David Less: Playlist for a Life in Music

The producer and author of “Memphis Mayhem” tells his story through the records he’s loved.

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First and foremost, David Less is a listener. His sheer love of music propels him through all the milestones on his résumé. And there are many of those, from his prolific publishing history, including the book Memphis Mayhem (reviewed in our November 2020 issue), to his years as a manager, board member, executive director, and/or division president of many corporate and nonprofit groups (including the Blues Foundation), to producing two Grammy-nominated albums, not to mention the soundtrack to an award-winning film, and co-founding Memphis International Records.

In a perfect illustration of “follow your bliss,” he’s become a sought-after consultant, author, educator, and administrator chiefly by way of chasing the music. Yet all those roles ultimately lead him back to where he’s happiest: in front of his hi-fi stereo in the Central Gardens home he shares with his wife, Angela.

Appropriately enough, that’s where our interview took place, sitting before his high-end Shindo LaFite speakers, each with its own glowing tube preamp, as he sifted through his vast collection of records and CDs. In the end, he picked nine of them to serve as guideposts along his lifetime of ever-deeper engagement with music.

Shep & the Limelites, “Daddy’s Home” b/w “This I Know”

Hull Records (1961)

This was the first thing that registered with me,” he explains as the old 45 spins. “I was probably eight or nine years old. My brother Mike, who’s five years older (I also have a brother, Stanley, who’s 18 months older), played these records, and I was listening. For the older guys, Elvis was the thing. But for me, it was this. It’s interesting because it’s Black doo wop music. It’s not Memphis music.” As he speaks, the Limelites’s silky harmonies chime in, “Oooh — Rat-a-tat! — Oooh.”

Meet the Beatles!

Capitol Records (1964)

Like many ’60s teens, an especially motivating musical epiphany for Less was seeing The Beatles live on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. “I grew up with rock-and-roll, I saw Ricky Nelson on television — it was kind of a thing,” Less recalls. “But when The Beatles came on, it was like, ‘What!? Really!?’ And then it was, ‘Okay, divide up your instruments, guys!’ I chose drums.”

Recalling that time causes Less to reflect on his comfortable, well-to-do youth in Memphis. “Talking my dad into getting me drums was not hard,” he says. “They were mine for the asking. That’s privilege. I think we all should remember that.”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced?

Reprise Records (1967)

Less expanded his horizons rapidly through his teens, discovering Thelonious Monk in 1965 (again, through his big brother, Mike) but mostly sticking to rock. He was primed to rethink all preconceptions just as he met Rick Ivy, who was destined to become both a respected visual artist and a multi-instrumentalist in Tav Falco’s Panther Burns and other unconventional bands.

“I was in ninth grade,” Less recalls, “and Rick invited me over to his house. We were a couple of East Memphis kids. His mom, who was right out of Leave It to Beaver, greeted me and said, ‘Oh, yes, he’s in his bedroom. It’s the last door down the hall.’ You know, ‘Thank you, Mrs. Ivy…’ I go to his room, open the door, and there’s Rick, buck nekkid, he’s drawn eyes around his nipples, and a nose, he’s staring at himself in a full-length mirror, and he’s got Are You Experienced? — which had just come out that day — blaring on the stereo. And I said to myself, ‘This guy … we’re going to be friends.’”

That began a lifetime of concertgoing for both of them. “As a result of us becoming friends,” he says, “we went to the Country Blues Festivals [the famed concert series at the Overton Park Shell, documented in the film The Blues Society], starting when we were 14. We were too young to be there. We just had our parents drop us off, and that’s how we saw Jimi Hendrix at the auditorium, and a lot of incredible music. But whoever was at those Country Blues Festivals … their life was changed. And Rick and I became friends until he died.”

Anthony Braxton, For Alto

Delmark Records (1971)

Popular music evolved radically through the psychedelic ’60s, yet not every fan was willing to pursue the truly “out” directions in which jazz then headed. Less, however, was more open than most.

“I went to Ohio State University for my freshman year. And there was a record store called Pearl Alley Disc, or PAD, a great record store. I walk in, and this record is playing, Anthony Braxton’s For Alto. And it was almost the same as when I first heard Monk or ‘Daddy’s Home.’ It just absolutely hit me.”

Dropping the needle today, Less muses further on the album’s frenetic, raw energy. “This guy is playing the Black experience, he’s screaming it through his fucking saxophone! I suddenly heard this guy reaching in and telling me and showing me just what it is, in the best way possible, the most direct way possible. And it absolutely gave me an insight that I had never had before. I bought the album and it started me, really, on jazz.”

After O.S.U., Less received his B.A. from Rhodes College and then entered the master’s program at then-Memphis State University, studying African-American music, especially that of Memphis. Through the years, Braxton’s For Alto stuck with Less. “I later met him and brought him to Memphis State for a show,” he says. “Great guy. He was very young then. Half the concert was a piece we commissioned him to write for 13 musicians. He was a good friend of Robert Palmer’s.”

