Came home and there was nobody in the house. The first time that has happened since we all moved in. The TV wasn’t even on. The only sign of life was a saucepan full of old plastic razors cooking on the stove. The water had nearly boiled away, and the razors were starting to melt.

Was alone there for at least 20 minutes. When woke up later, after midnight, at least six people were banging around the place and all was well.

Playing for a Piece of the Door : A History of Garage and Frat Bands in Memphis 1960-1975.

Shangri-La Projects, 2001.

As my own “Rock Gods” writing exercises suggest, I’m a sucker for local band lore. So much so that I don’t care where they’re local to. Whenever I find myself in a strange city, I make an attempt to search out a local-band anthology or two. That’s where real music history lies. I know this from having grown up in Boston in the 1970s and 1980s—the city may have been represented far and wide by Aerosmith, J. Geils Band, The Cars and—ugh!—Boston, but the real scene was beholden to bands like The Real Kids, The Lyres, Orchestra Luna and the majestic Willie “Loco” Alexander.

Some cities are lucky enough to have not just useful CD anthologies of their best local bands, but actual books itemizing key musical figures of the area. (The one for Boston is The Sound of Our Town by Brett Milano)

I found the scene-stirring volume on Kindle for ten bucks. Ron Hall loving chronicles a well-chosen 15-year chunk of Memphis music history. Rock was still developing then, so while local acts were often derivative of national or international ones (The Gants were so consumed by the British Invasion they apparently spoke in English accents and were presumed to be from abroad; other Brit-struck bands included The Peers of Carnaby and British Sterling), all the clichés hadn’t quite settled yet. There are tales of painfully nervous singers whose inability to look at the audience was misinterpreted as Brando-esque coolth, and the most fascinating fashion choices. “Tab-collared shirts were just out, so we all got them,” says a member of Tommy Jay & the Escorts (whose died-young leader is one of the most lauded local legends in the book). “The only problem was that all they had was medium and large, and they hung off us. They were banana colored, and we wore these burgundy ties with glitter on them.” Then there were The Robins, conceptualized by Ardent producer Jim Dickinson to cash in on the Batman TV show before that camp masterpiece even aired. Jim Gaston, a member of their back-up band The Avengers relates that The Robins “were Jim’s wife, Mary Lindsay Dickinson, and two of her debutante friends, Carol Johnson and Lucia Burch. … I think Dickinson briefly saw the Robins as becoming another Ronettes. They wore bat masks and designer outfits and were quite attractive and easy on the eyes, but alas, they couldn’t carry a tune and faded away quickly.”

There are many, many misfires like the Robins in Memphis rock history, and Hall (an avid record dealer and collector who runs the Shangri-La shop for like-minded music mavens) immortalizes these adventures as glowingly as he does the tales of bands who did in fact hit it big, a varied list of chart-toppers which includes Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, The Box Tops, The Gentrys (“Keep On Dancing”), The Hombres (“Let It all Hang Out”), The Mar-Keys (“Last Night”),

And the Knowbody Else (better known after they moved to California and changed their name to Black Oak Arkansas).  Ardent Studios, of course, was also the birthing grounds of Big Star—named for the grocery store across the street. How local-pride can you get? Big Star never had a hit, though a ferocious worldwide cult grew around them. Hall mentions plenty of bands which may have only dented the national charts (such as The Short Kuts with “Your Eyes May Shine” and “Born on the Bayou”) but were longtime superstars in the Memphis frat-party scene.

Hall narrows his survey to only bands which managed to release something on vinyl. In some scenes, that would be a high cut-off point; lots of extraordinary bands never made it into a studio, or did but had little to show for the experience. But for Memphis, the rule fits, since besides Ardent the city boasted the Stax (and its all-star session players led by Steve Cropper), plus numerous other worthwhile studios besides. If you were a popular Memphis band and didn’t release a record, you just weren’t trying. At the same time, it’s amazing that so many bands who gigged so frequently, which simultaneously attending high or college, working day jobs and/or starting families, were able to save enough money and time to cut records besides.

As Hall plows alphabetically through the dozens of bands and hundreds of musicians, the stories tend to become repetitive—appearing on the big local TV dance party show, playing  at the ribbon-cuttings of new department stores, opening for national acts, breaking up when members went to college or got married. But the enthusiasm, the sheer wonderment of living through that era of teen rock, is consistent no matter who’s talking. This is a book of wild-eyed wonder, exciting memories and hometown pride—on the stage, behind it, deep in the throng of fans, and decades onward in the heart of a nostalgic record dealer.

