MAY 7–13, 2020 I VOLUME 39 I NUMBER 14
NASHVILLESCENE.COM I FREE
Did Nashville Blow its Boom Years? by steven hale
NASHVILLE BYLINE: THE SISTERS OF SHUGGA HI BAKERY AND CAFE PAGE 5 CITY LIMITS: THE TORNADO AND COVID-19 THROW A WRENCH IN THE CENSUS PAGE 7 cover_5-7-20.indd 1
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MUSIC INSPIRES
Watch and Listen This week, we’re spotlighting moments that inspire us all. Visit our Watch & Listen page to explore videos and podcast episodes that are rooted in (and evoke) personal and creative inspiration.
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above: photo:
BRANDI CARLILE
EMMA DELEVANTE
NASHVILLE SCENE | MAY 7 – MAY 13, 2020 | nashvillescene.com
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CONTENTS
MAY 7, 2020
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Nashville Byline: The Sisters of Shugga Hi Bakery and Cafe.........................................5
Honoring the Struggle
CITY LIMITS
Kathy Leslie and Sandra Austin have turned their dream into a beloved neighborhood institution BY RADLEY BALKO
Mobilized Workforce ..................................6 Workers of Nashville unite for International Workers’ Day — but at a safe and reasonable distance
BOOKS
THIS WEEK ON THE WEB:
Fred Arroyo’s Sown in Earth offers a tender understanding of the immigrant experience
The Basement East Could Reopen by Year’s End
BY JOY RAMIREZ AND CHAPTER 16
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MUSIC
She Didn’t. She Doesn’t. She Never Will... 20
BY ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ
Ashley McBryde refuses to compromise her approach on Never Will
Pith in the Wind .........................................6
BY GEOFFREY HIMES
This week on the Scene’s news and politics blog
Count On It..................................................7 The tornado and COVID-19 throw a wrench in the already-challenging census
Girls to the Front ..................................... 21 Hayley Williams opens up on her debut solo album Petals for Armor BY MEGAN SELING
BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT
Taking Lessons ........................................ 21
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Brian Wright’s independent streak has led him to a good place with Lapse of Luxury
Boom City Bust
The Scene’s live-review column checks out livestreams by Smashbrothers and The Blam Blams, plus Sustain the Swing at Rudy’s Jazz Room
Two of the Country’s Worst COVID-19 Hot Spots Are in Tennessee — Both Are Prisons The Peach Truck Prepares to Open for 2020 With a New Model Book Club: Librarians on What You Should Be Reading
BY SKIP ANDERSON
COVER STORY
The Spin ................................................... 22
Did Nashville blow its boom years? BY STEVEN HALE
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BY LORIE LIEBIG, STEPHEN TRAGESER AND RON WYNN
CRITICS’ PICKS Watch Hump! Film Festival from home, get into birding, host a virtual queer film festival, celebrate Stevie Wonder’s birthday, dig into the Nashville Symphony’s online offerings, make a playlist of full ball games, tune in to Mirror House: Illegal Smile and more
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Primal Stream VII: The New Blood ........ 24 A metal doc, an overlooked Michael Mann film and more, now available to stream BY JASON SHAWHAN
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Not-So-Splendid Isolation ....................... 25
Sauce Bosses
Abstract Impressions.............................. 25
Nashville sons preserve a family legacy with Jim’s Spaghetti Sauce
A documentary about Hilma af Klint shows that art history must be rewritten
BY MARGARET LITTMAN
BY LAURA HUTSON HUNTER
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Trying Tribulation
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Matt Wolf’s new documentary turns Biosphere 2 inside-out
FOOD AND DRINK
BY JOE NOLAN
CULTURE
NEW YORK TIMES CROSSWORD
A new state task force seeks to ease racial disparities in health care BY ERICA CICCARONE
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PET OF THE WEEK! HI FRIENDS –
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A women’s column featuring a rotating cast of contributors
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FROM BILL FREEMAN A WORLD REIMAGINED FOR THE AGE OF CORONAVIRUS Never in our history have we seen fear on display like we are seeing now, as the coronavirus invades our lives at every turn, and to a greater extent than anyone could have imagined. If we’d been told a year ago what was to come, none of us would have believed that our future would need to be completely reimagined, or that our lifestyles would be forced to change to protect ourselves and our families. On Monday, I was staggered by the COVID-19 statistics in the U.S. — and of course they’ll be worse by the time you read this. We’ve had 1.19 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, with fewer than 200,000 recovered. As of Monday evening, there have been 68,672 deaths, which is more Americans than were lost in the Vietnam War. Since the new millennium dawned, we’ve experienced fear caused by the horrific attacks on 9/11; the fear and anger of the wars that ensued in Afghanistan, Iraq and other places around the world. We’ve dealt with the fear and uncertainty caused by the Great Recession, when too many Americans lost their homes and savings.
Still, nothing has affected our nation like the coronavirus. Not only do we have vital concern for our physical health — our nation’s economic health is failing too. The New York Times has reported that a steep decline in the world’s largest economies may have already begun, calling this the “new reality.” Real estate markets are bracing themselves and reflect more fear than even during the recession of 2008. The Los Angeles Times reports that 30 percent of Americans — about 15 million people — could default on their home loans if the U.S. economy remains closed through the summer. And CNN has reported the unemployment rate in April at 16.1 percent, the highest since 1939. We understand that to somehow slow the spiraling economy, our nation has to reopen. We have to find ways to get our nation back on its feet. How many ways will our lives change? Until a vaccine is found, there is really just one way to slow this virus, which in turn allows businesses to reopen and our economy to regain a foothold: prevention! Because of COVID-19’s incubation period — the time before symptoms are noticeable, which ranges from two to 14 days — research shows that to avoid and prevent the spread of the virus, we have to continue social distancing. Social distancing protocols, wearing masks in public arenas and washing our hands thoroughly and frequently are not only musts now, but also will continue to be essential going forward. Similarly, becoming efficient in sanitization and other health-based protocols will become a priority. One poll shows that 31 percent of Americans won’t shake hands even after the COVID-19 threat has passed, and while 25 percent are still open to the elbow bump, the majority think a wave or a nod will suffice. Most of our shopping will likely be online — as indicated even now by the 49 percent uptick in online sales. The
downside is that things may get worse before they get better, and due to the great increase of online shopping and the fear of leaving our homes, many businesses will close, leaving many out of work and in dire straits financially. But the overall hope is that as we adjust to health and hygiene protocols, the financial fog will lift. What else could lie in store? We can expect that more gatherings — such as high school and college graduations — will have to continue to be viewed digitally. For loved ones’ birthdays and other special occasions, perhaps we can only drive by, wave and hold up signs, sending gifts by mail, like many are doing even now. In addition to the social distancing and sanitizing protocols already in place, more may be required as we move forward to avoid another resurgence of the virus — a resurgence we cannot afford. Some countries have already introduced protocols exceeding those we’ve seen here in the U.S. According to The New York Times, residents of Sydney, Australia, can host only two visitors at a time in their homes. Some governments are requiring masks on trains and buses and advising the public to avoid faceto-face interactions at work. There are mandatory temperature checks outside of restaurants, malls and schools, and student cafeterias have plastic partitions. It would not be surprising if the U.S. were to follow implement similar protocols. Are we ready to do our part? If we all work together, maybe we can work through this difficult time, this reimagined life in prevention of coronavirus.
Bill Freeman Bill Freeman is the owner of FW Publishing, the publishing company that produces the Nashville Scene, Nfocus, the Nashville Post and Home Page Media Group in Williamson County.
Editor-in-Chief D. Patrick Rodgers Senior Editor Dana Kopp Franklin Associate Editor Alejandro Ramirez Arts Editor Laura Hutson Hunter Culture Editor Erica Ciccarone Music and Listings Editor Stephen Trageser Contributing Editors Jack Silverman, Abby White Staff Writers Stephen Elliott, Nancy Floyd, Steven Hale, Kara Hartnett, J.R. Lind, William Williams Contributing Writers Sadaf Ahsan, Radley Balko, Ashley Brantley, Maria Browning, Steve Cavendish, Chris Chamberlain, Lance Conzett, Steve Erickson, Randy Fox, Adam Gold, Seth Graves, Kim Green, Steve Haruch, Geoffrey Himes, Edd Hurt, Jennifer Justus, Christine Kreyling, Katy Lindenmuth, Craig D. Lindsey, Brittney McKenna, Marissa R. Moss, Noel Murray, Joe Nolan, Chris Parton, Betsy Phillips, John Pitcher, Margaret Renkl, Megan Seling, Jason Shawhan, Michael Sicinski, Ashley Spurgeon, Amy Stumpfl, Kay West, Cy Winstanley, Ron Wynn, Charlie Zaillian Editorial Intern Bronte Lebo Art Director Elizabeth Jones Photographers Eric England, Daniel Meigs Graphic Designers Mary Louise Meadors, Tracey Starck Production Coordinator Christie Passarello Circulation Manager Casey Sanders Events and Marketing Director Olivia Moye Events Manager Ali Foley Publisher Mike Smith Advertising Director Daniel Williams Senior Account Executives Maggie Bond, Debbie Deboer, Sue Falls, Michael Jezewski, Carla Mathis, Heather Cantrell Mullins, Stevan Steinhart, Jennifer Trsinar, Keith Wright Account Executive William Shutes Sales Operations Manager Chelon Hill Hasty Account Managers Emma Benjamin, Gary Minnis Special Projects Coordinator Susan Torregrossa President Frank Daniels III Chief Financial Officer Todd Patton Creative Director Heather Pierce IT Director John Schaeffer For advertising info please contact: Daniel Williams at 615-744-3397 FW PUBLISHING LLC Owner Bill Freeman VOICE MEDIA GROUP National Advertising 1-888-278-9866 vmgadvertising.com
Copyright©2020, Nashville Scene. 210 12th Ave. S., Ste. 100, Nashville, TN 37203. Phone: 615-244-7989. Classified: 816-218-6732. The Nashville Scene is published weekly by FW Publishing LLC. The publication is free, one per reader. Removal of more than one paper from any distribution point constitutes theft, and violators are subject to prosecution. Back issues are available at our office. Email: All email addresses consist of the employee’s first initial and last name (no space between) followed by @nashvillescene.com; to reach contributing writers, email editor@nashvillescene.com. Editorial Policy: The Nashville Scene covers news, art and entertainment. In our pages appear divergent views from across the community. Those views do not necessarily represent those of the publishers. Subscriptions: Subscriptions are available at $99 per year for 52 issues. Subscriptions will be posted every Thursday and delivered by third-class mail in usually five to seven days. Please note: Due to the nature of third-class mail and postal regulations, any issue(s) could be delayed by as much as two or three weeks. There will be no refunds issued. Please allow four to six weeks for processing new subscriptions and address changes. Send your check or Visa/MC/AmEx number with expiration date to the above address.
In memory of Jim Ridley, editor 2009-2016
NASHVILLE SCENE | MAY 7 – MAY 13, 2020 | nashvillescene.com
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city limits
The Sisters of Shugga Hi Bakery and Cafe
Kathy Leslie and Sandra Austin have turned their dream into a beloved neighborhood institution By Radley Balko Radley Balko is a journalist who covers criminal justice and more for The Washington Post. He is author of the books The Rise of the Warrior Cop and The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist. With his ongoing series Nashville Byline, he’ll profile fascinating characters, businesses and other parts of Nashville.
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n my family, we’ve always equated food with love,” says Kathy Leslie. “Our mother was a fulltime nurse. She worked long hours. But every night when she came home, she’d cook a full
meal, including dessert. That’s how we grew up. And we wanted other folks to feel that — to feel that love we felt growing up.” In 2016, Lesie, an attorney, and her sister Sandra Austin, a banker, left their jobs to start Shugga Hi, a cafe and bakery near Cleveland Park just east of the river. The cafe is a quaint but modern spot with wooden tables, a glossy black bar with orange vinyl chairs, and large, Jazz Age-inspired paintings along the walls. Depending on the day, the bakery display might feature a selection of cocktail-inspired cakes, a towering strawberry or Neapolitan cake or a lemon-blueberry bundt, along with daily offerings like bourbon pie and a selection of doughnuts, fritters and cookies.
