Robert's Western World

Day II (continued)
I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
Marshall McLuhan

The back streets of Nashville after midnight are seedy in some parts. Printer's Alley magnetizes a certain type of tourist. Its gaudy and blatant storefronts and marquis claiming 'authentic' New Orleans blues, and 'Live Dancers!' 'Show Girls', and 'Nashville Kareoke!', as if to say butchering someone else's song while your five sheets to the wind is somehow more elite in Nashville. I saunter threw Printer's Alley on this Sunday night like a hungry ghost. In need of something substantive. I won't find it here...If someone has to tell you they are 'authentic', they ain't...and I walk on...


Making my way up Broadway, every bar has a band blaring. Most of it is country rock. Even in spite of the 'fast food' style tourist pandering, this phenomenon always wow's me. Felt like this in Austin when I played South By South West. All the music from the bars and clubs bleeds out into the streets and mingles together in the oily sweat and smoke neathe the neon. Thats when I stumble (not literally) into Robert's Western World.


YES! and AMEN! Upright bass player slapping away like the boom-chicka-boom-clack of train tracks...drummer playin that locomotive language too...telecaster wailing and twanging, cutting through the barroom like heat lightning....I stand there, smack dab in the middle of the floor a foot from the stage and let the sounds soak into my skin...I feel the thump of the kick drumskin behind my eyeballs...the crooner at center stage with his acoustic gives me a wink, and I know that he knows that I know. These guys are playing for tips!? I find out later that two of these guys, the bass player and the drummer, have played with everyone from Johnny Cash to Dolly Parton. They are seasoned veterans in the war against crappy music. Here they are, in the autumn of their lives, playing for tips, and once...in a Nashville of a faraway different universe, they played these same songs on the Grand Ole Opry Stage. Back when America believed in music. Keep playin boys! I am grateful.