The Ballad of Sunrisers’ Fall

As told to Artie Capshaw

“I’m telling this one last time. The only reason I’m telling it again is because they thing out there that I’m some sicjk loony rock star… loon. And I was never that. Never was. I was a businessman. That’s what I thought I was doing.
“It doesn’t seem that way now. Those other guys fell as hard as I did, you could say—but when I formed The Sunrisers, I was picking the best of the best. Then we rehearsed twice a week for three months until we played out. There wasn’t another band in those days with our… determination. This was a plan.
“Our first show, nobody really knows about it. Everybody thinks our first show was our last show, but there were three. The first one was a party on the U. for a friend. A frat party, sort of, so we did mostly covers, then brought out our own stuff when everybody was drunk enough. I’m not about the vanity, but it went well, no question. There were a few guys who came up to us afterwards, blown away, like serious fans. Some of them were at our second show, when we opened for, you know, Mr. Magnificent you call him, at the Bull.
“We weren’t officially on the bill. We just asked if we could play at 8 o’clock, and nobody minded. Quite a few people there. I remember some of them thinking we were a national act on a tour, maybe part of a package with the headliner. Not sure where they got that idea, but I thought that was great. I mean, that meant people though we were already good enough to be signed or something.
“I was walking on air, walking on air. But I also got that this was new. I hadn’t fronted a band ever. I’d studied for this like a test. Training myself, creating moves, trying the words ten different ways.
“My day job then was in sales, and that’s how I approached the music. I was selling something. I know how crass that sounds, but that’s how I felt. The whole other rock thing, some spaced-out [bleeped homosexual epithet] grooving to the vibe in his own little world, who cares, no respect—I hate bands those guys, guys like that.
When we did the final show, it was staged as if it was our big introduction, so we actually wrote this song, “Splashy Debut.” I know how dumb that sounds, so you have to trust me, I was being ironic or whatever—I was acknowledging how over the top this all was, especially for this town. Seriously.
“Which is why… OK, we’re into I think the fifth song—‘Time to Fly,”’ which I later rewrote for another band, and it even got played on the Sports Channel. Not a bad song if I do say so. The song proved itself. I’d been trying to write simple rock lyrics, realizing how much I’d been overwriting, overpreparing. It’s a dopey lyric in a lot of ways—‘I’m tryin’ to find the time to try to fly.’ Why I’m proud of that lyric is that I wrote a flying song that refuses to rhyme ‘fly’ with ‘high’ or ‘sky.’ Intellectual, see? [Laughs.] Overthinking even when I’m dumbing down.
“Anyway, I’m in to the final chorus and I’m going to hit this campy high note and nail the whole gushy power ballad section just like I’d practiced. Spread my arms out just as the guitar solo finishes up, big transition. Got to start singing then, spread my wings, like literally, do the rock star theatrics.
“But—and I keep stressing this, don’t I? I had a careful idea of what would be too much. I’m really just spreading my arm, right? But as everybody knows, here’s what happened:
“I lost my balance. I admit it. Big freaking freak accident. That’s important, because all the stuff I got blamed for, it’s like people think I went on a rampage. My arm hit something—microphone stand, cymbal, guitar neck, one of those pipes in the ceiling, I really have no idea—and I probably twisted my body a bit and hit something else or something, and I just went down. I know I took the chord organ with me, and the coat rack with the costume changes on it. But I swear I have no idea how that lamp fell, which of course is all anybody wants to know. But it did, and it landed on that off-duty fireman who’d brought his teenage daughter to the show, and the rest is history. I will still testify, just as I did in court three months later, that nobody really got hurt—If anyone did, it would be me. But there was other testimony, and there were fines, and the city reduced the capacity of the club [from 125 to 100]. There were surprise inspections for months afterwards. And there was a short fence built around the stage, which lasted for three years or so, until IT hurt somebody.
“More to the point, the other bands never went on that night. A month later, they’d both be huge, then four months later they’d both be dead, without ever having played in our town.
“You hear that the band broke up that night. That’s not exactly true. We had no idea how much damage we’d caused, or how long one guy can drag out a lawsuit for personal injury, aggravated assault and whatever else the charges were. You know I’m still legally constrained from talking about that case. I can only mention the events that led up to it. That’s the real legend.
“So the monument to my band The Sunrisers… the legacy of the best-prepared, best-rehearsed, most all-star band I ever had anything to do with was the step they build between the bits of fence so the band get up there—the step that’s still there even though the fence isn’t—on which somebody wrote ‘Sunriser’s Leap.’ And every time it fades, somebody writes it on there again.
“Even that, I got self-critical about. I thought it should have been ‘Sunriser’s Fall,’ you know? Better symmetry.”

