Memphis Rent Party

by Robert Gordon

  RG: Do you like living in Miami?

  CM: I love it. I love it because it’s like Manhattan after nuclear war. All the things you love about New York are in Miami—the multiculturalism, the diversity in class and heritage. I get everything I want there—food, different people. New York is like a different country almost, and so is Miami, but it also has a strong sense of community, which New York doesn’t have. New York has kind of lost that. Miami is just beginning to create it. It’s really awesome. There are a lot of different painters, different bands are starting to grow. Youth culture is thriving here now. No one has cars. They skate, bicycle, and wear flip-flops. It’s Florida. It’s close to South America. They get a lot of vegetables. People are healthy. There’s no pollution. It’s on the water. Good living.

  RG: How close are you to the beach?

  CM: A block.

  RG: That must have been a nice thing when you were sobering up.

  CM: Absolutely. It’s always beautiful. There are flowers all year round; palms are everywhere, coconuts, jasmine. It’s amazing.

  RG: You mentioned New York. What was Richard Avedon like?

  CM: Cool as hell. He does all the portraits of the artists for the New Yorker, and he’d been given a record and he listened to it and said, “I want to see her before I shoot her.” He wanted to create a relationship before he shot me. So he invited me when he was in the hospital to meet him. I had just woken up. I played a show the night before. I got out of bed and got a bunch of flowers. I looked like shit. That was back when I was drinking. I was half-drunk, probably. He’s in the hospital bed and he’s like, “Oh, you look fabulous.” I was like, “I look like shit.” He said, “You look gorgeous. I want you to look just like this.” That was no problem, because I had a show the day before he wanted to shoot me. One of the first questions he asked me was, “Do you like Bob Dylan?” I was like, “Oh my God. Are you high?” “Good. Because I sense the struggle in your music.” He sent me a book: “To Chan, Yours in the struggle. Love, Dick.”

  RG: What book?

  CM: The Sixties. He was talking to me about Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin. He said, “I was doing fashion just to pay for trips to Cambodia and Vietnam. Something about your music shows me that you understand things, and I just want to talk to you.” I told him about the show that I was doing for Janis Joplin’s birthday in Central Park. He said, “I would love to come. I loved Janis so much. She was a great girl. Such a sweetheart.” He came to the show, this eighty-year-old man rocking out to Big Brother and the Holding Company and me.

  So then he shot me the next day. He wanted me to come an hour before so we could hang out. He took me upstairs. He has two different studios in New York. This is the one that’s around Twenty-First Street. He took me upstairs to his apartment. It was like a museum. It was modest—eight hundred square feet maybe, all open-floor, with a kitchen. He had a portrait of Marilyn. He’s like, “I did that when I was forty. I was older than you. You weren’t even born.” He had all these photos from Africa. He had pictures of his wife and his son and books upon books. It was just a mesh of collectible things from all over the world. He opened up a bottle of champagne, and we sat in the garden and I smoked. He was so accommodating. He was running around doing everything for me—so handsome, such an open-minded person. We talked about Dylan and a lot about the civil rights era. He was just a wealth of knowledge. I wish you could have interviewed him.

  Anyway, then we went downstairs and he was like, “I want to show you what I want you to wear.” When he opened the little dressing room, it was all Bob Dylan T-shirts. “I just want you to wear this. I’m going to rip it a little.” I was like, “No way.” He’s like, “You look great. Just leave your hair up.” He took about six Polaroids, eight-by-ten. I was sick. I’d just gotten back from Mexico. I had some toxin in my blood. On the seventh shot, he had cut my shirt. He said, “Keep pulling it up—just like it’s a towel or something.” And that’s the picture. My stomach was hurting so bad because I wasn’t eating and was just manic. My jeans were unbuttoned and unzipped the whole time, but when he told me to take the shirt off to snip it, that picture happened. The first pubic hairs ever to be published in the New Yorker. My grandmother shit a brick.