Palmer, a writer and musician, had been one of the Country Blues Festival’s founders, but by the ’70s he was writing for Rolling Stone and The New York Times, eventually becoming the latter’s pop music critic. “I was friends with Bob Palmer too,” says Less. “He got me my gig at Rolling Stone and DownBeat in ’76 or ’77.” Less also wrote for Memphis Magazine in those years. And, perhaps most significantly, “I met Jim Dickinson around that time.”

Ry Cooder, Into the Purple Valley

Reprise Records (1972)

Putting on Cooder’s second album, Less explains its importance as “the first time I really became aware of Jim Dickinson.” Having co-produced the Cooder album in L.A., Dickinson, by then much sought after for his piano skills and discerning ears in the studio, played in Cooder’s band for the subsequent tour, as recounted in his posthumous book, I’m Just Dead, I’m Not Gone.

“They did a live thing with Cooder and Dickinson at Ardent at the time,” says Less. “That’s when I became aware that he was a Memphis guy. ‘Wow, here’s a producer who lives in Memphis!’ I met him when NARAS [the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, now the Recording Academy] had their first meeting here, around 1974.”

The Seventies were a heady time for Less, who was writing, networking, and dabbling in music video (ultimately producing the syndicated Music Vision series). Meanwhile, he juggled school and various jobs, all music adjacent. “When I worked at Poplar Tunes [record shop], Bob Kelley, who owned Mid-South Concerts, had just moved to town, and we got to be friends,” he says. “He’d ask my advice. I was selling records and had my finger on the pulse of what people were buying.” By 1979, Less himself was a promoter, producing the Beale Street Music Festival until 1983.

James Luther Dickinson, Jungle Jim & The Voodoo Tiger (2006); Killers from Space (2007); Dinosaurs Run in Circles (2008)

Memphis International Records

As the twentieth century wore on and wore out, Less’ friendship with Dickinson continued, both of them fascinated with the overlap between rock, jazz, and the roots-heavy music of the Mid-South. In 2003, he and Dickinson produced the Grammy-nominated album Down in the Alley, by Alvin Youngblood Hart. By then Less and Bob Merlis had founded the Memphis International label. Producing Dickinson as an artist was the next logical step.

“I told Jim, ‘You fussed over your last record too much,’” Less recalls. “I said, ‘We’re going to make a record and we’re going to finish it in 10 days.’”

The approach worked. And as they labored on three albums this way, “he knew just what he wanted. He wanted the boys [Dickinson’s sons, Luther and Cody, of the North Mississippi Allstars] to learn to come into a studio, hear music for the first time, and make it their own. So they could be studio musicians, which they had not been prior to that. They’d been a band out on the road, playing blues, but not studio musicians. Dickinson said, ‘I want to give them a living.’ Those records I made with him are a trilogy, leading up to his death.” The final album appeared in 2008, just when Dickinson passed away. “He died August 9th of that year. I don’t even know that he saw the last album come out.”

Jazz Ensemble of Memphis, Playing in the Yard

Memphis International Records (2024)

Two years later, when Less produced Onward and Upward by Luther Dickinson and Sons of Mudboy (composed of the sons of Dickinson’s band Mudboy & the Neutrons), he was making good on his friend’s hope for the future. It too was nominated for a Grammy.

Now, he’s still listening to young players. Though Memphis International was bought by Jeff Phillips of Select-O-Hits, the legendary record distribution company, Less is working for the label on what just may be his proudest accomplishment yet. It’s inspired by a 1959 United Artists album, Downhome Reunion: Young Men from Memphis, which featured now legendary cats like George Coleman, Frank Strozier, Booker Little, Louis Smith, Phineas Newborn Jr., and his brother, Calvin.

To make a similar record now, Less created his dream team, with tenor saxophonist Charles Pender II, trumpeter Martin Carodine, keyboardist and vibraphonist DeAnte Payne, bassist Liam O’Dell, and drummer Kurtis Gray, all in their late teens and twenties. The playing is exquisite, full of inventive surprises.

“Jazz is just as good as it ever was in Memphis,” says Less, whose knowledge of the city’s music recently earned him a brass note on Beale Street. “Memphis is a jazz city. We felt it was time to show that, so we started looking for the best young jazz players to make a record with them. At the beginning, they were a bunch of guys who didn’t know each other. But as they played and cut all these tracks together, they became a band.” Lingering over this record more than any of the others, he says to expect its release this April. For Less, and all who listen, these young players strike a perfect balance, keeping one eye on the past and the other on the future, exploring the very cutting edge of music’s here and now. And that’s just where David Less wants to be.