Georgia Music, Winter 2012
by Bret Love

Trying to measure the breadth, scope and influence of the Elephant 6 collective is like trying to hold onto a handful of water: It’s slippery and amorphous at best. Their Wikipedia page lists more than 50 different acts associated with E6, from the core groups (The Apples In Stereo, Neutral Milk Hotel and Olivia Tremor Control) and famous signings to the Elephant 6 Recording Company label (Beulah, Elf Power, Of Montreal) to myriad side-projects, affiliated acts and friends of friends.

But what eventually emerged as one of the most significant musical movements of the ’90s initially began with four bored kids in the small college town of Ruston, Louisiana (home of Louisiana Tech University). Fueled by the local art scene and musical influences ranging from punk and noise to ’60s Britpop and experimental psychedelia, childhood friends Bill Doss, Will Cullen Hart, Jeff Mangum and Robert Schneider worked together in various incarnations (though never as a conventional band) before Schneider relocated to Denver for college and the others followed Hart to Athens.

An anomaly on the modern music scene, Elephant 6 was always more about collaboration and a shared personal ideology than it was about personal recognition. Members of the various bands intermingled freely, with Schneider and Doss working together in the Apples In Stereo; Doss, Hart and Mangum all original members of Olivia Tremor Control; Schneider providing production and instrumentation for Mangum’s Neutral Milk Hotel; and various friends from other Elephant 6 bands playing supporting roles on each other’s projects. But as a collective, they established a unique sound (perhaps best exemplified by NMH’s classic In The Aeroplane Over The Sea) that became as much an adjective as it was a record label. For a while, “Elephant 6” and “arty indie rock” were virtually interchangeable.

Now, 20 years after the iconic indie-rock institution was founded, Elephant 6 is suddenly all over the place again. Tireless E6 banner-wavers Of Montreal released a limited edition boxed set in October, with a new LP due in 2012. Olivia Tremor Control recently reissued their first two albums, and plan to release a new one (the first in over a decade) in 2012. Mangum, who has been called “the J.D. Salinger of indie rock” due to his hermitic seclusion since retiring after In The Aeroplane Over The Sea’s success, has resurfaced with a self-released Neutral Milk Hotel boxed set. He’s also the curator for March’s All Tomorrow’s Parties Festival (in Minehead, UK), in which he will perform alongside the Apples In Stereo, Olivia Tremor Control and other E6 bands such as The Music Tapes and A Hawk & A Hacksaw.

In light of this rare historic event (which will find all the original founders playing together as part of the “Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise”), we were able to speak with Doss, Hart and Schneider to get the history, evolution and influence of the Elephant 6 collective in their own words.

Will Cullen Hart: I first met Jeff when I was in grade school. Robert and Jeff went to the same school until sixth grade, and we played football together in seventh grade.

Bill Doss: (Laughs) I can’t imagine you playing football! I love that story of how you and Jeff decided to form a band.  You were on the football field and everybody got tackled, and y’all are just lying there while everyone went down to the other end of the field…

Will: We looked at each other and just started talking about heavy metal music. He asked me to come over to his house after school. Neither of us was very good, but we just enjoyed making noise.

Bill: I love the whole idea of you two looking at each other, tackled and sweaty on the ground. “Screw this, let’s start a band!” (Laughs) I met Robert when we were teenagers: I think he was 15 and I was 17. I was putting an ad up in a guitar store for musicians and the guy that owned the place said, “Hey, there’s this kid I think you’d get along with.” He gave me Robert’s phone number and I called him. He said he wasn’t really into guitars so much, but that he was into keyboards and had been listening to a lot of Rush. I ended up going to Robert’s house after school and using a four-track. Through him, I met Will and Jeff.

Robert Schneider: As unusual teenagers, we really felt the strain of the small town environment in Ruston, Louisiana. Just a few hours down Interstate 20 was Athens, where there was all this amazing music being made. When we were in high school, we unofficially made a pact that, one day, we’d all move to Athens. It’s so weird and at the same time incredibly cool that we were able to interact in the history of the Athens scene that inspired us and had given us confidence as young artists.

Bill: I went to a different high school than they all did, and nobody at my school was into music like I was.  They wanted to go hunting or fishing, or play basketball. When I met these guys, it was like, “Oh my God, these guys want to talk about music and play music all the time!”

Will: It was exciting for us, too. He played with Robert in some cover bands, like Fat Planet…

Bill: Which you named! To this day, if I need a good title for something, I’ll call Will. He was the one who coined the name Elephant 6.

Will: I just made it up because it sounded cool, and then Robert added “Recording Company,” which was great. It made us sound legit.

Robert: We lived in a college town, where the art department was strong and was a magnet throughout the state for all the weirdoes. They were usually musicians, especially punk and experimental, so there was this idea of being “conceptual.” We were always trying to be artists, not book a show at a mall.

Bill: I ended up playing with Jeff and Will, and played in various projects with Robert. But we didn’t ever really play in a project all together.

Will: Jeff and I couldn’t play worth [crap]. We would drink a lot and were just everywhere. Robert was more into musicianship. Robert’s always been my mentor, and still is.

Bill: I enjoyed the difference in those two things. When I played with Jeff and Will, it was more about feeling and making a lot noise and chaos. But when I’d play with Robert, he was kind of a prodigy. Robert has always been ten steps ahead of all of us… or a hundred steps. He’s unbelievable.

Robert: We’d record together in different combinations, usually in pairs. Jeff and I would record, but it was usually me recording his songs for him. Bill and I were musical partners and imagined having a band together in the more traditional way. Will and Jeff had a band that went through various names, but they were loosely formed bands. We were coming out of the punk/noise scene and we knew that you could be incredibly loose about your organizational structure, like Apple Records. We were pleased to emulate the most sloppy and haphazard of our heroes. It seemed natural to us, because we were making these bedroom recordings on four-tracks. It’s a very personal form of music.

