Alright, let’s return to crackpot opinion, fact fudging, and outright lies this time after my sentimental and painfully sincere piece on Ardent Studios and John Fry a couple of weeks back.
I think there is a curse on Memphis that spreads a collective blight over everything that happens here, particularly in the realm of music making. Some say the Chickasaw Indians placed a curse on Memphis when they ceded the land to the United States Government in 1818. Others trace the curse to institutionalized economic racism that saw Africans disembarking from the Middle Passage only to be held in slave pens and then sold as cattle to wealthy plantation owners who built fortunes from the cotton trade which were mostly created by the back breaking work done by African slaves.
Plantation culture and economy helped build this city; that fact seems hard to refute. Jim Crow segregation and the iron grip that Mayor E. H. Crump held on the city in the early to mid-20th century may have contributed to this curse. The Sanitation Workers’ Strike and subsequent assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis during the spring of 1968 have certainly cast a pall over the city since then at both national and local levels. The endemic poverty, soaring unemployment, a crumbling city school system, a spiraling crime rate, and a general sense of despair for those living in this city of ill abode make Memphis, Tennessee feel like less than a wonderful place to live.
If my faulty theorizing above seems less than believable then consider what has happened (and still does) to people foolish enough to attempt careers in performing and recording music here in Memphis. In previous installments I have harped on the demise of Stax Records and the role that Union Planters Bank played in willfully hastening that process in the mid 1970s, but the company was still selling records at a respectable, profitable rate when Union Planters decided to pull the plug on them financially. Aesthetically, Stax Records produced a body of work that is unparalleled in American music and now all that is left is a museum on the original site celebrating the glory that was Stax, but nothing can bring back those golden days.
Sun Records sold thousands of records and brought the transcendent talent of Elvis Presley to the world while beginning the careers of Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and other world class recording artists at 706 Union Avenue under the tutelage and production talent of the late, great Sam Phillips. But Phillips sold Elvis’s recording contract to RCA early on and Sun’s back catalog to Shelby Singleton in 1969 for less than a huge profit in both cases. And those are just two of the most well-known examples of the curse. Presley signing with carny manager, Colonel Tom Parker, and his subsequent artistic descent under the Colonel’s guidance may qualify as the saddest example of the Memphis curse, ending up overdosed face first in the plush shag carpet of his Graceland bathroom at the age of 42.
Consider the commercial failure of Big Star and Ardent Records who had the misfortune to be crippled by faulty distribution on the part of CBS Records when John Fry signed with that conglomerate in the early 70s. Of course, Big Star has gone on to be lauded and celebrated as one of the most influential bands of the 20th century. However, in the mid to late 70s the original members made nothing from non-existent royalties not paid for records which simply did not sell well or barely at all. I know from personal experience that more that one member of that group felt like commercial failures in the light of almost zero record sales at the time of their release. That started changing in the late 70s and culminated with the release of the Big Star box set in late 2009. But consider the tragic body count of the original members: Alex Chilton in 2010, Andy Hummel later that year and Chris Bell in 1978. No, I won’t term their passing as part of my curse theory, but their individual deaths certainly qualify as tragedies by any standard. And the litany of commercial failure and personal heartbreak continues on and on.
If you are a Memphis musician reading this I have a strong feeling you know just what I mean by this feeling of being cursed. This is a place of great inspiration, musically and creatively speaking, but things almost always go wrong personally and professionally here for seemingly inexplicable reasons. Curse or not, this place will break your heart and crush your soul sooner or later.
On that happy note, someone asked me recently if I had enough money to leave Memphis, where would I go? I was caught up short by that question and honestly answered that I did not think I could live anywhere else even if I had enough money to leave. The combination of beauty and horror makes this a most interesting place to live—but a hard place to play music.
Ross Johnson Photo: Don Perry
