Rediscovering the Popular ’60s Knoxville Cover Band the Redcoats

In Inside the Vault, Music Stories by Eric Dawsonleave a COMMENT

A few weeks ago, an interesting piece of film footage turned up at the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound. Opening on a close-up of a bass drum emblazoned with the words “The Redcoats,” the camera pulls back to reveal a group of nervous teenagers in matching sport coats performing James Brown’s “Hold It.” The footage is black and white, so we have to assume the coats are red, and the wood paneling behind them suggests they’re in somebody’s basement. After a cut, the camera angle changes to focus on the group’s organist, a smiling young blonde woman rocking a Farfisa. There are a few shots of a guitar solo, then a close-up of feet in shiny leather shoes that start to move vigorously as the opening notes of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” are played. A young man in a Beatles bowl haircut dances up to the mic and belts out the song, barely able to control his teenage voice. You believe he can’t get satisfaction, and would really like some.

The year is 1965, when the Redcoats were one of Knoxville’s most in-demand cover bands, popular at fraternity parties and sock hops. They’re still causing a stir years later. We put the clip on Vimeo and shared it via Facebook, and it has been one of our most popular pieces of footage we’ve ever posted.

The group’s origins lie in West Haven Elementary School in 1963, when John Anderson (drums), Mike Clark (rhythm guitar), and Max Hazlewood (rhythm guitar and vocals), then a seventh grader at the school, climbed on a stage in the gymnasium and knocked out a few Beatles tunes. They loved the experience, so they began to learn more rock and pop songs.

Practicing in Anderson’s living room, they soon had a large enough repertoire to play sock hops at the West Haven rec center. By the summer of 1964, they had added Chris Fox on saxophone, Max’s sister-in-law, Nancy Hazlewood, on keyboards, and Stacy Kinlaw on bass. John’s brother Harry, a sophomore at the University of Tennessee, after agreeing to manage them, convinced them to don red sport coats and change their name. Soon they began gigging at fraternity parties and on the Strip, at places like the Twinlight Lounge and the Pump Room. There were several garage bands playing covers around town at this time, but what seems to make the Redcoats unique is the fact they started out so young, kept playing in some form or fashion for several years, and went through several stylistic changes. Hazlewood remembers one night in particular when things began to change for them.

“One afternoon—Jan. 30, 1965—we were called and asked if we could play that night for UT’s Nahheeyayli homecoming dance because their scheduled act was snowed in at Charlotte,” Hazlewood recalls. “They asked us to play from 8 until midnight, or until the group could get there. That group was James Brown and the Famous Flames. We played for an hour and 15 minutes and his group arrived. We got to meet him and some of the band while they set up. Up to that point, we had been a rock and standards-type band, playing songs like ‘Moonlight in Vermont,’ ‘You Can’t Sit Down,’ ‘Louie Louie,’ ‘She’s About a Mover,’ Beatles tunes, and others. But after staying and watching James Brown, our interest immediately changed to soul music. After that point in time, we did James Brown, Otis Redding, Joe Tex, Wilson Pickett. We added horns and changed our name to the Martiniques. We continued to play around Knoxville and the surrounding area until late 1969 and the group went separate ways.”

Later that year, Jim Early of WBIR gathered the band in his basement to shoot footage for a piece he was producing on garage bands. The news story never materialized, and the raw footage was given to Anderson, who recently donated it to TAMIS.

Nancy Arp (formerly Hazlewood) lives in Walland now and was quick with Redcoats memories when I called her up. She was 22 at the time of the film, a few years older than the boys who were then attending West High School. Arp found she had a natural ability for music at an early age, surprising her family by playing “Love Lifted Me” on the piano at age 2. Before the Redcoats, she appeared on Cas Walker’s television show as a member of the Happy Three vocal group. She remembers the band gigging frequently and playing a lot of fraternities.

The band members all live outside Knoxville now, but aside from Anderson, who is based in Nashville, all live fairly close. Anderson says there’s been talk of getting the band back together.

Eric Dawson is Audio-Visual Archivist with the Knox County Public Library's Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, and with Inside the Vault combs the archive for nuggets of lost Knoxville music and film history to share with us. He's also a longtime local music journalist, former A&E editor of the Knoxville Voice and a board member of the nonprofit performance venue Pilot Light.

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