Will: I eventually went with a girl to live in the Virgin Islands, but it fell apart. We had just enough money to move back to Florida. She called a friend who lived in Athens and she came to pick us up. We thought Athens was a cool, small town with a great music scene, so we stayed.

Bill: Jeff and I would come every once in a while to visit Will. As soon as we were able, we moved out. Jeff and Will started Cranberry Lifecycles, which was a recording project that turned into Synthetic Flying Machine. That’s when I came out and started playing with them, and Synthetic Flying Machine then turned into the Olivia Tremor Control.

Will: Jeff had a song called Olivia Tremor Control, so he gave it to us…

Bill: …and Will named Neutral Milk Hotel, so they named each other’s bands!

Will: We were cool with Jeff leaving OTC to form Neutral Milk Hotel, because he had his own thing.

Bill: Everybody has to take his own path. It’s funny, because we all lived together at the time in Athens. I would walk by Jeff’s room and hear the songs coming out of the noise. Finally, he sat us down and was like, “I love playing with you guys, but I’ve got this thing I’m doing and I just have to follow through with it.” I’m so glad he did now. I don’t want to gloss over it and say it wasn’t sad, because it really was.

Will: I remember being bitter for a little bit, but In The Aeroplane Over The Sea was f—ing amazing. I don’t think I realized it: Jeff is one of my friends, and he’s amazing.

Bill: I remember hearing the record for the first time and thinking, “I can’t believe somebody I know did this!” It’s funny, because I hadn’t heard anything he’d been working on. He played it really close to his chest.

Robert: When we started [the Elephant 6 record label] we were trying to create a 7-inch and cassette label—sort of a mail order enterprise—because we were trying to bypass any sort of professionalism and music industry BS.

Bill: The bands on the label were people we met and felt some kinship with. Robert was in Denver by then, so Elephant 6 was growing out of there and also out of Athens. It was like there was the Elephant 6 East and West. We were doing our own things, but still tied in together. We’d get mixes from Robert all the time with new Apples In Stereo stuff. After checking the morning mail, we’d sit and listen to them and get inspired. We’d pull out the four-track and be like, “These songs are so good: We’ve got to do something better!”

Will: It was like, “I’ll show him!” Then we would send him our stuff.

Bill: He would hear that, and then send us more stuff back. It was almost like Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds, the way Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson were influencing each other, but also challenging each other.

Robert: When it comes down to it, it was me and Will who you had to ask for permission to join Elephant 6. The bands were all loosely structured bands where we absorbed our immediate social circle. Everybody in every band was also a songwriter, producer and genius in their own right. Our immediate social scene was brought into our musical scene as backup musicians, but often they were people we respected, and were better or more credible than us at the time. You’re boosting your friends because you admire them, and they’re playing in your band because they admire you.

Bill: People started using Elephant 6 as an adjective, which was cool but a little scary, too. I remember some record contracts that we were coming in and we were like, “Wait, this is too much!” We were always touring and in the studio—that stuff is fun—but then there was also meeting with record labels.

Robert: It really grew big when the members of the first wave of Elephant 6 bands all turned into real live performing bands instead of just being four-track projects. The collective became a band of bands. I suppose I’ll take the blame for letting everybody in, but in many cases I knew that it was a band that Will had been recording with.

Bill: This for me, was the moment when I realized Elephant 6 got big… It happened so gradually, then when it did happen, it seemed like it happened immediately. It got a little crazy. That’s one of the reasons Olivia Tremor Control decided to take a break. I think Jeff needed to take a step back [from Neutral Milk Hotel], too, but his step back turned into 10 years.

Will: The business got in the way of the feeling we got from just playing together.

Bill: Will and I had a bit of a falling out over stupid [crap] and didn’t speak for a few years, which really sucked. I felt like I needed to do some other stuff and play with some other people and figure out who I was as an individual instead of being part of this band. After a few years, it was time to get back together.

Will: It just happened and it was perfect. We needed a few years of, “Hey, I haven’t talked to you in a while. I love you, man”! It was awesome.

Bill: I can’t believe it’s been 20 years since Elephant 6 started! You hear interviews where people say, “It seems like just yesterday I was playing in Buffalo Springfield,” but it really does. Once 20 years have gotten behind you, you look back at all the stuff you’ve done. It’s a good feeling, but it’s just weird.

Will: [Olivia Tremor Control] has a ton of new stuff we’ve been working on, but we don’t have any finished songs.

Bill: We’re hoping to have a new record out in 2012. One thing I like about the way we make records is that there’s such a huge back catalogue of stuff we’ve been working on, especially Will. He is so prolific, with boxes and boxes of cassettes and CDs, and hundreds of songs.

Will: Whenever any of the four of us get together, we always make something up. It’s like, “Come on over and let’s record something!”

Bill: Jeff will come down to visit, and the first thing we do is go into the studio and play around. I’m still playing with the Apples In Stereo. Honestly, my goal [for the next OTC album] is to get Robert involved once we get enough songs to start mixing, just to have his ears and his brain there listening. It seems like, if he signs off on it and we sign off on it, then it feels like it’s done.

Robert: I think the four of us will definitely work together as a band in the future. I’m not joking. We’ve always been planning on having a band, and those plans are currently still in effect. In the case of Elephant 6, life allowed us to flow along many different paths. But now, making one band seems like the obvious choice, with me, Will, Bill and Jeff. We would write some f—ing awesome songs.

Georgia Music, Fall  2011

by Jewly Hight

Just a few months ago the most eye-catching items in this particular room of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum were Tammy Wynette’s sequined gowns. The curators have since given the space a complete makeover, and the wardrobe items in the room now have been reduced to a conservative black tuxedo. Mick Buck, the museum’s curatorial director, explains the reason: “Because Chet wasn’t exactly a clothes horse, even though he was always well dressed.”

The Chet he’s speaking of is, of course, Chet Atkins, the subject of an exhibit titled Certified Guitar Player, as well as a companion book and an ongoing series of performances, interviews and film screenings. Appropriately enough, the room has been transformed into guitar central.