  He gave me the sixth Polaroid. I have it. It’s eight-by-ten. When the hurricane hit my apartment in Miami, it blew my window out. It blew my kitchen door in. I lost one thing. I lost the photograph of me and my mom and my sister from before she met my stepdad. It really makes me sad. That was a good memory. The only thing I give a shit about was that picture that I lost and the Avedon portrait, which they found.

  RG: You’re working on a movie now. When I made the “Lived in Bars” video for you, I was so impressed with your acting instincts. I’m thrilled to see that world opening up to you.

  CM: I’d like to work with interesting directors. The guy from Magnolia [Paul Thomas Anderson] is someone the William Morris Agency wants me to work with. I just want to do a few roles—as an experiment and as an experience. The thing that I keep trying to stress to them is I don’t want to play Chan Marshall.

  RG: Do you miss the personal interaction of the audience when you’re working with the camera?

  CM: Having to lip-sync for music videos is strange. You’re interacting with the camera as a human, it’s really bizarre. You’re faking, faking, faking. But doing a film, it’s easier because I’m interacting with a person, not looking into the camera, lip-syncing to a song.

  I just had a great experience with the audience. I was in Miami, the first gig after I quit drinking. When I told them I was sober, they stood up. It made me really emotional to see that people cared about me, and they never even fucking met me. I’m thankful to those kinds of people. They send me letters saying, “I love you” and “I understand.”

  RG: What are some specific fan exchanges that have lingered with you, for good or bad?

  CM: I’ve always been the new kid in a different school, and never really had a group of friends. I was the silent kid everywhere I went, because I didn’t grow up in one place. When I was twenty-three, I went on my first trip to Europe. My first record for Matador, What Would the Community Think, did really well there. So I’m used to playing small shows, and in France it’s like a thousand people. The record label there had set up all these interviews. I wasn’t used to it. I didn’t understand how it worked. I’m an open person, and I didn’t realize that with some interviewers, you have to hold back or they’ll dig deeper. The experience was confrontational to say the least. So I had one more interview left and I started having a breakdown: “I don’t understand this attention and these strangers looking at me.” I wanted to just kill myself. I took off all my clothes and I shoved them full of towels, and I put my fake self, with shoes and the socks and everything, on the bed with a sheet over my head to make it look like I was dead. I curled up underneath the thing and was just bawling.

  The next interviewer came in, and I wanted them to just leave me alone. It was a girl’s voice. I was expecting a male journalist, and I was just bawling underneath the thing. She was about seventeen and she started crying and telling me she didn’t want to do the interview. She said, “I just want to tell you that last summer …” She had been on drugs and she had been in the hospital for trying to kill herself. She said, “I just want to tell you that when I heard your song it made me want to live.” She started bawling. It was a desperate situation. It shifted. I wanted to help her and hold her and give her some comfort, and it snapped me right the fuck out of whatever crazy shit I was feeling. That’s one of the most memorable things I’ve ever experienced. It wasn’t that she was upset when I went to hold her. She was crying because she was happy that she had been given the chance to recognize that she’s not alone in the world. That made me feel better because I was like, There are other people. It’s not a lonely world.

  JERRY McGILL

  Jerry McGill is the legendary outlaw of the Memphis underground, a gun-to
ting cowboy hero in black, the rebel who does wrong in the name of right. He’s the ugly woman who showed up at a Mud Boy and the Neutrons gig and uttered the line, “Known felons in drag,” which became the title of their first album. I’d sought information on McGill when writing It Came from Memphis and again when making the documentary from Bill Eggleston’s 1970s vérité footage, Stranded in Canton, but the only evidence of his existence was the occasional collect call from a penitentiary to Roland Janes, the house producer at the Sam Phillips Recording Service and former Sun Records guitarist. Roland didn’t mind all that much hearing from Jerry, but he didn’t love it either, because it could be a short step from a phone call to your front door. And McGill was, for many people, better a legend than a bodily presence.

