The Commercial Appeal - Go Memphis
Robert Gordon’s ‘It Came From Memphis’ turns 25
Late Memphis guitar legend Charlie Freeman.
ginning. That was going on almost 10 years.”
A couple years back, Gordon decided to peruse his publishing deal and found a solution. “I had a clause in my 25-yearold contract that allowed me to tell Simon & Schuster, ‘You must put this book back into print the way it’s supposed to be or you give up the rights.’ And, much to my surprise, they gave up the rights — which is what I was hoping for.”
Enter Third Man Books, the publishing arm of rocker Jack White’s Nashville-based record label and media company. Third Man Books — run by native Memphian Chet Weise — had previously been in discussions with Gordon about putting out an anthology of his work, which ended up turning into 2018’s “Memphis Rent Party,” released by Bloomsbury. With the rights to “It Came From Memphis” back in Gordon’s possession, Third Man offered to do an upgraded anniversary edition.
“Obviously Jack White has great aesthetic taste, and design is really important to them, so I thought maybe they’re the answer to getting [‘It Came From Memphis’] to looking good again,” says Gordon. “As it turned out Third Man wanted to start from scratch, they wanted to do their own original design. The byproduct of that was it opened up the book to as much rewriting as I wanted.”
The 25th anniversary edition of “It Came from Memphis” is not so much a new book, but certainly newly improved. There are some 80 photos that were not in the previous edition, and the text has also been expanded, with three new chapters by Gordon, as well as a new forward (by poet and critic and Hanif Abdurraqib, adding to Peter Guralnick’s original intro), plus an extensive consumer guide with updated listening, watching and reading resources.
For Gordon, the chance to rework the book after a quarter century was a welcome opportunity. “It’s interesting the way your different interests meld,” says Gordon. “I’ve become very interested in historic preservation over the years. So that became my analogy. I thought of the book as an old house. I didn’t want to change the footprint. But where I could let more light in, I wanted to make small adjustments to let more light in.”
One of the areas Gordon has significantly improved is in expanding the female perspective in “It Came From Memphis.” “After the book came out, there were all kinds of people who told me they should have been in it,” says Gordon. “But, in particular, there were some women who, looking back, I did feel should have been better represented. So for this new edition, I interviewed a dozen or so women and I was able to feather in their perspectives and bring more dimensions to the story.”
In revisiting his classic, Gordon had an even better appreciation for why the book connected — and continues to resonate — with audiences. “I hadn’t read it in many years when I started working on it again. Reading it after 25 years I was able to experience it with some distance. And it was exciting to see someone shining a flashlight in the dark corners of the Memphis music world and to hear these stories.
“I was thrilled to reread these stories about people, musicians who were embracing a sense of outré thinking, thinking way outside the box. And knowing that their efforts and their mistakes are every bit as important as the success. Often it’s the mistakes that make the successes. That’s the story of Memphis music, really.”
The Memphis Chess Club has been around, in one iteration or another, for more than 143 years. This week, however, it will take its ultimate form with the grand opening of a permanent location, one that will include a café and restaurant open to the public.
The new Memphis Chess Club — located at 195 Madison, on the first floor of Downtown’s Pressbox building — is both a throwback and a look forward. The earliest incarnations of the Memphis Chess Club first began meeting at Downtown in 1877.
“What we have done is taken and reinvented the Memphis Chess Club,” manager Emily Wolfe said. “Historically most chess clubs used to have a café in them. They were private clubs with cafes. We’ve taken that concept and made it our own and modernized it.”
The project is the brainchild of Casey Hill, president of Left Field Properties, which owns the Pressbox building. Hill is a chess player and longtime Memphis Chess Club member, who wanted to advance chess locally. While the club has historically met at different spots, most recently in East Memphis, giving it a permanent home base should significantly help bring more attention to the game in the Bluff City.
The newly rooted Memphis Chess Club will, naturally, be focused on chess — on playing the game, teaching it and hosting tournaments — but the space will also be a public friendly environment, with myriad amenities.
“You don’t have to be a chess player to enjoy what we offer. If you like good coffee and great food, you will have a home here,” says Wolfe, who is handling the day-to-day operations for Left Field Properties.
Memphis Chess Club will offer a full café menu, including breakfast as well pizzas and coffee roasted in house. The menu was created by Chef Grier Cosby, a native of Tupelo, Mississippi, who attended the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley, and graduated with a degree in culinary arts from Mississippi University for Women.
Memphis Chess Club launched with a soft opening with limited hours last week, but has moved into its regular hours, which are from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily.
