Metro Pulse/Insights/Knoxville: What's Your Problem?

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by Coury Z. Turczyn

"Nashville. No, Knoxville. Is there a difference?"

And with those words, I made the fateful decision to move here in 1986 to accept the only internship I was offered after graduating without honors from Michigan State University. I thought: What have I got to lose? It may take a few years before I become rich and/or famous, so I might as well keep busy. The job was at some place called Whittle Communications, a giant media empire built on snappy blurbs and expansive promises made to gullible advertisers.

But what was this "Knoxville" all about? I searched the vast reservoir of knowledge I had accumulated by then, and could only come up with one image: a humongous, golden Sunsphere thrusting into the sky not unlike the Eiffel Tower. Didn't they throw a world's fair there a few years ago? Well, that was something. And wasn't it right next to Nashville? Whatever. The more urgent concern was that it was located in the Deep South—Tennessee!—and the farthest south I'd ever been before was Sandusky, Ohio. Growing up in a Detroit suburb, you generally receive only two sources of information about the South: history-class lessons about the civil rights era and Deliverance. Neither provide much of an appealing picture. Nevertheless, clutching my 30-odd rejection letters from the cream of American journalistic institutions (not to mention Late Night With David Letterman), I boldly chose Knoxville because Knoxville foolishly chose me.

The very first thing I noticed about the city as I drove in was that the Sunsphere was, in fact, pretty damn small. Then there were all these hills that made your car engine emit labored wheezes (well, if your car was a rusting 1978 Camaro). And the heat! The humidity was enough to drown a cat. I pulled into downtown, parked the car, and decided to explore my new metropolis. I was the only one there. It was a Saturday. Early evening.

As I walked the empty streets, I felt like I was in that Charlton Heston movie where he's the last virile white male left on Earth. It was so quiet I could hear the breeze. Neck hairs prickling, I decided to get back in the car and try to find my apartment; it was in some neighborhood called Fort Sanders.

Thankfully, that first look was not the only view Knoxville afforded me. In fact, I soon found myself immersed in a genuine city. Unlike the placid subdivision I grew up in, Fort Sanders was a bustling chunk of city life with all sorts of people doing all sorts of things, a true community. There were parking lot concerts, porch parties with amateur bongo players, all-day shenanigans at the Hippy House; there were poetry readings at Vatican Pizza, subversive books at the Printer's Mark on 11th Street, big-hair shindigs at the Lone Star. I discovered a real music scene with local bands who were passionate about their own music, whereas my college town's scene consisted mostly of cover bands and weak New Wave imitators.

Branching out into the city, I found a place that was living in its own history. Northern suburbs have no sense of themselves because they often don't have much of a past, but here there were statues and plaques on every corner, reminders of what people did on these very streets a century or more ago, in buildings that were still standing. And there was an indigenous culture here, not something imported via cable television; true, you had to search it out and it wasn't ever-present, but local color was there to be found in unlikely places—the Victorian homes in Fort Sanders, The Wrangler on Northshore Drive, the original Long Branch Saloon on the Strip, Harold's Deli on Gay Street, ellaGuru's in the Old City, Dave's Music Barn way out on Clinton Highway...places that could be nowhere else but in Knoxville.

"The South" came to mean for me a region that spawns sweetly eccentric bohemians who create their own little universes—artists, musicians, writers, restaurateurs, retailers.

Yet, most native Knoxvillians I met didn't think their city was special at all. The local media seemed to do everything it could to avoid indigenous culture, printing or airing features on stuff that could happen anywhere (or was in fact happening somewhere else altogether). Why weren't the little pockets of culture I saw happening being reported or appreciated? I soon learned the unfortunate truth of Knoxville life: Knoxvillians have an inherent distrust or disdain for anything genuinely Knoxvillian. While an outsider such as myself could readily see the value of its hometown creations, natives mostly wrinkled their noses at them; the town has an inferiority complex.

For me, this explains much of downtown's moribund state; besides the historical ramifications of suburban flight, citizens and governments here have been reluctant to believe in (or support) any local, spontaneous growth—particularly if it's youthful. Stamp out the Snakesnatch Lodges, harass the Mercury Theaters, ignore the CyberFlixes until it's too late; that's not what this city needs! No, the only thing that'll save us are giant buildings that will make our city look like someplace else, whether it's Jake and C.H. Butcher's glass towers, Chris Whittle's Georgian campus, or Worsham Watkins' enclosed shopping mall. If only we can convince out-of-towners that they're in another city, then we'll be a success! How embarrassing if they found themselves in lowly Knoxville...

At the time, I thought somebody ought to do something about that; me, I had a writing career to start (though some bastard at the Knoxville Journal, Barry Henderson, turned me down when I demanded my own column). But a funny thing happened in 1991—five or six local rags were being published that actually wrote about the local scene (to varying degrees of quality). The best of the lot was Metro Pulse, a tabloid that seemed to have aspirations to become more than just a hodgepodge of music blurbs. So I thought I'd contribute to them, maybe write a column about the funny things I saw happen in dive bars; then I started doing movie reviews and writing features; and then suddenly I was managing editor.

Here's my chance, I thought. I'm going to find writers to report on the things I find interesting about this town; I'm going to show Knoxvillians what's cool about their own city—and what's really wrong with it. Perhaps then they'll stop whining so damn much and finally get to work on improving things, or maybe just go out and see a show.

Of course, I was a naive 28-year-old then; I didn't realize what I was up against. But the writers we hired then were damn good: Betty Bean, Lee Gardner, Jack Neely, Shelly Ridenour, Chris Barrett... Surely, with this kind of talent, people would pay attention to the local color we celebrated and the issues we exposed, maybe even develop an active interest. Nearly 10 years later, and many writers and stories later, I'm still hoping. I believe we've had a certain measure of success in improving the quality of life here and in puncturing that inferiority complex, but other times (as in the whole insanely exclusionary process behind the Worsham Watkins "masterplan" for downtown redevelopment) I wonder if Knoxville will ever change, or if enough people will even care.

I think, in just about any other city, Metro Pulse would've been widely appreciated as a great resource; here, I often get the impression we're mostly tolerated. Which is a shame, because in my professional opinion, Metro Pulse is one of the best alternative weeklies of its size in the country, with higher ambitions and professionalism than most. And with the number of prizes we've been awarded from out-of-state contest judges, people who don't live in Knoxville think so, too.

But, after nearly a decade of weathering physical and legal threats, name-calling, accusations, conspiracy theories, boycotts, demands, commands, as well as your run-of-the-mill angry emails, phone calls, faxes, and sudden visits from the greater Knoxville population, I find my stamina for such things greatly diminished. It's time for me to go back at tackling that writing career I was hoping for nine years ago. Fortunately, we have a go-getter by the name of Jesse Fox Mayshark to tackle the editor's job (he's still brimming with youthful energy) and veteran editor Barry Henderson to manage the crew (allow me to point out that it took two people to replace me).

I'd like to thank publisher Joe Sullivan for making Metro Pulse a financial reality, art director Lisa Horstman for bringing it to such vibrant visual life, Jack Neely for showing Knoxville its soul, systems manager Ian Blackburn for sticking it out, Hillari Dowdle for giving me the confidence to do the job, our loyal readers for forgiving our shortcomings, and the dozens of employees over the years who put their sweat into a publication that demanded much of them.

Believe in your city, and let it be what it is.