I never gave much creedence to the gun sale story, although like James I heard it too. Fact is, in the U.S., there are very few legal restrictions on the private sale of guns. Full Auto requires a class 3 license, but semi-auto is easier than selling a car to someone. (a car at least requires registration.) Heck, if you want a semi-automatic, just go to Wal-Mart and buy one! As to the timing, it was probably about the time of Iran/Contra,,, another weapons transfer that went unpunished!!

I thought "Sam" and "Burt" were the same guy.....but then again it seems one was from Iraq, one was from Iran, and one was from Jordan.....no, I still think Sam and Burt were different names for the same guy.....and depending upon which country the average college student hated the most he was from any of the three countries....anyway, more later on the early history of the pub, I was there and saw it all,,, but it being a bar, it will take me a while to piece it all together.

One fast, overwhelming memory I have of Ditty is at the Down Home when the Nightmares were playing. I hadn't known Ditty long; it was really crowded and hot, might have been the summer of '89. Some drunken hombre had been rubbing himself suggestively against Ditty's backside for almost an entire set of songs, under the guise of "dancing." When at last she'd had entirely too much of him, she turned around and VERY SWEETLY announced, "If you prod me one more time with your penis, I'm going to tear it off and feed it to you." He suddenly remembered something very urgent he had to go do, and was not seen again that night, nor do I think ever.

The Dialogue benefit would've been in April of '88. It took me a while to decide whether it was '87 or' 88, but I finally nailed it down because I remember going to Barb and Ann and Paul's place on Holston after school to change clothes. If it was '87 then I would've still been living on the tree streets. I really think Plane Jane themselves may have played that night as well, although I don't know how that would've happened unless it was through them being neighbors with Brook and John at Melubro Court. And I guess Brian and Heather were living there too at the time, in number 8. Anyway, there were three bands. I was mostly occupied with taking money and handing out literature to promote student activism in the era of Reaganomics. Ann gave me a break for a little while, I remember. She had that great jacket that had all the archie mcphee toys sewn into a little fringe along the back. I was down there for ages for some reason, watching Hicks climb up into the ceiling and change light bulbs, dangling from these flimsy little fixtures and doing pre-"mystery science theatre" voice-overs to whatever was on tv. (In the front? In the back? Was there ever a tv in the back? Doesn't seem right.) Brook had gone out of town on some campus rabble-rousing, or maybe the model UN at Appy State. The background on the indebtedness was, Dialogue never started out to be a newspaper; it was just a student organization, an attempt to revivify Brook's earlier "Students for Peace and Justice" by inviting conservatives or anybody with a point of view to participate, so that we weren't just all the time preaching to the converted. Some kid we didn't know just insisted it would be this brilliant idea to get a 606 loan and put out a paper, and of course vanished before the first issue ever had to be laid out or taken to the printer or distributed...or the loan paid back. I never did see the figures on that (I was the poetry editor, for christ's sake) but I assume the benefit must've cured a large part of our problem, because no irate SGA senators ever repossessed my car. I also remember it getting freezing cold and Hicks loaning me his black leather jacket- underneath it all, perhaps some species of a southern gentleman? Nah...

Ah, one can only wish that more of your performance-art concepts had made it to the stage, Prof. Ugly...Never (in those days) being quite sure which side of your mouths you boys were joking out of, if not actually both, an entire set of let's say, "Afternoon Delight" or "Chevy Van" and/or a pre-emptive strike of an entire Plane Jane set would've cleared that issue right up. I think the first show I ever saw was the benefit y'all played with the Nightmares to help drag mine and Brook's impoverished little student newspaper, the Dialogue, out of the fiscal hole, when you called yourselves "Ordinary Mary" as a stab at the Jane-sters. Did I say thanks for that, ever? Merely an oversight, I assure you. Have your sub-committee speak to my sub-committee about it.

Julie Fann used to tell the story that on that night, John Hicks was inscribing everyone's hand with a particularly trenchant summary of their personality, in indelible sharpie ink. On her hand, she said, he wrote, "Fuck me now." Hicks was a wonder of nature and a force all his own. He refused to mark on my hand in any fashion whatsoever, thereby declaring me either the stealth bomber or the absolute zero of humanity.

Chris: I know the guy you are talking about, I think it was Steve. I run into him from time to time, for a while he was working at the Hay House (or living there) in Kingsport. When I was still a probation officer I would see him there. Later I ran into him at scouting events, and I'm not sure why he was there either. Really nice guy, but was from a different mold from the rest of the Dracula gang. As I read your first entry today, I remembered that The Olde West had a full time bartender on staff, but served neither liquer nor beer. The bartender was a recovering alcoholic. Strange business model. To complete the off stage troika of bad nicknames, our sound/light man was Ric Milhorn, who you nicknamed "Hell Hammer." Ah the memories are flowing back like Pabst Blue Ribbon on quarter beer night at the Horseshoe Lounge....
As to your abilities as a director, anytime you want to put on another show here give me a call, I'm in. Especially if you let me be the "won''t feed a line to the forgetfull actor a week before opening, stage managing Nazi" again!

