Bobby Edwards drives tour buses for rock royalty, logging 26 years, 280 bands, and 3.4 million miles on the road.

By Bill Ramsey | April 19, 2012
The Pulse | Chattanooga’s Weekly Alternative

More than 30 years ago, Bobby Edwards was working at Memorial Auditorium in Chattanooga unloading gear for touring bands visiting town. One of those bands, Southern rock titans 38 Special—a particular favorite of Edwards’, who is also a musician—came to perform at the peak of their fame. He was a big fan of the band and remembers his first encounter with lead singer Donnie Van Zant.

“Like any teenager, I was in awe of rock stars,” Edwards says, “so I was very excited about seeing 38 Special and getting the chance to meet them.”

It would not be his last encounter with the “Wild-Eyed Southern Boys.” For almost a decade now, Edwards, a 1981 graduate of Hixson High School, has been the group’s tour bus driver, delivering the band—still “Rocking into the Night” after almost 40 years together—to clubs, fairgrounds and arenas across North America.

“I’ve told that story to Donnie. Of course, he doesn’t remember me from then, but he still gets a laugh out of it,” Edwards says during a brief break during a Chattanooga stop-over from the band’s current tour. “Who would have thought a 17-year-old kid who first met a band in his hometown would be driving their tour bus 30 years later.”

Edwards has been 38 Special’s tour bus driver for eight years, but he’s also driven buses for almost every chart-topping music act in a driving career that spans 26 years and almost 4 million miles. Indeed, Edwards’ driving career-span rivals—sometimes exceeds—the longevity of the bands he has driven.

For Edwards, it’s more lifestyle than business. He is on the road most of the year, crisscrossing the country in one of several custom tour buses, an exhausting but satisfying job he says, that has given him front-row access to some of music biggest stars. With a sterling reputation (not one accident), a massive mile count and an easy-going personality, it’s no wonder the soft-spoken Edwards is an in-demand—and perhaps the most trusted—tour bus driver in the country.

And while he’s one of the many unsung heroes behind the scenes of the music-touring industry, Edwards is also an invaluable asset and even “family” to such bands as 38 Special, who count on his endurance and skills to deliver them safely—and on time—to venues all over the country.

Edwards’ journey behind the wheel of touring music caravans began in the mid 1980s. The son of a musical family, he moved to Nashville after graduating from UTC in 1986 to chase his own dream of a music career. Solid and talented as a bass player, Edwards’ professionalism and reliability (a factor not unnoticed in a world of egos and debauchery) set him apart. Because of his background as a stage hand, he also had enormous respect for the crews who did the heavy lifting. So when the gigs dried up, Edwards was immediately drawn to the less glamorous but better-paying world of tour-bus-driving.

“When I started, there were only half a dozen or so companies with these kind of custom tour buses,” Edwards recalls. “It was a very small pool and you earned a reputation quickly.”

Edwards, a gearhead and custom car fan, took the road and driving like a fish to water and hasn’t turned back. While he doesn’t regret giving up his own music dreams, he still plays and will occasionally sit-in with the bands he drives. “They know I’m a musician, and that makes our relationship much more personal,” he says.

“I love the travel and the people I get to meet,” Edwards says during a brief stop to visit his parents in Red Bank, where I speak to him aboard the 38 Special tour bus parked in the lot of small church whose empty lot easily accommodates the massive bus and trailer he drives. “There’s a freedom to it that’s unrivaled.”

On this long road, Edwards has shuttled a “Who’s Who” of rock royalty, country superstars, at least one jazz legend and more bands than he can remember. At his home on the outskirts of Nashville, the walls of his office are filled with gold and platinum albums from the stars he has served. In the bus on this day are a few he has borrowed from his parents’ home—Alan Jackson’s smash 1991 album “Don’t Rock the Jukebox” among them—but his clients go well beyond the country genre and include Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, Stevie Ray Vaughn and revered jazz icon Miles Davis. There have also been touring Broadway shows, as well as gigs with NASCAR teams and the occasional run shuttling soldiers from base to base.

And of course there are stories. Many, many stories. In the intimate confines of a bus, Edwards is privy to the most intimate moments of the stars he transports. His observations and encounters are sometimes amusing, sometimes hilarious, often mundane, but a few remain standout favorites.

“I was awestruck in the beginning, but as you get used to being around these people, you begin to recognize they are human,” Edwards says.

Driving skills, endurance and longevity are valued in Edwards’ profession, but perhaps just as valued is the ability to not speak out of school. Edwards does not, but he has plenty of tales he’s ready and willing to share.

One favorite involves notoriously gruff bandleader and jazz legend Miles Davis, who Edwards drove on tour just before his death in 1991. Davis, quite explicitly and not without reason, had a low opinion of white people. He had been subject to such brutal racism for so long, Edwards says, that he quite frankly despised 99.5 percent of the white population. “There were times when he would blow his nose on the first row,” Edwards recalls.

Ever the Southern gentleman—and knowing his place—Edwards completed his assigned role as Davis’ driver with the utmost respect. Davis rarely spoke to the hired help, but apparently took a liking to his young, competent driver.

“We had arrived at our hotel and his tour manager showed me the manifest,” Edwards explains. “Below Miles’ name was mine. After my name, it read: Bus Driver Deluxe. Everyone else, including the musicians, was below me. ‘That means he likes you,’ the manager said.”

