‘Please save me from a boring life’
It’s been three decades since Todd Steed was a regular rocker along Cumberland Avenue, but the ghosts of The Strip are there, every time he drives to work at the University of Tennessee.
They don’t haunt him in the conventional sense of the word. He doesn’t grip the steering wheel with white knuckles and mutter about seeing dead people whenever he makes the drive from his home in Northeast Knoxville to the studios of WUOT, where he serves as music director and host of the nightly jazz series “Improvisations.” (Although if he did, he’d probably write a song about it.)
But while they may not spook him, they do make him a little sad, he told BLANK Newspaper recently, because behind the glistening brick-and-mortar facades of new stores and restaurants and apartment buildings, the specters of a gloriously hedonistic Knoxville music scene heyday shimmers.
It’s long gone now – places like The Torch, Salvador Deli, The Library and the Last Lap, even the fabled Longbranch Saloon, which finally gave up its own ghost a few years ago. But in his head, he still sees it: another memory at this intersection, an old friend leaning up against that telephone pole, the distant whine of feedback from one band or another just barely audible over the hum of cars and the din of horns down the carefully maintained and manicured new traffic lanes.
“It’s gotten to the point where I actually changed my driving route, because I need a little more space,” Steed said. “I used to come in on 17th [Street], and I still do, sometimes, depending on where I’m going that day, but it kind of got a little depressing. There are a lot of ghosts down there for me, a lot of people I knew in those days who are actually gone.
“Each place has these incredible memories, and they seemed like they were pretty short-lived, all of them, but transformational moments occurred in each of them. For example, I was just reminded that Superdrag’s first show was in the same place Dug Meech joined Smokin’ Dave and the Premo Dopes [at Record Bar, the music store that once occupied the Chipotle location, where Steed worked in 1982]. It’s so weird – it’s like when you watch these movies, and they have these flashbacks that go super fast, and that’s what it’s like looking down Cumberland Avenue.
“There’s been so much change that it’s almost hard to get a grip on it,” he added. “It’s almost like, where do you start in your memory?”
“Historic Knoxville High” is as good of a place as any. That’s the title of the new record by Smokin’ Dave and the Premo Dopes, the band whose 10-year run along The Strip coincided with the growing popularity of college rock. From 1982 to 1992, Steed, Meech and bassist Dave Nichols were one of the most beloved three-piece rock bands in this scene or any other, by way of self-deprecating humor and an indefatigable approach to rock ‘n’ roll that was almost Buddhist in nature, so in-the-moment was each record and each show.
“Historic Knoxville High” is the first Smokin’ Dave album since 1992’s “Huh,” and the name itself was inspired by Nichols’ own trip down memory lane, when he happened to be driving down Interstate 40 and see those three words emblazoned over the entrance to the old Knoxville High School building, which has since been converted into a senior living facility.
Knoxville High was in operation from 1910 to 1951, and while the structure and the signage are all that remains of the old institution, the name triggered in Nichols a yearning for those halcyon days when Smokin’ Dave and the Premo Dopes helped prime the pump for a scene that continues to produce more talented bands and musicians and artists than a city Knoxville’s size should rightly have.
“I took it the other way, meaning the good old days in Knoxville, because I remember the historic Knoxville High real well,” Nichols said. “And I just thought, ‘You know, the Premo Dopes should do an album with that name.’”
And so began a seven-year journey that saw the three old friends, who parted ways amicably when the Dopes called it quits and have continued to reunite sporadically in the years since, to get back to work in earnest. Creating “Historic Knoxville High” started out, the guys said, not so much as a new record but as a reckoning of what the town means to the Dopes, and what the band means to Knoxville. Tomes could be written on the symbiotic relationship between the two, and it’s no stretch to say that even if Steed, Nichols and Meech had lived in and befriended one another in a different city, that alternative version of Smokin’ Dave and the Premo Dopes would not sound the same.
After all, the band was built on the childlike joy that established Nichols and Steed as lifelong friends in the third grade and was amplified by a pubescent discovery of the power of rock ‘n’ roll. As a teenager, Steed was part of a cover band called Etcetera and started playing The Strip at 17 years old.
“I was in high school, and I used to tell my parents I was going to see the Monty Python late movie, and they would say, ‘Again?’ But really, we were sneaking out and going to play the Longbranch,” he said. “I remember one night, a bunch of bikers came in the side door without paying, and one of the guys in the band said, ‘Who’s going to make them pay?’ And I just turned and said, ‘Nobody!’ I may have been 17, but I wasn’t completely stupid!
