Memphis in the Meantime
Memphis and memories to cure the unemployment blues
Memphis was my first grown-up solo road trip when I was 21, three weeks after Kurt Cobain died. I worked as the assistant for a family that owned some shitty motels around the Midwest, which meant covering all parts of the hotel when needed, doing the books, picking up my boss’s kids from school, and trying to dodge the creepy head of maintenance, who was in his 60s and liked telling me how much real men like fat girls.
He was a Ruby Ridge/Waco conspiracy theorist, and that’s probably part of the reason why I’m a leftist now.
I got a concussion the day Kurt Cobain died. These events were coincidental. I took a sharp blow to my right temple in a way that’s too ridiculous to even discuss. When I left for work an hour later (ill-advised), I heard the news when I started my car. I assumed I had misheard or was imagining it, as I was starting to realize my brain wasn’t right.
Because I was acting pretty squirrly from the blow to my head, my boss let me leave early so I could drive myself to the ER. I took off a few days to recover and was eventually fine.
The only lingering issue: I was supposed to go to a convention in Memphis later in the month, riding with some ladies from the Columbia Convention and Visitors Bureau. We were working together to encourage charter bus tour groups to visit Missouri. They wanted me to wear cowboy boots. Okay.
Except when I was out with my concussion, my boss mentioned my injury to one of the CVB ladies. Somehow, she assumed that meant I wouldn’t be joining them in Memphis three weeks later. We learned of this the day before the trip.
Even though my presence was erased from the trip (fine with me, as I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing), my boss sent me anyway. “Just drive your own car. You’ll be fine.” Okay.
So, with no credit card or even a paper map, I took off for Memphis all by myself.
My reservation at the crumbling Days Inn on the river bluff south of downtown was a haul from the convention center downtown, which I navigated through road signs. Parking nowhere near the center, I walked and walked through what’s now bright and touristy. But back then, for every street that had a landmark like the Peabody Hotel, there was a neighboring street that gave me sickening butterflies.
My feet were bloody with blisters inside my cheap boots by the time I found the convention center, where I was informed I would be dining at a large table of tour providers, selling them on the winning reasons to visit Missouri (Branson) and why they should stay at our motels (please don’t). I was instructed to get up and walk toward the stage, clapping in rhythm when “the band plays a kind of funky song that says ‘Memphis’.” Okay.
What I did: I drank free glasses of cheap white zinfandel on an empty stomach, smirked at our host (TV’s John Davidson), turned down a much older tour provider when he invited me to have a drink at his hotel, and hobbled away to the strains of a Branson-ified take on Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee” with a bunch of people clapping on the one and three before I got the hell out of there.
That night, I drove all over Memphis. Still mapless, I went in circles, somehow finding the places I wanted to see: Sun Studio, Graceland, the Mississippi River, and everything in between. I didn’t get out of my car anywhere, mostly because I was broke, my feet were in dire condition, and some of the places where I saw signs of life didn’t seem conducive to me continuing mine. I accidentally crossed into West Memphis, Arkansas, and feared I was going to remain stuck on the access road to I-40 until I got to Little Rock. But I just drove, committing the locations of the places I wanted to visit the next day to memory.
It was 5 a.m. when I returned to my room and immediately fell asleep, only for a phone call from my mom to wake me an hour later. She’d called the Days Inn repeatedly in the night to check on me and was having a bit of a freak-out. Which … rightfully so. But I was doing just fine. Because 21-year-olds don’t require sleep to live.
That day, in much more forgiving shoes, I ate a flaming hot fried banana cream pie at Sun Studio. The studio hadn’t been open for tours for long at that point, and the building hadn’t been reconfigured yet. One side was still the diner where Sam Phillips negotiated recording contracts with Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis … all the early rockabilly artists I had loved since childhood. I hung out until another person arrived for a tour.
The guide led the two of us to the other side, where the studio was located. It didn’t take long for her to realize we both had better-than-average music history knowledge, and she wasn’t telling us much that we didn’t already know. “Do you want to just listen to a bunch of the master recordings that were made here? “
Fuck yes, we very much do want to do that.
And that was my first tour of Sun Studio—spending an hour in the studio, listening to the hissing tapes that ran as legends played.
I’ve been to Memphis many times since then. Nothing has yet to top that experience of being lost, alone, bloody, exhausted, and absolutely electrified by what I was hearing. It was freedom. And it matched what I was feeling, for real, for the first time in my life.
I feel the need to mention that, while I was in Memphis having a life-altering musical experience, Johnny and June Carter Cash were in Columbia and stayed at the shitty motel where my office was located. They played a small club on April 22nd.
On April 26th, Johnny released the first of the American Recordings albums.
To this day, I wonder if meeting Johnny and June—he sang “Amazing Grace” by the pool with the motel manager for fuck’s sake!—would have had an even bigger impact on me than that lost night and once-in-a-lifetime day in Memphis. I still don’t have an answer.
For the next ten years, Memphis was always my road trip destination of choice. I had a couple of youthful romantic rendezvous in Memphis. Celebrated my first wedding anniversary there. And my 30th birthday. But once motherhood hit, my trips slowed. I’d only been twice between 2004 and 2025.
Memphis is less than a five-hour drive for me, but I don’t go nearly often enough. It had been nearly seven years since I’d been to Memphis when I spent a night there on my way to New Orleans last April.
Things have changed.
I only spent a night, because Memphis feels like old hat to me, even though I haven’t spent much time there, and there’s plenty of stuff I miss and new stuff I want to experience. Memphis is a city I take for granted, probably because it was gifted to me when I was just a kid. It’ll always be there.
But the New Madrid fault line is so close, waiting to make the Mississippi River flow backwards again, taking this city with it. Never mind the evil forces that installed the world’s largest supercomputer in a poor, mostly Black part of town last year.
I should appreciate Memphis more. A city that’s always taken care of me when I was too young to take care of myself. It should be more to me than just a pit stop on my way to the blues highway. And the next trip will be.
I’ve only been to Memphis twice but thoroughly enjoyed both visits. Still found it a little sketchy in places - but I could say the same thing about St. Louis, and I’m always recommending it. I’ll get down to Gonerfest one of these years.