“I have something Mick Jagger can’t afford.”
—Jim Dickinson
Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music came out while I was living in Philadelphia, 1986. Cocky-ass me had dismissed Peter’s previous books: What can this guy teach me about my hometown? But I bought Sweet Soul Music, and the answer came quick: a whole damn lot. (I later went back to find Lost Highway and its predecessor Feel Like Going Home.) The book’s immediate impact, since I was just making my initial foray as a writer, was the resolve to interview Jim Dickinson on my next Memphis trip.
I’d known Jim Dickinson as a public figure when I was growing up—he played piano, guitar, and was a producer. Often quoted in the newspaper, he was hilarious, outlandish, insightful: “There’s a lot of people that can play better than me. But they can’t play with the Stones better than me.” (He’d played on “Wild Horses,” so he wasn’t just hyperbolizing.) Another newspaper quote: “A record is supposed to be unique. If you can do the same thing over and over again, what’s the use of making a record of it?” And: “Ethnic has become a bad word in the contemporary music business. There is this idea of generic music—raceless, sexless, androgynous. Prince, Michael Jackson … one size fits all. It’s to tremendous advantage of the record industry to try to sell three million units, but … the regional aspect of the record business has been swallowed up … All regional culture is in trouble in the United States right now.” And finally: “If they want us [Memphis musicians] to look like Nashville, we’re not gonna. If they want us to look like Lawrence Welk’s band, we’re not gonna. We’re a bunch of rednecks and field hands playing unpopular music.” Sam Phillips had retreated from music production and from the public; Jim was assuming his mantle, and he had my attention.
With my Sonic Youth review from the Philadelphia Inquirer to parlay and a visit to Memphis imminent, I pitched a Jim Dickinson feature to Option, a magazine that focused on indie releases and embraced the edge. (Jim later liked to quote wrestler Randy “Macho Man” Savage: “If you’re not on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.”)
Jim happily obliged my request. This would be my first assignment that wasn’t just work; it was my passion. Home for the winter holidays, I drove down to Eudora, Mississippi, crossed a levee road with lakes on either side (a symbolic baptism), and pulled up in the daylight to a place that was kind of isolated behind some trees and vines. Mary Lindsay Dickinson, Jim’s wife, led me to their back room; its three large windows overlooking the water made it feel like a porch. We sat on old, comfortable sofas. A couple days after Christmas, a large fir was in the corner.
I told Jim I’d been at the blues festival a decade earlier when his band Mud Boy and the Neutrons unleashed the rock and roll and got their plug pulled. I told him I’d been bringing whiskey to Furry Lewis’s duplex, had been to the cotton warehouse beer busts where punkabilly was being created by Tav Falco’s Unapproachable Panther Burns, featuring Alex Chilton. I told him I liked that Memphis artists were working outside the mainstream and making an international impact. I liked the rawness, and that they became popular by flouting trends, not following them. I thought Mud Boy and the Neutrons should have been bigger than the Rolling Stones. They rocked harder, their interplay of voices and instruments was better, they were stranger and more singular. I wasn’t indignant about their obscurity, but it did frustrate me.
Not Jim. In fact, he embraced the marginalization. There were no expectations to meet, no worries about losing popularity. Jim used to say, “I have something Mick Jagger can’t afford,” and with that he’d grab his belly’s not inconsiderable heft. Mick couldn’t afford to not look like a model; Jim could eat all the barbecue he could afford, could look like he needed to shower, could say what he wanted without worry about backlash. Dancing on the edge required a commitment to one’s own beliefs and a willingness to go to strange places; to adhere to one’s own muse; to make illogical, unprofitable, deeply personal decisions, like Jim cites Alex Chilton doing during the Like Flies on Sherbert sessions—intentionally flushing hits down the toilet.
Jim helped me understand the Memphis aesthetic as the inverse of a hit factory like Nashville. Oddballs and individuals thrive here, not homogeny, hegemony, or harmony. That doesn’t mean Memphis doesn’t want hits. It means Memphis insists on dictating its own terms, delivered via take it or leave it. Life may be short, buster, but art is long.
“The art form of the twentieth century is undeniably music,” Jim told me in the mid-1980s. “And the most important thing that has happened to music happened in Memphis. It’s like being in Paris at the start of the twentieth century. Culture has changed as much in the last twenty years as it did then, and the reason has been music.”
Mud Boy and the Neutrons was four people—Jim, Sid Selvidge, Lee Baker, and Jimmy Crosthwait. Early in their careers, Jim and Sid had gained some experience in the commercial music business: Jim as a session man for Atlantic, Sid as an artist for Stax. “The evil underbelly,” Jim called it: the experience of searching your soul to make art, struggling to express that art, and then seeing your hard work and your personal creation treated as if it were a washing machine or a hamburger. The intersection of art and commerce: Some are more suited to it than others.
