http://www.wgramsey.com/index.htmlBill Ramseyenbill@wgramsey.com© Bill Ramsey and respective publications2012-04-29T12:58:39-04:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 Sun, 22 Aug 2010 20:21:08 -0400bill@wgramsey.comNewspaper featuresThe PulseChattanoogaMusicians2012-04-29T12:58:39-04:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/bcea9d6fca9ea894a65e2d309ae0a88a-34.php#unique-entry-id-34http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/bcea9d6fca9ea894a65e2d309ae0a88a-34.php#unique-entry-id-34

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.]]>bill@wgramsey.comNewspaper columnEssaysThe PulseChattanoogaBoone's Farm2012-04-29T12:36:34-04:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/d0c6697cedb01d845b9d3072d8af9bd8-33.php#unique-entry-id-33http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/d0c6697cedb01d845b9d3072d8af9bd8-33.php#unique-entry-id-33

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.
]]>bill@wgramsey.comNewspaper features The PulseChattanoogaEntreprenuersWhiskey2012-04-29T12:18:15-04:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/c0cb92c1315d951c309458babea716cb-32.php#unique-entry-id-32http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/c0cb92c1315d951c309458babea716cb-32.php#unique-entry-id-32

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.]]>bill@wgramsey.comNewspaper features The PulseChattanoogaLocal Boy Done GoodIllustratorsCartoonists2012-03-10T10:24:44-05:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/ab690c7fd8e32ba2a08162fbefe3dd6f-31.php#unique-entry-id-31http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/ab690c7fd8e32ba2a08162fbefe3dd6f-31.php#unique-entry-id-31

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

]]>bill@wgramsey.comNewspaper columnEssaysThe PulseChattanoogaNostalgia2012-01-21T14:04:32-05:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/2d84e5e954f9037890746a8a855eb1f1-30.php#unique-entry-id-30http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/2d84e5e954f9037890746a8a855eb1f1-30.php#unique-entry-id-30

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.
]]>bill@wgramsey.comNewspaper featuresThe PulseJohn HiattCelebrity InterviewChattanoogaMusiciansTrack 292011-11-11T06:09:02-05:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/536737e256df0bfa88ba2d1c4f89fd58-29.php#unique-entry-id-29http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/536737e256df0bfa88ba2d1c4f89fd58-29.php#unique-entry-id-29
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.]]>bill@wgramsey.comNewspaper features The Pulse2011-10-28T05:48:13-04:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/73f3090af2481251c254b7f3cb016a5a-28.php#unique-entry-id-28http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/73f3090af2481251c254b7f3cb016a5a-28.php#unique-entry-id-28

By Bill Ramsey
The Pulse | Oct. 27, 2011
Photos by Lesha Patterson

If you’re looking for Dr. Shock, don’t bother lifting coffin lids or poking around cemeteries after dark. Ditto for the old WTVC studios in the Golden Gate Shopping Center, home of the original Shock Theatre. Shock’s current lair is in a suitably funky former hair salon on an appropriately shadowy block of a less-traveled downtown street. The windows are blacked out and a sign on the door alludes to the mischief within: “Nobody gets in to see the wizard. Not nobody. Not no how.” Just knock, goes the saying, the bell is out of order.

Most likely the Wizard of Odd will answer. That would be Scott Fillers, a local magician, horror movie enthusiast and yet another in a growing consortium of Friends of Shock Theatre who have lent their time, talent or, in this case, storefront to the recently revived horror host. Inside, a wall filled with Filler’s kitschy horror movie collectibles shares space with the set pieces that form Shock’s makeshift studio—cobwebbed stone pillars, a coffin, skulls and furniture that would not be out of place in Norma Desmond’s Sunset Boulevard home.

Before Shock himself appears, I regard his button-eyed puppet sidekick, Dingbat, in repose across the crushed velvet couch. When Shock enters from an anteroom, he is shocking only in his lack of Shock-ness: No cape, no dark eye makeup, no dangling cigarette, the latter a signature prop—along with the skull-topped cane—of the original Dr. Shock. “I had to quit smoking,” this Shock says, apologetically.

Shock is in street clothes, in this case his mortal form’s casual attire. Local musician Jack Gray is still feeling the weight of the cape and finding his footing a year after accidentally ascending to the role. But it’s surprising how much Gray, a heavy-set man with hound-dog eyes, a weary smile and an easygoing manner, resembles his predecessor, the late Tommy Reynolds.


Nurse Goodbody (Contstance Haynes) kisses Dingbat. Jack Gray plays Dr. Shock in a revival of the iconic Chattanooga horror host, whose program “Shock Theatre” aired on WTVC Channel 9 from 1968 to 1975.

Bob Brandy, Miss Marcia and, most notably, Dr. Shock, are figures who still exist in the nostalgic, gauzy memory of those who lived in the region during the 1960s and ’70s. With the exception of Miss Marcia, who still appears on local TV, most have died, as have the shows that propelled them into the hearts of viewers. Reynolds, a longtime program director at WTVC/Channel 9, earned cult celebrity status in 1970s Chattanooga as host of Shock Theatre, the station’s campy late-night horror movie fest that aired on Saturday nights from 1968 to 1975. Abetted by his curiously disturbing puppet sidekick Dingbat (created and voiced by Dan East) and the curvaceous Nurse Goodbody (Patricia Abney), Reynolds single-handedly introduced the genre to the local market.


Tommy Reynolds, the original Dr. Shock, in a 1970s promotional photograph.

At first, Reynolds—who began his on-air career as Shock in the 1960s hosting Science Fiction Theater on WTVC—adopted a camp Dracula persona, introducing and ridiculing a series of mostly low-budget horror and science-fiction movies during commercial breaks. He took the show to a new level when he began lobbing satirical bombs at local politicians, the Lookout Mountain elite and his fellow media personalities along with sometimes risqué comic bits that flew over the heads of youthful viewers but quickly caught older fans’ attention.

The pair would often push the envelope, straying into controversial territory, getting Reynolds and East got into hot water with station management, writes longtime local TV and radio personality David Carroll in his book Chattanooga Radio and Television. But their sometimes-naughty behavior just served to boost ratings—and advertiser response—Carroll recalls.

“Starting out as a radio deejay at that time, I can tell you that getting your name mentioned on Shock Theatre, even as part of a fake news story or other comedy routine, was huge,” Carroll says.

Dr. Shock’s reign of televised mock terror hit its zenith in the mid-’70s. Saturday nights after the late news mostly faded to black. But when a new, female general manager took over at WTVC in 1975, both Reynolds’ and Shock’s days were numbered. According to Carroll, “Evidently there was some disagreement between the two, so he went to WDEF, where he hosted afternoon drive radio show for a few years.”

Shock reappeared at Channel 12, but didn’t last long, nor did Reynolds, who landed at WHNT Channel 19 in Huntsville, Ala., where he briefly revived Shock Theatre. But Huntsville got only a glimpse of what had made Dr. Shock a legend in Chattanooga. Gone were Dingbat and Nurse Goodbody, along with the biting commentary. The show eventually fizzled and Reynolds retired.



But old horror hosts never really die—they just find new souls to inhabit. Enter Jack Gray and Johnny Stockman, a local film producer and editor, who had attempted a Shock revival in the early 1990s but was rebuffed by Channel 9. “I’d always loved the show and thought there was room for it to return,” recalls Stockman. “When I tried it [though], I ran into so many naysayers I gave up on it.”

News of Reynolds’ 2008 death again reminded Stockman of the character and when friends remarked Gray had more than a passing resemblance to Reynolds, the resurrection of Dr. Shock was under way.

What began as a Facebook gag quickly evolved into a serious attempt at reincarnating the character. Gray recounts donning the tux and cape for the first time, smearing greasepaint around his eyes and—most importantly—fashioning his hair in that distinctive Tom-Snyder-meets-Richard-Nixon look.

For better or worse, that simple act of bad grooming sealed Gray’s fate.

He’s tapped into the horror host zeitgeist. Reynolds didn’t invent Shock Theatre, nor was he the only Dr. Shock. A zombie army of horror hosts came to life on local channels nationwide when Screen Gems syndicated its fright films library in 1957 in a package dubbed Shock Theater, encouraging stations add a local host. The scheme worked and Son of Shock! followed in 1958, just as Reynolds began his career at WTVC. “When local TV stations were starting out, there wasn’t as much network or syndicated programming compared to what we’ve had since the 1980s forward,” says Carroll. “Stations had to fill some time, they were usually locally owned, so they were making stuff up as they were going along, trying a little of everything.”

Times, technology and programming changed, but horror hosts continued to grow in popularity with the rise of Elvira, Cassandra Peterson’s perennially popular “Mistress of the Dark,” in the early 1980s. Online, multiple fan sites catalog and document the genre’s history, and YouTube brims over with horror host clips. The 2010 documentary American Scary tracked down 300 horror hosts and profiled 60 of the most popular. “They set the tone for how we view horror movies as camp,” co-director Sandy Clark told USA Today last year. “I couldn’t believe no one had told this story before.”

In short, the timing was right for the rebirth of Shock Theatre in Chattanooga. Listen to Gray for a while and you’re convinced.

Baby Boomer masses that grew up with Shock, he says, are ready for it. As proof, Gray offers his large Facebook following and stories of fan encounters at numerous public appearances this year. He’s recruited an eager and enthusiastic co-host in Constance Haynes, who portrays the new Nurse Goodbody in an updated, goth style. Gray has even fabricated a reconstituted Dingbat after finding no one capable of recreating the iconic fanged puppet.

“Historically, it’s an honor to be part of this,” Gray says. “We’re really fans at heart and we’re having a lot of fun.”

Gray has spent the past year perfecting the character, attempting to faithfully honor Reynolds’ memory while adding his own brand of quirks and riffs. “I’m not an actor, I’m a musician. I get nervous in front of the camera and screw up, but maybe that makes it better,” he says. “It would be great to get into Reynolds’ psyche, but I’m developing my own technique as I go along.”

As Shock, Gray has worked hard to rekindle interest—making personal appearances at such events as ConNooga, the local sci-fi/horror convention; appearing at local haunted houses and pre-Halloween events; and preparing for a blowout Halloween night show at The Honest Pint, where his band, the Shock Theatre Orchestra, will perform its original rock opera, Hauntsville, a nod to Reynolds’ exile in Huntsville. All this has been a lead-in to what he expected, until earlier this month, to be the first full version of Shock Theatre on local TV in more than 30 years.

Gray has been doggedly pursuing a deal to return Shock to the air with WTVC management. So far, that relationship has been up and down. When Stockman and Gray first promoted the new Shock with videos on Facebook and YouTube last year, the response, says Stockman, was incredible. “They (WTVC) were calling us,” he recalls. The Shock team filmed segments promoting a Shock Theatre revival on WTVC’s digital channel, ThisTV, before Halloween last year which the station used in advance of the first program on Valentine’s Day. The results of that show didn’t sit well Stockman or Gray.

“They (Channel 9) rearranged and put it together badly,” he says. “It just sucked, the cutting made no sense. You had to watch the movie three times to see it all.” After the show aired, production went into a hiatus, but Gray was still thrilled with the response.

“We were really excited by the initial response from fans and WTVC,” Gray says. “Expectations were high. If we were going to do it, we wanted to honor the original concept and do it right.”

A few months ago, he forged a new deal with ThisTV to air a Shock special on Oct. 29 around Night of the Living Dead, the classic 1968 George Romero film. With the help of a sponsor, local restaurant Aretha Frankensteins, Gray paid $300 for the timeslot and launched a Kickstarter campaign he hopes will raise the $13,000 necessary to fund a full season of Shock Theatre.

But the ghosts of Reynolds’ ’70s quarrel with management and Stockman’s early-’90s attempts re-surfaced. The deal began to unravel, eventually falling apart completely.

First, the station questioned the legality and cost associated with airing Night of the Living Dead. Gray had done his research and assured station management that the film was in public domain, a detail he found odd considering he was dealing with a television station. (For the record, the film accidentally went into public domain after the distributor failed to use copyright notices on the original prints. The film is free and downloadable online).

But when Gray couldn’t produce legal documents verifying that fact, WTVC issued orders requiring Gray to write and film new bits (at his own expense) to air around commercial breaks for another film, most likely a classic from the 1930s already in their library such as Bride of Frankenstein. While this would have eliminated the cost of the airtime, the switch quashed his vision of running a modern horror classic around a coherent Shock program he’d already filmed—a deal the station had previously approved. The new segments would constitute two-minute commercial breaks, not a show, he says. He also had less than two weeks to write, rehearse and film the new bits to run Oct. 31 from 4 to 11 p.m.—not Saturday night, the night Shock fans expect. He was, in a word, shocked.

“They kept moving the target. We just couldn’t produce a quality show in that time,” Gray says wearily. “I’d had enough.”

WTVC General Manager Mike Costa declined to comment on the details, adding only, “It is unfortunate the Shock Theatre special could not become a reality. I made a decision in the best interest of the television station.”

In response, Gray says, “I’m constantly reminded of how Tommy Reynolds must have felt. This was the same way he was treated. I get the feeling they don’t like the fact that people want this to happen. Some things never change.”

Gray remains optimistic Shock Theatre will air again soon, this time, ironically, on competitor WDEF Channel 12 and its digital counterpart, Tuff TV, where he turned after the WTVC debacle and was warmly welcomed. The show will go on—only not on Halloween weekend. Gray says the all-new Shock Theatre will likely air Thanksgiving weekend on Tuff TV around Night of the Living Dead, a copy of which Tuff TV already has in its library.

“Tuff TV and WDEF are very open to what we’re doing, but we need some time to re-film and promote it properly. All this adds up to slowing down and getting this first show right. I think this is going to be a version of Shock Theatre that people will realize is different and much more developed,” says Gray.

But even a successful revival of the iconic show won’t likely usher in a new era of local programming, according to author and WRCB host Carroll. With the vast variety of shows now cheaply available to local stations for syndication, the cost and effort required to produce local programming doesn’t add up.

He notes, “Now that hundreds of channels, with every conceivable niche, are available, it’s unlikely that local stations would spend the money and energy required to launch that type of show.”

