“It’s a good game to play,” Harlan T. Bobo tells the Scene from somewhere in Memphis, where the singer and songwriter is busy building a backyard deck in the late summer heat. I’ve asked Bobo his real name, which he says is indeed Harlan T. Bobo — he changed his name legally years ago, and it’s been well-documented that he took the soubriquet from an ex-girlfriend named Yvonne Bobo, a sculptor and visual artist he worked with early in his career. But there’s no way he’s telling me the name he was born with, though he laughs and says it’s out there for me to find. It is, in fact, a good game to play with one of the most innovative pop musicians to have emerged from Memphis in the last two decades.
Bobo, who is 52, has released a new full-length, A History of Violence, on which he takes the Memphis concept of musical psychodrama to delirious heights. It’s his first record in eight years, a period that saw Bobo living in Perpignan, France, where he did carpentry work and helped out at his then-wife’s ice-cream shop. The marriage dissolved, and he briefly returned to Memphis in the summer of 2017 to cut A History of Violence with producer Doug Easley, who recorded Bobo and his band The Psychotic Lovers in a couple of quick sessions.
A History of Violence sits squarely in a line of confessional albums that includes Memphis-recorded touchstones like Big Star’s Third, Al Green’s The Belle Album and drummer and monologist Ross Johnson’s Make It Stop!, a minor masterpiece of middle-aged male self-recrimination. Johnson’s gamy tales have a spiritual kinship with Bobo’s narratives about the discontents of marriage. As he does on his superb 2007 full-length I’m Your Man, Bobo sounds like singer Scott Walker backed by punk band Wire.
Bobo moved to Memphis in 1996 after doing stints in in Waynesboro, Tenn., and San Francisco, where he played pedal steel in a band called Minnie Pearl Necklace. Once he got settled in the Bluff City, Bobo honed his chops in local bands and released his first album, Too Much Love, in early 2005. As he told Memphis Flyer writer Chris Davis in 2004, “I worked at a steakhouse in Lawrenceburg [Tenn.] back then for this guy named Beefy. … He’d have me drive him around so he could shoot at mailboxes on the way to the private club to get drunk. I was fresh out of San Francisco and that was some kind of foreign to me. But we were looking for a city to move to, and Nashville is too much like a little L.A.”
Too Much Love and Bobo’s 2007 follow-up I’m Your Man established his reputation in Memphis but failed to elevate Bobo to the prominence of The Grifters, whose post-Pavement style is a precursor to Bobo’s. Like fellow Memphis musicians Alex Chilton and Jim Dickinson before him, Bobo wasn’t interested in playing music-business games.
For example, what well-mannered careerist would miss an opportunity to play at South by Southwest, as Bobo did in 2008? Memphis publicist Rachel Hurley, who had assembled a showcase of Memphis musicians, 6 Degrees of Memphis, remembers how it went down.
“He had just had [I’m Your Man] come out, and tons of people showed up to specifically see him,” Hurley says. “People came looking for him and kept asking me, ‘Where is Harlan T. Bobo?’ And I was, like, ‘I don’t know where Harlan T. Bobo is.’ ”
Bobo doesn’t recall the specifics of that show, but he admits to being wary of the situation. “I do know I was completely covered in poison ivy, so it’s possible there was a reason other than being a snooty little bitch,” he says. “I’m definitely, how do you say, contrary when it comes to playing to those kinds of rules. It doesn’t help me. I’m trying to be better, more by-the-book.”
Like many who’ve heard Bobo over the years, Hurley is a longtime fan. A History of Violence puts Bobo’s extraordinary voice — which combines Bryan Ferry’s lounge-lizard stylings with the aforementioned Walker’s self-conscious crooning — on top of music that’s funny and subtly eccentric.
A History of Violence ought to raise Bobo’s profile, but you have to wonder if he can resist rewriting the standard script of stardom to suit his purposes. As he says, “Because I didn’t tour in the past, we have no idea if anyone’s gonna be at these shows, so that’s what we’re trying to figure out, how’s that gonna work and how much can we afford to do, really.”
