The bizarre adventures of the band that never was
In the annals of East Tennessee rock ‘n’ roll history, Quiz Band isn’t one that’s fondly remembered.
Founder Patrick Foster, in fact, never even set foot in Knoxville, mostly because he doesn’t exist.
Nevertheless, his curious ensemble, purportedly inspired by American game shows, earned a write-up in the Knoxville News Sentinel (and an ensuing retraction), caused a kerfuffle at Old City Java and spawned three actual shows by apologetic mischief-makers who would go on to enjoy a measure of national success as the Royal Bangs before quietly fading into obscurity, fondly remembered by a select few who were either involved in the elaborate practical joke or marvel that it was so successful.
“It was a little weird,” admits Chris Rusk, one of the masterminds behind Quiz Band alongside his old friend and Bangs bandmate Ryan Schaefer. “That was when we drew five people at The Pilot Light. We weren’t very popular at that point yet, but we did an interview with Jer [Cole, the long-time chronicler of local music for “Band Scene,” a weekly column in the Sentinel’s entertainment section]. At the time, we just made up some real bizarre [answers], and he would just put it in, and I think that gave us the idea.”
As a caveat, Rusk emphasizes, the guys didn’t do so with malicious intent. This was so long ago that Old City Java was still hosting local shows, long before the Bangs worked with Patrick Carney of The Black Keys or played “Late Night With David Letterman” or toured nationally and internationally. They still were in their teens, he points out: “We were just goofy, and we did it for fun.”
They had no idea of the ruckus it would stir up, but then again, Rusk always has had a penchant for the bizarre. Today, he’s a respected booking agent for Crossover Touring, which absorbed the Knoxville-based agency Prater Day a few years ago; this month, he’ll head to Chicago to oversee some operations for some of the bands he books, a talent he honed to varying degrees of success with the countless Knoxville ensembles of which he was a part over the years: Powersnake, Twinkiebots, Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight, The Cheat, Dixie Dirt and Ross the Boss (later changed to Russ the Buss, but we’ll get to that), just to name a few.
Currently, he’s playing with four active projects – Caps, Ex-Gold, Temp Job and God’s Buffet – and anyone who’s seen him onstage knows that in addition to his talents as a drummer (for most of his projects, he’s been behind the kit), he’s also a capable guitarist and bassist. More than anything else, he thrives on spontaneity, embracing what feels right in the moment and figuring out the logistics later. That’s how Temp Job, which is part of the Waynestock IX lineup on Feb. 1 and 2 at Relix Variety Theatre, came about.
“The Royal Bangs is not really a thing anymore,” he says. “We never really announced that we’re breaking up, but we’re all just busy doing our individual things, especially Ryan with his company [Hologram Electronics]. That’s huge, and very successful, too. I wouldn’t say we would never do it again, but I don’t see anything in the near future happening. But Ryan’s playing in Temp Job now.
“In fact, it’s me, Ryan and Sam [Stratton, the third member and co-founder of Royal Bangs] along with five other people, except I’m playing bass, Sam is playing sax and Ryan is playing keys. When Colin [Woods], who used to drum for Ex-Gold, moved back to town, we wanted to start a band because I like playing with him. But then I was at a Birdhouse show, and I see these singers doing this hip-hop, live-band thing that reminded me of ESG; it was real cool, this hip-hop, but real minimal in kind of a punk way. So I asked them, ‘You wanna sing in a band?,’ not knowing what the band was going to be or what the music is going to be.
“They said yeah and called me the next day, and once they were in, I asked Dexter [Webb] from The Holifields, who was there that same night, ‘You want to play guitar in a band?’” he adds. “I didn’t know any of these people, and they didn’t know me, but they all said yeah, and then Sam said yeah, and we all thought, ‘This sounds cool.’ Anytime anybody wanted to be in the band, I said yeah.”
There’s a lo-fi vibe to much of what Rusk is involved in these days, all of it inspired by a garage-rock aesthetic: friends and peers who just want to make a racket together rather than get on the radio or sell a gazillion albums. The hang is more important than anything else, and every show becomes a communion with like-minded pals who may not get all of the inside jokes but find themselves charmed by the music and the camaraderie nevertheless. That there’s a certain level of impishness to Rusk’s projects on top of the musicality only adds to the charisma. Take God’s Buffet, for example.
“That’s more of a weird one,” he says. “It’s a solo project, and I wear a gimp mask and a fetish vest and fog up The Pilot Light. I’ll light some candles and make it a semi-religious experience. It’s just me, but it’s kind of like punk music, and I play guitar over it. I used to do more noise and antics, but my mom came to one of the shows, and it really upset her because she thought I was too demonic or that I was reading from the Bible backwards. I would pass around a picture of myself when I was in eighth grade and do some weird, sexy stuff with it, and I think it weirded people out.”
Mom’s reticence to embrace it aside, the reaction is everything. Ross the Boss wasn’t a particularly notable band, but it’s still a point of pride on Rusk’s resume, mostly because it gives him claim to an unusual level of fame: He’s the only individual, to his knowledge, to ever be served papers in The Pilot Light. It started with an innocuous piece in the now-defunct Metro Pulse about the band, “kind of funny and dumb,” as he remembers, but the writer contacted Ross Badgett, the owner of the chain of hair salons that shared the band’s name.
