This reel-to-reel tape was recorded by Johnny Bragg, founder and tenor of the Prisonaires, a vocal group formed at Nashville’s Tennessee State Penitentiary. The Prisonaires were frequent performers at the governor’s mansion and recorded for Sun Records in 1953.
From the exhibit Night Train to Nashville: Music City Rhythm & Blues Revisited artifact
RESERVE TODAY
Birth Control Lessons Omitted From Sex Education in Tennessee
‘Baby Olivia’ addition to ‘family life’ curriculum prompts Scene investigation of MNPS materials
BY HANNAH HERNERPith in the Wind
This week on the Scene’s news and politics blog Grievances Set Stage for Annual Party Vehicle Hearings
New state protections and public complaints change terrain for downtown transpotainment
BY ELI MOTYCKAMetropolitik: Nashville Honors Civil Rights
Icon Diane Nash
The city held a dedication ceremony at Diane Nash Plaza Saturday — a good reminder that we should have a civil rights museum
BY BETSY PHILLIPSBanned Together
How book censorship is affecting Tennesseans and their libraries
BY KELSEY BEYELERBlack Opry honors Alice Randall, The Postal Service & Death Cab for Cutie, Nashville Kats season opener and more
Date Night: Geist and Pelato
From classy cocktails to top-tier Italian in Nashville’s Germantown neighborhood
BY DANNY BONVISSUTOAngelic Upstart
Tara Dugger honors the Nations’ punk roots with her spirited solo show
It Ain’t Math
A new biography limns the life of musician and artist Terry Allen
BY ODIE LINDSEY; CHAPTER16.ORG
Deep Roots
Kyshona explores her rich — and nearly lost — family history on Legacy
BY BRITTNEY MCKENNAUnrest in the House of Scartoe
One of The Protomen’s robot soldiers emerges from retirement for their 20th anniversary show
BY MATT SULLIVANTrust the Process
Eric Slick gets by in strange times on New Age Rage
BY STEPHEN TRAGESERFruits of Her Labor
Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield turns back toward her roots on Tiger’s Blood
BY JACQUELINE ZEISLOFTThe Spin
The Scene’s live-review column checks out Chuck Indigo, Becca Mancari and more at Record Store Day shows hosted at The Groove and Vinyl Tap BY JAYME FOLTZ, D. PATRICK RODGERS AND STEPHEN TRAGESER
Why So Delirious?
The People’s Joker is a visceral and visionary origin story
BY JASON SHAWHAN
Rental Failure
Documentary Kim’s Video takes its worthwhile subject matter off the rails BY CRAIG
D. LINDSEYNEW YORK TIMES CROSSWORD AND THIS MODERN WORLD
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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF D. Patrick Rodgers
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A RECENT POLL conducted by Vanderbilt University has revealed something quite extraordinary in today’s often divided political landscape: widespread approval for Mayor Freddie O’Connell and for his transit plan, across party lines. The 2024 Vanderbilt Poll shows that our city is filled with optimism, with a significant 9-point increase in the percentage of Nashvillians who believe that their city is headed in the right direction.
Mayor O’Connell’s approval rating stands at an impressive 71 percent, drawing support from Republicans (56 percent), independents (68 percent) and Democrats (85 percent) alike.
One of the poll’s main focuses is Nashville’s transit situation, where O’Connell’s practical approach has gained widespread support. With nearly half of commuters spending between 30 to 90 minutes in traffic each day, and many calling for better public transportation, O’Connell has become a champion for sensible transit solutions. The upcoming citywide transit referendum — further details of which O’Connell unveiled last week, and which is set for the November ballot — enjoys strong bipartisan backing, with 84 percent of respondents expressing support. That includes 70 percent of Republicans, 86 percent of independents and a remarkable 92 percent of Democrats.
Perhaps the widespread support can be attributed to the mayor having the good sense to include the community in his planning and his decision making.
As noted by the Nashville Banner: “The details have been hashed out in public meetings in the weeks since O’Connell launched the push in February. A half-cent sales tax surcharge would be expected to raise more than $100 million annually if voters approve the referendum, with the funds going to service increases, modernizing traffic signals, an expansion of the city’s sidewalk network, safety improvements, the development of more than a dozen transit centers across the county and, city officials hope, several dedicated bus lanes on Nashville’s busiest corridors. ‘This is how we catch up on our transportation to-do list in a big way. This program is designed to make a year-one impact,’ O’Connell [said].”
Further, as I mentioned in my March 28 letter, O’Connell’s transit plan is on track to be much more affordable than Nashville’s failed 2018 transit plan, and makes a bit more sense for our city at this particular time.
Digging into other details of the Vanderbilt Poll, it’s clear that O’Connell’s bipartisan appeal isn’t just luck — it’s the result of his effective leadership in the face of Nashville’s rapid growth and evolving challenges. Residents are feeling good about Nashville’s economy, with 68 percent rating it as very or fairly good. Ad-
ditionally, a whopping 78 percent express love for their city, highlighting a collective pride in Nashville’s identity.
The poll also reveals a strong consensus on the city’s priorities, with crime, education and affordable housing emerging as the top concerns. However, not everything is perfect. There is some apprehension that residents may be uninformed about significant future endeavors, such as future development of the East Bank and The Fairgrounds Nashville and racetrack revitalization. John Geer — co-director of the Vanderbilt Poll and professor of political science — expressed concern, stating, “If they aren’t keeping up with these projects, new unfavorable information about the project could quickly undermine support for it.” While optimism abounds regarding certain city priorities and the forthcoming transit referendum, it’s evident that challenges persist. Still, the poll makes clear that O’Connell has the city’s priorities in the right order — and that is no doubt leading to the number of Nashvillians who feel our city is back on the right track.
As Nashville gears up for the November 2024 election, anticipation is building around the transit referendum. With nearly half of commuters battling traffic congestion daily, the need for robust public transportation solutions is undeniable. The transit plan is one that resonates across party lines. If passed, this referendum promises to alleviate traffic woes, enhance safety and modernize infrastructure, ultimately improving the quality of life for all Nashvillians. As the Vanderbilt Poll shows our collective love for Nashville, perhaps this affection will only deepen after November, should the referendum prevail. Beyond political divides, the transit plan embodies a tangible step toward a more efficient and livable city — something we can all look forward to.
Bill
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‘Baby Olivia’ addition to ‘family life’ curriculum prompts Scene investigation of MNPS materials
BY HANNAH HERNER
A BILL THAT WOULD require an addition to the state’s “family life” curriculum in public schools has been sent to Gov. Bill Lee’s desk. It requires students to watch a three-minute video and suggests one made by the anti-abortion group Live Action called “Baby Olivia.” The animated clip contains some inaccuracies about the timeline of the fetal development process.
Rep. Gino Bulso (R-Brentwood), who sponsored the bill, called it one of the most important pieces of legislation of the session, while the admission of what many advocates call anti-abortion propaganda into schools sparked outrage.
But Tennessee’s family life curriculum is far from comprehensive. A Nashville Scene review of the materials used by Metro Nashville Public Schools showed education about aspects of birth control and emergency contraception exist, but are cut out.
According to the latest CDC data, Tennessee has the seventh-highest teen birth rate in the country.
Family life curriculum is required at some point in a student’s high school career. The Tennessee State Board of Education and the Tennessee Department of Education establish the curriculum in accordance with state law, while local education agencies (in this case, MNPS) adopt the curriculum — tasked with taking into account community values. Tennessee law was changed last year to require parents to opt in to the family life lessons; previously, they were required to opt out.
To comply with Tennessee law, the curriculum must be abstinence-based. The law states
that curriculum must “emphatically promote only sexual risk avoidance through abstinence, regardless of a student’s current or prior sexual experience.” It does require medically accurate information, and must also include information about adoption, the challenges of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, as well as detection, intervention and prevention of child sexual abuse and human trafficking and preventing dating violence.
Within the criteria, Nashville students have education on all of the state requirements, along with the classic diagrams of penises and vaginas; there’s even a bit of discussion about gender identity and sexual orientation. But what is perhaps most notable about the curriculum at MNPS is what is cut out. Red text on the lesson plan states several commands, including: “Omit emergency contraception page of birth control fact sheet.”
Students review a series of birth control fact sheets for abstinence, IUDs, birth control implants, Depo-Provera birth control shots, the pill, the patch, the ring, condoms, internal condoms, the sponge, spermicides and withdrawal. But students won’t learn what emergency contraception is, how it works, how effective it is and where to get it — including the fact that it will not terminate an existing pregnancy. The sheets certainly do not explicitly encourage the use of morning-after pills like Plan B. The materials say twice: “Emergency contraception is not a regular method of birth control. It should be used only in an emergency, when a regular method of birth control has failed, or in cases of rape.”
The “birth control choices activity” will also
not see the light of day at MNPS. In the activity, students read a paragraph about a couple and identify what is the best birth control choice for them, why, and where they can get it.
Mayor Freddie O’Connell and representatives of several community groups unveiled a new transit plan at Antioch’s Southeast Community Center Friday morning. It could bring new transit centers, 24/7 transit service, 86 miles of new sidewalks and modern traffic signals to the city. Pending approval by the state comptroller and the Metro Council, the plan will cost $3.1 billion and be on ballots for the Nov. 5 election. O’Connell, a longtime transit advocate, won the mayoral race in 2023 on a platform that included bringing a transit referendum to voters. The announcement follows several meetings by O’Connell’s Technical Advisory Committee and Community Advisory Committee. Public accounting firm KraftCPAs will now review the plan and must refer it to the comptroller for approval by May 31. From there, the mayor’s office must submit the plan to the council by June 7, when councilmembers will review and vote on the plan.
Two additional slides about birth control are scratched from the lesson plan. One titled “Getting Help With Birth Control” explains that some birth control methods require a prescription or have to be inserted by a health care provider. It urges that professional counseling and a trip to the doctor are beneficial, and notes: “The most important thing to remember about birth control is that it needs to be used correctly and consistently to work!”
Another omitted slide titled “Personal Questions” asks students to consider: “How easy will this method be for me to get? How easy will this method be to use? Does this method fit with my personal or family’s values?” A slide that asks students to write down all the benefits of abstinence they can think of in one minute, on the other hand, remains.
State law does not specifically ban teaching about contraception, but does ban it being distributed on school property. So it’s unclear why students cannot learn about emergency contraception or complete activities analyzing their birth control choices.
The state board of education punted the Scene’s question about why the slides are omitted to the local education agency (MNPS). MNPS spokesperson Sean Braisted says the teacher who developed the scope and sequence of the curriculum has retired. But it is reviewed and updated each year also to comply with state laws. ▼
As this issue goes to press, the Tennessee General Assembly’s 2024 session is nearing its conclusion. On Monday, Gov. Bill Lee admitted defeat on his universal voucher program — an embattled piece of legislation that created a divide among Republican legislators and faced widespread criticism from school leaders. Through the program (titled the Education Freedom Scholarship Act), students across the state would have received public funds to put toward a private education. The legislature did manage to pass the approximately $52 billion budget in both the House and the Senate last week, however. There was also action on bills related to health care, consumer protections and more. Listen to Episode 5 of the Nashville Scene Podcast to hear our reporters break down all the action — and inaction — at the Capitol in 2024. It’s available via Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
New state protections and public complaints change terrain for downtown transpotainment
BY ELI MOTYCKAPUBLIC COMPLAINTS, industry criticism and a new state law are shifting the landscape for party vehicles as the industry heads into a third year under Metro’s watch.
An industry-backed push to override city regulations at the state level failed with a caveat. Rather than remake Nashville’s entire entertainment transportation vehicle regulatory structure, lawmakers — lobbied by statehouse veterans McMahan Winstead & Richardson and led by House Majority Leader William Lamberth (R-Portland) — enshrined ETV operators’ permits with additional protections.
These will be tested at permit renewal hearings on May 16. Renewals can cost $2,500 to $5,000, and many operators face specific, detailed complaints submitted to the city via Metro’s non-emergency services portal hubNashville. Nashville Party Wagon alone earned 70 alleged violations since last year’s permit hearings.
Several legal categories of entertainment transportation companies — from pedal taverns to sightseeing trolleys to party barges — sit under the eye of Metro’s Transportation Licensing Commission. The body has become the focal point of tension between and among industry operators (who often point fingers at each other)
and city regulators, specifically Nashville Department of Transportation director Diana Alarcon, who frequently sits in on TLC meetings.
“There’s an ongoing topic I’d like to bring to the commission’s forefront,” Michael Winters, owner of the Nashville Tractor, told the TLC at a March 23 meeting. “No offense to the NDOT director, but that seat seems to be self-appointed. Since 2022-ish, a table has been pulled up, a live mic has been provided, all interjections from the NDOT director have been allowed, not objected to, and that sways the opinion of the TLC.”
Winters’ accusations that Alarcon violated city and commission charters reflect a frustration among operators who suspect the city wants to see their business die. The same day, Honky Tonk Party Bar owner Grant Rosenblatt followed Winters’ public comment with his own accusations leveled at Alarcon and NDOT. After a few minutes of mincing words, he went after industry operators’ favorite double standard: Old Town Trolley Tours. Drivers would likely recognize the green-and-orange buses cruising along Music Row and through Midtown.
“It’s the crux in my concern that lies in the preferential treatment afforded to this particular company for the last at least two years,”
The city held a dedication ceremony at Diane Nash Plaza Saturday — a good reminder that we should have a civil rights museum
BY BETSY PHILLIPSMetropolitik is a recurring column featuring the Scene’s analysis of Metro dealings.
ON SATURDAY, APRIL 20 — 64 years and one day past the time when Diane Nash stood on Nashville’s courthouse steps and asked Mayor Ben West if he believed it was wrong to discriminate against someone solely on the basis of their race — another Nashville mayor, Freddie O’Connell, welcomed Nash once again to those steps as the city honored her by naming the front plaza of the courthouse after her.