Follow the chronological flow of the way things are setup and the first guitar you’ll come upon is, quite literally, Atkins’s first guitar, an obviously well-loved Sears Roebuck Silvertone whose bridge is askew due to a make-do repair job. This was the guitar he had in his hands during the adolescent years he spent in Georgia, as he developed his playing skills and his aspirations of putting them to use as a famous professional guitarist.

Atkins, as everybody well knows, made good. The exhibit about him tells the story of a famous professional guitarist whose musical imagination was so broad, almost from the start, that not only country, but pop, jazz and other musically sophisticated styles fell well within its reach, and whose influence—as a player, producer and record executive and a person—extended in a thousand different directions.

Offers Buck, who, incidentally, did his graduate work at the University of West Georgia and spent a summer interning at the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, “The [Atkins] family was really, really instrumental in helping us flesh out the exhibit to try and present a really well-rounded portrait of Chet, not just as an artist but also as a human being.”

Atkins’s daughter Merle Atkins Russell credits her mother, Leona, with filling scrapbooks with years and years’ worth of photos, show bills, letters and the like, which Russell was glad to share with the museum. “We were camera bugs back then, thank goodness,” she reflects. “And thank goodness people still wrote letters.”

Chet Atkins with sister Niona and brother Lowell, 1935 - Courtesy of Merle Russell and the Estate of Chester B. Atkins

And from this assemblage of Atkins facts and artifacts, the argument can reasonably be made that Georgia is second only to Tennessee in shaping his storied life and career.

Down on the farm

Atkins was born in 1924 in the tiny East Tennessee town of Luttrell. His family may have been poor, but they were rich in music, frequently gathering for picking parties at the homes of friends and relatives. His older half-brother Jim was kind enough to give him some pointers on guitar.

When Atkins was around 11, the ragweed in Tennessee was aggravating his asthma so severely that his mother Ida feared for his wellbeing and sent him to live with his father Arley (they’d divorced and each remarried) on a 200-acre farm near Columbus, Ga. There, without the constant musical community he was accustomed to, Atkins intensified his focus on practicing the guitar and even lugged his Silvertone with him to Mountain Hill School; he liked what the natural reverb of the boys’ bathroom did for the sound of his playing.

Says Michael Cochran, who co-authored Chet Atkins: Me and My Guitars and contributed an essay to the Hall of Fame and Museum’s book on Atkins, “In Tennessee, Chet was one of many who played an instrument. …In that context, Chet was the little guy who would crowd up and put his ear against the sound hole to the point that he became a nuisance. …Whereas when he got carted off to Georgia, he didn’t have any friends, he didn’t have anybody’s house to go to for a music party. He wasn’t getting invited anywhere. He just sunk into that world of the guitar, and at that time the fiddle, too. A result of that was that he became known for that.

“In Tennessee, he was just another Atkins kid. Maybe somebody would have said, ‘Hey, that kid’s gonna be good some day.’ But, still, he was just a voice in the chorus. When he started taking his guitar to school, he was still Chester, of course [Chet came later], but that’s when he first began to establish his sovereign identity as a musician and as a guitar player.”

In her recently published memoir From the Hills of East Tennessee, Atkins’s younger half-sister, Billie Rose Shockley, mentioned that her brother had made a rudimentary crystal radio with a friend back in Luttrell. “When the crystal wore out,” she writes, “they would buy another one. Everyone thought it was a miracle that the radio worked. …No one else that we knew of around us had a radio back then.”

But the radio Atkins had access to on the Columbus farm enabled him to tune in to stations far and wide and hear things he’d never been able to hear before, like the singing thumbstyle guitarist Merle Travis, whose jaunty playing style became an immediate influence.

“He tried to teach himself to play like Merle Travis,” Buck says, “and since he couldn’t see Merle playing, he assumed that Merle was playing with his thumb and two fingers, since that’s a fairly complex-sounding style.” After all, there were no instructional DVDs back then. “Actually, Merle just played with his thumb and his index finger. But Chet basically developed a thumb and two finger style based on what he was hearing.”

No less important, though it’s been given less attention over the years, was the fact that Atkins could listen to his brother Jim performing with the Les Paul Trio on Fred Waring’s popular NBC radio program. Says Cochran of Jim Atkins, “He really was the quintessential crooner. If Bing Crosby hadn’t already existed, he could’ve been Bing Crosby. …The songs they played, they were not “Wildwood Flower”; they weren’t little three-chord songs. They were complex, the melodies and chord structures.”

So here was a kid from the backwoods hearing his own flesh and blood really get somewhere in the big city playing not-remotely-backwoods music. “That must have just lit the afterburners on Chet’s imagination for himself about what he could potentially do,” muses Cochran.

Radio wilderness

Besides practicing obsessively, Atkins was already tinkering with guitar technology. Though electric guitars were still in their infancy, he managed to electrify his and cobble together an amplifier. There was just one problem, says Cochran: “When he put together that pickup for the guitar and that amp, he had to take it to church to plug it in, because that’s where the electricity was.”

Before Atkins left Georgia for the final time in his mid-teens and returned to Tennessee to pursue a music career, he got his very first taste of radio work backing a preacher who had a 15-minute program on a Columbus station. As Shockley reminisced in her book, “He wrote home and told Momie [sic] about it. He had never been on the radio before, and he was so scared and nervous that he said, ‘I want to dedicate this song to my father and Daddy.’”

Chet Atkins at WNOX Knoxville c. 1945 - Courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

By the late 1950s, it would seem like almost everything Atkins touched turned to gold, but that certainly wasn’t the case during his early days in radio. He spent a good part of the ’40s bouncing from station to station, starting out at Knoxville’s WNOX, then heading to Cincinnati’s WLW, Raleigh’s WPTF, Nashville’s WSM, Richmond’s WRVA, Springfield’s KWTO, Denver’s KOA, back to Knoxville and—as a sideman for Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters—to Nashville, this time to stay.

