Nashville Scene 8-24-23

CITY LIMITS

Runoff Shifts Further Toward O’Connell 7 O’Connell consolidates support among former candidates and city institutions while Rolli weathers a late scandal

BY ELI MOTYCKA

What’s Next for Tennessee’s Sole StateFunded Historically Black University? ...... 7 President Glenda Glover will leave TSU at the end of the academic year

BY KELSEY BEYELER

Bankruptcy Reveals a Web of Real Estate

MOTYCKA

Blue Ridge, Ga.

This idyllic mountain getaway has scenic hiking and white-water rafting — but also chimps and Sasquatch

BY KELSEY BEYELER

CRITICS’ PICKS

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BOOKS

Working for a Living Songwriter James Talley tells his own story in Nashville City Blues

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Manny’s to Close in The Arcade

Ogles, Johnson Discuss Trump Indictments, Special Session in Franklin

MOTYCKA

MUSIC New Fuel, Same Flame

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HONORING CHARLIE STROBEL, A NASHVILLE ICON WHO CHAMPIONED COMPASSION AND JUSTICE

Nashville is known for its music, sports and hospitality, but our city has also been blessed with leaders who care deeply for our community — people like Father Charles Strobel, who passed away on Aug. 6, and who left many of us feeling the loss. Charlie, as he was called, was known for his untiring pursuit of social justice, and he left behind a legacy and a fine example we would all be wise to follow.

On a recent episode of his podcast No Small Endeavor, host Lee Camp revisits a 2020 interview with Strobel. In the episode, Camp notes that Strobel once complimented him via a quote from American writer Frederick Buechner: “One life on this earth is all that we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and the obvious conclusion would seem to be that at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can.” Strobel said Camp was not a fool. Nor was Charlie Strobel a fool — for certain, he lived his life fully and with the full intent of setting a good example.

Charlie’s life was truly evidence of the enduring power of kindness and the profound impact one individual can have on an entire community. Through his work with Room In The Inn, a nonprofit organization he founded, Charlie Strobel was a shining example of understanding and an advocate for those less fortunate. For those experiencing homelessness, Room In The Inn provides hope and safety. They can find support, shelter from the weather, a meal, computers to use, and referrals to other necessary services.

In the words of former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen: “Charlie accomplished a lot in his life, and I suspect that’s not why most of us are here this morning. We’re here because he was our friend, and he was very, very good at being a friend.” Such sentiments echoed throughout a memorial service held at First Horizon Park on Aug. 11, where individuals from all walks of life gathered to celebrate Charlie’s enduring legacy.

In his No Small Endeavor interview, Strobel mentioned a childhood memory wherein he recognized the stark disparities between privilege and adversity, which ignited his lifelong commitment to advocacy. He said: “I knew that there was something wrong whenever you saw a white water fountain and a colored water fountain. You didn’t know why, but you made some critical judgments about it. … In a simple way, a boy can make judgments. They’re smart enough to develop a conscience.”

Strobel believed the younger generation holds the key to a brighter future. As he told Camp: “I think that’s our hope for our future, that we’ve got a generation that has seen enough that they’re going to … walk to the Capitol or to the courthouse and claim the right to do that without punishment or without jail time.”

FEET OF

Charlie Strobel was an authentic, caring man, and his life was not without challenges — some of which were extreme. For instance, he had to face the tragic and violent murder of his mother,

Mary Catherine Strobel, in the mid-1980s — a situation that tested his faith and commitment to forgiveness. But in the face of that horrific situation, he and his siblings chose to advocate against the death penalty for the man who had taken their mother’s life. As Charlie once shared, “Forgiveness means peace. … But you can never even the score by killing one, or killing a thousand.”

Strobel’s journey from unimaginable loss to advocating for the value of forgiveness proves we have the capacity for grace and healing. We can find ways to mourn, cope and move on. Charlie Strobel did not stop working or advocating for others when he lost his mother. If anything, his fight became one of even greater effort.

In bidding farewell to Charlie Strobel, we reflect on his life’s work. His legacy reminds us that we can all be instruments of change, that forgiveness can heal even the deepest wounds, and that together we can create a world where social injustices become fewer or less pronounced. May we all be inspired by his example, and may his memory serve as a reminder that a life well-lived is to live “bravely and beautifully” — which in turn betters the lives of others.

We’ll miss you, Charlie, but your legacy will continue to inspire us all.

Bill Freeman

Bill Freeman is the owner of FW Publishing, the publishing company that produces the Nashville Scene, Nfocus, the Nashville Post, and The News.

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In memory of Jim Ridley, editor 2009-2016

CHARLIE STROBEL

PHOTO: HATCHER & FELL PHOTOGRAPHY

AUGUST 31

SHAKTI

50TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR

WITH SPECIAL GUEST JOHN SCOFIELD

SEPTEMBER 10 LIVE AT THE OPRY HOUSE

DREAMCATCHER

SEPTEMBER 23

TOMMY EMMANUEL

WITH LARRY CAMPBELL & TERESA WILLIAMS

SEPTEMBER 28 LIVE AT THE OPRY HOUSE

PEOPLE’S CHOICE

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SEPTEMBER 29 & 30

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ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10 AM

RUNOFF SHIFTS FURTHER TOWARD O’CONNELL

O’Connell consolidates support among former candidates and city institutions while Rolli weathers a late scandal

BY ELI MOTYCKA

On Election Day, the top two mayoral candidates — runner-up Alice Rolli and vote leader Freddie O’Connell — were separated by 7,012 ballots. With six more weeks of campaign time before the Sept. 14 runoff election, Rolli and her people likely sketched out a path to victory that banked on low turnout in left-leaning Davidson County, reactionary energy from suburban Nashville and voters splitting right from losing centrist campaigns. They did not plan on a toxic scandal broken by the Nashville Banner that aligned Rolli with the Proud Boys, an emblem of the Trump right, or O’Connell’s nearly complete consolidation of support among the race’s former candidates — two developments that have defined runoff August and put O’Connell in the catbird seat heading into early voting.

At campaign events, views on taxes (Rolli has pledged not to raise them) and city bureaucracy separate the candidates. Joint appearances lack any interpersonal attacks between Rolli and O’Connell, and even policy critiques between the two come out politely oblique, leaving political junkies nostalgic for the nonstop condescension of 2019’s Cooper-Briley runoff. The two candidates have met publicly at three forums since the general election.

“At two of the three, we were offered rebuttals — neither of us felt particularly compelled to jump in,” says O’Connell on the extremely staid nature of the runoff. He

speaks to the Scene by phone following an inopportune COVID diagnosis that the District 19 councilmember shares with at least seven chamber colleagues. “We’ve been comfortable enough with our own ideas to put them forward and allow voters to choose without trying to take a swing or tear down the other’s platform.”

In the background, the race has shifted neatly for O’Connell. A couple weeks after Election Day on Aug. 3, Matt Wiltshire, Heidi Campbell, Jeff Yarbro and Jim Gingrich had all lined up behind O’Connell with their own cute endorsement messages. Together these four candidates accounted for 40,000 votes in the general election — a solid center still big enough to be the foundation of city politics. Kept intact, it could have delivered a runoff spot to Wiltshire, Yarbro or Campbell. Split, it leaves the race for O’Connell, who reports “productive ongoing conversations” with Councilmember At-Large Sharon Hurt and Davidson County Property Assessor Vivian Wilhoite, the race’s two leading Black candidates.

Rosetta Miller Perry, publisher of The Tennessee Tribune — a historic and influen-

WHAT’S NEXT FOR TENNESSEE’S SOLE STATEFUNDED HISTORICALLY BLACK UNIVERSITY?

President Glenda Glover will leave TSU at the end of the academic year

BY KELSEY BEYELER

On Aug. 14, as incoming Tennessee State University students were moving into their new dorms, TSU President Glenda Glover was announcing her retirement. By the time she finishes the current school year in the spring,

Glover will have led Tennessee’s only state-funded historically Black university for 11 years.

“It’s time for me to come down from the mountain, and move to a different calling,” Glover said during a press conference.

tial newspaper focused on Nashville’s Black community — endorsed O’Connell (and opposed Rolli) in a staunch Aug. 14 editorial. O’Connell also took the firefighters’ endorsement. FW Publishing owner and 2015 mayoral candidate Bill Freeman (who owns the Nashville Scene) endorsed O’Connell on Aug. 17.

The Central Labor Council of Middle Tennessee, the Service Workers International Union (which represents Metro employees) and the Nashville Business Council all announced support for O’Connell in the past two weeks. Rolli holds support from the Nashville Fraternal Order of Police. Fran Bush and Stephanie Johnson — who finished 10th and 11th out of 12 mayoral candidates, respectively — have lined up behind Rolli. While O’Connell was winning the center, Rolli was losing it. A few revelatory Google searches prove that McShane LLC, the political consulting group that messaged and ran Rolli’s campaign, has pretty strong ties to the most vile elements of the nation’s far right. Rolli flyers were obsessed with Nashville crime and spun protests as riots, blasting provocative headlines on images of

She stood in front of a blue curtain that listed her accomplishments over the past 10 years, including increasing the university’s endowment and grant funding, adding and enhancing academic programs, and increasing enrollment and national recognition for TSU.

Vice President Kamala Harris and TSU alumna Oprah Winfrey were commencement speakers under Glover’s leadership, and her voice can be heard on the opening track of the Grammy-winning 2022 album The Urban Hymnal by TSU’s Aristocrat of Bands.

The university has also struggled under Glover’s leadership, having been scrutinized by lawmakers in recent years, including after the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury issued a critical report identifying financial issues at the school. Significant housing issues that left many students staying in hotels instead of dorms also drew attention to the university (though it’s worth noting that TSU isn’t the only state univer-

Nashville burning. McShane employees have contested the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, as have its clients, including U.S. Reps. Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs and Bob Good, who voted against certifying its results. Earlier this month, the Rolli campaign parted ways with Woodrow Johnston — her McShane campaign consultant who previously worked with the Proud Boys, a far-right pseudo-militia. Three weeks after Aug. 3, more than a few thousand votes separate the two campaigns.

Early birds can head back to the polls starting Friday, Aug. 25 — about when O’Connell will emerge from CDC-recommended isolation. Early voting ends Sept. 9, while 2023’s protracted campaign season will end Sept. 14, when runoffs for three council districts, four at-large seats and the mayor’s office will, finally, produce our final victors.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

GLENDA GLOVER PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

EARLY VOTING FOR METRO’S RUNOFF ELECTIONS WILL TAKE PLACE FROM AUG. 25 TO SEPT. 9, WITH ELECTION DAY TO FOLLOW ON SEPT. 14

FREDDIE O’CONNELL

ALICE ROLLI

sity that has relied on hotels to house students). School leaders have sought in recent years to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars they say the state has underfunded over the course of decades, and supporters attribute some of the university’s issues to underfunding.

In February, a joint legislative subcommittee reviewed the findings of the state comptroller’s audit and recommended that the school’s board of trustees address issues including campus housing shortages. The report suggested placing TSU under the direction of the Board of Regents, reconfiguring TSU’s current board of trustees, replacing TSU management, increasing reporting on aspects like scholarship and enrollment information and more. The subcommittee ultimately gave the board a year to address the findings, and a bill pushed by Senate Republicans during this year’s session sought to reduce the size of the TSU board. It did not pass, but its push illustrated the tension surrounding TSU on Capitol Hill.

State Rep. Harold Love (D-Nashville) is a TSU alumnus and represents the district in which the university is located. He has helped lead efforts to recoup missing funds for TSU, and says there has been a “good-faith effort” to pay some of that back — including $250 million from the state, which is being put toward infrastructure updates — but there’s still more to be accounted for. He also says he was upset about the bill that sought to decrease the size of the board, in part because he didn’t know it was coming.

“How does a bill even get discussed — that’s that drastic — without having a conversation with the legislator in whose district the school resides?” Love tells the Scene. “How are you going to have a proposal to reduce the size of the board of the only public HBCU in the state, while letting the other non-HBCU boards remain the same size?”

Glover declined to say that her departure was politically motivated, reiterating that “it’s just time” for her retirement. Love, however, tells the Scene that after talking with Glover, he knew “she was contemplating doing something related to trying to bring the temperature down in the legislature with regard to Tennessee State and the board of trustees.”

Even so, the Tennessee Black Caucus of the State Legislature called on Glover to stay for another year. According to state Rep. Sam McKenzie (D-Knoxville), the caucus chair, Glover “has been unfairly targeted by some state leaders.”

“When people look at Tennessee State University and point out the lack of maintenance in the buildings … issues with infrastructure and issues with other things, there has to be, I think, consideration of what was done with less,” says Love. “And the fact that when you have leaders like Dr. Glover who come in at the helm of these universities, and take them in a direction that’s positive, there should at least be, I think, a consideration by state leaders to say, ‘Job well done with what you had.’”

Glover has not said what her next move will be, but has said her “voice is now needed on a much more national platform,” referencing issues like equity within higher education and civil rights.

“I believe you and I can see the efforts, legislation [and] the policies that are being made every day to push this country back, to drag us back, to force us back, into an era that we all fought so hard to overcome,” said Glover during last week’s press conference. “An era that we have not seen since the days of the landmark decision of Brown vs. Board of Education.”

Who will lead TSU after Glover remains to be seen, but she says she doesn’t plan to help select her predecessor, noting that that’s the board of trustees’ obligation.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

BANKRUPTCY REVEALS A WEB OF REAL ESTATE DEBT IN GREEN HILLS AND 12SOUTH

Overgrown properties with half-finished homes are taken over by a federal trustee in the city’s richest neighborhoods

BY ELI MOTYCKA

Prickly towers of horseweed have shot up almost five feet in the yard of 2814 Kenway Road. The sprawling single-level home in Green Hills sold in 2021 for $1.1 million, on par with a red-hot market that has fueled a flipping boom on the city’s affluent West Side. Once an enclave for the city’s middle class — particularly white families fleeing integrated neighborhoods in the 1970s and 1980s — Green Hills is full of modest homes on spacious lots that have become prime targets for real estate investors to tear down, rebuild and sell. For those who could raise capital and stay organized through a mess of construction costs, invoices, contractors and leveraged debt, it was possible to double or triple investment in the upper echelons of Nashville’s boom housing market.

Brian Layton couldn’t. His bankruptcy case has left a trail of million-dollar homes in visible states of disrepair across 12South and Green Hills. A spate of lawsuits has revealed tens of millions of dollars in debt spread out across a vast network of LLCs connected to Layton in various states of legal and financial trouble.

All told, Brian Manookian, an oft-disciplined attorney who has since pivoted to private equity, started following the debtdistressed properties in hopes of finding his own business angle. As legal proceedings continue to reveal an impossibly complicated web of debt and credit, Layton’s downfall has become something closer to schadenfreude for Manookian, who set up a website to document the collapse and to

field complaints about Layton. He gets constant complaints from Layton homebuyers about shoddy work and rushed renovations.

“I think about whoever might have the misfortune of buying these houses,” says Manookian. “They’re polished turds.”

By Manookian’s estimates, organized on a color-coded spreadsheet, Layton has $51.2 million in debt across 20 properties held in nine LLCs.

Breckenridge Investments owns four more properties, including a 7,000-squarefoot behemoth on Marengo Lane — one of Layton’s few finished products, currently listed for $3.5 million. Another, 2400 Bear Road, sits like an overgrown castle near the three-way stop at Valley Brook. Great mounds of construction dirt have sprouted thick layers of vegetation. Empty soda bottles and building materials are scattered along a wide unfinished gravel driveway. On Aug. 11, Metro hit the property with a codes violation for weeds more than 12 inches high.

Nashatlantic Holdings LLC owns 2600 Acklen and 2406 Oakland. Layton bought

2600 Acklen via LH2 investments for $667,000 in 2021, then sold it to Nashatlantic for $1.8 million a year later. He’s the registered agent for both companies. Now it’s on the market for $2.95 million, down from $3.25 million in May. Meanwhile, overgrown nimble will is slowly taking over 2406 Oakland, a renovated Belmont-Hillsboro bungalow. In person, it’s in far worse shape than the stately photos in its $3.5 million Zillow listing. A handful of other LLCs own a few more properties, including the corner lot formerly home to Pilgrim Emanuel Baptist Church at 945 S. Douglas. This site is the focus of an ongoing lawsuit in which musician Chris Isaak, a onetime business partner, alleges Layton borrowed more than $2 million against their jointly owned property to fund his other LLCs. It’s an indication that Layton was commingling funds between projects, a bookkeeping no-no that could melt the legal barriers insulating each holding company.

