams has been with the Shades for almost 20 years. Michael Toles of Bar-Kays 2.0 and Skip Pitts (also of the Isaac Hayes Movement and the Bo-Keys) are past members. Larry Lee was a member of the Shades, until his death in 2007.

“It just started one musician at a time,” Thomas says of his amazing band. “We all come together and try to put the sound down.”

And that they do.

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Music Music Features

Floyd Newman to receive brass note on Beale

CREDIT: The Bo-Keys

This Saturday, November 1st, at 1 p.m., the legendary bandleader, instructor, and saxophonist Floyd Newman will be honored with a Beale Street Brass Note. Newman saw talent in Isaac Hayes, was the first musician to be chosen for B.B. King’s band, and was a longtime in-house musician at Stax Records. Now his significant contributions will be forever memorialized with a brass note on the Walk of Fame.

One of Newman’s most famous career milestones was the time he spent playing at the renowned Plantation Inn in West Memphis. There he led a band that featured a young Isaac Hayes on keyboards and famed Hi Rhythm Section drummer Howard Grimes. This band was the first time Hayes was offered a professional job as a musician. Soulsville Foundation Communications Director Tim Sampson says that largely because of his time spent at the Plantation Inn, Newman became “very instrumental in helping create what is known as the ‘Memphis Sound’.”

The Bo-Keys

In the time Newman spent at Stax, he was able to play with artists like Otis Redding and Booker T. & the MGs. He was also a founding member of the Mar-Keys, with whom he co-wrote the hit “Last Night.” As a composer, he also worked on the song “Frog Stomp,” which became a success with his own band and was featured in the films Great Balls of Fire and Wattstax.

Created in 1986, the Beale Street Brass Note program was designed to merge Memphis’ rich musical history with its most popular entertainment district. Newman’s brass note ceremony will begin at 1 p.m. with speakers, a video presentation from Brenda Berger O’Brien (daughter of the Plantation Inn’s owner Morris Berger), and live music. Come out to see a legend get immortalized.

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Film Features Film/TV

Film: Take Me To The River

It is said that all art aspires toward musicality, and no form comes closer than film. The linear flow of moving images naturally mirrors the aural motion of music. When the sound era dawned, the very first thing filmmakers did was turn their cameras on Al Jolsen and let the music do the talking.

Perhaps because of the two media’s similarities, many directors are also musicians. Such is the case with Martin Shore, a drummer from San Diego who toured with Cody Dickinson’s Hill Country Revue. Shore’s day job is as a film producer, and Take Me To The River, his directorial debut, is the latest music documentary to take on the question, “What makes Memphis music so special?” Guided by North Mississippi Allstars’ guitarist and son of legendary Memphis music producer Jim Dickinson, Shore gathers a who’s who of Memphis music legends together to make a record while the cameras roll.

The problem facing the directors of all music documentaries is how to balance the story and the music. It’s a simple problem of arithmetic: Unless you’re Martin Scorsese and HBO gives you three hours to tell George Harrison’s story, you have a limited amount of time to work with. Without the music, it’s hard to care about the story; but give the story short shrift and you lose the reason the audience is there in the first place. In Take Me To The River, Shore errs on the side of the music, and this is probably wise. The epic sweep of the Stax story has already been told in Robert Gordon’s Respect Yourself, so Shore constructs a series of vignettes from footage of the recording sessions interspersed with interviews with the musicians.

