LIVE – Out On The Weekend, 2016

[Published in Rolling Stone, OCTOBER 2017]

AMERICANA FESTIVAL LETS LINEUP SHINE BRIGHT, WRITES SAMUEL J. FELL

Out On The Weekend

Seaworks, Williamstown (Melbourne)

Saturday October 15, 2016

There’s a gale warning for Port Phillip Bay, although one doesn’t need a warning. Winds batter windowpanes and shake down trees, limbs flailing and cracking, the power of it all hitting you in the face, making your collars flap angrily, slapping your ears as you walk from the train toward the pier through the usually quiet and gentrified Williamstown streets; one doesn’t need a warning, it’s painfully obvious, debris scattered everywhere, leaves and branches, overturned bins and the like.

The crowd braces forward though and navigates the headwind, we make our way to Seaworks on the water’s edge where Out On The Weekend is running for the third time. An intimate gathering of likeminded souls whose only aim, despite the inclemency of the weather, is smoked meat and cold cans of beer imbibed to music of the country variety, Americana, alternative country if you will.

It’s an industrial scene, towering iron sheds arching over concrete throughways and rusty bollards, the incongruous and ramshackle Pirates Tavern across the lot from the Outdoor Stage where All Out Exes Live In Texas harmonise over a bed of accordion-led merriment, guitar and mandolin and ukulele skipping carefree alongside. This quartet has come a long way in a short time and the overtly sweet nature of their music, at times in the past too syrupy sweet, has a harder edge to it today, their sound a little tougher, although this makes it no less beguiling. It seems at odds with its physical surrounds, and yet draws it all together in a way which makes sense. People tap booted feet on old and cracked concrete. It does all make sense.

Inside, the hanger-like space eked out to form the main stage, the wind is less obvious, no gusts whipping skirts up and blowing hats off, merely ominous rattles and creaks as the old structure leans into it. Pigeons fly overhead and settle on rafters. Josh Hedley – suited, bearded, ten-gallon-hatted – commands attention with a voice of uncommon power and poise, using just his guitar as accompaniment, along with Will Van Horn on pedal steel, a near-virtuosic player whose tear-jerking country slide adds a glorious, warm melancholy to Hedley’s already heart-wrenching country songs.

Hedley himself is a character and his patter is upbeat and happy, belying the nature of the songs themselves. Van Horn hasn’t played any of said songs before, which highlights even more so his skill, and the pair embody country music and the big crowd raise cans of Melbourne Bitter in unison. Robert Ellis joins them for a track before it all wraps up and then it’s back out into the wind and to the bar and back to the Outdoor Stage.

The Cactus Blossoms, a brother-brother duo, two guitars and voices, somewhat reminiscent of The Milk Carton Kids, but with less punch and panache. They play well together and their voices meld into one and yet I’m left a little cold, not enough grit and grime for my liking – I like my country music set up against a bar, holding a beer into which to cry – but then, anyone to be seen after Josh Hedley had big shoes to fill.

Lindi Ortega

Lindi Ortega’s music has evolved over the past couple of years, more than just a little. Where before it held a strong element of western swing melded well with a rockabilly strain and was subtle and sharp, today it’s a full-blooded country rock assault. ‘Champagne’ James Robertson on guitar, along with Sly Juhas drumming, build the base from which Ortega’s impressive howl grows and yet as the set goes on, it all seems to blend into one and even the older songs are treated in this full-throttle style and so there’s no light or shade, just loud and fast. All well and good, but I feel this could have been done better.

They finish with a version of Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring Of Fire’, which at first seems tainted as the foldback seems to have failed and so they can’t hear themselves but then it all just meshes as they make the best of a bad situation and the song – dissonant, broken, cracked – becomes the highlight of the set.

Robert Ellis. Pic by Kane Hibberd

Robert Ellis, who’s swapped his casual day attire for a denim suit studded with rhinestones, has also evolved a great deal. No longer a solo artist armed with nothing other than an acoustic guitar and a clutch of well-written songs, Ellis today commands a crack regiment of musical soldiers who back his heaving, multi-headed beast of a set with an aplomb not often seen.

It all veers from near-cabaret to country to rock ‘n’ roll and back again, careening at breakneck speed from one style to the next and yet it’s seamless and adventurous, it’s stepped off the beaten path and can’t find its way back and yet it doesn’t need to – this is a musician who’s shed any semblance of normalcy and is intent on finding something truly different. It’s one of the most powerful sets I’ve been privy to and it leaves many standing stock still, mouths agape, limbs akimbo, not quite sure what just happened and yet wanting it to happen again in all its gruesome glory.

Many of us step outside, patronise the bar, stand around drinking beer, bourbon, stunned, before moving onto the next leg.

“Did you watch the last US presidential debate?” a colleague then asks me. “The last ten minutes or so,” I reply. “Did you see how Trump just stalked the stage?” “Yep.” “That’s what Cash Savage does, she stalks, although she does it properly.” It’s true, Savage stalks from one side of the murky stage to the other, stepping between members of her band – guitars, bass, fiddle – mic in hand almost daring someone to do something wrong or stupid before filling the air with her howl, her freight-train vocal express. The band pack a punch, the crowd heaves, almost breathing in and out as one, the band spend most of the set as silhouettes, country punk ‘n’ roll coming out of the blackness with more power than the wind which still whips the usually insipid bay water to angry, frothy, white caps.

Marlon Williams & The Yarra Benders

And so to the finale, Marlon Williams in his only Melbourne show of the year, a man whose star has risen so quickly and with such dazzling speed that one wonders where, if at all, it will finally peak. With his Yarra Benders in tow, Williams does as he has so well these few years past – songs of intricate beauty, a thin vein of country running through them all, crooned and howled, whispered and wailed, his voice is his weapon as is his arsenal of simple-yet-poignantly strong songs – it’s little wonder he’s as popular as he is.

A cover of Neil Young’s ‘Out On The Weekend’, for which this small festival is named, goes down a treat and it all wraps up a little too soon and one wanders out of the big ol’ shed at the end, with everyone else, and are buffeted again, gulls floating overheard in the dark on the wind above the taco trucks and burger bars (now long sold out), we all saunter out and talk it over, voices raised above the gusty howl, try and find a cab, an Uber, eventually to the train and back into the city leaving behind another example of how a music festival – one with the music and the punters in mind, more so, at least on a surface level, than the making of multiple monies – should indeed be run. A resounding success by all accounts, the music for the most part, truly great.

 

Samuel J. Fell

Gillian Welch

[Published in The Big Issue, issue #503]

In 2004, Gillian Welch conquered Australia; now she’s back with musical partner Dave Rawlings for not one, but two tours, writes Samuel J. Fell.

 

“I’m in Nashville where it’s a beautiful late fall, early winter’s day,” says Gillian Welch, the scratchy phone line doing little to dull a voice which has been a constant in my life for over a decade. Welch sounds relaxed, comfortable, happy in her little piece of the world, a town with a musical history matched by few others.

“Nashville has played a huge part,” she enthuses on the city she’s called home for over twenty years. “Before I moved [here], I had written three songs, ever, so my whole ‘finding my voice’ as a writer happened here, and happened because I feel connected here to the music that I love, the music that inspires me.