In September, another Layton LLC, McClain Investments, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Layton’s high-risk business practices started to spill out onto the public record, shedding light on the debt he’d racked up on four properties — two neighboring houses on Ashwood, one Victorian on South Douglas and a cozy house in Green Hills around the corner from Kenway, on Sugartree. All were maxed out to lenders. The Ashwood houses sold in the spring, and the other two were taken over by the creditor, Dallas-based Bell Rock Income Fund.

Unlike Chapter 11 — a plea for the court to hold creditors at bay so a debtor can reorganize and restructure — Chapter 7 bankruptcy forces an owner to give control of an entity to a third party. This is the situation for Grandote Investments, Layton’s LLC that owns properties on Linden, Beechwood, Oakland and Mountainview. The last one — an unimproved lot that Layton bought in 2021 — sold on July 20 for $775,000.

Grandote owed $850,000 on it and $9.65 million on the other three, all of which are up for sale right now, half-finished. Based on current listings, Grandote will come up at least $1.5 million short. In June, federal trustee Eva Lemeh took over Grandote’s portfolio.

“My job is to liquidate assets of the debtor and distribute funds to unsecured creditors,” Lemeh tells the Scene. “It is not a quick process.”

As Grandote’s bankruptcy progresses, it could start to touch Layton’s other homes held under different names. Lying is the difference between a bad bet and fraud; whether Layton’s business practices are proven outright dishonest or irresponsibly aggressive, he might have truly believed that a few good sales in one of the nation’s hottest markets could wipe away millions in debt.

“Just let me know if you can get that grass mowed,” says Jim Hicks, who lives next door to Layton’s overgrown castle on Bear Road. Hicks was out picking up trash on the street one Tuesday evening when the Scene was in the neighborhood. Hicks has lived in Green Hills for decades, he says, since Hillsboro was a two-lane country road.

“The neighborhood has had it up to here with this guy,” says Hicks, holding his hand horizontally up next to his chest.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

PHOTOS: ERIC ENGLAND

1501 LINDEN AVE.

2406 OAKLAND AVE.

DIVIDED COUNCIL APPROVES FULL IMPLEMENTATION OF LICENSE PLATE READERS

Automated scanners approved for countywide implementation despite protests from community and councilmembers

BY ELI MOTYCKA

In the final meeting of the Metro Council’s four-year legislative term, the body voted 24-14 to approve full implementation of automated license plate readers across the county. Full implementation follows a six-month LPR trial period mired in controversy over camera placements and police compliance with council safeguards. Metro police will oversee the expanded network of automated cameras, which cross-reference passing cars with state and federal databases.

Outgoing Mayor John Cooper opened the term’s last meeting on Aug. 15 with an address touting achievements of his administration. While Cooper did not mention LPRs in that address, a press release from his office the following morning celebrated LPR implementation as the first of “five notable pieces of Mayor Cooper’s legislation” passed during a “sprint” to the end of the term. A united coalition of legal and civil rights groups vocally opposed LPR expansion in a letter to the Metro Council dated Aug. 1. The groups include the Metro Community Oversight Board, the NAACP, the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, Chief Public Defender Martesha Johnson, the American Muslim Advisory Council, Conexión Américas, Open Table Nashville, Stand Up Nashville, and SEIU Local 205. The groups resemble the political base that propelled Councilmember Freddie O’Connell into pole position in this year’s mayor’s race. O’Connell initially voted to defer the legislation before voting against full

implementation on Tuesday night.

“Our city works best when everyone can feel safe and participate, but massive data gathering and surveillance only serve to erode trust and disproportionately target Black and brown communities,” reads the letter, signed by 19 individuals and groups. It references Community Oversight Board reports about how the LPRs have disproportionately surveilled majority-Black and low-income areas of the city during the trial period, resulting in high rates of officer use-of-force incidents against Black people and unhoused people. Immigrant advocacy groups worry that such widespread data collection could enable crackdowns from immigration authorities, a legal question that remains unanswered, even for policy experts.

“It was correctly stated that ICE does not need a warrant to go and access data,” District 30 Councilmember Sandra Sepulveda told colleagues, referencing HB2315, Tennessee’s 2018 law aimed at so-called sanctuary cities, which forces local governments to comply with federal immigration law.

“We are deciding to move forward on this when we have no protections for immigrants, no protections for minorities,” continued Sepulveda. “I want you to sit with that and think about that. Sit with your privilege and reflect with what that means for some of us. This is the potential separation of families, the potential separation of people who have been here for a very long time who have only known this as home.”

Earlier in the meeting, Sepulveda con-

nected LPR surveillance to Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti’s recent acquisition of health care records from Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

“There is a right way to do things and there’s a haphazard, careless way of doing things,” said District 35 Councilmember Dave Rosenberg, arguing in favor of Councilmember Delishia Porterfield’s motion for a deferral, which later failed 15-24. “Passing this tonight is haphazard and careless.”

A brief public comment period preceded the vote. Christopher Dickerson, a supervisor with MNPD’s homicide unit, spoke in favor of LPR implementation. His argument was based on the conjecture that the 2022 murder of Vishal Patel, an employee at a Kwik Sak convenience store in Hermitage, could have been solved faster with an LPR network. Among others, the Rev. Davie Tucker, a prominent city faith leader and director of the Metro Human Relations Commission, argued against LPRs. The commission has previously expressed disapproval of the plan. Tucker cited the fact that cameras over-surveil Black and low-income areas of Nashville.

“Your intent is not discrimination, but what is your impact?” Tucker said. “It’s your duty to please assuage the public’s concerns.”

By the time his name was called for public comment, Vanderbilt Law School professor Christopher Slobogin had already left the chamber to go home. He helped draft the city’s ordinance along with Councilmember Courtney Johnston.

“I don’t think it should be used for immigration purposes or minor traffic violations — even though those are technically violations of the law,” Slobogin tells the Scene “I think it should be used only for serious crimes like kidnapping and homicides. Technology could be used in what I call a ‘pan-vasive’ way: Watch everybody all the time, because everybody violates the law all the time.”

Even as Slobogin defends LPR legislation as compliant with the current best practices in law enforcement use of technology, he emphasizes that a lot depends on police compliance with the law and unanswered questions about data sharing, particularly with other law enforcement agencies. His 2022 book Virtual Searches: Regulating the Covert World of Technological Policing opens with the hearings that preceded Nashville’s LPR pilot program.

“It’s not entirely clear the city can prevent a state or federal subpoena from being executed, if an agency wants to access the data,” says Slobogin. “In the case of immigration, it’s possible immigration authorities could override any attempt by the city to stop access to the data. I think it’s a live issue. If I were the city, I’d be prepared to resist that, probably through litigation.”

Police can now begin setting up a network of cameras across the county. Their work is still bound by the ordinance, which includes restrictions on who can access LPR data and how it can (and can’t) be used. During its trial period, MNPD engaged surveillance tech vendors like Motorola and Flock Safety, and can now work to procure more cameras. Contracts with these vendors will govern how LPR data is owned and shared.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

THIS WEEK ON OUR NEWS AND POLITICS BLOG:

Vanderbilt University Medical Center research shows years of mifepristone underuse in treating miscarriages, despite FDA approval for the medical abortion drug in 2000. Stigma and access barriers contribute to the drug’s underuse in Southern states, researchers say. … Nashville’s police and fire unions are split on mayoral candidates Alice Rolli, who won the Fraternal Order of Police endorsement, and Freddie O’Connell, who got the nod from the International Association of Firefighters. This is the third endorsement of the cycle from the FOP, who backed Mayor John Cooper before he announced that he would not seek reelection, and endorsed Matt Wiltshire in the general. … Rolli’s campaign parted ways with Woodrow Johnston, a principal campaign consultant, after his ties to the far-right militia group the Proud Boys came to light in the media. Rolli connected with Johnston through the media consultancy McShane LLC, which works with far-right politicians, including several U.S. representatives who voted against certifying the 2020 election. Johnston disputed the firing in a letter to Axios, saying that he resigned. The scandal comes as Rolli tries to win moderate votes in a runoff against O’Connell. U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles and state Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson spoke at an event in Williamson County hosted by the Tennessee Faith and Freedom Coalition, a group that purports to fight “for children and against Marxism” in Tennessee. Ogles criticized the Department of Justice for its ongoing indictments against former President Donald Trump, an Ogles ally. Johnson ducked questions about passing commonsense gun laws at the legislature’s special session this week and previewed a “robust package of legislation” focused on sex trafficking that he plans to introduce during the state’s 2024 legislative season. … Gov. Bill Lee convened a special session of the Tennessee General Assembly this week in response to public calls for action on gun control after the mass shooting at the Covenant School in March. Scene contributor Betsy Phillips urges readers not to expect anything productive during the session. “We all know nothing good is going to come out of this special session,” she writes. “Well, no good bills are going to come out of this special session. But a lot of Republican voters are going to learn some stuff about how our state works, and that may ultimately be good.” … Inter Miami and international superstar Lionel Messi faced Nashville SC Saturday at Geodis Park in the Leagues Cup final. While Miami ultimately took home the cup, as reported by our own Steve Cavendish, it was still an exhilarating match. “It was just an unbelievable feeling to be in a game of that magnitude in front of our fans,” said Nashville SC’s Dax McCarty. “It’s just a shame that we couldn’t get over that final hurdle and bring a trophy home to them.”

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PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

UPCOMING SHOWS AT THE MUSEUM’S CMA THEATER

AUGUST 29 and 30

ERIC CHURCH

THE COUNTRY MUSIC HALL OF FAME AND MUSEUM’S 18TH ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE SOLD OUT

SEPTEMBER 6

JOHN OATES

AN EVENING OF SONGS AND STORIES FEATURING GUTHRIE TRAPP

SEPTEMBER 17

CORINNE BAILEY RAE

THE BLACK RAINBOWS TOUR WITH SPECIAL GUEST JON MUQ

OCTOBER 7

BOBBY BONES

COMEDICALLY INSPIRATIONAL ON TOUR

OCTOBER 8

THE PRINE FAMILY PRESENTS YOU GOT GOLD: CELEBRATING THE SONGS OF JOHN PRINE SOLD OUT

RODNEY CROWELL

THE CHICAGO SESSIONS TOUR WITH SPECIAL GUESTS ROB ICKES AND TREY HENSLEY

NOVEMBER 8

DECEMBER 21

A MUSICAL CONVERSATION WITH VALERIE JUNE, RACHAEL DAVIS, THAO, & YASMIN WILLIAMS

BIG BAD VOODOO DADDY

BIG BAD VOODOO DADDY’S WILD & SWINGIN’ HOLIDAY PARTY

GEOFF TATE & ADRIAN VANDENBERG

Museum members receive exclusive pre-sale opportunities for CMA Theater concerts. Learn more at CountryMusicHallofFame.org/Membership.

DISCY BUSINESS

Nashville’s disc golf scene is soaring

BY BRADEN SIMMONS

Adisc sails through the air toward its intended target, swinging from its level course into a right-leaning arc around a tree. It lands on the grass. Next, a carefully placed shot leads to a satisfying clanging of the chains, signaling the end of yet another hole.

Sometimes regarded as the weird love child of golf and a Frisbee, disc golf combines the two and has become a beloved niche sport for many in Middle Tennessee. Gameplay is organized like golf — with either nine or 18 holes, and a par for each hole — but subs a Frisbee-style disc and metalchain baskets in place of a ball and a hole. Some say its appeal, like golf, is that it’s easy to pick up but difficult to master.

Tennessee has more than 200 courses, 15 of them in the greater Nashville area. Nine of the Nashville area’s courses have been built since 2016 — the year the Professional Disc Golf Association was founded.

Music City Disc Golf, a local nonprofit that helps organize events, recently held a stop in the PDGA’s Elite Series called

the Music City Open, with the most recent purse for the event totaling $80,000. The event was originally hosted as a local amateur tournament before moving into the Elite designation — the highest designation for a tournament.

Zachary Hoy, president of Music City Disc Golf and director of the Music City Open, says community is what makes the sport so unique.

“There’s room for all types of people in disc golf, and I think that’s one of the biggest things,” says Hoy. “And it’s funny how [you’ll meet a player] who’s a lawyer, somebody’s a plumber, somebody’s a contractor, somebody who’s a guitarist, it’s all kinds of people.”

Hoy also notes that in the Nashville-area courses, most of the upkeep is done by community members. While upkeep of the parks themselves is done by Metro Parks and Recreation employees, each course has a designated course captain who works with Music City Disc Golf and communicates their plan with Metro for approval and assists with immediate maintenance of the courses. Other volunteers also contribute to course upkeep.

The Nashville Disc Golf Store serves as a hub for the city’s scene, with amateur and professional players alike shopping for specialty discs at the Murfreesboro Pike shop. An advanced player might use a combination of discs including a driver, a midrange and a putter disc when playing a course. Owner Shawn Groton has seen many changes in the sport since opening his store in 2015.

“I could see it really gaining momentum with YouTube, and more and more coverage and the tournaments on the weekends,” says Gordon. “And social media presence was really growing year by year since I opened the store.”

Groton also attributes disc golf’s increased popularity to the COVID-19 pandemic. He says lockdowns and social distancing brought many old fans back to the sport, and introduced new players who were looking for a safe hobby to keep them busy.

Among these new players was Bryan Stringfield, who now participates in a number of local tournaments and leagues. Stringfield says he averages at least three to four games a week with friends, and he credits the sport’s popularity to its ease of entry.

“It is just kind of an excuse to hang out with a bunch of people and meet as many people as possible,” Stringfield says. He also says the diversity of the game’s participants

is part of its appeal, citing the wide range of backgrounds of players. Also, for Stringfield and many other players, the appeal is in the simplicity. The game really only requires only three things: a disc, a course, and the patience to learn. If a player can find these three things, they should be ready for just about anything on the course.

“Coming together through a shared sport is something really special,” he says, “and the bonds or the friendships of people that you play with on a regular basis is something that I would have never guessed.”

If you want to put your skills to the test or just see the sport in action, Nashville has a handful of upcoming disc golf events. The Cane Ridge Open is taking place Sunday, Aug. 27, at Cane Ridge Park in Antioch, with both pro and amateur-level competitions.

The upcoming Labor Day Ams is all amateur, and will take place Sunday, Sept. 3, also at Cane Ridge Park. Visit discgolfscene.com for more information.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

SPORTS

PHOTOS: ANGELINA CASTILLO

CANE RIDGE OPEN SUNDAY, AUG. 27, AT CANE RIDGE PARK IN ANTIOCH

BRYAN STRINGFIELD

WITNESS HISTORY

These are Dallas Frazier’s handwritten lyrics for “If My Heart Had Windows,” the song that scored Patty Loveless her first Top Ten country hit in 1988—two decades after it was a hit for Country Music Hall of Fame member George Jones.

From the exhibit Patty Loveless: No Trouble with the Truth artifact photo: Bob Delevante

THE

Fivedestinationsforthe perfectweekendgetaway —plusdetailsonthebest themeparksintheregion

For our fifth annual Road Trip Issue, we at the Scene dispatched correspondents on fact-finding missions in five areas within a day’s drive of Nashville — Cincinnati; Hattiesburg, Miss.; Mammoth Cave National Park; Rugby, Tenn.; and Blue Ridge, Ga. What follows are rundowns of what to do and where to stay in each of these nearby locales, complete with tips for dining, entertainment, sightseeing and more. We’ve also got a roundup of

some of the region’s best theme parks. Need more recommendations for a quick getaway? Check out our past Road Trip Issue installments, where we give you tips for weekend sojourns to Red River Gorge, Ky.; Birmingham, Ala.; Shawnee National Forest; Bardstown, Ky.; Oxford, Miss.; Tupelo, Miss.; Columbus, Ind.; and much, much more. See you on the road, and safe travels!

BY LOGAN BUTTS

WHEN I WAS GROWING up in Middle Tennessee, my family would take trips to Pigeon Forge nearly every year. As a young theme park enthusiast, Dollywood was always the highlight of the vacation for me.

When Opryland was suddenly stolen out from under Nashvillians in the late ’90s, Dollywood and the cohort of theme-parkadjacent attractions in the tourist-heavy Gatlinburg and Sevier County area became the only in-state options left for families looking for a day of thrill rides, carnival games and fried food in a permanent location. With all due respect to the various fairs that pop up every year in Middle Tennessee, the lack of true theme park experiences in the area has always baffled me.

Louisville’s Kentucky Kingdom & Hurricane Bay, about three hours drive from Nashville, is the closest theme park to Music City.

The former Six Flags property closed for a few years in the early 2010s before seeing a revival a little more than a decade ago. It has since passed through a pair of ownership groups, and is currently operated by Herschend Family Entertainment, the same company that runs Dollywood and the classic Midwest tourist destination Silver Dollar City in Branson, Mo.

