Soooo... Spring. It is nice. Sure we have some cold rain but the nice days get mixed in and it is...sweeeeeet. It also marks the end of my wife’s busy season. She has been working 60 hours a week since Christmas and as a result we try and schedule a long weekend to mark the end to get to know one another again in some other context other than grabbing a meal together or saying good morning to one another before we go running off in 7 directions. Last year we went to Lexington to go to Keenland and visit some friends and drink some bourbon and eat some food. It was a very sweet trip and we ate a lot of good food and chilled at a bed and breakfast and decided it needed to be a tradition.
This year I had been thinking about perhaps doing Oxford Mississippi which I have heard is a pretty awesome town. Lots of good food and a little different southern college culture but we heard that Elizabeth Cook was playing the Grand old Opry then Nashville became the destination. Nashville is a 4-1/2 to 5 hour drive and once you hit 57 and head south it starts becoming a pretty drive. It was one of those Thursdays that was just...rain. it was nothing but rain and it was slow going. Lots of accidents and cops and even as we got south where Illinois gets pretty... we could see nothing. So we could not take a break to check out southern Illinois Shawnee Zipline. That will be another trip. The thing about the trip is that you have time... time to talk... time for Sandy to sleep and time to listen to a little music. Even in shitty weather.
Sandy had made reservations and she did her investigation and her research and determined that we needed to stay downtown. I didn't really know why but I trusted her even though I questioned why we wouldn't stay at the Opry Land Hotel since we were going to the Opry but she said no, so we stayed at the Hampton Inn which is two blocks off music row. It was a high rise Hampton Inn and it was OK, like most Hampton Inns are OK, but this one cost 260 bucks a night. Still, we got in around 5 and crashed for a few minutes and then went to explore.
We headed down to Music Row which is a bunch of bars and shops. It seemed like all of them had music and it was loud. Some of it was twangy, some of it was poppy. So we ate some bad BBQ at the BBQ place with the pig and we looked in shop windows and I saw the Hatch Show Print Store where they have created some of the best music art in history. We looked in the windows of 5 places and finally went in what I knew would be my favorite which was Roberts Western Wear. Roberts, back in the day was the home of BR-549, a seminal alt country, cross over band that cut an awesome “Live At Roberts” CD that was vaguely life changing at the time.
Roberts is cool. Most of these bars are set up like classic New York shotgun bars. Doors in front, bar running almost the length of the room. All the way back. The stage is directly to your left as you walk in and you can see the back of the band through the window and it is PERFECT.
All of these places are cool in their own way. Almost all of the bands play cover songs and they run the gamut but at Roberts seems to trend to Hank and Johnny and George Jones and it is just sweet and it is nice for me because my wife loves that kind of music and we have a good time together and listen and drink and watch people. We got a wobbly table in back (all tables in all bars in Nashville wobble... it has something to do with physics) and shared it with another couple who might have actually been older then us. There is scribbling all over the place and when I looked up I saw a sticker for my favorite record label.
The thing about Music Row is that there a lot of bars and on the side street to our hotel there was “The Swinging Door” so we went in there for a nightcap and heard some more fine country music. None of the bars has a jukebox because almost all of them have bands, all day long. That is the nature of the bar business down there and it is more than a little cool and fun. We enjoyed the swinging door but we had one more stop before bed. A friend of ours from St. Louis has a brother who was a singer songwriter in Nashville and he was not a bar owner. He opened a place called “The Listening Room” and he did it at least partially with a Kickstarter campaign. If you don't know what that is look it up. Anyway, the place is a beautiful huge room with a giant stage that is actually set up for... music. They had three singer songwriters sitting on the stage and they just kept trading off songs one after the other. Apparently they all lived in a place called “The Ryman Loft” and were subsidized to come there and write songs and sing songs. What an industry. A few songs... a few drinks and then off to the Hampton. Quite a Thursday.
