You See Me Laughin'

And the screenings continue. Sat down last night with the newly released You See Me Laughin’ from Fat Possum. Akin to Robert Mugge’s earlier Deep Blues, but more localized and specific in scope, it makes for a mostly engrossing and entertaining 73-minutes. Director Mandy Stein structures the narrative loosely around biographical sketches of the Fat Possum label’s principals. More recent recruits like Robert Belfour and James Caldwell aren’t mentioned. Neither are others in the rogues’ gallery of sidemen like SPAM. Most of the episodes are filled with the expected chronicles of hardship, woe, poverty and violence: Junior Kimbrough’s 28 offspring (a figure that’s since ballooned to “36” in recent FP press releases), the deaths of most of R.L. Burnside’s immediate family in an eight-month time span, and so on. One of the most disturbing unfolds with T-Model Ford’s testimonial of the boyhood demise of his testicle as outcome of a whupping. Several others recount shootings and stabbings with a troubling supply of braggadocio. Stories are told in an effective overlapping style and the anecdotal flow only drags in few spots, most noticeably in the final third.

The amassed footage is both the film’s strongest feature and its most vexatious one. Grainy film stock captures and enhances the environs and denizens of Holly Springs, MS- the stomping grounds of most of the musicians. A revolving soundtrack culled from the vaults magnifies the atmosphere of rural privation and stewing disaffection. These sorts of documentaries always manage to draw on revelatory sources. And the desire to screen the tantalizing chosen snippets in guises closer to their entireties is a natural reaction. But here director insists on persistently hacking them up. There isn’t a single performance in the film allowed to run start to finish without interruption. And some of the clips beg for such unexpurgated treatment. One vignette features Asie Payton tearing through a raucous version of “Worried Life”, but a string of inserted asides bleed its momentum. Another excerpts an early 70s juke performance by R.L. Swaying on a one-chord riff he repeatedly flashes a toothsome Cheshire grill at the camera, his lascivious smirk conveying volumes. It’s a fit, feline countenance strikingly at odds with the dentition-decimated, rheumy-eyed fogey that is the older Burnside throughout much of the film.

The segment on Cedell Davis makes for fascinating and harrowing viewing too. Walloped with the triple whammy of typhoid malaria fever, polio and the wrong place-wrong time results of a barroom riot that left him wheelchair-restricted for the remainder of his life, Davis has paid more dues to the fates than most folks can even fathom. Sitting slumped in his corrugated shack he demonstrates his singular method of guitar speak. Butter-knife clutched in an extremity that’s more claw than hand, he carves out an accompaniment to grunted lyrics in an alien tuning of his own devising. “Jo-Jo” Herman nails the sound perfectly during an adjacent interview segment when says: “It’s sounds out of tune to begin with because you’re not used to hearing that tuning, but when you listen to it for five or ten minutes, all of a sudden, it sounds like it’s in tune, you know, you just fall into his tuning." Davis’ Feel Like Doin’ Something Wrong is a must hear.

Watching segments roll by I kept waiting for the profile of Kenny Brown, Fat Possum’s unsung session man and for quite awhile one of few white faces on the music side of the mics. Brown’s easily the most technically accomplished of all the musicians on the roster and his gritty fretwork has shored up many otherwise rickety records. Looking like a gaunt, leathery Tom Petty in bib overalls with Adam’s Apple bobbing and collarbones poking at emaciated skin he tells the tale of his first gig with R.L. back in the 70s, before he acquired the honorific of Burnside’s “adopted son.” Miles from nowhere at country juke packed with local color, R.L. abandoned the stage for a game of dice out back and left Brown to his own devices- sink or swim, the lone cracker in the joint.

The film hits most, if not all of the bases and I had fun checking them off in succession. One chapter delves into the contentious economic arrangements that exist between the label and its stable of songsters, taking pains to present the blurred sides of the debate. What comes out is how the cleaver of exploitation cuts both ways. Some critics have berated the label as a modern day minstrel show and there are certainly kernels of truth to the claim in the regular cultivation and celebration of the most misanthropic aspects of the bluesman archetype. The egocentric and avaricious attitudes and behaviors of some of the Possum bullpen could easily give certain gangster rap superstars a run for the money.

Fat Possum honcho Matthew Johnson is definitely out to make a buck, but he repeatedly counters these capitalist goals with a nobler calling to document and promote as many of the musicians as possible before the impending Reaper’s call. The same can’t as easily be said for some of musicians, most of whom are more than content to leave the particulars up to him as long as the greenbacks continue to roll in. There’s a particularly telling and awkward scene where Johnson and his associate Bruce Watson counsel R.L. about the faulty wisdom in the latter’s attempts to continue fraudulently collecting disability checks. When queried as to the monthly amount of his guilefully-gained assistance, R.L. croaks “$111.” Johnson counters, “shit R.L., you make a lot more than that in an hour.”

Stein also explores the critical flak from attempts at making the music more youth/pop culture friendly. A scene in an Oxford, MS studio remixing one of R.L.’s tunes looks more like a casual game of crapshoot than anything meticulously crafted or premeditated. Johnson laments the prevailing public viewpoint of the music as antiquated and even obsolete and defends the postproduction gimmickry as a necessary evil. There’s a related segment on partnership of Burnside and the punk rock band The Blues Explosion. Both sides speak candidly about the resulting albums and the ire they engendered amongst purists. As usual R.L. boils it down to financial terms: “I didn’t thought it sound too good, you know, but after awhile a lot young peoples [bought it].”

Interviews with Bono and Iggy Pop, at once reverential and oddly patronizing, further elaborate on the FP covey’s infiltration into more popular musical culture. The U2 frontman’s anecdotes are particularly amusing, especially the pull-quote: “I guess in some college campuses we were big shots, but right there in Holly Springs you couldn’t fit us in a shot glass.” Iggy has his comeuppance when Junior Kimbrough coins him the mocking moniker “Lollipop” while on a shared tour circuit.

Another recurring theme emerges in the reality of the label’s finite talent pool, one that been rapidly evaporating for years. The director inserts long shots of Johnson roaming the dirt roads in his pick-up to exemplify the many trips spent combing the hill country in search of new blood. Most unlikely of the new ‘finds’ covered is Johnny Farmer-- the world’s most reluctant bluesman-- a guy who taught himself a few blues tunes for his own pleasure and was palavered, inveigled and finally out-right bribed into cutting a record. When his health nose-dived after the platter’s release, he took to ardently believing it the origin of all his ills thereby short-circuiting the probability of a proposed sophomore project. The above-mentioned Caldwell was positioned to be the label’s saving grace, his debut Remember Me bearing out Johnson’s confidence with a body of music rivaling some of Burnside’s best. Bricks in Johnson’s pillow, Caldwell passed away just prior to the record’s release.

Safari discoveries have winnowed to virtually nil in recent years. The prevailing paucity pushed Johnson to switch gears and focus his attention on alt rock acts like 20 Miles and Thee Shams as well as keeping his remaining roster as healthy as possible. Fat Possum’s latest coup is the Heartless Bastards out of Ohio. Fronted by Erika Wennerstrom, they’re also the first band on the label with a prominent female presence. Considering the label’s lingering misogynistic rep, it’s a step in the right direction. Stairs and Elevators, their debut, has been in near constant rotation at Rancho de Taylor and a small club gig I caught in February further cemented my esteem. With the Bastards in its ranks the label that’s perpetually tread water just off the shores of insolvency might have a renewed shot at financial security. As a sharp, entertaining foray into a subculture that is both fascinating and frightening Stein’s doc definitely does the trick.