One of the companies that attempted to revive Kentucky Kingdom during its two-year dormant period was the Koch Development Corp. (no, not those Kochs), the ownership group behind Holiday World in Santa Claus, Ind. The — you guessed it — holiday-themed park is roughly the same distance from Nashville as Kentucky Kingdom.

Depending on traffic, you can make it to Six Flags Over Georgia in less than five hours if you’re lucky. Located outside Atlanta in Mableton, the park is filled with DC and Looney Tunes-themed attractions like other Six Flags properties.

Kings Island, located in Mason, Ohio — a suburb northeast of Cincinnati — is probably the best option for thrillseekers within a five-hour radius of Nashville. However, true coaster-heads would tell you to make the 10-plus-hour trek to either Busch Gardens

DOLLYWOOD

location (Tampa, Fla., or Williamsburg, Va.), or to go all-out with a pilgrimage to the roller-coaster mecca Cedar Point

Located on Lake Erie in Sandusky, Ohio, Cedar Point is consistently ranked among the most thrilling theme parks in not just the United States, but in the world. Considering the trip takes “only” eight-ish hours from Nashville, the park is worth a visit for

anyone even remotely interested in theme parks.

Until Storyville Gardens — the rumored Opryland replacement with an edutainment bent that began to generate headlines locally in 2021 — actually makes progress in its development, these will continue to be the best options for any Nashvillians looking for a weekend of thrills. ■

Where Are the Region’s Closest Theme Parks? Searching for the best theme parks within driving distance of Nashville

Cincinnati, Ohio

It’s North and South. It’s Greek and German. It’s pints and parks and pork. Here’s how Cincinnati mixes everything up just right.

BY ASHLEY BRANTLEY

“AS GOD IS MY WITNESS, I thought turkeys could fly.” If that sentence is the first thing you think of when you hear “Cincinnati,” you’re not alone. The “Turkey’s Away” episode of WKRP in Cincinnati — in which a Thanksgiving giveaway turns tragically hilarious as live turkeys drop from a helicopter — is iconic. But it didn’t arm me with much in terms of context.

At just over 270 miles and four hours away, Cincinnati was our pick because we could make a pit stop along the way to see friends in Louisville — a critical feature when you’re traveling with a carseat-hating 1.5-year-old — and we heard the food was good. Sold! The drive itself is fine, but you do get the bonus of just barely entering Eastern time, which maximizes your daylight hours.

Stay

Downtown Cincinnati is pretty walkable, so anchor there. Your old-school option is the Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza, a National Historic Landmark built in 1931. The French Art Deco bar is sumptuous in a way that will make you feel brassy yet sophisticated — like somewhere you should throw a martini in some cad’s face.

For boutique options, try the Marriottowned Kinley or the 21c Museum Hotel. The latter is clean, modern and spacious — something you’ll appreciate if you’ve ever visited the small rooms at Nashville’s 21c (now The Banker’s Alley Hotel). They also have a balmy rooftop, an unstuffy atmosphere and a friendly staff who made sure to bring their signature penguin statue to sit with my daughter while we ate, which is always good for a smile. And at their restaurant Metropole, the shrimp with corn, okra and cacio-e-pepe grits was better than any grits above the Mason-Dixon line ought to be — creamy, savory, satisfying.

On the other side of the bridge there’s the Embassy Suites by Hilton Cincinnati RiverCenter. If you’re in town for a Bengals game, it’s a clean, convenient spot with a solid free breakfast.

Do

While we’re on the “other side” — aka the Kentucky side of Cincinnati, known as Covington — let’s start at the John A. Roebling Bridge. When it opened in 1867, it was the longest bridge in the world, with a suspension system made of 10,000-plus wires imported from England. My vote: Enjoy a scenic walk across, as driving will vibrate the fillings right out of your head. Then stop at Smale Riverfront Park. Explore the gardens, giant swings, splash pad, carousel and interactive foot piano where, yes, you can have your Big movie moment.

For fuel, you cannot go wrong at Cafe Mochiko. The Asian American restaurant is helmed by chefs (and spouses) Erik and Elaine Uykimpang Bentz. The latter

is known for baking delectable things — kimchi-egg croissants, peanut butter miso cookies — and getting attention from Food & Wine and the James Beard Foundation. At night, the bakery turns into an upscale slurpfest with its chili-miso udon and Cincystyle tsukemen. Mochiko is simply mouthwatering, both in food and in chill-but-luxe decor.

If you want classic, Cincinnati chili is, obviously, A Thing — and a good thing! More sauce than stew, the cinnamon-scented chili is great on hot dogs, which you can get at 80-plus Gold Star locations. But for the real deal, get it on spaghetti, and get it at Price Hill Chili Family Restaurant. With a name as sprawling as its building, this place is equal parts good Catholics getting out of Mass and locals eating off their hangovers. (And often, those people are the same.) All know that sweet sauce plus tender noodles plus starchy beans plus crunchy onions plus at least 25 pounds of shredded cheddar — aka “the five-way” — is just what you need to set you right.

For activity, start or end at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden. Midday is for suckers, but that’s doubly true here. The opening lines at 10 a.m. are Soup Nazi level, and they move just as fast, so buy your tickets online. The crowds come for good reason: This zoo is logistically and aesthetically one of the best I’ve been to (and that’s saying some-

thing, as I am from Memphis).

Exhibits include everything from monkeys that bleat like car alarms to the biggest insect display in North America. (No thanks!) Most importantly, they include Roo Valley, where you can walk among kangaroos, ducklings and baby penguins, and I’m not crying — everyone is crying because it is so disgustingly cute ... and because the lines are long, so bring activities. (Sidebar: I must shout out the Nashville Zoo here, whose Kangaroo Kickabout even lets you pet the

surprisingly soft ’roos, which is sublime.)

Another literally cool thing: The Cincinnati Zoo is an arboretum, a botanical garden devoted to trees, so it’s comfortable in high heat. Even the parking lot is impressive, with 6,000-plus solar panels that produce 20 percent of the zoo’s energy.

While you’re in the area, stop by Mecklenburg Gardens for a schwarzbier. Opened in 1865, the German restaurant and biergarten is a decidedly unstuffy addition to the National Register of Historic Places. In the late 1800s, it was a meeting place for German immigrants, many of whom came to Cincinnati to make their fortune in two equally sexy industries: steamboats and pork packing. By the 1920s, Mecklenburg was a speakeasy that let patrons know if there was liquor for sale using a model ship above the bar. (North meant party time; south meant dry.) Today, pull up a chair at the dark-wood bar — supposedly sourced from the actual Black Forest — and order fried sauerkraut balls and Bavarian meatballs. The meatballs are braised in a creamy, sherry-infused sauce that’s just the salty-rich snack you’ll crave after a Kölsch.

Walk all that off in the Over-the-Rhine (OTR) neighborhood, which is full of colorful murals, fun shops like Artichoke Curated Cookware Collection (where you can drop lots of cash on a fancy French dish) or Findlay Market (where you can drop very little cash on lots of stuff!). Whatever you do, don’t miss Rhinegeist brewery, which I would call an adult playground but is actually more of an adult compound with games and booze and the city’s best rooftop.

Walking around OTR, I learned something: America is doing church wrong. Thousands are closing, leaving stunning, empty buildings empty where we could be opening dope, architecturally significant restaurants or whatever Taft’s Ale House is a prime example. Named for Cincinnati’s own William Howard Taft, the Greek-revival building is two stories of dark wood with simple, original accents (stainedglass window, bell tower) and great beer. They have live music and, more importantly, they have fun, and we could all use more of that. See also: the bathtub upstairs, which is a nod to the now-disproven story that President Taft was so large he got stuck in one at the White House.

Back downtown, find the oldest bar in Cincinnati: Arnold’s Bar & Grill. The stillfamily-owned joint dates back to the 1830s, when it was a barbershop and feed store. The store’s courtyard is now used for live music, and some of the food has been modernized. The Mexican Street Cauli (fried cauliflower, done elote-style with Parm, mayo, jalapeño, etc.) is pretty spectacular. But you can still get their signature Greek spaghetti — in honor of the other group of immigrants who led the steamboatin’-pig-packin’ rush with the Germans — for a simple, salty pasta topped with garlic sauce, olives, bacon and Romano cheese.

The best thing about Arnold’s is that, like all the best places in Cincinnati, it has that I’ve-been-coming-here-all-my-life vibe. But don’t be fooled — things are different! As their website says: “The bartenders have changed ... women [can] enter through any door now, and the cost of a beer has increased slightly.” We’ll gladly pay the upcharge any time. ■

21C MUSEUM AND HOTEL

CINCINNATI ZOO & BOTANICAL GARDEN

MECKLENBURG GARDENS

HatTiesburg, MisS.

Art pops up in unexpected spots in the Magnolia State’s creative gem

BY MARGARET LITTMAN

AS SOMEONE WHO TRAVELS a lot professionally (and writes about it), I have a lot of text exchanges like this:

Q: Do you have any recommendations for San Jose?

A: California or Costa Rica?

But that doesn’t happen with Hattiesburg, Miss. — it’s the only town with that name anywhere in the world.

Hattiesburg’s reputation as a creative oasis with a public art mission, quirky boutiques, vintage shops and multiple rivers on which to paddle made it road-trip catnip for me. In addition to its unique name, Hattiesburg has a nickname — Hub City — due to its longtime status as a railroad hub. The 1910 historic landmark station still welcomes Amtrak passengers from New Orleans; Birmingham, Ala.; Jackson, Miss.; and other cities. Kicking back, reading a book and watching the rolling hills of Mississippi go by wasn’t an option because Nashville doesn’t currently have passenger rail. (Hey Gov. Lee, let’s do it — and bring $20 billion to the state.)

But I was OK with driving. I wanted to go to The Lucky Rabbit, the famous 10-year-old antique store/gift shop. It recently expanded and I wanted to be able to bring home treasures I found there. Also, I needed to pack my paddleboard so I could spend some time on the Bouie River. So I got in the car for about six-and-half hours. (If you are a fan of HGTV’s Home Town, you can stop in Laurel, Miss., about 30 minutes north of Hattiesburg. Downtown Laurel’s streets feel like a Truman Show set with all their branded shops.)

Stay

Hattiesburg is home to the University of Southern Mississippi, so like any good college town, it has many clean, convenient, affordable hotels. The Hotel Indigo Hattiesburg is near campus and in a walkable area with restaurants and shops. The Holiday Inn Express has a pool, free breakfast and a convenient location next to I-59. There are a few options for water views, including the Whiskey on the River cabins in nearby Petal.

Do

A couple of Hattiesburg’s absolute mustsee attractions have unexpected hours, so I plotted my schedule in advance. The aforementioned The Lucky Rabbit is open only on Saturdays and Sundays. It takes up two entire buildings (an old hardware store and an old grocery) of antiques, secondhand and vintage goods and other … well, stuff. Owners Brandon and Abby Thaxton like combing through goods and building fun displays to show off the goods. One of the cashier areas, for example, is a vintage grocery store checkout. There are rooms featuring imaginative replicas of different TV shows and movies — stepping in is like being at the Rosebud Motel in Schitt’s Creek, wigs on the wall and all. The buildings aren’t airconditioned, which you notice if you choose to vacation in Southern Mississippi in July.

So while I spent several hours here (and yes, found the giant antique schoolhouse map of my dreams), I took a break for a popsicle in the courtyard with water misters between the buildings (and again later with a beverage and a snack at Southern Prohibition Brewing across the street).

Hattiesburg is on a mission to have 100 murals in the city by 2025. There are murals on the sides of buildings, in crosswalks, on utility boxes, in a very cool tunnel where students leave their mark on the USM campus, and pretty much everywhere else. Maps help you find all the public art. My favorite is the “Suffrage” mural on McCloud Street, though I also caught several new works in progress. I stopped to watch the painting-in-action near the Longleaf Trace, a 44-mile park and bike trail, while eating an icy snowball. (Again, July in Mississippi was very hot.) Alpine Snow seems to be the old-timer’s favorite, but there’s no shortage of places to find the sweet

New Orleans-style treat.

The murals are just the start of Hattiesburg’s commitment to public art. I’m fixated on the genius of the Hattiesburg Pocket Museum. During the pandemic, the Hattiesburg Convention Commission built a museum in a downtown alley behind the historic Saenger Theater. Exhibits include optical-illusion murals, a piece by Kelsey Montague (creator of Nashville’s “What Lifts You” wings), and tons of miniature scenes hidden on electric meters and in crevices on the wall. Open 24 hours a day, the Pocket Alley offers scavenger-hunt-like tasks for kids to complete and a “pocket theater” where you can watch a short film through a viewfinder in the wall. It’s free and looks different during the day than at night, so I recommend going more than once.

Hattiesburg has roots in the civil rights movement, with several museums and displays to teach that history. (Hey Nashville,

it’s time to build a civil rights museum already.) The Sixth Street Museum District includes the Historic Eureka School. Built in 1921, it was the first school for Black children in Hattiesburg and only the second in the entire state. It’s been restored with museum exhibits in some of the classrooms, including photos from Freedom Summer. Plans are to expand the school into a larger civil rights museum. Next door is Smith Drug Co., a restored 1920s pharmacy with a soda fountain counter open on Saturdays only. I recommend grabbing a milkshake and checking out the artifacts. If you can’t, it’s still possible to get a sense of the restoration work from the outside. The gem of the district (and the city) is the African American Military History Museum. Housed in a historic USO post, the museum features interactive displays about the lives of Black soldiers in U.S. forces, from the American Revolution to Operation Desert Storm. While learning about civil rights, don’t skip the “If You Don’t Vote” sculpture of slain activist Vernon Dahmer Sr. in front of the courthouse.

After all that culture, it was time for me to get on the water. Hattiesburg’s Pinebelt Blueways system consists of more than 52 miles of water trails along the Leaf and Bouie rivers. Thanks to state grant funding, the city is putting in paddling and motorized access points, plus there’s terrific signage at each launch about how long that section of the river is, where the takeout is and what wildlife you might see on the way. (Hey, Metro Council and Gov. Lee, let’s get some signage and access ramps for recreational paddlers in Middle Tennessee.)

After all the snowballs, I arranged my schedule to have a healthy breakfast on a weekday at Birdhouse Cafe. It’s one of chef Katie Dixon’s restaurants, serving fresh, healthy bowls, salads and sandwiches. It’s tucked inside an appliance store — at first you might think it is just a display kitchen — and its hidden location adds to the charm. Depot Kitchen and Market also served delicious healthy breakfasts and lunches. If you go, bring me back one of the spinach bowls.

People who live in Hattiesburg call themselves “Hattiesburgers,” and so, of course, there is a HattiesBURGER Trail that helps you find all the burgers in the city. On that list is the old-school (for real, the diner turned 100 years old this year) Coney Island Cafe. If you’re feeling homesick, T-Bones Records and Cafe has an Old Nashville vibe, with vinyl on the right and coffee, salads and sandwiches on the left. ■

POCKET

MUSEUM

SMITH DRUG CO.

BIRDHOUSE CAFE

Mammoth Cave National Park

Come for a Kentucky cave tour, stay for a delightful country getaway

BY STEPHEN TRAGESER

SCIENTISTS AT EUROPEAN climate monitoring authority Copernicus Climate Change Service have officially confirmed the story you’ve heard: July 2023 was the world’s hottest month on record. Going someplace where you might want a sweater sounds good right about now, doesn’t it? You could hop a flight to Alaska, or drive four to six hours to the Smokies — or you could spend less than two hours on I-65 and visit Mammoth Cave National Park in south-central Kentucky.

Mammoth Cave, where the temperature inside stays between 50 and 60 degrees yearround, is close enough to Nashville to be a popular day-trip destination; if you grew up near Middle Tennessee, chances are good you’ve been there on a field trip. But staying in a cottage inside the park or finding a spot in one of the small towns nearby is a great foundation for a relaxing, budget-friendly weekend getaway. Cave City, Park City and Brownsville are in the immediate vicinity, while Horse Cave, Glasgow and Munfordville are among the places you can easily reach by car within about 20 minutes. A few minutes more and you’re in Bowling Green.

Stay

Cave City has long been a stop on family road trips, and you have your pick of chain hotels, RV campgrounds and cabins. There are plenty of short-term rentals, too. Want to go glamping in a tree stand? That is an option.

Adventures of Mammoth Cave, a company that offers kayak and e-bike rentals, zipline tours and other outdoor services, also operates The Wayfarer Inn. There you’ll find a handful of cozy rooms with all the basic amenities you could ask for, like a full bathroom, a coffee maker, a mini fridge, TV and Wi-Fi — plus a few extras, like a cozy nook for reading. On a recent stay, we found the location hard to beat: It’s along a beautiful stretch of Old Mammoth Cave Road, a few hundred yards from one of the entrances to the park and a leisurely 10-minute drive from the visitors center. Got a bigger group? Through Airbnb, Adventures of Mammoth Cave also rents the nearby Hanson Cottage, which sleeps up to six.

