Metro Pulse/Secret History/Two Masters

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David Brandt and Terry Hill, RIP

by Jack Neely

Two old friends died this month. I doubt they knew each other. They were a generation apart, lived in different parts of town. They had nothing in common except that they were both demanding, accomplished, and influential musicians and rare human beings of a sort we'll never see again.

David Brandt was, for 33 years, the exuberant organist and choirmaster at First Presbyterian. Sometime back in the '60s, I was in his junior choir. He kept us on our toes. When he was especially frustrated, or when he was especially pleased, he would blurt something out in rapid-fire German. Sometimes he'd greet me on the sidewalk in German, and tried to teach me a few phrases, which I never mastered. He spoke English well, with a German accent—a fact which stuck out in a church where the rare foreigner tended to be Scottish.

When he retired, he returned to his native country, where he died. I didn't know until I was an adult that his native country was North Carolina. He had picked up the accent during a postwar sojourn in Austria.

The composer worthiest of Herr Brandt's attention was his would-be countryman J.S. Bach. He played Bach on the church's massive organ with power, fury, and, whenever possible, speed. Some of the older folks who weren't used to his pace found it alarming. He even played old saws like the Doxology at competitive velocity, as though he were racing with the laggard congregation to finish it long before they did and, if he could, lap them once or twice on the way. It was thrilling.

David Brandt defined my concept of what church music, and classical music in general, should be. Thanks to him, it seems to me that the only good way to play a hymn is fast and loud, a half-beat ahead of the choir. It keeps the blood flowing, which is no mean task in a Presbyterian sanctuary. He'd sometimes stretch the service 15 or 20 minutes longer than the ministers expected it to go, and I never minded a bit. For him, every Sunday-morning service was the Götterdämmerung.

Along the way, he inspired other artists who went on to bigger, if not better, things than the First Presbyterian Church. Several of his choir members, including Soprano Cheryl Studer and mezzo-soprano Delores Ziegler, became opera stars who have performed at the Met and made recordings with some of the great orchestras of the world. Ziegler came back to sing at his service at the church this past Sunday afternoon.

And, as most folks have heard by now, Terry Hill died on Nov. 1 at the age of 48. I first knew Terry Hill as most people did, as a rock 'n' roll legend. About 25 years ago, he was the guitarist's guitarist, the finest electric guitarist in Knoxville, a status that remained his, as he played in a whole spectrum of bands, until this month. As a producer and sound man, he brought out the best in other musicians' recordings.

Terry started out in Knoxville but was in New York in the mid-'70s, when punk was brewing. Terry learned from the era's most daring bands, and brought what he learned back here. If most of the musicians I know are credible, he changed Knoxville music. After Terry returned, downtown musicians could no longer get away with imitating radio bands. He raised our standards.

He had strong and uncompromisable convictions that he expressed with blue-eyed intensity, but he was interested in people. He was a kind and generous friend. He approached even unmusical clods like me with an almost courtly politeness. Terry worried about us. If he heard you cough, he'd look concerned, and propose a remedy. He never worried about himself, and that may have been the tragedy of his life.

As a guitarist, he sometimes played in tight deference to the song, but he was attracted to warped melodies and sometimes he took off on flights that one friend aptly described as "astral." His style, I thought, owed more to jazz than to heavy metal. He sometimes wielded his guitar like a saxophone, taking it unfamiliar places. Sometimes I could follow along for the ride, and sometimes the ride left me dizzy.

If he had a fault as a performer, it was one that true musicians might call a strength: he cared about the music, and the music only. He was oblivious to stage presence. A stocky guy, not very tall, freckled, he went bald early, and never wasted much effort on what wispy blond hair remained. He relied instead on his earnest intensity.

I agreed with him, in theory, that the music was the thing, that everything else was superficial. But sometimes, when he played, watching him could be unsettling. Terry, the earnest, kind, eager conversationalist, vanished. The intensity that animated his face in quiet conversation seemed to drain from his head, the blood, the energy; everything seemed to go into his guitar. As he played he'd close his eyes for minutes at a time and, except for a twitch, Terry appeared to be away, gone somewhere. One of the last times I saw him play, he looked like a man being electrocuted. I had to look away.

Everyone who'd ever tried to play a guitar was awed by the sounds he made, and many were inspired. Of the hundreds who appeared at his funeral in Bearden early this month, maybe half were musicians who had learned from him or played with him. "Terry was not of this world," said the Methodist minister, his uncle. Everyone agreed. One friend compared him to Yoda.

Still, he was uncommonly curious about this world. In his own apartment in South Knoxville were things that interested him—books, thousands of recordings, a ham radio—and, really, not much else. It was like a treehouse occupied by an unusually intelligent kid. One of the things that interested him surprised me. In all our conversations about history, philosophy, and the necessity of punk rock, he'd never mentioned it. But once, maybe a decade ago, he had me sit down in his kitchen, and got me a can of beer. He was not drinking at the time, but kept a beer or two in his refrigerator for friends. Then the legend of electric guitar brought out his stamp collection.

It was an impressive collection, as far as I could tell, pages of ancient and exotic scraps of the world, of places he never visited. He said it was a tangible way of learning about history and geography. He knew the stories behind several, stories of civil wars and toppled dynasties.

In his latter months, his liver was failing him. He had hopes to get a transplant, and as transplant nominees do, he had all of his teeth removed, a routine preparatory procedure to minimize the threat of infection. He was told that sometimes, because of the limited supply of healthy livers, a patient has to be in very bad shape before they move to the top of the transplant list. He had to prove he needed a transplant. He took his final illness as a positive development.

I never saw him with his teeth gone, except in a picture taken by his longtime companion and ally, Jenny Arthur. On a sunny day he's carrying a melon into a car at a Chapman Highway market, smiling his toothless old man's smile in spite of everything.

We'll say goodbye to Terry at a special wake this Saturday, beginning at the Unitarian Universalist Church on Kingston Pike at 7 p.m., then moving eventually to the Preservation Pub for performances of some of Terry's work by some of his friends and admirers.