The cafe menu is heavy with Southern soul food, including staples like biscuits with pepper gravy, a fried pork tenderloin sandwich, a rich waffle topped with tater tots and smoked barbecue rib tips. Before the pandemic and ensuing citywide stay-at-home order prevented dining in, the “Jazz & Eggs” brunch would wake the place up on Sundays. Well-dressed patrons fresh from the pews would pick at a buffet bustling with rib-stickers like potato casserole, shrimp-and-grits, and collards and cabbage, while a musician — or two, or three — grooved from a small stage in the back corner of the dining area. “What do Nashvillians do?” Leslie says. “We love to eat. We love our live music. So that’s what —” Her sister interrupts: “And we love to drink!” “Yes, that too! So we decided that’s what we’d give them. Good food. Good music. And lots of alcohol.” The two women chuckle. Leslie and Austin — who are 63 and 65, respectively — grew up in northeast Nashville. They’ve watched much of the city flourish as large swaths of their own neighborhood were left behind. “When we decided to do this, we wanted to locate the business in a place the rest of the city had forgotten,” says Leslie. “This area was blighted when we set up shop. Prostitutes
walked up and down the street. But we saw what it could be.” The sisters originally planned to open a small neighborhood bakery featuring Austin’s sweets. “I’ve been baking since I was a girl,” Austin says. “Every year around Thanksgiving, our mother and I would bake eight, 10 cakes or more. It was way more than our family could eat. But it was about the experience. It’s just what we did. I kept that up. Even when I was in banking. Some people come home and watch TV or exercise to unwind. I’d come home, pour some wine and bake.” “My sister’s the master baker,” Leslie adds. “I’m the master eater.” But when the two found the 4,000-squarefoot building on a pie-slice-shaped plot of land between Whites Creek and Dickerson pikes, their plan grew more ambitious. “We just had all this space,” Leslie says. “Way more than we needed for a little bakery. So we decided we’d serve up some of our mother’s savory recipes, too.” The women put together a business plan, made their projections, and began to look for financing. That’s where they hit a wall. “It was really discouraging, I’ll be honest with you,” Leslie says. “We both came from the business world. My sister was a banker. We know how to write a business plan. We knew what we were doing. I don’t know if it
Photo: Eric England
Nashville Byline
Kathy Leslie (left) and Sandra Austin
nashvillescene.com | may 7 – may 13, 2020 | Nashville Scene
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CITY LIMITS was because we were African American, or because we were women —” “Probably both,” Austin interrupts. “Yeah. Probably both. But the banks would just look at us with this blank stare. It was like, ‘No, y’all can’t do that. Y’all should just go home.’ ” The sisters eventually financed the venture themselves, along with getting some help from friends and family. After a year of planning, Shugga Hi opened in July 2017, featuring Austin’s boozy cakes (her favorite: a Bailey’s Irish Cream cake) and a limited lunch menu. It was the brunch that put the place on the map, turning the sleepy cafe into a bouncing, post-church destination. They began with the obligatory selection of scrumptious, arterychoking breakfast foods — chicken and waffles, cheese grits, made-to-order omelets. But the sisters then added a second table of salads and lunch options, along with bottomless mimosas and bloody marys. By the time the cafe hit its two-year anniversary, Shugga Hi had garnered neighborhood buzz, glowing reviews, a perfect score on TripAdvisor and 4.5 stars on Yelp. When Metro Councilmember Sharon Hurt won reelection last year, she held her victory party at the cafe. The NFL chose Shugga Hi as a caterer when the city hosted the league’s
MOBILIZED WORKFORCE Workers of Nashville unite for International Workers’ Day — but at a safe and reasonable distance BY ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ
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he first day of May often sees marches and rallies across the world, as workers take to the streets to observe International Workers’ Day, celebrating solidarity and striving for better conditions for themselves and others. May 1 is a recognized labor day for many countries around the world, though it has its roots in the U.S.: The date commemorates the 1909 walkout of Chicago workers and the subsequent Haymarket Riot. But it’s difficult to safely conduct a public action during a pandemic — social distancing guidelines recommending people stay six feet apart means you can’t stand shoulder to shoulder in the streets, shouting and chanting rallying cries. (Granted, that didn’t stop a specific breed of right-leaning, pro-business demonstrators from gathering at the state Capitol on two separate occasions last month, protesting the state stay-at-home orders.) In order to safely gather on May 1, the folks at Workers’ Dignity — an organization dedicated to labor rights — thought up a new strategy: a caravan of cars and work vehicles traveling through Nashville. “As organizers, we are pretty social people, so we really wanted to do something that involved other human beings and interact in a way with them,” says Cecilia Prado, an organizer with Workers’ Dignity. “Even if it’s from our cars.” So on this sunny Friday morning, dozens of cars and trucks lined up in the parking lot of the Woodbine United Methodist Church, the starting point for the caravan. Some cars had signs, and some were being decorated with streamers; organizers with bullhorns were giving directions. The caravan ultimately drove
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2019 draft. As the cafe raced past its second anniversary, business was bustling. The sisters were doing well enough to start giving back to the community that supported them, including hosting an annual fall harvest dinner, open to anyone in the community. Last year they fed 400 people. “That’s another thing our parents instilled in us,” says Austin. “If there’s enough for one, there’s enough for two. If we’ve got it, you can get it as well.” They also mentor and aid other minority-owned businesses, including other restaurants. “We don’t consider other minority-owned businesses to be competitors,” Austin says. “When a new restaurant opens, we go dine there. We tell our customers to go there. When one of us is successful, we’re all more successful.” Then came March. And the tornado. The massive twister somehow danced an unlikely trajectory that not only destroyed the neighborhoods of many Shugga Hi customers, but also struck three of the city’s main restaurant suppliers — Best Brands, Sysco and Restaurant Depot. It was a hell of a blow. “We lost a lot of volume after the tornado,” Leslie says. “That was bad enough. But also our main food supplier
through downtown and by businesses and construction sites that have seen accusations of wage theft and unsanitary working conditions. The caravan also stopped at Nashville General Hospital to show support for the staff. “We just wanted to show our support for all the nurses and the only public hospital in Nashville right now, [which is] carrying a lot of the weight with COVID-19,” says Prado. During the pandemic, labor advocates have emphasized issues like workplace safety and sick leave — and many low-wage employees like grocery store cashiers and food delivery drivers have been deemed essential during the crisis. There are also concerns about people who have lost their jobs due to layoffs and business closures. “Safety, health and worker solidarity I think are some of our bigger themes with this event,” says Prado. Many signs emphasized that message, with slogans like “Not dying for Wall Street” a pushback against calls to reopen the economy as early as possible. The first stop for the caravan was the Hilton Garden Inn, where housekeepers successfully fought to receive back pay for owed wages. The parade of cars wrapped around the hotel’s entire block. From there, they drove to the construction site for the Fifth+Broadway apartment complex. Fox 17 reported recently that workers were concerned that Skanska, the company overseeing the project, was withholding information about workers testing positive for COVID-19. An international corporation, Skanska made the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health’s “Dirty Dozen 2020” list of dangerous employers. Other stops included the Sheraton Grand and the new Whole Foods on Broadway. The caravan made plenty of noise, honking in simple patterns, with drivers and passengers cheering as they drove through the city. Some folks even played instruments while stopped at lights or intersections. Workers’ Dignity also livestreamed the event on Facebook in English and Spanish, and were joined by Councilmember Sandra Sepulveda. EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
was totally destroyed.” “It was really difficult,” Austin adds. “We had to quickly adjust and source our food from other places.” The tornado also temporarily shut down the Jefferson Street Bridge, a main artery into the neighborhood. “It was already hard,” says Leslie. “But all of that then took us straight into COVID. It was just overwhelming.” As with pretty much every other restaurant owner in the city, when Nashville closed down dine-in service, Ausin and Leslie faced an existential decision: pivot or shut down. They chose to pivot. “When you’re a minority, you learn how to adapt to adjust to hardship,” Leslie says. “So that’s what we’re doing. We’re adapting.” Shugga Hi now offers curbside takeout as well as delivery through Uber Eats, and every Saturday they hold a “Cookout Takeout,” offering to-go boxes of breakfast staples, bakery items and new items like a grilled watermelon-and-pineapple salad. They’re also continuing to give back, preparing meals for medical professionals and first responders. The cafe isn’t exactly thriving, but it’s surviving. “Some days you ask if it’s worth it,” Austin says. “But then I think about the staff who stayed on. They could have gone home, applied for benefits. But they stayed true to
THIS WEEK ON OUR NEWS AND POLITICS BLOG: Metro Nashville Mayor John Cooper extended the city’s Safer at Home order through May 8, even as most of Tennessee’s counties began reopening under Gov. Bill Lee’s “Tennessee Pledge” program. A new public health order from chief medical director Michael Caldwell advises that “citizens and visitors of Nashville and Davidson County should wear a cloth face covering or mask” in public places. In addition, Caldwell’s order says, “Businesses or facilities open to the public shall post conspicuous signage” advising the same. Note the section applying to businesses uses the legal imperative “shall,” whereas the bit pertaining to citizens and visitors uses the squishier term “should.” … Cooper noted that the metrics city officials are using to determine Nashville’s reopening schedule are starting to move in the right direction and expressed optimism that schools could begin on time in the fall, though the city’s boffo Independence Day event is “probably unlikely” to occur. … At least 19 people staying at the city’s shelter for the homeless at The Fairgrounds Nashville tested positive for COVID-19, as did 100 others at the Nashville Rescue Mission. The city-run facility at the fairgrounds already had the camp divided into three sections: one for the healthy, a second for those showing the telltale symptoms and a third for positive cases not requiring hospitalization. … Restaurant Opportunities Center United Music City announced the launch of its Safer at Work campaign, which is petitioning Gov. Lee to allow food-industry employees who are concerned about health risks to continue receiving unemployment rather than return to their jobs. ROC Music City is also demanding dine-in service
us. So we owe it to them to keep going.” I ask the sisters if they’d received any aid from the federal COVID-19 relief packages. They laugh. “Oh, we applied,” Austin says. “And we were immediately told that the money was gone. But at least we got that far. I’ve read about all of these huge businesses that got millions. But I know places in the city, catering businesses who have been around for 25 or 30 years, and they never even received acknowledgement of their application. There’s a lot of frustration out there. I think the feeling is that if you aren’t connected to a big bank, you got nothing. The mom-andpop places were punished.” Still, the sisters have no plans to close down, and they’ll reopen on their own time. “We aren’t going to reopen as soon as the city lets us,” Austin says. “I have an underlying health condition, so I need to be extra careful. We’ll reopen when we think it’s safe for our staff and our customers.” But they’re also confident they’ll survive to see another jazz brunch buffet. “This too shall pass,” Leslie says. “You beat hardship by being flexible. By being patient. And adapt, adapt, adapt. We’ll get through this. We’re used to making bricks from straw.” EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
be removed from the first phase of Nashville’s reopening plan. Currently, bars and restaurants could open at half-capacity in Phase One. ROC doesn’t believe there’s a way to ensure social distancing guidelines are followed if that does happen. … It’s also particularly difficult to follow those guidelines while incarcerated. Two of the country’s worst COVID-19 clusters are in Tennessee prisons. At the CoreCivic-operated Trousdale Turner Correctional Center, 1,299 inmates and 50 staff members have tested positive for the illness, while there are 585 positive inmates at the state-run Bledsoe County Correctional Center. … Mayor Cooper presented his budget, which includes a 32 percent property tax increase. The mayor submitted his plan to the Metro Council, which can approve the budget or replace it with one of their own. Cooper’s spending plan cuts discretionary spending — like grants that go to arts and other nonprofit organizations — in half. Without the property tax increase, the mayor said, mass layoffs of Metro employees would be necessary. The property tax increase — which amounts to $750 for a home assessed at $300,000 — would raise $332 million in additional revenues. Cooper noted that the rate is still lower than Tennessee’s other large cities and, in fact, lower than it was before 2017’s state-mandated county-wide reassessment. … Attorneys for convicted murderer Byron Black asked the Tennessee Supreme Court to delay his scheduled Oct. 8 execution. The court already delayed one execution due to the pandemic. Black’s attorneys said it is impossible to prepare for or hold a competency hearing for Black — which would include expert witnesses from out of state. In a December filing, Black’s attorneys said he is legally incompetent to be executed. They wrote then that he has an IQ of 67, suffers from brain damage and has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. NASHVILLESCENE.COM/PITHINTHEWIND EMAIL: PITH@NASHVILLESCENE.COM TWEET: @PITHINTHEWIND
NASHVILLE SCENE | MAY 7 – MAY 13, 2020 | nashvillescene.com
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city limits
Count on It
The tornado and COVID-19 throw a wrench in the alreadychallenging census By Stephen elliott
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n association of nonprofit organizations, local government agencies and the federal government was gearing up for the monumental task of counting every person living in the United States. Then a deadly group of tornadoes hit Nashville and other parts of Tennessee, and the spread of coronavirus forced people to steer clear of one another. A decade’s worth of plans were suddenly scrambled: no rallies, no supermarket kiosks, and most significantly, no door-to-door canvassers — at least for now. “What none of us ever dreamed is that we were going to have a tornado and a virus pandemic happening in the middle of the census,” says Fabian Bedne, a Nashville mayor’s office staffer who is helping coordinate census efforts in Davidson County. “Which has been really devastating for everybody, obviously, but also for the process of counting every resident in the country.” The United States Census Bureau suspended field operations in March, says Michelle Archer, an assistant manager for the census region that includes Tennessee. But work has continued in the meantime, and could expand back into the field starting next month. Like the Census Bureau, local organizations have pivoted to online outreach. The Equity Alliance is one of those groups, and co-executive director Charlane Oliver says her organization is focused on black residents of Davidson, Rutherford, Montgomery and Shelby counties. “Our goal is to reach as many African American households in those counties to prevent an undercount and ensure resources flow to our community,” says Oliver. Instead of canvassing, The Equity Alliance is conducting phone banks, social media blitzes and other physically distant outreach efforts. Oliver is hopeful that the organization can launch its door-to-door program again soon. With Census Day — “not a deadline,” says the Census Bureau, but rather a day “to determine who is counted and where” — having come and gone on April 1, Oliver believes some in the community think the census is over.