Do Mammoth Cave National Park is the biggest attraction in the area, literally and figuratively: The cave system is the largest one known in the world. Some 426 miles of passageways have been mapped since the 18th century, with about 10 miles of that expanse open for touring. Many tours are available; there’s some overlap, but many of them visit different areas of the cave system and highlight different geological features or historical elements. Your options run the gamut from the classic two-hour Historic Tour to the intense six-hour Wild Cave Tour that requires special caving equipment (which the

rangers will provide) and beyond.

We split the difference with the Violet City Tour, a three-hour, three-mile hike. The National Park Service rates this tour as “Difficult.” I found it to be moderate through most of the course, though the climb got pretty strenuous in a few spots, especially toward the end. Our path was lit only by the provided clean-burning flame lanterns we carried, maintaining a fantastic ambiance for our guides to tell us the history that’s known of the cave — and some that we can only make educated guesses about, since there’s evidence that humans were coming into Mammoth Cave before we started recording our history, some 5,000 years ago.

A self-guided tour is a great cost-effective option, but our guides seemed excited and deeply invested in the stories. The Violet City Tour took us to some neat places, though not to some of the most dramatic rock formations in the cave. There are other tours for that — all the more reason to budget for more than one, maybe on different days so you don’t get worn out.

Whatever your days entail, you’ll want to fuel up first. Miss Betty’s Diner in Park City offered heaping plates of biscuits and gravy, and pancakes that were fluffy with a slight crispness on the bottom. Farmwald’s Restaurant & Dutch Bakery, just off I-65 in Horse Cave, has you covered for breakfast plates and sandwiches as well as outstanding cakes, pies, cookies, breads and doughnuts.

Any hike is bound to whet your appetite. Bucky Bee’s BBQ is a highly rated spot in Cave City that recently appeared on the Food Network’s Guy’s All-American Road Trip, and you can choose from competing Mexican restaurants in El Mazatlan and El Acapulco Cave City Pizza’s New York-style pie was exactly what we were after. The toppings were generously portioned and not too greasy, even considering that we got a Meat Eater (with sausage, pepperoni, ham, bacon and ground beef), and the crust took just the right amount of bite. We loved the cheesy breadsticks, which seemed to be made with the same dough recipe as the crust, and even the salad, often an afterthought at pizza joints, was fresh and flavorful.

We followed that up with a trip to Cave City Coffee and Creamery for some stellar scoops; they serve regionally popular Velvet brand ice cream, made by a family firm in Ohio. For drinks, some live music and maybe a game of pool in downtown Cave City, you can bounce back and forth between The Roxglass and The Dive, which are just a few doors apart on Broadway Street. We rode over to Glasgow’s Drink-N-Game barcade, where there’s an array of multi-game arcade cabinets to choose from at a quarter per play.

There’s tons more to see and do, both inside the park — come in cooler weather to take advantage of the miles of hiking and biking trails — and outside it. Here’s the tip of the iceberg: Several companies rent canoes and kayaks for floats on the Green River, and if your interest in caves is piqued, there are dazzling show caves at Diamond Caverns and Crystal Onyx Cave, or the Outlaw Cave that’s part of the horseback tour at Jesse James Riding Stables. In Horse Cave, there’s Hidden River Cave, home of the world’s longest underground swinging bridge. You can tour the cave separately or in addition to the attached American Cave Museum, and if someone in your party isn’t into it, there’s a panoply

of antique shops across the street.

You’ll find an abundance of spots catering to the kiddos, including Dinosaur World. Raven’s Cross offers collectibles and activities like sorta-paintball-esque Gellyball throughout the year and a Haunted Village in the fall. The much-loved Kentucky Action Park, home to a well-known Alpine slide, closed during COVID lockdown, but it reopened in August as Mammoth Valley Park

Mammoth Cave is far enough from Nashville that it feels like a vacation. Depending

on your wireless carrier, you might find service in the vicinity to be spotty, which can be a bonus (as long as you’ve written down directions to places you want to go). But it’s close enough that it’s easy to be flexible. I’m a car nut, and we made a stop at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green — exhibit highlights for me included An American Love Affair: 70 Years of Corvette and Custom CARisma — The Legendary Creations of Carl Casper (one word: Batmobile) — and we were still home in time for lunch. ■

VIOLET CITY TOUR OF MAMMOTH CAVE

THE WAYFARER INN

CORVETTE MUSEUM

Rugby, Tenn.

BY HANNAH HERNER

IN THE LATE 1800S, English author Thomas Hughes sought to make a Christian socialist utopia in rural Tennessee. Rugby, a town about two hours and 20 minutes east of Nashville, was developed to be a place where younger sons of English high society could make a name for themselves. The original plan failed, but the site was never completely deserted. Today, Rugby is a special place for its dozens of residents, who are mainly history buffs and outdoorsy folks who like the quiet and tight-knit community. There are also plenty of stories of past residents who supposedly still hang around in ghost form.

My road trip partner Morgan and I stopped for dinner in Cookeville, home to Tennessee Tech and the biggest town along the way. The downtown has cute shops like Plenty Bookshop and Glass Tangerine. The girls at Glass Tangerine suggested a homemade tortellini dish at Father Tom’s Pub, which was very tempting, but they also said we couldn’t go wrong with Crawdaddy’s. We were thrilled to be offered $3.99 pink drinks on special from our adorable waitress, who greeted us with an effusive, “Hi, girlies.” The lobster mac-and-cheese was generous and tasty, and we took the server’s suggestion and got pesto-goat-cheese dip with chips and the hot garlic shrimp. The food was very good, and I think the reasonable prices made it taste even better. Following that up with ice cream at Cream City was a treat, especially because they had orange sherbet — practically obsolete in Nashville creameries. We sat by the Cookeville Depot Museum’s defunct steam engine and listened to some live oldtimey music. Spirits were high.

If you’re going to Rugby, please do not make the same mistake I did — be sure to get there before dark, even if that means skipping the detour to the Crossville Bucee’s. (We didn’t.) The winding rural roads are hard to navigate at night, not to mention spookier than I’d like.

Stay

I was relieved to see other cars and know we were not the only people staying in the Historic Newbury House. I was decidedly less relieved to see two women walking out of the woods with flashlights. I was partway up the stairs when they let us know they’d be doing a paranormal investigation in the living room that night. I knew there were paranormal tours of the village, but I didn’t expect such an investigation to be happening right below our room. (Author’s note: I wrote this at 3 a.m. because I know that’s paranormal hours, and I am too afraid to get up to pee.) Still, it was sweet of them to invite us to join, and it was one of the investigators’ birthday — I wanted her to have a good time. Besides, if anything went sideways, there was a rotary phone outside the house, which meant I could call whoever was in charge of this place (unclear), or the police.

We stayed in the room named for Margaret Hughes, Thomas Hughes’ mother, who made the trek to Rugby at the age of 83. We

later learned that she was the matriarch of the community, someone who constantly had visitors and was well-loved. It was a relief to be staying in the room named for someone who left the earth on pretty good terms. The room was cooled by a window air-conditioning unit and featured no-frills accommodations. It was nice to be walking distance to the village’s festivities, though if I revisited, I think I’d take greater advantage of the downstairs sunroom, kitchen and card table.

Down the hall was a room named for a Rugby resident who died there, and according to the very reputable tennesseehauntedhouses.com: “Rumor has it that single female guests have been known to wake up in the middle of the night with the ghost of a man standing over their bed. Reports believe the ghost is Charles Oldfield.” Another source says he’ll say, “Hey girly.” Insult to injury, if you ask me. The next day our new friends told us their many ghost-tracking gadgets lit up, but didn’t specify if the ghost was an incel of sorts.

Do

Saturday started off strong with a onehour historical tour with our guide Brian. He was an excellent and engaging tour guide, worth much more than the $7 we paid per tour. We marveled at the gorgeous Christ Church Episcopal, which we heard is hosting a “royal” gay wedding for two of the residents later this summer. The Thomas Hughes Library is full of beautifully preserved original

books that date back to the 1880s. We ended the tour at the schoolhouse-turned-museum, where we listened to theories of why the colony ended — typhoid fever, a severe first winter, less-than-fertile soil, mismanagement, the fact that the younger sons didn’t know how to do manual labor, etc.

Fire is also unfortunately a recurring theme in Rugby. In 2019, the town’s cafe burned down, which locals say hurt tourism. A few months ago, The Canteen food truck opened, becoming the only food option in Rugby proper. I had an excellent ham-andprovolone sandwich with grilled tomatoes and pesto, while my travel partner loved her turkey-and-brie with pears. It would have been a good idea to bring some extra food

along, but we dropped the ball on that one. We did, however, enjoy the brick-oven pizza and drink selections at the Sawbriar Brewing Company, about 20 minutes down the road in Jamestown.

We were fortunate to have lunch from The Canteen with George Zepp, a former Tennessean reporter and author of Hidden History of Nashville, who has family connections to the village and an encyclopedic knowledge of the area. We also learned the ins and outs of printing a newspaper in the 1880s from Pete, a Mainer with a love of printing and telling you about it at Rugby Printing Works. I suggest taking cash to tip him and the other area craftspeople. Next door you’ll find Freeman at the Board of Aid to Land Ownership office and art gallery. I wish I could buy one of her beautiful paintings of local landscapes, but I did get to enjoy her expertise during a festive Paint and Sip experience.

Hungover from the shared giant bottle of white wine at Paint and Sip, we followed along to observe the tradition of Irish Road Bowling, which started promptly at 6 p.m. We deduced that if you’re a local, nobody claps for you — but if you’re a visitor, there will be applause. The paranormal investigators we’d met the night before surprised themselves by nailing the niche sport, and ended up holding the charred trophy that survived the 2019 cafe fire.

Rugby is also close to a number of hiking trails. We did a short (downhill) hike to the Gentleman’s Swimming Hole and back (entirely uphill). I had hoped to swim, but the water was too high and looked too much like chocolate milk. You’ll need water shoes. Still, it was enough to justify a stamp in Morgan’s national parks passport, for the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area

Exhausted from the ghostly loss of sleep and day full of chitchat, we were ready to head back to the city. But if you wanted to keep the strange history party going, you could drive 30 minutes further to the Historic Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary, where you can see the old cells in addition to eating barbecue and drinking moonshine.

On its face, Rugby is quiet and quaint, with some interesting history and pretty buildings. But on closer examination, it’s today’s residents who really make it shine. There will be more paints and sips and road bowling, as well as ghostly tours, car shows, festivals and even an adult summer camp coming up. Seeing the locals so invested in their Victorian village made me invested too. When you’re in rural Tennessee, listen to the (living) locals. ■

The locals in this strange, historic East Tennessee town are more interesting than the ghosts

GENTLEMAN’S SWIMMING HOLE

IRISH ROAD BOWLING WINNERS

CHRIST CHURCH EPISCOPAL

Blue Ridge, Ga.

This idyllic mountain getaway has scenic hiking and whitewater rafting — but also chimps and Sasquatch

BY KELSEY BEYELER

HAVING TRAVELED to Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge so often over the past few years, I forgot what it’s like to have a mountain vacation that doesn’t include a barrage of kitschy and outrageous attractions. Blue Ridge, Ga., helped me remember. The North Georgia town — not to be confused with Blue Ridge Parkway, which stretches from Virginia to North Carolina — is a roughly four-hour drive southeast of Nashville. The mountain town’s beautiful landscape and laid-back energy provide a relaxing atmosphere for a quick getaway.

Stay

As with any mountain vacation, a cabin with a view is the ideal lodging. There are lots of cabin rentals, a Hampton Inn in the downtown area, cottages for rent on the Old Toccoa Farm (which is also home to a golf course) and more. I rented an Airbnb in Cherry Log, which is a little less than a halfhour drive from the downtown area. Most of that drive is spent getting up and down the mountain — leagues more enjoyable than a 25-minute drive in Nashville traffic, so don’t let a little distance deter you. As always, when using booking sites like Airbnb or Vrbo, seek positive reviews to ensure safety and cleanliness. If you’re staying up in the mountains, make sure your car is equipped to handle steep roads and loose gravel. Download a map to where you’re going in case you run into reception issues, and prioritize arriving before dark on the first go-round so you can familiarize yourself with the area. There are plenty of camping opportunities for more outdoorsy and affordable options. If I had to choose a spot, I’d probably camp alongside Lake Blue Ridge at the Morganton Point Campground and Recreation Area

Do

Take advantage of stunning landscapes by spending as much time outdoors as possible. The city’s website is an excellent starting point for all kinds of activities, from wine tasting to white-water rafting. There are tons of outdoor recreational opportunities within an hour’s drive of Blue Ridge. The Southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail (which shares a starting point with the shorter, 300-mile Benton MacKaye Trail) is just under an hour away — but you don’t have to drive that far to hop on them, as there are access points closer to town. There are several river activities to engage in, like swimming and rafting. The city website has great maps for finding nearby hiking trails, waterfall hikes and river access points like Horseshoe Bend Park. In nearby Morganton, you can even hike at Project Chimps — a sanctuary for former research chimps. The company suggests a $2 donation for the hiking trails, but don’t expect to see chimps on the trail — you’ll probably hear them, though. You can also buy more in-depth tours and

EXPEDITION:BIGFOOT!

experiences with the chimps.

North Georgia is bear country — and also, maybe, bigfoot country. EXPEDITION:BIGFOOT!

The Sasquatch Museum is based in Blue Ridge. If you have any encounters on your trip (or elsewhere), you can report them to the museum, which is an active research and reporting center. I would’ve given anything to look inside the locked mini-fridge that had a biohazard sticker and a folded piece of printer paper that read: “Hair, DNA, Blood Samples ONLY.” Did the museum strengthen my belief in Sasquatch? I really

want to say yes, but I just can’t. But was it worth the $8 entry fee? Absolutely. The museum shares a parking lot with the Georgia Pinball Museum, which is full of vintage pinball machines and electromechanical games. In downtown Blue Ridge, pinballheads can also check out Vertigo Pinball, which has food and craft beers.

Downtown Blue Ridge is beautiful, and you could easily spend a day exploring it. While the area caters to tourists, it’s not overly developed and has lots of character. It appears to be very pet-friendly, too. Rin

Tin’s Barks & Brews Cantina has a restaurant, a bar and a “dognasium,” which is an indoor doggie playground that offers day passes so you can leave your pup behind while you explore. Roosters strut freely around the area. One of them is named Oscar.

The area also features antique stores, gift shops, a record store, a comic book shop, an escape room and more. You can browse local and visiting art installations for free at the Blue Ridge Mountains Arts Association, located in an old courthouse. I enjoyed Huck’s General Store, which is bursting with bulk candy as well as mountain-centric books, toys, T-shirts and souvenirs. I bought a deliciously spicy Huck’s brand hot sauce and a cookbook that includes recipes for roasted possum and squirrel with grits. Whether or not I muster up the courage to try them remains to be seen, but in the meantime I’ll be making the mountain hoe cakes and greentomato pickles.

There are myriad food and drink options downtown. For a caffeine boost, stop by Das Kaffee Haus or Tupelo Tea. Those in need of a quick snack can choose from a couple of candy stores, or stop by Blue Ridge Jerky. We grabbed appetizers at The Blue Coyote, which lands somewhere between a sports bar and a dive bar, and a band was setting up to play while we ate. Later, we enjoyed Harvest on Main — the delicious smell coming from the restaurant drew us in, though we had to wait for a while to get a table. Make a reservation. The cocktails were good, and the menu had a considerable offering of vegetarian options. I was intrigued enough to order the Three Onion and Apple soup, which is basically a riff on French onion soup that works surprisingly well. Per the recommendation of our waiter, I ordered a honking Duroc Pork Chop. The maple-bourbon glaze and the “drunken” raisin jam made it a very sweet dish. We also tried the Serenity Garden Cafe for lunch, where offerings range from soups and sandwiches to smothered chicken and liver and onions. The chicken salad sandwich I ordered was solid, served with a fat, juicy tomato slice and fresh leafy lettuce. The staff was charming, and the restaurant has an idiosyncratic little gift shop. The tables were, for some goofy reason, adorned with flamingos and pineapples glued to (clean) flip-flops.

Among the city’s largest attractions is the Blue Ridge Scenic Railway. It offers a great opportunity to explore the outdoors without having to hike. The historic railway takes folks on a two-hour, 26-mile journey that follows the Toccoa River from downtown Blue Ridge to McCaysville, Ga., and Copperhill, Tenn. — sister towns that straddle the state line. Pay a little extra and enjoy a two-hour layover to explore them. Our car’s guide explained the history of the railway and the area, pointed out notable landmarks, prepared folks for upcoming photo opportunities, and described the breeds and personalities of the dogs that chase the train from their yards. There are several cars you can choose from, including open-air and closed coaches, which include “premier” and disabled-accessible options. There’s also a restroom and concessions cars for all your mid-railroad needs. The availability of each car varies depending on the time of the year, so check out your options in advance — and don’t wait to buy your tickets. They often sell out.

