Memphis Rent Party

by Robert Gordon

  We see a shot of a young Sam sharing a guitar with a young Elvis Presley, a sort of student-mentor shot. “Here we have a picture of, that’s Elvis Presley and, is that you there in the checkered jacket?”

  Duh.

  “What year was that, do you suppose?”

  Sam will have none of this drivel, and he simply ignores Letterman. “Well I missed my calling. You know, Gregory Peck hadn’t got a damn thing on me in that photo, has he?”

  “No,” Dave says, sounding dejected. “And he still doesn’t and …” Dave trails off and then tosses that photo aside to reveal another one.

  Sam’s attention is now over the audience’s heads—on the back wall—and he murmurs, “Well, thank you David.”

  “Now let’s see who we have here.” But Sam looks further from the photos. Dave continues, “Who’s next in the big gala photo book of … that’s you and—” Dave verbalizes a blank for Sam to fill in, their conversation as stimulating as a standardized test.

  “Jerruh,” says Sam, entertaining himself with sounds.

  “Jerry Lee Lewis,” translates Dave in the tone teachers use to lead students through hoops.

  “The Killuh,” says Sam, making it rhyme with “Jerruh.”

  “Now this guy,” Dave begins enthusiastically before quickly petering out, “was one of the most talented musicians ever to uh, put anything on record, wasn’t he?”

  “No question about that,” says Sam. “I think Mr. Paul will tell us all that.” You don’t need me here to talk about what we already know.

  “Paul, you want to come over and get in on this?” The audience applauds as the ride loses more control. Sam is gleeful. As Paul leaves his banks of keyboards, Sam brays to the ceiling, “Mr. Paul-al.” Then he says, “This is my baby,” and Sam stands and hugs Paul Shaffer, who looks like a small turnip.

  “Okay now,” says Letterman, “We have other photos here. Paul, tell us what you know about these pictures.”

  And Paul Shaffer reaches across Sam Phillips—as if he weren’t there, as Sam wants it—and points to a piece of cardboard that we can’t see and says, “This would be Jerry Lee Lewis here. Probably Carl Perkins here. This would be, who would that be? Johnny Cash?”

  “J. C.” says Sam off camera, and it could be an answer or an exclamation.

  The photo is of the Million Dollar Quartet. “And Elvis on piano,” says Paul.

  It’s as if a tuxedoed stage manager has strolled out and announced, “The role of the legendary Sam Phillips is being played tonight by Paul Shaffer and David Letterman.” Sam the Man is busy producing, drawing out the best, the most unsettled performance, which for Dave and Paul means hosting a vacant center. “The guests on talk shows don’t matter,” they seem to say, “their role is to fill the time between commercials.” Sam’s work is about people, while Letterman—and television, and the wretched pop music made in the name of Sam Phillips: Their work is about selling soap.

  “And what were you recording there?” Dave asks Sam, “Was that an actual recording session?”

  “Well Carl Perkins was doing a session,” Sam begins with earnest interest, but then he too peters out. “And it just so happened … that all of a sudden there at 706 Union—” Sam pauses, opens his arms and drops his voice, “—our great big studio, it’s almost as pretty as this studio, good God this …” and while Sam mutters something and makes a funny face with his eyes and eyebrows, Dave abandons the photograph idea and puts them all away. Paul has been listening somewhat intently, but now he begins to fidget and plays his discomfort for laughs. Sam leans forward into the hypnotizing position and says, “But they all dropped by, and it just so happened that they all dropped by, and they all dropped by. And so we got together. We all got—well …”

  Dave drums his desk with his palms, and he says, “Yeah.” Then he reaches for some index cards and says, “Well, you’re certainly, you’re certainly [“an interesting guest,” interjects Sam] you’re certainly a legend.” Compliment though it may be, “legend” hearkens to the mythic and the dead. “You’re responsible for the very formation of rock and roll.” The rock and roll that caused riots? The one that sells sneakers? “Don’t you think you had a hand in helping the sound of rock and roll evolve from bits and pieces of other influences?”

  Sam’s had enough. “David, you’re getting awful serious for this show. What’re you setting me up for?” Sam’s work here is done.

  Dave’s had enough too. “I’m just trying to think of a real nice way to say good-bye, Sam.”

