Music Notes
by Mark Jordan & Jim Hanas
So You Say Want To Be A Blues Star?
This Saturday, August 16th, at 8 p.m. the Beale Street Blues Society will
be hosting the finals of their annual talent contest at Blues City Cafe.
Cover is $5. The contest will mark the culmination of six weeks of weekly
contests that were held Tuesdays at Blues City to determine the finalists.
The ultimate winner will receive a prize package that includes $500 in cash,
eight hours of recording time at House of Blues Studios, a paid gig at Huey's,
and $100 gift certificate from Amro Music.
Scheduled to compete are Keith Brown, Joe Schicke, Toni Green, Josh Miller
and Three-Wheel Drive, and Vince Johnson. Sadly, one finalist will be unable
to attend: Jesse Presley, a longtime supporter of the blues society, passed
away just a few weeks ago. So, to honor Presley, the Beale Street Blues
Society will use Saturday's contest to introduce a new charitable organization
in his name dedicated to the support and assistance of blues musicians.
Pickin' By The Lake
Memphis is known for blues, not bluegrass, but fortunately a few resolute
folks like the good ones at the Lucy Opry keep the banjoists picking and
the fiddlers sawing for local devotees of the music. And now count the United
States Navy among the keepers of the bluegrass. Starting this Thursday,
Naval Support Activity Memphis, in partnership Covington Pike Toyota, will
present its second annual Pickin' By The Lake Bluegrass Festival at the
Navy Lake Recreation Center in Millington. The event kicks off Thursday
night with a jam session. Then on Friday from 7 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. and Saturday
from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., the festival will present
a program that includes performances from bluegrass groups the Reno Brothers,
Unlimited Tradition, Columbia Highway, and the Navy bluegrass band Country
Current. Headlining will be longtime favorites the Osborne Brothers, best
known (for better or worse, depending on your college allegiance) for their
hit "Rocky Top."
For tickets and other information, call 874-5166 or 1-800-779-4252.
Abandon Ship
The details have arrived about the third annual Shangri-La Shindig, and
the big news is it won't be on a boat this year, but instead will take to
dry land at Green's Lounge. "We did the boat thing, that was fun, lost
a lot of money on that," says Shangri-La proprietor Sherman Willmott.
"[So] we decided to scale it back a little bit, make it a little more
homey." And Green's (now, by the way, called Dorothy's although the
new name might take a while to take hold) seemed like a natural since one
of the night's acts will be the joint's owner, Wilroy Sanders and his Memphis
Soul Blues Band featuring Daddy Mack. The headliners will be San Francisco
art-rockers Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, who don't really tour anymore
but are flying in special for the occasion.
Oh yeah, there's going to be a real live hippie in a cage, too. Willmott
says he's got one picked out, but he won't say who it is. "We have
one," he says. "He's in Overton Park right now hanging out under
a tree, doing a drum circle."
It all happens Saturday, August 30th, and since Green's -- I mean Dorothy's
-- holds fewer people than a boat, advance tickets are recommended and available
for $7 at Shangri-La, Otherlands, and Greenstar Auto Sales.
Straight to Video
Lots of action going on with the Oblivians. Their new record, Oblivians
Play Nine Songs With Mr. Quintron-- which pairs the trash-rock trio
with New Orleans organist Quintron for some gospel-flavored numbers -- is
finally in stores locally and slated for official release September 1st.
The release was delayed because the band's label, Crypt, was busy switching
distributors. And there will be a video, too, for the song "What's
the Matter Now?" Filming took place in town all last week at various
locations, including the Oblivians gig last Wednesday at the Madison Flame,
the latest bar to crop up where the Antenna used to be.
by Jim HanasMixing It Up
Two weeks ago, Saliva and Three 6 Mafia paired up for a rare but memorable double bill.
n the crowd,
stringy hair and tattoos, big-ass pants and Pumas blended into one another,
and it was impossible to tell which band the kids had come to see. Was it
the funky nouveau-metal of openers Saliva, or the homegrown gangsta rap
of Three 6 Mafia? No telling, although the predominantly teenage, white,
and suburbanite crowd stayed thick until the last "muthafucka."