“I can feel, see and sometimes even touch the musical tradition that I’m a part of, it’s all around.” Nashville burns with this musical tradition – from the scungy bars of East Nashville, to the humble Bluebird Café, the ostentatious Grand Ole Opry, the boot-scootin’ beer halls on Broadway across the Cumberland River from downtown – everyone lives for the music, the tradition growing stronger with each passing year.

Gillian Welch came to notice in 1996 with the release of her debut record, Revival. Produced by T-Bone Burnett (Los Lobos, Elvis Costello, et al), it featured Welch and musical partner David Rawlings in what has become their trademark sparse and simple style, just vocal harmonies overlaying acoustic guitar, touches of banjo. It was nominated for a Grammy the following year, and set in motion a career that today sees Welch as the darling of the Americana scene.

She’s not one to move quickly. There’s no real need. While she was reasonably prolific early on (Revival was followed by Hell Among The Yearlings in 1998, then the modern classic Time (The Revelator) in 2001 and Soul Journey in 2003), Welch slowed down, waiting until 2011 before her next cut, The Harrow & The Harvest. As each of her recordings have been, it was worth the wait, another collection of heavy, mostly dark and moody songs in the true red-dirt country tradition.

As well, she’s contributed to both Dave Rawlings Machine records, 2009’s A Friend Of A Friend, and most recently, Nashville Obsolete, released late last year, again adding her haunting and lithe voice to Rawlings’ brilliantly subtle guitar work.

The last time Welch was in Australia was back in 2004, touring Soul Journey. When she’s here in late January then, with Rawlings in tow – the tour will comprise Welch/Rawlings shows, as well as Dave Rawlings Machine shows – it will have been eleven long years since Australian audiences will have had the pleasure of seeing Welch in the flesh, bringing these songs to life.

“We’ve been talking about doing this for years… doing the duet show in one direction, turn around, fly the band in, play it back the other direction,” she says with a smile. “It’s a wacky brain-child we’ve been wanting to do… ever since we were down there.”

“[But] I really thought we’d have got down there with The Harrow & The Harvest, we talked about it,” she then muses, on why so long since they’ve been to Australia. “Time kind of gets away from you, and other stuff [pops up], and you just keep rollin’ along, you know? I have no good excuse, except we just stay busy, and it’s a big ol’ world, it takes a while to get around.”

Welch has certainly been around. Her songs have been covered by the likes of Emmylou Harris, Solomon Burke and Willie Nelson; her influence stretches around the globe (one listen to any of the myriad country-tinged singer-songwriters coming out of Melbourne at the moment is testament to this); Time (The Revelator) is cited as one of the great country records, by fans and media alike – it’s an album which has been played repeatedly in my house for years, I know it intimately, as do countless others.

Knowing all this then, perhaps it’s not so surprising, as it was at first thought, that when she’s here in January, it’ll be almost exactly twenty years since the release of Revival. “Wow, you’re right, I’d not thought of that,” she says, with an almost self-conscious laugh.

“We got a lifetime achievement award for songwriting this year (from the Americana Music Association), and it was funny and took us by surprise, and we were very moved,” she recalls, adding with another laugh, “but also we were kinda laughing at ourselves, because you know, I feel too young to be getting a lifetime achievement award!”

“But in the course of that, someone said to me, ‘Well, it’s been almost twenty years since your first record, so they’re allowed to give you a lifetime achievement award’,” she says, laughing again like she can’t quite believe it’s been two decades since that debut cut, laboured over so intently, finally released into the world, the beginning of something so lasting and meaningful for so many.

“We’re still trying to write better songs,” Welch says simply, towards the end of our interview. Her contribution to that great Nashville tradition is far from over, a lifetime of songwriting achievement still not done.

Fat Possum Records

[Published in the July/August issue of Rhythms magazine, July/August 2016]

Founded in 1991, FAT POSSUM RECORDS this year celebrates its 25th anniversary. For a quarter century though, it’s been anything but normal, writes Samuel J. Fell.

 

I don’t know when I first heard T-Model Ford. I remember how it made me feel though. Like I wanted – nay, needed – to fight, fuck and forget all at once. Guttural and shit-stained, all piss and bile, the music barely hung together by the skin of its teeth as it rumbled along all fractured and fucked up, so close to slipping off the rails but managing to cling on until the song ended with a rattle of a laugh, a guitar twang, the out-of-time thump of a snare drum.

I loved it.

I loved RL Burnside too, whether he was by himself or immersed within the punk blues the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion trafficked in, their 1996 collaboration, A Ass Pocket Of Whiskey, an eye-opening revelation for me. A few years ago, I was introduced to the music of Junior Kimbrough and I loved him too. Their music was hypnotic and droning, trance-like, thumping and riding off a primal beat, a far cry from the acoustic folk blues players, even the electric guys. This was something else entirely. Ragged and raw. No one seemed to give a goddamn. It was beautiful in a way.

T Model Ford

All those guys are dead now. They were outlaws – drinkers, murderers, miscreants – and it’s amazing some of them lived as long as they did. Burnside died from a heart attack in 2005. Ford died of respiratory failure in 2013. Kimbrough also died from a heart attack, allegedly leaving behind 38 children. They were outlaws and it came through in their music.

It was this music that also captured, firstly the ear, but then the heart of a young man named Matthew Johnson. In 1991, in his early 20s, Johnson and fellow Living Blues writer Peter Redvers-Lee founded Fat Possum Records, the now legendary indie label which championed these outlaw bluesmen, which brought them the fame and, ultimately, money, that they deserved. Or at least coveted.

This year marks 25 years since Johnson and Lee founded the label, a quarter century of highs and lows, of bringing this blues to the people in a variety of forms and stylistic mash-ups. It’s been anything but normal, anything but boring.

“It was recording RL Burnside, that’s all it was,” recounts Johnson on why the pair started Fat Possum. “I did not think it was gonna work, you know what I mean? I would have called [the label] something better, I wouldn’t have called it the stupid name that it got.”

He laughs when he says this, then adds, “We wanted it to be like, rock records. All that [old blues] stuff, people were very precious and that’s not what we were about at all, obviously. You know, we were like, screw this. We wanted it to be more of a rock ‘n’ roll thing.”

Which is exactly what it was. Records like Burnside’s A Ass Pocket Of Whiskey, which was licenced to Matador, was pure rock ‘n’ roll. A slew of the label’s other releases were hard and electric, droning and dirty, nothing like any of the other blues stuff going around.. This hard-driving, hard-drinking, foot-to-the-floor style of the music was all these bluesmen knew, and so Johnson and the label tried to harness that.

“There was something that was missing,” Johnson explains. “There were all these folklorists… big fat guys with a vest on, with cameras and shit, right? Everything was like, ‘Oh, this is a legend’. I was like, these guys aren’t gettin’ it – these [artists] are so much rowdier and more insane… fuck that, so that’s when we started putting [these guys] with Jon Spencer, or Iggy Pop, or The Beastie Boys or shit like that.”

“It got a lot wackier, I’m kinda proud of all that. I’ve been taken to task about the [purity of blues] which I thought was funny, I don’t care,” he goes on, his enthusiasm taking hold. “You know, no one will play acoustic if there’s an electric guitar there, for the most part, you know? The fact all those guys were being made to play acoustic because that was tradition and shit, that’s kinda bullshit, that’s not right. I was like, why should the kids have the Marshall stacks, and they don’t? So that’s the first thing we got, with RL.”

