Tag: HBO

Emmy-Nominated Docuseries Highlights the Impact of STAX Records

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It all began way back, nearly seventy years ago in Memphis, Tennessee, when an almost unremarkable thing happened: A record store opened its doors.

That a record store might exist in the home of the blues in 1957 was itself no remarkable thing. But this store, Satellite Records, was quite literally a sister operation to the recording studio next door. Satellite’s owner, Estelle Axton, was the older sister of the studio’s founder, Jim Stewart.

Stewart was a fiddler with a passion for country music. Long before the dominance of indie labels, Stewart had the idea to start his own studio and label, to get his music out to the masses. As luck would have it, his original country songs were… just fine. Nothing groundbreaking. But his work sparked the imagination of a young musician named David Porter, who strode into the studio one day and asked if he could lay down some tracks.

Long story short, Porter recruited some other artists who became a band known as Booker T. and the M.G.s – eventually the studio’s de facto house band. Suddenly, the label – named STAX as a combination of Jim and Estelle’s last names – was off to the races.

Now, a three-part docuseries from HBO titled STAX: Soulville USA is available for streaming on MAX. The series premiered at South by Southwest earlier this year and earned two Emmy Award nominations (Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series and Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Nonfiction Program). While the series did not prevail in those categories, it is a powerful, thorough, emotional telling of the relationship between music, its makers, and the world in which they live.

The series’ director – Peabody, Emmy, and NAACP award-winner Jamila Wignot – strung together an incredible array of rare and never-before-shared footage of the rise and fall (and rise again) of STAX Records between 1961-1975. But footage isn’t just from inside the studio walls. We see musicians on their first trips to Europe, relaxing in the pool at the Lorraine Hotel – a frequent STAX hangout before it became the scene of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. There is footage from civil rights protests and speeches and moments of great grief and outrage. There are contemporary interviews with the musicians and staff of STAX and Satellite Records, including Axton and Stewart.

And always, at the heart of it all, there’s the music.

In a For Your Consideration panel also available on MAX, Mignot admitted that, when she was approached to direct the series, she was “really just into it for the music.”

“I thought it was going to be this great-big, beautiful music story,” she adds. “As I started to do more research, and particularly looking into the work that [STAX biographer] Rob Bowman had done, I understood that it was a much bigger story that touched on social issues, history, and [it] really was this beautiful story of these folks who were, I think, led by intuition and desire, and weren’t necessarily trying to do more than the things that they loved. But they were very responsive to the world that was around them.”

Of course, outside the walls of STAX studio and Satellite records, Black people were subject to the cultural and legal realities of living in the Jim Crow South.

“[Jim Crow] was too strong a system to tear down,” bandleader Booker T. notes. “In Memphis, you had to keep your mouth shut and hope for the best. Or fight.”

While that was the rule of the road outside, inside STAX studio, Booker T.’s band had two Black members and two white. Together, they developed an approach to Southern soul music that would become one of the most influential sounds of the 20th Century.

Granted, as the civil rights movement went through its various waves in Memphis and beyond, and STAX players marched on picket lines without their white bandmates beside them, this complicated interpersonal relationships in the studio. But the music continued to compel everyone forward. As a result, music fans got to find solace in some of the greatest roots recordings ever made.

The docuseries’ executive producer Michele Smith commented on the artists’ legacies in a recent phone conversation.

“Those artists were just teenagers who had a love for the music,” she says. “[They] just wanted to be heard. What they did not know at that time was they were forging a path to history. They were working, they did know that what they were doing was technically illegal in the Jim Crow South. … They were young people who just wanted to make music. And they did a whole lot more than that. Their music, to this day, will … outlive all of us. It’s globally renowned and it’s some of the best R&B soul music out there, sampled by young people today.”

Being able to watch this music get made is certainly one major draw of the series. Isaac Hayes and the Bar-Kays developing the “Theme from Shaft”; Sam & Dave rolling out “Soul Man” for a live audience the first time; and Otis Redding onstage at the Monterey Pop Festival.

