Tag: Unapologetic

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Music Music Blog

The Flow: Live-Streamed Music Events This Week, March 11-17

CREDIT: Darnell Henderson II

As the weather becomes idyllic, and vaccines more common, there’s been a dip in live-streamed events. Venues with outdoor stages have been busier than ever of late, and some, like Murphy’s, are setting up their outdoor stages just for dear old St. Patrick’s Day. And yet some artists and venues prefer to err on the side of caution, and there are unique gems available for streaming on your device of choice as well. Cameron Bethany makes a rare appearance, as does the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, no less. Please tune in to their virtual concerts and, as always, tip generously.
Darnell Henderson II

Cameron Bethany

REMINDER: The Memphis Flyer supports social distancing in these uncertain times. Please live-stream responsibly. We remind all players that even a small gathering could recklessly spread the coronavirus and endanger others. If you must gather as a band, please keep all players six feet apart, preferably outside, and remind viewers to do the same.

ALL TIMES CST/CDT
Remember to reset clocks on Sunday, March 14.

Thursday, March 11
7:30 p.m.
Cameron Bethany – Dark Room Sessions
Facebook

8 p.m.
Devil Train – at B-Side
Facebook    YouTube     Twitch TV

Friday, March 12
6 p.m.
The Juke Joint Allstars – at Wild Bill’s
Facebook

8 p.m.
Jacob Church – at B-Side
Facebook    YouTube    Twitch TV

Saturday, March 13
10 a.m.
Richard Wilson
Facebook

6 p.m.
The Juke Joint Allstars – at Wild Bill’s
Facebook

7:30 p.m.
Memphis Symphony Orchestra – Beethoven’s 250th Birthday Celebration
Website

8 p.m.
The Eastwoods and Oakwalker – at B-Side
YouTube      Twitch TV

Sunday, March 14
3 p.m.
Dale Watson – Chicken $#!+ Bingo
Website

4 p.m.
Bill Shipper – For Kids (every Sunday)
Facebook

Monday, March 15
8 p.m.
John Paul Keith (every Monday)
YouTube

Tuesday, March 16
7 p.m.
Bill Shipper (every Tuesday)
Facebook

Wednesday, March 17
6 p.m.
Richard Wilson (every Wednesday)
Facebook

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: A Weirdo From Memphis

CREDIT: A Weirdo From Memphis

A Weirdo From Memphis

Screengrab from ‘Kerosene Heater.’

Music Video Monday is a dumpster fire.

2020 was a bad year for all musicians, but A Weirdo From Memphis (AWFM) had it worse than most. He lost his job, his first big tour was canceled, and he had both his identity and his car stolen. So, he did what he had to do: he wrote a song about it.

“’Kerosene Heater’ is what I felt like after one of the worst months of my life,” he said. “Sometimes you arrive at a turning point of realizing things aren’t going to be for a long time, and then living in that and embracing it and turning that feeling into art. Thats what making music turns into for me lately.”

Rapping over a Kid Maestro beat, AWFM speaks for all of us as he tells the world where to shove it. Now, the video — shot by Unapologetic collaborator 35 Miles and cut by Troy the Editor — is ready for a turn on the Catwalk.

Music Video Monday: A Weirdo From Memphis

If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com. 

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Cover Feature News

2021: Here’s Looking at You

If 2020 was the year of despair, 2021 appears to be the year of hope.

Wanna see what that could look like? Cast your gaze to Wuhan, China, birthplace of COVID-19.

News footage from Business Insider shows hundreds of carefree young people gathered in a massive swimming pool, dancing and splashing at a rock concert. They are effortlessly close together and there’s not a mask in sight. Bars and restaurants are packed with maskless revelers. Night markets are jammed. Business owners smile, remember the bleak times, and say the worst is behind them. How far behind? There’s already a COVID-19 museum in Wuhan.

That could be Memphis (once again) one day. But that day is still likely months off. Vaccines arrived here in mid-December. Early doses rightfully went to frontline healthcare workers. Doses for the masses won’t likely come until April or May, according to health experts.

While we still cannot predict exactly “what” Memphians will be (can be?) doing next year, we can tell you “where” they might be doing it. New places will open their doors next year, and Memphis is set for some pretty big upgrades.

But it doesn’t stop there. “Memphis has momentum” was Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland’s catchphrase as he won a second term for the office last October. It did. New building projects bloomed like the Agricenter’s sunflowers. And it still does. Believe it or not, not even COVID-19 could douse developers’ multi-million-dollar optimism on the city.

Here are few big projects slated to open in 2021:

Renasant Convention Center

Throughout 2020, crews have been hard at work inside and outside the building once called the Cook Convention Center.

City officials and Memphis Tourism broke ground on a $200-million renovation project for the building in January 2020. The project will bring natural light and color to the once dark and drab convention center built in 1974. The first events are planned for the Renasant Convention Center in the new year.

Memphis International Airport

Memphis International Airport

Expect the ribbon to be cut on Memphis International Airport’s $245-million concourse modernization project in 2021. The project was launched in 2014 in an effort to upgrade the airport’s concourse to modern standards and to right-size the space after Delta de-hubbed the airport.

Once finished, all gates, restaurants, shops, and more will be located in a single concourse. The space will have higher ceilings, more natural light, wider corridors, moving walkways, children’s play areas, a stage for live music, and more.

Collage Dance Collective

The beautiful new building on the corner of Tillman and Sam Cooper is set to open next year in an $11-million move for the Collage Dance Collective.

The 22,000-square-foot performing arts school will feature five studios, office space, a dressing room, a study lounge, 70 parking spaces, and a physical therapy area.

The Memphian Hotel

The Memphian Hotel

A Facebook post by The Memphian Hotel reads, “Who is ready for 2021?” The hotel is, apparently. Developers told the Daily Memphian recently that the 106-room, $24-million hotel is slated to open in April.

“Walking the line between offbeat and elevated, The Memphian will give guests a genuine taste of Midtown’s unconventional personality, truly capturing the free spirit of the storied art district in which the property sits,” reads a news release.

Watch for work to begin next year on big projects in Cooper-Young, the Snuff District, Liberty Park, Tom Lee Park, and The Walk. — Toby Sells

Book ‘Em

After the Spanish flu epidemic and World War I came a flood of convention-defying fiction as authors wrestled with the trauma they had lived through. E.M. Forster confronted colonialism and rigid gender norms in A Passage to India. Virginia Woolf published Mrs. Dalloway. James Joyce gave readers Ulysses. Langston Hughes’ first collection, The Weary Blues, was released.

It’s too early to tell what authors and poets will make of 2020, a year in which America failed to contain the coronavirus. This reader, though, is eager to see what comes.

Though I’ve been a bit too nervous to look very far into 2021 (I don’t want to jinx it, you know?), there are a few books already on my to-read list. First up, I’m excited for MLK50 founding managing editor Deborah Douglas’ U.S. Civil Rights Trail, due in January. Douglas lives in Chicago now, but there’s sure to be some Memphis in that tome.

Next, Ed Tarkington’s The Fortunate Ones, also due in January, examines privilege and corruption on Nashville’s Capitol Hill. Early reviews have compared Tarkington to a young Pat Conroy. For anyone disappointed in Tennessee’s response to any of this year’s crises, The Fortunate Ones is not to be missed.

Most exciting, perhaps, is the forthcoming Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda prose anthology, expected February 2nd. The anthology is edited by Memphis-born journalist Jesse J. Holland, and also features a story by him, as well as Memphians Sheree Renée Thomas, Troy L. Wiggins, and Danian Darrell Jerry.

“To be in pages with so many Memphis writers just feels wonderful,” Thomas told me when I called her to chat about the good news. “It’s a little surreal, but it’s fun,” Jerry adds, explaining that he’s been a Marvel comics fan since childhood. “I get to mix some of those childhood imaginings with some of the skills I’ve worked to acquire over the years.”

Though these books give just a glimpse at the literary landscape of the coming year, if they’re any indication of what’s to come, then, if nothing else, Memphians will have more great stories to look forward to. — Jesse Davis

Courtesy Memphis Redbirds

AutoZone Park

Take Me Out With the Crowd

Near the end of my father’s life, we attended a Redbirds game together at AutoZone Park. A few innings into the game, Dad turned to me and said, “I like seeing you at a ballpark. I can tell your worries ease.”

Then along came 2020, the first year in at least four decades that I didn’t either play in a baseball game or watch one live, at a ballpark, peanuts and Cracker Jack a soft toss away. The pandemic damaged most sports over the last 12 months, but it all but killed minor-league baseball, the small-business version of our national pastime, one that can’t lean on television and sponsorship revenue to offset the loss of ticket-buying fans on game day. AutoZone Park going a year without baseball is the saddest absence I’ve felt in Memphis culture since moving to this remarkable town in 1991. And I’m hoping today — still 2020, dammit — that 2021 marks a revival, even if it’s gradual. In baseball terms, we fans will take a base on balls to get things going before we again swing for the fences.

All indications are that vaccines will make 2021 a better year for gathering, be it at your favorite watering hole or your favorite ballpark. Indications also suggest that restrictions will remain in place well into the spring and summer (baseball season). How many fans can a ballpark host and remain safe? How many fans will enjoy the “extras” of an evening at AutoZone Park — that sunset over the Peabody, that last beer in the seventh inning — if a mask must be worn as part of the experience? And what kind of operation will we see when the gates again open? Remember, these are small businesses. Redbirds president Craig Unger can be seen helping roll out the tarp when a July thunderstorm interrupts the Redbirds and Iowa Cubs. What will “business as usual” mean for Triple-A baseball as we emerge from the pandemic?

I wrote down three words and taped them up on my home-office wall last March: patience, determination, and empathy. With a few more doses of each — and yes, millions of doses of one vaccine or another — the sports world will regain crowd-thrilling normalcy. For me, it will start when I take a seat again in my happy place. It’s been a long, long time, Dad, since my worries properly eased.— Frank Murtaugh

Film in 2021: Don’t Give up Hope

“Nobody knows anything.” Never has William Goldman’s immortal statement about Hollywood been more true. Simply put, 2020 was a disaster for the industry. The pandemic closed theaters and called Hollywood’s entire business model into question. Warner Brothers’ announcement that it would stream all of its 2021 offerings on HBO Max sent shock waves through the industry. Some said it was the death knell for theaters.