Still, you never know. The good doctor might just Shock everyone.
]]>bill@wgramsey.comWebsite InterviewArtcreations.com2011-09-08T05:57:38-04:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/f394bf1ffec70ea329924209d281847b-26.php#unique-entry-id-26http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/f394bf1ffec70ea329924209d281847b-26.php#unique-entry-id-26Man of 1,000 faces
Kevin Bate made a big splash with his Samuel L. Jackson mural. Now his portraits of the famous (and infamous) are popping up on walls all over Chattanooga

By Bill Ramsey | September 2011
From the “In the Studio” artist profile series
art-creations.com

Chattanooga artist Kevin Bate is the proverbial overnight sensation, only 40 years in the making. When his mural of Chattanooga-bred actor Samuel L. Jackson appeared earlier this year on the wall of a downtown building scheduled to be demolished as part of the Disco Demolition Project, Bate gained instant notoriety in the local media and his work sparked an informal campaign to honor the star (or have Jackson honor Chattanooga with his presence). Whether or not Jackson returns, Bate has been the beneficiary of excellent media exposure resulting in numerous commissions, including a 25-foot mural portrait of Bessie Smith at the new music venue Track 29 and a rendering of the famed St. Pauli Girl at the new Brewhaus on Frazier Ave, among others. Not bad for a lifelong artist who sold his first work ever this summer.

While Bate has always been an artist, he hasn't always been a muralist focused on iconic pop culture images. "My earlier work was more about graphic design, very intense pencil and pen-and-ink, hyper realistic stuff," he says, reckoning the commercial potential would be the key to a career as an artist. When that didn't work out, Bate put away his pens and pencils to concentrate on making a living. A decade later, Bate says it took his mother's prodding to "get him off the couch" and back in the studio. "She was asking me why I didn't paint anymore," he says. "So, I started working on my art again. I was kind of secretive about it and it took a while to find a style and an idea to work with, but when I finally hit on it, I realized I had something." Bate debuted his first work to his wife, a portrait of Frankenstein's monster in his now-signature high-contrast style, and got positive reviews. The next critic? His father, who was awed by the work's photo-realistic quality. "He looked at me, looked at the painting, looked back at me," recalls Bate with a laugh. "I told him I thought I'd found a style that was cool and worth pursing, and he said, 'Yes, I think so!"

During our interview for the first installment of "In the Studio," I found Bate a thoughtful, charming guy with an easy-going manner and a sharp wit. He's genuinely surprised — and delighted — with the attention paid to his work and with commissions rolling in, he's feeling confident about his future making a living as an artist full-time.

What part of the creative process do you find most exciting or engaging?
When I'm looking through old photographs and the perfect one steps up and slaps me across the face and says, “It's me. You're looking for me.” It's enough to make me call my wife in to show it to her and to stop work on the painting of the last pic that slapped me so that I can start on the new painting immediately.

What part of the creative process do you find most stressful?
I paint from light to dark, mixing as I go, always in one pail. This usually means that I don't get to the defining features — eyes, mouth, hair, the shadow under the nose — until the very end. Sometimes it is very hard to tell if a painting (especially a large one, like a mural, on the side of a building where everyone can see!) is going to come out right. Early on, it can be very stressful.

How do you make the choice of the manner and the materials you use in your work?
I started off painting with what I had around the house and in my workshop: luan panels, 1x2 supports, latex paint, big fat carpenter pencils. The subjects were pictures I'd seen and liked. I've been keeping a file for a while.

Do you render sketches or an underpainting before you begin a project?
Sketches definitely. I couldn't do what I'm doing without a few layers of sketches. Underpaintings usually only happen in murals and then they are really just a way of leaving notes for myself. Like, “If, when you get to this shape, it's not this dark, you need to go back and darken up the last three tones.” Or, “Don't forget that these two lines need to be really crisp. No cheating with a feathery brushstroke.” Weird, but it keeps me on track.



Have you completed works that you find difficult to part with, and if so, why?
When I was younger, I was very hesitant to part with my work. I still have almost everything I did in high school and college. But now, something has changed. I like the idea of pieces leaving me to go off and live elsewhere. And, don't tell anyone this, but not only did the destruction of the “Al” mural and the impending doom of “Samuel” not bother me, I actually think it's kind of cool. I've heard other artists say this. I can't explain it.

Tell me how you create a new work — the process, the materials, the worktable, your timetable.
I usually stumble across some cool pic and it goes from there. Next, a couple of rounds of sketching. Even on my smaller paintings I usually print an acetate to project so I can see how an image will layout on the panel. Sometimes I have to do this a few times until I get the composition right. Then I sketch out the shapes onto the panel and then paint. I paint with my drawing table flat, which everyone thinks is weird. But, that's how I do it. Again, going from light to dark, mixing each color in the same pail as I go.

What types and varieties of materials do you use?
I think I've used almost every type of brush made. I like a higher quality one-inch brush for murals. I don't skimp on these. They're the difference between a good line and a bad one. Sometimes I'll use a ½-inch round for getting into mortar joints. On really big murals, like Track 29, I'll use a four-inch foam roller on the background when I can. For my smaller paintings, I haven't really found a favorite brand or type of brush. It's got to be natural bristles, though.

Can you share any tips or techniques you've discovered?
If you're painting, buy the best brushes that you can afford and take care of them. The time and frustration you'll save with good brushes make them worth it. My art teacher in high school had us use liquid hand soap (the kind with moisturizers) to wash brushes and told us that the bristles were hair and had to be conditioned if we wanted the brush to last. Wash them well, sling or spin out the water and pull the bristles back into a point (on a round brush) or a chisel point (on flat brush) using the tips of your fingers and let them dry that way. This will keep the bristles from spreading and leaving little side trails when you paint. To speed brush cleanup, dip your brush in whatever you're using to thin your paint (water for acrylics, mineral spirits or linseed oil, whatever, for oils) before you even start painting and shake out the excess. The thinner will work it's way into the brush and make it easier to clean when it's time, especially around the ferrule. My dad taught me this.

How much has the computer impacted your work?

For murals it's a huge timesaver. It allows me to print sketches and thumbnails onto acetates to project onto the wall. In high school and art school, we would have to graph off our sketches, make a corresponding graph on whatever we were drawing on and transfer it over. I guess I could still summon the skill if I had to, but no one would pay me for that time. The computer and printer have helped me be much more cost efficient on the business end.

How large is your studio, and what do you like most about the physical space?
My studio is a converted workshop/storage shed in my backyard. It was 10' x 12', but my Dad and I took out a wall and added 40 more square feet to it in the spring. I love that it's outside and open to the elements (most of the year, at least). My dog, Mel, wanders in from time to time. My wife will come in with the baby for a garden tool or some potting soil. But when I need the time to focus and concentrate, I can still close the door and have the space to myself.

Do you prefer to work in the quiet, or with music or other sounds in the air?
Music, music, music — all the time. I try to match the mood of the music to the time of day. If it's light out, it's uptempo, anywhere from The Clash and Ramones to Kasabian and Eagles of Death Metal. At night, it's Morphine and Miles Davis to ... I don't know, XX and Fever Ray. If I'm working on a painting of a musician, I'll work a lot of their stuff into the playlist. Hank Williams Sr. was great. Bessie Smith kept me company many nights at Track 29.

What words of encouragement or wisdom would you like to share with amateur and/or emerging artists?
A couple of things: There are plenty of people out there willing to stomp on your dreams; don't be one of them. If you are inspired, follow it. Work it. Make it happen. Also, have multiple skills. Dreams don't happen over night. Look at me; I'll be 40 this month. I would have starved three times already if I hadn't had some other viable skills. Find something you can do during the day to put mac and cheese on the table while you paint (or draw, or sculpt, or compose, or play or act) nights and weekends. Oh, and don't smoke — that shit'll kill you and it's expensive.

Kevin Bate | Facebook
Age: 40 this month
Birthplace: San Francisco
I first knew I was an artist when: Grade school when my second grade teacher sent home an assignment for me to redo because I had colored outside of the boxes we were supposed to fill neatly. How's that for molding and shaping young minds! Good work there, Ms. Bearden.
The greatest influence on my work has been: Lately, Chuck Close. I stumbled on a book about him recently and it's what made me try my hand at faces. I'd never liked portraiture because I was taught that it had to be done in a certain, very traditional way. His worked showed me there were several ways you could do faces and make them astounding. One way, of course, was to paint very large.
Chattanooga inspires me because: With apologies to Vince Vaughn: “This town is so money and doesn't even know it.” I think that Chattanooga is on the verge of a huge leap forward. There is so much going on now in art and music and food in this town. We have new blood moving in every day. All the possibilities excite me. I want to experience and be a part of each of them.
My proudest moment as an artist: When people get real excited about a piece I've done, especially when they've just found out that I painted it. It happened a couple of times at Track 29's pre-opening. It's a huge ego boost.
I'm working on: A series of five (maybe six) 19' x 25' murals for Track 29; a proposal for the city for a sculpture based on my paintings; a mini Leslie Jordan mural for the Discoteca Demolition Project; and raising my 5-month-old son. All four are quite challenging and exciting.]]>bill@wgramsey.comAuthor Interview2011-06-12T10:31:10-04:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/ef40cf881a4f25fe9e1c4f74d1a3e5f7-25.php#unique-entry-id-25http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/ef40cf881a4f25fe9e1c4f74d1a3e5f7-25.php#unique-entry-id-25
Reluctant fan Nikki Van Noy first encountered the Dave Matthews Band in college, where she experienced a musical epiphany and found herself immersed in a cultural phenomenon that became a passion and almost a career following the band on their annual outings. A journalist and author, Van Noy has recently published “So Much to Say,” a fan’s perspective of the first 20 years of DMB. As a former chronicler of all things Dave for the band’s hometown alt-weekly, Van Noy interviewed me for the book, which debuted on June 7, 2011. I turned the tables on her for this chat about the book, her life under the spell of DMB and the fine art of combining one’s passions and making a living.


Nikki Van Noy

By Bill Ramsey | June 2011


Bill Ramsey: Your book begins with your own immersion into the world of the Dave Matthews Band 15 years ago. Your story has an almost born-again, religious tone of conversion — a reluctant non-believer enters the church of DMB and experiences a sort of musical rebirth. What is your mission with the book: Are you preaching to the choir, spreading the good word or simply affirming your faith — or all three?
Nikki Van Noy: It's probably closest to preaching to the choir. The hope is that "So Much to Say" captures a bit of the magic for those DMB fans who understand and value of the experience — sort of like the show recordings do, but in written form. I wanted to write something that would allow people to pick this book up 20 years from now when all is said and done and have that very visceral memory of, "Oh, yeah. That's what it felt like."

Most young people experience “a-ha” moments discovering The Beatles or Elvis. It’s a generational rite of passage. Do you draw a similar distinction with discovering DMB?
I think it depends from one person to the next and, also, I think it’s changed over time. From the many fans I interviewed, it seems like people in the earlier days sort of stumbled into DMB. They went to their first show for whatever random reason, had fun and kept going back. Because everything was still new, those earlier fans played a role in setting the tone for the live environment and community and what both of those things would become.

While I don’t know if DMB has reached the levels of the standard Bob Marley/Grateful Dead/Pink Floyd CDs my peers and I were practically issued along with our dorm-room keys freshman year of college, I certainly talked to a significant number of people who were turned on to DMB because older siblings or friends made it clear it was part of the college experience. Since more time has passed and the scene is so established now, I think newbies now go to shows with more expectations, both in terms of both the performance and the environment. Because of this, while it’s still a dynamic environment and experience, maybe it’s not as organic as it once was.

You write in your own discovery about the “personal connection,” the relationship the band has with its followers. In the beginning, it's an epiphany— these are my people! How has that changed over the years, by which I mean are there any moments when your devotion ebbs?
Definitely. I was very OCD about DMB when I first turned on to them in 1996. Around that time, the majority of my friends were also into them, so it was all DMB all the time: going to the shows, listening to tapes, trading tapes.

I remember stepping back from it all a bit in the early 2000s. I was still going to shows, but it got really big — a bit too big. I remember looking around PacBell Park in San Francisco after “Everyday” came out in 2001 and being a bit uneasy about the magnitude of it. It felt a bit more sterile somehow. I had a similar experience in the spring of 2002 at a show in Boston, when I realized everyone around me didn’t really seem that into what was happening onstage — it was more about talking to their friends during the show and getting blindingly wasted.

But the whole DMB scene tends to always cycle back around again too. I feel like around 2007 things contracted a bit again and a little bit of that old-school vibe returned. I come and go — some years I’ll go to a couple shows, other years a lot more than that, depending on what’s going on in my own life and what the general vibe is. This is subjective, though. I know for a fact a lot of fans would disagree about what years were the best.

The book includes a variety of voices who shed light on the band from their inception through their modern incarnation, but it doesn't not include direct contact with Matthews. Was that intentional?
I actually interviewed (DMB bassist) Stefan Lessard and his commentary is included. While it obviously would have been great to have more from the band side, if there is any member that’s appropriate for this sort of fan-driven book, it’s definitely Stefan. Over the years, he has become increasingly interactive with the fan base and seems to really advocate for DMB fans and give them a voice within the band. He’s quite in touch with what’s going on in the DMB community and seems to have an understanding of what songs fans want to hear that aren’t necessarily in frequent (or any other sort of) rotation.

You're an editor, a journalist and now an author. At what point did it first occur to you to turn from fan into chronicler of the band's history and what, if anything, changed from your initial idea proposal for the book?
I had what ended up being the seedling of this idea in December 2006. At the time I was working in publishing and spending all my creative energy working on other people’s books. I was increasingly frustrated and suddenly realized how long it had been since I’d written something for myself — it was all cleaning up and re-writing other people’s stuff.

I sat down to write and was stumped. I decided to stop thinking and just start writing about something that made me happy. What came out ended up being a haphazard essay about seeing DMB live. It got my creative juices flowing again, but I didn’t necessarily plan to do anything with it. Flash forward to September 2008, when I was at the Gorge (in Washington) and Berkeley, Calif., shows that immediately followed LeRoi’s death (the DMB saxophonist died from injuries sustained in an ATV accident at his Virginia home). As a fan, I was overwhelmed by the depth of emotion the fan base felt at the loss of LeRoi and the storytelling it sparked, with people remembering shows they’d seen him play. I realized then that the most effective way to document the entire history of DMB in a really authentic, meaningful way was through the fan base. That’s when the concept of this book clicked and I got moving.

