Memphis road trip - Part two

Saturday morning I woke up around 11, which was way too early but I couldn't fall back to sleep. I wasn't hungover so Dan and I got moving early. It was hot out - 25 degrees and sunny, a nice change from the dreary fall weather back home. Our first stop was a garage to get the headlights fixed. Unwilling to actually drive around or do it myself, I took it to the closest garage and got ripped off. While we waited for the work to be done we went for a walk around "downtown" Memphis. Memphis is the most run-down city I've seen after Sarajevo, and Memphis never went through a thousand day siege. The roads were falling apart, the sidewalks are in horrible condition, there are boarded up buildings everywhere and its completely lifeless. No wonder so much trashy rock and roll comes out of Memphis these days. I couldn't imagine anything but sleazy, trashy, dirty music originating from the city - anything else just wouldn't seem right.

Our first stop was Sun Studios. It was much smaller than expected and seemingly in the middle of nowhere. It was surrounded by empty lots, run down shops, and boarded up buildings. But the Sun sign is still intact and the lobby was filled with memorabilia, lots of Elvis pictures and pretty much everything else you'd expect. We didn't take the tour because it was too expensive and we heard it's not really worth it. We left Sun and headed down to Beale Street, which is where Memphis blues originated and musicians from all over congregated and playd. Nowadays its mostly tourist trap, though some of its charm remains and one great, dicount store remains. Surprisingly, on a hot, sunny Saturday afternoon it was really quiet. I guess everyone was out seeing George W. Bush, who also happened to be in Memphis that weekend.

After getting the car we drove down to Stax Studios. We read our Eric Oblivian-produced map poorly and ended up on some side streets in a run down, black neighbourhood where it felt like everyone was watching us two white boys with the foreign license plate drive by. We made it to the Stax museum and it was awesome. There were great displays set up outlining the history of the label and soul in general. They had two walls displaying original copies of every LP, EP and single that Stax ever put out. The highlight was Isaac Hayes turquoise and gold cadillac/pimp-mobile. Oh yeah, the whole thing was backed by that sweet soul music that made the label so legendary.

At five o-clock the museum closed and it was time to check out King Louie at Legba, Greg Oblivian's record store. Recording pickings were slim as most of the good stuff was already picked over by all the out-of-towners who had been to the store before us that weekend. King Louie was too hung over to play so we missed out on him as well. We got our first real meal of the weekend and then back to the Red Roof for a nap. But that didn't happen so after an hour of watching Total Recall we finally gave up and commenced drinking with our motel neighbours from Atlanta.

Then we went back to the Hi-Tone for the Saturday night show featuring The Final Solutions, The Lost Sounds and Viva-American-Death-Ray. The first two bands were good, especially the Lost Sounds, who blew me away. Viva was pretty dull so instead I left to grab a 40 of Bush Light from the gas station next door and drank in the parking lot with a whole lot of other people. We talked about music, Goners, and drinking.

At some point we left and went to an after-party at someone's house. It took a while for people to get there but once things picked up they just took off like crazy. The guy's house was a veritable shrine to Kiss and he also had a killer music and DVD collection. We watched a live recording of Little Richard and that got everyone dancing and hollering. Next he threw on a documentary on the amazing, original one-man-band Hasil Adkins. The best quote being, "Hasil used to listen to Hank Williams on the radio and he thought it was Hank all alone playing all those instruments, so thats how he taught himself how to write songs".

Someone was driving back to the the Red Roof so I went with them. We were going to party some more but we were out of beer and the management forced us into our rooms. It was 5 AM, so it was probably for the better, since the next day we had to drive back home.