Ken Shipley on #ShitMySylSays
The Numero Group co-founder on the veteran soul singer and the Twitter meme he inspired
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Syl Johnson is a character. Born in Mississippi in 1936, Johnson’s been singing for years and has been sampled hundreds of times by hip-hop and R&B artists. The recently released Numero Group box set, Complete Mythology, details his music from 1959 to 1971, and is damn near one of the prettiest collections The A.V. Club’s ever seen.
Numero Group didn’t just put the work into the box set because they love the music, or they wanted to win an award—they love Johnson as a person. It’s overwhelmingly clear in the liner notes to the record, and it’s even clearer on the label’s Twitter feed, where the #ShitMySylSays hashtag pops up pretty frequently. The A.V. Club talked to Numero Group co-founder Ken Shipley while he mopped the office floor about some of his favorite Syl-isms, as well as just how much he loves the dude.
The A.V. Club: How did #ShitMySylSays come about?
Ken Shipley: Over the course of about four years, we’d been doing interviews with Syl, and it got to the point where so many of the things he was saying to us were so quotable, we felt the need to keep and share with our audience what we’re up against here on a regular level. There are so many tiny bits that you felt like they were going to slip through the cracks if you didn’t start writing them down. We were recording all of it, but it wasn’t all going to make it into the CD booklet.
AVC: Some of the things he says are just so amazing.
KS: He says so many things. He’s so nuts, but brilliant and crazy and funny and charming and outlandish. He has an opinion about everything and that’s the thing about guys his age, he’s not going to have his own Twitter account. There’s not any way to get all of these elements in one place.
He did a ten minute monologue at the Old Town show, which was basically just a rambling version of #ShitMySylSays, though we try and boil it down to the nuggets and gems.
AVC: How do you cull the latest and greatest?
KS: Whoever’s on the phone with him at the time, we’re always IMing back and forth, so just whoever feels like it’s met that level, they put it up.
Here, this needs to be on the list, “You know Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan? Them motherfuckers know how to say what the people like.”
AVC: How do you think he comes up with some of this stuff?
KS: There’s a real thread in his brain of how these things come together, and it all comes back to his personal experiences and how he’s pushing them out into the world. It ebbs up against the things he’s been doing lately. Everything’s a parallel to something in his life, a song he wrote, a song he sung.
#ShitMySylSays takes things out of context, and you need context to understand him, but if you see them all together, it’s a running, uncensored train of thought, and it’s like poetry.
AVC: It’s pretty obvious that you love Syl a lot as a person, more than just as a musician.
KS: We have tons of love for him as a person. He’s like a member of our family. We wanted to take him to the world. A lot of people, when they resurrect someone’s career, they try to do a clean version of that person. Like Mavis Staples lately seems so pristine and saintly. I like that Syl’s come out with his personality, and he talks about crazy shit on stage.
There’s this one thing he always says, “Kid Rock super duper motherfucker put me back on my feet. Superfly motherfucker can’t be beat.” You hear that over and over again, and it’s almost like a little song in his brain. These are things he’s constantly remembering and thinking, “Oh, I should talk about this now.”
You don’t spend four years working with someone and not get to know them as who they actually are. Syl—people have thought of him as a hard-to-deal-with guy. He’s been extremely litigious over the past decade. The first conversation we ever had with him he said he wanted to sue us. He was just anti-working on anything because he’d been ripped off so many times. We had to endear ourselves to him, and he endeared himself to us. He’s the biggest person we’ve ever worked with, but he’s still not a celebrity. He knows my kids’ names. He’s a real person.
We don’t put #ShitMySylSays out there to embarrass him, but just to show that he’s active. His brain is very active, and he’s thinking about the gulf oil crisis, and his heart is in the right place on all of this, but how it comes out is through the lens of someone who’s older and from a different period of time. He doesn’t have all the information.
AVC: Does he get how Twitter works, or that this is happening?
KS: He namechecked Twitter onstage in Chicago, but he doesn’t really know what it is. I think he would love to know what it is, and he likes that there are people who care this much to know what he’s saying. It’s exposing him to a whole different audience of people. It’s like he needed to take that time off to become cool and relevant again.
