Old film, new soundtrack

Stranded in Canton and J. Spaceman

Last night I went with my friend Megan to see J. Spaceman and John Coxon perform their soundtrack to William Eggleston’s gorgeous nightmare Stranded in Canton, Eggleston’s film stitched together (with Robert Gordon) from thirty hours of footage shot on a reel-to-reel SONY Porta-pak camera in Memphis in 1973 and ’74. I’ve seen the movie several times, but only at home, and never in a space like this. I’ve loved Eggleston’s photography since I learned about it from Big Star album covers in high school (this lore-packed photo still remains an all-time favorite), but so has just about everybody. It’s the mundane, it’s the wild, it’s the very-much-alive colors screaming at you from the wall. You’ve seen them, you know what I mean.

Stranded in Canton is another beast altogether, an unwieldy peek into a strange Southern netherworld, full of people who seem like they were cousins of people I knew growing up. There’s so much love and grimey decadence in it, so much soul-stripped-bare humanity, you can’t look away, and in the looking it all becomes beautiful. There’s an element of performance to the people on screen, sure, but it’s bar performance and party performance not a film or even an iPhone performance, and the camera just seems like some novelty that happens to be there. So many characters pass through the screen in snippets, a million impossible stories only hinted at, never told. (Well, here’s one that got told: the definitive piece on Eggleston’s best friend, the soon-to-be-murdered dentist T.C. Boring, is this one by Will Stephenson from the Oxford American, who set out to find the famous red ceiling from Big Star’s Radio City cover and fell deeper on down.) You could spend the rest of your life wondering about the arguing old couple (even after knowing, in the credits, their tragic and maybe inescapable fate), or the woman who asks if the camera is in focus. Furry Lewis is forever, obviously, but there isn’t a single boring moment, frame, sound, human in this entire film. At some point it has to click for you that the characters presented here aren’t wrecked Southern caricatures. They’re real people, and they’re all geniuses. In this way, every viewing is a revelation.

(The scene with the guys geeking still just kills me. As Megan pointed out, everyone’s all boisterous and lively until they actually bite into the chicken’s neck. Then it just seems sad, like even they are disgusted by it, though they’re still grinning and peacocking. And then, you know, there’s feathers everywhere.)

But the biggest shock of the night was the J. Spaceman soundtrack. He’s been one of my favorite musicians since I was a teenager. I first heard Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space in junior high, only later getting tipped off to Spacemen 3 (remember, this was pre-streaming) by my friend John when we were working at a vintage clothing store in Oxford. Spaceman’s a guy you can always trust to sound exactly like himself, in tone, composition, in this melancholic sweet blissed-out kind of feeling that only he can evoke. Last night, I watched him play the same few chords you learn in your first guitar lesson and make them sound massive and beautiful and dreamy. I also watched him watch the movie, a film he had to have seen a hundred times before, big grin smashed on his face, laughing at Eggleston’s best friend T.C. Boring’s jokes about drug abuse, frowning in disturbed fascination at the gun scene. Spaceman wasn’t watching for cues as to what to play. He was watching for pleasure.

And yeah, the music cut out when there was music from the film being played. Not a lick during Furry Lewis or Johnny Woods or Jerry McGill. It felt like more than just an attempt at not clashing with what was happening onscreen. It felt like a sign of respect. The whole night did.

And another thing. I know British people’s obsession with Southern shit gets weird, but there was something appropriate about it being J. Spaceman playing the music for this Memphis movie. Growing up in Mississippi, passing through Memphis and all the same places this movie was filmed, we weren’t really listening to blues music, or Southern rock, or anything like that. We were listening to Spiritualized. We were listening to Spacemen 3. The North Mississippi hills, the Delta flatness, Memphis foggy off the river in the morning—it was so much Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized. I have a perfect memory of sunset, summer, windows down, pulling off 55 on Highway 6, and just being astonished at the colors, the smells, the hot breeze blowing in my face. And this is what I was listening to. What I’m saying is, watching the drunkenness, the debauchery, the pain and love and suffering and wildness, all to J. Spaceman warping sound three feet away from me—it just felt right.

It made me incredibly homesick. And also very glad to be in New York.

Thanks, y’all, for a beautiful night. I’ll never forget it.