- A champion for nonprofit causes in the Mid-South.

He's also spent the last three decades playing in Memphis's most enduring punk band.

I'm Chris McCoy, and this is a Conversation with Marvin Stockwell.

[punk music] Thank you very much for coming today.

We're actually here in Pezz's practice space in a undisclosed location in Midtown Memphis.

And you know, you spend a lot of time in Pezz's practice spaces, haven't you?

- Over the years, we, I've logged some hours in the Pezz practice place, the various practice places we've had all over town, yeah.

- Well, you're, so you're originally from Memphis, right?

- I'm a Memphis native, yeah.

Yep, yep.

- And tell me how you like got into music in the first place.

- Well, gosh, I always loved music, but I remember, you know, early on an idea that really kind of grabbed my attention.

My mom said, you know, offhandedly, she says, "You know, the Dooby Brothers were an underground band before they got big."

And I go, "What's an underground band?"

And she goes, "Oh, well, it's like they have a fan base and they're not widely known."

And I don't know, that idea always stuck with me.

And I think she kind of planted a seed unknowingly, because later on, when you're trying to find that, that music format there, you know, that genre that really speaks to you.

I was just like looking for something more urgent.

And some of that's testosterone and everything, but, you know, I was into aggressive music, but I ultimately found my way to, you know, that early to mid '80s punk and hardcore that I just fell in love with, and that ultimately became the, what Pezz, you know, really were influenced what Pezz ended up sounding like, My band.

- Your band, Pezz.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- Right?

Which is kind of burying the lead here, I feel like.

- Yeah.

Sorry.

- No, Pezz is a very important Memphis punk band for the Memphis scene.

And, you know, I made a movie.

- You're kind to say that.

- No it's totally true.

And listen, I can say those 'cause I made a movie about the Antenna club and the Antenna scene and, you know, we were both on that scene, you know, back in the day.

- Back in the day.

- Like that's where you got your, your kind of your start, not just with music, but also with public relations as well, kind of.

- Yeah.

I mean, you know, when you're in a band, you're, you're in the public, right?

You have to step to the mic and say something, so yeah, there's a bit of a spokesman role built right into my being in a band, but.

- And you also have to figure out how to get people to come to your shows.

Right?

- Exactly.

So you learn publicity, the grassroots way.

you go wheat pasting up flyers for hours on end to get folks to come to your show, to build an audience.

And then once you've built an audience, you have to understand, you know, how to, how to keep 'em engaged and, but also be producing something th at's genuine, you know.

From from moment one, we're just like, what we want to produce as a ba nd has to be genuine and from the heart, and with us cutting our teeth at the Antenna, really, the sub variant of punk hardcore th at really drew me in was that optimistic we can change the world type of, so Seven Seconds, you know, Dag Nasty, a lot of those, those, Minor Threat, a lot of those bands that were melodic yet aggressive and their message was all about how we can work together and change the world.

There's, you know, a more nihilistic side of punk, that wasn't honestly, primarily the side that really drew me in.

It was that optimistic side, which then gave way, mapped over to us becoming a more cause-related band.

Because if you're gonna learn about how we can rely on each other to change the world, I mean, ultimately you're talking about cause-based work.

- Well, so I think you say punk rock now, and I think people, a lot of people would think about, well, the Sex Pistols, they think about Blondie or The Clash, or, you know, maybe you think about Green Day or something like that.

But really, the real story of punk rock was not the big, you know, major label bands.

It was the thousands and thousands of small acts in places like The Antenna all over the country.

- Yeah.

- And it was, I mean, you know, can you talk about, - Sure.

- What the '80s were like when you guys started?

Because it was not, Punk rock, A: was not a monolith, it didn't all sound alike.

There were lots of different communities, and B: it had a relation--, that culture had a relationship to the larger culture, the monoculture, you know, this is where all the counterculture stuff went too.

- That's right.

- Was clubs like the Antenna Club, the 40Y club in Athens, you know, the 9:30 in DC, right?

That's where the counterculture ended up after, when the '80s started.

- Yeah.

- Right?

But can, can you talk about what it looked like from the inside at that point?

- Sure.

I mean, honestly, pre-internet, if you wanted to find, - Yeah, we gotta say pre-internet.

- Yeah.

I mean, before there was the internet, if you wanted to find out about the subculture, you kind of heard of people talk about it and you go, how do I find the key into that club, you know?

And you, you find out about Maximum Rock and Roll, which was a national punk hardcore magazine, and you read it and you see scene reports from other cities, states, and countries.

