Boomtown Showdown

[This blog post specially for Nick Murphy.]

Nashville is booming. There are cranes everywhere. Renewal is all around. Research says the hotels are more expensive than NYC. Apartment rents are sky-high. (Allegedly the largest U.S. city without a long-distance passenger railroad connection.) If America is making a comeback it is happening here.

Up early in Toronto on a snowy Christmas morning. Catch the blue night bus right outside our apartment, 06:48 direct to Pearson Airport, $1.95 seniors ticket. In about 30 minutes we are at check-in. Through U.S. Passport check with minimum hassle. Both flight and customs procedures now semi-automated. Long walk to gate A6e.
We board Westjet flight WS360 for Nashville. The Bombardier Q400 Nextgen aircraft is full. Depart 09:45, fifteen minutes late. A jolly Christmas mood prevails. We leave the white Christmas of Toronto behind. Sipping two Canadian Molson beers on the flight.
Arrive Nashville airport, the Gibson guitars are still in their display cases, just as I remembered them. Catch Jarmon shuttle bus to hotel - $55 return for two people. Dave, the driver, is not on his normal run to Kentucky, picking up soldier boys from Fort Campbell. We arrive at the Fairfield Inn and Suites by Marriot, Nashville Downtown/The Gulch, 901 Division Street, Nashville, TN. High of 73°F.
We walk downtown via the Broadway. Everywhere is closed. We catch the free bus which goes all round the town. The driver is plagued by down-and-outs. We hop off at The Gulch, declining a four-course Christmas lunch at the Marsh House, $72 per head. It begins to look like McDonald's! One last throw of the dice and we head for the Union Station Hotel, where we luck out, lunching at the bar in the fabulous foyer. Smoked Gouda Pimento Cheese, Spinach Salad and Grilled Chicken Sandwich, $36.14 plus tip. Back at McDonald's we buy some milk.
After time out, we head for the Station Inn for some old-timey live bluegrass music. No entry charge on Xmas night for the jam session. Drinking $4 Yuengling beers from Pottsville, Pennsylvania, $12 pizza to share. Short walk back to hotel.
26th: Walkabout in The Gulch: checking out Arnold's Country Kitchen, Carter Vintage Guitars, Downtown Antiques. Walk via Rosa L. Parks Boulevard to the Tenncare Building (former Bureau of Medicaid), an old government building now sadly being demolished. Nearby is the Hilton Homestead Suites, where Billy Ray Cyrus rents studio space. We backtrack to Tin Cup Coffee in the Horton Building, 136 Rosa L. Parks Boulevard. A trip to the Tourist Information Visitor Centre is followed by a pleasant lunch at Wild Wasabi, Cummins Station, with the Dunn family.
We check out a used bookstore where I purchase: "The Last Lap - The Life and Times of NASCAR's Legendary Heroes" by Peter Golenbock, 1998 hardback, well sold at $15. A couple of howlers in the book - he can't spell Carroll Shelby (error repeated in the index) or Dick Hutcherson (he becomes Hutchinson in photo captions). Golenbock relies too heavily on interviews without supporting research. He does however detect the rigged nature of NASCAR racing, which tarnishes their back story. The author is not a car guy in any real sense. Overall a potboiler.
Supper at City Fire, 610 12th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37203: shrimp and grits, followed by Apple Crisp, Chocolate Bread Pudding à la mode, Yuengling beer, $71.08 including tip. We ask our server, Meshach Jackson, a test question: what is the difference between a mandolin and a dobro? His detailed reply gives away the fact that he is a musician and songwriter, as we suspected.
27th: Walk to Belmont Mansion, 1900 Belmont Boulevard, Nashville, TN 37212, via Music Row, Vanderbilt University. We take coffee at Provence Breads & Cafe, 1705 21st Ave S, Nashville, TN 37212. We blunder into Bookman-Bookwoman, 1713 21st Ave S, Nashville, TN 37212, next door and already on our to-do list. We discover it is closing after 21 years. Annette scores eight paperback books for $8 (valued at $64).
After Belmont Mansion tour, $12 each, we take #17 bus along 12th Avenue South to Division Street. Subway takeaway lunch.