“The biggest challenge we have is combating misinformation online for those who are skeptical of the census,” she says. Census outreach has always been more difficult in low-income communities and places with outsized populations of immigrants and people of color, leading to undercounts that negatively affect resource allocation and political representation down the line. That trend is holding true this time around too, according to Bedne, who says response rates in Antioch and North Nashville are lagging behind those in whiter, wealthier parts of the county. That’s where groups like The Equity Alliance and the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, which is among the organizations promoting the census within the city’s immigrant communities, come into play. But Archer, with the Census Bureau, has identified a different trend as well. Communities where in-person delivery of questionnaires is necessary — like in rural areas — are seeing lower response rates. In Grundy County, for example, just 31.7 percent of residents have responded to the census; that’s compared to the statewide response rate of 54.8 percent and Davidson County’s 52 percent. The highest response rate is in the state’s richest county, Williamson County, where more than two-thirds of residents have filled out the form. With online, telephone and mail options available, door-to-door census collection is the last-ditch effort. It’s both the most expensive option and, presumably, the most likely to spread infectious disease (though Archer says canvassers will abide by all social distancing and protective equipment guidelines). That’s why Bedne and others are urging Davidson Countians to complete the form online or through other means. “We’ve been telling people, if you don’t want a census person to come to your house, just go online and complete the census, and then you’re checked off the list of people to go visit,” he says. “But if people don’t complete the census, sooner or later somebody’s going to be knocking on their door to get that information.” Email Editor@nashvillEscEnE.com
nashvillescene.com | MAY 7 – MAY 13, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE
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Did Nashville Blow its Boom Years? by steven hale
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n mid-March, Nashville’s boom years — a decade or so of extraordinary growth and prosperity — blinked out like a dying neon sign. Early in the month, with the deadly coronavirus pandemic tightening its grip on the globe and cases beginning to rise in Tennessee, some businesses had already begun closing their doors. Restaurant reservations on OpenTable were plummeting and would soon be down by 90 percent as compared to the same point in 2019. The SEC Basketball Tournament at Bridgestone Arena was canceled after one night of games. On March 15, Mayor John Cooper and the Metro Board of Health closed down the city’s bars, including the honky-tonks lining Lower Broadway’s neon canyon, which had essentially become a five-block super-spreader zone. A week later the mayor issued a “Safer at Home” order, instructing Nashvillians to stay put. In the wake of the March 3 tornado, many restaurants and businesses had barely begun their recovery efforts by the time the stay-at-home order came along. The tourists who would typically be crowding the city’s
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bars and restaurants were suddenly absent. For the week of March 22-28, the city’s hotel occupancy rate was 9.3 percent, compared to 92.6 percent during the same week in 2019. All of this was done for good reason, in the interest of public health. Arguably, it should have been done even sooner. But the effect was the same: Turn out the lights, the party’s over. But what about the hangover? On April 28, Cooper announced his proposed budget for the next fiscal year, which includes a 32 percent property tax increase — $1 per $100 in assessed property value, making the proposed new rate $4.155 of every $100 — as well as significant cuts and another freeze on scheduled Metro employee raises. No city will escape the pandemic and the ensuing economic shutdown unscathed. But in Nashville, the crisis has revealed weaknesses in a city that had every reason to be at its strongest. What did we get for our time in the sun, our decade of growth and cultural cachet as the burgeoning “It City”? And when the rain came, did it have to be this bad? Did we blow the boom years?
NASHVILLE SCENE | MAY 7 – MAY 13, 2020 | nashvillescene.com
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ALMOST TWO YEARS INTO BARRY’S TERM, THE COUNTYWIDE PROPERTY REAPPRAISAL — CONDUCTED EVERY FOUR YEARS BY THE METRO ASSESSOR OF PROPERTY — FOUND A RECORD INCREASE IN THE MEDIAN PROPERTY VALUE. PROPERTY TAX RATES IN SELECTED TENNESSEE CITIES Dollar amount is per $100 in assessed property value. Numbers via the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury for 2019 tax rates.
$8 $7 $6 $5
$4.155
$4.019
$3.155
NASHVILLE (PROPOSED)
CLARKSVILLE
NASHVILLE (CURRENT)
$0
$4.583
$1
KNOXVILLE
$2
$5.042
$3
CHATTANOOGA
$4
$7.245
centives and tax breaks to lure corporations to town is often referenced in discussions of the city’s finances, Mendes says the problem is far bigger than that. “I’m confident that you could cancel every economic incentive, and you would not avoid a rate increase,” he says. Mendes addressed that issue in a May 2019 blog post as he was pushing for a property tax increase for the second year in a row. Even assuming that Nashville gets no financial benefits out of its economic incentives packages, he approximated that current deals had a $41 million impact on the operating budget. That’s approximately the amount of money, Mendes wrote, the city would bring in by raising the property tax rate by 13 cents per $100 of assessed value — nowhere near enough to fill the hole in last year’s budget, much less the one the city is trying to dig out of now. A basic explanation of how we ended up here now can start with another set of twin crises that took place as the Aughts gave way to the 2010s. In 2010 — while the country was still reeling from the Great Recession and with the waters from that year’s disastrous flood having just receded from Nashville’s streets — then-Mayor Karl Dean and his finance director Rich Riebeling announced their plan to avoid a tax increase and save the city some money in the short term. They refinanced around $190 million of the city’s debt and made payments only on interest for a couple years, a move a 2019 Tennessean report on the city’s debt described as “akin to making only the minimum payment on a credit card.” The strategy essentially pushed large debt payments off toward the end of the decade. Two years later, with the economic landscape a little more settled, Dean raised property taxes by 53 cents per $100 of assessed value. Concerns about the looming debt still lingered — as documented in a February 2014 Scene article — but Dean and others involved in the decision still defend it as the right thing to do at the time. In 2015, with the city’s economy and cultural prominence growing, Megan Barry was elected mayor. Almost two years into Barry’s term, the countywide property reappraisal — conducted every four years by the Metro Assessor of Property — found a record increase in the median property value. It reflected the city’s rapid growth and churning housing market. State law prohibits the city from bringing in more revenue because of a property reappraisal, so the tax rate was adjusted down to make it revenue neutral. As Mendes has frequently noted in recent years, that is typically when Metro leaders would propose an increase in the property tax rate to take advantage of the increase in property values. But Barry decided against it, and the budget that was approved by the council — under the leadership of thenBudget and Finance Committee chair John Cooper — left in place the lowest property tax rate in Metro’s history. “That was the most consequential decision in the decade,” says Jason Freeman, a political consultant for SEIU Local 205, the health care and public service workers union that represents many Metro employees. Freeman has carved a niche for himself in local Twitter circles posting about city government and, in particular, the city’s taxes.
MEMPHIS
THE WORD “CRISIS” WAS SPREADING around Metro government before anyone had even heard of COVID-19. In July 2018, an article published by Governing — a publication focused on state and local governments — keyed on that year’s looming budget shortfall and asked the question: “How, in the middle of unprecedented growth, did Nashville’s government run short of funds?” (The author of the piece, John Buntin, now works as the director of policy and community safety in Cooper’s administration.) In a dire address to the Metro Council in November 2019, Tennessee Comptroller Justin Wilson said the city’s finances were a “mess” and told council members, “Despite all this wonderful growth and this booming economy that we have, Metro government is cash-poor.” When presented with the question in this story’s headline, Metro At-Large Councilmember Bob Mendes, who is in his first year chairing the council’s Budget and Finance Committee, shares a slide from a presentation on the city’s finances given by Metro’s Blue Ribbon Commission on March 9. It shows Nashville in last place on a graph showing the health of Rainy Day Funds in large American cities. “That alone answers the question,” Mendes tells the Scene. In a subsequent interview, he elaborates: “Every time the revenue shortfall comes up, I’m quick to want to add, ‘And we chose to have essentially a nonexistent rainy-day fund.’ You could’ve maybe withstood the revenue shortfall if we had even an average rainy-day fund for a big city in America. But choices were made in previous years to not do that. So when you combine the fundamentally worst-in-America big-city rainy-day fund with a tourist-heavy economy in a state with no income tax, that’s a significant budget issue.” Cooper and Mendes have been on opposite sides of the budgetary debates in recent years, but the mayor has acknowledged the city’s anemic reserves. “Unexpected disasters such as the tornado and COVID-19 are why cities have rainy-day funds,” Cooper said during his socially distanced State of Metro address in March. “Unfortunately, Metro government doesn’t have a rainy-day fund, and instead, actually thinned its cash balances. Our lack of a rainy-day fund has left us vulnerable in what has become a stormy season.” Mendes has been sounding the alarm about Metro’s finances and calling for a property tax increase for the past couple of years. In a 2018 interview with the Scene — in which he explained his proposal for an alternate budget that would have raised taxes — Mendes described then-Mayor David Briley’s budget as “built on quicksand.” Even at that point, nearly two years before the current crisis, Mendes said his inbox was full of emails from constituents “fundamentally not understanding how we can be in a budget crunch when the city’s booming.” He supported a property tax increase in 2019 as well, but it failed by just one vote. After Cooper released his new budget proposal, Mendes tweeted: “I have sworn off saying ‘I told you so,’ but these presentations are like a bizarre mash-up of my blog posts over the last two years.” Although the city’s strategy of using in-
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The decision not to raise taxes left about $400 million in annual revenue on the table, Freeman says. Beyond the historically low tax rate, some 17,000 property owners appealed their new tax rate, and — The Tennessean reported — 80 percent of them got their rates lowered. The result was a loss of around $20 million in expected revenue for Metro. At the time, many elected officials were happy to tout record low taxes. But Freeman says there’s an insidious dynamic involved in the reappraisal process that made 2017 worse. The process of resetting the property tax rate to make it revenue-neutral after an appraisal is called equalization. Essentially, Freeman explains, the tax rate is redistributed to achieve the goal of keeping overall revenue at the same level. The results are sometimes confounding. “The example we always use is,” says Freeman, “if you lived in Cleveland Park between the years of 2013 and 2017, and your home value went from $90,000 to $180,000, your tax bill went up by $400 a year, roughly. But if you lived in Green Hills and your house went from $600,000 to $700,000 — which is larger as a total-dollar increase, but on a percentage basis it’s much lower; you have a roughly 100 percent increase on one side, on the other side it’s like a 15 percent increase — your tax bill went down by three times what the other person’s went up. Your tax bill went down by $1,200. So you’ve redistributed that tax burden from a wealthy home to three small lower-value homes.” Freeman acknowledges that in the future it could work the other way — Green Hills residents could see their tax bill increase while others see theirs go down. But in any case, in 2017, some middle- and workingclass residents learned they’d be owing more in taxes without the accompanying increase in government services that one hopes to see from a tax increase. Fully aware that her decision not to raise taxes in 2017 looms large in the narrative of How We Got Here, Barry defends the decision in part by alluding to the lack of appetite on the Metro Council for a tax increase at the time. “I didn’t propose a tax increase in 2017 after the reappraisal, and I don’t believe the Metro Council would have supported one,” she tells the Scene in a written statement. She also references the same dynamic that Freeman highlights, suggesting that a property tax increase would have simply added more hardship to the homeowners who saw their taxes go up as a result of the reappraisal. “Projections had us capturing over $120M in new revenue that year without [a property tax increase], and we were seeing equity issues with the reappraisal where families in areas with historically high poverty were going to see increases in their tax bill, while areas of affluence would see reductions,” Barry says. “Given numerous successful property tax appeals by commercial entities and other sources of revenue shortfall, it would have been prudent to adjust the property tax in the following budget year, which is when members of the Metro Council began calling for it.” Barry, of course, wasn’t in office to take that “prudent” step. After her resignation in March 2018, Vice Mayor David Briley ascended to the office. A referendum on Barry’s mass transit plan awaited him, as
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METRO NASHVILLE PUBLIC SCHOOLS HAD ALREADY BEEN ASKED TO CUT $100 MILLION OUT OF ITS BUDGET FOR THE CURRENT FISCAL YEAR, AND THE DISTRICT IS UP AGAINST A $25 MILLION SHORTFALL FOR THE UPCOMING YEAR. did a snap mayoral election to determine who would serve out the rest of Barry’s first term. The transit plan was decisively rejected by voters. Riebeling, who stayed on after serving in the Dean administration and became Barry’s chief operating officer, tells the Scene that — as Barry suggests in her statement — the former mayor has told him she would have proposed a tax increase after the transit plan’s defeat if she’d still been in office. Riebeling concedes that 2017 would have been an “ideal” time to raise property taxes, but also cites the same issues as Barry. Additionally, he notes that the Metro officials at the time assumed that utilities — the value of which is assessed by the state — would rise as home values did. When they didn’t, it added to the revenue shortfall. “The last half of the decade we sort of lived off [the 2012] tax increase and the growth,” Riebeling says. “So what I would say is that the citizens of this community, taxpayers, have sort of benefited from that growth in lower taxes. … There comes a time when it catches up with you.” Briley, who won the election to serve out Barry’s term and suddenly became an accidental incumbent, resisted a tax increase that year, citing in part the same concern that Barry had. In a letter to the council’s Budget and Finance Committee ahead of a final budget vote, he wrote: “Many of our most vulnerable neighborhoods were already effectively hit with a sizable tax increase due to the reappraisal just last year, and we can’t ask them to pay even more.” The following year, facing another election, he vowed not to raise property taxes. That position was supported by one of his opponents, then-At-Large Councilmember John Cooper. Cooper campaigned on the idea that Nashville had given too much attention to the downtown core and handed out too many corporate tax incentives at the expense of the rest of the city. He quickly built a reputation on the council as anti-everything, and his opposition to property tax increases flowed from that, and what he described as financial stewardship. After spending more than $2 million of his own money on the campaign, he hurled Briley out of office in a landslide. For the first time in Metro history, an incumbent mayor had failed to win re-election. More than one longtime Metro insider noted with grim amusement the fact that a years-long refusal to increase property taxes had created conditions that fostered frustration with Metro government and contributed to the election of a characteristically anti-tax candidate like Cooper.
