Memphis producer, musician Jim Dickinson dies - Entertainment AP - MiamiHerald.comMemphis producer, musician Jim Dickinson dies
FILE - In this Wednesday, June 11, 2008 file photo, Jim Dickinson stands outside his farm in Coldwater, Miss. Dickinson, a musician and producer who helped shape the Memphis sound in an influential career that spanned more than four decades, has died. He was 67.Similar stories:By CHRIS TALBOTT
Associated Press Writer
JACKSON, Miss. -- Jim Dickinson, a musician and producer who helped shape the Memphis sound in a career that spanned more than four decades, died Saturday. He was 67.
His wife, Mary Lindsay Dickinson, said he died in a Memphis, Tenn., hospital after three months of heart and intestinal bleeding problems.
The couple lived in Hernando, Miss., but Dickinson recently had bypass surgery and was undergoing rehabilitation at Methodist University Hospital, his wife said.
Jim Dickinson, perhaps best known as the father of Luther and Cody Dickinson, two-thirds of the Grammy-nominated North Mississippi Allstars, managed an outsider's career in an insider's industry. He recorded with and produced greats like Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Big Star, the Rolling Stones, The Replacements and Sam & Dave.
His work in the 1960s and '70s is still influential as young artists rediscover the classic sound of Memphis from that era - a melting pot of rock, pop, blues, country, and rhythm and blues.
"I think he was an incredibly influential individual," Big Star drummer Jody Stephens said Saturday. "I think he defined independent spirit in music, and I think that touched a lot of people."
Dickinson's music was informed by his eclectic and encyclopedic record collection - sold off and rebuilt a few times over the years, usually around Christmas - and his wide array of friends.
"As a producer, it really is all about taste," Jim Dickinson said in a 2008 interview with The Associated Press. "And I'm not the greatest piano player in the world, but I've got damn good taste. I'll sit down and go taste with anybody."
A dabbler in music while in college and later in shows at the famed Overton Park Shell in Memphis, Dickinson was on his way to becoming "a miserable history teacher." But his wife insisted he focus on his music after watching him play shows with the blues legends of Memphis.
"They were rediscovering Furry Lewis and Sleepy John Estes, Rev. Robert Wilkins, these talents that were like gods," Mary Lindsay Dickinson said in 2008. "They were street sweepers. They were yard men. They had no money, no fame, even though they'd invented this style, this musical style that was changing the world. When I saw what he could do with them - he thought he was gonna be a history teacher - I said, 'No, no, no, no, let's try music and see what happens."
Jim Dickinson moved around, traveling with both his own projects and as a sideman until his sons were born. He gave up the road and the lifestyle, built a home studio and settled in to the hard-scrabble life of the independent producer that he jokingly compared to hustling.
His sense of humor, gift for storytelling and open door kept musicians filing through his studio and kitchen as his sons grew up. He took an interest in the boys' music as another father might his sons' baseball career, even drawing Luther and Cody into his own bands. They last released an album together as Jungle Jim and the Voodoo Tiger in 2006.
"Growing up he would play piano and electric guitar and it just always fascinated me, and I always had a little toy guitar of some sort around," Luther Dickinson said in 2008. "And I've really been blessed because I always knew what I wanted to do and it was totally because of my dad and his friends."
Dickinson's career touched on some of the most important music made in the '60s and '70s. He recorded the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses" in Muscle Shoals, Ala.; formed the Atlantic Records house band The Dixie Flyers to record with Franklin and other R&B legends in Miami; inspired a legion of indie rock bands through his work with Big Star; collaborated with Ry Cooder on a number of movie scores, including "Paris, Texas;" and played with Dylan on his Grammy-winning return to prominence, "Time Out of Mind."
He credited his work with Big Star on "Third/Sister Lovers" with keeping his tape reels turning over the years, and Stephens found Dickinson's fingerprints all over the album when he listened to it recently.
"There's so many contributions from people that Jim either brought in or helped steer," Stephens said. "And sometimes a brilliant decision is to do nothing, allow space and that sort of thing. His keyboard part in 'Kizza Me' is this great fractured piano that kind of cascades, like the piano's falling down a flight of steps. I think it was all about the spirit and the emotion."
