We've got a pair of disparate but (almost) equally illuminating new rock 'n' roll tomes for the bookshelf.
First up is Ron Hall's fantastic Memphis Rocks: A Concert History, 1955-1985 (Shangri-La Projects, $22). Hall, the Memphis subculture anthropologist behind such twisted and curiously compelling titles as Playing for a Piece of the Door: A History of Garage & Frat Bands in Memphis, 1960-1975 and Sputnik, Masked Men & Midgets: The Early Days of Memphis Wrestling, has come through again with this exhaustive listing of just about every Memphis concert from 1955 to 1985.
Hall, himself a failed concert promoter in the late 1960s and early '70s (a fiasco of a show in 1974 that found him stiffing the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band out of $800 sealed the lid on his promoting career), has gathered a treasure trove of advertisements, fliers, programs, photographs, ticket stubs and posters to illustrate this definitive history of live rock 'n' roll in the town that played such a crucial role in the genre's birth.
The listings actually begin with a July 17, 1954, Elvis Presley show at the Bel Air Club. A year later Elvis was onstage with Hank Snow and the Jordanaires for the Cotton Pickin' Jamboree. Arkansas natives and rockabilly pioneers Sonny Burgess and Billy Lee Riley were also playing the Bluff City in those days. On Nov. 15, 1956, Burgess, who played this year's King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena-West Helena, was on a bill with Ray Price and Marty Robbins at The Auditorium, while Riley did a gig with fellow Arkie Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins at the same venue on April 4, 1957.
To read Memphis Rocks is also to wonder at the amazing package shows caravanning around the country through the '60s. A 1964 show at Ellis Auditorium featured Jackie Wilson, B.B. King, Sam and Dave, Gladys Knight, the Drifters and others. Just look at this mind-boggling blues show from the same year: Jimmy Reed, Howlin' Wolf, Little Milton, John Lee Hooker, Rufus Thomas, Little Joe Blue, Big Joe Turner and T-Bone Walker.
Hall adds stories from people who were at the shows or involved with the productions. Chris Lovell, co-owner of music store Strings and Things, tells of a 1976 encounter with Paul Stanley and Ace Frehley of KISS who were doing some pre-show shopping, sans makeup. A bodyguard warned Lovell, who was armed with a camera, against taking photos, and a quarrel ensued until Stanley smoothed things over. He and Frehley spent the afternoon at the store, fiddling with guitars and talking about music. They were there so long that their limo driver abandoned them. Lovell drove the rockers, incognito, to their sound check at the Mid-South Coliseum in his Volkswagen Beetle, where they were denied access until Stanley convinced the guard that he and Frehley were actually members of KISS.
Jerry Swift, owner of The Ritz, tells of the 'round-the-block line to see Billy Joel open the venue on June 5, 1976. Oh, and there's the tale of British rockers Mott (which were Mott The Hoople minus Ian Hunter) demanding in their Ritz concert rider that Little Rock supergroupie Connie "Sweet, Sweet Connie" Hamzy attend their gig.
Ahhhh, rock 'n' roll. It's all here, the absurdities and transcendence, in Hall's wonderful time capsule of a book. Any Arkansan who has ever traveled across that wide, muddy ol' river to the bright lights of a Memphis night to catch or play a show can appreciate this creative and excellent collection.
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The Jesus and Mary Chain was started in the early '80s by brothers Jim and William Reid, products of East Kilbride, Scotland, a "mind-numbingly bleak" Glasgow suburb. The brothers, with bassist Douglas Hart and early fan-turned-drummer and Primal Scream founder Bobby Gillespie, unleashed a debut album, 1985's stunning Psychocandy, that melded Bo Diddley, the Ronnettes and The Velvet Underground with a wall of shrieking, squalling feedback that managed to have an undeniable pop core. It would eventually kickstart the shoegaze movement and influencing groups like My Bloody Valentine, The Stone Roses, The Pixies and others. After disbanding for nearly a decade, the band regrouped for the 2007 Coachella Music festival and has been touring off and on since.
The Chain's story is told in The Jesus and Mary Chain: Barbed Wire Kisses (St. Martin's, $22.99), Zoe Howe's loving biography. It's mostly successful, although it often seems only half the story is being told. This is likely due to the fact that while singer Jim Reid and many of the band's other intimates, including wild-man manager and Creation Records co-founder Alan McGee, spoke with Howe, William Reid didn't cooperate. For a band almost as well known for its sibling bickering and onstage fights as it is for its darkly beautiful and cracked rock 'n' roll, this can be a bit problematic.
Growing up, the Reids were social misfits who spent most of their time obsessing over records, taking solace in punk rock and living with their parents and on the dole when they started trying to form a band and make their own music.
The group played its first gig in London for a crowd of six people. The set was reviewed in New Musical Express, who described the band as sounding like a swarm of bees in an elevator shaft. At their next show they were tossed out of the club after a couple of songs.
Many early shows ended in violence, which was played up in the breathless English music press. The band, clad in black and hiding behind big hair and unintelligible Scottish brogues, was about as notorious as the Sex Pistols had been a few years earlier. It didn't help matters that, even as headliners, they often didn't play much more than 20 minutes before tearing up their equipment and/or stumbling off the stage in a stupor.
It's fun reading about the band's exploits -- altercations with Iggy Pop's road crew, fights between the Reids, a bloody scrap with Ice Cube's posse at Lollapalooza, drunken shows and constant battles with sound engineers. These dudes were doleful and difficult, but also hilariously cynical, and possessed a perverse genius for teasing the media and the public (see Jim Reid's baiting of a Belgian TV host and avowed Joy Division fan with a graphic and unapologetic put-down of that group).
Howe, an obvious fan who has written books about Stevie Nicks and Florence + The Machine, does a fine enough job of explaining the band's importance and influence (she acknowledges that Darklands, the quiet, feedback-free follow-up to Psychocandy, may be the group's masterpiece). Though it would have been nice to have heard from the other Reid, this book will do fine for now.
Style on 12/16/2014