Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.04.2006, Blaðsíða 40

of oddballs in a simple studio with one or two decent micro-
phones. The average home computer has a couple thousand
times the production capabilities of what went behind the better
recordings of the 20th century.
Our guide wound a dollar through the strings of a guitar
to show how Johnny Cash created a simple percussion instru-
ment that would get people dancing to Ring of Fire, and, a
few seconds later, admitted that this was the point in the tour
where things got crazy. Older women freak out when they see
Elvis’s microphone, but recently, young men have been crying,
somewhat hysterically, over the recently deceased Johnny Cash.
I ask if he hadn’t thought of just saying, “I’ll give you
something to cry about,” and threatening people at random. He
smiles politely.
“This is important to people. It’s moving to be here, where
your favourite song, something you’ve grown to love, was first
put down. It’s important to me, too,” our guide tells me.
As much as Sun Studios is about bonding with the founders
of rock and country, especially lesser-known names, Elvis Pre-
sley stands out somewhat head-and-shoulders above the other
geniuses. While you get the Horatio Alger story of Elvis coming
in dirt broke to record his first single, you also get some myths
debunked – Elvis famously claimed that he only recorded his
first single to give his mother a birthday present, but the session
was in July 1953, and his mother’s birthday was in April. Trivia
is one thing, but the Sun tour also presents video of Elvis’s first
television appearance – a flawless but aggressive blues-rock
show number that stunned everyone on the tour. Once you see
the show, you no longer think Elvis was a cracker with a good
voice and full lips… you think Elvis was a cracker with a good
voice and full lips who, at one point in his life, invented the rock
performance, perfected it, showed the world how to do it, then
moved on to invent and perfect cracker kitsch karate, which,
to somebody somewhere in the world, was likely another act of
genius.
The Other King’s Street
The locals, including the many hipsters at Sun Studios, recom-
mend we go out in Midtown Memphis, where indie music
dominates. The highest recommendations go to a woman play-
ing a double bass and singing, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, to
a crowd full of mid-20s thin people drinking whiskey cocktails
and beer. Handed a copy of the Memphis Flyer, an excellent
weekly street paper, we are also told about rockabilly shows
and a post-pop rock show. Beale Street, we are told, is only for
tourists.
Nice as it is to see young musicians get credit and recom-
mendations, our quick spin through Midtown reveals somewhat
generic music and style – a crowd of temps, computer program-
mers and art students watching their friends perform is a good
night out, but it doesn’t quite capture our imaginations.
So we head out to Beale Street. Before the hurricanes, Beale
Street was the slightly less sinful little brother to the French
Quarter – today, it is likely the best place in the world to see a
whole lot of top-tier blues at once. BB King’s club dominates
Beale Street, sitting atop the seven blocks of neon and blues and
jazz music like a castle.
BB’s is packed, but the street and the other blues clubs are
mostly empty – tourist season is March to October. Now it is
mostly locals and a few wayward Europeans.
We head for the Juke Joint, one of the older clubs on Beale
Street, to see harmonica guru Robert Doctor Feelgood Potts.
The Dr. Potts band tells you a lot about what goes on in Mem-
phis – the bassist is a young woman from Osaka, Japan, the
keyboardist from Janesville, Wisconsin, the drummer from New
Orleans, and the guitarist from Nashville, while Potts himself
is from Greenwood, Mississippi. Everybody but the bassist has
moved to Memphis because this is the only place you can play
blues every night and make a good living.
“Except on the down months,” the keyboardist tells me,
after we’ve had a moment of Wisconsin bonding talk. “We live
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