Memphis Shaken as Rock 'n' Roll Heart Is Stilled

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

Published: Friday, August 1, 2003

He had been ailing for months, his friends all knew, but Sam Phillips's death on Wednesday still knocked the wind out of Memphis.

The man who discovered Elvis Presley and in many people's minds invented rock 'n' roll, who gave the world Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison, Howlin' Wolf and Johnny Cash, who carried a childhood yearning with him from small-town Alabama to the biggest city in the mid-South and in short order set off a musical and cultural revolution that literally changed the world -- a man like that, no matter how old, does not leave this earth quietly.

His relatives were struggling to make funeral plans for Mr. Phillips, who was 80. His surviving Memphis recording studio was fielding condolence calls from strangers oceans away and old Sun musicians like the guitarist and bassist Dusty Rhoads. And in living rooms and music-industry offices across town, jogged memories were spilling forth.

James Lott, a studio engineer at Sun since 1986, recalled a recording session not long ago with the band Matchbox 20 and Mr. Lewis, the rock legend, and Ahmet Ertegun, the chairman of Atlantic Records. ''We were recording the old Charlie Rich song, 'Lonely Weekends,' '' he said. ''And with all this talent in the room, Sam just dominated the place. Jerry Lee was calling him sir -- 'Yes, sir, Mr. Phillips.' ''

Jim Dickinson, a piano player and singer who recorded at Sun with the Jesters in the 1960's, talked about the crazed look Mr. Phillips would get inside the control room. ''You looked into his eyes and saw that madness,'' he recalled. ''It was something beyond passion. His eyes would get black like they were all pupil -- he'd just take on the fervor of a preacher.''

Sun Records, the tiny studio at 706 Union Avenue that Mr. Phillips opened as the Memphis Recording Service in 1950 to promote the music of people who had nowhere else to make their voices heard, is now mainly a tiny tourist trap, a monument to a moment, a man and his music. Yet just a few of the visitors lining up for the hourly walk-through this morning had an idea beforehand of Mr. Phillips's importance.

Joe Coleman, of Farmborough, England, did. He was on his third pilgrimage to Sun with his wife Karen and 10-year-old son, Joseph. ''We were going to come anyway, but when we heard the news we wanted to be on the first tour,'' he said. ''It's our way of showing our respects. To us, in England, he was as big as Elvis.''

In the grand scheme of musical and American history, Mr. Phillips, who died of respiratory failure after a year-long illness, may have been bigger. It was Mr. Phillips, after all, who, well before an 18-year-old Elvis walked into his studio in 1953, had hungered for just such an artist: one who could accomplish his subversive goal of breaking down the barriers between black and white music and musicians.

He had set out in 1950 to record the great black musicians of the South: B. B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Joe Hill Louis and others. But when none of them could break into the mass market, said Peter Guralnick, the Elvis biographer and music writer, Mr. Phillips became convinced that ''a white artist with a Negro sound and feel'' could accomplish his purpose. ''It was a secret assault on a racist system -- the realization of a true sense of democracy, something very much against the mores of the time and place they lived,'' Mr. Guralnick said.

''He felt that you had to disguise it, that you couldn't be too explicit in your rebellion,'' he said. ''If he'd said, 'I'm recording this music because I want to break down all segregation barriers,' nobody would ever have listened to it. But it was so implicit in the music, he felt that by pursuing it, it was bound to happen.''

As much as this city has showered Mr. Phillips with honors in recent years, his start here -- fresh from Florence and Muscle Shoals, Ala., entranced by Beale Street's rhythm-and-blues vitality -- was one of unrequited love, Mr. Guralnick said.

''I wouldn't say Memphis really embraced Sam until recently, any more than the world embraced the music Sam recorded until relatively recently,'' he said. ''I would bet he was dismissed by most people as a nut, but not as a danger. Sort of like Elvis.''

