Company in Nashville

Company in Nashville

                My friend Alec had called me when I was in Memphis and said he was thinking about getting away from his parent’s house for a couple days—would it be okay if he drove down to Nashville and took a mini-vacation with me?  I told him of course—I thought it would be great to have company so early on in the trip.

                It wasn’t that bad of a drive from Memphis to Nashville and I had picked out a Comfort Inn hotel at an area that seemed convenient, and it actually wasn’t.  The hotel ended up costing over $75 per night, and I would stay there two nights.  It was off a highway exit about nine or ten miles from the downtown area of Nashville.  I arrived in the late afternoon and waited for Alec.  I went on the internet and found out Modest Mouse was playing a show at the Ryman Auditorium the next night.  Johnny Marr had recently joined the group and I had been very excited to see them in this rather inspired incarnation.  Alec arrived sometime around five or six, not much more than an hour after myself.  We smoked a bowl or two and I played him “Chinese Rocks” off of the new Richard Hell album I had just bought and referred to it as the greatest song about drugs, ever, which in hindsight sounds a bit overblown.  We decided to try to find the “honky-tonk” bars on 6^th St. We stopped in a Jack-in-the Box across the street before we headed downtown.  We found a microbrewery restaurant and had a decent meal and asked the waitress where we should hang out and she told us to go to the Flying Saucer, which ended up being a pretty cool bar, I guess.  After we left we walked past this hotel that had been built out of a renovated train station and were quite moved by its magnificent architecture.  Also notable was a building part of Nashville’s skyline that appeared to have some kind of empty box as its antenna.

                The next day we went to Bell Buckle, TN to visit my college friend Kristen, who had recently taken up a teaching position at the Webb School, where she had gone to high school.  It took us a little over an hour to get there from Nashville, just past Murfreesboro in a tiny town called Bell Buckle, which mostly just contained that school.  For a while I thought I had gotten lost on my mapquest directions, but it turned out alright.  We talked with Kristen for about an hour in her faculty-appointed apartment inside a dormitory.  She seemed happy and it was sort of unreal to be seeing her.  I was so glad I was able to make it to such a random locale.  Afterwards we walked around the campus a bit.  I think she had a dog that she had recently gotten and we had taken it for a walk.  At the end of it we posed for a picture.  Alec and I went on our way and we stopped for gas, and I called my brother-in-law Steve, who had gone to school at Vanderbilt, and I asked him what he used to do when he went out in Nashville.

After that, we went to Grimey’s Records, which was one of the best record stores I had ever been to.  They had in-store appearances from Liars coming up.  It was a small store, but they had everything I could have wanted.  I think I bought a used version of the Nirvana Unplugged in New York album there.  I also bought the New Pornographers album that had just come out, Challengers.  We also went to a used bookstore and I bought a copy of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae and George Eliot’s Middlemarch.  Then we drove past the Ryman Auditorium as people were beginning to line up around for the Modest Mouse show, and I managed to buy a ticket off of someone there and I was very happy.  We drove back to the Comfort Inn and Alec said he was going to go and I took a shower and smoked another bowl and drove out and found a good parking space and walked into Ryman Auditorium and sat down next to a young couple. 

The guy seemed a little bit drunk.  I think he was drinking from a flask.  He asked me what I was doing in Nashville and I told him about my road trip and he got very excited, telling me that I was living his dream for when he got out of college.  I talked to another young couple on the other side of me and noticed that Interpol would be playing at the Ryman Auditorium soon from the flyer the guy was holding.  I asked if he was going to see them and he said he would probably just go to the in-store appearance at Grimey’s.  I couldn’t believe Interpol would even be going there—that store was great!  Soon after Modest Mouse took the stage and played a wonderful show.  We were all in benches there, it reminded me a bit of sitting in pews at church, but everyone was standing up and swinging back and forth to the music.  At the end I went back to the hotel, probably got some fast-food for dinner, and went to sleep.  Chapel Hill was next.  Nashville had been somewhat interesting, but I had to admit I had more fun in Memphis.