Nashville has a rule that streets and parks can’t be named after someone until after they die. This means that, in general, we as a city don’t honor our civil rights icons until after they’ve passed. Conveniently, this means the city rarely has to publicly reckon with its past. But Metro councilmembers found a loophole: Naming something other than a park or a street after Nash — and ta-da, we get this amazing moment.
People who were part of the movement with Nash came from all over to be there with her for this. A couple of her high school friends were there. Many of her family members were there. And she took the time to make sure the crowd recognized them all. She gave a lovely speech, talking about her time in Nashville and illustrating the principles of nonviolence she learned
Rosenblatt told commissioners. “I also propose the board suspend any discussions related to permitting or permit renewal until a transparent explanation is provided regarding why this specific company is exempt while all other companies are restricted.”
Muttering broke out between commissioners. One commissioner said Old Town had, to his knowledge, received no citations from Metro. Another suggested that the body subpoena Old Town’s payroll records to confirm its hours of operation, the key point of concern for Rosenblatt and other entertainment-vehicle owners who are barred from running vehicles between 4 and 6 p.m. Old Town Trolleys ignored these restrictions, Rosenblatt said. Stepping in, Alarcon said the previous director had given the trolley verbal permission to run by its own rules.
When Alarcon’s predecessor Billy Fields showed up to receive an award at the TLC’s April 18 meeting, Winters showed up again, asking the body to explain the special route. The commission deferred discussion. Attorneys in the room squirmed.
Written complaints submitted via hubNashville back up the apparent double standard.
“The Sightseeing Bus is operating during the 4pm-6pm peak hours curfew,” reads a complaint signed by Lisa Haller. “This is the 4th incident that I’ve reported of Old Town Trolley in a week. Is the curfew still in effect or just not being enforced?”
These complaints form the legal basis for commissioners to potentially revoke next year’s permits. The Scene reviewed all 208 submitted to Metro since permits were issued last year. About half were submitted anonymously, while the other half came from four individuals: Haller, Jim Schmitz, Michael Hayes (a TLC commissioner)
from the Rev. James Lawson. She ended by speaking directly to those younger than her and her peers, saying how — even though they didn’t know us yet — they had loved us, and did this for us.
Whew, it was so beautiful.
I was thinking about how John Kasper, 67 years ago, on the evening of the first day of school, held his rally first at War Memorial Auditorium and then on the steps of the Capitol. How he urged his white crowd to “attack, attack, attack.” And how just this year, we had Nazis yet again at the state Capitol, rallying. And here, still, are Diane Nash and her friends, on the courthouse steps, offering Nashville an alternative to all that hate and anger, taking inspiration from those who came before them and working toward a better city for those who come after them.
The thing is, they’re so ordinary. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. I just mean that those who changed our city and then our nation were just ordinary people who wanted things to be better. Diane Nash had been training and preparing for months, but Frankie Henry stepped down off a city bus after dance practice and into the heart of the sit-ins almost by chance — no training, no preparation, nothing. Regular people who saw the chance to change things took it. And now they’re just quietly going about their lives.
How lucky we are to live among these unassuming heroes.
Councilmember At-Large Zulfat Suara on Saturday drew attention to the need for a civil rights museum/museum of African American history, pointing out that one of the cups the protesters had been fed out of at the jail back in 1960 had been passed around at the press conference that morning. “Where does it go after this?” she asked. “Where is its home?”
And this got me thinking, again, about whether we’re going to continue to dither on this and just hope that the families of historic figures keep and maintain artifacts and papers until we get our shit together. I mean, yeah, my
and an individual responsible for 95 complaints who left only a Gmail address. This ETV snitch, whose complaints cited specific lines of Metro code and included time-stamped photo evidence, did not return a request for comment.
“Nobody, whether a downtown resident or downtown worker in an office, bargained for the craziness of Lower Broadway moving up and down the streets,” Schmitz tells the Scene. “But it just kept spreading. Metro throughout just didn’t put a … priority on enforcing existing laws.”
Schmitz has since moved near Brentwood. Like many other complainants, he zeroed in on the sound level of music (by law, it can’t be audible 50 feet away). Commissioner Hayes submitted four complaints in the final week of March, knocking Old Town twice as well as Cruzzin’ Nashville and Grey Lion Tours.
“Where I’d be curious is, when it’s time for relicensing in a month, it’s one of the things that is supposed to be reported to us as licensing commissioners,” Hayes tells the Scene. “I didn’t file it anonymously. I took a picture of what I saw and sent it through the vehicle it was supposed to be sent through, not as a commissioner but as a guy from Nashville who works downtown and is invested in downtown.”
All 27 operators, who hold more than 80 vehicle permits collectively, will come up for renewal in May. New applicants can vie for permits as well.
“We’ll evaluate who wants to renew, who has insurance to renew, and who’s had violations,” Hayes says. “I don’t know what the TLC is going to do, but if you were to look at the tone of the meetings and the regulations, I think if you don’t already have a license, it will be hard to get a license.” ▼
money is on us doing that. We don’t seem to be able to move anyone quickly enough to buy a building to put such a museum in.
But we have the Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library downtown. We have the expertise to curate this already on the city’s payroll. What if the downtown library became the Civil Rights Museum and Library? The location is perfect, both because it’s right in the heart of things and because it’s built on the site of many of the civil rights protests. There’s parking. And the library already has the experts and pertinent collections. Plus, Metro archives.
Our time with these giants is growing short, and we don’t have enough steps at the courthouse to name after everyone. I just wish we could make as many opportunities to express our gratitude to each of them while they are still alive, as we did for Ms. Nash last weekend. And a museum just seems like such a great way to do that. ▼
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On April 13, dozens of people chanted this phrase as they marched in downtown Nashville. The inaugural March for Libraries — capping off National Library Week by celebrating libraries and protesting book censorship — was established by Cassandra Taylor, chair of the Tennessee Library Association’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee.
In recent years, libraries throughout the country have been caught in the crossfire of a raging culture war and attempts to diminish the identities of marginalized people by removing access to books by and about them. Tennessee is at the national forefront of book challenges and book bannings; while the former describes the process in which someone requests that a book be restricted or removed from school curricula, school libraries or public libraries (which may or may not ultimately happen), the latter indicates the process was successful.
The March for Libraries was a declaration of love addressed to libraries, the people who work in them and the people they serve. Attendees held signs featuring phrases like “libraries are for everyone” and “free people read freely.” Attendees also wrote anecdotes on library cards and read aloud passages from banned books.
As participants marched through Nashville’s streets, one person zipped by on a scooter and yelled, “Fuck you!”
Many book challenges are driven by claims that educators and librarians are trying to “indoctrinate” children by providing access to texts that depict violence, sexual themes or difficult truths about history. Librarians in Tennessee have been threatened and compared to pedophiles, facing claims from far-right activists that they distribute obscene materials in libraries. (They don’t.)
Clinton Public Library director Miria Webb traveled hours to attend the event. She has worked in the library system near Oak Ridge, Tenn., for a decade, and has been a librarian for nearly two. Dressed in a Reading Rainbow shirt, earrings featuring animals reading books and glasses depicting Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie, she expresses affection for her hometown library system and its patrons. She also admits she, like many other librarians, has struggled since book challenges started ramping up in 2022. Webb has considered leaving the profession as people make accusations that she says are “utterly untrue.”
“I have had people imply that I am the devil,” said Webb. “I’ve had people write me emails that compared queer people to cannibals. … I’ve been threatened with arrest by a former police officer at least twice.”
While no books have been removed from the Clinton Public Library system, contentious library board meetings have brought national attention to the East Tennessee town. Librarians have had to pull two titles from the adult section and put
them behind the front desk: Gender Queer and Let’s Talk About it
Hendersonville senior Julia Garnett also attended the April 13 march. Garnett has received national recognition from the White House for her advocacy around censorship. The school board in her home county considered a book challenge for A Place Inside of Me, a children’s book about a Black boy’s emotions before and after a police shooting. It was not removed from school libraries. In a separate incident, former Hendersonville Public Library director Allan
Morales was fired after an incident involving Christian actor Kirk Cameron and anti-trans activist Riley Gaines. Morales was ousted by a newly designated library board put in place by a county commissioner who is a member of the ultra-conservative Sumner County Constitutional Republicans.
Garnett, who is queer, says it’s frustrating to see the book challenges target diverse options.
“I’ve seen so many people older than me fighting for that representation,” says Garnett. “To see that removed from our libraries, and to see
PHOTO: ANGELINA CASTILLO CLINTON PUBLIC LIBRARY DIRECTOR MIRIA WEBB
all that effort that went into putting those books there in the first place be attacked, is really hard to see.”
As a response to censorship efforts, Garnett started the club Student Advocates for Speech, where students “discuss all things censorship.” She has also become more politically engaged by sending emails to elected officials, sending testimony to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and speaking at school board meetings. Other students from Memphis have done similar work through the Tennessee Youth Coalition.
Garnett and Webb are like many others across the country fighting to maintain the protections afforded by the First Amendment, which include the freedom to read and access information — as outlined by multiple Supreme Court cases. While attempts to censor, ban and challenge books are currently going strong — led by individuals, national groups and lawmakers alike — so are the efforts to protect them and support libraries. Even as Webb has been the target of ire, she acknowledges that the libraries in her district have more supporters than critics.
TRACKING BOOK CHALLENGES and bans can be difficult. Not all cases are reported. (Both PEN America and the American Library Association have websites for those who wish to report a book challenge.) Some titles get moved to differ-
Commercial Appeal reported that same year that Collierville Schools near Memphis temporarily removed at least 300 books from their collection as lawmakers considered censorship-related legislation. In 2022 and 2023, here in Middle Tennessee, Wilson County Schools removed six books from its libraries: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic; Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts); Tricks; Infandous; Damsel; and The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel. Last year, following a “decency ordinance” from the Murfreesboro City Council, four LGBTQthemed books were removed from the public library system: Flamer, Queerfully and Wonderfully Made, This Book Is Gay and Let’s Talk About It Although the county had to repeal the decency ordinance as part of a legal settlement, none of those books has been returned to public library shelves. (They are reportedly available to check out via the library system’s app.)
the campaigns against reading,” says former Nashville Public Library director Kent Oliver, who now works as a senior fellow for the ALA’s public policy and advocacy office. “It’s not just the overt attacks. It’s the whole psychological impact it has on librarians and library boards and libraries.”
ent library sections, removed from school curricula or taken out of school and public libraries altogether. Prisons also censor which books incarcerated people are permitted to read. While book bans and restrictions lead to decreased public access, there isn’t any legislation preventing people from purchasing whatever books they like. But removing books from public spaces means young people who don’t have permission or the means to buy the books and people who can’t afford to buy them effectively do not have access to them.
According to the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, at least 4,240 books were targeted throughout the country in 2023 — though the total number is likely much higher. ALA data also shows that Tennessee is among the top 10 states for book challenges, seeing at least 350 titles challenged through 21 attempts last year alone. Most challenges are happening in rural and suburban areas, led by groups that challenge multiple titles at once. Nashville’s public school system and public library system have received only a handful of challenges in the past few years, and those haven’t led to any books’ removal from school or public libraries.
In 2022, East Tennessee’s McMinn County school board removed Maus, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir about the Holocaust, from its eighth-grade curriculum. The
Censorship and book challenges have been encouraged in recent years by several Tennessee lawmakers. Former state Rep. Jerry Sexton (R-Bean Station) said on the House floor in 2022 that he would burn books after banning them from libraries. One law makes it a class-E felony and imposes a fine up to $100,000 for booksellers, distributors and publishers “to knowingly sell or distribute obscene matter,” to K-12 schools. Obscenity is defined in the state code as material that appeals to “prurient interests,” “depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct,” and “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” The Age Appropriate Materials Act of 2022 requires schools to publish their entire library collections online, create a policy for reviewing books for age-appropriateness and create a process for those who wish to challenge them. The law left the interpretation of what age-appropriateness means to school districts.
All of these things — obscenity standards, collection policies, online catalogs and book-challenge processes — were already in place before state Republicans revived book censorship as a hot topic. This information is available through school and library websites. Even so, advocates say increased scrutiny can create an intimidating atmosphere among librarians and educators — an atmosphere that can lead to self-censorship.
“That’s the subtle effect of censorship and
The effect echoes that of a similar law, passed in 2021, that prevents schools from teaching certain concepts related to race (commonly referred to as critical race theory) and sex. While K-12 schools were rarely if ever teaching CRT (it is an academic framework mostly taught in law school), the legislation made some educators hesitant about teaching some elements of American history or engaging in classroom conversations about real-world experiences adjacent to those concepts. One Tipton County school, for example, stopped taking field trips to Memphis’ National Civil Rights Museum after the law passed. A teacher in Sullivan County was fired for teaching lessons about racism via a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay and a Kyla Jenée Lacey poem.
Another law passed in 2022 gave Tennessee’s Textbook and Instructional Materials Quality Commission the power to ban books from school libraries across the state through an appeals process. If a parent challenges a book and is dissatisfied with their school’s and later their school board’s decision to keep it, they may appeal to the commission — which doesn’t have to read the challenged text in its entirety. While the commission hasn’t heard any appeals yet, new legislation passed this year could expand the pathways for that to happen. HB0843/SB1060, which amends the Age Appropriate Materials Act, passed in both the House and the Senate this month. The amendment states that materials that “in whole or in part” contain nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, “sadomasochistic abuse,” excess violence or something that is “patently offensive” as described in the aforementioned obscenity law are not appropriate for K-12 graders and should not be kept in school libraries. It also allows people to appeal straight to the textbook commission if a school board hasn’t responded to a book challenge within 60 days. How the legislation will affect school libraries moving forward is unclear.
One bill that was ultimately shelved would have allowed virtually any adult with a child to
Directed by Nat McIntyre
May 2 – October 24 | 5:30 – 9 PM
Collins Auditorium Tickets available at nashvilleshakes.org
An adventure through food, drink and song awaits at this weekly concert. A diverse music lineup provides the soundtrack and Thomas Dambo’s blockbuster exhibition TROLLS: Save the Humans delivers an extra dose of magic to a memorable night at Cheekwood.
