June 2010 Archives

Tennessee Shines took a break in June for the two-day Bijou Jubilee celebration, but it's back in July, though the artists haven't been announced yet.

Looks like there's a significant break coming after that, though, as organizers try to navigate a change in management at a company signed on as national sponsor starting in 2011 according to Josh Flory at the News Sentinel.

The obvious choice to fill the slot as Knoxville's top blues guitarist since Hector Qirko moved to South Carolina this month is Labron Lazenby. He'll get a chance to show why on a pretty big stage next week when he and his band, the LA 3, headline the Hard Knox Blues Bash on Thursday, July 1, in the Old City Courtyard behind Southbound Bar & Grill. That, coincidentally, is where Qirko, with his honky-tonk combo the Lonesome Coyotes, played his last Knoxville show before moving. (Not his last last, we all hope, just his last one before the move.)



Lazenby is a first-rate player; he and his band played at the International Blues Challenge in Memphis in January and reportedly sold more CDs than any other band there.

The Hard Knox Blues Bash is a fund-raiser for the Tennessee Valley Jazz and Blues Foundation, a local nonprofit founded last year to support the blues in general and the music of East Tennessee in particular. The Relentless Blues Band and the Hard Knox Blues All Stars will open the show, which starts at 8 p.m.; admission is $5, $2 for teenagers 13-17, and free 12 and under.

This just in from the AC Entertainment Twitter feed:  "Smashing Pumpkins play @The Valarium in #Knoxville on July 23. Tix on sale Friday noon. Their show in '08 @TNTheatre rocked!"

I mentioned it in my review this week, but it's worth noting again that the local death-metal band Whitechapel's third disc, A New Era of Corruption, opened at #43 on the Billboard album charts last week, with more than 10,000 copies sold. That's a lot of records for a death-metal band, especially one that was playing all-ages matinees in Knoxville just a few years ago. 

It's less than a year since the Black Crowes played the Tennessee Theatre, but they're already on the way back, and this will probably be the last chance to see them for a good long while. The band's announced a "lengthy hiatus" after this tour is over in December.

The tour will mix a 90-minute acoustic set (that's to accompany Croweology, a career-spanning two-disc collection of acoustic versions of Black Crowes' songs due out in August) and a 90-minute electric set. In typically understated fashion, the band has billed the tour as "Acoustic Hors D'oeuvres followed by an Electric Reception With The Black Crowes."

The tour stops at the Tennessee Theatre on Wednesday, Sept. 15. Tickets are $42 and $59.50 and go on sale Friday.

Looks like the Tortoise show scheduled for the Bijou Theatre on Sept. 12 has been canceled. No word on the reason, though the rest of the band's late summer tour still seems to be on, so fans of the Chicago instrumental group, one of the main groups responsible for the term "post-rock," can still catch the band in Asheville on Sept. 10; normal people who quit following Tortoise in the '90s can continue with their lives. (FWIW Lee Gardner did not like Tortoise's last album, Beacons of Ancestorship.)



Call the Tennessee Theatre box office at 865-684-1200 for refund information.

Photo by Whitney Bradshaw

Place of Skulls is one of Knoxville's underappreciated bands. So the 20 or so people who stuck around for PoS's headlining set at the Longbranch Saloon on Saturday got front-row seats and national-class trad doom metal, all for just $5. (The highest price was having to wait through Ophiuchus, a thrash/death band from Nashville with great chops and one of the silliest frontmen I've ever seen.) PoS played for just under an hour, fitting in old songs, newer ones, and at least a handful of songs from frontman Victor Griffin's former band Pentagram and a surprisingly effective cover of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." The weird thing about the band? Their classic doom is informed by Griffin's Christianity, though PoS is nothing like what anybody would call Christian metal.

Even though the band's barely acknowledged in its hometown--Griffin thanked the small crowd at the end of the show for supporting the "struggling doom metal scene in Knoxville"--Place of Skulls has a distinguished underground lineage: Griffin played in the seminal D.C. doom group Pentagram's classic lineup from 1981 to 1996 and wrote or co-wrote some of that band's signature songs ("Death Row," "Relentless," "20 Buck Spin"), and Scott "Wino" Weinrich (St. Vitus, the Obsessed) played on PoS's 2003 album With Vision. (That album and the 2001 debut were released on Southern Lord, home to Sunn O))), Boris, and Earth.)

Griffin and his band have been busy lately, though, and hopefully that will raise the band's local profile. A new PoS album, As a Dog Returns, has been recorded and is due out this fall, and for the last few weeks Griffin's been pulling double duty with Pentagram, who have seen a swell of past-due recognition in the last few years.  