“So these bikers came up to the front of the stage and were glaring at us like we were idiots, and one of them said, ‘You’re gonna play some Skynyrd.’ But it turns out I actually knew some, so we played ‘Free Bird,’ and then they became our champions – were buying the band beers (but not me, because I was a responsible teenager!) and buying us popcorn and literally lifting us up in the air at the end of the evening.”
Two things are notable about that particular story. Firstly, that even at 17, Steed knew how to charm a crowd, and while the instances when said crowd members wanted to stick a sharpened screwdriver in his smarmy eye were few and far between, it was a portent of things to come as he mastered that ability. Secondly, “Free Bird 2,” a song on the Todd Steed and the Suns of Phere album “Heartbreak and Duct Tape” that details a fan’s lament because his favorite band won’t play Skynyrd any longer is, in hindsight, a wink and a nod to those days of yore.
The Strip always was Mecca for Steed, who made the leap to a short-lived punk band called Real Hostages that “basically imploded,” he said. The earliest incarnation of Smokin’ Dave featured a combined lineup of the Hostages and another band from that era, Five Twins, which featured another Knoxville veteran, Brian Waldschlager.
“Brian’s band brought a lot of people, and there was this whole group of bands that lived in Fort Sanders and played on Cumberland Avenue all the time,” Nichols said. “That was kind of our circle, and in that circle, everybody sort of supported each other and drank together and crashed on each other’s couches and stuff like that, and we were totally removed from any other music scenes that Knoxville had.”
Eventually, the Dopes settled into the “classic” three-piece lineup after Meech, who describes himself as a “fan first,” turned out at a particular Smokin’ Dave show and commandeered the microphone for a full-throttle version of “Surfin’ Bird.” Steed and Nichols didn’t mind because the framework was already in place for the Dopes Zen-like approach to music as art created in the moment: Whatever happened was supposed to happen, and whether the power went out or bikers showed up or a rambunctious fan wanted to get on stage and sing, that became part of the show.
“Duke Ellington, I think it was, said he would sacrifice continuity for spontaneity,” Nichols said. “We sort of ran with that and threw continuity out the window.”
The Dopes, it could be said, kept their status as Knoxville darlings from going to their head because of that spontaneity. It was difficult to get caught up in self-importance when every show skittered on the edge of chaos, and as the guys saw how much fans loved the anything-goes spirit of a Smokin’ Dave show, they came up with even more unorthodox ways to entertain. Opening acts were often the guys themselves, playing under an alter-ego moniker (like The Haulin’ Oats Boys, which did bluegrass covers of Hall and Oates songs). One time, they invited friends to play poker on stage as a way to warm up the crowd.
“That self-deprecating humor aspect of our persona, most people when they go to see a band don’t really expect that,” Meech said. “I think they expect something else, so we took that approach and just ran with it.”
And along the way, they found the drive to do more than any of them had done with their previous projects, Steed added.
“One of the biggest differences, from Real Hostages to Smokin’ Dave, is that Smokin’ Dave was able to put out music, which the Hostages never did,” he said. “Having a physical record was like graduating from high school, and putting that record on WUTK, I think that’s when we started getting a lot more people [at shows] than just our friends. Audiences started getting bigger, which was always shocking.”
The biggest break, according to Nichols, happened thanks to Steed’s brother. He worked at a stamp factory and designed a custom Smokin’ Dave and the Premo Dopes stamp that the guys used to ink the hands of audience members who paid the cover charge at the door. One night, it went missing, and no one could find it. A few days later, a familiar name started showing up on bathroom stall doors across campus.
“Somebody went all over UT and stamped all of the bathroom stalls with that stamp!” Nichols said.
“For years, people would say, ‘Hey, I’ve heard of you! I saw the stamp in the music building,’ or wherever,” Steed added.
And once they ventured to a Smokin’ Dave show, they became converts. Acolytes, even: The social media chatter alone around the release of “Historic Knoxville High” has been next-level enthusiastic, and a listen to the record is proof-positive that despite the span of time, the guys haven’t lost any of their chops. If anything, the telepathic sympatico that steered their formative years has only deepened with time and age, so that a record that starts out with the Mothers of Invention-inspired “Brain Drain” can segue into the choogling “Live and Not Lern” reference of “Dear Headlines” to the funky slap of “Girls With Hair in Their Eyes,” a band classic that gets dusted off for the new record.
