Steve Wildsmith

Friday is the big day — tickets go on sale for upcoming events at the almost-completed Clayton Center for the Arts, construction of which is wrapping up on the Maryville College campus.

Earlier this week, readers of The Daily Times got a glimpse of the new Steinway pianos in the recital hall; starting Friday, they can begin planning their social calendars around several of the events taking place at the center in the coming months. Those events include:

• Maryville High School Orchestra Valentine’s Day concert with special guest Mark Wagner: 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 14. Tickets are $11 adults in advance/$14 at the door and $6 students.
• Jo Dee Messina: 8 p.m. Friday, March 26. Tickets are $36, $46 and $56.
• Grand opening gala: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 27. Tickets are $20.
• Contigula Brothers recital (benefit for the Adams Foundation, in the center’s Recital Hall): 2 p.m. Sunday, March 28. Tickets are $26 adults/$11 students.
• BANFF Film Festival: 2 p.m. Monday, March 29. Tickets are $10 advance/$12 day of screening.
• Delores Ziegler/John Wesley Wright vocal recital (in the Recital Hall): 8 p.m. Monday, March 29. Tickets are $15.
• Dr. Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys with Cherryholmes: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 29. Tickets are $24.50, $29.50 and $36.
• Ball in the House (five-man R&B vocal group): 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 30. Tickets are $20/$16 students/$11 Maryville College students
• “Our Town,” a production of the Maryville College Department of Theatre (in the center’s FLEX Theatre): Thursday, April 29 thru Sunday, May 2. $7/$5 Maryville College students
• Wood and Strings Puppet Theatre (in the FLEX Theatre): 7:30 p.m. Friday, May 14. $12 adults/$5 MC students

In addition, the Clayton Center for the Arts will serve as a local Tickets Unlimited outlet, allowing visitors to the box office to purchase tickets for most Tickets Unlimited events in the East Tennessee area. For more information, visit the center’s website, call the box office at 981-8590 or visit in person at 502 E. Lamar Alexander Parkway in Maryville. The box office opens for business at 10 a.m. Friday, Feb. 5.

Local actor Bruce McKinnon has a starring role in the upcoming movie on The Lifetime Network called “The Wronged Man,” and there’s also a cameo by local Southern rock outfit The Dixie Werewolves. Daily Times LifeTimes Editor Melanie Tucker wrote a story about it earlier this week (you can read it here), and if you’re interested in seeing the film, you can do so at 7 p.m. Sunday at Two Doors Down, 118 E. Broadway Ave. in downtown Maryville. (Jeff Breazeale, guitarist/singer for the Werewolves, co-owns the bar.)

It’s being billed as the “local premiere” of the film, and since McKinnon and the Werewolves will be in attendance, it’s as fancy of a red carpet event as you’ll find around these parts.

Admission is free; the film will screen at 8 p.m. Food will be provided as well, but leave the kids at home — Two Doors Down is a smoking facility, so it’s 21 and older only. Call 980-7771 for more information.

Two Doors Down online: Click here

Dixie Werewolves online: Click here

In case you missed it, we’re breaking down the conversations we had in last Friday’s edition of Weekend with various movers and shakers in the local entertainment scene to give you an idea of how entertainment in 2010 is shaping up. Today: Big Ears Festival 2010, a conversation with AC Entertainment founder/CEO Ashley Capps.

Despite his profile as one of the brainchilds behind Bonnaroo and the guy who gave his initials to East Tennessee entertainment corporation AC Entertainment, it’s doubtful even Ashley Capps could have convinced music writers at publications like The New York Times or Pitchfork that an avant garde music festival held in his hometown would be a massive success.

So he didn’t set out to do so. He just planned his first Big Ears Festival, held last February, and let fate take care of the rest.

As it turns out, the event was more successful than even Capps could have hoped — and if you look at his track record, the guy has an uncanny knack for calling these things. Simply pulling it off was a coup; having it so well-received by fans, artists and the media has made anticipation and buzz for Big Ears 2010 even bigger.

“The first Big Ears was really an idea I had been thinking about and contemplating for several years,” Capps told The Daily Times during a recent interview. “The big excitement was finally launching it in the first place after having thought about it and talked about it for such a long time. And from the artists and the audiences that attend, it was very affirming and gave us a lot of fuel for continuing to develop the concept and bring it up to another level for 2010.”

