Love Is Punk

by John Kennedy of The Dark City Kings

The Dark City Kings - Love Is Punk


Out of the blue? That doesn’t even describe the moment. Dark City Kings was the runt of the litter in the Asheville music scene. We’d lost two guitar players in the Spring and had just brought in a new guitar player and fiddle player. The core of Dark City Kings has been around the Asheville music scene for a decade – but this band was the runt of the litter and then tossed into a raging river to drown.

Dark City Kings? We were a drunken brewery band that was slowly writing original material. We wrote simple songs. We meant them. We wrote melodies you can sing in the shower and big sing-along choruses. We’d just decided to try again, write an entirely new songbook with this new band formation, practice twice a week, and play a show once a week.

We played our first show together on August 5th.

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You Can Never Tell Where Your Music Will Take You

by D.B. Rouse

You Can Never Tell Where Your Music Will Take You by D.B. Rouse

It’s not every day that a busker finds himself headlining a theater. It’s not every day that you find a theater headliner busking. After playing a couple rural theaters in northern New Mexico and the panhandle of Oklahoma (where I sold my weight in kazoos and got drunk off the power of conducting an entire theater full of kazoo players), we were back on the highway and out of money. It’s amazing how quickly money goes when you’re on the road. The rent goes in the gas tank, and the rest into our food tanks.

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