In interview clips, STAX alumni recall how out-of-place Redding and his band were – sober and polished in their well-pressed suits – among the mostly white hippie, dropped-out crowd. Recognizing the one thread that connected him with his seemingly polar-opposite audience, Redding started his set by asking, “This is the love crowd, right? We all love each other, don’t we?” The crowd roared, so he closed his eyes and lit into “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” with a passion and emotional clarity that was absolutely intoxicating.

“Otis Redding hit the stage,” recalled trumpet player Wayne Jackson. “All those hippies got quiet. They ain’t seen anything like us.”

Though that was the truth, it often was in those days of STAX artists making the rounds with their groundbreaking sound. But, certainly, nobody present for any of it – no matter if STAX was on its way up or its way down – would ever forget the way the music turned their soul.

Watch STAX: Soulsville USA via MAX.

Images courtesy of HBO.

The Righteous Gemstones Keep “Misbehavin'”

Posted on by Editor

Halfway through the first season of HBO’s megachurch comedy The Righteous Gemstones, the show devotes an entire episode to a flashback, showing how the family of Bible-thumping televangelists came to be so hilariously dysfunctional. The episode culminates in a live performance of a song called “Misbehavin’,” by siblings Aimee-Leigh (played by Jennifer Nettles) and Baby Billy (Walton Goggins). They’d been a child singing act years ago, and this countrified tale of juvenile hijinks was their biggest hit. They still remember every lyric and every dance move decades later.

The song would pop up two more times during the season, in different arrangements from different times: one from the 1960s, another from the ‘80s, and finally one in the present day. It threads through the series to present a very basic moral to the story: When you misbehave, bad things happen. But this version with Goggins and Nettles is the one that ended up going viral, a hit among fans of the show and newcomers alike who couldn’t get it out of their heads — especially that line about “running through the house with a pickle in my mouth.” It’s arguably the greatest moment on television in 2019.

“Misbehavin’” was written by the show’s creator Danny McBride, actress Edi Patterson, and composer Joseph Stephens, whose attention to detail ensured that many viewers would think the song had been around for ages. A North Carolina native who briefly studied classical guitar before discovering rock & roll as a teenager, Stephens took film classes in college and scored his friends’ student films.

“I’ve never had any formal training in music, outside of when I was a kid learning classical guitar,” he says. “I never took piano lessons or anything like that.” That approach, however, has kept him versatile. He plays an array of instruments for a diverse range of projects — many of them starring his old friend McBride, including Vice Principals and The Legacy of a White Deer Hunter. “I pride myself on being somewhat versatile, and over the years I’ve taken on jobs that asked for a lot of things that seemed outside of my wheelhouse. But that’s fun for me.”

For our latest installment of Roots on Screen, Stephens spoke to the Bluegrass Situation about writing music for church, using clog dancers as percussionists, and, most importantly, never scoring the joke.

BGS: The Righteous Gemstones is set in a South Carolina megachurch, where of course music is going to be very prominent. How familiar were you with that kind of setting?

Stephens: I went to church as a kid, and I was fascinated by big organ. I went to a Methodist church that had this massive organ built into the room. I would go back to that as a touchstone for Gemstones. I actually started using a big church organ, playing with some of the bass pedals in ways that sounded cinematic and less traditional. I was using different plug-ins and effect to mangle the sound and change it around so that it sounds big and gross at times and other times sounds really pretty and maybe spaced out. I wrote a bunch of music that I gave to Danny and the writers as they were putting the show together, just kind of formulating ideas. Danny knew he wanted to do some choir stuff, so I was exploring that as well.

Joseph Stephens

Music seems like a big part of what McBride does. There are always unexpected music cues in his shows that suggest a very deep knowledge.

