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Article published Nov 9, 2007 Kevin Abernathy brings out the brawlers to Manhattan's
By Steve Wildsmith of The Daily Times Staff
Like most of local singer-songwriter Kevin Abernathy’s musical tales, “Brawl on Scottish Pike” — the lead-off track to his new album, “Rock-n-Roll Fiasco” — is rooted in reality.
A reality that was almost a little too close for comfort one night, when Abernathy — moonlighting as a pizza delivery guy — almost found himself in the middle of said brawl.
“The whole record started with that song, and it all came from just observing all walks of life in South Knoxville, where I live,” Abernathy told The Daily Times this week. “There’s all types here — from the impoverished to the upper middle class, but I tend to write about the former, because I find them more interesting and more fun to write about. I just see what I see, and I wrote a record about it.
“For ‘Brawl on Scottish Pike,’ I was doing a stint delivering pizzas, and it actually happened. There were two guys in the road with their shirts off, ready to throw down, and I drove right up on it. It was a scary situation, so I just took a left up Cherokee Trail and got out of there. I’m not saying everything in South Knoxville is like that, but I had kind of a theme going after that song.”
A native of Madisonville, Abernathy moved out West after graduating high school in 1982, inspired by the atypical rock ‘n’ roll dream. When an older cousin, visiting from Florida, played a young Abernathy Peter Frampton’s “Frampton Comes Alive,” rock ‘n’ roll sank in its claws and never let go. When he received a video game for Christmas instead of the guitar he originally asked for, he traded it for a six-string and his first amp. Locking himself in his bedroom after school every day, he taught himself Van Halen and Jeff Beck solos and fell asleep cradling his guitar.
After landing in California’s Bay Area, he hooked up with the pop-rock outfit One and did the “starving artist” scene for a while — couch-surfing, sleeping in cars and never really putting down roots; as long as he had his guitar, however, he was content. After moving back to the Volunteer State, he did a stint in the East Tennessee hair metal outfit Shag Nasty before winding up in the Shapeshifters, a Nashville band that would land opening spots for Southern Culture on the Skids, Billy Joe Shaver, Webb Wilder and Junior Brown.
With those experiences to draw upon, he recorded the folk-heavy “Better Days,” released earlier this year. It’s a patchwork of rock ‘n’ roll chords and lyrically engaging story-songs; it’s the measure of a man who’s put his feet up after a long trip and spins a few stories for his pals.
By contrast, “Rock-n-Roll Fiasco” sounds like a man who’s put down some roots, who’s given up his hunger for the road — for now — and started poking his head down overgrown side streets, casting an eye across the landscape he now calls home and reeling in a few good yarns right out of his own backyard.
It’s a meaty stew of blues-based rock. You can call it Southern rock — Abernathy does — but it’s a record he’s proud of. With bandmates Jeff Simms on bass and Jeff Warren on drums, the Kevin Abernathy Band has upped the ante for local releases this year, adding another CD to a pile of great local music by different artists. It isn’t fancy — there’s no flashy studio trickery here (“Jeff turned the knobs, and he didn’t have a lot of good equipment to work with — three good mics and five or six crappy ones,” Abernathy said), no instrumental fireworks display. Just solid rock ‘n’ roll, which ain’t such a bad thing.
“There’s a lot more guitar and crunch in there, which is what I like,” Abernathy said. “I have an unflagging love affair with guitar played through a tube-driven amp with lots of distortion, but I like good lyrics and stories. Being from the South, those two things translate into Southern rock — and it is; I’m not afraid to call it that.”
In retrospect, perhaps another moniker is more apropos — South Knoxville rock. Local legend Todd Steed would be proud, and Abernathy probably wouldn’t mind so much, either.
“I really enjoy living in South Knoxville, and I don’t want to stereotype it or anything,” he said. “Compared to anywhere else, it’s just regular people, doing what they do. I got a few good songs out of it; songs that would just come out of nowhere, and I’d have to ride the wave until it’s done. I don’t want to dis South Knoxville at all; that might be dangerous.”
He chuckles, but he’s not altogether joking. If anything, he learned a lot in writing “Rock-n-Roll Fiasco” about the sort of people he calls neighbors.
“There are a lot of unsavory types of people in the songs, dangerous characters who don’t mind hurting you if they have to,” he said. “I tried to keep their situations harmless except for maybe one or two, but that’s just the kind of record it was going toward, so I went with it. I had a couple of other ideas, and I threw those in there, but I left some out that didn’t really fit with the record.
“It turned out to be a pretty good record, I think. I’ve heard a few people mention that it’s kind of redneck rock, or white trash rock — it is what it is, but it doesn’t define my whole catalogue of songs. Besides, I think the next record’s going to be mostly about girls.”