Six hours of mountain roads will tell you plenty about the person in the passenger seat. Susan, my better half, spent the drive keeping track of places we wanted to revisit. She was not nearly as fond of the curves Google sent us through. I loved them. They reminded me of learning to drive the back roads of northeast Monroe County, back when “youth gone wild” was less a song title than a fair description of how some of us believed a car ought to be handled. There were nights back then when a guardian angel must have been riding shotgun.
This trip came with a long list of firsts. Like our first visit to Gatlinburg, my first major multi-day rock festival, the first time seeing several names that had lived in my record collection for years and, before Friday was over, my first bear encounter. That last one would have to wait. There were guitars to hear first.
The Gatlinburg Chateau gave us a view down over the city, including the Space Needle lit against the night. The walk to the Gatlinburg Convention Center looked harmless enough going downhill. The walk back made a convincing case for wheels. By Friday, I had learned my lesson and called an Uber. My friend Weston Hooper drove in from Chattanooga later for Tuk Smith, Sebastian Bach and Pearcy/DeMartini, which saved me from another uphill hike and, as it turned out, put both of us on the path of that bear.
Inside the convention center, The Mountain Music Festival was built for movement. Multiple stages meant the day did not wait around for anyone. One set rolled toward another, acoustic performances broke up the electric assault and the hallways kept filling with musicians and familiar faces. For a first-timer, it was a lot to take in. Friday did not ease me into it. It opened the door, turned up the volume and kept going.
A place to land
Covering a festival like this means long days, late nights and very little time between the last ringing guitar and the next morning’s schedule. We want to sincerely thank our housing sponsor, The KiN Way, for giving us a place to recharge throughout the weekend and making this coverage possible.
Our gratitude goes to Channing and Rhiannon McGee for supporting independent music journalism and helping put IronTrakksMedia in the room for three packed days on the Mountain. You can find The KiN Way on Facebook or Instagram to learn more about the work they are doing and booking with them.
The first climb
No Love Lost had the job of getting Day 1 moving, and there is a special pressure in that spot. The room is still arranging itself. People are finding the stages, checking the schedule and deciding whether they are ready to commit. The band did not treat it like a warm-up. They came out together, worked the front of the stage and gave the early crowd something firm to lock onto.
Rebels Opera followed as one of the newer names on a weekend stacked with history. The photographs tell the story of bodies leaning into the same moment, guitars crossing the frame and hair dropping forward as the players crowded the lip of the stage. It looked a trying to carve out its own territory before the veterans arrived.
Stone Whiskey kept the electric side of Friday moving, while the acoustic appearances from Soto/Bieler and Hoekstra/Gibbs changed the temperature. The Soto/Bieler pairing was one of my favorite parts of the weekend. Stripped of a full-band wall, the songs had room to show their shape. The humor mattered just as much. The stage banter and antics were not simpy solemn unplugged interludes. They turned the performance into something loose, almost personal.
Joel Hoekstra’s impersonations were a show of their own. He is a serious player with a long résumé, but he did not carry himself as though everyone needed to stand at attention and admire it. That balance—elite musicianship without the museum glass around it—became one of Friday’s recurring pleasures.
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New favorites make noise
WildStreet arrived as a band I had never seen and left with a new fan. They were everywhere. Eric Jayk’s blond hair, streaked pink, flashed against the stage lights as he worked from the microphone to the edge of the crowd, arms raised above his head one moment and reaching outward the next. The rest of the band matched that restlessness. Nothing about the set felt contained to one square of the stage.
Ted Poley followed with another strong performance, another reminder that Friday’s schedule was not simply a march toward the larger logos at the bottom of the poster. The early and middle stretches kept producing sets worth stopping for.
Then came The Cruel Intentions, a Scandinavian band built from Norwegian and Swedish players carrying the kind of dirty, street-level hard rock that made immediate sense in this lineup. My first reaction was part Guns N’ Roses, part Ugly Kid Joe—not because they copied either band, but because they shared the same mix of danger, humor and hook-minded swagger.
They also understood how to use the stage. Guitarists folded toward one another, the singer worked the open spaces and a vertical blast of smoke punched upward behind them without swallowing the players. I spoke with Christian a few times during the weekend, and the offstage impression matched the set: serious about the music, easy to talk to and clearly enjoying the fact that a band from across the Atlantic could walk into Gatlinburg and connect this quickly.
