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Originally Posted by 7thsfsniper 
Reply With QuoteWell folks, I'm back home, but there are still a few more stories to tell. There is a big ole tale to tell about memphis & then one more post to wrap it all up.
I discovered a bunch of stuff within a very short time of arriving in memphis: there are Ethiopian cab drivers EVERYWHERE!; $100 gets you a better hotel 2 blocks from Beale St than I expected; Downtown memphis is one of the safest places in America day or night; it is damned hard to find a convenience store open in downtown memphis after 10:30pm on a Tuesday night; The American South has packages snack foods that make your arteries harden just looking at them (fried chicken & pork fat????); you just can't escape melbourne - this was the 2nd US city out of four that was using retired melbourne trams (trolleycars) as a tourist attraction. The next day I discovered an amemdment to point 3 - the week before, at an intersection I had to pass regularly, a woman had pulled a gun & shot 5 people before the police shot her. This would be national news in Australia. people barely batted an eyelid in Memphis. Fortunately there wasn't a repeat while I was there.
From then on memphis was a series of discoveries & journeys. I did a couple of bus tours around the city, a cruise on the mighty Mississippi, an historical walking tour, tours of Sun studios & Graceland, the reconstructed Lorraine Motel & a bunch of other stuff. Rarely was I let down.
Graceland was every bit as gaudy & kitsch as I'd hoped. You can almost smell the fried peanut butter & banana sandwiches as you watch the 3 TVs or look at the fake grass on the roof of the jungle room. The car museum full of ovepriced Elvismobiles is a hoot (the only thing cooler than 2 Stutz Bearcats was the pink Cadillac) and the private plane with a double bed inside was precisely what a private Elvis plane should be. I even got to chat to a guy on the tour who was in the Army in Germany at the same time as Elvis & bumped into him a few times (though he says he didn't actually speak to the King - he was a Master Sargent & it would have been awkward for all).
The cruise on the Mississippi was great - fake paddle wheel & all. I grew up in a river town. My family has owned land literally on the north bank of Australia's largest river for 150 years, so rivers need to do some work to impress me. This one did. it is HUGE. I loved its stories (apparently there are crocs not far downstream of memphis & sharks upstream!) & I loved that it is still very much a working river. Those tugs & their barge trains were a wonderful sight.
Driving around memphis was also quite an experience. It was the first time I have really been able to see close up what parts of a major Merican city that have experienced steep decline look like. The boarded up buildings & open fields that have sat idel for decades since their historic buildings were demolished were a depressing sight. So were some of the poorer parts of town - especially around the site of the now rebuilt Stax studios. This is something alien to me, but worth seeing.
There were three things in memphis that really made my trip wonderful. The first was the music. Funnily enough, the live music was a bit of a letdown. Beale Street is a sort of musical theme park. Everyone there is doing 'hits & memories' sets of covers, not all of them much related to Memphis. Some of the artists were talented, but there was a part of me that would loved to have found a down n dirty juke joint somewhere woutside downtown to hear the real deal. Of course, that might have been more than my life was worth. That isn't to say I didn't enjoy the music, but curiously the performance I enjoyed most was by a bluegrass group doing a free concert on Sunday afernoon in a nearby park. What was remarkable was the music history. I got to stand in the spot where Ike Turner & junior Brenston (on the adive of a young man called Riley B. King) recorded the first rock'nroll song in 1951. Conveniently, this was also the same spot where B.B.King, Howlin' Wolf, Rufus Thomas & Bobby Blue Bland recorded. Even more fortunately, it was also the spot where a young memphis truck driver recorded a song for his momma in 1955. Throw in Johnnny Cash, Jerry Lee & Carl Perkins & you have perhaps the holy of holies for modern western music. I also got to visit the Gibson guitar factory (almost enough to make me want to play), the 'Rock & Soul' museum and, of course, Stax Studios (more anon). Walking down beale Street, even in its sanitized version, you pass the place whereW.C. Handy wrote the first published blues (the house he was born in is there too, but not in its original spot). You also walk the street where the greats of the blues once walked - the place where that one, famous photo of Robert Johnson was taken. You can even walk into A. Schwab Drygoods, a shop that has changed little since that time. It is quite the place.