Briley did not respond to requests for comment for this story. NOW, AFTER BUILDING A POLITICAL brand on saying “No” and playing a pivotal role in blocking tax hikes, Cooper finds himself seeking a large increase. This increase is not designed to invest in a bold new vision for the city, but is rather a desperate attempt to plug holes in a ship that once seemed like it would cruise easily forever. As the mayor acknowledged in his State of Metro address, ahead of announcing what he described as a “crisis budget,” the city has drained its reserves. In recent years, as Cooper and his two predecessors, among others, refused to raise taxes, Nashville has been drawing on its rainy-day fund. At the same time, the city’s debt payments increased year after year. Cooper’s anti-tax stance over the past few years is firmly stuck in the craw of some Metro insiders (some of whom grumbled in Cooper’s direction on the condition of anonymity). Asked whether he regrets his crucial Metro Council votes against raising property tax rates, Mayor Cooper — responding through a spokesperson — suggested he does not. “In the last two budget cycles, property tax hikes were considered before we explored every possible opportunity for new revenue sources and management savings,” says the mayor in a written statement. “While we’ve had a need for better fiscal responsibility in Metro for some time, our current budget situation has forced us to do exactly that.” The current crisis will hit Metro departments hard. Metro Nashville Public Schools had already been asked to cut $100 million out of its budget for the current fiscal year, and the district is up against a $25 million shortfall for the upcoming year. The direct cause of today’s pain is the pandemic, but it was arguably inevitable after a decade of good times that was not matched by the political action needed to make it sustainable or equitable. The city has increased property tax rates only once since 2005. “We sort of baked in a tax rate that didn’t support running the city,” says Freeman of the decision to let taxes stay at a record low in 2017. “So the idea that people are used to paying now what they’re used to paying and looking at this as a big increase — it is a big increase in the context of what they were paying before, but when we set that tax rate, that tax rate did not support the needs of the city of Nashville.” Freeman points to under-resourced Metro
departments like Public Works, which added only two full-time positions between 2008 and 2018, and the Emergency Communications Center, which fields 911 calls and saw a net loss in dispatchers during that time frame. The SEIU represents many Metro workers, Freeman emphasizes, who have seen the city treat their agreed-upon pay plan as a discretionary expense. DESPITE PROSPEROUS TIMES FOR THE city, it has failed to meaningfully address issues like public transportation or the need for affordable housing. The boom decade saw many Nashvillians left behind. In a letter accompanying the 2019 Community Needs Evaluation conducted by Metro Social Services, executive director Renee Pratt notes, “Nashville’s poverty levels remain higher than pre-Great Recession, even amid high levels of overall economic growth.” Councilmember Tanaka Vercher — who served as Budget and Finance Committee chair and supported a property tax increase last year — points to other core government responsibilities that she says have been neglected, like infrastructure. “We, meaning all of us — government, citizens, ‘we’ because we’re all in this collectively — we lost focus,” she says. “We were romanced by being coined the ‘It City.’ ” She says, with a laugh, that if she had to vote right now, she would vote against Cooper’s proposed budget “because I’m pretty sure Councilmember At-Large Cooper would be a ‘no’ vote.” She goes on: “We can’t be asking the city to pay more for the same services that they’re paying less for. Right? Am I the only one that feels that way, or are you OK with getting the same thing but paying more for it?” Vercher says “there’s more trimming” that can be done in the budget, and under some questioning, she concedes that means laying off some Metro employees. Mendes adds the caveat that the budget conversation will change if the federal government decides to send financial aid to cities. In the meantime, though, he fears the upcoming budget will hurt the same people whether it leans toward taxes or cuts. Given the hole Nashville finds itself in, the budget will almost certainly include both. “You got two different dials,” Mendes says. “One is tax rate, the other is what you’re gonna cut. Different budgets might pick different balances of the two dials. I think the reality is that both dials hurt the same people the most. The least privileged people in town are gonna feel [a tax increase] most acutely, and they’re gonna feel the cut in services most acutely.” EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
NASHVILLE SCENE | MAY 7 – MAY 13, 2020 | nashvillescene.com
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BECOME A MEMBER TODAY! Celebrate the music we all know and love. Visit blackmusicmuseum.org for more info, and to secure your Legacy Membership today.
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NASHVILLE SCENE | MAY 7 – MAY 13, 2020 | nashvillescene.com
@THENMAAM
CRITICS’ PICKS E D I T I O N
you too can explore the world once again.
[DIRTY SHORTS]
WATCH HUMP! FILM FESTIVAL FROM HOME
Maybe you were curious about the Hump! Film Festival when it came to Nashville last year. The series of short porn films (five minutes or less) was founded in 2005 by Dan Savage, the legendary creator of sex and dating-advice column “Savage Love” and former editor of Seattle’s altweekly The Stranger. If you were intrigued but felt unsure about dipping your toe into public porn watching, you’re going to be thrilled with this news — Hump! is responding to the COVID-19 pandemic by bringing the series online for the first time ever. Tickets for the 15th annual Hump! Fest go for roughly $30 each, and the 16 films aren’t available to watch anywhere else — part of the fun is that none of the performers are pros, so a limited audience helps ensure their relative anonymity. You’ll likely see animation, straight and gay sex, kink, comedy and everything in between. Savage will host the screenings, which happen on Friday and Saturday nights from May 9-June 12. If you’re interested in sex, film, art or community-building, I highly recommend buying a ticket. Find out more at humpfilmfest.com. LAURA HUTSON HUNTER INTERNET
D I S T A N C I N G
[STUPID SEXY FLANDERS]
GO DOWN A SIMPSONS RABBIT HOLE
With an ongoing 30-plus-year run, The Simpsons doesn’t really need an introduction. But newbies and die-hards alike should be happy to hear they can find all 682 episodes on Disney+. Some favorites include perfectly structured joke marathons like “Lemon of Troy” and “Marge vs. the Monorail,” and more heartwarming entries like “Lisa’s Saxophone” and “Marge Be Not Proud.” But why stop there? There’s plenty of Simpsons multimedia out there, both official and fan-made. There’s Bartkira, a panel-by-panel remake of the landmark
J.R. LIND
GET INTO BIRDING
ART
FILM
S O C I A L
manga Akira featuring different artists. The defunct Instagram account Bootleg Bart, which curated unlicensed memorabilia featuring the iconic delinquent, was shut down, but much of its content still survives on Twitter (@bootlegbart) to showcase how Bart has been adopted as a symbol of various and contradictory movements, from Black Power to war propaganda. On YouTube, you can revisit those viral “steamed hams” videos, which remix a segment from the beloved “22 Short Films About Springfield,” or check out Simpsonwave, a series made from Simpsons footage remixed as grainy vaporwave music videos. You could even check out some video games, though that’s been an uneven venture for the franchise. Hit and Run and The Simpsons Game were two of the better entries of the 2000s, while the most ambitious is 1997’s Virtual Springfield, an animated tour of the Simpsons’ hometown. But the gaming crown goes to the 1991 arcade release, a side-scrolling beat-’em-up in which the family adventures through Springfield to save Maggie. And thanks to the Internet Archive, it’s free to play online.
[ALONE AGAIN OR]
EXPLORE THE WHITNEY FROM HOME
The deluge of online content that art institutions are making accessible is great for those of us who don’t get to visit New York or L.A. as often as we’d like. While a virtual visit might never be as satisfying as an IRL one, let’s talk about how great the Whitney Museum of American Art’s #WhitneyFromHome initiative is. I’ve found that browsing through the 25,229 pieces in the museum’s collection is a surprisingly rich experience — there’s so much work I hadn’t seen, and the pieces are all organized by categories that make it easy to DIY your own mini-tour. And in addition to putting images and information about each piece of its collection online, the Whitney has an extensive series of videos on its YouTube channel, including its 2018 Walter Annenberg Annual Lecture, to Keats. Even before the bald eagle became which is basically Kara Walker doing a America’s symbol (over Ben Franklin’s deep dive through her life and artwork objections), birds meant freedom. While for an hour. (Did you know she wanted to stretching our proverbial wings and be a witch when she was young?) There taking flight — both metaphorically and are also archives of audio guides for past literally, like in an airplane — is currently exhibitions. I was sad to miss the 2018 discouraged, we can take solace in the birds David Wojnarowicz exhibition History of our backyard. Behold the proud blue jay Keeps Me Awake at Night, and was riveted and the stunning tanager. Scan the skies for by the audio guide — especially the stories the V of the Canada goose and the widening behind the artist’s Sex Series. I can’t wait gyre of the Cooper’s hawk. See the Eastern to dig into the works of the current bluebird flit and the homely turkey exhibition Making Knowing: vulture clean up nature’s messes. EDITOR’S NOTE: AS Craft in Art, 1950-2019, which Learn the lingo of enthusiasts A RESPONSE TO METRO’S features work by faves Mike and make a life list with all STAY-AT-HOME ORDER TO HELP Kelley, Paul McCarthy the twitches you’ve ticked. SLOW THE SPREAD OF COVID-19, and Kiki Smith alongside Grab some binoculars and WE’VE CHANGED THE FOCUS OF OUR CRITICS’ PICKS SECTION. RATHER THAN a slew of lesser-known a field guide if you wish, POINTING YOU IN THE DIRECTION OF and emerging artists but birding can be enjoyed EVENTS HAPPENING THIS WEEK IN you might not have with only the equipment NASHVILLE, HERE ARE SOME ACTIVITIES heard of yet. It’s exactly the Good Lord provided. YOU CAN PARTAKE IN WHILE YOU’RE AT HOME PRACTICING SOCIAL the kind of thing that just Or simply relax on the patio DISTANCING. might sate your passion for and take in the warbles and contemporary art — and it’s tweets, and dream of a day when
[BIRD BRAINS]
GET INTO BIRDING
Birds, according to a study published recently in the Scientific Journal of Research & Reviews, are very strange. Of course, we know this already. For example, avian motion has no inbetween. When birds are flying, they are majestic, breathtaking, graceful. When birds are aground, they look like cut-rate animatronics with a low battery. Birds seem quite dim, yet some species navigate tens of thousands of miles without a hitch, and most of y’all don’t know which Old Hickory Boulevard you’re on. Man has admired the bird for millennia. They’ve been worshipped and adopted as symbols, and inspired poets from Coleridge to Angelou to Poe to Stevens
“KITCHEN,” LIZA LOU
HOBBIES
ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ
MAKING KNOWING: CRAFT IN ART, 1950-2019
nashvillescene.com | MAY 7 – MAY 13, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE
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critics’ picks
Unfortunately, Nashville Pride had to postpone its annual festival from June until the fall, but we don’t stop being queer in quarantine. Here are a few titles from the archives of essential queer cinema that you can watch. Start with Paris Is Burning (available for free on YouTube, albeit unofficially), Jennie Livingston’s seminal 1991 documentary about the ballroom culture of the ’80s — and I don’t mean foxtrot ballroom. These balls were created by African American and Latinx gay and transgender New Yorkers to establish family, community and safety — and to vogue and throw shade. Livingston spent seven years filming the balls and interviewing the house mothers and “children” of this transformational subculture. It’s righteous and celebratory, but not without tragedy. From there, head back to 1968 with Frank Simon’s The Queen (available on Netflix), which takes us onstage and behind the scenes of the 1967 Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant in New York City’s Town Hall. Through the film, we get an intimate glimpse into the lives of the pageant’s drag queens, who performed for a host of celebrities — including Andy Warhol, who financed the film — when drag was against the law in New York. The recently restored film is a triumph of pre-Stonewall queer visibility. Next up: Cheryl Dunye’s 1996 film The Watermelon Woman (available on Amazon Prime), which blurs the line between documentary and drama. In it, movie store clerk and aspiring filmmaker Cheryl (played by Dunye) discovers a fictitious 1930s black actress named Fae Richards who was credited in all of her films as “The Watermelon Woman.” Cheryl’s research reveals that Richards was also a lesbian, like herself, and the discovery leads her to many realizations. Dunye is funny and smart, and with a deceptively light tone, she archives something that still exists 24 years later: the erasure of queer black women in film, and their dedication to the art form
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ERICA CICCARONE [DON’T WAKE UP]
Build Your Own Streaming Alex Garland Film Festival
Each week in our Critics’ Picks, I’m suggesting a different filmmaker or performer around whom to build your own stay-at-home streaming film festival — from directors like Bong Joon-ho and Sofia Coppola to actors including Jennifer Jason Leigh and Nicolas Cage. For the eighth installment in our series, let’s look to one of the strongest voices in modern sci-fi cinema. British filmmaker Alex Garland — who turns 50 this month — first established himself as a novelist with 1996’s The Beach,
D. PATRICK RODGERS [SOMETHING GOOD]
Celebrate Stevie Wonder’s Birthday
We’ve unfortunately seen the deaths of many music legends in recent weeks, whether from COVID-19 complications or just old age — among them Bill Withers, Kenny Rogers, John Prine, Ellis Marsalis and Hal Willner. Have you found yourself praying that your favorite music icons
CLASSICAL
Host a Virtual Queer Film Festival
don’t get swept up in this deathly mélange? I certainly hope Stevie Wonder makes it to his 70th birthday on May 13, so I can spend most of that day listening to one hit after another, whether it’s something that came from his ’70s classic-album streak or a tune he composed for someone else. (“Tell me something good! Tell me, tell me, tell me.”) Hell, a collection of singles and rarities — aptly titled Additional Singles and Rarities — came out in November, so that’s something definitely worth bumping. And you can also never go wrong with the Wonder of Stevie compilations DJ Spinna and Bobbito assembled in the Aughts — they’re filled with covers, rarities and all kinds of Wonder wonders. Considering how much of an absurd, chaotic time we’re living in, I think we all deserve to celebrate Stevie together. CRAIG D. LINDSEY [MUSIC TO OUR EARS]
Dig Into the Nashville Symphony’s Online Offerings
As much as we’re all missing live performances, it’s been inspiring to see local arts organizations reach out to audiences in new and creative ways. For example, the Nashville Symphony has expanded its online presence with a wide range of entertainment and educational resources, available through both its website and various social networks. Music lovers can enjoy archived concerts or get to know orchestra musicians as they perform selected works from home. You can also check out Maestro Giancarlo Guerrero’s online lecture series “Beethoven Explained” (in which the music director digs into each of the composer’s nine symphonies), or “Classical Conversations” (which is largely modeled after his popular pre-concert discussions). And parents of school-age children can choose from a number of fun resources and activities — from interactive games and craft projects to full lesson plans and curriculum packets. Visit nashvillesymphony.org to learn more. AMY STUMPFL
SPORTS
[QUEER AF]
anyway. Donna Dietrich’s sexy, sandy tale of lesbian love Desert Hearts (available on the Criterion Channel and Showtime, and to rent on Amazon Prime and Apple TV), was produced on a shoestring budget in 1985, but you wouldn’t know it from the powerful performances of stars Helen Shaver and then-newcomer Patricia Charbonneau. Set in 1959 Nevada, the film tracks university professor Vivian as she stays in a ranch guest house awaiting a divorce — at the time, Nevada was the only place a woman could obtain one. There she meets a vivacious queer sculptor Cay, and the rest is queer cinematic history. Invite your friends to watch along with you at their homes, and you’ve got a DIY festival on your hands.
