Mr. Narrator
The banging on the door of my apartment on the campus of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga was long and insistent. When I answered, I found myself looking at a man who appeared to be a mash up of a California surfer, a Mad Max extra, and a Raymond Pettibone illustration. Impossibly handsome; angularly threatening; and menacingly cool beyond description. Thus, Chuck Jennings entered my life. And thus, my life changed forever.
Chuck, who was the frontman of a new band called “Hank” had been deputized by the members of several local punk bands to find me and enlist my help in promoting the fortunes of a small group of deeply underground bands. They had read my record reviews in the campus newspaper The Echo and liked my take on the post punk and early college alternative bands that I covered. Chuck and I clicked immediately and within a few weeks we were working together on a music newsletter that we were sure would change Chattanooga.
And man, talk about a place that needed some change. In early 1985, the city was collapsing in on itself. Jobs at the heavy manufacturing factories across town were disappearing as business after business closed their U. S. factories. The air smelled; the streets were empty; the water was poison; unemployment ran rampant; and a funk of desperate despondency weighed heavily on a city just about to be read its last rites.
Though we failed to produce more than a couple of issues of Shades of Gray and had nearly zero effect on changing Chattanooga, the friendship grew. “Hank” needed a manager and for a short while, I filled the bill. And for a while, we all pretended to be the Velvet Underground, or Iggy, or Joy Division. It was fun. And we did it on our own terms. It was heady stuff for a former “good Baptist boy” – transgressive, rebellious, liberating.
Hank ca. 1985
Of course, it wasn’t long before I started thinking about playing. I bought a bass, an old Ampeg 810 cabinet, and a 500watt Traynor amplifier head. I wasn’t very good but that was kind of the point – anyone can do it. Just keep playing and if there is anything interesting in you, it will eventually come out through the amp. And so, I did. I got better and within a short while, I had hatched a plan with my best friend from high school, who was a damn fine drummer, to move to Athens, GA and start a band (I also half-heartedly enrolled in classes at UGA). It was the summer of 1987.
I’ll avoid going down the rabbit hole of the Athens music scene of that magical time. Read Elizabeth Hale’s Cool Town. She was there and tells the story far better than I can. Suffice it to say, we practiced a lot. Got good fast and soon had a following in Athens and Atlanta. Long Low Rumble didn’t last long, but while it did it was a gloriously creative time.
Long Low Rumble at the 40 Watt Club, May 1988.
But all the creativity came with a cost and on a hot summer afternoon in 1990, I got the word that I was no longer a student at the University of Georgia. I had been a poor student, I changed majors like I changed my socks – Journalism, English, Political Science, Art History, History – and to be frank, I really didn’t want to be in school. So, I worked. Ran a kitchen in a Cajun-creole restaurant. And tried to figure out what came next.
History, and the Civil War had faded well into the background during my musical journey. And when I came back to it, I was a very different person. The politics of the artists and musicians I was around challenged the Reagan Republican worldview in which I had grown up and the insistent do-it-yourself ethos instilled an “if you can think it, you can do it” attitude that opened my eyes to new opportunities. My social vision opened wider, too – anti-racist thinking and pro-LGBTQ+ inclusiveness were assumed values among the creative community – and I came to embrace both.
Even so, I had not entirely shed the influences of my past, but I had a new perspective on the world and a different take on the Civil War. I looked at how to “do” history in a new way and understood what questions could be asked of the past differently. And when I got the opportunity to plunge back into research – this time for a museum project, I brought a different perspective. The documents I scoured – the official reports of the Confederate Arsenal at Atlanta, Georgia – suddenly yielded new protagonists. Women workers, railroad mechanics, and enslaved laborers sprang to the front. They had been there all along. But now, I saw them and their interests as central to the story I wanted to tell. Punk rock had changed my life. And I liked it.