“I remember his quote in the paper. They asked him what he thought about Ross the Boss the band, and he said, ‘I don’t know much about rock music, but it doesn’t sound family friendly,’” Rusk says. “Two weeks later, I was setting up for a show at The Pilot Light, and it was just me and the bartender and a guy in a suit sitting on one of the benches. At one point, the bartender said my name, so he knew I was Chris, and he just came up and asked me my name and just handed me some papers.
“I take them because I didn’t know any better – I was 19 or something – and he just left. I opened it and read it, and it’s a cease-and-desist letter saying that Ross of Ross the Boss wanted to seize all of our assets. And all I could think of was, ‘OK. Here’s a 12-pack of Pabst. This is what we’ve made. Cool.’”
Ross the Boss became Russ the Buss, which didn’t last much longer, and of all of his previous projects, it’s probably one that stands no chance of ever reuniting.
Which brings us back to Quiz Band – an outfit also unlikely to ever play again, mostly because it was never meant to play in the first place. After Cole wrote the “Band Scene” piece on the Bangs back in the day, Quiz Band was born in the waggish imaginations of his and Schaefer’s teenage minds. Like some of the bands he’s started over the years, it began as a lark, and the two never expected it to go as far as it did.
“We just wanted to see if Jer would write about it; we didn’t mean to be malicious or mean,” he says. “It was more like, ‘I wonder if this will work?’ We knew that Jer would do a lot of his questions through email rather than meet in person, and because he was friends with some of our friends, we knew he was looking for someone to write about, so we served it to him on a silver platter where he didn’t have to do much work. I know we sound like a**holes, but that’s not the way we meant it.”
An attempt to contact Cole through Facebook for comment on this article was unsuccessful. Given the reaction on the part of News Sentinel personnel, it’s probably a story best left forgotten. Rusk and Schaefer, however, sold it well.
“We came up with this character, Patrick Foster, and we just Google Image searched ‘moustache’ and picked the first picture, which was some 40-year-old man with a moustache, and we sent that as the band picture,” Rusk says. “We emailed Jer and said something like, ‘I’m Patrick Foster, and I’m playing Old City Java with my band, Quiz Band, and we would love to have a piece written about us in the News Sentinel.’ He wrote us back and said sure, and then he emailed a list of questions.”
It’s not difficult to picture the two snickering as they hunched over the keyboard, racking their brains for the most bizarre responses possible to those questions. Patrick was a European fencing champion inspired by American quiz shows, they decided, who moved to the States to “pursue a musical career in quizzing.” (Rusk is going from memory; the article itself has been scrubbed from any digital archives discoverable by Google.) Every answer was an exercise in surrealism, and to their immature delight, it was printed … along with an impending date for the Old City Java performance that was completely made up. And that’s when their consciences tapped them on the shoulders, he says.
“People got upset; there was a retraction or something, and we felt bad about it because they even listed a date that Patrick Foster would play Old City Java,” Rusk says. “Here was a date that our friends at Java didn’t know anything about, so we had to get in touch with them immediately and say, ‘Hey, that was us.’ They were like, ‘We were really concerned about this date we didn’t know we booked with somebody called Quiz Band!’”
As penance, he and Schaefer decided that they needed to fill the date – as the band that literally only existed on (and in) paper. They convened in the basement of the South Knoxville house they shared to figure out what, exactly, Quiz Band sounded like. Live, it turned out to be as bizarre as a fictional Patrick Foster might have originally envisioned.
“It ended up being a drum loop, and Ryan had sound effects over it – honk sounds and bong sounds on a loop. And then I had a shirt with a question mark on it, and I played guitar,” he says. “I would basically ask trivia questions and then answer them, and then we would sing about it. And then at the end of the set, I claimed that I won, and I had a big box with a big question mark on it, and I opened the box and there was cake, and I ate it in front of everyone. And that was Quiz Band.”
It was 10 minutes of phantasmagorical buffoonery that left everyone involved perplexed. Patrick, they informed those in attendance, had been called away at the last minute for a fencing tournament. That the members of the Royal Bangs also were in Quiz Band might have raised a few eyebrows, but knowing their sense of humor at the time, it’s doubtful many were surprised.
They made their apologies to Cole, and Rusk remembers no hard feelings. Quiz Band would go on to play two additional shows (“because the first show was obviously such a hit,” he says dryly), but advanced planning led to even greater heights of hilarity. The third and final one, at The Pilot Light, was more musically straightforward, but the second – a return to Old City Java – sounds like a gag straight out of a comedy set by Tony Clifton or Neil Hamburger.
“We actually had three contestants, and we planted one, because the prize was that we had a kiddie pool filled with bubble bath in the middle of Java, and the prize was to take a bath with me – in Java,” he says. “I remember we were playing with some metal bands, and I remember how upset they were because the floor ended up getting all watery and soapy, and it was really hard to mosh or whatever because people were, like, falling over.”