FILM
FILM
a much more fulfilling way to spend an afternoon than hate-reading conservative Twitter. LAURA HUTSON HUNTER
MUSIC
paris is burning
which Garland’s frequent collaborator Danny Boyle would adapt into a film of the same name starring Leonardo DiCaprio four years later. That one’s available via Amazon Prime, YouTube and iTunes for $4, and it’s a fine place to start. But where Garland’s body of work really starts to get good is with 2002’s excellent (and relevant) zombiepandemic flick 28 Days Later and 2007’s vaguely Kubrick-esque psychological space thriller Sunshine. Both films were written by Garland and directed by Boyle, feature notable performances from the alwayssolid Cillian Murphy, and are available for rental via all the aforementioned streaming platforms (also for $4 apiece). Garland also penned 2010’s Never Let Me Go and 2012’s Dredd reboot — both of which performed poorly at the box office despite generally positive reviews — but for the sake of brevity, we’re going to skip ahead to Garland’s directorial debut and only Oscar-nominated film, 2014’s remarkable Ex Machina. One of the most underrated movies of that year, Ex Machina is a small-scale A.I. thriller featuring Star Wars sequeltrilogy co-stars Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson (as well as an incredible if surreal dance sequence), and is available now via Netflix. Follow that up with 2018’s Annihilation (available via Hulu), which Garland wrote and directed — another exceptionally well-shot sci-fi thriller with a sterling cast (Natalie Portman! Jennifer Jason Leigh! Tessa Thompson! Oscar Isaac again!). That’s it as far as Garland’s feature films are concerned, but if you count yourself a newfound fan, you have to dive into Devs, an eight-episode miniseries that aired earlier this year on FX and is available to stream on Hulu. The series features Ron Swanson himself, Nick Offerman, as a bereft tech genius looking to regain the loved ones he’s lost via the unfathomable power of quantum computing. It’s a fascinating, imaginative series, and one of the best of 2020 so far.
annihilation
[TAKE ME IN TO THE BALL GAME]
Make a Playlist of Full Ball Games
So many days lately I’ve stepped outside and thought, “What a perfect day for baseball this would be.” Any baseball — big-league or otherwise. I dearly miss our hapless hometown Sounds, and haven’t yet pulled an all-nighter to tune into Taiwan’s Chinese Professional Baseball League game — the only pro league in the world currently going, with teams playing in
Nashville Scene | may 7 – may 13, 2020 | nashvillescene.com
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critics’ picks
[MaGic acT]
Watch Lodge 49 on hulu
radio
AMC’s Lodge 49 almost seemed preordained to become a brilliant-butcanceled cult classic — not least of all because it’s about an organization that some might accuse of being a cult. The show follows Dud (Wyatt Russell, the spawn of Kurt and Goldie Hawn), an unemployed surfer who, by forces mystical or imagined, is led to the Ancient and Benevolent Order of the Lynx, a fraternal society in the style of the Freemasons or Elks. As the Pynchon reference in the title might suggest, Lodge 49 soon reveals itself to be something singular and much stranger beyond that initial premise. Despite its good-natured charm, Lodge 49 is the rare show that’s honest about the despairing economic reality experienced by most Americans. But there’s an entire world bubbling beneath that depressing mundanity, a secret universe overflowing with rituals, covenants, secret ceremonies, Quixotic vision quests, and vast cosmologies beyond normal perception. Lodge 49 is perfect for the world we find ourselves living in now, when we’re all in search of little acts of magic to help endure modern life. If you don’t have cable, both seasons are available to stream via Hulu, and for rental via Amazon Prime. NATHAN SMITH [saFe as sOUND-hOUses]
Go DoWn the Rabbit hole on the bbc RaDiophonic WoRkshop
If you’ve ever been knocked pinwheeleyed by the wholly original, futuristic sound of Doctor Who, you might already know something about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a department that produced original electronic music and sound effects for the broadcasters’ radio and TV programs from 1958-1998. But you don’t have to be an Anglophile, an electronicmusic nerd or a sci-fi fan to be inspired by the story of the fantastically innovative people who worked there. Start with “The Story of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop,” a thorough 2008 retrospective published in the audio magazine Sound on Sound (and
available on the publication’s website). There, you’ll get an introduction to people like Daphne Oram and Desmond Briscoe, who pressed the BBC to establish a facility for exploring and expanding on then-new ideas about electronic sound generation and composition. They and those who came after blurred the line between electrical engineering and writing music in phenomenally creative ways, often with repurposed secondhand gear. You’ll want to hear the story, too. See YouTube for Wee Have Also Sound-Houses, a BBC radio program about Oram (who left the broadcaster and established her own studio in 1959), and Sculptress of Sound, another radio program about the life and work of Delia Derbyshire. Among many other things, Derbyshire and colleague Dick Mills were responsible for the out-of-this-world sound of the iconic Doctor Who theme. For some visual representation, check out former workshop composer Ray White’s archive of photos at whitefiles.org/rwg. The Beeb also produced a great documentary called Alchemists of Sound that’s currently available only on DailyMotion, which offers a look at more workshop composers’ work and interviews with artists they influenced. That’s plenty to get you started, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. STEPHEN TRAGESER MUSiC
TV
empty stadiums and an English-speaking broadcaster hired to satiate fans across the Pacific — but probably will soon. In the meantime, I’ve found solace in hopping on YouTube and making playlists of games from the past — no-hitters, Game 7s and other epics, but ordinary April and May games too. Search videos longer than 20 minutes by team or year and you’ll be surprised by what you find; MLB also has almost every regular-season game from the past decade archived on its official channel. Bless the people who take it upon themselves to digitize games they recorded onto VHS tapes years ago and post them for strangers’ enjoyment. Even when you know the outcome, you can still come away from a rewatch with new knowledge — especially when a Hall of Fame announcer like Vin Scully, Jon Miller or the late Ernie Harwell is in the booth. I find games from the early days of color TV (1951 and onward) especially beautiful in their simplicity, a reminder that baseball has survived wars and breakdowns in society before — and though the game will look different postpandemic, it will return. CHARLIE ZAILLIAN
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[have The KeY]
tune into MiRRoR house: illeGal sMile
From the release of his self-titled debut LP in 1971 to his death on April 7 due to complications of COVID-19, John Prine was beloved for the way he told stories, whether they were in his songs or not. His lyrics tell profound truths about the complicated business of living in casual ways; a collection of the anecdotes that peppered his stage banter would likely be worthy of a Pulitzer. Earlier this year, The Porch Writers’ Collective launched an event series called Mirror House, organized by outstanding prose writer and filmmaker Hilary Bell. It aims to bring together the literary and musical communities in Music City and break down some of the arbitrary barriers between the two. “I think there’s this really corny idea that writing or even being a writer is this dramatically solitary practice, but writing can and probably should be incredibly social,” Bell writes in an email to the Scene. “With that in mind, I wanted to create a series that had the energy of a live show without the self-serious arm-crossing that often pops up when people think of readings.” Appropriately, Wednesday’s virtual installment of Mirror House, named for John Prine’s opening song “Illegal Smile,” celebrates Prine’s work and the example he set. Porch co-founder Susannah Felts and writer and musician John Shakespear will read, and there will be musical performances from songsmith Ziona Riley and members of the group Styrofoam Winos. Neither Riley nor the Winos sound like Prine, but they share his gift for distinctive and conversational storytelling. The event starts at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 13, and you’ll be able to join in via Zoom — watch The Porch’s website and social media and Mirror House’s own social media channels for details. STEPHEN TRAGESER
Walk With feet ona
Mile
with the street, J.R. Lind we discover Nashville’s own unique beat – one mile at a time
| MAY17––Month MAY 13,2,2020 | Month 2015|| NASHVILLE nashvillescene.com nashvillescene.com NashvilleSCENE sceNe
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food and drink
Sauce Bosses
Nashville sons preserve a family legacy with Jim’s Spaghetti Sauce By Margaret Littman
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dane carder
Photo: Eric England
D
ane Carder, by his own description, is a “one day at a time” kind of guy. So the fact that his long-dreamtabout business — selling small batches of a familyrecipe spaghetti sauce — is launching just when Nashvillians who are stuck cooking at home need it? Well, it’s serendipity, not prescience. As you order a pint ($11) or a quart ($20) of comfort-food-style frozen Jim’s Spaghetti Sauce to make dinner for your family in week eight of quarantine, know that what you’re serving may be new to the city, but has a multigenerational tradition of serving families behind it. For years, Dane and his family talked about replicating the spaghetti sauce served at Jim’s Steak and Spaghetti House, the Huntington, W.Va., diner his grandfather opened in 1938. The sauce is a thing of local legend: The restaurant was given a James Beard America’s Classics Award in 2019 and sells 60 to 70 quarts of frozen sauce daily, in addition to kits of spaghetti-to-go and sit-down meals. (The restaurant has been closed due to stay-at-home orders and is looking at a gradual reopening plan, starting with frozen sauce only.) As popular as the sauce is, it has never been mass-produced or shipped. The only way to get it was to go to Huntington, W.Va. For years, Dane and his three siblings — all Nashville natives — would talk about how “someone should do something about the sauce.” But other than drive to Huntington to dine on it for special occasions, no one did. Then, last year it was time. An accomplished painter, Dane had tired of the art world and wanted to do something he felt would be of service to his community. He also wanted to give his mom Jimmie Tweel Carder, who at 79 is still running the restaurant, an eventual opportunity to return to Nashville, and he wanted to preserve the legacy of his grandfather and his mother. So he hit the road, making more than half a dozen trips to Huntington (five hours each way), learning the process that his family has used for more than 75 years. He knew it would be tricky to source the exact same ingredients in Nashville — looking for tomato paste that matches what they use at the restaurant, finding ground beef that is exactly the right consistency. He cooks at East Nashville food-business incubator and commissary kitchen space Citizen Kitchens using the same kind of 40-gallon steam kettle they use up at Jim’s, and in April, he got approval from the USDA inspector to start selling. “Dane and I have been discussing the production of Jim’s Spaghetti Sauce for over a year, even before our East Nashville kitchen opened,” says Laura Karwisch Wilson, partner and founder of Citizen Kitchens. “The Nashville Scene | may 7 – may 13, 2020 | nashvillescene.com
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food and drink
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center of every discussion has been how to duplicate the sauce exactly in a different environment than the original. It is to the point that I can’t tell the difference in a blind test.” She notes that changes along the way have included everything from the beef (specifically how to get the fine ground) to tomatoes to cooking and cooling times. Jimmie describes the sauce as “simplistic.” “It has no chunks of meat or onions, and people like that,” she says. “It is a nice combination of sweet with a zing to it.” The sauce itself, like her father’s restaurant, has humble beginnings. “It started out as, we would give sauce if someone did us a favor. The way we would say ‘thank you’ is we would give a quart of sauce. And then people would ask for it.” Other popular items on the restaurant menu include a grilled white-bread cheeseburger that Dane describes as being similar to Rotier’s. But the spaghetti sauce is the draw. With Dane and his three siblings all still in Nashville, he felt that the four of them had large enough circles of friends in town to sell enough sauce to bring Mom home and act on the family dream. The focus now is the original gluten-free, dairyfree beef sauce, and Dane is considering a vegetarian option. Dane’s older brother Shawn is a trained accountant and a partner with Jimmie and Dane in Jim’s Spaghetti Sauce. Dane’s the creative one, the cook — and the “most sentimental” of the Carder kids, according to Jimmie. But Shawn isn’t immune to the pull of nostalgia. “Our grandfather is one of the greatest
men I have ever met,” says Shawn. “He was genuine, compassionate, hardworking and treated people well.” After college, Shawn considered taking over the restaurant, but his then-girlfriend — now wife, Macie — wasn’t in Huntington. So he came back to Nashville to be with her. Macie plans to sell the sauce at The Factory at Franklin when retail businesses are back to normal. Other possible retail outlets include The Produce Place and Citizen Market, but for now, it is available by online order for pickup or delivery. “People are hoarding ground beef right now, and that is what this product is,” Dane says. “It is something that in a pinch can be packed away in the freezer. It feels like a valuable item to have at this time.” All of the Carders agree on one thing: For your first taste of Jim’s Spaghetti Sauce, eat it as Jim intended — on a non-fancy plate of spaghetti. Even so, Shawn confesses that he recently mixed things up: “It has always been on spaghetti for dinner and then leftover for chili dogs the next day. But I just discovered it as a base sauce on a pizza. It is one of my new favorite things.” Order Jim’s Spaghetti Sauce online via jimsspaghettisauce.com. Walk-ups may be available at the pickup options, which include Dane’s studio at 438 Houston St., Black Abbey Brewery at 2952 Sidco Drive, and Backyard Outfitters at 4411 Franklin South Court in Franklin. A weekly schedule, which may include additional pop-up locations, is posted each Sunday. Delivery is also available. Email arts@nashvillEscEnE.com
vegan & vegetarian with gluten-free options East Nashville
Now open for takeout & deliverycheck our website! Rest assured, we are taking all necessary precautions to ensure the safety of your food and of our staff. Stay strong, Nashville!
Save the dishwashing for later.