The other two in Mud Boy, Jimmy and Lee—initially the music biz attracted them. They wanted to taste stardom. There were, however, practical hindrances. Lee had a felony conviction for pot sales and Jimmy’s affection for alcoholic beverages had gotten him banned from airline travel. So constrained, Mud Boy settled into doing their thing, from home, infrequently, for themselves. Thirteen years after they began performing together, nine years after I experienced that near-riotous festival gig, they released their first album. I used it as the peg for my first magazine assignment. What follows is the transcript, edited, that the March 1987 Option article drew from.
In Eudora, hours passed and still we sat and talked. Jim stitched together a scene that I knew existed but was only beginning to understand. Daylight faded, talk intensified, and when Jim’s wife, Mary Lindsay, flipped on the Christmas tree lights, bathing the space in a glowing warmth, I knew I’d made new friends.
Mary Lindsay sat with us for parts of the interview. Jim was, at the time, working with the Replacements on what would become Pleased to Meet Me. I began by mentioning a recent article about one of Jim’s collaborators, Ry Cooder, that had also run in Option. Jim had worked with Ry on several soundtracks, including the Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas, then already a couple years old but still impactful—capacious, evocative, and mesmerizing.
Previously unpublished, December 27, 1986
ROBERT GORDON: I think that Paris, Texas stuff is great.
JAMES LUTHER DICKINSON: Oh I’m real proud of that. That exceeds something like the Streets of Fire soundtrack, which took five or six weeks to create. Paris, Texas we did in three days. And we did it in sequence, from the beginning of the movie to the end, and all of the emotionality is there without being calculated. We watch the screen and we accompany it—it’s so easy to do. My two favorite Ry Cooder movies are Paris, Texas and Southern Comfort, and they were both done that same way—very organically and without as many musicians.
On Paris, Texas I was playing an electric Kawai keyboard. I used reels of duct tape, rolling them across the keys. I rolled one of them down the black keys and the other one up the white keys, and the random harmonics were really nice—it’s the sound in Paris, Texas that’s like bicycle spokes.
RG: I saw you perform with Mud Boy and the Neutrons. Like Cooder, that seems like an ongoing collaboration.
JLD: It’s hard to say what Mud Boy is. The Mud Boy sound is like a spirit we try to summon, like the Pygmies in the rain forest summon the shaman. And the most successful that we can get is that sometimes [Mississippi hill country harmonica player] Johnny Woods appears. We can’t play too much because it becomes too familiar. When we started, we rehearsed for three months, and it took us seriously another three years to get over the three months’ rehearsal. We’re about the moments where the shit comes together, and Mud Boy tries to extend those moments.
I hear things between me and [Mud Boy guitarist Lee] Baker that if we stopped doing it, nobody on earth would be doing what we do, because of the peculiarity of our environment, because we both played with old blues players. Furry Lewis made a big difference in the way Lee plays. But it took away whatever little commercial value he might have had.
Lee plays on a lot of Alex Chilton’s Like Flies on Sherbert. Alex told me that he had gotten too good to play the kind of music that he was interested in. And I know just what he means, because I’ve preserved the way I played when I was fifteen or sixteen. I play just as bad now, and Alex, that’s what he wanted, somebody to play like he was fifteen or sixteen, but controlled. Alex is playing almost all of the piano on Flies. I’m playing the guitar almost all the time. Lesa [Aldridge] is playing piano on “Lorena.”
Johnny Woods with Jim Dickinson, left. (Courtesy of Tav Falco)
Furry Lewis, right, with Sid Selvidge, left, and Lee Baker, center. Ritz Theater, circa 1978. (Courtesy of Pat Rainer)
RG: That “No More the Moon Shines on Lorena” piano solo is so beautiful! It sounds like the fewest notes possible to create a melody. Was Flies banged out in a couple of hours like it sounds?
JLD: Oh Lord no, it was agonized ad nauseam. The actual playing was brief but the psychodynamics were pretty heavy. I’ve always lost control of Alex at the end. There’s one song on that record, the title song—if I could have mixed that with Joe Hardy at Ardent, we’d have been on the radio with it. And Alex knew it, so he flushed it instead.
RG: He didn’t want to get back on the radio? His recent “comeback” stuff on the New Rose label is so clean, he seems to aspire to radio now.
