Todd Steed is cleaning out his office. This Friday will be his final day as WUOT 91.9 FM’s program director, as well as longtime host of evening jazz show Improvisations, after 27 years of service to the University of Tennessee.
Indeed, there looks to be about 27 years worth of stuff in here. And also, somehow, a makeshift kitchen. “Mostly I use my office for cooking,” he says, sipping contentedly on his pu’er, a fermented Chinese tea.
To be fair, I specifically instructed Todd to not tidy things up before I came in. I’m working on a new series, I told him, wherein I invite myself into the offices of influential people and make sweeping assumptions about their lives from the state of their desks. (See also: “Jack Neely’s Desk is a Perfect Mess.”)
It doesn’t take an English major to read the metaphor of Todd’s office right now, crammed full of music, mementos and moving boxes. It’s the reflection of a life roundly lived, and now—once again—in transition.
The first time I interviewed Todd was Nov. 21, 2002 for UT’s student newspaper, The Daily Beacon. I was the entertainment editor and Todd was playing two shows that week, with two different bands. On Thursday night he was with a newer project, Todd Steed and the Suns of Phere, at Preservation Pub. On Friday his longtime outfit Smokin’ Dave and the Premo Dopes were performing a “reunion” show at Blue Cats.
I knew Todd’s songs from live shows and the Longbranch jukebox. My story was titled “Steed Shares Sunsphere Characteristics” and it was a real stretch. What I was going for, but didn’t quite nail, was Todd’s embodiment—then and, I’d argue, still now—of the Knoxville music zeitgeist.
In the years since Todd has shapeshifted his love of music and place into different roles: performer, audience and, when he’s interviewing musicians on the radio, a sort of shaman between the two.
Today, though, the tables are turned. I get to be the interviewer. We move from the liminal space of his office into the studio, a soundproof, windowless room deep in the bowels of the UT Communications Building. Thousands of records line the wall. Todd pretends to dump his pu’er on the microphone. “What are they gonna do,” he jokes, “fire me? Better hurry!”
Over the years, Todd has been a lot of things to a lot of people: friend, bandmate, teacher, colleague, mentor. I remember running up to Todd at the Preservation Pub bar, in grad school by that time, maybe, plying him for intel on how to get hired by Metro Pulse. He wrote the music editor’s number on a beer coaster and told me to call him the next day. I did, and it started a chain of events that have since shaped my career. He’s been a touchstone for me at various pivot points: job transitions, my wedding (where, by some twist of karmic fate, he got locked in the stairwell of the Sunsphere), and big life decisions like whether or not to run away to Europe despite not having a visa.
Todd’s Leslie imitation: “Todd, I think I set a house on fire. What do I do? Do I run, or …?”
Looking at Todd now across the desk, I have a lot more questions still. By what constellation of moments and choices did he get from point A to point B to whatever letter of the alphabet he’s on now? He presses “record.”
We start at the beginning. Todd grew up in the Papermill-ish area, in an area that’s now developed but was farmland in the ‘60s. “There was so much land around there that a guy parachuted down into our backyard,” Todd says. (Editor’s note: It was NOT, to Todd’s knowledge, the cocaine bear guy.)
The youngest of a 13-year span of several siblings, Todd absorbed everything they listened to — the Beatles, Beach Boys, Motown, Allman Brothers, Doobie Brothers, Sam and Dave, Jackson Five. “I didn’t listen to kids’ music,” he says. “‘Old MacDonald’ was stupid. I wanted to sing ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Twist and Shout.’”
His sisters used to parade him out to perform for their friends. “I was like a little performing monkey,” he says. “They’d bring me out, and when it got to the ‘woo,’ I’d shake my head. And I noticed that I got a lot of laughs.” That sense of humor — quick, dry, self-deprecating — has always run parallel to his artistry.
His parents got him a guitar from Pick ‘n’ Grin and he started playing it all the time. Like, ALL the time. His first band was a duo with a guy named Jeff Bull: “He was a genius who went on to become a nuclear safety expert out in Los Alamos. We had a band called Organized Confusion. We recorded nine records.”
I nearly spit out my coffee. “Whut.”
Some, he adds, were double-albums. “I’m not talking quality; I’m talking quantity. We recorded nine records direct to cassette. And I mean, it was horrible. It was just horrible. But we were having a ball. We were doing KISS covers and writing our own songs. ‘Constipated Porpoise’ was one that I was really fond of. We would blow the balloon and let the air out – that’s what the squeak was.”
In a quasi-lateral move, Todd joined a cover band called Etcetera. They played the Longbranch Saloon, Maryville High School’s prom afterparty, “and the Tiki Lounge in Oak Ridge, which led to many hijinks and some failed romances,” Todd recalls. “It was a great education because everyone in the band was way better on their instrument than me, so I got to really learn.”
At some point Todd and a bandmate, Scott Scheinbaum, decided to abscond. “We were on the punk rock side of things, so we didn’t want to play Toto anymore,” he explains. They started a true punk band called Real Hostages. It was the ‘80s and the Cumberland Avenue music scene was popping. Each of Todd’s projects bled into the next. One, Smokin’ Dave and the Premo Dopes, went strong for over a decade and was kind of a big deal. And then there was Opposable Thumbs, Apelife and Toddzilla.
By the time I first heard a Todd Steed show in the early 2000s, he’d already been on a real journey. “Oh, yeah,” Todd nods. “I’d already peaked a couple of times.”
I want to take this opportunity to retract my 2002 description of that Smokin’ Dave show as a “reunion.” Because, as was the case with most of Todd’s bands, they never technically broke up. It usually just ended in “I’m getting married” or “I’ve got to eat” or “I’m going to med school” or (true story) “I’m joining the circus.”
