Metro Pulse/Music/Eye on the Scene

Rock the 'Yotes

After playing to a jam-packed KMA "Alive After Five" crowd earlier this year, Knoxville's favorite swingin' country/rock/Americana band The Lonesome Coyotes will return to the World's Fair Park with a performance at the Foundry March 26 at 8 p.m.

If all goes well with this show, it could open the door for more concerts at the Foundry, which was the final home for Ella Guru, the popular nightclub run by Ashley Capps. With a capacity of about 700, the space could help fill the void in mid-size concert venues in Knoxville.

A popular regular performer at the Budweiser Pavilion during the 1982 World's Fair, The Lonesome Coyotes reunited in the past couple of years to do a handful of gigs and release a CD, '82-'02.

The Coyotes includes some of the finest musicians who have ever jumped onto a stage in this town, and its recent shows have been proof that the band has not lost any of its licks. Even though its crowd may not be as keen to partying as they were during the World's Fair heyday�heck, can anyone still party that hard?�they still howl with approval when The 'Yotes take the stage.

The 'Yotes will be performing live in the West Wing on West 105.3 during Metro Pulsian Benny Smith's Americana Jukebox radio show Sunday night, March 21 at 8 p.m. Smith will also be the emcee for the Foundry show, which will feature two sets.

The band is also booking regional dates to do some weekend shows in the Tri-Cities (March 27 at the Down Home), Asheville, Chattanooga, and other markets within a couple of hours' drive. "We just want to get the ripples started in the region, and get out and have some fun playing music," says 'Yote frontman/co-lead vocalist Steve Horton. Metro Pulse can't think of a better way to start the ripple effect than with a return to the World's Fair Park. And if you were at any of those World's Fair shows now you have a chance to make some new memories with the same bunch of 'Yotes.

Hector and Terry

Hector Qirko may be Knoxville's most dependable journeyman guitarist�bluesy here, country there, as each appreciative audience requires, but he often offers us glimpses that there's more to him. His latest release finds him on the fringes. The four-tune EP UWP is actually his last collaboration with guitar genius Terry Hill, who died in late 2002. The work of the two innovative guitarists is so adept that few will presume to pick them apart, and for the listener, there's no need to. The wildly impressionistic, mostly instrumental opus is a whole. Sit on the floor in the dark and give it a good listen. Three original pieces, "Freedom," "Work," and "Drugs" wash over you like an extravagant dream: they're experimental flights over a solid landscape of R&B rhythms. "Freedom" has a James Brown funk groove with anti-lyrics, an artistic manifesto: a stream-of-consciousness verbal piece that might remind you of much-missed conversations with Terry Hill; its emotion is belied by the fact that it's delivered in an electronic, stand-back-from-the-car robot voice. "Work" combines jivey acoustic and electric guitar work with ocean sounds. And "Drugs," not surprisingly the wildest piece on the record, is the soundtrack of a luxuriant nightmare laid over a slow drumbeat, with indistinct voices and a swelling "Ramayana Monkey Chant," credited on the minimal liner notes: a staccato, orgiastic vocal percussion that sounds like white blood cells skittering through your cerebral arteries. If you could only hear them and, maybe, sometimes you can.

"If 6 Was 9," is a worthy tribute to the Hendrix classic, with distorted voices and a surprising, but fitting, jazz-sax solo by Dirk Weddington. It's the kind of music that leaves us with the unsettling suspicion that words, and linear thought in general, is an oversimplification, and therefore a lie. You'd think that after 40 years we'd have come up with a better word for this sort of music than psychedelic, but there it is.

Go.

Thursday: Some people tell you that rockabilly is dead. The Camaros will tell you otherwise at the Preservation Pub.

Friday: Take in an early jazz show featuring a Japanese pianist Michiko Ogawa at the KMA. You can remain on this high-culture route with the KSO show with Burt Bacharach at the Civic Auditorium, if you so choose. Or contemplate the downfall of civilization with Absolute Wood at Prince Deli.

Saturday: Go see guitar maestro Hector Qirko at 4620.

Sunday: Soyeon Lee is part of the Young Pianist Series at UT Music Auditorium.

Monday: It's a Pilot Light week, tonight starring Place of Skulls.

Tuesday: Trans Am with the Fangs at the Pilot Light.

Wednesday: That boy some prick you know. All up in my hair, thinks that I care. He follow me here, he follow me there. These days I can't go nowhere.

�Benny Smith, Jack Neely, Joe Tarr