One More for the Road: Dixie Dirt

A paean to the contemporary Icarus of the Knoxville music scene

In the end, there were no toasts, no eulogies, no candles lit in memoriam for one of the most adventurous and creative bands in Knoxville’s music scene history.

When the four members of Dixie Dirt played their final note on April 12, 2008, they stepped off the stage and scattered. The house lights at Barley’s Knoxville came on, and the devoted followers of the four-piece indie-rock outfit found themselves a little lost. The set was abbreviated, there were no encores and after an hour’s performance, the band was done.

Singer and songwriter Kat Brock hugged a few before disappearing into the early spring night, back to her son, Ezra, and in a new direction that had led to her decision to step away a few weeks prior.

Bassist Bradford Carruth, always the quiet observer, studiously packed away his guitar, chatting quietly with a few hangers-on near the stage, gulping in lungs full of both relief and unease – the former for the dissolution of latent tension, the latter for life and music outside the shadow of a band that had become his entire life.

Guitarist Angela Bartlett headed for the bar in search of some anesthetic for a pain that felt like the broken heart of a painful breakup – resentment, love and sorrow swirling up from a dark well of the soul that raged against the dying of a band tied so closely to her identity as a musician in East Tennessee.

(Drummer Chris Rusk, ebullient as ever, was the third stickman for the group after Simon Lynn and Pete Bryan. His other project, Royal Bangs, was on the verge of an explosive breakout; while he has fond memories of his time in the band, he wasn’t as distraught over its demise as the three quasi-siblings who had been a part of it from the very beginning.)

Within a couple of years following that last performance, Brock, Bartlett and Carruth had scattered, leaving Knoxville in their rearview mirrors for lives and careers that, more than a decade later, seem as far both physically and emotionally from that fateful night as they could have gotten. Time, however, has a way of mending wounds and stitching back together broken hearts, and all these years later, with homes as close as Nashville and as far away as Seattle, they’ve found one another again.

Dixie Dirt may never play another show, they all agree, but the door is not shut on the possibility, either. After all, they are sisters and a brother, and whatever confused place they found themselves in when Dixie Dirt crashed to earth, they’ve come out the other side with full hearts and a renewal of love – for one another and for the music they once made together.

Angela Bartlett

After Dixie Dirt breathed its last, Bartlett found herself adrift. The band had served as an outlet for a darkness she’s carried inside her as long as she can remember, but with Brock and Carruth by her side, she was able to mold it into songs that ranged from the languid melancholy of “Parachute” to the raging thunder of the multi-part “Sleep.”

“It was very special, but at the same time, it was also very dark, and I had to mitigate a lot of my personal feelings with what I was told I shouldn’t be feeling,” she says, speaking by phone from the Seattle home she shares with her wife of five years.

“Right here, right now, I feel so differently about it than if you had asked me about it six or seven years ago. When it ended, I was really upset and pretty brokenhearted. Honestly, I was in a really dark place, and the relationships I had with Kat and Brad had been compromised by outside influences that we allowed to change how we felt about each other and what we were doing.”

She left Knoxville for Nashville, where she stayed until 2010 trying to find traction as a musician outside of the Dixie Dirt paradigm. She felt enormous pressure, she says, to pursue relevance, to attend shows, to play with as many musicians as possible – in short, to play the game.

“It got to a point where I thought, [forget] it, I don’t care; I don’t see the value of putting my name out there for anybody at all,” she says. “When I was 20, I felt like I had something to prove and felt like I had to plant my stake in the ground, but it got to where I wanted to go far away, to another place.”

And so she kept going, until she landed in the Pacific Northwest and pushed the memories of Dixie Dirt into a box that she didn’t open again for almost five years.

“I didn’t listen to Dixie Dirt, probably from 2009 until 2013, maybe,” she says. “When I moved out here, I completely pushed it out of my life. It was like, ‘This is something I did; it’s not who I am, it doesn’t define me, and it’s time to focus on something else.’ Prior to that point, it seemed like everything was focused on Dixie Dirt, and when you’re a part of something bigger than you, even if it’s a small thing, you can start to lose quite a bit.”

She found work in the culinary world, and today she’s a chef for a Seattle-area tech campus. She forged new relationships, fell in love and got back into the studio once, playing guest guitar on a friend’s record. She flirted with the idea of selling her instrument in 2011, but friends and acquaintances talked her out of it, and today she plays at home and for her wife, occasionally making home recordings for her personal pleasure.

In recent years, she’s revisited her old band – both sonically and through a renewal of her relationships with Brock and Carruth. The last time she listened to “Pieces of the World,” the band’s 2005 full-length, she felt a peace that eluded her in the aftermath of Dixie Dirt’s dissolution.

“The darkness I was talking about, I still carry that. It’s a part of who I am, and I’m able to mitigate that darkness with my life, through my actions, in a way that I’m more at peace with now,” she says. “And when I hear that record, it’s a good record. Being in Dixie Dirt felt good, and I can listen to it and step back and not be in it so much. I hear myself playing music, but I’m so far away from who that person was that it’s almost like I’m listening to someone I don’t know at all.”

Bradford Carruth

Before moving to Knoxville, Carruth received the first Dixie Dirt demos from his friend, Tim Regan, before the band had even recruited a bass player. He would play along with it in the bedroom of his family’s Germantown home, and when he returned to East Tennessee and enrolled in the University of Tennessee, he wound up in a philosophy class with Brock. Two weeks later, she pulled him aside.

“I was always a little intimidated by Kat, but she said, ‘I need to talk to you about something – do you have a bass, and can you play it?’” he says.

