They Call It Music City, Allegedly

My original idea this week was to go to my Grain Elevator and Processing Society (GEAPS) committee meeting, which was today in Kansas City, and call it a week for business travel, away from home for only one night. (I'm on the Educational Programming Committee, the main function of which is to put together the program for the annual GEAPS convention. For readers who are familiar with science-fiction conventions, EPC is the con com for GEAPS Exchange, which is next Feb. 24-27 in Grapevine, TX.)

My boss, Mark, had a different idea. Without bothering to consult with my or my schedule, he booked me to attend a two-day workshop on ethanol and biodiesel for another one of our publications, Biofuels Journal, to fill in for Susan, that publication's editor. The workshop was Tuesday and Wednesday, in Nashville, TN. This was particularly nasty scheduling, since the workshop would be over at 5 p.m. Wednesday, and I would then have to drive the company car eight hours to Kansas City, getting in well after midnight for a round of EPC meetings that would get underway over breakfast at 6:30 a.m. They don't even do that to interns during their medical residency, or at least, not all that much.

Mark knows that I like to travel, but there are limits. So I sat down with Susan, and the two of us worked out a compromise, in which I would attend the Biofuels Workshop one day only on Tuesday, visit a couple of grain elevators in Tennessee and Kentucky on Wednesday morning, and then drive to Kansas City and arrive at a reasonable hour, which I define as before Hereford House closes, which is one of the finest steakhouses in the United States and a regular hangout of mine when I'm in Kansas City, which is several times a year.

But I'd still have to do two nights in Nashville, and away from my sweetheart on Samhain on top of that. Nashville has never been one of my favorite cities. To get an inkling of why, rent the Robert Altman movie of the same name.

I've never much cared for country music. At best, the music is boring and uninteresting. Should some unfortunate country music composer were ever to slip, say, a fourth chord into a song, country music fans tend to rise up in anger and accuse the hapless songwriter of gettin' all high-falutin and puttin' on fancy-pants airs. Next thing you know, he'll be sipping pina coladas in Miami Beach with supermodels. Vegetarian supermodels! And it gets worse -- he may even start reading books!

The fact that country music seems to have become the official soundtrack of Nazi-Occupied Amerika makes me like it even less. A whole lot less.

Nevertheless, Nashville has become an ever-more popular spot for business meetings, and if you're involved in agribusiness, it's especially so. So I've had to spend my share of time in Nashville, and after a while, I started to find more places in the city suited to my tastes. You have to look for these places -- they're not so obvious as as the places with big cowboy hats and git-tars with five or six tour buses parked out front, but they're around for you if you want to put in the effort to find them.

I left my office in Decatur, IL around 12:30 p.m. Monday. That helped mitigate what often is the worst day of the year for me -- the first Monday after daylight savings time ends. Something about having it get dark before you leave work is either heinous or egregious, your pick. This way, I got to view some scenery, and the early dark wasn't so bad. You don't often get to view scenery at a time of year when you're commuting in the dark, not that Illinois has any scenery to speak of.

The drive wasn't bad, actually. Traffic on I-57 on the heavily-traveled stretch from Mt. Vernon, IL to the I-24 exit wasn't as heinous as usual, and fall colors were still peaking from around Mt. Vernon all the way to Nashville. I got to see a fair amount of them before night fell.

The Biofuels Workshop was being held at the Opryland Resort -- the world famous one off Briley Parkway. It's a fabulously luxurious place, if you can ignore the country muzak constantly blaring over the loudspeakers everywhere you go, like Big Brother's broadcasts in Oceania. (I've never actually stayed there, so I don't know if they pump that stuff into the rooms or not. I bet they do.) Rooms also cost $300 plus a night, so that was a little too pricey for my company, especially given my taste in meals.

So in setting up the trip, I went to bigbook.com and found a Super 8 about four miles away on Dickerson Pike. Now the thing about hotel chains is that they each have a certain range in quality from one franchise unit to the next, and Super 8 is no exception to that rule. This particular Super 8 on Dickerson Pike in Nashville was definitely on the low end of the range. My room on the second floor was recognizeably a Super 8 room, but it was missing some stuff you typically find in this chain. Like a foldout stand where I could put my suitcase, so I wouldn't have to put it on the floor.. Or an iron and ironing board so I could make my shirts look presentable for my meetings the next day.

