Monday, 9/24/07

Joie Todd didn't like the way this adulthood thing seemed to be impacting rock 'n' roll music.

"People don't want to wait until midnight to see a show in some smoky club," said Todd, who organized the Mucklewain festival in an attempt to battle the decline of the music he loves. "I've watched so many artists not getting the exposure they deserve. It's frustrating that classic rock 'n' roll stuff seems to be fading, and fading fast. I wanted to bring some authenticity back and re-energize people."

Last year, Todd worked to put on the first Mucklewain Southern Festival. He held it in East Tennessee, though many of the acts were based in Nashville. This year, the festival's second edition takes place Friday and Saturday in Pinewood, Tenn., about 45 west of Nashville. The lineup includes literate rock 'n' roll from Nashville-based performers Bobby Bare, Jr., Todd Snider, Webb Wilder, Trent Summar and Will Hoge, as well as sets from Lucero (Memphis), Drivin n Cryin (Atlanta) and other regional rock heroes.

"It's going to be a nice, old-school rock festival vibe, like a Southern rock festival from 1976," said Todd, who plays in Nashville band Les Honky More Tonkies. "There's a Southern thread running through everybody that's playing, but that doesn't mean there's going to be Confederate flags flying around all over the place or anything like that. I've always like outdoor festivals and gatherings where people of similar interests get together."

In addition to the rock 'n' roll, there'll be a quieter "songwriter stage," food booths, cheap beer, art tents and other attractions. While last year's event took place over one day and night, Todd has added a Friday evening component for the Pinewood festival.

"We're trying to grow it," Todd said. "Last year, people were rolling in on Friday night to camp. This year, we'll get it started on Friday at 5 p.m., have music into the night and then fire back up at 11 a.m. on Saturday. The idea of this is, 'Let's get out in the country and see a bunch of bands you probably haven't had time to pay attention to in the last five years, and away from it all.' Pinewood is 15 minutes from everything, which isn't bad as far as getting back to the hotel. But then again, it's 15 minutes away from everything. Which can be nice."

NO DEPRESSION

Todd Snider, Drivin' 'N' Cryin', Bare Jr. headline Mucklewain fest
Posted by Grant on September 13, 2007 12:59 PM

No, we don't know what a Mucklewain is. But festival organizer Joie Todd seems convinced that the southern thing needs an annual gathering of the clan and he's given that name to his celebration of southern music, art, and culture.

And so the second annual Mucklewain festival is schedule for September 28-29, upgraded from one day to two, and moved to Pinewood, Tennessee, 45 miles west of Nashville, four miles (it says) off I-40.

Among the 50 performing artists are (in absolutely no order) Lucero, Garrison Starr, Cory Branan, Amy LaVere, Will Hoge, Bobby Bare Jr., Scott Miller & the Commonwealth, Mic Harrison & the High Score (anybody see a V-Roys encore in the making?), Todd Snider, the reunited Blue Mountain, and Drivin' N' Cryin', Webb Wilder, Jason Isbell, Malcolm Holcombe, Will Hoge, Outformation, Trent Summer & The New Row Mob, Dash Rip Rock, and rogue Tennessean music critic Peter Cooper.

Advance tickets are $48 for two days of camping and music ($60 day of the show).

For more information: www.mucklewain.com. And turn it up.

nodepression.net

Sara Schwabe: Magical Mucklewain Memories

There's just something about live music in wide open spaces that makes people feel good.
There's also something about seeing 33 fantastic musical acts for thirty bucks that makes you feel a little guilty. Last Saturday's Mucklewain Southern American Rock Festival brought several thousand people all the way out to Whicker Park, beautifully situated in the middle of nowhere — I mean, Harriman.

When the day was over, the crowds made their way back to the buses--the long, winding path lit only by the intermittent 4-wheeler headlight, by LCD screens on cell-phones or by someone's lighter. Once back at the parking lot/campground, one could hear strains of Scott Miller emanating from the iPods of campers who just weren't ready to be done with the magic of Mucklewain.

