THE ROAD TRIP
WEEK 1

DAY 4 - Wednesday, March 17 (Saint Patrick's Day)
START: Cookeville, TN
END: Clarkesville, TN
MILEAGE: 150 miles

HIGHLIGHTS: Nashville; Ryman Auditorium; Amy Loftus

We drove into Nashville just before noon, opting to listen to the radio rather than CD's. One thing I've always loved about road trips was sampling the local radio stations in different areas of the country. And the south is by far my favorite place to listen. It's not unusual to hear Bon Jovi intermixed with Garth Brooks on the stations down here. They also play music that you don't normally hear in areas of the country where all the media has been bought up by big corporate conglomerates. As we entered the city limits, a real yee-haw solid green country song came on the radio and I cranked it up. I had never heard it before, but it sounded like old school country, the way country sounded before the Shania Twains of the world started crossing over into Top 40. I said to Lauren, "This is why I like the south. They'd never play a song that sounds this 'country' in Philadelphia." Little did we know at the time that that song, "Redneck Woman" would soon rocket to number one on the charts.

Lauren and I headed over to the Country Music Hall of Fame. I don't know why I assumed there would be no entrance fee. We considered paying the sixteen-dollar per person admission, but decided against it. I had really only gotten into country music in the last few years and figured I probably wouldn't know most of the people immortalized inside. We opted instead to head into the attached music store and buy some good country CD's for a lot cheaper than they sell them in Sam Goody up north. We picked up a Pam Tillis CD, a best of Aaron Tippin, and a Lucinda Williams album named (appropriately enough), "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road."

After that we headed over to Ryman Auditorium. Most famous for being the home of "The Grand Ole Opry" for over thirty years, this auditorium was originally erected as a Christian tabernacle for the spiritual edification of Nashville. Reverend Samuel Jones had often preached in Nashville against the signs of immorality, including dancing, gambling, cigarettes and especially alcohol - all the things that helped Thomas Ryman make money. Ryman, a successful businessman and owner of several Nashville saloons, decided one night in May of 1885 to go heckle Jones with a few friends at a local tent revival. Instead of breaking the reverend's concentration, Ryman found himself taken in by the message and became a saved man. He soon vowed that Reverend Jones would never have to preach under a tent again.

Originally erected under the name Union Gospel Tabernacle, Ryman intended the auditorium's use to be "strictly religious, non-sectarian and non-denominational and for the purpose of promoting religion, morality and the elevation of humanity to a higher plane and more usefulness." Until his death in 1904 and the death of Reverend Jones two years later, the space was rented out primarily to churches and traveling revivals.

Over the next several years and under new management, the auditorium's legendary acoustics, which were said to rival even Carnegie Hall's, drew secular music acts from all over the world. But it was a local variety show on Nashville's WSM radio that would ultimately immortalize the Ryman in music history. From 1943 to 1974 "The Grand Ole Opry", the longest continuously running show in country music history, called the Ryman its home.

When the Opry found its own digs across town, the Ryman continued in a limited role as a performance venue but ultimately had to shut its doors due to a lack of revenue. An $8.5 million renovation, completed in1994 restored the Ryman to its status as one of the premiere performance spaces in the country. It now functions as a museum by day and a live music venue, voted best in Nashville, by night.

Lauren and I paid our eight dollars per person and walked around the Ryman for over an hour. We sat in the pews, stood on the stage and looked at all the Grand Ole Opry paraphernalia in the wings. Backstage, the roadies were setting up for a Lucinda Williams concert later that week. We made sure to stop by the gift shop on the way out and I bought my first shotglass of the trip.

After that, Lauren and I spent the bulk of our day walking up and down Broadway, the touristy section of town. It's Nashville's equivalent of L.A.'s Hollywood Boulevard, New Orleans' Bourbon Street and New York's Times Square. It's fun, touristy, and it captures as much of the city's clichés as it can in one spot.

The feel of music's future is truly alive here. Just from glancing through the local alternative newspapers, it's obvious why Nashville is known as "Music City, USA". Nashville is to musicians what Hollywood is to actors. The city functions as a service to all the musicians who come here to "be discovered." And those musicians are the very lifeblood of the city. They are what gives Nashville its soul and sense of purpose. Every night and day there are countless venues offering live music and open mics. Even on a Wednesday afternoon, there were at least a dozen honkytonks open on Broadway with a band or solitary guitar player performing to both crowded and empty rooms. Many a famous singer - country, rock and otherwise - got their starts playing in the innumerable bars and clubs around this city.