There are a few books in the DMB canon already, none of which I can name of the top of my head. Besides tracing the arc of their existence and growth, what quality — besides its newness — do you think your book brings to library?
I probably shouldn’t admit this, but although I’m aware of other DMB books, I’ve never read them. When I want to read about the band, I go to the message boards. I feel like that’s where the real essence of and understanding of DMB is found. The idea of “So Much to Say” was to translate that sentiment into book form by letting the same people who are on the message boards tell the story. They “get” it more than any outside journalist or author really can (including myself — I’m just one person with one take on the experience). As far as I know, that’s the primary element that sets “So Much to Say” apart from other DMB books. Also, since the last book was written in the early 2000s, this one covers a lot more ground because massive chunks of the DMB story have happened since then: The Lillywhite Sessions, the trials and tribulations of the 2000s, LeRoi’s death, and the Big Whiskey era that’s followed in LeRoi’s wake.

As a serious student and now scholar of DMB, what did you learn along the way that you didn't know before?
I can’t say that I found much I didn’t already expect, but I continue to be overwhelmed by how much this band means to their fan base and what a real connection exists between band and fans. Through putting it all together in writing, I also gained a greater understanding of how adeptly DMB navigated the drastically changing music industry of the millennium, perhaps largely by accident. All the taping and trading dating back to their earliest days really allowed them to be nimble and open to drastic game-changers like Napster, not being wholly dependent on a music label, and emphasizing concerts rather than record sales for financial success.

With 20 years behind them, do you believe the band is as cemented in music history as its often closely paralleled comparison to the Grateful Dead?
In the course of writing this over the past couple years, I’ve become so conflicted about the DMB/Grateful Dead comparisons. Clearly, the parallels between the whole taping culture and travel aspect of the two bands are undeniable. But the big difference is that DMB has really straddled the mainstream and cult worlds, whereas the Grateful Dead primarily dwelled in the counter-culture. I do think that the real heart of DMB lies in their more cult following, but mainstream culture thinks it has a handle on DMB because, come on, who doesn’t know “Crash Into Me” and “Ants Marching”? Perhaps DMB’s more commercial success makes some people take them less seriously. It will be interesting to see where DMB is ultimately viewed as fitting into the music industry in the long run — and I think it could go either way. I’m not convinced the general public has a real understanding of how forward-thinking and revolutionary DMB really is from a business stand-point, or of how Deadhead-esque their significant cult following is. It will be interesting to see if this acknowledgement comes over time or not.

The Internet, the web, email, social media — these outlets really didn't exist when DMB first took hold (and I know this addressed in the book) but the band really grew along with technology, literally from Memorex to mp3, as you point out. How has that — perhaps especially Facebook and Twitter — enabled and connected the DMB "family"?
Antsmarching.org co-founder Matt Yette pointed out that DMB may well not be where they are today without the Internet. I think this is in some ways true. When the band first emerged, the Internet was still not that mainstream, but email was in colleges, which is largely where the DMB fan base took hold. Because DMB fans had more Internet access than the average American and also needed to communicate with other fans to trade tapes and learn about upcoming shows, they really were early adopters of online fan communication, dating all the way back to Minarets and DMBML. And, of course, it evolved from there, with increased Internet access and message boards leading to more and more fan communication and a more tightly knit, interactive community. DMB may only tour during the summer most years these days, but the community goes all year long and is just as compelling to many as the band itself. Most recently, Twitter changed things yet again, allowing Dave (for a while) and Stefan to really get into the mix with fans and start one-on-one dialogues that weren’t possible to this extent until a couple years ago.

Now that its about to be released, how are you feeling — proud, exhausted, wishing you could add another line? And are you going to tour?
Scared. DMB means so much to a lot of people and is in many ways a unique experience for each person. Also, I’m the first to admit that the whole thing is difficult to put into words. I know that, as a fan, I would read a book like this with a very critical eye because it’s someone else trying to explain what this means to me. I did it with a lot of help and input but, at the end of the day, it’s my name on the cover. Also, this is a fan base that knows so much about the band (and, certainly, there are people out there who know more than I do).

Ironically, for the first time in 15 years I’m not going to any shows this summer. I’ll spend this summer touring around with a very different band to write another book and am spending the money I would usually spend on DMB shows to spend my 11/11/11 birthday in Ireland and England. Having said that, when the more traditional tour resumes in 2012, I’ll be there with bells on. I’m curious to see what it will be like to “miss” the band for a bit.

Some of the books about DMB have been revised and updated. Given that there will likely be "more to say" down the line, can you see issuing such a volume in the future?
I’d love to revisit this when there’s “more to say.” I truly believe this is a band that will continue evolving and I think that the approach “So Much to Say” takes is the best way to tell its story authentically and with the heart DMB and their community bring to the table, which, to me, is really the most compelling part of the whole thing.

What else do you listen to and are there any other bands or artists you're as passionate about as DMB?
I’m a music lover in general, but DMB is at the top of the list — in large part because of the culture. Aside from them, I listen to everything from Billie Holiday to Death Cab for Cutie. I actually got turned onto Pete Kilpatrick Band through DMB this fall and have been on a big kick with them recently.

What is your favorite DMB moment?
I went to a show at Madison Square Garden in December of 2002 with a friend who was a huge Deadhead. I told him to go in with an open mind, but he was pretty dubious. DMB blew the roof off MSG that night to the point where the whole arena was literally rocking, culminating in this moment when the band brought James Brown onstage for a rollicking version of “Sex Machine.” I swear my ears are still ringing from all the noise that night. It was an explosion of energy that’s impossible to explain. I remember the look of elation on my friend’s face — he was just blown away. Seeing DMB win a hardened Deadhead over felt like a badge of honor.

What's next?
I’m writing another book this summer. The concept is similar in terms of bringing both fans a band into the narrative mix, but the difference is it’s in the pop genre and I’m more of an outsider looking in.

To learn more about Van Noy or to read an exerpt from the book, visit her website. “So Much to Say” is available in bookstores nationwide and online at Amazon and other sites.

© 2011 Bill Ramsey]]>bill@wgramsey.comCelebrity Interview2011-05-10T13:52:20-04:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/1622857a15160883a8f4af079f526434-24.php#unique-entry-id-24http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/1622857a15160883a8f4af079f526434-24.php#unique-entry-id-24

For former Chattanoogan Gretchen Bonaduce, whose tumultuous marriage to former child star Danny Bonaduce unraveled before millions, “reality” is both a concept and a business

By Bill Ramsey | May 2011

If you have ever dreamed, or at least daydreamed, about becoming a star (and who hasn’t?), there are two direct routes that can hasten your journey: Shamelessly audition repeatedly for any and every reality show and/or marry a current, former or marginal celebrity of any stripe.

Both paths are littered with landmines: The former is a cauldron of indignity, public humiliation and rejection, and you will likely resume your place in obscurity, cursing the competitor who dashed your dreams while you labor in minimum-wage drudgery; the latter, too, is also almost always a labyrinth paved with all manner of torment and abuse, and you will likely end up little more than a footnote, a mere mention in a dark, dusty corner of Wikipedia.

There is, of course, the against-all-odds chance you may find a way to spin your nightmarish experience into a jaw-dropping reality series. You may further extricate yourself from your co-dependent union, inspiring others while rising, Phoenix-like, from the cruel clutches of your (insert celebrity spouse name here) devastating death-spiral to advance your career, realize your dream of fronting a band and take your rightful place among the upper echelon of ex-spouses of Hollywood’s dustbin.

In this case, you would be Gretchen Bonaduce.

Bonaduce, you may recall, is the former wife of child star-turned-radio personality Danny Bonaduce, the wise-cracking middle-child of “The Partridge Family” who managed to extend his 15 minutes of fame long after its discard-by date. She has starred in or been the subject of many reality shows, but it is for her real-life marriage-meltdown to the problematic Partridge that she is most widely known — the strong but long-suffering martyr to the red-headed man-child with a catalog of disorders and self-destructive tendencies rivaled only by Charlie Sheen.

“Breaking Bonaduce” ran for two seasons on VH-1 beginning in 2005 and documented (many say exploited) the couple’s efforts to maintain their increasingly unstable marriage amid her husband’s episodic binging, which by then included several stints in rehab for a crack cocaine habit, a snowballing addiction to alcohol and an infamous encounter with a transvestite prostitute in Phoenix, where the Bonaduces met on a blind date and married the same day, allegedly because Gretchen would not have sex outside of marriage. Despite (or because of) critical backlash, the show was a ratings winner and propelled the Bonaduces into reality TV orbit for two seasons before divorcing in 2007.

Why lay your life bare before the camera, I asked? With candid honesty, Gretchen, now 45, admits the show represented a healthy paycheck during a difficult period. And while she says she and Danny were oblivious to the fact they were documenting the collapse of their marriage, she also cites the show as unexpected gift, an opportunity to make a statement on behalf of co-dependent spouses married to addicts who find the strength to leave them.

“It was very important to me to do something important and real,” she says. “It was not about recreating or setting anything up — neither Danny nor I realized the show was actually capturing the collapse of our marriage. I truly wanted to do something that made a difference, and I know it did. I received so much mail from women who were in the same boat. To make them feel like they were not alone … that turned out to be very important to me.”

These days, Bonaduce fronts the ‘80s throwback cover band Ankhesenamen, or Ankh for short and named for King Tut’s wife (who, ironically, must have suffered some celebrity-spouse angst), and is CEO and star of what could be called Gretchen, Inc., a multi-faceted, one-woman business that includes fronting and promoting her Los Angeles-based band on Facebook (where she has 5,000 “friends”); creating, producing and appearing in reality shows; and raising her two children, Isabella, 16, and Dante, 10, from her marriage to Danny, who has since remarried and hosts a morning radio show in Philadelphia.

Given she is a reality-show staple, it’s interesting that so little is known about Bonaduce’s own backstory — overshadowed by the dim but still glowing wattage of her infamous ex-husband — which includes a time living in Chattanooga. Born Gretchen Hillmer in Waukeegan, Ill., her family moved frequently before her father’s work as a nuclear engineer brought him to TVA’s Sequoiah nuclear plant and Hixson, where a teenage Gretchen attended Hixson High School in the early 1980s.

In an email interview, I found the busy singer, businesswoman and mother something of a paradox. A self-described Christian Republican who supports the troops, God and country, Bonaduce is also a supporter of gay rights and has been photographed in bondage. When not performing with her band, Gretchen reaps the dubious rewards of having been Mrs. Danny Bonaduce on such behind-the-curtain vignettes as “Hollywood Ex-Wives.” She is engaged to marry her drummer, Kevin Starr, and in April was a member of a panel at Reality Rocks, a quasi-fan fest/how-to convention in Los Angeles, alongside such peers as Christopher (Peter Brady) Knight, of “The Brady Bunch,” and Eric Roberts, actor and brother of Julia, and recently an inmate at Dr. Drew Pinsky’s “Celebrity Rehab.”

Possessed of a keen sense of humor and relentlessly optimistic, it’s not difficult to imagine Bonaduce will succeed in any or all her myriad endeavors. While the former Chattanoogan may have never imagined her future would include marrying a dysfunctional, dual-addicted child star, that path, for better and worse, led her on her current journey — one she embraces without a hint of irony.

Your band, Ankhesenamen, appears to be your primary focus at the moment. The makeup and costumes have a punk-meets-new-wave look and feel and the music is 1980s behind-the-Top-40 radar. Tell me about your musical background, experiences and influences.
I have sung my whole life, including in gospel and varsity choirs at Hixson High, and I also joined my first band in Chattanooga. I think we were called Boys Life, but I preferred to call us the World’s Most Unlikely Band. A motley crew of characters, for sure. I have always been an average singer, but what I lack in range I try to make up for with enthusiasm. I started Ankh because I am old [laughs]. I have been singing these songs for 25 years, so I figured the songs would be the easier for me to remember [laughs]. Plus, I just love the ‘80s so much. Incredible music came out of the era. Growing up in Chattanooga, you could sometimes pick up the college radio station in Knoxville, so I listened to bands like Joy Division, U2, The Cult, and The Cure before most people had heard of them. I saw my first concerts at the UTC Arena and I had my own stool at Yesterday’s. I was a fixture there every weekend (even when I was under age with my fake ID). I think the most embarrassing moment in my life was when my dad called them and told them I was in the establishment and that they better throw me out or he would close them down!

Besides the obvious, you’ve got quite a resume as an element, focus or star of reality shows. Are you producing or appearing in any new shows?
I’ve been producing shows since “Breaking Bonaduce.” I was very lucky to have produced two seasons of that show. We declined to do a third season because we thought it would implode our marriage. Now, I wish we would have since it turned out to be inevitable anyway. We brought in “I Know My Kid's the Next Child Star” as an alternative and we produced that as well. After that, I was cast on a show called “Gimme My Reality Show.” I was up against several celebrities to write, produce and edit my own show. America voted and somehow I won! I never thought I would, since I was competing against people from “American Idol” and “Baywatch.” I didn’t realize I had that kind of fan base. I have several shows optioned by production companies right now, which basically means nothing, but I keep plugging away. It’s a numbers game. The more you throw against the wall something is bound to stick.

Among other things, I understand you have a clothing and fragrance line. You’re a businesswoman, a “personality,” front-woman for a band. Tell me about “Gretchen, Inc.” — are you cultivating a brand?
I wish I was a brand. Right now the Gretchen “brand” has very little value. I am not doing the clothing or fragrance for the time being. But I actually had very big plans for branding myself and wanted to get a jump on getting everything arranged in case the brand exploded. So far there’s no explosion. But if it comes I'm ready. I enjoy running and being the focus of my business. But Hollywood is a very young town, so you can’t be the focus forever. As a woman, when you start to age you become less and less relevant in this town. You need a Plan B. I have a Plan C and D as well.

It’s undeniable that your marriage and life with Danny changed the course of your life, for better and worse. You were married hours after your first blind date. You must have known who he was. What were you thinking?
[Laughs] That is the age-old question, isn’t it? I lived in Germany when I was a kid so I was never exposed to the “Partridge Family” much. I knew who he was, of course, but I did not understand the magnitude of that show. When we met, the radio station (where Bonaduce worked) made him go by “Danny Partridge” when he was 30, which could easily explain his drinking problem [laughs]! Honestly, having analyzed that question myself on numerous occasions, I think we were two little lost souls in search of someone else to save them. Thank God he married me and not some crack whore (which he could easily have done). Let’s face it, any reason to marry someone is good as the next. Half of them don’t work out anyway. Eighteen years in Hollywood is like 50 years anywhere else, so I am quite proud of it. But you can’t blame me for getting out. Look what I had to work with — I should have gotten a medal for hanging in for as long as I did!