Already, the initial lineup has been announced — legendary Minimalist composer Terry Riley was introduced as the artist-in-residence for this years festival (scheduled for March 26-28 at various venues in downtown Knoxville), and earlier this month, the big names were rolled out: Vampire Weekend, Joanna Newsom, St. Vincent, Andrew W.K., The Ex, Gang Gang Dance, Clogs, 802 Tour (Nico Muhly/Doveman/Sam Amidon with Nadia Sirota), The xx, Javelin, DJ/Rupture (solo), DJ/Rupture and Andy Moor, My Brightest Diamond, the Calder Quartet, Gyan Riley and jj.

For some, it was a surprise; last year’s focus on avant garde music was groundbreaking, but this year’s talent seems to have more of a pop element. Given that it’s likely Big Ears will be a part of the East Tennessee entertainment scene for years to come, get used to such changes, Capps said.

“It was never the intention of Big Ears to create a strictly avant garde music festival,” he said. “That doesn’t interest me that much. I love avant garde music, but the principle was to bring that world together with other musical worlds. From the beginning, the limitless ideas has been a beautifl thing to me, and I think that’s been part of the success. Who knows? It may not always be an annual event; I can imagine it happening several weekends a year, each having a different character and focus to it.

“(In 2009), we had too many options. We had a wealth of possibilities, and ultimately you have to make decisions about what you feel works and what you feel might work better … in a slightly different context, and so forth and so on. I like improvisation, but you always start with a basic theme. This year, we have two — Terry Riley, and the secondary theme is taking some of that influence he’s had in the world of pop music and exploring some of those connections, many of which may not be obvious to anyone except me.”

Making those sorts of connections — whether they’re music or business-related — has made Capps the success that he is. Not only does his company book and manage both The Tennessee Theatre and The Bijou Theatre in downtown Knoxville, it contributes booking to other venues (such as The Valarium), organizes such events as Bonnaroo and Sundown in the City and has now moved into the realm of artist management, taking on two particularly talented clients — ukulele phenom Julia Nunes, and banjo goddess Abigail Washburn.

His radar for both the not-so-obvious is what makes Big Ears 2010 so appealing — wondering how it will work within the confines of the Big Ears concept is intriguing. Add to that the addition of a musician like Andrew W.K. — known by casual fans for such hits as “Party Hard” — and it gets even more interesting. Capps, however, sees it as a gleeful sort of opportunity to throw the Big Ears hipsters who fawned over a group like Antony and the Johnsons at last year’s festival a curveball … to in fact force them outside of their comfort zone, should they choose to participate again this year.

“To what extent I was aware of him, I put him in the box of being a guy who does party music,” Capps said. “But when I started talking to a string quartet about coming to perform Terry Riley’s music, which they’ve been doing for years, they started talking about all of these projects they were doing, and one was with Andrew W.K. I had heard about the tour they did together, and I started checking out the YouTube video and talking to Andrew’s manager, and I myself became aware that this is an amazing artist who’s pushing himself on a number of different fronts.

“To me, it’s completely consistent in keeping with what the Big Ears vision is. The last thing in the world I want is for Big Ears to become a predictable thing. It’s extremely important for me that it’s full of surprises.”

And if it gives Knoxville a little share of the limelight, showcasing East Tennessee as a place where the unusual and the magical can happen alongside the traditional, then all the better. Obviously, Capps and his crew don’t have to put on Big Ears in East Tennessee — if they can take several hundred acres of Middle Tennessee farmland and turn it into Bonnaroo, they could probably put on Big Ears in just about any city. But it works, and Capps is glad of that.

“There’s a certain assumption by some people that it’s our homebase and where we are, and there might be a little bit of truth to that, but I really believe that Knoxville is a fabulous place to do it,” he said. “Part of that has to do with the way Knoxville’s downtown has rebounded and become an exciting place to be. There’s a tremendous amount of character to it — so many historic buildings and downtown businesses that are unique, and if you add that to the fact that we have these fantastic venues all within walking distance of one another, it’s really easy to figure out. We chose Knoxville because of that infrastructure.

“I was pleasantly surprised by how much the press and so many of the artists and fans have embraced Knoxville. One of the artists from last year’s festival is planning to move here because he really enjoyed the experience so much.”

Finally … “Rebel Scum” gets its due.

That kick-ass, long-in-the-works documentary about Knoxville band The Dirty Works, which has been roughly five years in the making, now has a local screening date — Saturday, Jan. 16 at Patrick Sullivan’s Saloon, 100 N. Central St. in Knoxville’s Old City. No word on an exact time or whether there will be an admission charge, but we’ll let you know as soon as we know.

