Metro Pulse/Music/Eye on the Scene

Just Enough Years in the Circus

Dave Nichols, bass player of the legendary Knoxville band, Smokin' Dave and the Premo Dopes, will be moving home at the end of May. Nichols has spent the last eight years touring as a guitar player with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, keeping a relentless road schedule. "Mainly I'm just coming back because I love Knoxville. I want to live there," Nichols says from New York City, where the circus is doing a month of shows. "We travel almost 50 weeks out of the year. I feel like I've done it, if not too long, long enough.... I'm really excited about moving back, getting off the road, getting into a house."

Nichols plays guitar for the whole 2-1/2-hour circus show, sometimes two or three times a day. "By the end of a two-year run, we've played the same show 900 or 1,000 times. And it doesn't change much," he says.

It's hasn't been all hard work, though. He's gone everywhere in the United States, getting to stay in the major cities for a month at a time. "We live on the train and that train travels all over the country. We have some incredible runs through California and Utah and Washington State. Train tracks go a lot of places highways don't go."

He's looking forward to playing out, but doesn't have any plans at the moment. "Every time I come in to town and I get a chance to play with guys, it's so much fun," he says.

There's a reason it's called 'KnoxVegas'

Picture this, if you can: Beside a Ringling Bros. circus train in a ruined post-industrial landscape of dead freight cars and roofless warehouses, a half-dozen men disguised in helmets and fireproof suits pour scrap iron into a white-hot furnace as a rock 'n' roll band plays. People are eating piles of dead crawfish and long brown objects from a box marked Tiger Kitty Litter. Faces peer curiously out of the circus train as a bald, rotund and nearly naked tattooed man drives nails horizontally into his face via his nostril. He has a target on his back, and a girl throws darts; they pierce his skin. He lies on broken glass as women walk on his back. He hangs flatirons from his nipples and his scrotum and they swing, in gentle arcs. Then things begin to explode in the bonfire, and dozens of missiles whiz, spewing sparks into the sky and across the party, scattering the crowd. At midnight, the police arrive.

A Hieronymus Bosch vision of Hell? The Twilight Zone episode Rod Sterling never got past the censors? Alternate lyrics to Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man"? Maybe it's any or all of those, but it was also the fabled Spaghetti Bowl last Friday night. Fortunately, the hosts, Aespyre metalworking group, which runs its metal-arts forge down here in the Underbelly, didn't get in serious trouble. The cops just told them to cut it out; the party was worrying a lady up in the highrise on Summit Hill, who thought the joint was on fire.

Those who missed Aespyre's semi-regular iron pour or the show by American Plague will likely have another chance. Those who missed the appearance of performance artist Sideshow Bennie juxtaposed with a Ringling Bros. train (which was not the same crew that Nichols is with) and out-of-control fireworks, well, you may have missed your chance for it, at least in this lifetime. Some circus people apparently had that impression, too, and ventured out of their train to join in the rare fun.

Go.

Thursday: Jodie Manross Band keeps getting better and better. Check her out at Barley's.

Friday: How often do you get to hear Japanese jazz at the KMA? At least once a year. Tonight's the night.

Saturday: Leslie Woods writes great songs and performs them with a hell of a band. At Blue Cats.

Sunday: Dame Darcy at the Pilot Light is the best thing going.

Monday: Not only do you not need an excuse to drink, you're expected to! Do it at the Pilot Light to the sounds of Newport and Drunk Horse.

Tuesday: Take a midnight stroll around your neighborhood. (No peeking in the neighbors' windows!)

Wednesday: Egyptian night at King Tuts. Mmmmm.

—Madame "a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun" Georgie with Joe Tarr and Jack Neely