Anarchy In The Music City! The Other Side of Nashville's Musical Pioneers

Since the early 1960s, Nashville has been known worldwide as the "Music City" for its robust country and gospel music industries. For over 40 years now, Nashville has also been home to a thriving hotbed of rock, blues, rap, and Americana music. "The Other Side of Nashville" has grown from a few makeshift bands playing original songs and scraping for gigs into an internationally-respected scene that has attracted creative immigrants from across the globe.

Anarchy In The Music City! is an oral history of the origins and evolution of Nashville's alternative music scene as told by the pioneers that made the music. Using artist interviews culled from the pages of Rev. Keith A. Gordon's critically-acclaimed book The Other Side of Nashville, this illustrated volume includes conversations with both well-known music-makers like Jason & the Scorchers, Webb Wilder, Tony Gerber, David Olney, and Chagall Guevara as well as regional cult rockers like Tommy Womack, the Dusters, Donna Frost, and Aashid Himons, among many others.  

The “Reverend of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Rev. Gordon has been writing about rock and blues music for 50 years. A former contributor to the All Music Guide books and website, and the former Blues Expert for About.com, Rev. Gordon has written or edited 25 previous music-related books and eBooks, including Blues Deluxe: The Joe Bonamassa Buying Guide, Planet of Sound, The Other Side of Nashville, and Scorched Earth: A Jason & the Scorchers Scrapbook.

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The History of Music Zines In Nashville, Part Four

As stated previously, Gus Palas had sold the bloated carcass that was The Metro to Radio Lightning to use as a sort of in-house music magazine. Station manager Ned Horton had some great ideas for the rag, and no little amount of vision, but he knew right from jump street that he had to do something about the magazine to make it more professional if he was going to sell it to advertisers. He spent a crapload of money on new Apple computers and all the software needed to make a magazine look nice, and then he went out and found a couple of guys to use all this new gear.

Ned hired Daryl Sanders and Jody Lentz from Athlon Sports. Unlike Gus and, really, even myself, these guys came from a higher level in the publishing biz. Athlon was a mega-bucks company, publishing annual sports guides for S.E.C. and NFL football and such, magazines with glossy color covers and lots of advertising. I knew Daryl briefly from the good old days of Take One magazine, where he had worked with Thom King before I came along, and he was to take the editorial reigns of The Metro. Jody was an accomplished graphic artist that could make a Mac sing, and his redesign of the rag made it look cool, clean, and professional.

Daryl and Jody rounded up a staff, including some very fine writers like Jason Moon Wilkins, Holly Gleason, Brett Ratner, Audese Green, Warren Denney, and even my old pal Andy Anderson, as well as the Reverend, to fill up the pages of The Metro each month. Under the new editorial regime, and in keeping with the radio station’s eclectic mix of musical genres, the scope of The Metro expanded to include coverage of reggae, world music, jazz, blues, and the new “jam band” genre. Sometime in mid-1993, The Metro became Bone Music magazine and Gus Palas found himself gently pushed out the door.

Initially, the Reverend contributed CD reviews to Bone, and since I was one of the few staffers that was plugged into the Nashville music scene, I got to cover local bands as well. If the ‘80s offered great local bands like Jason & the Scorchers, Webb Wilder & the Beatnecks, Walk The West, the White Animals, and Afrikan Dreamland, the decade to follow would see an explosion of talent. Clockhammer, Max Vague, the Floating Men, Price Jones, Chagall Guevara, and many more would also create cool and challenging music during the ‘90s.

It was Daryl Sanders who officially dubbed me “The Reverend” and began running my byline as Rev. Keith A. Gordon, claiming that since I was always preaching about music, the media, politics and such, and since I was an ordained minister, I should therefore be called “The Reverend.” I began writing a column for Bone called “Dancing On the Edge” that covered music, zines, counter-culture, and something called “the Internet.” It was Bone publisher Ned Horton who declared that “nobody wants to read about the Internet,” and therefore the magazine (and my column) should be sparing in its coverage of the fledgling technology.

With Sanders and Lentz at the helm, assisted by people like Kris Whyte (now Whittlesey, later editor of All The Rage) and guided by Horton, Bone expanded with regional editions in a number of cities, including Atlanta, which were sponsored by local radio stations. A small four-page insert called T-Bone was produced for The Tennessean newspaper, featuring artist interviews and CD reviews. By 1995, Bone Music magazine was a bona fide regional phenomenon covering the best mainstream and alternative music. Ned even discovered the Internet, and the Reverend was allowed to cut loose with a cover story that year about “music on the Internet.”

