Punk was the reformation of the canon of rock and roll. If Joe Strummer is a singer, then who can't be? With a head full of halfcocked ideas, a recovering but busted heart and just enough concentration to get them onto paper, my songbook started filling up. 

Kevin Crothers and I became musical compatriots a few years earlier. I was a guitar player in my cousin's Christian band all through high school. Kevin saw us play one night and called up to say, "you don't look like you belong in that band." We were thick as fiddlers in hell after that.

We played with song ideas in at his and my Mom & Dad's house, using 2 track recorders, Mattel drum machines, and finally his nice Cutec 4 track. To me those recordings were the Home Boys.

When a roommate ran off unexpectedly, I had extra space in my Fort Sanders Manor apartment. We set up the Cutec and I laid out of class. I couldn't have been more excited. My songs, at the time, seemed like the most important thing I knew.

So with this full-on enthusiasm, I persuaded two friends to join us. Kevin played bass thud. David Tumblin played drums in some of the punk bands from the Bundulee's era and was begged into mine. Steven Wicks played a nimblequick and punchy guitar that was fluid and filling. . . I owe these guys a lot for cramming so much talent into the playing my songs.

At about our third practice, Kevin recorded a song and drove it straight to WUTK. We played it right then and there -woohoo. We played about four shows in interesting long gone venues – Vic n' Bills Rock and Roll Deli, the Buttonwood downtown and a field in Benton, Tennessee.

This whole thing lasted about six months as Tumblin and I split for out of state schools. Kevin was quickly scarfed up by the popular dancemanic band, Sea Seven States. Awfully Anglo formed with Steven Wicks in that fine three-piece outfit.

In the month before we left the Home Boys behind, we recorded our original songs. From the KC's Cutec to cassette tape in 1985 to mp3's nearly twenty five years later, here are the Home Boys. - Scott Carpenter. 

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