I don’t buy it. Warner Brothers, owned by AT&T and locked in a streaming war with Netflix and Disney, are chasing the favor of Wall Street investors, who love the rent-seeking streaming model. But there’s just too much money on the table to abandon theaters. 2019 was a record year at the box office, with $42 billion in worldwide take, $11.4 billion of which was from North America. Theatrical distribution is a proven business model that has worked for 120 years. Netflix, on the other hand, is $12 billion in debt.

Will audiences return to theaters once we’ve vaccinated our way out of the coronavirus-shaped hole we’re in? Prediction at this point is a mug’s game, but signs point to yes. Tenet, which will be the year’s biggest film, grossed $303 million in overseas markets where the virus was reasonably under control. In China, where the pandemic started, a film called My People, My Homeland has brought in $422 million since October 1st. I don’t know about y’all, but once I get my jab, they’re going to have to drag me out of the movie theater.

There will be quite a bit to watch. With the exception of Wonder Woman 1984, the 2020 blockbusters were pushed to 2021, including Dune, Spielberg’s West Side Story remake, the latest James Bond installment No Time to Die, Marvel’s much-anticipated Black Widow, Top Gun: Maverick, and Godzilla vs. Kong. Memphis director Craig Brewer’s second film with Eddie Murphy, the long-awaited Coming 2 America, will bow on Amazon March 5th, with the possibility of a theatrical run still in the cards.

There’s no shortage of smaller, excellent films on tap. Regina King’s directorial debut One Night in Miami, about a meeting between Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown, premieres January 15th. Minari, the stunning story of Korean immigrants in rural Arkansas, which was Indie Memphis 2020’s centerpiece film, lands February 12th. The Bob’s Burgers movie starts cooking April 9th. And coolest of all, next month Indie Memphis will partner with Sundance to bring the latest in cutting-edge cinema to the Malco Summer Drive-In. There’s plenty to be hopeful for in the new year. — Chris McCoy

Looking Ahead: Music

We usually highlight the upcoming hot concerts in this space, but those are still on the back burner. Instead, get a load of these stacks of hot wax (and streams) dropping next year. Remember, the artists get a better share when you purchase rather than stream, especially physical product like vinyl.

Alysse Gafkjen

Julien Baker

One of the biggest-profile releases will be Julien Baker’s Little Oblivians, due out on Matador in February. Her single “Faith Healer” gives us a taste of what to expect. Watch the Flyer for more on that soon. As for other drops from larger indie labels, Merge will offer up A Little More Time with Reigning Sound in May (full disclosure: this all-Memphis version of the band includes yours truly).

Closer to home, John Paul Keith’s The Rhythm of the City also drops in February, co-released by hometown label Madjack and Italian imprint Wild Honey. Madjack will also offer up albums by Mark Edgar Stuart and Jed Zimmerman, the latter having been produced by Stuart. Matt Ross-Spang is mixing Zimmerman’s record, and there’s much buzz surrounding it (but don’t worry, it’s properly grounded).

Jeremy Stanfill mines similar Americana territory, and he’ll release new work on the Blue Barrel imprint. Meanwhile, look for more off-kilter sounds from Los Psychosis and Alicja Trout’s Alicja-Pop project, both on Black & Wyatt. That label will also be honored with a compilation of their best releases so far, by Head Perfume out of Dresden. On the quieter side of off-kilter, look for Aquarian Blood’s Sending the Golden Hour on Goner in May.

Bruce Watson’s Delta-Sonic Sound studio has been busy, and affiliated label Bible & Tire Recording Co. will release a big haul of old-school gospel, some new, some archival, including artists Elizabeth King and Pastor Jack Ward, and compilations from the old J.C.R. and D-Vine Spiritual labels. Meanwhile, Big Legal Mess will drop new work from singer/songwriter Alexa Rose and, in March, Luna 68 — the first new album from the City Champs in 10 years. Expect more groovy organ and guitar boogaloo jazz from the trio, with a heaping spoonful of science-fiction exotica to boot.

Many more artists will surely be releasing Bandcamp singles, EPs, and more, but for web-based content that’s thinking outside of the stream, look for the January premiere of Unapologetic’s UNDRGRNDAF RADIO, to be unveiled on weareunapologetic.com and their dedicated app. — Alex Greene

Chewing Over a Tough Year

Beware the biohazard.

Samuel X. Cicci

The Beauty Shop

Perhaps a bit hyperbolic, but the image that pops into my head when thinking about restaurants in 2020 are the contagion-esque geo-domes that Karen Carrier set up on the back patio of the Beauty Shop. A clever conceit, but also a necessary one — a move designed to keep diners safe and separated when going out to eat. If it all seems a little bizarre, well, that’s what 2020 was thanks to COVID-19.

We saw openings, closings, restrictions, restrictions lifted, restrictions then put back in place; the Memphis Restaurant Association and Shelby County Health Department arguing back and forth over COVID guidelines, with both safety and survival at stake; and establishments scrambling to find creative ways to drum up business. The Beauty Shop domes were one such example. The Reilly’s Downtown Majestic Grille, on the other hand, transformed into Cocozza, an Italian ghost concept restaurant put into place until it was safe to reopen Majestic in its entirety. Other places, like Global Café, put efforts in place to help provide meals to healthcare professionals or those who had fallen into financial hardship during the pandemic.

Unfortunately, not every restaurant was able to survive the pandemic. The popular Lucky Cat Ramen on Broad Ave. closed its doors, as did places like Puck Food Hall, 3rd & Court, Avenue Coffee, Midtown Crossing Grill, and many others.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Working in the hospitality business requires a certain kind of resilience, and that showed up in spades. Many restaurants adapted to new regulations quickly, and with aplomb, doing their best to create a safe environment for hungry Memphians all while churning out takeout and delivery orders.

And even amid a pandemic backdrop, many aspiring restaurateurs tried their hand at opening their own places. Chip and Amanda Dunham branched out from the now-closed Grove Grill to open Magnolia & May, a country brasserie in East Memphis. Just a few blocks away, a new breakfast joint popped up in Southall Café. Downtown, the Memphis Chess Club opened its doors, complete with a full-service café and restaurant. Down in Whitehaven, Ken and Mary Olds created Muggin Coffeehouse, the first locally owned coffee shop in the neighborhood. And entrepreneurial-minded folks started up their own delivery-only ventures, like Brittney Adu’s Furloaved Breads + Bakery.

So what will next year bring? With everything thrown out of whack, I’m loath to make predictions, but with a vaccine on the horizon, I’m hoping (fingers crossed) that it becomes safer to eat out soon, and the restaurant industry can begin a long-overdue recovery. And to leave you with what will hopefully be a metaphor for restaurants in 2021: By next summer, Andy Ticer and Michael Hudman’s Hog & Hominy will complete its Phoenician rebirth from the ashes of a disastrous fire and open its doors once again.

In the meantime, keep supporting your local restaurants! — Samuel X. Cicci

“Your Tickets Will be at Will Call”

Oh, to hear those words again, and plenty of arts organizations are eager to say them. The pandemic wrecked the seasons for performing arts groups and did plenty of damage to museums and galleries.

Not that they haven’t made valiant and innovative efforts to entertain from afar with virtual programming.

But they’re all hoping to mount physical, not virtual, seasons in the coming year.

Playhouse on the Square suspended scheduled in-person stage productions until June 2021. This includes the 52nd season lineup of performances that were to be on the stages of Playhouse on the Square, The Circuit Playhouse, and TheatreWorks at the Square. It continues to offer the Playhouse at Home Series, digital content via its website and social media.

Theatre Memphis celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2021 and is eager to show off its new facility, a major renovation that was going to shut it down most of 2020 anyway while it expanded common spaces and added restrooms and production space while updating dressing rooms and administrative offices. But the hoped-for August opening was pushed back, and it plans to reschedule the programming for this season to next.

Hattiloo Theatre will continue to offer free online programming in youth acting and technical theater, and it has brought a five-week playwright’s workshop and free Zoom panel discussions with national figures in Black theater. Like the other institutions, it is eager to get back to the performing stage when conditions allow.

Ballet Memphis has relied on media and platforms that don’t require contact, either among audience members or dancers. But if there are fewer partnerings among dancers, there are more solos, and group movement is well-distanced. The organization has put several short pieces on video, releasing some and holding the rest for early next year. It typically doesn’t start a season until late summer or early fall, so the hope is to get back into it without missing a step.

Opera Memphis is active with its live Sing2Me program of mobile opera concerts and programming on social media. Its typical season starts with 30 Days of Opera in August that usually leads to its first big production of the season, so, COVID willing, that may emerge.

Courtesy Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Dana Claxton, Headdress at the Brooks earlier this year.

Museums and galleries, such as the Dixon Gallery & Gardens, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, National Civil Rights Museum, and the Metal Museum are functioning at limited capacity, but people can go and enjoy the offerings. The scope of the shows is limited, as coronavirus has put the kibosh on blockbuster shows for now. Look for easing of protocols as the situation allows in the coming year. — Jon W. Sparks

Politics

Oyez. Oyez. Oh yes, there is one year out of every four in which regularly scheduled elections are not held in Shelby County, and 2021 is such a year. But decisions will be made during the year by the Republican super-majority of the state legislature in Nashville that will have a significant bearing on the elections that will occur in the three-year cycle of 2022-2024 and, in fact, on those occurring through 2030.

This would be in the course of the constitutionally required ritual during which district lines are redefined every 10 years for the decade to come, in the case of legislative seats and Congressional districts. The U.S. Congress, on the basis of population figures provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, will have allocated to each state its appropriate share of the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. And the state legislature will determine how that number is apportioned statewide. The current number of Tennessee’s Congressional seats is nine. The state’s legislative ratio is fixed at 99 state House members and 33 members of the state Senate.

Tennessee is one of 37 states in which, as indicated, the state legislature calls the shots for both Congressional and state redistricting. The resultant redistricting undergoes an approval process like any other measure, requiring a positive vote in both the state Senate and the state House, with the Governor empowered to consent or veto.

