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When Knoxville rocker Todd Steed isn’t busy hobnobbing with Tina Wesson at Panera Bread, he daylights as the programs abroad coordinator for UT

by Mike Gibson

To Knoxvillians of a certain vintage, it’s hard to think of longtime local rock guy Todd Steed as anything other than, well, longtime local rock guy Todd Steed—once the face of seminal Knox college band Smokin’ Dave and the Premo Dopes, and then a stand-out bandleader and solo artist, working variously under the monikers of the Opposable Thumbs, Apelife, Toddzilla, and Todd Steed and the Suns of Phere. For those of us who know of him through his music, Todd Steed was and is a first-rate rocker, an inveterate clown, a performer par excellance, and as audaciously clever a songwriter as the city has ever produced.

But there’s another subset of folks who know the man we call Toddzilla only as Mr. Steed—world traveler, scholar, all-around nice-guy and student facilitator, coordinator of the University of Tennessee’s Programs Abroad office in the Center for International Education. Many of them have never heard him call out North Knoxville or UT broadcasting icon John Ward in song, nor seen him duckwalk across a stage with Berry-esque aplomb, nor read a Premo Dopes album review in the pages of Spin magazine.

“When I actually saw him perform, I was awestruck,” says Lindsay Criss, a 22-year-old UT graduate who spent a semester at a university in Stockhom, Sweden on Steed’s recommendation in the fall of 2002. “He’s so professional in person, wearing a tie and crossing his legs. And here he is jumping around yelling... It was awesome. It was difficult to go back Monday morning and see him walking around like he spent the weekend fixing his garage.”

“I tried for years to keep music separate from this life, to not even mention it to students or colleagues,” Steed says, seated in his office at the Center for International Education, contiguous with Melrose Hall near the campus library. “But that didn’t work. I kept running into people who knew me from the music... I finally realized it wasn’t a negative to be in some stupid rock band on the weekend. There’s not a penalty.”

When Smokin’ Dave and the Premo Dopes broke up in 1994, it marked the end of an era for Steed. The band had been the local music scene’s best hope for wider recognition, had hung together through a dozen years and a handful of critically praised independent records. The Dopes’ dissolution was a passage of sorts, as Steed and his fellows at last faced up to the deferred prospects of adulthood.

“My reason for staying here was gone,” Steed says. The wanderlust of his rock days hadn’t dissipated, however, and he moved to the city of Vilnius, Lithuania, where he taught in a music conservatory during the week, and worked for a local English-language television news broadcast on weekends. He chuckles that the experience finally afforded “a chance to tell my parents I was using the Journalism degree I earned at UT.”

He came back to Knoxville within a year, however, spent time as a substitute teacher at local high schools, then enrolled in the UT Master’s program in Foreign Language Education. With designs on further globetrotting, he specialized in teaching English as a second language.

Upon finishing the program in 1996, he moved to Indonesia, and spent a year as academic coordinator for an English language school. When the Indonesian economy suddenly went into a catastrophic tailspin, he was forced to return home once again.

“That was the most challenging job I ever had,” Steed says. “I was managing 10 or 11 young and excitable teachers from around the world, some of whom had never had a job before. Then the economy completely tanked, and I had to try to hold everything together and keep people at work.

“It got to the point where $1(US) equaled 16,000 Indonesian rupias. I couldn’t pay off my loans or anything. Things got so bad, I knew one woman who made a pillow out of excess rupias.”

Steed says having to leave Indonesia was a significant disappointment: “I was depressed... I had seen so much promise there before the economy turned.” He might have taken heart had he known that, unwittingly, through the combination of his experience abroad, his academic studies, and even his Premo Dopes-era wanderings, he had prepared himself for the job he holds today.

When he returned stateside, he took a position in the UT Center for International Education, which he describes as “the one-stop shop for international students and scholars, and for Americans who want to get out of the country.”

He started in the center’s immigration department, where his job consisted mostly of helping foreign students obtain visas, buy insurance, and otherwise navigate the bureaucratic hazards of overseas transfer. After three years, he moved to the programs abroad office, and eventually became its chief coordinator; his responsibilities include recruiting students to travel abroad as well as promoting and organizing overseas study programs.

“There’s a lot of P.R. work; the challenge is getting students through this door,” Steed says. “Once they come in, we have a pretty good chance of getting them to go somewhere.