Wandered into the Preservation Pub sort of randomly late Friday and caught the latter chunk of a really good set by Asheville's Discordian Society. Yes they're a jam band or a groove band or whatever, but they actually really jam and groove. My problem with a lot of post-Dead groove stuff is that the noodliness tends to extend to the rhythm sections and the song structures generally. The great first-wave jam bands (thinking not just of the Dead, but Country Joe, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Fort Mudge Memorial Dump) were built on mad R&B vamps and tight turns that provided the fuel for the spaces in between, which could be filled in by guitars or organs or whatever. The Discordian guys are much more in the mold of those bands than they are like Widespread Panic or whatever jam band it was that made you decide you hate jam bands. They're deliberately silly in the manner of a lot of classic psychedelia, but the precision of their playing belies the good-time goofball vibe. These guys have practiced. And the bass/guitar/drums/keys/sax lineup gives them a lot of room to work with.

There is always too much to see and too much to say about Bonnaroo, so with the dirt finally washed off my feet and the layers of sunscreen and sweat mostly scrubbed away, a few final notes:

During Bonnaroo the city limits of Knoxville seem to temporarily stretch all the way to Manchester. As usual there are a lot of familiar faces on the farm, both in the crowds and on the smaller showcase stages.

As if. Jay-Z's closing set on the main stage Saturday illustrated a lot of things, some of which weren't exactly news (e.g., Jay-Z is a great rapper and a great showman). But it was interesting how completely he owned the Bonnaroo collective. The under-25 crowd knew all the words to songs that came out a decade ago or more. If you don't think of "Big Pimpin'" or "Jigga What, Jigga Who" as classic rock yet, their reception from 70,000 or so Bonnaroovians says it's probably time to start. 

There's music here, too. Some good things:

Jonathan Sexton (of Knoxville generally and the Big Love Choir more particularly) was hard at it Friday afternoon at Bonnaroo, hugging an attempted 24-hour world record number of people. Including me. I was just standing there taking pictures, when he said, "Are you going to hug me, or just take pictures?" Which is one of the more novel pick-up lines I've ever encountered...

Having apparently seen the limits of Crocs, the young women of Bonnaroo have settled this year on rubber boots as protection against the muck and grime. They don't breathe so well, but they do keep the toes out of the mud (and the worse-things-than-mud that inevitably become part of the Bonnaroo landscape). But that doesn't mean they can't be cute. Pink is the preferred color, with decorative flourishes including daisies and butterflies. How your feet will smell in the tent at the end of the day is your problem, but smelling anybody's feet at Bonnaroo is best left to the fetishists anyway.

Blogging about Bonnaroo has become sort of a cliché in itself. You show up, you write about the heat, the humidity, the hippies, the hash. So, yes. Let's stipulate all of that. They all seem to be present and accounted for.

Hector Qirko is one of the best guitarists--and one of the best guys--who's ever been part of Knoxville's music community. He's got chops (his main projects during the 30 or so years he's been here have been the near-legendary post-punk band Balboa with Terry Hill, the revved-up honky tonk group the Lonesome Coyotes, the long-running blues-and-more quartet the Hector Qirko band, and a spot backing R.B. Morris) and taste (particularly evident in the Latin rhythms that have crept into the HQ Band's Chicago-style blues, but also on his recent raga-influenced performance on HQ Band drummer Steve Brown's solo disc).

So his departure later this month for South Carolina is Knoxville's loss. You've got one more chance to see him when he gets a showcase in the Old City Courtyard behind Southbound Bar & Grill on Jackson Avenue. The Lonesome Coyotes are headlining, and Hector and R.B. are kicking things off with their familiar two-guitar duo set-up. Tickets are just $5, music starts at 7:30 p.m.

Here's Mike Gibson's 2005 cover story on HQ, and there's also a tribute thread at Knox Blab.

Is Sundown in the City a victim of its own success? After the enormous crowd and massive traffic tie-ups that attended Thursday night's Blues Traveler show on Market Square, the future of the event is again the subject of discussion. You can find multiple perspectives on this KnoxBlab thread, including this from Sundown creator/promoter Ashley Capps:

Knoxville has been getting a series of master classes lately in the art of aging ferociously. Last week, it was 64-year-old Neil Young storming the Civic Auditorium. Last night, it was 66-year-old Diana Ross bringing a packed Tennessee Theatre repeatedly to its feet with a sparkling set of indisputable classics that ran from her Supremes days to her disco diva era. (Stopping off along the way for songs from Lady Sings the Blues, Mahogany, and The Wiz.) She sounded terrific--her voice still has that keening, girlish edge, but she deploys it with a sort of knowing wink that you can't mistake for innocence. And she looked great too, leaving and then returning to the stage in a series of ever more extravagant costumes (the word "dresses" would not do justice to the yards of fabric involved).