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The Chillbilly Phenomenon

Women of the NWFA
'We have met the football family, and she is us'

Maternal Madness
Tots influence new moms' picks for UT's season

Malignant and potentially dangerous musician/comics (skip the 'potentially')

by Mike Gibson

It was more than 15 years ago in the cavernous gray stairwells of the University of Tennessee's pre-renovation Gibbs Hall that a hulking undergraduate football player named Tim Irwin first picked up the rudiments of guitar from a fellow lineman, tight end Kyle Aguillard from Port Neches, Texas. Irwin salvaged his dad's old Ovation acoustic from home, and pretty soon the din of country and soft-rock classics from the likes of Merle Haggard and Simon & Garfunkel rang through the halls of the old Letterman's warehouse.

"Kyle was an excellent natural musician, and he showed me the basics," says Irwin, a retired veteran of the National Football League who, even today, at 6'8", resembles nothing so much as a phone pole with shoulders. Now an attorney and professional sports agent, he is hosting four of his current musical co-conspirators and one reporter in his modest Gay Street offices on a Friday afternoon.

"But he was like most guitarists; you couldn't trust him," Irwin continues. "He'd use your toothbrush when you weren't looking, then put it back before you turned around again."

Questionable hygienic practices notwithstanding, Aguillard's six-string mentoring served Irwin well through 13 long, gelid seasons with the NFL's Minnesota Vikings; when he wasn't starring at right tackle for the Vikes, chances were good as not you could find the big man wailing blues and country in low taverns from Minneapolis to Mankato, Minn., abetted by a clutch of local musicians who sometimes included head coach/drummer Denny Green. Irwin's trademark vocal performance was on Jon Anderson's "Swingin'," oft-requested at the Caledonia Club, a little honky-tonk where he performed almost nightly during training camps.

Those days are over now, and Irwin has departed the vicious animal milieu of professional football...for the vicious animal milieu of the legal profession. And having done so, he still needs a release mechanism, gentle relief from the hellish tensions of daily Bloodsport.

Enter the Chillbillies, a local blues/country/rock 'n' roll band comprised of six grizzled professional men, including Irwin on vocals and guitar. For nearly three years, the band has shaken floors at venues ranging from the Catholic Diocese to finer beer halls like Kingston Alley or the Doghouse in West Knoxville. They play a handful of original songs as well as a lumpy mix of covers—the incongruous likes of which include "Man of Constant Sorrow," the Allman Brothers' "Statesboro Blues" and the Commodores' funk nugget "Brick House."

Irwin first met 'billies Teddy Phillips (drummer) and George Massengill (a medical professional, on vocals, keyboards, harmonica) in the latter half of his football career, at the wedding of a mutual friend. Intermittent musical collaboration followed and grew ever more volatile as the years passed. They were eventually joined by bassist Larry Patton, a Cookeville studio owner; Don Taylor, a former FBI man and professional musician who played horn and flute behind Lynyrd Skynyrd in the 1980s; and guitarist Victor Hill, who Massengill says "mostly works like hell at not working."

The resulting outfit is a strange hybrid of honky-tonk, party band, white-boy R&B and throwback rock 'n' roll. The 'billies even desecrate hip hop—or something that crudely resembles it—on a tune called "The Farmer's Rap," the refrain to which includes a shout-out to the virtues of "diggin' taters/pickin' maters/baccer cuttin'/corn shuckin'."

"Our only ambitions are to sound good, and to have fun," Irwin says, then adds, after a pause, "Or maybe that should be to have fun, and then to sound good. There are easier ways to make a living, that's for sure."

No, it's never that simple; there are rules attendant to being a Chillbilly, an inflexible code that brooks no nonsense from members with heretical instincts that might otherwise wreak havoc with notions of reason. Cover versions of Yanni songs are anathema, for one thing; little known, says Irwin, is the fact that the band recently forged a secret pact with the fey New Age poster boy, a blood oath that neither he nor the Chillbillies will ever breech the other's musical territory.

Also required of each Chillbilly is an intuitive sense of what key the rest of the outfit is about to essay, regardless of whether the song in question is a familiar one, or even one that so much as existed the moment before the first chord is struck. "Sometimes you get a signal as to what key we're in, but you're pretty much expected to know," Irwin says.

But of primacy in the Chillbilly Code is the No Practice Rule, to which the outfit has scrupulously adhered since Day One. "The first sumbitch that even mentions practice is fired," says Phillips, his jaw set in grave resolution.

Adds Massengill, "There's a fine if any of us even practice at home."

All of which adds up to Big Fun, yessir. Like the night someone knocked the stage lights into the swimming pool at a Catholic Diocese function. Or at a recent show when sundry pieces of musical equipment, lost in a crowd of dancers, were found crushed in the ponderous wake of an abundantly proportioned female reveler.

"Slowdown songs are by request only," relates Hill. "But occasionally we get a slow crowd. We played a blue-hair night a while back, at a funeral director's convention in Gatlinburg. That party was dead."

The men are fast becoming a staple at football- and UT-related functions. They played a singularly loud show at a birthday party for UT men's basketball Coach Buzz Peterson, held at the home of Lady Vols' coach Pat Summitt; they also rang in a Phillip Fulmer golf tournament, and a couple of Peyton Manning birthday parties as well. The former Vol quarterback joined the 'billies on stage and sang "You Don't Have to Call Me Darlin', Darlin'"—a tune which Massengill holds as "the perfect country music song"—and the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want." The coming football season will see them play several Friday pre-game shows at the Doghouse, as well as post-game fetes at either Litton's or Kingston Alley.

The Chillbilly phenomenon is a malignant and potentially dangerous one. Familiar faces are starting to reappear at successive performances, including those of several local VIPs, like actor David Keith, singer Con Hunley, and even state Sen. Tim Burchett, who reputedly harbors certain unhealthy fixations concerning Lynyrd Skynyrd and David Allan Coe.

Booking is available through Steve Queisser at 363-5666 (and yes, friend, that is a hint), and a CD is forthcoming, entitled simply The Chillbillies: Plugged. An advance listen reveals it to be full of top-flight musicianship and bottom-rung humor, seven original songs spiked with covers like "Further on up the Road," Shel Silverstein's "Marie Laveau," and the Beatles' "Get Back."

There isn't any Elvis, though. Massengill says, without blinking, "We don't play any Elvis, because we don't want to be disrespectful. We think he's still alive."