Now we have kind of a vacation routine or perhaps a vacation rut that calls for me to get up, leave the room, get newspaper, go to breakfast and leave my wife to sleep. A couple of problems with that as we get older but the biggest one that has recently presented itself is that I can no longer eat my normal breakfast of biscuits and gravy and in fact no toast or anything with wheat or that might have been with wheat. As the writer of the St. Louis Diner Review I have...obligations though and with a little work I found The Hermitage. Just a little out of downtown... slightly seedy and perfect. I had eggs and sausage and they were awesome but they could have done a lot better for me... if I had let them. I will still make a strong recommendation for it if you hit downtown.
I then went and grabbed my lovely wife and we headed off for what the Hobbits refer to as 2nd breakfast. We tried to go to “The Pancake Pantry” on Belmont near Vanderbilt but it was packed so we settled for some foo foo place across the street that was a bakery which was likely not the perfect place for a gluten intolerant boy. But we muddled through. i think I ate some ham and an egg. Then we were off to Vanderbilt to visit a girl we knew who was going there and it turned out she is actually a campus tour guide and we got the “tour”. It was getting a little cool after having been in the 70’s last night but we took a nice forced march around the campus and... wow... what a beautiful campus. We saw everything from their football and baseball fields to their library, to sorority row. It was really beautiful. They also had a cool thing in their commons which projected EVERY google search that was being entered at the school at that moment and in laser script put all these hundreds of searches on the floor where you could walk over them, and read them, as you walked over them and it was.. cool.
We left there and headed back downtown to walk around some in the daylight. We went straight to where I wanted to go which was Hatch Show Print. It was gorgeously full of posters all over the wall of music, events. The place was packed with people looking at the poster art for sale and what is displayed on the wall and we shopped for a while and discussed whether we could by a large print to put in the family room before buying nothing and leaving. We needed a nap but not before we went back to Roberts. But it was a big night coming up which now required... a nap!
We got up for happy hour and drove to East Nashville where evidently all the cool kids live and play. We headed to a place recommended on no less than GOOGLE as the best street tacos in Nashville. It is questionable whether they were actually gluten free but the place had a long lines and was more than worth the wait. We split 4-5 of them with carnitas, chicken and some unidentifiable meats.
From there we went well filled to the 5 spot. Tim Carroll, husband of the beautiful Elizabeth Cook. He does happy hour every Friday at 5 at the 5 Spot in East Nashville. The ceiling at the 5 Spot looked a lot like this:
http://www.the5spotlive.com/blog/
We came in and order some drinks and were thrilled to find out that in East Nashville they
serve drinks in glasses. That is a treat. The 5 Spot is a really quality dive bar and we were the ONLY ones there. Literally. The bartender. The band, and us. And they do it every week. We had two drinks and they played 5 songs and it was awesome. He simply is a great guitar player, has a very solid voice and writes some seriously bad ass songs. He does get annoyed with me requesting songs he cant remember but... I can live it. But we had to go because it was time to go to THE GRAND OLE OPRY!
Now I cannot pretend that I had any real desire to go to the Grand Ole Opry but, I had never been, and Elizabeth Cook was playing and it did seem like it might be kind of a bucket list item. We got there and parked about a mile away. It is in OPRYLAND which includes a mall and a hotel and it is all kind of new and kind of cement and charmless. But the Opry... the Opry is pretty cool. it is really not a huge venue with a floor and a balcony seating and it looks like most people use the stage. There were fewer bathrooms than at a Blues game. We found our seats on the balcony at 8:05 and the show had already started and... it was kind of cool. The way it is formatted is there is a different host every half hour and during that time three acts play... two songs each. And it was... fun and interesting and sooooo country. And there was an announcer who did commercials and each section had it’s own sponsor and it was sooo country. But is was fun and Elizabeth Cook excellent and Tim Carroll made it over from the 5 Spot and we saw... (End of Part 1)
