It’s that time of year again, when the days shorten and music fills the limpid autumn air, presaging the holidays on the horizon. In choosing a season for their recurring music festival, the good folks at the Mempho Music Festival knocked it out of the park — or into the Memphis Botanic Garden, as the case may be, where the glory of a Bluff City fall is at its best. Let the revelry begin!
And yet autumn also predisposes us to contemplation. There’s a wistfulness in every falling leaf that leads us to glance back and take stock of how we got where we are, for better or worse. Great music can facilitate that, offering a hand to carry us into the realm of soul, spirit, and song, where our lives float in suspension.
Somehow, Mempho consistently curates bands that offer both good times and philosophical reveries. Take festival favorites Widespread Panic, often dubbed a “jam band” but also proffering songs that feed our heads with a kind of poetry. How can one not take a moment to reflect when hearing their song “Climb to Safety”?
“You can hear, hear it comin’/Like a train out of control/Surely leaves you wonderin’/Exactly where your ticket goes.”
Fellow Mempho headliner Tyler Childers is also prone to take a backward glance now and then, reflecting on life’s lessons, as in his ode to that common quest for a critter conjured by folks who would lead the naive down roads to nowhere, “Snipe Hunt,” in which he sings from the perspective of one such naïf, “I sat on the hill like a Jeremiah Johnson/And I froze my dumb ass off all night/And that’s the way that I feel when I look at our past/And the handshakes you gave me, if you’re callin’ them that/And the snickers you tried to pass off as laughs/And the way your eyes never met mine.”
A campground prank, the snipe hunt, evokes a dead-end friendship from the past. Such are the painful truths that masters of song craft dare us to consider, not to induce some remorse-riddled paralysis, but to carry on with clarity, or at least make calamity rhyme. Thirty years ago, the brilliant Pharcyde, also on the Mempho bill this year, spat these words of determination: “Now that I’m older, stress weighs on my shoulders/Heavy as boulders, but I told y’all/Until the day that I die, I still/Will be a soldier, and that’s all I told ya.” Indeed, a common determination to keep hustling forward through adversity lives in all these bands, none more so than the reigning queen of the proceedings, Mavis Staples, who once sang, “Its a long walk to D.C. but I got my walking shoes on.”
Road Dog Poets Roll Home
Which brings us to Lucero, who have persisted in their superhighway sojourns to the point of becoming a quarter century-old Memphis tradition. The coast-to-coast fans they’ve won over during that time tend to hold the band dear to their hearts, but none so much as in Memphis, where the group’s distinct, solid-rocking chemistry and Ben Nichols’ hard-truth lyrics touched a nerve in this city’s zeitgeist right out of the gate.
Tapping into the zeitgeist is something songwriters tend to do effortlessly, if not always consciously. And it’s what many acts on the Mempho rolls this year do best. Nichols, for his part, considers it a dream booking. “I was very excited when I saw the lineup, and I was very appreciative that they included us in the festival, and especially on that particular day with Tyler Childers headlining, and Charley Crockett playing, and Sierra Ferrell and John R. Miller. If I would have seen that lineup, I would have wanted to play that show. If we weren’t on the show, I would have been like, ‘Why the hell aren’t we included?’ But they got it right, and they were nice enough to invite us, and I’m really glad we’re a part of it.”
Mempho, it turns out, taps into a tight-knit community of songwriters, some solo, some with bands, who are used to seeing each other and even touring together out on the nation’s interstates. As Nichols notes, “We’ve known Tyler Childers for a long time. He played shows with Lucero in the old days, before blowing up and becoming so massively successful. Then I got to play a few shows with him, when Tyler invited Cory Branan out to play some of these stadiums, like the Target Center in Minneapolis, and in Oklahoma City, and in Little Rock. Cory put together a full band for those shows, since they were such big venues, and I got to play bass for him and play these gigantic venues with Tyler. And it was super fun! I hadn’t talked to Tyler in quite a while. It was nice to touch base with him again, and then knowing that this Mempho Fest was coming up, it’s cool to kind of come full circle.”
It’s a full-circle moment in a few ways. Lucero first played Mempho in 2018, the group’s 20th anniversary. In April of that year, they threw their annual Lucero Family Block Party, by then an institution in their hometown. Pursuing a relentless touring schedule, with already a dozen albums under their belt at the time, they’d built a devoted national following and had become de facto ambassadors of Memphis. So it was only natural that then-Mayor Jim Strickland declared April 14th, 2018, to be Lucero Day, citing them as “a source of inspiration, encouragement, and strength for listeners all over the world.” Later that year, their hometown would cheer them on again at what was only the second Mempho to be staged.
When I spoke with guitarist Brian Venable on Lucero Day in 2018, he mused about their 20th birthday, and the memorabilia the band were displaying for the occasion. “I’ve been, I guess you would call it hoarding. I have 20 years of notes and papers and art and snapshots and old flyers. … We’ll have some old guitars, Roy’s old drums, John’s upright [bass], and two display tables that’ll have things like the notebook where I wrote ‘Lucero’ for the first time, lyrics, and other memorabilia. There will be old Memphis Flyer covers, calendars from the ’90s; we did skateboards and I have the original art. Just neat stuff. Not very many bands make it 20 years without breaking up, so it’s kind of a milestone for us as individuals and as a band in Memphis.”