Visit nashvillescene.com for our daily takeout picks. nashvillescene.com | MAY 7 – MAY 13, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE
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culture
trying tribulation
A new state task force seeks to ease racial disparities in health care By Erica ciccaronE
R
apper, actor, activist and spoken-word artist Rashad Rayford (aka Rashad Tha Poet) has been crossing genres in Nashville for 15 years. A veteran of the Nashville hip-hop community, Rayford matches agile raps with soulful jazz. He’s also a mentor with youth-development organization Southern Word, a public speaker and an outspoken member of Nashville’s black community. In the time of the coronavirus pandemic, he’s adding public-health advocate to his résumé. In a Tennessee Department of Health public service announcement currently airing on TV and viewable online, Rayford addresses the strength and resiliency of black and brown communities while paying tribute to essential workers. The commercial shows photos of health care workers, delivery drivers, grocery store employees, public transit workers and more, and Rayford recites a short poem called “We Will Survive,” which reads as follows: In the midst of this trying tribulation Our actions have risen to the occasion Communities colliding like solar systems to heal souls with wisdom Staying safe and willfully volunteering a smile The black and brown faces of Tennessee who face this head-on We are resilient, we are strong, and together, we will survive. “It is hitting our community really hard,” says Rayford, “[and the department is] trying to get people educated on how they best can go about being safe. I wrote a piece that speaks to people trying to connect together and use their resources to help in any way possible, but also to [recognize] the people on the front lines. People in our community are usually the ones working essential jobs, so they are more likely to be exposed to this virus.” Across the nation, hospitals have reported that black COVID-19 patients are dying at rates disproportionate to the population. Racial, ethnic, geographic and economic inequalities that create barriers to care under normal circumstances are now exacerbated, and state officials are looking for ways to be responsive to these communities. The Tennessee Department of Health’s new marketing campaign targets racial and ethnic minorities across the state with a series of commercials that now air on TV and radio stations, and are also being pushed out on social media. The initiative is the result of a new state task force created by the Office of Minority Health and Disparities Elimination. According to the office’s assistant commissioner, Kimberly Lamar, the task force is charged with lifting the burden of health disparities across the state during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. The task force builds upon existing relationships that the office has with a variety of faith community partners, academic health centers and colleges — particularly historically black colleges and universities — as well as other state and
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external health care programs. “We have to get away from the one-sizefits-all model in terms of where our messages go,” says Lamar. “We usually send all of our messages through a portal, and they go to whomever they reach in a way that isn’t targeted. A barrier there was that we needed to know, who are the gatekeepers for the community? Where are they receiving information? What are the local newspapers?” In Tennessee, the rates of infection among racial and ethnic minorities have been roughly proportional to the population, though the rate of coronavirus-related deaths among black Tennesseeans has been higher. The U.S. Census’ most recent estimate puts the state’s black population at 17.1 percent. Last week, the state reported that 20.8 percent of those who tested positive for COVID-19 are black. Black patients account for 29.2 percent of coronavirus-related deaths. Hispanic and Latino residents — who make up 5.6 percent of the state’s population — account for 8.7 percent of cases and 2.6 percent of deaths. However, the state’s testing capability has only recently become more robust, and these numbers may continue to change if the task force is successful in encouraging more people to get tested. Also, experts suggest that the lack of comprehensive testing nationwide may be undercutting the reported death toll of the virus. Rayford notes that black Americans often face psychological barriers as well. The
ugly history of race and health care in the United States compounds the challenges that many black Americans have experienced when attempting to receive care in the past. The existence of implicit medical bias is well-documented. People of color who haven’t felt cared for by the government in the past may have difficulty putting their trust in a system that they feel has failed them. Lamar agrees that building trust is one of the task force’s challenges. “We are a trusted entity,” says Lamar. “We need to show that we hear the community, we hear your voice, we hear what you’re saying — and show that we are responding to that. It’s the only way we’ll be able to gain their trust. [It may not be] until they see that their voices are being heard and that we are responding to them, and it’s evident in the work that we do, it’s evident in how we communicate, it’s evident in how we design our programs, it’s evident in our outcomes. … It’s going to take time, but that’s the reason that we’re doing this.” Other commercials in the campaign address prenatal care during the pandemic, social distancing, testing and how to use resources on the Tennessee Department of Health’s website. You can watch them all — most of them in both English and Spanish — on the state health department’s YouTube channel. The department plans to keep the task force operational in the future, once the pandemic is over. “COVID is a conversation starter, and we’ll immediately be addressing the COVID response,” says Lamar. But, she says, it will be a “continuing conversation.” Email arts@nashvillEscEnE.com
rashad tha poet
NASHVILLE SCENE | MAY 7 – MAY 13, 2020 | nashvillescene.com
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bookS
Honoring tHe Struggle Fred Arroyo’s Sown in Earth offers a tender understanding of the immigrant experience By Joy RamiRez
“W
e had no books in our house on Reed Avenue,” writes Fred Arroyo in Sown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging. Nevertheless, the recollections of childhood in these moving essays have all the sensory detail of someone for whom memory is guided by language. Most of the essays center on the relationship between Arroyo, now an assistant professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, and his father, originally from Puerto Rico, who met Arroyo’s mother while working in a Green Giant cannery in Michigan. Arroyo depicts a distant father who struggled with alcoholism and was sometimes violent, but who ultimately represents the struggle of every immigrant longing to find his place in a world where he feels he doesn’t belong. “They’d sit on the front porch or out in the backyard at the picnic table, and they’d talk over steaming bowls and full glasses,” recalls Arroyo, of Sown in Earth: ESSayS of his father and his MEMory and BElonging friends, “and on By Fred Arroyo the edge of their The UniversiTy oF animated voices ArizonA Press I began to hear 267 PAges, $22.95 the importance of memory and story, and no matter how far you were from home, you could gather in the company of other men and bridge the endless lonely distances you carried inside.” Arroyo writes eloquently about the instability of his childhood shuttling back and forth from Connecticut to Michigan, where his mother’s family lived, while being at the mercy of his father’s unsteady jobs and mercurial temper. But in these memories Arroyo finds a way of understanding his past and the indelible ways in which it has shaped him as a writer. “I had seen my father drunk before,” he writes, “witnessed him with the eyes of distance and closeness, the eyes of a camera saving what would last forever, and I felt the silence between us grow inside me, felt its weight pushing against my chest, and wondered if this is how the roaring of words begins.” The title essay, which could be considered the emotional anchor of the book, is a meditation on the summer that Arroyo, 14 years old at the time, worked alongside his father and his father’s friends in the potato fields of southwestern Michigan. In these pages Arroyo warmly recounts feelings of kinship with the men, moments of shared experience that allow him a tender understanding of their struggle. “Their bodies were like old books forgotten on a dusty shelf and in the pages their muscle and sweat were the verbs and conjunctions that composed the truth of their lives,” he writes. The realization that he is also one of
them, if not the same, gives him a purpose for his life’s work. “Those days of dew, sun, corn and potatoes will always be a part of me. They are a part of the bloodline I’ll work to continue until I die, and then maybe they’ll fall apart like crumbled dirt and turn to dust and become part of the sun and the sky and the earth. They grow in every new word I write. … They grow in each new word that’s sown in earth.” In trying to convey the cruelty and complexity of his father in the only way he knows how — through writing — Arroyo acts as a witness for all of the men whose names he doesn’t remember. In these essays, he accomplishes what he sets out to do: “to work in a way that honors the struggle and dignity of their lives.” And in doing so, he sets in motion the linguistic memories that compose a life, however incomplete. The more I delve into the memories of my father, the more I realize his life is an unfinished book; it continues to grow the more I try to write it, new pages revealing themselves day after day, as if this growing will go on without end. Even if I take the next twenty years to write it, I won’t make his life and story any more complete. The story will still be fragmented, small, minor, adrift in a turbulent sea between a kitchen and an island, between a father and son.
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Although his father’s life refuses summation in the end, Arroyo manages to reach an understanding of himself and the forces that shaped him to become the writer he is today. For more local book coverage, please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee. Email arts@nashvillEscEnE.com
nashvillescene.com | MAY 7 – MAY 13, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE
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music
She Didn’t. She Doesn’t. She Never Will. Ashley McBryde refuses to compromise her approach on Never Will By Geoffrey Himes
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Photo: Daniel Meigs
O
n the title track of her new album Never Will, Ashley McBryde shrugs off all the doomsayers who predicted she’d never get beyond the bars and open-mic nights where she honed her craft. Over the midtempo thump of a Springsteenish roots-rock anthem, she echoes the countless warnings she heard along the way: “Where you’re going is a dead end / Playing in bars only makes you the star of a house band.” The tune came out of a songwriting session between McBryde and Chris Harris, who’s also in her road band. Their bandmate, guitarist Matt Helmkamp, had emailed the sound file of a guitar riff he had just come up with, encouraging them to include it in a song. When McBryde and Harris matched words to that musical phrase, they landed on something that sounded like a mantra: “I didn’t. I don’t. I never will.” “When you have a statement like that,” McBryde recalls, “that’s heavy. You can’t just back it up with fluff. You have to come up with a story that’s just as heavy. So we started talking about all the people who told us we’d never make it. We had a lot of the same experiences; most musicians do.” They came up with the line, “I’d been gone long ago if I’d listened to what they were saying,” to set up the refrain, and the rest of the song wrote itself. The lyric highlights McBryde’s allegiance to her road band and the importance of the rock in her country-rock sound. And it reflects her ongoing struggle to defy conventional wisdom and forge a different kind of country music career. McBryde’s efforts are ongoing, because she still hasn’t gotten where she wants to go, despite numerous triumphs. Her success with critics was highlighted in the Scene’s Country Music Critics’ Poll, where she was voted the best New Act of 2018, and her breakout LP Girl Going Nowhere was the poll’s third-best album. Both that album and Never Will, released April 3, have landed in the top 10 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart. She also received new-artist honors from the CMA, the ACM and CMT, and she scored two Grammy nominations. For all that, however, McBryde has still labored at country radio. She hasn’t had a song rise higher than No. 23 on the radio-determined Hot Country Songs chart. She has received a lot of advice about how to change that: lose some weight, straighten your hair, add more pop, use Music Row writers. Her response: “I didn’t. I don’t. I never will.” In fact, she doubles down on her contrarian approach with this follow-up album. The rock-flavored songs hit harder than ever, but there is also an old-time country song in the
Never Will out now via Warner Music Nashville
Carter Family mode, and a couple of folk-rock singer-songwriter songs. When McBryde does lean country, it’s old-fashioned, sinful country: songs about compulsive drinking, unglamorous sex and violent revenge. Bravest of all is “Shut Up Sheila,” a song poking fun at an overly pious relative — perhaps country music’s most overt skepticism of religion since Kacey Musgraves’ “Merry Go ’Round.” “I was told that your second album has to prove your first wasn’t a fluke,” McBryde says. “But you have to be mindful that you should only change what you want to change and stay true to who you are.” And that’s what she’s done: She’s broadened her sound to include things she’s always done live — like the mountain music and folkie stuff — but refused to add anything that wasn’t already part of her toolkit. The result is an album even stronger than its predecessor. McBryde had self-released two LPs and an EP during her apprenticeship years, but her first widely distributed album was Girl Going Nowhere. The title track of that record was also a tale of persisting in the face of doubters. It was inspired by a true story about her high school algebra teacher in Arkansas mocking her ambition to move to Nashville and write songs for the radio. It was such a gleeful “I told you so” that Garth Brooks adopted it for his live shows. If “Girl” was the high school version of that theme, “Never Will” is the college version. It recalls the years when McBryde was attending Arkansas State University and playing the bars in nearby Memphis. “Like a college degree,” she recalls, “those years in the bars are something no one can take away from me. I wouldn’t trade that education for anything in the world. There weren’t any books, but I learned a lot. People would go, ‘Oh, you’re in a bar band,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s one of the coolest things you can do.’ ” What did she learn? How to lead a band. How to add enough rock to country to pull people’s attention away from the TV screens. How to sneak the increasing number of originals she was writing into the set
list by pretending they were covers. “I stopped saying, ‘This is an original song,’” she explains, “because for a lot of people that’s a signal to go to the bathroom. I would just play the song. One of them might come up later and say, ‘That song about the break-up; who did that?’ and you say, ‘Oh, I wrote that.’ That puts the song in a different light.” She learned how to take a plastic gas can, cut the top off, and write “Gas” with a dollar sign on the front as a tip jar. “People may not want to give you a tip,” she adds, “but they’ll help you get home. You can look at all the singles in there at the end of the night and say, ‘Crap, I only made $80 tonight.’ Or you can go, ‘Man, each slip of paper is a person who made a decision to acknowledge us and what we do.’ ” She learned how to deliver a classic country cheating song without apology, too. One such classic is the first single from the new album. “One Night Standards” features lines like: “No king bed covered in roses / Just a room without a view / I don’t want a number you ain’t gonna answer / Let’s just stick to the one-night standards.” To finish the song, McBryde and her frequent collaborator Nicolette Hayford called in Nashville’s topranked song doctor, Shane McAnally. “When we’re writing with someone like Shane or Lori McKenna,” says McBryde, “Nicolette and I have to meet in the parking lot beforehand and tell each other, ‘It’s going to be all right. You’ll be fine.’ Once we got inside, I was talking about the night stand between the two beds in a motel room, and I said, ‘It’s a one-night stand; it’s a onenight standard.’ And Shane said, ‘One-night standards — that’s it.’ A lot of the time, the best-known writer in the room won’t come up with the line, but he or she will sniff it out as the hook when it passes by.” McBryde didn’t co-write “Shut Up Sheila,” but as soon as she heard Hayford sing it, McBryde knew she had to record it, even if the chorus described a funeral like this: “We don’t sing ‘Amazing Grace.’ We don’t read from the Bible / We just go about letting go in our own way.”
