Metro Pulse/Music/Carl Snow

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A local icon returns

by Mike Gibson

Carl Snow is a portrait of studied resolution poised in front of a microphone stand next to friend and conscripted back-up singer John Tilson. With earphones clamped tight on bobbing noggins, he and Tilson are laying down vocal tracks to a song off Snow's forthcoming Big World Records CD Useless Songs on a rainy evening at Knoxville's 613 Studio.

"MMMMM-wop, wop!... MMMMM-wop, wop!...," the duo croon in something that falls just short of unison. The vocal line is a backing part on the song "One of Them," a gritty, rousing celebration of rock 'n' roll vinyl LPs, though it sounds like nothing so much as some minimalist take on acapella doo-wop to the studio onlookers who can't hear the main track blaring in the singers' ears.

"Wait; we missed that last 'wop,'" Snow says, suddenly breaking off and signaling engineer Rick Wolfe to stop the recording. Much animated discussion of humming and wopping ensues, as the three men try to figure how to achieve a happy synchronicity of parts on the already densely arranged track.

All of the recording sessions for the album have had a similarly loose, impromptu character about them, with well-traveled local musicians and FOS (Friends of Snow) trailing in and out, contributing piecemeal parts to a record that will be the first full-fledged label release from one of the city's most accomplished guitarists.

"I'm lucky that I have all these friends who are great musicians," Snow says during a break in the recording, ticking off the names of a few Useless contributors, local luminaries such as bluesman Hector Qirko, singer Kim Baxter, and the late guitarist Terry Hill. Sadly, the record will contain some of the last recorded output from Hill, an influential local teacher and player who died in late 2002 after a long fight with Hepatitis C.

"The idea of 'useless' became the whole thought process behind this record," he continues. "Useless is a zen-like quality. Instead of stripping things down to essentials, I was asking 'What else could I have added here? Who else can I get to play on the track?'"

Though mostly absent from the local music scene in recent years, Snow is a veritable Knox rock legend, a burly punk-rock madman who played in any number of notable outfits dating back to the early 1980s. His resume includes stints in Whitey, 30 Amp Fuse, Red and Screaming Boy Blue; he was also a founding member of KoRo, a short-lived but seminal 1980s hardcore outfit whose ferocious early demos are still dearly traded in underground punk-rock circles the world over.

Now proprietor of his own out-of-home Moss Hill Mastering (he describes it as "an all-purpose 'finish shit up' studio'), Snow says his Big World recording deal was sheer serendipity, the result of an Internet correspondence with the widow of a jazz legend.

Snow met and traded emails with Ingrid Pastorius, wife of the late bass virtuoso Jaco Pastorius, through an online Joni Mitchell message board about five years ago. When Ingrid expressed an interest in hearing Snow's own music, he sent her a handful of singer-songwriter demos he had recorded at home with the help of his long-time teacher, the aforementioned Hill. She liked the tracks, and passed them along to Big World Records President Neal Weiss, whose label has issued a number of posthumous Pastorius CDs.

"I wasn't shopping," Snow says. "I was a very content hermit. Then Neal calls me and pays me this huge compliment, and tells me he wants to release a full-length album."

With 15 cuts that have more in common with Leonard Cohen than throwback hardcore, Useless Songs seems a pretty unlikely album for an old punk rocker to make. But in many ways, Snow has always been a pretty unlikely punk rocker. He looks the part, to be sure, with his scars and shaven pate and copious old-school tattoos.

But unlike most reformed punks, Snow is a consummate musician—a studio adept, a versatile multi-instrumentalist, a virtuosic guitar player who was at one point on the verge of attending the prestigious Berkelee College of Music in Boston.

And his tastes have always been diverse, eclectic, as much XTC as SST, his conversations peppered with references to the work of artists like Television, Frank Zappa, or perhaps studio experimentalist Bill Laswell.

"Someone called the stuff I'm doing on Useless 'Americana,'" Snow says. "I have no idea what that is. That's spooky to me, because once anything has a label, it can't be honest. It has to live up that label.

"I like to think of it in terms of an organically fed Brian Eno producing the Replacements covering Tom Waits songs. I think it harkens back to old '70s Nick Lowe, or maybe me channeling a redneck Nick Drake."

Due out later this year, Useless Songs will also serve as a memorial to Hill. A veteran of landmark Knox punk and rock outfits like Balboa, WH-WH and Plynth, his influence as both a teacher and player held sway over a whole generation of local musicians; for Snow, he was at once a guru muse, and friend.

"Terry was a big impetus for getting this record done," Snow says. "He kept telling me, 'You've got to put this out; it's too good not to.' When he died, I couldn't talk or look at my guitar for a month. I got over it by trying to make a record I thought he would like. And I think I did."