On a Saturday night in September, the Tennessee State Fair came to its grand finale in downtown Nashville.
The daylight hours brought a celebration of good old-fashioned American spectacle: the Truck and Tractor Throwdown, the BMX Bike Stunt Showcase, nightly wrestling matches, a hamburger eating contest, farm skill competitions and a petting zoo. One would be hard-pressed to find a fuller celebration of life around the Volunteer State, but among the funnel cake and pig races something large was missing: despite its host city being one of the world's eminent destinations for live music, the Tennessee State Fair featured no live music.
In almost any other place this would seem odd, but on that same Saturday night another, bigger deal was going down as the 25-venue large Next Big Nashville festival roared into action. The annual cavalcade of shows featured 250 artists from all levels of fame looking to make their mark among the esteemed alumni of Music City, and for five days music took over the city - although in reality music rules the city the other 360 days of the year as well. That these two events should run opposite each other almost doesn't make sense – how could a celebration of the state completely ignore the lifeblood of its political, economic and cultural capital? – but that's the thing about Nashville's relationship with its music: it's exactly what people expect, even when it tries not to be.
"It's a great city if you work in music," says songwriter/producer Brendan Nayman, "but it's really a bad place to be if want to play music. There's a lot of stages, but there's even more people trying to get on them." Like most of the Nashville music scene, Nayman is an import – in his case a 2005 transplant from Florida because, as he puts it, "there wasn't shit but heavy metal and techno in Florida." Nayman's passion was in playing his own country-infused brand of singer/songwriter music, and saw Nashville as his chance.
"The thing that sucks is that's what everyone does," he continues. "You work and work to get gigs, and so do all your friends because everyone here does music. Then after a year, all of a sudden you line something up – but so does your friend's brother's band for the same night. So no one comes to see you, and what can you do? Gigs are tough to come by with so much competition."
And Nayman makes a good point, as any of the city's countless musician-slash-somethings will tell you: despite the large number of people who live in Nashville, very few are actually from Nashville – of its 553,000 residents, only half were even born in Tennessee according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. And while there aren't any concrete numbers on what people move to Nashville for, it's hard to imagine the Caterpillar offices having the same appeal to newcomers as the lights along Broadway and the record companies up and down Music Row. But away from the Country Music Hall of Fame, the landmark saloons and the outskirt honky tonks, an unexpected truth presents itself: not everyone came here to play country.
"Oh yeah, we got some real hip-hop shit goin' down here," says rapper/free jazz poet Marshaun Campbell, who performs under the name Stylistick, "but brothers [are] reppin' way down into the Dirty [South]. Everyone [knows] that." Like Nayman, Campbell moved to Nashville from Florida, and despite pursuing different musical directions saw similar possibilities. "Any city with this many people's gonna have something going on," he explains. "New York wasn't my sound, and you gotta think: How am I gonna pay the rent while I get this thing off the ground? People want to talk about the Dirty, but Atlanta's almost over where hip-hop goes and there's not much happening in 'Bama or Memphis lately, and shit, New Orleans? Not yet for that. Not yet."
And also like Nayman, Campbell says the level of competition makes him a better performer but also forces him to work harder – sometimes too much. "That's something everyone runs into 'round here, you know? You walk around the hood, you got brothers rapping on the corner, selling mixes, freestyling and beat-boxing. You walk around downtown, you got white boys playing Johnny Cash songs on the corner," he says with a laugh. "People just wanna play what they got inside, you know?"
But, Campbell adds, any aspiring hip-hop artists looking to Nashville should know the city really only offers two hip-hop friendly clubs: Twelfth and Porter, and Café Coco. "This is some of the finest studios, smartest engineers and best live musicians in the world," he says, "and you can make something beautiful here. But it's just like the subtle message is 'keep that shit in the ghetto.' I play guitar so I do some live playing with blues groups, but if I want to rap on stage? Got to drive my ass to Memphis for that."
In fact, while Campbell says he does shows in Memphis a few times a year, metal guitarist turned country promoter Jon Saunders took the exact opposite route. In 2006, Saunders' band, Pitchdevil, was gathering steam in the small-but-supportive Memphis metal scene but liked the appeal of immersing itself a city that was non-stop music.
"It was either we move to Nashville or we move to Austin," Saunders explains. "This seemed like the better idea because if we fell on our face, we weren't that far from home." Saunders says his band lasted "about six months" in Nashville, until their frustrations over the lack of suitable (and available) local gigs led to the band's dissolution. "There really wasn't, in our experience anyway, much in the way of venues that would book us," he says. "I don't know if it was because of the type of music we played or what, but it was just depressing. We'd worked so hard, and we could still get gigs playing for a few hundred people in Atlanta or Chicago or even back in Memphis, but here in town we were getting invited to play lunch hour at some barbecue shack. It really messed with us."
He points to the staggering number of venues around town, then explains just who's playing them: "Country singers. It'll sound weird, but tourism plays a lot into it. This city gets a lot of visitors each year, and there's a certain expectation people have of what they're getting. Old ladies from Illinois and Indiana who come here looking for the Opry don't want a band like mine yelling at them about how awesome Satan is. Every promoter in this town knows this, and they know there's a wealth of gospel and country talent here, so they have the easiest job in the world. Hell, that's how I became a promoter."
Pitchdevil went on hiatus in early 2007, but Saunders says his second career as a concert and party promoter will eventually fund his band's proper debut album. "It's weird," he says, "I don't really like the kind of music I'm helping to get booked, but there's just so much of it here. You almost can't help but be affected by it somehow."
