Memphis Rent Party

by Robert Gordon

  I’m real proud of that stuff. It’s interesting to see it come back around. Like on this Replacements thing, the three people at Warner Brothers who recommended me for the project, all three of them turned down Big Star 3rd. And that album is the only reason I’m on the Replacements project. Nobody wanted to hear 3rd when we were selling it. [The head of Atlantic Records] Jerry Wexler said, “Baby, that record you sent me makes me feel very uncomfortable.” I went back and listened to it myself before the Replacements to see if I could figure out what was so appealing to certain people, and what I think it is, the record is so romantic. A lot of it is dark romance, yet it is still very very romantic.

  As a producer, I am not for everybody. I shouldn’t say this because I don’t work enough as it is, but I don’t make hit records. Why should everything have to be a hit? What a sick idea. All I do is make things sound better. And in terms of southern production, there’s not too many people around doing what I do anymore. There’s not anybody left who does it any better.

  RG: Southern production—you’re quoted in Sweet Soul Music talking about producer Quinton Claunch rattling the change in his pocket to affect the way someone plays. He doesn’t say anything, he just stands there and rattles his pocket.

  JLD: Southern production is a different approach, a little less confrontational. When I was a session player, I would work with southern producers and I thought they were nothing. I thought, Boy, if I could get to Hollywood and work with real producers this would all be different. And of course I completely misunderstood. It took me years to figure out what southern producers were really doing, because they didn’t appear to be doing anything. Quinton rattling the change, I saw that work every time. If something’s not working, the producer just has to change it until it does work. You don’t have to be Phil Spector making huge orchestrations and dictating notes. For example, walking in or out of a room is very effective. It all comes down to contrasts, and what could be a bigger contrast to being in the room than not being in the room?

  Jim Dickinson, Ace Studio in Jackson, Mississippi, 1978. (Courtesy of Pat Rainer)

  Think about silence. Silence is a thing in space, and when you break silence, you create rhythm. You divide the nothing with something. I think that as a producer, my part of the production is the space between the notes. It’s what enables me to do different kinds of music. I think the artist brings the identity to the record, but what I bring is a series of flavors. I’ve said before that production was the barbecue sauce.

  Straight people are afraid of artists, and I am an artist, and a lot of producers aren’t. And that scares record company people, the idea of, This guy thinks it’s art not business. The desire to make records, you’ve got to take it back to the primal urge. It is literally the fear of extinction; it’s the wish to record the unretainable nature of the moment. Time is going away from us and the art wish is that desire to retain the moment. By recording and playing back, you have made time into space; you have captured the moment. It goes back to the cave paintings, the handprint on the wall in the back of the cave. The idea that by drawing on the wall, you affect reality, that you can in fact alter the moment and re-create it. And that’s what, as a producer, I try to do. The event has a soul: It is the essence of the event that you record, and the whole idea of immortality is right there!

  I know it’s easy not to take it to that level, but if you do it over and over again, all day and every day, it’s hard not to think about it.

  RG: Have you produced yourself?

  JLD: You have to be on two sides of the glass, so there’s no way you can produce from inside. There has to be somebody listening. I’m a big foe of self-production. And almost everybody that I work with ends up thinking that they can produce themselves because they can’t see what I’m doing. What I do is real small and almost never observed.

  RG: I recall you describing the way you initially learned piano—

  JLD: Three up and four down, just like poker. You take any note on the piano and you go three notes up and four down, you have a major triad. The Phantom showed me that.

  RG: Who is he?

  JLD: He was this black guy that my father’s yardman brought over to the house. My father’s yardman, Alex Teal, taught me everything he thought was important to teach a nine-year-old white boy: how to shoot craps, how to throw a knife underhanded—the important life lessons. He sang as he worked, and when he realized I was interested in the music, he brought these two piano players over. One was Butterfly Washington and the other, I never knew his name—the Phantom. He said all music is made up out of codes, and I thought he meant a secret code like [in] Captain Midnight, a comic book which I was way off into. But of course he meant chords! And when he showed me that, I thought, All right, this is a system. I can do that.

