The other week we were in Nashville at the renowned Bluebird
Cafe listening to the singer-songwriters do their thing. Mostly
this was my songwriter-girlfriend’s idea, though admittedly I
rather enjoyed the show. The Bluebird is a venue for serious fans
of country music, though you’d never know it from looking at the
place, set down in a nondescript strip mall next to a hair salon
and a dry cleaners. Not exactly the Metropolitan Opera House, or
even the Ryman Auditorium. Maybe that’s apropos, considering how
commercial and nontraditional country music has become. Or had
become by 1995 when Robbie Fulks first sang what many of us were
thinking:
Hey, this ain’t country-western
It’s just soft-rock feminist crap
And I thought they’d struck bottom back in the days of Ronnie
Milsap
Now they can’t stop the flood of ***holes, there ain’t a big enough
ASCAP
They serve food at the Bluebird, though dining is frowned upon. You
wouldn’t chomp on a taco salad at the Metropolitan Opera House
during
Rigoletto, would you? Try and order nachos at the
Bluebird and you are likely to get dirty looks — from me, anyway.
Drinking, however, is mandatory there being a seven-drink minimum
(that’s what I told my girlfriend, anyway). And where else will one
find waitresses who wear T-shirts that read “Shhhhhhh!”?
On the evening we were there four songwriters — Jamie Teachnor,
Kerry Kurt Phillips, Kevin Denney and Tim Johnson — performed in
the round surrounded by more than a hundred appreciative listeners.
Performed is not the right word. These were songwriters, not
performers, but they sang well enough, I thought, to make their own
recordings. Apparently it takes more than a good voice and great
songs to make it in Nashville. It takes pizzazz. And I don’t mean
Nudie suits and rhinestone dresses. It takes whatever Keith Urban’s
got, and I don’t mean Nicole Kidman. We were most impressed with
Jamie Teachnor, from Fagus, Missouri, an unincorporated area on the
Arkansas border, who doesn’t look old enough to drink, but writes
and sings like someone who’s lived several lives, none of them
happy.
AFTER THE SHOW we spoke to Tim Johnson, an Oregonian of all things.
He was over by the bar, not surprisingly, giving hugs to Kerry Kurt
Phillips. My girlfriend wanted some free songwriting advice.
Johnson asked where we were from. “St. Louis?” he cried. “What are
you doing in St. Louis? You’ve got to move to Nashville!” Sure, and
once you move to Nashville, you have to move to Austin or New York.
There’s always somewhere more happening.
I know lots of struggling local musicians. Many of them are
middle aged and have accepted, albeit reluctantly, that they will
never make it as professional musicians, that as artists they are
mediocre at best. I have followed their careers, rooted for them,
attended their shows when I could, bought their CDs, and wished
them well. But by the time they reached 40, Father Time had pretty
much knocked the illusions out of them and most were grateful they
had kept their day jobs as senior regional managers or music
teachers. They are now able to write and perform their songs
because it is what they enjoy doing, not because it is how they
hope to make a princely living or because they’d hoped to achieve
some kind of low-rent immortality as an inductee into the Country
Music Hall of Fame. Like a tired swimmer, they have stopped
struggling and accepted their fate. This couldn’t have been easy
for them because we are so often fed that old line about “holding
on to your dreams.” Fortunately Keith Urban wasn’t appearing at the
Bluebird that night (as if!), so we didn’t have to sit through his
treacly version of that cliche:
‘Cause someday baby
Your ship is gonna come in, so
Hold onto your dreams
‘Cause everything ya see
Comes true if you believe in holdin’
On to your dreams
Oh, God. If you drive outside of Nashville to the suburb of Forest
Hills you can see one of Urban and Kidman’s many palaces high up on
a hill, paid for by writing doggerel like that. Amazing.
Today, Nashville feels like a museum, haunted by the ghosts of
Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, and Minnie Pearl. Only at the Bluebird
do the city and the music come alive.