The emphasis and appeal of such shows as your and others (“Behind the Music,” “True Hollywood Stories,” “Celebrity Rehab”) plays to the public’s appetite for watching celebrities self-destruct. Now, the public is enthralled by Charlie Sheen. When does reality become surreality and how do you reconcile yourself?
I think Charlie Sheen is in a bit of trouble. Charlie, meet Danny. Danny, meet Charlie. Same guy. I recognize his manic mood swings and bi-polar condition very well. Still, I took a wealth of things away from the show and I don’t regret doing it all. I think to make a reality show that made a difference is something very valuable and rare. I doubt “The Bachelor” can say that.

What reality shows does a reality show star watch?
I love the PBS shows — “Manor House,” “1940 House,” “Frontier Families.” I also love “The Colony,” which I believe was on National Geographic.

What were your ambitions growing up Gretchen Hillmer? Did you engage with music/entertainment at an early age, and did you perform at all while you were in high school?
I wasn’t really that focused on the school part of high school, but I sure embraced the party aspect. The one teacher that made such a difference in my life was a Hixson teacher, music and drama teacher Barbara Branch. She changed my life and was an incredible inspiration. I loved music and was in any choir that I could get into. I also loved the drama club, but learned early on that I am not a great actress. I was cast in every play, but always in a minor role. I did not have the confidence, nor did my teachers, in my abilities to pull off a major role. That has changed — I have more confidence in my little finger now then I did as a teenager.

Locals are currently rooting for Lauren Alaina Suddeth, a teen from the area who is competing on “American Idol.” If it existed back “in the day,” is that something you might have auditioned for?
Never! I would never have had the nerve to go out for that. Even now, I would not be able to sing a capella in front of those judges.

Reality shows increasingly dominate prime-time TV — almost everyone and anyone wants or has dreamed of being star. But fame is fleeting and, as you well know, often a rough ride. As someone who has been on that train, so to speak, do you have any advice for would-be reality stars?
Yes — just live your life and don’t worry about what others think. Be a good person, help as much as you can. Use your name for good causes. You owe it to the universe to give back as much as you can.

© 2011 Bill Ramsey]]>bill@wgramsey.comCelebrity Interview2010-12-31T00:06:24-05:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/d547f5b805f185c6feae31d050ba6ba5-18.php#unique-entry-id-18http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/d547f5b805f185c6feae31d050ba6ba5-18.php#unique-entry-id-18Fil-Am actress Ali Ewoldt brings passion to role of Maria in national tour of ‘West Side Story’

By Bill Ramsey
Filipino Press | Jan. 1, 2011

Actually, I just interviewed Ali Ewoldt, the actress who plays Maria in the national tour of “West Side Story” (which begins its five-day run at the Civic Theatre in San Diego on Tuesday, Jan. 4). But why quibble — the lyric fits. Chat on the phone with the very pleasant Filipino-American (from, appropriately, Pleasantville, N.Y.), and she’ll make you feel as though you’re already friends.

Caught in the crush that is Los Angeles traffic on a recent Friday before Christmas, Ewoldt was happy to talk (she wasn’t driving, thankfully) about her starring role in the classic musical and her Filipino heritage in our brief but revealing interview.

No stranger to the role, Ewoldt said she’d done smaller-scale productions of the show and then performed for eight months with the international cast. But she has yet to tire of the timeless love story with one of Broadway’s most memorable scores.

“When I got home (from the international tour), a similar team was casting the national tour,” she said. “I actually had my agent beg for the role. It was a long, amazing audition with (playwright) Arthur Laurents, who came in to help out. He walked me through the part. It was kind of intimidating, but very inspiring to work with the man who wrote the show.”

The national tour, which began in October 2010 and continues for a year, is, she said, a “fabulous experience.”

“There’s a little bit of change, more Spanish, to heighten the realism,” said Ewoldt, who added she watched the film version many times as a young girl. “But it carries the same passion and emotion of the original.”

Though she has played many roles in her young career — she’s a Yale graduate who has been singing and dancing since the age of 10 and has appeared in such blockbuster shows as “Les Miserables” — Ewoldt, 29, said she was inspired early on by such Filipino icons as Deedee Magno Hall and Lea Salonga. She’s since worked with both performers. All three have played Jasmine from Disney’s “Aladdin.”

“I was inspired watching Deedee and Lea do what they do,” she said. “To get to work with both of them was mind-blowing.”

Ewoldt, whose mother is Filipino, said she draws a lot of support from the Fil-Am acting community in New York.

“In New York, there’s so many wonderful Fil-Am musical performers. A friend from New York sent some Fil-Am friends to see ‘West Side Story’ here in L.A. There’s an amazing sense of community. It’s a real support system.”

Along with fellow Fil-Am cast member Kevin Santos, a singer and dancer who plays Tio, a member of the Sharks, Ewoldt says she never tires of what she calls the “vast role” of Maria.

“I continue to discover new things,” she said of her character and the show. “It’s such a deep piece on so many levels. I love the magic of live theater, so no show is ever the same.”]]>bill@wgramsey.comCelebrity Interview2010-11-28T17:57:45-05:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/006c60abd33c13d88efe8f679602241c-14.php#unique-entry-id-14http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/006c60abd33c13d88efe8f679602241c-14.php#unique-entry-id-14By Bill Ramsey
Filipino Press | Nov. 27, 2010

You’re fine. The weather’s fine. Everything is fine. Then one day it hits you. That song. And the memories come rushing back. And everything is still fine, but not as fine as it was. And then — after the song rotates in your head for days; after you find yourself randomly singing it — it slips away. And you shrug it off. And everything is fine again.

That, in a nutshell, could be called “On and On” Syndrome. Singer-songwriter Stephen Bishop is the melancholy musical chemist responsible.

Anyone over 40 will likely remember the song, a Top 40 hit for Bishop in 1977. With its lazy, tropical rhythm melding effortlessly with Bishop's wispy, lonely voice, “On and On” became a radio staple for years, the musician’s signature song and, along with his other hits — “Save It For a Rainy Day,” “It Might Be You” and “Separate Lives” among them — cast him as the go-to artist for the broken-hearted.

“I write much better when I’m heartbroken and sad or melancholy,” Bishop has said many times. And he hasn’t drifted far from that sentiment in the 35 years since he first penned the song.

“A lot of people thought it was an upbeat song at first,” Bishop said during a recent phone interview from his home in Los Angeles. “But I’m just like everybody else. I have a bunch of different dimensions to my personality. Sometimes I’m sad, sometimes I’m in a good mood. It just so happens that when I’m sad, that’s when I write the best.”

Despite its breezy feel and an opening line that suggests Bishop finding solace “Down in Jamaica,” he said he wrote the song not in the tropics but from his then-home in Silver Lake. “I took some poetic license,” he said.

As much as “On and On” has been embedded in the inner jukebox of those who remember it fondly, the song has followed Bishop — who, beyond his chart success, found further renown as a songwriter for other artists and as a genuinely funny (in a subdued, melancholy way, of course) actor and author — ever since. The singer, who turned 59 on Nov. 11, will perform “the song,” along with his other hits when he joins David Pomeranz and Joey Albert for a package concert on Sunday, Dec. 5, at Pala Casino (see What’s Happening for more information).

While the concert is billed as “Flashback! Best Hits of the ’80s,” it stars a trio of stars who have become Filipino favorites, Bishop among them. As it turns out, Bishop is huge in the Philippines.

“I’ve toured there five or six times,” he said. “And I’m going back in February (2011).”

The Pala concert is also something of an homecoming for Bishop. Born in San Diego in 1951, Bishop attended Horace Mann Junior High School (now Mann Middle School) and graduated from Crawford High School (now the Crawford Educational Complex). As a teenager, the singer had several ambitions: He played the clarinet in the school orchestra, considered becoming a history teacher and, typically offbeat, aspired to be president of French's mustard, simply because, he said, “I loved French’s mustard.”

Fortunately, The Beatles changed everything for the young mustard-lover. Bishop traded his clarinet for guitar, joined The Weeds, a local rock band, and set out for stardom in Los Angeles, where he sought a record deal by just “walking around,” he said, before winding up as a staff songwriter for EH Morris Music Publishing for $50 a week. “That wouldn’t happen today,” he said. “These days it’s so hard.”

While laboring at Morris penning songs for such diverse artists as Chaka Khan, Barbra Streisand and the Four Tops, Bishop began compiling the songs that would form his 1977 debut album, “Careless.” Along with "On and On," which climbed to the No. 11 spot on the Billboard charts that year (the album also earned him a Grammy nomination), Bishop scored with “Save It for a Rainy Day.” That same year, “Saturday Night Live” went on the air, with Bishop as the show’s second musical guest with host Art Garfunkel, who discovered Bishop's talent at Morris.

His association with the show’s first breakout star, John Belushi, and his friendship with director John Landis, led Bishop to a sideline career as a bit player in “Animal House” (as the folk singer whose guitar Belushi smashes during a toga party — Bishop still has it; he also sang the movie’s title theme song) and “The Blues Brothers,” to name a few.

Although “Careless” and his second album, “Bish” earned gold records, Bishop’s solo career began to wane by the 1980s. Still, his songs were in demand and Bishop found even greater success as a songwriter, composing such hits as “It Might Be You,” the theme from “Tootsie,” and 13 other films, including the Grammy- and Oscar-nominated “Separate Lives,” from “White Nights,” a smash hit for Phil Collins. His songs have been recorded by Eric Clapton, Barbra Streisand, Art Garfunkel, Steve Perry, Stephanie Mills, Kenny Loggins, Johnny Mathis, Phoebe Snow, David Crosby, The Four Tops, Aswad and Pavarotti.

Fast-forward 25 years and Bishop — with a catalog of a dozen solo albums behind him — is still churning out new material. His newest album is “Yardwork," an acoustic guitar and vocal solo album.

But after all these years, he's still playing “On and On.” The song, he said, has been very good to him and — you can almost see him smiling when he feels like crying — he wouldn’t dream of leaving home without it.

“I'd better do it,” he said with a laugh.]]>bill@wgramsey.comEssays2010-08-22T21:52:14-04:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/6aa4f75011d5bbf8e88f89abf86d272a-7.php#unique-entry-id-7http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/6aa4f75011d5bbf8e88f89abf86d272a-7.php#unique-entry-id-7By Bill Ramsey
The Hook | Sept. 2, 2004

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — When the wit, wisdom and familiar quotations of Dave Matthews are inevitably compiled and published, a substantial portion of this potential bestseller will doubtless be devoted to Matthews' penchant for poop humor and scatological references. And that was before the recent scandal that rocked Chicago: allegations that Dave's bus had unleashed a torrent of human waste on hapless tour boat passengers.

Among contemporary celebrities, Matthews is peerless — perhaps even unique — for analogizing his inner workings to his inner workings, as the quotation above so graphically demonstrates.

No public figure of recent vintage can rival Matthews' willingness to share these intimate, moving moments — or his remarkable ability to contextualize them so fluently. It's testimony to his rakish charm that Matthews escapes the scrutiny such indelicate pronouncements might bring celebrities of more ordinary caliber. Indeed, Matthews' discharges are even central in self-appraisals of his "regular guy" image.

"I'm Johnny Boring," he tells Playboy in a February 20 Questions interview. "I work so fucking hard at being a regular guy — 'cause I'm as regular as an orange fiery turd flying out of an elephant's ass."

But does Matthews' fecal fixation reveal only a propensity for ribald bathroom humor, or is it a sign of some deeper, constipated childhood confusion?

Certainly, any psychological profile would begin with a thorough examination of his upbringing. Freud's five stages of sexual development include the anal stage (from age one to three) in which the bowel movement — and specifically the withholding of such movement — becomes a gratifying activity, allowing a child his first experience of exerting power over his parents. The degree of leniency during toilet training, Freud asserts, results in one of two types of personalities: anal-expulsive (sloppy, disorganized, reckless, and defiant) and anal-retentive (obsessively clean, intolerant, stingy, and passive-aggressive).
It's obviously impossible for us (to say nothing of repellant) to trace Matthews' feculent infatuation. But we come not purely to psychoanalyze the man. Rather, we come to celebrate his curious compulsion for anal analogies.

Matthews clearly exists on a different plane than his rock-star peers. Even while the band and organization bearing his name generate untold wealth — Forbes estimates that the band took in $28M in 2003 from performances alone — his personal indulgences are almost inconsequential.

Eschewing the wild spending sprees that other musical prodigies seem to regard as rites of passage, Matthews splurges not on cars, planes, or Hollywood mansions but on the one room of his home where he can relieve himself of the pressures of stardom) and perhaps his turbulent digestive system): the bathroom.

"I always said that if I had the money I'd get a long bathtub here in America," Matthews told a Playboy interviewer when pressed for details of his luxury spending. "The bathtub in my house in Virginia is made from three old cast-iron tubs, the ones with the feet. I want a bathtub that, if I ask my wife to climb in, she can get in there with me. It's a hell of a tub."

Evidently, Matthews spends quite a bit of quality time in his porcelain sanctuaries at home and on the road. But where does this paper trail of anal-ogies begin?

Hook editor Hawes Spencer has the dubious distinction of being the first to catalogue Matthews' excrement-focused omnibus, performing a journalistic colonoscopy in a brief but illuminating article titled "Gut-wrenching: Will Dave go out there burdened?" in a DMB tribute issue marking the band's triumphant homecoming in 2001.

His findings? No major assessment or profile of Matthews up to that time lacked an example of the singer's gratuitous potty puns or a direct reference to impending trips to the throne.

Dubbed "Mr. Anus" by sister Jane in a 1994 Rolling Stone article for his incessant allusions to his bowels, Matthews gleefully picked up the gauntlet in a 1998 interview: "Think I'm going to have a movement soon. Better go and find a quiet place. Don't want to go out there burdened," he told Spin magazine.

