Help! There's A Fire

Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, Nashville was known as the “home” of country music. Although several significant rock ‘n’ roll albums were recorded in the ‘Music City’ by artists like Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and others, the growing metropolis had little or no rock music scene until the early 1980s when bands like David Olney & the X-Rays, Cloverbottom, The Smashers, the White Animals, and Jason & the Nashville Scorchers took the first steps at establishing a foothold for rock music in the Music City.

This fledgling music scene was nurtured, aided, and abetted by the Nashville Intelligence Report. Over the course of a little more than three years from 1982 to 1985, Nashville Intelligence Report zine publisher/editor Andy Anderson and his dedicated crew of rock ‘n’ roll fanatics published 28 issues of the city's first rock music-oriented publication.

The zine’s intrepid reporters were quite clever in worming their way backstage and grabbing interviews with superstars-in-waiting like R.E.M., the Police, the English Beat, Katrina & the Waves, and the Bangles, talking with many of them early in their careers. They also spoke with established artists like Johnny Ramone, Iggy Pop, and Joe Strummer along with lesser-known, but no-less-influential bands like Black Flag, the Meat Puppets, Violent Femmes, and Minor Threat.

Help! There’s A Fire offers a selection of some of the best writing from the Nashville Intelligence Report as curated by Anderson and N.I.R. contributer Rev. Keith A. Gordon. The profusely-illustrated book includes a number of previously-unpublished vintage photos of bands like R.E.M., U2, The B-52's, and Pylon from the collections of photographers Tony Frost and Terry Allen and the writing is representative of the quality and diversity of content published by N.I.R. during its tenure, capturing the magic of the music being made at the dawn of the Nashville rock scene.