Thanks for the confession, Mr. Russ Cicero.
Making fresh history on wobbly stages this week:
Saint Overboard—in which the beloved Bullfinch gets dunked and a famous old friend finds a new alias this Thursday—is a multi-band project among Pair of Pink Socks, Bathystol and Loretta Chose Life…. Hamilton’s frat-friendly party bands same night includes Plays With Fire and Lady Valerie (with Kane Luker from Sundry Persons on guitar)… And at Dollaire’s, should you care? Beware! Hoppy! Hoppy! Hoppy!

In Latin class, I designed the entire record cover for the first album of a band I hope to have. It’s all paisley with little dots and lines. I showed it to my Latin teacher, then took it home to work on it.

It’s Kathleen’s favorite of all the breads I bake. It is soft as you please inside, with a crust that’s hard as a rock. Not unlike a skull, I suppose.
My mother was born in Vienna, so my expertise with this loaf could be considered genetic. I got the recipe from Dolores Casella’s indispensible A World of Breads (1966, David White Co.) and I follow it practically to the letter.
You use twice the yeast you ordinarily might (4 ½ teaspoons), dissolving it plus one tablespoon of sugar in a quarter-cup of warm water. Do this in a big mixing bowl and you won’t have to switch receptacles. While that’s beginning to bubble, you scald one cup of milk, to which you add an equal amount of cold water. Make sure the milk/water is lukewarm (if too hot, it kills that poor little yeast), then stir it into the yeast/sugar. Casella’s book says to add eight cups of flour (!) and a whole tablespoonful of salt (!!), but I’ve found there’s not really enough liquid to accommodate that, so either make it six cups of flour or work in another cup or so of warm water. Knead it a whole lot—and there’s a whole lot to knead—and when it’s “satiny,” as they say, roll it into a ball and let it rise in the same mixing bowl you’ve already been using, with a dishtowel or plastic wrap placed over the top. After an hour and a half, punch the dough down, divide it and shape it into two or three loaves (I do long ovals, but round loaves hold their shape well too). I fit them side-by-side on a big cast-iron pizza pan which has been greased and sprinkled with corn meal (per Casella’s recipe. I don’t do the cornmeal thing for other breads, but I like her style here.) Make slashes in the dough so it can stretch a bit, then let it rise for another hour. Before that hour’s over, preheat the oven for 450 degrees. Before baking, mix an egg white with a little water (like, I don’t know, a tablespoon or two?) and paint the loaves with it. The whites can squirm around if not mixed well, and you want to get this right because otherwise you get just fried egg on the pan instead of a crunchy crust. I actually own a pastry brush but when I’m worried about a particularly light dough caving in I just dip a paper towel in the egg wash instead and drag it carefully about the loaves. Use over half of the egg wash, but save some for later. (Insert “all your eggs in one basket” joke here.)
Bake at that extreme heat of 450 degrees for ten minutes, then knock the temp down to 350 and keep the bread in the oven for another fifty minutes. As if an hour of baking isn’t enough (and for most breads that’s plenty), after that you’re expected to take the bread out of the over, carefully apply more egg/water to the now well-formed and dark crust, and bake it for half an hour more.
Yes, two and a half hours of rising and an hour and a half of baking, plus that egg nonsense. But absolutely worth the effort. (Besides, like it’s a bad thing to have a hot oven going all afternoon on one of the coldest days of the year?)
According to my mother and grandmother, in the early 20th century the Viennese were really good at things like opera and skiing. This is another painstaking, time-consuming luxury they excelled at.

Time to parse a few lyrics.
When Sonny Blitt of the Blats bellows “Honeypie,” he is talking about his wife, Helen Powell.
When Sissy Spangler shouts “ !,” she is calling for her dog of that same name.
When Yoost mentions “the old school,” it is because he is divorced.
When Arch Form erupts that list of girls’ names—“Annabellacarladonnaella,” etc.—in “Guerilla Girls,” it is because he claims to have slept with every one of them while in college. (Neat trick, since he apparently lived at home and commuted. The girls in Prunella/Zanella, by the way, insist that none of them are implicated in the tune).
When Millie of the Model Marvels sings that lanquid song about “Joooooooooe,” she has not actually ever talked to Joooooooooe (not his real name)—she is crushing rather severe.
Finally, and closest to our heart: From now on, when we write of Delia “Sykie” Sykes, you are to understand that we are writing about our girlfriend.