BLUE RIDGE SCENIC RAILWAY

BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAINS ARTS ASSOCIATION

THE SASQUATCH MUSEUM

SEP

SEP 14 to 16 | 7:30

OCT 8 | 7:30

Presentation

CRITICS’ PICKS

WEEKLY ROUNDUP OF THINGS TO DO

THURSDAY / 8.24

MUSIC

[WORLD BOOGIE IS COMING] BAG MEN

Here’s a new band that promises to work in the gray area where soul, jamband-style soloing, Little Feat and good old Southern rock meet. Bag Men played their first shows in June, and the power trio — guitarist Luther Dickinson, bassist Nick Govrik and drummer Steve Gorman — released a couple of tunes in July. Govrik and Gorman have played in Nashville’s Trigger Hippy, which synthesized soul, Little Feat, The Allman Brothers and Atlanta Rhythm Section on 2019’s Full Circle & Then Some. Meanwhile, Gorman has also played with post-Southern rockers The Black Crowes, a band that sought to update Southern rock. Bag Men’s single is nice — “A Lil Sumpin’ Sumpin’” does indeed rock mightily in an avant-soul vein. The trio has also included Clarence Carter and George Jackson’s “Snatching It Back” and Al Green and Teenie Hodges’ “I’m a Ram” in their recent set lists. Dickinson, who has taken blues into jam-band territory with North Mississippi Allstars, brings MemphisMississippi overdrive to bear on the proceedings, and the trio plays fluidly. As with North Mississippi Allstars, The Black

Crowes and Trigger Hippy — and Atlanta Rhythm Section, for that matter — boogie bands like Bag Men really need good songs. Let’s hope these guys keep writing. 8 p.m. at The Basement, 1604 Eighth Ave. S. EDD HURT

ART [LOOP DE LOOP]

CHALET COMELLAS: SHAMAN IN THE LOOP

I’m almost positive that the title of Chalet Comellas’ exhibition, which she produced with longtime collaborator Clint Sleeper, is a riff on the concept of the ghost in the machine — it’s just too invested in the relationship between spirit and computer. Shaman in the Loop is a computerbased multidisciplinary installation that investigates the intersection of artificial intelligence and self-care. In her artist’s statement, Comellas describes the desired effect of these works, which include paintings, drawings, video and sound, all created through an auto-generated process. “The tension within these works,” she explains, “lies within the absence of human intervention, and asks us to reflect on the body, healing rituals, and the various extensions of technology across a range of contemporary spiritual practices.” That’s heady stuff, but Comellas is a maestro at bringing big ideas down to

CHALET COMELLAS: SHAMAN IN THE LOOP

THROUGH SEPT. 21

Vanderbilt’s Space 204

earth — her gallery, Unrequited Leisure, has consistently brought high-level screenbased artwork to Nashville since it opened in 2019. This show is bound to be a thoughtprovoking experience. Opening reception 3-5 p.m.; through Sept. 21 at Vanderbilt’s Space 204, E. Bronson Ingram Studio Arts Center, 1204 25th Ave. S. LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

[SPACE

SPACE

FRIDAY / 8.25

MUSIC

IS THE PLACE]

DYER OBSERVATORY TELESCOPE NIGHT

Space is often a chilling and inspiring concept: a vacuumless and empty place, peppered with countless comparably tiny planets and stars (and Matt Damon). It can often seem difficult to discuss with others, especially with the difficulty of seeing any stars in the sky in Nashville given the immense amount of light pollution. Now with Vanderbilt’s Meet the Astronomer Talk series, you can find out more about what’s out there and even get to look through their awesome telescope. This week, resident astronomer Billy Teets will be focusing his event primarily on eclipses, both solar and lunar, and the science behind them. So come on down, learn more about the final frontier, and ask all those questions you’ve had since The Martian 8 p.m. at Vanderbilt Dyer Observatory, 1000 Oman Drive BRADEN SIMMONS

[MAKE IT MO’ BETTER]

MO BETTER BLUE ROOM

As Nashville hip-hop has blossomed over the past few years, an array of loosely affiliated crews has coalesced. You see groups like Inner Circle and Six One Trïbe using their combined strength to build up platforms and tap resources in ways that are really hard to do without the established infrastructure that musicians in the country, Americana and rock worlds enjoy. Friday at The Blue Room, you have a chance to check out the work of folks from the BlackCity family. At the top of the bill is Brian Brown, who over the past decade has consistently been one of the strongest

BRIAN BROWN

MCs in a city full of great ones. Back in January, he simultaneously celebrated the second anniversary of his debut LP Journey and a great new EP called Two Minute Drill at Drkmttr, followed by exceptionally groovy singles like “Feelin’ Good” and “Better Days.” Saucyy Slim slides easily between silky-smooth raps and soulful R&B, while TriplePlay Squeek brings ferocious bars and a wicked sense of humor, and OGTHAGAWD offers up a measured flow and his philosophical perspective on taking care of business. 8 p.m. at The Blue Room at Third Man Records, 623 Seventh Ave. S.

STEPHEN TRAGESER

MUSIC & DRINK

[YOU’RE

NOT THE ONLY ONE] NUNS N’ MOSES

Looking for a genuine “Only in Nashville” way to pregame this weekend’s Guns N’ Roses show at Geodis Park? Nashville SC icon Soccer Moses is way ahead of you. The pitchside prophet — otherwise known as Stephen Mason, guitarist for Christian rockers Jars of Clay — has assembled a group of singers and musicians from around town to don habits and wimples and play two 45-minute sets covering the classic rock titans as “Nuns N’ Moses.” The group of “rotating Axls” on lead vocals will include many talented performers from around town, and Bad Luck Burger Club, Pied Piper Creamery and hosts Yazoo Taproom will provide refreshments. If it seems like they’re taking the joke pretty seriously, there’s a good reason: The whole event is a fundraiser for the Nashville Humane Association, which cares for shelter pets in Music City. 6 p.m. at Yazoo Taproom, 900 River Bluff Drive, Madison COLE VILLENA

[PROLIFIC HITMAKERS]

MUSIC

SONGWRITERS UNDER THE STARS FEAT. JON NITE, JOSH OSBORNE & CHRIS DESTEFANO

You won’t assemble a more illustrious trio of songwriters than Jon Nite, Josh Osborne & Chris DeStefano. Between them they have provided numerous huge hits for top stars and earned industry awards and acclaim, with their works regularly powering the artists who’ve recorded them straight to the top of the country charts. Nite’s lengthy list of accomplishments includes No. 1 singles, CMA Triple Play Awards and an ACM Vocal Event of the Year designation for the single “We Were Us.” Osborne has had a decade’s worth of hits since scoring his first chart-topper with Kenny Chesney’s “Come Over.” Keith Urban, Billy Currington, Kelly Clarkson and Tim McGraw are just a handful of those who’ve enjoyed huge hits with his catalog of songs. Chris DeStefano has also enjoyed multiple No. 1 hits, with the list of those who’ve reached the top with his compositions including Rascal Flatts, Luke Bryan, Brett Eldredge and the powerhouse duet combo of Miranda Lambert and Carrie Underwood. The tune he provided for them, “Something Bad,” later was reworked into the opening theme for NBC Sunday Night Football. These three will now present their prime tunes to audiences as Cheekwood brings them together for a memorable Night Under the Stars. 7 p.m. at Cheekwood, 1200 Forrest Park Drive RON WYNN

[I’LL

KEEP YOU]

THE ALL-AMERICAN REJECTS & NEW FOUND GLORY

Nostalgia is everything in pop punk these days, and perhaps since my brother and I never owned any New Found Glory CDs growing up, the band has always seemed like a generic group that borders on just the wrong side of my “how whiny is too whiny for this genre” line. They know how to write a hook, but it’s hard not to hear Simple Plan’s theme song for What’s New Scooby Doo? when I listen to them. The real gem of this bill is The AllAmerican Rejects, who helped push pop punk’s angsty but accessible power chords to a commercial peak in the mid-Aughts with their self-titled 2002 release and 2005’s double-platinum Move Along. The song “Dirty Little Secret” has become a meme-y shorthand for anyone trying to portray teen life during that period, and “Move Along” was such a commercially appealing song that it ended up being used in a completely awesome advertisement for Lego’s Bionicle theme. The band’s biggest hit came with 2008’s “Gives You Hell,” and while they haven’t released a full album for more than a decade, they’re still a huge draw for folks looking to relive the heady days of the mid-Aughts. 7 p.m. at Nashville Municipal Auditorium, 417 Fourth Ave. N. COLE VILLENA

SATURDAY / 8.26

MUSIC [UNRELENTING ROCK] THE PRETENDERS

On Sept. 15, Rock and Roll Hall of Famers The Pretenders will release Relentless, their first album of new material since 2020. They kicked off the North American leg of their international tour

in support of the record on Aug. 11 and will make a stop in Nashville on Saturday evening at The Blue Room at Third Man Records. The legendary band has dropped three singles from Relentless thus far, most recently “A Love.” “I suppose ‘A Love’ is the most traditionally Pretenders-sounding song on the album, in the vein of ‘Kid’ or ‘Talk of the Town’ or any of the midtempo ones over the years,” frontwoman Chrissie Hynde says. As the only original and consistent member of the band since its inception in 1978, Hynde informally calls the current lineup “The Pretenders Collective.” In addition to James Walbourne on guitar, Hynde is backed on the tour by Dave Page on electric bass, Chris Hill on double bass, Kris Sonne on drums and Carwyn Ellis on keys and guitar. Their soldout show at The Blue Room will be their first appearance in the city since 2018 and represents a rare opportunity to see the legendary band in an intimate setting. 8 p.m. at The Blue Room at Third Man Records, 623 Seventh Ave. S. DARYL SANDERS

[BOTH SIDES NOW]

MUSIC

CLOUDMOUTH W/KYLE HAMLETT & THE ROBE

Something I love about Nashville artfolksters Cloudmouth is that I’ve been listening to them for something like seven years and I still struggle to explain exactly what they do. The first time you hear the trio of singer-guitarist Kyle Numann, drummer Amoretta Taylor and multi-instrumentalist Chris Wilson, you might focus on echoes of British pop experimentalists like Radiohead, XTC or even Pink Floyd. (If XTC’s Andy Partridge’s singing voice didn’t have a British accent, he might sound a little like Numann.) Whether you start with Cloudmouth’s 2018 LP Dark Energy or their recent single “Take Me to a Lake” — a song

that’s been in the works since the early days of the pandemic — the key roles that the folk underpinnings play in their songs become more and more apparent. Saturday, they’ll take over The 5 Spot with support from ingenious folk-schooled songsmith Kyle Hamlett. (Depending on how many players are available, it might be the Kyle Hamlett Cinco or Quatro.) Also joining in is The Robe, the curious synth-centric project of Katie Haas and her husband Rollum Haas, MVP drummer-about-town for the past two decades; they welcomed J.B. Bennett into the fold for their most recent release, 2021’s The Jason EP 9 p.m. at The 5 Spot, 1106 Forrest Ave STEPHEN TRAGESER

FILM [THRILL CRAZY… KILL CRAZY…] LOVERS ON THE LAM: GUN CRAZY

This black-and-white film noir from 1950 is another tale of a guy who gets wrapped around a femme fatale’s little finger. The guy in this case is a gun-obsessed man (John Dall) who falls in love with a trigger-happy bad girl (Irish actress Peggy Cummins). The two eventually become partners in crime, going on a nationwide stickup spree that, of course, leads to them becoming wanted fugitives, especially when innocent bystanders start getting snuffed out. Expertly directed by B-movie vet Joseph H. Lewis (wait until you see the one-take bank heist scene!) and co-scripted by blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo (he gave his screen credit to Bad Day at Black Rock screenwriter Millard Kaufman), this almost absurdly moralistic tale of troubled lovers who literally live and die by the gun is a twisted hoot. It even inspired a very loose remake in 1992, directed by Tamra Davis (CB4) and written by Matthew Bright (Freeway) — with current daytime talkshow host Drew Barrymore as the femme fatale! Showing as part of the Belcourt’s

PHOTO: H.N. JAMES

CLOUDMOUTH

ADEEM THE ARTIST • AMYTHYST KIAH • BAHAMAS • THE BAND OF HEATHENS • BELLA WHITE

BLUE WATER HIGHWAY • BOBBY RUSH • BOWEN*YOUNG • BUDDY MILLER • CAT CLYDE

CHATHAM RABBITS • CHRISTIAN LOPEZ • CHUCK MEAD • COLBY ACUFF • COLE CHANEY

CORY BRANAN • DALE WATSON • DAN TYMINSKI BAND • DARLINGSIDE • DELLA MAE

DOM FLEMONS • DRAYTON FARLEY • EILEN JEWELL • ESTHER ROSE • FANTASTIC CAT

FRUITION • GABE LEE • J.D. CLAYTON • J.R. CARROLL • JESS WILLIAMSON • JESSI COLTER

JIM LAUDERDALE • JOHN PAUL WHITE • JOHNNYSWIM • JONELL MOSSER AND THE TAJMAHALICS

JP HARRISʼ DREADFUL WIND & RAIN • KAITLIN BUTTS • KASSI VALAZZA • LAURA CANTRELL

LEON TIMBO • THE LIL SMOKIES • LINDSAY LOU • LOLA KIRKE • LORI MCKENNA

MAGGIE ROSE • MARY GAUTHIER • THE MCCRARY SISTERS • MICHAEL CLEVELAND & FLAMEKEEPER

MICK FLANNERY • MIGHTY POPLAR MIPSO • NICK SHOULDERS • NORTH MISSISSIPPI ALLSTARS

ODIE LEIGH • THE PANHANDLERS • PARKER MILLSAP • ROBBIE FULKS • ROBERT ELLIS

RODNEY CROWELL TRIO • RUFUS WAINWRIGHT • SAM NELSON OF X AMBASSADORS • SARAH JAROSZ

THE SECRET SISTERS • SHOVELS & ROPE • STEEP CANYON RANGERS • SUMMER DEAN

SUSTO • SUZY BOGGUSS • TANNER USREY • TEDDY THOMPSON • TOMMY PRINE

THE WATSON TWINS • THE WILD FEATHERS • WILLI CARLISLE • WILLIAM FITZSIMMONS

WILLIAM PRINCE • YASMIN WILLIAMS PLUS OVER

100 MORE!

Lovers on the Lam series. 1:15 p.m. Aug. 26, and 3:40 and 7:20 p.m. Aug. 29 at the Belcourt, 2102 Belcourt Ave. CRAIG D. LINDSEY

[DEMOCRATIC

MUSIC

VISTAS]

GUNS N’ ROSES

Guns N’ Roses’ 1987 album Appetite for Destruction epitomizes the idea of hard rock as a Hollywood fantasy that might just include you, which means it’s a flawed fantasy to begin with. The success of that album’s hits —“Welcome to the Jungle” and “Sweet Child O’ Mine”— and the follow-ups Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II allowed bandleader Axl Rose to create Guns N’ Roses’ 2008 full-length Chinese Democracy, which took 14 years and $14 million to create. The group’s lead guitarist, Slash, isn’t on Chinese Democracy, and it doesn’t matter. Because Rose worked so obsessively on the record — read Art Tavana’s superb 2018 Billboard piece on its tangled history, “The Divisive Legacy & Surprising Future of Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy,” to get the full picture — it stands as a dense, crazy meditation on the nature of rock ’n’ roll itself, complete with some very pointed guitar solos by ax master Buckethead. Meanwhile, the band’s 1993 “The Spaghetti Incident?” bridges the gap between Hollywood fantasy and punk grime on a set of cover versions by the likes of Johnny Thunders, Fear, Marc Bolan and well-known Los Angeles songwriter and cult leader Charles Manson. (Manson himself didn’t receive royalties from the recording.) The group is reportedly working on new music, and chances are they’ll play some material from Chinese Democracy. Country singer Carrie Underwood opens. 6 p.m. at Geodis Park, 501 Benton Ave. EDD HURT

CARS

[CZECH SECRET WEAPON]

