when i was 19, i moved to knoxville, tennessee from savannah, georgia. the move itself was a personal defeat; knoxville was only a hundred miles from my hometown and was as the destination everyone in kingsport had in mind when they declared, “fuck this shithole one-horse town. i’m movin’ to the city.” it was completely expected.

just a year and a half earlier i’d proclaimed to my entire senior class that i expected to be living in berlin by my thirtieth birthday. savannah had an expensive art school, and that was what sent me packing back to knoxville with my tail between my legs. i could afford school in knoxville. it was nothing like berlin. embarrassing.

but knoxville did have something in common with berlin, and i found it. my best friend, ana, took me to a beat up little neighborhood on the edge of the city my first night in town. it was a weird little crossroads where trains still ran, a shipping neighborhood that had died about forty years earlier when the interstates were built through tennessee. there was a bridge leading down into it from knoxville’s gutted, burned out downtown shopping district from the sixties. going there felt like going to a dead end, a really scary one. everyone called the place the old city, because it was a sad old reminder of how busy knoxville had been before the railways had died and shipping routes passed the city by. it was a little black tumor, coated in soot, lit by the occasional train headlamp, and dead silent except for the occasional shrieking punctuation of an engine’s whistle.

near the central intersection was a three-story brick building, filmed in ash, hunched like a troll over the street. all the local hipsters went there almost every night. the music was fantastic. you could get a DJ gig there if you could prove you could scare the shit out of the crowd when they made requests. people would show up, dressed in high rock drag: black leather and denim, little betsey johnson dresses, white hanes t-shirts and houndstooth wool tights, outrageously expensive (and ridiculously stacked) fluevog platforms, cutoff long johns with the knees blown out under ripped up camouflage shorts held up with black suspenders, wifebeaters stained with blood from last week’s fight, whoever the fuck that was with, and of course doc martens. oxblood if you had any taste at all. never any lower than ten-eye.

they’d dance to bands that nobody had heard of in tennessee: revolting cocks, ministry, bauhaus, siouxsie and the banshees, click click, depeche mode, new order, the smiths, curve, moev, voice of the beehive, and so on. the city had a 3AM curfew and it was pretty widely known that this dump didn’t card very thoroughly. it was called planet earth, and it was run by chuck burnley.

planet earth was the first place i called mine. i loved the music, i loved the snarl, i loved the drunks who went there. i didn’t hang out with them very much at first, but later some became my longest-standing friends. there was brent, who had a reputation as the city’s richest louche; he threw parties that were legendary. there was howard, the guy everyone wanted to fuck, man and woman. howard later opened the closet, which i designed materials for, and the logo led to the first typeface i designed—and that was the direct link that got me out of tennessee. there was amanda, who was a fucking wreck. she was one of those tennessee williams southern belles with gigantic hair, a cubic ton of eyeliner, and tight dresses.

one night, sitting on the front steps, amanda applied her eighth coat of lipstick, then realized she didn’t have anything to blot with. rather than teeter back into the club on her ludicrous heels, she screwed up her face and kissed the cold, sooty brick wall. i doubt amanda even remembers having done it; she was a ridiculous drunk. that smeary lipstick heart stayed there for almost a decade, and it remained, to me, a secret valentine to the city—even years after planet earth was cleaned up and tricked out into condos with a nice little photography shop underneath.

planet earth fell by the wayside as the neighborhood slowly gentrified. for a while, it was in direct competition with an enormous club called the underground, which played rave. (that was always said in a sneering tone, but we would go back and forth between the two clubs anyway.) when chuck saw the dance scene moving to the underground, he began hosting more shows—and it turned out chuck had an ear for local talent nobody else could match.

chuck gave early an frequent gigs to the judybats, who were local favorites notorious for a great tune about southern hair, called “all i wanna do is fuck your hair.” the ‘bats later got signed to sire records, and that lasted for a few albums and some college airplay with minor hits like “don’t drop the baby,” and “daylight.” (brent did hair and wardrobe for their videos; howard’s friends danced in them.) chuck also hosted superdrag, r.b. morris, aquarium rescue unit, immortal chorus, and the kind of out-of-towners nobody else in knoxville would have even thought to bring in: we saw shows by pigface and g.g. allin among others. i learned a lot about punk, not to mention punk posturing.

as a direct result of planet earth, the old city turned into the coolest nightspot in tennessee, and hosted such places as acme pizza, which was the direct predecessor of yeehaw industries, nationally known for the quality of its’ southern horse brutality (as we call it down home, laughing at the northerners’ ideas of who we are).

chuck was the guy who put knoxville back on the map, and got knoxville rock on the map for the first time. a lot of musicians in the area owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

chuck died last week, at 58. he had lung cancer, which surprised nobody; i don’t think i ever saw him without a cigarette (and usually a beer; a wide-eyed crazy gleam in his eyes). with chuck goes a huge chunk of local tennessee rock history. there’ll never be another chuck. there’ll never be another guy who can single-handedly revive an entire section of a city the way he did. there’ll never be another drunk redneck punk so badass that he’ll get his scruffy butt up from the pavement after being run down with a car and beat the shit out of the driver—while the hundred or so people in his bar watch out the front door, wide eyed.

knoxville owes him a big goddamned party in thanks.