Various Artists

Thank You Friends: The Ardent Records Story

Big Beat Records

By Ed Ward

In popular music, stories have a tendency not to go the way you want them to. For instance, it was inevitable that psychedelia would eventually hit Memphis, and, around 1968, it did. What would seem also inevitable would be that it would take on the local flavor, inheriting the city's heritage of blues, rhythm and blues, and soul.

And yes, it did that, too, at least at first. You can read all about it in Robert Gordon's wonderful It Came From Memphis, and, if you can find them, there are two companion CDs worth of musical documentation of the legendary Mudboy and the Neutrons and the others who came and went. Probably the most interesting band to come out of early psychedelic Memphis arrived via Little Rock: the Insect Trust mixed country blues, free jazz, old-time country, and semi-San Franciscan rock on two LPs which stand up well today, even if the band had to head to New York (or, more accurately, Hoboken) to achieve what they did.

But some of the most enduring and influential bands to come out of that era didn't look in that direction at all. Maybe reasoning that the locals who were born to it did a better job than they could, and that anyway, the signature musical unit of mainstream Memphis music at that moment, Booker T & the MGs, were already integrated, a significant bunch of Memphis' rock talent looked to England. Until now this story has existed in a little bubble labeled with the name of its most prominent band, Big Star. With the release of a double-CD, Thank You Friends: The Ardent Records Story, on the British Big Beat label, curated by the inimitable Alec Palao, the whole amazing story is on the table.

Ardent began with a bunch of teenage boys fascinated with radio and electronics, most notably John Fry, who, with a partner, John King, leased a space at 1457 National Street in 1966. With their interest in audio engineering, they heard something in Beatles records that others didn't, and figured that, with all the talent around town, they might be able to make equally cool-sounding records. They bought up-to-the-minute equipment from an engineer at WDIA, the pioneering black station in town, and engaged a young weirdo from Mississippi, James Luther Dickinson, as a producer.

The Ardent crew got lucky: Memphis is a major media center in its region, and there was a constant need for radio ads, jingles, and the like. Stax Records, too, was shouldering more work than their own studio could handle, so Ardent hummed all the time and the bank-books looked good. By 1968, a second engineer, Terry Manning, joined the staff, and that's when things got weird in a good way.

Manning had played with Lawson and Four More, who'd recorded Ardent's first single in 1966, a couple of Jim Dickinson-penned tracks, both included here. "If You Want Me You Can Find Me" has a Bo Diddley beat and bratty, garage-y vocals, while "Halfway Down the Stairs" rips a line from Beethoven's 9^th as a hook, and plays it on what might be an early electric sitar - or, more likely, a messed-up guitar. Manning also played with the Goatdancers, whose "Patches of Dust" from 1968 is a fine rave-up. They used down-time in the studio to cut some solo tracks: the Small Faces-influenced "Rocks," a lovely orchestrated ballad, "Not At All," and the country classic "Guess Things Happen That Way" reinvented in 1970 as the kind of thing some of Island's bands -- Spooky Tooth, say - were doing in England.

Manning's deep understanding of British pop moves and ability to fuse them with American ideas made Ardent a magnet for bands who shared the vision - or wanted to. There were the Wallabies, who insisted they were Australian (despite lots of evidence to the contrary), played in pajamas on stage, and left behind the woozily psychedelic "Up and Down Children"; the 1^st Century, whose professionalism derived from their having been former Pharaohs (as in Sam the Sham and...) who'd decamped to a psychedelic commune in the woods before re-emerging under their new name; and the Bitter Ind and Honey Jug, whose pop-psych records were produced by Jim Dickinson.

But it was Christmas Future, another bunch of teenagers, who began turning Ardent towards its destiny. Steve Rhea and Chris Bell, two members of the band, took engineering training from John Fry so that they could use the studio at night when the commercial sessions weren't happening -- and so Fry and Manning could limp back to their houses to sleep for a change. Bands mixing Manning, Rhea, and Bell recorded under a bunch of different names -- the Badgers and Icewater are two - and the results are some of the most original music of the times.