  Paul Shaffer laughs into his hand. Lightning cracks across the fake skyline. They’ll cut to a commercial, and when they return, Sam will be gone and Dave will resume. Five minutes is too long for a pop song anyway.

  Sam and Dave shake hands, laughing. Letterman, somewhat bewildered and clearly relieved, sums it up for a TV finish: “The legendary Sam Phillips.”

  JIM DICKINSON

  “I have something Mick Jagger can’t afford.”

  —Jim Dickinson

  Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music came out while I was living in Philadelphia, 1986. Cocky-ass me had dismissed Peter’s previous books: What can this guy teach me about my hometown? But I bought Sweet Soul Music, and the answer came quick: a whole damn lot. (I later went back to find Lost Highway and its predecessor Feel Like Going Home.) The book’s immediate impact, since I was just making my initial foray as a writer, was the resolve to interview Jim Dickinson on my next Memphis trip.

  I’d known Jim Dickinson as a public figure when I was growing up—he played piano, guitar, and was a producer. Often quoted in the newspaper, he was hilarious, outlandish, insightful: “There’s a lot of people that can play better than me. But they can’t play with the Stones better than me.” (He’d played on “Wild Horses,” so he wasn’t just hyperbolizing.) Another newspaper quote: “A record is supposed to be unique. If you can do the same thing over and over again, what’s the use of making a record of it?” And: “Ethnic has become a bad word in the contemporary music business. There is this idea of generic music—raceless, sexless, androgynous. Prince, Michael Jackson … one size fits all. It’s to tremendous advantage of the record industry to try to sell three million units, but … the regional aspect of the record business has been swallowed up … All regional culture is in trouble in the United States right now.” And finally: “If they want us [Memphis musicians] to look like Nashville, we’re not gonna. If they want us to look like Lawrence Welk’s band, we’re not gonna. We’re a bunch of rednecks and field hands playing unpopular music.” Sam Phillips had retreated from music production and from the public; Jim was assuming his mantle, and he had my attention.

  With my Sonic Youth review from the Philadelphia Inquirer to parlay and a visit to Memphis imminent, I pitched a Jim Dickinson feature to Option, a magazine that focused on indie releases and embraced the edge. (Jim later liked to quote wrestler Randy “Macho Man” Savage: “If you’re not on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.”)

  Jim happily obliged my request. This would be my first assignment that wasn’t just work; it was my passion. Home for the winter holidays, I drove down to Eudora, Mississippi, crossed a levee road with lakes on either side (a symbolic baptism), and pulled up in the daylight to a place that was kind of isolated behind some trees and vines. Mary Lindsay Dickinson, Jim’s wife, led me to their back room; its three large windows overlooking the water made it feel like a porch. We sat on old, comfortable sofas. A couple days after Christmas, a large fir was in the corner.

  I told Jim I’d been at the blues festival a decade earlier when his band Mud Boy and the Neutrons unleashed the rock and roll and got their plug pulled. I told him I’d been bringing whiskey to Furry Lewis’s duplex, had been to the cotton warehouse beer busts where punkabilly was being created by Tav Falco’s Unapproachable Panther Burns, featuring Alex Chilton. I told him I liked that Memphis artists were working outside the mainstream and making an international impact. I liked the rawness, and that they
became popular by flouting trends, not following them. I thought Mud Boy and the Neutrons should have been bigger than the Rolling Stones. They rocked harder, their interplay of voices and instruments was better, they were stranger and more singular. I wasn’t indignant about their obscurity, but it did frustrate me.

  Not Jim. In fact, he embraced the marginalization. There were no expectations to meet, no worries about losing popularity. Jim used to say, “I have something Mick Jagger can’t afford,” and with that he’d grab his belly’s not inconsiderable heft. Mick couldn’t afford to not look like a model; Jim could eat all the barbecue he could afford, could look like he needed to shower, could say what he wanted without worry about backlash. Dancing on the edge required a commitment to one’s own beliefs and a willingness to go to strange places; to adhere to one’s own muse; to make illogical, unprofitable, deeply personal decisions, like Jim cites Alex Chilton doing during the Like Flies on Sherbert sessions—intentionally flushing hits down the toilet.