A year later, however, the bottom fell out for Bone. The zine was losing “affiliates” across the country, reducing the number of editions that were produced (and the income received from those other radio stations). The Internet was providing music news faster than a monthly magazine, and Ned later admitted that he had underestimated the growth in popularity of the ‘net as a new media outlet. Neither Ned nor the radio station had anything to counter the ‘net, and it hurt the magazine.

In May 1996, Horton was asked to resign his position by the station’s owners due to a difference in management philosophy. Local businessman David Tune took over as station manager and soon discontinued both Bone magazine and something called Bone-TV that ran one or two shows on a local station. The new Metro/Bone magazine had managed to squeeze out almost four years before falling beneath the reaper’s blade.

There haven’t really been any significant local music zines that I’m aware of since Bone went belly up ten years ago. The Reverend published sporadic zines such as a resurrected R Squared and R.A.D! (Review And Discussion of Rock & Roll) on a limited basis during the late ‘90s before launching the Alt.Culture.Guide™ music webzine in 2000. There was KP’s Rock & Read zine, which evolved into Shake Magazine, published by local musician Chris James. The local scene was never Shake’s main focus, although Chris and writers like Steve Morley wrote about some interesting music. The Nashville underground was covered admirably for years by Donnie and April Kendall and their lively House O’ Pain zine, but that publication eventually ran its course as well.

With the explosion of local rock ‘n’ roll talent like the Kings of Leon, Paramore, and others it’s a wonder that no young entrepreneur has decided to launch a new Nashville music zine. Then again, maybe the era of zines has long passed, with the web and music blogs taking up the cause. When I look back at the halcyon times of the Nashville music zine, circa 1977-1997, I have to say that it was a hell of a run... (2007)

The History of Music Zines In Nashville, Part Three

Okay, so here’s how it really went down. It was the fall of 1991, October or November, methinks. The Metro was on its last legs. Palas had pissed off, burned, and mislead enough people around town that there was no haven left for his little music rag. We had set up an interview with musician Eugene Chadbourne – who remains one of the most interesting artists plying their trade in the American underground today – and tied it to an EC show that Gus was allegedly promoting at the Cannery. It was a slam dunk, really: a Chadbourne interview in the paper, a live show a week or so later, and to top it off, a friend of mine agreed to cover Eugene’s meager $500 guarantee. Gus didn’t even have to part with any coin, just put on the show...

Chadbourne called me when he rolled into town and I met him in Green Hills. We left his rental car in a lot that I knew would be safe for overnight storage (having left my car there in a drunken Cantrell’s stupor many a night) and ran down to Pizza Perfect to have some dinner. Now, the Reverend was already mighty suspicious, since Palas hadn’t returned any of my calls that week, and an issue of The Metro with my Eugene Chadbourne interview was nowhere to be found. A deal was a deal, though, and I had already handed off my buddy Eric’s five C-notes to Eugene, so, as they say, the show must go on!

Eugene and I arrived at the club around 7:00 PM (for a 9:00 PM showtime) to find the windows darkened and the parking lot strangely devoid of cars. Gus had supposedly arranged for Walk The West, who had met Eugene in Austin, to open the show and I figured that the lot would be full of that popular local band’s fans. No such luck. We threw some rocks against the one window that was lit, waking the club’s “security guard” from his slumber. The night watchman, a buddy of Gus’s that was crashing at the club, had no knowledge of any show going on that night, and he was right.

I called up several friends, including the one that had paid Eugene’s guarantee, and we all agreed to meet out at his house. There, Chadbourne pulled out his trusty songbook and beat-up guitar and proceeded to put on a private show for 13 listeners, right from the comfort of Eric’s couch. Unfortunately, Nashville didn’t know what it was missing, ‘cause Eugene rocked the house and we all had a grand old time.

Flash forward several months to the spring of 1992. The Metro had been AWOL since the Chadbourne fiasco and local music fans, accustomed to a monthly...more or less...music zine were getting edgy. A number of people approached the Reverend and asked what it would take to start up a new rag. “Money” was always my answer, and when Mark Willis of New Sound Atlanta (who had taken over booking the Cannery in Gus’s absence) and Mike Phillips of local band Peace Cry agreed to help underwrite the venture via advertising, R2 (or R Squared, for “Rock & Roll”) was born. Pan Doss at the Pantheon club jumped on board, as did Steve West at 328 Performance Hall, and off we went...