The 1954 production of Elvis's first record -- ''That's All Right'' and ''Blue Moon of Kentucky'' -- changed everything, more or less. Farther down the list of Mr. Phillips's achievements and claims to fame, his admirers here said, was what he did for the city itself.

''With his early rhythm and blues, and then with Elvis, and Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison, and even later on with Charlie Rich, he was showing the world that there was a unique style of performance and recording that was developing in Memphis,'' said John Fry, who grew up here listening to Sun's records before founding Ardent Studios, producing ZZ Top, in 1966.

''It's been hard for the public to get hold of what Memphis music is,'' Mr. Fry said. ''Nashville, it's easy, it's homogenous, it's country. Memphis has always been a place where two or three unlikely things meet and form something new. We truly are a crossroads or a melting pot. A lot of the music that Sam pioneered is exactly that confluence of styles. And that's made musicians around the world fascinated with Memphis.''

Far more important, Mr. Dickinson said, was Mr. Phillips's influence on society, all the more amazing because it stemmed from a simple statement -- that he would record anything, anywhere, any time. ''It's hard to imagine the world before rock 'n' roll, before Elvis, or before Sam, however you want to put it,'' he said. ''We were not nearly as free as individuals, because that was what Sun Records was about, was freedom of expression.

''The last time I heard Sam speak, he said a line about the significance of every soul to God,'' Mr. Dickinson added. ''Maybe all those souls are equal to God, but to man, some are more equal than others.''

Lives of the great songs / Cheatin' meeting of minds: The Dark End of the Street

BARNEY HOSKYNS

Sunday, 9 January 1994

'THIS IS probably one of the greatest songs that's ever come out of black American music,' announces Ricky Ross over the piano intro to Deacon Blue's live version of 'The Dark End of the Street' (1991). 'I first heard it done by Gram Parsons, and then by a guy called Ry Cooder . . .'

Strange, one might think, as neither Parsons nor Cooder could be described as black Americans. But that's really the point about 'The Dark End of the Street', an archetypal 'cheatin' ' soul ballad which has been done in every musical style from country to folk to blues and back to deep southern soul. There is something that sets it apart from other cheatin' numbers, an air of dread allied to an urgent sense of time and place:

At the dark end of the street,

That's where we always meet,

Hiding in shadows where we don't belong,

Living in darkness to hide our wrong.

You and me, at the dark end of the street,

You and me . . .

From the ominous descending chords to the central image - bringing the adultery so close while obscuring it in the penumbra of shame - the song is as stark and joyless as cheatin' gets. On the original version, recorded by Memphis deep- soul man James Carr in 1966, the chorus - 'You and me, at the dark end of the street/ You and me' - is both tender and terrified. With each chorus, the two voices become ever more furtive. The last one just goes, 'Tonight we'll meet, at the dark end of the street/Mmmmmmm . . .'

Haunted by their guilt, these adulterers 'know time's gonna take its toll/We have to pay for the love we stole': in the bridge section, Carr simply wails 'They're gonna find us]' three times over a blast of horns and a death-rattling electric guitar.

The song was written by Dan Penn and Lincoln 'Chips' Moman, southern whites with a deep love for black soul music who'd met at a Wilson Pickett session in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. One of the biggest hits to come out of Muscle Shoals had been Jimmy Hughes's 'Steal Away' (1964), virtually a prototype for the whole cheatin' genre. 'I'd been wantin' to write another 'Steal Away' for two years,' says Penn, 'and when I came to Memphis to work with Chips, I still wanted to write that great cheatin' song.'

One night in the late summer of 1966, Penn and Moman were attending a country-music DJs' convention at the Anchor Motel in Nashville - 'poppin' pills and playin' poker,' as Quinton Claunch, James Carr's producer at Goldwax Records, recalled. Claunch says that the two men broke off from the game and asked if they could use his room. 'I said: 'Boys, you can use it on one condition, which is that you give me the song for James Carr,' and they said I'd got me a deal.'