  Jim helped me understand the Memphis aesthetic as the inverse of a hit factory like Nashville. Oddballs and individuals thrive here, not homogeny, hegemony, or harmony. That doesn’t mean Memphis doesn’t want hits. It means Memphis insists on dictating its own terms, delivered via take it or leave it. Life may be short, buster, but art is long.

  “The art form of the twentieth century is undeniably music,” Jim told me in the mid-1980s. “And the most important thing that has happened to music happened in Memphis. It’s like being in Paris at the start of the twentieth century. Culture has changed as much in the last twenty years as it did then, and the reason has been music.”

  Mud Boy and the Neutrons was four people—Jim, Sid Selvidge, Lee Baker, and Jimmy Crosthwait. Early in their careers, Jim and Sid had gained some experience in the commercial music business: Jim as a session man for Atlantic, Sid as an artist for Stax. “The evil underbelly,” Jim called it: the experience of searching your soul to make art, struggling to express that art, and then seeing your hard work and your personal creation treated as if it were a washing machine or a hamburger. The intersection of art and commerce: Some are more suited to it than others.

  The other two in Mud Boy, Jimmy and Lee—initially the music biz attracted them. They wanted to taste stardom. There were, however, practical hindrances. Lee had a felony conviction for pot sales and Jimmy’s affection for alcoholic beverages had gotten him banned from airline travel. So constrained, Mud Boy settled into doing their thing, from home, infrequently, for themselves. Thirteen years after they began performing together, nine years after I experienced that near-riotous festival gig, they released their first album. I used it as the peg for my first magazine assignment. What follows is the transcript, edited, that the March 1987 Option article drew from.

  In Eudora, hours passed and still we sat and talked. Jim stitched together a scene that I knew existed but was only beginning to understand. Daylight faded, talk intensified, and when Jim’s wife, Mary Lindsay, flipped on the Christmas tree lights, bathing the space in a glowing warmth, I knew I’d made new friends.

  Mary Lindsay sat with us for parts of the interview. Jim was, at the time, working with the Replacements on what would become Pleased to Meet Me. I began by mentioning a recent article about one of Jim’s collaborators, Ry Cooder, that had also run in Option. Jim had worked with Ry on several soundtracks, including the Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas, then already a couple years old but still impactful—capacious, evocative, and mesmerizing.

  On the Edge

  Previously unpublished, December 27, 1986

  ROBERT GORDON: I think that Paris, Texas stuff is great.

  JAMES LUTHER DICKINSON: Oh I’m real proud of that. That exceeds something like the Streets of Fire soundtrack, which took five or six weeks to create. Paris, Texas we did in three days. And we did it in sequence, from the beginning of the movie to the end, and all of the emotionality is there without being calculated. We watch the screen and we accompany it—it’s so easy to do. My two favorite Ry Cooder movies are Paris, Texas and Southern Comfort, and they were both done that same way—very organically and without as many musicians.

  On Paris, Texas I was playing an electric Kawai keyboard. I used reels of duct tape, rolling them across the keys. I rolled one of them down the black keys and the other one up the white keys, and the random harmonics were really nice—it’s the sound in Paris, Texas that’s like bicycle spokes.

  RG: I saw you perform with Mud Boy and the Neutrons. Like Cooder, that seems like an ongoing collaboration.

  JLD: It’s hard to say what Mud Boy is. The Mud Boy sound is like a spirit we try to summon, like the Pygmies in the rain forest summon the shaman. And the most successful that we can get is that sometimes [Mississippi hill country harmonica player] Johnny Woods appears. We can’t play too much because it becomes too familiar. When we started, we rehearsed for three months, and it took us seriously another three years to get over the three months’ rehearsal. We’re about the moments where the shit comes together, and Mud Boy tries to extend those moments.

  I hear things between me and [Mud Boy guitarist Lee] Baker that if we stopped doing it, nobody on earth would be doing what we do, because of the peculiarity of our environment, because we both played with old blues players. Furry Lewis made a big difference in the way Lee plays. But it took away whatever little commercial value he might have had.

  Lee plays on a lot of Alex Chilton’s Like Flies on Sherbert. Alex told me that he had gotten too good to play the kind of music that he was interested in. And I know just what he means, because I’ve preserved the way I played when I was fifteen or sixteen. I play just as bad now, and Alex, that’s what he wanted, somebody to play like he was fifteen or sixteen, but controlled. Alex is playing almost all of the piano on Flies. I’m playing the guitar almost all the time. Lesa [Aldridge] is playing piano on “Lorena.”