Dickinson's later work as a producer veered wildly across genres, skipping from Mudhoney to T Model Ford to Lucero and Amy Lavere.
"I'm not really a success-oriented person," Dickinson said. "If you look back at my records that I've made as a producer, they're pretty left-wing. It's some pretty off-the-wall stuff. Especially in the punk rock days. I literally took clients because I thought it would impress my children. I did work in the '70s and '80s where that was definitely my main motive."
August 16, 2009
Memphis producer, musician Jim Dickinson dies - Entertainment AP - MiamiHerald.com
Jimmy Page My Les Paul Guitar is My Mistress and Wife | Parade.com
Jimmy Page My Les Paul Guitar is My Mistress and Wife | Parade.comJimmy Page: My Les Paul Guitar is My Mistress and WifeThree real-life guitar heroes rock the house in “It Might Get Loud.” Jack White (White Stripes), Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin), and The Edge (U2) get together for an impromptu jam session in Davis Guggenheim’s documentary tracing the rise of the electric guitar and three legendary musicians who made it their own.by Jeanne Wolf
Parade.com’s Jeanne Wolf found out some of Jimmy Page’s own rock memories and why he’ll miss the man who started it all, Les Paul, who passed away Thursday.
Jamming with The Edge and Jack White.
“What was so fascinating about it is that we are all really self-taught guitarists. We all have real interesting characteristics. It's not like we're part of an orchestra, where everyone has been taught the same way. But it turned out to be a great experience.”
Photos: Rock band reunionsRemembering Les Paul.
“He’s the man who started everything. He’s just a genius. He set the scene for what was to come as the pioneer of the electric guitar and new tape-recording technology. The Les Paul Gibson guitar that I got, I’ve played all the way through my career. It’s absolutely irreplaceable. I’ve had a marriage with that guitar. It’s my mistress and my wife -- and I don’t have to worry about paying any alimony. Of course, it has spawned some sons and daughters because I’ve acquired far too many guitars over the years. The blessed part is that I can’t play them all at once. If I just got back to my basic tools like the Les Paul, I suppose I could eliminate quite a few.”
Delivering newspapers got him started.
“I don't think my parents understood at all what I was doing, but they certainly didn't sabotage any of it. My dad bought me my first guitar, which was an acoustic. After that I wanted to pay for my own, so I got a paper route and got an electric one.”
Stars reveal what they would tell their younger selves
What he listened to as a kid.
“It was rock and roll and then the blues. It was just purely what was available to be heard in those days. I started listening to the radio and it was like this arm came out of the speaker and pulled me in. I was seduced. But for sure, I was influenced by all of those early rock and roll artists, the ones that came out of Memphis, Little Richard, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. These days I've been listening to a lot of rockabilly.”
Hearing his influence in current performers.
“That's how music travels on. I mean that's how I learned. But as far as the record business goes, it's in a total change at the moment. I think kids want to get their music for free, but they are keen to hear live music. So I don't know how that's going to work out at the end of the day.”
The secret to making a great song like “Stairway to Heaven.”
“How it came about was just tinkering around on the guitar. It came from that. That’s exactly how it happens. You might have just tuned up, and you start playing and one minute you have nothing, or just a couple of chords, and the next minute you’re actually coming up with some new vision.”
Paul, Ringo Unveil 'Beatles: Rock Band'
Still finding new fans after all these years.
“I guess I was old before I got young. Whenever I think about it, I think you just get measured up by what you do, what you produce, as far as your music goes. For me, it’s almost like being in the same picture with a different frame.”
As for those blasted critics.
“You can just be sarcastic or you can try and look at the positive side of it and say, ‘Well, they just didn’t have a clue,’ Each of our albums was so radically different than the one that preceded it, I guess the reviewers had no point of reference. The people who bought our records and got into them understood what we were doing.”
Celebs reveal their first jobs
Don’t look for Led Zeppelin on Guitar Hero any time soon.
“Obviously, there have been overtures made to us, but if you start with the first track on the first Led Zeppelin album, ‘Good Times Bad Times,’ and you think of the drum part that John Bonham did -- how many drummers in the world can actually play that? It’s like if they opened their Guitar Hero and started dabbling, there could be a lot of alcohol consumed and they still wouldn’t come close to Bonham.”
