The Man Who Lives For Guitars

Will Jones (better known as Dr. Epiphone) is a man with a commitment to doing what he loves. In black cargo pants and a lab coat, Jones has given talks and performances on Epiphone guitars in 40 countries. Epiphone has been making guitars since 1928, but has operated as a brand within the Gibson umbrella since 1957.

Jones isn't "just selling guitars" either—Jones has played all over the world, including with the band Twisted Sister. Though recently he's been traveling less, Jones still loves his work and has a plethora of stories to tell. The root of that love is that he’s selling something he believes in. “If I get excited about something,” he explains, “it’s my job to impart that excitement.” Jones’ enthusiasm spans across other hobbies and interests as well: we spoke about how he's done a little bit of everything he loves.

Jones has done the “Dr. Epiphone” act in places like Argentina, Russia, Japan, Spain, The Philippines, seeing a massive variety of cultures and their relationships with music. But, he says, “there's not a lot of difference” in what they look for in a guitar. He remembers a particular event in Germany, shortly after their unification, called Music Mecca. It was a massive, multi-level convention center all made of concrete—and utterly full of people, dozens of them bouncing riffs off of the walls. Imagine an enormous, stone Guitar Center. 

It’s experiences like these that contribute to the constant novelty in Jones’ work. “It’s been a pretty cool job, and it’s always changing into something else,” he says. While he thinks that his more local work might seem “mundane to most people,” he enjoys interacting with all of the dealers and consumers. It’s also given him some time to look back. He notes that “it’s easier to evaluate all of these experiences when [he’s] not living in the middle of it.”

ELECTION NIGHT PARTY

🚨 The Crimes Unfit to Print While the debate over crime statistics continues to rage, much of Tennessee experienced a week straight from a horror movie. First, news broke that an illegal Honduran immigrant, wanted in a Nashville hit-and-run that killed a 10-year-old Tusculum Elementary student, had fled to Mexico. Then, a rote noise complaint in a Nashville apartment complex on Saturday led an assailant to chop off a man’s hand with a machete. 

As Nashville dealt with these violent acts, a judge in Knoxville decided to release the name of a 15-year-old boy accused of murdering middle school student Savannah Copeland by repeatedly stabbing her with a pocketknife in an area park. 

A decade ago, local media would have reported every sensational detail of these crimes with aplomb. However, in 2024, such acts receive only a cursory amount of attention because they expose cracks in the current political narrative. The problem is further compounded by corporate entities like Gannett and Meredith buying up local outlets and forcing reporters to comply with the news agendas meant to shape national discourse. 

Both Nashville stories clearly involved illegal immigrants, which WSMV made abundantly clear in their coverage of the machete attack by not revealing the names of any witnesses and translating the soundbytes from Spanish into English that dominated the news package. If it weren’t for Tennessee Conservative News, the hit-and-run would have barely lasted one news cycle. 

Knoxville media seemed primed to cover the most heinous crime to hit East Tennessee since the racially motivated 2007 murders of Farragut suburbanites Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. But when the alleged murderer was identified this weekend as Malakiah Lamar Harris, interest immediately evaporated. 

Tip O’Neill’s maxim that all politics is local may well still be true. But now, national entities are attempting to shape the local as they see fit, a violation of both baseline journalistic standards and the public interest reporters are sworn to protect.

📑 CRB May Finalize MOU This Week The Community Review Board and the Metro Nashville Police Department are planning to meet this Thursday to go over the latest draft of their memorandum of understanding. Negotiations have been ongoing ever since the CRB was established to replace the city’s Community Oversight Board, which was gutted by the state legislature during 2023’s General Assembly. Over the last year, the CRB has been trying to regain its ability to oversee investigations regarding MNPD misconduct. Tensions have remained high during MOU negotiations, stoked by the CRB’s unprecedented effort to draft a Zero Tolerance Sexual Misconduct Policy for MNPD since June.

During yesterday’s Community Review Board meeting, the CRB’s attorney Frank Brazil sounded hopeful that this week’s meeting will be the last. “We're meeting in the historic courthouse—both of our teams—to discuss, and hopefully finalize and execute, this memorandum of understanding,” he told the board members. 