Along the way, Atkins was expanding his horizons. He pored over all the records WNOX had on hand by gypsy jazz master Django Reinhardt and Spanish chamber guitarist Andres Segovia, and played in pop orchestras as well as string band settings. It was during this period that Si Siman at KWTO started calling him “Chet” instead of “Chester,” a slicker, snappier moniker Chet immediately embraced. But the reality was that Atkins’s progressive playing also got him fired from more than one station. Says Buck, “He said that sometimes he was let go because his playing wasn’t country enough, or maybe it was too country depending on the station or the program or the program director.”

Steve Sholes at RCA Victor in New York decided to sign Atkins after Siman sent him the guitarist’s demos. There were a few unsuccessful early attempts to fashion Atkins into the next Merle Travis, singing and all. But the first single of Atkins’s to even begin to get anywhere was “Galloping on the Guitar”—an instrumental that earned its title—recorded in 1949 at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta since RCA didn’t yet have recording facilities in Nashville.

The Nashville years

It wasn’t long after Atkins made his permanent move to Nashville with his wife Leona and their only daughter that he fell into co-writing with Boudleaux Bryant—born in Shellman, Ga. and raised in Moultrie—whose hot fiddling he’d heard years before on Atlanta’s WSB. They started out writing jingles together (the manuscript of a Martha White Flour jingle of theirs, “Good Gracious It’s Good,” is on display in the exhibit) and moved on to instrumentals—like the Atkins signature “Country Gentleman”—and a couple of vocal ballads that became hits for Eddy Arnold and Red Foley.

Around this time, Atkins was getting more and more session work as a guitarist; there was no question that he was in his element working up arrangements in the studio. The unintended side effect was that Sholes—who was also his label head—began asking him to pull double duty. And so, Atkins came to be both picker and producer. “I think Chet probably enjoyed it in the beginning,” Cochran muses, “but what he was really doing was making himself valuable to the label.”

Atkins had his first hit as a producer with Don Gibson’s “Oh Lonesome Me” in 1958. By then, his own recordings were taking off, too. He’d churn out albums—three a year—sampling a dizzying array of styles, some rootsy and plenty not. There’s a reason he’s not only in the Country Music Hall of Fame, but the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, too, in the sideman category.

None other than George Harrison wrote the liner notes for 1968’s Chet Atkins Picks on the Beatles. The signed notes from Harrison are in the exhibit, and so is a letter from Hugh Hefner congratulating Atkins on winning Playboy’s Jazz Poll, which just goes to show many listeners considered him a jazz guy.

Russell says her dad would, from time to time, consult her about the musical tastes of the teenage demographic: “Sometimes he would ask me to come down and listen: ‘Would you like this as a young person?’ And he listened to everything, he heard everything.”

She can recall the precise moment when it dawned on her that her dad was a towering musical figure. “I was probably in the second or third grade,” she says, “when somebody at school—in fact, I think one of the teachers—asked me about my father: ‘And is it true that he plays on the radio? And is it true he’s on television? And is it true this and that?’ And I went, ‘Well, yeah.’ And I thought, ‘God! That’s my father.’ And all of a sudden it was a big deal to me. I was really impressed.”

And rightfully so. Atkins was doing impressive stuff. He took in musical styles from all over the map, and interpreted them with tastefulness and precision. On a single album—Chet Atkins in Three Dimensions—he glided from traditional folk to pop to classical material. Rick Kienzle, in his contribution to the exhibit’s companion book, drove home what all of this meant: “Chet Atkins vaporized the lingering stereotype of the crude, backward country guitar picker unable to tune his instrument, much less play more than a few rudimentary chords.”

‘Atkins-esque’

Not a few young guitarists drew influence from the anything-but-backward Atkins. As a teenager, smooth jazz guitarist Earl Klugh snatched up as many different flavors of Atkins albums as he could. Says Klugh, “That’s what I loved about his music, I think, most of all. I’ve kept my records like that as well, just a great variety.”

For Klugh, it was a revelation to see Atkins giving a solo instrumental performance of “Lara’s Theme” from Dr. Zhivago on Perry Como’s television show. “The first thing I realized was, ‘Here’s a guy playing the guitar, and he’s not singing,’” Klugh laughs. “And I’m like, ‘Well, this is great, because I can’t sing. So maybe I can do this.’ It was just amazing, because he was playing all these parts of the song. It wasn’t just like strumming; he was playing the melody, the bass line. It was very interesting from my perspective because I’d been playing piano. … So that really was a life-changing thing for me.”

Growing up, Paul Yandell—who’d go on to spent a quarter-century as Atkins’s second guitarist and bandleader—couldn’t afford any Chet records of his own, so he listened for Atkins’s songs on the radio and learned to play what he extremely modestly refers to as “warmed-over Chet.”

Steve Wariner—who’d eventually be signed by Atkins as a singing, songwriting guitarist—got his hands on all the Chet albums in his dad’s collection. Says Wariner, “Pretty soon my head’s spinning as a young guy going, ‘Wow, man, this is not your typical country hillbilly guitar player here. This guy is on another planet. He’s all over the place. And he can do it with all of them, on any level.’ … All of a sudden you’re going, ‘I want to be like him! I want to do that!’” Wariner captured the varied eras of Atkins’s playing with affectionate attention to detail on a tribute album a couple of years back.

Atkins made a mark not only on guitarists, but on guitars themselves. The Gretsch Company signed him to an endorsement deal—then a very cutting-edge thing—in 1954. (It’s only fitting that Gretsch would be a presenting sponsor of the Atkins exhibit.) “Chet was Nashville-based, he was an incredibly talented musician, he was a real gentleman and a man of his word,” explains current Gretsch president Fred W. Gretsch. “So all of those things added up to a desirable partner.”