Another poignant tale centers around the late Texas blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughn, who Edwards knew at the peak of his fame and new sobriety.

“He put his arm around me once when we were walking back from an AA meeting,” Edwards recalls. “And he said, ‘I’m glad you know me now.’ I said, ‘Why?” He said, ‘You wouldn’t have liked me very much when I had an 8-ball in my pocket. I wasn’t a very nice person.’”

Edwards is fond of his moments with these greats and treasures the experiences, but he recognizes that like the careers of the classic rock stars he often drives, it’s a road that will eventually end. But he doesn’t see the horizon any time soon. “As long as it stays fun, I’ll keep driving,” Edwards says.

And with that—the bus never stops running; it’s cheaper that way—he climbs into his “executive office” and prepares for the long road ahead.

By Bill Ramsey | March 22, 2012
The Pulse | Chattanooga’s Weekly Alternative

If you spend time inCalifornia and drink wine, chances are you are a fan of Two Buck Chuck. In that far-off nirvana where one can freely purchase wine (or any other kind of beer or liquor) at convenience stores, Trader Joe’s is the go-to grocery store for a certain brand of premium wine with Skid Row pricing. I speak, of course, of Charles Shaw wines, which have gained a passionate following in California for their excellent taste and, more importantly, the $1.99 price tag, hence the nickname.

Visit any Trader Joe’s and you’ll find customers carting cases of Two Buck Chuck out the door, stocking up as if a nuclear winter were forecast. Indeed, many live in fear of the day when these award-winning wines’ bargain-basement price will disappear. That’s not likely. Fred Franzia, who along with his brother, Joe, own Bronco Wine, which makes Shaw and other low-cost domestic brands, has for years engaged in a war against the pretentiousness and priciness of his competitors, saying only a sucker would pay more than $10 for a bottle of wine and colorfully taunting other winemakers as “bozos in a glass.”

You won’t find Two Buck Chuck in Chattanooga, since it is exclusively sold through Trader Joe’s, the charming California-based chain of small grocery stores who’ve made their legend by selling a wide variety of high-end products at reasonable prices in stores staffed with knowledegable foodies and wine experts. Tennessee’s arcane liquor laws prohibit the sales of wine in grocery stores, and until this is corrected we’ll likely never experience the joys TBC or Trader Joe’s.

I relate this tale not to rail against the state’s laws (although they deserve to be railed against; but that’s another story), but because Two Buck Chuck reminds me of a time when bargain-priced wine was less about quality and all about bang for the buck. Even wine snobs agree that TBC is actually a very good wine. But it’s the $1.99 price tag that has made it legend and its only competitor in the low-end market prior to its introduction has been a certain stable of wines most connoisseurs would politely call swill. You know them as the flavored, low-alcohol wines that cost less than $5 and would, if consumed quickly enough, produce the desired effect—namely a cheap buzz. I speak here, of course, of Boone’s Farm and Mogen David 20/20.

Ask anyone over 40 about Boone’s Farm or MD 20/20 and you’ll likely be regaled with stories lodged deep within their high school memories. At any high school party in the 1970s or ’80s, these were the preferred beverages of our dates and girlfriends. And because they were both cheap and easy to procure (even for under-age students with bad fake IDs), they remain a nostalgic favorite. But they also occupy different levels in the social strata of teen drinking of which an entire study could be written.

It is my memory that Boone’s Farm appealed to most teenage girls because it did not taste like alcohol and had at least an element of “class.” In the supremely preppy era of my high school years, this rather dubious distinction mattered a great deal. While many girls I knew were eager to party—as eager as any boy, as I recall—they were not so eager to be seen swilling Miller Ponies or a Mickey’s Big Mouth. Sipping a glass of Boone’s Farm (strawberry was a particular favorite) lent a certain degree of sophistication to even the most debaucherous gathering. And if they sipped their way through an entire bottle, as was often the case, chances were the provider of said “fine wine” would be rewarded with some form of carnal pleasure. Rather louche, I know, but consider the time.

Less favored by my crowd’s female population was MD 20/20, the grape-flavored fortified wine we simple referred to as “Mad Dog.” Mad Dog gained its popularity as a “bum wine,” a cheap high without the sting of liquor but with a boosted alcohol content that hit the mark much faster than Boone’s Farm. Indeed, 20/20 originally stood for 20 ounces at 20 percent alcohol, something my friends and I became aware of rather quickly. The girls of my high school years rarely ventured into Mad Dog territory, but it was quite frequently used as a base for an even more fortified punch (mixed with Everclear) that became a popular non-beer option at many parties of my misspent and reckless youth.

The boys, of course, found both Boone’s Farm and Mad Dog to be of sufficient alcohol content to achieve the maximum buzz in the minimum time, which of course was the point when one was 16. And while it was certainly easy to drink oneself sick by pounding ponies, nothing said sicker than a post-party ralph-fest brought on by the sugary sweet aftertaste of strawberry or grape wine.

Nevertheless, there remains an entire cult of devotees who continue to sing the praises of Boone’s Farm long past their high school days. At the Boone’s Farm Fan Club online (boonesfarm.net) pages of testimonials declare the superior taste and value of the brand with vigor and zeal. Consider this high school memory from Sandie, who followed her own son’s post with this: “I remember drinking Boone’s Farm Strawberry Wine in high school while I was a dating a guy named Randy. He drank MD 20/20 while driving. Good times!”

