The White Animals
Saturday evening at Exit/In, a 46-year journey that began in a cellar on West End will come to a close when legendary Nashville indie-rock band The White Animals give their final public performance.
The emphasis is on this being their final public performance — they’re not ruling out still playing some private functions. “If some billionaire wants to give us a big pile of money to play their wife’s birthday party or something, we wouldn’t be adverse to that,” founder and frontman Kevin Gray says with a laugh.
But as far as booking shows and selling tickets, Saturday’s show will be their last one. According to Gray, it just felt like it was time.
“It just kind of feels right,” he says. “We’re still on top of our game, and we’re all still friends, but the logistics are pretty crazy for us. Rich is in East Tennessee, Steve’s in Thomasville [Ga.], and I’m in Dallas.”
Rich is lead guitarist Richie Parks, and Steve is bassist Steve Boyd, the band’s musical director and one-half of the potent Boyd-Gray songwriting team. Drummer Ray Crabtree is the only member of the band who still calls Nashville home. Together the four bandmates will be leaving behind an indelible legacy etched in the annals of the city’s rock history.
The White Animals jump-started the indie-rock scene in Nashville in 1979 with a lengthy weekend residency at Herr Harry’s Phranks and Steins Rathskeller, ground zero for the city’s punk and New Wave scene. They were DIY pioneers launching their own label — Dreadbeat Records — and releasing their own singles, EPs and LPs. In 1984, they became the first indie rock band from Nashville to land videos on MTV when both “Don’t Care” and “This Girl of Mine” were in rotation on the network.
The band toured from coast to coast, averaging 300 shows a year. They mostly played clubs and colleges, but they also headlined 3,000-seat theaters and opened for The Kinks, Talking Heads, Duran Duran and other major label recording stars. Major publications including The Village Voice, CREEM, Stereo Review and The Hollywood Reporter gave the band positive press, but they never landed a coveted major label contract. So after nearly a decade of life on the road in a van, they decided to disband in 1987.
The White Animals reunited in 1999 and released the career-spanning compilation 3,000 Nights in Babylon, which featured 17 tracks from their debut EP Nashville Babylon and the four studio albums they released in the ’80s — Lost Weekend, Ecstasy, Drums in Church and In the Last Days. Since then, the band has released two more acclaimed studio albums — an eponymous record in 2001 often referred to as Monster Mash Message and Star Time in 2024.
“I’m thankful for all the people that supported us all those years,” says Boyd, reflecting on Saturday’s show being the band’s last. “I’m just grateful for all the people who booked us for shows, the radio DJs who played our records and the people who loved our music.”
“God, that’s a heavy thought,” says Parks, who is still processing the idea that Saturday night will be their final public performance. “I think we’re all a little sad.”
Adam Dread, one of the band’s longtime supporters who gave them extensive airplay on Vanderbilt radio station WRVU in the early ’80s, will serve as emcee Saturday night as he has done at many of their Nashville shows. (Formerly a broadcast station that now streams online, WRVU is a free-format channel that features student DJs and once included community DJs as well.)
“Their legacy is, it was such a great, happy scene — and still is,” Dread says. “They make more of a personal touch with their audience, so it’s an experience.”
While their days as a live band will come to a close, there probably will be some future recordings. “Like The Beatles, we’re coming off the road,” says Gray, “but we can still be a studio band.”