The relationship proved to be a win-win. Having a top-notch signature guitar line reinforced Atkins’s reputation as a noteworthy and increasingly influential musician. And the Gretsch Chet Atkins models—which benefited from Atkins’s continuous pursuit of better-sounding and more advanced guitar technology—appealed to players all over the modern musical landscape, not a few of them—like the Beatles’ Harrison—from the exploding field of rock ‘n’ roll. “Basically [Chet’s] best known works were all done on Gretsch guitars,” points out Gretsch. And several Gretsch guitars from Atkins’s personal collection—including his trademark Country Gentleman—are featured in the exhibit.

Out with overalls, in with rhinestones

You’ll often hear Atkins—along with fellow producer Owen Bradley—called an architect of the Nashville Sound. But that designation in itself reveals almost nothing about what the sound of the Sound was like. Atkins had been made head of RCA’s Nashville operations in 1957, and throughout the late ’50s and ’60s he framed a good many of the singers he was producing—Jim Reeves, the Browns, Skeeter Davis, Bobby Bare and more—with the lush, uptown textures of string sections and silken background choruses, as opposed to hard country’s fiddle and steel guitar. The point was that, as on his own records, Atkins applied a sophistication that appealed to an adult pop audience; he was taking modern country music places it wasn’t really known for going.

Paul Hemphill, observing Atkins at close range in his 1970 book The Nashville Sound, offered an astute take on the one-time farm boy’s considerable cultural savvy. Atkins, he wrote, “had the back-country roots of all the great country musicians but had gone a giant step further by developing interests in such diverse areas as poetry, classical music, philosophy and electronics. Atkins, in short, was not simply a ‘picker,’ but a master musician who was no more at home on the stage of the Opry than he was guesting with the Nashville symphony or playing at the White House….”

In the early ’70s, Atkins backed off from the bulk of his producing responsibilities because of the toll they were taking on his health. But Atlantan Jerry Reed—whom he’d first encountered when Reed was performing in the hillbilly stage show Georgia Jubilee and signed to RCA in 1965—was one he kept producing. And since Atkins was then returning his focus to his first love—guitar playing—he cut many a Reed-written instrumental and the two pickers made albums as a duo.

In the Atkins exhibit (and on YouTube) there’s a great video of Atkins and Reed making a 1970s television appearance. It takes a few false starts for them to agree on a song to play—“Baby’s Coming Home” won out—and in all their bantering Reed plays the loose-goosey good old boy to Atkins’s wry, polished professional. The same sort of contrast comes through in their playing—Atkins’s clean touch meeting Reed’s grittier attack—and makes for an entertaining performance.

Making “C.G.P.” mean something

The exhibit, you’ll recall, was dubbed Chet Atkins: Certified Guitar Player. Because the music business had no official title to offer—nothing equivalent to, say, certified public accountant or registered nurse—Atkins made up the C.G.P designation for himself, then bestowed it upon Reed and three other pickers: John Knowles, Wariner and Tommy Emmanuel. (In a touching moment at the exhibit’s opening, Russell named Yandell the fifth and final C.G.P.)

This C.G.P. business was all in good fun. Atkins presented Wariner with his award just after winning the Grammy category in which they’d both been nominated; Atkins even gave Wariner his gramophone trophy, joking that he already he already had loads of them at home. (Atkins won 13 Grammys over the course of his career).

On the other hand, the C.G.P. awards certainly weren’t without meaning. Explains Buck, “[Chet] said that he’d always wanted a degree, like from Vanderbilt or some place, but he never got one.” It could be argued that those honorary awards were a way for Atkins—who’d never finished high school—to highlight the musical intelligence, study and prowess involved in the mastery of his instrument. Sophisticated musicianship of that sort, indeed, deserved as much respect as any academic credential.

Atkins collaborated with a number of impressive guitarists, and Klugh—a virtuoso on the nylon string—was one of them. Atkins guested on a Klugh album, Klugh returned the favor and the two of them teamed up for several TV performances, included more than one episode of Hee Haw.

Klugh loaned the museum a nylon string gifted to him by Atkins. Says Klugh, “In his inscription he basically said, I’m giving this to you, because I know that this was the first classical guitar you heard that got you on your way.’”

Buck was plenty pleased to have it to display. “I had actually been on the lookout for this particular guitar,” he says. “I had seen it pictured in one of Chet’s guitar books, but it wasn’t with the guitars that were here, obviously. But I didn’t know where it had gone, who he had given it to or what. When Earl informed us of this one we were like, ‘Yes, please!’ Earl even drove up from Atlanta to bring it to us.”

A generous gatekeeper

You find that people are happy to help when it comes to honoring Chet Atkins, even if it involves making an interstate delivery. For a guy who’d inevitably had to tell people “no” sometimes as the head honcho at a label, he was as universally well liked as anyone in the business.

“Anybody who wrote him a letter at the office, he would write them back,” shares Russell. “Or if anybody sent a tape, he would write them back: ‘We’re not using this kind of music now. Keep trying. I hope you’ll keep writing. Send me some more stuff sometime.’ …He knew what it was like to be on the other side, and to be trying and not making it.”

That was no doubt why Atkins not only signed and produced Wariner, but gave the young musician a paying gig playing bass in his band until Wariner’s own recording career started taking off.

Yandell was the beneficiary of Atkins’s generosity at their very first meeting; he had shown up to audition for the Opry, which was Atkins’ turf. As Yandell tells it, “[Opry announcer] George D. Hay came out and said, ‘Son, you’re next.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ve got to go down and get my guitar and amp.’ He said, ‘Well, we don’t have time for that. I’ve only got about 10 minutes.’ So Chet was standing over there against the wall. … I guess he was smoking a cigarette. He said, ‘Well, just hang on a minute.’ He was rehearsing down around the corner in Studio C for the Prince Albert show, which they did every Saturday night at nine o’clock. So he [went] back there and got his amp and his guitar and brought it around there and went in the studio and hooked it all up. And he said, ‘Here, play my guitar.’ You can imagine how I felt.”