Reserve tickets at cheekwood.org
file a lawsuit against a public school district to enforce the Age Appropriate Materials Act. (Currently, only school staff, public school students and parents of those students can do that.) The legislation was introduced by Rep. Gino Bulso (R-Brentwood), who has been accused of having a conflict of interest regarding this bill because he is currently representing parents and members of far-right group Citizens for Renewing America, which is seeking to do just that.
GROUPS LIKE CITIZENS for Renewing America and Moms for Liberty are among those leading the push for more censorship across the nation. It’s not uncommon to see people associated with groups like these reading passages from books they disagree with at school board meetings. Websites like booklooks.org have streamlined the process for finding books to challenge via “book reports” that highlight concerns and cite specific page numbers with examples from the texts. (Conversely, the website uniteagainstbookbans.org shares “book résumés” for people to help defend them.)
Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice tells the Scene that Moms for Liberty “never thought to get involved on the book issue.” The goal of the organization, she says, is to reform the public education system by becoming more involved in children’s education, engaging in advocacy and training people to run for school board seats. Justice says the public school system is “captured” by teachers’ unions and the “progressive far left.”
“Getting laws passed isn’t enough,” says Justice when asked if she’d like to see more legislation to ensure that students aren’t accessing certain books or ideas. “But it is necessary for parents, for there to be transparency.”
Justice tells the Scene that Moms for Liberty isn’t against LGBTQ people, but rather the “sexualization of children.” She also says her group supports the teaching of history as long as it’s age-appropriate. The group mostly targets books with LGBTQ themes and those pertaining to race, taking issue with references to sex and racism. The books themselves and the materials with them are selectively highlighted — the Bible, for instance, which features a great deal of violent and sexual content, is not considered objectionable or too mature.
Moms for Liberty has been identified as an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Some members have been linked to a white supremacist group; an Indiana chapter quoted Hitler in a newsletter; and one member suggested separating LGBTQ students from their peers. Even so, the group wields political influence in states like Tennessee and Florida. Bulso was featured as a speaker at one of Moms for Liberty’s Williamson County events; Laurie Cardoza Moore, a member of the state textbook commission who has a say in which books Tennessee’s students have access to, also has ties to the organization.
Cardoza Moore founded Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, a pro-Israel nonprofit that was previously identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. (The SPLC has removed the
organization from its list of hate groups.) Her organization hosted a 2023 “Taking Back America’s Children” summit, where she referenced her influence over textbook changes. She also made headlines in 2010 for opposing the construction of a mosque in Murfreesboro, and has been known to spread disinformation about 9/11 and the 2020 election. In a 2022 op-ed, Cardoza Moore accused Kent Oliver of promoting “pornographic, racist, antisemitic and anti-American content” in the Nashville Public Library. An editor’s note clarified that the claim was not true.
THOSE ADVOCATING AGAINST book bans must consider whether they’re willing to stand by their arguments even when it means libraries stocking books that they personally disagree with. If they disagree with recent book bans, would they feel the same about Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, or filmmaker D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist epic The Birth of a Nation? Even as we’re seeing a rise in white supremacy and far-right extremism Tennessee?
Oliver calls it “a big discussion in our profession right now.”
“I think by and large, librarians believe we need to maintain that nonpartisan collection, because we’re very committed to the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment,” he says.
The ALA’s “Library Bill of Rights” states: “Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.” While not every library has the same collections, Mein Kampf is in fact available in the Nashville Public Library system and in some local schools.
Swallowed up amid the charged rhetoric around book banning are parents who make good-faith inquiries about the purposes and necessity of books that are available to children. A 2021 book challenge made in a Nashville elementary school, for example, pertains to Virginia Loh-Hagan’s Yakuza vs. Mafia.
“I am not opposed to my son being exposed to violent content if it has artistic or educational value,” reads a complaint submitted by the parent of a second-grader from Dan Mills Elementary. “Yakuza vs. Mafia does not have any artistic, cultural or educational value, and instead
glamorizes violent criminal activity and guns.” According to the school’s library catalog, the book is still available.
Before the recent wave of book challenges, parents sometimes questioned various texts and presented concerns to librarians. It just wasn’t quite such a spectacle, and resolutions were usually worked out internally. Those kinds of conversations can still happen.
“Parents certainly have the right to decide what their children read,” says Oliver. “Librarians have always wanted parents to be with their kids when they’re in the library.”
The issue, he says, is when one person’s disapproval limits access for an entire community.
FOR ALL THE ENERGY spent on banning books, even more is spent protecting them. Polls, including one conducted by Ipsos in 2023, show that most Americans do not support book censorship. Likewise, courts largely rule in favor of keeping books in libraries.
The book-banning phenomenon has sparked increased engagement with challenged texts because, naturally, when people are told they can’t do something, they often want to do it even more. Widespread access to the internet makes that very easy — many of the topics parents seek to shield their children from are widely available online, in popular media and out in the real world anyway.
There are many local initiatives created to engage with banned books. Before leaving his role as director of NPL, Oliver started the Freedom to Read campaign, which featured, in part, library cards with the phrase “I read banned books.” Those cards are still available. Banned-book displays have popped up in libraries and bookstores, especially during Banned Books Week in October.
Local poet Ciona Rouse and musician Aria Cavaliere started a regular Banned Books Happy Hour at Third Man Records.
“We believe that language matters, and [we believe in] being able to intelligently have conversations around literature and language that’s crafted for people to read,” says Rouse. “I think it’s much better to be able to have conversations
rather than to just shut off the language.”
Penguin Random House, the Freedom to Read Foundation, PEN America and Little Free Library have also started a Banned Wagon, which tours states to distribute free banned books — it stopped at Nashville’s The Bookshop in October.
Sarah Arnold at Parnassus Books tells the Scene, “We definitely sell more copies of books that are banned,” including two of owner Anne Patchett’s books — Bel Canto and The Patron Saint of Liars — that have been banned in Florida. Arnold also says that, when Maus and Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons were banned in Tennessee school districts, author Katherine Applegate bought 100 copies of each to be distributed in those areas. Parnassus also partnered with the Students of Stonewall from the Oasis Center’s Just Us program, a community for LGBTQ youth in Tennessee, to develop a curated list of books featuring LGBTQ characters and characters of color. A few students from the group shared their thoughts on representation in literature with the Scene
“As a person who doesn’t necessarily like reading that much, seeing myself in books/characters I relate to is basically my only motivation to actually read,” says 10th-grader Alaena Smith. “It’s not only affirming but just nice to see characters that I can relate to. It can be hard in real life to find friends and people in general that understand my experiences being queer, and these books remind me that there are other people out there like me.”
“A lot of my understanding of myself has come through the books I’ve read,” says 12thgrader Ray Scott. “These books have made me feel normal, understood and accepted. When I didn’t know of anyone like me around, I could find community through literature. Knowing that people will have to unnecessarily suffer through confusion and self-hatred because of political agendas and purposeful fear-mongering is sickening. It’s always about protecting the kids, but I know firsthand that book bans do nothing but harm them.”
To prevent LGBTQ youth in Tennessee from losing access to books they feel represented by, Just Us program leader Joseph Clark — also known by his drag alter ego, Champagne Van Dyke — has started Champagne’s Book Nook, where teens across the state can request LGBTQ books, free of charge. The program has sent out more than 230 books in less than two years.
Just as much as librarians are here to protect books, they’re here to serve those who want those books by providing resources, information and sometimes just a friendly ear. If you have a question about a book, ask them about it. Remember that libraries also provide myriad resources beyond books — they offer puppet shows, fitness opportunities, crafts, author talks, multilingual conversation clubs, health and fitness equipment, tools, board games, musical instruments and more.
“We want to bring information out into communities,” says librarian Miria Webb. “We want to bring literacy out into the communities. We want to bring joy out into communities.”
MAY 7
HERMANOS GUTIÉRREZ WITH DONAVON FRANKENREITER
JULY 17
ASIA WITH FOCUS, MARTIN TURNER AND CURVED AIR ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10 AM
AUGUST 26
PJ MORTON WITH THE CAVEMEN. ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10 AM
SEPTEMBER 25
ANNE WILSON WITH JORDAN ROWE ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10 AM
OCTOBER 4
SAM BARBER WITH HANS WILLIAMS ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10 AM
OCTOBER 9
YOU GOT GOLD
CELEBRATING THE LIFE & SONGS OF JOHN PRINE ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10 AM
OCTOBER 15
EXPERIENCE HENDRIX
CELEBRATE THE MUSIC & LEGACY OF JIMI HENDRIX ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10 AM
OCTOBER 23
DYLAN GOSSETT ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10 AM
When Nashville hosted the NFL Draft in 2019, the event set attendance records and brought in beaucoups of money. Although there won’t be 600,000-plus tourists (or annoying Jacksonville Jaguars fans) in Music City this time around, the Titans are still hoping to make the 2024 NFL Draft a bit of an event for local football devotees. The team is hosting a draft party at Nissan Stadium on the first night of the event. The event is free, but you must claim a ticket online. Fans can expect local food trucks, games, the opportunity to tour the team locker room, an appearance from Titans mascot T-Rac and more. A few current and former players are even expected to drop by. It’ll be the perfect spot for you to celebrate and/or commiserate with fellow Titans fans during the post-Jon Robinson era. LOGAN BUTTS 5:30 P.M. AT NISSAN STADIUM
1 TITANS WAY
MUSIC [MILESTONES] BLACK OPRY THREE-YEAR CELEBRATION HONORING ALICE RANDALL
The Black Opry began as an online presence for building community among Black country and roots artists that grew to include a traveling roadshow called The Black Opry Revue — which has put on showcase events across the country and at major festivals like CMA Fest and AmericanaFest, among other projects — and now indie label Black Opry Records. It’s astonishing to consider that the small crew behind Black Opry has accomplished all this in just three years. One factor that plays a significant role: More often than not, the country music business has historically treated Black artists poorly when it acknowledged them at all, leaving a wealth of talented and passionate people out in the cold. Representation is important, but so is bringing Black and brown people into roles where they can shape broader creative decisions. Before Alice Randall was a celebrated novelist, she was a Music Row songwriter; white artists cut her
songs under the direction of white producers, and the characters she wrote and the stories she told were often obscured. She tells the story in a new memoir called My Black Country, and the companion album features 11 of her songs recorded by Black women, including Allison Russell, Saaneah, Adia Victoria, Rhiannon Giddens and Randall’s daughter Caroline Randall Williams. Fittingly, Black Opry’s celebration on Thursday will feature performances of songs from My Black Country as well as an array of other artists (lineup TBA) from the Black Opry family. STEPHEN TRAGESER 7:30 P.M. AT CITY WINERY 609 LAFAYETTE ST.
FRIDAY / 4.26
DANCE [TAKE ME TO THE WATER]
More than 66 years after its humble beginnings at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater continues to carry forth the mission and legacy of its visionary founder. This weekend, you can experience the power of Alvin Ailey’s work firsthand as
his internationally acclaimed dance company returns to TPAC’s Jackson Hall for three performances. Audiences can look forward to seeing Ailey’s iconic masterwork Revelations along with a number of other powerful selections. Friday evening’s program will feature newer pieces from celebrated contemporary choreographers, including Century by Amy Hall Garner and Are You in Your Feelings? by Kyle Abraham. Saturday’s and Sunday’s performances will highlight a number of Ailey classics, such as Memoria, Pas de Duke, Masekela Langage Opus McShann and more. But let’s face it, Revelations — which has rightfully been called a “cultural treasure” — is the main event. First performed in 1960, this exquisite work honors and explores themes of Black history and culture with movement set to African American spirituals, gospel and blues music.
AMY STUMPFL
APRIL 26-28 AT TPAC’S JACKSON HALL
505 DEADERICK ST.
During its original run from 2004 to 2005, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s acclaimed Night Train to Nashville: Music City Rhythm & Blues 1945-1970 exhibit examined the role Nashville’s pioneering R&B community played in the city’s rise as a major recording center. Now, to celebrate the exhibit’s 20th anniversary, the museum is presenting Night Train to Nashville: Music City Rhythm & Blues Revisited, which opens Friday for a run through September 2025. “This 20th anniversary edition of Night Train to Nashville includes highlights from the original exhibit, along with newly discovered artifacts including stage outfits worn by Jackie Shane and Jimmy Church, instruments played by Johnny Jones and Bobby Hebb, and fabulous original show posters from the 1950s and ’60s,” says the museum’s Michael Gray, who was co-curator of the original exhibit with Daniel Cooper. The exhibit also includes previously unpublished photos, such as Sam Cooke backstage with Nashville musicians at the New Era Club and Jimi Hendrix and Billy Cox during their days at Fort Campbell in the early ’60s. The opening weekend’s festivities include a panel discussion Saturday afternoon, “All Aboard the Night Train! Nashville’s Groundbreaking R&B Television Series.” The Night Train TV series ran from 1964 to 1967 and featured many of Nashville’s best R&B musicians backing the city’s finest R&B singers, as well as out-of-town stars. The panel will include Church and Frank Howard, both of whom appeared on the show, and producer Noble Blackwell’s wife Katie and daughter Tracye. DARYL SANDERS
THROUGH SEPTEMBER 2025 AT THE COUNTRY MUSIC HALL OF FAME AND MUSEUM
222 REP. JOHN LEWIS WAY S.
[IN DREAMS]
MUSIC
SLUSH RECORD RELEASE FEAT.