Good times, indeed, and with my 30th high school reunion on the horizon later this year, I suspect a certain group of those attending will fondly recall the fruity beverage of their youth with dewy-eyed nostalgia. Living in a post-ironic era that celebrates Pabst Blue Ribbon and other downscale beers, it’s quite possible Boone’s Farm could make a comeback. But then again, my suggestion at marketing the stuff as the “Official Beverage of High School” will probably never pass muster—it’s just too obvious. After all, I’m pretty sure there’s a high schooler down the street who already knows this, so why ruin the secret—hipster marketing is all about a wink and nod.

Bill Ramsey is the creative director of The Pulse and consorted with many girls in high school who drank Boone’s Farm.

Joe Ledbetter and Tim Piersant revive Chattanooga’s whiskey tradition with their new liquor label. Now if they can just make it here.

By Bill Ramsey | April 19, 2012
The Pulse | Chattanooga’s Weekly Alternative

“First thing’s first,” says Joe Ledbetter, a gleam in his eye and a devilish grin on his face as he uncorks a fresh bottle of whiskey. He pours two fingers of the brown liquor into a sparkling high-ball tumbler emblazoned with the logo of the Chattanooga Whiskey Company above the slogan “The First Taste.” He studies the nectar for a moment, sips, and smiles again. “Now, where were we?” he says with a mischievous laugh.

It will be the first of many “first tastes” for Ledbetter and his partner, Tim Piersant, during the launch party last Friday at Lindsay Street Hall for the new whiskey the young entrepreneurs founded just six months ago and based largely on a Facebook post that asked, “Would you drink Chattanooga whiskey?” A flood of responses in the affirmative confirmed Ledbetter’s assumption and the fuse was lit. On Friday evening, hundreds of bottles of bourbon bearing the Chattanooga Whiskey Company brand fill tables inside the ornate hall as a small army of servers prepared to man their stations for the evening event.

“I just hope it doesn’t suck,” Ledbetter says, half serious, half joking, referring to both the event and the reaction to the fruit of his labor and passion. His whiskey—smooth and warm, with just a brief, sharp spike the liquor is known for—does not suck. Nor does the event. Hundreds are invited and hundreds turn out to sample the new whiskey, which Ledbetter proudly proclaims will both return and revive Chattanooga’s storied distilling history, an industry that has been dormant since pre-Prohibition days.

Ledbetter has reason to be excited. Thirty years ago, he might have been laughed out of town, such was the state of downtown Chattanooga (and, for that, matter the bourbon whiskey market). But these days, the Chattanooga “brand” reeks of a renewed spirit of revival, spirit and renaissance, and Ledbetter and Piersant are banking on that special brand of local pride and Tennessee’s history of fine whiskey propelling them to fame and fortune.

The only problem? The Chattanooga Whiskey Company’s 1816 Reserve is not made in Chattanooga—not even in nearby counties, where state law allows distilling and bottling of liquor. No, Chattanooga Whiskey is distilled in Indiana—Lawrenceburg, Ind., to be exact, home of Lawrenceburg Distillers Indiana, which concocts such brands as Templeton Rye. At Lawrenceburg, Ledbetter says he found the right distillers offering the right mix (74 percent corn, 21 percent rye, 4 percent barley) at 90 proof (45 percent alcohol). “I’m the type of person who wants to know all there is about a subject when I become passionate about it,” he says. “I knew a lot about whiskey before, but I’ve learned a lot more. We had a very clear idea about the kind of whiskey we wanted to make—a pre-Prohibition mash build, something you’d find a 100 years ago—and then we found the right distiller.”

Jack Daniels might roll over in his grave, but Ledbetter’s “recipe” has less to do with the iron-free cave spring water and sugar maple charcoal Daniels favored and perfected on his Lynchburg property than reacquainting a city with it whiskey heritage. When distilling laws change in Hamilton County—something Ledbetter says he is campaigning for—he will be quick to reunite the whiskey with its city.

“We really want to make it here,” Ledbetter says. “It’s not about a person [like Jack Daniels] or even a fictional character [like Capt. Morgan]. It’s about a city with a rich history and heritage. Right now, it’s all about getting the word out and support.”

In other words, it’s a message in a bottle. Laws may change, but until they do, it makes no real difference to Ledbetter if his Chattanooga Whiskey is made in Chattanooga or Lawrenceburg. Mystique, after all, is rarely grounded in reality. And nothing sells, or indeed enhances, illusion better than liquor.

This week, Chattanooga Whiskey 1816 Reserve and its pricier companion, Cask, will get it’s first test as it goes on sale in liquor stores around the city. At $27 a bottle for Reserve and $40 for the premium Cask, it’s not cheap. But cheap bourbon is neither the goal nor the target market. Ledbetter and Piersant consider themselves connosieurs with a passion for fine whiskey and Chattanooga, and they’re banking on Chattanoogans returning the love.

So far, that’s happened—at least in enthusiasm for the product online, where Chattanooga Whiskey’s Facebook page boasts almost 5,000 fans seemingly foaming at the mouth awaiting the new brand’s availability in the city. After its debut this week in Chattanooga, the whiskey goes on sale around the state and Ledbetter has ambitious plans, fueled by a new Kickstarter campaign, to take the product nationwide over the next few months.

