'We want to rock 'n' roll': The Black Crowes cap strong opening night at Mempho Music Fest
The Bluff City’s big fall music gathering returned on Friday, as the annual Mempho Music Festival kicked off at the Memphis Botanic Garden.
Initially launched as a bit of counterprogramming to the spring Beale Street Music Festival, Mempho spent its first few years at Shelby Farms Park — which was a beautiful venue, but also something of a nightmare in terms of staging and setup. Post-pandemic Mempho has found the ideal balance between location and logistics, settling in the equally bucolic (but far better appointed) confines of the Memphis Botanic Garden’s Radians Amphitheater.
In terms of its musical identity Mempho continues to evolve — and this year’s edition could almost be considered three different fests in one. Friday’s opening day offered a strong selection of jam band and Southern rock sounds with acts like The Black Crowes and Larkin Poe. Saturday’s bill leans toward indie and alt rock with appearances by Dinosaur Jr., Ween and My Morning Jacket, while Sunday’s finale will favor more roots and pop-oriented sounds with performances by Turnpike Troubadours and Lake Street Drive, among others.
Even with this mix of genres and variety of acts, Mempho offers an overarching vision and connected experience for its patrons. Some local festivals, like Beale Street Music Fest, have struggled in trying to be all things to all people. Others have found a distinct niche, like the garage rock extravaganza Gonerfest — which was thriving just a few miles west of the Botanic Garden all weekend. But Mempho has sought and successfully found a happy middle ground.
Certainly, the energy was uniformly solid throughout Mempho’s opening day. It was a decidedly relaxed vibe that colored the fest’s early hours, with local and regional acts like Hope Clayburn’s Soul Scrimmage and the long-running Oxford outfit Kudzu Kings bringing an affable energy to their sets, while jam band Joe Russo’s Almost Dead and Southern roots duo Larkin Poe gently upped the ante as the sun set and the evening wore on.
But it was Friday’s headliners, The Black Crowes, who offered the perfect encapsulation of the Mempho aesthetic. The reunited group — fronted by lead singer/lead guitarist siblings Chris and Rich Robinson — is deeply Southern, fundamentally rootsy, with a strong jam band element, but with plenty of rock 'n' roll bona fides.
MUSIC NEWS: Grammy winner Jason Isbell finishes his degree at University of Memphis. How it happened.
The band came out sounding sharp with a setlist designed to please, kicking off with an epic take of their early-‘90s radio hit “Remedy.” “What’s happening Mempho?” asked Chris Robinson after their opening number. “It’s Friday night, The Black Crowes are here, and we want to rock 'n' roll.”
The band continued its strong start with impassioned versions of “Sting Me” and “Twice as Hard,” before serving up an aggressive version of “Gone,” which singer Robinson dedicated to all their friends who didn’t survive “on their road to finding bliss.”
Led by the Robinson brothers, the band — an eight-piece ensemble, including a pair of backing singers — worked their way through the essentials from their catalog, highlighted by a run through their hit cover of the Otis Redding Stax number, “Hard to Handle.”
The crowds that came to the see the band were healthy, if not as big as those for last year’s opening-night Mempho performance by The Black Keys. It’s hard to eyeball a festival crowd and gauge whether the size of the audience equates to success in terms of dollars and cents. But judging purely on vibe and feeling established on its opening night, Mempho continues to be a winner.
This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: The Black Crowes cap strong opening night at Mempho Music Festival