Dan Penn isn't too clear as to the exact sequence of events that night, but he does recall trading an acoustic guitar back and forth with Moman. 'We were only in there for about 30 minutes,' he says. 'I guess 'Dark End of the Street' was the culmination of two or three years of thinkin' about cheatin'.'

Only a few weeks later, Chips Moman engineered James Carr's 'Dark End of the Street' session in Memphis. His own American studio was being refitted that week, so the session was moved to Willie Mitchell's Hi studio, where Al Green later cut a string of hits. For both Moman and Penn, Carr remains the greatest male singer of Sixties soul. 'He had an emotional power that really stirred me up,' Moman says. 'I could have listened to him all day.' There is no doubt that some of the haunting power of 'Dark End of the Street' derives from the tragic enigma of James Carr himself, a man recalled by Quinton Claunch as 'a very reserved, religious-type person'.

After Carr's 'Dark End of the Street' made the R&B Top 10 in February 1967, several soul versions followed in quick succession - none of them a patch on the original. Percy Sledge managed a respectable stab in April that year, but lacked the gravitas to pull it off. Chips Moman engineered a preposterous rendition by Oscar Toney Jr, complete with sweeping strings and thunderous drums that all but buried the singer's harsh gospel tenor. The version by Roy Hamilton on Moman's own GP label was less bombastic, and certainly better than Joe Tex's lazy, ragged reading on his 1968 Soul Country album.

The most significant cover by a male soul artist was Clarence Carter's 1969 reworking, entitled 'Making Love (at the Dark End of the Street)'. Carter hardly bothered with Penn's lyric, using the song as an excuse to ham it up as a country preacher, giving a leery sermon about the birds'n'

the bees. According to the pianist Jim Dickinson (another 'redneck with a black soul'), Carter's 'Dark End' was a favourite record of Mick Jagger's. 'I was having dinner in Miami with Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd, Mick and Bianca, and Clarence was playing at the hotel,' Dickinson says. 'Through the doors come the three chords of 'Dark End of the Street', and Jagger says, 'That's my favourite fucking song in the world]' Turned out he could recite the entire spoken intro.'

Aretha Franklin's treatment of the song on her 1970 album This Girl's in Love with You has become something of a litmus-test for her fans. Is it 'a brilliant, near-transcendent' reading, as the soul historian Peter Guralnick has claimed, or a typical example of her tendency to show off, riding roughshod over Penn's lyric? Whichever, it's a long way from the sublime understatement of her 'Do Right Woman - Do Right Man', the other classic Penn and Moman wrote in 1966, and comes perilously close to what Franklin's own producer Jerry Wexler called 'oversouling'.

Written by white country boys for a black soul singer, 'The Dark End of the Street' was soon being tackled as straight country. Hardly surprising, given the prevalence of adultery in both soul and country music, but it took that cosmic cowboy Gram Parsons to attempt a version which was both soulful and countrified. Actually, the version on The Gilded Palace of Sin (1969) by Parsons' Flying Burrito Brothers was all but ruined by Jon Corneal's Neanderthal stomp of a drum track, but Parsons' wavering twang intuitively caught the sombre fatalism at the heart of the song.

By the Seventies, respectable country artists were covering the song. Accompanied by her mentor Porter Wagoner, the 25-year-old Dolly Parton lent 'Dark End' her spookiest Smoky Mountain tremor of a soprano: no dark dread here, just Appalachian guilt, backed by softly strummed guitars, tinkling piano fills, and the wistful sigh of Pete Drake's pedal-steel. It took the Kendalls, a father-and-daughter duo, to push the country-duet treatment to its logical guilt-ridden conclusion - not that there wasn't an implicit incest in all the other cheatin' songs they recorded.

Compared with the Kendalls, Linda Ronstadt's crisp country-rock rendition on her 1974 album Heart Like a Wheel was bland. Much closer to the spirit of Dan Penn was Ry Cooder, who managed to capture all the song's fear and loathing in an instrumental slide-guitar version on Boomer's Story (1972), recorded at Muscle Shoals. The lyrics were reinstated when Cooder revisited 'Dark End' on the live album Showtime (1977); in fact, they were all but torn apart over six-and-a- half minutes by the wonderful vocal trio of Bobby King, Terry Evans and Eldridge King.

