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Article published Jan 26, 2007 'Guerrilla troubadours' make leap from Maryville College to Deek Hoi bandmates
By Steve Wildsmith of The Daily Times Staff
They called themselves guerrilla troubadours — three upstart Maryville College students with a talent for making music and a penchant for mischief.
If you frequented Knoxville nightspots a couple of years ago, you might have witnessed them in action. And if you happened to be a certain guy who got arrested one night in Knoxville's Old City, you may have been the recipient of your own personal, albeit brief, concert.
"We used to call ourselves The Pilot Light's House Band, because we would do these two- to five-minute sets," said Deek Hoi founder/front guy Daniel Coy. "We called ourselves Swayze, and we also used to run into bars, jump on stage, play a song really fast and then run out, all without the bar knowing we were coming."
In addition to performing regularly at the aforementioned Pilot Light, the Old City's indie rock club, Swayze also leaped on stage at Barley's Taproom and even commandeered the crowd at Fiction, the dance club catering to the fraternity/sorority set intent on dancing to music that most definitely doesn't sound like something Swayze — which evolved into Deek Hoi — would play.
"Girls seemed to like it a lot more than boys did," Coy said. "One night, there was a guy down in the Old City who was getting arrested for public intoxication or something like that, and we ran up and said, 'We have a song for you.' And we started playing the same song we always did, 'Ode to Joy.' We called it 'The Song What Made Us Famous.'
"At first he was facing us, and when we started playing, he turned his back to us. The cop started screaming and threatened to arrest us, so we ran. We didn't mean for it to be mean-spirited. We weren't picking on anybody; we were just feeling the moment."
Eventually, Swayze took a more serious turn. Coy and his fellow Kentucky native, Jen Rock, had moved down to attend Maryville College, where they met Jennifer Bradley. A musician who's played in several bands, Coy struck up a musical collaboration with Rock quite by accident.
"We lived together a couple of years back, and then I moved away and came back and was living within a block of her," Coy said. "She had really started picking up the guitar and had learned this old folk song called 'Barbara Allen.' She had never played it for anyone before, but we were close friends, so she played it for me ... and it was just amazing. It was just beautiful, and I thought that we definitely had to get something going, because she was too good not to."
At Maryville College, they met Bradley, who volunteered to play drums — even though she didn't know how. In the collective spirit that inspires Deek Hoi, Coy encouraged her.
"She has really good taste in music, and that's a good place to go for something, even if experience isn't there," he said. "Sometimes, good taste is better than anything else."
That led to a meeting with Josh Sidman, the band's upright bass player. Sidman had recently moved to East Tennessee from San Francisco, where he had played bluegrass and folk music, adding a rootsy, earthy element to the quirky folk rock that Coy and his bandmates were beginning to play.
The band's most recent album, "The Golden Country," was released this week, and the band will celebrate with a CD release show tonight at The Pilot Light. It's a record that requires repeated listenings, mostly because it sounds like the audio equivalent of a fever dream — slow, swirling melodies that emerge from a shimmering soup of synthesizer, guitar and gentle vocals. It can be disconcerting, especially for those who want their music clearly defined and grounded — but that's also the beauty of Deek Hoi: everything is vague and abstract, from the low-fidelity production of "The Golden Country" to the willingess of band members to experiment outside traditional song structures and arrangements.
"It's a super low-fi album that we recorded on cassette tape in the spare bedroom, sometimes on our hands and knees crowded around a microphone," Coy said. "Some people may not like it, but that kind of spirit, if you have something that's good or honest, is what makes people forgive some of the other things about it. And maybe the recording quality isn't what it could be, but then again, that becomes a whole other sound and instrument on its own.
"I'm a huge Beck fan and have been from the beginning, especially his early track, low-fi stuff. The idea that you can play an acoustic guitar with screaming feedback at the same time. There's just something about recording like that, that appeals to me. I'm a huge fan of the pioneers of that sound, and I think that contributes to kind of a community feel. When you get a bunch of people together that like each other and like what they do, they're only going to compliment each other and add to the spirit of the project."