  For me, finding McGill was a reminder to be careful what you wish for. He remained part of my life until he died, always alerting me in subtle ways that he could find me when he wanted to. There were signs I should have seen, like the fact that when he finally surfaced in 2010, Mary Lindsay Dickinson did not want him to know even in which state she and Jim lived. There were many unpleasant days when making Very Extremely Dangerous, when the vérité footage of Jerry’s ugliness was overwhelming. For this new movie in which we followed him for about ten weeks—fresh out of prison, newly connected to his old girlfriend, and suddenly diagnosed with lung cancer—we had to make Jerry’s character at least somewhat palatable, and we’d enter the edit room saying, Time to chisel off some more hate. But there were also some experiences shooting it that were so full of humanity, my heart could barely take it—more than once he gave advice to little kids, drawing from his mistakes to improve the lives of those he didn’t know. The humanity and the venom—an outlaw’s realm.

  Jerry McGill, from William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton. (Courtesy of William Eggleston)

  We made this movie knowing only that McGill was a compelling character and trusting that if we stayed with him, we’d find a story. A fictional narrative filmmaker writes the story, then shoots the pieces and edits them together—easy peasy. Documentaries are much more challenging—the footage is all there, what’s the narrative? When this film’s termination sideswiped us, we found ourselves in the edit room, reviewing the material and asking, What’s the story? It is, in a way, the most exciting kind of filmmaking.

  I’ve maintained contact with Jerry’s then girlfriend, Joyce. She’s a lot more stable since his demise, and she doesn’t have his temper. Or his guns.

  Very Extremely Dangerous

  Liner notes to Very Extremely Dangerous, 2014

  I made a mistake in my first conversation with Jerry McGill that would (mis)shape our enduring relationship: I gave him my home address. Prior to this first spring 2010 phone call, I’d searched the Florida prison records for information about him, seeking both “Jerry McGill” and “Jerry Cole” (his birth name). Later I’d learn he was serving under the alias Billy Thurman. The first time McGill heard his real name during this prison stay was on his way out. As McGill, just discharged, approached the sunlight, a beefy Florida prison screw pushed open the big office door and called out, “Thurman!” McGill looked up and answered subserviently, as prison had taught him. The screw said, “Who is Jerry McGill?” McGill, smelling freedom, did not miss a beat. “That’s my BMI name, that’s the name I write songs under.” And he was free again.

  Jerry McGill first came to my attention through Jim Dickinson, the Memphis record producer, Rolling Stones accompanist, and Big Star producer. Dickinson told me about the 1973 portable video footage that photographer William Eggleston shot, Stranded in Canton. Eggleston’s movie is stolen—and his life almost taken—by Jerry McGill, behaving at his most out-there (or so one would have thought, until we shot our documentary). The gun in his hand held to another man’s temple, McGill turns to Eggleston’s camera, steely behind dark shades in a dark room, and says, “I don’t care nothing ’bout that.” Talking to the camera, about the camera.

  After the ensuing four decades, I learned, his sense of bravado had faded not at all.

  Jerry McGill was Memphis’s homegrown Lash LaRue, our own personal outlaw. McGill traded Lash’s black whip for a .44 Magnum, kept the black hat, kited checks, attempted murder, robbed a liquor store and some banks, and stayed on the lam.

  Rock and roll led him to his life of crime. He cut the only record he’d ever release at nineteen for Sam Phillips’s Sun Records in 1959. He’d play the nightclub stage, then after the spotlight’s glare, he’d meet the criminals and make a new kind of record: a sheaf of Memphis arrests and more serious issues with the Feds.

  He always loved music, and during most of his thirteen years running from federal agents (the armed robbery charge), McGill was Waylon Jennings’s road manager, mostly under the name Curtis Buck. That’s how he’s acknowledged on Waylon’s albums—as rhythm guitarist and sometimes as co-writer (including of “Waymore’s Blues,” a song basically stolen from Furry Lewis, though Jerry later paid Furry)—and that’s the name he was married under on the stage of Nashville’s Exit / In while running from the FBI. His main Waylon duties were getting the man to his next gig and collecting the money due. He carried a briefcase full of cash and a very large handgun; and he drove on a driver’s license he could not show the law.

