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He pulled out a 45 copy of Chris Montez’s “Let’s Dance”, which the Ramones had just covered on their first album a few months before and played it continuously for an uncountable number of times at high volume, saying over and over: “In the future all art will be like this.” And he was right. In matters concerning art I have never known Bill to be wrong.—Ross Johnson
Ross Johnson, “Wet Bar“ (1982)
Baron of Love: Moral Giant
A chapter preview from Ross Johnson’s upcoming memoir on Spacecase Records. Out late September 2020.
CHAPTER 30: DICKINSON As in James Luther Dickinson or Jim Dickinson or simply Dickinson as he was referred to by friends and strangers alike. I always addressed him as Jim, but if we were playing a recording session or a live gig we always wondered aloud if Dickinson was going to show up. And often he didn’t for reasons of health or personal ones that were highly private. I often felt Jim wouldn’t show up because he felt something was wrong with the context of the gig or session, that something was unlucky somehow. I never asked him about this, just a feeling I had. If he didn’t show, there was disappointment but no offense taken. If he did show up he always elevated things in what felt like a magical way, for lack of a better term I will repeat a story here I told in the liner notes of Goner’s Make It Stop! about meeting Jim. I repeat stories verbally all too often, but I don’t like to tell the same story over in print or in filmed interviews. I was working as a sack boy in the summer of 1972 at one of the local Big Star (yep) chain groceries. Jim would usually shop for groceries there mid-afternoon Friday while my drumming idol Al Jackson Jr. shopped at the same Big Star on Friday around dusk. They were the only customers who ever tipped me for carrying their groceries out. One day I got the nerve up to speak to him as I was loading groceries into his car and said: “You’re Jim Dickinson, aren’t you, and you recorded with the Flamin’ Groovies on Teenage Head, didn’t you?” Years later Jim admitted that he thought I was going to ask about The Rolling Stones but was impressed when I mentioned the Groovies instead. We had an extended conversation in the parking lot about the Teenage Head session and he enthusiastically mentioned that he got paid $700 by producer Richard Robinson for one night of work on the record. I got in trouble with grocery store management for staying in the parking lot so long, but the conversation was worth it. There are so many stories about Jim I could tell, but I’ll relate just a few here. When I started playing with the Panther Burns in 1979 he remembered our parking lot chat about the Flamin’ Groovies. I’ve said it before, but I always considered Jim an unofficial member of the group because he produced and played on several of our recordings as well as joining us on many live performances. Recording with Jim and Alex was not often easy; there was always some tension left over from the Sister Lovers sessions. There was also a lot of attitude on display at Panther Burns recording sessions and I often felt out of my league, musically and emotionally speaking. Jim sensed this and one day he followed me outside Phillips Recording Studio when I was taking a mental health break and he told me I had as much right to be in there as Alex, Tav and the other players. Jim could always sense what was going on psychologically among musicians at a recording session and produced accordingly. My favorite production technique that Jim used was the stories he would tell before cutting a take. Sometimes the stories were oft-repeated, but I loved hearing him tell them over and over. I often asked him to tell stories about the late, great guitarist Jesse Ed Davis. He always obliged. During the last few years we recorded together we would inevitably talk about the Klitz and his early efforts to produce them. He always thought they should have been hugely successful. I agreed. In 2008, co-producer and Reigning Sound drummer Greg Roberson set up a pro-bono session at Jim’s Zebra Ranch Studio for me to record a number of favorite covers and one original about legendary Arkansas rockabilly singer Bobby Lee Trammell. Greg did a great job of putting a band together, drumming so I could concentrate more on “singing” (almost all my solo rant records were done live with me singing and playing drums at the same time) and co-producing the record with Jim that became Vanity Session by Jeff Evans and myself that was eventually released on Spacecase Records. Rather than using booze and pills as my muse for the session, I opted for a herbal concoction that enabled us to record 13 songs in a little over three hours. During a break, Jim and I went outside to talk privately. Both of my parents had died not long before the session and I could tell Jim was not in the best of health himself so talk rather naturally turned to death. I won’t disclose what we said that day since the conversation was private, but the topic of death was on both of our minds. A little over a year later Jim would be dead in the late spring of 2009. Jim was a mentor, father figure of sorts and friend to me as he was to an untold number of other musicians. I was going through a bad patch with depression in the spring of 2009 and Greg Roberson thoughtfully told Jim I was rather down at a time when he was gravely ill. Nevertheless, he penned a very encouraging email to me then which lifted my spirits considerably. He did so during a period when his own life was ebbing away. That was Jim, always involved with what others were thinking and feeling. A few years later I sent that email to his widow Mary Lindsay Dickinson because I wanted her to know how concerned Jim was about other people until his death. Of course, she already knew as did her sons, Luther and Cody, the North Mississippi All Stars. I agree with the title of Jim’s memoir, that he is merely dead but not gone. I always imagine him being onstage or in a studio when I perform live or record since his death. I couldn’t have a better revenant or muse.
