Remembering my fast and furious days at Xpress

Editor’s note: August marked Xpress’ 30-year anniversary. Throughout September we’ll be celebrating the milestone with articles, photo spreads and reflections from current and former staff members. Thank you for reading Xpress, and please consider becoming a member. 

I don’t remember the name of the singer who chased me out of the downtown coffee shop, howling unprintable words and brandishing a thickly rolled copy of Mountain Xpress. The woman saved her better phrasings for the stages of the jazz clubs that dotted Asheville in the early millennium: popular Tressa’s on Broadway, for example, and a short-lived sushi-and-cocktails experiment down on Biltmore Avenue called Tunatini’s. 

A club name like “Tunatini’s” sticks in the temporal lobe whether one wants it there or not, but I’ve long forgotten the name of the outraged singer. This was 2002 or ’03. The coffee shop, today Stony Hill Bistro, was Gold Hill Espresso & Fine Teas.

I could blame my memory lapses on Asheville’s peculiar crests and troughs — all its cultural sea changes. It’s easier to pine for the lost atmosphere of your city’s perceived heyday (thinking of you, Vincent’s Ear and Chicken Alley) than to try and recall specific acts on ever-revolving marquees.

But more likely it’s just the grim march of time. After all, I moved to Asheville in 1994 — the same year Mountain Xpress was launched. That’s three decades. What hasn’t happened?

I do recall it was summer. It had recently rained, the slate sidewalk was slippery, and the singer’s weaponized copy of Xpress posed real danger.

Because in those days, the paper was stacked. In the early 2000s,  a standard weekly issue ran around 75 text-heavy pages — much longer if there were special sections — with a word count that approximated Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. A single edition of Xpress offered a cover-to-cover reading journey of about two hours. 

Office hours were long, too. And no wonder: We were putting out the equivalent of a short novel every single week.

More challenging than the sheer volume of content was trying to fairly divide preview coverage between national acts and the geysering local scene. We published four or five long features and a section of shorter writeups (“Smart Bets”) that grew as fast as the unchecked Virginia creeper vines that invaded the pre-HVAC arts and entertainment office, running in hungry trails up the window frames and all the way across the ceiling.

A redux of older music forms — mountain traditional, garage rock, Americana — was trendy at the dawn of the millennium, but the renovation of antique buildings? Far less so. Artists who dropped by for interviews tended to mention the gothic foliage before anything else, but I was too tethered to my grape-colored iMac G3 to pay much mind. 

We’d all gotten new computers to keep up with the boom: the boom of the era, of the arts, of the internet. Band press kits still arrived in physical form, with an advance CD and an 8-by-10 black-and-white glossy, but I now had PR folks from Montford to Marshall, from coast to coast and from around the world emailing me for coverage. 

These were the days when you could catch a reading by The New Yorker humorist David Sedaris at Malaprop’s Bookstore instead of in an auditorium. In 2003, the dance event Folkmoot in Waynesville was named the state’s official international festival. It ran for weeks in July, and requests for quotes from visiting performers involved the use of interpreters. Asheville’s own troupe, The Rebelles, embodied the thirst for arty burlesque, selling out show after show at N.C. Stage Company downtown.

The Rebelles’ neo-vaudeville strip act may have been smoldering, but Xpress’ early internet server was even hotter. It survived at least one epic meltdown after my inbox topped out at 11,000 undumped messages. No stranger to stealth reporting, I hid in the Miles Building’s tiny bathroom, marshaling the nerve to tell our IT guy I hadn’t emptied my trash in six months.

Which, then, came first? The glut of talent in that prosperous era or the avalanche of electronic communication — this bottomless new conveyance by which to get word and then spread it? The advent of the search engine squashed the inconveniences of hard research but also, sadly, the charms of obscurity.

In the previous decade, homegrown acts such as ragtime revivalists the Blue Rags had risen organically, through word-of-mouth, begetting early-2000s stars like The Avett Brothers and Old Crow Medicine Show. Now, on top of old-fashioned road touring, roots-rock bands had the exploding “information superhighway” to buoy their fame.

DIY label Fat Possum Records out of north Mississippi propelled elder bluesman R.L. Burnside and his peers onto stages everywhere. Again, though, this was premillennium. Blues disciples get credit for the grapevine effect, but if the Fat Possum phenomenon was the ’90s version of viral, it was also due to print media: namely, a controversial firecracker of an article in national Spin magazine. Xpress did its part locally with a cover story ahead of the Mississippi Juke Joint Caravan’s frenzied appearance at The Grey Eagle.) 

By the time Burnside died, in 2005, the new roster of Fat Possum labelmates had online momentum to help raise them up — they wouldn’t have to wait until they were in their 70s to receive widespread recognition. Between 2003 and 2006, on the strength of brilliant albums and newly, ardently connected fan bases, Aimee Mann and Neko Case — the last two artists I happened to interview during my time at Xpress — went from indie darlings to respectively filling Diana Wortham Theatre and The Orange Peel. 

But back to that angry jazz singer. She had received a “Smart Bet” to promote her upcoming show instead of the hoped-for feature. Profoundly offended, she had little sympathy in her repertoire for the plight of an editorial staff continually having to decide what to cover and how — balancing a golden cup that would not quit running over. 

It wasn’t the first time I would be threatened, bribed or insulted during those years. But the perks were nice, especially the analog gestures: David Sedaris mailed me a postcard from Germany after our interview. A gracious local theater company once presented the Xpress arts staff with a tray of homemade lasagna.

Today, in autumn 2024, the marvel is that any newspaper — any periodical regularly distributed in physical form — could inspire such passionate feelings in its reading public. It might be malice, sometimes. But it matters.

Melanie McGee Bianchi worked for Mountain Xpress from 1997-99 as an arts reporter and editorial assistant and from 2000-07 as arts and entertainment editor. 

Note: This photo caption for this story was updated on Sept. 9, 2024, to include the name of the photographer.