“Lots of students have misperceptions about going abroad. They think they’ll get homesick, or won’t be able to handle it. Heck, a lot of them can’t handle coming back home when they’re through.”

The center ships between 400 and 500 students abroad every year, Steed says. Most of them travel to more familiar western European destinations such as England and Spain and France. But Steed takes special pride in convincing one of his charges to venture into decidedly non-Western locales such as Thailand or South Korea.

“Part of my job is getting people to consider something other than just the typical European hits. If they come in and say, ‘I want to go to England,’ I’ll say ‘Let’s talk.’ There’s a sense of accomplishment if I get someone to try a semester in Chile. And the students usually find it so exciting when they get there that they never worry about the cultural differences.

“I try to gauge the student’s experience level. Some of them maybe haven’t been outside their comfort zone. They may not be ready for a semester in South Africa. Others, you could put them out in the desert, and they would be happy.”

“He (Steed) has stories from all over the world,” says David McCollum, a recent UT chemical engineering graduate who spent a semester in 2002 studying in Suwon, South Korea. “And sooner or later, one of them is bound to grab your interest. He has a story for everybody. And everyone here values Todd’s opinion enormously. He’s been around the world, so if he says a place is good, and that it’s safe, you know it’s true.

“I loved South Korea. It was challenging, moreso than if I had gone to a ‘traditional’ place. But that’s what I wanted. Sometimes I stuck out like a sore thumb, but people were very forgiving.”

In addition to helping American students in choosing their overseas study, Steed serves as a resource for international students who come to the University of Tennessee. “I try to model myself after the people who helped me out of jams when I was in another country,” he says.

His duties in that regard include conducting basic orientations and teaching cross-cultural classes to mixed groups of Americans and internationals. But Steed prefers not to limit his outreach to the office or the classroom; he occasionally takes foreign exchange students on camping trips to the Smokies, or on weekend getaways to Camp Montvale in Blount County. “That’s always nice right after orientation,” Steed says of the Montvale trips. “It gives them a chance to run around, dance, shoot arrows and blow off steam.”

The combination of Steed’s droll affability and his efforts beyond-the-call have paid off in the form of abundant good will; the students who have taken his classes or otherwise sought out his guidance tend to speak glowingly of him. “I had Todd for orientation, and then as a professor,” says Shirine Benhenda, a microbiology and bio-chemistry major from France who came to UT in August of last year. “He was awesome as a teacher, and very funny. I think the reason he does his job so well is that he really understands how cultures are different, and how people’s mentalities are different.”

And with increasing frequency, Steed finds himself reaching students through his musical endeavors as well as his strivings as a teacher/administrator. A case in point: during a recent weekend performance at an area nightclub, he remembers looking over the dancing crowd and recognizing a group of international students.

“I saw one of them do a triple-take when he looked up at the stage,” Steed recalls. “It was like, ‘Hey, that can’t be the Study-Abroad Guy.’ He’s the ‘Study-Abroad Guy,’ therefore he can’t play guitar.’ At the end of the show, he and his friends called up to me, ‘Mr. Steed, you rock!’

“It’s strange that some of the international kids like what I do, because the music I play has always been very culture-specific,” says Steed, whose dense and heavily referential song lyrics are sometimes outside the ken of non-Knoxvillians, much less non-Americans. “But a lot of the international students have a pretty sharp sense of satire, and they’ll sometimes get the humor more than the Americans do. I no longer try to make a secret of my music; it’s a great way for people to learn about another culture.”

That he feels freer in sharing his “other life” with students is significant. There was a time, says Steed, when the apparent dichotomy of his weekend and workaday alter egos was difficult to reconcile, particularly for a guy who had once believed he might fashion a career out of playing rock ‘n’ roll. Now he says he’s finally resolving the identity crisis that was the inevitable byproduct of shifting priorities, of recasting a consuming passion as a subordinate avocation.

“It was weird when I started doing office jobs,” Steed says. “I thought that at heart, I’m a musician, one that just didn’t happen to be making enough money. Now I’ve come to see that I’m a creative type, and that creativity can be applied to a lot of situations, to writing a song or to making someone’s international study program as good as it can be. I quit looking at myself as one thing or the other.”

June 10, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 24 © 2004 Metro Pulse