What the hell is wrong with Mittens?

[matthew]

well, the interview went pretty well. We did it at the Lair. I was sitting in front of Stan's drums and they said with all our lights in there that I had one of the best looking segments. They did ask the Memphis question and I kinda just did the ole Memphis/Nashville comparison ( that nashville songwriters are doing it more to sell songs whereas memphis songwriters are more or less doing it to please themselves).. We talked a bit about recording at Easley's and the whole DIY aesthetic.. 

Cool.

[Doctor Rock]

Is the Memphis music scene particularly big, compared to other cities?  I mean, if you have a large number of people living in a specific location, chances are some of them will play music.  The fact that some places seem to produce more popular music than others may simply be the result of continued attention.  All you need is a couple of initial successful acts, people remember the older successful acts, and they keep looking for their replacement in the same place.  Plus, if a city has an active music scene with a few successful musicians, many musicians from the area around it will move to the city, for obvious reasons. 

I know, it isn't very poetic...

[Bizarro]

I took a class called "Memphis Music" from David Evans at U of Memphis. He's an ethnomusicologist who played with Hammie Nixon and recorded Junior Kimbrough and RL Burnside, among others, early in their careers.

Anyway, what he told our class was, approximately "Imagine a US map in which the states are laid out according to where cultural regions really begin and end, instead of arbitrarily, based on rivers or longitude and latitude. Now imagine there's a state called 'Mid-South' stretching from West Kentucky, halfway to St. Louis, down just past Jackson, Mississippi and half way to Nashville. Memphis would be the capital of this hypothetical state. It'd be right in the middle. And a hefty amount of all the culture and commerce taking place in the entire state would go down there. With all those people and ideas flowing through there all the time, of course there's music happening. It's not mysterious at all."

Documentarians probably find this intensely logical answer very boring.

[Full Blown Possession]

Dr. dog on conan

[Full Blown Possession]

Meh i pass