Patrick and the Machine: HS in Nashville
8 Jul
For those not following along on Twitter, I spent an extended Fourth of July holiday weekend in Nashville, Tennessee. Mind you, I am no fan of contemporary country music, but Nashville is built on the legends of the art form, guys and gals like Cash and Nelson and George Jones and Loretta Lynn who I really enjoy. I prepared for the worst and hoped for better.
It was better than expected, at least at first. We first hit two bars on Broadway, The Stage (which I gather from my companions was prominent in some movie I’ve never seen that probably had a separate wardrobe person for funny hats) and the legendary Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge. As I said, I’m no fan of country music, but even I knew Tootsie’s, where everyone who was everyone in country music played and drank and drank and drank and played a little more. “Coal Miner’s Daughter” included a scene in Tootsie’s. Roger Miller wrote “Dang Me” in a booth there. Kris Kristofferson has probably puked in every one of its 146 corners. This was Saturday night of a holiday weekend, and these were Nashville’s most prominent performance bars. One would naturally expect that the best of Nashville’s usually gargantuan talent pool would be on display, and it was, in a sort of way.
In both of those bars, and in every bar we entered for the rest of the night (until our last stop at the Full Moon Saloon, which played Tom Petty’s Greatest Hits between sets just to cheer me up), the pattern was the same: Male singer who was out of American Idol central casting on acoustic guitar with a plaid shirt and usually unfortunate facial hair, skinny blonde girl working the crowd for tips and hopping on stage periodically to sing, anonymous backing band. More striking was the complete lack of original music; every song was a cover, and some weren’t even remotely country songs. The last song we heard at Tootsie’s was a blonde chick belting out “Don’t Stop Believing” to a confused crowd that she had begged to sing along. Most of the singers (certainly the aforementioned Journey enthusiasts) didn’t even appear to know the names of their band members. The guy from Three Doors Down who co-fronted with Steph Perry kept referring to them as “this band,” as in “Give it up for this band!” Mind you, four hours and ten beers into the night, none of this seemed particularly strange; the bands work for tips, people want to hear cover songs, you play cover songs. I actually started working on a post comparing the setup to Whiskeytown’s two-singer system, a system that slowly disintegrated as Ryan Adams took command but would have been right at home in the honky tonks of Broadway that Saturday night.
And then we went out on Tuesday.
Tuesday was the day after the Fourth of July. Tourists were leaving. Locals were partied out. The rain was falling. There was basically no earthly reason why anyone would be out, and yet there were bands in the bars. And I mean BANDS. First up, Eileen Rose & the Silver Threads:
We walked into Layla’s Bluegrass Inn halfway through their set, and the difference between this and whatever Saturday night was was immediate. This was a group that wasn’t afraid to turn the metronome to about 120 and go off the script of the songs they were covering. And they were still covering songs, but the songs weren’t the half-nuked Garth Brooks from the weekend. They were songs too old and too obscure for any but the oldest and most hardcore country music fan, and yet they were incredibly effective, mostly because there was clear cohesion within the band. For the first time all weekend, there was a band on stage, rather than a centerpiece or two surrounded by a supporting cast that could be easily interchanged as necessary. My doubts about the Nashville scene were set up here, then blown away by The Eskimo Brothers, a trio of smart-asses performing at Paradise Park:
Paradise Park is a trailer park-themed bar, which sets up perfectly for the whole tongue-in-cheek thing that these guys constantly pull, but they were following the one constant rule of mockery: If you’re going to take to someone’s or something’s own medium for purposes of mocking it, you’d sure as hell better be good at it. The Eskimo Brothers cracked wise for a couple of hours, but they were also phenomenal musicians who could play at or above the level of anyone we’d seen to that point, including the Saturday night crew at the legendary Tootsie’s, and they were playing an empty Paradise Park on July 5. And that’s what made what happened next the funniest moment of the trip.
The Eskimo Brothers covered “Folsom Prison Blues” (later described as “the National Anthem of country music” by the lead singer), just as every other band we’d seen can do, and they were killing it. Crushing it. Obliterating it into fine dust that would coalesce and reform into Folsom Prison Blues again like T-2000. And the lead singer got to shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die, only it came out like so:
When I was just a baby
My momma told me “Son,
Always be a good boy,
Don’t ever play with guns.”
But I shot a man in Tootsie’s
‘Cause he was hangin’ out in Tootsie’s.