'Dark End' touched something in English musicians at the time when every pub-rocker in London wanted to be JJ Cale. If Chris Spedding's version on his 1972 solo album The Only Lick I Know was dire, the song was more successfully rendered as a folk ballad during Richard and Linda Thompson's 1975 performance at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. It's strange to hear this classic song of infidelity sung by a married couple. A decade later, reformed pub-rocker Elvis Costello was performing angrily impassioned versions of the song, but if it's downhome authenticity you want, try the late-Eighties versions by R&B veterans Lazy Lester, James 'Thunderbird' Davis, and Artie 'Blues Boy' White.

The song's appeal for celtic soul boys - from Deacon Blue to the Commitments, whose Andrew Strong turned it into a piece of Joe Cocker breastbeating - is obvious, since Catholics are suckers for black guilt. Less obvious is its appeal to Cincinnati's Afghan Whigs, who began their career on the Sub Pop label, original home of grunge. But the Whigs, who regularly did 'Dark End of the Street' in concert last year, have a penchant for 'tearing the guts' out of soul classics. 'You can achieve so much more by not covering these songs in an obviously 'soulful' way,' says big Whig Greg Dulli.

Now Dan Penn has finally got around to recording his own version of 'The Dark End of the Street', for the imminent Do Right Man (Sire/ Blue Horizon). 'I really don't know why so many people have done the song,' he says. 'See, cheatin' was bigtime back in the Sixties, whereas now people know that cheatin' isn't necessarily too healthy. The song kinda glorifies cheatin', but there's some redemption goin' on in there too.'

'It's a song that transcends all barriers,' says Jim Dickinson, whose entertaining version is on a New Rose album by his band Mudboy & the Neutrons. 'It's been sung by men to women, women to men, men to men, and women to women. Dan says it's the ultimate cheatin' song, but I've finally decided it's about politics. It's about keepin' things secret - no matter what you get up to in the daylight, the real action takes place in the dark.'

THE POP LIFE; The Hills and Delta Flow in Their Blood

A wrestling match flickered on the screen in the trailer home of Jim Dickinson, the renegade Memphis producer and musician, and his wife, Mary Lindsay. His son, Luther, sat slumped in an armchair.

Once a full-fledged punk-rocker, Luther Dickinson has spent recent years immersed in the Mississippi hill country blues and roots-music scene surrounding his home. At 26, he is among the best guitarists of his generation, having plunged into the deep well of knowledge shared by his neighbors. These include the bluesmen R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough (who died in 1998) and the 92-year-old fife-and-drum musician Othar Turner, one of the oldest living links to the roots of American music. In addition to leading the powerful blues-jam band the North Mississippi All Stars with his 23-year-old brother, Cody, Luther has also been producing new recordings by local legends like Mr. Turner.

''It makes me so happy to see him participating in this North Mississippi music scene,'' Jim Dickinson said of Luther. ''I never thought I'd see him playing -- for want of a better word -- roots music.''

Luther protested: ''But you knew something would happen. You moved us here.''

His mother shook her head. ''No,'' she said. ''You and your brother said that you were tired of going to school with white people. That's why we moved here.'' (The boys, who are white themselves, used to attend a private school east of Memphis.)

''One of my most important relationships,'' Jim Dickinson said, ''was with an older black man, who taught me everything. But I didn't think that the relationship of an old black man and a young white boy was still possible today. And now Luther is in one, and with a monster of a human being like Othar.'' Mr. Dickinson continued, discussing watching his son play guitar as Mr. Turner corrected him and taught him to value feeling over technique.

