High Score wins points for originality

By Raul Fernandez
It¹s a rainy Monday night, and I¹m winding my way around the historic Fourth
& Gill neighborhood looking for a house with loud rock music blaring from
its windows. The street is eerily quiet, but there are a couple of people
working under the hood of their car on Lovenia Avenue. I finally break down
and grab my scribbled note to remind myself what address I¹m looking for.
I¹ve gone too far. I circle back around and see the house. As I walk toward
the door I wonder if this is indeed the right place. I was supposed to meet
the band at one of their rehearsal sessions, but I don¹t hear any music. I
look at the address one more time to be sure. As I reach to knock, the door
opens. "We were worried that if we were playing, we wouldn¹t hear you
knock," says Chris Cook, one of two singer-songwriter-guitarists for
Knoxville¹s very own super-group, the High Score.
They are all sitting around watching a documentary special on a cable
network channel.  Chris, Dave Walker (bass) and Robbie Trosper
(guitar/vocals) are all drinking beer on a long, comfy couch. Jason Peters
(drums) sits perched on his recliner downing Arizona Green Tea. They are
watching the story of Michael Larsen. Not a rocumentary on VH1 as you might
expect from a group so grounded in the history of rock < this is better. The
special is on the Game Show Network, and it¹s called Big Bucks: The OPress
Your Luck¹ Scandal. Yep, you guessed it. This is the story of the guy who
managed to win more money than anyone in the history of television on a game
show (through 1984), or to put it another way, he got the high score
($110,237 in case you¹re wondering).
If you're not familiar with the High Score, and I¹m talking about one of
Knoxville¹s finest rock 'n¹ roll ensembles, then maybe you¹ve heard some of
the bands they¹ve been a part of. Jason and Robbie have been playing
together since they were in junior high. They were doing the guitar/drum
thing as Ramblin¹ Roy long before the White Stripes made it acceptable to
mainstream America. Years later, when the V-roys called it quits, Mic
Harrison was looking to form his own band, and he enlisted their help to
form the short-lived, but now legendary Knoxville band, the Faults. Chris
Cook was the frontman for Knoxville¹s premier Southern Rock outfit, Mustard.
Although Walker had no previous band experience on his resume, he has been a
stable fixture in the Knoxville rock scene since moving here in the early
'90s. Together, the four-some create some of the most melodic and inspired
rock ¹n¹ roll in the Southeast. Combining elements of punk, country,
hair-metal and anthemic power-pop, they are a much needed breath of fresh
air to the Knoxville music scene.
After several minutes discussing the Michael Larsen story, we finally get
around to talking about music. It's obvious that everyone in the room
(myself included) is passionate about rock ¹n¹ roll. The conversation
quickly turns into a bitch session in which we all air out our grievances on
the way popular music has little or no credibility anymore. Our biggest
grief is not with the bands that happen to be at the top of the charts, but
rather with the infrastructure, which manages to put those bands at the top.
For instance, on their debut album Sexy Losers [Lynn Point Records] the band
chose to record all the songs at home on their eight-track. Of course, any
band with aspirations of getting radio airplay, even college radio airplay,
has to consider having their initial recordings mastered by a recording
engineer.  So the High Score took their home recordings to Jesse Jones,
recording guru for Nightsong Studios here in Knoxville.
"Some of the stuff that we took into Jesse to mix that we had recorded here
baffled him. Not that it was incredible or anything, but the way we did
certain things< like we recorded an amp in the bathroom with the microphone
in the bathtub< just sounded ridiculous to him," Chris says. The engineer
was so grounded in the idea of how a record was supposed to be made that he
was confounded that anyone would try something new or experimental.
"He freaked out when I told him we used a condenser mic on Chris¹ guitar,"
Robbie continues the story, his voice then changing to a slightly higher
pitch: "Well, why did you do that?  I can tell, now!"  Back to his own
voice:  "We thought it sounded good.  Every guitar tone on the album is
different. That¹s why we did it ourselves. We didn¹t want a producer telling
us You can¹t do that.¹"
Perhaps even more telling is that after Sexy Losers was released it started
to garner favorable reviews, and Jones was surprised.
"I guess our definition of 'making it' is quite different of what the
public¹s definition might be," Chris explains.
The High Score may never have a hit record playing on Extreme Radio, but
that is unimportant.  As Trosper so eloquently puts it, "Making it, is when
you go to record an album, and everyone in the band is happy with the
result.  We achieved that with Sexy Losers."