And you realize it's a worldwide movement and it's all about changing, a lot of it is about changing the world.

And so this was, I was just, I was fascinated by this world and I wanted to be a part of it.

And, and thankfully somebody pulled me into the Antenna Club.

Our, Pezz's first drummer Nick Couples, his, his older brother, Rod Thomas, who was also in the Compulsive Gamblers.

He was in a band called Slit Wrist, and then he was in the band Sobering Consequences.

And so, whereas I think a lot of like, people are inspired by who the national acts are, like, "Oh, I kind of want to do a thing that's like that!"

Our inspirations, at least at the outset, were all local examples.

Like, I was able to see a local band take the stage and say urgent things about what they're feeling in the city they're living in.

And they were talking about my city.

They lived in my city, and I also got to see them haul their own gear, get up there, and then afterwards you could go talk to them.

So it was a much more human experience than the kind of mass culture, Ticketmaster, bouncers, event staff, enormo-dome thing.

It was, it was the polar opposite.

And I thought it was much more of a human thing that I could actually interact with as a human.

And the bar for participation was, oh, I'm in a band and you, and you talked to Steve or Mark McGee and they put you on the bill.

So like, you could immediately participate.

There wasn't some like, oh, I need to get the demo in the right hands of the right power broker that'll talk to some manager and maybe some person in LA will say that I've got the right look.

No, no, no.

Like somebody local can say, you can play in next Friday if you can get there.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

And if you can survive that, then maybe you can like, - Yeah!

- You can, you know, ramp up.

- Yeah.

- A little bit, and you guys survived that.

More than survived that, y'all ended up-- - Well, we, my only goal was to put out a seven-inch vinyl record.

I was like, I want to play the Antenna and put it on a vinyl seven-inch record.

And once we crossed that goal, those goals off the list then was kinda like, well, what's next, and then by that point, we were having so much fun, there was no turning back.

- We talk about Memphis music history and, and it seems like everybody, and the powers that be, they wanna stop at '75 when Stax goes under, but there was so much more with, there're still great musicians here - Sure.

- Doing all kinds of different music, and, and Pezz is definitely the one, and that's one of the reasons that I wanted to do the Antenna documentary that I did.

But Pezz is definitely one of the ones that it's like, like y'all were much bigger, much more influential in the big picture of punk rock too.

You know?

I mean, - Appreciate you saying that.

- Well, you had somebody you, you had to run somebody off your name, didn't you?

- Yeah I know that.

- True.

That's one of my favorite stories.

- Well, there was a, there was a Pezz with two Z's in Canada.

- There was another Pezz!

- There was another Pezz.

- And didn't they file a, - Well, their manager reached out to us and, and said that if we could give them $5,000, they, they'd change their name in stead of the other way around.

So we retained a lawyer and we were able to prove that we had actually, so international law is such that if, whoever establishes the trademark name in a given country is the one that has primacy.

So they're, they were banking on the fact that we hadn't established the name Pezz in Canada.

Unfortunately, a friend of ours, Ben Allenbaugh, he had kept, who was a fan of Pezz, still is, he had kept all the Maximum Rock and Rolls and he went and he'd flagged every mention of us.

I dunno whether he did that after the fact, but anyway, he was able to dig out these old Maximum Rock and Rolls and we were able to, to prove that we had actually been aired on Maximum Rock and Roll radio.

And in the ad was the, were the Canadian stations that it aired on.

So we were, and it's got the date of the magazine and we're like, and the air date, and we're like, we were broadcast in Canada conclusively before you existed.

And so yeah.

So we were able, and then they changed their name to Billy Talent, and I think they went on to some measure of success in Canada.

- They, no, they did.

They did go on.

- Yeah.

- But they weren't as talented as y'all.

- Well.

That's a sudden, I appreciate you saying, well, I'm sure most people, they've got their fans.

- They got their fans, - They actually have way more fans than we do.

- Well, that whatever, they're wrong.

Those fans are wrong.

[laughter] So another thing though, you are Catholic.

- Yeah.

- And were raised Catholic and continue to be a devout Catholic.

- Yeah.

Now, a lot of people would look at, you know, they would look at The Antenna scene, they would look at the, what they believe about punk rock.

And they're like, how is this guy-- - A Catholic?

- Yeah, a Catholic, and then, you know, one of the leaders of like one of the greatest and longest running punk mans in Memphis history, how do you square that circle?

- To me, there is a kind of a through line with the radical person Jesus is, and the radical message of the gospels.