Writer Dave Colapinto, who has twice profiled Matthews at pivotal career peaks, related a classic Matthews comment in the opening of his 2001 Rolling Stone profile, "The Salvation of Dave Matthews": "He makes a couple of jokes about the state of his bowels: 'Things feel ... I don't know. Loose.' "

It was perhaps after eliminating the source of his pre-concert burden at the same show that Matthews spiced his stage banter with this rhetorical outburst: "Does anyone check the toilet paper after they wipe their butt? I'm just asking. I personally don't — I got an incredible confidence level. I'm an extremely thorough person. I don't need to look, but I've heard — rumor has it — that many people do!"

Indeed, maybe we're digging too deep. In divining the secrets of Matthews' defecations, we're confusing the act with its metaphorical implications.
Perhaps Matthews' excremental expositions are simply a subconscious reference to the artistic process — or an allegorical nod-and-wink in an attempt to demystify the hyper-analytic discussions sparked by the cryptic lyrics that have kept Dave on top of the rock world for more than a decade.

Whatever the case, in the Tao of Dave, shit happens — but it's the dump that is his muse: "I get visitations often when I'm having a crap," he once told Newsweek. "I have these ideas, and they come in, and I'm, oh, very excited about them. But then they vanish."

Maybe he flushed.]]>bill@wgramsey.comEssays2010-08-22T21:40:11-04:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/c1ff490ea3a13efe6e1e4328068e70ee-6.php#unique-entry-id-6http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/c1ff490ea3a13efe6e1e4328068e70ee-6.php#unique-entry-id-6By Bill Ramsey
The Hook | April 1, 2004

CHARLOTTESVILLE. Va. — I woke up this morning, as I have recently, at 5:30 a.m., a disturbing trend but one I seem incapable of curing. This unwelcome development is eased somewhat by the knowledge that Bob Edwards, host of NPR's "Morning Edition," is awaiting me, reporting the news in his mellifluous, comforting baritone.

Edwards' voice is the soundtrack of these early hours as I plow through my e-mail, light that first delightful cigarette of the day, and enjoy the morning jolt of numerous cups of strong coffee. He has been my morning companion throughout my working life. Edwards himself has been up since 1am, reading the day's papers and setting up overseas interviews before anyone wakes.

Over the 25 years he's been doing this, I have often marveled at his tenacity. I sometimes think I couldn't imagine beginning the day without him.
But this morning I learned I will soon have to.

Just short of his 25th anniversary as host of "Morning Edition" — a job he has held since the program's debut — NPR announced last week that Edwards will be replaced in the near future. The decision, according to NPR programming executive Ken Stern, is part of the network's efforts to "update its programming." Stern is quoted in The New York Times explaining the decision:

"This is part of the natural evolution of NPR, and finding the critical mix of new voices and familiar voices. This is not about individuals but about goals for the show itself. Bob is not leaving. He's going to be on the air for years to come, and that is the context that this needs to be understood in."

I'm trying to understand this, but Stern's rationale doesn't make sense to me — or, it seems, to Edwards himself.

"I would prefer to remain the host of Morning Edition, certainly through its 25th anniversary in November," he told the Times. "But apparently it's not my decision. It's my baby. I was there from the get-go. I never had any plans to do anything else."

This sudden announcement has taken Edwards and his devoted listeners by surprise and left more than few in shock. It's especially curious since the program, with 13 million listeners weekly, has grown NPR's audience share by 41 percent in the last five years. Edwards was unceremoniously told of his ouster earlier in March with no advance warning. Given the brief opportunity to absorb the shock, NPR allowed him to inform his staff before issuing a press release March 23 announcing its decision to reassign Edwards into a senior correspondent position.

Stern said that correspondents (read: possible replacements) Steve Inskeep and Renée Montagne would host the show beginning May 1 when Edwards launches a promotional tour for his latest book, Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism.

Reading this news ruined my morning, and I listened to Edwards' show with more intensity than usual, wondering if he would say anything. He didn't.
I'm disturbed by the news of Edwards' removal not only because I'm a fan and loyal listener, but also because it shows startling hubris on the part of NPR management. I wouldn't be so hurt if Edwards himself bowed out; in fact, I'd understand it completely. Devoting a quarter century of his life to a single program that requires him to adopt a lifestyle few adults could accept — since beginning the show he has gone to bed at 6pm in order to arrive at the studio by 2 a.m. — would exhaust lesser reporters of much younger years. But Edwards is a youthful 56 and seems not in the least tired or stale. He takes much-deserved hiatuses from the show each year and returns, presumably, refreshed. He obviously loves his job.

The decision also raises the question of NPR's motivation and judgment. In an era when most news programs are frightened to lose their "name" anchors, I am mystified by NPR's explanation. Amplified by the fact that NPR relies heavily on its listeners and is often the target of public-funding debates in a conservative Congress, it's astonishing that NPR would make such a move. Edwards is far from retirement age. Arbitrarily replacing him is absurd, not to mention a disservice to public radio listeners and supporters.

It's also a maddeningly bad business blunder. I'm sure Stern believes that his own stock will rise once the furor has died down. There's no other answer. I agree with him that broadcasting requires the infusion of fresh new voices when longtime anchors become too entrenched and no longer hold the attention of their audience.

The last time I put NPR on hold for a significant time was years ago, when Edwards' longtime mentor, sports-casting legend and Friday commentator Red Barber died in 1992. Barber, who lovingly referred to Edwards as "Colonel" in a nod to the anchor's Kentucky heritage, came out of retirement to join the show's regular contributors in 1980. Edwards seemed almost to suffer a breakdown when Barber died, and he took a break to write a wonderful memoir of his years with the venerable journalist. I stopped listening because I sensed the loss as much as Edwards did — Fridays weren't as much fun without Barber.

But I soon returned to the fold, as did Edwards, and "Morning Edition" again became a staple of my morning routine.

It's an understatement to say that the show won't be the same sans Edwards, even as he's "promoted" and will continue contributing as a senior correspondent. I may even get used to it. But I don't have to like it.

Maybe I'll just sleep in.
]]>bill@wgramsey.comNewspaper features2010-08-22T20:52:20-04:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/35c76aee82644e73a6003c13b00a676e-5.php#unique-entry-id-5http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/35c76aee82644e73a6003c13b00a676e-5.php#unique-entry-id-5By Bill Ramsey
The Hook (Charlottesville, Va.) and Seattle Weekly | November/December 2001

NEVER UNDERESTIMATE the Quiet Ones. They always get the last laugh, the best revenge, and, in the end, even the girl.

While Bill Gates made it hip to be square, George Harrison remains the original Quiet One. Long before Gates made millions out of computer code, equally geeky Harrison—a gangly teen, all ears, Adam's apple, and crooked teeth—held the keys to being cool in his nimble fingers. He was a Quarryman, a stoic sideman to John Lennon's snide rebel rocker. And then a Beatle, one quarter of the best band ever—and an inspiration for Quiet Ones everywhere. The youngest (Harrison was 58) and still quietest ex-Beatle died on Nov. 29 following a battle with cancer.

But being a Beatle wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Not for Harrison, at least. Overshadowed as a songwriter, musician, and wit, Harrison would not shine until late in the group's career. By then, he'd introduced his mates to Eastern mysticism, the Maharishi, the sound of the sitar, and songs called "Something," "Here Comes the Sun," and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." However subtle or striking, Harrison's influence, in many ways, shaped the end-period Beatles.

Along the way, Harrison got one girl (the beautiful Pattie "Layla" Boyd who left him for his friend Eric Clapton); and found inner peace, marital bliss, and fatherhood with another girl (second wife Olivia Arias). And he was the Beatle who produced, arguably, the finest post-Beatles album, All Things Must Pass, the lead single from which became the first No. 1 song by a solo Beatle following the breakup.

With the 1970 release of the three- album set and the success of that single, "My Sweet Lord," Harrison blossomed. While Lennon and McCartney waged war on vinyl, Harrison stayed above the fray and emerged emancipated. Although he might never again match what has been called the album's "sprawling greatness," the Quiet Beatle, however briefly, became a master of the musical universe.

IT MUST APPEAR cruelly ironic to Harrison, his fans, and all of Beatledom that the Quiet One's death came less than a year after the rerelease of his milestone musical achievement. Remixed, remastered, and repackaged for the occasion of its 30th anniversary, All Things Must Pass continues to receive critical praise. Unfortunately, however, it's better known for the long plagiarism and copyright infringement lawsuit surrounding "My Sweet Lord" and the Chiffons' 1963 hit, "He's So Fine."
To the untrained ear, the songs have nothing in common. Compare "He's so fine/doo-lang, doo-lang, doo-lang" with its brash, unadorned girl gusto to the subtle chanting and slide guitar work of "My sweet Lord/hallelujah" and "My sweet Lord/Hare Krishna."

While the temperaments of the two songs may be continents apart, the notes of key passages are much the same. Had either Harrison or his producer Phil Spector (famous for his "wall of sound") recognized the similarity between the two songs, the albatross of the dispute that plagued him may have been averted. Harrison had said he could have easily changed a few bars. Instead of a footnote, the case became a cancerous sidebar in itself, drawing attention away from Harrison's otherwise landmark masterpiece.

Viewed in the context of precedent-setting legal cases, the controversial lawsuit is nevertheless a fascinating, if complicated and protracted, story with enough plot twists and greedy characters to generate a movie-of-the-week miniseries, if not a book.
"There's definitely a book," Harrison said in a 1996 interview with the CD-ROM magazine Undercover, "because, now with any kind of law pertaining to infringement of copyright, they always quote this case."

The colorful cast of characters includes a financially unstable music publishing company gasping its last breath; the incorrigible Allen Klein, the manager whose business practices are widely blamed for the breakup of the Beatles; a fleet of attorneys who made careers out of the long-running case; and, of course, Harrison himself, who at one point offered to give the song away rather than suffer either the indignity of being labeled a plagiarist or, more likely, the frustration of defending a song he had hoped would become a spiritual mantra for peace.

Klein eventually relinquished the copyright for "He's So Fine" to Harrison in the early 1990s. Through his appeals, Klein was granted negligible interest on royalties from "My Sweet Lord" during his stewardship of the song, but ultimately ended up with little more than he had paid for—rights to the song and a mountain of legal expenses.

Harrison—by then resurfacing on the charts after a spate of spotty albums with such efforts as Cloud Nine and his role as a "Traveling Wilbury," the supergroup featuring Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne (of ELO fame)—was relieved, but still haunted by the case.

"It's all over with," Harrison told interviewer Paul Cashmere in 1996, "and the result of it is I own 'My Sweet Lord' and I now own 'He's So Fine,' and Allen Klein owes me like $300 thousand or $400 thousand 'cause he took all the money on both songs. It's really a joke. It's a total joke."

The Quiet One got the last laugh, but the belief that he ripped off "He's So Fine" remains a common misconception. "I still don't understand how the courts aren't filled with similar cases," Harrison wonders in his book I, Me, Mine, "as 99 percent of the popular music that can be heard is reminiscent of something or other."

In an attempt to shed some "light comic relief" and to "exorcise the paranoia about songwriting that has started to build up in me" at the time, Harrison wrote "This Song," which begins, "This Song has nothing tricky about it/This Song ain't black or white/And as far as I know don't infringe on anyone's copyright."

Ironically, the Chiffons, no strangers to capitalizing on the episode, recorded "My Sweet Lord" in 1975, an effort that fell flat. Perhaps they were emboldened by the 1972 English rerelease of their 1966 hit, "Sweet Talkin' Guy," which became the group's highest-charting single.

Fans will also be happy to note that Harrison's dark sense of humor remained intact. Last month, he released a new song, "Horse to the Water," under the publishing credit of "RIP Ltd. 2001."

EVENTUALLY, ALL Beatles must pass, but the band's legacy—and each member's significant contributions to the world of popular music—continue. While legal textbooks coldly arrive at the fact that Harrison was guilty of copyright infringement, it is hardly the proper epitaph. George Harrison has been many things: Beatle, solo artist, husband and father, spiritual seeker, Formula One race car driver, and movie producer.

As a National Public Radio music producer and commentator so eloquently put it during a discussion of the rerelease of All Things Must Pass in January: "So, George Harrison, the one denied his rightful share of the spotlight blazing on the world's biggest band, the man stabbed by a crazed fan in 1999, the one who insisted on chanting Hare Krishna when it would have been easier to sing silly love songs—George Harrison has survived. And though perhaps his greatest work is All Things Must Pass, the album and its title song tell us otherwise. Some things remain constant—like the transforming power of this music."]]>bill@wgramsey.comNewspaper features2010-08-22T20:42:30-04:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/2760eb57a0ccad24b0cbfa9386d98780-4.php#unique-entry-id-4http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/2760eb57a0ccad24b0cbfa9386d98780-4.php#unique-entry-id-4By Bill Ramsey
The Hook | April 11, 2002

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Try to remember a time when commercial radio stations didn't sound the same, from town to town, up and down the dial. If you long for the days when deejays played requests and when playlists at least pretended to reflect local listener demand, forget it. Those days are long gone.

You may not be old enough to remember such movies as FM and sitcoms such as WKRP in Cincinnati, which depicted the halcyon radio days of free-form '70s radio. But even the youngest of us can remember when President Clinton, under heavy pressure from a Republican-controlled Congress, signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

This law ended decades of regulations limiting the number of stations one company could own in any one market. From smallish towns such as Charlottesville to metropolitan megawatt cities, the act allowed commercial radio companies to create a pre-programmed, voice-tracked, market-researched, electronic beast. Amid this backdrop, one company, Texas-based Clear Channel Communications, came to program the songs that make the entire country sing ± or beg for mercy. Now the government is stepping back in to examine the ramifications of its actions.

In late March, the FCC made Charlottesville and Clear Channel the focus of its scrutiny. Finding the "potential for competitive harm," the Federal Communications Commission has set a hearing on Clear Channel's long-pending acquisition of WUMX, also known as Mix 107.5 — something the commission hasn't done for more than 30 years. If Clear Channel, which currently operates WUMX under what industry insiders term a "hostage" station, or a station managed, and even paid for by its suitor, but not approved by the FCC, thinks the deal will have smooth sailing, FCC Chairman Michael Powell may have news for them.

While the 1996 act allowed such "stewardship," it clearly defined any one company's ability to control market share. Making an example of WUMX, Powell says Clear Channel provides "no public interest benefits or mitigating circumstances. Indeed, the only significant evidence presented was that the transaction would create a market in which the top two owners would have a combined 94.2 percent market share."