I called down to the front desk to see if I could get an ironing board. The phone rang and rang, an no one picked up. After the better part of half an hour, I decided to go down to the front desk to see if I could find anyone. As soon as I shut the door to my room, I realized I had locked my key inside. So I definitely needed to find someone.

The lobby was abandoned. A sign on the checkin desk said to use the house phone to dial zero to fetch a clerk. I tried that, and the phone range 30 or 40 times. There was a bell on the counter, and I figured, damn rudeness -- leaving a guest abandoned and locked out of his room was even ruder, so I pounded on the bell for a while. Nothing.

I had my cell phone with me, so I called Verizon directory assistance and got the 800 number for national Super 8 customer service. At the national office, all they could do was the same thing I had been doing. The hotel phone rang for about 10 minutes, with no response.

At this point, I was beginning to get concerned. What if a burglar was threatening a guest somewhere in the motel? What if a guest had a medical emergency? I seriously considered pulling the fire alarm. Before doing that, I decided to go through the four floors of the motel and see if I could find anyone.

Up on the third floor, my shouts of "Anyone home?" finally got a response from some 12 year old boy who came out of one of the end rooms. Turns out, the woman who checked me in was the manager, and he was her son -- they lived in a small apartment in the hotel. He ran off to see if he could find Mom, and I went back to the lobby.

The manager finally came down on the elevator and apologized, saying that she was the only one there and had been cleaning some rooms out of signal range of her portable phone. I finally got back to my room with an iron and ironing board in hand.

All of which goes to say that if you're going to be visiting Nashville and want to stay at a Super 8, there are several other locations in the metro area, most of which are likely to provide you with better service than the one on Dickerson Pike.

At this point, about the only thing that would salvage my evening would be a good restaurant meal, and here at least, Nashville offered a lot of options. I pulled our the yellow pages and selected a place at random, coming up with a place on West End Avenue called Valentino's Ristorante. I guessed from the address, west of downtown near Vanderbilt University, that the place would be fairly upscale. For all of its hick bravado, there actually is quite a lot of money in Nashville (almost none of which goes to the artists, which may explain why so much mainstream country music is so morose and bitter).

I consulted my street map and drove over there. It was a little place on the backside of a Marriott Courtyard Inn. A sign out in front of the restaurant said valet parking only, so I drove around a couple of blocks until I could find a spot on the street

I hit the gourmet jackpot. Valentino's turned out to be a very upscale Italian place, with a northern Italian menu. I started with a warm spinach salad in a spicy tomato vinaigrette, with sliced mushrooms, hard boiled eggs, and big bits of crumbled gorgonzola cheese. About the time I decided to get the recipe from the chef, out came the entree, a pair of pork tenderloins on a bed of mushroom risotto, topped with sliced porcini mushrooms and big shavings of parmesan. The first bite was like an orgasm on my tongue.

If you're in Nashville, Da Zedman sez check out Valentino's Ristorante. Take a shitload of money with you.

This blog isn't really for work-related stuff, so I won't bore you with a lot of detail about the BBI Biofuels Workshop at the Opryland Resort. Suffice to say that I had trouble finding anywhere where the country muzak was quiet enough for me to call my office or Penny and actually hear them on the other end of the line. They did turn it down in the room where the educational program was going on -- a little.

This was Oct. 31, and I had checked on Witchvox.com to see if anyone was doing a public Samhain ritual in the Nashville area. The calendar of events listed a public circle being run by a student group at Middle Tennessee State University in a little town called Murfreesboro, about 25 miles southeast of Nashville. The event was supposed to start at 10 p.m. on a grassy hilltop on the univesity campus.

I'd given the event some serious consideration. However, there were no directions to the site, and trying to find a hilltop in an unfamiliar campus in an unfamiliar town after dark placed two strikes against the notion of going. Strike three was a forecast for rain, possibly heavy. I decided to do something else for the night.