Todd: “It was always something like that. I was always the last one to grow up. Every band I’m in, everybody grows up and leaves, and then I’m like, ‘OK, I’ll start another band, and then I won’t have to grow up.’”
“So, that’s still the plan.”
Todd originally didn’t want to go to UT. Nothing against his home or his family or the city: “But I was like, you know, I’ve been here 18 years. It’s time to see Johnson City, you know?”
Todd’s parents countered that he could live at home and go to school and it would save them a bunch of money. He said OK. Within a couple days on campus, he’d changed his tune: “Oh, this is going to be awesome.”
He heard there was a student radio station, WUTK 90.3 FM, and went looking for it. “That took a while,” he says. “I just walked in and asked if I could work there, and they said, ‘Yep.’” Same thing when he walked into The Daily Beacon and got on the entertainment beat under Betsy Pickle.
“I never wanted to be a hard journalist. And I got my wish!” Todd says. He wrote reviews of Pink Floyd and Joe Jackson albums, and covered live concerts like Sha Na Na and a Jimmy Buffet show amid false rumors that Buffet had died in a plane crash: “They just brought his coat out and said, ‘Tonight, it’s Jimmy Buffet’s coat.’ And I was like, well, this is going to be fun.”
He graduated with a journalism degree in ’84, which got shelved for a while as he toured with Smokin’ Dave. When it came time for a career switch, he surveyed some pen-pal friends he’d made on tour about what he should do next. A friend in Lithuania suggested he move there and set him up with a job teaching at a music school. He’d dreamed of living abroad, and it was an opportunity too random to resist.
At some point, by virtue of being an American with a journalism degree and some radio experience, he got recruited onto the first English-language newscast in the country — first as an editor, then on-air. “I loved being on TV in Lithuania, once I learned to pronounce the president’s name correctly,” Todd says. “But when I got back, what I really missed was teaching.”
So he returned to UT to get a master’s degree in education. He started teaching at the English Language Institute on campus, then traveled to Indonesia to teach there for a year. Then, once again, he returned to UT and started working at the Center for International Education. Our paths crossed again when I went abroad to intern at a music magazine in Dublin.
After 9/11, Todd says, study abroad got trickier and more stressful: “I loved it, but there was a lot of anxiety because you’re taking 30 students to Beijing and you’re in charge, you know? Or you’re sending someone to a country you’ve never been to and boy, you hope it goes well for them. You care about the students.”
Meanwhile, he was teaching a jazz class and in 2006, he went to WUOT and asked about doing a show. They gave him two nights a week and the title of part-time jazz coordinator. He enjoyed it so much that he went to then-director Regina Dean and said he’d love to join the team full-time if there was ever a spot. The problem was that everyone loved their jobs there so much: “No one ever quits. No one ever retires.”
But eventually, someone did.
Todd came on full-time in 2010. Under his watch, WUOT’s jazz programming grew into one of the strongest in the country. Night after night, Improvisations has brought listeners deep cuts and interviews with legends that wander from jazz theory to life philosophy. Meanwhile, Todd expanded the station’s creative reach with programs like Studio 865—live sessions that make the studio feel like a front-row seat—and jazz-meets-train-travel podcast Improvisations To Go.
“Work is fun,” Todd says of WUOT. “Everybody that works here is cool, and everybody who works here is talented, and they’re all really mature, very reasonable people who care deeply about what they are doing.”
These days Improvisations is hosted by someone different each night: Todd’s on Tuesdays, and then there’s Eric Reed (Mondays), Paul Parris (Wednesdays), Taber Gable (Thursdays) and Chris Woodhull (Fridays). Tomorrow will be Todd’s final evening behind the mic.
How do you know when it’s time to hang it up, or at least stumble in a forward direction toward the next thing? What if, 27 years later, it’s still your dream job? What if “the next thing” is an unknown?
“I’ve asked so many people that, and they all gave me the exact same answer, which is: ‘You’ll know,’” Todd says. “And, well, they’re all wrong. That moment never happened. Then one day, I was just doing the math. You wait too long, you leave the roulette table one roll too late—it’s all gone. You know? And so I just sort of weighed that.”
He picked a random end-date, Halloween. “And then once I made up my mind, everything fell into place. And then I was like, OK, I feel good.”
Todd says he can’t predict his emotional state when he wakes up on Nov. 1: happy, sad, or just disoriented. He’s promised himself a couple months of doing absolutely nothing. His wife, Tammy, says she’ll be keeping a close eye on him, to see what happens. Todd has never not been busy. “It may just be walking my dog seven times a day,” Todd says. “I have no idea, but I’m not worried.”
“One of the great things about being kind of an improvisational-type musician—even with lyrics, we would make them up—is that I’ve always been comfortable not knowing. And I’m more comfortable now than ever not knowing. I kind of enjoy it,” he says.
Up until this point, Todd says he hasn’t put much effort into reflection. He hasn’t had time to. That’s the curse and blessing of a deadline-driven career. Lately, though, he’s been looking back, attempting to sort of map it all out in his head. It’s definitely not a straight line, he says, and it’s not an unbroken line either. He describes the mental picture as “insane to look at.”
I guess it’s like comparing the sheet music of classical music and free jazz. One kind of makes logical sense when it’s laid out in front of you, the notes all behaving politely and getting along. The other would look like somebody sneezed black ink onto the page. And besides which, its players are just going to do their own thing anyway.
In a sense, Todd has lived his life like jazz.
“What I realized,” he says, “was I was sort of improvising the whole thing, all along. In my 20s and in my 30s, I was so afraid of being bored. Like, that to me was the great fear: being in a boring job. And I just knew it was going to happen. I just felt this foreboding that, well, everybody eventually has to suck it up and do it. But all that worry was a waste of time. My instincts were always pushing me in the right direction—whether I followed them or not made all the difference.”