The first issue of R2 hit the streets in June ‘92, a quarter-fold tabloid with local rocker Threk Michaels and metal legends King’s X on the cover. I had lined up a pretty strong staff of writers, most of them former Metro scribes, including Brian Mansfield (who wrote a great Will & the Bushmen piece) and my old NIR buddy Andy Anderson (who contributed a piece on the Ellen James Society and interviewed the Replacements’ Chris Mars). We had articles on international artists (Midnight Oil), regional artists (Atlanta’s Stonehart) and local artists (Michaels, Stealin’ Horses). Clint Brewer, who would become the editor of the Nashville City Paper, contributed a cool Widespread Panic article, and Andy and I scratched out a bunch of album reviews, including discs by the Ramones, Body Count, the Beastie Boys, and Jason Ringenberg’s first solo album, One Foot In the Honky Tonk.

It took a lot of work to get that first issue of R2 off the ground, and after collecting all the advertising monies due, we broke even, if I remember correctly. Aside from the writers who were paid a pittance for their contributions, folks like Mike Phillips and his wife Wendi, Mark Willis and his new Sound Atlanta staff (especially Roxanne), Nancy Camp and Pam Cross in Atlanta, and Nashville’s Randy Ford and Donny and April Kendall were all instrumental in getting the zine on the street. Thanks to Willis, we had distribution in Nashville, Atlanta, Roanoke VA, and Myrtle Beach SC. The zine had great content and if the lay-out looks a little dated and undergroundish as I look at it today, it was, by all measures, a minor triumph.

With little or no money left after producing issue number two of R2, Mike Phillips and I began badgering our advertisers (Go West Presents, the Pantheon, Deja Vu, 527 Mainstreet in the ‘boro and, of course, New Sound Atlanta) to place ads in issue number two. Andy and Brian and myself started cranking out copy when, who should reappear on the local scene but Gus Palas! As we were hitting up advertisers for commitments for our second issue, we often found that Gus had been there first, talking shit and trying to undercut us.

Seems that Gus was trying to resurrect The Metro after a hiatus of nine months or so, and the only way that he could do it was by running down those of us who had supported him through the years. We heard reports of Gus saying that I didn’t know how to put together a magazine (actually, I had taught him), that we had second-rate writers (Brian Mansfield has since published several books and has written for USA Today for over a decade) and so on. It was a dirty campaign and a lot of potential advertisers were on the fence.

The Reverend, veteran of biker bars and early Internet flame wars, was ready for the fight when, unfortunately, my father died unexpectedly. After working security for New Sound Atlanta at the Cannery on a Friday night, I spoke with my father early Saturday morning before going to bed. I was awakened by my mom who said that they had rushed dad to the hospital. By the time I could drive from Franklin to Nashville, dad had died...and all the piss and vinegar that I had worked up for a feud with Palas drained right out of me. At that moment, I didn’t really care about R2 or The Metro or much of anything except my family.

Unbeknownst to all of us, behind the scenes, Gus was negotiating to sell The Metro. Maybe he knew that he couldn’t beat us (after all, R2 had his best writers and most of his advertisers) or maybe he was just trying to cash out and split town. Either way, he somehow convinced Ned Horton and Radio Lightning to buy The Metro for a reported $10,000 and bring the zine in-house. I’ll never understand why Ned didn’t just start his own music zine through the radio station rather than pay Palas (after all, The Metro was nothing more than a couple of crapped-out computers by this time, and Gus hadn’t published an issue in over nine months).

I found out about the sale of The Metro when Gus called me to offer his condolences for the loss of my father and to make an offer to buy out the second issue of R2; seems like they didn’t have any material to publish a new issue of The Metro, so Gus convinced Ned to pay me $500 or something like that for the contents of our second issue. Since it didn’t appear that I was going to be able to get another R2 on the street anyway, I agreed to the purchase, paid my people and made peace with Gus. In the process, I was drafted onto the staff of the “new” Metro, although it wouldn’t be long until changes were in the air...

Read More: The History of Music Zines In Nashville, Part Four

The History of Music Zines In Nashville, Part Two

Let’s clear the air before we begin discussing The Metro. Gus Palas was an asshole of the first degree, a manipulating conman whose promises never lived up to the reality. Over the seven years or so that Gus published The Metro, he ripped off, pissed off, and disappointed a hell of a lot of people. As The Metro’s main contributor throughout its run – the zine’s music editor and resident critic, as well as photographer, graphic artist, and all-around whipping boy – nobody (and I mean nobody) got ripped off by or pissed off at good ol’ Gus more than the kindly Reverend. After all, I stood shoulder to shoulder with Palas through thick and thin, defended him at the risk of my own reputation, and went out on a limb for the rag more than once.