I drove out into the burbs and found an Outback Steakhouse for dinner. My normal policy on business trips is not to do chain restaurants. But in this case I made an exception -- living as I do with a vegetarian makes Outback positively exotic.

Then I drove downtown, found a parking spot on Second Street -- the big touristy section downtown -- and made my way down the street to B.B. King's Blues Lounge.

Of course, the original B.B. King's, owned and named after the blues legend, is two hours away in Memphis, but this would do nicely. With the heavy concentration of professional musicians in Nashville, it isn't all that hard to find genres of music other than country, if you know where to look.

I found this branch about a year and a half ago when I was in Nashville for the International Association of Operative Millers convention. Our Milling Journal editor had quit on us, so as the flour milling magazine's original editor, I took over the job until we could find a sufficiently competent and loyal replacement, which meant I was stuck having to go to the IAOM event. That wasn't so bad, really, except that Milling Journal was one of about two dozen sponsors of the annual "Allied Trades event," which that year was at a Second Street establishment called Wild Horse Saloon. Which turned out to be a world-famous establishment, which of course, I didn't know about until then because I avoid the country music scene like I avoid syphillis.

The event was supposed to be a buffet and dancing, and I pretty much figured there would be country music. My company's contingent walked down there from the convention center. Wild Horse turned out to be a very large club with odd decor, big plaster buck-toothed horses in cowboy hats swilling beer and the like. There was a large dance floor and a big wraparound balcony up on the second floor, where the buffet was served. The food was reasonably okay, and I was getting free drinks, which are the best kind.

Then the line dancing lessons started.

I'd heard the term before, and I was pretty sure that it was connected to country music, and I was pretty sure that it was something I didn't want to do. My instincts were correct.

There was a stage at one end of the dance floor, and the curtain opened to reveal a DJ behind his turntable setup and this woman decked out in country music style with cowboy hat, jeans, and boots, and she started exhorting people to come out onto the dance floor and line up. People lined up in these long straight lines, like kids coming in from recess at the Catholic grade schools of my youth. The woman started teaching them these dance steps, which apparently were performed in unison, without partners. After a while, as the dance floor filled up, it reminded me of nothing so much as those big mass stadium exercises with hundreds or thousands that are performed for Dear Leader Kim Jong Il in North Korea, in order to show that collective beehive behavior is superior to decadent capitalist individualism. It was the stuff of a libertarian's nightmares.

I swear, at one point, the woman shouted out, "ONLY FAGGOTS REFUSE TO LINE DANCE!"

"Better get out there," Pub lisher Mark said to me.

I shot him a filthy look. And I sat up on the second floor balcony, drinking merlot and watching this display below me for about as long as I could stand it. Finally, I excused myself and told Mark I would be cabbing back to our hotel.

I got myself out of the Wild Horse as quickly as possible and turned north on Second Street. After a few steps, I spotted a very familiar sign. I'd been to B.B. King's on Beale Street in Memphis a number of times and never failed to have a good time there. So this blues outpost was like a sanctuary in a honkytonk wilderness.

Back in February of this year, GEAPS Exchange was also in Nashville, and wouldn't you know it? There was a special event at the Wild Horse, and Grain Journal was once again one of the sponsors. This time, though, I knew exactly what to do.

This Halloween night, with about half of the people on the street in costume, seemed like a very good time for some blues. Actually, it wasn't quite that. They had a band called the Soul Searchers -- six instrumentalists and a male and female vocalists -- and they specialized in performing Motown stuff from the 1960s and early 1970s. And they didn't do half bad, either, considering that everyone in the band except the female vocalist was white. I sat back, sipped my wine, admired the paintings of blues greats on the walls, and enjoyed the music for the rest of the evening.

Da Zedman sez check out B.B. King's Blues Lounge, either in Nashville or Memphis. He also sez check out Wild Horse Saloon, believe it or not, but only if you have a strong stomach and really, really, really like line dancing. Blessed Be.