Some of the subjects of our stories have had trouble with this concept, but we are indeed ethical, honorable, and open. Pride ourself on that. We keep a suitable distance from the scene we cover—never liked those columnists who fronted bands, or booked shows, or who otherwise had a personal fame-or-fortune stake in the scene. We figured out our place, we thought, and that meant figuring out where our place was not.
Then we fell in love.
Have we overstepped? In writing about it, we mean. We’ll find out soon enough. For now, let’s go to the distracting ellipses and bow out gracefully:

The Ted Marks survived an actual harassment suit that actually went to court. That’s making your mark in clubland. They reappear, bruised but still smirking, at Hamilton’s Thursday with the bespectacled Unhatched Eggheads and Greenhorse (is that some liquor reference we just don’t get?)… Dollaire’s has a mystery local solo act, Wisest Man in the World, along with “…And If I’m Elected,” the side project of a former Selectman and two of his trusted aides. (You know who it is. We’re tired of writing his name, and if he decides to run again all this club publicity will only be subject to the Equal Time statutes, won’t it?). Basically, it’s a night out for bigwigs coming from the nearby Downtown Chamber meeting. Reliable bar band My Son the Double Agent (aka Teenybopper for the CIA when its female back-up singers are along) is there for support, and will do two full sets of corporate covers so the suits and ties can dance… The Bullfinch has Is Anybody Listening?, Eighth Deadly Sin and Girl in the Freudian Slip—three bands with blondes!—but even our favorite watering hole can’t hope to match the biggest show in town that night: a convention for sex therapists and licensed sex workers at the hotel on the hill. Appropriate (and appropriately named) bands—some members of which are in the sex field themselves—have been approached from far and wide, and the two-night ballroom blitz features (though not necessarily in this position, uh, order) Nude for Hire, Backyard Sport, Pussycat Transplant, Room at the Topless, No Good End, Henri’s Big Night and The Mislaid Brassiere. Beat that, or beat off…

Gar was singing a swinging tune from yesteryear.
“Oooh, I’m gonna love you any old way.”
He paused.
“What are,” he proposed, “any old ways of loving?”
We pondered.
“Frottage,” I suggested.
“Outhouse sex,” he countered.
“A III-some, or IV-play” I said, then regretted it because roman numerals aren’t funny out loud. But Gar cracked up anyway, and that was it.

I had an internet-based Broadway showtunes radio channel on the other day, and suddenly out blasted “King of New York.” Not a Broadway melody at all, of course, but a Hollywood one, from Newsies, Disney’s disastrous 1992 attempt to reinvigorate the American movie musical.

It took me back to a whole era when not just Hollywood musicals but Broadway ones seemed doomed. When the original Beauty & the Beast cartoon first hit in 1991, Theater Week magazine put it on its cover as exemplifying the best characteristics of a big Broadway musical. A few years later, of course, it was one, and Disney was intently transforming Times Square back into the theatrical, family-friendly 42nd Street of yore. But in the early ‘90s, times were dire: the “best musical of the year” was a Hollywood cartoon, and the biggest hits Broadway could manage were Crazy for You (the crassest sort of simplistic nostalgia) and Kiss of the Spiderwoman (the kind of obtuse modern turn which frightened away as many tourists as it lured). This was the era of—I have to invoke it—Nick & Nora, not to mention The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public. Desperation, sheer desperation.

And it was catching. Newsies wasn’t awful, just not the sort of film you could pin a resurrection on. The same unfair expectations doomed the British film Absolute Beginners, another shoot-for-the-moon musical where the presumed universality of youthful rebellion is tempered by the undeniably un-universal specifics of time and place. (For Newsies, that was the 1899 New York newspaperboy strike; for Absolute Beginners it was the post-war England of nascent neo-Nazis and other extremely short-tempered authority figures.)

Newsies’ commercial failure doomed the youth-oriented movie musical genre for at least another decade and a half, until the very same director, Kenny Ortega was given another try and scored beyond a generation’s wildest dreams with High School Musical. Composer Alan Mencken, meanwhile, reverted to Beauty & the Beast’s Broadway transformation.

Anyhow, “Extry, extry, Joe! Read all about it!”: “King of New York” still kills. “Comin’ at ya, lousy wit’ stature.”