Technically, these are comedies we’re making, but we both tend to gravitate toward treating it like dramatic material. So I rarely ever score a joke. I’m always trying to score the drama of the situation and letting the absurdity of what they’re doing carry the comedy. The music shouldn’t point at the joke. We treat it like a Coen Brothers movie or something heavier.

In Vice Principals we would literally score a comedic scene with ‘80s horror movie music, just to play with the unusual side of what music can do for comedy. Danny pushes me to do something different all the time, but it’s rarely ever like, “Let’s make comedy music.” It’s more like, “Let’s make music that we find interesting.”

That points to something I’ve been thinking about regarding Gemstones and how it walks a really fine line. You’re finding humor in this setting, but you stop just short of making fun of the characters’ faith. You’re not exploiting the church for cheap laughs.

When Danny first pitched me the idea, I wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out. It’s dicey to make a show that’s set in this heavily religious background, especially when you’re filming it in the Deep South. It seemed a little risky. But I had faith that they would find a way to do it right. And when I started reading the script, I was so pumped because it turned into something different. It turned into this absurd family drama.

The show is about this family and the degree to which the wealth and success they’ve enjoyed have turned them into monsters. It’s not really about their religious background. That’s just their job. It’s not about what they do. It’s more about what they’ve become and how they got there. I think John Goodman’s character in particular had better intentions, and we’ll see how much of that gets touched on in the future. I don’t think they knew how to handle their success — or losing their mother. The glue that held them together was lost, and now they’re just coming apart. No one’s there to give them much guidance, so they just turn into beasts.

Walton Goggins and Jennifer Nettles in The Righteous Gemstones

And a scene like “Misbehavin’” seems to carry some of that weight, despite being hilarious. It really speaks to how those two characters relate to each other, and there’s something desperate in the way these adults perform this juvenile song.

Danny and I always say that “Misbehavin’” became the soul of the show, because it captures everything the show is about: Doing bad things can lead to trouble. But it’s playful. You’re supposed to feel that these siblings are enjoying themselves and having fun with the song. It’s supposed to feel innocent and joyful, but also weird and a little left-of-center.

It also had to sound legit. It had to feel like it’s something that actually existed in the world at some point. Once we created the song, it just overtook everybody. When they filmed that scene with them singing it, everybody was singing along off-camera. It became a mild obsession for a lot of us.

And those two actors — Walton Goggins and Jennifer Nettles — have so much chemistry. What was it like recording with them?

They really did kill it. The sessions were a lot of fun, even though they didn’t do them together. Jennifer is such a pro, so she did her part in minutes. She banged it out and that was that. But Walton was way more methodical and really wanted to get into character. And then he had to shift gears and do a different version of the song when his character is much older. He and Edi did their version together, which is very different from the ‘80s version.

 

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What kind of research did you do for the song? Were you going back and finding older examples of juvenile Christian music?

When I was thinking in terms of instrumentation and when I recorded all the music, I was constantly referencing the Carter Family and Johnny Cash. It was fun to explore the way their vocals were mixed and the way their instruments were mixed. I was listening to a lot of their music just trying to figure out how they got a particular sound or whether they were putting autoharp and guitar in the same channel, just hyper-analyzing all of it.

But in terms of writing, there wasn’t really any research. I knew it was going to be somewhere in the world of Johnny Cash, with a traditional chord structure, two minutes long, two verse and a chorus and an instrumental break. The structure was going to be pretty standard. It all came together pretty fast and very easily. But I didn’t really reference any children’s music at all. It was always Johnny Cash and the Carter Family, and maybe the Collins Kids. But it wasn’t a children’s song – more like a country song that had been made famous by kids.

And there are three versions: There’s the version the kids recorded in the ‘60s, the version we see them perform in the ‘80s, and another version from the present day. Was it challenging to rearrange the song three different times for three different eras?

It was definitely challenging the whole way ‘round. We had to audition a bunch of kids and then go out to California to record them. That version had to sound one way, and then we have another version that needed to sound somewhat authentic to the ‘80s, like a live band on a church TV show would sound. And then we had to do a modern bluegrass version. And they had to be fast so they could do some legitimate clogging during the interludes.