It all started during the summer of 1985. At the urging of Bernie Walters (the madman and visionary that tried to get the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame to locate in Nashville), I received a phone call from Gus Palas. Bernie had told him that I was the “go-to” guy around town, the one writer that he needed on the staff of his new magazine. I bought into Gus’ vision of a local music magazine and offered my dubious expertise to get the thing off the ground. The Metro got off to a rocky start, with Gus overestimating the meager (unpaid) staff’s ability to crank out a zine every two weeks, and overestimating the amount of ad revenue the publication would pull in. From a gloomy basement office in an alleyway off Belmont Boulevard, we published the first half-dozen or so issues of The Metro in a cocaine-fueled haze.

Over the next seven years, Gus would keep the rag going by hook or by crook, publishing on a shoestring budget, frequently changing office spaces when the unpaid rent would prompt a “midnight move.” When local typesetters would no longer work on the rag without cash in advance, Gus scraped up the money to buy some Mac computers and do the lay-out and design in-house. He ran the magazine out of seedy offices (Melrose, Music Row), a nightclub (The Cannery), and even his own apartment. Somehow, Gus got The Metro on the street more often than not.

There was a period, around 1985/86 or so, when Gus was off playing rock star with the Simmons brothers and their band the Stand. During this year, Gus abdicated his role in the magazine to a bunch of Vandy kids, pretty much duplicating the same error that Thom King had made with Take One magazine a decade earlier. During his absence, this writer was marginalized by the new staff and the magazine took off in a different direction, with a more “artistic,” hipper vibe. Palas returned from his hiatus in mid-‘87 and took over the reins of The Metro from the Vandy grads that were running it.

When this group of disgruntled former staffers was shown the door in a power play between them and Palas, they started up the short-lived Fireplace Whiskey Journal. Launched in the spring of 1988 by former Metro editor Kath Hansen along with writer Tom Wood, his girlfriend (later wife) Nicki Pendleton, Regina Gee, and local musician Lee Carr, Fireplace Whiskey Journal drew the line in the sand. You were either for Gus Palas or you were against him.

In the zine’s first issue, Wood fired off the salvo “In Defense of The Metro,” a sarcastically titled editorial criticizing Palas for poor business decisions, his inability to keep a strict publishing schedule and...horror of horrors...for wasting ink on bands like Metallica. This writer shot off a response to Wood’s smug editorial, defending Palas and The Metro (and, by extension, my own work). The Fireplace Whiskey Journal’s ruling council refused to publish my rebuttal piece in “their forum,” which, of course, prompted another response on my part. Why dredge up ancient history over two publications that no longer exist? Because I was right, dammit, and they were wrong!

As I wrote at the time, “all of the creative efforts of every Nashville musician, poet or painter won’t add up to shit if nobody outside of Davidson County is exposed to them. To this end, The Metro has served to represent Nashville culture to the world...not totally, nor flawlessly, but as adequate and balanced a forum as is possible in what is an advertiser-supported publication.” I concluded my tirade with, “like it or not, Gus Palas has done more to promote local talent of ALL kinds, from alternative acts to heavy metal and all who stand in between, than the whole lot of prancing, posing, pseudo-intellectual rich kids and snobbish Vandy grads slumming for a semester or two down on Elliston Place.” And, in retrospect, this was true. Yes, we put Bon Jovi on the cover of the very first issue, in August 1985, but we also put cult L.A. cowpunk band the Screamin’ Sirens on the cover of number two.

Throughout the history of The Metro, I personally wrote stories on local talent like Dessau, the Dusters, In Pursuit, F.U.C.T., Jet Black Factory, Jason & the Scorchers, Webb Wilder, Threk Michaels, Chagall Guevara, and Aashid Himmons, among many others. We also pursued stories of national importance, and provided important coverage to artists like R.E.M., Billy Bragg, Faith No More, Mojo Nixon, the Ramones, and King’s X. The Metro’s eclectic editorial direction often provoked grumbles among local scenesters that we gave coverage to our friends, or that you could buy your way into the rag which, in one sorry instance (the unfortunate Whyte Lace incident) proved true. However, on my part, I wrote about bands that I liked, or those that contacted the magazine and asked for a story, and I was never paid a dime by Gus or anybody else (tho’ Tom Littlefield and Kenny McMahan did buy beer on a few occasions).

The Metro became a force to be reckoned with around its fifth anniversary, shortly after Gus had hooked up with Lisa Hays and Lisa became the rag’s de facto managing editor. A ground-breaking interview with Tipper Gore at the height of the PMRC controversy prompted an outraged Jello Biafra to pull out a copy of the magazine on Oprah Winfrey’s national TV show, flashing The Metro on screen and quoting from the interview. This led to my interview with the Dead Kennedys frontman and more national attention. We became one of the first publications in the country to write about Living Colour, Sepultura, and Stealin’ Horses. We published Andrew Eldritch’s favorite Sisters of Mercy article and championed free speech in Nashville’s punk underground. The magazine sponsored three “Nashville Music Awards” bashes and could boast of readers from across the country and in Europe.