In the final two decades of Atkins’s life, Georgia was more than happy to claim him—if not as a native son, at least as a multifaceted musical legend who’d spent truly formative years there—and he recognized the connection on his side, too. In the early ’80s, he held a golf tournament at Callaway Gardens, not too terribly far from where he’d lived with his dad. Later on, he played benefit shows for Mountain Hill School. The Georgia government, for its part, declared a stretch of I-185 “Chet Atkins Highway.” The resolution declared “the citizens of Harris County are especially proud to have such a link with this country music star who has frequently acknowledged his Southern roots and strong connections with Georgia and its people.”

And in 1995, Atkins was fittingly inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. His performance at the induction ceremony that year remains an institutional highlight.

It’s only when you consider Chet Atkins’s remarkable story from start to finish—rural roots to cosmopolitan impact—that you truly appreciate why it’s bound to live on.

Women, put down your laptops, grab a guitar and get into the groove Feb. 17-19 at Ladies Rock Camp, the annual fundraiser for Girls Rock Camp ATL. The event is a three-day rock and roll fantasy experience where women learn to play an instrument, form a band, write a song together, and play a big rock concert finale. Beginners are absolutely encouraged to attend! Atlanta-bred roots rocker Michelle Malone will lead the songwriting workshop and serve as a floating band coach, giving participants tips, tricks, and pointers along the way. Legendary blues artist Beverly “Guitar” Watkins will play a private lunchtime set, making for a once-in-a-lifetime musical experience. The unique weekend of learning and making music includes lunch and dinners by the Peasant Bistro, Mellow Mushroom, and Doc Chey’s, and continental breakfast will be served in the mornings. Tuition is on a $350 to $500 sliding scale; space is limited. If you don’t have an instrument one will be loaned to you at no additional charge. Registration information can be found at www.girlsrockcampatl.org or email camp@girlsrockcampatl.org for more information. Girls Rock Camp ATL can also be reached by phone at 404.964.5976. Girls Rock Camp ATL is an Atlanta-based non-profit organization dedicated to empowering girls and women of all backgrounds and abilities through music education, creative expression, and performance. All proceeds from Ladies Rock Camp support Girls Rock Camp ATL scholarships and strengthen the sustainability of the organization’s programs.

 Zac Brown’s Southern Ground Artists is making its mark on Atlanta by truly doing things differently

by Jewly Hight

Sonia Leigh

Sonia Leigh could have made the announcement from any given stage in any given town on any given night: “I don’t know if y’all know this, but I’m on Zac Brown’s label, Southern Ground.” But spoken during her late-November show at the Nashville rock club Exit/In, those words took on special significance.

The club sits less than two miles from the music industry hub known as Music Row, a pair of tidy one-way streets lined by record labels, publishing companies, recording studios and other establishments integral to the business of music making. Standing in its shadow, Leigh gave her shout-out to Southern Ground Artists, 250 miles away in Atlanta and set apart from established models of commercial music making by a good deal more than geography.

Sure, Brown—the label’s founder and a bona fide band-leading country superstar—could have chosen to set up shop in Music City, long a key destination for people pursuing careers in music. Due to downsizing in the record biz, there’s surely prime real estate available. Plus, his management company, ROAR, keeps an office there.

But it makes sense that Brown would want his young, genre-stretching label to be based where the Zac Brown Band found early and essential support for its genre-stretching ways, as opposed to a place where people took a while to catch on.

Lynn Oliver, Southern Ground’s general manager, summarizes, “What we defined as ‘new country’ was not what Nashville defined as ‘new country.’ We think that ‘new country’ is a lot more open-minded, and open to guys that wear beanies instead of cowboy hats.”

“It’s nice to watch something grow from where you did, and I think that has a lot to do with it, too,” Chris Sherrer, the company’s chief operating officer, muses on the Georgia connection. “This is where [Zac’s] made his mark, had his opportunities.”

Not surprisingly, a tinge of native pride could be felt in ZBB’s CMA Awards Show rendition of “Georgia On My Mind,” which featured the contributions of Savannah resident Gregg Allman. And beyond simply being on his mind, Fayette County is where Brown hangs his beanie when he’s not on the road.

Community organizing

Georgia also is home to the majority of the Southern Ground roster, including Leigh, who’s been kicking around Atlanta for years. Everyone seems to have their own account of meeting Brown in a live music setting and striking up a friendship; that those stories, taken together, sound more like the formation of a mutually supportive music community than, say, a string of strategic talent-scouting efforts, says a lot.

Take Leigh’s story, for instance. About a decade ago she won a recording session with John Hopkins, who would go on to become ZBB’s bassist. One thing led to another. Leigh joined an all-girl rock band with Hopkins’ wife. They wound up playing at Brown’s now-defunct Lake Oconee restaurant, Zac’s Place, and a song of Leigh’s caught his ear.

“That’s when we met,” she says. “I remember us just totally hitting it off and really developing this respect.” It seemed only natural that casual co-writing sessions and gigs opening for Brown would follow.

Levi Lowrey

Playing fiddle in Leigh’s band was Levi Lowrey, the Dacula-based great-great grandson of early hillbilly fiddle star Gid Tanner. Upon learning that Lowrey’s talents extend to singing and songwriting, Brown showed up to hear him do his own thing one night. Lowrey’s folk ballad “Rosalee and Odes” caught his ear, and so began the conversation that eventually brought Lowrey into the Southern Ground fold.

Nic Cowan

Label mate Nic Cowan had never met Brown before opening for him in Carrollton. Brown, then a strong regional draw without any national hits, told Cowan of his plans to start a label—a label he wanted the younger songwriter to be part of. Cowan marvels, “I was just lookin’ for some advice, but ended up gettin’ a hell of a lot more…”

Oliver Wood—a fixture in the Atlanta blues scene and the lead-singing and guitar-playing half of Southern Ground’s Wood Brothers—was invited by his friend and ZBB’s keyboardist Coy Bowles to participate in a songwriters’ round that also featured Brown; there, with guitars in hand, Wood and Brown got properly acquainted.