That was tough to work out knowing that it was going to be filmed live and needed to be convincing. We didn’t want to do it in a way that was too on the nose, though. For the ‘80s version, we knew we didn’t want it to sound like Fletch or something. It couldn’t be too ‘80s. But it’s really something you’re not supposed to notice. It’s just supposed to feel inherently legitimate.

Dance is such a big part of that first performance of the song. I feel like clogging in particular so rarely portrayed in any kind of mainstream media.

That became a big part of Walton’s character. We had a choreographer that came up with their dances, and when we were recording, I brought him and his wife in and set up this wooden stage. I had them clog and do some of the routines they’d rehearsed. I kinda orchestrated them, had them do different tempos to the click and record a bunch of sounds. A lot of what sounds like percussion on the show is actually them clogging. I used it in some of the score pieces.

There’s one cue near the end of the first season when the Gemstone kids are wondering what happened to Walton’s character. As they’re talking about him, you hear this percussive sound come in. It sounds like percussion, but it’s clogging. I wanted to remind the audience of that character, so that he would be kind of hanging around some scenes even though he’s not really on screen. That was fun because I was using these percussive rhythms that I wouldn’t normally go to.

A lot of viewers thought this was an actual song that had existed for fifty or sixty years. That sounds like maybe the biggest compliment you could get.

Totally. When the song first appeared on set, apparently a lot of the crew were confused about it. They couldn’t find it on Spotify and it didn’t turn up online. They were convinced that it was something that had existed before. And that’s when we were recording the version set in the 1980s, before we’d even unveiled the original version from the ‘60s. That version ended up getting posted online illegally, and someone sent it to my wife as proof that they had found the original. He thought he had found this old recording of these two kids singing it. He was like, “This is the original!” And my wife had to tell him no no no, that’s the “original” they recorded for the show.

Photo Credit: Fred Norris/HBO

My Least Favorite Life: A Conversation with True Detective’s Lera Lynn

Posted on by Editor

Fans of HBO’s critically acclaimed crime show, True Detective, are well aware of Lera Lynn, the remarkably talented singer whose original songs set the tone for a number of scenes in the show’s diviest of dive bars, the Black Rose. She took a few minutes to tell us how she landed the role; what it’s like to work with the show’s music supervisor, T Bone Burnett; and where we can find the songs she wrote for the show.

You got to play your original music on one of the coolest, most widely acclaimed shows on TV. Inquiring minds want to know how you managed to score that gig.

Good looks and charm!

My Dad used to say the same thing, but he was not nearly as charming and definitely not as good-looking.

[Laughs] My manager had been sending my music to T Bone and he was interested in using the title track from an EP I released last year called Lying in the Sun. So we had a meeting in Nashville — “a three martini lunch,” as he calls it — and we just hit it off. He asked me if I’d be interested in writing music for the show and [facetiously] I told him I’d have to think about it. I said, “Hell, yeah, I’d love to” so he flew me out to L.A. We wrote and recorded four songs in two days. We played those songs for [the show's creator] Nic Pizzolato and the producer, Scott Stevens, and they really liked the music. T Bone said, “What do you think about this girl as the singer?” I remember Nic saying they might have to give me a third eye for it to make sense. Luckily, I was just made into a junkie, not a three-eyed monster.

I interviewed Rhiannon Giddens back in the spring time. Her last record was produced by T Bone. Her response was the same as yours when he suggested he produce it. She said, “Yeah, you know, I have to think about it … for two seconds!” Tell me about working with him, about his approach.

