Music City Madness

I was in Nashville for the weekend to meet up with some old friends and see a show. You're aware that I've been taking little trips to the South for a couple years now. Why? I don't know. The South is close compared to the East and way closer than the West. And the American South is different. It's mysterious. It's scenic. There's a lot of history. White trash history, African American history. Native American pre-history. Mounds. River bottoms. Fried fish. Mostly I go places because I'm crazy and if I don't go somewhere I go a different kind of crazy. The South is close.

I've been to Nashville many times but never really thought of it as being in the South. Most of the time I thought of it as the place where I had to go to pick up my kids when they were going back and forth to New York on the Chinatown bus or at the airport because it's much cheaper to fly into Nashville than the little regional airport where I live. I always went early and explore the city. I like going to the thrift shops. Sometimes you find something from the music world. A cool pair of shoes, a western shirt. And I like local southern cooking in iconic little restaurants. I always search those out. Nashville has some good ones.

I met my friends at Bolton's. Bolton's is my favorite fried fish and chicken place, not just in Nashville but of all the fried fish and chicken places throughout this crazy world. Usually I get a big can of Heineken from the gas station down the street because the food is hot, but tonight I didn't want to get too full so I brought some red wine instead of the cold beer. A nice bottle of Valpolicella from Trader Joe's and my friends brought aTempranillo. It was a nice meal. Fried fish, cole slaw and potato salad with bottles of wine. Nothing crazy. Just dinner with friends outside Bolton's on a warm spring Nashville evening. Then we went to the show.

The next morning I got up early and explored east Nashville, which is the part of Nashville where the cooler locals live and congregate. I noticed the Nashville Biscuit House while driving around aimlessly. That's how I explore strange places. I drive around aimlessly. The Biscuit House looked iconic. Trendy white people were waiting in a line out the door. I didn't feel like queueing so continued on my way. Just down the street was an outdoor thrift market where I bought a pair of Carhartt overalls and had a long chat with the guy pictured aboveselling records, mostly about music and the superiority of vinyl and concerts over the years. He regretted not seeing some of the bigger acts. Everyone plays Nashville so he had plenty of chances. Fortunately, I have no regrets. He had a lot of old paperback books for sale. Most of them were fifties and sixties novels with cool retro racy covers. There was a little paperback first printing of some John Cheever stories which I really wanted but cheaped out since I wouldn't want to ruin the old book by reading it.

I went back to the biscuit place later and there wasn't a line so I went in. Something was terribly off. I could feel it when I first walked in. The photograph above captures a bit of it. I wish I could have photographed more, but it would have been rude to openly photograph people eating their breakfast. Even if I suspect people are not real, as I did in this case, I always act on the assumption they are. A guy along the wall was eating a giant breakfast. A heaping plate of eggs and potatoes and meat. He rhythmically put one forkful in his mouth after another. The waitress served the portly couple in the booth next to me a heaping plate of pancakes and a giant biscuits and gravy. The guy on the wall kept shoveling food in his mouth. The waitress came back with large plates of bacon and sausage. The guy was still eating. One forkful after another. Rhythmically. The pile of food on his plate didn't seem to be going down. The waitress brought the large couple another two plates, Belgian waffles and something or other. The guy by the wall kept shoveling. Another two plates arrived for the portly couple. The guy by the wall kept eating like an automaton and the pile of food on his plate didn't go down. It didn't go down at all. I had the fried fish. It was good but not great. A little undercooked.

The nominal reason I went to Nashville was to see Scott H. Biram, who you know I find fascinating as both a great artist and as a fucked up individual. His assistant told me you never know what you're going to get from one night to the next and this night we got the full spectrum. The show was in a bowling alley. It was in a cool bowling alley in east Nashville that booked more alternative-ish bands and a nice performance space, but still, the sound of it. Scott H. Biram in a bowling alley. I figured the chances were fair that it would be a Spinal Tap like experience.

It got close. Scott started out very professional and was playing as well or better than the other times I'd seen him, but the audience kept buying him shots of whiskey. He knew better and ignored the shots for awhile, but they kept coming and he started throwing them back.

It was a great crowd. They knew his songs and sang along at the right parts. That seemed to energize Biram and he did some incredible guitar work. His sound is high level good. I doubt any other solo artist comes close. It wasn't just me. There were more than a couple times he pulled off some incredible playing that reached musical transcendence. I saw people in the audience look at each other with dropped jaws signaling like did you fucking see that? But the whiskey shots started adding up. Playing became uneven. There were sublime moments, but also painful ones.

That's the thing with fucked up self-destructive artists. They (we) sniff a little success and immediately do something to sabotage it. Biram pulled off an incredible version of Mississippi Fred McDowell's "Going Down to the River" followed by a rousing version of "Truck Driver" that had the audience finishing the refrain with a joyful scream of "east Texas and Vietnam." The song ended in raucous applause and all he had to do was keep going with his own songs or another blues cover, but instead he tried to play something by Woody Guthrie. Not only did no one want to hear a song by Woody Guthrie, Biram was really struggling to remember how to play it. It sure looked like the whiskey had totally kicked his ass. He was mumbling and looked like he might not be able to continue. I half expected some little people to come out and dance around a tiny Stonehenge.

But after the Woody Guthrie disaster he had a few more shots and managed to regroup and take it to a whole new level of crazy. He does a gospel preacher bit where he blesses members of the audience. He starts by making some sounds on the guitar and routing it through a bunch of mods to make a Satanic loop of devil music. Then he launches into a sermon about the temptations of Satan and Jesus and Whiskey and chickens and who knows what else. If I had any sense I would have recorded it, but I don't so I didn't. I did get a few pictures though. It was incredibly intense and one of the greatest musical sequences I'd ever experienced. Totally off the rails. I'd never seen anything remotely like it.

The first thing I did in Nashville was to go to the botanic garden. I left early and got there when they opened. While I was there, I had an epiphany. When I started typing "epiphany" just now, the computer thought I was trying to type "episode," like I had some kind of psychotic break, or perhaps a mild stroke. That's what we're coming to.

You know I go to botanic gardens a lot. I lived near the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for 15 years and went all the time. In Tucson I was a member of the Desert Museum, which is more of a garden than a museum, and there was a little garden up the street that I went too many, many times. I could go on. It's been like that everywhere I've lived. So it's putting it mildly when I say I’ve always had a positive impression of botanic gardens, but in Nashville I realized that they are as much like zoos as gardens, if not more so. I see that now because of Lola's gardens. She has transformed our yard into a little botanic garden. The yard, front and back, has 12 separate gardens, each with different plants. Herbs, vegetables, flowers and local plants that attract pollinators. I have a large area I'm turning into a native habitat. We have different places to sit throughout. There are sculptures and other artistic accents.

Watching Lola's garden evolve year after year eventually taught me that abundant animal life is the necessary for a healthy garden and having local plants is what attracts the most animal like. Public gardens go to great lengths to keep animal life away. And they keep individual plant species isolated, or weed free in the common lingo. Like zoos for plants. I suspect the plants are just as sad as the zoo animals. Taken from their homes and families. Isolated. Caged.