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Souvenirs

by Mike Dotson

It's easy to give 3 and a half stars to a CD & be done with it if you don't know the musicians. It's not so easy if you've heard those songs 30 times, lyrics spouting from a familiar impassioned face. Like when the first V-Roys CD, Just Add Ice came out—how could I separate it from the V(ice)roys' many New Year's Eves at Tomato Head & insufferably hot summer nights in Mercury Theater? Then there was that one New Years Morn I struggled to consciousness in Fort Sanders' emergency room & the last thing I could remember was the V-Roys starting their encore nine hours earlier. When Just Add Ice came out, it took me months to place it in my petty ranking of the 10 best CDs of the year, because the other nine were mere plastic objects from the store. I just couldn't stir my V-Roys in with them at all.

So I have to tell you about some recorded musical artifacts of our just-barely-big-enough town with its demographically overbearing campus, & I won't—I can't—do it from the Rolling Stone Record Guide perspective. Don't care to.

Remember Vatican Pizza? I'd never settled into hanging out anywhere on the Strip, as much as my friends liked Sam & Andy's, & in spite of my best friend from high school opening a place that often hosted top Athens bands. Just never got that comfortable hanging anywhere-until two brothers, Chris & Danny opened the Vatican in the late 80s at the downtown end of Fort Sanders, across Forest Avenue from the site of the Fort's most venerable old neighborhood bar, the Yardarm. Their fit-for-a-pope pizza was copied from Fellini Pizza, where at least one of the brothers had spent some time behind the counter during the early days of that, now, nearly mainstream Atlanta eatery.

The Vatican is the first bar I can remember just hanging out in, no matter what was going on. I'd walk over from my downtown office in a suit for lunch & then return in the evening dressed more like the jackbooted kids that filled the place. In summertime, the Red Stripe would always foam about 4 ounces out onto the bar when you opened it. RB & Swifty & Jack Neely & Rus Harper regularly slammed poetry at the Vatican, probably before slam rules had been written. Once every few weeks, a beat-up van would stop by to disgorge a first rate thrash band.

Chris & Danny's own band, Jesus Chrysler, rattled the Vatican walls & shook up the Red Stripes now & then. They put out a respectable LP, This YearÍs Savior (Toxic Shock, reviewed elsewhere in this issue). But their recording that really got me was an anthem of identity based on consumerish lust, "I Wanna Be," on their 7 inch EP Turn or Burn. No Knoxville song was repeated as often on Unradio.

This bar/pizzeria had less accommodating landlords than its namesake & closed the doors after not too many months. In the Old City, on the other side of downtown, Ashley Capps was making Ella Guru one of the hottest stages in the world, hosting Townes Van Zandt, Sun Ra's Arkestra, King Sunny Ade, and Mose Allison before a just-barely-big-enough crowd from all over. Steve Dupree, a civilizing presence there most nights, likes to tell about folks flying down from NYC to catch a show at Ella. The interior was as wacky as you'd expect from a place named after a character in a Captain Beefheart song. Fanciful, beautifully crafted metalwork separated the two levels of tables. Painter Andy Saftel gave the bartop a colorful, mindblown surface. I spent about 3 nights a week there, usually among friends, but it wasn't a hangout—it was for dinner & the concert.

Ashley often hosted RB Morris & the Irregulars, which was basically Hector Quirko's blues band plus RB doing RB's Beat Knoxville Bard thing in song. Now & then, D. Void eased into the house & once, after a few late night beers with RB, agreed to publish RB's first recording, Local Man, a cassette sporting a Steve Pogue painting of dancers on the cover. The male in the painting's center appears to be dancing right through his partner, just like the dance instructors tell you to do. In fact, his posture is that of a man Steve once saw stepping off a bridge into thin air. I have to admit, I initially bought Local Man just because I like RB personally—I'd enjoyed his poetry but never heard him sing. (So maybe this is a more objective take than you'll get on the other recordings here.) Oh yes! Make a back up copy; this tape is a keeper! I'll never tire of these performances. I don't know of any better music in the world that has been released only on cassette.