I don’t know that his approach is the same for every project. For this one, he made it very clear to me that we were trying to shape a character through the tone, the style, the delivery. A character that would match the tone of the show, that would fit into that dive bar. That bar scene where the chick is always playing and nobody’s listening. Other than that, it was pretty relaxed and easy working together. He wanted to capture live performances, so we would just set up mic for the guitar and a mic for the vocal. I’d do a few passes and he would come in after every take and say, “Yeah … that’s good … let’s do some more.” It was a little nerve-wracking and surreal, too, the first time we sat down to write together. I didn’t really know what to expect; I haven’t done a lot of co-writing, so I’m not well-versed in that arena. But he’s a really easy-going guy and, I think, one of his greatest skills as a producer is knowing which person is right for the job. It was a really natural process.

Casting is everything. Knowing how to cast the right person for a role or the right person for a song.

Absolutely. Everyone T Bone works with is just great. Every musician, every engineer. He’s a very interesting person. He’s very easy-going, but you can tell the wheels are constantly turning.

How different was “shaping a character” from the way you have approached songwriting on your own?

I think there are a lot of advantages to having restrictions in art. Writing for a character other than myself was liberating because I don’t necessarily have to stand behind the sentiments expressed as being my own values and opinions. They weren’t tied to my personal identity. So it freed me up to explore things.

This question comes from our editor, who asks, "Why does your character look so bruised and beaten up? And why on earth is she playing music in that horrible bar filled with crime bosses?" 

It has to fit the show. It wouldn’t make sense for a person of sound mind and spirit to be playing that music in that place. The music is pretty high quality, it’s pretty sophisticated stuff. Most people who are capable of writing music like that would probably think, “Hey, I might be good at music; maybe I should try and pursue a career.” Unless, there’s one other problem, which she clearly has and is therefore lacking motivation.

… to go beyond that stage with that guitar and that voice.

Right. Exactly. And those songs.

One of my favorite episodes in which you appear is the one called “Down Will Come.” You’re doing this desolate tune about this man alone, just you and electric guitar, with Semyon and Velcoro doing some serious guy talk in the booth by the stage. For those of us who love the behind-the-scenes stuff, can you give us a little insight on how that scene was shot? Were they always in the room? Out of the room? Multiple takes, stuff like that.

They were always in the room. I was always in the room. Either just for eyeline or background shots. Every different angle is a different set up. They have to move the cameras and shoot it again. It was my first time being a part of any of that. It’s very elaborate and it’s very impressive how quickly and efficiently 50 people in one room can work together.

It is, isn’t it?

And then the actors, of course … their ability to jump into a character, at a moment’s notice … I can’t wrap my brain around that. I remember the first time they said, “Hey, singer, we need you over here for eyeline.” First of all, I thought, “What the hell is ‘eyeline’?,” ‘cuz no one was really explaining to me how the process worked or what any of the lingo meant. She said, “Just stand here so the actors can look at you, as if you’re on stage.” I didn’t know, when they were looking at me, if I was supposed to be looking at them, or am I looking at the floor, or was I supposed to smile and wave? [Laughs] It was a funny moment for me.

Vince Vaughn and Colin Farrell are pretty impressive actors. Did you get to hang out on set with those guys?

Yeah. They were so kind. They were very appreciative and complimentary of the music. I think they were really excited to have music being played in a scene; it was inspiring for them. They were very hospitable and nice to me.

We always like to hear that about actors we respect.

Yeah. I mean they’re nicer than “nice people,” actually. I was impressed with how kind they are to everyone around them.

I saw an email from your manager that read, “‘My Least Favorite Life’ — from True Detective, music from the HBO Series — is out today!” Tell me more about that.

Harvest Records has released the songs as singles as they’ve appeared on the show so that’s how “My Least Favorite Life” has become available. It says “unknown artist” until the song appears on the show, then it unveils itself to the world. It’s on iTunes, Amazon, all the streaming services, etc. Four of my songs have been released and then, I think, there are a couple others that have been released, as well. In August, they’re going to release the full soundtrack.

Are you interested in continuing acting?

Yeah, I’d love to explore it. I have no experience. I don’t know that it’s fair for me to say, "I want to continue acting." I haven’t paid any dues; I haven’t put in any time. But it would be great to explore.