RL Burnside

This is what set Fat Possum apart from the get-go. They quickly made for themselves a reputation for not conforming in any way, shape or form, which is why they’re so highly regarded today. The blues they were working with was different to begin with, but they took it further – there were hip hop hybrids, punk hybrids, rock ‘n’ roll hybrids. These artists began to cross over, picking up fans in the unlikeliest of places. The label’s reputation grew.

Despite this, they’ve never really made any money over the years (they were funded by Epitaph in the mid ‘90s, saving them from certain death), but they’ve always managed to keep afloat. There’ve been a few events which have also helped – signing The Black Keys early on in their career; securing the rights to Al Green’s back catalogue. For the most part though, it’s not been easy.

“I’m not really sure, to be honest,” Johnson laughs when I ask why he never called it quits, why the label is still here after 25 years. “Epitaph and The Black Keys [saved us] as we were teetering on the edge… I hope we still have relevance today, I mean, we’ve had to change our game. I do miss those guys a lot. We still have some guys, like Fat White Family, to carry the torch of RL Burnside.”

According to Johnson, there’s nothing happening in rural Mississippi these days. Not like back then, no one of the ilk of Burnside, Kimbrough, Ford, Fred McDowell, Jessie Mae Hemphill, Johnny Farmer. “RL’s gone, Junior’s gone, all the stuff I liked is gone,” he concurs. “The people who learned it and had those crappy jobs, the real-deal guys, they’re all gone. [Today’s kids] don’t care, they’re doing the hip hop thing, and I get it. They think it’s a white person’s thing.”

He pauses after he says this. I get the impression that despite the hardships he would have endured dealing with these artists, (“It was basically like chaos theory,” he laughs at one point), he misses the fucked up unpredictability of it all, not to mention the raw power of the music itself, now only existing, gathering dust, in the label’s vaults. It’s sad in a way. Sad that these renegades have died out and there’s no one to replace them.

The label itself of course, has managed to survive, essentially by expanding their sonic horizons. Their signing of The Black Keys is well documented, as is their work with Iggy Pop, Solomon Bourke and Dinosaur Jr. It’s fair to say they’re still known as a blues label, but these days Fat Possum has many different fingers, in many different pies.

“A lot of it was necessity,” Johnson explains on this sonic expansion over the past decade and a half. “[And] it has to be bands that I like, that’s the only criteria. There’s something about all of these bands, The Districts are one of my favourites, and I love Seratones. We just had to evolve, or it would just get kinda old, you know?”

Now home to the likes of the lo-fi rock of Sunflower Bean; the roots/rock hybrid that is Seratones; the unhinged punk roots of Fat White Family; the country of The Felice Brothers; Jon Spencer’s disjointed side-project Heavy Trash, Fat Possum has indeed changed its focus. What hasn’t changed though, is the quality of the acts that call the label home – sure, it’s different music, it’s not as hectic and chaotic as it would have been in the early ‘90s, but Fat Possum is still very much alive, still very much focused on what they see as good music.

“I hope so,” Johnson says after some thought, on whether the label has another 25 years in it. “I mean, hopefully we’re not gonna undo what we’ve managed to accomplish so far.” He laughs again here, and then lapses into silence before adding, “It’s gotten so damn hard… for a while things were flying off the shelves, not hugely, but you know…”

The label’s motto is ‘We’re Trying Our Best’, which says it all really. That’s what they’ve been doing since 1991, and even as the record industry continues to slip and slide, they’ll keep on trying their best. It’s why they’ve survived as long as they have – an unflinching belief in the music they’re working with, regardless of any outside influence. Just like the lurching, jangling, fucked up outlaw bluesmen they originally championed.

For more information on Fat Possum and its roster, head to www.fatpossum.com

 

Bernard Fanning

[Published in the July/August issue of Rhythms magazine, Cover Feature, July/August 2016] 

While BERNARD FANNING’s new album stems from a feeling of unease, it blooms as one of the songwriter’s strongest releases. He talks to Samuel J. Fell.

 

It’s a Monday afternoon. Late autumn and sunny. It’s crystal clear and the air is sharp, cool in the shade courtesy of a light breeze but warm in the sun, brightening the scene; makes the grass seem greener and the surrounding shrubs livelier despite the fact there’s been no rain for a month or so.

Bernard Fanning sits on a day bed, leaning against the wall of his small studio, up on a hill above Byron Bay. You can see it down below, spread along the coastline in among the trees against the water’s edge. Out in the bay itself is Julian Rocks. It’s so clear you can see the whitewater breaking around their base. The lighthouse sits atop Cape Byron, slightly to the south, the sunlight glinting off its tall, white walls, standing guard over the most easterly point in Australia.

Fanning sits taking it all in. It is, as I’d mentioned to him when I’d first arrived, a view you’d not get sick of. He agrees and during the couple of hours we spend sitting out here, we both periodically gaze out over it all. It’s calming. Serene. Seems to me to be a perfect place to put together a record.

Fanning, in light blue jeans and black jacket, hair hanging down to his shoulders, flipping across his face, grey stubble, pale skin, is in good spirits. He smiles a lot and his laugh rings out across the green, sloping garden, occasionally startling lorikeets playing in the trees hanging over the driveway to the side. I’m always wary prior to speaking to prominent rock stars, well aware they could be completely consumed by an inflated sense of self-importance, nothing more than preening posers.

But Bernard Fanning’s not like that. Sure, he’s a prominent rock star, he fronted one of the most iconic Australian bands of all time in Powderfinger. His solo debut, Tea & Sympathy, was incredibly successful, five-times platinum. But he’s just a guy with a wife and kids, sitting here having a chat about music, about the state of the world, life in general. Just shooting the breeze like any of us.

Inside the studio, producer Nick DiDia is tinkering. Occasionally, music drifts out from the open door around the corner, soundtracking certain parts of our conversation. “It’s shit, isn’t it,” Fanning says at one point as he looks out across the Pacific. He laughs again. I do too as I follow his gaze. “Yeah,” I say. “Terrible.”

***

Bernard Fanning’s new album, his third solo effort, is Civil Dusk. It’s the first in a two-part series, the next being Brutal Dawn, slated for release sometime next year. Civil Dusk was written in part in Kingscliff, a small coastal village a little further north, and partly in Madrid, Spain, where his wife is from. It was all recorded here, aside from the demos, in this little space on top of a hill overlooking Byron.

Civil Dusk, the term actually comes from civil twilight, which is a photography term,” he tells me. “It’s when the sun has gone down beneath the horizon. Scientifically, I think it’s when the sun is six degrees below the horizon. But pretty much everything is still visible, but not in direct light. And it looks different. So that idea, that metaphor…”

He trails off at the end of that sentence and switches focus to the term brutal dawn, which we both agree is the perfect name for an album by a Norwegian death metal band, but the sentiment is clear. Civil Dusk is about things not being quite as they seem, or quite as you remember them, and they’re about to change. Perhaps to be revealed once more, in a different light later on, under a brutal dawn.

I ask him if, as a person, he’s a worrier, if he’s prone to anxiety. “Oh yeah, totally, I’m a real worrier,” he says candidly. The reason I ask this is because in the bio that accompanies the new record, he’s quoted as saying, “Each day, I wake with a feeling of unease.” It’s a line which ties in with the idea behind the record, the civil dusk preceding a brutal dawn.