Film Review: The Manson Movie… unreleased | LA.CityZine.com - Los Angeles
Film Review: The Manson Movie… unreleased | LA.CityZine.com - Los Angeles
Last September in Los Angeles, the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival took place at the Sunset 5 Theater in Hollywood. The festival was sponsored by Independent Film Quarterly, Independent Movie Channel - both owned by festival founder Stuart Alson - and Moli.com. The festival boasts showcasing the next generation of voices in independent film and video, wrong! I went there was to watch the one good film in the festival; “The Manson Movie†was the opening night headliner in the documentary category. “The Manson Movie†is fascinating, just for the access he was granted with the notorious Manson Family.
Hendrickson is the only person alive that can boast being Manson the family filmmaker.During the two-year period around Manson’s trial Hendrickson lived, played, traveled, and got high with the Manson family while rolling 35mm film the whole time. The documentary takes us from Viet Nam, and all the footage was shot by Hendrickson himself; the L.A riots, trail and life with the Manson family, as he lived with them at the Spahn Movie Ranch. Hendrickson films infamous family members Paul Watkins, Lynette “Squeaky†Fromme, Steve “Clem†Grogan, and more in the late 60’s, and early 70’s. In “The Manson movie,†the kids are doing anything from acting, playing, and singing at the Spahn ranch, to protesting, hiding out, and monologing for the camera in this eighty-five minute long film.
It’s like a Manson family reality show, as the footage takes us through the start of the Los Angeles riots that took the life of activist Rubin Salazar and Squeaky Fromme outside the Los Angeles courthouse as the Manson trial took place. Hendrickson and Sharon Tate had the same spiritual advisor, and his working in Hollywood gave him an insider’s view. He spoke-freely of the investigation of Tate/LaBianca murders, Hollywood, Roman Polanski and the LAPD detectives covering the case.Hendrickson said The (Lacy) Peterson case is the classic example, the husbands always the first suspect. I talked to a woman, a friend of Sharon Tate’s that said it wasn’t his (Roman Polanski) baby, and that they had an open ended marriage.
In “The Manson Movie†we see the family skinny-dipping, singing, cooking, smoking weed, dumpster-diving, but the tone often drifts to the dark side; its fear, suspicion, and psychotic-devotion to their beloved Charlie. He narrates the film as, telling us about how the girls make dumpster casserole (laced with pot) one-minute, and jump to jaw-dropping footage of the family’s secret Devil’s Canyon retreat, and Death Valley ranch, interviews and protesting Charlie’s trial.One of the more fascinating things is that Hendrickson went to the L.A jailhouse to meet with Manson to talk about the filming of his movie. Another interesting incident where he was told “in a few days†he’d go to the courthouse and film, and that Manson himself was expecting to be filmed. The end result for us, the viewer is a lot of new Manson footage in the film. We hear from the Hendrickson, the cameraman, about how it felt being there, living through being the one pointing the camera at Charles Manson.
The footage alone is enough for the movie to be released. I asked him why he would make this film, and speak out now. Hendrickson said the difference is he is 63
and he doesn’t give a ****. You know, what I really had to, what I’ve really done is for my Grandchildren, because years ago somebody said, and I had the idea then to make a film, make it like you’d make a home movie for your grandchildren.â€Â
Hendrickson doesn’t leave out anything, or play to one-side or another in “The Manson Movie†he just uses this film-footage to document the times. The film is a fantastic documentary and a time capsule from the death of the sixties.
Jim Dickinson latimes.com keyword alex-chilton
POP EYE
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: What do the current albums by the Replacements and Green on Red have in common? Veteran Memphis producer Jim Dickinson, who did several cult-fave Alex Chilton records in the early '70s. Asked to compare the two bands, Dickinson said: "Green on Red are extremely intellectual and like nothing better than staying up all night discussing Sartre and Kant while smoking packs of cigarettes and drinking pots of coffee. The Replacements' idea of a good time is to get drunk and fall down!"
Rest Haven Restaurant, Clarksdale, Miss.
Rest Haven Restaurant, Clarksdale, Miss.
2:20 p.m. Feb. 23
Its never too early to start planning the road trip from Chicago to New Orleans for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. One mandatory stop is Chamoun's Rest Haven Restaurant in Clarksdale, Miss. I called yesterday to make sure they are still open. They are.