In a time when Americans in their 20's are so connected to the rest of the world by cable and the Internet, it is rare to find a young band like the Mississippi All Stars with such a strong sense of the region they come from. No group in any other part of the country could make the music the Mississippi All Stars do because their roots run so deep into the hill country and Delta around them, the music of Fred McDowell and R. L. Burnside, whose sons and grandsons the band often collaborates with.

''We would never move out of here,'' Luther Dickinson said. ''If we became successful, it would be our responsibility to bring that success here. In fact, we want to open up our own juke joint in Memphis. We're going to do it: us and R. L. Burnside's sons. That's our New Year's ambition.''

Luther left his parents' trailer and met his brother in a shack surrounded by barbed wire on the back of their property. This was their studio and, in keeping with their sense of tradition, its walls were lined with asbestos squares of soundproofing, not unlike in the old Sun Studio in Memphis. This was a band that valued authenticity over health.

Luther and Cody Dickinson talked music nonstop. They discussed the musical keys favored by local guitarists, the evolution of lyrics as they traveled from the Delta to hill country, the differences between the live and recorded work of long-dead bluesmen and why Rage Against the Machine is a far better band than Limp Bizkit.

Far from purists, the Mississippi All Stars have worked up their own dense hybrid boogie incorporating the riff-heavy and hard-hitting elements of hill country blues. At a recent concert at the Cave in Chapel Hill, N.C., the band played for three hours, stringing together traditional blues songs into long solo-packed jams. Cody Dickinson played skittering drum solos that verged on free jazz while Luther Dickinson had a huge arsenal of techniques. No two guitar tricks were the same: one minute he was using the alternating thumb style of Mississippi John Hurt and the next he was hammering the fretboard with a limp-wristed hand to produce a chugging rhythm.

The band was reminiscent of the power blues of 60's rock acts like Cream, Steppenwolf and Jimi Hendrix, but had the postmodern electricity of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and the exploratory lust of jam bands like Phish and Widespread Panic. The band recently signed to Tone-Cool Records in Boston and will release its first CD in the spring. But already it has put out independent cassettes and a single, toured with Medeski, Martin and Wood, and remixed songs for the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. The brothers' side project, an up-tempo jug band called Gutbucket, toured with the Squirrel Nut Zippers.

Though their father initially tried to steer his sons clear of music, their fate was sealed early on. Before he could even speak, Luther would spend hours enthralled as he watched the tape running through his father's reel-to-reel machines. ''I was in my dad's studio one day hanging out, and my mom scooped me up to carry me back to the house. He had a huge old Ampex eight-track machine, and I pointed to that and said, 'Studiolioliolio.' And that was my first word, studio, before mama or anything.''

By the time Luther was in third grade, he says, he had formed a band, the Rebelaires, with his younger brother. They performed two shows playing Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Bo Diddley songs. As teenagers, they grew up influenced by their father's groups (particularly Mud Boy and the Neutrons) and hung out in his studio recording as sidemen with the Replacements, Mojo Nixon and Billy Lee Riley. Soon they had their own bands, like Pigs in Space and D.D.T., before they settled on blues boogie with the North Mississippi All Stars in 1996.

As the sun set, Luther and Cody Dickinson left the studio and piled with friends into their van. It was Sunday night, time to make their weekly pilgrimage to Junior Kimbrough's Juke Joint, a ramshackle club in nearby Holly Springs, perhaps the best-known juke joint in the South.

Tourists often trek there in hopes of finding a venerable bluesman in his element performing for locals. But on this night any tourist would have been in for a shock. The scene was the exact opposite of that at Manhattan blues shows, which tend to involve a bunch of white folks' watching a black man onstage. Here, the black locals were dancing and drinking as a couple of white musicians sat onstage, the North Mississippi All Stars. Luther and Cody revved up songs by R. L. Burnside, joined by Mr. Burnside's son Garry on bass and grandson Cedric on drums. Though some tourists may have been disappointed because they were looking for something more authentic, they were wrong: this was authentic North Mississippi hill country music at the turn of the century, handed down across generations and played less with tradition in mind than keeping the crowd on the dance floor.