Lauren and I took a seat inside The Bluegrass Inn and watched an absolutely adorable band called Silk & Saddle perform. This was not your typical bluegrass band. First of all, not a one of them was older than eighteen. According to their website, all four members, the Carters, are siblings. The two oldest girls, Scarlett and Amber-Dawn played mandolin and fiddle respectively. Each was dressed in low-rider pants and midriff shirts, accessorized by piercings, dark eye makeup and several dozen black bracelets. It struck me that they wouldn't look out of place in a goth band. The lead guitar player, Frank sported a Beatles-esque mop-top, while the youngest member of the band, Kat appeared on stage in hot pink sandals, rainbow tights and could easily have been mistaken for Avril Lavigne. We only caught the end of their set, but they were incredible. So much raw talent. Frank could pick a tune on his guitar faster than most anybody I've ever seen. We bought one of their CD's before leaving the bar.

One of my plans for this trip was to keep a graffiti log wherever we went. I found my first entry in the Bluegrass Inn's men's room: an epitaph to Timothy McVeigh, and a lament that with him gone, who will be left to stand up against an "increasingly communist government like the one we have." The reflection was surrounded by several retorts of "Fuck you."

I learned on my second road trip, when I visited cities like Chicago, Memphis and New Orleans, that you can't truly get the feel of a city and understand its soul in just one day. Even a weeklong visit will at best only show you the touristy stuff. I firmly believe that to truly take a city in, you have to live there for at least a year. Only then do you learn the local haunts, adopt the local lingo and see a city for what it really is - good and bad. After all, to love a city is to love it for its flaws as much as anything else. Nashville was no different. I understood this going in and we had a great time, but I left with a feeling of wanting more. Nashville is definitely a city I could see myself living in.

The overriding reason Lauren and I wanted to come to Nashville was to see Amy Loftus. Amy is one of the many singer-songwriters trying to make it in Nashville's music scene. I had first seen Amy perform in a little club back in Los Angeles and her soaring to-the-rafters voice and on-stage charisma drew me in instantly. After I left L.A. we kept in loose touch and when I told her Lauren and I would be passing through Nashville on the road trip, we made plans to meet up and watch her perform.

This was the first time Amy had ever met Lauren. Even though I had gone to see her perform the couple times she'd been in our neck of the woods, Lauren had always had school or work on those nights. We'd often joked that Amy must think I'm conjuring this Lauren person out of thin air. The eventual greeting was like that of old friends.

We met up with Amy at her cute little Nashville house and there were hugs all around. She introduced us to her dog, Koda, then we loaded up and followed Amy (whose car sports a bumper sticker that reads: "God bless the freaks.") over to East Nashville where she was playing at a club called Hobo Joe's, a small, out of the way place in what seemed to me to be a residential area. From the outside it seemed kind of shady and dark. I was almost tempted to ask, "Are you sure this place is safe?" But inside, my tensions eased. Hobo Joe's (which has since closed its doors) was a very cool, hip little bar with low lighting, couches, magazines like Maxim and Guitar Player on the tables, black lights and posters and of course, a little stage with decent acoustics.

Amy was performing in a type of set called a "round", something I'd never heard of before, but which is apparently quite common in Music City. I'm not sure if it's done the same way in every club in Nashville, but at Hobo Joe's, there were three mics and stools on stage, one for each performer. One song at a time, each musician takes turns singing their material. It's a cool, intimate little performance where each performer feeds off of and fuels the others. Tonight was "Writers Night" which meant it was specific to musicians performing their own songs rather than singing their renditions of somebody else's work.

At Hobo Joe's, they did a set with the ladies first, followed by a set for the men. Apparently the third singer didn't show up for Amy's set, so it was just her and another woman, which meant each of each of them got to sing an extra song. And that was just fine with us.

Amy's performance was incendiary. The last time I'd seen her play was in a club in New York six months before, and it hadn't been the Amy I remembered. She seemed too timid or something and just didn't let loose with her voice, her most powerful instrument. Her performance at Hobo Joe's made me remember what had drawn me to her music in the first place. She'd improved a lot since that first time I'd seen her in L.A., becoming much freer with her voice, able to let go and riff and scat and experiment with her own songs without missing a beat. There is a much more noticeable confidence and charisma to her now that I believe the rest of the world will see eventually.

After the ladies' set, the three of us watched a couple rounds of the men before sneaking out to dinner. We ate at some Mexican restaurant that Amy knew of and proceeded to have one of the most amazing conversations of my life. It's great how certain people can just open up and talk freely about anything with people they hardly know. Amy, Lauren and myself are three such people. We talked about everything from the road trip, to faith and God, to babies and midwifery. We talked like old dear friends until, reluctantly, the evening had to come to an end. The staff was cleaning up and the restaurant was closing. We said half-a-dozen good-byes and hugged several times before getting into our separate cars and heading to the interstate. Lauren and I drove about an hour north of the city and spent the night near the Kentucky border.