Occasionally the members of the very band that creates an original, affecting sound have the toughest time explaining it to others. Maybe they’re just too close to the music, too “in it.”
Such is the case with local indie-punkers Crumbsnatchers. Asked about their sound, founders and lifelong friends Sam “Guetts” Guetterman (vocals, guitar) and Phillip Mosteller (lead guitar) vacillate between comparable bands and genre descriptors before settling on perhaps the most fitting description: how the music makes them – and their audience – feel.
“It’s like if your boss pissed you off and you just quit,” Guetts says. “Our band’s music is the sound of the joy of quitting your job,” Mosteller expounds. “It’s being invited into some reckless abandon.”
Gleeful, anarchic, and energetic indie rock with undercurrents of what turn out to be some righteous punk rage at the system, all contribute to this feeling. At a Crumbsnatchers gig at the Pilot Light in August, the band had people skanking, moshing and crowd-surfing–and they were just the opening act. They do, in fact, sound as if they’ve just had a gleeful blowout with a supervisor and then stepped right on stage to celebrate.
The band has been busy lately, finishing recording on their first full-length album, Big House, working with Famous London Recording Studio (run by the Kelly brothers of The Rockwells).
They’re fresh off an exciting one-off collaboration with Devon Evans, an original Wailer, on a B-side version of one their songs, and some short tours including a trip to play SXSW last summer. After the departure of founding bassist Sam Birchfield, the group is enjoying the spoils of working with Knoxville music renaissance man Niles Haury (Grandpa’s Stash) as interim bassist.
“It went really well for us,” Mosteller describes of the band’s process breaking into the scene. It started with a show at The Well in Bearden, which quickly turned into a weekly show, and the crowds grew. Then the band started hitting some downtown venues like Preservation Pub, and the crowd followed. “That’s when we knew we were getting more fandom,” Mosteller says. “We’ve got a great fan base in Knoxville.”
“We book almost 90 bands per month at Scruffy City Hall and Preservation Pub,” says Scott West, owner of Preservation Pub and Scruffy City Hall, in a quote on the band’s press page. “Of of those thousands of bands we’ve booked over the years, I’ve seen no more potential in any band that I’ve seen than Crumbsnatchers.”
Since then the band has continued to play around town and started doing mini-tours around the region.
Some of this joyful embrace of music might not have happened the same way if not for an almost tragic circumstance in Guett’s adolescence that cemented his need and love for music as sustenance.
The band’s album title, Big House, references their playful name for their home and practice pad in Fourth and Gill, but also references the concept of confinement or prison, something that Guetts has unfortunately experienced firsthand.
“I don’t want to get too political, but I got into an investigation of the private for-profit prison system,” Guetterman says. This is in part because he was a victim of this very system for most of his 17th year before being able to opt out when he turned 18.
Teen Challenge is a military-style Christian camp with multiple locations where parents send wayward youth and sign a waiver eradicating all parental rights and visitation for the time the camp deems necessary, and campers are only allowed infrequent calls or visits with parents that are completely monitored. Guetts explains his time in this camp was hellish, involving restrictive rules and often verbal and physical abuse, cloaked in Christian reform. “Our place was pretty bad, pretty nasty,” he says. “Things where they really crossed the line.” One such encounter he recounted featured a youth who refused to submit over and over again, and one night was taken out of his bunk in the middle of the night by some “really ripped dudes” and never seen or heard from again. “He disappeared,” Guetts says.
But perhaps the worst thing for Guetts was that he wasn’t allowed to play music. “It was ripped from me and since then it’s played a big part in my life, because it was taken away from me,” he says. When he was able to write to Mosteller, he hatched plans to go for music full-on once he had his freedom. Guetts has since made peace with family but not the camp, but says because of the waivers signed on his entrance, he has no legal grounds to press charges or file suit. “There’s a lot of ways that no one will ever find out about it, either,” Mosteller adds.
So that translates into some of the album’s frenetic sound, urgent lyrics and explosive conceptual art, done by Nicole Saltzer of Iikki Illustrations and which Guetts says “is amazing. I’m in love with it. It’s very special to me. It really tied it all in with the music.” The lyrics themselves are often abstract or emotion-based, Guetts says, “painting a picture,” meant to “talk a lot about different things, capture a sentiment or feeling… A lot of it was about a fear of entrapment or fear of getting locked up in some sort of way.”
The band says their experience with new collaborators like The Kelly Brothers at Famous London, collaborating with The Wailers and playing with Haury have been boons to their progress, success and excitement with the new music.
“It was an amazing experience,” Mosteller says of working at Famous London. “We absolutely highly recommend…we never felt rushed. They’re also very quick and efficient. I learned a lot.” Guetts adds, “They’re guys who give give a sh*t.”
The same for playing with interim bassist Haury, who was able to jump in at Birchfield’s departure and quickly learn the tunes with what Mosteller and Guetterman describe as a high level of professionalism, while also adding a lot of stage presence. “That’s the great thing about Niles,” Mosteller says. “We were able to get back to activity quickly and without losing quality.”
“I had musical blue balls,” Haury says, recounting his excitement at jumping on stage with the band and rocking out again for the first time since his group Grandpa’s Stash had lapsed into inactivity.
“It was a dream scenario,” Mosteller says of the connection. He’s obviously energetic and has great stage presence.”
“Niles has been great for us, says Guetterman. “I can’t stress that enough.”
Haury got to experience the exciting tail end of recording the 13-track album, when Devon Evans, a member of the original Wailers who had met Guetterman in an airport with a guitar on his back, struck up a conversation, and then responded to Guetterman’s invitation to come into town to help them, staying with Haury while in town.
“With his presence, and the opportunity,” Haury says, he was very inspired. “Every day he’d just wake up and walk a different direction and just talk to people. His persistence at 74, his passion and his [earnestness]… it lit a fire under my ass.”
When the band came in to do a revamped B-side of another song on the album, Evans had them changing up instruments, stripping down the song, letting themselves feel the music, setting a special vibe.
“It seems to me they had discussed it,” Haury says.
“It was loose,” Guetterman says. “Everybody was just hanging out…we scaled the song down…everybody was just acting goofy, having fun.”
“He definitely spoke his mind,” Mosteller counters. “We got in the studio and it was like we had brought him home. He definitely knew his way around the studio.”
“He definitely had a certain focus about him that I admired and hopefully learned from,” Guetts says.
Evans spoke to Blank from Haury’s Backhouse (a Fort Sanders home/concert venue/Airbnb hotel) the night before he left town to go back on tour, saying of the Crumbsnatchers:
“They are real youths…I’m trying my best to give them some inspiration. It’s about the youth, giving the young people a chance to grow…[but] not get swell-headed. Music belongs to the people.”
He went on to give a beautiful philosophical description of music that may be the best way to end an exploration of a young band’s love and pursuit of original, meaningful music:
“Music is music. It has no boundaries. I come from a heritage that everything in my life is connected to a song, a rhythm and a dance… One has to research the life of an islander where for us, everything is rhythmic…it’s about freedom and people, a voice for the people to heal those who are sick, to nurture those who need nurturing. It’s not a celebrity; it’s a lifestyle. It’s a cultural ancestral lifestyle.”
Since the time of writing, Crumbsnatchers went on to play the Bijou Theatre for the first time as part of Knoxtacular, a fundraiser for Knoxville Mercury and the Knoxville History Project, on March 5. Their next show will be part of the Big Asses festival running concurrently with Big Ears, at the Pilot Light on Saturday, April 2. Big House is expected to be released in mid-May.