Evening walk to Bridgestone Arena where the Nashville Predators are playing the Minnesota Wild in the NHL. The Preds lose 2-3 in sudden death overtime. Also present: Peter Frampton; Vince Gill (singing backup with the Gypsy Rose covers band). $10 Stella beers, ouch! They insist on checking my ID - the second time I say: "I'm still 65!" Politically correct lawyers gone mad.
28th: Tour of the Downtown Antique market, next to the railroad tracks. Early lunch at Arnold's Country Kitchen, 605 8th Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37203. They say you can't have have fast, cheap and good. Wrong. Arnold's has southern food to die for! Fried catfish, baked squash, stewed okra and black eyed peas. Get there early to beat the crowds.
We catch the free green bus to Walgreen's, where we score half-price Walker's shortbread biscuits among the Xmas remainders. I send a solitary postcard from the Post Office in the old arcade. We avoid the George Jones and Johnny Cash museums. Supper at Otaku Ramen in the Gulch: Veggie Miso, Donburi Hot Chicken fusion.
29th: Breakfast at Slow Hand Coffee, 300A 10th Ave South, Nashville: coffee and "Basic Biscuit," a zesty cheddar scone. Two buses to the Piggly Wiggly at Dickerson and Cleveland, 85 cents for seniors. This is Food Stamp country. A sign on the door says: "Free ride in a police car for shoplifters." "Take on Me" by A-ha is playing. Carroll Shelby turns up again with his own-brand Chili. I note the food carts are all from Home Depot.
We take the bus back to town and walk some distance to Marathon Village, an old factory that is home-from-home to the American Pickers TV show, spotted from a distance by the old water tower. Lunch at The Frist Museum, BBQ pork sandwich, good value for two at $21.08 plus tip. Taxi back to hotel - we have walked far enough.
30th: We have been wondering where folks in The Gulch get their groceries, when we spot Turnip Truck, hawking "Urban Fare." We take the #5 bus to the Piggly Wiggly at 2900 West End Ave. Annette is thrilled with a Piggly Wiggly souvenir shopping bag at $1.99. You can't beat a good groceteria. We walk on to The Parthenon, a giant replica of the real thing, in a park. Why bother to go all the way to Athens when you have a facsimile right there in Nashville, which is in much better shape and devoid of panhandlers? Tee shirt: "Hard work beats talent, when talent doesn't work hard."
Rite-Aid is beckoning with the never-ending quest for Goldenberg's Peanut Chews. "Chewing it old school." We are relieved to find Philly's finest at $1 a pack of eleven. Across the street to Barnes and Noble bookstore. Half price diary at $5, made by Gallery Leather, 27 Industrial Way, Trenton, Maine 04605. I feel I have made a small contribution to keeping Americans in employment. I also buy the book "Enduring Courage: Ace Pilot Eddie Rickenbacker and the Dawn of the Age of Speed" by John F. Ross, remaindered at $6.98.
We walk back to the Gulch via Vanderbilt University, where the Robin has set up home for the winter on the lawns. I've never seen so many. We lunch at Sambuca, a cavernous bar: soup followed by fish and chips, grilled polenta, $30.24 plus tip.
In the evening we walk to the Lower Broadway for the Franklin American Mortgage Music City Bowl "Downtown Showdown." The Nashville Volunteers, (the Vols, UofT football), have defeated the Nebraska Huskers, 38-24, at the Nissan Stadium. The crowds are streaming across the bridge over the Cumberland River to celebrate on the Broadway, Nashville's honky-tonk heaven. $6 cans of beer are on sale from stalls, no ID check, no problem drinking outdoors.
To get the party started we have the band Locash, low-rent rockers, who feature songs about trucks and getting drunk. After some redneck buffoonery - "Hey bubba, why are you wearing sunglasses in the dark?" - we head for the warmth of the bar at the Westin Hotel for supper and a Yazoo beer, $48.18 plus tip.
31st: Next morning it it all going too well as the Jarmon bus picks us up at the hotel at 08:30. At the airport I realise I have lost my notebook for the trip. A frantic search for the bus and I can see my book through the window. We locate the lady driver who unlocks the bus and my sanity is restored. A lucky save. Turns out our flight is delayed so we are treated to another rendition of "Frosty the Snowman." Don't rock the jukebox.

