Michael Shipp of Benton has performed with ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons and Arkansas Billy Bob Thornton

 

Michael Shipp of Benton has had music ingrained into him for most of his life. And the effort has paid off. Through the years, Shipp has performed with such people as fellow Arkansan Billy Bob Thornton and ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons. But what it really all comes down to is the music.

Shipp grew up in Blytheville, located approximately 60 miles from Memphis.

"It was in the mid '60s," Shipp said. "There was a rather big music thing."

Shipp soon became interested in the "British invasion" of bands like The Rolling Stones and the Monkees.

"It always identified with me," Shipp said. "I think [part of it] was the historical aspect."

When Shipp heard his first Les Paul guitar, he was hooked. However, Shipp was not satisfied to simply listen to and appreciate these bands' music. He wished to know more.

"I had to know--where did they get all of this?" Shipp said. "It was kind of like a magical thing. It came back to where I was raised."

Growing up near Memphis guaranteed Shipp one thing: he had the opportunity to listen to many of the great musicians of the time.

"Muddy Waters, the Kings of Music," Shipp said. "They are my heroes."

One of Shipp's heroes stuck in his mind, however.

"Johnny Cash--he was always for the underdog," Shipp said.

Shipp first began to seriously play music in high school, where he joined the band. Shortly after graduation, he met Thornton. "I knew Billy through his brother," Shipp said. "He [Thornton] was my drummer for 10 years."

They formed the band Tres Hombres and moved to Houston to pursue their careers.

"We were booked as a ZZ Top tribute kind of act," Shipp said.

In 1983, Shipp was nominated for the Texas Music Awards New Guitarist of the Year. Tres Hombres was doing well, and the band got ready to cut a new record.

"Then, there was a recession, and I moved back here," Shipp said.

The band did not record together again until Thornton got the idea to do SLING BLADE, the movie that made him famous. He came back to Arkansas to film and ended up calling on Shipp for help.

 "Some of the jam session parts were recorded at my house," Shipp said. "We had so much fun that we decided to do it again. I wanted to make it my career."

Thornton released an album and did a 12-country tour, with Shipp, in 2002 and 2003. Shipp's own record came out  in December 2003. Toward the end of the project, Shipp asked his friend, producer Steve Tolson, to get involved.

"Producing, mixing and remastering," Tolson said. "We worked well together."

Tolson said that Shipp's album, entitled THE ADVENTURES OF ROOSTERBOY, is more of a story than anything else.

"The concept is that it's about a young man in the South and his trials and tribulations," Tolson said. "It flows as a movie and each song is a scene. This makes it a real listening experience."

Shipp also found help through Gibbons, with whom his guitar style has often been compared.

"He took me under his wing," Shipp said. "It was a special deal."

The album was mostly recorded in Nashville, with Kimberly Dahme on background vocals and Col. Bruce Hampton joining in on certain songs, particularly If You Had a Soul. "He sounds like Foghorn Leghorn on a cell phone," Shipp said. "The song has gone over real well with people."

Tolson said that Hampton recorded the song in an unusual way--over the telephone.  "I told him I would let the phone ring four times and the machine would pick up," Tolson said. "We recorded the song off of my answering machine. You can even hear the beep at the end."

Another memorable song on the album is Voices, which discusses what Shipp terms "self-righteous people." Recording the song took a large effort and was, in many ways, the hardest to record.  "We brought in Walter Cronkite's report of the day JFK was shot, as well as evil little kids' voices from a movie I had seen but couldn't remember the name of," Shipp said. "We were set to do all of this on 9/11."

Shipp said that after hearing the news, he and the crew sat around for most of the day, trying to absorb what had happened.

"Around midnight that night, we decided to go ahead and record the song," Shipp said.

"But every time we tried to edit the song, we had a problem. We always felt that we were haunted by those kids."

The song that Shipp will always remember recording, however, is I Still Miss Someone, a Johnny Cash original.  "It was the first song I learned on guitar, when I was 8 or 10 years old, and it was also the first song I ever rearranged," Shipp said.

Cash heard about Shipp's attempt to record the rendition of I Still Miss Someone and called to say that he would like to be a part of the process.

They met in Los Angeles, where the band was temporarily recording.  Shipp laughed as he recalled the night before he met Cash.  "[Billy] and I got paranoid--convinced it was a huge mistake. Billy asked, "What if he doesn't like it?"'" Shipp said.

"It was three hours before we were supposed to meet them. For the next three hours, we practiced and practiced the song."

They needn't have worried, however. Cash showed up, intently listened to them perform, and then said, "I like what you did with my song."

Shipp also found out at that time that Cash had written I Still Miss Someone the first night that he met June, who would later become his wife.

Although the song did not make it onto Shipp's record, he performs it at every concert in a tribute to his lifelong musical hero.

At this time, Shipp is working on some new projects and hopes to have a new record out by next spring. Tolson hopes the new record will be as memorable as the first.

"It was by far one of the most creative experiences I've ever had the privilege of working with," Tolson said. "It's all about art."