Ledbetter and Piersant have invested their own money and borrowed to fund their new company, guided by an intimate group of enthusiastic mentors and financial experts who believe in the idea. They’ve created a sleek website, hired local designer Steve Hamaker to create the company’s turn-of-the-20th century logo and both are investing increasingly more time to the new venture. Ledbetter is an insurance broker recently living in Washington, D.C., and now returning to live in his hometown full-time; Piersant works for his family’s business in Dalton, Ga. Both say they are “all in” as the company grows.

Just out of the barrel and onto the shelves of local liquor stores, it will take time to determine the success of Chattanooga Whiskey’s venture, but the company has at least two crucial elements in its favor: a nostalgia for Chattanooga’s rich history amid its blossoming renaissance as a center for culture, the arts and technology, as well as its increasing attraction as a business center located in a beautiful, hospitable mid-size Southern city; and the return of American bourbon whiskey as a popular, premium liquor and cocktail ingredient, fueled by the growth of small-batch bourbons that have attracted a cult following in bars from coast to coast.

First, some nostalgia. As Ledbetter is quick to point out, Chattanooga was once a liquor-distilling mecca. From the late 19th century until the early 20th century, the city was home to dozens of distillers before Prohibition became the law of the land. Businesses such as the Chattanooga Distillery, E.R. Betterton and the Lookout Distilling Co., among many others, were distilling, bottling and selling liquor in Chattanooga and the Tennessee Valley. Many of these brands, such as Betterton’s White Oak Whiskey feature labels, packaging and bottling similar to the famed Jack Daniels Distillery in Lynchburg. It is just that look—the old-style, ornate lettering, the etched engravings of the distilleries and the era-appropriate slogans (Chattanooga Whiskey uses “The Dynamo of Dixie”)—that attracted Ledbetter to research the history of American whiskey in general and Chattanooga in particular. “We want to bring back that spirit,” he says.

Of course, Prohibition sealed the fate of all of these companies, but even after its repeal in 1933, Tennessee made it difficult for whiskey-makers to distill their product in the state. Until a few years ago, only Jack Daniels and George Dickel were the only distilleries in Tennessee. That changed in 2009 with a new law that opened up the state to distillers in any county where both retail package sales of liquor and liquor-by-the-drink sales have been locally approved. Some counties opted out, including Hamilton County, but county commissions in those counties also have a right to opt in by vote of the county commission. Ledbetter says he is gathering support to help make that happen. “It takes time, people, support—and pressure,” he says.

The other element in Chattanooga Whiskey’s favor is the rise in popularity of bourbon whiskey as a premium liquor in the United States. The center of the so-called Bourbon Boom is, of course, the South, ancestral home to Kentucky bourbon and Tennessee whiskey. As Robert Moss writes in the companion feature in this issue, not surprisingly titled “Bourbon Boom,” this was not always the case. “America’s Native Spirit,” as bourbon whiskey was christened by Congress in 1964, fell on hard times through the 1970s and ’80s, suffering an identity and ownership crisis while single-malt scotch became the coveted drink of high-brow, hip tastemakers. The younger crowd widened the divide, opting for white or clear liquor such as rum and vodka. That trend continues, especially in the vodka market, where high-end offerings are flavored with everything from chocolate to bacon and butterscotch.

Fine bourbon whiskey, of course, needs no added flavoring (and would be something akin to sacrilege amongst aficionados), although its bite—which caused many to make what is known in the industry as “the face,” a scrunching facial expression—spurred the large distilleries to trend toward blended whiskies. By the late 1980s, small-batch and special “reserve” brands came on the market, smoother, super-premium bourbon whiskies that retained the liquor’s character while largely reducing the sting.

The technique worked and bourbon whiskey has undergone a two-decade renaissance, replacing single-malts as the connoisseur’s choice, sipped straight or with only a cube of ice or splash of water to cut its sharpness. The high-end whiskey market has exploded and the South is ground zero, with brands such as Pappy Van Winkle occupying the apex in the galaxy small-batch bourbons, selling for as much as $65—a glass.

But in the world of liquor, like those of fashion, art, design and architecture, fancy is fickle and fleeting. Today’s hot small-batch bourbon may be tomorrow’s “brown water,” a swill “reserved” for gutter drunks. But it doesn’t hurt that such popular TV shows as “Mad Men” have revived a hip consciousness for an era when bourbon was the successful man’s drink of choice (Don Draper favors dark liquor, and frequently orders an Old Fashioned). It’s worth recalling that such “men’s men” as Frank Sinatra were champions of Jack Daniels, which Ol’ Blue Eyes called the “nectar of the gods” and rarely drank anything else.

All that swinging “ring-a-ding-ding” is good for boutique business. Retro-mania has sparked revivals in dozens of high-end, up-market business from cigars to motorcycles, guitars and gastronomy. Riding the coattails of a trend is easy, but in the end, however, nothing succeeds without a little savvy marketing and a skill for tapping the vein emerging markets. Ledbetter has those skills in spades.

While living in D.C., Ledbetter approached the proprietors of a favorite watering hole with the idea of launching a “whiskey society,” an exclusive club of young, upper-income men and women such as himself with a taste for fine liquor and cigars. He promised the owners he’d bring in 50 people who met those requirements—with the pre-requisite that if he did, he’d drink for free. It worked. Not long afterwards, Ledbetter typed the fateful Facebook post.