  RG: How did you get started as a producer?

  JLD: I’d gotten some publicity locally as a folksinger. Bill Justis, who’d been at Sun with Sam Phillips, he was making party records for the Mercury label, instrumental covers of hits. This musician I’d known from high school was working for him in Nashville, and I guess my friend’s mother sent him some publicity about this folk festival that I put on at the Overton Park Shell, but I get this call from Justis to come be on a record he’s making called Dixieland Folkstyle. The session was all Nashville heavies: Bill Pursell, Bob Moore, Buddy Harman, Grady Martin, Boots Randolph, the Jordanaires, and the Anita Kerr Singers. And me. It was real tight union sessions, and in the middle of the second or third day these side doors to the studio, which had never opened, these doors swing open and here comes this big fat redneck all dressed in black with sunglasses, big greasy ducktail, and little Sherman cheroots [mini-cigars] with his name on the side that he handed out to everybody. He was talking and cussing real loud. I thought, Boy, they’re gonna throw this son of a bitch out, he is history. But instead of throwing him out, the session stopped cold and everybody goes out to the parking lot to see this guy’s matched set of midnight-blue Jaguar XKEs. I said to my buddy who’d gotten me the job, “Who is this guy? What is the deal?” And he says, “Oh that’s Shelby Singleton. He’s the producer.” I said, “I thought Justis was the producer,” and he says, “No Justis is the artist.” I said, “Well what are you?” And he said, “I’m the arranger.” And it was like lightning struck! I thought, Somewhere in here there’s a job for me. Finally.

  RG: You’re producing the Replacements now. How’s that going?

  JLD: Westerberg is way way better than anybody gives him credit for. It may be the best stuff I’ve ever done. The Replacements even have a song called “Alex Chilton.” “Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton.” We have about twenty-one tracks cut.

  RG: You making a double album?

  JLD: I’m always the one who says, If you’ve got enough material for two records, you can make a much better single unit. With the exception of Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, I can’t think of a double album that couldn’t be a better single album.

  RG: Exile on Main Street included?

  JLD: Although it’s heresy, I couldn’t think of a better example. There’s a record ruined by cocaine. The idea of cocaine is what made it into a double record. I think Exile could be a motherfucker as a Stones single record. Keeping the slop, that’s what I’d keep.

  I’m going to try to retain two Replacements songs. We’ve got a cut of Chris Mars, the drummer, singing “Cool Water” that personally breaks my heart. I’m going to have to sacrifice that, so other sacrifices will have to be made. I see production as a series of compromises. You can compromise, I can compromise, we can compromise right on into corporeality.

  RG: You seem to have been really busy lately.

  JLD: Yeah, I actually made a living at it this year in Memphis, which I hadn’t done since 1969. Memphis is a great place to be from. I did real well for a lot of years just shuffling my feet, wearing my hat and saying, I ain’t got no nothing, and playing real dumb. That kind of petered out in the late seven
ties, but fortunately the movie deal came along.

  MLD: You came out of retirement to produce Big Star 3rd.

  JLD: That was for revenge—on Dan Penn.

  RG: Well, explain that.

  JLD: Yeah. In ’73 my oldest boy was born and my best friend and guitar player died in the same month—Charlie Freeman, from the Dixie Flyers. And I kind of stopped, did nothing for a bit. I did a skin flick here in Memphis. I’m an accompanist, and to accompany a visual image is the ultimate form of accompaniment. I used to sit with the TV sound off and play. Before that, I’d been producing Ry Cooder, and I quit him to produce Dan Penn, who was the guy who produced the Box Tops. We got pretty far along the line, about eight or nine tracks, but we had a disagreement over money and I quit. So I produced Big Star 3rd for revenge, because Penn really wanted to produce Alex again. He had made hit records on him before, and he could do it again.

  I think revenge is the noblest human motive.

  RG: What became of your Penn project?