In the end, though, Gus was a pretty shabby businessman and there was never enough money to support The Metro. Although the magazine had always attracted talented writers – folks like Rebecca Luxford, Brian Mansfield (later a long time USA Today writer), Bill Spicer, and old school scribes like Andy Anderson, Thom King, and yours truly – The Metro went dark sometime late 1991 or early ‘92. When Gus resurfaced after a ten-month hiatus, it was to sell what was left of The Metro to WRLT-FM, Radio Lightning, which published it for a few months and changed the name (and editorial focus) to follow the interests of the station. Thus was Bone Music Magazine born, in part three of this series...

Read More: The History of Music Zines In Nashville, Part Three

The History of Music Zines In Nashville, Part One

What was the first music zine in Nashville? That honor, without a doubt, goes to Hank Magazine, published by man-about-town Harvey Magee. Hank focused on “cosmic cowboy” songwriters that had flooded the town during the early ‘70s, as well as Southern rockers like Charlie Daniels and the Marshall Tucker Band. Hank covered other strains of music – for example, this humble scribe placed a Johnny Rivers album review in the zine during my senior year of high school – but Magee’s zine was really an unheralded forefather of No Depression, featuring artists like Don Schlitz, Marshall Chapman, and Guy Clark.

Then there’s Thom King’s Take One Magazine, which was really more than just a music zine. Thom, who I kind of knew from Franklin High School, launched the zine in 1977 with an eye towards serious journalism...like an early Nashville Scene, with a better balance of local news, thought-provoking articles, and entertainment coverage. I came on board somewhere around issue number three or four, after running into Thom at Shakey’s Pizza in Green Hills and asking for a gig writing album reviews.

By the end of the year, Thom and I were pretty much running the rag on our own, with help from his brother John and writer Sam Borgerson. Hank had pretty much disappeared by 1977 and Take One picked up the slack in music coverage. We were the first publication in town to talk about the Ramones and the punk revolution of ‘77, and if we were criticized for writing about Nashville’s “first” rock band, the Smashers, we redeemed ourselves with coverage of Cloverbottom. Thirty-plus years later, Thom and I still talk about the trials and tribulations of publishing Take One.

During the waning days of Take One, I disappeared to Detroit for a couple of years (1979-80) and reveled in the ultra-cool punk rock scene exploding in the Motor City. A funny thing happened while I was gone, though – Nashville developed a rock scene of its own. Working out of a beer joint/hot dog stand by the name of Phrank-N-Steins, Rick Champion provided a forum for original bands like Cloverbottom, the Actuals, and others to play. Allen Green’s short-lived Grab! music zine documented this growing scene during 1981/82, with great writers like Kent Orlando, Curtis “C Ra” McGuirt, Glenn Hunter, and Champion himself. The zine had an irreverent wit, and the couple of copies that I still have of Grab! offer stories on Factual and the Wrong Band as well as reviews of records by the Ratz and the Smashers.

After Green started his own band – the way-ahead-of-their-time Suburban Baroque – Grab! fell by the wayside and Nashville was without a real local music zine for a while. I published copies of my own zine Anthem on a sporadic basis, and covered some local bands, but most of Anthem’s meager circulation went to places like England, Germany, and Poland as well as to L.A. and N.Y. and Chicago through mail swaps with other zinesters.

Enter Andy Anderson and the Nashville Intelligence Report. I can’t remember when, exactly, Andy began publishing NIR but his zine picked up where Grab! left off. Andy was excited about the local music scene, and the zine featured many of the same writers that had populated Grab! Somewhere along the line I got involved with the project, and Andy published the zine for several years, championing local bands but also covering national artists like Katrina & the Waves and Los Lobos.

When Andy went home for a year (Knoxville, I think), Rick Champion took on the mantle as publisher, and NIR carried on without missing a beat. When Andy returned, he took back over from Rick and published NIR until sometime after Gus Palas came to town and launched the more commercially-oriented The Metro music magazine. Andy stopped publishing NIR and ended up doing some writing for The Metro during the late ‘80s. Andy was a good writer with a real fanboy’s enthusiasm for the music; he fled the local scene during the dark days of the mid-‘90s, relocating to New York City, before landing in North Carolina.

Read More: The History of Music Zines In Nashville, Part Two