For the past 30 years, a handful of broadcasting companies have bided their time, knowing the day would come when federal regulations designed to protect public airwaves from media monopolies would be lifted. But the watershed act of 1996 turned the piranhas into great white sharks, and no company took advantage of deregulation more aggressively than Clear Channel.

A year earlier, this relatively unknown but profitable broadcasting company owned 36 radio stations across the country (four less than the maximum of 40 then permitted by law), primarily in small- and mid-size markets. With the stroke of Clinton's pen, Clear Channel went shopping like a housemaid who had just won the lottery. Today, the chain is more than the nation's largest radio empire. In only six years, Clear Channel — its corporate name derived, ironically, from one of its early station's historic status as an FCC-sanctioned "clear channel" frequency audible in dozens of states during a national emergency — spread its money and influence far and wide. Besides its more than 1,200 stations in all 50 states, including its Charlottesville presence, Clear Channel also owns 19 television stations, has a stake in 250 radio stations overseas, operates an enormous billboard chain, and is the nation's leading concert promoter. As The Los Angeles Times recently reported, Clear Channel's sales have rocketed from $74 million just 10 years ago to $8 billion last year — a mind-boggling 100-fold increase.

During this spending spree, the company acquired most of its notable competition. In the checkout lane, Clear Channel purchased its major competition, radio conglomerates such as Jacor (whose 400 stations were purchased for $3.4 billion in 1998), the powerful AMFM network of stations (purchased in 1999 for $24 billion), and expanded its empire and influence by becoming the country's largest concert promoter with its $4.4 billion purchase of SFX (now known as Clear Channel Entertainment) in 2000. Those billion-dollar deals have left the company with an onerous $9 billion debt, far surpassing its stratospheric profits. But is Clear Channel worried?

No, not even with the advertising slump following September 11 and four consecutive quarters of losses (during which revenue slipped more than 11 percent from $2 billion in 2000 to $1.86 billion last year). Clear Channel executives view the losses as a minor meteor shower in their galaxy. And, like many large corporations in the post-9/11 era, Clear Channel has plans to reverse the slide.

That doesn't mean reining in its ravenous appetite for new acquisitions (the company has recently laid the groundwork to purchase the Seattle-based Ackerly Group, another radio, television, and billboard conglomerate) it means downsizing its most expensive component: voice talent: we call them disc-jockeys. On the big map of radio stations dotted across the nation, Clear Channel's 10 percent market share may not appear monopolistic. But market for market, not even its closest competitors (Infinity, Viacom, or Heritage) brokers its influence as brazenly as Clear Channel. In February, company president Mark Mays, son of founder and CEO Lowry Mays, blamed severance packages paid to 2,000 employees axed after September 11 as much as 9/11 itself. Personnel is where the cuts slice deepest — just one reason why the company is known as "Cheap Channel" to many detractors and former employees.
“
Clear Channel had a reputation of buying up markets, slim-lining the product, and diluting the talent to the point of homogenizing," said former Charlottesville jock Hal Abrams, who was half of a morning drive team for WUMX.

Abrams said he saw Clear Channel cost-cutting first-hand.

"As the transition of ownership took place," said Abrams, "odd things started happening around the office. Little blue wires, Ethernet cables to be specific, started to appear from the acoustical panels in the ceiling. After 20 years in the business, you realize this is a good reason to fear your job."

But it was allegations of low ratings — not replacement by computer — that caused Abrams and fellow morning personality Naomi Spimoni to be axed about a year ago as their contracts ended in favor of replacements Vinny Kice and Brooke Shealy.

"As anyone in the business who has a brain knows," said Abrams, "it takes more than one ratings period and support from their program director to succeed."

Allegations of penny-pinching arose long before Abrams' firing or 9/11. In fact, Clear Channel gleefully defends its radio revolution. In what is known as "voice tracking," the company takes the age-old practice of syndicating popular programs such as Casey Kasem's "American Top 40" to a new level: putting its own core voice talent to work across its network and, through clever editing, making it appear as though such veteran star jocks as Rick "Disco Duck" Dees are spinning the hits and gabbing with rock stars in Your Hometown, USA. Clear Channel defends the practice as a broadcasting revolution, pointing out that by virtue of its vast resources and talent, it can bring big market talent to small town America.

Brad Eure, president of Eure Communications Inc., Clear Channel's largest local competitor, said that voice tracking signals the demise of community-based radio and severely limits the ability of new talent to enter the field. How, for example, will the next Rick Dees or Howard Stern break into the biz? As Andrew Jay Schwartzman, president of the watchdog agency Media Access Project, told the Los Angeles Times: "Our worst fears have been realized. A lot of the things Clear Channel is doing are the traditionally questionable industry practices, but now on steroids." Such as self-censorship.

This is the company that in the wake of 9/11 allegedly sent out the infamous songs-to-avoid list ("Walk Like an Egyptian," "Stairway to Heaven," and about 150 others) it has since denied issuing at all. Once the subject of tongue-in-cheek articles in business publications mocking its Texas origins, the little ol' radio company from San Antonio — much like George W. Bush — is no longer a laughing stock. And as W. has done, the man who started its meteoric rise to power may shock, stun, and surprise you.

Birth of an empire
Clear Channel founder Lester Lowry Mays, a petroleum engineering graduate of Texas A&M with an MBA from Harvard, is a smart but stereotypical Texas businessman. Which is to say he's more comfortable roaming his massive South Texas ranch than toiling in the company boardroom. In a 1992 Forbes profile, Mays is quoted claiming surprise at the course of his career: "I had no intention of getting into the broadcast business."

In 1972, a 36-year-old Mays was running a small investment-banking operation in San Antonio when investors approached him for capital to fund a failing FM country station. Teaming with future Texas business legend Billy Joe "Red" McCombs (a car dealership magnate who now owns the Minnesota Vikings), Mays borrowed $175,000 from a local bank, while McCombs chipped in an additional $125,000. When the investors backed out of the deal and the dust cleared, Mays was thrust into a business he knew nothing about. Others might have winced and swallowed the bitter pill of the gamble. Not Mays. He did his homework and decided to hitch his star to broadcasting. By the time of deregulation, Mays was rich beyond his wildest dreams. So what drove this soft-spoken, spotlight-shunning Texan into the ranks of the John Kluges of the world? Ego? Avarice? Greed?

None of the above, if the stories can be believed. For Mays, Clear Channel may just as well have been Coca-Cola or Nike. With his focus on the bottom line, Mays couldn't care less — then or now — about the music. If Britney Spears sells umpteen millions of records, then dammit, the pop princess will be heard on Clear Channel stations — as long as she remains a profitable product.

That profit-margin focus has come at a price. Mays, now 66, has morphed, in the eyes of critics, from an amiable Ben Cartwright into an evil Darth Vader whose Dark Star reaches into the smallest corners of the country. Like market #225: Charlottesville, Virginia.

As defined by Arbitron, the industry standard for radio ratings, there are 10 commercial radio stations in Charlottesville — a remarkable number for such a small market. Yet, in many ways, Charlottesville represents the sort of town Clear Channel built its empire on. Even before deregulation, Clear Channel's strategy was alarmingly simple: enter a smallish market, purchase struggling stations, double the sales force, and market like mad. In 1998, Clear Channel applied the strategy here. Almost instantly, the company scooped up five stations and has run and reaped advertising revenue from a sixth, WUMX 107.5.

In Charlottesville, Clear Channel's only substantial competition is Eure. Which is not to say that Eure's programming is always less pre-programmed or ratings-driven. After all, after bringing them here, it was Eure executives who fired such seemingly popular talk-radio stars as Lee Fielding (1997) and Nancy King (2001). But at least Eure is locally owned. And that fact, according to the company's top executives, remains a huge plus in the battle for Charlottesville.

Before passage of the 1996 act, Eure owned only two stations: WCHV and WWWV. The company acquired other stations in a merger with Charlottesville Broadcasting Corporation: WINA, WKAV, and WQMZ — plus the operation of WUVA ("Kiss FM”), the station it was denied from operating by the same laws that govern Clear Channel's pending agreement to purchase WUMZ. When the federal government uncorked the bottle and released the free-market genie, it also limited the number of wishes it allowed. Under a federal law designed to balance deregulation by capping not ownership but market share, Eure was grudgingly forced to release its sales agreement with WUVA. And in December 1999, Eure was ordered to sell WCHV. The buyer: Clear Channel.

The battle lines have been drawn: it's hometown Eure versus worldwide Clear Channel, only Eure is the little fish in its own pond, a position the company doesn't like. Chief among its complaints is the WUMX "hostage" situation. Eure said it wouldn't begrudge Clear Channel if it the same laws that forced it to release its hold on WUVA, the prized third coin in the Charlottesville radio market, were applied to Clear Channel's lease of WUMX. According to an industry news source, Duncan's American Radio, Clear Channel led the Charlottesville market in 2000 with 45.8 percent of revenue, followed by Eure's 38.5 percent, and WUMX, the so-called Clear Channel "hostage," with another 9.9 percent. If Clear Channel acquires WUMX, it's got a majority of the local market. But that situation may change.

On March 19, the FCC made an example of Clear Channel's Charlottesville "hostage" situation. The FCC's almost unprecedented hearing into the matter, and the resulting media attention will likely force the agency to re-examine the stack of complaints, petitions, and lawsuits piling up against Clear Channel at the FCC and the Department of Justice. The FCC's announcement of the Charlottesville hearing is good news for Eure. But the company still has a few beefs. Eure vice president and general manager Dann Miller is peeved over the loss of Rush Limbaugh. The entertaining, if histrionic right-wing commentator was a mainstay of mid-day talk radio on Eure's WINA until last year when Clear Channel announced to its competitors that its franchise was moving to Clear Channel stations, in this case to WCHV. It was a stunning loss for WINA and other non-Clear Channel stations nationwide. Didn't you know? Among its other holdings, Clear Channel also owns Premiere Radio Networks, syndicator of the nation's most popular talk shows, including Limbaugh, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Dr. Dean Edell, Art Bell and Jim Rome.

As for the controversial use of voice tracking, or "cyber-jocking," Clear Channel has eliminated thousands of DJs and their high salaries by having one jock send out his or her show to affiliates.

"Most Clear Channel DJs do shifts on two stations," said Miller, "and at least three shifts come via email from other Clear Channel stations."

Another commonplace, though hardly original, Clear Channel tactic is the big giveaway. Even if they don't like the music, a lot of listeners will tune in if a station is giving away big bucks, a trip to the Grammys, or some other fantastic prize. Local broadcasters such as Eure can give away dozens of CDs and restaurant dinner, but it simply can't compete with Clear Channel's war chest of big-ticket goodies. Here's the rub: If a Clear Channel station in Charlottesville runs a big-money contest, say giving away $1 million, as they have recently, what callers may not realize is that they are competing not only with other local hopefuls, but with listeners all over the country.

"We were very concerned at first because Clear Channel made it sound as if each station was giving away the prize being promoted," said Miller.

Clear Channel insists it made it clear that the contest was national in scope and that listeners were not duped. Legal? Yes. Ethical? Depends on your point of view. But more weighty and serious matters are now facing Clear Channel.

Though the company continues to defend its business practices as "aggressive but legal," others such as Congressman Howard L. Berman (D-CA) disagree. On Jan. 22, Berman fired off requests to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and FCC Chairman Powell calling for an investigation into the negative effects of consolidation in the radio and concert promotion business, specifically citing Clear Channel.

"I am particularly concerned about widely reported allegations that Clear Channel has 'punished' recording artists who have not used its concert promotion service by denying them radio airplay," said Berman. "Also of great concern are reports of 'parking' or 'warehousing' of radio and television stations by Clear Channel. Press accounts and pending FCC complaints state that Clear Channel is trying to exceed legal limits of ownership of radio and TV stations by using third parties, shell corporations, or related entities to make the purchases," Berman's letter states. "If true, this practice is both against the public interest and hurts competitors."

The Congressman asked the Department of Justice and the FCC to investigate and to vigorously prosecute any wrongdoing. Berman gets an "A" for effort. But will it happen?

"There's been some communication between the Justice Department and the FCC," a Berman spokesman who asked not to be identified said.

Washington, D.C., attorney Arthur Belenduik, who specializes in communications law and represents Eure and an advertiser in Ohio suing Clear Channel, holds his cards close to his vest, but admits the company is near the edge of the safety zone, a lesson such Bush pals as Enron CEO Ken Lay have learned all too well.

A lifelong Republican with a history of putting his wallet behind the GOP, Lowry Mays may not invite media attention personally, but behind the political scenes, the man is no shrinking violet. His political preferences and checkbook have always leaned right — from San Antonio to the Texas Governor's Mansion to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As the Los Angeles Times points out, while governor of Texas, Bush appointed Mays to a state technology council in 1996. In return, Mays contributed $51,000 to Bush's victorious 1998 re-election campaign. When W. became a serious candidate for president, Clear Channel sent a healthy $106,000 check to the Republican National Committee, while Mays personally contributed $37,000 to the party.

Will Bush pal Ashcroft really go after Mays? Ranking House Democrat John Conyers of Michigan has said he wants to hold hearings on allegations that record companies are making covert payments to radio stations to ensure that music from their artists gets airtime. As the Wall Street Journal reported in January, such hearings would focus on whether record companies are funneling tens of millions of dollars through third parties to get around a federal ban on "payola." But it's probably unlikely that Conyers' request stands a chance of actually derailing a company with the heft of Clear Channel.

Why? In an award-winning series for internet magazine Salon.com, reporter Eric Boehlert found that high-priced record promoters called "indies" do the dirty work for record labels. In larger markets, indies pitch records weekly and are paid directly by labels for each "add" to a station's playlist, sometimes as much as $2,000, according to Boehlert.

Sleazy, sure, but the bad news doesn't stop there for competing commercial stations. For better or worse, Charlottesville — which doesn't have big concert venues — feels the sting every time Clear Channel Entertainment entices Charlottesville's youthful college audience to shows in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Richmond, and Raleigh, North Carolina. In many markets, Clear Channel either owns or has a stake in the venues where its acts perform and have an exclusive agreement with Ticketmaster, the nation's largest concert ticket seller. While local Clear Channel stations doled out tickets to such shows as Dave Matthews' April 4 spring tour opener at the MCI Center in Washington, D.C., Eure's stations could pay for tickets to give away, but do little more than stand on the sidelines.