  JLD: Never came out. Emmet the Singing Ranger Live in the Woods was the album title. The best thing I did on that session was a song called “Tiny Hineys and Hogs” about Harley riders. I had two Harleys in the studio, one of them playing rhythm—it was held open—the other one was playing on the beat. The guy was retarding the spark to get it on the beat and then giving it gas to keep it from dying. It was shooting four feet of blue flame. It was unbelievable. The whole studio filled with carbon monoxide.

  Knox Phillips, he’s Sam’s son and also a producer, his friend was visiting—Mike Post, who does TV theme songs. I was wearing this hat with a feather that hung down into my beard. Mike Post was afraid of my hat, and when he saw the motorcycles, he was terrified, thought he was in the presence of some kind of insanity. The fucking motorcycle takes a solo; it sounds like a saxophone at one point. It is unbelievable. Everybody is saying, “The motorcycle is right on the beat!” Of course, everybody is playing with the motorcycle, that’s what’s really happening. Real good sessions.

  RG: Are you going to put any of this stuff out, these reels you’ve got?

  JLD: Yeah, like the bank robber is a missing part of this. I’ve got some stuff on him that I’d like to put out.

  RG: Who was the bank robber?

  JLD: His name is Jerry McGill, and he was the youngest artist on the real Sun Records in the fifties. He had a record called “I Wanna Make Sweet Love.” When I had my band in high school, he had the only other nonprofessional rock and roll band in Memphis. We’ve known each other off and on.

  RG: He’s still around?

  JLD: Well, he’s a fugitive. He comes and goes. But I did some really good stuff on him. In fact, Alex is singing background on some.

  The title of the Mud Boy record Known Felons in Drag is from Jerry McGill. Mud Boy was opening for Waylon Jennings, and Jerry used to be Waylon’s road manager. There is both good blood and bad blood between them, to the point where the cops knew that Jerry would show up to this gig. So they were all over backstage, waiting to get this fugitive. And Sid Selvidge [Mud Boy cohort] was outside, saw someone and thought, Yeah, that’s got to be McGill or that’s the ugliest woman I ever saw. And he walked up to McGill, who was dressed up as a woman, and that was the only thing McGill said to Selvidge: Known felons in drag.

  RG: I missed the Tennessee Waltz, Mud Boy’s farewell performance in 1978. You’ve got videotape of that right?

  JLD: Oh yeah, there were more video cameras on stage than there were musicians. Bill Eggleston and his son were shooting. Bill has this video movie, Stranded in Canton, which I don’t think the world is ready for yet. They showed it at Yale and MIT a couple of times. The classes say, No that’s all put on, no one acts like that. People do not act like that.

  RG: What is it, this footage?

  JLD: Oh it’s just Eggleston following us and a few other people around. The star of the film is the bank robber [Jerry McGill], and Campbell Kensinger, the guy who did the motorcycles. There’s a chicken-head geek down in New Orleans and a couple of pretty good transvestites. It’s amazing. Alex is in it.

  RG: Wow, I’ve got to see this.

  JLD: It’s all black-and-white, shot in low light. He would go around with this infrared camera, and everybody figured it was just Eggleston drunk, that he didn’t have any film or whatever. It started out they were filming this old drag queen down in New Orleans named Russell who is, if Mick Jagger ever saw this guy’s act, he would go home and get in bed, he wouldn’t bother to try anymore. And it kind of spread from there.

  RG: What’s the story with Tav Falco at the Tennessee Waltz?

  JLD: At the Tennessee Waltz, Gus—Gustavo has always been Gus—I never knew Gus sang. The day of the event he said, “Would it be all right if I sang a song, Jim?” He had the fingers cut out of his gloves and he played “Bourgeois Blues,” and for the solo he took a buzz saw and cut through his guitar. Alex was in the audience, and Alex just loved it. He came backstage and said to Gus, “Me and you, we’re a band.” And that was the birth of Panther Burns.

  Gus was always a performance artist. He and Randall [Lyon] and some others had a performance group, the Big Dixie Brick Company. Gus would join us on stage as the three-legged man. He had a little fez on and some sunglasses and a tuxedo, with an artificial leg coming out of the fly of his pants. He would dance, and with all the other shit going on on stage it really looked like the guy had three legs. Jerry Phillips, Sam’s other son, he said, Dickinson, the three-legged man is just the best thing I’ve seen since the Bullet.