PRESSURE HEAVEN & SAM HOFFMAN
If you’ve been curious about dream pop and shoegaze but haven’t yet taken the plunge,
Maxwell Barnett’s project Slush is a great place to start; and if you already love them, you’ll feel right at home. From a sonic perspective, the singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist’s new EP #3, released April 19 via To-Go Records, takes lots of cues from both of those styles — as well as the traditions that influenced them — and illustrates how they’ve filtered out into the broader musical lexicon. Chiming and pulsing guitars, thrumming bass and lively, insistent drums stir up clouds of slowly shifting reverb and echo. Barnett’s high-register voice ripples over the top like messages from an arcane spirit, recalling My Bloody Valentine’s Bilinda Butcher and Kevin Shields and Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser by way of Tame Impala’s Kevin
Parker. The lyrics aren’t too hard to make out if you listen, but the narratives aren’t always clear; is the lilting “Shadow of Mine” about parting ways with a partner, or musing literally about what happens to your shadow when you step out of the light? Either way, you’ll get to hear it directly from Barnett at Friday’s release party. Every year, a few bands sharpen up their skills by playing heaps of shows around Nashville, and it’s a treat to see them every time; one of them in 2024 is Pressure Heaven, whose blend includes big doses of dream pop and industrial music, and they’ll support on Friday. Songsmith Sam Hoffman, who plays out less often, will be there too, bringing the thoughtful ’60s- and ’70s-inspired pop of his latest LP Books on Tape
STEPHEN TRAGESER
8 P.M. AT SOFT JUNK
919 GALLATIN AVE.
When it comes to moody, minimalist crime dramas about hitmen who are cool, calculated and monosyllabic, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï is the one that set it all off. In 1967, the French noir master crafted a pulp yarn that isn’t just stylish and suspenseful; it’s also sexy as hell. That’s mainly because he got French matinee idol Alain Delon to star as a fedora-and-trenchcoat-wearing assassin who spends most of the movie dodging cops and his double-crossing employers after knocking off a nightclub owner. The Belcourt could practically make a film festival out of all the flicks this movie clearly inspired. Hell, David Fincher dropped his handsome-hitman flick
The Killer (starring a hella meticulous Michael Fassbender) on Netflix in November. Of course, this is not to be confused with John Woo’s breakthrough 1989 film The Killer, which has the eternally awesome Chow Yun-fat as the suave hired gun. (You see what I mean?) At the moment, the theater will screen a new 4K DCP restoration of this influential thriller before the Criterion Collection re-releases it on Blu-ray in July. CRAIG D. LINDSEY
APRIL 26-28 AT THE BELCOURT 2102 BELCOURT AVE.
John Lennon’s life and career are certainly well-documented. But fans will be able to catch a decidedly unguarded glimpse of the rock legend this weekend as Bennett Galleries hosts The Lost Weekend: The Photography of May Pang. As a onetime personal assistant to Lennon and Yoko Ono, Pang would become Lennon’s lover and confidante during his so-called “Lost Weekend,” which lasted from late 1973 into 1975. During these tumultuous 18 months — in which Lennon separated from Ono and moved to Los Angeles — Pang took tons of intimate photos capturing Lennon far from the spotlight.
Highlights from this private collection include candid shots of Lennon with fellow rockers (and members of the infamous “Hollywood Vampires”) such as Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson, Keith Moon and more. Other gems include one of the last known photographs to be taken of Lennon with Paul McCartney. Pang herself will be on hand this weekend to share some of the stories behind the photos, which will be available for purchase. AMY STUMPFL
APRIL 26-28 AT BENNETT GALLERIES 2104 CRESTMOOR ROAD
[ESCAPE VELOCITY]
Ben Tanner and John Paul White’s production on Alabama folk-rock duo The Secret Sisters’ new album Mind, Man, Medicine ends up sounding a bit glazed. That’s appropriate for a folk-rock-country-soul album mostly recorded at FAME Studios in legendary Muscle Shoals, Ala. The harmonies of sisters Lydia Slagle and Laura Rogers are as stirring as ever, but the production slightly obscures the songs they’ve written for Mind, Man, Medicine. When the songs and sonics skew to pop, as on the record’s opener “Space,” the album achieves escape velocity. (“Space” was co-written with Jessie Baylin and Daniel Tashian, who know their way around a great pop tune.) Most of the material on Mind is about how the duo is dealing with the problems of transience and the desire to stay at home with family and friends, far from the pressures of the music business and the road. The album peaks with “Never Walk Away,” which features a simplified post-Phil Spector arrangement that puts me in mind of the styles of popsoul singers like Lorraine Ellison and Dusty Springfield. Meanwhile, “I Needed You” sounds like The Secret Sisters have been listening to
The McGarrigle Sisters — it’s both arty and wholesome. Still, I think the album title itself might suggest a missed opportunity for this talented group. Instead of Tanner and White’s retro production style, I imagine an album with beats, electronics and up-to-date sounds The Secret Sisters could use in service of music that might address the eternal mind-medicine-man problem. But that’s Americana, and Mind, Man, Medicine is a smart record that’s often gorgeous. Ugandan-born and Texas-residing singer Jon Muq, who releases his Dan Auerbach-produced debut album Flying Away in May, opens.
EDD HURT
8 P.M. AT THE BASEMENT EAST
917 WOODLAND ST.
BOOKS [THE FUTURE IS INDIE]
If you’ve ever lamented the loss of your Scholastic Book Fair era, get excited. This Saturday is Independent Bookstore Day, a national daylong party honoring indie bookstores through contests, special story times, exclusive books and So. Much. Swag. Each bookstore celebrates its own way, so choose your favorite or make a day of bookstore hopping! Parnassus will host a lineup of author signings, including romance writers Sarah Adams (The Rule Book), Lauren Kung Jessen (Red String Theory) and Jenna Levine (My Roommate Is a Vampire). The Bookshop will add to the bookish merriment with giveaways, including a free, exclusive-to-The Bookshop tote when you spend $30. Both The Bookshop and Parnassus will have Independent Bookstore Day merch for sale along with, of course, lots of books. But these aren’t your only options! The Green Ray was dubbed Best Niche Shop in last year’s Best of Nashville issue. Queer-owned Novelette Booksellers’ colorful selection and even more colorful walls are to die for. Defunct Books, while tiny, is a treasure chest of unusual used books. Alongside craft supplies and toys, Fairytales Bookstore keeps its shelves stocked so that every child finds themselves reflected. Celebrate the written word this weekend — I’ll see you there!
RYNE WALKER
SATURDAY AT YOUR FAVORITE INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE
[TRAIN OF THOUGHT]
TENNESSEE CENTRAL RAILWAY
MUSEUM MODEL TRAIN SHOW & OPEN HOUSE
Tennessee is seemingly a tough place to be for a train person like myself. While I can’t take a train to work (no offense, WeGo Star) or on a vacation, train experiences are still possible if you know where to look. The Tennessee Central Railway Museum’s model train show and open house is a good place to be trainadjacent. During the event, visitors can see the railway’s fleet of 1950s passenger cars and stop to eat lunch in a dining car. Volunteers who are restoring the 1942 steam engine No. 576 — which used to be on display at Centennial
Park — will be on hand to discuss the years-long process. (I highly recommend checking this out.) You can also try out the 576 whistle simulator. In addition, if tiny trains are more your thing, there will be model railroads on display and vendors selling supplies. Despite Nashville’s dearth of actual trains, I would argue there’s no shortage of train enthusiasm. HANNAH HERNER
9 A.M.-3 P.M. AT THE TENNESSEE CENTRAL RAILWAY
MUSEUM
220 WILLOW ST.
For more than 20 years, Scott H. Biram has blazed solo down the nation’s interstates with a gritty, greasy, grungy fusion of country, blues and roughneck punk, offering up a kind of a bar-based master class on doing your own thing. This week, that road takes the “dirty old oneman band from Texas” to the high-falutin’ stage at City Winery — but most likely, the lesson plan has not changed. Biram is a longtime purveyor of lo-fi truckin’ songs, crusty, wastecase waltzes and anthemic wise-assery. Expect a set list of tunes that veer between lowdown and lightheaded as he hammers away on a distorted hollow-body electric hooked to a rig of pedals and mics and sings of bleary-eyed characters who constantly wander the line between sin and salvation. In the future, he’ll be hailed as either an underappreciated anti-hero or a musical loose cannon with a chicken wing tattooed on his forearm — a resounding success either way. CHRIS PARTON
6 P.M. AT CITY WINERY
609 LAFAYETTE ST.
After a 17-year absence, the Arena Football League will make its long-awaited return to Music City. The Nashville Kats are back in town and set to kick off the 2024 season with a highenergy home opener against the Minnesota Myth inside Nashville’s historic Municipal Auditorium. Now led by former Tennessee Titans coach Jeff Fisher and local sports media figure Greg Pogue, the franchise is under new leadership for the third time since originally joining the AFL in 1997. Onetime Kats assistant coach Dean Cokinos brings an extensive résumé and decades of experience to the sidelines as the team’s new head coach: He’s coached everywhere from Brentwood Academy to Berlin, and won the AFL’s top prize, the ArenaCup, as the head coach of the Tennessee Valley Vipers in 2008. Fans can expect to once again kick it with Kool Kat — the team’s beloved guitar-wielding, ball-tossing, rockabilly “mas-cat” — during a family-friendly pre-game and tailgate party, which will also feature music, games and food trucks. Blanco Brown — best known for his viral hit “The Git Up” — will perform the national anthem during opening ceremonies.
JASON VERSTEGEN
7:30 P.M. AT MUNICIPAL AUDITORIUM
417 FOURTH AVE. N.
In March, Wes Anderson earned an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short for “Roald Dahl’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.” While “Henry Sugar” is no doubt brilliant, some film buffs [raises hand] saw the win as a consolation prize for a singular writerdirector who’s gone far too unrecognized by the Academy. Yes, Anderson has earned 16 Oscar nominations over the course of his nearly 30-year career, and, yes, 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel won four trophies in technical categories (the only four wins for Anderson films before “Henry Sugar”). But several of Anderson’s movies — including last year’s delightful Asteroid City — were fully snubbed. Another excellent Anderson effort that got no love from the Academy? The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, a film that proved Anderson is the sort of auteur who can execute his ornate visions on a very large scale. Co-written with Noah Baumbach and featuring a knockout cast of frequent Anderson collaborators, The Life Aquatic is a funny, bittersweet Moby Dick riff that pays tribute to French nautical pioneer Jacques Cousteau. It also features one of Bill Murray’s richest, most nuanced performances and an unbeatable soundtrack. As the final installment of the W Hotel’s Screening on the Steps: Wes Anderson Films series, The Life Aquatic — which turns 20 this year — will screen Sunday evening on the Spanish Steps of the Gulch hotel. The screening is free and open to the public.
D. PATRICK RODGERS
7 P.M. AT THE W NASHVILLE 300 12TH AVE. S.
[20 YEARS OF TEARS]
MUSIC
HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS’ 20TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR
There’s plenty to cringe about when I think of myself in 2004. I was 14, trying to shrug off my childhood by cracking aggressively dark jokes, covering myself in black and obsessing over a cartoon serial killer, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. But tangled in that cringe is a fondness for that moody teenager who slouched onto the bus with her too-big Green Day messenger bag, taking the seat in the back corner to scratch Story of the Year lyrics into the seat. This is the girl I was when I moved from Neopets to Myspace but still spent most of my “computer time” looking up music videos with a friend standing over my shoulder. (Remember “computer time”?) Somewhere in one of these video-hopping reveries, we heard “Ohio Is for Lovers” for the first time, and I had new lyrics to carve into seats. With this song, and soon after with “Niki FM,” Hawthorne Heights became the poster children of early-Aughts emo. Twenty years and six studio albums later, they’re back
on tour, screaming the catchy chorus of “Niki FM” to, what I imagine, is a slightly older crowd than the first time around. But hey, I still have a lot of angst. I bet you do too. RYNE WALKER
8 P.M. AT CITY WINERY
609 LAFAYETTE ST.
End-of-semester concerts in high school auditoriums are important rituals for band and orchestra students. It’s fun to show off to classmates, family members and favorite teachers! But performing in a huge, fancy venue like the Schermerhorn, in Music City of all places? That’s the kind of experience that could inspire a lifelong passion or even a career in music. You can support the next generation of talent by attending the spring concert for the Tennessee Youth Symphony, an audition ensemble composed of the top young players from around the area. These kids are good — check out clips from December’s winter concert at Belmont’s McAfee Concert Hall to hear for yourself. Attendance is free, but donations are encouraged. That’s a great deal in my book: Someday some of the performers could return to 1 Symphony Place as part of a professional (and much more expensive) touring orchestra. COLE VILLENA 7:30 P.M. AT THE SCHERMERHORN
1 SYMPHONY PLACE
Picture this: It’s 2004. Your Urban Outfitters beanie fits perfectly. You wear incredibly thickrimmed glasses (black, of course). When you go to the bar, you order an off-the-beaten-path beer that perplexes your Bud-guzzling friends. Online, your Myspace layout is second-to-none. Pumping out of your car stereo? Two CDs, on repeat: The Postal Service’s Give Up and Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism. Ahhh, the glory days, right? For a cohort of mid-Aughts indie-rock fans, these coming-of-age albums are top-tier, and in Nashville this week, that same generation can celebrate Give Up and Transatlanticism with a co-headlining gig from The Postal Service and Death Cab at Bridgestone Arena. (You read that right — nostalgia fills arenas, y’all.) A sought-after rock tour that features Ben Gibbard — frontman of both acts — pulling double duty each night, the 20th anniversary run launched last year before expanding into spring 2024 with a fresh slate of amphitheater and arena dates. And yes, each night includes full-album performances of Transatlanticism and Give Up. Just like the good ol’ days.
MATTHEW LEIMKUEHLER
SPRING STREET Presented by THE NASHVILLE PREDATORS
When you’re done checking out all our fantastic vendors, stop by Spring Street where you can experience all sorts of interactive arts and fun surprises! Don’t forget to bring your creative side with you!
HISTORY AND CULTURE CENTER
Located just a couple blocks from the Square, come see history quite literally come to life at the Moore-Morris History and Culture Center! A multi-sensory tavern experience, living portraits, and a FREE root beer float for solving Williamson County’s oldest crimes, make plans to visit the Center during Main Street Festival!