There’s a geographic center to that record. …midtown Memphis.
“Sister Lovers started as a joint Lesa and Alex project.”— Ross Johnson
Baron of Love: Moral Giant
A chapter preview from Ross Johnson’s upcoming memoir on Spacecase Records. Out late September 2020.
Chapter 20: FROM PERFORMANCE ART TO INDIE LABEL BAND
It had to happen, I guess, after our first self-released EP on Tav’s Frenzi label made its way across the pond to the attention of Rough Trade Records’ label head, Geoff Travis. I declined a weekend of gigs in NYC (Will Rigby of the dB’s filled in on drums) during the summer of 1980 and Travis happened to be there and offered the band a chance to record a single and LP. I’ve told this story often enough, but not to echo John Lydon too loudly, once the record companies show up, everything changes. Not always for the worse but usually. We went from a word-of-mouth cult band to a cult band with a tentative record deal. We got quite a bit of press attention and started to acquire a reputation as a shambolic live act who made the early Replacements sound like a tight bar band with a programmed set. The change had already been occurring internally before Geoff Travis showed up with the disappearance or dismissal of trumpet player Rick Ivy and synth players, Eric Hill and Vincent Wrenn. Ron Miller, a classically trained double bass player who played with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, was brought into the band. We were very aware that we were being promoted and identified with the Cramps and the Gun Club as well as the burgeoning psychobilly scene in Britain. Ron was a great bass player, but I rarely heard his standup bass even though his amp was usually placed next to my drum kit. Standup basses with contact pickups were no match for our onstage sonic firestorm volume. He sounded great on the Burns’ debut LP, Behind the Magnolia Curtain, which I did not play on because I was fired from the group at the time. I’m on record as saying how Chilton’s drumming made that a much better recording than if I had played on it. Jim Sclavunos from Manhattan started touring with the Panther Burns because I declined most of the road work offered to the band then. He simplified arrangements on a lot of songs and an EP was done for Debbie Harry and Chris Stein’s major label-backed vanity imprint, Animal Records.
At that time in the early 1980s I started playing with a number of local acts and also one from Baton Rouge, OFB/Our Favorite Band, who later did an LP for Big Time, a label distributed by RCA in the States. I started to enjoy playing with other people who had an interest in playing rawer music, but I was still desperate to play and record with Tav and the Burns whenever they might require my services. I might have been a founding member with a contract stating so, but I was just a fill-in place keeper in the group from 1981 on. That’s how I felt anyway. By 1984 the Panther Burns were without a record label. I’m not certain, but on a weeklong tour of California in 1983 (which I did play on) there were rumors of meetings with SST and Ralph Records, both labels I thought rather well-suited to record and promote the band. Maybe I am making this up; you’d have to ask Tav whether those meetings occurred and how they might have gone. Whatever happened, we came back from that tour without a record label. Hard to tour without a label: that old familiar equation. However, in 1984 the late Patrick Mathé of Paris-based New Rose Records offered to release an EP of the Burns. That was when we started working almost exclusively at Sam Phillips Recording Studio with Roland Janes engineering and Chilton producing.
We tried to make records that sounded like music, a real radical turn for us, given our identity as a noise band who relied strongly on feedback. So we did record after record at Phillips using this approach with zero feedback and I have to admit that I am ashamed of almost all of them. Trying to make mainstream records that could be played on radio (but never were) seemed a less than worthy task for the Panther Burns. I kept my mouth shut about this for the most part because my identity was tied up in playing live and recording with them even if I found the recorded results shameful and dull. Still, I enjoyed the first European tour in 1987 greatly (I declined subsequent ones due to work and financial commitments). Transforming from aural assault to bar band was not why I wanted to start playing with Tav’s group. I didn’t know that he was soon to leave Memphis for a place he could pursue his identity as an artiste. When he left I was completely lost as to what to do, musically speaking.
Ross Johnson’s memoir is in!
Purchase here.
Chapter Six of Ross Johnson’s upcoming memoir, The Baron of Love.