By the way, for anyone interested in party games, as a result of the Dracula production, Stinky Finger is a mere five (5) degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.

In my defense, what Chris fails to mention is that was probably the tenth time that night I had been sent by him to quiet down the "chatty" actors. Also worth noteing is that calling a conversation between Puke and Coker "chatty" is akin to calling a Husquavana chainsaw "a mild hum." That not withstanding, I did later feel bad as the offending party in this case was as I recall Pat Tabor, who was normally quiet as a church mouse.
Working with Chris and company was an interesting experience to say the least. We had no budget for props, so we found ways to manufacture what we needed from what we found laying around. A cane was required for Dracula to break a mirror in one scene, and we had to obtain both from what we had on hand. We stole the mirror from an apartment originally used for the night watchman, and as it was broken each night it became smaller and smaller, until in the end it was the size of a postcard. As it was taped to it's backing to prevent glass from flying into the crowd it became harder and harder to break. The cane began it's life as the coat rack in the lobby. Each night Chris and I would steal another section and I would take it home and lovingly craft it into a gentleman's cane, which was broken the next night trying to smash an increasingly smaller mirror. In addition, we needed a gunshot to coincide with the attempted shooting of Dracula. For this we used caps and a 12 lb. hammer we had found amongst the tools in the back room. Every night Chris complained that the gunshot was not loud enough, so that in the end we had about 6 rolls of caps duct taped to the head of the hammer. When I struck it to what we used as an anvil, the shock was so strong it blew the hammer out of my hand, and that night's shot was followed with the sound of the hammer slamming into the floor.
Then there was the day of the crickets. The Olde West was teetering on the brink of finacial disaster at the time, and so to sell more tickets they had matinee shows for one of the local middle schools (Blountville I think). Instead of having dinner for the kids, the theatre served free popcorn. Imagine 250 children eating popcorn in unison, and then imagine trying to preform or hear stage ques in what sounded like a room full of gigantic crickets.
Until reading Chris's posting I had not thought of Dracula in years. Now I remember why.....

Thanks ever so to all new JC bloggers out there (hail, UglyUgly)--
It is a more formidible task than I realize, sometimes, for even good writers to reconstruct emphemera from their past lives. I was talking with Scott Plez about this just last night. (We went to see an AC/DC tribute band- from Knoxville- at the local sports bar. Who says the surreality has stopped?) It is my hope to achieve, in this electronic format, the same sort of thing that happens whenever a bunch of us old-timers get together at something like a Stinky reunion show and start those conversations where one tiny shred of memory leads to another, and a contradiction, and usually a few revelations as well. We always end up saying, "Damn, we shoulda taped that," but there is something so invasive about dragging recording devices into casual social settings. I just hate that. But I'm hoping this will take off in the way those beautiful, spontaneous conversational rambles always seem to. We're hoping to start posting pictures on the blog soon, which I think will help. So just remember, if you want to avoid me coming to your house with a tape recorder, POST!

For all you Cheese Heads out there:

http://www.tommywomack.com/cheese.html


The tent's gettin' bigger, the tent's getting bigger, the tent's gettin' bigger...it's a MONSTER!

I may have a very low-fi copy of some of the Paralyzers' tunes on an unmarked cassette somewhere. "I Break Down" is a great song that I use to do in my blessedly brief solo career before playing in The Bystanders (b. 1997 d. 1999 RIP).

Other tunes I tried to cover were the Nightmares "Look the Other Way" (GREAT bass line John) and "Daydream"

Did anybody go to the Nightmares' Knoxville gig at Geronimo's? Oh, the humanity! Dirt floor. A guy sportin' a Mohawk screaming: "Play more Bowie!" First time I heard the Nightmares cover the Dead's "Truckin'." My friend Munch tripping over the owner (doing God knows what) on the way to the bathroom located at the end of a pitch-black corridor.

Question:

What current bands (local to JC or otherwise) do you think would have dug (or sound like they were from) the JC mid-80's music scene?

Wilco?
The Strokes?
Death Cab for Cutie?
Guided By Voices?



P-O-L-L-UTION

This is a noble cause.

I hope to contribute what I can to it. Only a few of you may remember me: Allan Maki. I surmise that I am a few years older than most of the bloggers that have posted thus far and, due to that, I was on the periphery of the whole "scene" back then. I finished up my undergraduate time at ETSU in '84 and was a working stiff in the mid 80's when JC exploded (musically speaking). I did get out and see a lot of shows. Mainly Nightmares, Plane Jane and a couple of Sticky Finger shows. I remember going to see Gov't Cheese, The Paralyzers, Blooshrooms, 63 Eyes, Uncle Green, Dillon Fence and beholding Southern Culture for the first time at the Highlander.

