Mike Gibson

The world’s wastebaskets are filled with tattered bar-naps scribbled over with big ideas that never got off the ground—product concepts, book titles, and fragments of movie scripts. But when Knoxville’s Jonathan Sexton ran into former Whiskey Scars bandmate Matt Urmy ...

One of the Knoxville’s favorite performers is coming back home, at least once a month, to front a monthly concert and interview series with everyone’s favorite local columnist.

What to do with the smoky remains of the McClung warehouses on Jackson Avenue downtown is an issue that won’t go away—mainly because little progress has been made since the historic buildings went up in flames in 2007. Recently, the ...

Since its founding in 1991, the Hindu Community Center, which also houses a Hindu temple, has served many functions to the community of local Indian expatriates who frequent it. It is a social gathering place for people with shared culture, ...

Protest the Hero has the earmarks of a first-rate prog-metal outfit, to be sure. But beyond the obvious technical brilliance—and occasional profligacy—of the band’s music, there’s an impassioned quality to Protest’s performance

The handwriting is on the wall, or so it would seem for Knoxville’s Lakeshore Mental Health Institute—even though the state’s plan to shut down the 125-year-old facility still has to pass muster with Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam and the General ...

When Tennessee’s new voter ID laws take effect on Jan. 1, their ostensible purpose will be to cut down on voter fraud. But critics say the only fraud lies in the notion that the new law is actually intended to ...

There’s a rumble in the distance: a knuckle-popping cadence from a 10-man drum corps that sticks together like triple-sided tape, syrup on glue. And here they come, marching ’round the gate leading into the stadium: the Mighty Marching Roadrunners of ...

Stewart wasn’t a big guy—maybe 5-foot 6-inches, and 150 pounds. But you couldn’t have scalloped an ounce of fat off his hardest figure, and he carried a knife with a blade the size of small boat oar, which he could ...

After 20 years of working with Knoxville’s urban youth, Tribe One is in danger of ceasing operations. Executive Director Stephanie Davis says if a capital fund-raising campaign does not raise $50,000 by Oct. 1, the organization will have to close ...

Knoxville jazz history is still in the making, in more ways than one, as producers of A Place for Me: Living Jazz in a Small Southern City head down the homestretch still looking to secure crucial funds to put the ...

There are certain things that don’t really add up about University of Tennessee football Strength and Conditioning Coach Ron McKeefery. With his blunt snub-nose features and burnt sienna hair, he looks a lot like that kid who used to beat ...

After a temporary reprieve last spring, Knox County School custodians and their allies are girding themselves to fight the outsourcing of their jobs to a local firm come next year.

Give Kevin Abernathy one thing: the boy sure can play. He’s like some East Tennessee trailer park Eddie Van Halen, or maybe a backwater Steve Vai, with a couple of stiff fingers.

Brown, the son of esteemed pianist/composer Donald Brown, has inherited his father’s gift for lacing straightforward melodies with bracing spikes of often revelatory harmonic invention.

Scarcely a year after his third release as a solo artist, 2010’s Spies Lies and Burning Eyes, the notoriously deliberate singer/songwriter/poet R.B. Morris is already on the cusp of releasing his fourth, Rich Mountain Bound, a no-frills, 12-song collection featuring ...

The Old City has had its ups and downs over the years, but recently it’s been on a revitalization roll with new businesses and development that’s been drawing crowds, as Mike Gibson finds.

Tongues wagged and message boards... er, messaged about Quentin Tarantino, writer/director of cosmic import, and his alleged presence in Knoxville this week; purported sightings abounded. But we have the scoop, from a member of the local service industry (no, not ...

After five years locked up, Scott West has a lot to say—about prison, downtown Knoxville, and people who wish he was a little more repentant

Given the Knoxville Knights' recent record of success—they were 8-2 in 2010, following the two championship seasons—and the fact that they barely register so much as a blip on the radar of most local sports fans and media outlets, they ...

There was a joyous, feral quality to the Dirty Guv’nahs earliest recordings and live shows, owing in no small part to then-neophyte lead singer James Trimble’s unrestrained stage romps and his glorious infatuation with the incendiary power of his newly ...

Many may remember Kevin Niceley as the colorful proprietor of the Mercury Theater, a popular alt/punk/rock club that operated on Market Square—in the space now occupied by Preservation Pub—from 1992 until 1998.

With the opening of the Speakeasy—the new upstairs lounge at the Preservation Pub—Pub entertainment coordinator Bernadette West hopes to change the way people see live music in downtown Knoxville.

Local jazz and R&B keyboardist Keith Brown—perhaps most widely recognized as the man behind the keys in popular local funk/rock/soul ensemble Aftah Party—will see the release of the first recording under his own name, 'Sweet and Lovely.'

Bill Scarlett’s nurturing influence—as a man, a musician, and a teacher—touched nearly everyone who played or listened to jazz in Knoxville.

