Feeling kindred spirits

July 31, 2011|By Sarah Rodman, Globe Staff

MEMPHIS - Because I am a music fan by avocation and rock critic by vocation, this city - home to the legendary R&B and rock music labels Stax and Sun Records, Elvis Presley’s Graceland, and artists as diverse as legendary soul titans Al Green and Aretha Franklin, proto-power popsters Big Star and urban pop smoothie Justin Timberlake - was always on my list. After repeated visits over the years to other meccas such as Austin, Texas, and Nashville, this spring, Memphis’s number came up.

My friend Joe and I arrived, fittingly, with Green blasting on our rental car stereo. Voracious music consumers and good friends since working at the late, great Massachusetts record store chain Good Vibrations in the ’80s, we made Memphis our final destination on a weeklong musical road trip through Tennessee that included stops in Nashville and in Pigeon Forge to visit Dollywood.

Even with nearly four days at our disposal and an excursion to the mammoth annual Beale Street Music Festival in Tom Lee Park, we were unable to see and hear everything this city - which bills itself (like some other cities do) as the “birthplace of rock ’n’ roll’’ - has to offer.

It seemed like the sidewalks and buildings were singing to us when we got to the Beale Street, the city’s main drag of clubs, bars, and souvenir shops. And in a way, they were.

There was the thwap-thwap-thwap rhythm of the feet of a young boy practicing a gravity-defying tumbling routine he would perform later for tips. There was the heated riffage of a hot blues band doing a cover version of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Pride and Joy’’ wafting from the open door of a club. There was the exuberant racket of a group of buskers in front of the New Daisy Theatre hooting out original blues and teasing passersby who would stop and dance for a spell. And there were the raised musical notes slipping under our feet proclaiming the pride and joy the city has in its musical exports, commemorated on the Beale Street Brass Note Walk of Fame.

By midnight Beale would be a bustling thoroughfare filled with lubricated tourists, good old boys on the prowl buying cold ones at a street vendor, listing college kids, blaring sounds, and flashing neon. But on our first pass on this Thursday afternoon, ducking in and out of T-shirt shops and an ancient Schwab’s dry goods store, the street gave off a slower, laid-back pulse.

Our next stop was Graceland. About a 10-minute drive from downtown, the King of Rock’s compound is a sprawl of strip mall gift shops anchored by the mansion on one side of Elvis Presley Boulevard and Heartbreak Hotel on the other.