RB's Knoxville Sessions CD postdates this cassette & Take That Ride (reviewed elsewhere) was recorded still later. Both are better in many ways, but most songs on Local Man are not repeated on the CDs. The music is more rockin' & the lyrics more Knox-centric & Orphic than the two CDs. And, for this listener neither CD resonates with a familiar time and place like Local Man. Last time I asked D. Void, there were a few untouched copies left—ask RB.

Ella's original incarnation succumbed to familiar problems of downtown development & made a second go of it in the Foundry on the worlds fair site before transforming into AC Entertainment & saving the Tennessee Theater etc., etc., etc.

At the beginning of this decade, Tomato Head was mostly a day-time restaurant & night life on Market Square consisted of sitting around with the homeless watching the Tomato Head staff drink their after-closing beers behind locked doors. At least you could skate. Then, Mercury Theater & the Snake Snatch Lodge stirred things up for a few years. Jackie Arthur's shot-lived Snake Snatch was the closest I've ever come to finding a home away from home. On the wall by the front door, writ large, were Thoreau-like words, "Oh for a lodge in the wilderness!" I don't know whether Jackie's buddy Steve Pogue has ever mixed a highball, but he's still my all time favorite bartender. He popped the tops on a million of the best tasting Pabst Blue Ribbons ever served. He painted the big reclining nude behind the bar & a few other items that inhabited our reveries for those few months that the place was opened before a dozen skinheads blew through with broken bottles and cursed the space.

Saturday nights we'd be packed three-deep at the bar. Pushing past that nicotine-rich crowd to see who was in the back or to stand in line at the bathroom was a real big city, tiny bar experience, very rare to these parts. Indie rock usually issued from a cassette player behind the bar, but the John Spencer Blues Explosion, Sleepyhead and Royal Trux veered through town to play in that little wide space at the back, past the long bar. Knoxville music delights Terry Hill, The Lawn Darts & the Rude Street Peters roused patrons' hearts month after month. Guitarists Eric Lee & Dave Wilson, whose current band is Dark Logik (previously Idle Hands), played their first show together here with Peyton Wilson wailing & Jim Conn banging upended plastic paint buckets.

Terry Hill often stood around the Snake Snatch on one foot smoking, pulling the other foot up behind him with his free hand like a gymnast preparing for a set. Terry never otherwise looked like a gymnast, but he's a guitar acrobat of the first rank. He's tutored lots of Knoxville's six string stuntmen.

Terry'd found some rockin' success in the arena rock 80's & ended up in lower Manhattan during the No Wave days, doing more listening than playing in public. At the beginning of the 90s he brought back to Knoxville a fragmented esthetic of lyrics that plumb the psyche way beyond Elvis Costello's nervous stabs and full force arena guitar crashing over elaborate songs-songs that were crafted with close filigree comparable to that of Steely Dan and discreetly bore stylistic infusions from Zappa and traditional musics of North & South Africa.

When the Snatch first opened its doors, Terry Hill was just finishing up a series of shows at Manhattans with his Semiconductors band featuring Smokin' Dave Nichols on bass & Steve Brown on drums. They'd recorded a CD, Beauty that came out soon after the Snake Snatch closed. One of Beauty's songs describes the broken down eroticism smoldering in a departed girlfriend's abandoned clothing. A chilling blues on hard drugs ends confronting a well-armed selfmonster.

Many of Beauty's songs found new life in the Snake Snatch, performed with XTC brevity & a lighter, pop mix by Terry's Plynth quartet. Plynth included most significantly the reclusive Paul Jones on keys & benefited from the mix of Jamie Shoemaker, later Superdrag's sound man. They recorded and mixed a CD that's not out yet. We've heard little of Terry with a band since then.

The Rude Street Peters may have played the Snake Snatch more than anyone. Their cassette Don't Make Me Get Up (reviewed elsewhere in this issue) is my favorite because it reminds me of the best shows, even though It Only Hurts When I Exist has more of their best songs. The Peters are still carrying on around town. Play it again, Peters.