No one anticipates any disagreements between any branches of government. Any friction in the redistricting process will likely involve arguments over turf between neighboring GOP legislators. Disputes emanating from the minority Democrats will no doubt be at the mercy of the courts.

The forthcoming legislative session is expected to be lively, including holdover issues relating to constitutional carry (the scrapping of permits for firearms), private school vouchers (currently awaiting a verdict by the state Supreme Court), and, as always, abortion. Measures relating to the ongoing COVID crisis and vaccine distribution are expected, as is a proposal to give elected county executives primacy over health departments in counties where the latter exist.

There is no discernible disharmony between those two entities in Shelby County, whose government has devoted considerable attention over the last year to efforts to control the pandemic and offset its effects. Those will continue, as well as efforts to broaden the general inclusiveness of county government vis-à-vis ethnic and gender groups.

It is still a bit premature to speculate on future shifts of political ambition, except to say that numerous personalities, in both city and county government, are eyeing the prospects of succeeding Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland in 2023. And several Democrats are looking at a potential race against District Attorney General Amy Weirich in 2022.

There are strong rumors that, after a false start or two, Memphis will follow the lead of several East Tennessee co-ops and finally depart from TVA.

And meanwhile, in March, the aforesaid Tennessee Democrats will select a new chair from numerous applicants. — Jackson Baker

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: PreauXX & AWFM

Music Video Monday is putting in the time.

In 1993, University of Colorado professor Anders Ericsson first put forth the idea that the key ingredient in expertise is 10,000 hours of practice. Many interpret it as a message to creatives everywhere: Talent doesn’t matter so much as not giving up.

PreauXX’s new song “10K” is an ode to the grind.

“They say it takes 10,000 hours to become a master at your craft…have you taken your journey?” asks PreauXX. “This song is dedicated to the people who are relentless about their grind/hustle/goal. Are you willing to do what it takes to get to where you want in life?”

PreauXX’s partners in grind on this Unapologetic joint are producer Kid Maestro and A Weirdo From Memphis.

“10,000 means something different to everybody,” says AWFM. “Could be your journey, could be your price, could be your bounty. What does it mean to you?”

The video, directed by 35Miles, puts us in the middle of a cutthroat card game.

“Shout out to Unapologetic Visual for creating this visual experience,” said Kid Maestro. “Their eye and vision really brought this song to new heights. Also, I won the game of UNO in case anyone was wondering.”

Music Video Monday: PreauXX & AWFM

If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Cover Feature News

Movie Music! Memphis Musicians are Getting their Songs in Films and TV Shows

CREDIT: Darnell Henderson II

“You picked up on this energy

I can see it in your E-Y-E

It’s like I’m fresh off the shelf, fresh off the lot, fresh out the pot.

It’s like I’m brand new … “

Cameron Bethany wrote and sang those words at a turning point in his life, when he was indeed feeling brand new. For the singer/songwriter and his colleagues in the Unapologetic collective, it marked one of those moments of reinvention that they all strive for, a moment of pure authenticity, unaffected by conventional demands. Like most such moments, it was intensely personal.

Darnell Henderson II

Cameron Bethany

That was more than three years ago, released on his debut album, YOUMAKEMENERVOUS, so it came as a bit of a surprise when that musical moment took on a new life this summer. In the Netflix series Trinkets, as one character confronts two others and then walks out of the scene in disgust, the track’s beats kick in, full of portent and tension, until the final credits and the song’s chorus roll out together.

It feels as if the music was designed for the scene. And while the licensing of his song for a major television series, known in the industry as placement, represented a hefty payday for Bethany and co-producers Kid Maestro and IMAKEMADBEATS, it was the way the show’s and the song’s aesthetics dovetailed that made it feel like such a triumph to the singer.

“When we were making the record, when I first brought it in, I had a small GarageBand track, and we talked about what I did as we remade it. We all agreed that it sounded like something that could be used in movies or commercials,” Bethany tells me. “But I couldn’t imagine it might be placed. So it’s almost like we predicted the future a little bit. Still, it ended up being better than anything I could have thought about.”

Although having music tracks placed in movies, television, and commercials is part of Unapologetic’s bread and butter, all agree that this moment was special. “When I first heard that [the placement] was happening, I went back and ended up falling in love with the show,” Bethany says. “Which I was hoping for. I was hoping it was something I could watch on a daily basis, something I gravitated to. Me liking it made me love that moment and made that moment so much more. I would have been grateful either way, whether I liked it or not. But it adds something, to be a fan of something that your work is featured in.”

It doesn’t always happen that way, of course, but placing a song in a movie, a series, or an ad, or scoring such media from scratch, can often be the one time an artist or group is paid a fair price for their music. Now, with live shows few and far between due to the pandemic, and streaming paying only pennies for plays, such placements, also called synchronization or “sync”-ing, have taken on a new importance.

David Patten Mason

Marco Pavé

Memphis rapper Marco Pavé, who has also enjoyed some success with music placements, including the locally made indie film Uncorked, notes that there are different levels of success in the game, but all of them tend to be more lucrative than live shows or album sales, at least for an independent artist. And they tend to offer more exposure as well.

“The placements that you’re really trying to get are the feature films in theaters,” he says. “TV is more of a mid-tier, that could be more high-tier depending on the network. That could range from $2,500 to $5,000 for one song. So it’s definitely a payday for a lot of artists. And it’s a huge discovery tool. A lot of people consider music supervisors to be the new A&R of the music industry. It’s a level of discovery that you really can’t beat because for one, you’re getting paid, but also you’re getting discovered in a way that labels are not suited to do.”

If music supervisors, in choosing the tracks that films and series use, are especially hands-on, they may indeed take on the de facto role of artist and repertoire (A&R) development. But just as often, tracks are lifted wholesale from albums or singles.

That’s been the case for a long time. One local example comes from the surf/crime jazz group Impala, whose love of such genres led them to self-release an EP cut at Easley-McCain studios in the early ’90s.

Billy Fox

Joe Restivo, Willie Hall, Lester Snell, and Michael Tolesore

Bassist and producer Scott Bomar recalls that the EP led to bigger things. “Then we put our first record on Estrus Records, Kings of the Strip, and that got distributed real widely. It seemed to get a lot of attention specifically in Los Angeles. That was the days of faxes, so I remember getting a fax out of nowhere from somebody at HBO, and they wanted to license a song for a Rich Hall show. Which we did. I didn’t know anything about licensing whatsoever. We’d been working in the studio with Roland Janes, so I asked Roland about it and he broke it down and explained the business part of it. And the information he gave me, I feel like I made a whole career out of it. He really gave me some good advice.”

The best was yet to come for Impala, thanks in part to serendipity. “The story that I heard is that George Clooney’s music supervisor for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, David Arnold, was in New Orleans for Jazz Fest and he bought our very first EP at a record store there. It had our version of Henry Mancini’s ‘Experiment in Terror.’ And we licensed that to George Clooney’s first film that he directed. It was probably the biggest placement we had.”

That such an obscure track could translate into a major placement many years after its release leads Bomar to conclude: “The best thing you can do to get your music licensed is tour and try to get airplay. The more exposure you get for your music, the more chance you have of a director or somebody hearing it. Of course, you can send the stuff to people, but it seems like as much as you try to get things licensed, a lot of times it’s just sort of blind luck. Random.”

It’s ironic that Bomar emphasizes the role of luck and fate, when in fact he has parlayed those early successes with Impala into a career in the ultimate “placement” — soundtrack production. Early work by the band first caught the attention of local underground auteur Mike McCarthy, who hired them to score his film Teenage Tupelo (remastered and reissued this year). This in turn caught the ear of then-burgeoning filmmaker Craig Brewer, who, after his The Poor & Hungry captivated filmgoers, contacted Bomar about his next project, a film called Hustle & Flow.

“He gave me a script for it,” Bomar recalls, “but it took another five years for it to actually get made. And when John Singleton came on board, he said I’ve got some great composers in Hollywood that could do this, but Craig really vouched for me. But, even though I’d been working with Craig on this thing for five years, he said to me, ‘You’re gonna have to sell John.’

“Now, Shaft was John’s favorite movie in the whole world. His email even had Shaft in the name. So I told him about [Bomar’s soul band] the Bo-Keys, with Willie Hall, and Skip Pitts who played with Isaac, and he got real excited about that. And then I realized I had a live recording from the night before in my pocket. So I put the CD in and the first thing on there was us doing the theme from Shaft. The first thing he heard was Skip doing that wah-wah guitar intro and Willie playing the high hat, and he said ‘Yep, this is it!'”

That 2005 soundtrack by Bomar, which complemented the pure hip-hop that won Three 6 Mafia an Oscar for the film, would take on a second life this year, as Brewer worked on another labor of love, Dolemite Is My Name. “Craig and Billy Fox were editing the film and trying out different music and having a hard time finding the right vibe,” says Bomar. “And Craig told Billy, ‘Put in the Hustle & Flow score.’ Craig said once they started editing with that score, it really started to come together. I think they really fell in love with that sound for Dolemite.”

The final result was a masterful, original genre study of blaxploitation scores in what may be Bomar’s finest achievement. Yet he still finds soundtrack work and placements to be elusive. “If that was the only thing I did, it wouldn’t be sustainable for me,” he says. “I’m thankful for those projects when they come around, but they’re not always there. For someone outside of Hollywood to get placements, it’s a little tricky. You’re not gonna get as much of it. You’re not in the middle of all the action.”

Though both Bomar and the Unapologetic artists have stoked interest in placements with frequent visits to New York and Los Angeles, an alternative approach, being pioneered by Made in Memphis Entertainment (MIME), is to bring L.A. to Memphis. With the legendary former Stax songwriter David Porter as a partner, MIME can turn some heads, but that’s also due to astute management by company president Tony Alexander.

“About two and half years ago,” explains Alexander, “as part of our overall strategy, we acquired a songs catalog, a sync business in L.A. called Heavy Hitters Music Group, that had been around about 25 years. And that business has continued to grow. So that’s our L.A. operation, and that has been very, very beneficial to us. Made in Memphis Entertainment has the label, but we also have the recording studios, the publishing companies, and our distribution business. Heavy Hitters Music Group is one of our publishing companies. They represent about 1,700 artists, and their business model, unlike many that sign the writer, is to sign the songs. And then they represent the songs for placement. They have a pretty amazing track record.”