Reminded of Newsies’ best song, I checked the DVD out of the library and watched it with my daughters. Eight-year-old Mabel was captivated. Six-year-old Sally railed loudly against for its first half-hour (“This is horribly boring!”) but finally warmed to it and was dancing on the couch to it by the time the newsboys won their labor struggle. For older viewers, it’s hard to not get caught up in seeing Christian Bale still playing boyish roles (and singing in a New Yawk accent besides), or Max Casella (who in ’92 was still on Doogie Howser, and who wouldn’t really resurface after Newsies until the last few seasons of The Sopranos) tap-dancing in a bowler hat.

Try as I might, I can’t remove Newsies from its flop mystique. I once interviewed Kevin Tighe, who plays the evil warden of the prison-like “House of Refuge” in the film, and he was impressed at how the film had become a cult favorite following such an ignoble initial reception. But Newsies is too spectacular to be a cult hit, even too spectacular to be reenvisioned as a stage musical in the way that Xanadu or Hairspray has been. It depends on throngs of strapping young boys with piles of newspapers poised on their shoulders, platoons of short-pantsed dancers who eclipse the stars—especially since those stars (Bale, Bill Pullman, David Moscow) can’t sing or dance distinctively at all.

Eschewing star turns for chorus-line overkill may be what Newsies actually did right. In an age where Broadway was still overly dependent on name stars (even the aforementioned Kiss of the Spider-Woman, which hung its hat on Chita Rivera), Newsies soft-peddled them. The secret, it turned out when Ortega’s High School Musical came around, was to have a whole ensemble of overbearing personalities scrapping with each other, then forming the faceless kickline for the big all-in-this-together power ballads. You could say Rent took that route too.

Newsies is an unexpectedly strong footnote in the history of the late-20th century American musical. It’s lousy with stature.

Blackie Blackman, self-styled leader of the Blackie Blackman Boogety Boogety Boogie Band, had a message for his fans between songs on Friday’s set. (The B5 is a regional outfit whose crashpad is about 100 miles from here, though they play in town so often they’re assumed local. Their bassist also went to boarding school in our fair city, if that counts.)
The diatribe for the tribe took almost 20 minutes to deliver, and cut down heavily on the evening’s funk factor. Seems Mr. Blackman had been unjustly detained on the way to the gig, for driving while Blackie. And, incidentally and allegedly, navigating a car through a huge wave of pot smoke behind the dashboard. He should sing the police report next time; it might be more entertaining, though allegedly not as entertaining as the alleged chase the alleged victim led the alleged “racist fuzz” (both of whom, he neglected to mention onstage, were black) on. Sorry to be a news reporter there for a second, but it’s in our blood, which was boiling at nearly as high a temperature as Blackie Blackman’s that evening, though for different reasons.

Elsewheresville: We grant that Blackie Blackman is a frequent target of abuse, and that the local original music community is overwhelmingly white, and largely allergic to funk or hip-hop, which remain largely underground commodities. (Is there a vaccine the club bookers could take?)
When Mr. Blackman assumed his stage moniker legally some years ago, some called it a publicity stunt since the band was just starting to make it in the larger clubs after two years on the college circuit. But, it was counterargued, such an in-your-face identity change, and BB’s natural irascibility, weren’t actually great mainstream selling points. Blackie has been his own biggest obstacle to fame. Being mad at cops isn’t the issue. Choosing the middle of a set to switch to improv political performance art is.

The Jewish fraternity at the college on the hill is holding a dance party Saturday featuring The Figgits, Tranifatts and Wendell Horse—all of which feature members of the frat. (It’s the house with the “All Men Are Dogs” and “Bimbergs Welcome” signs outside. Ask for Ingrid the maid.)… Same night, the Bullfinch handles the dark and dreary winter nights well with Cautioned Phoebe, My Fenimore and Ate the Éclair—that’s two past tenses and a pronoun, so you know it’s Goth to be good… Hamilton’s weekend, meanwhile, tends toward ironic soul, with Don’t Step on That Beetle, The Pippa Pipkins and—really?—The Hurty Gurdies, who can’t help but clear the room of fans of those other two bands…. Dollaire’s? Disaster. Trust us: You don’t want to see bands called Special-When-Lit, Felix Phooey and Mister Gillie. Even if you’re insane and literally want to see singers swinging from the rafters. We’d rather eat the éclair…

Slept out in the hall because I thought Mar had left the signal meaning he had someone in the room with him. He didn’t.