I was living on 10th Ave for a time in '87 when the Nightmares used our basement space for practice, and what not. I recall coming home from work one day and seeing a neighborhood boy of about 10 twisting away on the sidewalk outside our house as the Nightmares jammed in the basement.

Will publish more when time permits.

Elvis' brain in a jar,

Allan Maki

Wow...does anyone have email for Martin? The little kibble-eater should be here to give an account of himself. I also never knew Brook and Heather met in the Philosophy department. More on that later.

But first I must ask about this place O'Malley's. Was it what later became the Offshore? (I'm guessing because of the Bristol locale.) The weird place in Johnson City was indeed called Cowboys, and it was actually my favorite place to see the Nightmares, mainly because they made them play something like four sets a night. I think that was every song they had, twice. Which was great for me. Every Thursday night, all summer long, 1986. There was that mechanical bull in the middle of the dance floor, which was kind of a nuisance but could be useful if you were trying to avoid someone. And speaking of covers, this is how I knew I'd found a home...The first time I saw the Nightmares, as I walked through the door at Cowboy's, I was greeted by "Suffragette City." My jaw hit the floor and pretty much stayed there. Something I could get behind? I'd already had a contretemps with JC alterna-culture in the form of James Arwood, fannying about with his mohawk and PiL jacket, along the lines of "sticking your neck out this far for image eradicates all your self-professed nilhism. If you were a real nilhist, you'd just wear sweatpants from K-Mart, like me." Never one to pass a hornet's nest without swatting at it with a big stick, me. I was burning my bridges before they were even built. Nevertheless, if there was a band in town that could play "Suffragette City" and do it justice, I knew something was happening that I had to keep my eye on.

The first place I met Heather was at Cowboy's. In the bathroom. She was wearing a fabulous red mini-dress with maribou trim around the hem. She was attempting to comb her hair, which was terribly tangled, and just ripping chunks of it out. She was saying to Lynne, "Maybe I should take another one. Do you think I should take another one?" and Lynne was saying, "For god's sake, no." I was trying to wash my hands and get out without opening my big mouth and letting mom come out, but every individual hair that was left on Heather's head screamed to me for help. I took her hairbrush away from her and finished brushing out her hair. I was pretty sure she'd never remember it, and in fact I think Heather and I "met" each other a grand total of eleven times before she would remember me at all, and then only because I told her to quit bothering. It probably came across as snotty, but only 50% of it was miffed arrogance on my part; the other part was just truly a feeling of why should it matter. It was at least as amusing as it was offending, and I felt really prepared to embrace that state of affairs, but I don't think it went over that way. I remember where we were; Brook and I had stopped at Lynne's, and she and Heather were having a cherry pie baking contest. Holy domesticity, batman.

I remember Andy Boy. Andy Boy and "The Plain Truth" represent the Genisis of the J.C. music scene, or at least the expulsion from paradise. The Plain Truth was arguably a Knoxville band, although as I recall only one or two members were from Knoxville. Thier drummer, Tommy, is still in the area and works for Bridge Computers last I heard. Anyway, how many folks out there remember the Shooters Lane show? It was I beleive the first punk show in J.C. Final Curtain would not come along for 6 months to a year later (the fall of 1984) Unlike Andy Boy, Final Curtain and The Plain Truth did drink at the time. Alot. Often in John Smith's basement.

Ah, good one Scott. The median surfing event… That was one “off-roading” experience I was glad not to be part of. :^P

As far as the turnip goes, I believe we have most of those archived in a file folder. A great mag!

Let’s start at the beginning of my music career (and quite a few others in JC). There was a “band” called Andy Boy. Yes, it was named after the produce company. This “band” consisted of quite a few of my musical friends and was formed in high school. Our deal was writing and recording songs on the weekends. Since none of us drank at the time, we were very productive. I still have 20 or 30 cassettes and many open reel tapes of our music; but that’s another story.

The great thing about Andy Boy was our musical timeline. We essentially went through a 10-year average band lifespan in a year and a half. We had:
1. Our skiffle period
2. Our heavy rock period
3. Our experimental period
4. Our breakup and split into two bands period:
a. The Acid Cows
b. DKM (Drew, Kurt & Mark) Sorry guys, I can’t remember the name.
5. Our get back together and suck period.
It was good stuff and great training ground for later musical careers.

By the end of its existence, probably 30 people had played in Andy Boy. I might be bold in saying, but quite a few of the most influential musicians in the JC scene played in AB at one time or another. In the next few months, I want to start a timeline/family tree of the musicians in JC. Also, I’m going to start digitizing the best of AB stuff before the tapes all rot and start a companion site that is music of this time.

I’m done rambling’ now. Keep the stories coming!