I laughed for three hours. No kidding, three hours, not only because it was uproaringly funny in both content and execution — perfect pitch, perfect drawl, and he let the line go into the next measure of the song just to emphasize the punchline rather than rush it — but because it crystallized what I was starting to see, that the Nashville music machine has no real interest in musicians at all. This is nothing new, of course. In fact, when we toured the Country Music Hall of Fame, two things were striking (well, three things, but we’ll get to the third later): The number of individual artists inducted far, far outpace the number of groups (basically just Alabama and some gospel quartets from the 50′s and 60′s), and the number of songwriters inducted was far greater than anyone could imagine. They showed video of Bill Anderson, who is no slouch: Former member of the Grand Ole Opry, soap opera star, etc. But Anderson has won two Song of the Year awards in the last decade, for songs he wrote for Brad Paisley and George Strait. These aren’t half-assed dunces, either; Paisley and Strait are seasoned pros and have written their own material before. Songwriting is common practice, though, so common that they separate Vocal Performance (for the singers) and Song (for the songwriters) at the awards show. The same goes for the solo artist vs. bands dynamic. The HOF made special reference to artists who kept their backing band rather than touring and recording with studio musicians, mostly because it was, and is, so rare.
Nashville doesn’t want the boot stompin’ of Eileen Rose & the Silver Threads or the hijinks of The Eskimo Brothers. They want the Three Doors Down guy and the blonde. They don’t want musicians so much as they want pretty people who are marginally competent singers. Bands cost money (you have to pay the whole band, rather than the one bro and some studio musicians on contract) and want artistic control. The companies don’t need a cohesive band to put together an album and go on tour; they need a marketing gimmick to sell the music someone else wrote. It doesn’t matter that you can’t sing, pretty boy. Put on a funny hat. Taylor Swift will belt out whatever songs you put in front of her and make a pucker face at Kanye. Nashville might have music, but it has no soul.
We went to Milwaukee on Wednesday night to see Florence and the Machine and the Black Keys — that staple of the Slow States — at Summerfest. Excellent show, of course, but I was struck by Florence Welsh, whose voice is so beautiful it brings you to tears without even knowing the context of the song, and who twirled around the stage in a burnt orange dress like Neko Case’s middle cyclone, and this tornado loves you, people. She was phenomenal, and yet all I could do was thank the stars that she was more into Ann & Nancy Wilson than she was Naomi and Wynona Judd. If she’d gone to Nashville with all that talent, she’d be stuck playing July 5 to a handful of people in a tiny bar.
Other observations:
– I got the chance to sing David Allan Coe’s “You Never Even Called Me By My Name” at Lonnie’s Western Room’s Sunday night karaoke show, which was a lot of fun. I can’t remember the last time I was nervous about karaoke, but it’s a bit of a different crowd when you’re doing country standards in Nashville. And that song really is the greatest beer drinking song ever.
– Darius Rucker, late of Hootie and the Blowfish, performed for the Fourth of July and was fantastic as always; the man has the best male voice I’ve ever heard live. But he also proved my point. He wasn’t necessarily with a nameless band, but they faithfully played all the Hootie stuff note for note regardless, because that’s what you want from Darius. Rucker moved seamlessly to country because he has a good voice and he’s marketable.
– Related note: Seriously, Fairweather Johnson is a great album. Pick it up again sometime soon, turn on “Tucker’s Town,” and lament that the Blowfish have blown their last.
– They had Elvis Presley’s Caddy at the Hall of Fame, complete with a gold-plated television and record player in the backseat. Elvis basically owned America’s first minivan.
– The third revelation from the Country Music Hall of Fame: It’s a mostly chronological three-level exhibit you go through starting from the third floor and working down toward the bottom (by the time you make the move to the second floor, you’ve basically hit the Johnny Cash heyday). We walked through the first exhibits of the second floor and, as happens from time to time in an open museum layout, we sort of passed by some exhibits on our right without looking. We got to Hank Williams Jr.’s small exhibit, and I laughed at the fact that the Monday Night Football song wasn’t mentioned. What I didn’t realize was that the exhibits we missed were actually a massive exhibit to Hank Williams Jr. complete with a long video interview, a jacket from one of the Monday Night Football openings with random NFL team logos sewn on the sides, and this absurd narrative of Hank Jr. as some sort of modern country music luminary. It was surreal, especially given that Hank Williams Jr. pretty much did “Family Tradition” and then sucked for like 25 years.
– OK, the good stuff. Didn’t have any real knockout beers in Nashville. The best of the lot was Yazoo Brewing Company’s Dos Perros, a brown ale brewed in the traditon of Mexico during the Austrian occupation of the late 19th century. Not only did I not know that a brown ale could be made in Mexican tradition, I had no idea Austria ever had anything to do with Mexico. Sorry, Rambler. I also sampled the Sweetwater 420 IPA, which was pretty generic IPA fodder. The best beer I had on the trip, of course, came from Milwaukee, where the Leinie’s Let’s Fest beer brewed specifically for Summerfest was delightful.