While MIME develops local performing artists like Brandon Lewis, Porcelan, and Jessica Ray, they also quietly go about the business of placements. And yet, Alexander notes, “The vast majority of who we represent are not local to Memphis.” Rather, Heavy Hitters Music Group tends to work with L.A.-based producers, who are more savvy to the ways of placed recordings. Accordingly, one of MIME’s missions has been to educate local creators in the ways of placed tracks.

“One of the reasons why education is such an important component of what we do is that we wanted the local artists here in Memphis to understand what makes songs sync-able,” Alexander says. “These are the things that make them easy to clear. So we can create more opportunities for Memphis artists. Because historically, most of the time that Memphis artists were able to get placements, it was for things that were either produced here or had a Memphis theme. It was not access to global projects or projects that were not Memphis-oriented. And that’s what we’re really trying to do, is open up opportunities for Memphis artists to get placements in non-Memphis-oriented projects.”

As the manager of MIME’s 4U Recording Studio, Crystal Carpenter takes that educational role very seriously, showing artists who work there, for example, how important documentation, credits, and even file formats are. As Alexander explains, “One of the things that makes sync easier for an artist or writer is if it’s one stop. If the master and the publishing is controlled by the same individual, that’s really what a lot of music supervisors are looking for. Because if it’s too complicated, they’ll just move on to another song.”

Beyond impromptu teachable moments in the studio, MIME also sponsors workshops to confront such issues in a more focused way. Tuesday, October 20th, and on the 27th, they’ll host workshops covering “the nuts and bolts of music licensing and publishing, creating and pitching, artist branding and sync-writing for a brief vs. placing existing music.”

MIME is not alone in this pursuit. The local nonprofit On Location: Memphis was originally formed to produce the International Film and Music Festivals, but when entertainment attorney Angela Green took over, she changed directions. “I felt that the film screening space was getting crowded, and that there were a lot of organizations doing it quite well. There were other areas of film and music being overlooked. That’s what led to me coming up with the Memphis Music Banq.”

Margaret Deloach

Memphis Music Banq

The Memphis Music Banq, launched a year ago, administers music for placements, and now represents the work of nearly a dozen local artists. This Banq contains songs, not dollars, though its aim is to translate one into the other, and it offers workshops and networking opportunities for artists who seek knowledge about the world of placements. One lighthearted series they host is their “Mixer Competition,” wherein two or more music producers try scoring a single film, and viewers vote on the best score. Such opportunities for education and networking have already paid off, with Memphis Music Banq creator Kirk Smith having landed a soundtrack deal for Come to Africa, to be screened at this year’s Indie Memphis Film Festival. (The next such mixers are scheduled for October 15th and October 20th.)

And yet, with many of these educational opportunities focused on how to do things according to the established norms and expectations, it’s important to remember the fundamental philosophy of IMAKEMADBEATS, founder of Unapologetic: Be your most authentic, vulnerable self in all your work. “I feel like if people are looking for a hired hand, they’re not going to come to me,” he says. “They’re gonna come to me for what I do. They’re gonna come to Unapologetic for what we do. Because we’re daring and we’re bold. It would be hard to imagine someone saying, ‘Hey Cameron, we need you to do this Aretha Franklin thing here. Make that happen.’ We’d be like, ‘What?’ People are going to go to Cameron because he’s going to be who he is.”

Categories
Music Music Blog

Listen Up: Ethan Healy: On Returning to His Memphis Roots. New Single and Video Released July 23rd

Ethan Healy in ‘Second Wind’



Ethan Healy returns to his Memphis roots in his new single, “Second Wind,” which was released along with the video July 23rd. 

As he raps in the song, “South in my mouth/and man I can’t control it/even if I hold my breath”

“The song sounds like redemption to me,” says Healy, 27, who now lives in Los Angeles. “I spent a lot of 2019 doubting and second-guessing myself. And writing this song was really cathartic. The song began as a means of self-acceptance and, eventually, became a general commentary on life as I was seeing it. The song really opens up as it progresses. And, as the second verse continues, you hear a sort of push and pull between normal and pitched vocals. In the same way, I’ve really stepped into myself more fully this year.

“I’ve been working toward finding a balance between humility and ego. But, overall,  the song, really, is kind of a coming to grips with myself. My inspiration. My identity. I was really kind of shutting my roots out for a while. So, calling on Memphis in the song really meant to be a reminder to myself: ‘This is where you’re from. This is what you’re inspired by.’”

And, Healy says, “‘I am Memphis,’ is what it essentially is saying.”

The Buick LeSabre in the “Second Wind” video is a nod to Memphis. “I got on the phone with Huey’s Midtown to figure out what type of Buick ran into the restaurant in the 1970s. The woman said she contacted some of their family and they couldn’t remember.”

‘Second Wind’

The Buick was “just to tie into the Memphis allusion and that specific moment. The first words are, “Fist-full of wind in the back of the Buick/Same one that wrecked into Madison Huey’s”

Being from Memphis is a plus, Healy says. “It really provided me with a fearlessness and creativity. Growing up in Midtown helped a lot because there was a freedom of expression there that became my baseline. That’s really all I knew was being able to express myself. And trying to express myself rather than holding everything in. I still hold stuff in, but I think growing up in Midtown but also having my friend group around me, I was surrounded by creative, musical  people.” 

Healy grew up playing soccer and other sports, but he also liked to sing. “I always liked singing in the shower all the time. We grew up going to IC (Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception). My mom was in the choir. She was always singing a bunch of hymns nonstop around the house.”

He wrote prose before he wrote music. Jamie Brummer, his advanced placement English teacher at Christian Brothers High School, “literally reached into the depths of me and pulled my voice out of me,” Healy says. “He really helped me find my voice. My poetic and writing style in general. He opened a lot of doors for me. We were reading stuff like a lot of Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, learning about different writing styles.”

Healy’s parents divorced right after he got out of high school. “I needed a way to express myself. Get out the emotions I was feeling. I didn’t have that at the time. I picked up the guitar the summer after high school. I just kind of stayed in my room and learned guitar.”

He “cut his teeth” on hip-hop from grade school through middle school and then high school, so he rapped while he played guitar.  “I grew up listening to a lot of rap.”

As for college, Healy, who had made some videos in high school, was drawn to film and video production. “I’ve always had an affinity for stories and storytelling and I thought that would be a really cool way of doing it.”

But his advisor at the University of Memphis “wasn’t as invested” in his future as Healy hoped. “I operate on feelings a lot. I did not get an ounce of good feeling from it. ‘I’m going to listen to my gut here.’ I had a secondary path. Physical therapy.”

Healy graduated in 2015 with a degree in exercise physiology.“And a few months later I started my doctorate at UT downtown in physical therapy.”

But music still was a part of him. During his last two years of college, he sat down and tried to figure out what he wanted to do with his craft. “I really enjoy music, but I want to create something I’m ultimately proud of that will really tell my story and really access some of the fictional styles I like as well. So, I storyboarded for a year or so and wrote a real coming of age story. It was basically like a rags-to-riches story where someone gains the world but loses everything.”

He wrote music to go with it. “I told the story through music and made it all one piece of art.”

Healy recorded three or four songs that were released on Soundcloud by 2015. A blog, Hillydilly (now Before the Data), picked him up and included the songs. “It was a blog a lot of music industry people kind of scout, watch to see who is making what music. That was really the turning point for me.”

He learned how to present his music to people “to make it more approachable. I’d made music for a while. I just wanted to figure out what’s not clicking with people. I tried a little less. The law of reversed effort was in full effect. I kind of loosened up a little bit and things started working. People started listening.”

Henry Head

Ethan Healy

Healy never was employed at a job pertaining to his degree. “I was being approached by labels as I was making a living just with something I considered to be a hobby at this point. I figured it wouldn’t be productive for me to turn down an opportunity to really do something creative and fun.”

He released  A Galaxy with Skin, a mixed tape, in 2015, and Subluxe, an album, in 2017. “They both told a very similar story from different perspectives and different levels of experience from different times of life. So, they’re all centering around this idea of recognizing what’s in front of you. And one vehicle for that would be the disillusionment of knowing what really matters when you’re given everything.”

Healy began using a binaural microphone in 2017 on Subluxe  “for field recordings that would either serve as added textures or transitions between songs.

“The way the microphone processes audio is the same way the human ear receives audio. So, when you play these recordings back, if you had the headphones on, it sounds like you’re in the exact context the sound was recorded in. Some tires screeching on my car is like an exact 3-D map of where the audio is being recorded. It’s another way for me to inject nature and inject my perspective into the stories and have them push things forward. And create momentum.”

The microphone worked perfectly on “Build,” one of his songs on Subluxe. “It’s kind of an account of this one night in Memphis when I was growing up. My friends and I were skateboarding outside pretty late. We got the cops called on us by this one neighbor. It created this divide in our neighborhood. To be able to put the listener into the story, into the experience of the song, I used the binaural mike to convey some of the details of the night.

“A friend of mine is smoking a Black & Mild. You can hear the burning of the cigarillo in your right ear. And you can hear the gravel in your left ear and right ear at times.”

The binaural microphone is a way to “ground the listener in the experience and the story. It’s like a world for them to live in. It’s an escape, in a way.

“I had label interest from 2015 until 2018. I signed a joint venture with RCA in December of 2018.”

That same year, Healy finished grad school, went on tour with his music, and moved to Los Angeles.

He’s devoted three years to his current album. “I spent a lot of time figuring out exactly who I wanted to be in music and in life in general. And a lot I need to change about myself. I had a lot of opportunities to reflect on what I want to talk about and the stories I want to share.”

Healy took heart from Memphis hip-hop group Unapologetic. “I wanted to be Unapologetic. Fearlessly creative and not afraid to push boundaries in music. But also take matters in my own hands. I want to learn production more. I want to have a larger hand in the production of the music that is coming out under my name.

“Up until Subluxe, I had production credits on maybe two of the songs. For this next album, the majority of it came from my mind. Came from my hands. It feels really good.”