JLD: When I first met Alex he was living in his mama’s house and he had the gold record for “Cry Like a Baby” on the wall, and it was sealed in a glass box, and the label had peeled off the record and fallen inside. I think that sums up Alex. I played with Arlo Guthrie on “City of New Orleans,” and Arlo taught me the same thing: He was totally exploited and didn’t get any of the money. And they both believe that if somebody is going to fuck it up, it’s going to be them.
MARY LINDSAY DICKINSON: At one time, Alex was having four records released in the same month and we saw his mom taking him to a department store to buy a suit of clothes.
JLD: Alex never received the royalties for anything until Flies on Sherbert, and you can imagine how much he made on that. The exploitation factor, which is critical in any recording situation, just gets too ugly for some people and they want to control it themselves. On Big Star 3rd, I watched Alex sabotage every song that had real commercial potential. Paul Westerberg [from the Replacements] does the same thing with the comedy material. I think that’s an interesting thing in common.
RG: But Paul doesn’t have the same exploitation factor—he’s not had the big hit.
JLD: No, but he’s just as afraid of being incorrectly perceived. Alex doesn’t want anybody to think he’s serious. It means a lot to him for people to not think that.
RG: I really love “Kanga Roo” from 3rd.
JLD: “Kanga Roo” was the time where I truly had control. Alex put it down with his voice and the twelve-string acoustic guitar on the same track, just to make it harder to mix. If they’re on the same track, those levels are predetermined. He and Lesa did it in the middle of the night. He said, “You want to overdub on something, overdub on this.” Defiantly. So I started stacking shit up on it. I did the strings first for the melodrama. Then I started playing guitars. Pretty soon Alex was out there with me. “Kanga Roo” is good, but it’s just a prelude to “Dream Lover,” which wasn’t on the record and should have been. It’s the single that was left off of Big Star 3rd, and, in a way, it’s the whole point of the record. Alex is playing piano, and he wouldn’t tell anybody even what key he was in. He said, “I’ve played the song twice. I played it when I wrote it, and I played it for Lesa, and I shouldn’t have done that.” He said, “If I play it one more time, I’m going to be bored with it.” That’s the kind of thing I’m sympathetic to, so I said, “Sing a little bit, then we’ll do it.” After the first bridge, I don’t know if he forgot lyrics or what, but he says, “Play it for me, guitarist,” and Baker starts into one of his funk solos and we overdubbed the Memphis Symphony on it—it’s really pretty good.
Those sessions, we had an upright bass, a jazz player who did all the bowed stuff, and he thought we were completely insane. He would laugh openly while he was playing. As far as I was concerned, we just gotta get it while he’s still laughing.
RG: 3rd seemed to barely get released. Does that frustrate you?
JLD: I did a European tour in ’83 where I first started realizing what Big Star 3rd had done, because where people knew enough to talk to me about anything, they knew enough to talk to me about Alex. I didn’t think that stuff got around the corner. In America, it didn’t. People have come to me and said, It changed my life. The first time I thought, Yeah, sure. But it’s happened over and over. There was a generation of twelve-year-old boys that were devastated by Big Star 3rd; that’s the only conclusion I can reach. They used to say that about the Velvet Underground’s first record: Everybody that bought the record formed a band. Certainly that must be true of Alex now.
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 seventies, 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 when 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.”
There was popular aesthetic, and there was Memphis. Hadn’t Sam Phillips kept the takes with the technical mistakes—bum notes, phones ringing—because the spirit was present? Tav Falco’s approach to music was similar: “Here was an art form that I could participate in by just picking up the instrument,” Tav told me, “like a Kodak Instamatic camera.” Capturing this spirit wasn’t about the force of spewing one’s guts; this was an artistic process to honor. The chaos of Like Flies on Sherbert was intentionally developed. Memphis wasn’t about getting it right or wrong, it was about getting it.
As a writer, I’ve learned that sharing that captured moment takes careful reflection. Bum notes in a song can bring pleasing idiosyncrasy, but in writing they’ve caused me much regret: choosing words that are awkward or flat-out incorrect, getting facts wrong, mistakenly betraying what an interview subject understood to be a private moment. Jim and I talked about that too—the business of recording, of capturing time. It can be so unforgiving, displaying mistakes. It can also prolong a beautiful present.
Years later, Jim made passing reference to his old house on Yates Road in Memphis. He, it turned out, was the hippie in the house behind the one we lived in when I was about six. My younger brother and I would hang on the cyclone fence we were not as tall as and stare at the cadre of long-haired freaks going in and out. The Memphis beatniks—my people! They frightened as much as intrigued; I remember many a stoner wandering in their backyard like something out of a Monty Python Flying Circus episode opening. I remember not just the volume of the music but its physicality as it boomed out of that little shack of a house, refusing all constraints.
Jim died in 2009 and I miss him all the time.