CARTOONS @ THE FRANKLIN THEATRE
The Franklin Theatre’s doors are open to the public during our 40th Annual Main Street Festival! All weekend long you can shop exclusive theatre-themed gifts and take a behind-the-scenes tour. PLUS they’ll be showing a full slate of cartoons beginning at 10AM each day.
MAIN STAGE Presented by NISSAN USA
You can’t have Main Street Fest without MAIN STAGE! Rock on over to the Square to see a variety of bands, acts, and performances take center stage.
ACOUSTIC STAGE Presented by GRAYLINE
There’s plenty of great music awaiting you at Main Street Festival’s Acoustic Stage!! You’re not going to want to miss out on this year’s incredibly talented lineup of performers on the corner of 4th and Main!
PETZONE Presented by PETSENSE
Main Street Festival is for everyone, including the pups! If your furry family members are accompanying you on Main Street, be sure to stop by the Pet Zone featuring a fenced-in pet park, refresh station, treats, pet vendors and more!
KIDZONE Presented by HOPE UC
Looking for endless fun at Main Street Festival? Look no further than Kid Zone! With exciting games, creative crafts, and engaging activities, KidZone is the ultimate destination for your little adventurers.
Enjoy Discounts & Win a Movie Ticket to The Franklin Theatre! Grab a passport and follow the Caterpillar Crawl to find the unique Caterpillar at each destination and write its code on your passport to claim your prize!
•McGavock's Coffee Bar & Provisions
•Sweethaven
•Posh Boutique
•Shuff's Music
•Twine Graphics
•Savory Spice
•Hester and Cook
•Tin Cottage
•The Registry
•Whitney's Cookies
•Triple Crown Bakery
•The Heirloom Shop
•Stable Reserve
•Kilwins Franklin
•Walton's Jewelry
•Sweet CeCe’s
•Visit Franklin
•Finnleys
•Binks Outfitters
Passports available at the DFA tent on the square or at each shuttle stop entrance.
508 Loveless Events
KNOCKED LOOSE
I’m just shouting along to Knocked Loose, the gnarled Kentucky hardcore band known for occasionally snarling into breakdowns (just … look it up). Knocked Loose, one of the most formidable touring acts in heavy music, brings its collection of bone-breaking anthems to Marathon Music Works this week for a sold-out gig that’s the band’s first in Middle Tennessee since dusting up circle pits on the Farm at Bonnaroo last June. The show comes days ahead of the band dropping You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To, a buzzed-about third full-length due out May 10 on Pure Noise Records. Want a taste of the album? Spin “Blinding Faith,” the cathartically — and sometimes chaotically — heavy tune from a hardcore act that refuses to rely on tried-and-true repetition. British band Loathe plays main support; New York City trio Show Me the Body opens the show.
MATTHEW LEIMKUEHLER
7 P.M. AT MARATHON MUSIC WORKS 1402 CLINTON ST.
The discursive approach that the Australian band Pond takes on albums like 2017’s The Weather and 2019’s Tasmania results in watery music that really does pool into something like ponds. Pond’s songs tend to suggest the struggles of organically based life forms against the forces of entropy, boredom and weather — maybe they could title an album Terrarium The Weather’s “A/B” kicks off with a repeated guitar riff that morphs into a series of piano chords that sound like Pond lifted them from a Delfonics album. The eight-minute Tasmania track “Burnt Out Star” reveals the band’s debt to Can and to krautrock in general. At their best, Pond turns the usages of early prog rock into music that’s indecipherable on purpose, and I hear hints of the influence of avant-pop pioneers Brian Wilson and Arthur Lee throughout their most recent albums. If, say, Philadelphia power-pop band Sheer Mag evokes everyone from Mick Ronson to Big Star on their new album Playing Favorites, Pond fuses Arthur Lee’s weirdness with 1970s AM-rock icon Rick Derringer’s guitar sound on “Neon River” and “(I’m) Stung,” the
first singles from the forthcoming release Stung! If observing the dynamics of a musical mutual admiration society among Christopher Cross, Prince and Can is your thing, Pond may be the best band in the world right now — these guys could get you hooked on tuneful discursiveness. Opening will be Utah rocker 26fix, the stage moniker of singer and songwriter Erica Goodwin. EDD HURT
8 P.M. AT THE BASEMENT EAST
917 WOODLAND ST
So there’s another Omen movie out there besides that prequel that’s tanking at the box office. (I guess after the Sydney Sweeney freakout Immaculate, people have had their fill of gory nunsploitation flicks.) Even though this Omen does have references to the devil, this film has more to do with Central African people coming to terms with their superstitious but traditional upbringing. A Congolese man returns to his homeland with his pregnant European girlfriend, and, of course, things do not go smoothly when they get together with the fam, who consider him more than a black sheep. We also meet up with his younger sister, who is struggling to deal with her boyfriend’s polyamorous ways, and a teen gang leader who honors his late sister by wearing the dress she last wore. Belgian-Congolese rapper Baloji obviously used his formative years growing up away from his roots to write and direct this visually stunning, engagingly unpredictable take on the old adage that you can’t go home again. As this movie illustrates, for some people on this planet, never setting foot in that muhfucka ever again isn’t just a suggestion — it’s also highly recommended. CRAIG
MAY 1-5 AT THE BELCOURT
2102 BELCOURT AVE
SOUL FEATURING
From classy cocktails to top-tier Italian in Nashville’s Germantown neighborhood
BY DANNY BONVISSUTO
Date Night is a multipart road map for everyone who wants a nice evening out, but has no time to plan it. It’s for people who want to do more than just go to one restaurant and call it a night. It’s for overwhelmed parents who don’t get out often; for friends who visit the same three restaurants because they’re too afraid to try someplace new; and for busy folks who keep forgetting all the places they’ve driven past, heard about, seen on social and said, “Let’s remember that place next time we go out.”
IF YOU’VE EVER waited tables or bartended, you know that most restaurants are one world during setup and another once the doors open. During setup, you can polish silverware with one hand and eat a burrito with the other. It’s perfectly acceptable to flirt while you clean condiment tops in the side station. Back in the day, a fellow server fashioned a tail out of cocktail napkins, attached it to an unsuspecting co-worker’s belt and watched him walk around that way
until service started. Once doors open, playtime is over, but a bit of banter continues as the early birds glide in.
It’s rare that I enter a restaurant right at 5 p.m., as the logistics involved in making that happen require roughly the same amount of effort as a military obstacle course. So I loved sitting at the bar and pretending to read the cocktail list while the Geist bar staff finished their conversations about disgusting drinks they’ve had elsewhere and who hit on whom after work the night before.
My husband Dom surprised me by ordering the Blackberry Basil Gimlet sans gin, an admirable attempt to conserve calories ahead of a big dinner. I went with the Barracuda, a purple snow cone of ube, rum, coconut cream and pineapple in a glass, and we shared the tuna crudo. Both were exactly as light as I needed them to be, especially on these first hot nights
that feel nice now but foretell the beatdown we’re about to take this summer.
If the original “John Geist Horseshoeing” sign along the front of the building doesn’t give it away, Geist is home to a former blacksmith shop that operated as a family business from 1886 to 2006. That history speaks through the exposed brick in the bar and main dining areas, and in the creak of the floors, then makes a very hard, very odd shift at the “Champagne garden” — an outdoor dining area that will drip with wall-toceiling-to-wall faux florals until they switch to holiday decor in November.
There was a night game at First Horizon Park, Geist’s backyard neighbor, and I noticed one lone Sounds jersey among the other dressy-ish date nights and family dinners. Geist isn’t the place to pound a few beers before heading to the ballpark — leave that to Neighbors and Von Elrod’s a few doors down. As Dom and I headed out, it felt like half of Nashville was in the area to root-root-root for the home team, and the other
Geist
311 Jefferson St. geistnashville.com
Pelato
1300 Third Ave. N. pelatorestaurant.com
half was an eight-minute walk in the opposite direction.
Do you ever enter a Nashville restaurant and wonder, Where did all these people come from and how did they know to come here? That’s how I felt at Pelato, which — at the corner of Monroe and Third — isn’t exactly in a high-foot-traffic area (yet). When we walked in right at 6 p.m. it was a fully formed party, with music, servers hustling plates around and just a few open tables between the main area, patio and back dining room. Now I see why it’s nearly impossible to land a reservation between 5:30 and 8:30 p.m. on weekends, even a week in advance.
This is not the place to exercise restraint. Pelato is an Italian tapas concept, and the entire menu wants you to order too many plates, pass them around and urge your fellow diners to take a bite — but not so many bites that there are none left by the time the plate
comes back around. That way you can have more burnt broccolini — especially the floret part that soaks up the toxic-sludge-looking combination of black garlic, Calabrian chili, lemon and olive oil. You may think you don’t want your broccolini to be burnt, but you’d be wrong. Every bite is like getting your face kicked in (in the best possible way).
From a section of the menu labeled “The Goods,” we also had the Pelato Salad, a classic Italian with tender gigante beans and oregano vinaigrette, and the Eggplant Parm Stuffed Bread, which sounds like a big bread-fest but is actually a very thin outer layer of bread with eggplant Parm and red sauce baked inside.
From “The Meats” section, I had the Short Rib Stracotto. “Stracotto” translates to “overcooked,” but it was slow-cooked until it fell apart into a glorious heap of rich, meaty meat. Dom went with the Chicken Parmigiana and its perfect crust of crispy cheese around the edge. We shared the Radiatori Vodka, featuring pasta shaped like little radiators, which is a good choice of noodle because the thick cream sauce clings to its folds. It had a surprising but not unpleasant amount of heat.
A case for the Dark Chocolate Budino: Do you
need it? No. Is it a really lovely way to punctuate a rich meal? Yes it is. Would it be even better if someone sprinkled some fleur de sel on top before sending it out? Without a doubt.
Pelato came highly and frequently recommended by a dear friend whose husband may or may not have owned and operated an Italian restaurant in Sylvan Park. It’s always a risk to try a place based on what friends like — what if I don’t like it as much as they do? — but not if those friends spent years slinging their own version of sun-dried-tomato pesto penne.
The morning after our Saturday night visit, Dom asked two questions: 1. How soon is too soon to go back to Pelato? And 2. Who can we bring with us? Though he often says the wrongest possible thing to me, this time he was speaking my love language. I longed to answer 1: Tonight. And 2. Your mom, if it were possible — because Lucy, who died in 2021, would’ve ordered half the menu at Pelato, posted fuzzy food photos on Facebook and bought a T-shirt at the host stand on her way out the door.
This is what great Italian food does: It makes you want to share it with others who’ll enjoy it as much as you have, and miss the ones you can’t share it with anymore. ▼
THE YARD @ ONEC1TY
Tara Dugger honors the Nations’ punk roots with her spirited solo show
BY CAT ACREEIN HER FIRST solo exhibition, mixed-media artist Tara Dugger operates at the punk intersection of forging and foraging. The result, Angel’s Echo, is an intimate collection of DIY collage art and fashion.
Showing through May 18 at Random Sample in West Nashville, Angel’s Echo includes 17 prints and collages, as well as a collection of altered and painted garments and accessories. In the center of the gallery, a pillar acts as a kind of altar, with several objects stacked atop — a heavy silver chain, a large black pyramidal candle, a small plastic cube that contains a coil of plastic mesh and printed transparency film, like a trapped bit of sloughed snakeskin.
Dugger’s varied processes include printmaking and painting, but she also works with sunlight photo transfers and exposure lamps. She says her list of materials is “anything I can get my hands on,” and includes offcuts, magazine cutouts and ephemera found in the streets of the Nations. The effects of these different techniques are left visible, so there are jagged rips of paper, rough edges of plastic, dangling threads and fistfuls of crushed flowers throughout. Dugger has made some of the garments herself with second-hand fabric, but most are thrifted pieces that have been adorned and modified with stitches and slashes of paint. Chains swing from the brims of ballcaps, colors run in long drips, big silver safety pins pierce big silver grommets.
of the prints find their way onto T-shirts, such as “Hot Springs,” a haunting black-and-white scene of a crumbling stone staircase.
Along with her diagnosis, Dugger is open about other dark areas in her life, particularly a “breakdown” in 2022.
BIERGARDEN ADOPTABLE PETS OFF-LEASH AREA
DOGGIE SPA ARFS & CRAFTS
Bring your canine companions out to oneC1TY for an afternoon of puptastic activities and superior sips benefiting Nashville Humane Association. MORE
The punk art of the 1970s was all trash and scavenged refuse too — anything accessible was fair game, and it was never cost-prohibitive. The only thing that was truly “new” about punk was the attitude: disruptive, rude, irreverent. And while Dugger’s attitude is definitely new, her revelations are directed inward. Her creative process has led to a level of vulnerability, raw emotion and public self-acceptance that she’s previously never known.
“It was such a heavy time for me,” she says. “It really made me feel excited to be alive when I started to get better. I was excited to make things and be vulnerable, and that’s always been a challenge. I think that this has been a really good practice for me to just, like, put myself out there.”
Dugger’s colors are moody and mottled, with dark blue, black and white occupying most of the space. But bright colors — particularly saturated yellow and traffic-cone orange — erupt from the pieces that showcase expressive, naked female bodies. “Receive” is a powerful yellow sequence of intimate scenes between two women, while the yellow smiley faces of plastic grocery bags suffocate the edges of erotic magazine clippings in “Exact” and “Once More.”
marched out of the gallery and onto the sidewalk, their faces obscured in bunched fabric veils, a throbbing ambient track playing in the background. To once again bring things full circle, the closing reception on May 18 will coincide with the publication of a book inspired by the show, to be published by Renascence Books. The book, also titled Angel’s Echo, will include collage art and emulsion lifts from Polaroids taken during the fashion show. When it comes to feminist punk art, nothing seems more appropriate than a zine or book that celebrates the human body and subverts their objectification — especially female bodies.
In the act of dismembering and reassembling the discarded pieces of her neighborhood, Dugger has found a way to counteract the violence of losing control over her body. Diagnoses and darkness can stick to a person, and you have no choice in the matter; with fashion, you can choose exactly what you’ll carry with you.
