The Gospel According to Blind Willie Johnson 
SXSW 2010 
Music
Milligan’s Island
A resonant tenor and a barking delivery set Austin’s Malford Milligan apart from other soul singers—and that’s not the only thing.
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During his early days in Austin, Milligan prowled a favorite record store and listened to rock and roll of the Bad Company and King Crimson vein, but the city’s flourishing music scene was alien to him. On a whim, he joined a Buddhist society; at his first meeting he was mortified when the leader told him to take off his shoes—his socks were riddled with holes. But it was in the midst of the Buddhists, while voicing meditative chants, that he began to discover his talent. A voice teacher who belonged to the group heard him eight years ago and announced she was going to groom him to be a lead singer. “Blew my mind,” he says, “because it was so far removed from my reality. But all of a sudden I really wanted it.”
In 1989 he joined alternative rocker Craig Ross in a band called Stick People; their sensibility and sound were a different take on jazz fusion until one of their last gigs, in New Orleans, moved them toward something more Southern and soulful. In honor of that inspiration, Ross proposed calling a new band Storyville, after New Orleans’ notorious red-light district and the birthplace of jazz. Four years later, Ross decided to launch a solo career and later recorded a praised album, Dead Spy Report (MCA), but before he left, Storyville performed at Austin’s South by Southwest music festival. There Milligan caught the attention of a New York—based independent, November Records, which put out the band’s debut, Bluest Eyes, the next year. (The title cut was Milligan’s partly autobiographical tribute to the Toni Morrison novel The Bluest Eye.)
Though the album caused a stir in Austin, the label went under not long after. Yet even if Bluest Eyes engendered no great sales, its recording laid the foundation for a Texas supergroup. Originally from Corpus Christi, Chris Layton was the gum-chewing drummer who, with jazzlike precision, could meet and hold the pace of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s swirling, Hendrix-like style. Dumas-ex Tommy Shannon—the bassist who played on the live recordings that made white albino Johnny Winter an instant star in 1969—was Vaughan’s best friend and companion in extravagant vices and eventual recovery. (Old rock hands who are still in the business tend to drink a lot of coffee.) Likewise, Storyville’s other guitarists, David Grissom and David Holt, signed on with glowing bona fides from Lubbock and beyond. A discussion with the band, in fact, quickly is awash with nostalgia for Lubbock crap games, bootleggers, the original Stubb’s, characters walking around with pistols stuck into their jeans, and the sameness of the one-mile sections of farmland where the Milligan family chopped cotton.
All that origin and influence, plus a trace of gospel, infuses the Storyville sound. Grissom, Holt, and Milligan collaborate on the songwriting, and the band is so confident of the material, they seldom deign to play a cover; a recent exception and stunning addition to their repertoire is the Hendrix classic “Little Wing.” They’re a rock and roll band, not a blues band, which, according to conventional wisdom, is a sound marketing strategy. But the heart of the band is Milligan, and as he has grown and matured, his taste and style have echoed his rediscovery of Redding, Al Green, and other masters who share his ethnic roots. On A Piece of Your Soul, he’s at his best crying out the desperate frustration of love’s wrong turns: “Damned if I do / Damned if I don’t / You say you will / And I know you won’t / So cynical / I’ve thrown it all away.” However Storyville is packaged and promoted, its emergence is indeed a good day for the blues.
“I make records to get a wider audience and play for more people,” Milligan says. “Don’t get me wrong: I like making records. But I don’t know if anything is really good unless I bring it in front of people. One of the hardest things for me is not to sing the songs, but to talk in between and make that connection. This band has really made me be more personable, but I’m still goofy as hell; I’m not cool. With them I’ve definitely embraced soulful singing a lot more, in a stylistic sense, but also just getting at that place I need to be. Onstage the song is the master. I’ve got to go where it tells me to go. And if I’m not doing that, I’m standing on the outside looking in and feeling really bad. I don’t like being on the outside of that tune.”
And he can’t get enough of trying to find his way in. Despite tour dates from California to New York, high hopes for the release of a second single, “Blind Side,” and plans to return to the studio this summer, Milligan remains one of the most accessible Austin performers; he’s still a regular at the Antone’s jam sessions. One recent cold night finds him stomping around the club’s parking lot in flannel shirtsleeves, pumping his fist, and appearing to talk to himself. Actually he’s voicing one of his Buddhist chants, which is how he warms and psychs himself up to sing. But he’s doing this right beside the street. His breath fogs his argent hair and visage, and he looks absolutely deranged. An Austin patrolman slows down and gives him a long look. Oh, no, an observer thinks. He’s going to get arrested.
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