In May of 1997, Wally Miles had just walked out of high school with a diploma and no particular plan. Lollapalooza was the biggest thing in music. So he and three friends did the only reasonable thing available to teenagers in Blount County with a summer stretched out in front of them: they drove out to the lake in Louisville with a case of beer and a car stereo, cranked up Mötley Crüe and Iron Maiden, and called it a festival.
“It was just us, a case of beer, and a boombox. Actually, a car stereo,” he says. “It was low-key McGee… so much fun.”
Nobody took notes. Nobody sold a ticket. There were, by Wally’s own accounting, “three people at best.”
Twenty-nine years later, that afternoon has a name, a two-night lineup, a venue, a beneficiary, and three generations of people who show up for it.
First, the name. He’s Walter, technically, but so is his dad, which he says “causes marketplace confusion.” Friends have called him Wally since forever, and Wally is what stuck to the party.
The second year, the format changed in the way most good things change, which is to say casually. “It’s like, hey, let’s get a band this time. I’m in a band. Okay. Cool.” He actually was in a band. He still is. And that was the moment the lake trip picked up the one ingredient it’s never lost: live music, played by people who wanted to be there.
From there it followed the arc of the internet itself. The early 2000s were the house party era, and Wallypalooza spread almost entirely through AOL chat rooms and word of mouth. Then MySpace hit, and the thing outgrew living rooms. In 2008, Wally moved it to Nader’s, the long-gone Blount County hot spot, and something shifted.
“That was the first time actually taking it out in public,” he says. “You didn’t have to know Wally to come to the party.”
By 2011 it had real momentum. The party moved out to a biker bar on 411 Highway called Big Daddy’s and settled in for a three-year run. At its peak, Wally was throwing two or three Wallypaloozas in a single year. “It was so hot. It was crazy.”
Then came an unexpected twist for Wally…
He was 40 years old. He and his wife had just bought a house. His youngest daughter was one, maybe two. He’d been noticing things. His legs felt heavy, his steps were getting shorter, his posture was going. He’d filed all of it under the same explanation most 40-year-olds reach for.
“I just thought I was getting old and out of shape.”
Nurse friends had been asking him for years. Do you have Parkinson’s? Anybody in your family have Parkinson’s? He shrugged it off every time. Getting to an actual answer meant ruling out a stroke, ruling out MS, ruling out stress. It was a long process of elimination that finally landed, in April 2018, on Parkinson’s disease. His neurologist told him he’d almost certainly been walking around with it for years before that and seemed genuinely surprised it had taken so long to pin down.
“I thought it was either for old people or just Michael J. Fox,” Wally says. “Not 40-year-old Wally in Maryville.”
He had big plans at the time. He wants to be clear that he still does. “I just have to pivot.”
For its first two and a half decades, Wallypalooza benefited exactly nobody. Wally is refreshingly unsentimental about this. “It was really a shallow soul,” he says, then immediately softens it: “It was a fun time. It’s Van Wilder.”
The pivot came from someone else’s idea. In 2021 (pandemic timeline, as Wally puts it), he brought Wallypalooza to The Bird & The Book in Maryville for the first time. It worked, so he came back the next year, and the next, and he’s been there every year since.
At one of those early shows, Lisa pulled him aside and told him she’d cut a check to the American Parkinson Disease Association in his honor.
“I was just taken aback by it. I was blown away. It never occurred to me.”
It occurs to him now. Wallypalooza is still free. No cover, all ages, the way it’s always been. But there are QR codes at the merch tables for anyone who wants to donate to APDA. Wally doesn’t handle any of the money himself. What he handles is the part that turned out to matter more: getting people in a room, letting them see somebody living with this thing out loud.
“I need to get out and live a little and spread some awareness,” he says. “Let people know life does go on. You can still do fun things. Use some imagination. Just have a good time.”
There’s a real cost to two nights of this, and Wally is candid about it. He’s protective of his bandwidth these days. He has a family. His bedtime is around nine.
Stress triggers his symptoms, and not just the bad kind. “Sometimes stress, positive or negative, will trigger my symptoms. I can get overstimulated with excitement.” The things he loves can be the things that set his body off, which is a cruel piece of arithmetic for a man who throws parties.
What gets him through is a crew that knows the signs. “If I start to dip, you know, I have an off time, and that happens. But I got a good squad, man.” He’s blunt that this doubles as public education. Most people know exactly one thing about Parkinson’s, and that thing is Michael J. Fox.
The other thing keeping him upright is yoga, specifically DDP Yoga, the program built by 1990s WCW heavyweight champion Diamond Dallas Page after he wrecked his back. “It’s more like broga,” Wally says, laughing. He does it at home, nonstop. “Yoga’s been my saving grace.”
Wally has been making music with the same songwriting partner since seventh grade. He and Vince, now a dentist on 411, started playing together in 1992 and had their first band practice on the night Bill Clinton was elected. They recorded an EP in Vince’s garage on a boombox. The band, Miles-Ingle, has been variously synthwave, David Bowie-ish, experimental, new wave and post-punk over the years, with about 40 singles and two EPs on Spotify and Apple from 2019 onward. The pre-2019 material is still sitting somewhere waiting to be uploaded.
That thirty-four-year run makes Miles-Ingle a strong candidate for longest-running band in Blount County, a title Wally had never considered until it was said out loud to him.
This year’s lineup has a similar déjà vu running through it. Becki Grace graduated with Wally in 1997 and is playing Wallypalooza for the first time. He asked her personally, after she assumed the whole thing was rip-roaring metal. (There’s some of that. There’s also a lot else.) Joshua Lee Jordan is class of ’97 too; he and Wally have known each other since John Sevier in 1988. Catalyst hasn’t played the festival since 2011 and 2012. Seven Year Sideshow are what Wally affectionately calls repeat offenders. NinjaWitch and Sgwamp Mawgs are new to him, and one of his favorite parts of the job is discovering bands at his own party.
“This is our class reunion,” he says, “and we don’t have to talk about our jobs and all that crap. Hey, major album coming out. You know? The real stuff. The stuff that matters.”
And on Friday at 5 p.m., before any band plays, Wally is doing something he’s never done: roughly thirty minutes of spoken word, alone, opening his own festival. He’s not sure yet whether it’ll be funny or dramatic. Somewhere in the neighborhood of Henry Rollins, maybe.
The reason is simple. Parkinson’s has been chipping at his confidence, so he’s going to go stand in front of it.
“I’m just like, dude, let’s just jump out there.”
Ask Wally what surprises him most about year 29 and he doesn’t talk about lineups.
“People my age that were there, they’ve slowed down. They go to bed early. But they’re bringing their kids. It’s insane. I’ve seen three generations show up at Wallypalooza.”
He’s already thinking about year 30, though he’s pacing himself. “If I survive these two nights, and I’m sure I will.”
Where: The Bird & The Book, Maryville When: Friday, August 14 and Saturday, August 15, 2026. Music starts at 5 p.m. both nights. Cost: Free. No cover, all ages. Donations to the American Parkinson Disease Association accepted via QR code at the merch tables.
Friday, August 14
Saturday, August 15