Memphis blood and Nashville teeth
Tora Tora brought Memphis into the room the way only Tora Tora can. I have been a fan for years. The logo filled the screen, the crowd pressed in and Anthony Corder worked the stage in front of a band that did not need to pretend these songs were new to make them feel alive.
The following day, I learned that Corder is also a fellow Mississippian. I love those “small-world” connections, especially at a festival where people have traveled from every direction. A conversation in a hallway can suddenly make a stage feel closer to home.
The Reb Beach Fusion Band came next with the kind of playing that can make a crowded festival room focus on a guitarist’s hands. Beach’s résumé is enormous, but the pleasure of the set was immediate rather than academic. He smiled through passages that would tie lesser players in knots, the red guitar bright against a stage built from stacked black amplifiers—a natural.
Then Tuk Smith and his band hit hard enough to make the transition feel like getting smacked in the face—in the best possible rock ’n’ roll sense. Eddie Trunk introduced the set and talked about how long he had wanted to see the band live. Once the music started, he came down and joined the rest of us on the floor. I liked that. Trunk has spent a career talking about rock, but in that moment he was simply another fan in the crowd, watching a Nashville favorite prove why the introduction carried so much anticipation.
Smith’s set supplied a needed generational jolt. Friday respected the past, but it was not trapped there. WildStreet, The Cruel Intentions, Rebels Opera and Tuk Smith all made the same argument in different ways: this style of rock still has people willing to sweat for it, write for it and throw themselves across a stage for it.
The room gets heavier
Lynch Mob roared in with renewed fury. Andrew Freeman fit the band naturally, singing with the force needed to stand in front of that much guitar. Jaron Gulino remains one of my favorite bass players to watch and photograph because he does not disappear into the bottom end. He performs every part of it. The bass anchors the band, but Gulino keeps it visually alive as well.
And then there is George Lynch. What can be said about his six-string work that has not already been said? The useful answer is what happened in the room: heads turned toward the guitar, the band tightened around him and the set landed as a full sonic assault without becoming shapeless noise. The volume had detail inside it. Nobody seemed interested in complaining.
That blast became the setup for Sebastian Bach, who came out swinging and never really stopped. He still performs as though the stage might be taken away if he leaves any breath unused. His son Paris Bach was behind the drums, playing with the same fearless attack his father brought to the front of the stage. There was something genuinely fun in watching that family resemblance travel through two different parts of the band.
During “Big Guns”, Bach invited a woman from the crowd onto the stage and leaned all the way into the song’s bawdy joke. It was ridiculous, loud and completely on brand. She is not likely to forget it. Neither is anyone who saw Bach keep pushing past the natural ending of the set until his sound man had to physically steer him away. Some performers leave a little in reserve for tomorrow. Bach appeared offended by the concept.
RATT ’n’ roll at the summit
Friday’s headliner brought Stephen Pearcy and Warren DeMartini back together around the music of RATT, backed by Carlos Cavazo, Matt Thorne and former Slaughter drummer Blas Elias. That lineup put an absurd amount of hard-rock history on one stage without turning the performance into a nostalgia display.
The set reached through the obvious classics and into deeper cuts from “Dancing Undercover.” “Lay It Down” had the guitar bite people came to hear. “Round and Round” became the room-wide payoff it has been for decades. My personal favorite guitar lick arrived with “Way Cool Jr.”, a song that still moves with a different kind of swagger than the rest of the catalog.
DeMartini’s playing was the center of gravity for me. Pearcy worked the crowd while the band filled the stage around him, and the guitars kept returning to those familiar shapes without sounding embalmed. There is a difference between replaying old songs and stepping back inside them. Pearcy, DeMartini and company chose the second option.
Afterglow
After the final notes, Weston and I started toward the parking lot. We turned between two buildings and found a good-sized young bear beside an overturned garbage bin, enjoying whatever late-night snacks Gatlinburg had provided. We tried to give it room and slip around without disturbing dinner. The bear noticed us anyway and seemed just as uncertain about the two humans as we were about it.
We made it to the car. When we rounded the corner, there was the bear again, still looking for an escape route from us. That felt like the only fitting ending to a day this overloaded with firsts: twelve hours of guitars, old favorites, new discoveries, a headlining run through the RATT catalog and one startled bear trying to figure out why the rock crowd had spilled into its night.
The mountains had welcomed us with curves, amplifiers and teeth. Day 1 was done.
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