Save the Fort, Part 3

Love the Fort but don't like the poetry or can't stand the singer/songwriters? Then this, my friend, is for you. The great Bill Mize and the traditional Irish folk band The Travelers (featuring Evan Carawan) will be tickling your eardrums on Oct. 23 at the Bistro at the Bijou. All proceeds, including the $5 door charge, will go to the Historic Fort Sanders Neighborhood Association, who will use it for legal fees and future support-the-Fort activities. The event is also a wonderful warm-up for the Nov. 3 City Council meeting. Great music for a great cause. Now get your buns down there already.

Knox Radio: 801.

MP Readers: 1.My recent tirade about the morning show change (bringing in a satellite feed of Chicago's Man Cow) at 94.3 "Extreme Radio" has brought in a spate of letters from concerned readers. I thought I'd share one of them, in the hopes of finding someone to rally to the Cow's defense:

"In the volume 8, number 40 issue of your magazine, Shane Cox's statements finally prove once and for all that he truly can't tell his ass from a hole in the ground. He states that, "syndication is the wave of the future" and that, "a rock station, to keep its listeners, has got to have a major rock 'n' roll morning show." If this were even remotely true, then why have I quit listening to WNFZ on my morning drive to work? I'll tell you why, because that crap-in-a-can they call a morning show sucks like a new Hoover! How do you keep your listeners when you drive them away with an obnoxious show that hardly ever even plays a song? Is Shane trying to outpace WIMZ in the race to lose Arbitron points and listeners? Maybe his less than shining days at WIMZ have finally swallowed him whole. I still listen to 94.3, but not in the mornings. I want music not crap-in-a-can. Shane, pull your head out of the sand and listen for a minute. That sound isn't people cheering for you..."

Keith Moore
Knoxville

Go 'Roys!

The V-Roys second album, All About Town, has been out for only days, but is already getting some of the attention in the national music press they've deserved for years.

Billboardmagazine, the music industry weekly—with the emphasis on industry—never makes a big deal of a band unless its editors are convinced the band is going to make somebody a whole lot of money. Somebody in the know is apparently hearing cash-registers ringing in the background of All About Town, because the Oct. 10 Billboard gave the V-Roys a prominent profile—with photo—on the first page of the national weekly's "Artists & Musicians" section.

The article, headlined "E-Squared's V-Roys Rock This 'Town,'" quotes Jerry Gerard, disc jockey for Lexington's WRVG, who calls the 'Roys "just a great, kicking American aggregation, almost a modern equivalent of Creedence Clearwater Revival."

The profile also quotes Shane Tymon, manager of Knoxville's Disc Exchange, confirming that the 'Roys' first album, Just Add Ice was "easily the best-selling title" in Disc Exchange's 10-year history.

Label E-Squared is currently marketing the full album mainly to radio stations with "roots formats," but two singles—Mike Harrison's "Amy 88" (Billboard calls it "a driving uptempo rocker") and the Scott Miller/Steve Earle collaboration "Arianne" are going out on special promotional CDs to triple-A commercial stations across the country.

Meanwhile All About Town got a four-star ("excellent") rating in the October Stereo Review. The reviewer, well-known music biographer Alanna Nash, wrote, "what stands out is the band's cornucopia of sounds: a buzzing saw of an electric guitar, a sneering snare, an angry bass. For all the simplicity of its subject matter, the music here is as complex as good pop music gets. In their close-cut suits and ties, the V-Roys may look like frat boys, but they play like mothers."

—Zippy "My Mother Rocks" McDuff