Our First Band Interviews in Nov. 1993

The first three band interviews were Big City, Dirtball, and The Trouble with Larry. Dirtball had a professional looking, 8x10 black and white photo. Big City had a snapshot. The Larry guys, who lived in a sprawling Fan apartment with cats, had a professional looking CD.

Big City was Billy Ray Hatley, Velpo Robertson, Audie Stanley, Mark Szafranski, Mike Edwards and soundman Karl Erickkson.

Hatley is with Billy Ray Hatley and the Showdogs now. Szafranski still owns Metro Sound Company, and it’s still downtown. He moved from a small store on the northside of Broad across the street to a bigger space. He was consistently the most annoying full page advertiser I had to deal with because he always had to be persuaded, and was very particular about the ad. The deal was never done; it was a constant negotiation.

Big City, which was formed in 1987, was the house band at the Bus Stop in Shockoe Slip for almost three years. They recorded a CD, “Big City Live: Kissed by the Gods” at the Flood Zone, when the club had a recording studio upstairs. Their goal was to be on “Saturday Night Live.” It didn’t happen.

“If you want to work in this town, you have to do covers. We do whatever it takes because we’re old guys,” said Hatley.

Dirtball was Wes Freed, Neal Furgurson, Jim Garthoff, Peter Headley, Kirk Henderson, Jeff Liverman, John Mosher, Mike Rodriguez, Paul Watson and soundman Curt Blankenship.

You can see Freed now on TV commercials for a car junkyard. Headley still lives in the same house on Cary Street, now surrounded by pricey renovations. I went to a party at that house once when there were no interior walls, except for around his bedroom. He nailed the door of his bedroom shut to keep partygoers out. The bathroom was lined with blankets, but you could see down inside it from the staircase. You could see the lower floor from holes in the upper floor. Outside in the backyard was the car that had brought Headley to town. It was one big planter. I hear the house is superdeluxe now, although you can't really tell from the outside.

Dirtball was a relatively new band playing “hillbilly soul.” Their biggest problem, they said, was “Peter’s toilet doesn’t flush and we practice in his house.” Freed would travel through a few more bands with relatively the same sound during the next 15 years.

The Trouble with Larry (scroll to the bottom of article at link) was Richard Sarvay, Mark Abba, and Kathy Jones --who would soon leave the band -- and a drum machine. For awhile, toward the end, they actually had a drummer. Finding local welcoming stages for their “art punk” style of music was a neverending problem, although they could and did play out of town. (The interview was written by Rebecca Edwards, who probably never wrote for me again because I don't remember her.) They were one of the few bands still advertising towards the end of the Journal's print run, although with dark and scary ads featuring two-headed calves.

Their CD had Easter Island style heads on it, and we determined it was cursed. Something bad happened to everyone who had it to review.

“Being self-taught hinders you because you don’t know the rules and you come across stuff in a torturous manner, but on the other hand, you’re not bound by the rules,” said Sarvay in ’93.

I suspect Richard is now selling music and comic memorabilia on eBay out of Bumpass under the name hillbilly_behemoth. I say that because Hillbilly's store is Good Kitty Collectibles, and Richard's music company was called Good Kitty, too.

1993 Quotes and Updates

Plagiarism in music is what they call the folk process.

-- Arlo Guthrie said this during a concert at the Flood Zone

It was a great show, and my first. The audience sat in rows of chairs.

After 75 days, no one remembers.

-- Japanese saying

This is what I advise everyone who thinks their personal problem is the end of their world. Just about everything blows over.

Reasons not to be in a band: One is likely to acquire a slight ringing in one’s ears. One hears about money a great deal but rarely sees any. There are fans who can be a problem, or there are no fans, an even bigger problem.

-- Thomas Beller in The New Yorker

My design for the Journal was heavily influenced by The New Yorker, a magazine I love to subscribe to when I have money. All those shows when I stood in front of the amps because that was the best place to take a picture, I'm paying for it now. I can't seem to filter out background noise anymore, so I don't hear the TV if the dishwasher or air conditioner is running. I can't hear people talking to me in restaurants.

The one time I feel confident and comfortable is when I’m playing a show. I’ve made this little world for myself and that’s the one place where I can really be strong. I’m in control and I can say things that I don’t regret because it’s all been planned out. Nobody can interrupt me because I have the stage. It’s a way to communicate with people without really having to talk to them. Just because I’m lonely and I want to communicate doesn’t necessarily mean I like people.