Around this time, a genuine pop star showed up wanting to work at Ardent, and they were so impressed they decided to fund an album-length project. Terry Manning jumped right in, and so was born Alex Chilton 1970 (although the name was added later and the album recorded in 1969). As a teenager, Chilton had had a huge hit with the Box Tops, "The Letter," and had gotten mired down in legal problems afterwards. He hadn't stopped writing songs, though, and he had some killers. "Free Again" probably has its origins in the post-Box Tops imbroglio, but the exuberant melody and Jeff Newman's searing steel-guitar playing - which would have eclipsed any other steel-playing rocker's work had it been released at the time - make it one of America's great lost hit records. "Every Day We Grow Closer" and "The EMI Song" (aka "Smile For Me") are almost as good.

But here we are with people wanting the story to go in a different direction than it was going. When Bell and Rhea took the Icewater project to Elektra - two amazing tracks are on this collection - the A&R guy told them it sounded too much like the Beatles. Atlantic, astonishingly, passed on the Chilton tapes. Was it that they wanted refried boogie? Were their ears stopped up with wax? We'll never know.

One powerful company that did want this stuff, though, was Stax, which realized that they'd captured the ears of young America with Otis Redding, who was now dead, and wanted a rock division that could get them more action on the pop charts. Al Bell was now president of the label, and a fervent advocate of Ardent's experiments. It was time to get something going, especially when he offered the studio a deal: Ardent would find bands and record them, Stax would promote and distribute the records.

Rock City, another studio project, was raided for its bassist, Andy Hummel, its guitarist, the omnipresent Chris Bell (who'd known Chilton since school days), and its drummer, Jody Stephens. In a nice ironic move, they named themselves after a Memphis grocery chain, Big Star.

Big Star was a band of which it could be said, as someone once remarked about the Velvet Underground, that they only sold a couple of thousand records, but everyone who bought one went out and started a band. Unfortunately, when their self-titled debut came out in 1972, America was deep in the throes of boogie-mania. Guitar solos ruled and sharp, clever pop songs were desperately un-hip, and although they were critics' darlings, Big Star never really got going. If you've never heard them, you should get Big Beat's CD of their first two albums (the second, Radio City, is, if anything, even better than the first), but the alternative mixes and demos included here will give you enough reason to seek them out. Masterpieces like "When My Baby's Beside Me" and "September Gurls" still sound fresh today, and Big Star's hook-laden choruses and powerful, unusual chord changes pretty much wrote the bible for the ‘80s' power-pop movement.

Ardent was all set to build up an empire. They'd signed Cargoe, from Tulsa, whose "Feel Alright" is another forgotten pop masterpiece. Just as things were looking great, however, Stax began to fall apart. It had spent too much money, there were management problems, and, most importantly, there weren't any hits. Chris Bell walked out on Big Star, then came back long enough to co-write and cut some songs for Radio City, but again the album tanked. Bell left for England, where he was confident his talent would be recognized. It wasn't. Big Star was essentially down to an increasingly messed-up Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens, and an album called Third was recorded but deemed too weird to release. Ardent the studio kept going, but Ardent the label disappeared, and Big Beat was right to title the collection after the obscure Big Star track thanking everyone for "making this so...probable."

In retrospect, Al Bell's trying to get a rock label folded into Stax seems at least partially fuelled by what was going on in Memphis' black music world at the time. One of a kind weirdness had landed there, too, not only at Stax, which started the Enterprise label for experimental soul, but in the Sounds of Memphis studios, which had its own label, and on the Select-O-Hits label, run by Sam Philips' brother Tom. As we can hear on another remarkable new anthology drawn from these three sources, Memphis 70: The city's funk and soul in the decade after Otis (BGP), traditional soul hung on in fine form, but new sounds were creeping in, too. Probably the most blatant example of this is "Blackrock Yeah Yeah," by Busta Jones' legendary band Blackrock, which recorded for Select-O-Hits and had a minor hit with this proto-Funkadelic track. (There's also a whole album that's pretty remarkable, hint hint, BGP). But there's also the moody protest of Smithstonian's "Mississippi Mud" and Mel and Tim's ecstatic "Keep the Faith," and the mysterious Hannon, whose "The Way of Me" from 1978 points to rhythmic grooves that would flourish a couple of years later with disco.

Things have settled down in Memphis since Big Star and Blackrock formed the poles of pop expression there, but the music made during this creative explosion is still mostly very little-known. These two collections offer 68 compelling tracks which go a long way towards shedding light on it.