And Charlie Starr, front man of Blackberry Smoke—also on the roster—got to know Brown when both their bands played Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Simple Man Cruise. “There were actually a couple of guys in the band that my wife and I knew already,” Starr explains. “So we all became friendly really quickly.”

The latest Southern Ground signees, Atlanta-bred hip-hop brother duo The Wheeler Boys, found themselves in a right place, right time situation of their own—as Leigh’s neighbor. Says Sean Wheeler, “It’s kind of funny because we spent a solid nine months, 10 months just going back and forth: ‘Oh yeah. I make country music.’ ‘Yeah, well I make hip-hop music. One day we should trade CDs.’ We finally got around to it and she’s like, ‘You’re really good!’ ‘Well, you’re really good!’ She’s who introduced us to Zac.”

Several members of the ZBB also go way back with Brown, and the same goes for folks employed by the label. His friendship with Sherrer dates back to the late ’90s, and he sang in a barbershop quartet with Tyler Walker—who works as a recording engineer and in A&R—in high school. Those are two of many examples.

Pass the ‘Chicken’

You get the sense Brown has never had a problem drawing people together or generating expansive ideas. Says Oliver, “I toured with the band for the first two and a half years when I was their day-to-day manager. So there were a lot of late-night bus rides where [Zac] would just talk about what he loves, and a lot of that has to do with philanthropy and fellowship.”

Brown’s many loves—family chief among them—keep him so busy these days that he was unavailable for an interview. However, when this writer spoke with him a little over a year ago, he emphasized the communal drive behind what he does: “Once I started playing with other people and realized this is a social thing—it’s just like hanging out with your buddies, but you’re all united together in making a sound and making harmony—I kinda just got the bug for it. …I figured out a way to get in and write and share and collaborate with all the people I care about.”

After ZBB began having its blockbuster commercial success, he was able to circle the wagons and launch Southern Ground in 2009. The band’s first country number one, “Chicken Fried,” provided the operation with both momentum and its name, taken from lyrics in the first verse.

“I think for [Zac],” Oliver offers, “everything that he has created and everything in his vision is stuff that he’s been doing his whole life, but maybe just on a smaller level. …The cooking, the playing, supporting other artists, that’s stuff he’s always done. He’s always invested his own money and his own time, but it was just more on a local level. And now that he has the platform to share it with the world, that’s what he wants to do.”

“That is the kind of guy he is,” says Leigh. “I think it started like a seed for him, but then it developed into something. But my first thought when he asked me to [sign], the only reservation that I had was we’re friends and music peers. …I didn’t want that ever to be interrupted. He’s like, ‘That’s not gonna happen.’ And it never has.”

What Brown can do for you

Wood Brothers

This year, Southern Ground released studio albums by Leigh (1978 December), Lowrey (I Confess I Was a Fool), Cowan (Hard Headed) and The Wood Brothers (Smoke Ring Halo), marking the first time the former three have had their music distributed nationally and the first full-length the Woods have made since parting ways with Blue Note Records.

Blue Note has also been home to Chris Wood’s other band, Medeski, Martin & Wood, and the label went through a major shakeup when it was bought by EMI. The brothers came to their new deal with considerable perspective. “We really like the idea that even though Zac is not experienced with having a record label, his business in general has a lot of momentum, probably more so than most record labels these days,” explains Oliver Wood.

Blackberry Smoke saw their previous label disintegrate, too. Southern Ground just released their Live at the Georgia Theatre DVD, and a new album is coming next year—their first since 2009—along with an EP from The Wheeler Boys.

Southern Ground headquarters is an even more bustling place than you’d imagine—which is why it’s been nicknamed “the Hive.” It’s housed in what was once a sprawling men’s clothing store on Atlanta’s Westside, a place Cowan knew well before music paid his bills. “I used to load, God, probably a hundred boxes a day of suits and stuff like that into UPS trucks that would go to what is now the record label,” he remembers.

Sherrer estimates they employ as many as 175 people, including everyone out on the road. That may seem like a gigantic number, but, then, there’s much more going on under Southern Ground’s roof than you’d expect at a label—like in-house merch (Lucy Justice Goods), catering (Baby Goo), videography (Southern Reel), metalworking (Southern Grind) and leather (Southern Hide) businesses.

Many sounds, one city

Brown has drawn comparisons between what his team is doing in Atlanta and what Stax Records accomplished in Memphis and Motown in Detroit during their heydays. Starr, being a southern rocker, throws in a reference to what Capricorn had going in Macon in the ’70s. Like those famed ventures, Southern Ground does a lot in-house and represents serious investment in a regional music scene.

Oliver points out that they’re not exclusively working with Georgia-rooted artists; the label has begun relationships with Sarah and Christian Dugas—a Canadian brother and sister formerly of the adventurous string band The Duhks—and Bermuda-born reggae-popster Mishka.

Still, it’s no small thing that the label’s first six acts are locals. Wood’s take is “Atlanta’s a big place…. There’s a lot of different niches that just rarely cross over with each other. There’s this amazing hip-hop scene, and then there’s all the Americana and blues. And a lot of times those things function in different parts of town and they’re just different groups of people. I think one of [Zac’s] visions is that, ‘Wow, there’s all this good music. These people should cross-pollinate more. If nothing else, know each other and create together and have a label that can support more than just one kind of music.’”

Southern Ground most certainly supports more than one kind of music. You won’t find a Stax- or Motown-style assembly line setup, where set groups of players and producers constantly clock in for sessions; the aim isn’t to fashion a single sonic calling card.

The Wood Brothers specialize in tuneful, jazzy, groove-based alt-folk, while Blackberry Smoke has a hard-hitting, countrified southern rock aesthetic and Lowrey is a barroom country-folk soul searcher in the Kristofferson storytelling tradition.

Cowan’s devil-may-care, southern pop-funk doesn’t sound a thing like any of them. He’s thankful that Brown has never insisted it should: “I realized this was a guy that really believed in what I was doing, and accepted the fact that I was doing southern music and urban music and trying to find a mix. He got it, and most people kinda weren’t really getting it and wanted me to go one way or the other—either go southern or go urban.”

