ROCK-POP EXPLOSION CROWDING COUNTRY FOR POPULARITY IN GRAND OL' NASHVILLE

By Jack Hurst, Country music writer.
Chicago Tribune
June 22, 1986 Sunday

Copyright 1986 Chicago Tribune Company

The country music capital of the world is becoming a launching ground for young pop-rock acts.

A half-dozen have been signed to New York and Los Angeles recording
contracts from Nashville in the past year, and that's drawing more rockers to
a city most of them would have dismissed just a few years ago. Increased local attention to their "alternative" Nashville music has brought to light a startling fact: the presence of 300 or more rock and/or pop bands now based in the city.

"This town is about to bust wide open," says Ken Mansfield, a new Nashville resident who has headed American record company offices for the Beatles and Andy Williams. In the 1970s, he played a leading production role in the so-called "outlaw" revolution that catapulted such artists as Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Hank Williams Jr. into prominence. "It's going to make the outlaw thing look like nursery school," he says, "because this time it's not necessarily going to be even country- rooted."

Diverse musical energy in Nashville--a scene that includes strong gospel, rock-and-roll, and rhythm & blues roots--seems to have produced the right climate for pop-rock bands and/or soloists. Acts with such as the Sluggers, the Georgia Satellites, Walk the West, Tom Kimmel, In Pursuit, the Metros and the Voltage Brothers have signed recording contracts with companies that are either classified as "majors" or distributed by majors.

A consciousness-raising spark for both Nashville and the world went off last January, when an ambitious organization called the Nashville Entertainment Association staged a so-called Music Extravaganza featuring performances by 11 young pop-rock bands. The shows drew an audience of more than 1,000 that included 29 record company talent-hunters from New York, Los Angeles and Nashville.

"The city of Nashville--as opposed to its record industry--is much more of a heavy-metal and strong rock-and-roll town than it is a country one," says Jane Cleveland, a young NEA worker who like several others gained her first music-business experience booking concerts on the Nashville campus of Vanderbilt University.

Teena Camp, a T-shirt manufacturer who has been with NEA since its 1980
inception, agrees with Cleveland's assessment. "Yet the rock-and-roll community hasn't always been accepted by the industry professionals here," she says. "The Music Extravaganza brought a lot of people from the rock-and-roll community together with the Nashville industry people for the first time."

But the thing that changed everything, everyone agrees, was the advent of a band called Jason & the Scorchers a few years ago. Now working on their third album for EMI/America, they achieved worldwide critical acclaim while galvanizing this young, Nashville community in what was part rebellion against Nashville's country image and part tribute to it.

"Even though their music has come out sounding quite different, two of Jason & the Scorchers' primary influences were (country giants) Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers--and their other one was Bob Dylan," remarks Steve West, who came up with the idea of staging the Extravaganza and whose employer, an aggressive regional chain of record stores called Cat's, has played a large role in developing and promoting the Nashville pop-rock scene.

The Scorchers were formed on the Vanderbilt University campus by undergraduates Jason Ringenberg, son of a central Illinois hog farmer, and Jack Emerson, whose father is a Tennessee-born Florida attorney. The intellectuality behind their fiery music is indicated by whom Ringenberg cites as his literary influences: Faulkner, Hawthorne and Flannery O'Connor.

Emerson, an English Literature major, dropped out of the band after six months as the aggregation became full-time and began doing out-of-town shows. Nevertheless, he became almost as important to the expanding Nashville image as Ringenberg. The Scorchers were finding no label interested in signing them when, in a bar one night, Emerson had a long conversation with the manager of British pop-rock singer Elvis Costello, who was in Nashville to record. The manager had helped found a British record company called Stiff in 1977.

"Basically," recalls the 26-year-old Emerson, "he told me: 'Get up off your butt and do it.' I thought, 'How hard can it be?' Because although the main record distribution centers are New York and Los Angeles, a lot of the manufacturing goes on right here." With about $15,000, much of which came from his father, Emerson founded Praxis ("Greek for 'to do' ") Records, a five-person operation that has expanded into management and song-publishing. It represents not only Ringenberg's aggregation but also the Sluggers, the Georgia Satellites and a still-developing group called the Questionnaires--and it is besieged with requests to manage others.