Make no little plans

Took the Porter flight from Toronto City Centre Airport to Midway, Chicago. Rode the Orange Line train to Roosevelt on the loop and walked to our hotel. Tickets $2.25 each. Walked to State Street and scored a history book about Butte, Montana for 25 cents, in the discarded section of Chicago Public Library. Early supper at the Artist's Snack Shop at the Fine Arts Building on South Michigan Avenue. Formerly Studebaker carriage showroom and workshops. Tea and carrot cake while watching the Gatornationals drag racing from Florida on TV. Pic by ALT.

An Appeal to Reason - A Cool Look at Global Warming

In this book Nigel Lawson, the former British Chancellor, systematically demolishes the bunk that passes for the "science" of global warming. He rightly points out that the emissions cuts in the UK are an expensive folly, a cost today with no benefit for succeeding generations. All done because of Blairite views on morality and ethics, the same ones that brought us the dodgy dossier and the Iraq war.
Lawson has done us all a great favour in exposing the sham for what it is. As he points out no British publisher would touch his book which he says he was able to write only as his public career is over and he no longer seeks employment. Many thanks to The Overlook Press of Woodstock, New York for righting the wrong. The greatest danger he points to is that scientists who are sceptical about the United Nations and its fell works are denied access to funding. This is science as religion which plans to snuff out academic freedom. After all the argument is "settled." Not while Lawson is around it isn't - as he says "that is no excuse for abandoning reason."
Lawson pokes fun at Al Gore, the man who invented the internet, as he invented most of the scenes in the film An Inconvenient Truth. Actually the truth is inconvenient as it does not support the doomsday cultists who say the end of the world is nigh. Here in cold Canada we would be glad of a bit of global warming! Bring on the northwest passage.
Any contrarian should read this book. It is a tonic for those spoonfed the pap from politicians and gullible journalists. Only 106 pages long and heavily footnoted, Lawson nails the flabby thinking, particularly the reliance on computer modelling, and the liberal guilt of the west.
Lawson opens with a quote: "There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted." (Schopenhauer, Die Kunst Recht zu Behalten.) I have a shorter saying: "There is nothing so stupid that it won't happen."

Crashed and Byrned

"Crashed and Byrned" is a good read but not a great book. Recommended to me by Ian Titchmarsh, the racing commentator, over dinner in Macau, it is written for a general audience. About the career of racing driver Tommy Byrne, it didn't quite live up to its billing. The book is maddeningly lightweight if you are a petrolhead. There is a clue on the cover - the strapline being "The Greatest Racing Driver You Never Saw" which of course is nonsense. I well remember seeing Tommy comfortably winning the F3 race at the British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch in 1982.
Written by Tommy Byrne, with journalist Mark Hughes, it tells of the rise and rapid decline of Byrne, one of the many nearly-men of Formula One racing. His self destructive streak turned a sublime talent into the life of a born loser; only redeemed later when he calmed down. The book makes the case that he was a match for the great Ayrton Senna Da Silva. We shall never know.
There is more than a taste of sour grapes as we rifle through his back pages. The crowning achievement of his career was a stellar F1 test at Silverstone in 1982 for the McLaren team when he was clearly fastest in a 'doctored' car. Ron Dennis, the McLaren boss, could have 'made' Tommy Byrne, but was unimpressed. Dennis himself was dismissed by the F1 snobs as an 'oily rag,' a former mechanic above his station. Perhaps because of this he was the last person likely to be impressed by Byrne, a self-confessed 'tea-leaf' given to drinking, snorting, fighting and debauching. The book is full of scatological language which suddenly seems completely out of fashion.
Byrne is not the sympathetic character he, and his collaborator Hughes, would have you believe. In the words of Paul McCartney: "You took your lucky break and broke it in two." Going to the F3 awards ceremony stoned out of your mind was not the greatest career move, when F1 racing was turning all corporate.
Signing a three-year contract with the Theodore F1 team, against the advice of Ron Dennis, was cited as the start of the spiral. Yet Keke Rosberg drove for the team, winning the International Trophy race in the wet at Silverstone in 1978, and went on to an F1 World Championship with Williams. Racing is often about making the most of the opportunities that come your way. Ayrton Senna won the Macau Grand Prix for Theodore 'Teddy' Yip in 1983, yet Yip is dismissed in the book as a two-dimensional character. Real life is never that simple.
There are interesting insights into Byrne's early career - for example how the various Van Diemen drivers avoided competing against each other to share the spoils. This points to races, and championships, being fixed and only diminishes Tommy Byrne's Curriculum Vitae.