“Yeah, doesn’t everyone?” he asks with a laugh when I read that quote back to him. “It sounds a little too depressing. I don’t mean… it’s unease, it’s not full-blown anxiety. It’s more like, I’ve got shit to do, lots to do. As an artist and a human being. Firstly as a dad, the basic stuff of making breakfast, getting school lunches ready, you know. Making sure everyone’s got two shoes on when they leave.

“[But] it’s a combination of everything. When I’m writing, I don’t sleep very much. I wake up a lot of times at night, and often with the last idea I had before I went to bed, kinda ringing in my head. And it’s pretty annoying, and pretty annoying for my wife. It’s hard to shake when you have an idea that you haven’t abandoned yet, that you haven’t managed to go, ‘I’m not gonna keep going’.

“And what I mean by that, that’s a completed song as well. It’s not like, ‘That song’s finished’, it’s ‘I’m not working on that anymore’. Because inevitably, a few months later, you’re gonna find holes in that idea and go, ‘Fuck, I wish I’d done that’.”

I venture that this is the lot of the artist, that no matter what you do, you’ll never really be satisfied. Or at least you’ll think you’re satisfied, only to realise a little while later that you no longer are. “Yeah, that’s exactly right. You have this momentary satisfaction,” he says. “Anyway, the anxiety thing, I don’t want to play that up too much… it’s more because I usually get up first in the house, at around 4:30, and I read the paper. And that usually starts that feeling of unease, just reading about the state of the world.

“And that impacts a lot on the way that I write.”

Despite this assertion, Civil Dusk isn’t a record populated with songs dealing with literal world events. It’s not an album that bemoans the state of the world, not in a direct sense anyway – Bernard Fanning, who in the past has been very vocal about, and supportive of, a number of pertinent social issues, isn’t setting out to preach to a world he sees as wrong, or broken. Civil Dusk seems to be more about a feeling and a state of being, as opposed to presenting like a list of injustices, set to song.

As well, these feelings are framed through a series of love songs, whether happy or sad, disguised somewhat – the meanings are visible, but not in direct light, the songs civil dusks in themselves.

Another strong thematic vein that runs through the record is the idea of decisions and their resulting consequences. “I guess that’s another symptom of age and being forty-something,” he muses. “Looking at decisions I made when I was in my 20s and things that I thought were a great idea at the time. I mean, I’m in the unfortunate position… of having a lot of the things I’ve said, recorded, when I was in my 20s and maybe not at my smartest.”

He laughs again. “So, things like that. But also looking at that in the wider sense, how are things like, even on a personal basis especially, Powderfinger breaking up, how that has impacted on me and other people around me, stuff like that.”

“I don’t really want to be drilling down into the detail of what the songs are about, because I don’t really like doing that,” he then says, changing position on the day bed. “I want people to have their own discovery of songs, they have that thing where they… it’s what I do, put myself in the position of the author, pretty much all the time, when I’m listening to music.

“If I can really relate to it, then I can sing that song with a real kind of verve, it resonates with me. Otherwise, it doesn’t really impact… I like people having the opportunity to do that themselves, without it being all explained and spelt out to them. I mean, you don’t really need to do it anyway.”

“The future’s suffocating on an echo from the past.” A line from ‘Belly Of The Beast’, the final song on Civil Dusk. One could interpret that in myriad different ways. It’s a strong line though, one of the strongest on the album. It sums up the civil dusk, the decisions and resulting consequence. It’s powerful.

Fanning laughs again, and I sip from my cup of coffee which is cold now, and light a cigarette, moving over to a sunny patch on the grass. We both look out over the ocean and we’re silent for a bit.

***

“All I knew is that I wanted to base it around acoustic guitars and pianos, that’s all I knew,” he says when I ask him what his initial MO was for Civil Dusk. “Whether I had a band or not, I didn’t know, and then I soon found out I’m not an accomplished enough musician to do a guitar and vocal record that would stand the test of time.

“I wanted to do most of it myself, I wanted to play most of it myself, which is kind of… Departures was the opposite of Tea & Sympathy, and now Civil Dusk and Brutal Dawn are the opposite of Departures. They’re reactions to what you’ve done before. And also stepping stones, I don’t know, it’s hard to explain.”

I suggest that despite how different this new album is to Departures, his second solo record which came after 2005’s Tea & Sympathy, to him it would no doubt seem a natural evolution. “Yeah,” he concurs. “Totally. But at the same time, I can understand why some people when they heard ‘Battleships’ for example, were like, ‘What the fuck?’

“Because for me, that was part of the whole evolution of making that record, going through all the processes of getting to that song, but that ended up being the first thing that a lot of people heard.”

Civil Dusk is very much a return to vintage Fanning, for wont of a better phrase. Where 2013’s Departures was much more of a rock record, this new one is closer to his solo debut in that the songs, all of which were built around acoustic guitar and piano as he’s explained, are softer and more intimate, there’s more of a folky vibe, a rootsy vibe.

This isn’t to say there aren’t capacious and loud moments. ‘Wasting Time’ is almost a throw-back to the Powderfinger days, and ‘Change Of Pace’ too is upbeat and up-tempo, chugging along, very aptly named, appearing as it does mid-album after a couple of slower numbers. Sonically, the album is very warm as well, it throbs with a low warmth, due in large part to Fanning’s want to use only timber stringed instruments.

“It’s what appeals to me, it’s what actually hits me in the chest when I’m listening to music,” he says on this warmth. “I’m totally open to synthesisers and whatever else, but even when it comes to guitars, I prefer an acoustic guitar to an electric guitar, just the sound when I’m writing, I feel that richness. When you’re sitting playing with it, you feel it in your body.

“You do with an electric guitar as well, but it’s manufactured a bit, and that’s why my favourite thing to write on is a piano, because it’s like a fucking band. It’s massive and delicate and super melodic and has all those different ways you can voice things… so that’s why I wanted to do that. That’s what gets me. And I listened a lot, while I was writing, I listened a lot to Late For The Sky by Jackson Browne… it’s a fucking masterpiece. I really liked how this record was talking about the problems of society, through the prism of the problems in relationships.

“I’ve always tried to do that, and I’ve never particularly been able to articulate it for a whole record, and this is the closest I’ve got to being able to do that, I reckon.”

It’s fair to say that of any of Fanning’s records, whether on his own or with Powderfinger, Civil Dusk is his Late For The Sky. And this isn’t comparing Fanning to Browne. It’s comparing a style of songwriting, and in this instance, Fanning has produced some of his best work.

***

We finish up the formal part of the interview but stay sitting where we are, looking out again at the view from our vista in this ranging garden up on a hill on the New South Wales north coast. Fanning asks me what music I’m listening to at the moment, and we spend the next ten minutes or so discussing what we’re hearing that we like, what’s worth getting into. He writes a few of my suggestions down in his phone, always on the lookout for something new to stimulate his never-ending lust for good music.

He’s added something of his own to that canon with Civil Dusk. Whether it strikes as many chords as his solo debut, remains to be seen. Tea & Sympathy was an extremely high bar to set after all – indeed, as I drove up here, I couldn’t get ‘Wish You Well’ out of my head, having listened to it as part of the research for this story.

