December 15, 2006
We’ve been here a year, but made our first road trip to Nashville this past week. It’s 200 miles, but on the misnamed Music Highway (I-40) which links bluesy Memphis to the capital of corn and country western, the travel time is just under 3 hours. Along the way are the community of Bucksnort and a state park named for the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. There’re also a few tourist traps: the alleged birthplace of Casey Jones, Loretta Lynn’s Country Kitchen and Grinder’s Switch, the fictitious home of the equally fictitious and late lamented Cousin Minnie Pearl. Beyond that, the Music Highway is flat, rural and littered by the occasional mangled raccoon or deer corpse.
Sharon engineered this trip. She bought tickets weeks ago to see the Dixie Chicks after the Memphis stop on their current tour was cancelled because of poor ticket sales. It pains and disturbs me that we’ve moved in with a population so willfully blind and stubbornly ignorant that they’d elect to the U.S. Senate a Chattanooga good ol’ boy over a bright, well-educated and experienced younger man, and on as anachronistic and obscene a non-issue as race. The good news is that Harold Ford Jr. only lost to Bob Corker by 40,000 votes which holds out some hope for the future. The yahoos still hold an edge, but not by much, and while my outlook may be influenced by our own move here away from Southern California, everywhere I visit in Tennessee there seems to be evidence of a reverse migration from the blue states. Minnie Pearl and Uncle Dave Macon might turn in their graves, but Tennessee no longer belongs solely to hicks.
We stayed at the Millennium Maxwell House on the western outskirts of downtown, only learning after we got there that it was, indeed, the surviving remnant of the original Maxwell House. While it is the only coffee offered on the menu, up in our room the percolator used single-cup Colombian packets of the Juan Valdez variety. Apparently the multinational Millennium chain (recently in the news as owner of the London hotel where former KGB spy Alexander Litvenenko developed polonium 210 poisoning) favors globalization over nostalgia, at least when it comes to caffeine.
The temperature dropped from 70 to 30 overnight and when I left Sharon on the steps of Ryman Auditorium (original home of the Grand Ol’ Opry) to park the car in downtown Nashville, she looked like a Peanuts character bundled for a blizzard: my little red-haired girl with a weather-induced red nose. Walking back from the car, I got a good look down Broadway at the hunk of Nashville that has given it its unofficial international designation as Music City. I remembered from my last time visit 20 years ago that Broadway housed the Barbara Mandrell One-Hour Foto and the Conway Twitty Laundromat, but all that remains of those short-lived attempts at franchise (seems to me Minnie Pearl tried selling ribs for awhile too) is Ernest Tubb’s Record Shop which still operates half a block from the venerable Merchant’s Bar & Grill. The record store still contains an impressive catalogue of CDs from country stars as recent as Leeann Rimes and as ancient as Jimmy Rogers and the Carter family. It is telling, however, that the only Dylan album they carry is Nashville Skyline.
Nashville’s skyline has changed dramatically since Dylan’s boot heels came a wanderin’ the first time some 40 years ago. The new Bell South building dominates downtown, its pointed twin towers making it a unique architectural standout hovering above Church Street and Printers’ Alley. With good cause, locals call it the “Batman building.”
But the new Titans Stadium across the Cumberland River and the high rise hodge-podge in Nashville proper have not totally defeated its pretensions as the Athens of the South. Besides Maxwell House and its coffee, there are other Nashville constants: the insulin-defying marshmallow, chocolate, pecan and caramel Goo Goo which is coming up on a full century of fattening Southern asses; Gruhn’s Guitars at the corner of 4th & Broadway where the best and most expensive array of six strings in the world have been sold for half a hundred years;citywide service of Jack Daniel’s sippin’ whisky which is made about 60 miles south by southeast of Nashville in ironically dry Moore County, yet another measure of Tennessee’s remarkable hypocrisy.
And yet, the greenest state in the land of the free (actually pretty gray by November) is not always mendacious, as proven by the Dixie Chicks at the gala new Gaylord Entertainment Center across the street from the equally new Country Music Hall of Fame. These women are formidable and, unlike lame duck George W. Bush, just hitting their stride. Like Bill Maher and others who dared speak out loud and early against the Administration’s breathtaking deceit in Iraq, the Chicks took a sustained professional hit at the hands of Clear Channel and its redneck Muzak programmers. After the gutless minions of Michael Eisner fired Maher off of ABC, the comedian found refuge on HBO, but the Dixie Chicks had no such forum to reach their audience. For three years, country radio froze them off the airwaves (despite the fact that these are allegedly public airwaves – a topic for a future essay on the FCC and how the scabrous Reagan Administration perverted the phrase “free market capitalism” into “monopoly”).
But here we are a month after the Democrats took back Congress and both Bush and his murderous Iraq policy stand buck naked and discredited for all to see, while the Dixie Chicks are still standing tall, playing great music. Too bad the hee-haw fans of Toby Keith weren’t listening to the Chicks before 2,000 GIs came home in body bags.
They kicked off the concert with a clip from their new documentary which effectively slams Bush and all that he stands for, then segued into a playing of “Hail to the Chief” before they took the stage. And yet, despite this strident opening, their two-hour set was remarkably balanced – a sensitivity that would hardly be heard if Anne Coulter teamed up with the Bush twins to form the Anti-Dixie Chicks. The Chicks might poke fun and speak their dissenting minds, but they are neither vicious nor condescending like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly or other lightning rods of the big-mouth conservative ignorocracy.
I came away uplifted and humming a Dixie Chick chant on the drive back to Memphis:
I hope
For more love, more joy and laughter
I hope
We'll have more than we'll ever need
I hope
We'll have more happy ever afters
I hope
We can all live more fearlessly
And we can lose all the pain and misery
I hope, I hope
Rumsfeld is history and even that venerable arms merchant General Electric has granted Matt Lauer license to call Iraq a “civil war” on The Today Show. Things are looking up. Have a Merry Christmas.
