Book review —
It Came From Memphis by Robert Gordon (Faber & Faber)
Memphis music writer Robert Gordon and a friend had stopped at a store in Holly Springs, Miss., to buy some singles, when they spotted a tiny R&B record store down the street. They went in to check out the merchandise and struck up a conversation with the man behind the counter, who told the two strangers they could come to a house party he was throwing. That afternoon, Gordon and his friend found themselves in a remote shack by a cotton field. Outside, it was 3 o’clock and broad daylight; inside it was dark and sunless as midnight. One room was piled with furniture and drunks passed out on homemade fruit beer. The other room was something else—a riot of bodies that surged and twisted, while a blues guitarist wrung one long, sinuous, endless groove from his instrument. “It was very much not like a club,” remembers Gordon in a phone interview. “It was like walking through a mirror into a different world.”
That’s an equally apt description of reading Gordon’s book It Came from Memphis, an enormously entertaining account of the fallout from the collision between white Memphis kids in the 1950s and the glorious blues musicians who existed on the fringe of the city’s consciousness. Like Gordon’s trip to the house party, It Came from Memphis offers a glimpse into the alternate universe of 20th-century pop music, where the music you’ve heard pales—in every sense of the word—beside the music you’ve never heard, the city’s own secret muses and treasures.
“I wanted to expose deserving people who needed the exposure,” said Gordon, who will sign copies of It Came from Memphis at Davis-Kidd Booksellers this Saturday. A longtime observer and fan of the Memphis music scene, Gordon wrote the book out of his affection for the city’s unsung heroes, including the great psycho-soul band Mud Boy and the Neutrons and the prodigious jazz pianist Phineas Newborn Jr. “These are people,” Gordon says, “for whom popularity and acceptance is not a goal.”
The cultural bombthrowers Gordon describes in It Came from Memphis didn’t need fortunes or national fame to cause an impact far beyond the city’s boundaries. Indeed, in Memphis—where crackpot visionaries, hustlers and unheralded geniuses jostled one another in every conceivable social setting—the smallest actions could have enormous ramifications. In a fascinating chapter, Gordon tells how a badass Memphis wrestler named Sputnik Monroe very likely shattered the color line separating African-Americans and whites in the city in the 1950s. How? At his wrestling matches, Monroe coerced a lackey working the door into underreporting the number of black patrons buying tickets. The resulting crowds overflowed the segregated sections—thus relaxing standards throughout the city.
Through a multitude of similar stories and characters, Gordon shows how the breakdown of segregation in Memphis led to a cultural cross-pollination that would change American popular music forever. His heroes include WHBQ deejay and television host Dewey Phillips, whose blue streak of Martian jive obscured the fact he was playing “race records” and white artists side by side. No less important was his brilliant gorilla-suited sidekick Harry Fritzius, whose insane antics nudged a generation of Memphis kids toward artistic anarchy. (It’s hard to say which is funnier: the Fritzius story about the hornets’ nest, the Elvis acetate or the Jayne Mansfield cut-out.) From blues singer Furry Lewis to stripper/observer Marcia Hare, from western hero Lash LaRue to Alex Chilton, from the demise of segregation to the late-1960s flowering of Memphis soul, Gordon draws connections that are illuminating, poignant and sometimes alarming.
When the book was first published last year, Gordon said, “I was worried that I had connected dots that weren’t supposed to be connected.” The overwhelmingly favorable response to the book, both inside Memphis and out, has convinced him otherwise. Since its publication, It Came from Memphis has inspired a companion CD on Upstart Records that is every bit as essential as the book. It features a sterling sampling of unheard Memphis music, ranging from Mud Boy and the Neutrons to photographer William Eggleston.
Much of the impetus for both, Gordon says, came from his friendship with Mud Boy’s Jim Dickinson, the legendary Memphis producer and keyboard player whose career spans from Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones to Big Star and the Replacements. “He was the one who told me about Sputnik,” Gordon says reverently. It is Dickinson who functions in the book’s pages as Memphis’ historian, humorist and musical conscience. It is Dickinson who succinctly tells how soul entered the bloodstream of white Memphis youth: “Everybody learned it from the yard man.”
Such observations make It Came from Memphis worthwhile reading even for non-Memphibians. (Especially provocative are Gordon’s insights on the differences between Memphis and Nashville, which he boils down to “the difference between a recording-industry town and a record-industry town.”) “In Memphis, the music isn’t treated as a history class,” Robert Gordon says. “When it’s done right, it isn’t taken out of the juke joints and the fields. The same demons that were there in 1936 are still there, and can still be conjured up today.” It Came from Memphis proves that what’s chaotic and terrifying in life can become enthralling and exhilarating in art.