And so to me, my participation in the, in the Antenna punk scene was like, the early church was the, was in a way was the outcast place where the, you know, the misfits went.

This crazy persecuted group.

I mean, of course now that the church has been co-opted by the state, you know, et cetera.

- Once again, it's the same arc.

It's the same arc as the-- - That's true.

- As the hardcore.

- If you look at the early church and, and the persecution, regardless.

So to me-- - We can go on about this in great lengths.

- No, but I'm, I'm just saying actually my social justice, kind of Catholic orientation maps over perfectly to punk rock and, and what the, the message is within.

Both pot up to my values of wanting to change the world.

I mean, you know, the, the ongoing redemptive work of the world, you know, is, is a framework for understanding the church's ongoing work, Jesus's ongoing work, the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit.

I mean, there are a lot of people who, who use a lot of different words.

And some people say the universe or you know, the universe opened this up for me.

I am totally okay with that.

To me, that's common denominator language.

And so for me, there's no division in the messages that come through the gospel and the messages that come through incredible Jawbreaker lyrics.

- Yeah.

- Or, or, or quite frankly messages that channel through me and end up in Pezz songs.

It's all one consistent cloth.

- Well, so to leave Pezz behind for a little bit.

- Yeah.

- And talk about what you know, who you are now, you ended up drawing on some of your experiences as a promoter to get into public relations.

- Yeah.

- Right.

Did you go to U of M, is that correct?

- I did, yeah.

Yep.

Yep.

I'm a tiger.

So, yeah, you know, it, it's interesting to think back and realize that the kind of promotion end of being in a band also lends itself well to, actually my degree's in journalism.

So, I was a journalist, section editor, and columnist up in Illinois while my wife went to grad school at the Northwest Herald.

So, and I did a brief stint at WKNO on the radio side.

So I did have a brief journalism career before I became a public relations guy.

And, you know, with the downturn in journalism, and fewer and fewer jobs when I was moving home from Memphis, I just looked and there weren't any, any journalism jobs really to have.

Did a brief stint at WKNO and then the same pushout of resumes ended up giving me an interview at Church Health and I became their communications director in 2004.

- Which was pretty soon after they had really gotten going.

Right?

- '87 was when they got founded.

But really, I, I would argue that I got there right at a time of great, this beginning point of a great growth.

So they had, they barely had 90, a hundred employees and by the time I left in 2017, they had like 260.

So I, my 13 years there mapped over to a period of great growth for Church Health.

And I was able to do some really great professional things as a PR guy and communications director, helped rebrand what was then Church Health Center to Church Health.

And then of course I was on the steering committee for the, for the move to Crosstown Concourse.

So that was an incredible arc to be on from like, you know, established nonprofit providing care to the uninsured when I landed there in '04, already established, already doing great work.

And then that growth arc, I was a one person communications team.

When I left, I was leading a team of six and we'd rebranded Church Health and had moved into Crosstown Concourse.

So that was a, and I'd been allowed to grow Rock for Love, the annual Benefit show that lasted 13, eleven years and benefited.

We raised more than $400,000 for Church Health.

And I was able to leverage my participation in the music scene.

My friends Jeff Hewlett and JD Reger did the same.

- And those were always great shows too.

I played a couple of those and went to a lot more of 'em.

But they were always, always fun.

- Those were a lot of fun, and, and in the final four years, my friend Elizabeth Cawein kind of joined the creative team in helping to book it.

- Who's been doing great work as well.

- Incredible work.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so I was, I was able to do so much really fun and interesting stuff that I think leveraged my skills and gifts in a way.

And, once we'd moved into Crosstown and I'd, I'd rebranded Church Health, with a lot of help, that's when St. Jude came calling and then I was over there for four years.

And honestly, you wanna talk about cause-based work, you know, the Danny Thomas story is like, well, I mean, it's, it's the stuff of legends, right.

- But that was just an entire another level of, you know, more budgets, bigger venues, "venues" I guess, bigger audiences.

- Yeah.

- Bigger targets.

- Yeah.

Well, no, I had to, I, I left Church Health being good, having a good working relationship with the Memphis Media, and I thought I was a pretty good PR guy.

- Yeah.

- And I went to St. Jude and they said, okay, we went to land coverage in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and all these science journals that you, science trade publications that you've never heard of, like Genome Web.

- Right.

- Go.

- Yeah.

You don't know about, you don't have connections at Nature.

- But I grew them.

Yeah.

I grew them.

Yes, I did.

Yeah.

Vivian Marks at Nature was one of my, specifically.

- I just randomly said that.

But you actually do know somebody at Nature.