Photo: From left, Cody and Luther Dickinson and Chris Chew of North Mississippi All Stars. (Steve Roberts)

WebCorp: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/23/arts/the-pop-life-the-hills-and-delta-flow-in-their-blood.html

'Make It Stop! The Most of Ross Johnson' (Goner Records 2009 CD) ['Baron of Love' from Alex Chilton's 'Like Flies on Sherbert' (Jim Dickinson: 1979)]

MY CONNECTION BELOW

THAT'S THE DIRECTOR'S UP THERE

From

Make It Stop!
The Most of Ross Johnson

produced by
Bob Mehr

[originally produced by Jim Dickinson for 'Like Flies on Sherbert' 1979]

SPECIAL JAPANESE INTRODUCTION QUOTE!

"

Maybe some of the strange times, but he, in a sloppy manner, in which it is his feeling, was that, like him, it's pure rock!"-- JAPANESE FAN ON 'BARON Of LOVE'

Like the kin of Jerry Clower, Jerry Lewis, and Jerry Lee Lewis passing a coffin on Percodan, Ross Johnson's "BARON OF LOVE (PT. 2), the video [special abbreviated version] from Alex Chilton's LP, "LIKE FLIES ON SHERBERT" is his Ross Johnsonest release yet!

This PANTHER BURNS' cluster-fuck alumni helped foment Memphis's 1970s 'cult of no personality' scene, which brought together a horde of shut-ins, and provided 'art damage' therapy, propagated by Tav Falco and his Unapproachable's.

Tav used a tool borrowed from the infamous cult leader chest: quasi babble-speak on top of dissonant musical accompaniment.

The cult called 'PANTHER BURNS,' named after an apocryphal [also cultic ] legend--unverified and orally passed from Plantation to cotton field--where 'you know who' thought they saw 'you know what' ON FIRE [!], smack dab in Mississippi's Delta.

This cult consisted of Alex Chilton [guitar], Tav (Gustavo)Falco [vocals, Silvertone guitar], Jim Dickinson [guitar *not sic], Eric Hill [synthesizer], and our man of the hour--the reason we're here! The greatest one-handed, beer-gulping timekeeper since the man from Munchen held a metronome and a Weierstrass while simultaneously yodeling--Ross Johnson [stand-up drums]!

LIKE FLIES ON SHERBERT ['LFOS'], recorded at Sam Phillips Studios, 1979; mixed the following year; released as a pipe-dream on Sid Selvidge's Peabody label; one year later on Aura; and finally by Patrick Mathe's French, New Rose, wherein it has grown into the greatest cult record of 'em all--in my opinion.

The album is divided among Chilton originals and Nashville Bar Band covers [think of a Lower Broad band-rider which includes Dexamyl and a keg of Schnaaps].

The only non-LX vocal track on 'LFOS' (although LX makes known the spirit of the recently departed Baron, Elvis in this tallboy-fueled, extempore-eulo-billy, seance/monologue, through his use of ribbons of a/b guitar feedback), this 'Flies,' was remastered by Dickinson, who says it's as good as it's going to get--which in Memphis means "ROSS JOHNSON will forever be remembered for "Baron Of Love (Pt. 2)"! *Orig track from Alex Chilton's 'Like Flies on Sherbert' produced by Jim Dickinson From Ross Johnson's Goner Records' self defecating 25-year retrospective autobiographically titled 'Make It Stop!The Most of Ross Johnson'.

[some of the content of this review may have been taken directly from other sources, where it may have been mechanically manipulated into its current state by the author. The author is not responsible for any over-three word strands which may still may remain in tact--thank you.]

i think this is by Andria Lisle, but i'm not sure: WHICH ONE DO YOU THINK IS BETTER?

What do Alex Chilton, Jim Dickinson, Tav Falco, Peter Buck, Monsieur Jeffrey Evans and Jon Spencer have in common?