“I struggled a lot in high school because I had [an autoimmune] diagnosis that was really difficult to deal with,” says Dugger, who attended Nashville School of the Arts. “A lot of those years, just being a teenager and having this heavy [burden of] learning to live with autoimmune illness — it felt like survival mode for a long time, and in those times, creating felt harder.”
Fans of Dugger’s intimate DIY style can follow her this summer to the Red 225 Gallery at The Packing Plant, where she’ll be participating in an ideal show for her work: an all-women exhibition in which the theme is intimacy. ▼
Dugger is a child of West Nashville. She “grew up poor” in the Nations and found her place in the neighborhood punk scene. Random Sample even occupies the small building where Dugger’s father operated his guitar-repair business for nearly a decade. This is the kind of “full-circle” moment that runs throughout Angel’s Echo Free-form painted circles appear as a recurring motif on many of the garments, and several
Each piece in Angel’s Echo that contains a woman’s body feels like a safe and trusted experience — there is power and ownership to Dugger’s display of sexuality. The most aggressive image is in “Exact,” in which a woman’s mouth is crammed full of cigars, but even this potential violence is tempered by the presence of the woman’s nipple, a raised little punctuation mark that looks somewhat like a cigar tip — a similarity that softens the aggression and maybe even makes it playful.
The March 2 opening reception for Angel’s Echo was also the first fashion show held at Random Sample. Models in Dugger’s designs
Angel’s Echo
Through May 18 at Random Sample, 407 48th Ave. N. Closing reception and book release 6-9 p.m.
Saturday, May 18
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Come meet this bashful pup at NHA today!
or
A new biography limns the life of musician and artist Terry Allen
BY ODIE LINDSEY
Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry
3900 Hillsboro Pike Suite 14 | Nashville, TN 37215 (615) 953-2243
Shop online at parnassusbooks.net
parnassusbooks
IN 2016, DAYS after iconic songwriter Guy Clark died, a posse of his peers converged on Terry Allen’s house in Santa Fe, N.M. Their last names speak to the caliber of their own music: Crowell, Earle, Ely, Gill, Harris, Keen, Lovett.
After the makeshift memorial, when everyone went home, Allen was stuck with Guy’s long-standing directive: His cremains were to be cast into sculpture. “My thought,” Allen quipped, “was to make a goat and shove ’em straight up its [ahem].”
Truckload of Art: the Life and Work of Terry Allen details his ongoing impact on music and conceptual art. The biography spends ample and appropriate time on its subject, since even a Google search won’t locate another esteemed country musician whose art has been exhibited at the Whitney, MoMA, MOCA and LACMA, not to mention various installations around the globe.
To quote Allen, writing about art is “like trying to French kiss over the telephone.” As such, biographer Brendan Greaves does a fine job braiding the “distant worlds of conceptual art and country music” via interviews, archival research and Allen’s personal journals. Assisting this is Truckload’s chronological structure: “The Lubbock Section,” “The California Section” and “The Santa Fe Section.”
parnassusbooksnashville parnassusbooks parnassusbooks1
“Lubbock” documents Allen’s adolescent, irreverent streak, his indelible family experience (including irreparable family trauma) and his nascent creativity. Allen’s musical education included concerts by Buddy Holly, Elvis, Hank Williams and T-Bone Walker. One journal entry notes that a Bo Diddley show hit him with the “force of a prophecy.”
Texas also gave him a wild twang, a knack for
small-town stories and a penchant for darker cultural narratives: of dust, wind and wheezing; thalidomide-warped babies; and the tall tales of forebears who “coughed so hard their ribs popped out of their skin.”
In Lubbock he fell in love with his future wife, Jo Harvey, an artist in her own right and his collaborator for 50 years. But before their relationship had time to kick in, Terry bolted to Los Angeles, swearing he’d never look back. As an early journal entry noted, “I want to be an artist. I want to be a writer. I want to be a musician.” In a later interview, he defined art as “getting out of town.”
“The California Section” covers his artistic development at the Chouinard Art Institute, where he crossed paths with the likes of Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington and Marcel Duchamp. Driven to develop his own creative process, Allen took the advice of Man Ray, who insisted that when making art, “there are no rules, only responsibilities” to the work.
In time, Harvey joined him. They hosted a radio show that featured interviews with Linda Ronstadt, Gram Parsons, Maybelle Carter and many others. Yet Hollywood decadence was tough on the couple, and even proved itself unsafe for them and their two young children. Greaves captures a stark moment in 1969 when the Allens came home to find a strange woman sitting on their floor, spinning records while “dead-eyed.” Turns out the intruder was a Manson family member. It was time to split Southern California.
Truckload discusses Allen’s catalog of recordings, but uses the albums Juarez and Lubbock (On Everything) as the lens through which we can consider them.
Regarded as a masterwork, 1975’s Juarez continues to drive Allen’s process. As Greaves
explains, for “five and a half decades, [Juarez] has served as the elusive, enigmatic axis mundi of his art.” The songs of star-crossed lovers, U.S.-Mexico-border-meets-conquistador-era narratives, violence, sexuality and identity crises reflect Allen’s years of pre-planning and his ongoing drive to explain memory. Juarez reflects Allen’s idea that his artwork is often “the shortest distance between two question marks” — even if the questions keep popping up.
Whereas Juarez remains a wellspring, 1979’s Lubbock (on Everything) is an identity, a return to the town left behind. The album captures the brighter side of Allen’s humor and satire, and features his most covered songs: “New Delhi Freight Train” and “Amarillo Highway.” While Juarez is spare, Lubbock was recorded with a crack band. Still, Greaves reveals that this doesn’t imply perfection. When producer/ musician Lloyd Maines confronted Allen about his erratic timing, the response was, “Relax, man — it’s music, it ain’t math.”
Several albums, exhibitions and personal hurdles later, Santa Fe proved the ideal place to reset. As Truckload makes clear, after six decades, Allen’s creative work is still robust. His new work still mines and reimagines the past, rendering culture, memory and wit.
Such is the case with that Guy Clark directive. Instead of a goat, Terry sculpted two bronze crows, honoring Clark’s late-life obsession with two nests seen in Lubbock. Though the totem had changed, Allen’s process held firm. He worked through love, profound loss and shared history, then offered up a wink and a grin. He claims that “my only regret” was not shoving some ashes inside the crows’ [ahem].
For more local book coverage, please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee. ▼
Kyshona explores her rich — and nearly lost — family history on Legacy
BY BRITTNEY M c KENNAA LEGACY IS a complicated thing.
Who is remembered — and how they are remembered — is often decided by those with money and power. History is written, as the adage goes, by “the victors,” and “victor” is just a dressed-up word for the oppressor. To be remembered, then, is a privilege. And to highlight a once-ignored legacy is a radical act.
Kyshona writes her family’s once-unknown history on her new album Legacy, out Friday. Following her thought-provoking 2020 record Listen, Legacy is a long-gestating project by the singer-songwriter and music therapist, one initially sparked by familial loss and eventually shaped by confronting her ancestral history.
“I found that I started writing a lot of these songs after I lost an elder,” Kyshona tells the Scene “I hadn’t quite processed it yet, but that was my way, I guess, of processing what I had lost, or who I had lost, trying to immortalize them in a song.”
Those exercises led Kyshona to wonder more deeply about her lineage. That was something difficult to unravel, as records for Black Americans and their families are much less likely to exist or be easily accessible. It wasn’t until she worked with a genealogist at The Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History & Culture that she had a fuller portrait of her own family tree.
Kyshona and her band were enjoying time off around a tour stop in Washington, D.C., in 2021
when they visited the museum and happened to catch a genealogist when she had free time to talk. The genealogist sat with Kyshona for more than two hours, scouring records and filling in gaps, as part of a free service offered to museum visitors. (The museum’s records date back to the 1860 U.S. Slave Census.) Together they were able to find information about Kyshona’s family that she thought she’d never learn.
“She showed me why I was hitting roadblocks,” she says. “She just showed me other ways of finding my family’s story, like to look at the wills of the men who owned my family. To this day, I’m still not done with all of the assignments she gave me back in 2021, because it’s so complicated. And then you get angry and frustrated and you have to take a beat.”
Prior to working with the genealogist, Kyshona says most of her knowledge about her family came from a great-aunt on her father’s side who tried Ancestry’s DNA testing. She was able to tell her other relatives what tribe they descended from and what region of Africa was once their home.
“I remember how that felt, like, ‘Oh, my God, we actually have a connection — we have a place that we know our people were stolen from,’” she says. “I think I had realized, like, ‘OK, this is a lot to handle.’ It’s a lot to carry, you know — taking on finding the family stories and origins.”
Something Kyshona had to confront while making Legacy was the emotional pain of learning her own history, which had been held by her family for generations. A Black descendant of enslaved people, Kyshona has a complicated relationship with her family tree.
“Being raised in the South, some parts of my family history were so painful they didn’t want to talk about it,” she says. “So that was hidden from me. And it’s like, ‘You know what? First of
One of The Protomen’s robot soldiers emerges from retirement for their 20th anniversary show
BY MATT SULLIVANLET ME TELL you about a magical time in history that I like to call “2004” — a time of flip phones, MySpace and “Vote for Pedro” shirts. A time when The Protomen played their very first show.
While trends have come and gone in the two intervening decades, the Mega Man-themed Nashville institution’s stature has only grown. Originally a one-off project that came to life within MTSU’s recording industry program, The Protomen have gone on to produce two concept albums based on the Mega Man universe (with a third on the way), plus live albums, a covers album, soundtrack work and a handful of EPs.
Onstage, they’re a band of robots battling an evil Dr. Wily against a backdrop of synth-worshipping arena rock and power ballads. And those battles have only gotten larger — in January, the group played video-game-centric MAGFest in Washington, D.C., to an audience of 5,000.
With their 20th anniversary coming up, marked by a long-sold-out show at Eastside Bowl, I connected with one of their former robot soldiers. Guitarist Scartoe Gleason, who exited the band in 2009, is someone I’ve definitely never met before and am in no way associated with at all.
Hey, it’s great to finally meet. This is crazy, because I’m always get-
all, we have to stop keeping secrets. You’ve got to let go of the shame.’ And maybe one way that I could encourage other people to get to talking and sharing stories and sharing our real history is through a record like this.”
To help tell the stories she discovered, Kyshona tapped a stellar roster of guest artists, including Ruthie Foster, Keb’ Mo’ and Odessa Settles, with additional contributions by Brittney Spencer, Aaron Lee Tasjan and more. “The Echo,” one of the singles released ahead of the record, neatly encapsulates both the overarching theme of Legacy — “You are the song / I am the echo,” she sings — and demonstrates the organic, rocking, soulful groove that marks the album.
She recorded the new LP in Memphis at Southern Grooves, the studio of producer-engineer Matt Ross-Spang (whose long, long list of credits includes Margo Price, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, The Mountain Goats and many more). She says being in Memphis enabled her to realize her musical vision in ways she never could before. There were
ting mistaken for you. That doesn’t make sense. Your face isn’t even silver. Yeah, I guess that’s true. Can you tell me a bit about the early days of the band? Oh man, it was great. It’s crazy to think of the stuff we got away with back then. Some really ridiculous situations like getting run out of a house in San Diego and ending up in Tijuana. Plus all the insane ideas we’d have for shows. Definitely the sorts of things you can only pull off in your 20s. No one in their 40s would still be doing that sort of thing. Absolutely no chance.
Let’s hear some more about those early battles with Dr. Wily. They were hard-fought for sure. Back then we didn’t have the best equipment for the job, and battle plans were kinda made up as we went. But clearly, we came out on top. That’s why absolutely nothing bad has happened in the world since 2009.
That’s the year you left the band. What have you been up to since then? Oh, you know, the normal robot retirement stuff. Traveled a bit. Got a little spot out on the West Coast and started a family.
Wow, that’s pretty much exactly what I’ve been doing since 2009. What a crazy coincidence! Anyway, yeah, I mostly wait for Panther or Commander or Murphy or Gambler or any of the other guys and gals from the band to call. I’m sure they’re out enjoying their retirement as well.
I’m not sure about “retirement.” Since you left the band, Protomen have done the Warped Tour, played Bonnaroo, been featured in Rock Band 4, played Tenacious D’s festival and performed with Jack Black, toured Europe and Australia, had a song on the Cobra Kai series — I could go on. [Scartoe spits coffee.] They’ve done what now?
I just mean — what’s it been like to watch their success from afar? I, uh. Yeah, that’s — why did no one call me? Is this because I told Commander that I don’t like Journey?
plenty of occasions when Ross-Spang’s deep Rolodex of local artists and players helped.
“That experience in Memphis, it was different,” she says. “I could say, ‘Hey guys, think “gospel quartet.”’ And they knew what I meant. I love my Nashville players. But there’s just something different about when you have older Black men in the room with you, and you can make a reference and they get it.”
Kyshona will perform in support of Legacy at 3rd and Lindsley on May 26. She explains that as she rarely plays shows in Nashville, it will feel like a homecoming of sorts. She’s hoping to bring together some of the key players on the album to help really bring the record to life.
“I’m just excited about showcasing these Memphis legends, like these players. I’m excited about telling these stories. But I’m also excited about having fun onstage with my friends. And I hope we get people to go home and talk about their own family history. … We keep them here when we say their names.” ▼
What’s not to like about Journey? Don’t you start with me too.
So you had no idea the band was still going? I just don’t get it. I thought we fixed everything.
I don’t think everyone would agree about things being fine since 2009. What do you mean?
Well, for one, remember that guy from The Apprentice? Oh man, that show sucked.
Here. [Sullivan hands Scartoe a stack of newspapers.] You’ve got to be kidding me.
I had heard a rumor that you would be rejoining the band for their 20th anniversary show, but I guess since all of this — [Scartoe cuts Sullivan off.] Oh, yes, yes. I, uh — yeah, I’m definitely doing that, and the thing about me not knowing was just a bit. Remind me, where’s the show again? I assume with everything you just told me that we’re playing the Ryman.