  RG: The Bullet?

  JLD: You don’t know about the Bullet? Piano Red, back in the fifties, used to have a quadruple amputee that traveled with him who was “the Bullet,” and the audience would be hip to this and they would scream, Bring on the bullet, bring on the bullet! And they’d bring out this little guy, no arms no legs, and they’d sit him on a stool right in front of the microphone and he’d just scream, Wahhhh, and the band would play, and that was the Bullet. Piano Red had a great stage show in the late fifties. That was back when just everybody didn’t have a stage show.

  RG: The performance art aspect of the Panther Burns is pretty clear.

  JLD: At the first Panther Burns gig, it degenerated into a jam where members of the audience got onstage to sing.

  MLD: That audience loved it so much they wouldn’t let Alex off the stage, and he had to take a leak, and finally he just did.

  RG: He peed off the stage? Damn, then I was there at that show.

  MLD: Oh, it went all the way across the room. He really did have to take a leak.

  JLD: When they originally had the Panther Burns, [drummer] Ross [Johnson] knew about music but he didn’t know how to play, and Gus would play in one tempo and sing in another. When they would start to find a groove, Alex would throw them something wrong and fuck ’em up again. And the band didn’t understand that that’s what was happening—for fully a year. It was just exquisite. He was there to strictly fuck up, to play things he couldn’t possibly play on his own stuff. Gus can still sing and play in different tempos without knowing it, though, if he’s properly encouraged. But Alex reaches a point in his production techniques where he likes to turn off or turn down the weird parts. Like on Flies, Lesa played a lot more parts than are now audible. It reached the point where he started to erase them.

  Lesa Aldridge, Alex Chilton’s muse during much of the 1970s and 1980s, at the Well, circa 1978. (Courtesy of Dan Zarnstorff)

  MLD: Think that was partly jealousy?

  JLD: Sure it was. Because she could play so much more worse than he does. But it’s the same thing with Gus. Gus can play with complete innocence, Alex is jealous of it, so he turns it off or down. Do you know about the Klitz? The all-girl punk band?

  RG: I saw them at the Well once, and Tav’s girlfriend threw a Heineken bottle at his head.

  JLD: You’ve got to have the element of danger. This is my description of the Klitz: They didn’t know what the notes were, they knew whe
n the notes were.

  RG: Any reason why you haven’t had a record of your own since—

  JLD: Oh I’ve been ready to make another one since I was through with Dixie Fried. Nobody asked. And I like to be asked. Everybody has to get off on something.

  RG: What’s your thought on Memphis today?

  JLD: When Stax went down, it was sixty million dollars on paper, so I figure you can double that. And I figured Memphis would never recover from that. But I’ll be damned if I don’t think it is. The suckers for one thing—near record people. And that’s what pays for the big wheel to turn, near records.

  RG: What do you mean there, “near records”?

  JLD: Well, Panther Burns is not quite a near record, but it would be if I wasn’t involved. A near record is just beyond a vanity project. Bread-and-butter jobs that someone pays for. They may not be a real talent, but someone believes they are. One of my partners in Mud Boy, the bass player Jim Lancaster, he used to produce records in Mississippi at the Whitfield sanitarium. Because, as he maintains—which I heartily agree with—those inmates have a right to make records too. There’s some pretty interesting sessions as a result of that. I don’t see any difference between those sessions and the Replacements sessions. It’s the same process, and you have to honor it. If you honor the process, then you have something that stands a chance in the overall moral struggle of the world.

  I drove home from that interview exuberant. I’d long witnessed the public appearances of the Memphis underground, but Jim took me to the catacombs, laid bare a place where the spirit of the amateur was more prized than technical skill; where record sales were welcome but not as the criteria for success. “Hits are in baseball,” he said. “Your royalty lives in a castle in Europe, and fair is where you go to see the pigs race.”