In some ways the musical highlight was a bus tour with a man called Garry Hardy, a man who IS memphis music. What can you say about a guy whose first rock concert (at the age of 4) involved Elvis, Johnny Cash & Carl Perkins. He went on to re-open Sun Studios in 1987, 25 years after it closed, and record artists such as U2 (Rattle & Hum). He also knows everybody who was anybody in memphis music. In addition to singing, Gary had a million stories & factoids. At one point we pulled up to a spot where Elvis has lived as a kid. Gary pointed to a blue-roofed house a couple of hundred meters away told us that B.B.KIng had lived in that house at the same time! We drove past the studion Sam Phillips (Sun founder) opened after he sold Elvis' contract for $35,000. In the driveway was a car belonging to one of the producers there. Turned out the producer had once been a musician - and had played guitar on 'great balls of fire'. memphis is just full of this stuff. iut is thick on the ground there.
The second great highlight of my visit to memphis was the people. Well, four in particular. Having spent years on WAB chatting with and arguing with 7thsfsniper, I finally got to meet him. As a bonus, Eric brought with him his lovely wife Becky & two local friends, Ed & Nina. You are never 100% sure how well you will get on with someone who you have only met online, but I think its fair to say we hit it off. Even better for me, I had a great time with Becky, Ed & Nina. Ed is well read in local history (in addition to having lived some of it) & so we had some great chats. Eric, becky & I got to visit the very moving Civil Rights museum at the site of the rebuilt Lorraine Motel - where Dr martin Luther King was shot in 1968. The introductory film, about the man standing closest to King when he died, left barely a dry eye in the house. It was chilling to stand so close to the spot where james Earl Ray stood & see the gun he fired. We were then joined by Ed & Nina for a trip to the rebuilt site of Stax studios (notice a theme here - someone once said the Memphis has torn down more historic buildings than most cities have). That was a BALL! We saw some of the holy relics of music: the instruments used by Booker T.Jones, Steve Cropper & 'Duck' Dunn to record some of the greatest soul music of all time; Instruments recovered from the plane crash that robbed toe world of Otis Redding; equipment used to record some of the music; the mortgage Estelle Paxton (the 'ax' in Stax) took out to fund the studio; and perhaps best of all, the giant pimpmobile driven by Isaac hayes at the height of his fame. Stax was just the best fun - could have stayed all day. The following morning we finished off our time together with a visit to something I don't get to see at home - a US gun show. The full range of legal weapons was on display, except for one of those big .50 cal rilfles. Well, maybe next time. I actually had a great time...and spent more money than Eric! (on T-shirts, Civil War memorabillia & some 'gator jerky I smuggled through customs).
My other great memory of Mepmphis is tied in with the great friends I met & made - the food. Eric had clued me in that ribs would be on the menu when we hooked up, so I spent the first few days trying other cuisine - especially some fine cajun food. I had po' boys, jambalya, fried okra, fried pickles & biegnets (small fried pastries). Then came the ribs. BBQ ribs are not something we eat in Australia, When we BBQ it is usually cuts of meat or sausages cooked on a hotplate or grill. The elaborate spices & slow cooking is just not our thing. More's the pity. Eric & I split a rack big enough to choke a large 'gator (I still reckon he left me the bigger share) one night. The next night we went to Rendezvous, apparently the finest ribs in town. No argument here. The p[lacve also has atrmosphere, from the collection of old muzzle loaders on one wall to the football helmets hanging from the ceiling. I got a 'small' rack that damn near killed me. Good does not begin to describe these ribs. They just melted in my mouth. For a while there I feared that Eric was point blank going to refuse to leave - they were that good. We finished off on sunday with a 'Red Robin' burger. I'm not normally a fan of chain restraunts, but the folk at RR do good work. Indeed, my burger there was considerable better than the highly touted Dyers burger on Beale street (apparently Dyers have been using the same grease for 80 years). here's the kicker - ahving eaten my way through every supersized & greasy portion of food I could find in the US, I appear to have lost weight on my holiday. Go figure.
Memphis had one more small treat in store for me. That evening I was standing on the corner of Beal & Sth Third st. Sth Third is better known to popular culture by the name it takes on outside the city limits - Highway 61. The blues highway. The place where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil (that intersection is a few hours south). So, here I am at perhaps the most important musical crossroad in America - Highway 61 & Beale. At the light pulls up a massive off yellow caddy coupe. Hanging from the rear view mirror two of the biggest fuzzy dice you will ever see. behind the wheel a dear ringer for Isaac Hayes complete with sunglasses & cigar. A true 'only in America' moment.
Good food, good friends & good music. Memphis was a special treat.
"If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees.
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