“We started getting together in Dave’s basement, I believe, in 2014,” Steed said. “We just started going through a bunch of songs we played back in the day, and a couple of songs just sort of erupted from that.”
“Stop the Song,” for example, a track anchored by Meech’s skittering drum work that was inspired by Nichols’ son. Four years old at the time and exasperated with the racket dad and his friends were making in the basement, he stuck his head into one session and hollered for the men-children to … well, stop the song. Steed started riffing on those three words, and in true Smokin’ Dave fashion, another classic was born.
“Really, the album title brought us together to put out an album around that,” Nichols said. “We really hadn’t gotten together before that, hardly. Maybe once in the time since we called it quits.”
“We were just kind of playing with the idea of making a record, but because we weren’t gigging regularly, there was no one saying, ‘I paid for this! Where is it?’” Steed added. “It was fun. There was no deadline, no discussion, no rehearsal of what we were going to do. We’d go into the studio and just hit record, and we did that three times.”
Most of those sessions took place at The Arbor Studio, owned by fellow scenester John T. Baker, and over the course of seven years, the stacks of tracks that would become “Historic Knoxville High” continued to grow. The guys like to joke that by the time COVID-19 hit, they had a Beach Boys-sized collection of songs, outtakes, alternate versions and snippets that could just as easily never have materialized into an album proper.
“We were having so much fun, we just kept going and going, and the tracks kept getting higher, and it sort of became like your bedroom, where it gets so messy at a point to where you don’t want to clean it at all,” Steed said. “There was a part of me, and I mentioned this to my wife, that it might even be more cool if we never finished it, if we end up with about 40 hours of recorded music, and we handed it to Dave’s and Dug’s kids to finish.”
The whole world got more serious, however, thanks to COVID, and the Dopes were no different. Suddenly, the three men found themselves with more time on their hands. More than that, it felt on some subconscious level that the playful insouciance of the Smokin’ Dave ethos might be exactly what was needed to push back against the heaviness of a world locked down and isolated by a pandemic. And so they took to the internet to cull through the material, mix the winners and prepare a double album that was released on April 1. In so doing, they’ve created not only the first new Smokin’ Dave record in almost 30 years, but one that truly emphasizes the Knoxville in the title. Case in point: “Check Them Balances,” featuring the trumpet work of local jazzman Jason Thompson, and the slinky, dreamy, sexy grooves of “Kudzu,” which is elevated to a whole other level thanks to the contributions of husband-and-wife duo Kelle Jolly and Will Boyd.
“That particular song, I think, came from a bass riff Dave had floating around that he played on the piano, and we kept thinking, ‘Something is here, but it’s missing something huge,’” Steed said. “I tried to sing the lyrics I wrote, and they did not sound good. I did not like the lead singer, so we thought, ‘What would it be like to have a great singer? That would be a first!’
“And because this record is two albums, the general approach was, ‘If there’s anything anybody wants to try that we haven’t done before, or done before differently, let’s try it.’ When I hear Kelle come in on the song, that’s my most favorite moment of the record.”
Smokin’ Dave and the Premo Dopes always have worked best when happenstance and good fortune found a harmonious rhythm with intuition and musicality. It charmed Knoxville back in the band’s heyday, and it survived through the years to influence “Historic Knoxville High,” as well, Nichols said: Bringing in Thompson and Jolly and Boyd wasn’t pre-planned, but in building each song to its fullest potential, bringing them on board only made sense.
“The biggest difference for me was that because of the isolation of the pandemic, we could talk over some stuff for five minutes, be on our own for a couple of hours, and I could really get into some details and tweak things or stuff that normally I wouldn’t have been able to,” Nichols said. “If you’re in the studio, you don’t have the luxury to sit back and block everything out and give everything a close listen and come back with suggestions because, usually, the clock is ticking.”
“Kudzu” isn’t the only song in which Steed’s vocals take a backseat: A point of pride for all three men is “Orange Day,” which features Meech getting a star turn as both a lyricist and singer. It wasn’t created in a vacuum, the drummer pointed out; their ability to play to one another’s strengths coaxed it out of him.