By Bill Ramsey | March 1, 2012
The Pulse | Chattanooga’s Weekly Alternative

During one week at the peak of his career as an illustrator, Sandy Huffaker had assignments from Time, Sports Illustrated and BusinessWeek. He had to turn down a fourth assignment that week from Newsweek. “I just didn’t have time,” says the Chattanooga-born artist during a phone interview from his home in tiny Raphine, Va.


Sandy Huffaker and friend on his Raphine, Va., farm.

The 1970s were the “glory days,” Huffaker says, for himself and a stable of talented illustrators whose work routinely found itself on the covers of the nation’s premier newsmagazines and in the pages of The New York Times. For the better part of that decade, Huffaker was among an elite breed of commercial artists—his hero and fellow Southerner Jack Davis, the legendary Mad Magazine illustrator, among them—working during a remarkable period when art directors routinely turned to illustration to give comic relief to the country’s deeply serious and dark problems. From civil rights and the women’s movement to Vietnam and Watergate, the gas crisis and inflation to the rise of Jimmy Carter, Huffaker mined a deep well of material ripe for his brand of visual wit and caustic satire.



“All that work has gone away,” Huffaker says, somewhat ruefully. But it was a damn good run and, he says, an era for illustrators that may never come again. It didn’t come easy even then, Huffaker admits, but with changes in technology, the turn towards photography and computer graphics, art directors adopted new directions and never looked back. “I doubt any artist could expect that kind of work these days,” Huffaker says.



Huffaker’s work and style were a culmination of his years spent as an illustrator and political cartoonist for newspapers in the Deep South. Born in 1943 into a staunchly conservative family, Huffaker says he didn’t have any political leanings until he escaped Chattanooga after six years of military school at McCallie. His talent and inspiration as a cartoonist until then had been drawn from the sometimes subversive Mad, but it was his experience as an undergraduate at the University of Alabama that awakened the Liberal lurking within. “My father went to Annapolis (the U.S. Naval Academy)” says Huffaker. “He just didn’t understand.”



Arriving in Tuscaloosa at the height of the civil rights movement with then-Gov. George Wallace defying the federal government’s insistence that Alabama’s state-run universities open their doors to Blacks, Huffaker and his future wife witnessed first-hand the raw racism of Wallace and much of the South as the governor’s tactics became a national disgrace.

Huffaker had seen enough and his political identity began to emerge, but he found his first real job not far away at The Birmingham News, where he cut his teeth as an illustrator on the newspaper, penning illustrations for the daily paper and its Sunday magazine. After two years, Huffaker was determined to leave the South and pined for the big leagues, bright lights and the promise of fame in New York. He sent his portfolio to Maurice Sendak, the legendary “Where The Wild Things Are” illustrator to gauge his prospects, and when Sendak replied, “C’mon up, you’ll do all right,” Huffaker wasted no time. “I had a wife and two kids,” Huffaker recalls. “It was the ballsiest move I ever made.”

Timing and talent were on Huffaker’s side. The artist scored two book assignments during his first week in New York that helped him survive the initial shock and boosted his name recognition. Other assignments soon followed and Huffaker took his place among the nation’s most in-demand illustrators.

But New York was not all glamour. His wife was almost raped and the gritty reality of the city forced him to consider a less volatile environment. At the end of the 1960s, Huffaker joined The Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer as that paper’s first editorial cartoonist. Under Claude Sitton, a former New York Times correspondent, the paper became a government watchdog, earning it the nickname of “The Nuisance and Disturber” from the region’s conservative base. But the experience was transformative for Huffaker. During his three years at the paper, Huffaker says he earned the equivalent of a PhD in politics and civil rights.

Returning to New York via his new home in Princeton, N.J., Huffaker renewed his relationships at magazines and newspapers, quickly gathering assignments for The New York Times’ “Week in Review” section and Time’s “Americana” page. For the next 15 years, Huffaker’s illustrations appeared almost everywhere—on magazine covers, record albums and books—racking up industry and professional awards and the praise of art directors. “Sandy is one of the heavies in cartooning in America ... his stuff can be devastating,” says former New York Times art director Eric Seidman. “His understanding of politics is amazing.”

When magazines and newspapers turned away from illustration, and Huffaker’s own creative juices began to ebb, he turned to book illustration and fine art. He wrote two well-received books of his own during the 1980s and illustrated dozens of others before moving to Santa Fe, N.M., to open his own gallery.



“Cartooning was always considered a lowly art, but I knew it could make the leap to fine art if it was done right,” he says. Despite stellar reviews and shows across the country—including a one-man retrospective at the Hunter Museum in Chattanooga—Huffaker closed his gallery and moved to Virginia to pursue his art and freelance illustration career. “It was the first time I felt I had failed, and it hurt a lot,” he says.

Distanced from politics for some 20 years, Huffaker says the events of 9/11 revived his political cartooning career, which continues to this day. His work is syndicated to hundreds of newspapers and magazines around the world, but he maintains a slower pace, reflecting the calm nature of his life in rural Virginia.

Ever the reluctant Southerner, Huffaker says he has largely come to peace with his home, though Virginia, he says, is South enough and he rarely returns to Chattanooga. In 2009, reconnecting with his Southern roots and humor, he wrote and illustrated “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Redneck,” a tongue-in-cheek, slice-of-life tale that is less memoir than a recognition of all he finds palatable about the South.