Here's an edited version of a story I wrote from a visit in early 2004. I was hungry. I had spent half a day talking to musician-producer Jim Dickinson at his North Mississippi compound. Then I went to this classic diner to eat Lebanese food. I think Mississippi is an underappreciated state.
CLARKSDALE, Miss. -- The parched terrain surrounding Chamoun's Rest Haven Restaurant is best-known for nourishing the blues. John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters all came from this part of the Delta, 75 miles south of Memphis. Blues are not usually linked to Lebanese cuisine. But the Rest Haven has been serving kibbies in the Delta since 1947........
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.....The traditional Lebanese dish consists of ground round steak, cracked wheat, onions, pepper, salt and olive oil. Kibbies are served fried, baked or raw. Homemade pita bread is served on the side.
The Rest Haven is at 419 State St. (Highway 61), just blocks from the Delta Blues Museum. When Muddy Waters was a young man, he sang on the corner of 4th and Sunflower, a mile and a half northwest of the Rest Haven. The restaurant is owned and operated by Chafik and Louise Chamoun (sha-moan). Chafik's cousin Woodrow and his wife, Amra, built the restaurant in 1947. Their parents were born in Lebanon.
The Rest Haven is as quaint as a Route 66 roadside attraction with its long evergreen awning and clean white brick that was cast in nearby Indianola, Miss. The same brick can be seen in a motel across the street and a nearby subdivision. The Rest Haven seats about 120 customers in a cafe and a separate dining room. "I'll tell you, 99 percent of the people who come here from the Netherlands, Germany or Boston know about our food better than the locals," Chafik Chamoun says while sitting in the diner on his Sunday off day. "Did you hear about the tabouli?" Well, no.
"Tabouli is our appetizer salad," he says. "You get parsley, cracked wheat, green onion. You can put a tomato in it and put some olive oil and lemon juice on it." Blues lovers from all walks of life have found the Rest Haven. "I don't know if you know the ZZ Top?" Chamoun asked. "They were here."
He walks over to a wall of fame and points to a picture of the bearded Texas trio eating kibbies and grape leaves. Chamoun continues, "I was busy making a living. I didn't know anything about the ZZ Top. It was 10 in the morning and these guys with long beards walked in. I asked my wife, 'Who are these people?' My wife said I better not say anything. She said, 'These people are famous. They are the ZZ Top.' They have been good to this town. They raised money for the blues museum. They've been here three or four times."
ZZ Top had a hit with "Tube Steak Boogie," but to my knowledge they've never written a song called "True Delta Kibbie." The meat is at the core of the kibbie. "It is not hamburger," declares Chamoun, a ringer for the late Anthony Quinn. "And it's not ground beef. You get the leanest meat you can get."
A local butcher trims off every piece of fat for the Rest Haven. He then grinds the meat not once, but twice. The cracked wheat is prepared by Ghossain's, a Lebanese bakery in Youngstown, Ohio. The bakery owners are from Zahlee, Lebanon, the hometown of the Chamouns. The wheat is boiled, dried, cracked and shipped to Mississippi.
"We get 40 packages of wheat every other week," Chamoun says. "Each package has six loaves. That's what we go through in a week's time here."
Chafik, 72, and Louise, 66, studied at the American School in Zahle, Lebanon, during the 1950s. She was an American citizen. Her father died when she was young and her mother reared the family on a farm in Lebanon. "I wanted to go to America more than anything," Chamoun says. "You were looking for a better life. You read about the United States. You think money grows on trees. There is more to it than that. You have to work."
Chafik works at the Rest Haven between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. six days a week. Around lunchtime Chafik will head home for a 20-minute nap. Louise doesn't come around the restaurant much anymore, but she does drop in occasionally to see how the kitchen is going and to make sure the premises are clean.
Every morning the kitchen makes homemade chocolate, strawberry and coconut pies, each one stacked with an Elvis pompadour of meringue.
The Rest Haven breakfast crowd is known for fetching the coffeepot to serve themselves and their neighbors. And check the words of wisdom from Louise's needlework behind the diner counter: "By the Time Your Children Are Fit To Live With, They Are Living With Someone Else."