This approach makes for some magical moments. Al Kapone chats with Booker T. Jones as the legendary keyboardist drives his van around town. The Hi Records backup singers the Rhodes Sisters recall how Willie Mitchell used to exclaim “God the glory!” when they hit a note he liked. Frayser Boy, who wrote the Academy Award-winning flow for “It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp” admits to Skip Pitts, who played guitar on Isaac Hayes Academy Award-winning “Theme From Shaft,” that he has never recorded with a live band before. Pitts refuses to even look at a chart before launching into the Rufus Thomas song “Push And Pull.” The magnetic and eternally young Mavis Staples changes the song at the last minute, and then soothes her collaborators’ nerves with a few well-placed smiles and a stunning vocal performance. William Bell tells the story of David Porter writing “Hold On I’m Comin” while an amused Porter looks on. Narrator and Hustle and Flow star Terrence Howard becomes completely overwhelmed by emotion after recording with the Hodges brothers, including a frail looking Teenie. Bobby Blue Bland teaches Lil P-Nut to sing “I Got A Woman.” And finally, Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads produces a session with Snoop Dogg and the Stax Academy Band pulling together more than a dozen musicians to cut “I Forgot To Be Your Lover” in less than 30 minutes.

It’s fun to be a fly on the wall in these recording sessions held in historic spaces, and the camaraderie and respect between the players is evident. The talent, discipline, and instincts on display are amazing, because, as the indomitable Deanne Parker says, these musicians came of age in a time when “we didn’t have any technology to make you sound better.”

Take Me To The River never answers the question of why this city produces so much great music. But then again, no one else has ever been able to put a finger on what Charlie Musselwhite calls “that secret Memphis ingredient you can’t write in a book.”

Take Me To The River
Playing Friday, September 12th
The Paradiso

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Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Sunday Morning Coming Down at GSL

Grace St. Lukes is hosting a musical lecture series that starts this Sunday, September 7th. Luther Dickison is the inaugural guest of the series that focuses on religion in Southern music. Luther’s topic is “Up over Yonder: The Sights and Sounds of Heaven.” Robert Gordon, author of Stax history Respect Yourself, talks about “My Baby on Saturday Night, Jesus on Sunday Morning” on Sunday, September 14th. Look out: Sunday, September 28th is a big deal: Al Gamble and  Paul Janeway from St. Paul and the Broken Bones discuss ““From Gospel to Soul.” St. Paul and the Broken Bones are on a major roll as second-generation purveryors of Southern soul. Gamble is the go-to Hammond organ wizard of his generation. The lectures run from 9:30 until 10:15 a.m.

Sunday Morning Coming Down at GSL

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Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Al Bell To Introduce WATTSTAX at the Shell Friday

Indie Memphis‘ concert film series plays host to Stax co-owner Al Bell, who will introduce and discuss the origin of the musical documentary film WATTSTAX. The film captures the Stax roster at the height of the label’s success during a 1972 concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The opening sequence strikes you immediately in light of recent events in Ferguson. Richard Pryor’s monologues are disturbingly prescient. Bell organized the festival that Mel Stuart captured in the 1973 film. Al Bell’s remarks will be a Memphis history lesson. The music makes you move, and the dialog makes you squirm and think. It’s the funkiest lesson in civic morality in the history of humanity. Friday, August 29th, at 8 p.m.

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Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Roland Janes Memorial Tribute Jam

On Monday, June 30th, friends and colleagues of the late Roland Janes will jam in his honor at the Levitt Shell. The free event is the work of Janes’ friend and collaborator J.M. Van Eaton. Both men were session musicians at Sun who became rock royalty when another day’s work resulted in “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On” and unleashed the Killer on polite society. Friends from Roland’s life and career will honor him as a guitarist, an engineer, a businessman, and as friend. He was that and much more to so many. The list of invitees tells the tale.

Sun-era stalwarts George Klein, Travis Wammack, Sonny Burgess & the Legendary Pacers, and Hayden Thompson. Smoochy Smith, who moved to Stax after working at Sun, went on to write “Last Night,” the song that broke Stax nationally. Smoochy’ll be there.

Van Eaton and Janes were old friends and participants in the birth of rock and roll.

“Roland and I started at the same time in the music business,” Van Eaton says. “I was still in high school. Tech High School. Billy Riley had just got a record deal with Sun and I met Roland at the studio one day when I had my little school band in there. They heard me play and Riley didn’t have a band. So he started putting his band together and he asked me if I wanted to be a part of his band. Roland was the guitar player. The bass player in that band was Marvin Pepper. Billy hired him and that was the original Little Green Men for ‘Flying Saucer Rock n Roll.’ So I met Roland back in 1956, probably.”