Within days, he found himself at band practice. That was in 2000; two years later, the band released its official debut, the EP “Springtime Is for the Hopeless and Other Ideas.” Over the course of eight years, he grew to regard Brock and Bartlett as sisters, and even today, they remain two of the most important people in his life, he says.

“I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time with that close of a group of people,” says Carruth, who works as an Uber driver in Austin, Texas. “At the height of it, we were practicing at least 30 hours a week. We would get to practice early and stay late, and as far as the live shows go, we created this really amazing tension – the really good, onstage musical tension, the moments of being able to hear a pin drop in the room when we were doing something low key, then the explosions that happened afterward. We feel like we all sacrificed so much for that band and put everything else in our lives on hold for almost eight years.”

In 2003, the band moved to Athens, Georgia, briefly, right after creating a labyrinthine rock opera titled “The Unending Perils of a Predestined Destiny.” With only three public performances that included a backup choir, it’s a project that’s lost to the annals of time. But once the band returned to Knoxville after parting ways with Lynn, they regrouped with Bryan and recorded “On Our Way Like We Never Met” in 2004. “Pieces of the World” followed in 2005, and the band tried to capitalize on its momentum with East Coast tours and opening slots that included a Sundown in the City warmup for the Drive-By Truckers, among others.

There are other batches of recordings that have yet to see the light of day, including some from sessions during which Brock announced she was quitting the band. Songs like “Shined” and “Drunken Argument” were live staples of searing camaraderie, but they remain hidden away on tape and digital files that Carruth hopes to unearth one of these days.

It would, after all, make for a more fitting coda, he adds.

“For me, it was a sigh of relief by the end of it because we were all moving in different directions – not in bad directions, just different directions,” he says. “It had gotten to the point where we were taking four separate cars, for example, to a show in Chattanooga. Something was lost.”

He stayed in Knoxville for a while, starting the short-lived project Invisible Giants, for which he sang and played harmonica. Playing bass grew difficult because of a degenerative neurological disease that affects his hands and feet, he says; he moved to New York for a period until the degeneration made working as a chef too difficult. These days, driving for Uber keeps him off his feet, but like Bartlett, he rarely plays these days.

“I actually got to see Angela in September, and that’s the second time since I left Knoxville,” he says. “Each time I left, I bawled my eyes out. I still feel so emotionally connected to both of them. That’s the thing I got out of it the most: the relationships.”

Kat Brock

Of the three, Brock remains the closest to Knoxville. She still has family here, and after a brief period in New York, she settled in Nashville, where she worked in various career fields before settling on law school. These days, she reviews contracts and does contractor work for a company called Due Diligence, and the pace allows her to work from home for a couple of days a week, which gives her time for motherhood. (Ezra, whom she affectionately refers to as Ez, turns 13 this year. A musical sidenote: A budding musician himself, Ezra has been making music lately, Brock says, with Elijah Davis, the son of former Superdrag frontman John Davis, who also resides in Nashville.)

A visual artist as well, she’s continued to paint, but in recent months she’s found herself drawn back to the guitar, she adds.

“I haven’t had it out for years, and, in fact, it was at my brother’s house, and I had him bring it to me,” she says. “He had it cleaned up and tuned up, and I started teaching myself how to fingerpick, which is something I’ve never done before because I never needed to or had the confidence to do it. And it’s opened up this whole world of sounds for me, this whole other way of writing songs. I ended up buying a 24-track and a loop pedal, and I’ve started playing with that. I’ve entered this whole new musical world that I never, ever explored before. I don’t know what I’ll do with it, but it’s nice to get lost in it again.”

Brock’s also been in regular contact with Bartlett; last summer, she made the trip to Seattle, and the two old friends renewed their friendship through food, fishing and rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a bond she’s determined to maintain, she says, because of how much it once meant and how much it still does.

“With Dixie Dirt, we created a family,” she says. “We practiced four or five times a week, maybe even sometimes six or seven, depending on what was going on. We toured quite a bit, and I was just never alone. I was around people I felt close enough with to completely be myself, to do and say whatever I wanted to do and say, and together we created something we really believed in.

“I miss that. I miss having something so meaningful and creating something so meaningful with other people who feel it as much as I do. What I loved about it, too, was how many different kinds of people seemed to feel that with us. From every walk of life, every kind of different social group, it seemed like there was something for a lot of people. It was very inclusive.”

With the gift of hindsight, the adoration so many felt for Dixie Dirt is awe-inspiring, Brock says. It fills her with gratitude, and any time spent reflecting on the band leaves her humbled to have been a part of something that was so special to so many people. It was an antidote to the disconnection that seems so prevalent in society these days, and when she puts on the old records on occasion, she feels it.

She can close her eyes and see her sister and her brother in those moments when they turned toward one another, backs to the audience for a few minutes, and churned out gargantuan waves of guitar and fuzz and energy that clanged with a desperation, a longing, for something greater. She feels it still, and in those moments when she’s sitting in a Nashville coffee shop, 11 years removed from the final time Dixie Dirt played a Knoxville stage, she sometimes wonders: Is that magic still possible?

“We talk about Dixie Dirt often – how much it meant to us and how much we mean to each other – because it was such a special time,” she says. “Angela and I talked about it in January, and I remember her saying, ‘I can’t say this won’t ever happen again,’ and that made me feel really good because I’ve always had those feelings, too.

“Now that we’re all kind of grown up and doing our thing, it’s like all of the sad stuff has kind of washed away. The differences we had, they’ve all washed away. They’re my soulmates, Angela and Bradford. I know that and feel that, and I still have a great connection with them that I don’t have with many people.”