They’ve all lent their talents to the skewed genius that is Memphis drummer/ranter/raconteur extraordinaire Ross Johnson.

Johnson’s name may only be familiar to a cult of faithful followers, but he’s one of the true heroes of the Southern alt and punk rock underground. From his days riding shotgun with Chilton, to his efforts helping found the Panther Burns to his work with outfits like the Gibson Bros. and ’68 Comeback, Ross has been a dedicated soldier in the trash rock trenches for four decades – while creating a catalog of truly brilliant and bizarre solo recordings on the side.

This January, Goner Records, will release Make It Stop!: The Most of Ross Johnson. This career-spanning collection includes 20-plus tracks, covering Ross’s solo sides and numerous all-star collaborations from 1979 to 2006. It’s a wild, wooly, sonic and lyrical journey that’s sure to take its place among the more outré anthologies in your CD collection.

Ross' mostly spontaneously composed songs – which concern his fraught relations with women, booze, and the very nature of being a Southerner -- are part deconstructionist roots music, part absurdist comedy. Imagine a cross between Hasil Adkins and Sam Kinison, or Charlie Feathers and Albert Brooks, or Kim Fowley and Jerry Clower, and you’ll get the picture (please forgive the groping hybrid comparisons, but as you’ll find out, Ross is rather hard to define). Call it southern fried outsider art or rockabilly psychosis, but once you get a glimpse of Ross’ twisted vision, you’ll never look at the world the same way again.

But Johnson’s story is more than that of just an unhinged rock and roll hellion. An Arkansas native and son of a respected newspaper editor, he moved to Memphis as a teen, just in time for the city’s mid-60s garage band boom. He got his foot in the music scene as a one of the few original and enthusiastic fans of hometown pop group Big Star. Johnson then went on to write for the legendary Lester Bangs at Creem, under the memorable alias of Chester the Conger Eel. He soon befriended Alex Chilton, helped introduce punk rock to Memphis, and later became a notorious imbiber/MC/ringleader as a founding member of Tav Falco’s Panther Burns. Since then he’s spent time thumping the tubs for a variety of wild outfits from the Gibson Bros. to the Ron Franklin Entertainers --- all the while maintaining his alter-ego as a mild mannered librarian at the University of Memphis.

Make It Stop! is a treasure trove of material that collects a variety of out-of-print, hard-to-find, and previously unreleased selections from Ross’ colorful career, including singles, album and comp appearances for labels like Peabody, Sympathy for the Record Industry, Sugar Ditch, and Loverly.

There is of course his legendary vocal debut, “Baron of Love Pt. II,” one of the highlights of Alex Chilton’s famed Like Flies on Sherbert album.

Also, included are solo tracks ranging from 1982’s infamous “Wet Bar” – which was featured on the companion CD to Robert Gordon’s book It Came from Memphis – to early-‘90s cult classics like “It Never Happened” and “Nudist Camp,” down to the recent acoustic nugget, “Signify,” a ridiculously raw self-confessional that will have you laughing and crying simultaneously.

The disc also unearths some never-before-heard (and suitably insane) tracks Ross recorded with R.E.M.’s Peter Buck amid a drunken haze sometime in early 1983.

Credited to

Our Favorite Band

[HEY, THAT'S ME],

songs like “Rockabilly Monkey-Faced Girl” and “My Slobbering Decline” represent some of Buck's first work outside of R.E.M.

(Amazingly, when the tapes were discovered in late 2007, Buck had total recall of the sessions and the songs; Ross has no recollection of recordings whatsoever).

Also included is Ross’ work with a couple mid-‘90s groups he fronted like Adolescent Music Fantasy – dig the band’s twisted take on “Theme From ‘A Summer Place’”. Ross and multi-instrumentalist Tim Farr stir things up as The Young Seniors – check their brilliant cover of Bobby Lee Trammell’s “If You Ever Get It Once” and a revamp of The Gentrys’ hit “Keep on Dancing,” which Ross mutates into a meditation on the embarrassing nature of “ass whoopings.”

