Dusty Springfield's Dusty in Memphis (Thirty Three and a Third series)

Rating:
Summary: Beats a cup of coffee
Review: What was so special about Memphis that producer Jerry Wexler took the diva of British pop there and created pop magic? Warren Zanes, 1980s teenage rock star in the Del Fuegos turned PhD (cultural studies) in the 1990s, has written a small book to find out, the first in a series on classic albums. Continuum offers its writers a lot more space than Greil Marcus did in Stranded - 32,000 words by my count - and Zanes uses it brilliantly.
His essay isn't academic deconstruction but a mix of personal passion, acute perceptions and old-fashioned journalistic leg work. Being a musician helps his analysis of what makes the album so special, but even more so is his understanding of Southern culture. He writes of the creatures inhabiting the album; when he hears the opening to `Breakfast in Bed' ("You've been crying, your face is a mess. Come in, baby, you can dry your tears on my dress") he pictures Cloris Leachman in The Last Picture Show. To understand these characters means grasping how the South serves as the backdrop to it all. Not just the South that's there, but the South that's in the popular imagination. "Sweating, carnal, obsessed with the past, violent, agrarian despite the times, natural, authentic, certainly unpredictable ... it sometimes seems that [the weed] kudzu is simply the plant form of a mythology that has already covered the region."
Zanes' ideas about the spirit of the South, how it connects with literature, with history, with civil rights and with trash culture - and how it shapes its music - are beautifully expressed and convey a deep understanding of the milieu. His book is unpretentious but profound, avoids hype and self-indulgence while going off on always-relevant tangents that take in Flannery O'Connor, Huck Finn, Alan Lomax, The Dukes of Hazzard and To Kill a Mockingbird. He talks to Wexler and co-producer Chips Moman and, best of all, tracks down Stanley Booth, recluse writer and professional Southerner, who wrote the original liner notes (and the sublime True Adventures of the Rolling Stones). He quotes the influence of a boys adventure book from his youth ("In the North, young men dream about the South. The more discriminating among them slide down the darkness and go straight to Memphis") and explains the magic of Memphis, and Springfield's uncanny way of capturing it. "Led by a singer in a mask, the team that made Dusty in Memphis went after beauty and came up with a little truth." Zanes' essay is the best extended think-piece I have read on music since "Mystery Train", or the contributors to "Stranded". The other writers in the first Continuum series (covering the Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society, Love's Forever Changes, the Smiths' Meat is Murder, Neil Young's Harvest and Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of Dawn) have a hard act to follow. (By the way, Linda Bowden's misunderstanding of what this book is about is typified by her connecting it to the Coltrane "Love Supreme" book: that is a completely different approach, a different series, and different publisher.)