In the meantime, the band is ramping up for a busy 2010, frontman Christopher Scum tells us: “We have the movie premiering in several cities, we have the 7 song EP called ‘Get Wrecked’ coming out, and I will have a brutally honest CD coming out by spring called ‘Tracks,’” he said. “It’s gonna have eight or 10 new songs on it, and then I’m gonna put some old stuff (maybe never before released) on there; I’m thinking about 18-20 songs.”

The last time we wrote about the documentary, he described it as thus: “We just got in the van, went to our gigs across the South and it all got captured on film. Now they’re going to put it in some documentary form. It could be great, or I could hate it, I don’t know.”

Check out some Dirty Works/Scum goodness:

The “Rebel Scum” trailer

“Get Wrecked” video

Download the song “Fifty Acres,” by Christopher Scum: Right-click here (choose “Save Link As” or “Save Target As”)
Christopher Scum on Myspace: Click here

Download the song “Wife Beater,” by The Dirty Works: Right-click here (choose “Save Target As” or “Save Link As”)
Buy “Biscuits and Liquor” by The Dirty Works: Click here

Read a July interview we did with Scum

It sounds like the set-up for a righteous punchline — a comedian, a dancing hillbilly from West Virginia and a jack-of-all-trades from Blount County walk down the red carpet at a Los Angeles film premiere …

The thing is, it’s part of Robb “Storm” Taylor’s life — and now the Blount County native is taking his Hollywood connections and brushes with fame and turning it into a new publication that debuted last week under the title of One Eighty Magazine. It’s a free, monthly newspaper-style magazine that addresses various facets of popular culture that Taylor finds intriguing — and it’s all done out of his home on Sevierville Road.

“If something like Metro Pulse or The Daily Times are legitimate news sources — current, updated with what’s going on and what’s timely — I want to be the illegitimate news source,” Taylor told me this week. “I want it to be a true culture magazine — I don’t want to involve politics or religion, because then you’re going to segregate part of your audience and get slammed. I didn’t go to school for journalism, so I’m going to write about whatever’s cool — choppers or skateboarding or golf or tattooing or whatever.

“These are all things that people have an interest in. It was an idea that I tossed around for a month and put together in a month — so basically, it was a two-month process, just me and a designer. And for the first issue, I’m pretty happy with it. I’m thinking about making the next one lemon-scented so it’s better for lining kitty boxes around town.”

Irreverent, good-natured, funny — these are all traits that have made Taylor a local celebrity. Graduating from Heritage High School in 1985 and attending the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, his first enterprise was as part-owner of The Underground, a dance club where he served as deejay. During that time, he befriended P.J. Clapp, a South-Doyle high graduate who would go on to stardom as Johnny Knoxville.

From there, he did some traveling with and production work for the MTV show that Knoxville made famous — “Jackass.” He had an idea for his own program, and after returning to Maryville to work in real estate and development, his idea was turned into a program on the Turner South network. “Yokel” ran for a season before Fox acquired Turner South and slowly killed the network.

From there, Taylor hit up his old pal Knoxville to assist in making a documentary on Jesco White, the famous “dancing outlaw” of West Virginia. First featured in a PBS documentary in 1991, White grew to — and into — something of a rural legend: a hard-living, hard-drinking backwoods hillbilly who carries on the tradition of mountain dancing, a mix of clog and tap that’s native to Appalachia. Taylor’s documentary — “The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia” — raised White’s profile even more, and led to the aforementioned red carpet incident.

“That was insane,” said Taylor, who’s working on a distribution deal to take the documentary to home video, in addition with negotiating with Viacom — MTV’s parent company — for a network airing. He also continues to shop it around at film festivals around the country.

“At the LA Film Festival, Mike Judge (creator of “Beavis and Butt-head” and “King of the Hill”) came over to the hotel, and we were hanging out with Johnny Knoxville,” Taylor said. “We had some beers, but when we realized we were late for the red carpet (premiere), we were all freaking out. Jesco didn’t want to waste a 12-pack, so he asked me to carry his beer down the red carpet. I didn’t realize he put an open container of Miller Lite in there, so here I am walking down the red carpet, dripping beer.”

Not everyone, however, felt that the documentary is an accomplishment — at a question-and-answer session at an independent film festival in Memphis, one audience member expressed shock and dismay at certain scenes in the documentary and asked why the audience members seemed to find it funny.