An Ever-Morphing Sound
Now, seven years later, they’re still carrying on, but they haven’t done it the way some imagine it, by pursuing a surefire sonic formula over and over. Rather, they’ve very intentionally morphed their sound from one album to the next, adopting a soul horn section for a time, incorporating ’80s power rock synth textures into one album, then stripping it back down, as with this year’s powerfully intimate release, Lucero Unplugged, featuring Nichols and pianist Rick Steff reinterpreting the band’s catalog as a duet. “You get to really appreciate Rick’s playing, and hopefully a little bit of the songwriting kind of shines through,” says Nichols of the album.
Nichols finds all the stylistic shifts a bit perplexing himself, looking back on Lucero’s 20-odd albums as a body of work. “I’m always kind of at the mercy of my own whims and whatever has come into my world at the time, like, ‘Ooh, I want to do that!’ For better or for worse. And so with Lucero, I can err sometimes too much in this direction, trying to infuse other genres into what Lucero does, whether it would be synthesizers and kind of ’80s production, or maybe other times a little too raw and not enough production. I kind of go back and forth depending on whatever mood I’m in or whatever has caught my fancy in the moment. I’m trying to get better at that, although I’ve been doing this for 30 years, so I don’t know if I’ll ever actually do Lucero exactly the right way, but each time I’m trying to, and it’s funny how I think I’m in control of what I’m doing.”
At the same time, there has remained a core Lucero sound, built on the instinctive rock that’s hard-wired into the personalities of Nichols, Venable, Steff, drummer Roy Berry, and bassist John C. Stubblefield. As Nichols sees it, it’s “what I think our strengths actually are. Which would be a Southern indie rock band or an indie Southern rock band, one of the two, and just kind of keep it simple, stupid.”
“Keep It Simple, Stupid,” of course, has been a maxim adopted by many great players, including the Stax house band, according to Steve Cropper. In Lucero’s case, they then add doses of cowpunk, country, power ballads, soul, and other flavors to taste. And building their boundary-pushing tendencies on a reliably rocking foundation has made them perfect for festivals like Mempho, or Red Rocks Amphitheatre, for that matter (as heard on their 2021 live album recorded there). Yet through the bombast that they’re quite capable of, Lucero delivers some very nuanced storytelling. And that’s what makes the music ring true to so many: Any of the characters populating their songs, facing rage, love, grief, or indecision, could be us. For those of us lucky enough to face the challenges of adulting or parenthood, Lucero has been right there beside us, also accumulating gray hairs.
In a way, their embrace of the grit and grind of touring parallels the tour of duty we’re all doing, and the ways we’re thrown together and torn apart. “The first word she said to me was goodbye,” Nichols sings on “Among the Ghosts.” “In the west the sky grows darker/Back east the sun will rise/Back home my wife and daughter/Don’t know where I am tonight/But soon I will find a road that leads home.”
“In the old days, we had no reason to necessarily be at home,” Nichols muses today. “Going out on the road constantly seemed like our natural environment. Now we’ve cut back [on touring] a little bit just for personal reasons, but it’s also tricky. With Covid, business took a hit. We had a whole year of shows booked, and those went away, and then the shows the following year went away, and we’re still recovering from that. We’re not back to the ticket sales that we were able to do in 2018 or 2019 yet. And part of it is just, we’re getting older and our crowds are getting older.”
Getting older is a topic Nichols doesn’t mince words about, either in conversation or in his songs. “There’s no avoiding it. I’ve always written very matter-of-factly about whatever is going on in my life at the time, for better or for worse. And over the years, I’ve also tried to step outside of that and write from other people’s perspectives and other stories. I’m not the best at it. It doesn’t come naturally to me, but I’m working on it and trying to think more about the craft of songwriting. But yeah, just growing older and changing perspectives, changing times, having a wife and a daughter now, all of that — I can’t help but to put into the songs. I tell people that I still write plenty of heartbreak songs, but now it’s usually about being away from my daughter, missing time with her.”
And whether or not the first word she said to him was really “goodbye” doesn’t matter as much as the tragedy it conveys, and the longing. When Lucero takes to the Mempho stage this coming Sunday, they’ll put over a quarter century of that longing, not to mention struggle, growth, hard knocks, and exultation, into every note, and they’ll do it in their own eclectic way.
“I do like that we can open up for Jawbreaker one day and then the next week open up for Steve Earle, and we can get away with both,” says Nichols. “I like this weird Frankenstein genre that Lucero has built for itself. It does keep me on my toes, and it keeps me interested, and it still makes it really fun recording and writing the music.”
Lucero performs on the Bud Light Stage on Sunday, October 5th, at 4:45 p.m. For more information on all of Mempho’s featured artists, visit memphofest.com.