“It was different for me because Todd sort of threw down a gauntlet,” Meech said. “He said, ‘Here’s a lyrics folder in our Dropbox; throw in a word or a phrase, if you want,’ so I did that one day. I came up with a couple of lines that rhymed about one of my favorite subjects, and over the course of the next few days, I added more.
“Eventually, it turned into a song after I heard the music in my head, so I sat down at the piano, figured out the melody and counter-melody and said, ‘Here you go,’ and gave it to Todd and Dave to do their parts. For me, that was definitely different.”
“The fact that Dug wrote a song and sang lead, and that he and Dave worked on the horns and stuff, for me is very exciting,” Steed added. “For me, one of the most exciting things is trying things we never tried before. One of the models for this record, I think, is ‘The White Album’ by the Beatles. It’s not their best, but it’s my favorite because the variety is so rich, and it’s such a deep experience. These are things I’ve wanted to do, and not just on a Dopes record, but when playing with Dave and Dug, it gives you a lot of possibilities and places you can go.”
That the Dopes picked right back up where they left off – pushing boundaries via humor, ability and the subliminal message of mindfulness – begs the question: Why the hell didn’t this band get any bigger?
Oh, they were certainly big enough. And while the three men likely wouldn’t have complained about fame and fortune finding them, that was never the goal. In fact, Steed added, that they got as big as they did never lost its luster.
“There’s a Loudon Wainwright song with a line in it that says something, ‘It still amazes me when we get paid,’ and we took the opposite view after a while: ‘I can’t believe we’re getting away with this!’” Steed said. “At the end of the night, someone is handing me $300 in cash? And there’s no paper trail?”
The Smokin’ Dave stories of moments too bizarre to be believed unless you were there are plentiful – opening for R.E.M. … playing with Hüsker Dü and the Replacements … a random fan in Charlotte, North Carolina, who loved it so much when the band came to town that he financed its 1990 record, “Too Many Years in the Circus” … the reviews in Creem … the overtures from record companies that eventually fizzled when the Dopes refused to shoehorn themselves into a commercially viable product.
“Quite frankly, my lead vocals are not the kind one could characterize as commercial,” Steed said with a chuckle. “I realized pretty soon, ‘Hey, I know what’s holding us back – it’s me!’ We were always a Forrest Gump kind of band, but we never had the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company or the Apple investment. We were never that lucky to have those things fall in our lap.”
“Not when you heard us back-to-back with R.E.M.,” Nichols added wryly.
“Or opening for the Aquarium Rescue Unit and realizing that if these guys can’t make it, what chance have we got?” Meech chimed in.
But that’s OK. There was never any bitterness for the fickle hand fate played them, and when they did decide to retire the Dopes, there was nary an acrimonious word said. Nichols ran off to join the circus (literally), Meech moved to Nashville and Steed went on to join bands like Opposable Thumbs and Apelife before putting together his longtime, revolving-membership outfit, the Suns of Phere. They got together in 2000 to play a bizarre acoustic show at the Pizza Kitchen in West Knoxville to celebrate the release of the compilation record “It’s All Our Vault,” as well as a Joy of Music School fundraiser at The Square Room in 2014, but “Historic Knoxville High” not only marks a return to the studio, but to the possibility of live shows as well, once COVID subsides to a nuisance.
“I think now we’re thinking about how we would pull these songs off live, because we all want to play them live,” Nichols said. “And I think the time will be around the corner when we can. I know I’m always thinking about the next time we get a chance to play, even if it’s 10 years from now.”
Because that’s the thing about Smokin’ Dave and the Premo Dopes: The band, and the music it makes, is timeless. “Historic Knoxville High” sounds like it could have been unearthed from a Smokin’ Dave time capsule buried in the 1980s, just as much as “Huh” sounds like it was recorded last week. The band has been, and always will be, of the moment.
And not just any moment – but one lived in right here in East Tennessee. And while that geosynchronous specificity to Knoxville may have contained the band’s beautifully bizarre genius mostly between the Smokies and the plateau, it’s a gift from the keepers of rock ‘n’ roll both old and new that they’re still around to give Knoxville new music.
“There was a lot of long hours with not much going on in the last year, so there was a lot of comfort in making it for us,” Steed said. “Having these songs to work on was a real gift. And in a way, it’s a handwritten letter, carefully written on paper. And all it says is, ‘Here’s where we’re at. This is what’s been going on with us, and we hope you’re doing OK. Here we go! Signed, the band that’s here if you need us.’”
wildsmith@blanknews.com
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