Kevin Crowe

As you recall from our last episode of The Spirit of Knoxville, the amateur balloon project was aiming to be the first to cross the Atlantic. And attempt number four almost made it, as Kevin Crowe relates.

Marshal Andy, a role that Andy Smalls has been playing for nearly three decades on stage and on local television, is a genuine singing cowboy, the likes of which haven’t existed in popular culture for the past 50 years.

Scanning the sheet music for “Modul 35,” one of pianist Nik Bärtsch’s compositions from 2006’s STOA, it appears to be a dizzying array of eighth- and sixteenth-notes, bridging across the page and rarely, if ever, letting up. It’s a tight, ...

Knoxville Inventors race against time and weather to send the spirit of Knoxville across the globe in a ballooning adventure.

How much Roller Derby can one town support? We'll soon find out. Joining the Hard Knox Roller Girls in contention for your Derby dollars is upstart league the Smoky Mountain Derby Rogues. Kevin Crowe reports from trackside.

Copyright Laws Die Hard. Last November the word “COPYSHOP” was painted—in big red letters—across the brickwork at 317 N. Gay St. It’s the latest, and perhaps most controversial, installment at the Art Gallery of Knoxville—Copyshop, in short, was designed to ...

A new business brings video-game combat to Gay Street's 100 block.

File under “It Sounded Like a Good Idea at the Time.” When banjo player and WDVX DJ Matt Morelock got an invitation to tour China in a pick-up hillbilly band, he quickly decided to take it. But his adventure abroad ...

Woefully brutal, Sadville’s first LP, Make Ready the Cross, hit like a sledgehammer back in January. After signing with Brooklyn’s Inkblot Records, they recorded seven sludge masterpieces, many of which had been polished at live shows and house parties over ...

It begins with a single note stretched out for nearly a minute; as a whole, it’s a slice of free-form cosmic lo-fi electronica, coupled with some of the loud hell-raising that we’ve come to expect from the boozy confines of ...

The most worldly of any record to come out of Knoxville, Jazz for Justice features South African reedman Zim Ngqawana, as well as locals Mitch Rutman, Carlos Fernandez, the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra, Rusty Holloway, Keith Brown, Vance Thompson, and Mark ...

Shawn Gallagher, a bespectacled Casio-whiz and fine wearer of vintage sweatshirts, came to Knoxville shortly after the release of Bad Animal’s 2005 debut The Hunted. According to the story, Gallagher left Tallahassee, Fla., to pursue his dream of wrestling at ...

It was a big year for University of Tennessee Professor Mike Lofaro, and maybe for the reputation of Knoxville native James Agee, too; Lofaro edited not one but two thick hardback books about Agee, both published by UT Press.

Metal die-hards can rest easy. Electric Wizard hasn’t released anything for three years, but the band is still making epic, brooding, behemoth songs. “Black Magic Rituals & Perversion,” for example, clocks in at 11 minutes

High above Gay Street, on the fifth floor of the Woodruff Building, Yee-Haw Industries and Jill Colquitt have organized an arts-and-crafts holiday blowout, featuring familiar local artists and some of their good buddies. If you were around in 2003, back ...

It starts with a low-frequency buzz moving at a glacial pace. You pray for release, but it never comes. The sound grows louder, lurching forward in sloppily syncopated waves. A few high-tech squeaks ripple across the vast soundscape. It’s all ...

Lines would form around the block every day at 12:10 in the afternoon. The anxious people came to hear country music, and over 50 years ago, the WNOX studio at 110 S. Gay Street was the vibrant center of Knoxville’s ...

It's all about hawking dreams and laying groundwork for nightmares each time the Yard Dogs Road Show, which is best described as an itinerant hobo circus, rolls into town.

There once was this crap band called Teenage Love. Sometime in 1985, staggering onto the stage at Vic and Bill's in the Fort, they were exultant, barely able to stand up straight, sneering at the crowd. “Here’s a goddamn romantic ...

“We were in Granada, in the south of Spain,” says Chris Lowe, frontman for the relatively new Woman, a band that has, in just a few short months, helped to rekindle a flame in the heart of the Knoxville underground. ...

The Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight plays a brand of skronk that’s one part Vandemark 5 and one part John Zorn, with subtle hints of doom and sludge metal thrown in for good measure. Elements of noise-rock and free ...

“Memphis was kick-ass,” says Julia Hungerford, the drummer for local sultans of misplaced surf rock, The Cheat. It was October, Friday the 13th. “Everyone was drunk and rowdy,” says muscleman/guitarist Fletcher Stewart, a guy who’s not shy about going shirtless ...

"Once I get up there and start playing, it's like crawling into the cockpit of a Tie Fighter," says Jon Worley, frontman of the shoeless, hillbilly-and-proud-of-it Cornbred Blues Band, an agglomeration of bluegrass, funk and a near-lethal dose of corn ...

"I've done a lot of bad things in this town," Christopher Scum responds after a brief pause, calmly smoking a cigarette. Scum (aka Chris Andrews) has been raising hell in this town for more than a decade. He got his ...