Regardless, with this new album, he’s done something worthy, something good.

“Well, I guess I’m in a situation where I’m starting to feel more comfortable with the idea of having been in a band that was really, um, popular,” he muses when I ask him where he’s at, as an artist. “I’m starting to have a better understanding now of why as well. Because we never thought about that stuff when we were in the middle of it, we were always thinking about what we were doing next.

“I guess now I’ve had a bit of time to look at it. And it’s from what people tell you, how the songs of the band impacted their life, concerts or whatever, and I’m really proud of what we did. I think it’s really good, and so far has stood the test of time. It’s 20 years in September since Double Allergic came out actually.”

We both marvel at that thought – how can it be two decades since the release of one of the band’s most enduring albums? Fair boggles the mind. Fanning’s come to terms with it though, as well as the rest of the band’s success and it seems to have set him up well, for where he’s at today.

“I’m really excited about getting connected again with writing music that hits me really hard, and that will make an impact on people, emotionally. Primarily on me,” he concurs. “And I’m the only barometer that I really have.

“And obviously Nick, we’ve got a studio together now, so it’s pretty likely that we’re gonna be making a lot of records together for a long time. I’m really excited about the idea of just keeping on making records. I didn’t know, when I turned 40, whether I wanted to keep doing it or just try and do something else with my life… it took me a little while to work out what I wanted to do.”

“Making a break from living in Brisbane and being in Powderfinger has really invigorated me as well, given me a lot of energy to get back into work,” he adds. “And now having a studio, with this horrible view…” Another laugh.

I tell him it’s paying dividends, that I’ve been enjoying the record, and that it’s a grower, an album you really need to explore. “I hope that’s [the case], I would hope that it takes ten listens to go, ‘Oh fuck, that’s fuckin’ awesome’, the back of the record especially,” he enthuses.

“Because you know, from growing up listening to records, you tend to start with track one and you go through and get to know the back of the record later, maybe months down the track. And we put a lot of work into the sequencing with that in mind, so that there’s rewards for perseverance.” Another laugh. “That’s the thing with working with Nick, we both put such value on the ‘album’, because that’s how we grew up loving music. I would hope that that would have some impact on younger people who listen to this record. And with people more my age too I guess.”

Soon afterwards, we finish up properly and Fanning walks me out the front to where I’ve parked the truck. We shake hands and he stands for a bit before turning around and walking back towards the studio where DiDia is still tinkering. He’s in a good place, and regardless of whether he wakes with that feeling of unease or not, it’s translated into some deep and thoughtful music, which befits the man responsible for some of this country’s most iconic songs.

It may be the civil dusk before a brutal dawn, but Bernard Fanning is doing all he can to make sense of that. And that’s all he can do.

Civil Dusk is available from August 5 through Universal Music. The second instalment, Brutal Dawn, will follow in early 2017.

Game Of Drones

[Published in The Saturday Paper, July 30/2016]

The fledgling sport of drone racing has pilots viewing the course through cameras mounted on their stripped-down, supercharged craft. Samuel J. Fell meets the US champion, in his hometown of Brisbane.

 

Like a bat out of hell, the little X-shaped machine, small propellers mounted at the end of each four arms, shoots off into the distance. In a matter of seconds it’s no longer visible to the naked eye, although you can hear it, buzzing through the trees at speeds of up to 140 km/h.

It suddenly reappears from on high and like a demented magpie at the height of nesting season, it swoops, pulling up at the last minute and executing a series of barrel-rolls, ripping past the two of us standing on the wooden deck of a house on a hill in Ormeau, just south of Brisbane. It banks sharply, a left turn, and darts back into the bushland, again invisible.

Chad Nowak, standing beside me, is the one controlling it. Via a set of goggles, he sees what his machine sees courtesy of a small camera mounted on its nose, beaming its feed directly back to him. A large silver remote controller hangs from a lanyard around his neck, the machine operated by almost imperceptible movements of his thumbs on the two small joysticks. He brings it back towards us, slowly now, and lands it expertly on the wood next to my left foot, removes his goggles and grins at me. Welcome to the weird, wonderful and relatively new world of First Person View (FPV) freestyle drone flying.

Chris Nowak

Nowak, Australian born and bred, is the current US Drone Nationals champion, having won the inaugural event last July in California. He’s the poster boy for a rapidly burgeoning aspect of the growing drone industry – FPV racing and freestyle. Having flown line-of-sight RC vehicles and fixed-wing gliders since he was 14, the now 37-year-old is in high demand at events around the world: a year and a half ago, he was mixing automotive lubricants in a factory. Today, he has sponsors, fans, and a reputation as one of the world’s top drone pilots.

“It’s just something so different,” he muses when I ask why FPV freestyle and race flying has become so popular in such a short time. “When I go flying out in the park and I’m just flying around, people [see it and] go, ‘Oh it’s a drone’. Their reaction would be no different if it was a foam airplane or something like that.”

“The moment I put the goggles on them though, they go, ‘Wow!’ It’s the same reaction every single time,” he goes on. “And that’s the best way to explain it – why it’s taking off is because of that wow factor. It’s like playing a video game, it’s like the pod racers in Star Wars, it’s that extra dimension that we haven’t been able to access until now.”

Simon Jardine, head of drone consultancy company Aerobot, has been flying drones longer than anyone in Australia. His company provides advice and builds and modifies custom machines for the likes of the military and Surf Life Saving Australia. As he says, “Right now, technology is racing forward at such a pace, it’s hard to keep up. We can fly further, [we can fly] behind obstacles, with zero lag, so it’s instant: what you see is what you see.”

“You have to have zero latency,” concurs Paul Dumais, an aerospace engineer currently building a new prototype for Aerobot. “They’ve gotta be able to send a signal via a video transmitter wirelessly on a 5.8gigahertz frequency, to his goggles, with zero latency. Or as little as possible. Because if you’re doing 140 km/h, a couple of milliseconds [out], you’re hitting something.”

While talking with Jardine and Dumais, in a park in Byron Bay, I’m handed the goggles and Jardine flies line-of-sight while I see what his drone sees. The speed and manoeuvrability of the stripped-back machine is incredible; it’s easy to see how you’d come unstuck if the feed back to the goggles was even a tiny bit out.

Drone racing and freestyle has, in the past twelve months, become big business. The inaugural event Nowak took out was a relatively small affair, but since then the profile of this fledgling sport has grown almost as fast as the accompanying technology. In March this year, in Dubai, the World Drone Prix offered a $1m prize pool. This year’s US Nationals in August have partnered with American sports channel ESPN. The World Drone Racing Championships will run in Hawaii in October. The money and the interest are growing rapidly as are, by default, the politics: a number of bodies jostling for control of the fledgling sport.

“Unfortunately, [these bodies] are all just sitting there arguing, and all the pilots want to do is race,” Nowak laments. “And we’re going, would you guys stop fighting and just let us have some fun?”

As a result, Nowak and a handful of other top pilots have begun to distance themselves from the organised racing aspect, preferring instead the more renegade freestyle side to a pastime with almost limitless possibilities. “It’s kinda the same as skateboarders, they go out there and they make those videos,” he smiles. “You’ve got the rebels that just wanna make the videos and lead the lifestyle, then you’ve got the guys who wanna go to the competitions. I’m the guy that just wants to be the rebel and lead the lifestyle.”