SUMMER DEMO SERIES

The gearheads at Lane Motor Museum top off their summer demonstration series with the majestic 1947 Tatra T87, which late-night television legend and devoted car enthusiast Jay Leno calls “the greatest car nobody’s ever heard of.” Built and developed in Czechoslovakia by Hans Ledwinka (a contemporary of Ferdinand Porsche), the T87 features a dramatic teardrop shape and distinctive rear fin that made the automobile aerodynamically progressive for that era. Its stunning Art Deco profile and forward-thinking engineering can be traced to today’s modern supercars. An odd side note to the Czech manufacturer’s history includes the many alleged deaths of Nazi officers while behind the wheel of Tatra automobiles during Germany’s occupation in World War II. According to Czechoslovakian lore, the German officers loved the high speed and advanced handling of Tatras, but their reckless driving led to so many deaths that Hitler banned command from driving all Tatra models. Noon at Lane Motor Museum, 702 Murfreesboro Pike JASON

VERSTEGEN

MUSIC

[CHURCH HOUSE, GIN HOUSE] WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT: A TRIBUTE TO TINA TURNER

In a state known for its musical significance, the title of Greatest Singer can only belong to one woman: a sequinclad, molten-hot diva from a tiny Tennessee

village who rose from rural poverty to the top of the charts. Famous enough to be known by only one name, she became a star of stage and screen known for her sexy swagger, enormous blond wigs and selling millions upon millions of records over a 50-year career. No, not Dolly. Another hero — Tina. From her beginnings in the unincorporated Nutbush community of Haywood County to Mad Max’s Thunderdome, Tina Turner revolutionized music again and again. There’s no local singer who could do Tennessee proud by honoring Turner’s songs quite as well as the brilliant Keshia Bailey. Her LadyCouch project with Allen Thompson will be paying tribute to the music of the recently passed Rock and Roll Hall of Famer. Joining the celebration will be a host of talents including the soulful, sultry voice of songwriter Sarah Jean Kelley, avant-garde pop singer Crystal Rose and Alexis Saski — whose 2014 Shakin’ shows off just the kind of juke-joint jump blues that gave Tina her start. Plus $1 of each ticket benefits youth arts nonprofit YEAH! Rocks. 6 p.m. at Riverside Revival, 1600 Riverside Drive P.J. KINZER

SUNDAY / 8.27

BOOKS

[NINE THIRDS]

THIRD MAN BOOKS ANNIVERSARY PARTY FEAT. SOMMER BROWNING, KENDRA DECOLO, & MORE

Third Man Books, the publishing arm of

Third Man Records, is celebrating nine years this month with a stacked lineup of performances and readings at The Blue Room. Local favorites with Third Man titles under their belts Kendra DeColo (My Dinner With Ron Jeremy) and Caroline Randall Williams (Lucy Negro Redux) will be reading, as will singer-songwriter (and onetime Scene guest editor) Adia Victoria. The headlining event will be something that’s likely brand-new to Nashville audiences — poet and comedian Sommer Browning’s one-woman show, Good Actors, which she describes as “a bit Spalding Gray and a bit Maria Bamford and a bit SleaterKinney.” Sounds like just the ticket. 1 p.m. at The Blue Room at Third Man Records, 623 Seventh Ave. S. LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

MUSIC [BOO] GHOST

If you go downtown Sunday (no judgment — promise!), don’t be surprised to stumble across some occult, quasi-satanic rock music shenanigans. It’s likely just fans of Ghost, a Swedish rock phenomenon known for over-the-top theatrics and mega-melodic power-rock riffs. With head-to-toe costumes, towering set pieces and a stage caked by smoke machines, Ghost typically delivers a shameless spectacle worthy of shockrock godfather Alice Cooper or masked headbangers Slipknot — a you-shouldsee-this-at-least-once show for fans of heavy music. And considering the distance between the band’s homeland and Music City, it may be a while before metal fans get the chance at another night with frontman Papa Emeritus IV (aka singer Tobias Forge, who’s long adopted stage personas on tour) and his band of so-called “Nameless Ghouls” (aka a rotating cast of unnamed musicians who join Emeritus onstage). The show comes as part of Ghost’s Imperatour, a twoyear run of shows spanning four continents in support of 2022 studio album Impera. Amon Amarth opens the show. 7:30 p.m. at Ascend Amphitheater, 310 First Ave. S. MATTHEW LEIMKUEHLER

[THE MUSIC OF THE NIGHT]

THEATER

BRIAN CHARLES ROONEY: BY REQUEST

Brian Charles Rooney is nothing if not versatile. They made their Broadway debut as Lucy Brown in The Roundabout Theatre Company’s 2006 revival of The Threepenny Opera (co-starring none other

SOMMER BROWNING

GHOST

CRITICS’ PICKS

than Alan Cumming), and have gone on to earn rave reviews for their work offBroadway and in national and European touring productions. Rooney also has appeared in sold-out engagements at Feinstein’s/54 Below & Joe’s Pub in New York City, wowing audiences with their extraordinary vocal range. Fortunately for us, this charming artist currently calls Nashville home. If you’ve somehow missed their recent performances at Nashville Rep (Elf) or Studio Tenn (The Sound of Music), you can check out Brian Charles Rooney: By Request, onstage this weekend at The Barbershop Theater. Part of Street Theatre’s popular cabaret series, By Request promises a host of fan favorites, including some “gender-bending surprises, as well as some joyfully comedic medleys.” It’s a great lineup to be sure, but I’m particularly excited about big numbers such as “Poor Unfortunate Souls” and “As If We Never Said Goodbye.” 7 p.m. at The Barbershop Theater, 4003 Indiana Ave. AMY STUMPFL

MONDAY / 8.28

FILM

[THE MEDIA MADE THEM SUPERSTARS] LOVERS ON THE LAM:

NATURAL BORN KILLERS

Back in 1994, Oliver Stone’s phantasmagoric serial killer saga Natural Born Killers was so divisive that it could be seen on film critics’ best and worst lists for that year. Looking to wag a finger at those obsessed with scandal and sensationalism, Stone took Quentin Tarantino’s story of murderous lovebirds Mickey and Mallory Knox (played here by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis) and turned it into a media-eviscerating satire. He even got Robert Downey Jr. and Tommy Lee Jones to play scuzzy men looking to capitalize off the pair’s bloody exploits. From the hellaciously hyper way this thing is shot and edited, it seems Stone was on all the drugs

when he made it. (Producer Jane Hamsher practically confirmed it in her 1997 memoir Killer Instinct.) Whether you love it or hate it, it’s still the most batshit selection in the Belcourt’s Lovers on the Lam series — and you’ll be able to see it in glorious 35 mm! 5:30 and 8 p.m. at the Belcourt, 2102 Belcourt Ave. CRAIG D. LINDSEY

TUESDAY / 8.29

MUSIC [CHIEF-IN-RESIDENCE] ERIC

CHURCH

Eric Church joins elite company — such as Marty Stuart, “Cowboy” Jack Clement, Vince Gill and Miranda Lambert — this week when he steps onstage at the CMA Theater for a two-night run as the 2023 Country Music Hall of Fame Artistin-Residence. Created by Hall leadership in 2003 to celebrate “a musical master who can be credited with contributing a large and significant body of work to the canon of American popular music,” these shows typically offer a one-of-a-kind experience for those lucky enough to score tickets. Career retrospectives, stripped-down acoustic sets, buzzworthy surprise guests — it’s all on the table when an Artist-inResidence week returns to downtown Nashville. Given Church’s long-running commitment to marathon performances and freewheelin’ showmanship, concertgoers should expect all of the above to be on the table during these shows. Concertgoers looking to double down on all things “Chief” downtown can head inside the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum for Country Heart, Restless Soul, a careerspanning Church exhibit that opened last month. Concert ticket proceeds benefit educational programming at the Hall of Fame. 8 p.m. at the CMA Theater, 224 Fifth Ave. S. MATTHEW

t e d m u s i c i a n c u r r e n t l y t o u r i n g a s t h e o r g a n i s t a n d k e y s p l a y e r f o r t h e G r a m m y a w a r d - w i n n i n g C o u n t r y d u o , T h e B r o t h e r s O s b o r n e , h i s d i s t i n c t i v e s t y l e h a s a l l o w e d h i m t o a d d n u m e r o u s m u s i c a l c r e d i t s o n r e c o r d s f o r a r t i s t s a s d i v e r s e a s H u n t e r H a y e s , C h r i s B r o w n , J a z m i n e S u l l i v a n , a n d m o r e B a c k b y p o p u l a r d e m

NEAL JOHNSTON

With over two decades experience working in Nashville we’d love to be part of your next addition, renovation, or custom build!

BIRDIECONSTRUCTION.COM

BOOKS

WORKING FOR A LIVING

Songwriter James Talley tells his own story in Nashville City Blues

BY EDD HURT

James Talley’s Nashville City Blues: My Journey as an American Songwriter is too evenhanded to be a cautionary tale about the dark corners of the big-city music business, but this is a songwriter’s memoir with a moral in tow.

In the mid-1970s in Nashville, Talley cut a series of albums that drew from Western swing, rock ’n’ roll, blues and folk while remaining — at least on the surface — country music. His 1975 debut album, Got No Bread, No Milk, No Money, but We Sure Got a Lot of Love, appeared during an era when Nashville’s music industry struggled through an identity crisis brought on by the ascendancy of rock and the influence of tunesmiths like Bob Dylan and Guy Clark on country songwriting.

flair that characterizes his best songs: It had rained hard again the night before. We looked at one another and thought about the ridiculousness of the job, with no power, the drunken superintendent, and another day of wading in the mud. We decided we’d had enough. We turned the car around and headed back through Albuquerque, then up into the Manzano Mountains to the little lake at Manzano and went fishing.

Nashville City Blues tells the story of an innovator who writes about working for a living, a subject Talley knows well and one he doesn’t sentimentalize. As he discovered when he began building his career, a certain kind of work — promoting an image of yourself — starts after you’ve already finished making the music.

Nashville City Blues shifts into high gear when Talley moves to Nashville in 1968 at age 24, but he grounds the story of his encounters with Music City U.S.A. in the varying locales of his childhood and adolescence in the war economy of the 1940s. Talley was born in Tulsa, Okla., and his parents moved to Washington state in search of work. His father got a job as a chemical handler at a nuclear reactor, the Hanford Works, and Talley’s mother — he describes her as “aloof and abrupt” — taught school and considered herself upwardly mobile.

The family ultimately settled in Albuquerque, N.M., in 1952, and Talley recalls his years in the city as a period of discovery. By the time he was a high school senior, he had formed his own group, modeled after The Kingston Trio. “We all played guitars, wore striped shirts, and sang all the Kingston Trio’s songs at school assemblies,” Talley writes. “We called ourselves the Ivy Three.” He immersed himself in folk music and art and rode horses at a scout ranch in the summers. After he graduated from the University of New Mexico, he returned to Albuquerque, where he joined a construction crew charged with setting concrete culverts for Interstate 40, only to be thwarted by rain. Talley describes the scene with the

By the time Talley drove into Tennessee in a 1949 Willys panel truck, country songwriting had undergone a sea change at least partly caused by the shock of hearing Bob Dylan’s 1966 album Blonde on Blonde, recorded in Nashville. Talley’s subsequent career — he made four superb albums for Capitol Records between 1973 and 1977 and continued to release albums until the present day — has played out as an example of an ambitious songwriter and singer bending the forms of country, folk and rock in the context of Nashville, which always looks for hits.

Along the way, Talley met with the great country-folk songwriter Billy Edd Wheeler, who listened to the songs Talley had been writing about working-class life. (Talley was a welfare caseworker in Albuquerque and later supported himself in Nashville as part of the city’s rat-control effort.) “Well, I feel like I have been listening to sociology here,” Wheeler commented. “I don’t know what we could do with these songs in Nashville.”

Talley recounts his complex dealings with record-business executives and selfproclaimed business managers in unsparing fashion. His supporters included Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler, who signed Talley to a deal with Atlantic three years before Talley’s debut album appeared on Capitol. His string of Capitol albums got praise from rock critics Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus, and each album bears down on bedrock American music, with 1976’s Tryin’ Like the Devil showing a strong blues influence.

Talley’s songs didn’t establish themselves as the classics they are until decades later — in particular, “Are They Gonna Make Us Outlaws Again?” and “Forty Hours” should be in the repertoire of every Americana band that’s worth its salt. Talley delves into the machinations of a dirty business, but Nashville City Blues is finally a story about the idealism that comes only through work. As Talley writes, “Songwriters, regardless of how they are abused and underpaid, still rule the world artistically.”

For more local book coverage, please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

NASHVILLE CITY BLUES: MY JOURNEY AS AN AMERICAN SONGWRITER BY JAMES TALLEY UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS 240 PAGES, $24.95

STEVE AUSTIN

SATURDAY, September 9, 2023

RIVERFRONT PARK NASHVILLE | 3PM-7PM

Live Piano

Friday, August 25

Sunday, August 27

FILM SCREENING

USO Celebrity Tour: Starring

Patty Loveless

(1989)

FRIDAY · NOON

SUNDAY · 11:00 am FORD THEATER

Saturday, August 26

SONGWRITER SESSION

Clint Daniels

NOON · FORD THEATER

Saturday, August 26

INTERVIEW AND PERFORMANCE

Patty Loveless

2:30 pm · CMA THEATER

SOLD OUT

Sunday, August 27

MUSICIAN SPOTLIGHT

Carmella Ramsey

1:00 pm · FORD THEATER

WITNESS HISTORY

Museum Membership Receive free admission, access to weekly programming, concert ticket presale opportunities, and more.

Tuesday, August 29

Wednesday, August 30

THE EIGHTEENTH

ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE

Eric Church

8:00 pm · CMA THEATER

SOLD OUT

Saturday, September 2

HATCH SHOW PRINT

Block Party

10:00 am, 1:00 pm, and 3:30 pm

HATCH SHOW PRINT SHOP LIMITED AVAILABILITY

Saturday, September 2

SONGWRITER SESSION

Bobby Tomberlin

NOON · FORD THEATER

Sunday, September 3

MUSICIAN SPOTLIGHT

Jason Coleman and Meagan

Taylor

1:00 pm ·

NEW SAMEFUEL,FLAME

Be Your Own Pet, reunited and reenergized, burns bright as ever on Mommy

BY P.J. KINZER

Be Your Own Pet is a phenomenal group of punks who exploded into Nashville’s rock ’n’ roll underground while they were still high school students at Nashville School of the Arts in the early Aughts, and became an international sensation in short order before disbanding in 2008. Last year, they reunited for a progressively longer string of gigs, which included opening some dates on Jack White’s Supply Chain Issues Tour. Friday, the band will release Mommy, their first new album in 15 years, via Third Man Records.

Album titles aren’t necessarily meant to be taken literally, but when I catch up with threequarters of the band on a videoconference, singer Jemina Pearl is in her minivan with her two kids — a dramatically different vibe from the bombastic stage presence that’s been her calling card from the beginning. Within a minute or two, guitarist Jonas Stein and drummer John Eatherly join us; bassist Nathan Vasquez can’t make it this time.

“We didn’t know we were going to necessarily make a record,” says Pearl. “But when we got together two years ago and met up, Nathan was kind of like, ‘I only want to play shows if we write new music.’ And none of us had really thought about that.”

For anyone who missed Be Your Own Pet’s arrival circa 2004, it’s hard to imagine a parallel. The group, which originally included Jamin Orrall on drums, had chemistry and chops well beyond their years, which they channeled into buzzing guitar hooks, hipjerking beats and rowdy live shows. They commanded the attention of a new generation of rockers in Nashville and far beyond, touring internationally and getting ink in publications of every size including NME, Rolling Stone and Nylon; not always for the best — Pearl has discussed being objectified and abused. Via Thurston Moore’s imprint Ecstatic Peace in the U.S. and international label XL Recordings, they released 2006’s Be Your Own Pet and 2008’s Get Awkward. Between those albums, Eatherly took over for Orrall; he left to focus on JEFF the Brotherhood, his much-loved band with brother Jake Orrall, and Infinity Cat, the label the brothers started with their dad, which released BYOP’s early singles. Still, that much time under a bright spotlight that never seemed to turn off brought new stresses that the young quartet wasn’t prepared to navigate, and they called it quits about five months after Get Awkward came out.

“It was kind of like lightning in a bottle,” Stein says of the band’s success. “And it was all just really quick, and fast, and crazy, and difficult, and really fun, and really shitty and — it was just a little bit all over. And I think that those are some vague reasons

why we kind of burnt out. We had a lot put on our plate from the get-go.”

All the members continued making music in various capacities around various life commitments. Stein had a long run fronting rocking punks Turbo Fruits; Vasquez’s projects included fantastic noise-pop outfits Deluxin’ and Road Block; and Pearl released her solo LP Break It Up in 2009 and co-founded punk outfit Ultras S/C. Eatherly played with Pearl and Vasquez and also started rock group Public Access T.V. in Brooklyn. Third Man, which was co-founded by Pearl’s husband Ben Swank along with Jack White and Ben Blackwell, approached BYOP about reissuing their albums, but Vasquez’s stipulation that they write new music if they were going to be getting onstage lit a creative fire under the band.