Billy Lee Riley’s Little Green Men: Riley, Roland Janes, Marvin Pepper, and J.M. Van Eaton

Soon after, the backing band made history.

“We’d probably been together about two or three months and Jerry Lee Lewis walked in. He didn’t have a band. So they called us to the studio to back up Jerry. We thought this was an audition to see if he had any talent. Man, we cut this song called “Crazy Arms,” which was his very first record, and that took off enough that they wanted to do the second one. The second one was Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On. So we both played on that. To fast forward to when that kind of played out, Roland and I played in band together in Millington at Fleet Reserve. This was a club band. We got a picture. He had already started Sonic Studio by then. But we played three nights a week for five years at this one place out there. We were packing them in every night.There were four of us in that band, and three of us are still living. We’re gonna bring those guys in.”

Also on the bill are several artists who Roland produced. John Paul Keith was one of Roland’s last real sessions before his death last year. Jon Hornyak was one of many Missourians who found their way to Memphis to work with Janes. His band Interstate 55 will also play.

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Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Mabon “Teenie” Hodges

CREDIT: Photo: Glen Brown

We are saddened by the passing of Teenie Hodges. He was fundamental to the sonic identity of Memphis. He co-wrote “Take Me to the River,” a song that could be a thousand years old. He co-wrote “I’m A Ram,” one of the best rhythm tracks ever recorded. His work with Willie Mitchell, Al Green, and — most importantly — with his surviving brothers Leroy and Charles will endure.

Photo: Glen Brown

Mabon ‘Teenie’ Hodges

We talked to his brother in March and to two of his torch bearers yesterday for this week’s Local Beat column. Last Friday, the Stax Academy Alumni Band played Hodges’ “Love and Happiness” at B.B. King’s on Beale. It’s hard to imagine a better tribute. That video and some of his best recorded and live work are below.

Stax Academy Alumni Band at B. B. King’s from Memphidelity on Vimeo.

Mabon ‘Teenie’ Hodges (3)

[jump]

This live footage of O.V. Wright from 1979 is a fine example of Hodges’ smooth style.

Mabon ‘Teenie’ Hodges

An earlier version of this piece mistakenly attributed the guitar on Willie Mitchell’s “20-75” to Hodges.  

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: Sbukley | Dreamstime.com

Sbukley | Dreamstime.com

Cher

First of all, allow me to be totally self-serving and talk up the big “Stax to the Max” festival happening Saturday, April 26th, from 11 a.m. until 7 p.m. at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music (my real job). There’s free admission, food trucks, vendors selling all sorts of things, and all-day live music by the likes of Singa Bromfield, the Stax Music Academy Junior Academy (I guarantee they will be the big surprise of the day), the Daddy Mack Blues Band, the Bo-Keys featuring John Nemeth and Percy Wiggins, Swingtime Explosion, Toni Green (be still my beating heart), and Stax legends William Bell, the Mad Lads, the Temprees, and none other than Sam Moore of the most soulful duo ever, Sam & Dave.

Sam will perform as the Stax Music Academy’s special guest. Saturday is also the grand opening of the new Memphis Slim Collaboratory at the original site of bluesman Memphis Slim’s house next door to the Stax Museum (yes, the one where the sign with the message “Renovations Coming Soon” has been posted for about the past 10 years). It is way cool and open for tours that day. So I want everyone who reads this or uses it to line the litter box to come out for this festival. It’s a trip.

And do you know why they let me get away with writing this kind of self-promotional article? It’s because I’ve been writing for this paper for more than 25 years now. For a long time, as its founding editor, it was every week. So let’s say for the first 15 years, I wrote somewhere in the range of 780 columns for the Flyer. And let’s say for the past 10, at every other week, that’s somewhere in the range of 260. No one ever accused me of being a mathematician, but I think that comes to 1,040 columns in 25 years. That is absolutely frightening.