- No, I landed a story about.

- Can you, can you help me pitch nature?

I'm gonna.

- Yeah.

Do you do anything about Genomic Pipelines?

- No.

No, not really.

- Aw, okay.

- Well then you can, trouble, but I, I landed a big story about St. Jude Cloud and the Genomic Pipelines and the Pediatric Cancer Genome Project and all that jazz, yeah.

- So now you're on your own, you have your own company, what's it called?

- Champion the Cause.

- Champion the Cause?

- Champion the Cause.

- Sounds like what you've been doing all your life kind of.

- It is funny how like, cause-based work is really the through line.

- What, how do you define cause-based work?

- That's a great question.

You know, in a lot of people tried to talk, not a lot, a few people tried to talk me out of using the word cause in the name.

They're like, I get it, I get it that it resonates with you, but it might limit you.

They said, well, you might not get the FedEx account.

And I, and I thought, oh, okay.

So I thought about it and I thought to myself, I don't want the FedEx account, I don't want the FedEx account.

And there's nothing wrong with doing PR for FedEx, but I'm like, I don't want to put my skills at the behest of polishing their global brand star.

- Right.

- And making it a little shinier.

It's a great global brand star, but they don't, they don't need me.

I'm much more drawn to cause-based work.

So what's the definition of cause?

Well, I get to define it, right?

And I, it doesn't just have to be a nonprofit.

It could be a, a for-profit company's corporate social responsibility work.

It could be a group of artists that aren't even a a 501(c)(3), you know, people coming together, you know, to celebrate, celebrate Omar's brass note on, on Beale Street.

Actually, I'm not sure that's been announced yet.

So I don't know when this airs, but like that's in the pipeline, but you know what I'm saying?

- Omar Higgins - Yeah.

- From CCDE, Chinese Connection Dove Embassy, who absolutely deserves a brass note on one of the great musicians that this town has produced in the last 20 years.

And who passed away a few years ago, basically from lack of healthcare, which is another story entirely, but.

- That's a whole 'nother episode.

- It's a whole 'nother episode.

- And my time at Church Health.

I could, I could hang with you right there.

- Yeah, Yeah.

We can talk about that.

But, - Yeah.

- Well, you know, one of the things that you definitely wanted to talk about today that you have been at the forefront of since the beginning is the push to attempt to save the Mid-South Coliseum.

- Sure.

- And it's a funny looking shirt you got on there.

What's that?

- Yeah, no, so this is my friend Jamie Harmon's Coliseum shirt.

So, you know, he just, this is a shot staring up at the ceiling.

- It's the ceiling, yeah.

- Of the Mid-South Coliseum.

So, yeah, you know, what's interesting is, so if Champion the Cause is my for-profit publicity practice, I also have a platform called "Champions of the Lost Causes".

It's a book I'm writing and it's a podcast that I host, and I, on the podcast, I interview people who, who champion other causes.

Whereas the Coliseum cause was the thing that made me investigate the matter entirely.

I said to myself, why do people have the fire in the gut?

What is, why do people champion causes?

What sustains them, and what helps them succeed?

So I first had to, to investigate why I had the fire in my gut.

And then I thought, I don't want the book to be built strictly on my own experience.

So I thought I'll interview people that champion other causes and that'll enrich my knowledge set and it'll make an interesting podcast.

So I'm about 40 episodes in and I've learned a lot.

And yes, it's enriched my writing and it, it's also helped me understand conceptually the kind of like frame for what I was really put on this earth to do, right?

And that's why there's a through line all the way back to Pezz and being a cause-based band, starting to write "Champions of the Lost Causes".

I am a person who champions the cause of the Coliseum.

And so now when I back up and I realize, you know, Roshun Austin champions the cause of affordable housing in Memphis, you know, my friend Ginger Spikler championed the cause of creating Crosstown High, you know, reinventing high school within Crosstown Concourse, it's vertical urban village, right?

So there any, the people who stopped the pipeline going through South Memphis, I mean, it's really, there's a lot to it.

And you can champion the cause of your own precious life.

So like I get to decide what that definition means, and yes, I get to be generous with myself if I wanna reach, for instance, to, so I have a, a healthcare client out of the Carolinas that I work with, and what is healthcare and science other than finding cures and alleviating suffering, though I can say, oh, that's the ongoing championing of those causes.

I can get behind that and tell interesting stories of people doing great work in research and science, which benefits from my four years at St. Jude.

- But the cause of the Coliseum specifically, - Yeah.

