High-octane modern rockers enjoy second lives as doctors, lawyers and more
In hindsight, the members of The Big Tease had the last laugh.
They went far by local band standards, riding the wave of post-punk alt-rock made popular locally by such like-minded bands as Jag Star and Copper. They caught a lot of grief from East Tennessee area hipsters for making music outside the conventional mud-caked roots-rock that’s been the predominant genre around these parts since time out of mind, yet they still packed the house at clubs along the Cumberland Avenue “Strip” during the band’s heyday.
They even endured a savage review from the old Knoxville alternative weekly newspaper, Metro Pulse, which slagged their debut record, “Beautiful Addiction.” And while neither entities properly exist anymore, the former members of The Big Tease seem to be doing alright.
“We joke around and say we’re the most un-rock ‘n’ roll band that used to play rock ‘n’ roll,” singer/guitarist Chase Pattison said recently. “Bill (Dabbs, the band’s keyboard player) is a doctor. Brent (Moreland, the group’s bassist) is a lawyer. I have an MBA and I work in health care, but even though I’ve got music playing all day long, if I play it myself these days, it’s to an audience of three: my wife and two children at home.
“I would say I’m semi-retired, only in the sense that we like to joke around (the band also included drummer Gavin Foster) and say, ‘When are we going to figure out a reunion or something?’”
Before The Big Tease, Pattison played around East Tennessee as a solo artist, and he’d met Foster and Moreland through church. They started jamming, realized they wanted to a keyboard and Foster recommended Dabbs, whom he’d known and played with in marching and concert bands going back to elementary school. When the guys came together to form the band, they tried to approach it with a maturity that belied their years (or their party anthems).
“One of the things we did early on was to say, ‘How long do we want to try and make it in this industry? How long do we want our dreams of being full time rock ‘n’ roll musicians to go?’” Pattison said. “And we all agreed that we wanted to go for at least a few years after college, so we set a date: the summer of 2007. We didn’t really define it, but we basically agreed that if we didn’t have some sort of substantial moment, whether that was signing a record deal or something similar, we were going to think about The Big Tease as no longer being the dream.”
With an expiration date in mind, the guys got to work, in the studio and on the stage. For “Beautiful Addiction,” the band blended rock, pop and funk for a sound that carried an ’80s vibe but sounded equally at home on modern rock radio alongside bands like Maroon 5 and The Killers. That mainstream-oriented vibe won The Big Tease legions of local fans, and the band was consistently a top draw at the long-gone Old City club Blue Cat’s and at fraternity parties on the University of Tennessee campus.
“Knoxville was different then,” Dabbs said. “We started off playing Barley’s, and eventually we were doing the Blue Cat’s shows, and even Hanna’s in the Old City would have us. A lot of those places are more dance clubs or do more of the alt-country or indie-folk Americana these days, if they even exist at all.
“A lot of it, too, was that we were before you could really download songs. We had a Myspace account, but that was it, and just driving around, getting our name out there, forced us to play out a lot. We amassed a fan base in person as we were trying to sell records and what not. It’s not like it is today, where bands get to tour with an iPhone and have GPS. It’s a wonder we survived!”
The band formed during the freshman/sophomore years of college, and while the band’s popularity grew (they once opened for the Goo Goo Dolls in the Tri Cities), they refused to give up on their respective educations. A follow-up EP, “Paper Symphony,” added a healthy dose of indie rock and flourishes of psychedelia into the mix; heavy on piano and intricate, layered vocals, it evoked comparisons to The Decemberists covering “Strawberry Fields”-era Beatles and earned The Big Tease a modest team of supporters.
“We had management, a tour/booking agent and some radio support, and we were doing our own publishing and licensing,” Pattison said. “Our management, at the time, put together a showcase in New York and invited 10 or 15 different labels, from the big boys down to the smaller groups, to come see us. That was in January 2007, and that was a defining moment. We all agreed that if someone bites, we would know that was it, and if not, we would start thinking about what we would do next.”
Back in Knoxville, Dabbs got married a couple of weeks later, and by that summer, with no phone calls coming down from New York, the guys went their separate ways. It wasn’t acrimonious or bitter; it was just the end of the road. Dabbs went to med school, Moreland went to law school and The Big Tease faded into the annals of East Tennessee music scene history. The guys still stay in touch, however, and remember those glory days fondly.
“We were together 24-7 for several years, and when you do that, you get to create lifelong friendships,” Pattison said. “We just had a lot of fun. Blue Cat’s was always fun, and we always had a good time on the UT campus, whether we were playing for a fraternity or a sorority or over at New Amsterdam. Those were a lot of fun, because there were always several hundred people there, and we always had an interesting way to market the show: let the girls in free.
“We always had the place jam-packed, and it was always a lot of fun. And over the years, we did it all. We dressed up for Christmas concerts, for Halloween concerts … we took the music seriously, but not ourselves.”