“It’s about a grandmother’s funeral from an entirely different angle from anything in country music history,” says McBryde. “It’s about that one relative who doesn’t know when to shut up. Everyone’s got a Sheila in their family; I’ve got two of them. Not everyone gets a chance to set that person straight, but Nicolette and Charles [Chisholm, her co-writer] set her straight, so now you don’t have to.” The album also includes “Stone,” a sobering song about losing a brother to death — as happened to both McBryde and Hayford. “First Thing I Reach For,” whose title is completed by the phrase, “is the last thing I need,” is a classic country lament about bad decisions, whether the narrator is reaching for brown liquor in a bottle or a stranger on a mattress. “Sparrow,” co-written with Brandy Clark and others, is a smartly ambivalent song about the touring life, balancing the thrill of a boisterous audience with the ache of missing the family left behind. The album’s opener, “Hang in There Girl,” is another variation on the theme of “Don’t let the naysayers get you down.” In this case, the narrator is not McBryde as a high school or college student, but as a working professional who drives down a rural road and sees her former self in a 15-year-old girl checking the mailbox in front of a run-down single-wide trailer. “I know too well that look in her eyes,” McBryde sings. “I’ve been right there at the end of that drive / Hang in there, girl, you’re gonna be all right.” And the singer believes the future of country music is going to be OK too. “I think our listeners are as smart as we tell them they are,” she says. “And in this genre, we too often tell them they aren’t that smart. I was co-writing with someone at a publisher’s once, and I threw out a line. He said, ‘Whoa, you need to shoot low, because the listeners are riding ponies.’ We don’t need to be all artsy and Shakespearean, but we don’t have to be dumb either. If we just talk to them about real life in their own language, it’s gonna be all right.” Email music@nashvillescene.com
Nashville Scene | may 7 – may 13, 2020 | nashvillescene.com
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Petals for Armor out May 8 via Atlantic Records
Girls to the Front Hayley Williams opens up on her debut solo album Petals for Armor
By Megan Seling
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s the lead singer of Paramore for the past 15 years, Hayley Williams has been through some shit. There’s been good: world tours, multiplatinum record sales (a first for a rock band from Middle Tennessee) and a Grammy. There’s also been bad: bandmates leaving under acrimonious circumstances, with one departure ending with a legal battle. And then there’s been the ugly: leaked personal photos, and randos on social media stalking Williams via sockpuppet accounts intended to look like close personal friends and family. None of those things seems to have had as
Taking Lessons
Brian Wright’s independent streak has led him to a good place with Lapse of Luxury By Skip Anderson
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n March 2, the night a deadly storm steamrolled its way across Tennessee, Brian Wright was onstage at The Basement East, performing with his wife Sally Jaye under the name No. Lapse of Luxury out 1 Knife. Within an hour of May 8 via Cafe Rooster the rock-schooled songRecords smiths packing up their guitars and heading home, a tornado had crossed
big an impact on Williams as her 2017 split from then-husband Chad Gilbert, frontman of pop-punk peers New Found Glory. Their 10-year relationship began when Williams was 18, and only after their separation did she begin to talk openly about the overwhelming depression and anxiety that she struggled with throughout her 20s. Those discussions played a key role in Paramore’s most recent album, 2017’s dance-pop-infused After Laughter, as well as the extensive tour that followed. On Williams’ first solo effort Petals for Armor — a 15-song album being released as three EPs, with the final installment dropping Friday — they take center stage. Petals for Armor opens with “Simmer,” an eerie electro-pop track that winks in the direction of Björk’s “Human Behaviour.” Williams’ song begins with a look at a person’s relationship with anger: “Rage is a quiet thing / You think that you tamed it / But it’s just lying in wait.” Within two minutes, she’s examining what can be done with anger: “If my child needed protection / From a fucker like that man / I’d sooner gut him / ’Cause
nothing cuts like a mother.” “ ‘Simmer’ was one of the first songs to be completed and demoed,” Williams tells the Scene via email. “In order to get to some of the other subject matter on the album, I had to first look at my own anger and examine where and why it was. Rage, and more specifically ‘feminine rage,’ has prompted many a good change in just about every arena. In my own life, it has saved me.” The power of that rage is what propels Williams forward through the very difficult and personal process of sorting through the past decade of her life — almost like the first step of an emotional exorcism. Williams addresses grief in the graceful and bittersweet “Leave It Alone.” In “Dead Horse,” a tune inspired by African pop musicians like the Lijadu Sisters, she confronts regret, admitting to having an affair with Gilbert when the two first met. (He was married at the time.) The process of coming clean is messy and ugly. But it’s not all bad. Hell, it can even be fun. “Cinnamon” is an experimen-
tal Kate Bush-flavored song that bends and shifts erratically, like someone dancing for the first time and discovering all the different ways in which their body can move. In the refrain, Williams insists, “I’m not lonely, baby I am free!” She also summons her best Madonna and Janet Jackson-circa-1990 vibes on songs like “Over Yet,” a celebratory dance anthem about persevering through adversity. In the bright and bursting chorus, Williams is enthusiastic in her confidence: “It’s the right time to come alive, baby, if you wanna try to get out of your head.” “This is a huge compliment,” she says when asked if these nods to other musicians are intentional. “Literally every one of those artists were called out or referenced at any given point throughout the demoing process. Björk is one of my all-time favorite artists, and Janet Jackson is a hugely underrated writer and producer. She is such a badass performer that I think her musical skills actually get overlooked.” Dedicated Paramore fans will recognize some of the names in Petals’ credits — both Taylor York and Joey Howard helped write several of the album’s songs. But Williams brought in some new blood too, collaborating with several other women. They include writer and producer Steph Marziano and creative director and photographer Lindsey Byrnes. And yes, that’s Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus (aka super-group boygenius) you hear harmonizing on the ethereal “Roses/Lotus/Violet/Iris.” The process to get to these songs may have been uncomfortable, but the result feels instinctive and organic. It’s like we’re seeing Williams in her natural state, maybe for the first time ever. “I have found myself more open than ever to receiving support from fellow female artists and my female friends,” Williams says. “While I was in my marriage, I was a very closed-off person because I had quite a few trust issues, which included women. When you’re ripped open wide and you’re starting from scratch, you’re a little more willing (or maybe just desperate) to find connection and be transparent about your vulnerabilities. I met some of my closest female friends over the last few years since deciding to take my life back into my own hands.” Email music@nashvillescene.com
the Cumberland River, nearly leveled the Beast, as the venue is known, and roared eastward toward Five Points and beyond. “We left about an hour before the tornado came,” Wright tells the Scene. “We were lucky to get out. Our home was unscathed, but all around us, there’s damage. Our kids were with my mom, and her house was also unscathed. But it took us four hours to drive what normally would take 10 minutes to get them. There was just so much devastation.” Wright and Jaye had formed No. 1 Knife largely to fund the production and distribution of Brian Wright & the SneakUps’ Lapse of Luxury, his seventh album, which is out Friday via Cafe Rooster Records. The tornado, combined with the tumult brought on by the coronavirus, gave him pause about releasing the 12song LP as scheduled. “I certainly considered delaying the album, but it’s been finished a long time,” Wright says. “I wanted people to hear it. When’s a good time anyway? No-
Photo: Stacie Huckeba
Photo: LINDSEY BYRNES
music
nashvillescene.com | may 7 – may 13, 2020 | Nashville Scene
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MUSIC body really knows. In the end, it was a simple choice. I make records, hopefully sell enough to make more. We’ve got so much music we’re working on for this year from [the Cafe Rooster Records] roster, I don’t want it all piled up waiting for the right time. I’d also like to help keep people entertained as best we can during this time of uncertainty. If you’re gonna be locked down, might as well turn the music up.” Wright and Jaye founded Cafe Rooster with Gabe Masterson in 2016. In addition to Brian Wright & the SneakUps and Sally Jaye’s band Ladies Gun Club, artists on their label include The Minks, Jon Latham, Blackfoot Gypsies and LadyCouch. Alumni include Darrin Bradbury, who signed with ANTI- Records in 2019. Wright, a versatile alt-rocking guitarist and songwriter, relocated to Nashville from Los Angeles in 2011. At the time, he was hot off a three-year gig as guitarist for the house band on the late-night TV show Last Call With Carson Daly. “L.A. was good to me,” Wright says. “When I came to Nashville, I just liked it. I signed a publishing deal with BMG/Chrysalis. Besides being a songwriter for myself, I wrote with people like Darrell Scott, Bill Lloyd and Jim Lauderdale. I got to spend a day writing with Guy Clark. Working with these seasoned, legendary songwriters was very eye-opening to see their approach.” In addition to seeing how these songwriters approach their craft, Wright also saw the nuts and bolts of their methods. He says Scott fuels his songwriting with notably high-quality coffee. Lauderdale carried two cellphones into his writing session with Wright, one of which he recorded their session on. And Clark hand-wrote the lyrics to the two songs they wrote together in pencil on graph paper. But the same day they penned those two songs, Wright played for Clark an original song with trendy hooks and flashy lyrics that Clark characterized as “tidy.” Wright says the polite criticism of the lyrics’ commercial nature was a hard lesson, but a helpful one. “I’ve not played that song since,” Wright says. “Guy affirmed for me that an artist should write from the heart, write what he wants, and don’t write with other people in mind. Everybody wants people to like their songs. But a poet’s job is to follow the muse and surprise yourself. Guy could have been a lot more wealthy and well-known if he had tried to write more commercial songs, but he knew better. Do you want to be rich, or do you want to be happy?” Leaving behind commercial songwriting is not to suggest that Wright’s music is an exercise in self-indulgence. Lapse of Luxury is a reflective, sparkling burst of alt-rock creativity driven by inspired grooves, aided by Masterson as co-producer. The aforementioned singer-songwriter Latham contributed, as did bassist Tommy Scifres and drummer Matty Alger. Wright grounds the album with masterful guitar work and portraits of novel-worthy characters. Today, Wright is as independent as an indie artist can be. He recorded Lapse in a 20-by15-foot shed in his backyard. “It’s not a Home Depot shed; it’s one step up from that,” he says. “To see it from the outside it’s super humble, but inside, it’s a nice studio. We’ve got it vibed out. It’s a little laboratory in the backyard. We have everything we need, but not everything we want.”
THE SPIN SWEET STREAMS (ARE MADE OF THIS) BY LORIE LIEBIG, STEPHEN TRAGESER AND RON WYNN
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ip-hop is a vital expression of black creativity, and it’s one of the most important contributions to global culture in the past half-century. In that time, rap has become a big business, filling stadiums around the world, topping pop charts and greatly influencing a huge range of other popular music genres. But at its core, hip-hop is still about love and respect for the power of words, and what you can do with them in the presence of a little melody and a whole lot of rhythm. Nashville rap duo Smashbrothers — aka Broadway Rapper (born Kyhil Smith) and Top Notch (Kelly Buchanan) — didn’t have fancy production or worldwide hits to bring to their installment of the Scene’s No-Contact Shows livestream series on April 28. What they did bring to their marathon two-and-ahalf-hour set was a mind-blowing freestyle rap game. After all, when they’re not practicing social distancing, this is what they do: Broadway Rapper spends hours at a time serving off-the-dome verses backed up by his own beats from the sidewalks along Lower Broadway, while Top Notch — who explained during one verse that he got his name because he excels as both a DJ and an MC — is part of multiple shows at various locations of the bar Tin Roof. As a seemingly endless supply of beats rolled by courtesy of Top Notch’s turntables, the pair traded bars like the greatest tag team since the Rock ’n’ Roll Express. Topics on the lighter side included a sincere love of dogs, practical advice on wooing (once we can actually go back to the club and listen to some Bobby Brown) and poking fun at a pal who showed up in the comment panel. Heavier bars covered mourning the loss of a friend and the strain that the coronavirus is putting on their community. “I know y’all sick and tired of hearin’ the same sad song / ‘Stay in the house for 14 more days,’ ” Top Notch rapped. “The mayor’s trippin’, y’all / But we got to give way / I understand one thing, we gotta protect ourselves / So I’ll stay inside too / ’Cause I don’t wanna face death.” While livestreaming is never ideal, it gives viewers a peek into a band’s creative process, offers a reminder of the strength of their songs, and puts a spotlight on the particular skills they bring to the table. Folks SNIDER REMARKS: TODD SNIDER
who tuned in to the April 30 installment of No-Contact Shows got all three. Bradley Owens, frontman and keyboardist of glam-rock outfit The Blam Blams, played with natural flair and skill to spare. Owens performed in a cozy home studio space hung with costumes, looking something like a dressing room in a Broadway theater. The vibe was appropriate, as several of the songs are slated for the group’s forthcoming debut album Opening Night. Three members of the quartet are queer, and one of their goals is making a welcoming space for all people through explorations of identity and equality. The Blam Blams’ LP (release date TBA) is a concept record that follows a young bisexual actor and artist named Sydney Fabel, who’s trying to find his way in the art world of London in the 1970s — he’s got a partner, Isabella, and a role in an exciting new theatrical production. Owens has a stunning voice, which he applied to rich, evocative and dramatic melodies. One component is the theatrical energy of Freddie Mercury, but Owens’ sound leans a bit more toward blues and soul — putting Elton John, a huge fan of Leon Russell, into the mix makes the picture a little clearer. Owens switched the sound of his electronic keyboard between a grand piano and a Supertramp-esque electric piano, and overall, the flavor was very much of the 1970s. But the songs are focused on timeless topics like defining boundaries in relationships and affirming your identity. The past few weeks of COVID-19-related shutdowns have been rough ones for live music in general, and Rudy’s Jazz Room in particular. But fans and members of Nashville’s jazz community got to enjoy several of what the great Rahsaan Roland Kirk would call bright moments on May 2, during a benefit for the beloved club. Sustain the Swing featured heartfelt appeals for support and provided a kaleidoscopic guide to the range of styles, skills and approaches practiced in Music City’s improvisational universe. It also reaffirmed the idiomatic versatility regularly showcased at the club. There were solo instrumentalists and groups, acoustic and electric performers. There was a nice blend of covers and originals — songs that echoed the mainstream jazz canon, and others that stretched and expanded it. Artists and groups either streamed live or were featured in prerecorded performances. Greg Pogue, host of Nashville Jazz on the internet radio station Acme Radio, served as emcee and seamlessly handled the transitions between segments. The centerpiece of the program was the night’s only set streamed live from the club,
featuring The Wooten Brothers, whose late brother Rudy is the club’s namesake. The trio of Victor (bass), Regi (guitar) and Joseph Wooten (keyboards) with drummer Derico Watson superbly combined elements of funk, soul and jazz, even branching out to include an energetic cover of James Brown’s “Sex Machine.” Though Sustain the Swing had originally been billed as a two-hour affair, the growing list of participants stretched the event to just under the three-hour mark, with absolutely no downtime. Highlights included solo saxophone segments by Rahsaan Barber, Don Aliquo and Jeff Coffin, as well as vocal delights from the duos of Greg Bryant and Dara Tucker and Connye Florance and Kevin Madill. Those were just a handful among the host of topflight artists helping make this a very special night. The best news was that more than $10,000 was raised for the GoFundMe campaign launched to support Rudy’s Jazz Room and its staff, and the stream got more than 7,000 views. Since late March, singer-songwriter and longtime East Side resident Todd Snider has spent his Sunday mornings streaming a live set from inside The Purple Building in the heart of Five Points. A slew of artists have opted to stream during post-dinner prime-time hours, but Snider’s series What It Is offers up an easygoing vibe that feels like a comforting gathering of friends, still slightly buzzed the morning after a late-night party. The livestreams have acted as a special sort of creative outlet for Snider, including a way to deal with an unexpected loss. During his Easter Sunday livestream, he paid tribute to his longtime mentor, collaborator and friend John Prine with a set full of covers from Prine’s incredible career. On May 3, Snider kicked things off with a musical nod to another legend: His first song was “The Ghost of Johnny Cash.” It’s a brilliantly written story-song, and an example of how any situation retold by Snider feels like a long-lived piece of folklore. During the show, Snider ran through an array of songs from throughout his career, including “Ballad of The Devil’s Backbone Tavern,” “You Think You Know Somebody” and “Alright Guy.” As the set came to a close, he brought viewers back into the sometimes harsh reality of contemporary life by performing his brutally blunt and fittingly appropriate song “Tension,” which he segued into a cover of Woody Guthrie’s folk classic “This Land Is Your Land” (not to be confused with Snider’s own take on the tune, “This Is Our Land”). Although Snider may not have all the answers for how to navigate our strange times, his music and wit certainly help bring a sense of comfort in the chaos. EMAIL THESPIN@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
DEDICATED TO A BROTHER: THE WOOTEN BROTHERS
EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
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NASHVILLE SCENE | MAY 7 – MAY 13, 2020 | nashvillescene.com
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film
Primal Stream VII: The New Blood A metal doc, an overlooked Michael Mann film and more, now available to stream
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By Jason Shawhan ast week’s installment in my ongoing list of recommended streaming titles journeyed into catharsis and delved deeply into dark emotional places, but things are mellower this week. I cannot speak for reality, and due to deadlines, you’re reading this more than a week after I wrote it. So let’s just say that I am trying to conduct things along the lines of those great German philosophers, Alphaville — “hoping for the best but expecting the worst.” Check this section in recent issues of the Scene for more recommendations of what to stream while in quarantine.