For their sake, and the sake of music lovers everywhere, let's hope that this Brigadoon of music festivals will show itself again next summer.

www.knoxville520.com

August 24, 2006

Muckletastic

It was a hot, steamy East Tennessee Saturday and there was no better place to be than sitting on a hay bale, eating smoked chicken wings, drinking $2 beers and letting an uninterrupted wall of wonderful Southern music wash over you. It was the inaugural MUCKLEWAIN, brainchild of Nashville’s JOIE TODD, and, though it might not have smashed attendance records, everyone there seemed to be having a grand ole time. We arrived early in the afternoon, crested the hill and looked down upon a small valley with a stage on either end. The farther down the hill you went, the stronger the sound became, and by the time we were standing in front of SOUTHERN BITCH, the grassy hills had created a perfect acoustic bowl, resulting in the best outdoor sound we’ve heard all summer. There were signs of growing pains elsewhere—our laminate was a vendor pass with a sticker that said press stuck on the front—but all of that was part of this fledgling festival’s down-home charm. There was no dearth of Nashville flavor—THE KATIES’ grungy, melodic rock was a standout. Perhaps the most wonderful, unexpected thing about Mucklewain, and its off-the-beaten path locale, happened when the sun went down—it was dark, like middle-of-nowhere-Blair-witch dark. The stages were like signal fires in the rapidly cooling evening and we felt a wave of nostalgia, a sensory experience that was so essentially summer—the hum of the cicadas, the smell of wet grass and a feeling of rightness so rare in this world. (What? The Spin can’t have feelings?) Headliner STEVE EARLE played solo, while TODD SNIDER’s stage boasted a packed house, including fellow Nashvillians TOMMY WOMACK and WILL KIMBROUGH. By the time LUCERO took the stage at 11:30 that night, the cheap beer and heat seemed to have sapped the crowd a bit, but the boys from Memphis played a tight, rugged set that must have carried for miles. By the end of the night, the rain had held off and the heat had broken. We stumbled through the dark back to our car, already looking forward to next year.

www.nashvillescene.com

Mucklewain Festival Celebrates Southern American Rock
By: Craig Shelburne

HARRIMAN, Tenn. -- Mucklewain is a name that fans of the current rock scene in the South should know. Several thousand agreeable people converged on Whicker Park near here on Saturday (Aug. 19) for a full day of mostly rock music under mostly clear
skies and plenty of good vibes all around.

Steve Earle. Photo by Brian Tipton

www.cmt.com

August 17, 2006

Benevolent Tornado
An unlikely fellow plans a Southern rock festival
by Richard Lloyd

Joie Todd. Photo by Eric England

Joie Todd Kerns worries that his persona—untamed hair, cutoff jean shorts, sleeveless T-shirts and leather vest, the thick East Tennessee accent and stream-of-consciousness speech pattern—undermines him with the “suit-and-tie guys” he has to deal with for things like insurance and beer licensing, interactions he has little taste for. “It’s definitely the shit I don’t like,” he says. “That shit ain’t fun.” And a month away, it’s the shit that can still wreck his vision for Mucklewain, the upcoming 30-act Southern music festival that Kerns has been organizing for months.

It’s over 100 degrees in the mid-July sun as the Van of the Great Green Jesus rolls through Memphis with the windows down. The van, which owes its nickname to the green-robed Savior bobblehead atop the dashboard, usually ferries the Nashville bar band Les Honky, More Tonkies to dates throughout the Southeast. As usual, Les Honky frontman Johnny Mark Miller is at the wheel, with drummer Kerns riding shotgun. Both 30, the pair’s friendship extends back to adolescence in Kingsport. The rest of the band is absent, but the point of this trip is not a gig; it’s a search for promotional opportunities. The air conditioning cuts the van’s gas mileage in half—on Mucklewain’s shoestring budget, conditioned air is a luxury they can’t afford.

Kerns is the brain, not to mention the tears and, especially today, the sweat behind the festival. Billed as a celebration of Southern music, art and culture, the concept took shape during late-night conversations in this very van. From such humble origins emerges the summer’s most unlikely event, with a lineup including regional favorites Steve Earle, Allison Moorer, Lucero, American Minor, Todd Snider, Will Hoge, Garrison Starr and others.

