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Hope Nicholls, the queen of Charlotte’s underground, turned 65 in January. “Having a huge birthday party at Snug Harbor,” she says with glee on a gray, drizzly December weekday at Boris & Natasha. That’s the offbeat boutique she and her husband, Aaron Pitkin, have owned and operated since 1999 (though at its current location on The Plaza near Matheson Avenue only since 2021). The two have been together since they met at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa and decided to make music together.
They still are, with a band called It’s Snakes. Their bands Snagglepuss, in the aughts, and Sugarsmack, in the 1990s, preceded it. But they’re remembered best for Fetchin Bones, a punk-inspired but musically eclectic band that recorded four albums in the ’80s and toured with acts like R.E.M., The Replacements, and Red Hot Chili Peppers until their breakup in 1990. Pitkin played guitar, and Nicholls, the lead singer, threw herself into live performances with a howling intensity that drew comparisons to Janis Joplin and Patti Smith. Fetchin Bones was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in Kannapolis in 2023. “Their expansive artistic exploration,” according to the hall, “went beyond one sound or genre, instead paying reckless homage to an explosive mix that helped to define the creative renaissance evolving from Southern college towns, clubs, and underground happenings in the United States and England in the early 1980s.”
Hope Nicholls and It’s Snakes perform at Snug Harbor in January for her 65th birthday.
At the time, those Southern college towns included Chapel Hill; Spartanburg, South Carolina; and, especially, Athens, Georgia, home of R.E.M. and the B-52s. They did not include Charlotte, which has always had bands and musicians but never a scene. Yet Nicholls, who grew up in Davidson and graduated from West Charlotte High School, has spent most of her life here and has no plan to leave. What’s more, she sees reason for optimism in local music—it still hasn’t achieved its potential, but population growth has meant more musicians, and Charlotte has more venues than you think. “Everyone I know,” Nicholls says, “is in three bands.”
Her words have been edited for space and clarity.
I mean, when I was 5, hearing Bringing It All Back Home by Bob Dylan. When I was probably 4, hearing “House of the Rising Sun” by The Animals. These were moments where I’m like, “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard.” Hearing Lesley Gore when I was probably 2 or 3, singing, “It’s My Party,” and thinking, I’ve never heard somebody use their voice in this kind of way. Stuff like that. It just goes on and on, Cream and Sergeant Pepper, both when I was 7—and for me, it wasn’t just Cream, it was Disraeli Gears, the cover of that record, how they were dressed, the fonts, all these things. It’s just really basic for me. It never changes. I do all the fonts for every band, for every business, all my aesthetics. It’s just all like one big thing.
Nicholls’ jotted lyrics. “Music is aspirational,” she writes. “Music is potential.”
I never thought I was remotely talented enough to be a musician. I never sang in church or school or anywhere, but it was the punk rock attitude. I loved everything about it. I loved the music, I loved the fashion, I loved the politics, I loved the outsider perspective—which is a big perspective for me—of not wanting to go into banking or business or anything, which seems like a very Charlotte thing. I always said, “I’m gonna be very content being on the outside.” And I continue to feel that way. That’s one of the ways that I run Boris & Natasha, making sure that people feel included and not excluded. I’m much more interested in helping somebody who has $50 to spend than $500.
I love music. I’m listening to this ridiculous Barenaked Ladies Christmas record right now. I’m a musicologist, for sure.
We’ve been together since 1981. In the first five minutes, he said, “What are you interested in?” I said, “I’m interested in music, and I want to be in a band.” He said, “Me, too.” And I said, “Oh, OK, well, we’re gonna do that together.” That was it. Nothing’s ever changed. I was 21, and he was 20.
We were inspired by the music that we were listening to as musicians. So X was a big influence to start, The Gun Club, Violent Femmes. Those were three foundational influences, as well as, for me, the B-52s and Pylon. It had morphed a little bit by the fourth record (Monster, released in 1989). We were a little more interested in bands like INXS and foundational songwriter bands like The Rolling Stones and, you know, classic (Led) Zeppelin. Always a lot of influences.