Aqua-Chem has two other locations, under different names, in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., and Houston, but its Knoxville location is its corporate headquarters. According to plant manager Tracy Gamble, most of its business is for military use of one kind or ...

Long before Elvis’ hips or Jagger’s lips, long before the Killer was luring little girls into sin from the pulpit of his piano, certain musicians have been suspected of colluding with the devil himself. Small wonder, then, that so many ...

Think of San Francisco’s NOFX as a tween of American punk rock. Having just missed the cut-off that would put the band in good standing as members of the first wave of ’80s punk and hardcore, the group nonetheless is ...

The Knox County school board filled in many of the details concerning a proposed math and science magnet school set to occupy the venerable L&N Station downtown at its Jan. 12 meeting. Yet somehow the big picture didn’t get much ...

Regulars of Market Square’s Preservation Pub have doubtless already explored the plush new upstairs digs, under construction during the fall and finally open to the public on Dec. 13. The new upper room appears to have been worth the wait.

A video chatting site hopes to connect you with interesting people you don't know. But can a Knoxville duo really compete in the realm dominated by Facebook?

n fall 2011, West High’s nearly two-decade quest for International Baccalaureate membership will come full circle when it officially becomes an IB program school.

Change is afoot for the Foundation for Global Sustainability, which has arguably been the staunchest proponent of environmental awareness in the region. And where it initially seemed that FGS might close its doors after 22 years of activism in the ...

Mike Gibson partakes an evening of artful dance at a recital of the Austin-East Dance Company in East Knoxville.

Former Pentagram guitarist-cum-Knoxvillian Victor Griffin returns with an arena-sized version of his latter-day power trio Place of Skulls, the first with founding lineup of drummer Tim Tomaselli and bassist Lee Abney in place since 2001’s Nailed.

If you look past librarian Nelda Hill's conviviality, you’ll catch the full measure of the discerning intelligence that is currently ushering the library’s non-print department through the rapid technological changes of the 21st century.

The men of Knoxville’s Gun*Slinger don’t want to be seen as some sort of chic retro act, nor as worshipful revivalists; they just want to be taken for what they are, mostly—a band of misfit mid-twentysomethings articulating their unspoken rage ...

More than any other genre, blues is the music of experience—usually of the hardscrabble variety. Take singer-guitarist Labron Lazenby, of local blues quartet Labron Lazenby and the LA 3. Though he’s still under 40, he’s looking back at 22 years ...

Man for man, Orange County’s Avenged Sevenfold is arguably the most talented band in metal today, and surely no other working outfit has each member play such an integral role in its sound.

Youth showcases a young band wholly at ease melding their particular stew of classic- and roots-rock influences in a way that’s familiar, yet still their own. It’s roots rock with a searing raw edge, blues rock with heartland soul.

That Knoxville’s Downslave is somewhat derivative of a certain now-defunct groove-metal outfit with a deceased guitar player (rhymes with: Mantera) shouldn’t deter anyone who appreciates real metal from picking up this local release.

The Deftones have always stood apart from other metal groups, particularly acts that came up alongside them through the 1990s. Whereas most metal acts have two modes—on and off, like a switch—the Deftones present a whole volume knob’s worth of ...

Ordinarily, people tend to call active gentlemen of Rocky Wynder’s vintage “spry,” but he’s much more than that. At times, the 82-year-old saxophone player is positively electric; his long, lanky frame perambulates across the floor in a series of quick, ...

From his early days playing R&B on the chitlin circuit to his stint as a sideman for the late, great drummer and bandleader Art Blakey, to his solo work and his time as a jazz professor at the University of ...

With the western facade of the University of Tennessee’s Henley Street conference center in a state of hazardous disrepair, UT officials hope to replace hundreds of the ’50s-era structure’s trademark blue glazed tiles with something “very similar.... to help maintain ...

To hear city officials and Knoxville Area Transit spokespeople tell it, Knoxville’s soon-to-be-unveiled transit center is more than just a new building where folks can wait for a bus; it’s also a civic standard-bearer for environmental excellence and a potential ...

Finally, after eight years, Downslave has released its first full-length CD, Cost of Freedom, a 10-song blast of tight, focused, and blisteringly accomplished “groovy Southern metal.” The disc was produced by GWAR guitarist Flattus Maximus, aka Cory Smoot, whom Downslave ...

At the unlikely hour of 8:30 on a Monday morning, the Tribe One building on Magnolia Avenue is quaking to its sturdy foundations, shaken by wave after wave of human voices in the gleeful throes of full-throttle expression, rocked by ...

From the opening moments of “Nearness of You,” it’s clear that Allyson is a singer and performer blessed with rare gifts.

While the band has the requisite familiarity with the Black Sabbath catalog, the Sabbath moves are well-tempered by other frames of reference—early Sub Pop, propulsive mid-’90s desert rock, other ’70s outfits.