Healy wanted to take “more control in life. I needed to be more self aware. And more, I guess, less selfish and just more approachable. I had gone through some traumatic stuff and developed a lot of calluses for it and I think that was beginning to affect the people around me. And I wanted to be able to still be myself, but also learn the right way to be treating myself and others.”

He’s now “much more self aware and considerate of the world around me.”

Healy began to see a therapist after he moved to Los Angeles. “I uncovered different parts of myself. I’m a bad perfectionist. I have a tendency to have this all or nothing kind of thought. Very binary kind of thinking. I think I accept mistakes a lot better now. I know mistakes now don’t define me. I’m more forgiving of myself and others.”

He even changed his appearance at one point. “I had a lot of ego to dissolve. And a really easy way to cut the cord of the ego at the start of my therapeutic journey, in a way, was to shave my head. I spent so long on my appearance in the morning with my hair, it became an anchor that really dragged me down and buried me inside myself.”

Describing “Nikes On,” the first song he did on his current album, Healy says, “Fighting time is wasting time. It’s yours for the taking and not the other way around. It’s a reminder for me to stay present. With my perfectionism, I spent a lot of time trying to make the past perfect and worry about the future.”

‘Nikes On’

As for wearing Nikes, Healy says, “I grew up listening to a lot of hip hop so Nike was mentioned in a lot of songs. And then I grew up playing sports and would always wear Nikes. I was very familiar with the brand.”

The line “I’m fast as lighting bro ya better use ya Nike’s bro” in T. I.’s song, “What You Know” made an impression on him, Healy says. “That line stayed in my head basically my whole life.”

Healy wears Cortez Nikes in “Nikes On.” “The Cortez Nike just reminded me of Forrest Gump.”

Originally, Nike was going to donate 30 or 40 pairs for the video, Healy says. “And then a week before we were filming, it came out that they going to have to re-allocate those funds to All-Star Weekend that was happening at the same time.”

Healy and his crew ended up buying “70 or 80 pairs” of Nikes, which they used in the video. “But we returned basically all of them.”

They were “working on a tight budget,” so they just kept the ones that had “scuffs on them,” Healy says. The majority of them were 10s or 11s. “The ones too dirty we kept and gave away to people who needed them or our friends.”

Healy wears Nike socks in his “Tucson” video in which he uses his foot to control a looping pedal, and Nike shoes and socks in “Reckless” and “Nikes On.” “I do wear them regularly. But I made sure to wear them in the videos.” 

He purposely wore the Nike apparel as subtle hints about the upcoming “Nikes On” video. “I wanted to leave these small Easter eggs along the way. Like a bread crumb trail.”

Healy made “Second Wind” with his friends Conrad Hsiang, Grant Yarber, and Ali Abu-Khraybeh at Joshua Tree, California. He and the three, whose producer names are “Public Library Commute,” “YOG$,” and “Forty Thieves,” “traveled to Joshua Tree this past February and spent a week and a half making music there. We made this song there.

“I grew up listening to U2 and they released their album, The Joshua Tree.  I always had that in the back of my head that would be a cool place to go create something.”

As for Hsiang, Yarber, and Abu-Khraybeh, Healy says, “We spent enough time working together where we all speak the same language creatively. We don’t even have to talk while we’re working. We know what the other is thinking.”

Henry Head

Working at Joshua Tree: Conrad Hsiang, Ethan Healy, Grant Yarber, and Ali Abu-Khraybeh.

This wasn’t the first time they got together. “It’s always a house and it’s always a different house for fresh energy. We’ve done it three times now. We set up the studio on this long dining room table and we faced it out toward the desert. There was already a piano inside and a bass, too, so we just recorded everything really natural in the middle of the room.

“I recorded the first verse on the binaural mike in the living room. As you listen to the first verse you can visualize the free space of the living room that the vocals were occupying. Some natural reverb. You hear things from across the room. The refrigerator door shuts at one point. Henry (Head) the photographer was walking down the spiral staircase behind me and you can hear the squeak.”

Healy is near the completion of his new album. “I’m going to finish up a couple of more singles to be released and I’m hoping this album will come out sometime in October.”

Reflecting on his career so far, Healy says, “To this day, I’m so surprised that this is what my life is. I’ve always felt like it was supposed to positively affect a large amount of people, but I never knew it was going to manifest in this creative way. I always thought it would be with physical therapy or something else. But I’m constantly amazed music has taken me this far and I’m still able to do it for a living. It’s crazy.”

To watch the “Second Wind” video, click here: 


‘Second Wind’

‘Second Wind’

Categories
Cover Feature News

Rocking the Boat: Memphis Musicians Speak Truth to Power

CREDIT: Joseph Higgins

A few weeks ago, after Memphis protesters had already been joining in the national calls for police reform and accountability, standing firm in the plaza outside of City Hall, organizers felt something extra was in order to bolster morale and keep the demonstrators motivated. That’s when Joseph Higgins’ phone rang.

“Man, it was a beautiful experience,” Higgins tells me. “Some friends of ours hit us up and said, ‘We’re doing something at City Hall and we really need some music. We asked all these different bands and we haven’t heard back from ’em.’ This was Sunday night [June 21st]. And some bands told them, ‘Man, I don’t want to mess up my look in the scene or have clubs treat us different because we’re standing up for what’s right.’ I thought, ‘Wow, that’s crazy to hear about Memphis musicians not wanting to go into the trenches.’ We were like, ‘Man, this is right up our alley.’”
David Vaughn Mason

Chinese Connection Dub Embassy protest

That would be an understatement. Joseph is one of three brothers who have wed a passion for music and a passion for justice in equal measure. Indeed, the Higgins family has been pivotal in distilling political outrage and righteousness into song. It’s a rare talent, but when done right, it’s galvanizing.

The band in question was the Chinese Connection Dub Embassy (CCDE), one of the few reggae bands in the region, and one of the most politically outspoken. “We’re all about truth and rights,” says Higgins, “and spreading the word of injustice, and trying to get some kind of solace at the end of the day for all the stuff that’s going on in the world right now — from COVID-19 to police brutality to No. 45 acting crazy.”

And it was clear that the band raised everyone’s spirits at City Hall. “I felt all the energy from the city. They were so supportive. The whole essence of ‘we’re all in this together’ really stood out. We had a little kid that jumped up in the middle of our set, couldn’t have been more than 4 or 5 years old.”

That Sunday on the plaza was the perfect time to unveil the band’s new single, “Dem A Callin (Flodgin),” released July 10th on Bandcamp. “I won’t be bought, I won’t be sold. We will decide how our story’s told … Dem a callin’!” sings guest vocalist Webbstar on the track. The words ring true in this historical moment, when deciding how the story is told is half the battle. As stories develop around any given incident, the different narratives begin to coalesce and compete. There is the story embedded in, say, a police department statement, versus the story in a live video of the incident. Indeed, the simple phrase “Black Lives Matter” itself offers a narrative in three simple words, shaming those who would terrorize Black people. It’s not surprising that the cover image for CCDE’s single is a protester wearing a #BLM face mask.

These are not the kinds of songs typically associated with the Bluff City. The weight and momentum of Memphis’ rich musical history can obscure those less-illuminated niches where, over the decades, songs that examine the social fabric, or rip it wide open, have emerged. But they are there, and with this story, the Memphis Flyer aims to honor them.
Ziggy Mack

Negro Terror

CCDE is only one example. In fact, it’s only one example from within the Higgins family. Out of that same household sprang the hardcore punk band Negro Terror, which was equally unabashed about calling for progressive change through the power of music. But the genesis of both bands has a tragic side: Their guiding light was the oldest Higgins brother, Omar, whose sudden death after a staph infection in April 2019 was mourned throughout the city.

Says brother David of the two bands: “They both were started by Omar out of his love of music and community. He wanted to start a big musical family and bring people together. And your color, race, religion, sexuality didn’t matter. And that’s how we were brought up. My mother and father were into bringing people together. Our whole family is all about truth and rights. Fighting against oppression and injustice. My mother was a member of the Urban League. So it’s in our blood. As far as Negro Terror, it’s still going! We’re actually finishing up a record, Paranoia. Omar titled it that. He’s all over the record.”

Negro Terror also lives on in the 2018 documentary of the same name by director John Rash, which culminates in a music video for their most popular song, “The Voice of Memphis.” It’s a hardcore homage to the indomitable spirit of this city rising up to be heard, but the song has a surprising provenance. “It was originally a white power anthem, and Omar completely flipped it on its head,” says David. “It was by a band called Screwdriver. The singer, Ian Stuart, was a white supremacist Nazi, and he said, ‘That’ll be the day when I hear a n*gger cover one of our songs.’ And not only did Omar cover it, he changed the lyrics around, made it Memphis, and did it better!”


Negro Terror is one inheritor of the city’s punk legacy, which has often been the source of our most politically charged music. The punk label, of course, is no guarantee of political content, but the genre did usher a new social consciousness into rock music when it sprang from the gutters in the mid-1970s. That was true in Memphis as well, though that was when punk was more of an attitude than a formulaic sound. One of the most punk moments of that decade was when roots rockers Mudboy & the Neutrons capped off an outdoor music festival with their take on “Power to the People”: “Hey hey, MHA, someone moved Downtown away,” quipped Mudboy member Jim Dickinson to the Memphis Housing Authority. “I’ve got a new way to spell Memphis, Tennessee: M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E!”

That era also saw the premiere of Tav Falco, who sang Leadbelly’s “Bourgeois Blues,” then cut his guitar in two with a circular saw. With his Unapproachable Panther Burns, he would continue to dally in political waters, with songs like “Agitator Blues,” “Cuban Rebel Girl,” or even 2018’s “New World Order Blues.”

But others soon took the impulse in different directions. One of the sharpest purveyors of political pith since the 1980s has been one-time Memphian Joe Lapsley, now a college history instructor in the Chicago area.
Don Perry

Neighborhood Texture Jam

“I’m the lead singer of Neighborhood Texture Jam,” says Lapsley. “If anybody knows about having to explain progressive issues to white people in Memphis, it would be me. To be fair, Texture Jam tends to be a magnet for people that are attracted to something more liberal than what they’re accustomed to in this milieu. But there’s also people there that don’t give a shit about that stuff, you know?”

