Who is Benjamin Smoke?

by Ryan Mauldin

Donning a frayed, cotton dress and a shabby beehive wig, she drags on her cigarette and teases the audience with intermittent flashes of skin, if only they will pay for a glimpse. Ms. Opal Foxx, né Robert Dickerson, queen of a thriving, close-knit music scene in Cabbagetown, a former mill town in Atlanta, Georgia, is the inspiration for David Dorfman's production Come, and Back Again, which explores "the mess we create and the mess we leave behind."

In the late 1980s Benjamin, Dickerson's elected moniker, fronted the Opal Foxx Quartet, then the premier group of Cabbagetown’s underground music scene, which included the Jody Grind with Kelly Hogan and Chan Marshall (Cat Power). Opal Foxx, between 10 and 14 members, was a junkyard jamboree of rock, blues, and honkytonk filtered through a punk ethos and the gravelly baritone of its cross-dressing frontman, a confluence of Flannery O’Connor and the Cockettes. The band’s debut album, The Love That Won’t Shut Up (an allusion to Lord Alfred Douglass’ line, “the love that dare not speak its name”), included songs produced by Michael Stipe, who saw them perform in Athens.

A Rare Jem

by Adriana Leshko

Jem Cohen is a filmmaker, photographer, teacher, and activist whose career has been inexorably intertwined with music—from his earliest years forging an artistic identity in the DC punk scene, to the non-traditional “documentaries” about bands like Fugazi and Smoke that put him on the larger cultural map, to his long term relationships with musicians Patti Smith (an executive producer of Cohen’s recent, rapturously reviewed feature film Museum Hours) and Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto, both frequent collaborators.

What he is not is a music video director. Or, as he puts it: “It was always my intention to pull ‘music videos’ as far away from being commercial promos as possible.” Still, over a long and varied career, he has made numerous short films set to the music of artistic friends and colleagues, including R.E.M, Elliot Smith, Jonathan Richman, and many, many others.

Here, in honor of Jem’s BAM mainstage debut at the BAM Harvey this Thursday with the film and music hybrid We Have an Anchor—featuring live performances by Guy Picciotto (Fugazi), Jim White (Dirty Three), T. Griffin (The Quavers),  Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor), Jessica Moss (Thee Silver Mt. Zion), Sophie Trudeau (Godspeed You! Black Emperor), as well as special guest vocalist Mira Billotte (White Magic)—we present one of our utterly subjective favorites: an intimate, workaday domestic and artistic portrait of rock goddess Patti Smith at her most human, set to Smith’s mesmerizing cover of Nirvana’s "Smells like Teen Spirit" (with cameos by Smith’s cats and her son Jackson):