We were here for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis, when his wife Lorena chopped it off with a kitchen knife, put it in her purse, drove off, and tossed it into a field. The penis was found and reattached, and she was found not guilty by reason of insanity and ordered to spend 45 days in a mental institution. He subsequently tried to make money in a couple of porn films but ended up delivering pizzas and doing other odd jobs.

We were here for the first George Bush presidency with his sidekick Vice President Dan Quayle. Then we were here for the eight Clinton years, the eight George W. Bush years, and now going-on-six Barack Obama years. If you had told me 25 years ago that the United States would have an African-American president, one who got reelected to a second term, I would have been more than a little skeptical that Amurika would have the wherewithal to do that.

We were here for all of Cher’s final concert tours. We were here for wars in Kuwait, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. (There were probably others I can’t remember.) We were here for the deaths of Lucille Ball, Jackie Onassis, Audrey Hepburn, Kurt Cobain, and a slew of others that we covered in one way or another. We were here for Lobster Boy trying to kill his wife by rolling across the room as fast as he could and repeatedly head-butting her. We were here for the construction of the Pyramid, FedExForum, National Civil Rights Museum, and aforementioned Stax Museum, along with its Stax Music Academy and the Soulsville Charter School. Heck, the Flyer was around for the demolition of the original Stax studios building. Who would have thought that at the original site of Stax Records, there would be an academic college prep school whose every senior has not only graduated but has gone to college with some kind of scholarship or grant.

Funny, the Flyer has had just three editors in its quarter-of-a-century lifetime: yours truly, the late and much-loved Dennis Freeland, and its current editor, some guy named Bruce VanWyngarden. The staff is much larger than the two and a half of us who originally put out the paper by carving the copy into a concrete pad and running ink over it, and the paper is all the better for it.

No, we didn’t have the internet, or even email in the very beginning. Nor did we have cell phones or iPads or iPods or much of anything in the way of being able to mass-communicate anything. No Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, texting, sexting, or Google Glass. But we could smoke at our desks during work, and there’s something very, very valuable about that. So there.

Come to “Stax to the Max” Saturday, April 26th, and tweet, text, Facebook, and Instagram ’til your heart’s are content. Just don’t forget to listen to the music and get a hot dog.

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Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Memphis Music is EVERYWHERE!!!

On a recent trip to San Francisco, I sat down for breakfast at the justifiably heralded Boulette’s Larder. The place is the jernt when it comes to breakfast: crazy view of the Bay Bridge and food on the highest order. I was the first person in the door. If you don’t know already, you should wear a goddamn Stax hat everywhere you go. Everywhere. Here’s why:

When I sat down and ordered black quinoa with chickpeas and poached eggs (best breakfast I’ve ever had), my waiter casually mentioned that he had been Isaac Hayes’ personal vegan chef. Holy freaking smokes.

Elijah Joy is a vegan food power house. He’s cooked for the Hot Buttered Genius, for Moby, and for B.B. King’s Blues Clubs. It’s no wonder to find him at Boulette’s, which could not be any better. Joy and I discussed how important Isaac was to the world and how saddened we were by losing him so early and unexpectedly. Here is his Wikipedia page, which you may read after you’ve finished all the Flyer copy and patronized a handful of advertisers.

Vegan Chef Elijah Joy

  • Vegan Chef Elijah Joy

Memphis moves in funky ways, even on the west coast.

Think that’s enough? WRONG!

Later that day, a Flyer colleague and I took a cab to the Flower Conservatory. On the way, the cabbie was listening to a wicked soul station. Carla Thomas came on the radio. I mentioned that we were from Memphis, and the guy lit up like a Chicks Stadium fireworks display. He CARED about Carla. Our music is a precious export and something for which I will always have unlimited pride.