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The Scribes of the Strip
How to edit a phenomenon
by Jack Rentfro
Cumberland Avenue Revisited: Four Decades of Music from Knoxville, Tennessee is a one-of-a-kind compendium of articles illuminating the growth of a cultural phenomenon in a mid-Southern college town that needs to start appreciating its unique, if flawed, identity.
I’ll betcha no other book like it exists. There, I said it. I challenge Athens, Charlottesville, Chapel Hill, Austin and all of ’em to come up with anything remotely like it. Where else has there ever been such a collection of professional writers, musicians, bartenders, barflys, waitresses, clerks, lawyers, businesspeople and assorted ne’er-do-wells taking a leap of faith with an insomniacal daydreamer to create an original work—sum and whole—to celebrate our own magnificent haplessness?
A lot of variables coincided to make this book not only a viable concept, but just plain possible. I don’t even have room to talk about how not just the nation but UT itself changed dramatically in the ’60s, setting the stage for revolutions both macrocosmic and microcosmic. Or the personal issues that made me the right guy at the right time to pull this off. So I’ll just try to enumerate some of the mechanics behind this piece Metro Pulse has asked me to write as part of the kick-off festivities for MetroFest, the first of what is planned to be an annual celebration of Knoxville’s wide, deep pool of musical talent.
Let’s start here: I am the author-editor of this anthology and take most of the credit and all of the blame for its shortcomings. A little less than three years ago, my old friend Maggie Longmire called to see if this old broken down hack (she didn’t say that, but I bet she was thinking it) would be interested in writing the liner notes for a proposed reunion album for her old band, the Lonesome Coyotes. The conversation, fueled at my end by Scotch, turned into a wide-ranging nostalgia session about the good old days on Cumberland Avenue back in the ’70s. When Strip habitués could choose between the Texas swing of the Coyotes or David O’Dell and David Young’s combo, Bullrooker, sometimes on the same night in bars only a few steps apart. Or go hear Ears, a modern, original rock configuration led by Henry Bauch; or listen to a UT dropout named RB Morris who was building an original repertoire that foreshadowed both Spoken Word and alt.country with his groups, C-Rock City and Shaky Little Finger. And a nice young man named Todd Steed was out there, taking “Freebird” requests from bikers at the Longbranch while his parents thought he was at the movies.
Within a few days, the idea of slopping together some kind of limited monograph about Cumberland’s heyday had transmogrified into something else altogether. I envisioned an encyclopedic task, one that would encompass the entire pop music scene Knoxville has thanks to its large, ever-transitioning population of mobile, intellectually curious university students. It must pay homage to our Appalachian roots while juxtaposing our native culture with new styles of music.
By God, I was going to need help, or else this was going to be like the thousand and one other crackpot schemes that fell apart in the cold light of day. It needed to be an anthology of articles by as many people as I could find who would be interested in various specialties, be they slam poetry, underground publishing (the advent of cheap photocopying in the late ’70s and the resultant explosion of homemade band flyers can’t be over-emphasized), recording studios, indie businesses and general lifestyle topics—not to mention too many great bands to possibly cover even if I spent the rest of my life on it. This holistic approach was the only legitimate way to capture the spirit of the place. As I had no special belief in finding a publisher, let alone making any money from such a quixotic project, I offered this disclaimer to anyone who would come aboard: I would do virtually all the work and not make any money if any was made. Profits would instead go to a charity that we could all be happy with. Appropriately, considering the book’s powerful Fort Sanders connection, it was decided to make the James Agee Park that beneficiary.
First, I called upon my tattered, yellowing connections to my late newspapering career. That would give me a core group of real writers, most of who were young, idiotic or interested enough in local music to go along for the ride. My equally dismal career as a musician did nevertheless leave me with lots of friends in that field. That came in handy as well. From there, I somehow assembled a company of about 100 or more good troops, as far-ranging in the writing world as Phil Moffitt and Jim Dykes to beginning writers like Amanda Mohney, a sharp chick I cold-called and recruited directly from her Cat’s Records reviews in the Halls Shopper News. To varying degrees, I knew Morris, Steed and Scott Miller, Knoxville’s leading triumvirate of songwriters (better keep an eye on Tim Lee and Mic Harrison, boys). That bought me a lot of street cred. As did winning over Rus Harper, whose help in documenting underground publishing is rivaled only by the help I got there from the godfather of Knoxville’s graphic guerrillas, Eric Sublett. Raven maven Jay Nations had been recruited to talk about his second-hand record store. About a year afterwards, he called to see if I’d given up yet. I hadn’t, so he suggested that we get a committee together and start pitching the damned thing. For real. His friend, Charlotte Klasson, pointed us toward a cheap printshop and put some numbers together for us to show prospective publishers. In June, 2003, about 18 months since the phone call from Maggie Longmire, we had the first, exploratory meeting with Brian Conley, new owner of Metro Pulse. The Knoxville daisychain still had not run out of links—article-contributor and Irish musician Wendy Smith pointed me toward designer Laura Atkinson who had a nearly supernaturally simpatico sense of what I wanted the book to look like. Handy, since we only worked together in person one day. Wendy Smith’s fellow Greeneville compatriot, Benny Smith, now with Metro Pulse, would flog the book tirelessly at the marketing end.
In the end, perhaps this book’s strongest statement is a reaffirmation of the stand-on-our-own ethic displayed by so many of the very musicians it seeks to recognize.
Early in the process of assembling this anthology, Shannon Stanfield, punk hero, now professional photographer, complained off-the-cuff how UT students now have to drive if they want to go to a club and hear music, a situation that obviously contributes to drunken driving. A shame, since, in my day, you could walk from your Fort Sanders apartment to the Strip and go to half a dozen bars with live music and walk home at the end of the night. Assuming you could still walk.
But Cumberland is the wellspring of it all, the holy grotto where it all started, where the Clifford Curry-led soul scene changed to Loved Ones psychedelic at the end of the ’60s; where country rock asserted our roots in the ’70s; where Epworth/Jubilee folkies (like Sparky Rucker and John McCutcheon, both of whom I coerced into telling their stories) came down from Highland and Laurel avenues to double as Pied Piper protest leaders; where punk kicked the hippies’ asses in the ’80s. We may still be trying to calculate the aftermath of the World’s Fair on Knoxville, but it did signal the beginning of the end of the Strip as the musical focal point. Maybe there’s some kid out there who’ll read my book in 20 years and get the ridiculous idea to take up the cause and write a book about the endless flow of amazing music that can be heard almost any night on Market Square or the Old City, the inheritors of the Strip’s musical legacy.
September 9, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 37
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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