Lucy's Finds Promo Pal in Punkumentary

BY Jim Bessman
Billboard, December 21, 1996

NEW YORK - It's not just a dog's life anymore.

Lucy's Record Shop, Nashville's indie/alternative record store, which was named after its owner's excitable pet Weimaraner, is an award-winning documentary as well.

"Lucy Barks!," a 45-minute video produced, directed, and edited by Vanderbilt University graduate Stacy Goldate, recently won the best video award at Nashville's prestigious international Sinking Creek Film/Video Festival. The video, which premiered at the store in June and is prominently displayed and sold at Lucy's for $14, took two years to complete, and, as the video-cassette box notes, "documents two years in the life of Nashville's small but intense punk rock scene as it centers around a little record shop named after a dog, Lucy."

The "tail" of the tape, Lucy enjoys full run of the store, as does her friend Jack, an overweight black labrador who has never voiced regret that Mary Mancini, their human companion and owner of Lucy's Record Shop, chose to name the store after her and not him. On Friday and Saturday nights, Lucy's, which has become Nashville's veritable alternative community center, presents local and national indie punk bands, mostly "do-it-yourself indie rockers who book their own tours," says Mancini. Admission at the all-ages shows is $5, and even the dogs mosh.

Live performance snippets on "Lucy Barks!" feature some of the many bands that have played there: Bikini Kill, Lambchop, Brainiac, Fun Girls From Mt. Pilot, Crop Circle Hoax, Lois, Sugarsmack, Wally Pleasant, the Frothy Shakes, Hearth & Home, Fecal Matter (since renamed High Strung), Brown Towel, Blue Ribbon Field Day, Cobbs, Little Moneky On A Stick, Flossie & the Unicorn, My Quintron, Heather, and Marky & the Unexplained Stains.

Goldate, who's now is Chicago working on a documentary about radical left-wing political activists, made "Lucy Barks!," her first effort, for her appropriately named MeDoBaMeSelf Productions. "Nashville's known as a money-making music industry, but a lot of musicians here are skipping past big labels and high production cost and are doing things themselves and enjoyinging low production values as an art form," she says. "I could relate to that, having no budget and experience."

The filmmaker estimates her pro-duction costs at $2,000, "which is nothing for a documentary, but I was able to do it because people donated equipment and a guy did all the post-production on an expensive system in a whole weekend for free because he read about me." The "Lucy Barks!" project, Goldate adds, received plenty of press and word-of-mouth during its making and further benefited from a fund-raiser party where several of the featured bands performed.

"The whole time I was doing it, I wondered why I was doing it and where I was going with it," says Goldate, who had been a DJ at Vanderbilt station WRVU-FM Nashville and was fascinated by the music scene surrounding the nearby Lucy's. "I don't have multiple piercings or tattoos like a lot of the kids that go there, but I found I had a lot more in common with them than I thought. And l had friend in bands who were playing there, so I knew about it and thought it was a cool place beeause it was about the music and art—that everybody can do it and be an artist. And it's $5 whether it's a big band from Olympia [Wash.] like Bikini Kill or a local band playing for the first time. It's not about making money, but doing for the sake of doing-which what indie filmmaking is about. So I found so many parallels."

Filming without any theme or plan, Goldate basically followed the Lucy bands around, shooting almost 100 hours of footage. "I thought she was a flake and would never get it off the ground," says Mancini, "but she started showing up with a camera and filmed everything. People started getting excited, and I realized she was serious." "

"Lucy Barks!" is ironically book-ended by black-and-white clips from Marty Robbin's old "Country Style, U.S.A." TV show, effectively contrasting the music for which Nashville is known with the music which Lucy's specializes. With Lucy barking in the background as the opening credite roll, Mancini, in between trying to hush her, relates how she moved to Music City in 1991 from New York. Unable to find a label job, the former Elektra A&R staffer entered the retail realm the following year, since Nashville lacked indie-oriented stores selling new product.

Three months later, Mancini began filling her small-inventory store's unused space by staging the all-ages shows, teaming with Donnie Kendall, guitarist for Fun Girls From Mt. Pilot, who was frustrated by the city's shortage or venues willing to present indie bands. As music attorney Jim Zumwalt notes in the video, "Lucy's is an outlet for music that the local music industry probably has almost no connection to whatsoever."

Well, not quite.

Capitol Nashville's marketing department, inadvertently perhaps, recently supplied Lucy's with a full-sized Trace Adkins promotional stand-up. "I put it out, and the punk rockers took care of the rest," says Mancini, explaining that Adkins' image was quickly covered by straight-edge rock symbols, body piercing, and tattoos. "I was shocked when he walked in one afternoon and took a picture with it. But he was very confused by all the aymbols, and I bad to explain them to him."

To commemorate the Sinking Creek award, Mancini is giving free admission to shows with the purchase of "Lucy Barks!" which is displayed on the front counter by the cash register. And to further exploit the attention brought to her store by the documentary, Mancini is making two postcards of its mascol.

"One is of Lucy, wild-eyed and upside-down with her feet sticking up in the air and a goofy look on her face," says Mancini. "The other is of her sleeping with her stuffed toy teddy bear-which I won at the Tennessee State Fair-before she tore its head off:"