Whitesville to Nashville: I took first
shower. Drove out and Tim put on an
impromptu playlist of American-themed music.
Sousa, etc. By the time we’d
broken into modern stuff (i.e., repeating on a loop Whitney Houston’s 1991
Super Bowl performance of the National Anthem) we arrived at the motel. Econo-Lodge.
Very nice. Not as close to the
city as we’d thought it would be. On the
internet I discovered a chicken festival (your guess is as good as mine) and
pinpointed it on my map. We headed
towards it with Tim driving but it didn’t take us to Nashville center so we
didn’t check it out. Just turned around
and drove towards the big buildings we could see some miles away and hoped that
something would be there. Soon it became
clear that we were on the right track.
Passed Nashville’s pretty City Hall.
Tan building with columns. That’s
all it takes to impress me it seems. Eerily
there was almost no traffic in this part of the city and I wondered if that was
on account of its being a holiday or just the way Nashville was. I would have expected there to be MORE traffic
on a holiday. Maybe relatedly the city
was very, very quiet. We parked in a
complex (there were a few of them around and well-marked…good planning,
Nashville) and when we stepped onto the street there was not a voice to be
heard. I may be misremembering but I
think I could even hear the wind.
We walked towards a
street where we saw people convening and what do you know! Turned out this was the Music City July 4th
Festival, Nashville’s big event and probably the reason the city was reported
to be so much fun on the 4th. What luck! The city had blocked off much of Broadway, a
main street apparently, and along its sides were stands where one could
buy beer or lemonade or water if one so chose.
Cleverly there were also “mist stations,” from which mist (duh) was
steadily sprayed and under which you could walk to cool off if overheating. I took advantage of one midway through the
day. For some reason my feet felt like
they were BURNING the whole time we were walking around. Are Converse really poorly ventilated? Were my socks producing like an inordinate
amount of friction inside my shoes? Was
the heat of the pavement rising through my soles and baking my feet? Don’t know what it was but it made walking
very uncomfortable.
After we’d walked the
street and taken the lay of the land we decided to get lunch and so stopped at
a big bumping place called “Brewhouse Downtown.” Food was fine. The menu had lots of Southwest options on it
and this was somewhat irking as we’d just come from the Southwest and I was
hoping for something more Nashville-specific.
Does Nashville have an original food culture? I dunno.
Big beer selection, anyway. We
sat a horseshoe-shaped bar (one of at least two bars in the facility but the
only one shaped like a horseshoe) and it was manned by a sole
waitress/bartender. There probably
should have been more than one waitress/bartender because service was
slow. My Cajun sandwich, though tasty, came
to me lukewarm. Above the horseshoe bar were two flatscreen
TVs. The one closest us was playing a TV
movie about Babe Ruth starring a young John Goodman (it looked TERRIBLE but we
couldn’t hear the dialogue). More
attention-grabbing, though, was the program playing on the farther TV: Nathan’s
Hotdog Eating Contest. The whole thing
was so captivatingly absurd. I said to
Tim that sometimes clips of Japanese gameshows used to play on American TV and you’d watch them and think, “What the hell is going on over there?” American TV appeared to be creeping ever closer
to that level of absurdity. Nathan’s
Hotdog Eating Contest was meant to be ironic, right? Right?
With its little pre-competition American Idol-esque contestant biographies
(for who could become invested in this without first learning about Joey Chestnut’s
longtime girlfriend or “Megatoad’s” impoverished family or
whatever)? Yet there was something
sincere in the sheer athleticism on display.
This was a real challenge being undertaken by real people. You could see the eaters sweating and
struggling and you couldn’t help but empathize and take sides and root root
root for your man. Hard to get the tone
of something like this and maybe, I thought, it was because I rarely watched TV anymore but I felt as if I were party to some foreign ritual. To me this was as strange as any Japanese
show – but hadn’t I been to that very boardwalk and seen people who looked just
like that and even eaten Nathan’s hotdogs?
Again, hints of insanity.
Left BD and walked
Broadway. In addition to the pop-up
beer/lemonade stands there were bars all over the place and in each bar a band
playing. Some places were more hip than
others. We walked to the far end of
Broadway which was incidentally the Kiddie Korner and there were lots of kids
running around having the time of their lives.
Blow-up castles and bouncy houses.
A GIANT INFLATABLE SLIP ‘N SLIDE!
We didn’t partake though joked/thought about crashing the bouncy house. Here, as at the other end of the street, a
band was performing live in front of a sizable crowd. The crowd was moving around and not all
listening. Tim and I on the other hand
took a great interest. The band consisted
of two college-aged guys, one college-aged girl, and an elderly man. One of the college-aged guys was bearded and played bass and the other was the featured soloist on
every song and was unassuming and imposingly talented. The college girl sang lead and had a
cotton candy pop-country belting voice.