With songs like “Rush Limbaugh, Evil Blimp,” NTJ made no bones about their leftist tendencies, instincts which made some of their best material relevant to this day. “Wanna see the rebel flags, wanna go and see ’em?” Lapsley bellows in “Old South.” “They’re next to the Swastikas in a museum!” At times, Lapsley took the lyrics a step further, ripping up or burning Confederate flags in their early shows. “Listening to Texture Jam back then,” Lapsley says now, “you were getting a taste of Black Lives Matter before it even happened.

“In Oxford on beer bust night, I said, ‘Anybody that doesn’t want to celebrate the entry of James Meredith here on the 30th anniversary of his registration, well they can just get up and leave!’ These big white football player dudes and their dates all stood up from the first four or five tables. I could see the fear go through the band, so I said, ‘If they come, you’ve got guitars and basses. Just start swinging.’”

Pezz was another band from that era that carries on today with sporadic reunion shows. Their 2017 release, More Than You Can Give Us, updates the Reagan-era punk that first inspired them to today’s struggles, as captured by the album cover, which juxtaposes an image from the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike with one of protesters shutting down the I-40 bridge in 2016. Meanwhile, Pezz frontmen Ceylon Mooney and Marvin Stockwell carry on to this day as community organizers and activists.

The punk spirit lives on in countless other Memphis bands, though what punk actually is is debatable. “If you do hear a band that’s truly just punk, it’s probably kind of boring at this point,” says Natalie Hoffman of NOTS. Yet she and NOTS are usually lumped in with the tag. And while NOTS’ lyrics can often be oblique, they naturally venture into gender politics by virtue of NOTS being an all-woman band in the hyper-masculine punk scene. In that context, the alienation of “Woman Alone” is a unique social critique: “Woman alone/in a landscape/is it always the same? What’s it like/to be a subject analyzed?”


The truth is, songs of political or social critique can take many forms, and they need not wear their outrage on their sleeve. Bassist MonoNeon wrote “Breathing While Black” after seeing the first footage of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police, but gave his outrage the soft-sell in this case. “While the song came from being saddened by George’s murder, the song is for every Black man and woman who has dealt with police brutality,” he says. And the mellow mood of the sparse Prince-like funk and jazzy harmonies does indeed give the track a more generalizable air of contemplation. It’s a universal song of mourning, in a way, with enough bounce to keep listeners motivated.

Some performers make the message even more palatable by taking a more subtle approach. Brandon Lewis, a new artist with David Porter’s Made In Memphis Entertainment (MIME) label, has just released a track produced in January which relates to the current Black Lives Matter movement, titled simply “Black Man.”

As Porter says, “’Black Man’ is not a protest song, it’s an inspirational song about enlightened people, about the pride that these young people feel today. Because I know you’re viewing me as a Black man, let me let you feel the pride that I have in being a Black man. That’s why that hook works.” Proffering a positive message of self-affirmation is a far cry from burning the stars and bars onstage, but may ultimately be just as effective. For at the heart of today’s protests is a demand for dignity and respect.
Matt White

John Paul Keith

Those qualities can be celebrated in unexpected ways. Americana and rock-and-roll singer/songwriter John Paul Keith recently released his song, “Take ‘Em Down,” in sympathy with the TakeEmDown901 movement, but it begins, surprisingly, with a bit of Southern pride. “You can tell I’m from the South when I open up my mouth …” he sings, before turning to the chorus, “Them statues got to go in every state across the USA.” This is no pride in whiteness, but a refashioning of what “Southern” can mean. As the song goes on, you come to understand that Keith is celebrating a new vision of Southerness that embraces our diversity. “Can you hear the Southern feet marching in the street/And someone saying on a megaphone/No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA/And we ain’t gonna rest until they’re gone.”

“The music is very much Southern,” says Keith. “That tune and those chords, you could take that and do it in a gospel way, or the way I did it, which was more country or rockabilly. It would work either way. But I was trying to repurpose that sound, and use it to say something about this thing. And it also came organically out of me like that. That’s what popped in my head ’cause that’s who I am. I liked using something that comes from the rockabilly tradition for this purpose. I liked that, the idea of refashioning this sound to say something about these old statues.” It’s a rare hybrid of blunt political observations and subtle identity politics, and it works.

Protest has been the stock-in-trade of Memphis hip-hop for decades. While it can be argued that there is political dynamite in even the most gangsta trap track out of this city, simply by virtue of its hyperrealism, there have been select lyricists who step back from the euphoric rush of the crime spree and encourage more contemplation, even as they preserve the urgency of rap’s rapid-fire flow.

Though inactive since the untimely death of group member Fathom 9, the Iron Mic Coalition (IMC) are the undisputed kings of this realm, sometimes called conscious or knowledge rap. When producer IMAKEMADBEATS first returned to Memphis, having spent most of the early aughts in New York, the first artists to really capture his attention were the Iron Mic Coalition. One of the pivotal members was Quinn McGowan, a comic book creator, tattoo artist, and visual artist whose son Quinn is now affiliated with the Unapologetic collective. Another was Fathom 9.

As IMAKEMADBEATS recalls, “In my opinion, while IMC had various talents, Fathom 9, to me, was the most left-wing. I think that’s why I gravitated towards him early on. I went to his funeral, and I heard people walk up to the mic and say, ‘Fathom was weird in a way that made us be okay with being weird.’ He had no shame. He was past the point of comfortable and cute. You’d watch him and say, ‘All right, when is he gonna change positions?’ He did it in a way to where it was daringly uncomfortable. And you know you did your job if you inspired hundreds of people.”

Don Lifted

Among those who were so inspired were the Unapologetic team themselves, who often celebrate ‘weirdness,’ and in doing so, are helping to reshape the image of hip-hop and Memphis itself. While not all Unapologetic artists have a political ax to grind, the very process itself has a political impact. Artist and producer Lawrence Matthews, aka Don Lifted, has found the collective’s embrace of the strange to be liberating, both personally and politically, when he works with them on occasion.

“I’m not necessarily making protest songs per se,” says Matthews. “But I’m talking about my Blackness, my queerness, all of these things. My anxieties and fears around religious beliefs, and the juxtapositions of being in the South and being a Black dude that doesn’t fit into those boxes. Being called a white boy over there, but I’m still Black enough to get murdered over here. But don’t get it confused, I’m still what I am.

“I’m not signed to Unapologetic, but I’m affiliated. And you being allowed to show up is a great thing. The fact that I get to sing songs about what I do is political in a city where they do not allow anybody to have a national platform if it is not soul or street music. I have heard every single way you could shoot a person, every single way you could deal drugs, every single way that you could make street music. But I don’t always hear the way that Black men feel. So I appreciate the space where people are allowed to talk about things I talk about in my music, or that PreauXX talks about or that AWFM talks about. I’m very thankful for those spaces. My voice can be as different, as loud, as odd as it wants to be. And I got a lot of that from listening to conscious hip-hop music.”

Marco Pavé

Yet, while political or cultural struggles inform nearly all hip-hop, especially hip-hop that embraces “oddness” and the interior life, not many artists have picked up conscious hip-hop’s overt politics in the way the Iron Mic Coalition once did. One exception is Marco Pavé. His 2017 debut album, Welcome to Grc Lnd, was a shot across the bow, with thought-provoking lyrics like “Bring me a coffin/’Cos they won’t accept that I am so fluorescent /they place us in darkness/I still see ancestors” capturing the same zeitgeist that inspired Pezz. Blocking the I-40 bridge in 2016 was a turning point for both public demonstrations here and the artists who were inspired by them.

Welcome to Grc Lnd might be considered a concept album of sorts, centered on those protests, but Pavé’s next move surprised many: a hip-hop opera revolving around the same concepts and tracks, redubbed Welcome to Grc Lnd 2030, with a premiere at Playhouse on the Square in 2018. It was the kind of multimedia tour de force that is all too rare in Memphis, combining music of the street with music of the salon, and a heavy dose of political critique.

Since then, the critique has moved into the streets, as apathy fades and a sense of empowerment spreads. Combining demonstrations with a band, as the organizers who invited CCDE Downtown last month were doing, may be the newest frontier in politically charged music-making. It’s a powerful combination. Music has a way of reframing old truths in a new light, and of presenting complex realities in concise, poetic form. And that can change minds.

As Joseph Higgins reflects, “It’s been a slow drip. It’s hard to educate people one by one. So with Negro Terror, the name and the concept, Omar was able to not only preach the message of unity, but to teach. And get people to not just understand, but overstand.”

And stand they will, backed by the beats and riffs and rhymes of Memphis musicians who keep one eye on the world and another on the dream.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Everyday Conversation: Unapologetic’s “What You Doin, Nothin?”

More than a month ago, local hip-hop record label Unapologetic introduced a series of comical skits and interviews called “What You Doin, Nothin?” on YouTube and on its Unapologetic World app. In the series, hosts A Weirdo From Memphis (AWFM) and Cameron Bethany cover a range of topics with special guests that were originally filmed in 2017.

“Initially, we had plans lined up to release episodes with large platforms,” says AWFM. “But every time we would get things going, things would fall through the cracks and never work in our favor. And then, of course, COVID-19 happened, and it just created a virtual environment where we could take the time and we could do it and push it on our own.”

So far, seven episodes have been released, featuring interviews — “Shaved” features Project Pat, and “Eyebrow Meat” features MonoNeon — and skits, as seen in “Master Drill Sergeant” featuring Tutweezy. According to AWFM and Bethany, the inspiration for this series came from natural conversations and jokes share Catherine Elizabeth Patton

Cameron Bethany

d between them and the rest of the Unapologetic crew.

“Sometimes, we’d be having conversation, and one day, AWFM, myself, and IMAKEMADBEATS were in the studio, and we were talking about past experiences,  and we had the idea to just record our conversations,” says Bethany.

Before filming each episode, the behind-the-scenes crew would help AWFM and Bethany brainstorm conversational topics and would place them on a wheel for the hosts to spin. “Whichever one it lands on, Cam and I will immediately go off the cuff with whoever we’re talking to, just to keep it organic and not premeditated,” says AWFM.

According to Bethany and AWFM, getting out of their comfort zones and switching to a new mode of entertainment was a little intimidating at first. But once they got the hang of things, they knew they had something special in the works.