In their own way, The Wheeler Boys straddle the same chasm with their blue-collar rhymes and mash-up of heavy beats and down-home acoustic licks. They’re also the only hip-hop act on the label. (Add to that the fact that Walker—the lone person at Southern Ground with a PhD in classical composition and theory—is working with them.) Sean Wheeler is aware how strange all this may look on paper.

“I think one thing that was really important to [Zac] was our music, it is in a lot of ways struggle music,” he offers. “…I’ve had people point out to me that if you just write down our lyrics and read through ’em, a lot of our songs could be confused with blues songs. And I think to Zac that’s really what it was about, is that we’re not really stereotypical rap music. For him, it makes sense because people that appreciate country in a lot of cases appreciate hip-hop.”

Leigh, too, boldly blends musical sensibilities. Her vocal attack musters the toughness and bite of rock, and her songs recognize no barriers between honky-tonk, alt-country, roots rock and R&B. That Brown and band have conquered the mainstream country format ahead of her could make all the difference in the world to how people hear her music.

“I think what he’s done has definitely opened up the doors for a lot of artists,” she reflects. “Because what I think that a lot of people in country music realized that they missed was the opportunity to be a part of something great when they turned their backs on Zac in the beginning. So now they don’t want to miss that opportunity when something different comes around.”

left to right: Sonia Leigh, Levi Lowrey, Zac Brown, Nic Cowan

Writers in the round

Aside from the fact that acts in the Southern Ground family don’t play by narrow genre rules, it’s not musical style that unites them. Songwriting is their common ground. They all write their own material—it was their original songs that grabbed Brown’s ear in the first place—and they sign publishing deals along with their record deals. Says Cowan, “I think that’s the unifying trend at the label.”

The trend at a lot of labels dealing in country, rock, R&B or pop is to lean on outside songsmiths and, quite often, to nudge recording artists who aren’t really writers to get in on co-writing just for a piece of the publishing. The songwriting philosophy at Southern Ground couldn’t be further from that.

Says Lowrey, “I think everybody involved, when we were growing up and doing this, we never considered it an option not to record your own songs. It was just this is the way it was done. You write these songs and then you play ’em out. That just seems like the way it’s supposed to be to us, to me. It wasn’t like you see [in Nashville] where you take an artist and you develop them and then you give them the right songs and you put ’em out there and back them with money and whatever else.”

Starr echoes the sentiment: “In Blackberry Smoke—obviously, good songs are good songs. We’ve recorded a few songs that I didn’t write or that we didn’t write. I’m not putting that down at all. But if we were a label full of people that were looking to Nashville writers for songs to fill up an album, there wouldn’t be any magic there.”

The singer/songwriters of Southern Ground—all of whom can stand on their own—frequently help each other flesh out ideas, along with Brown, several members of ZBB, like Clay Cook, Hopkins and Bowles, and Brown’s traveling co-writer Wyatt Durette. Most of the label’s artists spend time touring with ZBB, and, notes Lowrey, “When you have 18 songwriters on the road, eventually somebody’s gonna get together and write with each other.”

Besides the uniqueness of a label shaped by an against-the-grain yet business savvy artist-founder, there’s one more thing that makes the culture of Southern Ground stand out. Remember the philanthropy Oliver referred to? She didn’t just mean that Brown shares his success with his artist friends. He’s building Camp Southern Ground, a nonprofit camp for kids overcoming behavioral and learning disabilities and disadvantaged backgrounds.

And he makes a point to encourage everyone on his team to give back. Everyone.

Wheeler recalls the day he sat down with Brown to hash out their contract, a contract that came with a rather unorthodox provision: “‘If you see somebody on the street that needs help and you can help them, you have to do that. That’s your obligation as [a Southern Ground signee]….’ That means so much to me, and it really summed up everything about [Zac]. Dude, you’re talking to a couple of rappers you’re trying to sign. I can’t imagine anybody else at any other company bringing that up in the negotiations.”

Feb. 11 & March 10

Every second Saturday, the Albany Civil Rights Institute Freedom Singers, led by original SNCC Freedom Singer Rutha Mae Harris, present oral histories and testimonies from the Albany Movement marches and narrate with Freedom Songs.

Albanycivilrightsinstitute.org

December 12, 2011 -

The B-52s were formed on an October night in 1976 following drinks at an Athens, GA, Chinese restaurant. Naming themselves after Southern slang for exaggerated ‘bouffant” hairdos, the band soon attracted an ardent following, becoming the talk of Athens. Before long they began making trips to New York City for gigs at CBGB’s, their thrift store aesthetic and genre-defying songs electrifying the post-punk underground. A record deal soon followed and their self-titled debut sold more than 500,000 copies on the strength of its first singles, the garage rock party classic “Rock Lobster” and “52 Girls.”

Thirty five years and more than 20 million album sales later, the B-52s remain one of rock music’s most one-of-a-kind and enduring bands. Looking back at band’s pioneering fusions of punk, new wave, and vintage rock, it would be tough to imagine the contemporary musical landscape without Keith Strickland’s matchless guitar stylings and the trademark call-and-response vocals of Fred Schneider, Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson. From groundbreaking songs like “Rock Lobster,” “Dance This Mess Around” and “Private Idaho” to chart-topping hits like “Love Shack” and “Roam” and “Deadbeat Club” to their thrilling reemergence on the pop scene with their 2008 CD Funplex, the B-52s can surely take credit for a body of work that is unique, beloved and timeless.

THE B-52′S 35TH ANNIVERSARY SHOW

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9
8PM

TICKETS ON-SALE FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16TH AT 10AM

Ticket Locations
The Classic Center Box Office, www.ClassicCenter.com or by phone at 706-357-4444

Ticket Prices
$150* / $59.50 / $49.50 / $39.40 plus applicable fees (all seats reserved)
*includes meet & greet with The B-52′s
More Info:

www.Theb52s.com

www.classiccenter.com

www.nationalshows2.com