Though Clear Channel's local operations director maintains that his stations purchase the tickets they give away on the air, it's a barely kept secret that Clear Channel has $2 million invested in Musictoday.com, the Ivy-based online merchandising company set up by Dave Matthews Band manager Coran Capshaw. The thousands of dollars Clear Channel spends purchasing tickets from Capshaw are a drop in the bucket compared to the windfall of profits from the shows and the expensive merchandise rabidly purchased by fans.

Cleaning house
A year ago, Hank Kestenbaum, 48, a 25-year radio veteran, was ready to land in cozy Charlottesville. He was also the man Clear Channel wanted to "clean house," and shore up its sales operations in town, some of which were reputedly less than productive. A former DJ, program director, and station owner, Kestenbaum said he had more or less peaked in the radio business by the time he arrived in Charlottesville. The owner of several stations in Tallahassee, Florida, which competed against Clear Channel, he said that the company's offer, along with the sale of his stations, was the right move at the right time.

Congenial but prepared to parry with any thrust at Clear Channel from a reporter, Kestenbaum said his job is to make his advertisers happy and to educate them in the proper use of radio advertising. His position on voice tracking? "It's a better product than what I can produce locally.

“If the product suffered," Kestenbaum, said, "I'd spend the extra money to hire local DJs."

Yes, he remembers the "good old days"; sure, he's in the business of making his company money; and yes, if such elements as voice tracking deliver a better product than he can offer by paying a local DJ as much, then he pleads guilty.

"Radio," he said, in a moment of clarity not associated with business, "is theater. It's what comes out of the speakers. It's all imagination."

He said it's easy to point the finger at big, bad Clear Channel, a company Boehlert called a "big bully," but what's not so easy is the matter of keeping radio —and not just Clear Channel stations — on the air.

"We're not perfect," said Kestenbaum, "but we're getting better. Deregulation was good. It kept hundreds of stations on the air that would have gone dark. That's good for radio."

This isn't just about money or market domination. Commercial radio thrives on attracting the largest audience possible to make its station(s) attractive to advertisers. But as long as indies dictate the playlists of Clear Channel or Eure (which both insist is not the case) or any station, and voice tracking becomes the cost-cutting standard, a large segment of listeners may increasingly turn to alternatives such as WNRN, the six-year old independent station Mike Friend (known as Mike Seay on the air) started and still successfully runs.

"Syndicated, voice-tracked, satellite-delivered, cookie-cutter radio drives away educated listeners," said Friend. "Commercial radio listening has dropped every year since the late 1980s," he added citing industry reports. "In that time, non-commercial radio listening has tripled."

Friend said that such National Public Radio drive-time shows as "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered" find a healthy audience among those weary of hearing the latest Creed hit played three times an hour.

"In places like Charlottesville where there is an option like WNRN," said Friend, "that option tends to do very well. Even fare such as that produced by stations like WTJU does okay if it's competently executed and promoted."

As for the future of commercial radio and the music industry, Friend offers little hope.

"For cutting-edge aficionados of various music genres," he said, "commercial radio has been irrelevant for a generation."

On its way to publication, a funny thing happened to this article. Waldo Jaquith mentioned the FCC's action on his online chatroom, cvillenews.com, and got over a dozen comments almost immediately. Even Jaquith himself chimed in: "This company is truly evil. If you don't know about Clear Channel, I highly recommend that you read at least one of the articles from Salon.com."

Charlottesville can consider itself fortunate, perhaps, that the creator of WKRP, the show that depicted radio as it could be — absolutely local and absolutely loveable — lives here. We called Hugh Wilson to see what he thinks of the Clear Channel influence and radio in general. Wilson said he doesn't even listen to the rock stations he captured so crisply with WKRP.

"I'm of a certain age," said Wilson, "where I listen to talk radio — and NPR."

But at least the feds seem to be listening. And it's been a long time coming.]]>bill@wgramsey.comMagazine features2010-08-22T20:40:59-04:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/11ab48d6a0b32a03adcf58ff77fc67ed-3.php#unique-entry-id-3http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/11ab48d6a0b32a03adcf58ff77fc67ed-3.php#unique-entry-id-3By Bill Ramsey
Texas Music Magazine | Spring 2005

To millions she was simply “Selena” — a superstar at 23 in her native Texas and throughout Mexico and Latin America, scoring hit after hit with steamy ballads such as “Amor Prohibido” and bouncy, Tex-Mex bubblegum synth-pop ditties such as “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom.” Squeezed into form-fitting spandex tights, topped with leather biker caps and revealing rhinestone-encrusted bustiers, the late singer’s slightly naughty sensuality mesmerized her worshipful legion of admirers at sold-out concerts while remaining a squeaky-clean role model to young Latina girls. But to country star Wynonna Judd, Selena was just a good cook.

Just weeks before her tragic death on March 31, 1995, at the hands of an unstable former employee, Selena was perched on the precipice of making the leap from “Tejana Madonna” to mainstream megastar. After a long-awaited series of meetings between EMI recording executives and her father and manager, Abraham Quintanilla, Selena selected from a batch of songs submitted for her approval to record for her upcoming album, “Dreaming of You.” Most appealing to her was the Keith Thomas composition, “I Could Fall in Love.”

“The song selection happened before she went [to Thomas’ Tennessee recording studio],” remembers Abraham Quintanilla, who continues to fan the flames of Selena’s memory and mentor upcoming Tejano artists cast in her mold. “We were looking for something [in a song] that would fit the [mainstream] market, and we felt that ‘I Could Fall in Love’ was a that song.”

“When she arrived, the airline had lost her luggage,” remembered songwriter Thomas, who owns Bennett House studios near Nashville and had previously crafted smooth pop and R&B hits beginning with Ronnie Millsap and later Whitney Houston and Amy Grant. “So where does she go to replace her wardrobe? Wal-Mart. She was so down to earth like that.”

After shopping, Selena craved Mexican food and picked up the ingredients for arroz con pollo, a popular Tex-Mex concoction of chicken and rice, and returned to the hideaway studio to prepare the food. At the same time, country singer Wynonna Judd had arrived at Bennett House, where she was also working with Thomas on a new album.

“Before Selena got there, Wynonna was talking to Keith about needing a new cook,” Abraham Quintanilla said. “Keith had the studio refurbished as a home for artists, and she went to the kitchen out and started cooking. Wynonna shows up, smells the food, and heads straight for the kitchen where she finds Selena, who she thinks is the studio cook. Selena never let on that she was there to record.”

These vignettes are etched in Thomas’ memory of Selena’s short visit and, he said, are indicative of her girl-next-door appeal. “She was just like that,” Thomas emphasized.

At first, Thomas didn’t know what to expect when EMI sent him a tape of Selena’s Spanish-language songs to gauge his reaction and inspire a suitable song to aid him in transforming the singer’s success in the Latin market to a larger mainstream audience. Thomas was a key element in EMI’s plans for Selena, whom the company had carefully nurtured in preparation for a crossover campaign. Although already an icon among her Latin music audience and peers, the vivacious young performer was little known beyond the U.S.-Mexico border regions, where she played to packed arenas and fairgrounds as her records routinely topped Latin charts. Thomas, coming off a stint guiding the reincarnation of Amy Grant from Christian artist to secular sensation on the strength of the duet “House of Love,” was an obvious choice.

“I thought from all that I heard that she was a star,” said Thomas. “Everything she had going on was working — there was no question: She was equal to anyone I had worked with.”

Thomas at first signed on to write and produce the entire “Dreaming of You” album, but an already full schedule forced him to focus on only the a few tracks. Selena liked “I Could Fall in Love,” and the song became the focal point for Thomas and Selena.

“I had the lyrics,” remembered Thomas, “which was backwards, because I normally write music first, and she just gravitated toward that song.”

Thomas did his homework, and had all but completed the backing accompaniment by the time Selena arrived in the spring of 1995 to add her vocals. Programming the punchy synthesizer and bass tracks himself, Thomas brought in session musicians Dann Huff, Mark Hammond and Tommy Sims to provide layers of guitar, drums and bass to create the tune’s sinuous melody. The session went exceedingly smooth, recalled Thomas, but when Selena suggested she add a spoken-word verse in Spanish near the song’s end, Thomas was intrigued but helpless.

“Here I was thinking this is a great idea, but I didn’t speak a word of Spanish,” he recalled with a laugh. “I still don’t know exactly what it is she says in the song.”

The love song was an immediate contender for the album’s debut single and Selena’s emotive embrace of the lyrics reveal her connection to the song. A torch ballad set to contemporary rhythms, Selena’s passionate vocals ooze with the aching of a woman on the verge of giving her heart to a new lover, even as she fears rejection but dreams of kissing and caressing the object of her desire. Although Thomas had no insights into Selena’s personal life, his song closely paralleled the relationship between the young singer and Chris Perez, the handsome rock guitar prodigy who had joined Selena’s band and — over the grudging objections of her protective father — became her lover and ultimately her husband.

With the recording complete, Selena returned to Texas while Thomas set about polishing the track for inclusion on the album, which was set for a late summer release in conjunction with a tour and media push to launch the record to mainstream Top 40 radio markets. To help bolster her effort, Thomas enlisted the backing vocals of Trey Lorenz, whose haunting falsetto was featured in a string of Carey’s hit singles. Selena was set to return to Nashville for post-production when news of her death reached the songwriter.

“I remember the day it happened,” Thomas said. “My production manager walked in an told me Selena had been shot. I had a pain in my heart. She was coming back to town in three days to finish up and then she was … gone.”

As the tributes flowed freely and Selena’s story ricocheted across the country, the fresh young star on the cusp of launching her breakthrough mainstream album had literally crossed over.

Almost overnight, Selena became a household word — and when People magazine rolled the dice, printing an entire tribute issue dedicated to her life the week following her death, more than one million copies were snapped up by fans and those lured by the young singer’s sultry appearance and the lurid headlines that surrounded the soap opera-style story.

In August 1995, EMI released “Dreaming of You.” Buoyed by the remarkable outpouring of grief even outside her native Texas and Latino fan base, the bilingual album stormed the Billboard 200, debuting at No. 1. The record, preceded by the single, “I Could Fall in Love,” was the first album recorded mostly in Spanish (albeit in collected form) to debut at the industry bible’s top spot.

Achieving her ultimate goal of crossover success only in death, Selena managed also in afterlife to lead a tidal wave of Latin artists into the mainstream. A year after her death, Jennifer Lopez was chosen to portray the singer in a biopic based on her short life. Released in 1997, the movie prompted a renewed of interest in Selena, and the soundtrack (including “I Could Fall in Love” and much of the “Dreaming of You” package) sailed again to the top of the charts.

A decade later, many still marvel at the aura of effervescence that surrounded the Lake Jackson-born singer, who grew up singing along with FM-radio staples of her era but embraced her Mexican heritage to become the voice of a cross-cultural phenomenon that continues to blossom.

“There’s something intoxicating about the mix of Latin and pop,” Thomas said. “We’re still searching for the next Selena.”]]>bill@wgramsey.comMagazine features2010-08-22T20:35:25-04:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/52c16eed6c950c72fd71d19ad7f1292c-2.php#unique-entry-id-2http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/52c16eed6c950c72fd71d19ad7f1292c-2.php#unique-entry-id-2By Bill Ramsey
Texas Music Magazine | Summer 2006

Buck Owens, suffering the diseases and scars that plague most old men, wore out on March 25 and died in his bed at the hard-lived age of 76. But not before taking the stage one more time on the streets of his beloved Bakersfield, the inland California city the native Texan made famous and called home for more than half a century.

Tired, Owens told his band there would be no show the night of March 24 — hardly the first time the Buckaroos had been told to cancel a performance at the Crystal Palace. The Palace is Owens' multi-million dollar over-sized honky tonk with good food, plenty of neon and not a thing any more interesting for a hundred miles around.

But when the legend learned several fans had driven all the way from Bend, Oregon, to see him perform that night, he reportedly sighed, “Aw, man,” indulged himself with his preferred meal of Texas-style chicken-fried steak and sang a round of some of his 19 one-time No. 1 hits.

“He had his favorite meal, played a show and died in his sleep,” Jim Shaw, his keyboardist for 35 years, would tell The Los Angeles Times. “We thought, ‘That's not too bad.’ ” Owens would have appreciated the simple epitaph.

For the next week, the town that Owens had adopted and put on the pop culture map with his hit song, “Streets of Bakersfield,” grieved at the passing of its most famous citizen. When he was alive, they’d named the street where he built his dinner club Buck Owens Boulevard. The city allowed him to purchase and relocate the massive “Bakersfield” city sign near his club's entrance and added the community's name to that of the half-dozen other cities claiming to be the birthplace of honky-tonk music. And Austin wasn't Nashville West, either, city residents would tell visiting writers; Bakersfield was.

His funeral on April 2 gave the city yet another round of national attention with a one-day showcase of country music featuring Dwight Yoakum, Garth Brooks and Brad Paisley at the Baptist service and later during a private wake at the Crystal Palace. Clint Black came on April 4 for the re-opening of the club. The youngest of the singers Owens would inspire, Paisley, played for free at the Palace on May 6.

The Buckaroos came back, too, this time backing up Owens' son, Buddy, to occupy the space his father had on the Crystal Palace stage each Friday and Saturday for most of the past decade. “The first song we did was ‘Streets of Bakersfield,' ” Shaw says. “My wife said later I was visibly struggling to maintain my composure, but after we got through that song, things were fine.” The evening brought back memories of 1974, Shaw says, when longtime Buckaroo guitarist, Don Rich, died, and the band played on. “It was traumatic, but just as we approached that show at Red Rocks in Colorado after Don died — where Buck refused to replace Don so early — we just did it,” Shaw says.

When Owens had decided to perform the night before he died, he was suffering from an unspecified illness that had confined the signer to a Los Angeles hospital a month earlier. He suffered a stroke in 2004 after throat cancer surgery in 1993 and a bout of pneumonia in 1997. Still, even in his last years, Owens gave the Crystal Palace the feeling of a western Graceland, remembers Robert Price, a columnist for the city's newspaper, The Bakersfield Californian. But unlike Elvis, Owens' appeal to the common man was backed up by his common sense at business.

“They're Going To Make A Big Star Out of Me”
Even the Beatles were fans of the beyond-country appeal of Buck Owens, choosing to adapt his “Act Naturally” hit song into their own chart climbers, adding an English accent to the prophetic lyric, “They're going to make a big star out of me.” America made a big star of Buck Owens with 19 consecutive No. 1 hits during the 1960s for the singer, songwriter and musician. Those who didn't already know his music would recognize the name and plain, weathered face when he became the unlikely star of the long-running television variety show, “Hee Haw” from 1969 until 1986.