She was a good showman although she didn’t take many chances musically. The last band member looked as if he could
have been the singer’s father. He
was gray-haired and had a bushy walrus mustache and played guitar but rarely
soloed. During some bits (a guitar solo
for example) he and the LS would talk into each others’ ears as if discussing
strategy. It was an intriguing
relationship. Later as we moved through the
bars we discovered it to be common practice for a band of young people to
recruit a veteran to play backup guitar.
Made sense but resulted in some strange visuals. A foxy (untalented and perpetually hoarse)
young woman backed by a Mark Twain lookalike.
Mattie and Melody backed by the Nashville Old Folks’ Home.
After leaving the KK we
roved from bar to bar looking for the perfect combination of atmosphere (dive-y
but not empty and sad OR packed and rowdy) and band (girl pop-country of the
kind we’d left behind at the KK). First
bar was promising but played too old-timey music and the singer (mentioned
above) was too basic; second bar was packed and featured a trio of singing,
strumming high schoolers (automatic disqualification); third bar was full of
dancing high schoolers (even worse); fourth bar was too empty and
ratty. We were on the verge of giving
up. Then we walked by a big marquee:
“TEQUILA COWBOY.” It was very noisy and
very big and colorful and these were all (to Antisocial Me) bad signs. But they weren’t carding at the door (just an
added encumbrance) so we slipped in to survey the scene. Full of people but not uncomfortably so. Music loud but not insurmountable. Two barstools available not AT the bar but on
a little island proximate to it. On one
wall a huge amateur painting of Spaghetti Western-era Clint Eastwood. Band: awesome. Lead singers were a beautiful woman and a
wispy haired short dude. WHSD, who
turned out to be named Brett, played guitar and had a consistently on-pitch if unmemorable voice. Apparently he was a Nashville
boy. BW, who turned out to be named
Bethany Pope, was an extraordinary belter.
Voice better suited to rock than country but she sounded good on
everything. Bethany had a pretty, light
high voice too. Truly a dynamic talent. She smiled and laughed whenever she wasn’t
singing and seemed like she would be a blast to hang out with. Every now and then Bethany would walk around
the bar with a tip jar and I gave her two dollars over the course of the
three-plus hours we were there. They deserved it. They played popular country
songs and took requests and at the end of their long and highly satisfying set
Bethany sang “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes.
I expected her to sing it like the 4NB soloist but she didn’t insofar as
she hardly used her high voice. She
didn’t have to. Instead she belted the
whole thing and it was just mindblowing.
Three minutes of no holds barred belting. She was so damn good. The band, called “Points West,” also featured
a great old-guard guitarist named Rusty Russell. Rusty was wasted even when we got there at like 3pm but still
rocked it. Tended to yell out sarcastic things after songs: “Does it need a Jack and Coke up here or is it just me?” “You know in most
parts of the country when a singer asks the audience to sing along they
actually sing along!” “I was thinking
about getting out of the business when this song came out. I remember.
It was 1972.” Sometimes in the
middle of his solos he’d play the first part of the National Anthem to great applause. Impressive that he could find and work in the
melody in any key. After a while
though it stopped seeming like a cute tie-in, more like a cynical applause-inducer. Tim and I loved, loved, loved Rusty and
aspired to be him and felt like we were in many ways already him.
Finally we left around 6
(when Points West finished their set). We checked out the potential fireworks sitting areas and weighed our
options. Should we go back to the car
and grab our fold-out chairs and then wait it out until 9:45 when the fireworks
would reportedly begin? That had been
the plan all day. But now Tim made the
argument that we should probably go back to the motel. Why?
I’m not exactly sure but it felt like the right move at the time. And in a way it WAS the right move: back at
the motel we could relax on beds in front of a TV AND see the
fireworks. We were also tired. Really tired.
And the idea of staying up and active for three more hours was…daunting. Went back to the motel room and ordered dinner. We got pizzas (medium cheeses for each of us)
and Tim got breadsticks and I got wings.
We watched INDIANA JONES and determined that IJ was really an
embodiment of the American pragmatic spirit.
Willing to shoot an enemy where the honorable thing would be to engage
him in a sword fight or whatever.
Ducking for cover when his oblivious enemy was soon to be chopped to pieces by an
airplane propeller, etc.
Around 9pm Tim and I
heard some popping sounds outside and walked out to see if we could spot
fireworks. Barefoot we made our way to
the Nashville side of the motel overlooking the pool. There were fireworks going off in three towns
and we were far enough away to see all of them.
Kind of a panoramic view. Over
Nashville we could see some big colorful ones going off and figured we’d been
given faulty intel about to the show’s starting time. There were a number of people outside on the
balcony and by the pool on the level below watching and no one was
talking. We walked
back to the motel room and Tim said he was satisfied.
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