The beer license on the wall says "2006" but they party like it's 1999 in this joint. We readily admit to having long lost our patience for the travel writers who come to southern juke joints expecting/hoping to stumble into some scene from 1936: coal oil lamps, moonshine, and a cat in a fedora playing a blistering slide guitar. This standard for the juke experience is naive, impossible, and not a little presumptuous about our progress down South.
Would-be time travelers take heart. The L&B is here for you. But instead of transporting you to that elusive, ethereal juke joint experience, this joint takes you back to that decade of decadence: the 1980s.
We pulled up to the place, saw the hand-painted exterior of the building, with white Doric columns on a black background, and a silhouette band announcing, Morris Lounge: Featuring the Total Package Band. We figured we were in business. The interior decoration pretty much kept with the theme: birthday party streamers (it's always either Christmas or somebody's b-day in a juke joint), and security TV screens showing the parking lot. The bar had a total of five people in it.
Three more heads popped out of the kitchen as we entered, all looking completely fucking shocked to have guests. Morris himself greeted us and said, totally convincingly, that he and the band were just getting ready to crank it up, why don't we have a seat, sure he'll bring some beer right over, they have a new vocalist, and he'd like to hear what we think of her progress. Morris- a 45-year-old black man- assured us that he'd been practicing his Michael McDonald voice, and working on some Journey songs. I felt racially profiled. He spoke with the speed and self-confidence of a man in the embrace of the powdery pixie of the ‘80s.
All of the artists and 99% of the clientele at Memphis jukes are black, most of them middle-aged. So nothing had prepared us for the Total Package Band's vocalist, Kim Woo, a fairly hot white chick in her early to mid 20s. There are jukes in town that see heavy tourist traffic, but this isn't one of them. We never quite figured out what brought Ms. Kim into the package.
The Total Package includes Morris on lead bass and vocals, some dude on double-stack synthesizer, a drummer, and Kim singing lead and backup. Kim played both Wendy AND Lisa to Morris' Prince in the set we heard, kicked off with a "1999> Controversy" medley, wound up with "Purple Rain," with a few stops outside the early Prince and the Revolution canon in between. Not the best band working the scene. Kim, according to Morris had been, "singing a lot of karaoke" prior to her joining the band.
All in all, a bizarre, highly entertaining night. If you're visiting and have one night on the town, this probably shouldn't be your first stop, but if you're on a citywide juke joint crawl from the sublime to the absurd, you can't miss this.