“We had discussed the idea of getting together and writing for a couple of days, and demoing some songs with Jeremy [Ferguson] from Battle Tapes,” Stein explains, noting that all four members brought songs to the table. They worked quickly at Ferguson’s studio, recording three tracks that Stein played for Swank. “After those three demo songs we did — which aren’t demos

anymore, they’re actually on the album — that’s when shit started becoming more realistic as far as writing a whole new album.”

What was most important for Pearl was for her voice to represent who she is today, nearly two decades after BYOP took off like a bottle rocket.

“Now I’m not just 20 years old, going crazy — feeling insane because I’m not on medication,” she says, referencing the bipolar disorder she grappled with. “Now I’ve kind of got my shit together. But I’m also a mom, and so I kind of wanted to figure out how to write punk rock songs about where my life is now.”

Hard-hitting lead single “Hand Grenade” examines how Pearl found a path to healing from past trauma, and “Goodtime!” is a hardcore shout-along about how, as a parent, it can be hard to get to hang out with other adults. Meanwhile, opening groover “Worship the Whip” and choppy disco track “Rubberist” take on fetishistic themes, much the way The Velvet Underground did with “Venus in Furs.”

“I also tried to think about how back in the day, we would just pick like a random topic to write a song about,” says Pearl. “Like, ‘Oh,

we love riding bicycles. Let’s write a song about riding our bikes!’ Like, ‘Oh, I love latex. I’ll write a song about my love of latex!’ Same vibe, only now I’m 36.”

“Drive,” near the end of the record, is one of its most intriguing songs. It’s about speeding through your hometown with the windows down, and its first three lines resonate with the weird duality of nostalgia and shame that can come with having a long relationship with a place: “Back in the city that I call home / My past is everywhere I roam / Don’t want to be the same person each day.” I ask Pearl about the differences between her relationship with Nashville when she was a teenage musician and her relationship with it as an adult musician who has kids of her own.

“I feel a lot more love in Nashville, and support in Nashville, now than I did then,” she says with a smile. “I don’t know if it was, like, a Southern thing about being a really loud, brash young woman … that rubbed people the wrong way, but I felt like I got a lot of shit in Nashville all the time growing up. So I don’t know — maybe Nashville is just catching up. We’re meeting each other in the right place, right time, right now.”

EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

MOMMY OUT AUG. 25 VIA

THIRD MAN RECORDS; PLAYING SEPT. 16 AT THE BLUE ROOM

PHOTO: KIRSTEN BARNETT

FIGHT NOR FLIGHT

Becca Mancari goes boldly on Left Hand

BY HANNAH CRON

Becca Mancari isn’t afraid anymore. Their new album Left Hand, out Friday via Captured Tracks, grapples with heartbreak, death, depression and trauma. But the songs are not stuck in those moments, as Mancari moves through the difficult emotions with the ease found only through experience, like a tree with roots widespread to withstand any storm. On Left Hand, Mancari invites the listener to sit with them without trying to immediately force a specific narrative. For Mancari, this kind of vulnerability separates this record from their previous LP, 2020’s The Greatest Part “I allowed there to be space on this record,” says Mancari. “Even if you look at the timestamps of the songs — on The Greatest Part, there’s a lot of two, two-pointsomething [minutes]. And I think there is a lot of me that was afraid to let people sit in with me. And I think I was fighting back, in a way of, ‘Accept me, love me, see me.’ … That is an attribute of fighting back, right? Like, when you’re wanting to fit in or be part of something. And I always felt like I was on the outside. I think similarly to how I was raised — like, I was never a cool guy.”

Many of the record’s tracks speak to Mancari’s childhood, a deeply religious and fraught one, culminating in their leaving home disowned at 16. But Left Hand, named for an image in Mancari’s Italian family crest, isn’t an angry record. Songs like “Homesick Honeybee” and “It’s Too Late” deal with a complication that many face: figuring out how to sever ties with harmful ideologies while maintaining a bond with loved ones who hold them. It’s a hard and painful process, one that Mancari says is crucial for growth.

“I don’t know the answer fully, but I do know that: It can get better,” they say. “And I know that, like, for me — I keep doubling down on this — it is a journey of self-love and self-acceptance. That is something that has to happen in our lives. Because I think, unfortunately, a lot of our parents, like, they weren’t allowed to experience that.”

It would’ve been easy for Left Hand to be a very different record. Beyond parsing Mancari’s family trauma, there was a session with a big-name producer that fell apart when they showed Mancari the kind of disrespect so many women and queer artists face. It would have made sense for them to respond by writing a record fired up with rage. But Left Hand shows a maturity far beyond that, beginning in a place of anger but blossoming into healing and acceptance.

“We all have choices, that’s true, but there’s agency and acknowledgment, and you have to have some accountability for that,” Mancari says. “But I think for me, like, I’ve been angry. ‘It’s Too Late’ is an angry song, by the way. That’s the song that started me, though, being free to write all

the other ones. That was the cornerstone — that was, like, ‘It’s OK, I’m as angry as I’ll be.’ I’m saying: ‘You almost killed me. Do you not understand? … Like, queer people are killing themselves, kids are killing themselves. Don’t you understand what you do matters?’”

Mancari’s story as told through Left Hand has deep Nashville ties. From a lyrical reference to fistfighting at The 5 Spot in “Over and Over” to a trio of local chosenfamily collaborators — Julien Baker, Brittany Howard and Zac Farro — the experiences and connections Mancari has made in Nashville are an essential part of both their healing and their art.

“I came up by myself here — I came up, like, with no support,” they say. “I did not have any parents’ support. I was not a kid that went to Belmont. I was not a kid that had, like, a trust fund. No offense to those kids, they’re great. But I came here with two bags and a guitar. And I had never visited before. I just got in my car one day and said, ‘I’m gonna go to the hardest place to become a songwriter and learn from the best.’”

Mancari has come a long way since those early days, from working at Mas Tacos to releasing a queer Americana record, 2017’s Good Woman, before it was widely accepted in the South. Their journey to success and acceptance, though not easy, has helped create a culture of love and healing around them, one that exudes light throughout Left Hand. If The Greatest Part was Mancari fighting back, Left Hand is the sound of them realizing they don’t have to. And those who listen and find it resonates with them don’t have to, either. For both Mancari and their audience, the story is just beginning.

“I really want people to know, like, this record is me. This is Becca — this is just the cusp. I think it’s just gonna get better from here.”

EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

LIKE A GLOVE

Beth Bombara

feels at home in her own skin — finally — on It All Goes Up

BY RACHEL CHOLST

Beth Bombara has been making music for more than a decade. But with her new album It All Goes Up, the singersongwriter feels like she’s finally gotten comfortable — with herself, with her craft and with the journey she’s on.

“I’m a very haphazard gardener,” Bombara

says via phone, nestled among the peppers, squash, eggplant and tomatoes in her St. Louis backyard. “I’ll randomly throw seeds in the ground and forget what I planted.”

Perhaps her approach to gardening is a release from her methodical approach to her work. It All Goes Up was primarily written during COVID lockdown and finds Bombara exploring a range of guitar-based genres, all held together by a meticulous layering of sounds. Thematically, the album focuses on loneliness and connection, though Bombara feels the songs’ meanings will change with time and road-testing. “Obviously, when I write I’m inspired by the time and place that I’m in,” she says. “But I also am a nonspecific writer a lot of times, and that has allowed the songs to take on a different life and absorb a little more meaning.”

PLAYING AUG. 24 AT THE UNDERDOG, AUG. 25 AT 3RD AND LINDSLEY AND SEPT. 23 AT THE 5 SPOT

LEFT HAND OUT FRIDAY, AUG. 25, VIA CAPTURED TRACKS; PLAYING THE BLUE ROOM OCT. 6

PHOTO: SOPHIA MATINAZAD

PHOTO: VIRGINIA HAROLD

7:00

WMOT Roots Radio Finally Fridays featuring BETH BOMBARA, ALEX HARRIS & JAKE YBARRA

RESURRECTION: A JOURNEY TRIBUTE and FRIENDS with CASEY’S COUNTDOWN

DAVE PAHANISH, BOBBY TOMBERLIN & RAY STEPHENSON

PABLO CRUISE with JAIME KYLE

FINGERNAILS ARE PRETTYA Tribute to The Foo Fighters with INDIFFERENCEA Tribute to Pearl Jam

THE TIME JUMPERS

RACHEL LOY’S SH*T LIST featuring SINEAD BURGESS, AVA PAIGE, DYLAN ROCKOFF, SINCLAIR, JON AANESTAD, OLIVIA RUDEEN, CAROLYN DAWN JOHNSON with ADAM HOOD

DALLAS MOORE + ALEX WILLIAMS

CHASING TONYA + LENOX HILLS with DYLAN DUNN

TRASH PANDA & HOTEL FICTION w/ Angel Saint Queen MY SO-CALLED BAND

SEAN MCCONNELL W/ Bowen*Young

vlad holiday w/ Teddy At Night and Crystal Rose

DARLINGSIDE w/ Jaimee Harris

THE TESKEY BROTHERS

WYATT FLORES W/ KAITLYN KILLIAN

KENDALL STREET COMPANY w/ DIZGO & Connor Kelly and The Time Warp

PROJECT PAT

YOKE LORE W/ GIRLHOUSE thee sinseers AND the altons w/ Mount Worcester of montreal w/ locate s,1 and ritzy d

dogs in a pile w/ Airshow

elder w/ rezn & lord buffalo

the glorious sons w/ The Velveteers

DEERHOOF W/ FLYNT FLOSSY & TURQUOISE JEEP

DURAND BERNARR w/ JeRonelle

LEAH KATE w/ Conor Burns, Senses & Alex Capelli

DOPAPOD W/ STOLEN GIN

JAKE MILLER W/ HARIZ MAUDE LATOUR W/ DEVON AGAIN

AMERICANAFEST: Mipso, Della Mae

AMERICANAFEST: Band of Heathens, Kaitlin Butts, The Panhandlers, Wyatt Flores, Drayton Flores

AMERICANAFEST: A Tribute to 1973

AMERICANAFEST: Sarah Jarosz, Maggie Rose, The Wilder Blue, Blue Water Highway, The Shindellas

zz ward w/ jaime wyatt noah gundersen w/ casey dubie mo lowda & the humble W/ JIVE TALK

SHAWN JAMES W/ RACHAEL DAVIS & EVAN BARTELS ambar lucid w/ rubio & ethanuno

LANCO vacations

BAG MEN featuring Steve Gorman, Luther Dickinson and Nick Govrik

VINJE & JUSTIN LUIS [7pm]

Circuit Circuit, My Wall, Clot, Caregiver [9pm]

Jillette Johnson w/ Jake Etheridge [7pm] Drugdog w/ Mel Bryant & The Mercy Makers, and The Prickly Pair [9pm] this2, Liana Vine, Serena Laurel Girls Rock Nashville: Feat. Abby K., Kenzi Whittington, Chelsea King, Brittany Ray, Monte Mader, Essy BRADLEY GASKIN [6PM] THE HEARTWRECKERS [7PM]

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Flight Attendant, OTNES, Clover Jamez, Travollta, Ancient Posse, Beau Burnette

The Dead Bolts, Mojo Thunder, Willie Pearl Maddy Hicks w/ Caroline Dare [7PM]

Ellie Stone, Geordann Daguplo, Tristan Bushman [9PM]

Roz Malone, Daisha McBride, Qualls and Ken-Say

Bombara takes this approach by design.

“I like that about songs,” she says. “Yes, there’s probably one original intentional meaning, but depending on where the listener is when they hear the song, it could impart a different meaning.”

As she collected songs during quarantine, Bombara revisited an old friend: the classical guitar she had studied in college. Bombara hadn’t touched it in 10 years, but dug it out of the back of her closet. Writing on the instrument opened new paths for Bombara, who typically plays electric or steel-string acoustic guitar.

“When you play the classical guitar, you can’t use the guitar pick,” she explains. “You have to play fingerstyle, which lends itself really well to different chord inversions and different rhythms. That helped paint the first sonic draft of those songs. They ended up being more emotive and moody. Feeling that instrument in your hand and having it sort of guide you is a really cool thing.”

Bombara had studied classical guitar for only a few months before putting it back down, but giving it another shot with an extra decade’s worth of other fingerpicking styles allowed her to explore.

“I was trying to challenge myself,” she says, “and to give myself space to say, ‘What if this song has less lyrics? What if I do an instrumental bridge and there’s no lyrics?’”

Creating this spaciousness gave Bombara the opportunity to capture the pain of early 2020 while embracing positivity.

“I was also looking ahead and saying, ‘I’m gonna make the most of this moment,’” she says. “‘My life is not bad. Things are hard, but there’s a lot of positivity to look forward to.’”

Bombara brought that sense of adventure to the recording studio. Typically, she prefers to record live, but this album required more structuring. The rhythm tracks were recorded live, then Sam Golden added layers of guitar and strings, and Bombara added more tracks of her own on top.

“We were really going for those jangly, layered guitars.”

Other songs, like the hard-hitting “Give Me a Reason,” developed a bit more organically. The band recorded five takes, then chose the version with their favorite guitar solo. The end result is a fearlessly exploratory album, with Bombara testing the limits of her heart’s — and her guitar’s — potential. She and her band stop in East Nashville on Thursday at The Underdog, where she is eager to see how the songs have changed on the road.

“I love playing with my band,” says Bombara. “It’s so invigorating, and nothing is the same every night. Different stages, different audiences — and even unexpected things, like technical difficulties — it’s a little bit different every time. Sometimes I worry that I’ll get tired of playing these songs live. And that’s a possibility. But right now, they’re still new and fresh, and I’m very excited.”

Bombara & Co. will play WMOT Roots Radio’s Finally Friday at 3rd and Lindsley on Aug. 25 before they leave town. They’ll be back in Music City for an official showcase at AmericanaFest, playing Sept. 23 at The 5 Spot.

“I’ve been self-releasing records for a long time, and it’s hard to keep putting your art out there. But I feel like with this record, I’m finally settling into this feeling that I’m gonna be doing this my whole life. I love doing this, and I’m going to keep doing it whether I’m on a record label or not. It’s been a pleasure working with Tulsa-based Black Mesa Records to put out this new album. It doesn’t matter how many other people are validating it. Writing this record for me has helped me fall in love with the process and become the most comfortable in my own skin that I’ve ever been.”

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THE SPIN

BETTER TOGETHER

BY STEPHEN TRAGESER

“Sometimes the best you can do is just piss off the bad guys,” Jason Isbell told a sold-out house at City Winery “I sleep really good when the bad guys are angry. They’re fired up right now. … They are large mad.”

He was addressing the crowd Aug. 15 at Together in Action, an event featuring a shedload of songwriting talent presented by two Nashville organizations that elevate marginalized people’s voices in music — Country Any Way, launched by Black Opry’s Holly G and Tanner Davenport, and eQuality Events, founded by Richard M. Williams and songwriter Autumn Nicholas. Taking the stage as the lights went down, Davenport explained that the funds raised from ticket sales would be donated to the Tennessee chapter of Moms Demand Action — a national organization allied with Everytown for Gun Safety, which organizes educational events as well as advocating for stricter gun laws through lobbying, protest actions and more.

The show came ahead of a special session of the state legislature, called by Gov. Bill Lee to start on Aug. 21. One of the session’s ostensible goals was to discuss gun reform, responding to calls for changes that might prevent tragedies like the Covenant School shooting. Said voices include parents of Covenant students, famous musicians like Margo Price and Ketch Secor and, per a recent Vanderbilt poll, a majority of Tennesseans. Republicans in the legislature made it clear they weren’t interested in discussing any measure that would restrict access to guns, going so far as to publicly urge Lee, their Republican colleague, to not call the special session. Though Lee had previously voiced support for extreme risk protection orders, which would take guns away from people experiencing a crisis, he did not include an ERPO proposal among the session’s bills (though it remains possible for another lawmaker to do so).

An array of speakers at Together in Action addressed the importance of pushing back. Leeann Hewlett, leader of the Tennessee chapter of Moms Demand Action, noted that even after the Covenant shooting, the General Assembly passed a bill that would limit liability for gun manufacturers. State Rep. Gloria Johnson — one of the Tennessee Three, called to the carpet by state House Republicans in April for participating in an anti-gun protest — said that bills up before the special session focus on the wrong things, like trying juveniles as adults in court and moving toward criminalizing mental health issues.

“If it isn’t abortion, it’s gun violence,” said Tequila Johnson, co-founder of The Equity Alliance, emphasizing the importance of building a broad coalition to counteract the legislature. “If it isn’t gun violence, they’re attacking trans kids. If they’re not attacking trans kids, they’re attacking people of color. … This is not just a one-issue thing. This is

an issue of hate. Hate is running rampant in our state, and it is not going to change without us.”

