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He was around 9 when he created a band with his stuffed animals, giving each one a different voice and writing songs for them. At 14, Fenstermaker started hearing punk and underground music. That's when his dad bought him an electric guitar. "It took me all of two days with the guitar to realize, this is what I want to do," Fenstermaker says.
Growing up hearing his parents' Hank Williams, Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings records sparked a sense of rebellion, and punk was his outlet. From 16 to 24, Fenstermaker was in a band called IYF Pork. The band wrote 100 or so punk songs, but never formally recorded anything.
It was during this period that Fenstermaker would drive to Charlotte regularly to see concerts and to try and get his band some gigs. He was working three jobs, including stints at Bi-Lo and Subway, so he could save money to buy a car and gas. A chance meeting with future Milestone owner Harper at a Queen City Underground concert eventually led to friendship. When Harper took over the punk club, Fenstermaker constantly pestered him about a job — any kind of job.
"He kept bothering me about getting a job there and I kept saying, 'You're bothering me, kid. I don't need help,'" Harper says. "I finally said, 'You think you're bad enough to run the door? Go do it.'"
Fenstermaker wound up spending a lot of time in the door booth at the Milestone, and though no one can recall exactly who gave him the nickname, people were always calling him Andy "the doorbum." While hanging out in the club after hours with Harper and fellow musician Robert Childers — the drummer son of critically acclaimed Mt. Holly singer/songwriter David Childers — Fenstermaker's friends pushed him to do some acoustic guitar songs.
"Robert and Neal and I would sit around at the end of the night, hang out, get drunk and play guitar. They convinced me to do some solo shows," Fenstermaker says. "I was terrified of it — it was weird after playing with a bunch of noise behind me."
"Andy always saw himself as the frontman for a punk-rock band," Harper says. "The songwriting, though, was always really strong. It came out of asking him to play his punk songs on an acoustic."
Originally calling himself Ugly Dobro alongside Childers' Handsome Banjo, Fenstermaker eventually took on Andy the Doorbum as a monicker for his music as well as his visual art and other projects. But he still thinks of himself in Ugly Dobro terms.
"My family is real rural farming folk — I think that's impacted me in every way it could have," he says. "I'm a simple-living sort of guy. My ethos and outlook on life are a lot closer to someone who lives on a farm than someone who plays punk and lives in the city."
The Man Killed the Bird... — the title is from a pygmy legend — is the fourth Andy the Doorbum album. His other releases include a cassette tape, an EP and a few 7-inch records. He's recorded most his music from the comfort of his home studio, but he cut his first album in that small, cramped door booth at the Milestone. Where else?
Harper had bought a new PA system for the club and asked the sellers to throw in a four-track recorder. He gave it to Fenstermaker. "I told him it was part of his payment for working the door, and that he should record an album while he was in there," Harper says. He helped Fenstermaker set up a microphone and cymbals in the door booth, and — voila! — Fenstermaker's debut, The Doorbooth Album, was born.
Spending seven nights a week at the Milestone, either working or playing shows, Fenstermaker found it tough to make the long drive back to Gaston County each night, so he moved into the club with Harper, who'd been living there for a couple of years. Tuckaseegee Road is in a rough neighborhood, so the two developed safety strategies, like a routine they called "clear the place," which entailed going around the building with their pistols to make sure no one else was inside when they slept.
"Neal liked having me there because then he knew he wasn't the only one hearing things," Fenstermaker says. "Eventually, I moved into the attic. There's still a cage area up there where I used to keep my two cats."
The club has no kitchen. No shower. No hot water. "We would take sink baths in the dirty-ass Milestone bathrooms," says Fenstermaker. "After a point, we realized we weren't getting clean because any cleanliness was gone within minutes just from being in there. Without windows, you can't tell what time of day it is. There'd be times when you'd stay up all night bullshitting with the bands and go to bed at 10 a.m. and wake up at 7 p.m. when the next bands were coming to load in."
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