Hightide on Tubi Get an early start on your Mother’s Day viewing with this little-seen 1987 Aussie drama. Lilli (Judy Davis!) is a small-time backup singer/dancer for an Elvis impersonator who finds herself stuck in a small coastal Australian town. That happens to be where Ally, the daughter she had to give up several years prior, is living with the mother of Lilli’s late husband. This is Douglas Sirk-level drama, playing out in a completely relatable fashion. Director Gillian Armstrong (she did the 1994 Little Women) does incredible work with the three lead actresses, and the performances add a degree of specificity to the story. Imagine Secrets and Lies mixed with a little bit of Tender Mercies and you’ve got the idea. Hat-tip to friend and colleague Alonso Duralde (of the Linoleum Knife podcast empire), who let me know that this rare gem had surfaced out there in the big electronic subconscious of the internet. Film critics: Even in this time of cinematic uncertainty, we’re still working to make sure you’ve got something amazing to experience.
blackhat
The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years on Amazon Prime Or as we like to call it, the fun one. Penelope Spheeris’ The Decline of Western Civilization series is an essential trilogy for anyone interested in the social history of the Los Angeles music scene. Part I is the essential punk rock document. Part III is a devastating look at a blank generation abandoned by all social structures. And Part II is a blissful soak in the sweaty crevices and flammable stank of the period of time when hair metal held sway over the goals and gonads of L.A. after dark. Like Heavy Metal Parking Lot, like American Movie, like 101, this is one of those documentaries that even people who couldn’t care less about documentaries love, and rightfully so. If you dream in metal, this is every fantasy come true. If you want to put on some thigh-high boots and spray your hair to the heavens, you may certainly do so. If you want to mock
The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years
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the aspirations of delusional drunks, you can do that as well. Spheeris is one of our great documentarians, getting at the truth behind the camp and the melancholy just behind the mascara. If you’re interested in other exceptional second installments, there’s also Addams Family Values and Gremlins 2: The New Batch (both are on IMDb TV, and both improve upon their predecessors).
Blackhat Director’s Cut on FX Michael Mann’s 2015 hacker epic Blackhat just sort of disappeared in theaters. That’s despite having all the Chris Hemsworth (with a great physical presence but an uneven performance) that audiences could want, as well as one of our great weirdo directors continuing to innovate in the realm of digital cinematography. This director’s cut does some shifting of the timeline, refocuses some aspects of the plot, and fixes some (deeply) sloppy overdubs. If you’re not a hardcore Mann fan (would the proper portmanteau of “Mann” and “devotee” be “Mannatee”?), it’s entirely possible you might not even notice the differences, but it feels like a sleeker and more organic narrative in this incarnation. The abstracted sequences depicting the transfer of data are still themepark avant-garde (using microphotography like those first few shots in Pink Floyd — The Wall, which I just saw for the first time recently but isn’t streaming anywhere, and y’all ...). Also, Mann is probably a fan of How to Get Away With Murder, because this film understands that Viola Davis’ performance and Viola Davis’ wig are not the same thing. This is a 2015 film yet it feels like a lifetime ago, because one of its central tenets is multinational cooperation.
Coma on TCM One of the great ’70s suspense thrillers
(with a peerless Jerry Goldsmith score), this Michael Crichton film of a Robin Cook novel is one of the most influential mysteries of that decade. Coma has secret institutions, black-market mayhem, a resilient and determined protagonist (Geneviève Bujold, charming and unconventional), and spectacular key images — bodies, suspended by wires, stretching as far as the eye can see. Sadly, the conspiracy that provides the book and film’s skeleton is pretty much business-as-usual these days, which just helps illustrate how completely fucked-up modern life is.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter / I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House on Netflix If you missed Oz Perkins’ exquisite Gretel & Hansel back at the end of January, it is currently on VOD services; it’s one of the year’s best offerings, equal parts Bruegel, Caravaggio, Carter and Bettelheim. But Perkins’ first two films are both streaming on Netflix, and both are worthy of your attention. The Blackcoat’s Daughter (also known as February), is a bleak and cold film about temporal uncertainty, possession, murder, madness and a sadness that comes from a place of spiritual emptiness that we don’t yet have words for in the English language. It’s also the step between Mad Men and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina for Kiernan Shipka. I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is the slowest of slow-burn ghost stories (featuring the return to cinema of the incomparable Paula Prentiss after ages) about a young woman working as a caregiver and attendant for a reclusive novelist. Blackcoat has the more visceral thrills of the two, but every film Perkins has made so far in his career has been exceptional, and you simply can’t go wrong with any of them. Email arts@nashvillescene.com
Nashville Scene | may 7 – may 13, 2020 | nashvillescene.com
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film
Not-SoSplendid Isolation
Matt Wolf’s new documentary turns Biosphere 2 inside-out By Joe Nolan
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n 1991, the World Wide Web opened to the public, Nirvana released Nevermind, and Silence of the Lambs took a bite out of the box office — and eight artists, adventurers and ecologists visited another world without leaving the Arizona desert. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if a backto-the-land hippie commune partnered with a Texas oil tycoon, the answer is Biosphere 2: a man-made ecosystem, meant to be selfsustaining, contained in a massive complex of greenhouses built in the appropriately New Age-sounding Oracle, Ariz. Matt Spaceship Earth NR, 113 minutes Wolf’s new documenAvailable to stream tary Spaceship Earth via belcourt.org beginning Friday, May 8 takes viewers back to the age of the postManson hippie diaspora to introduce a group of intrepid voyagers — the ones who became the first “biospherians” — before public perceptions of their IRL world-building changed from environmentally inspirational to scientifically suspect. Wolf’s previous films have illuminated insular subcultures (2014’s Teenage) and spotlighted creative outliers (2018’s Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, and 2019’s Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project). Spaceship Earth’s documenting of an ambitious community of restless creatives and determined scientists finds a welcome home in his filmography. Wolf has a great sense for balance, whether he’s
Abstract Impressions A documentary about Hilma af Klint shows that art history must be rewritten By Laura Hutson Hunter
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he story Beyond the Visible gets to tell is extraordinary — the mysterious, unacknowledged life of pioneering Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, whose work calls into question the generally accepted history of abstract art. Upon her death in 1944, af Klint left a mountain of paintings to her nephew, along with the instruction that he not make them public for at least 20 years. Examined with a contemporary eye, her paintings upend the art-historical status quo — she was making purely abstract works years before the established masters Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint of the genre. NR, 93 minutes; in The strength of the English, German and debut documentary Swedish with English from director Halina subtitles Available to stream via Dyrschka rests largely on belcourt.org beginning the gravity of its concept. Friday, May 8 Interview subjects like artist Josiah McEhleny and German academic Julia
weighing archival footage against contemporary interviews or finding just the right mix of detailing projects and fleshing out personalities. As a result, Spaceship Earth feels like the definitive excavation of the Biosphere 2 story — thorough and complete, but not quite exhaustively exhausting. Wolf does a great job of profiling his protagonists, who mostly connected in San Francisco in the late 1960s, just before flower power wilted in the shadow of Helter Skelter and many in the counterculture decided to drop out of straight society in hopes of creating personal utopias. The back-to-the-land movement of this era took the Whole Earth Catalog as its bible and ecoarchitectural visionary Buckminster Fuller
as its patron saint. Most of those who would later become self-proclaimed biospherians united at New Mexico’s Synergia Ranch under the leadership of the charismatic John P. Allen. The ranch became a communal eco-village and the headquarters of an avant-garde theater troupe. Allen and his cohorts brought various artistic, scientific and activist bona fides to the group, but they all shared big ambitions for making a lasting impact in the real world: They built a massive ocean-going sailboat from scratch and taught themselves to voyage around the globe. They opened an art gallery in London and funded their travels with theater performances, before Allen created a partnership with oil tycoon Ed Bass to fund their
Voss create a backdrop of credible sources, and their input pushes forward the film’s central theme — that art history must be rewritten. But the story itself has its own set of obstacles — the documentation of af Klint’s actual life is scarce, and the mystery her work presents is still in the process of being solved. Beyond the Visible confidently asserts af Klint as a pioneer of abstraction. Her paintings are presented side by side with works by artists like Kandinsky, Mondrian and even Warhol. And it’s not just that af Klint was making similar work — it’s that she was making it years before the so-called invention of abstract art. A groundbreaking work by Joseph Albers from 1971 is strikingly similar to a painting af Klint made in 1916. A 1928 Paul Klee features shapes that af Klint put in a painting eight years earlier. Even Cy Twombly’s rolling scrawls had a predecessor in af Klint’s oeuvre. For a story so seemingly unbelievable, it seems ironic that there are a handful of great documentaries with similar premises. The 2004 documentary In the Realms of the Unreal tells the story of outsider artist Henry Darger, whose prolific world was unseen until his death in the 1970s. Finding Vivian Maier, released in 2013, is another essential doc about an unknown photographer with incredible posthumous success. These films were supported with storytelling devices that were unavailable to Dyrschka: The Darger doc includes animated segments that bring to life his idiosyncratic scenarios — mainly little girls frolicking in idyllic vistas — and the Maier film benefits greatly
from the artist’s many self-portraits, which form their own kind of document of her life. Beyond the Visible doesn’t have any such methods to enliven af Klint’s biography — if the documentary lags, it’s due to the dearth of biographical materials that might otherwise help contextualize these stories. Still, the importance of the discovery of af Klint’s work is beyond what Darger or Maier could have imagined, and that’s what makes Beyond the Visible truly fascinating. Darger and Maier are outsiders, but af Klint demands to be taken seriously in the mainstream timeline of art history. Swedish curator Iris Müller-Westermann suggests that in 20 or 30 years, af Klint might be considered the most impor-
endeavors. Wolf utilizes the group’s own archival footage to depict this backstory and the Biosphere 2 experience, and that footage alone makes Spaceship Earth a valuable record. It puts viewers at the communal dinner table, landing at exotic ports of call, and inside the Biosphere itself. Wolf also examines the controversies surrounding the Biosphere 2 project: Some scientists insisted that Biosphere 2 was more of an ecological PR stunt than a legitimate experiment. Others pointed to use of outside supplies and a carbon dioxide scrubber, thus undermining the project. That said, there were medical doctors, engineers and successful inventors among the biospherians, and Spaceship Earth makes some of the criticisms about the not-so-closed nature of the project read more like misunderstandings resulting from a lack of transparency than pseudoscientific shenanigans. Spaceship Earth’s biggest weakness is that there isn’t actually much controversy — or drama — at all. Biosphere 2 wasn’t a total success, but it wasn’t a complete failure. John Allen comes off as a bit of a caricature of a cult leader, but if that’s what he is, he’s extremely benign and his group is outrageously creative, productive and lasting. In fact, many of the biospherians still live at Allen’s Synergia Ranch. The biggest challenges the group faced under the dome were failed crops and rising carbon dioxide levels. Everyone agrees that starvation and suffocation are absolutely life-threatening, but nobody would argue that lethargy and irritability are intrinsically cinematic. Spaceship Earth, like its subject, is best viewed as a capsule of a time and a place, and a group of all-too-human visionaries. It’s got a lot to say about the state of our planetary ecology and the psychology of creative dreamers, and it’s also a superbly welltimed release as a study of life in isolation. Email arts@nashvillescene.com
tant artist in Sweden’s history, on par with Edvard Munch in Norway. The most satisfying aspect of Beyond the Visible is how it presents af Klint’s work as an impediment to the problematic market that’s driving the art world. According to the filmmakers, it is no longer possible to tell the history of art without including Hilma af Klint. And that breaks open the whole concept of an untouchable canon in art history. “We can’t present Hilma af Klint as an isolated figure,” Voss says toward the film’s end, “because she brings with her a whole series of questions that will hopefully make art history exciting again for years to come.” Email arts@nashvillescene.com
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