With a capacity of 240 (under normal non-coVID-19 circumstances), the facilities include the café
Inside the Memphis Chess Club at 195 Madison Avenue in Memphis on Oct. 9. The Memphis Chess Club will feature a full cafe and weekly tournaments.
area and a mezzanine where people — including students from the nearly Visible Music College — can come read or study. There’s also a downstairs tournament room with a capacity of 80, as well as a chess classroom and another space for private lessons.
“We have a really amazing setup, that will allow us able to accommodate all the programming we would want to do right here in-house,” Wolfe said.
While the café and facilities are open to the public, Memphis Chess Club will offer a variety of membership packages for those interested in taking up the game or getting deeper into chess.
Social memberships will allow members to play anytime with tables, pieces and clocks provided, while offering access to the club’s mobile app and library, plus weekly adult open play sessions. Tournament memberships for more serious enthusiasts include all those perks, plus a free tournament per month as well as discounts on all classes, camps and merchandise.
Family memberships (for two adults per household and all children) include all the social/tournament privileges, as well kids open play sessions and more. Annual membership costs range from $50 for the social tier to $150 for the family package.
“It’s a family-friendly place, but we also serve wine and beer — so for the adult play sessions the grown-ups can have a great time and have some wine and get worse and worse at chess with every glass,” joked Wolfe.
Given current COVID-19 restrictions, larger tournaments will have to wait, but Memphis Chess Club plans to kick things off with a handful of smaller tournaments and regular weekly programming that will be attendance capped and socially distanced starting this week.
For more information, a look at menu or to purchase a membership, visit the Memphis Chess Club website.
Ah, Memphis, the Southern capital of sin and song — “the old Delta synonym,” as Eudora Welty dubbed it, “for pleasure, trouble, and shame.”
The sin might have been as sinful somewhere else, but it’s the song that really made Memphis Memphis. No wonder so many writers have made it their subject, this city that changed the world through sound. Now comes David A. Less with “Memphis Mayhem”, a slim volume touted by its publisher, ECW Press of Canada, as the “definitive story of the birthplace of rock and roll.”
Don’t worry — it’s not. There’s no more a definitive book on Memphis music than there is a definitive Memphis song (or sin). So we can just keep on reading and listening, partaking of the pleasures of each.
The chief pleasure of “Memphis Mayhem” lies in the serious care Less takes in telling this story of a city that set the world on its ear, time and time again, with blues, gospel, R&B, rockabilly, rock, soul, pop and even jazz. That meticulous approach befits a third-generation Memphian who has spent his life around the city’s music, talking to those who made it and seeking to understand the forces and influences that shaped it.
Less takes us to the barrooms and nightclubs where drink and sometimes blood flowed, but he’s more interested, for example, in the underage kids who gathered in the parking lot outside the Plantation Inn, across the river in wideopen West Memphis, Arkansas, listening to the great Black bands inside through a metal speaker such as you’d find at a drive-in restaurant. “I would just go and sit and listen to the music,” songwriter and musician Don Nix told Less. “I didn’t dance or drink or anything else. I would just sit there and listen to that music.”
They weren’t just listening. They were learning.
Less takes us to school — literally — on the music of Memphis. He takes us to Manassas High in 1927, where future jazz legend Jimmie Lunceford, then a 25-year-old gym teacher, became the first band director at a Black city school. He started a student band called the Chickasaw Syncopators, which grew into the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra and would rival Cab Calloway and Count Basie in popularity. Less lingers over Booker Little Jr., a Manassas High product who was on his way to jazz greatness, playing with Eric Dolphy and others, but died at 23 from a blood disorder. And he takes us to Club Handy, “an after-hours stop for young hip musicians who wanted to test their skills against one another” at jam sessions and in cutting contests. The band leader at Club Handy was Bill Harvey, described by one regular as “something like the father of all of the musicians.” That regular was
“Memphis Mayhem” by David A. Less
Willie Mitchell, who would go on, of course, to produce soul classics by Al Green and Ann Peebles at Memphis’ Hi Records.
Again and again, Less connects the dots. Or the notes, as it were.
A lifetime of living in Memphis, loving the music, revering those who made it, will do that. Even better if you make that music your life’s work — from research for the Smithsonian Institution and the National Endowment for the Humanities to a partnership in the Memphis International Records label. Less interviewed everyone from Memphis Slim to Steve Cropper, Dan Penn to Teenie Hodges. In the acknowledgments of Peter Guralnick’s 1986 classic “Sweet Soul Music”, the author thanks Less, “who freely offered up the fruits of his own extensive research as well as taking me out to Al Green’s Church of the Full Gospel Tabernacle for the first time.”
