Lucy's Record Shop

Doyle Davis' business cards read “Vinylist,” which is so perfect since he’s been a champion of vinyl as a music delivery system his whole life - as a kid picking through his parents’ collection, as a used record buyer at The Great Escape, as a Lucy’s Record Shop customer buying every Guided By Voices record he could get his hands on, and as the co-owner of Grimey’s New and Preloved Music, a Nashville...

There is no other band more legendary or more inextricably linked to Lucy’s  than the Fun Girls From Mt. Pilot. Chris Fox, Troy Pigue, Charles “Cat” Tidball, and Donnie Kendall dressed in women’s clothes when they played, which  caught people’s attention, but it was their songs - short bursts of frenetic pop-punk energy and clever lyrics - and their stage antics that earned them a devoted following.<...

Travis Howell started playing the drums because his dad told him he couldn’t. His first band, No Remorse, was the first metal band to grace the Lucy’s stage and the first and only to be mistaken for neo-nazis. Sloppy, a punk-metal hybrid kind of thing, came next and then Adrenaline Hammer, which went on to become 12V. When 12V sold out Lucy’s, Travis realized a long-held dream. 

Travis’ time at Lucy’s incl...

Joshua Toomey has loved metal since he was a kid. He went to metal shows, played bass in metal bands ( including Primer 55 with his friend Bobby Burns), and is now host of Talk Toomey, a podcast dedicated to metal music and news.

Dallas Thomas picked up a guitar and became a prolific Lucy’s regular when he was just 14-years-old and barely able to lift his amp, playing with his friends in Fingerhutt, High Strung, Brown Cow, Little Monkey on a Stick, and Boobyhatch (to name just a few). And he was just getting started. After Lucy’s, Dallas, Erik Holcombe, John Roberson and Chris Fox formed the “satanic thrash rock juggernaut” t...

Do you ever wonder what has and hasn’t changed in the punk DIY community in the last 30 years? To find some answers host Mary Mancini spoke with 17-year-old Dru the Drifter who does it all - he writes and performs, books shows, and records and releases his own music. They talk about his musical influences, his struggle to find places to play, his songwriting process, how living in the bible belt fuel...

John Rogers, who first stepped into Lucy’s Record Shop when he was just 14-years-old, is an accomplished writer and photographer who uses his camera to document both the jazz scene and the streets of New York City. In this episode you’ll hear how growing up in Nashville -  from seeing live music at Lucy’s and playing in his own bands to drinking coffee at Bongo Java and collecting records from The Gr...

Corey Kittrell’s story is similar to many of the kids who came to Lucy’s. But if we look through the lens of race, it is very, very different. Not many kids who looked like Corey came through the doors of Lucy’s or had the negative experiences that inspired him to write his ‘zine, My God Shaves.

Corey was born and raised in Franklin, TN., a quaint, historic town...

In 2019, music writer Randy Fox discovered a long-forgotten nugget of info - sixteen years before Lucy’s opened its doors at 1707 Church Street in Nashville it was home to another record store called Buckley’s. Randy has an insatiable curiosity and an unbridled enthusiasm for music and history, so this story has lots of twists and turns. It starts in Kentucky and his discovery of the Sex Pistols and ...

They played in a trailer in the middle of some scary woods, slept on the nasty floor of a club, and blew up snack cakes on a dusty back road with Steve Albini. This was life in the 90s for Montgomery, Alabama, noise-punk band bert. Guided by the mighty Book Your Own F*ckin' Life ‘zine, bert had all the resources they neede...

It wasn’t easy being gay in Nashville thirty years ago. Host Mary Mancini talks to guest Michele Crow about her personal experiences, digs into the compelling history of Nashville’s gay bars and nightclubs, and reveals what it's really like when a gay bar and a punk club try to co-exist.

CREDITS/SHOW NOTES

Lambchop...

Dr. James Noble is a BFD neurologist at Columbia in New York City. But as a college student in the 90’s, Jamie Noble hung out at Lucy’s Record Shop to feed the love of live music that’s clearly part of his DNA.

Jamie remembers a lot about Lucy’s -  the bands he saw (Bugskull, Low, Blonde Redhead, Crop Circle Hoax, etc.),

Lucy Barks! is a documentary about Lucy’s Record Shop that was made by Stacy Goldate in the mid-90s when she was a student at Vanderbilt University. It’s one of only a few physical recordings of the shop and it really captures the look, feel and spirit of the place with footage from inside as well as outside on the front sidewalk (an important part of the community). It features the kids who went the...

In this episode host Mary Mancini sits down with Christine Doza who published her first ‘zine, Upslut, in 1993 to distribute to her classmates and out a predatory male teacher. After hearing from Christine it won’t shock you to know that her essays have been taught in universities or that the Riot Grrrl-inspired

Join Smilin’ Jay McDowell, guitar-player-turned-upright bassist from the small town of West Lafayette, Indiana, as he takes you on his journey from watching and playing in bands in the back room at Lucy’s to traveling the world with BR5-49.

In the mid-90s, Jon Sewell was a fish-out-of-water mischief-maker at a private conservative all-boys school. He was called “Johnny G” by the older kids and “Troublemaker” by the headmaster. Then he discovered Crass and an anarcho-punk was born. He protested against the military industrial complex, ran the local Food Not Bombs chapter, and played drums in the band Murdered Minority. When it came time ...

Host Mary Mancini sits down with poet and artist Christine Hall. 

When they first met at a suburban Junior High just outside of Nashville some thirty years ago, Mike Shepherd was the rule-following new kid with a stash of X-Men comics under his chair and Jereme Frey was the black and white checkered Skidz-overalls wearing local with a stash of X-Men comics under his chair. They sat next t...