The Oxford American Music Issue showed up in the mail this morning, along with the annual two-CD anthology of Southern music.
This one's got the 1987 track "So Much" by the Windbreakers, the '80s college rock band co-fronted by Tim Lee, who's been a Knoxvillian for going on a decade now and currently leads the Tim Lee 3 with his wife, Susan Bauer Lee on bass and Rodney Cash on drums.
In the accompanying essay, novelist Will Clarke doesn't say much about the Windbreakers' music ("It's gorgeous," in reference to "Stupid Idea," is the extent of his analysis) but muses on songs and bands he missed during his own adolescence. It's pretty typical middle-age nostalgia, but the Windbreakers are indeed a classic example of a band that should have been bigger. As Clarke writes:
This one's got the 1987 track "So Much" by the Windbreakers, the '80s college rock band co-fronted by Tim Lee, who's been a Knoxvillian for going on a decade now and currently leads the Tim Lee 3 with his wife, Susan Bauer Lee on bass and Rodney Cash on drums.
In the accompanying essay, novelist Will Clarke doesn't say much about the Windbreakers' music ("It's gorgeous," in reference to "Stupid Idea," is the extent of his analysis) but muses on songs and bands he missed during his own adolescence. It's pretty typical middle-age nostalgia, but the Windbreakers are indeed a classic example of a band that should have been bigger. As Clarke writes:
"The Windbreakers' undeserved obscurity defies my explanation. They had the songwriting chops. They had the sound. They even had the indie-hitmaker producer. If this was all laid out on a spreadsheet, the sum total of this equation should have equaled rock stardom."
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