“I would be one of the people in your series (Local Boy Done Good) who never returns,” Huffaker says, with a laugh. “But a couple of years ago, I was hanging out in a local bar with some rednecks. I’d always wanted to write a novel and I missed a lot of things about the South. The book was the result. I guess you could call it less of a novel than a slice of life,” he says.

At 69, Huffaker says he is at peace with most everything, despite the topsy-turvy nature of politics, which may stoke his ire at the drawing board, but not his personal life.

“I liked Obama and figured we were in good hands,” he says. “He’s been disappointing, but I don’t worry too much anymore. I’m out in cow country in a beautiful spot with no neighbors, painting and waiting for inspiration. It’s not a bad life.”

Sandy Huffaker

• Born in 1943 in Chattanooga, graduate of McCallie, University of Alabama; currently lives in Raphine, Va.

• Nationally syndicated political cartoonist, illustrator, artist and author whose work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, BusinessWeek and The New York Times, among many other publications.

• Latest projects: Political cartoons, illustrations and fine art for numerous clients.

• Latest book: “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Redneck,” available on Amazon.com.

• Website: huffakerart.com

Cult of the Record Bar
A love letter to the mall record store

By Bill Ramsey | Dec. 15, 2011
The Pulse | Chattanooga’s Weekly Alternative

A couple of months ago an obscure music website posted a story under the headline “CD-format to be abandoned by major labels by the end of 2012.” Through the power of the Internet, the just-believable-enough story — which carried no byline and quoted no sources — reverberated across the web with the power of a New York Times blockbuster, at least to the music-buying public, who are so accustomed to downloading and streaming the article seemed altogether likely.

Though not true—while growing fast, digital downloading and streaming are not expected to outpace CD sales anytime soon, with one industry executive claiming 74 percent of all albums sales this year came from CDs—the article did spark a debate among musicologists and fans: If the CD didn’t exist anymore would anyone miss it?

The same story under a different headline was written 30 years ago when Sony offered the first CD (alongside the first CD player), notes New Musical Express music writer Luke Lewis, resulting in pure profits for music labels as we rushed to replace our vinyl collections with new compact discs. The story goes back further; the same apocalypse was sounded when 8-track tapes were introduced, then cassette tapes. In the digital download/streaming era, music fans lament the loss of the CD with less fervor than the death of the vinyl record, but audiophiles have noted the deterioration in quality with each revolution in format.

But that’s another story. Lost in the debate, though not lost on the casual music buyer, is not the format but the delivery method. While the ability to instantly download or stream music cheaply, if not freely, to anyone with a decent Internet connection has been cause for celebration among music buyers, the romance of buying music, as this issue demonstrates, has not. For those born within the last 30 years, this argument will mean almost nothing. If you’ve purchased a CD in a retail store at all, chances are it was either at Best Buy or Walmart, neither of which will ever be the source of nostalgic movies starring the likes of John Cusack or Jack Black.

But for those of us who grew up in the 1970s and ‘80s, buying music meant visiting the mall. Where I grew up in Hixson, that meant Northgate, and the destination was Record Bar. There really was no other choice, at least for mainstream music fans like myself and many of my friends. Back then few of us had developed eclectic enough tastes to bother with the independent record stores, places like the Nickel Bag, which, while offering some paraphernalia of great interest to more than a few of us, reeked of what kids today might call old-school hippie music. No, what we wanted was the latest Springsteen, the new Tom Petty album, the hot Top 40 single (on 45rpm), maybe a poster, a T-shirt, one of those groovy Discwasher cleaning systems.

The Record Bar was no Championship Vinyl, the fictional record store owned by John Cusak in High Fidelity and staffed by quirky geeks with encyclopedic knowledge of music, but for many it was the epitome of hip (who, after all, didn’t want to work in a record store) and for some, a career (there is a Cult of the Record Bar Facebook page where former managers and employees trade memories). It was also, with the possible exception of Spencer Gifts, the coolest store in the mall, a sanctuary and a temple, a gathering place now fondly remembered as less than a retail outlet than an iconic element of the youth of a few generations.

Of course, the Record Bar wasn’t the only store in town. Freestanding music stores began popping up in the late 1970s and preferences, if not allegiances, were formed. Across Hwy. 153 from Northgate, an oasis of cool was birthed in the form of Paradise Records in what then seemed an enormous space devoted entirely to all things music. Wall-to-wall bins of albums, tapes, posters and accessories filled Paradise, along with an impressive collection of non-mainstream records that became increasingly important as our musical tastes evolved. Before the end of the ’80s, Record Bar had become Tracks, Paradise morphed into Peaches, then Cats, before the entire enterprise folded into the megastore, or the big-box outlet. Or whatever.

For me and many of my friends, the memory of the Record Bar (and Paradise, Peaches and Cats) is as strong and personal as the music we purchased there. We combed the bins together, sharing opinions, comparing notes and flaunting our (always) superior musical tastes. In the best-case scenario, we traveled in pairs (who went to the mall alone?), bought our favorites and ran home to engage in a stereophonic battle of the bands. Sure, we loved the music, but it was the records and, to a large extent, the record store that brought us together, even those of us who had nothing else in common.

