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Nashville's Musikmafia Muscling In National Scene


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Posted 4/4/2004 9:21 PM Updated 4/4/2004 10:47 PM

Nashville's MusikMafia muscling into national scene

By Brian Mansfield, Special for USA TODAY

Nearly every Tuesday night in Nashville for the past three years, a few hundred people have gathered at a series of clubs to celebrate "country music without prejudice."

"MusikMafia," as the shows and the loose aggregation of musicians who perform at them are collectively known, bears little resemblance to typical country music concerts. Drawing a racially and generationally diverse audience attracted by e-mail blasts and word of mouth, MusikMafia events are as much flash mob as honky tonk, as much performance art as guitar pull.

Recently, MusikMafia has begun to flex its muscle outside Music City.

•Redneck Woman, the first single by MusikMafia moll Gretchen Wilson, a 30-year-old single mom from Pocahontas, Ill., is No. 20 on Airplay Monitor's country singles chart. It shows every sign of being a career-making hit.

• Big and Rich, a duo consisting of MusikMafia "godfathers" Big Kenny and John Rich, are at No. 22 with Wild West Show, notable for its spaghetti-Western guitar twang and Outkast-like "Hey Ya!" chants.

• James Otto, a third MusikMafioso, released an album, Days of Our Lives, in February. Wilson and Big and Rich have albums scheduled for May.

"It's the most interesting musical movement since I've been around Nashville," says Sony Music Nashville president John Grady, who released Wilson's record.

"I've been in Nashville since 1996, and I haven't seen anything like it," says music publisher Cory Gierman, one of MusikMafia's four founding godfathers, along with Big and Rich and singer/songwriter Jon Nicholson. "I can imagine the Outlaw movement, when Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson and all those guys were hanging around each other. It's probably similar to that."

The semi-regular Tuesday-night tradition might soon be ending, or at least changing dramatically. Big and Rich will open Tim McGraw's summer tour; they plan on taking some of their crew, including 6-foot-5, 260-pound Dallas rapper Cowboy Troy, on the road.

MusikMafia also has started infiltrating other cities. An event at Kid Rock's after-show party in Memphis last month drew Rock and members of Saliva and Puddle of Mudd onstage. The crew also has held shows in Detroit, Chicago and Houston.

"It's obviously not going to be able to go every Tuesday with all of us," Rich says. "We're going to be all over the world. But when we all come together, I think it's going to start becoming an event."

http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/20...htm?POE=LIFISVA

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Posted 4/4/2004 9:59 PM

MusikMafia helps keep little guy in the picture

By Brian Mansfield, Special for USA TODAY

When Big Kenny and John Rich started MusikMafia three years ago, both men were looking in from the outside of Nashville's music industry.

Rich had left the country group Lonestar shortly before the group recorded the biggest hit of its career; he had been dropped from his subsequent solo record deal by e-mail. A cup-of-coffee rock record deal for Big Kenny, aka Kenny Alphin, had yielded one album and no hits. (Related item: MusikMafia muscles into national scene)

With few prospects on the horizon, the pair set up a regular Tuesday night gig to showcase their songs at a hole-in-the-wall nightclub. Along with fellow singer-songwriter Jon Nicholson, who had fronted a local rock band, and recently laid-off music publisher Cory Gierman, they hooked up a sound system, brought in couches and set out candles.

"The first couple of weeks, 20, 30 people showed up," Rich recalls. "After about three months of doing shows, there were three or four hundred people between 10:30 and 1:30 on a Tuesday."

Alphin says: "People would be hanging on the stair rails so they could watch. We busted the wall out in the back after two weeks, so then we had a back room you could get people into."

Having outgrown four smaller venues, MusikMafia has now taken up residence at the Mercy Lounge, a 550-capacity venue housed in a 142-year-old downtown cannery building.

"We keep moving it around, never advertising it," Alphin says. "It's all word-of-mouth. They have to find us."

Says Warner Bros. Nashville chief creative officer Paul Worley, who signed Big and Rich and executive-produced MusikMafia member James Otto's debut album: "Nashville has never been a town particularly supportive of live music. Only in the really down, lean, hard times do movements like this arise. It's out of a basic, primal need that people have to do something together."

The MusikMafia mind-set extends beyond the stage. After Alphin and Rich met Gretchen Wilson while she was tending bar and performing at a Nashville blues bar, they wrote songs with her and set her up with music industry contacts. When she auditioned for Sony Nashville chief John Grady, they accompanied her.

"I learned how to be a songwriter through John and the people he introduced me to," Wilson says. Wilson and Rich wrote Wilson's top-20 debut hit, Redneck Woman, together, and Rich co-produced Wilson's forthcoming album.

Other MusikMafia associates include Cowboy Troy, a 6-foot-5, 260-pound black "cowboy rapper" from Dallas; Damian, aka "Mr. D," a percussionist and human beatbox whom Rich found playing late one night on a Nashville street corner; an independent limo driver and recovering drug addict named Limo Larry; and Rachel Kice, a painter who creates her work to their music.

"They have their own posse," Worley says. "It's like what happens in the urban world. They have this posse of die-hard fans from all walks of life that follows them."

MusikMafia attracts a crowd as diverse as any in country: music college kids, eager young music-business executives, middle-aged black women and wizened old men who look as if they might have come from the nearby rescue mission, all drawn to the show by the lack of a cover charge. At any given moment, the band may range from piano, saxophone and dobro to nine or more people crammed onto a small stage and hunkered over mikes together.

"It's just people who all love music," Rich says. "You don't have to necessarily be playing or writing music. You can just love it and show up. Definitely, the people that have less-than-pure motives get weeded out of the situation real quick."

The leaders of this ragtag musical movement are an equally unlikely pair: Rich, a self-described rock 'n' roll cowboy with a Zapata mustache, and Big Kenny, the wild-eyed, sandy-maned "Universal Minister of Love" who is given to down-home sermonizing.

"It's not necessarily the music that's the movement," Rich says. "It's the mentality."

Explains Kenny, who once ran a small logging company: "It's the forest, is what it is. Trees don't fall down in the forest. They may stand there, leaning against another tree until they die, but they don't fall down. If you've got enough trees standing around you, there's just something there to hold you up all the time."

http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/20...usik-side_x.htm

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