In a world of music festivals corrupted by heavy-handed corporate sponsorship and ruined by greedy promoters, Mucklewain may be just the antidote. It’s hard to imagine a more regionally embedded enterprise—Kerns has even kept the concessions specific to the Southeast, selling treats like Wickles Pickles and MoonPies, washed down by RC Cola and Sun Drop.

The festival leapt toward becoming a reality last winter when Chuck Whicker, a musician and longtime friend of the Kerns family, volunteered his farm in Harriman (half an hour from Knoxville) and some seed money. As the lineup filled in and the date drew nearer, others, including BMI and Gibson Guitars, have come on board with modest support.

Kerns estimates the makeshift venue’s capacity at 10,000, though he would be thrilled to draw half as many. Tickets are $30 to $45, with limited free camping space on-site. The goal of 5,000 tickets sold would put the show in the black, and probably ensure another round next year. The problem is getting the word out.

With a budget for just a skeleton print and radio campaign, Kerns and Miller have taken to the ’Net and the streets. There’s the inevitable MySpace page, but perhaps more important is old-fashioned street promotion—stumping in small and midsized cities throughout the region. On this sweltering July day, just inside a month shy of the festival date, the boys hit Memphis in the afternoon and then press on to Oxford, Miss., by evening. And of course, back home that night—there’s no money for a hotel room, and the boys need to be in Harriman working on the site the next day.

Standing a lanky 6-foot-5, with tangled blond hair well past his shoulders, Kerns makes an impression. He was voted friendliest in his Kingsport High School class, and one can imagine that if a similar honor were conferred in Nashville today, he’d garner a significant number of votes. The sheer force of his personality has propelled Mucklewain from the beginning. Nashville singer-songwriter and festival artist Will Kimbrough calls him “Hurricane Joie.” “I mean in a good way,” says Kimbrough. “He’s like a benevolent tornado. You know, it takes a dynamo to do this, and that’s Joie Todd.”

The hurricane blew into Nashville in ’95 and enrolled at Belmont to study music business. Showing his penchant for bucking long odds, Kerns walked onto Belmont’s powerhouse basketball squad despite having failed to crack the starting lineup of his high school team. Although he played sparingly as a Bruin, he was on the roster of Belmont’s NAIA Final Four team.

After graduation, Kerns parlayed an internship into a full-time—if low-paying—job at Steve Earle’s E-Squared label, tour-managing artists like Starr and The Derailers. But by 2003, he’d burned out. By 2005, Kerns was odd-jobbing it, managing the West Nashville institution Bobbie’s Dairy Dip, pulling shifts at East Nashville’s 3 Crow Bar and Red Wagon Café, and playing Les Honky shows. He was also fomenting his dream of a showcase for the Southeast’s underexposed Southern rock scene. But Mucklewain is about more than just the music for Kerns. It’s a testament both to his deep love for the region of his birth, and to his ambivalence about the South’s complicated political and cultural legacy.

Mucklewain’s eccentric name originates in East Tennessee lore, the story of Tunis Mucklewain, a melungeon patriarch who posed as a Native American spy during the Revolutionary War. Little known outside the region, the melungeon are a clannish, reclusive band of mixed-race settlers in Appalachia whose origins are undetermined, as much the stuff of legend as anthropological fact. “Everyone knows about the melungeon where we grew up,” Miller says, describing their exotic traits (extra fingers and rows of teeth) and bogeyman status for East Tennessee kids.

The regional and mythic elements of the melungeon are what attracted Kerns to the name: “Melungeon is this kind of hidden Southern cult thing, very specific to East Tennessee…. Mucklewain has just the perfect hillbilly ring to it to signify what [the festival] is about,” he says.

Bonnaroo is Cajun slang for “a really good time,” while Lollapalooza is an anachronistic term for “something outstanding or unusual” that Perry Farrell first heard on a “Three Stooges” short. Compared to these charming but trivial monikers, Mucklewain has a darker and more mysterious ring. Like Kerns says, it’s a regional thing, though it’s not really part of Appalachia’s “official” history—it’s more underground and obscure.