Further highlights include a handful of team-ups between Ross and fellow garage cult icon, Monsieur Jeffrey Evans (Gibson Bros., ’68 Comeback). The duo essays everything from the freaky holiday anthem “Mr. Blue (Cut Your Head on X-Mas)” to a souped-up take on “Farmer John,” with equal parts guitar distortion and manic glee.

Make It Stop! comes packaged with a handsome 16-page color booklet, featuring Ross' own hilarious biographical essay, as well as tributes from acclaimed author Robert Gordon ("It Came From Memphis," the Muddy Waters bio "Can’t Be Satisfied"), MOJO writer Andria Lisle, and pop culture critic John Floyd.

Once the proverbial needle drops on this collection you’ll be – as Gordon notes in his liners – “seduced then debauched” by Ross’s “rivulets of rage, humor, and words words words.”

Don’t say we didn’t warn ya’.

TEENAGE TUPELO - Oxford American

Who needs a Grindhouse when you've got the best Drive-In Director in America living right here in Memphis? Nobody steals a shot like Mike McCarthy. Shooting permits are or chumps. Watch gape-mouthed as D'Lana Tunnell strolls the width of East Tupelo, Mississippi, in nothing but high heels, lingerie, and the most baroque bouffant since Dolly sang with Porter. She's lashed by a leering soundtrack of grinding sax and guitars, her lips set and petulant as she wobbles through the broken sidewalks. It's mesmerizing, it's cheap, and it's perfect. While his earliest films like THE SORE LOSERS ("They Wanted Meat So They Ate The Flower Children") and his recent burlesque collection BROAD DAYLIGHT ("Penis Enlargement The Old Fashion Way") have their slutty appeal, he made something weirder than genius with TEENAGE TUPELO. Starting with one of the most potent gnostic myths in rock & roll - "What If The Twin Had Lived?" - McCarthy weaves his personal psychodrama with Elvis lore and smears it with classic drive-in tropes. There's a lesbian girl gang, of course. But less predictably, they're righteous, assisting our heroine. When D'Lana's character Topsy Turvy, gets in a catfight, you recoil in horror as her updo gets mangled. "Not the hair!" you cry out - a perfect Southern sentiment.

It's easy enough to tick off a greatest hits of exploitation scenes. The kind of "wouldn't it be cool" riffs any film geek spins at the video store. But TEENAGE TUPELO anchors that sleaze deep in the South, and deeper in McCarthy's warped little psyche. It's in the details: the tree fort stashed way back in the scrub pine where teenagers smoke, drink and grope; the boarded-up downtown; the store fronts gaping and abandoned; the empty lots overgrown and the brick warehouses with their cracked loading docks. Then, twining through that landscape, you've got McCarthy fantasizing about his biological mother, who put him up for adoption. Is he the long-lost offspring of Jesse Garon? After TEENAGE TUPELO, you can work through the rest of his oeuvre: SUPERSTARLET A.D. (where men have devolved into cavemen and roaming gangs of machine-gun girls split along hair color lines) or his further inquiries into the King with DAMSELVIS, DAUGHTER OF HELVIS, and ELVIS MEETS THE BEATLES ("An unpopular movie about the most popular icons of our time"). And, hell, he's even a good citizen, devoting a large chunk of his energy to preserving old Memphis landmarks through his SHAPE OF KINGS website. Who else would try to save Elvis's favorite roller coaster? But don't dig into McCarthy's filmography out of civic duty. This isn't chamber-of-commerce stuff. Do it because you're a horny, deep-fried, hip-wiggling, butter-bean-eating, hairdo fanatic. Do it because you like your rock & roll filthy and menacing. Do it because you know the perfect Mississippi enlightenment of a hot August day when your brain hums to the drone of the cicadas. Do it because it's the wrong thing to do, but it feels so right. David Smay, Oxford American Magazine, Issue 57, 2007

Oxford American