In March, Anna came home from New York for Spring Break. I had just finished a two-year project in Serbia and was in the process of getting reacquainted with my younger daughter, putting in some homework and looking for a new gig. Because there was not much going on in Chapel Hill, I asked her if she might be interested in a road trip to Nashville. She enthusiastically agreed and I found what looked to be a well located air bnb. I didn’t do much preparation beyond that, figuring that I would use the evening and the early morning to plan each day. Beyond the Country music hall of fame, hot chicken and maybe some live music, I didn’t think the trip through that seriously, and was excited to see how it might play out.
The celestial jukebox known as Spotify allowed us to play a game that we had discovered earlier in the year. One person plays a song and the other has to play a song that is somehow related--same word in the title--I Got the Feeling to Feeling Allright to Allright now--, different artist with the same name--Chuck Brown to James Brown to James Taylor. We had gone for 6 hours at Christmas and made it as far as Knoxville, stopping to listen to the Hamilton soundtrack for the final two hours. I was ⅔ of the way through the book and Anna knew the play back to front, having closely followed practically everything related to it over the past 4 years. It was fun to talk about the history; about the events left out of the play; the songs cut from the script; and the adroit wordplay of the characters.
We arrived around 8 pm, and found the key under the mat of our apartment, which was in an older neighborhood, not far from the football stadium, on the east side of the river. I made a quick run to the supermarket, picked up a pizza from a nearby Yelp recommendation, and we made plans to walk to the Country Music Hall of Fame the following morning.
I was up earlier than Anna, and, while I sipped my coffee, I wondered if there might be some kind of dinner theater, where we could hear some live music in an all ages venue that was not too late. I found two possibilities: a steamboat cruise that included dinner and a “musical history of Nashville” and a venue called the “Listening Room cafe,” which had a decent looking menu, and seemed to offer a 6:30 and 8:30 show. The earlier show seemed to be sold out for tonight, but I figured I could probably manage the 8:30 show, and resolved to propose it to Anna when she appeared. She was interested, and, since the venue was close to the Hall of Fame, I figured that maybe we could pop in some time, check it out and see if we could get tickets to the earlier show.
We walked over the bridge to the hall of fame, noticing the Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash museums and adding both to our list of possibilities. We had also discussed a studio tour, and the very helpful HOF employee, in addition to recommending some good barbecue places, sold us on combining the HOF visit with the guided tour of the famous RCA Studio B, where some of Nashville’s most celebrated music, including much of Elvis’ best work, had been created.
The HOF was very interesting, but like many such venues, it left me, by no means a country music expert, unsatisfied and hungry for more information. It was mostly plaques summarizing the work of the inductees, along with costumes and instruments. Pretty much what you would expect from a hall of fame, and I’m not complaining, just letting you know that this type of venue is not my preferred one. I ended up much preferring the Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash museums when we visited them the following day. Each provided a level of detail and interactivity that helped me learn a lot about artists with whom I was passably familiar to begin with.
We finished around noon. Our studio tour was scheduled for 130 and while I retrieved our coats, Anna found a convenient diner, where we grabbed a quick lunch. We returned to the HOF and after a short wait, a bus and a guide arrived to take us to the studio. The guide was well prepared and knowledgeable, regaling us with stories of Elvis, Johnny Cash and all the legends who had made music in the famous studio B.
After the bus returned us to the HOF, we walked over to the cafe I had discovered earlier. It was empty, and although the chalkboard indicated that the 630 show was sold out, I figured I would ask the bartender. He looked at me quizzically and walked over to look at the chalkboard. “That’s from last night.” he told me. When I asked him about tonight, he professed ignorance about ticket sales and told me to go online. Although this seemed implausible, we sat down at the bar and I checked again, finding that tickets for tonight now seemed to be available.