Relevant to Tequila Johnson’s comment: Beyond the exceptional talent of the many musicians who performed at Together in Action, what stood out was the diversity and intersectionality of their perspectives on gun violence. It’s a credit to the event organizers as well as the players, and it made the night even more than a fun show for a good cause, with highlight after highlight after highlight.

Simply put, the proliferation of guns in the United States, coupled with astonishingly minimal gun control, makes everyone less safe. It increases the already elevated risks for the LGBTQ community, which Jessye DeSilva pointed out as they introduced “Dysphoria” and “Queen of the Backyard.”

Julie Williams called up Brittney Spencer to duet with her on “Big Blue House,” in which a young Black girl’s father keeps her at home — because to play with the neighborhood kids, she’d have to get past a white man who carries guns and flies a Confederate battle flag. Even being a white family with means doesn’t insulate you from the anxiety of send-

ing your child to school in our current environment, as Isbell sang in “Save the World,” a song from his latest LP Weathervanes

It was also a night for expressing joy. The Kentucky Gentlemen, bringing some of the coolest harmony parts I’ve heard in a country tune in a while, sang about breaking cycles of poverty and instability in an as-yet-unreleased song whose chorus goes: “It ran in the family / Till it ran into me.” Denitia sang about embracing the present moment in “All the Sweet Tea.” Devon Gilfillian, who shouted out his old co-workers from his days as a City Winery employee, spoke eloquently and genially about not demonizing people you disagree with. As he sang “Love You Anyway,” the refrain “We’re all in this shit together” resonated.

“I think a lot of times we forget,” coorganizer Autumn Nicholas said quietly, tuning up their guitar before performances of “Listening” and “Be Gentle.” “We put a space in between what has happened, and we kind of just move on. … It is also hard to live with knowing we can make a difference — so why don’t we try?”

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PULLING PUNCHES AND CLAIMING SPACE

Bad Girl Boogey , Barbie ’s Allan, Bottoms and the current state of queer cinema

BY JASON SHAWHAN

It’s odd how so much of contemporary queer visibility is illustrating paradoxes in real time. Acceptance and tolerance do seem to be winning, but terribly slowly. And in opposition to this, homophobia and transphobia have gotten louder and even more disruptive and violent. So there is a larger audience for queer narratives, but more presence means painting bigger targets. So for every big gesture or subplot, there are attempted boycotts or international censors lurking with knives ready.

This isn’t new. Vito Russo’s still-essential 1981 book The Celluloid Closet addresses the ways queer audiences had to learn to squint and parse signifiers like grad-school semioticians since the silent era, using coding and trickery to discuss tiny, glittering fragments of hidden lives. And in some instances, filmmakers and studios have returned to that kind of Purloined Letter approach, all the better to dodge overzealous censors or psychos with guns. This summer’s Haunted Mansion, from gay director Justin Simien, illustrates this situation with a weird balancing act between a publicized Dan Levy cameo and a blink-and-you’llmiss-it revelation that happens without words or acknowledgment. Fast X lives and dies based on Jason Momoa’s character Dante, a fashionable crime lord with a peerless accessories game and a love for drama, and any queer viewer can tell you he’s the gayest villain since Saint Taylor Negron’s Mister Milo back in The Last Boy Scout — but he is never explicitly identified as such. So in 2023 we’re now back to the era of plausible deniability to ease past barriers. There was an uproar about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem made by the right-wing outrage industry having a whole woke/broke scandal. This was due to a marketing miscommunication and people like Andrew Tate being unable to avoid stirring shit up when they thought a mutant rat might be dating a mutant roach. All that matters about Master Splinter, as a charcter points out in this year’s exuberant Joy Ride, is that he’s a good father. In Talk to Me, popular jerkface Haley is played by trans actor Zoe Terakes. Haley is neither a trans nor a nonbinary character, but the film is still banned in Kuwait because of their presence. Globally, queer people merely existing is too much for these insecure reactionaries. “We live on a dying planet, facing impossible obstacles.” That’s what Billy (Cole Escola) said in last year’s Please Baby Please, hitting on the big thesis statement for anyone trying to live a truthaful life right now.

But the despoilers have won. There’s not really any coming back from the climate crisis at this point, and brazen demagogues and Nazis are regaining the apparatus of power throughout the world. So why is it, then, that their anger demands that queer people just not exist at them? They’ve killed the planet — how is that not enough?

There are other paths that can be taken, whether it’s Michael Cera’s Allan in Barbie or how — much in the way that Star Trek’s the Borg always seemed to represent an industrial socialist technarchy — there’s something very elegant and sexy and queer about the way Esai Morales’ Gabriel in Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning — Part One becomes the emissary of AI menace The Entity; a haute couture glow-up with an upgrade in the most intimate of knife-fighting and salt-and-pepper menace. Would love Donna Haraway’s thoughts on the matter.

The recent Theater Camp does a good job of navigating a space where identity is mutable (the defining characteristic of any actor), representing all manner of queer folk of all ages, and it got a PG-13 from the MPA — an organization that loves nothing more than throwing out R or NC-17 ratings at anything even slightly LGBTQIA+. Theater Camp is an immeasurably valuable film because it depicts queer identities that aren’t focused on the sexual side of sexual identity, and it does so with a hospitable and open heart, with a deep appreciation for showstopping musical numbers. (See also: Celia Rose Gooding’s “Keep Us Connected” in the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds musical episode “Subspace Rhapsody,” responsible for the biggest emotional response in anything this year since Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music and The Last of Us episode “Long Long Time,” because game recognize game.)

In some ways an analysis of trends and tropes, in others a tract about the rich bounty of queer cinema currently out there (and coming soon), this piece is trying to get a grip on the trees keeping us culturally above the rising waters of a doomed world. There is no monolithic queer opinion on anything (trust me, I’ve been getting into

enough verbal scraps about Bros in the past year to bring back wild flashbacks to the days of Alien3 discourse), but here are some thoughts about The Current State of Queer Cinema.

RED, WHITE AND ROYAL BLUE CURRENTLY STREAMING VIA AMAZON PRIME VIDEO

Incredibly popular for an R-rated romcom about dudes shaking up multinational complacency by doing it, this feel-good fantasy talks about PrEP and actually illustrates the catch-22 paradox about current queer visibility pretty well. And it does all that even while eschewing realism with the same glee with which President Uma Thurman tears into her pan-Southern accent — seriously, it does for American English what Angelina Jolie’s exquisite turn in Alexander did for continental Europe linguistics. Red, White and Royal Blue stars Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine are pleasant without being particularly gritty (the latter much better served by his turn as football star Jeff in Bottoms), and the film delivers the emotions you would expect of it. The only major stumbling block is its villain: Real life has multiple examples of complex queer villains (think Morrissey, Caitlyn Jenner or George Santos), so leaning on a one-and-a-half-dimensional cipher like this film does feels a bit disingenuous. Still, audiences are flocking to it — from the privacy of their own homes.

BAD GIRL BOOGEY CURRENTLY AVAILABLE VIA VIDEO ON DEMAND

Director/co-writer Alice Maio Mackay was 17 when she made Bad Girl Boogey, a gutsy and brutal look that sidesteps all the niceties that allow audiences to not have to engage directly with what they’re viewing. The murderous cruelty that follows a handcarved mask throughout contemporary Australia in this film resides in everyone. The mask in question merely allows the wearer to access their darkest impulses, and it’s the queer community who bears the brunt of it. This film bolsters LGBTQIA+ representation in horror as both heroes and victims, to the point where it may be too much. But

the catharsis this trans director summons is undeniable, and anyone interested in horror that pulls no punches needs to pay attention to whatever Mackay is up to.

KOKOMO CITY COMING SOON TO THE BELCOURT

Digital monochrome portraits of Black trans sex workers across the nation, this documentary from D. Smith has so much heart, and it will fuck you up. It’s funny and fraught and tragically real in that subject Koko Da Doll was already no longer with us before the festival run even started. These women are smart and resourceful, and they are doing everything they can just to get by. Kokomo City illustrates how transphobia and homophobia are symptoms of corrosive selfishness — how so much of the chaos in this particular historical moment is driven by inexplicably rage-filled people not wanting to even have to peripherally acknowledge that something counter to their way of life, which was their parents’ way of life, exists. It’s the same PragerU denialism we’re seeing in school systems across the country, but focused on the present rather than the still-scarred past. Whatever emotions you’re looking to experience and explore, this has all of them.

PASSAGES OPENING AUG. 25 AT THE BELCOURT

For a film already infamous for getting slapped with an NC-17 (since surrendered) because of its sexual frankness, Passages is even more shocking because of its emotional forthrightness. Like its 50-year-old progenitor The Mother and the Whore, this is a portrait of what happens when someone (in this case, a filmmaker named Tomas, played by international treasure Franz Rogowski) decides that one person (his husband Martin, played by precious angel/ Paddington/Q Ben Whishaw) isn’t enough, bringing schoolteacher Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos, fresh from magical realist/queer sci-fi epic The Five Devils, still the best film of 2023 and the only film with the power to unmake my own existence, currently streaming on Mubi) into the kind of emotional singularity that happens when you love someone who lacks empathy. This is a

PASSAGES

great film, but also a bleak one — despite the fact that it stars three of the best (and most intriguing) actors in global cinema, it’s the emotional truths that really stick in your brain. Director and co-writer Ira Sachs pulled off a similar trick with 2012’s Keep the Lights On, which did a very good job of explaining that the cruelties an addict deploys don’t always disappear when they get clean — though he makes films that often deal with a gay milieu, the emotions are relatable to anyone. Thankfully brisk (just over 90 minutes), this is one of those films that speaks enough truth to keep the mind

STUCK IN CRUISE CONTROL

Gran Turismo is a long ad with a checklist of clichés

BY KEN ARNOLD

Video game movies have recently been shaking the reputation they gained from decades of bad movies. There was the first Super Mario Bros. movie (1993), the long-running live-action Resident Evil series and anything Golden Raspberry Awards Worst Career Achievement winner Uwe Boll touched (House of the Dead, BloodRayne, Postal, Far Cry, the list goes on). But the past five years, we’ve seen a surge of adaptations that have won over the fans and critics alike, including animated Netflix series Castlevania and Arcane, and HBO’s zombie drama The Last of Us. And while not necessarily beloved by most critics, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, as of this writing, stands as the highest-grossing picture of 2023. Gran Turismo is not an adaptation of the game it shares a name with — but it is loosely based on the real-life story of a racing gamer turned pro racer.

Gran Turismo follows Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a high-level player of the racing game Gran Tursimo. Jann dreams of driving cars professionally but is constantly discouraged by his father (Djimon Hounsou), who thinks Jann is wasting time

swirling long after the lights come up and you saunter home. If Barbie didn’t help you end your toxic relationship, bet this one will.

BOTTOMS OPENING IN THEATERS SEPT. 1

Uninterested in a protracted coming-out narrative, the latest Emma Seligman (Shiva Baby) joint finds two lesbian high school students (national treasures Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott) crafting a novel solution to their lack of dates and popularity — creating a self-defense course for young women that allows them to win over the objects of their affection. Bottoms is a singular

approach to the raunchy teen comedy, and it fires on all cylinders, with great supporting work from Red, White and Royal Blue’s Galitzine as the star quarterback and former NFL star Marshawn Lynch, who is one of the funniest people alive and who should immediately be signed to do more comedies by enterprising filmmakers as soon as the strikes are over. A lot of people are balking at some of the violence in this film, but the violence feels correct if one is being truly honest about American schools, regardless of the general, mildly fanciful tone.

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playing games all day. Meanwhile in Japan, Nissan agrees to host a competition where the best Gran Turismo players in the world are invited to GT Academy for a chance to represent Team Nissan in the professional circuit. Jann qualifies for the tournament and goes to GT Academy, where he and all the other qualifying gamers are coached by former racer Jack Salter (David Harbour) to learn how to drive a real race car, with the winner of the program joining the professional circuits.

On paper, adapting the racing game to the big screen doesn’t make much sense. For the uninitiated: The Gran Turismo series of games is a simulation of motor sports racing. No story to adapt or body of lore and characters to pull from. So PlayStation decided, rather than adapting the game itself, to take the story of one of its more famous GT Academy grads and push the video game’s accuracy as being

responsible for Jann’s success. The final result is a safe-bet story with all the beats you’ve seen time and again throughout sports movies. Jann’s earlier racing career is rearranged and dramatized to fit the sports-drama template, and you can probably predict the result of each race by the time it starts. That said, the visual spectacle alone could be enough to satisfy the gearheads in the audience — the stunt driving is mixed with discrete CGI in a way that’s engaging enough to not be noticeable unless you’re searching for it.

While not as bad as the worst gaming-movie offenders, Gran Turismo doesn’t have enough narrative meat on its bones to satisfy the cinephiles — but it has enough visual flair to entertain its target audience. A win for fans of the gaming series, but it won’t quite do enough to bring any new fans in.

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GRAN TURISMO PG-13, 134 MINUTES OPENING WIDE FRIDAY, AUG. 25

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ACROSS

1 N.F.L. team with a logo of a bird’s head, for short

4 Tiring journey

8 Something you might pick up from a restaurant

13 Conjunction in a text

14 Jazz singer/pianist Krall

15 Experts

16 Online tabloid based in L.A.

17 Worth discussing, as an issue

19 Polo competitor

21 Cry with a fist pump

22 James who was played by Beyoncé in the biopic “Cadillac Records”

23 Crown cover

25 City on a gulf in either Europe or the U.S.

27 Light touches

28 Young person with uncommon wisdom, say

31 “What ___ Like” (Everlast hit)

32 Inter ___

33 Folder at work, perhaps

36 Chart topper, for short?

37 Snowbird or Steamboat

40 Lead-in to gender

42 Trim

44 Plane figures?

45 D-Day vehicle: Abbr.

46 Dwells

49 Princess in L. Frank Baum books

50 It comes before the main event

52 Fictional swinger

54 Sit down ungracefully

55 Q: “Did you hear about the cow that cried wolf?” A: “Fake ___!” (dad joke)

58 Warm beverage cover

59 Accommodation for a long train trip ... or a hint to entering a certain letter 14 times in this puzzle

62 A goose egg

64 Instrument played with a mezrab

65 Wipe

66 Número of African countries where español is an official language

67 Quick to start in, perhaps

4 Highball offer?

5 ___ Sunday

6 Six + cinq

7 Certain Palestinians

8 Acquire flavor, in a way

9 The “R” of the M.M.R. vaccine

10 Speak to the masses

11 Long-running comic whose main characters aren’t human

12 Like Magellan in 1519

14 “My man!”

18 Oscar-winning director Chloé

20 Chanted syllables

23 Greater than great

24 Hilarity, in an internet-y spelling

26 Deer stalkers

29 Truss who was Britain’s P.M. for 49 days

30 Slow to react, maybe

32 Peaceful quaker?

34 Classic 1934 novel written in the form of an autobiography

35 Worrisome

38 Inbound or outbound thing: Abbr.

39 Middle ___

41 Wawrinka of tennis

43 “Once again …”

47 Weigh station sight

48 Pressed

49 Spanish gold

50 Hop aboard?

51 Rappers, in a sense

53 Parcel unit

54 [Check this out!]

56 Man-eater

57 Turn into a PDF, perhaps

60 Ask some inappropriate questions

61 Knucklehead

63 “The devil’s lettuce”

Online subscriptions: Today’s puzzle and more than 9,000 past puzzles, nytimes.com/ crosswords ($39.95 a year).

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last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken o n SEPTEMBER 25th , 2023. It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashvil le Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

Joseph P. Day, Clerk Logan Chapel, Deputy Clerk

Date: July 26, 2023

Joseph Zanger Attorney for Plaintiff NSC 8/3, 8/10, 8/17, 8/24/23

nessee, therefore the ordi-

nary process of law cannot be served upon ANGELA

LEE HARPER It is ordered that said Defendant enter HER appearance herein with thirty (30) days after August 24th 2023, same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken o n SEPTEMBER 25th , 2023.

It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashvil le Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

Joseph P. Day, Clerk Logan Chapel Deputy Clerk Date: July 26, 2023

Joseph Zanger Attorney for Plaintiff NSC 8/3,

Illinois Tool Works, Inc. seeks Project Engineer to direct & coordinate research, design, development, & implementation of enhancements for products/processes. Reqs BS + 3 yrs exp. / MS +1 yrs exp. 10% tr’vl. Mail resumes to HR, ref: Project Engineer, to 31 Volunteer Drive, Hendersonville, TN 37075.

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Elevance Health, Inc. seeks Developer Advisor in Brentwood, TN to implement and maintain database security. Apply at www.jobpostingtoday.com ref #93785.

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