Metro Pulse/Music/The Used To Be

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What:
The Used To Be w/ the Pink Sexies and Actress

When:
Friday, Feb. 27, 10 p.m.

Where:
Patrick Sullivan’s

Cost:
$5

Tom Pappas revisits his restless youth with The Used To Be

by Mike Gibson

Most people are at pains to leave behind the reckless obsessions and desperate agonies of youth. Not Tom Pappas; he revels in them.

The former Superdrag bassist’s new Wrecked ‘Em Wreckords CD Shameless Self-Destruction (released under the band name The Used To Be) chronicles a time more than a decade past when his punk-rock fixations and youthful anomie held sway over his musical instincts.

“Those Used days were some of the craziest,” says Pappas in a recent phone interview. “I listen to the lyrics now, and it’s like looking in someone else’s diary—someone who was mentally ill. That was a dark time in my life—the usual self-hatred, destruction-mode type stuff some people go through when they’re young. The music really helped me out a lot. It let me scream all that stuff as loud as I could out. It was barbaric music, very Ghengis Khan.”

For those who weren’t familiar with Knoxville rock circa 1992, Pappas was singer, guitarist and principal songwriter for the Used, a hell-bent four-piece post-punk outfit that also featured future Superdrag members Brandon Fisher and John Davis. With a sound cobbled from the detritus of old Stooges, Hanoi Rocks, and SST punk records, the band earned the censure of local venues due to the ravening chaos that erupted at most of its shows.

“Stuff got destroyed when we played at clubs,” Pappas remembers. “I remember people pulling the glass tops off tables at the Tomato Head, squirting the tables with ketchup, then slam-dancing and rolling around the floor in glass.”

Used gigs were thereafter relegated mostly to Fort Sanders house parties, where the devastation was better tolerated (the blowouts took place at the White Avenue rental where Pappas and Fisher were tenants), if no more controlled. “Those parties were like an excuse for everyone to go crazy at the same time, this amalgam of frat boys, punk rock kids, older Fort Sanders people,” Pappas says. “We were playing once, and these two girls stripped to their panties, hanging from the rope swing in the front yard. I remember looking out and saying, ‘This is completely screwed.’”

The chaotic milieu the Used fomented would later give birth to Superdrag, the four-man power pop unit that went on to a decade of success in the world of indie rock. Featuring former Used drummer Davis as singer, guitarist and principal writer (with Pappas on bass), Superdrag departed from the methods of its pugnacious predecessor, yet kept a measure of its spirit.

“Some of the elements that led into Superdrag, the more violent aspects, came from the live aspects of the Used,” Pappas says. “The primal aspect, the wall of sound aspect, the rocking aspects—those things bled over. The live attack of Superdrag was sort of the baby of the Used.”

Flash forward a few years: Pappas began releasing his own new music under the name Flesh Vehicle, departed Superdrag and moved to Nashville. Superdrag continued until 2003, when the weight of endless touring and family pressures forced remaining members to call it quits.

Then former Knoxvillian Mike Condon (now living in Memphis) called Pappas with a proposition. Condon was a veteran of the old White Avenue band parties, and his fondest memories from that time were of the Used. With Pappas’s blessing, Condon founded his own independent label with the goal of recording the band’s original material.

Condon has since released CDs by both Pappas’s Flesh Vehicle and Knoxville band the Pink Sexies. Only recently has the label’s raison d’etre come to fruition, with Pappas and former Used members Davis, Fisher, and bassist Chris Hargrove re-recording the old songs in 2002 and 2003. The final product—dubbed The Used To Be, since another outfit has since taken the Used name—is available in select stores, as well as on the Wrecked ‘Em Wreckords website and Pappas’s own rockbandmerch.com.

“When Mike first called me I was elated, because I was really attached to the Used,” Pappas says. “When I first had to give it up for Superdrag, I cried over the thing.”

Now the original Used line-up are planning a miniature Tour of Tennessee, with shows in Knoxville, Chattanooga, Nashville and Memphis. Though all of the members now have day jobs or other absorbing musical pursuits, Pappas hopes the reunion could become an annual affair.

“We’re taking it a step at a time; if these shows do well, there are other offers,” Pappas says. “I’m not the same person I was 10 years ago, but I still like these songs just as much now as I did then. It’s still some of the most barbaric, over-the-top stuff I’ve ever been involved with. It still [makes] my soul feel lighter, screaming all that anguish out at the top of my lungs.”