I struggle to remember the last time I purchased a physical piece of music. I’ve long since liquidated my massive LP collection and largely abandoned collecting CDs. Hell, my iPod mostly sits in a drawer, uncharged and collecting dust. I listen to music in my car and stream it on my computer at work, but there’s no evidence at home that I’m the hardcore fan and collector I was even 15 years ago.

When I moved back to my hometown of Hixson this year after 30 years away and only a handful of visits in between, I was eager to visit my old stomping grounds. As I wandered into Northgate, it seemed impossibly small, nowhere near the palatial plaza I remembered. Gone were my favorite haunts—the Record Bar, WaldenBooks and (from a later age) Mr. P’s—and, like many malls, the place had a faintly decaying air, as if it were hanging on just long enough for me to pay my respects. But as I made my way around the mall, I was pleasantly surprised to find For The Record—an actual record store. In the mall. In 2011. (See Page 8 for a profile.) It’s no Record Bar or, for that matter, a true indie record store, either. But the store gave me hope—for music, for malls, for everything that lives in my ever-more present nostalgia.

At 47, I’m too young to linger long in the past, but old enough to appreciate what made it worthy of nostalgia—and I’m not alone, as I’m reminded each time I mention the Record Bar on Facebook. While my taste in music has changed over the years, I’m pleased, even sentimental at the idea that a store like For the Record exists in my mall after all these years. While the Best Buys and the Walmarts still stock all the hits and more than a few misses, I doubt 30 years hence anyone will recall a memorable moment there, much less devote a Facebook page to the experience.

The Best Songwriter You’ve Never Heard of Drives South to Chattanooga. Don’t Make Him Say ‘Damn This Town’


By Bill Ramsey | Nov. 10, 2011
The Pulse | Chattanooga’s Weekly Alternative

Every two years or so, John Hiatt makes a record that gives music critics and DJs at those few radio stations worth listening to in America something to agree on. Which is to repeat, this time in the words of WUTC-FM’s Richard Winham, “John Hiatt is the best songwriter you’ve never heard of, but you’ve almost certainly heard his songs.” It’s sadly true, but after 40 years, Hiatt has long made peace with this bit of cruel irony.



Hiatt, as he will tell you, tells me, tells anyone, really, doesn’t write songs for anyone else. Never has, never will. John Hiatt writes John Hiatt songs—tough, gritty roadhouse-ready rock and roll and poignant “this-is-what-I’ve-learned-about-love” relationship songs that give you pause and make you think out loud, “Damn, where has this guy been all this time?”

Turns out, he’s been around for a long, long time, and those same songs have caught the ears of others who’ve done with them what he has not—with few exceptions—been able to do: turn John Hiatt songs into hit records.

The short list: Bob Dylan, B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt, Eric Clapton, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris—hell, even Ronnie Milsap—have covered Hiatt songs and made more than a few hits of them. “Thing Called Love” helped Bonnie Raitt come back from cutout-bin obscurity in the 1980s. “Angel Eyes” dovetailed into perfect harmony with Jeff Healey’s too-short career. Clapton and King built an entire double-platinum album out of Hiatt’s Riding With The King in 2000.

Hiatt shrugs it off, enjoys the royalties and keeps on writing, playing and hitting the road with various versions of the bands who record his music—20 albums’ worth now (if you count live discs and compilations)—that stretches back to 1974’s Hanging Around The Observatory and is now bookended by his latest, Dirty Jeans & Mudslide Hymns.

At 59, Hiatt’s never had a Top 40 hit of his own, but that fact neither haunts him nor deters him. At 21, he wrote “Sure As I’m Sittin’ Here,” a No. 16 charting hit for Three Dog Night that earned him a record deal with Epic and he’s never looked back. The idea that he’d write hit songs has likely occurred to Hiatt many times. At one point he very likely relished the idea, maybe still would. But these days a hit song doesn’t enter Hiatt’s consciousness very often. He is flattered that so many artists, some of them personal heroes he grew up listening to, have covered his songs, but says he was never comfortable writing for anyone but himself.

“I don’t write for other people, never have,” he tells me during a phone conversation. He was speaking from his longtime Nashville home, during a break from his recent tour, before making the short trip to Track 29 for his first Chattanooga performance since he can remember. “I love what I do and I just have a real passion for it. I love writing and recording—hell, I don’t know how to do anything else.”

That’s not exactly true—he’d probably be racing on the Indy circuit (and has) in another career—but modern American music would be much worse off were it not for Hiatt, and songwriting would be devoid of one of its finest craftsman. After years bouncing around record labels where he was variously (and futilely) categorized as new wave, country or blues, Hiatt found his own successful niche with the release of Bring the Family. This 1987 record marked the beginning of a rich, remarkable and uncompromisingly excellent period of songwriting and recording featuring his own flinty, whiskey-and-cigarette-aged vocals.

“I had not had success out of the box,” Hiatt says of his early efforts. “Success gains you freedom at record labels, so they keep intervening. [Bring The Family] was the first record we got to make on our own, independently. I was so screwed up, learning to live without drugs and alcohol, I didn’t know what to do. The producer said, ‘You can just sing in the shower and we’ll release it.’ ”

Sobriety unleashed something. Hiatt released seven albums on three labels prior to Bring The Family. Each had their moments, as Hiatt gathered critical momentum and a solid fan base, thanks to relentless touring in the U.S. and overseas. But mainstream success eluded him. His influences—Elvis (Presley and Costello), Dylan, the blues and country—produced erratic, often critically acclaimed records, but each failed commercially. Nuggets from these years ensconced him as songwriter to the stars. A young Rosanne Cash latched on to “The Way We Make A Broken Heart,” dueting with Hiatt on the song in 1983. The song went unreleased until Cash re-recorded it and took it to No. 1 on the country charts in 1987—the same year Hiatt released Bring The Family.