It's
amazing -- although not surprising, given the countless ways Memphis is
divided by race -- that double bills like the Saliva/Three 6 Mafia show
two weeks ago at the New Daisy don't happen more frequently. But the truth
is they don't. Sure, black and white artists work together all the time
in Memphis, and almost always have, from Sam Phillips recording black artists
to Dewey Phillips playing them on the radio. It's one of the things that's
made the city what it is. And collaborations take place all the time, but
most often in the traditional forms of blues, soul, R&B, and jazz. Ask
even a diehard fan of those types of music about local rap, however, and
you might not get an answer.
Because rap, let's face it, has a bad reputation and has inspired more tsk-tsking over the plight of the youth today than anything since punk -- or rock-and-roll, for that matter. Gangsta rap -- a category Three 6 clearly fits into, although the group's female vocalist, Gangsta Boo, suggests the term "reality rap" -- is, simply, the "race music" of the Nineties, requiring all the worry and concern that that term demanded in the Fifties.
Which is why the Daisy's double bill seemed so right, and a long time coming. It is, after all, the productive collision of cultures that put Memphis on the map in the first place.
And as the hottest hard-rock band in the city, Saliva was the perfect other half of the equation. Whether it's because of the aggressiveness of new metal or the impact rap has had on it ever since the arrival of bands like Faith No More and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, rap and hard rock share some inner connection. Look at Ice T's punk band Body Count, or the current tour pairing Rage Against the Machine with the Wu-Tang Clan.
Saliva's set certainly revealed the effect rap has had on hard rock outfits in recent years. Lead singer Jose Sappington came off more like an MC than a metal frontman, with his knotted dreads, track gear, and hip-hop mannerisms. On the band's best songs -- like "Spitshine," for example -- the tempo and phrasing of the vocals were much closer to rap than to the operatic pretenses of arena metal.
"We wanted to do it because the planets are aligning for Memphis music right now," he said after the set. "It's a good time for the Memphis music scene to come together and merge and represent as one." He said the racial division in Memphis comes from the top down, from the powers that be, rather than the other way around. "This generation doesn't know what racism is," he said.
Guitarist Chris Debaldo said the double bill had been brewing for a long time. "Memphis rap rules. It's the best rap in the world," he says -- a conviction backed up by his aging Three 6 Mafia T-shirt. "They can give us some of their [fans], and we can give them some of ours."
And that's what happened when Three 6 hit the stage, the six Mafia members joined by a whole crew of friends -- not like an entourage, more like a party -- dancing, shaking hands with the crowd, and just hanging out on stage. The mosh pit turned seamlessly into a funky, bouncing mob, with the kids in the front singing along without missing a beat and holding three fingers in the air in every possible combination.
This generation may not know what racism is, as Sappington said, but lots of them clearly have heard of Three 6 Mafia. And whether the overwhelming whiteness of the crowd had to do with where the show was promoted or just with the fact -- one older than rock-and-roll -- that white kids think black music is cool without the reverse being necessarily true (for an argument along those lines, see the cover story in the latest and last issue of San Francisco's Might magazine), the crowd was undoubtedly into it.
"Stomp muthafucka, stomp mutha-fucka, stomp," the whole place chanted, fingers in the air, as the Mafia capped off their set with a song that showed off the "hyper vibe" groove co-founder D.J. Paul Beauregard says distinguishes Southern rap from its coastal counterparts. The set wasn't very long. They were in and out in a hurry, gone and straight out the exit door. It just doesn't take long to pack up a DAT cassette.
Three days later, the six members of Three 6 Mafia sat at a table with Cliff Coltreri, VP for A&R of Relativity Records, announcing the deal that will not only put some promotion and distribution muscle behind the band, but also open the door for other area rap acts as the group's new label, Hypnotize Minds, becomes something of a major-label outpost.
Saliva has been courted by labels ever since winning the local and regional Grammy Showcases to advance to the national showcase earlier this year. Instead, they decided to go local by putting their self-titled debut out on Mark Yoshida's Rockingchair label, due out this week.
At the Relativity press conference, as the cameras
rolled, the group made its intention clear of becoming "a second Elvis
in this town," and D.J. Paul pointed to the Daisy show three nights
earlier as an example of the vibe that sets Southern rap and Three 6 Mafia
apart. "It was a night to remember," he said.
Saliva
CD-release party Friday at Six-1-Six
Three 6 Mafia's new single, "Tear the Club Up '97," is due out later this month, to be followed by their new album, Chapter 2: World Domination, later this year. September 20th,they are planning a "Give Back to Your Community" free concert at a venue to be announced.