“The reality is that some things are so harsh and absurd that you have to laugh at it,” Taylor said. “We didn’t set out to throw our opinions out there or judge these people; it’s a documentary, so we show them for who they are. People either get it or don’t; there’s no real broad in-between. I happen to get it and like it.

“When you do mess with culture, you’ve got to go in with your guard up, because you’re going to be hit. This guy kept going on and on, but after a while, the audience was defending us — turning around and yelling at this guy, and because of the hype, they gave us another screening at that festival.”

White, he added, makes for a much more fascinating celebrity than the folks with whom he’s rubbed shoulders in Hollywood. That’s one reason he’s pitching a Jesco White reality/variety show — a “weird, anything-goes, low-budget kind of thing,” he said. It’s also one of the reasons he’s content to remain right here in Blount County, away from the trappings of Hollywood and the faux sincerity that rings hollow.

But he doesn’t mind making a phone call once in a while, calling in a few favors for the sake of whatever project upon which he happens to be working. Right now, it’s One Eighty Magazine — and while he only has a single issue under his belt, he’s already planning for what the next several will contain.

“The celebrity lifestyle is cool, but it’s not for me,” he said. “I’ve had the good fortune of meeting some celebrities in the past few years, but they’re not paying my light bill, so they were never really on the top of my priority list. But with this, maybe I can get them to help me do something.

“We’ve got some pretty good interviews coming up (including one with John Basedow, the square-jawed purveyor of the “Fitness Made Simple” video series). We’re breaking it down into three categories — Celebrity, Under-the-Radar and ‘Shaking the Common Hand.’ This past issue was a little too male-heavy, but we hope to change that, too — our food critic is female, and we’re going to do a perfume test for an upcoming issue.”

Check out Storm’s shout-out on the “Jackass World” website, as well as the Facebook page for One Eighty Magazine.

The Knox County Public Library posted the lineup for its “Movies on Market Square” series today, and on the heels of that comes news of films that will be shown at “The Shed” at Smoky Mountain Harley-Davidson, 1820 W. Lamar Alexander Parkway in Maryville. After the final “Shed” performance of the year — on Halloween night, by Alice Cooper tribute act Mr. Nice Guy and local vixens White Lightnin’ Burlesque — “The Shed” will show its first ride-in movie at 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 7. Here’s what it says on the venue’s Myspace site: Featuring the movie “Easy Rider.” Free popcorn and hot chocolate. Bike Parking will be arranged under The Shed. Bring a blanket to get comfy on next to your bike.

Admission, by the way, is free.

Here’s the lineup for “Movies on Market Square” as well:

• Field of Dreams (PG) on September 11
• The Goonies (PG) on September 18
• Kung Fu Panda (PG) on September 25
• Casablanca (PG) on October 2
• Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (G) on October 9
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (PG 13) on October 16

The films are free to attend and begin around 8:30 p.m.

If you keep up with our local music scene column “East Tennessee Dirt,” then you’ve read reference to a film called “The Revenant” by Maryville College alum Daniel Coy, also a member of local lo-fi/indie-Americana outfit Deek Hoi. The band, which included a few Maryville College students in the lineup, was known as Swayze — aka, “The Pilot Light’s House Band” — during its heyday.

Anyway, over the past year, Coy has worked on The Revenant” — a film he describes as “the blood-soaked true story of the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park” and starring several local musicians and artists, including Eric Lee (of Double Muslims), Jason Boardman (owner of The Pilot Light), local troubadour Cain Blanchard, Elizabeth Wright (editor of the now-defunct Knoxville Voice), Sarah Bush (founder of Slo Foods Knoxville). Although it was produced by John Ferguson of The Apples in Stereo, Coy wrote and directed it in the style of the old Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns, and in March it was screened at Club Catalyst in Knoxville’s Old City as part of an artists community showcase.

Back then, Coy told us that “the movie has a ton of Maryville College grads. It was co-written with Sara Baker; stars Rusty Kirby and Sarah Bush; Jen Bradley (of Deek Hoi) helped with special effects; and Jen Rock helped with voice overs. We all went to school together.” As it turns out, however, “The Revenant” isn’t the only film Coy’s been working on. He recently sent us a link to the YouTube trailer for his most recent short film — a bizarre-looking spectacle called “Late American History,” a short film that appears to blend elements of The Coen Brothers with “The Road Warrior.” Check out the trailer here, or go listen to Deek Hoi online.