Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.04.2006, Blaðsíða 41

on those tips, and you just have to convince people that, you
know, even though there aren’t many people in the winter, we
still need those tips.”
Dr. Potts, the bandleader, is less worried about the tips.
After posing a bit for our photographer, he points out that it is
only natural that a group of Icelandic journalists would travel
thousands of miles to see him. “What you’re talking about, with
the blues, is miracle root music, the universal beginning.”
When I acknowledge the universality of blues, he moves on
to explain the appeal of Robert Doctor Feelgood Potts. Mainly
being that “if you go on Google, you’ll see hundreds of Dr.
Feelgoods. But there’s only one Doctor Feelgood Potts.”
Dr. Potts asks me if I understand the importance of Missis-
sippi, and I say I guess that I do, as I’ve just arrived from there.
He gives me the broadest of smiles, leaning back so that he
almost falls off his chair.
“You ain’t been in one of those juke joints down in Missis-
sippi, have you?”
“Sure, yeah.”
“I’ll tell you, you’re talking about home. I’ll play you some
home-style music, then,” and he stands up. Instead of going
onstage, he turns to greet the rest of the crowd and sell CDs.
In a few minutes, the band heads back up, the keyboardist
stopping by one more time to remind me of the tip bucket, and
to point out that the New Orleans flood has brought a lot of
musicians into town, which makes it that much harder to make
a living.
Dr. Potts eventually gets back onstage, and while the
music is still big band and polished, Memphis style, he begins
to stomp and jump on the beat – his eyes half open, a beatific
smile on his face, he seems in danger of falling off the stage.
“Yup, that’s the juke joint style,” our photographer says,
recalling our experience at a Clarksdale, Mississippi juke joint,
then gets out of the way.
We begin the drive back South at dawn, taking a brief detour to
cross the Mississippi and look over the enormous glass pyramid
set against the river in order to remind the world of Memphis’s
namesake.
A few hours later, we stop at our tenth Waffle House, and
drop the last of our money on deep-fried chicken sandwich con-
coctions and bottomless coffee. In eight days, we have driven
2,000 miles, examined the wreckage of one of America’s worst
natural disasters, interviewed scores of people, done significant
body damage to our rental car by running over middle-of-the-
highway potholes and been overwhelmed by the culture of the
poorest state in the US.
As we cover another 800 miles to get to the Orlando
airport, we talk about the life of a cultural and tourism maga-
zine – how much good it might do for an Icelandic publication
to point out the diversity of a place on the opposite end of the
hip spectrum. Hip, we feel, almost always goes hand-in-hand
with income level. Just as rich kids are popular in John Hughes
movies, rich cities and nations get the benefit of the doubt in
the gossip of tourist and economic publications – first comes the
money, then comes the hype.
When we run a feature story on the South with New Or-
leans, Mississippi and Memphis getting full coverage, we will
have done ourselves proud, we say.

The next day, after a marathon of driving to get to the Orlando
airport, our ad man will inform us that he misread our contract
– we never got full approval from our sponsors. We are sup-
posed to cover Orlando, not the South.
A week later, I will pull the Mississippi feature altogether, opt-
ing instead to cover a local political concert that the internation-
al phenom Björk has gotten behind. It will be the most popular
feature the magazine has run.
FOREX_grapevine_MAR06.indd 1 2006-03-31 14:20:10
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