Praxis got the Scorchers signed to EMI more than two years ago. Arista then signed the Sluggers a year ago, and the Georgia Satellites recently made a deal with Elektra-Asylum. The Questionnaires could already have a contract, too, Emerson says, but Praxis' management believes its acts should have songs enough for two albums before they sign on dotted lines. Emerson is quick to note that Praxis' success has owed much to Jim Zumwalt, an Illinois-born attorney who moved to Nashville from Memphis last October.

A Peoria native and graduate of Eastern Illinois University, Zumwalt got his law degree at Memphis State University and first represented rhythm and blues acts in Memphis. Then he started expanding to Nashville, where his office now has three people, as opposed to one in Memphis. In addition to the Praxis acts, Zumwalt represents Walk the West, a young band he discovered and signed to Capitol Records, and Tom Kimmel, a young Nashville songwriter he has recently signed to PolyGram Records. "The business is just exploding here," Zumwalt says.

One of the most prominent among the growing community of Nashville entertainment lawyers is Mike Milom, a former small-time rock drummer who presently represents such big-time Nashville names as Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty, Brenda Lee, Ricky Skaggs, Hank Williams Jr. and Alabama. Milom sees a line of revolutionary evolution from the "outlaw" activities of Jennings and Nelson, with whom Ken Mansfield worked in the '70s, through Alabama to Jason & the Scorchers. "In fact, the success of Alabama was almost as important a factor as Jason's, because Alabama's arrival opened the door for (self-contained) bands," Milom says.

He adds that younger musicians who have come into Nashville since Alabama achieved stardom in 1980 have tended to be more rock-influenced. Supporting themselves by writing "contemporary country" songs for some of Nashville's big names, they have meanwhile created an environment much more congenial to young pop-rock bands, he says.

The fertility of the scene was underscored by the Extravaganza. Steve West got the idea for it in 1985 when, as the man who sets up promotional concerts by young pop and rock bands in the parking lots of Cat's Records shops, he happened to talk to an MCA Records talent-hunter visiting Nashville to scout a Texas band. "I asked him why A & R people didn't come to Nashville more often, and he said there weren't enough bands playing here within a given period of time," West recalls. "So we put together 10 of the best we had."

To headline they used In Pursuit, which had moved to Nashville from Cleveland and gotten signed by MTM Records, the still-new Nashville company in which movie and TV actress Mary Tyler Moore has an interest. Formed as a multimusic operation instead of merely a country one, MTM, which is distributed by Capitol, has not only camped in the country charts with hits by both Judy Rodman and the Girls Next Door, it has hit the black charts with the New Jersey-based Voltage Brothers and now is working to break an upper Midwest rock group called The Metros.

West notes that there are two other Praxis-level independent record companies now operating in Nashville, Dread Beat and Neo--and that he so strongly believes in Nashville's pop revolution that he has just left Cat's to begin managing and booking bands and promoting and producing concerts with Neo. He adds that the country music establishment, which in recent recessionary times has begun to try to lower the age range of its listeners, contributed a lot of the money it took to stage the Extravaganza.

A spirit of mostly friendly revolution is what first changed Nashville's image from that of a blue-blood banking, printing and insurance center to that of a country music town, and the process has been going on ever since. Jack Emerson, who finds most current country music boringly "bland," says the city's spirit, and its different pace, make it not only a great place for young bands to develop but also for them to stay.

"Nashville's the kind of place where you'd want to bring up a family," he says. "I know that doesn't sound very rebellious, but when you're 27, have progressed to the place where you have some stability in your career and are getting married and planning on having kids, you want to be able to provide security for your family and the people you work with. You can do that here. I get a real buzz out of New York for a couple of days, and I can live in Los Angeles for a week. But then I want to go back to Nashville, where I can look out my window at a tree."

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