There are mistakes in the book:
Page 175 "Terry Borscheller" should read "Terry Borcheller"
Page 176 refers to a "Nacho" who is an unidentified character, presumably an editing error.

The book is short at 200 pages and easily read at one sitting. There are eight empty pages at the end of the paperback edition which could have been usefully filled with an index. There are no photographs or driver history. A cheap and cheerful production.

Barrow boy far from home

Last week-end we were sampling Chilean empanadas in Kensington market here in Hogtown. I stopped at a street stall which had two railway books. The guy asked six dollars so I offered him five - he said toss a coin for it and I lost! He said: "My dad was a 'barrow boy' in Manchester" and we shook hands. I hadn't heard that expression for a while - nor 'knocker boy' for that matter - a 'wide boy' who'd knock the front door and offer to buy household antiques on the cheap.
The books I got are "Canadian Pacific" by J. Lorne McDougall and "Then Came the Railroads" by Ira G. Clark. Annette bought a Carlton Ware Foxglove jug for $2 - deal.

Notes from Hazzard County

Up on a lovely sunny day in Nashville and we rented a car and headed south to the Lane Car Museum - not open but worth returning today. A Tatra was parked outside. The out-of-town motels were advertising $30 per night, $150 per week. We drove on to Opryland where we stopped at Opry Mills for the shops - Barnes & Noble bookstore being largely empty so we supped a large tea while discussing our purchases. I bought "How Nashville became Music City USA" by Michael Kosser which has a CD included of some rare cuts. Annette was thrilled to find a book by Alexander McCall Smith at $13, which would be $20 for sure back in Hogtown.
We flunked a trip to the Opryland proper, a huge building complex, as there were signs saying $16 just to park the car. We had lunch at Bob Evans, a chain familiar to us from a previous tour. Nearby was Cooter's Dukes of Hazzard Museum with the General Lee parked out front.
Heading back into town we stopped at the Piggly Wiggly to stock up on grits - hard to find outside the south. This small supermarket was full of Piggly Wiggliness! Can't beat a good groceteria.
Back in the city we stopped at the Tennessee State Museum. $9 to park the car for an hour and the inevitable rushed visit. I focused on the Civil War exhibits. After a time out we were back at Christopher Pizza in time to catch the set of Damien Horne, a singer recently in Africa with Kenny Alphin of Big & Rich - can't get away from those guys. His sidekick was Chris Patterson who proved an able rhythm section with a drumbox, which he sat on, and a few handheld gizmos.
Back at the hotel a no-name comedy band with a touch of Skynyrd played to an audience of two - us - with such gems as "How you look naked in the waterbed", "I'm in love with my blind, blind date", and "It might be cheaper to keep her." From the sublime to the ridiculous. Reminded me of "I've got friends in low places."

Country Boy

My good friend Derek Watts has written a book about Albert Lee. Check Albert out on You Tube.

Moonshine and motors

You can't go to North Carolina without encountering NASCAR and moonshine. At least if you are lucky. Heading down the Blue Ridge Parkway I felt compelled to divert to North Wilkesboro, home to a fabled old NASCAR track. I don't come from Dixie but I've heard of the magic. We stop and ask a guy driving a beer truck how to get there - he knows exactly where to go which is fitting.
Wilkes County equals 'shine country. The former capital of bootleg whisky. We head out to the shuttered North Wilkesboro Speedway, meeting Paul Call who has been minding the place since it lost the Winston Cup dates back in 1996. Life hasn't been kind to the Speedway since. Grass is growing up through the track, NASCAR has turned its back.
All the NASCAR old-timers are grieving that it should be this way. Big money talks while the exploits of Junior Johnson fade into the past. We carry on to Kannapolis, home of the Earnhardt clan. We bump into Guy Furr over lunch who hands me a business card saying "retired bootlegger." He spent his youth running whisky from the mountains to the piedmont. We agree to meet next day where he kindly gives me a book entitled "Return to Thunder Road" and a DVD about the bootleg days, which establishes the connection between bootleg whisky and the early days of NASCAR.
Later in the tour we are at "The Rock" - North Carolina Speedway at Rockingham - a more modern facility which is still facing the kiss of death. NASCAR has carelessly discarded the past. The future is thereby cheapened.