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 Shangri-La, Stax, and Sherman
Or, how a mild-mannered guy who has never written a song became the most important music figure in Memphis. By Paul Lukas
“THIS IS THE HOUSE where Aretha Franklin was born,” says Sherman Willmott, pulling his crowded tour van to the curb in front of a nondescript shotgun shack on the south side of Memphis.
The reaction is immediate, as several people in the van ask the same thing you’re probably thinking right now: Isn’t Aretha from Detroit?
“Well, Detroit’s where she grew up,” says Willmott. “But she was born in Memphis and spent her first two years in this house while her daddy preached at a local church.”
Willmott has a seemingly endless store of these small but telling revelations about his hometown. “That’s what’s so great about Memphis,” he later tells me, as we share a platter of ribs at his favorite barbecue shack, the Cozy Corner. “You’re constantly going, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ People don’t know Otis Redding recorded here. They don’t know Aretha was born here. It’s my job to tell them.”
Willmott currently pursues that job as the proprietor of Ultimate Memphis Rock ’n Roll Tours (www.memphisrocktour.com). While Graceland has become a kitschy self-parody and Beale Street is now little more than a blues theme park, Willmott’s tour focuses on the nitty-gritty details of the River City’s music history — everything from recording studios and record-pressing plants to gravesites and the record store where a young Elvis Presley furtively watched as customers bought his first records. Memphis’s musical stew — a complex mix of influences, shaped and molded by the cotton trade — can be tricky for outsiders to grasp, but Willmott’s combination of a researcher’s mind and a storyteller’s voice helps bring it into sharp historical focus.
The tour operation, which launched in 2004, is the latest in a series of projects that have essentially made Willmott the unofficial trustee of the city’s musical heritage. Over the past 17 years, he’s opened Memphis’s best record store, curated its best music museum, authored a travel guide to the city’s music-related sites, founded his own record label and publishing imprint, and directed a documentary film. In a town whose music scene is famous for larger-than-life characters like Elvis, Sam Phillips, and Isaac Hayes, the case can be made that Willmott — an affable, low-key 40-year-old who hasn’t been in a band since high school and has never written a song — is the city’s most important music figure of the last generation.
“I don’t know about that,” he says, an unspoken “aw, shucks” hovering over his words. Then he checks his watch, wipes some barbecue sauce off his cheek, and heads out to do another tour.
IRONICALLY, WILLMOTT wasn’t particularly interested in Memphis music until he left for college, where friends turned him on to his hometown’s cultural legacy. Still, when he returned to Memphis in the late 1980s, his first entrepreneurial venture was a massage and flotation-tank business called Shangri-La — not exactly the sort of thing from which music history is made.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he says. “But it wasn’t working out, so about 18 months into it, I decided to follow my heart and switch over to selling music.” And just like that, in 1990, Shangri-La became Shangri-La Records.
The store soon developed the well-worn ambience of a record collector’s hangout, with an emphasis on Memphis music history. As its reputation spread among music cognoscenti nationwide, Willmott noticed a new trend: “People from out of town were coming into the store and saying, ‘We’ve been to Graceland, but there’s nothing else to do here.’ And we’d say, ‘Have you been to Alex Chilton’s house? Have you been to this club or this old studio?’ And the people would get all excited, so we’d end up drawing maps for them. And eventually we decided to just print a whole guide.”
That’s how Willmott ended up publishing Kreature Comforts (self-mockingly subtitled “Low-Life Guide to Memphis”), a magazine-style travel guide to the city’s coolest and least touristy attractions, most of them music related. Full of helpful, irreverent tips (“Vegetarians, plan ahead! This town’s bad for you!”), it’s now in its fourth edition, with 15,000 copies in circulation.
Along the way, Willmott spun off a record label — called Shangri-La Projects — which focused primarily on Memphis acts (one of which, the Grifters, developed a national following). He also produced and directed a documentary about local bluesman Will Roy Sanders, which he took on the festival circuit, and published two books about Memphis’s forgotten 1960s garage and frat bands. In a little over a decade, he’d become an all-purpose ambassador for the city’s music.
But he was restless. The store had found its niche and no longer felt like a challenge, and he was getting burned out on the other projects. That’s when a friend told Willmott he was trying to acquire the site of the old Stax Records studio, where countless soul classics by the likes of Otis Redding, Booker T. and the MG’s, and Albert King had been recorded. Stax went bankrupt in the 1970s, and the studio was later demolished to create a parking lot, to the profound embarrassment of Memphis music fans. Now Willmott’s friend wanted to create a soul-music museum on the site — and he wanted Willmott to be the founding curator.
“It was one of those easy, life-changing questions,” he recalls. “It took me about three seconds to say yes.”
Willmott sold his stake in the store to a partner (the store remains an essential stop for music fans visiting Memphis) and spent the next several years acquiring the memorabilia that would form the museum’s permanent collection, a process that often involved cajoling suspicious R&B artists into parting with their precious instruments, stage costumes, and other artifacts. For the most part, he was successful, but one prize had eluded him: Isaac Hayes’s gold-plated, TV-equipped Cadillac, known colloquially as the Shaftmobile.
“We finally heard from a Memphis police sergeant who’d bought the car at auction 20 years earlier and was willing to sell it to us for $20,000,” he says. “So I made the arrangements, picked up the car from him, and started driving it back to our storage unit. That was great — everyone was honking and waving at me. But it started overheating and smoking, and that was pretty much my worst nightmare: A white boy in south Memphis having to get towed in the Shaftmobile.”
Fortunately, the car just made it. Today, it’s a centerpiece attraction at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, which opened in 2003. The museum is a wonderful, state-of-the-art facility, as fun as it is educational, and it’s the culmination of Willmott’s love affair with his hometown’s music scene.
“No matter what else happens to me,” he says, “I can always say I got to give something back to Memphis.”
WILLMOTT LEFT the Stax project once the museum opened, took a little time off, and then set his sights on a new project.
“As I researched the museum, I learned all sorts of new things about Memphis music, things most other people didn’t know about,” he explains. “Plus, we had all these other new attractions in town — the Cotton Museum at the Memphis Cotton Exchange, the Gibson Beale Street Showcase. I realized there was a story to be told that could tie all these things together.”
That’s how the tour operation started. You want Elvis? Willmott can give you an Elvis-centric tour. You want Stax? He can show you where all the artists lived and tell you endless stories about them. “But most people want the broad spectrum,” he says.
And that’s what they get — and not just in terms of music history. “I know where the good food is, which bands are playing, where to avoid traffic tie-ups, all of it,” says Willmott. “Basically, I’m going to show you the kinds of things I’d want you to show me if I were visiting your city.”
But of course, none of us would be able to show him where Aretha Franklin was born.
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