According to my notes, it’s a bowling alley. OK — yeah, that checks out. ▼
“WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW” is a cliché, but there’s still wisdom in it. Eric Slick is a Philadelphia native who moved to Nashville before the pandemic with his wife and fellow stellar musician Natalie Prass, who was herself returning after an extended period away. His extensive résumé includes playing in Prass’ band and longtime membership in beloved Philly rock ’n’ pop ensemble Dr. Dog, plus his own growing catalog of intriguing solo records. What Slick knows intimately is the creative process — what’s wonderful about it, as well as what’s not so great.
“The window of vulnerability is only open for so long,” says Slick from across our table at a coffee shop. “And unfortunately, my windows were really small during the last couple of years. … This record actually opened the floodgates to a whole new way of thinking about being creative. This is a long-winded way of saying that my ideas about creativity are kind of shaped by the things that I was writing about on the record.”
New Age Rage, out Friday, covers a broad range of emotional and sociopolitical territory, starting in a very personal place but connecting to things that all of us struggle with as we live in this weird time of hyperconnection and intense isolation. Slick explains that the opening pair of songs, “The Moment” and “Freakin’ Out,” are about chasing down musical ideas and wrestling with writer’s block; among other songs on the LP, they examine internal conflicts in an honest way that makes it easy to hear echoes of yourself in them. “New Age Rage” grapples with cultivating meaningful connections when our base-level interactions are warped by social media and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.
“As much as I am preoccupied with social media, and staying in touch with people, and being active as a musician, I ultimately want people
Waxahatchee’s Katie
Crutchfield turns back toward her roots on Tiger’s Blood
BY JACQUELINE ZEISLOFTTHE FIRST TIME Katie Crutchfield headlined the Ryman in 2022, it was a “huge deal.”
“I grew up in the South, I grew up in Alabama, so playing the Ryman was the biggest bucket-list venue that I had,” she tells the Scene via Zoom. Her whole extended family came out for the show, and the night was a sort of homecoming for an artist raised on country music.
On May 1, Crutchfield will return to the Mother Church in support of Tiger’s Blood her sixth LP as Waxahatchee. She anticipates that this go-round will be “a little more relaxed.”
I associate Waxahatchee playing in Nashville with a brisk fall night in 2015 at Exit/In, where she played a
Eric Slick gets by in strange times on New Age Rage
BY STEPHEN TRAGESERto be brought together,” Slick says. “I don’t want people to be divided — music should be a unifying force. So in my own humble way, I’m trying to put that out with this record. It’s not just a record about A.I. It’s not just a record about social media. It’s actually, like, ‘Maybe we should all have second thoughts about how we engage with this stuff.’”
Slick recorded at home but collaborated with an impressively broad array of musicians. Some work was done in person with folks he knows well. He co-wrote the album with Kyle Ryan, whose many credits include writing with Prass and serving for almost a decade as Kacey Musgraves’ music director; Prass contributed lyrics and vocals to New Age Rage as well. Andy Moult of Speedy Ortiz is an old friend who Slick values as a co-producer for his ability to coax musicians out of their comfort zones, and Battle Tapes’ Jeremy Ferguson, who produced Slick’s 2021 LP Wiseacre, mixed New Age Rage. Using the power of the internet, musicians from elsewhere who Slick has little or no history with also made significant contributions that elevated the album. He cites Kimaya Diggs’ vocals on “Freakin’ Out” and a vocal and flute arrangement from V.V. Lightbody’s Vivian McConnell on “The Moment.”
On New Age Rage, Slick & Co. build on the lush Todd Rundgren-esque 1970s pop sound of Wiseacre, diving headlong into the ’80s pop landscape as it was reshaped in the funky image of legends like Nile Rodgers, Maurice White and Prince. Slick credits the sonic shift in part to a fascination with vintage synthesizers (“that thing that happens in your mid-30s,” he quips) as well as to 102.1 The Ville, the radio station programmed by music and media maven Shannon Sanders. With soul, funk and R&B sounds prevalent on Philly radio, The Ville eased the
sparse and serious set of tracks from her early, critically acclaimed indie-rock records like Ivy Tripp and Cerulean Salt. Cradled by the DIY punk scene in Philly, she spent the Aughts lighting up small venues like Exit/In, and as her music got more recognition, she made appearances on bigger and bigger stages, including at Pitchfork Fest. For that show on the Rock Block, she rocked baby bangs and a fuzzy, electric sound.
With her 2020 LP Saint Cloud, an acoustic guitar appeared. Like moths to a flame, new fans latched onto the vulnerability and softness of Saint Cloud’s Americana sound. You can partially attribute that to Brad Cook, who produced both Saint Cloud and Tiger’s Blood. Cook had previously produced records for Crutchfield’s longtime partner, folk-forward songsmith Kevin Morby.
“It sounds cheesy,” Crutchfield says, “but Brad helped me see myself a little more clearly.”
What she sounds like now is much more country than one would anticipate from her 2015 show. Yet her cover of Lucinda Williams’ “I Lost It” in her set that night showed that the new sound wasn’t too deep under the surface.
homesickness that emerged when Slick and Prass found themselves trapped at home in COVID lockdown. Slick heard artists both new and familiar to him, and their musical storytelling skills were a major inspiration.
“So many of the old P-Funk songs are … either hypercritical of the government, or they’re, like, ‘Let’s fuckin’ party,’” he says. “Natalie and I both saw Stevie Wonder, and that’s another show where you are running the gamut of human emotions. You get ‘My Cherie Amour’ — everyone’s crying. You’re getting ‘Living for the City’ and ‘Sir Duke’ — everyone’s dancing. But then you also get ‘Pastime Paradise.’ I wanted [my] set to have more range, so the songs eventually became [that] by design.”
Accordingly, New Age Rage is simultaneously thoughtful and hard not to dance to, even sitting down. The groovy, zingy celebration of
difference “Ratboy Two” grew from a writing exercise that involved going down an internet rabbit hole on the Razzy-winning 1986 film Ratboy. “Lose Our Minds” riffs on the necessity of giving your brain a reprieve from the constant onslaught of information and focusing on things you love.
Keeping all these goals in mind, Slick is headed back to his garage after we meet, continuing his work on a kinetic, interactive live show that takes cues from Pee-wee’s Playhouse Expect vivid lighting and video elements, inflatables and more — maybe even a karaoke segment.
“I didn’t want to just go up there and play songs and hope that people were entertained. I really want to just — even if it’s at a loss, put everything I’ve got into it, because I never get to do that.” ▼
5.10 LET’S SING TAYLOR
5.11 SOUL BRUNCH: TRIBUTE TO 90S R&B
5.11 AN EVENING WITH JEFFREY GAINES & DAVY KNOWLES
5.12 MOTHER’S DAY BRUNCH WITH REBECCA SAYRE
5.12 JIMMY GNECCO OF OURS
5.12 AN EVENING WITH JONATHAN BUTLER (EARLY AND LATE SHOWS)
5.13 PENNY LANE: THE ALL-GIRL BEATLES TRIBUTE
5.15 ZAN FISKUM WITH MAKENA HARTLIN
MIMOSA BAR SATURDAYS & SUNDAYS *subject to change
“When I was younger, I was not thinking about my roots musically,” says Crutchfield. “I threw all kinds of stuff at the wall just to experiment.”
Her time in the Northeast led her to reject her upbringing on country music and be even “a little bit embarrassed” by her intimate familiarity with it. That changed with Saint Cloud and resonates throughout Tiger’s Blood, which is full of sonic and visual references to the South. She makes metaphors out of the crape myrtle, the flowering shrub that some Southerners let grow as tall as a tree, imbuing everyday flora with meaning: “You come alive in the heat / You ain’t crossing state lines / Stood up like a crape myrtle / Can’t be killed or denied.”
Her love for Louisiana native Williams’ music helped her embrace her musical upbringing. “[Williams] extracts
magic from the South — and there’s a lot of magic to be extracted,” Crutchfield says, “and kind of weaves that in while never fully committing to being full-blown country.”
Like Williams, Crutchfield has not fully bought into the genre of country music, but by embracing its sounds and her connection to them, she’s evolved a beautiful new sound. The threads between her early punk records and the music she makes now are easily traceable. Her inimitable voice and lyrics are the focal point on every song. You can follow the evolution in her lyrics as well. While she used to write from a sadder mindset, she decided to explore new territory on Tiger’s Blood. The lead single from the record, “Right Back to It,” which features gut-wrenching harmonies from Asheville it-boy MJ Lenderman, is one of the best duets in recent memory, as she sings lovingly about a long-term relationship: “You
stage, and they left the stage amid a burst of confetti.
just settle in / Like a song with no end.” Over banjos, you hear that she’s tapped into a vulnerability singular to this moment in her career.
For this tour, fans can expect a set covering 2020 to 2024: most of Saint Cloud, all of Tiger’s Blood, and songs by Plains, her duo with Waxahatchee bandmate Jess Williamson.
“We’re going to be keeping it really loose every night, and trying to just play off of each other and have a new experience every night.” ▼
Playing 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 1, at the Ryman
RECORDS ARE FUN to own, and if that’s the extent of your relationship with them, that’s fine. But shopping for them at a mom-and-pop spot where humans decide what to stock and rubbing elbows with others who share your interests (or have totally different ones) add lots of layers to the experience. That creates one more way to build a community with your neighbors, and that’s what Record Store Day is really all about. The boatload of Nashville musical talent on display on what turned out to be a gorgeous Saturday, via shows at two of the many local stores taking part in the holiday, enhanced that feeling. Per tradition, Acme Radio Live organized the setup in the backyard of The Groove. Despite minor technical difficulties, Bre Kennedy proved patience is a virtue as she opened her set with “Control,” a tune from 2021’s Note to Self, and softly serenaded the crowd with songs from her latest record Scream Over Everything. She brought out Jess Nolan for a gut-wrenching duet on “The Vase” and Robby Hecht for an as-yet-unreleased song. “This feels like the Nashville I moved to in 2015,” Kennedy said to the intimate crowd. Backed by DJ Mad Mauves and his sidekick Baby Mauves (literally his baby, by the way), Chuck Indigo brought the crowd alive with well-crafted bars that also bared his soul. Over the years, his sound has evolved into a wild blend of neo soul and electropop, but his philosophical perspectives and poetic flow define his performance. Every word is meaningful for the East Nashville native. As he said: “If it ain’t your purpose, don’t waste your time.”
Next up, funky rocking megaband Tayls was a party all their own, boasting a string of smiley-face balloons and frontman Taylor Cole’s homemade special-effect gizmos in service of their purposeful chaos. “We’ve been dying to play this gig,” Cole told the crowd. The group couldn’t contain their excitement: During “Scarlet Letter,” pianist Mo Balsam took a flying leap from the
Stellar showman Nordista Freeze closed out the festivities at The Groove, throwing cowboy boots and tambourines. If you weren’t familiar with his act, you might not have expected someone sporting his sheer black top and orange camo pants to fire off songs like the doo-wop-kissed bop “Wysteria.” If you’ve heard of Freeze, though, you know he has a reason for everything he does, and the crowd positively erupted as he alternated between psychedelic pop and experimental rap. At the end of the set, he made a characteristically unconventional exit, climbing the lighting rig and scurrying across the store’s roof.
With the release of her record Drive & Cry less than two weeks away, Emily Nenni played a quick set of boot-scootin’ country tunes to a bustling crowd at the backyard stage outside Vinyl Tap Nenni’s soprano twang and snare-tight backing band — known as Teddy and the Rough Riders when they’re playing without her — got a handful of couples two-stepping down in front. Nenni has been gaining momentum and fans over the past year or so, and rightfully so. With her Grand Ole Opry debut set for May 4, we’re excited to see her star rise even more.
Tuning up between “The Palace” and “Honky Tonk Heart,” two songs from their newest LP Holler that touch on the restorative powers of one’s local watering hole, The Watson Twins gave a hearty welcome to their neighborhood. Holding the hands of toddlers with adorably tiny ear protection, parents gently nudged their way to the front row — whether it was a first concert experience for the kiddos or just an early one, it was undeniably neat.
Inside, following a delightful drag interlude from Lucy Skrews, Becca Mancari and their bassist and guitarist appeared (sans drummer), fresh off a run of dates opening for Tegan and Sara. They focused on their most recent organically groovy and electronically enhanced work, last year’s Left Hand and 2020’s The Greatest Part (though they also played the gem “Golden” from 2018’s Good Woman), and the vibe was confident in a punkish way. If you love Mancari’s records, catch them in person for the stories behind their songs — like live liner notes, but better.
Back outside, songsmith Jo Schornikow accompanied herself on electric piano, with Anson Hohne on drums. The duo arrangements of songs from her 2022 LP Altar were gorgeous, with Hohne showcasing his mastery of dynamics. It’s a shame the crowd wasn’t in a more contemplative mood; here’s hoping for a chance to catch the pair again in a quieter place. After we had to leave, Schornikow returned to join life and musical partner Matthew Houck for a surprise set celebrating Revelator, the new LP from his widely loved project Phosphorescent
Rock stalwarts Tower Defense, meanwhile, practically blew out the windows with tunes from across their post-punk-inspired catalog, including their newest single “Friendly Factions.” Their music continues to be a sterling example of how growing older and feeling more responsibility, both personal and civic, doesn’t mean you have to stop rocking — in fact, that’s one of the best ways to cope with the anxiety and reach out to others.
“In Nashville sometimes and Tennessee especially, it can feel hard to feel like you’re at home sometimes, so watch out for your neighbors, keep your loved ones close — those that might be targeted by, I don’t know, the state legislature,” said singer-bassist Mike Shepherd. “This is our town, and they can’t take it.”