Nowak has just returned from the States where he’s been filming episodes of Rotor Riot, a YouTube-based series not unlike Top Gear, but with drones instead of cars. Nowak and a handful of other pilots head to different locations (abandoned warehouses, woodlands, even shooting ranges) and put their machines through their paces, everything filmed and uploaded to an audience of, at time of writing, 34,918 subscribers.

YouTube has proven an incredibly important medium for these drone pilots – Nowak’s channel has 17,228 subscribers; US pilot Mr Steele (Steele Davis) has 26,361; and Charpu (Carlos Puertolas), the “godfather of FPV”, has 55,289 – it was from the popularity of his channel, that Nowak initially began to attract sponsors, and was invited to the first Drone Nationals.

Drones today are more and more common, being utilised in a variety of everyday situations, from aerial filming to shark spotting. Hobbyists have been flying line-of-sight drones for a number of years now too, beginning with the Parrot AR drone, which could be operated via an iPad, and the DJI Phantom, also relatively simple to control.

These racing drones are a different beast though. Stripped back to maximise speed and efficiency, the tech is incredible. Dumais talks to me about 32bit boards, Electronic Speed Controllers, and software like Baseflight, OneShot and Cleanflight. Jardine is flying a Warpquad 6-Inch on 25 volts – it weighs around half a kilo, flies at a 55 degree angle, has a five minute battery life, and can hit speeds of up to 140km/h. And it’s only going to get better.

“In the very near future, perhaps before the end of the decade, the FPV experience will be hyper-realistic,” says Dumais. “Like you’re actually flying in the drone but on acid. It’ll be the combination of high-end computer gaming to provide insane virtual reality tracks, superimposed over real physical terrain.” The sky, quite literally, is the limit.

Samuel J. Fell

 

 

Stars & Hype: First Time Notes On The American Deep South

 THE DEBUT BOOK FROM AUSTRALIAN JOURNALIST SAMUEL J. FELL

Australian / New Zealand Customers:

$AU 17.00 (+$AU 5.00 Postage)
To purchase, please email the author direct via the address on the Contact page.
***

American / European Customers: The title is available from Amazon in your home territory

ALSO AVAILABLE ON E-READER (Kindle, iPad, etc)

“The hotel room door is dead-bolted and a few people are sitting on the upstairs balcony walkway smoking weed. It’s hot again, high humidity, the noise from Interstate 55 across the used-car lot seems muted in the heat which in turn drowns out the talk from upstairs, adds to the industrial atmosphere.

The Mississippi State Fairgrounds are just over the road on the other side, back on the edge of Jackson, an area made up of switch-backs and one-way streets, cheap motels and the same fast food joints – Whataburger, Shoney’s, Waffle House. A literal dead-end which defines what lower-America is all about; cheap, fast, move on and forget.”

***

A non-fiction novella, Stars & Hype: First Time Notes On The American Deep South, is the first book from Australian journalist Samuel J. Fell.

A rough, raw and largely uncut account of his maiden trip through the US Deep South late last year, Stars & Hype… was written “on the run, across five states and as many time zones, drunk, sober and somewhere in between.”

Finding time to write and record his thoughts on a place “as alien as it was familiar” during the six week trip he undertook in October / November 2015, Fell recounts the experience in vivid fashion, the dust and grit, the glitz and glam coming to life on the page – the book is truly a wide-eyed account of a time and place that both lived up to expectation, and fell well short.

Best known as one of Australia’s most prolific freelance music journalists, Samuel J. Fell is a Senior Contributor to Australian roots music bible Rhythms, and has contributed to a range of publications from The Sydney Morning Herald and Rolling Stone, to The Saturday PaperThe Guardian and Australian Guitar. Concurrently, he is writing a history of the Australian rock press, which this year celebrates 50 years.

What Came Out Of BigSound

[An alternate version of this story ran on Crikey, Friday September 13, 2013 – click here]

BigSound

Fortitude Valley, Brisbane

September 10-13, 2013

Sitting on the bus into Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley for the final night of BigSound – Australia’s reasonably modest answer to the behemoth that is Austin, Texas, music industry shindig South By South West – I find myself savouring the calm.

It’s early evening on a Thursday, traditionally a day to let loose, to get a jump on the upcoming weekend, but it’s been a long few days and so I’m enjoying the relative quiet; the hum of the engine, the gentle forward motion, the space, the solitude.

It’s short-lived though. “Last stop before the city,” yells the driver, a pork barrel of a man in navy blue shorts, neck like a ham, and so I’m ejected onto the sidewalk at the corner of Ann and Brunswick and the calm is all but a distant memory.

For this is the Valley, where the city’s drunken elite meld all too easily with the barrel bottom, a place that used to house the bohemian element, before rapid, and rampant, development had them fleeing across the river to the relative safety of hippie haven, West End.

The music still resides in back alleys though, upstairs in odd warehouse spaces, boutique venues still thriving and so it’s the ideal place for BigSound, this year running for the 12th time, a three day conference that brings all involved in music in this country, and beyond, together to nut out problems faced by an ever-shrinking industry, to collaborate in order to overcome barriers to growth, to find the ‘next big thing’, to talk.

Idle talk, big talk, small talk, chit chat, back chat, talk back. It’s all about the talk – to paraphrase from ‘79 sci-fi flick Alien, at BigSound, no one can hear you scream. Because they’re all too busy talking. It’s a tsunami and it washes over you leaving you battered, bruised ear drums, craving silence. I long for the bus.

“It’s about connecting people,” says Executive Programmer Graham Ashton, this year being his last BigSound at the helm. Given it’s late on the Thursday, he’s sufficiently relaxed. “People come from all over the world… [BigSound] is about making connections.”

Networking, they call it. It’s happening all around us, standing as we are in the dingy smokers area out the back of what was once Mustang Bar, people with sky-blue lanyards talking shop. Or perhaps, given the hour, shit.

During the day, over the past three days, BigSound is a mild-mannered conference, comprising panel discussions like The Future Of Australian MusicIndie Labels 2013 StyleTouring Tips & The Live Music Environment, along with a plethora of In Conversations.

By night however, it’s like this; there are over 120 bands playing over two nights this year, and so music flows, as does the hooch, and an environment like this is fostered, where people spill outside in between songs to network. To connect.

“There are no rules to this,” Ashton says after a bit of thought. “That’s why music is so exciting. Every band is different, every idea is different, there are no rules. One thing though, [BigSound] isn’t education, it’s inspiration.”

The inspiration for most comes in the form of the music itself – scungy rock ‘n’ roll bands, thundering country, lilting folk and pogo pop, for this is why we’re all here. Whether it’s Billy Bragg or Robert Forster playing Bakery Lane to a full house, or some young quintet out of Melbourne playing an early slot to an almost empty room, the entire place throbs with not only literal sound, but with an inspired energy. People are excited, they want to share, and so connections are made, as they should be.

It’s not all beer and skittles however. One of the reasons events like this exist is to talk about what’s not going right, about how to change same, how to better the industry and to help all those who work within.

In typical fashion, during the The Future Of Australian Music discussion, outspoken promoter and label head Michael Chugg lashes out at commercial radio’s local music quotas, saying, “The quota’s far too low and they take advantage of late night… running tracks from midnight to dawn. They’ll deny it, but it’s true… It’s bullshit, and it’s holding the industry back.”