That seminal record, recorded with a supergroup that included Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe and drummer Jim Keltner (who would together briefly form a side project dubbed Little Village), touched a nerve. Independence—from alcohol, drugs, record labels—marked a turning point for Hiatt, reflected in a song he says he would not mind being remembered for, “Have A Little Faith In Me.” Again, a string of other artists—Joe Cocker, Delbert McClinton, Jewel, Jon Bon Jovi—nabbed the song for their own, but Hiatt’s own voice rose above them all.

Nine successive albums all broke the Billboard 200, including Slow Turning, the follow-up album to Bring The Family that included such hits as “Paper Thin,” “Tennessee Plates” and “Angel Eyes.” But it was Bonnie Raitt’s version of “Thing Called Love” from her 1989 album, Nick of Time, which reached No. 11 that year and helped re-boot Raitt’s own floundering career, that earned him the most acclaim as a songwriter. More records, countless tours and another label (A&M) followed that success.

Not much has changed in the intervening years, Hiatt insists, besides the ability to record and release records on his own. “That certainly helps,” he says of his indie status, “being able to make records that I want to make when I want.” His latest is the ninth since departing A&M after Perfectly Good Guitar.

Hiatt now writes and records his own records in his Franklin studio and leases them to New West Records, with whom he’s had a fruitful relationship since 2003’s Beneath This Gruff Exterior. His prodigious output—more than 700 songs and counting—he says, is simply a matter of occupation, and, he has joked, aging. “I’m running out of time,” he’s said on more than once occasion.

These days, Hiatt consistently releases noteworthy albums that have earned him the sort of high praise—if not multimillions—that those who have recorded his songs are more often associated with. It is not unusual to see the terms “national treasure” and “icon” tagged to his name, though he blanches at such sobriquets.

His music is neither influenced nor tied to moments in time, although you’d get that sense from his most recent album covers, which reflect a “Grapes of Wrath” grit and weariness that echo the nation’s economic plight. Hiatt is not a “message” songsmith in the mold of his fellow Indianan, John Mellencamp. Instead, he deals in the politics of life, family—the joy, the pain and day-to-day moments that underscore his best love songs—and, occasionally, the reckless abandon of his youth.

“All my songs are message songs,” he says, turning my question around. “I’m talking to the people—that is political. Causes and such is not something I deal in. It’s not my thing. There are other people much more knowledgeable than me in that arena.”

Politics may not appeal to Hiatt, but the ravages of disaster, natural and otherwise, pockmark his songs. Dirty Jeans is filled with references to monumentous events from the past few years. From floods and blizzards to remembrance of 9/11, Hiatt brings an emotional resonance—felt if not explicitly expressed—to his songs that form boundaries.

Speaking recently to another interviewer (Hiatt does lots of interviews) he reflects upon the events of recent years, connecting his lyrics to the everyman assessment of life he’s become known for. Not the really big stuff; just the stuff of daily life we all muddle through and can connect to and relate with.

“The 2010 flood in Nashville tore up some of our place and thousands of people lost their homes,” he told one reporter. “It didn’t get much national attention because there weren’t enough lootings—not enough bad news. Then, we did a winter tour and every city we went to got hit by a blizzard. The songs that came out of that were about the impermanence of things—the constant shifts of people and things.”

Even after 25 years of marriage, Hiatt still regards his love affair with similar impermanence, as if it will flutter away with the prevailing winds. His love songs—“relationship” songs, really—chart his comfort levels, affirm his core beliefs and celebrate small tendernesses—but the songs don’t get any easier, he says. “Love songs are still the hardest songs to write because they can become corny so quickly.”

In “I Love That Girl,” he writes of such “corny” affirmations, singing, “And she wakes me with coffee and kisses my head/And starts to explain about something she’s read/I say, ‘Darling, you haven’t heard a word that I’ve said’/And I love that girl.”

You can’t help but find something in common with Hiatt’s scenes from a relationship and I ask him how is wife responds to such valentines. “She likes ‘em for the most part,” he says with a laugh. “She’ll say things like, ‘That’s nice.’”

Unintentionally, it seems, the corniness of Hiatt’s sentiments are the ones the ring most true and he mines the mundane as if these fleeting moments that pass us all by will disappear, unremarked upon. Love, Hiatt, seems to say, is what happens when you’re not paying attention.

Such moments, along with a healthy dose of rock and roll, Indiana-style—hot cars, fast women and nights under the bleachers—and the wicked sense of humor that Hiatt brings to his live show, combine into something he regards as the epitome of his essence. Even for an artist who has lived from eight tracks to digital downloads.

“Nothing beats live,” he says, seeming to anticipate the road shows ahead of him. “You can’t download live and that’s the most exciting part. We’ve got a great little four piece band, it’s rock and roll, the classic setup and we’ve been rocking all over the country—the shows have been a blast.”

John Hiatt’s road goes on forever, it seems. We’re lucky to catch a glimpse.

John Hiatt performs Thursday, Nov. 17, at Track 29.