Klan Meeting I said I would leave out standard chronological autobiographical material so maybe we can take a break from the Panther Burns saga for a moment to visit a strange memory from my childhood in Arkansas. In 1949 my father was hired as the Arkansas bureau chief of Memphis’s leading daily newspaper, The Commercial Appeal. My mother and he moved to North Little Rock from Memphis where they had met and married; she hated the working-class environment of North Little Rock so they moved across the river to Little Rock proper a few years before my birth. My father mostly covered Arkansas politics which he later described to me as “corrupt beyond belief.” Growing up in Arkansas was like growing up in a separate nation state, a bit like Transylvania, I often jokingly say. It’s Southern, but it feels isolated perhaps because of the terrain, both geographical and cultural. A cowboy mentality reigned in a state without cowboys. Little Rock is at the foot of the Ozark Mountains, full of rolling hills and pine trees. In my youth it was also full of undisguised and unrepentant segregationists. The term racism would not have been understood by even the most enlightened anti-segregationists in that state. Any elected official foolish enough to take a public stand against segregation could be assured that he would not be returned to office by the voting citizenry of Arkansas. Of course, the same was true for just about any politician in the South and elsewhere in the 1950s. It was common knowledge that the Ku Klux Klan ran most of the small towns in the neighboring state of Mississippi. The Klan was a presence in Arkansas too, of course, as was also the rabidly racist John Birch Society, particularly in the northern, mountainous part of the state. My father in his later years would say that Arkansas didn’t need the Klan because most of its inhabitants were already virulently segregationist (uh, that would translate into openly and unapologetically racist today). However, the Klan did like to maintain a visible public profile in the state so my father was assigned to cover one of their rallies just outside of Little Rock, the highlight to be one of their patented cross burnings. My parents came from typical Southern families where racist language was the order of the day. They both wanted to leave behind that legacy so growing up I never heard the N word spoken in our home. During that period the respectful terms for black persons were Negroes and colored people. I learned the other less-than-respectful terms at a public park located on my street from my youthful peers. Back to the Klan rally. My mother, father and I piled into our newish 1956 two-door Chevy Bel Air (oh, how I wish I owned that car now) one crisp autumn evening in 1957 and headed to the rally. I was four years old at the time and I still trust my ailing, failing memory enough to describe the events I saw that night. We arrived at the rally and found a parking space in the open field where a huge wooden cross had been erected. My father told us to stay in the car with the doors locked and not to get out, no matter what. The field was also full of Klan members in their identical white robes and peaked hoods. My father’s task was to interview Arkansas’s Grand Wizard, the head of the state’s Invisible Empire (just one of the many terms used to describe the Klan; Tav used it ironically on the title track of the Burns’ Panther Phobia LP, by the way). However, identifying the Grand Wizard was no easy task since all members were dressed identically. I recall my father talking to one member after another, trying to find their leader. He came back to the car disgusted at one point and expressed frustration in not being able to identify and interview the leader of their noble organization. He headed back to the field and finally found the Grand Wizard. They exchanged a few terse words, but my father did not get the extended interview with him he was seeking. It was time to burn the cross and it was the Wizard’s duty to set it ablaze. As we pulled away from the rally I gazed out the back window of our Chevy at the burning cross. I didn’t understand anything about it at the time. In a very few years I would know plenty.
Spacecase Records Podcast 029
Listen Here
Playlist: 1. YUZO IWATA - "Goodnight, Daylight Moon" Daylight Moon LP (Siltbreeze, 2018) 2. THIGH MASTER - "Exodus" Thigh Master/Dag Split Euro Tour EP 7" (bruit direct disques, 2018) 3. BAD TIMES - "Streets of Iron" Streets of Iron LP (Goner/Nuthin - Reissue, 2018) 4. ADOLESCENTS - "Democracy" Adolescents CD (Frontier - Reissue, 2006) 5. THE BIBS - "Fine Wine" From the Fish Houses LP (Soft Abuse, 2016) 6. SAVAGE REPUBLIC - "The Birds of Pork" Customs LP (Fundamental, 1989) 7. AMY AND THE ANGELS - "I Hate Being In Love" Making Waves - A Collection Of 12 Womens Bands From The UK LP (Girlfriend, 1981) 8. SPARKS - "Rock 'n' Roll People in a Disco World" Terminal Jive LP (Virgin, 1980) 9. MIKE REP AND THE QUOTAS - "...And Idols" Heroes...And Idols EP 7" (Bag of Hammers, 1993) 10. JEFFREY EVANS AND ROSS JOHNSON - "Cotton Fields" Caldonia b/w Cotton Fields 7" (Spacecase, 2018)