At the Byron Bay Bluesfest showcase at lunchtime on Wednesday, festival director Peter Noble attacks on a different front, saying in front of a large crowd, “I don’t want to criticise [politicians], but they’ve got to emulate,” referencing the lack of support the Australian government offers its musicians compared to their Canadian counterparts.

Perhaps he should have had a word in Wayne Swan’s ear, although the ex-Treasurer seemed far more preoccupied with UK punk poet Billy Bragg, seen at both his show and his keynote speech, tweeting later about the latter, “A really engaging discussion by Billy Bragg… about the power of music and the purpose of politics…”

It’s a shame Bragg wasn’t around a few months ago to give the same talk to the crumbling Labor party, but I digress.

So it remains to be seen what comes out of BigSound this year, at least in terms of solid, lasting, effective change. If you were to just buy a ticket to the music side of things, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that music in Australia is alive and well, and it is, without a doubt.

A new government though, not one renowned for generous arts funding, will have an impact, but as the dust still settles, people nursing final night hangovers, it seems inspirations and connection, the initial aims of BigSound, have been achieved. There is, however, still a lot to talk about.

Samuel J. Fell

American Deep South Vol. 4 – Nashville, Tennessee

[Published on the Rhythms magazine website, November 2015]

Having spent a good deal of my younger adult years living in the hip and cool bustle of Melbourne’s inner north, coupled with the fact that it doesn’t take much to convince me to throw on my old cowboy boots and tap my leather-shod feet to some tonkin’ country/blues, for me Nashville was like coming home.

We based ourselves in East Nashville (thank you AirBnB), an area of town that over the past five or six years has blossomed from a working class neighbourhood into a tight-knit community of young families and single twenty-somethings, renovated little cottages on tree-lined streets and, of course, a thriving venue, restaurant, food truck and music scene.

It should be noted that East Nashville is hip as hell. I felt on many occasions over the five days we were there, trolling the bars and eateries, that my moustache wasn’t twirly enough (or at all), my skinny jeans weren’t skinny enough, and at 35 with no kids, I was far too old. We dove right in, none the less.

Before we got down to exploring however, there were a couple of bucket-list items which needed ticking off, two things which stem from the same place, but which couldn’t be further apart.

Our first night in town we head twenty minutes out from downtown to the Bluebird Café, that songwriter’s mecca, a tiny little place that for thirty-three years has acted as both a sounding and spring board for countless singer-songwriters, something Nashville has in abundance.

A non-descript little place, located in a strip mall between two hair salons, the Bluebird is an institution. It only seats a hundred people, and seven nights a week presents an early and a late set. Tickets for the week’s shows go on sale on the Monday morning, and most are sold out within the hour. People line up outside a couple of hours or so before showtime, hoping to grab one of the last few seats not sold online, or snap up any that have been reserved but that no one has turned up to claim.

Songwriters In The Row

We catch the early show, a Songwriters In The Row session, featuring four local singer-songwriters – Jesse Terry, Michaela Anne, Alex Wong and Lizanne Knot – each playing a song, passing the baton down the line. It’s a fascinating way to assess music, each player exhibiting a different style, each player bringing their own strengths and weaknesses to the table. It’s a listening room, so people are quiet, respectful. This is where people get their start, and it’s exciting to be in a room that holds so much history.

Speaking of history, and in direct contrast to the Bluebird, our second night in town we deck ourselves out in our most outlandish country-wear (including the dark cherry red boots I bought from a second hand joint in Austin), and head to the country music hub of the universe, The Grand Ole Opry. Both the Bluebird and the Opry are, fundamentally, about country music. But they could not possibly be more different.

Where the Bluebird is a quiet listening room, the Opry is big, bold, loud, brash, AMERICA. It’s such a blatant change, we can’t help but sit through the show with big grins plastered over our faces at the pure and un-ironic fanfare of it all. It truly is an experience, one I can’t recommend highly enough, no matter what strain of country music you’re into.

The Grand Ole Opry, of course, began as a radio show in the mid-‘20s, which makes it the longest running radio program in history. It gained popularity quickly back then, becoming a four-hour program featuring any number of traditional performers, moving in 1943 to the Ryman Auditorium, before settling at its current home, The Grand Ole Opry House, in 1974. The House was seriously flooded five years ago, but it’s been restored to its glittering best.

We’re treated to a number of musical acts over the two hours, from the glitz and glam of modern, contemporary country – The Willis Clan (a troupe of eleven brothers and sisters who I believe were on America’s Got Talent last year); John Rich; and Brad Paisley – to some serious old school country talent from the likes of Jesse McReynolds and the Charlie Daniels Band.

The former group are fine at what they do, but are hardly my cup of tea. McReynolds though, with his group behind him, huddled around the one mic playing the sweetest bluegrass you’ll find anywhere replete with perfect vocal harmonies, was astounding. As was Charlie Daniels and his band – man, their version of ‘The Devil Went Down To Georgia’ was incendiary, Daniels himself on fiddle, he almost set it alight, went through at least two bows during the course of the song – magical stuff.

The biggest crowd response went to Paisley, this is the modern day Opry after all, but as a whole, this was some serious entertainment, something you just don’t see over here. We were taken backstage afterwards for a tour too, which is recommended if you’re after the history of the place. We headed back to HQ and sat out the back with a couple of beers to debrief – epic stuff indeed.

A good deal of the rest of our stay in Music City was spent exploring both East Nashville and The Gulch, an area just out of downtown that used to be an industrial hub, but which has now been gentrified and is home to craft breweries, artisan distilleries, quirky shops and a myriad music venues.

We stayed well clear of Broadway, Nashville’s equivalent of Bourbon and Beale, preferring instead the more downhome style East Nashville offers in spades. There ain’t no problem finding good eats in Nashville – The Pharmacy on the edge of EN laid down some serious gourmet burgers; Pomodoro some fine tapas (fancy mac ‘n’ cheese, good stuff); and Mas Tacos, man, you want good and quick Mexican in the mid-south, this is where you go. Most of these places have a daily happy hour too, good for cheap cocktails pre-dinner, along with any number of arty beers for a couple of bucks. I’m not much of a craft beer man myself, preferring a working man’s brew like Bud, Lone Star or Pabst (all basically as close to VB as I could get – I’m a classy guy), but when in Rome…

And of course, Nashville’s claim to culinary fame, hot chicken. And by hot, I mean spicy. As we head out on the last day, we stop in at Pepperfire, which is perhaps the most aptly named place we patronise all month. We decide it can’t be that hot and so get a serving of chicken tenders extra-hot, potato salad and beans on the side.

Big mistake – this was so hot, we couldn’t finish it. I tried hard, it tasted so good. But I feared permanent damage to my taste buds, and so had to leave some behind. Highly recommended, but note they don’t muck around with their spice levels – I’m still sweating.

Music venues, there’s a million of them. Just down from where we stay is the Five Points area, a five-way intersection stemming off Woodland Street which offers music in abundance. We have a beer at the Treehouse one night, no music, but we strike gold our final night in town.

The Basement East, a little further out from Five Points, looks like a bunker from the outside, but once through the doors, while it is a bit cavern-like, has the best sound I’ve heard all trip. We catch the last couple of songwriters showcasing their weekly spots (The Danberrys and another whose name I couldn’t catch), before the Sunday Post begins and it’s rock band time. We catch about five bands all up, for five dollars, few cold brews, not a band place.