Chafik and Louise were married on Nov. 29, 1953. They haven't been too busy to have children: Mona, 39, is an educator in Tyler, Texas. Paul, 41, is an engineer in Conway, Ark. Elizabeth, 45, is a nurse in Ashland, Ky. Vivian, 47, is an assistant principal in Cleveland, Miss. Robert, 50, is a Memphis attorney. And Paula, 43, works at the Rest Haven. She is also a dietitian. "The kibbie is real healthy," she says. "It has bulgur pure cracked wheat and there's no fat in the meat at all."
Chafik and Louise arrived in New York on May 5, 1954. The newlyweds came to America on a Greek passenger ship. They had about $200. They ate the nightly special of pickled fish and spaghetti. The trip took 21 days. "There were 1,800 people on the boat," Chamoun recalls. "The ticket was only $300 per person, so you didn't expect the Queen Mary." They did have the good fortune to run into some Lebanese people who brought along kibbies and cabbage roll. "We were in heaven!" Chamoun says.
Lebanese people have immigrated to northern Mississippi since the 1880s. They opened grocery stores, peddled goods and worked on farms. "There used to be many Lebanese here," Chamoun says. "Now, there's 20, 25 families." (Clarksdale's population is 20,000.) Chafik's first job was to help an uncle run a Clarksdale nightclub, circa 1955-56.
"People came from the farm on Saturday and would go to downtown nightclubs to hear the blues," he says. "On Saturday night it was like Broadway. People were walking everywhere." But a new world opened up when Chamoun's grandfather gave him $300 to buy a green 1951 Plymouth. Trouble was, Chamoun did not know how to drive a car. "A friend of my uncle's taught me," he says. "His name was Oxodine. We drove a 15-mile radius on Highway 49. We didn't park, he didn't show me how to pass, we didn't do anything. We came back and he said, 'You know how to drive'. I went to visit one of my kinfolks. I was so proud of my car, I didn't want to park in the street. I was scared somebody would hit it, so I parked in the driveway. When it came time to go, I didn't know how to back up the car.
"But the hardship is the best experience."
Using his newly acquired skills, Chamoun became a traveling salesman for Raleigh Products. Locals knew him as "The Raleigh Man." Chamoun drove up and down Highways 61 and 49. He would get nervous every time he drove past Parchman, the Mississippi State Penitentiary on 46 acres along Highway 49. Blues guitarist Son House did time here (1928-30) and Elvis Presley's dad, Vernon, spent eight months at Parchman in 1938 for forging a check.
Most of Chamoun's clients were farmers. He sold on credit, but farm people always paid back on time. "It was like Avon," he says. "I would go house to house. I sold hog medicine. Perfume. Pie fillings. Sometimes the farm people would buy stuff from me just to help me, too." Chamoun kept his goods in the trunk. He stopped at a house, opened the trunk and customers would gather around the car. They pointed at what they wanted to purchase. He would point at the price. Chamoun takes a drag off a thin brown filter cigarette and says, "I could speak a little English. But I couldn't understand everyday English."
In 1968 Chamoun found a burst of energy from his kibbies. He opened a small grocery store on Friar's Point Road, outside of town. He built on a 25-seat diner, which is where ZZ Top discovered kibbies. "I was making pita bread," Chamoun says. "Then we made a kibbie sandwich. That brought people in. After that, I sold cabbage rolls and grape leaves. The next thing you know, I'm selling lunch."
Chamoun also sold Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles in a Highway 61 dealership. And during his remaining free time Chamoun was still "The Raleigh Man." In 1990 Chamoun and his wife took over the Rest Haven, which was operated by a cousin. Of course, it would be a cliche to say the rest is history. Every meal at the Rest Haven is a new celebration of America's cultural crossroads.
Chamoun's Rest Haven Restaurant is open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily except Sunday. Reservations are not required (662-624-8601).
Memphis Shaken as Rock 'n' Roll Heart Is Stilled
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
Lives of the great songs / Cheatin' meeting of minds: The Dark End of the Street
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 BELOWTHAT'S THE DIRECTOR'S UP THERE
Make It Stop!produced by
The Most of Ross Johnson
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(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).Our Favorite Bandsongs like “Rockabilly Monkey-Faced Girl” and “My Slobbering Decline” represent some of Buck's first work outside of R.E.M.
[HEY, THAT'S ME],
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
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