It’s Snakes, which includes (left to right) her husband, Aaron Pitkin, on guitar; Darrin Gray on bass; and Greg Walsh on guitar.
One of the first shows Aaron and I ever went to was here in Charlotte, seeing Bow Wow Wow. That literally exploded my brain. It was at a club called Viceroy Park (off Tyvola Road). It lasted only, like, maybe two years, but R.E.M. played there, Let’s Active. We saw Iggy Pop there. That was unbelievable.
I’ll just keep naming bands.
We stayed in Charlotte because of our families. I never wanted to live where it was cool. We probably would have done best, maybe, in a small town like Athens, because we both grew up in small towns and that might have been nice. But we didn’t want to live anywhere except where our family was.
Charlotte’s never been cool. Now, people come here, and they know that people are not going to have, like, the cool factor that’s in Chapel Hill, “Oh, you’re not cool enough to live here”—there used to be kind of a problem with aloofness, or cliquishness. We just didn’t ever feel like any of that. I think now, really, people are very welcoming in Charlotte.
What’s happening in Charlotte is, we’re just getting so many new people here, but it’s hard to see how you can have a coalesced scene without the things that we’re talking about: radio, a lot of young people who really care about music, you know? I mean, that’s part of what you do in college—kind of learn who you are. We are getting people who are a little bit older, so they kind of already know.
There’s just never been a way to make an alternative music scene have traction until we started to have density here. Now, there’s an amazing number of bands, and there’s a lot of venues, but for a long time, there wasn’t even a venue.
When we moved back—and we’re talking about the early ’80s—it was just The Milestone (Club). The Double Door would occasionally get somebody interesting, like Root Boy Slim, but they didn’t want bands like us. We would never have played the Double Door in Fetchin Bones. That was too weird for them. We didn’t have the radio; we didn’t have the university or college. That’s why Athens and Chapel Hill were popping off.
We did everything in a punk way: how we dressed, we made our own flyers, we booked our own shows. We did everything ourselves. You know, we couldn’t even believe it when Danny Beard wanted to sign us to DB Records—Danny Beard is DB. The only reason that he even knew about us is because we’d been booking shows with bands from Athens. And then, as soon as we played Athens, people wanted us to play in Atlanta. And then once we got signed to DB Records—which was an Atlanta-based independent record label that originally signed the B-52s, that signed Pylon—we were pretty much in the national spotlight.
Nicholls hand-drew the iconic Fetchin Bones logo in 1987, when she lived in an apartment on Park Road. She keeps the framed drawing in a closet to protect it from sunlight.
So we were just playing in Nashville one night, and all these guys had come from New York and LA to see us. We were playing a showcase, and Capitol Records came up and said, “Do you want to sign with Capitol Records?” And we didn’t even think it was real. That was early ’86. And then we went on tour with R.E.M.
The places that It’s Snakes plays always have interesting things going on. We play all over. We just played Saturday night for Krampus (NoDa Krampus Krawl), at Jack Beagle’s. Snug Harbor, Tommy’s Pub—Tommy’s has a very interesting mix of music and DJing. Bart’s Mart, The Milestone, Visulite—all these places where you can hear some cool music in between bands, and you’re gonna hear bands. Oh, Petra’s, too, of course.
I mean, you have to depend on your phone in a lot of ways. So maybe, you know, you go to Petra’s Instagram, you see who’s playing, right? That’s what I do. I go to the different clubs. I see who’s playing. I go to those bands’ Instagram (profiles), and I see who they’re playing with. I mean, I have a million ways to find out about new music, because I am constantly looking for new music.
I mean, you know, it’s nice to be remembered. We were the biggest band for a long time, probably, until The Avett Brothers came out, from Charlotte.
I always feel bad for people who, like, make it to the NFL or NBA, and they make a whole lot of money, and then end up broke because they thought that their ship had come in. Well, the ship will come in, and then the ship will go right back out. So you’d better have your own rowboat. That’s what we’ve always done. It’s a do-it-yourself perspective, where you don’t forget how you got there in the first place and remember that you may have to back out the same way. 
© 2025 Charlotte Magazine.
The Queen of Charlotte’s Underground Gets Real About Local Music – Charlotte Magazine