And so is the festival, which tells a different story about the region and Southern rock music than the usual connotations of “Free Bird” or of crude red-state cultural stereotyping. Kerns doesn’t entirely reject the legacy of Muscle Shoals, but Mucklewain’s version of Southern rock owes more to R.E.M., Blue Mountain and Jason & the Scorchers (whose former leader, Jason Ringenberg, is on the Mucklewain bill). And unlike the reactionary racial politics of Lynyrd Skynyrd or The Charlie Daniels Band, the acts in this festival lean decidedly left, from well-known death penalty opponent Earle to Nashville favorite Kimbrough, whose most recent album, Americanitis, catalogs his discontent with corporate greed, religious dogmatism and presidential mendacity. While Kerns insists that politics weren’t part of his agenda in setting the lineup, he concedes, “It does seem to be a group of fairly like-minded people.”

And here, on the road, visiting indie record stores, head shops, hip cafés and rock clubs (all in impressively abundant supply in Memphis and Oxford), Kerns is in his element, and having fun. At each stop, the clerks, managers and baristas he meets are taken in by his effusive pitch, and many share both his enthusiasm and encyclopedic knowledge of the genre. He is careful at each stop to highlight bands with local ties. In Memphis that means Lucero, Todd Snider and Cory Branan. In Oxford, Cary Hudson (of the disbanded Blue Mountain) and Starr.

Around twilight in Memphis, he meets up with Branan at the HiTone, where Branan’s got a gig later, and they take a break from the journey, sipping PBRs in an otherwise deserted club. But Kerns and Miller are on a mission. Kerns is determined to hang a poster in Oxford’s famous Square Books, reflecting his intention that Mucklewain be seen as “a literate Southern rock festival,” (The website, mucklewain.com, even has a recommended reading list.) Oxford turns out to be well worth the trip, and not just for the freshly made chocolate chip cookies at the bookstore, as the storied college town is filled with clubs that nurture Mucklewain-style Southern rock.

They arrive back in Nashville at 5 a.m., and are back on the road by early afternoon. This pace will continue, as they build the stages, hand-cut bookmarks and fliers, meet with the Harriman beer board (by press time, they were approved for a one-day license) and continue the promoting, anxiously counting down to Saturday when the fruits of their labor will at last be revealed, on Tunis Mucklewain’s birthday.

The Tennessean
Friday, 08/18/06

Muckle-fest brings Southern rock buddies to Eaststate farm
By JASON MOON WILKINS

Allison Moorer will appear in Harriman, Tenn., at Mucklewain Festival, which also features her husband, Steve Earle.

To Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo, Bumbershoot and all the other oddly named music festivals across America, you can now add the distinctly Southern-sounding Mucklewain. (I think I have a cousin named Mucklewain. . . .)

This one isn't named after a lollipop or a vague neo-hippie notion. Mucklewain is the chosen moniker for what the organizers are calling a ''Literate Southern Rock'' festival. The festival even comes complete with its own co-creator/character, the terrifically Southern Joie Todd Kerns, who, in his still young career, has worked in many areas of the music industry and with several of the artists performing, such as Garrison Starr, Scott Miller and Steve Earle. It's Kerns' and co-founder and Les Honky More Tonkies bandmate Johnny Mark Miller's boundless enthusiasm for underexposed Southern rock bands and Southern singer-songwriters that helped turn a random thought into a daylong event that has already attracted international attention.

''It kind of came together in my head last September,'' Kerns says. ''We were talking about all these touring bands across the Southeast, and about how the touring world is down, and it's just tough in the clubs these days. We thought, well, why don't we do a festival with all these bands? I started kicking around the idea more and more, and to be honest with you, after about two days I was encompassed in it.''

At first, the only criteria for artists, according to Kerns, were that they be ''exclusively Southern and rock and current and original,'' but the palette expanded a bit as the lineup took shape.
''The Americana thing has kind of bled into it, which is fine, but when it's all said and done, I want to keep it a rock-minded thing,'' Kerns says. ''No jam bands. At all. I've been working on it 10 or 11 months, but it feels like I've been working on it for 10 or 11 years, since my days at E Squared Records working with the V Roys and Steve (Earle).''

With the idea still in its infancy, Kerns and Miller realized they needed a few key things to make it happen: ''A headliner, a date and a place to have it.'' The place he found is a farm in East Tennessee owned by ''a musician and music-lover friend who just liked the concept of the festival.''

