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