“It started out as something fun, and the closer we got to finishing it out, we got to thinking, this is really turning out to be something serious,” says Bethany. “And I could see the potential in it. And we just held onto it. We knew what we had once we put it on paper. We wanted to give it our best shot. And none of us really knew what we were doing. None of us are comedians or TV personalities or anything like that. We’re just learning every day that who we are is way more than we think we are.”

A Weirdo From Memphis

AWFM adds, “Even the small things that you don’t think about, like where your eyes are looking and where they’re going to appear, like they’re looking at the camera, all of that. You can kind of see it from like the first episode to the end, how we got good at on-camera chemistry. But it definitely was experimental. And it’s always going to be experimental, just because we focus on other art forms as our main situations. So with that being said, every time we do this, it’s going to be a new feel-around every time, because this isn’t what we normally do or practice on the regular.”

Regardless, the two say they feel like the overall reception over the series has gone very well.

“We kind of second-guessed ourselves, and we didn’t know what to expect,” says Bethany. “But we garnered around 2,000-3,000 views within the first 24-48 hours. For us, it’s just things like the crowd or the audience enjoying what’s coming from it.”

AWFM adds, “The day after an episode will drop, friends reach out or have opinions on a topic. Because we did it three years ago, a lot of times we don’t remember what we were even talking about. So, it’s just exciting for us sometimes seeing what we said in an episode and what our opinions were back then. It’s been pretty cool to have conversations about it and laugh at it all.”

The series is more than halfway to the end of its staggered release, with only about three or four more new episodes left to air. Although Bethany and AWFM don’t reveal much about what we can expect to see in the remaining episodes, AWFM does admit that viewers will have the opportunity to meet a non-human, but “memorable,” friend of theirs in one of the final episodes. The hosts say that when COVID-19 ends, they hope to pick up where they left off and film another season, possibly incorporating viewer participation by asking for topic idea submissions from the audience.

In the meantime, Bethany and AWFM say that the emergence of COVID-19 has given them extra time to pursue and follow up on other facets of their creativity, which continues with Unapologetic’s mission.

“I think some of our best songs and music video-based content have come from this,” says AWFM. “And just living in the moment has allowed this show to get created, and I think we can walk away from it with more talent, more versatility, and just an open mind. It can be discouraging when you don’t know what’s possible or what might be going too far. And a big thing about Unapologetic is there’s no such thing as too far; [we] never put a box around what we could do or what we couldn’t do. And this show is a very big exercise of that.”

Episodes are released every Monday. Download the “Unapologetic World” app on your Android or Apple device to tune in, free.

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Cover Feature News

The Music Issue: Music in the Time of Corona

With shelter-in-place still the most responsible policy for all of us, a lot of people are imagining that the once-thriving music scene in Memphis is withering on the vine. But a lot of people would be wrong.

Casting a wide net for signs of life recently, I’ve reeled in a full haul of ways that local musicians are rising to the challenge of making their art accessible, and, in some cases, even making a little money. Though their income sources have shrunk, musicians are honoring their best impulses to simply get their art out there.

Amy LaVere and Will Sexton

There wouldn’t be a Flyer Music Issue without music. And, without question, the music and musicians are still there, working their craft, helping all of us cope — and with a new sense of connection and hope.

Players and Payers, Now Online!

We all know about live-streamed shows by now, of course. It’s become the new normal, and with our weekly online listings in The Flow, the Flyer has attempted to acknowledge and promote the practice. But it’s tricky to keep up with all the action. In the past week alone, we listed nearly three dozen separate streaming events, and we know we didn’t cover all of them. (Musicians, send us your announcements!) Several of these were virtual festivals with a dozen artists or more, all coordinating their homebound performances through a central hub. All told, these artists’ commitment to both social distancing and social unity (and, let’s face it, self-promotion) has been impressive. Thanks to the internet, perhaps we can have our cake and eat it too?

Nationally, live-streaming has had its ups and downs. The data-crunching company Chartmetric released a study earlier this month stating that: “The U.S. Top 100 YouTube artists surged during lockdown, but as daily infections continued to rise, that demand failed to keep pace, perhaps because consumers turned to other non-music content or other sources of entertainment as the reality of sheltering in place indefinitely started to set in.”

That leaves aside the question of why viewership should correlate in any way with the infection rate. Once you’re in place, either you’re prone to watch live music or you’re not. And of course, national data on “the top 100 artists” has almost nothing to do with the local scene, which celebrates independent artists in all their forms. By all indications, live-streamed music events are on the rise in Memphis. (The first edition of The Flow only listed two dozen events.)

And many are reaping some sorely needed financial rewards for their live-streamed efforts. Mark Edgar Stuart, who has done four such online events, was taken aback at the response. “The first two I did, I was like ‘Wow, I’ve never made that at a gig before!’ There might be something to this web show business, you know? This might carry on once COVID-19 is over.”

Most of Stuart’s events have taken the classic “man with guitar lives here” approach, where he plays for viewers from a chair in his home. But he’s been inspired by others who strive to lend their live events more panache. “I love seeing how people are getting creative with it. Graham Winchester, doing a show in the bathtub! I saw Jesse James Davis do one a few weeks ago. He had his backing beats happening and it looked cool. I was like, ‘Yeah, kudos.'”

A Weirdo From Memphis aka AWFM

Striving for an original approach is on many performers’ minds. A Weirdo From Memphis, aka AWFM, says his plans for live events have been steadily evolving. “I decided to fall back until I can make it special. I don’t know if you’ve just logged on to Instagram on a random Friday night and seen like 12 Live bubbles across the screen? It used to be kinda like an exciting anomaly. ‘Whoa, somebody’s on Live, what are they gonna be doing?’ And now it’s like everybody has their own live TV show. Which is sometimes just them sitting there. People think that what they do is special, and they think that they’re standing out but don’t really zoom out and see the picture and see that you’re really just walking in the same direction as everybody. So I’d rather make sure, when I do pop on Live, it’s a thing to get excited about because I’m doing something different. I’ve really spent some time figuring out what that was supposed to be for me. And I have the answer now, and everything I need to do it is on its way to being in my hands. If you’re not really about the artistic experience, it’s like a microwave. I’m trying to put some food in the oven!”

PreauXX

Fellow Unapologetic rapper PreauXX keeps his IG Live events fresh with the inherent spontaneity of freestyle, at which he excels. “Whenever I want to get some stuff out, I just go on IG Live for 30 to 40 minutes and just freestyle over beats. And whoever joins in my Live will give me a beat or give me a topic, and I just rap for 40 mintues, just for the hell of it.”

Of course, not everyone can rap extemporaneously with such aplomb, especially if your forte is making beats. But Unapologetic producer C Major has taken to the live internet anyway, via the beat battles hosted by a St. Louis-based group called Fresh Produce. As their web page (freshproducestl.com) explains, “Eight beatsmiths compete head to head in a tournament style bracket battle consisting of three rounds. Each producer is given at least one minute per round to impress the five judges, which include former winners from multiple beat battles, DJs, tastemakers from around the area, and the difference maker, The Crowd.”

As C Major points out, “It’s a whole experience, with interviews, clips of videos in between the beats. And the people in on the session can vote on whose beat they rock with the most. They’ve got a championship round on May 27th that I’m gonna be on again.”

Producer C Major of Unapologetic

But C Major also points out another avenue for internet-based music, one he’s only now discovering: online gaming. “I’ve seen some crazy shit. They have whole festivals on Minecraft, which is ridiculous. There are bands, not even playing live, but with pre-recorded stuff they’re doing with their characters in Minecraft, and they’ve got a sea of people watching, just all characters on a computer. It’s crazy! You can be in the world of Minecraft and walk into a building and there will be a flyer and everything. And at a certain time, you go into a venue, and they’re just in there, the little blocks with guitars and shit. A drummer and shit. And your character is there with other characters. I’ve got two little boys, and they’re really into that world. So me and them stayed up one day and watched that. It’s crazy how creative people can be.

“Seeing that level of creativity just got me thinking,” he continues, “I can’t just hop on Live with my phone now. I mean, that’s cool, too. It has a level of personal-ness that you want, but at the same time, these people are out there, like they’ve been waiting for this moment.”

“My technology will shine now!” chimes in AWFM with a mad cackle.

Like so many of us (and like my own interview with them), the Unapologetic crew has also kept up their collaborative momentum with Zoom meetings, as they plan their next moves. “Every Wednesday, we have a big Zoom meeting with 12 to 15 people,” C Major explains. “It used to be a lot of planning and business, and we still do a lot of that. But now, I really cherish the time to just tell people what’s going on with me, and listen to what’s going on with them. It’s almost like therapy.”

PreauXX nods in agreement, adding, “Them kumbaya sessions are so soulfully needed.”

Another, more public version of stoking the creative fires has been pioneered by singer/songwriter Cory Branan, whose response to being a shut-in was to launch a homemade talk show, UMM, with his favorite fellow songsmiths. Episodes go live on Instagram every Wednesday, then remain archived on his YouTube channel. With such guests on the split-screen as Amanda Shires, Jason Isbell, Ben Nichols, and Frank Turner, it’s a veritable who’s who of today’s songwriting legends, and Branan’s queries reflect his own poetic approach to the craft: “You said when you finish a song, you’re like a sleepwalker who wakes up holding a bloody knife, surrounded by corpses,” he quips to Frank Turner, who responds, “I can still remember it being on the brain for a good few months, and then one day it’s finished …”

Other musicians are taking live-streamed shows to another level, albeit with careful social distancing in place. After all, many of us wish the drummer was always forced to stay six feet away. (ba-dum-bum!) Amy LaVere and Will Sexton, living together in matrimonial bliss, began their Thursday “Love Stream” shows on Facebook simply enough as a duo, but now have stepped out on their porch for some shows, inviting bandmates to play along from a safe distance.

Mark Edgar Stuart — via virtual remote control

And now, almost as an outgrowth of this internet community, actual live music, in front of real people, is beginning to take form in unpredictable ways. When the Joe Restivo 4 held an impromptu concert on drummer Tom Lonardo’s porch last Wednesday, with social distancing in place, it attracted a small crowd, well-spaced, up and down the street.

