Music Row Is Dying
How can you write about Nashville without writing in cliché? Everything in the town is shaped like a guitar. Or a guitar pick. Or a music note. Blake Shelton’s booming voice blasts over the airport PA system when you land, promising The Real Country Music Experience. Guaranteeing it in a false bonhomie that sounds vaguely threatening. Trudging past bedazzled cowboy boots marked up to highway robbery prices, Music City Welcomes You over and over until you’re curbside. I’d had three bourbons on the plane. I didn’t want music, I wanted a bed. Some peace and fucking quiet.
The strip of Broadway called “Music Row” has changed, and not for the better. Fast disappearing are the venerable haunts of the old days, narrow honky-tonks with a stage crammed next to the door and a long line of thirsty drinkers bellied up to the bar, bodies twisted to watch the pickers and crooners howling twang into their microphones. In their place, more and more, are polished, spacious cathedrals to capitalism, each named after a country superstar who has agreed to be marketed as a guarantor of that Real Country Music Experience. Blake has one, Ole Red, two doors down from Miranda Lambert’s Casa Rosa. Jason Aldean’s stands shoulder to shoulder with Garth Brooks’ cavernous new nightclub for wannabe cowboys. Each one isn’t so much a watering hole as it is an industrial distribution system for cheap beer made expensive by the brand name, because these are brands first and artists second, etched in matte grey metal over the bar. They’re cold and corporate milking machines designed specifically for the bachelorette party crowd, Disneyfied reproductions of the old sawdust-and-Shiner Bock dumps that clung to your feet with stickiness as you elbowed your way through the crowd.
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Six years earlier, clad in sequins and black lace-up boots and a dirty blonde dye job, Chelsea Field took to the sidewalk stage at 301 Broadway to warm up the passing crowd for the bro country superstar Luke Bryan. The two were on site to promote the opening of Luke’s 32 Bridge Food+Drink (the ampersand having long ago fallen out of fashion in the world of the gastro pub), riding the wave of country music celebrity that comes with twenty-one number one songs on the Country Airplay chart and apparently pairs so elegantly with Chickpea Bruschetta, Beer Can Chicken, and a Knockin’ Boots cocktail topped with a floater of Rum Chata. For those doing the math at home, all those number ones belong to Luke Bryan. The building, and restaurant, and tens of millions of dollars’ worth of real estate up and down Music Row, belong to the T.C. Restaurant Group. And the T.C. Restaurant Group belongs to the Field-Hesler family, headed by the twin brothers and convicted felons Joel “Joe” and Jon Field, and Joe’s son-in-law Adam Hesler, Chelsea Field’s husband.
Field was originally signed to Moxy Records as the label’s first ever artist, housed at 305 Broadway, a building later purchased by her husband for $32 million. Little remains of her music career, aside from a few press releases with no pickup and a link to her artist Myspace page, the ultimate enduring testament to dust bunny irrelevance. Her debut single, “Things I Should’ve Said," was not a success.
T.C. has been nothing but. Crammed along Lower Broadway, or LoBro as it’s known to the bachelor party guides and no one else, is a slot machine succession of “concept” bro-bars and unthreatening, antiseptic establishments such as WannaB’s Karaoke (“an immersive, interactive musical experience” appealing to “everyone from the most seasoned singer to the shower yodeler”), recently christened a honky-tonk empire by the Nashville Business Journal. Each multimillion-dollar monstrosity has been blessed by the Nashville City Council, with one councilman calling the T.C. Restaurant Group “a really, really good partner in everything going on downtown.” Conveniently, the Field brothers no longer have an ownership stake in the company; Joe Field sold his stake to his son-in-law two years before pleading guilty to tax-related felonies. Tennessee law forbids anyone convicted of a felony in the previous ten years from owning more than 5 percent of a restaurant with a liquor license.
The Field brother’s past, which the Business Journal detailed extensively in an examination of fraud, prison time, and embezzlement to pay for a race car team sponsorship and, yes, a country music career, seems all but forgiven and forgotten. Both twins still work for the hospitality group. So does Chelsea Field. Each year, it seems, a new multi-story nightclub – many under the T.C. umbrella – rears its ugly head in Nashville, another bar+kitchen with eight-dollar longnecks and it’s a Nashville thing, y’all t-shirts for sale next to the Fireball slushee dispenser.
Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville opened on Lower Broadway in 2010, the original urban pioneer in the art of selling a slice of twangy Gulf Coast to Ohioans stopping in Tennessee on their way to Orlando. Less than a decade after opening, Margaritaville’s Nashville location topped $12 million in revenue, an eye popping 1,000 percent increase from its first year in business.
Buffett passed away in 2023. That same year, the Margaritaville business grossed $2.2 billion in global revenue. Camp Margaritaville is a brand of RV resorts under the busted flip flop conglomerate, thriving alongside boutique hotels, mass-market lodging, and all-inclusive resorts. Margaritaville Hotel Nashville opened in 2019. “We don’t have to create a lifestyle; we have a lifestyle,” declared Margaritaville president of development Jim Wiseman earlier this year.
Merle Haggard once made millions playing the Workin’ Man Blues. Charley Pride’s In a Mississippi Cotton Pickin’ Town helped turn him into the first black country superstar. Cashing checks singing about being broke, or going broke, helped turn more than one streetcorner guitar strummer into a redneck millionaire. Jimmy Buffet made a billion-dollar fortune convincing fans that he would be just as happy broke. Parrotheads believed that he meant what he said. Blake Shelton, Mister Chappin' our ass 'cause we can't afford Charmin, really, really doesn’t.
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I’m halfway to drunk again without even trying. Scowling at the changing street like some horribly pompous self-appointed protector of the old ways, in a town I barely know on a street I’ve never seen sober. Another shot of Crown doesn’t help. Another beer doesn’t either. Both sit fat inside my belt, pushing against my enormous Budweiser belt buckle, the King of Beers holding back my growing gut. My companion hates country, doesn’t like the South, and joins me in my sneering. He’s really leaning into his coastal elitism. I fucking hate country music in a stage whisper has me roaring. It pairs just right with my belly full of bad beer and good whiskey and my disdain for the frigid redneck discotheques shoved so rudely along a street being robbed of its rancid beauty.
The next bar is one of the old ones, the band is loud, and my fellow drinker and disdainer is laughing and loose and so am I and it’s a little sloppy now but the singer can really croon and the drunken convention goers are dancing with their Morgan Stanley badges swinging wildly and their loafers smashing dirty lime wedges under heel and I reach into my pocket and yank a wad of bills out. Tell me what you wanna hear I yell into his ear over the thunderous crashing of the drum set, the pale chubby drummer slamming his sticks down over and over half hidden by the lithe body of his lead singer. Ain’t It Fun by Paramore he screams back, grinning the grin of a schoolboy spiking the prom punchbowl, and I weave through the crowd of mid forties Pilates devotees sucking vodka tonics through bright straws and stuff cash into the tip jar and holler my request into the blonde singer’s face, who shoots me that same schoolboy grin and tosses her hair and yells an order to her bandmates and the first notes hit and the place goes nuts, all rock no country rules broken convention defied. Arms are up and the Morgan Stanley crowd is screaming in delight, and I wink back at him and he salutes me with the plastic tumbler of unnecessary bourbon and I stumble off to the bathroom and stand there looking at the dip spit in the urinal and mumble fuck you, Blake Shelton before I piss the poison of Music City down the drain.
Sam Jefferies has written one book, the true story of Nashville's only homegrown hockey hero, and won no awards. He appreciates a good pair of suspenders.