- Has been, is something that has been percolating, I guess for lack of a better term in this community, for better part 15 years, right?

- That's true.

And we've only been active.

When I say we, the Coliseum Coalition, has really been active for about eight years.

And it's something civically that, that Memphis has to solve one way or another.

We, it's a big long story.

I don't know if we have time to capture it all.

But, you know, fall 2014, my friend Mike McCarthy, he and I were at a campus school event and he, and I said, "Hey Mike, how's it going?"

And he like, he had this, he had this look on his face like, "Man, I'm not doing good."

And I was like, "What's going on?"

You know, and he's like, "well, they're gonna tear down the Coliseum and that's all.

Did you read the paper today?"

And I was like, "Oh, Mike, they wouldn't do that," you know.

[Chris chuckles] We part ways.

And all of a sudden I see Mike on Facebook just getting angry and angrier, and I figure like, okay, you're a PR guy, right?

Like, do your good deed.

And I'm like, "Hey Mike, "why don't you turn that into a guest column "for The Commercial Appeal?

"I'll act as your editor.

I'll pitch the editor and get them."

And, and he goes, "I need another movement like I need a hole in the head."

Because he'd been a principal actor in the safe, in the, the fight to save Liberty Land.

- Liberty Land and the Zippin' Pippin.

- Indeed.

- Too.

- And you know, and he's also, he's a filmmaker and a musician.

I don't know, we keep coming back to this.

- And one of my best friends, yeah.

- Yeah.

Oh, and just, he's a great guy.

But, but we keep coming back to this nexus between music and art and activism in this city.

And, you know, you see, - They're tied together, yeah.

- They're intimately tied together and have been.

- They are.

- You know, going back, I don't even know before I was aware.

- Oh, sure.

- So why has the Coliseum been sitting empty all this time?

- Well, what's become apparent to me, really in just in the last week is that, you know, we, we've been at the table with the city and, and the degree to which we were at the table is something that we always kind of wondered.

And with the current demolition plan, I, I think it's safe to say that we were never really as at the table as we thought we were.

There has been an unwillingness to listen to the desire of the people.

We have been an all-citizen, all-volunteer group.

We've done, we did our own assessment of the Coliseum and found that it's in excellent shape.

The city did their own assessment and corroborated those results.

So there's, there is no question if, if anyone's saying, oh, the Coliseum's is a, has fallen down, untrue.

Two separate assessments have shown-- - That's gonna, that building's gonna stand longer than either one of us are.

- Unless somebody tears it down.

- Unless somebody tears it down.

- And a lot of people, and I, I think the point we've reached is a point of exasperation.

So I think people who are saying tear it down already, let's move on, I've gotten some sympathy for them because I've realized they're just tired of waiting.

I'm tired of waiting.

We've always been an all cards on the table organization.

We want to aid the city in helping find the highest and best use for the Mid-South Coliseum.

It's a useful building in good shape, but what are we gonna do with it?

And we've just never been met with anything other than, you know, I think at the, at its best, we were coordinating on the tours and they thought, okay, well the common denominator is maybe you'll bring in some third party interests.

- Which is what you thought you were doing too.

- But we've done that and all of those ideas have gone away to die.

Imagine if the city administration had put, imagine if Mayor Strickland had put the same, like, you know, pull out all the stops effort on reopening the Coliseum.

I think he, he could maybe pull it off.

The shame of it is we as a citizen group have been, had our hands extended for his entire term.

And we've been kept at arm's length.

We could have helped him be the mayor that coasted into the Hall of Mayors with, with that as a victory as being the mayor that reopened the Coliseum.

But he squandered that opportunity and now he's, it's a race to try to get a sports stadium.

Which there's nothing wrong with sports stadiums.

I love sports, right?

But it's like, it's a, it's a last minute mad desperate dash to try to do something in the last minute.

And, and people say, well, he wants it to be part of his legacy.

I would argue that it will be a stain on his legacy.

And it will be a stain, it will be a stain and a wound in this city.

And I think especially now, especially now with things with going on the way they are.

This is not the time to tear down the most unitive building we've ever built.

The very first building that was conceived and built with racial integration in mind in 1964.

We think that's important in the city where Dr. King gave his life speaking up for black sanitation workers and the marginalized.

Why would we do that?

We shouldn't!

We're not gonna!

[both chuckle] I'd say that confidently and optimistically.

- Well this has been an amazing conversation.

Thank you very much.

- Thank you so much.

- And keep up the good work.

- Thank you, Chris.

- Good luck.

- I appreciate it.

[punk music] [acoustic guitar chords]