-- Juliana Hatfield

Remember her? Probably not. This works for writing, too. I can communicate without having to actually be with people. I have never liked talking on the phone. I feel like a hostage. When I first starting doing the paper, a lot of men called me and would talk for hours. I was like a sounding board for a couple of dozen guys, married, single, usually older than younger. It’d start out being about music, then it would be about life in general. Maybe it was because I was home during the day and many of these guys were, too, playing househusband while their wife worked and doing music at night and weekends. I heard a lot of stories about the local groupies and bad girls. After my boyfriend moved in and I started working during the day, the calls stopped.

Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income, half the possibilities of life are shut off. You hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent. I pity with all my heart the artist who is entirely dependent for subsistence upon his art.

-- W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage, 1915

Songwriters write their best songs before they become rich and famous. It’s hard to relate to your audience when you’re no longer living their lifestyle. I think Maugham is wrong. My husband wrote a half-dozen songs when he was in his 20s and he hasn't written anything since. What does he have to feel passionately about these days? Maybe this song: "I'll Take the Garbage Out When I'm Ready (Back Off Woman)"

There can’t be any thought process when you’re playing if you want to get close to music.

-- Charlie Haden

What makes the difference between a great musician and a mediocre one is what’s played between the notes: the feeling you give the silences as well as the sounds.

-- John Densmore, The Doors

You are the worst audience in the world. You very rarely look at me, you never applaud, and you don’t look like you’re having any fun whatsoever.

-- an acoustic performer about me

This guy, who was sort of a friend because I met him before I started writing about music, was confused. I wasn’t at his show to encourage him or be a fan girl. I was there to write about his show, and the room he was playing. I wasn’t there to have fun. I was working.

The Bottom was better when it was just dilapidated old buildings and everybody was afraid to go there.

-- an anonymous musician quoted in a 1993 Times-Dispatch article.

The most threatening places are the white, middle-class places where a lot of athletes go. That’s where the fights are. They seem to be the most volatile of people – the highest level of testosterone and the lowest level of intellect.

-- John Fralin of the Swingaderos on bar brawling, 1993

I remember around this time, a family took their mom out for her birthday to a show at Scarlett’s, which was on the first floor of what is now once again Main Street Station. They were asked to leave for being rowdy. There was a shoot-out with security on the front steps and people died, including the mom!

Historical Records

Much to my amazement, the VCU library said they had all but six of the printed copies of the Richmond Music Journal. Since I did 12 a year from 1993 to early into 2005, that’s a lot of issues.

I was able to quickly supply electronic copies of three of the newer ones they were missing, and the other three I took to the Library of Virginia where they promise (I hope) not to lose them while they make microfilm copies of them for the VCU library.

While I was waiting for them to come get my precious papers, I paged through them. One of them, June 1997, claimed to be the biggest Journal ever. It was 40 pages, and so full of ads, it was unbelievable. I think I actually did bigger papers a few times after that, but then there was a long and rapid decline. Still, I was just amazed at how good and comprehensive the paper was in its heyday of 1994-1999.

In September 1999, I went to work for the Mechanicsville Local, which was a dream come true because my ambition in life since childhood was to work for a small community newspaper. I put out a weekly paper of 36 to 52 pages every Monday, and except for a sportswriter who did about 10 of the back pages, I wrote the whole thing.

I covered Mechanicsville and Hanover government with the same controversial intensity with which I covered local music in the ‘90s and managed to piss off a few readers and advertisers, just like I did on the Journal. The publisher, a woman from West Virginia with an accounting background and no journalism experience at all, wanted a shopper, an inoffensive paper that just raked in the advertising dollars and never generated any controversy, so after two years I was given the boot. Two-thirds of the rest of the staff soon followed me out the door after the paper was bought and sold repeatedly, and finally was eaten alive by Media General, the publishers of the evolving Times-Dispatch. Sigh. It was fun while it lasted, just like the Journal was.

In a fit of disillusionment, I tossed my more than 120 Locals, but I held on to the Journals. I’m glad Ray Bonis at VCU did, too. All those crazy stories and interviews and photographs of more than a decade of the local music scene will survive. I like to think that was the last good decade of local music, but old-timers always tell me it was the ‘70s, or maybe the ‘80s, or the time when the drinking age was still 18.

The other, obvious, thing I learned was it's better to own your own little paper and work for yourself. You won't make any money, but you'll have more control. And anyway, I found out after I left, the Local paid me nearly $10,000 a year less than they had the men who did the same job before me.