  When last released from prison—his third long stint in two states under two names—his friend Paul Clements showed him a computer and said, “This is the Internet.” Jerry said, “Put my name in there,” and they did, and found him profiled on a blog, Boogie Woogie Flu. Scrolling the comments about himself, McGill saw a message from his 1959-era Memphis girlfriend, Joyce. Fresh from prison, he joined her in Alabama, and days later attended a North Mississippi Allstars gig—Jim Dickinson’s sons—letting them know he was looking for their dad. Free, in love, and playing guitar, he was dealt a sudden blow: lung cancer. He declared he’d make good music before he died and booked a day at Sam Phillips Recording Service in Memphis.

  Jerry McGill, with aliases. (Courtesy of Robert Gordon)

  My Irish film partner, Paul Duane, had been corresponding with Joyce for a couple years (having found her in the same comment thread on that blog). When Jerry showed up, she called Paul, and he called me. Joyce e-mailed me some stories Jerry had written—they were very well written—and I found myself on the phone with the long-lost Memphis outlaw. I told him how much I liked his writing, and he said, “Give me your address, I’ll send you more.”

  Time stopped in that moment. For twenty years I’d maintained a PO box for just such occasions, but I had let it expire a while back. McGill was seventy now and, I reasoned, he couldn’t be the same dangerous man today. Was it really a risk? I gave him my address.

  McGill was a professional criminal. He never let me forget that he knew where I lived, knew my routines. (Once, a few years later, he rang while I was driving. “You heading to your weekly workout?” Damn, he was good.) And he was a junkie. During the making of the film, he and Joyce got in a fight, and she kicked him out of the car and drove back to Alabama. Jerry was wandering the Memphis streets, needing a fix, with my home address. I was on my way out of town, so I showed his photo to my wife and two kids, one barely a teenager, and explained that if he showed up at the door, no matter what he said, they could not let him cross the threshold.

  Paul and I and cinematographer David Leonard videotaped McGill’s final recording session, when he was joined by Memphis greats like Sid Selvidge, Jimmy Crosthwait, and Jim Lancaster, as well as Luther and Cody Dickinson. He was so good on camera—just like he’d been with Eggleston forty years earlier—that we saddled up and rode with him. He was an artist expressing himself in song. He was a budding short-story writer of considerable talent. Free again, he was establishing a home, drawing on the honeymoon feel of his renewed, deep-rooted relationship. And he was a hot-tempered man always armed with both knives and guns (including a very ornate sawed-off shotgun), despite the risk of mandatory prison as a convicted felon. He stole a cell phone off
a neighboring table while dining out with us. (We made him return it through the restaurant’s mail slot.) In our presence, he threatened his best friend, his girlfriend, and people who’d never be his friend. We held tight until ten weeks later when we jumped off the Jerry McGill marauding maelstrom, fearing for our lives, our sanity, and our movie.

  I remember phoning Joyce at one point, after a particularly harrowing outing with Jerry. I told her, “We had no idea that things were going to play out like this.” And she said, “I didn’t either. I hadn’t seen him in forty years. I’m as new to him as y’all are.”

  McGill’s musical tracks were squirreled away by several associates, and as we found them, a larger picture of McGill’s talents emerged. The greats wanted to play alongside him. Mud Boy and the Neutrons in the 1970s sessions that Jim Dickinson produced (featuring some of their best-ever performances, with Lee Baker’s guitar on “Desperados Waiting for a Train” sounding strung with prison wire). Waylon Jennings and his Waylors joined the Memphis Horns to back him, and guitar great Travis Wammack later leapt to the call. His last session featured the North Mississippi Allstars and his first session Sun’s Little Green Men: Roland Janes, Billy Lee Riley, and J. M. Van Eaton. Paul and I found evidence of a Curtis Buck master, but we were unable to track its owner. McGill lost more master tapes than most people ever record.

  Things mostly worked out for McGill. Joyce, who knew him before he was Curtis Buck, dug down to the nice guy beneath the thick skin, the one she’d known in the 1950s. After filming was complete, she saw him through his illness—with the understanding that she’d monitor the pain pills—and they lived several happy years together. The two of them were early rock and rollers who’d met in the shade of Sun Records, and they were sharing their sunset years, lying in bed with their heads together, one humming a tune and the other guessing its name.