The Quintessential Music City Moment
“It’s a Music Row dive bar,” Jami Anderson explained to me over the phone, and as I step into Bobby’s Idle Hour Bar I see that she was not kidding about the inherent divey-ness of the place she chose for our meeting. From the scuffy carved piano against the wall to the yellow curtains on the window that turn the bright sunlight outside into the murky color of a nicotine stain, the place looks lived-in, to say the least.
The denizens of Bobby’s look pretty lived-in as well. These are weather-beaten men who have lived life hard (“This one time, the Secret Service arrested me for threatening Jimmy Carter”), love old-school country music (“Beethoven would have made it big a lot sooner if he had used a harmonica”), and wear cowboy hats with a casual ease which the younger wannabes in town—who wear their headgear about as conspicuously and uncomfortably as top-hats—would do well to emulate.
Faced with a cooler full of beer, I choose the sole exception: a vile bottled neon yellow “pineapple colada” concoction that somehow manages to taste like tropical cough syrup. A perfectly silent man in baseball cap flashes some mysterious signal to the bartender, who informs me that Ferris has covered my drink. It seems that I have stumbled into one of the last bastions of Southern male courtliness, where ladies never pay for their own drinks and the menfolk apologize for cursing in front of the gentler sex.
“Sorry I’m late.”
Jami breezes through the open doorway. She has paired her green cowboy boots with a pair of girlish pigtails, and wears her exquisitely bedazzled rose-patterned cowboy hat with both ease and aplomb. Ferris silently buys her a beer and she and I sit down to chat while the men huddle around the bar with some of their newly arrived cronies.
It turns out that Jami’s comfort level with authentic dive bars and country-western footwear is hardly uncharacteristic. Though the girl’s a transplant to Nashvegas, she seems to have an uncanny knack for bypassing pretentiousness and jumping headfirst into the kitschy yet very real essence of this town. Her very first visit to our fair metropolis is a great example of this rare talent: she worked at Hatch Show Print and stayed at the Drake Motel.
“I was good friends with Jim Sherraden,” she says of her gig at the legendary Hatch Show, as she plays with her beer bottle. “So I took a few weeks off from my normal job and came here to work for him. A voice in my head said ‘you need to move here.’ I was living out in the suburbs of Cincinnati on the Kentucky side and it was booooooring.”
I hear a guitar being tuned and realize that, as unlikely as it seems, the bartender has conjured an instrument from some dark corner behind the bar.
“[The Drake Motel] looked great online…” Jami continues ruefully. “I’ve always been attracted by motor courts with awesome neon signs. I was intrigued… stay where the stars stay. I still really want to know what stars have ever stayed there.”
As a graphic designer, Jami has managed to dip her toe into two of Nashville’s biggest industries. While she does a lot of design for the music industry (one of her CD designs was nominated for a Grammy in packaging in 2003), she only accepts work on albums she actually likes. “Packaging is just an expression of the music into something you can touch,” she muses, as the bartender puts down his guitar long enough to ask if we want another round (“It’s on Ferris, ladies”). “When I design someone’s CD, I listen to it over and over and over again.”
She’s also done work for Nashville’s colossal Christian publishing industry, and has actually designed Bibles for a local publishing house (including a duct-tape-cover prototype). “It’s actually a great medium to design for,” she insists, when I let out a sarcastic laugh. “When they’re aimed at a certain demographic, such as women or students, its fun to get into that demographic and really make something readable.”
By now, the guitar tune-up has turned into a full concert. The bartender is strumming his guitar and singing about sleepy hollows and cheating hearts with great emotion; several of the other men provide backup, while the Beethoven critic handily pulls a harmonica from his pocket and adds his contribution to the mix.
“Besides,” Jami says with a smile as she takes another sip of beer, “if I did the same thing everyday, I would bash my head against my computer screen.”
When we finally stand up to leave, the men are still entirely absorbed in their spontaneous music-making. It all makes sense, really, I think to myself with a chuckle. This woman obviously has her finger on the pulse of Nashville memes and—seriously—can you get more fucking Nashville than Bibles and country music? Ferris nods a silent farewell towards us from the melee at the bar, and I smile in his general direction, at once amused and absolutely in love with this quirky Music City that manages to live up to its name when you least expect it.
Originally published by the Nashville Edge, 2007-2008.
May 6, 2009 at 11:21 pm | writings | No comment