Get On Your Bikes, Disc Ex-ex-changes, and more

Get on your bikes and ride!
A fond farewell and best wishes to Bill Dellinger and Tiffany Hartung, as they leave Knoxville for the mean streets of Detroit. Well, maybe not so mean. Hartung took a job with a chapter of the Sierra Club in a suburb just outside Detroit. Dellinger was the proprietor of Tennessee Valley Bicycles, offering new and used bikes, as well as repairs. A few months ago, the shop moved from its original Chapman Highway location to Magnolia Avenue, beside Marie’s Tavern. There, Dellinger built a back patio to host live music performances. Bike nuts Scott Smith and Eric Ohlgren have taken over the shop and will continue to sell bikes and offer repairs, as well as host the occasional live show.

Disc Ex-ch-ch-ch-changes
Unless you’ve been too busy downloading music and movies the past few weeks, you’ve heard that Disc Excange West is closing. The store will be consolidating much of their inventory and a few lucky employess with their flagship South Knoxville store, effective Feb. 1. In the meantime, the west store will have a sale to try and thin out some of their CDs, records, DVDs and the multitude of knick-knacks they have around the place.

(Suggestion for the new, improved South store: less lunchboxes, toys and bacon-flavored breath mints; more vinyl and hard-to-find CDs.) The retail music business has been struggling the past few years, and it’s hard to imagine it getting much better in the years to come. It’s especially sad to see it effect smaller, independently owned stores, such as the DE, which has been large and in charge for 20 years now. Downloading is quick, easy, inexpensive (often free), and we’re all going to do it to some extent or other. But go browsing, invest in some larger album art and tactile sensation and buy a record or CD from these guys now and then, or else when your hard drive goes on the fritz, you might not have anyone in town to help you replace your music library.

If That Ain’t Country, It’s a Damn Good Joke
Indomitable local punk legend Christopher Scum has switched it up a bit with a gentler (but not kinder) acoustic effort, in a genre he’s calling Scum Country. A number of Scum songs were recorded by Carl Snow, with musical assistance from Snow, and backing vocals from Leslie Woods and Andy Pirkle. His voice works surprisingly well in the setting, sort of a Tom Waits meets Steve Earle effect. A full album should be out by March, but for now, you can check out a few of the songs on Scum’s Myspace page.