We walked back to the apartment, and adjourned for a couple of hours of rest and social media. Then we walked back to the cafe, where we were ushered to a table in a pleasant space with enough room for a couple of hundred diners. The program for the evening was a pair of accomplished songwriters performing songs they had written for other people, and an up and coming duo from Vancouver, who were selling copies of a recent cd and trying to figure out which song to release as their first single. All were incredibly talented and it gave you a real sense of how competitive the business must be. We enjoyed the show immensely, but, in all honesty, I suspect that we will never hear from any of them again, nor that they will be awarded a plaque at the hall of fame down the road. This was the subject of our conversation on the way home, ranging from the business of songwriting to the creation of art for art’s sake and everything in between. My daughter is still passionate and idealistic about art, while I have a more cynical take on things, and I think it was good for both of us to hear each other, although I was probably more open to her points than she mine. Dinner was a pimiento cheeseBLT for me and fried green tomatoes for Anna. Both were excellent
The next day I discovered that the steam boat was not going out, but, as luck would have it, our beloved basketball team was playing the Boston Celtics in a nationally televised game. After a morning with Patsy and Johnny and a lunch of queso and a variety of small tacos at a local place, we spent the afternoon visiting the capitol building and the state museum. It was nice to see Anna’s intellectual curiosity in history, a far cry from the old days of difficult museum visits with young children who couldn’t see what all the fuss was about all these paintings and longed to go back to Euro Disney.
We walked back to the apartment for another siesta, and then out to one of the recommended hot chicken places; one that I’d confirmed offered chicken tenders for the one of us who prefers her chicken off the bone, as they say. We got there early enough to avoid the reported long lines and ordered our chicken and sides. Mild tenders, mac and cheese and fries for Anna; hot dark meat fried chicken with slaw and mac for me. There were two levels of heat beyond hot, and while delicious, the chicken was at the upper range of my tolerance level, if not a tick beyond. I loved it.
We drove back to the apartment just in time for the game. Most of the Celtics key players were out, as well as John Wall, the Wizards star, so the game didn’t have quite the lustre it might have otherwise. Still, these are our boys and we settled into the sofa to watch. It was a close game, back and forth, and Anna had lost track of some of the recent additions to the roster. When I introduced her to Jodie Meeks, the veteran 3-point shooter signed this season to replace an endless parade of such players (Rasual Butler, Martell Webster, Jared Dudley, etc), she remembered the first line of Lloyd Cole’s Rattlesnakes, which begins “Jodie wears a hat although it hasn’t rained in 6 days.”
We were both silent for a while and then I blurted out: “Jodie shoots a three although he hasn’t scored in 6 games.” We spent the next 30 minutes playing with that line, and then Jodie sent the game into overtime with a clutch three at the buzzer, and Bradley Beal helped the Wizards eke out a double overtime victory.
We went to bed happy, and the next day we spent driving back to Chapel Hill, listening to the recorded versions of some of the songs we’d heard the night before.
The next day, I was walking to the gym, going over the lyrics to the song we’d been playing with during the game. The verse I was trying to rewrite goes like this
Jodie wears a hat although it hasn't rained for six days
She says a girl needs a gun these days
Hey on account of all the rattlesnakes
She looks like Eve Marie Saint in on the waterfront
She reads Simone de Beauvoir in her American circumstance.
She's less than sure if her heart has come to stay in San Jose
And her neverborn child still haunts her
As she speeds down the freeway
As she tries her luck with the traffic police
Out of boredom more than spite
She never finds no trouble, she tries too hard
She's obvious despite herself
She looks like Eve Marie Saint in On The Waterfront
She says all she needs is therapy, yeah
All you need is, love is all you need .
I came up with this:
Jodie shoots a 3 although he he hasn’t scored in 6 games.
He says a man needs the ball these days
if he’s ever gonna make big plays.
He looks like Vinnie Johnson, in 1988,
Heats up the microwave, in his journeyman circumstance;
He knows that his job's on the line,
Trying hard to get re-signed.
He says all he needs are open looks,
Yeah all you need is luck is all you need.
I wrote it down when I got home and performed it for Anna when she came up for breakfast. But the magic was gone. Looking at it now, it’s obviously imperfect and doesn’t quite follow the original. But it is special to me nonetheless, and the capstone of a great road trip, which combined a little of both the music and basketball that we've enjoyed so much of together over the last twenty years..