You’re in good hands, then, being taken to school by a guy who took Peter Guralnick to church. He’s lived the story he tells, although he only occasionally appears in it. At one point, he’s a 14-yearold boy at the Overton Park Shell, hanging out backstage with a friend, and meeting blues great Furry Lewis at the first Memphis Blues Festival in 1966 — “an eye-opener,” he writes, “for two kids from the all-white suburbs.”
Later, in the mid-1980s, he’s the corporate director of entertainment for The Peabody hotel — and still has that youthful enthusiasm for the Memphis sound in all its variations, as played this time by a jazz legend:
Like many luxury hotels, we had a lobby bar with a grand piano. I would sometimes receive a telephone call late at night from hotel security.
At a glance ‘Memphis Mayhem: A Story of the Music That Shook Up the World’
By David A. Less. ECW Press. 232 pages. $16.95.
“Sorry to bother you so late, but Phineas Newborn Jr. is playing piano in the lobby and he won’t leave. What should we do?’
My response was always the same: “Just leave him alone and enjoy what he’s playing.”
You wouldn’t begrudge the author appearing a little more in his own book, but this less of Less is more approach seems perfectly in character. This isn’t about him. This is the story of Memphis, its music and musicians — and he tells it well, if without the flair and verve you’ll find elsewhere on the same subject.
No, this isn’t the last word on Memphis music or the first book to read if you’re not already immersed. Hopefully I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but the canon includes Stanley Booth’s “Rythm Oil”, Preston Lauterbach’s “Beale Street Dynasty”, and most anything with Robert Gordon’s name on it.
“Memphis Mayhem”, though, is a worthy addition to the shelf because Less puts the music first. And then, from the parking lot of the Plantation Inn to the lobby bar of The Peabody, from the Black high school band rooms to Rev. Al Green’s church, he lets it ring out.
No sin in that.
For more local book coverage, please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.
Sure, I could poke fun at all of the new and old pumpkin spice products out on the market this year. The Pumpkin Pie Kitkats, Werther’s Original Harvest Caramels with pumpkin spice and the Burt’s Bees lip balm. I might roll my eyes at the promise of a limited-edition Pumpkin Spice Kraft Mac & Cheese coming to us from Canada or the Nestle Toll House Filled Pumpkin Spice flavored “baking truffles.” But I won’t. Many love this mix of ground cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves and maybe some allspice and lemon peel for some very interesting reasons – I know I do – and it’s quite fun to see what those food science geniuses on the development teams all over the nation come up with each year.
It all began when Starbucks introduced their Pumpkin Spice Latte back in 2003 and each year, something new and decidedly pumpkin spicy comes out on the market from candles to coffee to creams to soothe those aching muscles.
Boom Chicka Pop has a Pumpkin Spice drizzled Kettle Corn and oh yes, Pumpkin Pie Pop-tarts are on the menu, too. Will I sip the Vive spiked sparkling water with a hint of pumpkin spice while munching on some Blue Diamond almonds dusted with pumpkin spice? Will your kids clamber for a bowl of pumpkin spice Cheerios for breakfast? Taco Tuesday might now feature Mrs. Renfro’s Pumpkin Salsa and Spam Saturday (not real) might feature Pumpkin Spice Spam, which, when released in 2019, sold out within hours. And it goes on and on.
So why do we love pumpkin spice? Well, some of us. I know others just cringe.
Scientists say that smell is linked to memory, and the aroma of pumpkin pie baking in the oven is one of our most treasured comfort food memories. That aroma and the flavor stir up the reward centers in your brain and each ingredient has its own properties. Ginger is an anti-inflammatory and energizer that promotes healthy aging. That nutmeg is great for the immune system and indigestion. The allspice is full of antioxidants.
Make your own pumpkin spice mix
My pumpkin spice blend is very easy to make. I sometimes make it from the already ground spices but the whole spices are readily available, too, and I use a coffee grinder to make my own fresh spice powder. Here’s the basic recipe, but I do experiment with other elements like that lemon peel, which I dry, ground white peppercorns and even finely ground roasted cacao beans. Feel free to make a larger batch and keep in the jar in the refrigerator for up to one year.
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon 1 teaspoon ground ginger 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg 1 teaspoon ground allspice or cloves Combine all of the spices in a bowl or jar for storage.
Rachel Forrest is a former restaurant owner who lives in Austin, Texas. She can be reached by email at rforrest@gatehousemedia.com.
Scientists say that smell of pumpkin spice is linked to memory, and the aroma of pumpkin pie baking in the oven is one of our most treasured comfort food memories.