Dusty in Memphis
- Nov 16, 2024
- 3 min read
★★☆☆☆
Dusty in Memphis, the first in Continuum’s (now Bloomsbury’s) long-running 33⅓ book series, was published way back in 2003, to my complete shock (and slight horror). After reading a handful in 2010, I took advantage of a deal to acquire the first 100 books of the series in late 2014 or early 2015. Now prominently displayed on a bookcase, and, more importantly, readily accessible for the first time in years, I can take advantage of squeezing in these short books between library requests or as a respite from heavier tomes.
Author Warren Zanes, known first to me as a member of the garage-rock band the Del Fuegos, is probably better known to most as the guy who wrote Tom Petty’s biography, titled (What else?) Petty: The Biography. Zanes holds a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies, and it’s clear from Dusty in Memphis that he’s a pretty smart guy. As far as premises go, Zanes sets us up from the outset that “this book is about an experience with a record more than it is about a record.” He continues, “It’s both a chronicle and an analysis of what happened when a particular person met up with a particular piece of vinyl at a particular time and the unfolding of that relationship.”
That sounds … fine (?) … I guess, though I’ll admit to having a bit of pause at the word “analysis.” But things start well enough. Zanes is not a writer of economy (nor, generally, am I), but he does have a conversational style, inasmuch as his somewhat formalist writing (which is not to say stuffy or academic) can present itself conversationally. I mostly felt like I could have been listening to a well-written and well-delivered podcast. And while Dusty in Memphis the book was not specifically about Dusty in Memphis the album (as in a book about the making of the album, for example), the album nevertheless remained the focus of what unfolded, including snippets of interviews with many involved, including, amongst others, Jerry Wexler, Chips Moman, and Arif Mardin.
It’s hard to know exactly where things begin to run afield, but run afield they do. Zanes’s doctorate kicks in—recall the word “analysis” above—and soon he’s no longer talking about “what happened when a particular person met up with a particular piece of vinyl at a particular time.” He’s not even talking “about an experience with a record.” Instead, he goes long on why we from outside the South have a fascination with the South—not the real South but the imagined South (emphasis Zanes’s): the South of folklore and fantasy, primal and authentic, symbolically loaded, impossibly tangled in its own mythologies, and made strange from the pressure of meanings overloading the place. In short: the South as Other.
If Zanes doesn’t exactly plumb the depths of this line of inquiry, this is a pocket-sized 121 pages after all, he at least chisels at its margins in a myriad of pseudo-intellectual ways—via sociology, ethnography, anthropology—but the analysis never comes full circle to what it all means to him and his experience with the album. Instead, he offers lazily in his final paragraph, “I was in love with Dusty in Memphis because I was in love on a regular basis. And what a mess that could be. I needed someplace to go with all of it. That album gave me one, a fantastic place, a place I’d gone before. But never had I gone with such a guide.” Unfortunately, if the point of the 33⅓ series is to impart a greater appreciation for a given album—and I don’t know that it is, but if it isn’t, it probably should be—Zanes could have been a better guide if he’d written a little less from the head and a little more from the heart.
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