“He was proud of his contributions during the early years, when he was nothing more than a highly sought-after studio guitarist,” Price, the local newspaper columnist and his long-time chronicler, says. “He talked a lot about that special time between 1953 and 1957, when the dividing line between country and rock was sort of hazy. Country artists toured with rock artists, and individual performers swung back and forth between the two genres without even mussing their hair,” Price says.

Prior to his hit-making assault on the charts during the 1960s, Owens, like many artists of the day, attempted almost any tactic that would set him apart from the competition. “Corky Jones” was Owens’ rockabilly pseudonym, under which he recorded a brief output. The name was intended to disguise his identity from the country music establishment, which took a dim view at the time of country artists straying into the then-new form or rock. Owens as Jones recorded “Hot Dog,” backed with “Rhythm and Booze,” on the Pep label. But the “establishment” had little to worry about — the record went nowhere.

Owens was nonplussed at being judged up or down by the musical business or rock or country, Shaw remembers, preferring to stick to the basics that would continue to set him apart from the increasingly sophisticated gadgetry adopted by his contemporaries inside the recording studio. “I think it was his production values, the stripped-down thing,” Shaw says. “He was getting back to basics. I really think that was what set him apart. He insisted on doing things from the outside, recording his sound his own way.”

As a vocalist gifted with almost perfect pitch and a guitarist who merged his Tex-Mex roots with California's surfer-twang sound, he turned his everyday observations into popular catch phrases with his song writing. He was born the poor son of a sharecropper on August 12, 1929, in Sherman, Texas, 65 miles north of Dallas, and christened Alvis Edgar Owens. He dubbed himself “Buck” after the family mule. Although Owens is most closely identified with Bakersfield, the singer never dismissed his Texas roots. Years later, when Dwight Yoakum later approached Owens about the idea of re-recording his hit “Streets of Bakersfield,” incorporating the accordion music and polka-style back beat of Tejano legend Flaco Jimenez, the Texan in him would embrace the arrangement.

Owens learned to play the guitar when his family moved west to Arizona in 1937 in search of a better way to make a living. As a teenager, he performed behind a young female singer for a daily 15-minute radio show in Mesa, a suburb of Phoenix. In Arizona, he met and married Bonnie Campbell (who would also later marry Merle Haggard, another legend from the Bakersfield suburb of Oildale), and they had two sons. If Sherman, Texas, wasn’t booming, neither was Phoenix in those days. Owens picked oranges to pay the rent, and Bonnie went to live with Owens' aunt and uncle in Bakersfield, California, where picking crops also made up the local economy. Owens soon followed, and Bakersfield became his permanent home. Owens’ marriage didn’t last — the couple divorced in 1953 — but it was in Bakersfield where Owens met and fell in love with the newly created Fender Telecaster electric guitar.

Owens and his guitar found steady work at The Blackboard, a local honky tonk where he crossed paths with many of his mentors and contemporaries. Future stars such as George Jones, Merle Haggard and Roger Miller all played there in the 1950s. Owens briefly left to run radio station in Tacoma, Washington, but quickly returned to Bakersfield in the 1958. Upon his return, he met a fiddler-turned-guitarist named Don Rich, with whom he would record his first Top 10 record, “Under Your Spell Again.”

Far from Nashville, Owens was not impressed nor influenced by the Nashville Sound. “Buck's appeal to so many of today’s younger artists is based in the fact that he wouldn't knuckle under,” Shaw believes. “He was outspoken, he had a love for radio and he understood the sound he wanted. Some people called it the lowest common denominator, but it would always sound good. When you heard his records, you knew it was Buck.”

Neither would he fit himself into Nashville’s definition of country. From country to rock and gospel and blues, there was almost no genre of music Owens did not appreciate or adapt to what already was being called his “Bakersfield twang.” Price, the Bakersfield newspaperman who wrote Owens’ lengthy obituary, believes in another life Owens might just as easily have been a blues singer or a rock star. “But he was born poor and white, and raised on the Texas-Oklahoma border in the middle of the Great Depression. If he was going to play music at all, it was going to be country music,” Price says.

Alongside his string of original 1960s country hits such as “Tiger By The Tail” and “Together Again,” Owens and his Buckaroos would fill their albums with versions of such early rock classics such as “Johnny B. Goode” and “Memphis, Tennessee.” Nothing was further from the Nashville sound than the songs of The Beatles, and Owens became a fan who was thrilled when the Fab Four played his songs. Today, the odd marriage of Owens’ Bakersfield Sound and the pop sensibilities of The Beatles is reflected in the music of The Derailers, an Austin-based band led by guitarist and co-founder Brian Hoefeldt. “Just listen to The Beatles’ ‘I’ll Cry Instead,’ ” Hoefeldt says. “They incorporated Buck's sound.”

Owens didn’t mimic The Beatles, but he patterned one his songs, “Cryin' Time,” after the work of another of his heroes, Ray Charles, who scored a No. 6 Billboard chart hit with the tune. During the 1960s, Owens also established a record for a 45 single, alternating the top spot on the charts between the A-side “Together Again,” with “My Heart Skips a Beat” on the B-side. The Arizona orange picker would attract sold-out performances at Carnegie Hall and the London Palladium, and also play the White House at the invitation of fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson. The “picking and grinning” he did during his “Hee Haw” years wasn’t his favorite gig. “I just kind of prostituted myself for their money,” The Bakersfield Californian reported him telling one interviewer.

But back in Bakersfield, he already was learning how, like his music, to make money his own way. He created his own music publishing company, and he purchased radio and television stations in Bakersfield and Arizona that made him millions. He had so many business interests in Bakersfield, some jokingly dubbed the city “Buckersfield.” His family's country-themed radio station, KUZZ-FM, still often commands top spot in the ratings. After “Hee Haw” and the death of Don Rich, Owens’ interests in music faded until he was approached by rising young country star Dwight Yoakum in 1987, who had been crediting Buck Owens and the Buckaroos as his inspiration for songs like “Little Ways” to newer audiences unfamiliar with the Owens sound. Yoakum came to Bakersfield in 1987 and convinced Owens to join him on stage at the Kern County Fair to sing Owens' 1972 hit, “Streets of Bakersfield.” Owens and Yoakum re-recorded the song, and Owens had his first No. 1 hit single in almost two decades. This time, Nashville paid attention, and at last Owens was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

The re-release of “Streets of Bakersfield” made the city an attraction, too, and gave new fans a place to go when Owens completed construction of his $6.7 million Crystal Palace and began playing weekly at the combination nightclub, restaurant and museum to Owens’ unique brand of country. Now that he’s gone, “if it's marketed properly, it might start radiating a little Graceland-like Karma, although that's a tough comparison to life up to,” muses Price. “Hopefully, the Buckaroos will stick around for a few years, and I know Buck's son, Buddy Alan Owens, will be playing a few dates here and there.”

Buckaroos keyboardist Shaw says the Palace is a great venue, even without Buck, “and I know he wanted it to continue to be a living, active place, so the Buckaroos will continue.” The annual Buck Owens Birthday Bash will take place on August 12, and celebrity guests are expected, he says.

For the Owens legacy, the accolades did not end with the eulogies. On May 23, during the 41st Annual Academy of Country Music Awards in Las Vegas, an unlikely mix of musical genres was represented on stage during a salute to Owens. Country star Yoakum joined ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, Brad Paisley, original Buckaroos steel guitarist Tom Brumley, Byrds legend Chris Hillman and drummer Travis Barker from Blink 182 to perform “Act Naturally” and, of course, “Streets of Bakersfield.” Owens, who spent his career refusing to confine himself or his music to any one genre, would have applauded. ]]>bill@wgramsey.comEssays2010-08-22T20:32:27-04:00http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/e23f7a46d18ab168ea6e492f21291e53-1.php#unique-entry-id-1http://www.wgramsey.com/clips_files/e23f7a46d18ab168ea6e492f21291e53-1.php#unique-entry-id-1By Bill Ramsey
Bakersfield Californian | July 2006

“Never look a Trekkie in the eye.” Those words were thrown down like a gauntlet from a costumed “Star Wars” fan scoffing at the approach of an the old-fashioned Star Trekker through the throngs of the tens of thousands in attendance at this year's Comic-Con in San Diego. If “Star Wars” fans think Trekkies are crazy, the under-30 Manga set was baffled at the lot of them.

Comic book conventions have come a long way since I attended my first one 29 years ago, when Spiderman, Superman and, of course, Trekkies, were in abundance. Today, updated still are plentiful, if unrecognizable to me. But there are also hundreds of new, high-tech comic book heroes — and anti-heroes — appearing at a rate accelerating as quickly as Hollywood can convert them to a movie or hot new video game.

There's certainly none of the comic book geek stigma I suffered when attending my first comic book convention in the 1970s with my fellow social outcasts. By the 120,000 people who attended this year's Comic-Con International convention in San Diego July 20-23, including some of Hollywood's hottest actors and directors, being a comic book fan is being “in” with the celebrity crowd — or so you’d think. Even the 3,000 credentialed press corps fell under the spell of the phenomenon. And that’s exactly how the comic convention has evolved: a bona fide pop culture extravaganza.

This year, I was among that throng for the first time in decades, fascinated by the gargantuan size and appeal and, admittedly, tapping a long dormant geek desire to view a modern convention and what I'd been missing since I last attended one more than a quarter-century ago.

The 36-year-old Comic-Con began like many other comic book and science fiction conventions. The first was held in 1970 in the basement of the historic U.S. Grant Hotel in downtown San Diego and reportedly attracted only a few hundred fans. Today, it occupies acres and acres of every available space in the cavernous San Diego Convention Center, spilling out onto downtown streets and into the city's harbor parks.

If comic book geeks have quietly inherited the earth, they have also inherited Hollywood, with the comics-to-screen hoopla becoming more the norm at each year's massive gathering.

Celebrities abound at Comic-Con each year. Aside from such regulars as directors Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith are the actors who populate the movies based on comic books. This year, “Spiderman” star Tobey Maguire stopped by to talk about the upcoming “Spiderman 3.” Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes were there to promote their upcoming “Ghost Rider” movie — a spin-off of a lesser-known, bleaker Marvel Comics series.

Back in the 1970s, you were lucky to encounter a minor cast member from the “Star Trek” series, or maybe an aging Adam West to talk about the old Batman television series. But that didn't matter as much as meeting your favorite artist or writer. For comic book fans, such talents as John Byrne or Marv Wolfman were the celebrities. To get an autograph, snap a photo and spend a few moments chatting about your favorite character was what made those conventions a thrill. More than that, said Brad McGill, a longtime comic book fan and former convention dealer from Chattanooga, Tenn., it was the one time each year you could be among your own kind.

“I felt like I was somebody,” McGill said, who fondly recalls attending the popular Chattanooga-based Chattacon during the late 1970s. “We were the geeks at school, but at the convention we were kings of the world for a weekend.”

In their early days, comic conventions were mostly held at discount hotels in dingy ballrooms on the outskirts of town. But that didn't matter to fans of the era. We were in search of our own personal Holy Grail – the one comic book we had always wanted but lost or never found.

I still remember my first convention, the same Chattacon that McGill also attended in my hometown of Chattanooga in 1977. Like Comic-Con, Chattacon fans attended year after year, kindred spirits who enjoyed the company of their fellow geeks in a place where nobody was pointing fingers and sniggering. Here, they were free to argue the finer points of the construction of the fictional Starship Enterprise or ponder comic book plot lines for hours. And, as McGill pointed out, it was $10 for a weekend of all the beer you could drink and the priceless enjoyment of being around fellow fans.

Things have changed, but there still are acres of comic books and toy comic book characters for sale at Comic-Con, although the convention has evolved into at least a quarter of a mile of visual feasts in the form of big-screen animation, movies, film shorts, interactive video game displays and musical performances.

For many, the freebie comic books, buttons and toys are just as much a draw as the endless number of photo ops with sometimes scantily clad costumed comic book characters. Fans also can claim bragging rights as the first to try upcoming video games and at least snippets of comic-inspired films not yet in the theaters.

Such young fans as Bakersfield actor, comedian and aspiring comic book writer Michael Armendariz represent a newer generation. A member of the local comedy troupe The Blacklist, the 27-year-old Armendariz began pursuing comedy after high school, but his fascination with comic books runs deep into his childhood.

"Growing up, ever since first Superman movie, I was into them," he said. “From about the age of 10 on, I began reading Batman and superhero stuff."
Armendariz attended his first Comic-Con 13 years ago and is still an unabashed fan who counts the event among the highlights of his year. Asked about the changes the event has experienced in those years, Armendariz said the introduction of movies and media into the world of comic books and science fiction are a natural evolution.

"Back in grade school,” he said. “I'd go to meet my favorite artists and writers. Now, it's a nice blend, because I like movies and comic books. I've seen an ebb and flow over the past decade. Things go in cycles, but comics never lose their popularity. Most people these days go for the Hollywood scene, not the comic books, but the core characters and comic book lovers are still there."

What is encouraging is that at the center of every year's Comic-Con is the very serious business of comic book collectibles, from boxes of well-read comics and newer editions from up-and-coming comic book artists to elaborate displays of vintage comics with some very high price tags. That's where dealers like Scott Hudlow come in.

Hudlow is an archaeologist, instructor at Bakersfield College and veteran exhibitor of comic books popular and rare. This year was his 10th at selling comic books and his fifth at Comic-Con. For Ludlow, comic books will always be the mainstay of these conventions.

"The show has changed due to many factors, and it has simple grown extremely large,” Hudlow said, taking a break from his booth filled with displays and dozens of boxes of comics. “Movies and media guests add people, but for the most part, these guests are not on the floor, so they don't really affect the day-to-day business of the show for dealers.”

Hudlow, who grew up as a comic book fan and collector and visits smaller conventions around the state and western region several times a year, said the San Diego event is truly comic book Mecca for fans and dealers.

"Comic-Con is fun, but it's also stressful due to its size and the amount of distractions around you, like the people in outlandish costumes,” Hudlow said. "It really is a world unto itself. It really doesn't compare to anything else.”

For him, and for geeks like me, it will always be the comic books that bring me back.]]>