Pegasi 51 calls it "stripped-down dance music." We call it good.
by MIke Gibson
The guys in Pegasi 51 are a decidedly down-to-earth bunch. Regular joes all, they're each pushing (or maybe pulling) the 30-year mark here on planet earth, and they all hold day jobs at very terrestrial places. Take singer Rusty Yarnell, for instance, a sweet-natured, unflappable sort who works as a mechanic for Fisher Tire. Or unassuming every-guy drummer Kicki Pena, a seat-builder for Sea Ray motorboats.
Yet these earthy, dependable fellows have for more than five years produced some of Knoxville's spaciest, edgiest and most trend-oblivious rock 'n' roll, a confident melding of '80s mascara music, new wave and goth and industrial, with contemporary hard rock and dance beats. The result is a compellingly visceral and ineffably modern brand of rock—and I mean that word in its most literal sense, with none of the deplorable connotations it carries in commercial broadcasting nomenclature—a visionary sort of rock futurism defined, perversely enough, by its throwback spirit.
"I've had people come up after a show and say 'I haven't heard anything quite like that before,'" says Yarnell, reclining in a cushiony Am-vets relic at his home in East Knoxville. He and his fellow Pegasis make noise here in the back bedroom, every Tuesday and Thursday evening, 7-ish (after the day-jobs are through, natch), drinking much and lurching noisily through the band's now-considerable oeuvre of jolting ultra-post-modern heavy rock.
"I've heard the word 'refreshing' from some of the people who watched our shows," Yarnell continues. "I thought that was a pretty cool compliment."
Yarnell, for his part, almost looks like a 21st-century leather-jacket rock dude when he's not in his workaday garb, with his long, ductile form and poutily spiked black hair and the careless fag perpetually dangling from a weave of gaunt fingers. But even if his appearance sometimes nods at rockishness, the notion is given lie by his prepossessing manner and grin.
For those who've been absent, or perhaps not paying attention, Pegasi was founded in February of '97 when roomies Yarnell and Greg McGuire (guitar) found kindred spirits in brothers Kicki and Tevy Pena (bass) and began writing songs inspired by early Cult records and '80s dance, as well as the neo-retro fuzz of mid '90s hard rockers Kyuss and Monster Magnet.
Through the course of playing, according to Yarnell, "every place you can play in Knoxville," the band has undergone considerable evolution—including the addition and subsequent deletion of a keyboard player—yet held fast to its singular musical identity. Some Bauhausian flourishes are still there, especially in Yarnell's ringing vocals and fondness for echo and compression effects, as is the driving, insistent quality that lies at the heart of every Pegasi 51 song.
"I think of what we're doing as stripped-down dance music," says Kicki. "Dance music without the bullshit, with instruments, a little heavy and raw."
"There's a nervous sound to our music, a paranoia," four-stringer brother Tevy says. "It's edgy, creepy, sort of floundering and claustrophobic."
Adds Yarnell, "It's as if something's about to happen, a paranoid thing. I think we're looking for a feeling that there's not a word for yet."
The course of that paranoia has been well-charted thus far, through three excellent full-length local CD's and a couple of equally fine single/EP releases. The foursome's spring, 2001 full-length Le Petite Morte is still available at some local stores.
Yarnell explains that the Pegasis have well over 50 songs in their repertoire now, and that yet another CD is on the way: "We've got six or eight whole new songs, plus enough ideas to get in the studio and hammer out another album."
It behooves appreciative local listeners to get hold of those releases, because Pegasi 51 has become scarcer hereabouts of late. The band plays predominantly out-of-town shows, leaving the cloistered confines of Knoxville at least three times per month, and they've aggregated small pockets of fans in select southeastern cities.
Their increasingly wide-ranging travels have taken them as far afield as New York City this year (where they met Beastie Boy MCA in a run-down Chinese noodle house), and have garnered them notice in various regional publications and on-line 'zines. "We've booked shows with everybody that would book us, just for the experience," says Yarnell. "And it's worked. We're so tight now, we're automatic. We don't even need to speak on stage."
But again, let me reiterate that these Pegasi fellows are regular joes, otherwordly sonics notwithstanding. And as such their goals are realistic, perhaps even attainable for four guys from a small town playing loud music. They're more interested in pursuing their spacy muses unfettered and untethered than in chasing others' notions of success. Yarnell says he and his 'mates agree they'd like just enough help "so (they) don't have to sell CDs out of a box.
"For us, it's not about being in the Top 40 and on every playlist in the nation. This is an extended vacation from my normal routine. It's a 'great escape.'"
April 18, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 16
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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