  Johnny Woods with Jim Dickinson, left. (Courtesy of Tav Falco)

  Furry Lewis, right, with Sid Selvidge, left, and Lee Baker, center. Ritz Theater, circa 1978. (Courtesy of Pat Rainer)

  RG: That “No More the Moon Shines on Lorena” piano solo is so beautiful! It sounds like the fewest notes possible to create a melody. Was Flies banged out in a couple of hours like it sounds?

  JLD: Oh Lord no, it was agonized ad nauseam. The actual playing was brief but the psychodynamics were pretty heavy. I’ve always lost control of Alex at the end. There’s one song on that record, the title song—if I could have mixed that with Joe Hardy at Ardent, we’d have been on the radio with it. And Alex knew it, so he flushed it instead.

  RG: He didn’t want to get back on the radio? His recent “comeback” stuff on the New Rose label is so clean, he seems to aspire to radio now.

  JLD: When I first met Alex he was living in his mama’s house and he had the gold record for “Cry Like a Baby” on the wall, and it was sealed in a glass box, and the label had peeled off the record and fallen inside. I think that sums up Alex. I played with Arlo Guthrie on “City of New Orleans,” and Arlo taught me the same thing: He was totally exploited and didn’t get any of the money. And they both believe that if somebody is going to fuck it up, it’s going to be them.

  MARY LINDSAY DICKINSON: At one time, Alex was having four records released in the same month and we saw his mom taking him to a department store to buy a suit of clothes.

  JLD: Alex never received the royalties for anything until Flies on Sherbert, and you can imagine how much he made on that. The exploitation factor, which is critical in any recording situation, just gets too ugly for some people and they want to control it themselves. On Big Star 3rd, I watched Alex sabotage every song that had real commercial potential. Paul Westerberg [from the Replacements] does the same thing with the comedy material. I think that’s an interesting thing in common.

  RG: But Paul doesn’t have the same exploitation factor—he’s not had the big hit.

  JLD: No, but he’s just as afraid of being incorrectly perceived. Alex doesn’t wa
nt anybody to think he’s serious. It means a lot to him for people to not think that.

  RG: I really love “Kanga Roo” from 3rd.

  JLD: “Kanga Roo” was the time where I truly had control. Alex put it down with his voice and the twelve-string acoustic guitar on the same track, just to make it harder to mix. If they’re on the same track, those levels are predetermined. He and Lesa did it in the middle of the night. He said, “You want to overdub on something, overdub on this.” Defiantly. So I started stacking shit up on it. I did the strings first for the melodrama. Then I started playing guitars. Pretty soon Alex was out there with me. “Kanga Roo” is good, but it’s just a prelude to “Dream Lover,” which wasn’t on the record and should have been. It’s the single that was left off of Big Star 3rd, and, in a way, it’s the whole point of the record. Alex is playing piano, and he wouldn’t tell anybody even what key he was in. He said, “I’ve played the song twice. I played it when I wrote it, and I played it for Lesa, and I shouldn’t have done that.” He said, “If I play it one more time, I’m going to be bored with it.” That’s the kind of thing I’m sympathetic to, so I said, “Sing a little bit, then we’ll do it.” After the first bridge, I don’t know if he forgot lyrics or what, but he says, “Play it for me, guitarist,” and Baker starts into one of his funk solos and we overdubbed the Memphis Symphony on it—it’s really pretty good.

  Those sessions, we had an upright bass, a jazz player who did all the bowed stuff, and he thought we were completely insane. He would laugh openly while he was playing. As far as I was concerned, we just gotta get it while he’s still laughing.

  RG: 3rd seemed to barely get released. Does that frustrate you?

  JLD: I did a European tour in ’83 where I first started realizing what Big Star 3rd had done, because where people knew enough to talk to me about anything, they knew enough to talk to me about Alex. I didn’t think that stuff got around the corner. In America, it didn’t. People have come to me and said, It changed my life. The first time I thought, Yeah, sure. But it’s happened over and over. There was a generation of twelve-year-old boys that were devastated by Big Star 3rd; that’s the only conclusion I can reach. They used to say that about the Velvet Underground’s first record: Everybody that bought the record formed a band. Certainly that must be true of Alex now.