From there, we stroll back Five-Pointsward and sidestep into The Five Spot. Now this place, with its sticky carpet, its dark back-alley ambience, its cheap beer and smoky beer garden, is my idea of heaven. The band playing the late slot are Heath Haynes and a rag-tag bunch of musos and they specialise in tonkin’ country/blues with a healthy appreciation for a rockabilly tangent – I’ve found my people.

We while away our last hours in Music City toe-tappin’ and Bud-drinkin’, reminiscing on all we’ve seen over the course of the past month. It wasn’t just cities, we road-tripped from New Orleans through Cajun country, followed the river up into Mississippi, stayed in Natchez, Jackson, Indianola, Clarksdale, and from Nashville headed to the Smokys for a few days prior to heading home. I can’t nominate a favourite place or part of the trip, but suffice to say, this was a pilgrimage, a savage journey to the heart of the American music. It was wild, it was free, it was untamed and loose and AMERICA. I’d recommend it to anyone.

American Deep South Vol. 3 – Memphis, Tennessee

[Published on the Rhythms magazine website, November 2015]

I’ll preface this piece by saying that because of a tight schedule, we only spent two days in Memphis, which I can tell you isn’t nearly enough time to delve into the incredible history this Tennessean city is custodian to.

The birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll and soul music, and the conduit through which most southern blues passed on its way north to places like Chicago, Memphis is ground zero, truly a musical mecca, and a city which wears that tag with pride upon its collective sleeve.

Beale Street

Basing ourselves out of the upmarket Madison Hotel in downtown (a rock ‘n’ roll haven in itself, having hosted a plethora of touring acts from Radiohead to the Chili Peppers and all in between), we used what little time we had to hit three Memphis-specific areas – BBQ, museums and Beale Street. As one should.

Beale Street is similar to New Orleans’ Bourbon in that it’s a party strip, lined with a myriad bars and restaurants, all boasting live music and cheap beer – no matter we were there mid-week, Beale Street caters for all comers, seven nights, 365.

Proceedings begin in the beer garden section of Kings Palace Café where a family band – three brothers and a sister on vocals – are encouraging all to write their requests on “the back of a twenty dollar bill” and drop it in the bucket. Then they play it, their repertoire is extensive, and although they lack punch on the quieter numbers, they cook on the faster tunes.

From there we head east, plastic go-cup in tow, and take a seat in the Blues Hall, which is the juke joint section of the Rum Boogie Café. Billed as the last juke on the street, the Hall is a long, narrow room that essentially is as it sounds. We catch the McDaniel Band (all dressed in white pants and red shirts), who lay down a blistering set of Chicago-influenced blues, much to the delight of those wanting to dance – good stuff.

We wind it down by stepping into the Rum Boogie proper and sit in the pavement section and watch it all go by as The Lucky Losers pedal their suave brand of soul/blues inside. Memphis’ NBA team, the Grizzlies, have a game just around the corner at the FedEx Forum, and so foot traffic swells at around ten in the evening before tapering off leaving just the mid-week revelers. Good for people watching.

Earlier that evening, it’d been all about BBQ. Memphis is renowned for it, and acting on a hot tip, we headed down to Central BBQ for dinner, an easy stroll down Sth Main Street. This place is an institution, has won a slew of awards, and it’s easy to see why. We dig on the pork plate, potato salad and slaw, green beans and big cans of Pabst. It’s divine and I wish I had more stomachs so I could go back again and again.

Still on food, and food other than BBQ, our first night in town we were hosted at Eighty3, the restaurant attached to the Madison. I feel I must apologise to executive chef Max Hussey, who I’d met in the lobby earlier in the day, because by this stage of our trip, all I wanted was something simple and familiar and so I ordered steak frites. Most unadventurous.

The food was great though – the restaurant’s signature skillet cornbread, probably the best scallops I’ve ever eaten, a 12 ounce prime ribeye and, on the advice of the chef, deep-fried Oreo cookies and cream to finish it up. The lady behind the bar accidentally poured someone else a Maker’s Mark which they didn’t want, so she slung it over my way. They know how to look after a weary journo at the Madison and Eighty3, no doubt.

Wednesday day, prior to our Beale Street sojourn, was all about museums, and two in particular – the Civil Rights Museum, which is housed in and around the infamous Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in 1968, and the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum off Beale.
The Civil Rights Museum, which essentially traces the history of the civil rights movement from the 17th century through to today, is hands down the most comprehensive and emotionally-charged museum I’ve ever been to. We were in there for three and a half hours and only covered a little over half, such is the depth it goes to, the history it covers.

It hits hard too, we left emotionally drained, the utter horror, fear and complete disregard for humanity reverberating in our minds – from slavery to segregation, Jim Crow, the Freedom Riders, marches to Selma and Montgomery, it’s incredible and more than a little sad. And yet there’s triumph in there too – the Civil Rights Museum covers it all, I will certainly be back to finish it off.

We head from there to Rock ‘n’ Soul, which by comparison seems lacklustre. It’s not, but perhaps don’t go and walk through straight after the Civil Rights. It does cover a lot of ground though, from the blues players heading north in the early part of the 20th century, the bustle of Beale Street at the time where players came to ‘make it’ (including Mr BB King), to the birth of soul and rock ‘n’ roll over at Sun Studios. It’s only a small museum, but it does a good job of keeping things precise, giving you a nice overview from which you can then explore in more depth by heading to Sun or Stax or one of the many other musical museums in town.

Speaking of the former, on our way out of town on the Thursday morning, we make the detour and stop in at Sam Phillips’ Sun Studios, a little way out of downtown, along Union Avenue. Writing this a couple of weeks later, at the end of a five week trip through the deep south, I can say that Sun was my favourite place of all.

It looks like nothing, from the inside and out. A small, non-descript building with a little diner / gift shop in the front, a tiny museum upstairs and a recording studio out the back, it could just be some dive somewhere. It looks old, tired, bland, particularly the studio.

But it’s not. It throbs with an intensity. It positively shakes with history. It leaks it all over you.

I stand on the same black gaffa ‘x’ on the floor where Elvis stood when, in a desperate last-ditch effort to get Phillips’ attention, he started strumming Arthur Crudup’s ‘That’s Alright Mama’, in that fashion that essentially started rock ‘n’ roll. I see the cigar burn on the lower E key on the piano, from Jerry Lee Lewis’ cigar. There’s a giant photo on the wall of Elvis, Carl Perkins, Lewis and Johnny Cash, all in the studio at the same time, just hanging out. It happened just over there, on those nondescript plastic floor tiles, the same ones that Phillips laid himself.

The place is magic, pure magic.

And so our short stay in Memphis comes to an end. There’s so much more to see in a city that’s full to the brim with musical history, and I’ll definitely be back. If you’re in any way partial to basically any music whatsoever, then I suggest you do the same.

 

Samuel J. Fell stayed at the Madison Hotel courtesy of the Memphis Convention & Visitor’s Bureau and the Madison Hotel. He was hosted at Eighty3 by the Memphis C&VB and Eighty3. Passes to all museums were courtesy of the Memphis C&VB and the respective museums. Thanks to all organisations for their help and hospitality.