‘The Whammy Bar Diaries’
In the early 1980s, Kevin Abernathy was like a lot of kids who played guitar: He fantasized about going to California and becoming a rock star.
On a local level, 30 years later, Abernathy sort of is a rock star. He’s one of the most respected singer-songwriters and guitarists in East Tennessee. He has released a string of critically acclaimed albums, has regularly headlined shows around the region and has opened concerts for legends. Although his guitar is a little louder and more aggressive than the genre typically allows, Abernathy’s lyrical strength and melodicism generally place him within the Americana genre.
Abernathy’s latest project, though, takes him back to the ‘80s when, at the age of 18, he took a bus to the San Francisco area and chased his rock ‘n’ roll dreams. “The Whammy Bar Diaries” is a song cycle that is being released at the clip of one song per month on Abernathy’s website (www.kevinabernathymusic.com) with an accompanying written memoir that relates to each song.
Each track explores the musician’s story of being an aspiring rocker following his dreams, with some of them being loud, brassy numbers having a flashy ‘80s guitar feel. There’s a hint of Van Halen here and there, but overall, it’s unmistakably Abernathy. He’ll present the work as a concert on April 26 at Barley’s in the Old City.
Abernathy started the memoir many years ago, but he only recently began writing songs about his experiences in California. For the project, he’s re-teamed with Uwe Lueth, who played drums with Abernathy in California, moved to Knoxville a few years ago and works as a sound engineer.
“We got to play together at Waynestock for the Tom Petty tribute, and that kind of fueled the fire for getting this thing going,” says Abernathy.
“The first song [“California”] is about the California myth because that’s what it became to me,” says Abernathy. “It was someplace I had to go because all my heroes lived out there. I’d read in a magazine when I was 11 or 12 years old. I used to read Creem and Hit Parade and Circus. I’d get lost in these magazines in the drug store, and my dad would have to come and pull me out.”
Abernathy, who grew up in Madisonville, traded a video game system he’d gotten for Christmas for a guitar while he was still in middle school. He was a junior in high school before his aspirations of moving to California started to seem possible. At the beginning of the year, Jeff Giles, who called himself “Koji,” enrolled in Abernathy’s Madisonville High School. He was from Northern California.
“He’s got long hair. He plays guitar. I met him, and we became friends,” says Abernathy. “We started talking about forming a band. He told me about Uwe and Nick [Alva]. They played bass and drums. He said, ‘If you move to California with me, we can start a great band.’ I said, ‘Hell, yeah!’”
Five months after graduating high school, Abernathy headed west to the Bay Area and formed the band One with Giles, Lueth and Alva. Within a year, the group had interest from a man who told the group he’d help them make a video to get on MTV, buy them equipment and help them get signed to a record label.
However, after a promising start, the would-be mentor dropped One to back another band.
Still, the four-piece was playing shows and even landed a gig opening for Night Ranger at a minor-league baseball stadium in Rohnert Park, California, where Abernathy was living.
Actually, that was just one of the towns where Abernathy lived. He sort of crashed all over the Bay Area. Sometimes it came down to living in his car or in the chicken shack behind the manager’s house.
“I just thought it was part of the rock ‘n’ roll story: couch surfing, getting kicked out, finding another place to live, all the girls taking you into their parents’ house,” says Abernathy. “Back then, the parents were like, ‘Who’s this guy? OK.’”
One thing that was obvious from the start was the chemistry between Abernathy and Lueth. The two became a songwriting force, outpacing the number of songs the other members were coming up with.
“When me and Kevin were in the same room, we would come up with some killer [stuff],” says Lueth. “It just happened every time. I’d be sitting there [goofing] around on the drums, and he’d say, ‘Do that again.’ Or vice-versa. It was just always like that.”
Abernathy’s father supplied some funds for the band to record some demos in a good San Francisco studio. Some people with industry connections were interested in what they heard but balked at signing a contract with the band.
Getting fans and gigs wasn’t always easy, either. The group did a tour of high schools in Sonoma County, playing in common areas during school lunch. Abernathy and Lueth remember one show at the high school that the group’s second bass player, Mike Cossins, attended, where the PA system went out, but Abernathy’s guitar still had juice. The crowd, who were unimpressed when the full band was playing, began to gather when Abernathy and Lueth kept going with their instrumentals. Giles, who had no power for his vocals, was not happy.
“Then everyone started getting jobs and separating and going their own ways,” says Abernathy. “You’d spend a lot of nights waiting for someone to show up to practice … Our second bass player, Mike, started playing death metal because that was the thing, and he tried to play with both of us. Then he stopped showing up.”
In 1987, five years after arriving in California, Abernathy had had enough. “It felt like nobody was really doing anything but partying,” he says.
Although he considered moving to Los Angeles (where he had originally dreamed of going) and people advised him to check out the music scene that was happening in Seattle (and would become a phenomenon three years later), Abernathy decided to go home. Not long afterwards, he attended art school in Atlanta, but he was always coming home to Madisonville and Knoxville on the weekends. It was in Knoxville during this time that Abernathy met Christine Embry, whom he later married.
The two moved to Nashville, where Abernathy hoped to hone his songwriting skills and maybe sell a few tunes. He also joined the band The Shapeshifters, led by Tri-Cities rocker Brian Relleva, before returning to Knoxville for good.
“It’s a good thing all that happened, or I wouldn’t have a family,” says Abernathy.
The couple has three daughters, Roxie, Lucy and Eliza, who have their own popular band, The Pinklets.
The Pinklets, in fact, will provide background vocals for the April “Whammy Bar” concert. Manning Jenkins, who performed with Knoxville’s Hypertribe during the ‘80s, will play bass, and Derek Senter, who performed with Abernathy in the band Punken Stupor, will sing lead vocals on some tracks, leaving Abernathy to fully concentrate on guitar.
In a way, “The Whammy Bar Diaries” brings things full circle. Abernathy and Lueth have revised a number of songs that they wrote in the ‘80s, with Abernathy writing new, better lyrics to the vintage tunes.
“All that stuff we had come up with, and it never got recorded, never got out there,” says Lueth. “No one ever heard it. I’m sure there’s hundreds of thousands of musicians with the same story. It’s a sad story, really … I’m glad it’s finally seeing the light of day.”
