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Article published Dec 7, 2007 Farris returns to city where his life turned around (the first time)
By Steve Wildsmith of The Daily Times Staff
Mike Farris is probably more familiar with Knoxville than most folks who drive the city’s streets and wake up in the shadow of the Sunsphere.
Farris, you see, has been down and out here. Not just in a barely-scraping-by, eating-Spam, working-for-minimum-wage kind of way — we’re talking way down and way out.
“I lived in Knoxville for about four years, in Fort Sanders, and I broke up with my girlfriend and then I overdosed,” Farris told The Daily Times this week. “I ended up in the hospital over at UT, and they kicked me out, and I ended up living in Tyson Park. That’s where my journey began.
“I realized that everything I’d done had fallen apart on me, and I just decided to give it to God so he could show me what my path would be. Everybody had their lives figured out, but I didn’t; so from that point, in that park, I got up off my ass, went back home and rehabilitated for the first time.
“Within a year, we had the Screamin’ Cheetah Wheelies formed, and we signed to Atlantic Records,” Farris added with a chuckle. “I went from Tyson Park to (Atlantic Records founder) Ahmet Ertegun’s office. What a trip.”
Such is the roller-coaster ride of Farris’ life and career. That was in 1993; over the course of the next five years, the Screamin’ Cheetah Wheelies would release a handful of albums, including their self-titled debut which included the modest hit “Shakin’ the Blues.” To this day, the Nashville-based five-piece is still considered a boogie-rock bridge between classic rock of the 1980s and jam-rock of the 1990s, and the band’s music has found its way onto various soundtracks over the past several years.
The group toured with such acts as Sheryl Crow, the Dave Matthews Band, ZZ Top and the Allman Brothers Band, but Farris struggled with drugs and alcohol throughout the band’s tenure. Even as he fronted Double Trouble, the rhythm section of late guitar legend Stevie Ray Vaughan’s band, he struggled to find himself, and in 2004, at the graveside service for a deceased family member, he made a decision to turn his will and his life over to God.
He had always been a faithful man. Raised in church, he had turned, off and on, to God over the years, and had found grace from his struggles. This time, Farris was ready for something more — redemption. As the fog lifted, he turned his attention to the music he had been writing over the years. Filled with the majesty of old-school soul and R&B, the songs had a gospel sound to them that Farris remembers well from his childhood.
“I actually had a concept for this album going in, for about five years, but the problem was that I was too out of it to ever realize it before,” he said. “When I got sober, my manager gave me the money and said, ‘Look; this is what you’ve always wanted to do. This is your dream. Here’s the money; don’t worry about a thing, and do what you do.’
“She allowed me the complete freedom to do that. I walked in with only a couple of templates for the sound that I wanted — mainly, sort of a Preservation Hall Jazz Band meets Ry Cooder’s Buena Vista Social Club. I wanted to make the studio like Ry did — to turn the room into an instrument itself, because to me, it just makes me feel like I’m there, like it pulls you right into the experience.”
The end result is “Salvation in Lights,” a holy-rolling, piano-pounding, booming-voice of an album that’s pure Holy Ghost-fueled energy. It’s a praise-and-worship album, a mix of Farris’ original compositions and old standards, and it’s incendiary in its passion. With a voice that sounds elated and triumphant, Farris sings his heart out and never lets the listener doubt for a minute to whom he’s giving all of the credit.
“To be a party of such an amazing sound, after all these years of struggling, just made me so happy I would tear up,” Farris said. “It almost makes you feel like a steward of this music. And once we got into working on the album, we started looking around for other things to compare it to, to see if we were on the right track, but there was nothing else around.
“We realized we were combining a lot of elements that nobody’s ever done, and that was a shock to us. Different people have done different things with gospel and horns and that New Orleans sound, but nobody’s gone back and revisited all of these old songs and brought them back to life. It’s almost like we stumbled across this buried treasure in America’s collective attics.”
Although Farris — who performs Thursday at the Time Warp Tea Room in Knoxville — will be performing songs off of “Salvation in Lights” in a solo format next week, the bottom line is that the meaning — the intent — still comes across as powerful as ever.
“They break down differently, and I perform them differently — for instance, ‘I’m Gonna Get There’ turns out to be a more introspective, talk-with-yourself experience when I play it live,” he said. “It’s almost a reflective song, a song that’s thinking about the journey and how it’s been going. It’s an inner monologue of sorts.”
Longtime Cheetah Wheelies fans may scratch their heads, not knowing what to make of the man who seems born anew in the spirit of religious fervor, but that’s OK with Farris. He’s not up there to save your soul; he’s up there telling you how he saved his own.
“I’ve had people go, ‘I liked him better when he was high and singing,’ because some people want you to be in that constant state of flux,” he said. “It’s fascinating for people to rubberneck while you’re on stage; it’s like driving by a wreck. But this music didn’t really catch everybody completely off guard. From the outset, the songs I wrote with the Cheetah Wheelies were very spiritually based.
“I do run across some people who just aren’t going to have anything to do with it. Whether they went to Catholic school as a kid or whatever, they’ve got some kind of hang-up with Christianity. But for me, there are a lot of different ways you can break down the album. It’s the music I love more than anything — my favorite music to play and listen to — and it also coincides with what I happen to believe in.
“I’m lucky that people actually like that music, and I think they like it because this music is found in the very origins of all popular music that we know of now,” he added. “Whether you’re listening to Nickelback or 50 Cent, it’s all based on this gospel stuff, and I think that’s a healing salve from God Almighty to all people.”