But Mark Edgar Stuart may have the best, and strangest, example of this. As he explains, “Three weeks ago, I did a show for a bunch of pontoon boats. I had a superfan out in Eudora, Mississippi, who lives in a lake community, and he was like, ‘Dude, will you do a concert? I’m gonna promote it to the rest of the lake, and we’re gonna have all the pontoons come out to the dock and you can play.’ I was on a dock with a PA, nobody around me. And it was a listening crowd. You could smell the joints being passed around. It was fun! It was about 18 boats, maybe 50 or 60 people watching. They were all six feet apart.”

Venues Hunker Down

Such wacky alternatives do make players and fans alike a bit wistful about actual music venues. But, looking for signs of hope that we’ll one day have music in clubs again, I need turn no further than the sounds of hammers swinging down the street. As all the world shelters in place, B-Side Bar is giving its stage a makeover. “We had to raise it up a few inches to fit these new subwoofers under there,” says co-owner Brad Boswell. And they’re not the only ones making the most of the downtime.

“We’re just trying to get things that we never get done when we’re just blowing and going like we do,” says Jason Ralph of the Blues City Cafe. “When you’re as busy as we are all the time, you don’t have a chance to do a lot of the things that you want. So we’re trying to take advantage of this unfortunate break we’re having. Like redoing the kitchen floor, things like that.”

Owners and managers of music venues throughout the city are nervously pondering the day when people can congregate once more. Yet no one is sure what conditions need to be met for that to happen. Some plan to follow the authorities’ lead. “Everything will be based on CDC and what they put out, and what local government puts out,” says Ralph. “What I really don’t want is to make that happen and then have to close again.”

Yet some feel even an official go-ahead may not be enough. “We’re not gonna open up just because the governor says it’s okay, you know?” says Boswell. “We’re just gonna play it by ear. It’s possible we’ll start out doing live-stream shows first, before we fully open. But we’re not even discussing it yet at this point.”

Brett Batterson, president and CEO of the Orpheum Theatre Group, thinks smaller venues will have an advantage. “I think the smaller venues like Halloran Centre will open first. Gradually we’ll get to a point where the Orpheum will reopen.” Meanwhile, they’re hosting home-recorded performances in their Memphis Songwriters Series, regular live-streamed events on Facebook every Saturday.

Most see reopening as a mirror image of how they shut down. Boswell notes that B-Side was one of the first to shut down, and may be among the last to open again, perhaps starting with only live-streamed shows.

Blues City Cafe first phased out bands, then allowed dining customers at half-capacity for more distancing, then offered only takeout before closing completely. Ralph thinks featuring live bands will be the last phase of reopening, but even that will take some adjustment. “A lot of people don’t realize, it’s gonna look a lot different, regardless,” he says. “Even once we’re going 100 percent, as busy as we are on Beale Street, it’s not gonna be like it was any time soon.”

Laying Down Tracks

While we await such changes, musicians soldier on, and records — the other side of the musical coin — are continuing to be made, by hook or by crook. Since the quarantine era, there’s been a flowering of tracks swapped via the internet. While many producers and engineers have found the explosion of home recording gear to be a mixed blessing (pun intended), in times like these, such home rigs are keeping many of them busy. Since shelter-in-place began, countless players have gone back to finish tracks, often inviting colleagues to add overdubs in their own home studios, to then assemble later into a final mix.

As usual, the Unapologetic collective is ahead of the curve. Nothing as clunky as email is needed. As C Major explains, “We’ve actually got it set up to where the whole ProTools folder is on Dropbox, so whenever you record [in your home studio], I’m getting the updated session immediately. And I’ll go in and tweak stuff. So we’re basically kind of in the same studio, just over the internet. We just adapted that way. Dropbox updates in real time. So if anyone makes any change to the session, it’s gonna show up on mine.”

Others take a hybrid approach, stepping carefully into the city’s professional studios, armed with masks and sterilizer. Calling me from Delta-Sonic Sound, the studio run by Big Legal Mess producer Bruce Watson, Mark Edgar Stuart gives an on-the-scene report. “Will is in the tracking room, wearing a mask. I’ve been wearing a mask all day and am now outside. Bruce has been wiping down the headphones and all that kinda business.”

A similar scene, with even more players, was in place at the famed Royal Studios two weeks ago, when Michael Graber invited his favorite players to record new material — composed during his days and nights as a shut-in — with Boo Mitchell at the helm. “A lot of musicians who are usually busy with gigs or on the road were able to join in on the sessions,” he explains. “So we planned to go in and properly distance and record. And we ended up, in two days, recording 24 original songs. Some of these songs are strange compositions. We’d use traditional bluegrass instrumentation on some, but then we were throwing in dulcimers, harmoniums, bouzoukis, six-part harmonies, that kind of stuff. So it got pretty wild.”

Though everyone wore masks, hosting so many players at once proved challenging, and Graber sounds a cautionary note: “It was really, really hard to sing. I ended up taking my mask off. As did some of the other background singers. We tried to keep distanced. We were very conscious the whole first 12-hour day. But by the end of the second day, we were getting tired, people were rushing to the food when we had it out. The longer we went, the more the challenge it was to hold up those standards. It’s just what it is. It was a microcosm of what’s gonna happen as we re-enter society. First we’re very cognizant, and then we slowly let our guard down.”

AWFM says, “When we create, it’s really on top of each other, kinda like a family vibe, but that’s not the wisest thing to do right now. Especially with everybody going back home to their families. ‘Cause you can be like, ‘I’m good,’ but not realize that you’re a carrier of it and take it to somebody who’s less equipped to deal with it. That would be pretty devastating. I’ve seen people that have accidentally killed their parents or grandparents, just by having a mild case of it. They had already been existing in the house for two weeks, and really messed things up. So we haven’t created face-to-face in a minute. It’s a lot to lose, man.”

Musicians and non-musicians alike struggle with such contradictory impulses these days: to be safe, to protect others, but at the same time, to create, to collaborate, to commune. Perhaps the Unapologetic approach can benefit all of us. Says PreauXX, “For all of us, it’s been a survivor’s mentality. You can either lounge around or you can adapt.”

NIVA

More than two months ago, Growlers hosted metal bands Weedeater and The Goddamn Gallows during what would become the venue’s final show before it was forced to temporarily shut its doors due to stay-at-home orders caused by COVID-19. 

Within that period, Growlers has seen a loss of tens of thousands of dollars, and with a definite reopening date unknown at this time, that loss could add up to be much more. Growlers has since begun offering takeout food and has applied for and received loans from the Small Business Administration (SBA). But according to Mike Glenn, managing partner and national talent buyer for the venue, that’s not going to be enough to keep them afloat until they can reopen.  

“We have a great landlord in Yong Rhee, so he’s been helping in regards to rent,” he says. “But there’s utilities, certain taxes, etc. We are accruing a debt load, as are all venues.”

Nearly a month ago, Glenn caught wind of independent venues throughout the country joining a group called the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) who have been seeking to rally support from state representatives and from U.S. congressional leaders to provide additional federal aid for venues. 

“Dayna Frank, [owner of First Avenue in Minneapolis and president of NIVA], is a friend of mine, and I heard rumblings of her and a few other indies starting this,” says Glenn. “So, being in this business my entire life, this was something important to me. We don’t have billions like Live Nation or AEG. So I’m very passionate about standing for indie venues and promoters.”

NIVA, which comprises more than 1,600 independent venues throughout the country like Minglewood Hall, Exit/In in Nashville, and the Troubadour in Los Angeles, has issued a letter to the U.S. Congress asking legislators for further assistance to help keep overhead charges and taxes paid until they can present shows again.

In the letter addressed to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the collective asked that the SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program be revised to increase the program’s loan cap and extend the program until all the affected businesses can resume operations at full capacity. They also asked for other modes of assistance, including establishing a business recovery grant fund, granting various forms of tax relief, and extending unemployment insurance to contract workers and artists who wouldn’t normally receive benefits. 

Glenn has worked closely with Chris Cobb, owner of Exit/In, contacting Tennessee Representatives Steve Cohen and Jim Cooper, as well as Senators Lamar Alexander and Marsha Blackburn, to ask for their support.

“The conversations with them have been very promising,” says Glenn. “All have supported the efforts.”

Last week, there was progress on the local level when the Shelby County Commission approved an amendment to the 2021 fiscal year budget that would allot $100,000 to assist local venues like Growlers, Minglewood Hall, and Levitt Shell with rental and employee assistance.

“I’ve only heard of a few other cities in the country doing that,” says Glenn. “So it’s wonderful having great local leadership who support the arts.”

According to Glenn, this is a good starting resource for venues in Memphis to be able to stay on their feet until they are able to put on shows again.

“We just want to get back to what we love, putting on events for people to have a great time,” he says. “But we also want to be safe about it. There’s just something about a room full of people vibing together that can’t be replicated with other options. So, hopefully, we’ll get back to that sooner than later. The people are the reason I’m in the business in the first place.” — Julia Baker

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Unapologetic Releases New Comedy Chat Show “What You Doin, Nothin?”

The ever-restless minds of the Unapologetic Records crew recently had a big show at Crosstown Theater canceled because of COVID-19 pandemic. (You can see some video of their epic Indie Memphis 2019 performance here. I was there, and it was even more spectacular IRL.) Now, to fight those lockdown blues, they’re releasing a long-gestating project.

“What You Doin, Nothin?” is a combination of interviews and surreal comedy skits featuring Unapologetic’s Cameron Bethany and A Weirdo From Memphis. “We shot this series in 2017, and, for a handful of reasons, never released it,” says producer and Unapologetic mastermind IMAKEMADBEATS. “I think there couldn’t have been a better time than now.”

The first episode, “Shaved”, which features Memphis hip hop legend Project Pat, drops today (Monday, April 20th) on the Unapologetic YouTube channel. The second episode “Memphis Drill Sargent” will feature a guest appearance by Bluff City funnyman Tutweezy. After the first two episodes are released on YouTube, the remaining episodes will stream on the Unapologetic World app, which is available for both Android and iOS devices. Here’s a little taste of of the weirdness to come:

Unapologetic Releases New Comedy Chat Show ‘What You Doin, Nothin?’