Kerns originally wanted to find a location closer to Atlanta and to hold the event this spring, but things fell into place in a slightly different fashion. One part that did work out the way he wanted was recruiting his old pal Steve Earle. His presence attracted other artists, and soon the lineup took shape with a list that reads like a who's who of Southeastern touring artists of the past 15 years. Some names are a little less well-known than others, but that was Kerns' intention.

''I'm not trying to do Bonnaroo,'' he says. ''I've been trying to keep it realistic along the way. To make it big enough, but small enough. There's only 10,000 tickets available.''

GoTricities.com

Impressive music lineup iniates Mucklewain festival
By staff report

Joie Todd Kerns and Johnny Mark Miller of Les Honky More Tonkies

Q: What's a Mucklewain?

A: It's a well-stocked music festival, birthed by two guys from Kingsport
They’ve anchored the rock ‘n’ roll band Les Honky More Tonkies for nearly eight years. Now, Kingsport natives Joie Todd Kerns and Johnny Mark Miller are taking their partnership into a new area: festival promoters. The Nashville-based duo is the brains behind Mucklewain, a one-day music festival to be held Saturday, Aug. 19 at Whicker Park in Harriman, Tenn, about 30 minutes west of Knoxville.

Beginning at noon on that day, music will be heard continuously from two stages.
The lineup features a stellar mix of established and newer acts from the rock ‘n’ roll end of the Americana music spectrum.Among the 30 acts slated to perform are Steve Earle, Allison Moorer, Todd Snider, Scott Miller, Jason Ringenberg, the Yayhoos, Tommy Womack and Will Kimbrough. In booking the event, Kerns made a conscious decision to focus on rock ‘n’ roll acts from the South.

“It’s an underexposed rock ‘n’ roll scene,” said Kerns, a Dobyns-Bennett High School graduate. “A lot of the artists have been calling it a reunion or a gathering. We just wanted a day where a lot of like-minded people can get together and enjoy some music in the mountains of East Tennessee.”

By doing so, Mucklewain is giving voice to hard-working, quality artists who seldom receive mainstream radio airplay.

“These guys have been touring their butts off for years and years,” said Miller, a Sullivan South grad. “Whether they’re playing for five people or 500, they play just as hard. It’s a lot of great bands, just a small sampling. There’s tons of others all over the country.”

In planning the festival, Miller and Kerns vowed to keep consumer costs down. Tickets are $30 in advance and $45 the day of the festival. And while camping is available, there will be no camping or parking fees for Mucklewain attendees.

“A lot of these festivals nickel and dime people to death with six dollar beers and stuff like that,” Miller said. “We won’t be doing that. This is a working man’s festival.” The idea originated last fall while Les Honky More Tonkies was on the road, lamenting how their rock ‘n’ roll peers received little in the way of radio airplay.

“We were talking about how there was no real outlet for these bands and their kind of music,” Miller said. “Joie was like, ‘Somebody ought to do something.” And I said, ‘Well, why don’t you?’ So he took the ball and ran with it.”

A former employee of Earle’s E-Squared label, Kerns was soon calling various musicians to gauge their interest. The response was overwhelmingly in favor of such an event, leading Kerns to seek sponsors and a place to hold the festival. For the latter he settled on Whicker Park, an enclosed farm space located 35 miles west of Knoxville.

“With Nashville and Knoxville being my two major hubs, I wanted to keep it closer to Knoxville,” Kerns said. “We also wanted to draw from North and South Carolina and Atlanta. It turned out to be a perfect location.”

The festival takes its name from Tunis Mucklewain, a Revolutionary War-era Melungeon who posed as an Indian to spy on the British.

With radio playlists getting tighter and tighter, Kerns hopes the festival can help artists infiltrate the consciousness of music fans throughout the South.

“You could take all these redneck kids that love Kenny Chesney, put them in a room and play them a mix tape of about half the bands at Mucklewain, and they would really, really like it,” Kerns said. “These artists are just stubborn Southern guys who really like rock ‘n’ roll.”

More:

• metropulse.com
• bmi.com
• wbir.com
• cmt.com/news
• thedailytimes.com (Maryville, TN)
• wutkradio.com
• thedailytimes.com (Allison Moorer)
• Birmingham Steve Is Sparky Blog