The chair of the CRB’s MOU committee, Drew Goddard, outlined one of the main hangups remaining in the negotiations. “One thing [MNPD] pushed back on was the request that came from us… that there be quarterly meetings between the chief and executive director and not their designees,” he explained. Instead, the police department is proposing to meet anytime there is a dispute to resolve. “They thought that would happen often enough you wouldn’t need to have separate quarterly meetings.”

CRB Chair Alisha Haddock expressed disappointment with Chief Drake over the reluctance to schedule quarterly meetings. “I think we were all at the conscious conversation—when it was held by the mayor's office at First Baptist Capitol Hill Church downtown—where the chief stated that he actually likes Director Fitcheard and he would be happy to meet with her, and he'd be happy to work with the Community Review Board,” she said. Haddock went on to explain that MNPD’s opposition to establishing a regular meeting arrangement in the MOU “probably goes against what a lot of us think is, you know, correct when you're talking about ethics and morals.”

🚗 Rideshare Poaching Nashville rideshare drivers are uniting in hopes to ban out-of-state Uber and Lyft drivers. “At the end of the day, they take the money back to their state,” local driver, Arkangelo Wilson, told Fox17’s Kaitlin Miller. “We the people of Tennessee are not benefitting, and they are outsourcing our job.”  Wilson has formed an organization urging state legislators to follow in the footsteps of other states, such as Alabama, Kentucky, Georgia, and Florida, in passing legislation to prevent drivers from crossing state lines to pursue rideshare fares in Tennessee.

Speaking of rideshares, both the Davidson County Republican Party and the Davidson County Democratic Party are offering free rides to election polls for Nashville voters. You can check out the available arrangements here.

DEVELOPMENT

• East Nashville set for tacos; Nashville steakhouse remodels (NBJ)
• Small east side commercial building planned (Post)
• Jelly Roll bar to be located on Broadway (Post)
• Mixed-use Madison project eyed for 2025 start (Post)
• Planning Commission OKs rezonings for hotel projects (Post)

✹ THIS WEEK IN STREAMING (October 29th)

Trap (Max) One never knows if the newest movie from twist-ending all-star M. Night Shyamalan will be a worthy successor to The Sixth Sense or rival that movie about Mark Wahlberg facing off against killer trees. Fortunately, the director’s latest ends up near the top of the heap thanks to Josh Hartnett’s masterful turn as a dad taking his daughter to a Taylor Swiftish arena concert, who also happens to be the serial killer that the FBI orchestrated the show to catch. The whole affair may go on a bit too long, but it’s a gripping thriller with plenty to say about both the masks we wear and the middle class’s decline in Northern cities like Philadelphia. 

Hysteria! (Peacock) The season’s best horror series finds a stagnant heavy metal band capitalizing on the 80s satanic panic when their small town becomes obsessed with the disappearance of the local high school’s star quarterback. Turns out, that occult stuff may be more than a load of BS. The cast makes for one of the strongest teen ensembles since the days of Dawson while B-movie icon Bruce Campbell, Modern Family’s Julie Bowen, and True Blood’s Anna Camp add some nostalgic flair. 

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (Mubi) This French-Canadian vampire tale finds a teen bloodsucker whose compassion keeps her from killing as she navigates her thirst and feelings for a suicidal boy when her parents cut off her blood supply. Darkly hilarious and deeply affecting, it’s the mashup of Let The Right One In and Ferris Bueller we didn’t know we needed.

THINGS TO DO

View our calendar for the week here and our weekly film rundown here.

📅 Visit our On The Radar list to find upcoming events around Nashville.

🎧 On Spotify: Pamphleteer's Picks, a playlist of our favorite bands in town this week.

👨🏻‍🌾 Check out our Nashville farmer's market guide and yearly festival guide.

TONIGHT

🎸 Gabby's World @ DRKMTTR, 8p, $12, Info

🎻 Late Romantic Quintets @ Schermerhorn Symphony Center, 7:30p, Choose What You Pay, Info

🎸 Hank Born @ The Underdog, 9p, Free, Info

🎸 Honky Tonk Tuesday @ Eastside Bowl, 8p, $10, Info‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌
+ two-step lessons @ 7p, The Cowpokes @ 8p

🎸 Cole Ritter and the Night Owls @ The Underdog, 11:30p, Free, Info‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌

📰 Check out the full newsletter archive here.