Metro Pulse/Music/South East Xports

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What:
Scull Soup, The Royal Bangs, Diversified, and Chick Graning: South East Xports 5 CD release party

When:
Tuesday, Sept. 16

Where:
Blue Cats

Cost:
$5

Got Blues?
Nan Citty & Blues Voice jam with the best

Melanie Holdway showcases local and regional rockers on her South East Xports radio show

by Mike Gibson

When erstwhile local hard rock station FM-98.7 switched to a smooth jazz format in 1999, disc jockey Melanie Holdway's first thoughts were not of her own job, which would soon be forfeit, but of the fate of the locals-only music program she hosted on Sunday nights.

"We got the news that day that we would be changing formats at 5 p.m.," remembers Holdway, better known on local airwaves as simply 'Mel'. "The thing that popped into my head was, 'What about South East Xports?'"

Arguably local music's greatest champion, Holdway founded South East Xports in early '99 as an on-air showcase for local and regional bands. The 98.7 changeover proved to be a merely temporary setback, as Holdway found a new home for Xports on local 'Extreme' rock station FM-94.3.

Now she's orchestrating the release of South East Xports 5, the latest in a series of annual CD compilations culled from SEX submissions. Look for the SEX 5 CD release party on Sept. 16 at Blue Cats in the Old City, featuring performances by contributors Scull Soup, The Royal Bangs, Diversified and Chick Graning.

An Oak Ridge native, Holdway made her first forays into radio at the Atomic City's FM-WATO in 1982, spinning Perry Como records for the oldies station's blue-haired listeners. A rocker at heart, she was also lead singer in an all-girl band ("Us Girls") she now describes as "punk-metal, I guess; sort of a crossbreed.

"Our songs sounded pretty good," she says with a laugh, "as long as our drummer wasn't trying to play bass drum with her flip-flops on."

Weaned on traditional '70s-era Rawk such as Led Zeppelin, Rush and April Wine, Holdway's own musical ventures nurtured within her an abiding fondness for the pure, organic pleasures of local rock.

"Magic lives underground; I really believe that," Holdway says without a trace of cynicism or irony. "A lot of the stuff you hear on radio is product; it's refined. Underground local music is where it's at."

Holdway moved to Greensboro, N.C. in the late 1980s, where she worked as a disc jockey for a classic rock radio station there, in the meantime whiling away her evenings at a friend's nightclub, a small music venue dubbed Somewhere Else.

"The pay sucked," she says of her nighttime job. "I was working for tips, scrubbing toilets, working the door and stocking the bar. But that's probably as fulfilled as I've ever been in my life. We would book anything, as long as it was rock and as long as it was original."

Holdway moved back to Knoxville to be close to her mother in the mid-'90s, and eventually signed on when 98.7 became a rock station under Dick Broadcasting in 1998. The original station owners were receptive to her conception of a showcase for unsigned or independent local/regional bands, and soon gave SEX a greenlight.

Now ably assisted by fellow 94.3 jock Phat Ass (aka Brad Luttrell), Holdway takes the mike every Sunday from 10 p.m. until midnight (on other nights, she works the door at the aforementioned Blue Cats). In soliciting material for the program, she asks only that demos submitted for airplay have some semblance of sonic clarity.

"Phat Ass doesn't care to tell someone that they suck," Holdway laughs. "I've got a big heart. I want to play everyone. But you get demos from some of these bands that sound like they were recorded on a jam box."

Though she has a very palpable enthusiasm for all of the local music that comes her way, Holdway admits she holds a few past SEX contributors especially dear to her heart. Melodic modern rockers Copper are particular favorites, she says. "They're phenomenal. Somebody please sign them already."

She's also partial to The Royal Bangs, whose music is an intriguing hybrid of quirky pop and hard rock, and whose SEX 5 contribution "My Friend the Television" appears on the CD under the name Suburban Urchins; and to old-school Knoxville rocker Chick Graning, a veteran of the city's early-'80s punk scene whose SEX 5 track "Superfine" is like a classy, deftly-executed power pop calling card, reintroducing him to local listeners after a long absence.

A few SEX alumni have gone on to bigger and better things; Brent Smith, former lead singer for Knoxville metallists Dreve, for instance, is now frontman for Florida-based FM rockers Shinedown. Others, including recent contributors Brood and The Invocation, have broken up before their SEX compilations were even released. No matter, says Holdway; all of them have a place in the colorful mosaic of local music history, with their contributions serving as powerfully rendered aural documents of feeling, time and place.

"Their songs are like a snapshot in time," Holdway says. "Hopefully, someone will pick up a South East Xports compilation 20 years from now and say, 'Wow, this is pretty cool. I wonder where these guys are now?'"