Well, that was quite a week.
I’ve been derelict in my duties as reporter, but certainly not in my duties as musician/explorer/moron. I’ve been on the non-stop flight to Busytown this week, and with the assistance of vast quantities of coffee and wine, and the dream of the unifying organizational powers of the iPhone on my mind, I’m almost at the point where I can pull my multi-directional life off.
Starting last Friday, I helped to host my company’s first wine event, a co-promotion with the importer Frederick Wildman & Sons and the super swanky Nuevo-American restaurant The Watermark. Set up in the loft bar of the Watermark, we showcased five French wines new to the Nashville market, with my company serving as the retail outlet for folks who wanted to purchase wines. Basically, the extent of my work was to hob-knob with the rich people, drink wine, and eat the excellent hors d'oeuvres—not bad for a night’s work. Do you remember the scene in That Thing You Do, the Tom Hanks picture about the fictional 60s band, “The Wonders”? One of my favorite moments in the movie is when Steve Zahn’s character, Lenny Haise, turns to drummer Guy Patterson on the stage of a Hollywood TV show and asks, with innocent glee, “Skitch, how did we get here?” I ask myself this question frequently, and on Friday night, after my fifth glass of wine, looking out the floor to ceiling windows of one of the nicest restaurants I’ve ever been in at Nashville’s downtown skyline, I whispered it to myself, hoping no one would hear me.
Saturday, I roused myself early and prepared for another brisk day of sloshing and schlepping in the wine world. I don’t remember much of the early part of the day, just a haze of customers, distributors with wine to taste, and the buzz of the Hill Center passing outside the windows. Sometime during the day I acquired free tickets to see Jackson Browne at the Ryman Auditorium that evening; a very nice man in a baseball cap came in to offer them to Ed, my boss, who offered them to Melanie, our wine educator, who in turn offered them to me and Harlan. I was more than grateful to oblige their request to take the tickets and leave work early to attend a show at one of the most historical and revered venues in our country. Jackson was in fine form, as was the Ryman itself. I was surprised to find that the auditorium was arranged width-wise in the building, with the stage on the side instead of depth-wise with the stage in the back; the result is that every seat is closer to the stage, and even the rear-most seats in the balcony are closer than most middle seats in other theaters. The seats are church pughs, remnants of the Ryman’s days as a house of worship. While aesthetically pleasing, they are not comfortable and force you to get rather personal with your fellow concert-goers, but I suppose that they were intended for the penitent man, not the comfort-seeking, beer-drinking music viewer.
Sunday saw the arrival of my fellow music makers, my comrades-in-arms, Benny Harnish and Dan Dorff. Benny, sometimes bass player in many of my musical configurations, was fresh off the boat from Holland, having spent the last two months escapading around Europe with his girlfriend and his bass. Dan is the drummer in many projects in which Benny and I have been involved, such as Southpaw and the Sinisters, The Queen City Zapatistas, and, if memory serves, one Princes of Hollywood gig on St. Patrick’s Day. I had invited Benny down to Nashville to play bass for my first gig in town with Chad Harris, and since he’s a sucker, he said he’d come. After rehearsals on Sunday and Monday evenings we were feeling pretty good about the upcoming show so we headed over to the 12th South Taproom, a quaint bar with great beer just up the road from my house where one of the big studio bass players in town, Dave Pomeroy, holds down a weekly night of music making and joke telling. It quickly turned into a sort of after-hours-for-the-working-musician; the barkeeps put up the stools and locked the doors but seemed content to let us sit around, drinking beer and talking shop. I learned that the Spanish-style hacienda compound across the street was the property of Dolly Parton and we also spent a great deal of time on the topic of John Hartford, and the best techniques for dancing with a banjo.
Tuesday night was the gig, and though the band wasn’t as tight as I had hoped—we did just learn the material, mind you—I had fun, and the club owners were awful nice, as were the other performers. A fellow Ohioan who I stayed with on one for my first visits to Nashville last year happened to play the first set of the evening, and it was a pleasant surprise to see him again. We retired to Chad’s house for some light drinking, heavy snacking, and some short-lived musical revelry, which concluded with me singing the few songs I know in Spanish.
The following morning I was up early to get some paperwork done over at the office and had the pleasant surprise of being subjected to the tasting of some 75 new wines from two distributors. Going on four hours of sleep, and having skipped breakfast and coffee that morning, I was surprised to find that my palate was in otherwise extraordinary shape, and the wines seemed to leap out of the glass at me, uncharacteristically self-evident. I did manage to slip into the darkened office to sleep on the shag carpet in between sessions, and I made it through the morning relatively pleasantly. One of the great things about being in the wine business is that you meet many fine and fascinating folks, and this week was no exception; on Wednesday and Thursday alone I met with a Frenchman via Ashville, North Carolina who brought us some of his superb catalogue of French wines and a thick, charming accent, and two Californians, one whose company imported a small selection of New Zealand wines (minerally, tangy, and excellent) and the other who owned Broc Cellars, making some fantastic blends from small, old Californian vineyards. I had some great wine this week.
The remainder of the week went by in a blur, as this was our busiest week in the store since opening, including a record breaking Saturday. Meanwhile, I spent mornings makings lists and working on new songs, not to mention trying to clean the house. I’ve got some new material that is starting to take shape, and I hope that by fall The Princes of Hollywood will be back in full swing, and I’ll be able to get some of these songs out there and see what people think. The insanity was interrupted on Sunday evening by a sojourn to suburbia, the shire of Brentwood, for a delightful dinner with someone with ties to Drue; a fine time was had, and Harlan and I got to flex our proverbial wine muscles and steward the selection to go with dinner. Overall, not a bad way to end a frantic and delightful week.
And, shit, what a song: please listen to Dan Reeder's "Work Song", the perfection of the African-American field song in contemporary, middle-class white guy form. Yes!
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