Though the party rolled on, we ended our afternoon with Afrobeat champions Afrokokoroot, who appeared Saturday as a 10-member ensemble led by the ever-animated Sunny Dada. Amid thick, kinetic syncopated grooves, they sang of kindness and hope for world peace, and even taught us some dance moves. What a gift to get to share a city with Dada & Co. — hell, with any of these folks, let alone all of them — and call them neighbors! ▼
The People’s Joker is a visceral and visionary origin story
BY JASON SHAWHAN
CONTROVERSIAL FROM THE jump with its 2022 Toronto Film Festival premiere — and followed immediately by an injunction from the powers that be at Warner Bros. Discovery — The People’s Joker has been a hot topic for a while
JUNE 6
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directed many episodes of On Cinema and
Nashville’s longest running outdoor movie series, Movies in the Park, is now in its 30th season!
The beloved series will return to Elmington Park in June 2024 for four nights of FREE family fun including vendors, food truck fare, giveaways, themed activations and a feature length film screening under the stars. FREETO
artists, comedy freaks and gender theorists have managed to craft a film that feels like a whole comic book arc, with the different visual styles serving as a deeply effective metonymic device for the experience of going month to month with a story that has you hooked. And the story is a good one, steeped in DC Comics characters and lore, but also relatable to anyone who has dabbled in the chaotic and sometimes destructive world of stand-up comedy culture. (Of the many forces of chaos and destruction lurking in all manner of Crime Alleys and corporate boardrooms, the primary villain is Lorne Michaels — here voiced by icon Maria Bamford.) Oddly enough, by taking the attempts at Comic Book Movie Monoculture (the Marvel Cinematic Universe being particularly bad about trying to make everything look the same) out behind the bar and rolling them, The People’s Joker may be the kick-start/ resuscitation that helps the genre find new ways to be relevant. It’s messy, sometimes monstrous and periodically moving.
In this Gotham City, a riot of high-concept and no-budget digital and analog animations (paying tribute to the work of legendary comic book artist Bill Sienkiewicz not in any specific style, but rather in the way that every scene has its own look best befitting the emotions of the material), comedy is under the iron fist of the government. The only path for Jokers (and
the occasional Harlequin) is via the United Clown Bureau (a merciless skewering of both and the financially icky Upright Citizens Brigade), a variety show/cult broadcast that is the only legal pathway to public humor. So our heroine, Joker the Harlequin (Drew), decides to make her own way in the world of absolute comedy genders, putting on avantgarde theater performances with other variants on Batman villains (personal fave — Nathan Faustyn’s Penguin, who broke his family’s hearts when he changed his major to think pieces) that skirt the nebulous edges of art, comedy and dragging one’s friends through the creative process.
In the midst of this gray-area performance art life, Joker the Harlequin meets Mistah J (Kane Distler), a transmasc Joker styled like Jared Leto’s take on the Clown Prince from David Ayer’s 2016 Suicide Squad film — “damaged” face tattoo and all. It’s a development that demonstrates that even this stylized riff on shared comic book history has some new things to offer mainstream movies, and this aspect of the film shines with Drew’s willingness to talk about issues that are usually kept within the community. Though you can’t help but realize that The People’s Joker is using these characters to open up whole new worlds, demonstrating the versatility (ha!) that comes with decades of personality shadings and the willingness to share toys. (Compare this with the forthcoming WBD-endorsed and -funded Harry Potter reboot that seems designed to calcify versions of beloved characters in the amber of a curdled creator’s desperate need to define their legacy by destroying it.)
This is a film that puts its cards on the table up front with a dedication to Joel Schumacher. (Would that I could give Saint Joel’s career the kind of thoughtful encapsulation Anthony Oliveira did for literary magazine Hazlitt.) Joker
the Harlequin is visually engaging in a dialogue with Prince’s Gemini character from the 1989 Batman music videos, and I am all for that. The whole reason these superhero characters are perennial subjects of imaginations, fantasies and books that continue to sell is because they are elastic concepts more than capable of handling whatever we can throw at them. (This is also a film that will make you sad about what has become of Tumblr and seemingly every weirdo art space on the internet. Which is just another subset of the ongoing story of venture capital as the thing that devours the entire universe. Which is exactly what happened to WBD.)
If you look beyond the Smylex gas and the Lorne Michaels megalomania and the organized systems designed to stratify and control individual thought, The People’s Joker is still a visceral and visionary origin story. We occasionally get a flashback to Joker’s childhood, when an attempt to be real and honest causes a fracture between generations that is going to stick in the heart of anyone who is continually flummoxed by how so much of contemporary anti-trans legislation is rooted in parents thinking it’s about them, or meant to reflect on them — Li’l Joker says, “I promise I’ll never even tell you if I’m sad.” Those are the moments that make heroes and villains, and also that make exceptional movies. ▼
The People’s Joker NR, 92 minutes Opening Friday, April 26, at the Belcourt
Documentary Kim’s Video takes its worthwhile subject matter off the rails
BY CRAIG D. LINDSEYKIM’S VIDEO COULD’VE been a fascinating look at how a legendary video store inspired and influenced cinephiles and future filmmakers — if only the filmmaker documenting it all wasn’t such a gotdamn lunatic. That lunatic’s name is David Redmon, a documentarian and film nerd who — along with his wife Ashley Sabin — crafted this embarrassing salute to both physical media and the titular New York video chain that was a paradise for movie-loving hipsters like Redmon before the stores shut down in the 2010s.
The Kim’s Video and Music chain was run by Yongman Kim, a dry cleaner who did for home video what maverick movie distributor Donald Rugoff did for foreign films back in the ’60s and ’70s. But while Rugoff brought future world-cinema classics to his own New York arthouses, as affectionately chronicled in the 2019 documentary Searching for Mr. Rugoff, Kim took a more renegade approach by making VHS bootlegs of overseas and/or obscure films and offering them for rent.
American who really misses VHS tapes. “I’m gonna be here for a long time,” he obnoxiously tells the authorities when they first catch him trespassing.
Redmon becomes hellbent on liberating this treasure trove from the clutches of these “disrespectful” Italians, who I’m quite certain would’ve handed the stash over to him if he promised to leave them alone and never come back. He seems more concerned with tailing these people and exposing their alleged shadi-
“We felt like we were above the law,” a former employee said about his days at Kim’s. Redmon definitely takes these words to heart as he goes on a globetrotting mission to find the 55,000-plus tapes and discs that were shipped away after the closure of Kim’s Video. The filmmaker traveled to Salemi, a Sicily commune that received the collection when Kim made a deal with then-Mayor Vittorio Sgarbi, who was looking to turn the village into a hub for cultural tourism. Unfortunately, after Sgarbi left office, an associate who was supposedly in charge of the preservation found himself under investigation for mafia ties — thus the tapes and discs at Centro Kim’s (the name of the Salemi location) began withering away, gathering dust and sustaining water damage.
Kim’s should be a documentary in which Redmon talks to the various parties involved and makes a case that the collection should be in better hands. Instead, he makes his film in a mostly illegal, very batshit manner. Instead of giving a heads-up to the Salemi folk ahead of his arrival, he shows up (without an interpreter) and begins harassing townsfolk, asking people who clearly don’t speak English for the collection’s whereabouts. The place is closed when he finally finds it, but that doesn’t stop him from entering without permission (and this isn’t the only time) by sneaking in an open backdoor. When he’s not comparing himself to the mavericks and antiheroes he’s seen in various films (he piles on the accompanying film clips, flexing his deep critical knowledge), Redmon mostly becomes a nuisance for the Italians — an ugly
ness than focusing on the man who started the whole damn thing. When Redmon finally meets up with Kim halfway through the picture, the former video store magnate (who is described by former employees as “scary” and “shadowy”) is now a mild-mannered, Jersey-based traveling businessman with bygone aspirations of becoming an independent filmmaker.
Anyone who knows about this saga is well aware of the happy ending that lies in store (pardon the pun) for all these precious cinematic goodies. But getting to that jubilant climax means you have to plow through Redmon acting like an even more self-righteous Nick Broomfield, going on an obsessive, cringe-worthy quest that reeks of delusion and self-centeredness. He doesn’t get into what really made video stores like Kim’s obsolete — the rise of video-on-demand and streaming platforms like Netflix. (Though he does give us a close-up shot of the Netflix logo on a New York street ad.)
While Kim’s Video may open the floodgates for other documentaries on legendary video stores (I would love to see a doc on Evergreen Video, the Manhattan shop where late rock critic/Rolling Stone editor Paul Nelson was a proud employee), I hope future films will be more considerate and less condescending. And hopefully, not directed by a possibly unhinged person who gives cinephiles a bad name. ▼
Kim’s Video
NR, 85 minutes
Through April 28 at the Belcourt
Saturday, April 27
HATCH SHOW PRINT Block Party
9:30 am, NOON, and 2:30 pm
HATCH SHOW PRINT SHOP
LIMITED AVAILABILITY
Saturday, April 27
SONGWRITER SESSION
Cameron Bedell
NOON · FORD THEATER
Saturday, April 27
PANEL DISCUSSION
All Aboard the Night Train!
Nashville’s Groundbreaking R&B Television Series
2:30 pm · FORD THEATER
Sunday, April 28
MUSICIAN SPOTLIGHT
Mark and Maggie
O’Connor
1:00 pm · FORD THEATER
WITNESS HISTORY
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Receive free admission, access to weekly programming, concert ticket presale opportunities, and more.
Saturday, May 4
SONGWRITER SESSION
Jerry Salley
NOON · FORD THEATER
Sunday, May 5
MUSICIAN SPOTLIGHT
Wyatt Ellis
1:00 pm · FORD THEATER
Saturday, May 11
HATCH SHOW PRINT
Block Party
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SONGWRITER SESSION
Bryan Simpson
NOON · FORD THEATER
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SONGWRITER SESSION
Faren Rachels
NOON · FORD THEATER
FULL CALENDAR
THIS TIME AWAY FROM YOUR
1 Closest to raw
7 Jolt of electricity
10 Evidence of an injury
14 Apt key for a musical prodigy?
15 Celebratory work
16 Something that can be spun
17 Awkward period, for many
19 “Laugh-In” comedian Johnson
20 Radius of a unit circle
21 “Of course!”
22 TV surname at 742 Evergreen Terrace
24 Part of your body that smells the most?
26 ___ film
27 Repeated sound that can be “cured”
28 Action movie highlight
32 Galley gear
34 Took a leisurely walk
35 Detroit River’s terminus
36 Housing projects?
37 Ordered
38 “It’s so over for us!”
40 Classic sports car feature
41 Temporary stays
42 “___ cosa fai?” (Italian for “What are you doing?”)
43 Front of the bus?
44 Allow to take, perhaps
48 Genesis antagonist
51 Norse war god
52 Cry from an upset sibling
53 Opera that premiered in Cairo
54 Puzzling activity, as seen four times in this puzzle?
57 ___ Turismo (racing video game series)
58 Genre for the Mighty Mighty Bosstones
59 Roman slate
60 Li’l
61 Fig. sought by an identity thief
62 Deals a mighty blow
1 Martin Sheen’s real first name
2 Kind of organic acid
3 Fair fare
4 Stub, say
5 2002 George Clooney film set in a space station
6 “Ooh-la-la!”
7 Frenzied situation
8 Frenzied situations
9 Group on Louisiana’s state flag
10 Longtime Los Angeles sports venue
11 It plays on the road
12 Second-highest of four
13 “___ there”
18 Malcolm’s dad on 2000s TV
23 Obligation
25 1970s-’80s sitcom about a trio of zany roommates
28 Paleontology : fossils :: speleology : ___
29 Tinged
30 Semimonthly tide
31 Summer setting in D.C., for short
32 Round sandwich
33 Line from Nike
34 Like logs for a fireplace
35 Reactions of disgust
36 Quality of many episodes of “The Twilight Zone”
39 Fantasy character?
40 Iconic painting housed at Oslo’s Nasjonalmuseet
42 Dead spots?
44 K-12 grp.
45 Quitter’s declaration
46 Mathematician George known for his work on logic gates
47 Stone and others
48 Herb in saltimbocca
49 St. Patrick’s land
50 Reactions of disapproval
55 Tennis ball container
56 Hitter’s stat, for short
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE
Online subscriptions: Today’s puzzle and more than 9,000 past puzzles, nytimes.com/ crosswords ($39.95 a year).
Read about and comment on each puzzle: nytimes.com/wordplay.
Crosswords for young solvers: nytimes.com/studentcrosswords.
IT Developer - .Net III (Multiple Positions, GEODIS Logistics, LLC, Brentwood, TN): Reqs Bach (US/eqv) in CS or rel & 5 yrs C# & .Net exp. Alt: will accept Master’s (US/eqv) in CS or rel & 3 yrs C# & .Net exp. Also reqs exp w/ JQuery, Angular JS, or React; Oracle, PostgreSql, or SQL Server; Oriented Prgmg or Dev, N-Tier Design, Interface & class inheritance, & IOC; profic w/ source control & best practices using GIT &/or SVN; UI & necessary code infra exp using Angular; expertise in IIS, Web Services, SOA, Test Driven Dev, ORM tools & SOAP & REST; knwl of 3PL, transport sys &/or warehouse mgmt; knwl of leading inds tech w/ strong knwl around IT gov, proj planning, & tech usage/alts avail in multi-platform environ; PC literate w/ exp w/ MS Outlook, Word
Access & Excel. Mail CV to Sharon Barrow, 7101 Executive Center Dr, Ste 333, Brentwood, TN 37027.
Ref# ITDEV038698.
UBS Business Solutions US
LLC seeks an Associate Director, Critical Infrastructure Systems Engineer in Nashville, TN. Full time position. Support UBS Critical Infrastructure environment w/a focus on active directory services, Azure, provisioning, & public key infrastructure. Requires Bachelor’s in Comp Sci, IS, or a related field + 5 yrs exp. Qualified Applicants apply through SHProfRecruitingcc@ubs.com.
Reference 001309. NO
EOE/M/F/D/V.
reproductions, lock installs and repairs, vehicle fobs.
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CLEANUP & RESTORATION:
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Have zip code of service location ready when you call!
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