NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE — COUNTRY MUSIC CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

To: Sam Kite, Ohlsdorfer Friedhof, Hamburg, Germany

Dear Sam,
Decided to use one of your ‘pen-names’ to confuse the postman — I can see him now at your gate, brows knotted. Aren’t these big postcards great? And the photos are a big improvement on the retouched, 1950s-style European kitsch. Dwayne met me at Nashville airport. I checked in at the Budgetel and we headed straight for Music Row to check out Dwayne’s pale-blue Gibson Les Paul flame-top prototype. Icy cold as we set off for the Cannery and my digestion suffering from jet-lag irregularity. There was popcorn and pizza and cold Bud and I felt blasted after one beer. It had been a long day. Jackyl did their blues solo on a real chainsaw and chopped up the furniture. The singer came close to sawing through a main power cable overhead. Jimmy claimed that he was not obsessed with sex until he saw the brunette with tight jeans, thoroughbred calves and smooth-muscled thighs. Maybe sixteen years old. Jimmy asked about her, was told to keep his hands off. “Still got the baby fat on her,” said Dwayne, in that unmistakable southern drawl. Who was that girl?

THE NASHVILLE SKYLINE

Sam,
On the photograph you can see a view of the ‘skyscrapers’. After miles of dull, low-level sprawl, at least the centre had big-city ambitions; and yet it was stunted, half-finished. An abandoned factory building or disused railway station (roof partly collapsed and that which remained a complex pattern of shattered glass and buckled corrugated iron) counterbalanced the miniature opulence of the few towers pushing up from monotony — an allergic reaction to Shoney’s, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Boot Country, Budgetel, Guest-Quarters, malls and bars.

FAMOUS NAMES ON NASHVILLE STREET SIGNS

Next stop was the Goldrush, Sam, a bar next to a clothing store called Dangerous Threads. Bob the bartender tried to tempt me with the Jack, but I noticed a bottle of Dickels up on the shelf. We saw that girl again. Even prettier up close, and I overheard her curiously adenoidal voice. After half-an-hour, my head was a void and I was sitting on the stairs, attracting the curiosity of the natives. We picked up Jamie and Japanese George from the airport with a stock of Jack Daniel’s Lynchburg Lemonade, Tennessee Tea and the smooth green label which Dwayne said is not aged for as long as the black.

JACK DANIEL’S TENNESSEE WHISKEY DISTILLERY, LYNCHBURG

Well Sam,
It rained all day when we went to Lynchburg and there was an alarming hush in the air; the trees dripping, earth sodden, the smell of grain and charcoal permeating everything. Jimmy and I tasted the fermenting sourmash. It was fragrant, earthy — sensual, somehow. The guide had an unusually deep rural accent with short pauses before the end of his sentences which, culminating in a rush, were followed by “now-aah” (shocking in its redundancy) and even Dwayne had never heard this idiom before: “Now we do have here, at any one time, about twelve-mirrion barrels...of whiskey, now-aah.” I joked to Jamie that, as a penance, we must pilgrimage for ever more to the places that have caused our rock-and-roll decline: the guitar factory, Graceland and the Jack Daniel’s Lynchburg distillery.

A SOUVENIR OF YOUR VISIT TO THE CRACKER-BARREL

Homesick already, Sam. At the store attached to the Cracker-Barrel, Jamie bought an electronic hobby-horse for his baby daughter that neighed and clip-clopped realistically when you pulled on its ear. Above the door, a sign read: “There Are No Strangers Here Only Friends You’ve Yet to Meet”. We dubbed the horse ‘Nasher’ (short for Nashville) and you should have seen Jamie run amok with the horse in the hotel corridors (aiming its stuffed, impaled head around open doorways to neigh at the residents) and startling passing drivers with it from the back of the bus.

THANK YOU FOR DRIVING CAREFULLY — BUCKSNORT, TENNESSEE

Dear Sam,
Lots of cut-price memories so far, a few priceless ones: Deirdre’s cherry lips; Taco Bell black bean burritos and taco salads; the cornucopia of the shaving foam display at Piggly Wiggly‘s; the exquisitely-named Velvet at the Budgetel reception counter; grits, hash browns with Heinz ketchup and coffee at Shoney’s; Maxwell House filter coffee at the Budgetel, Heart Smart non-dairy creamer, Lite n’Sweet sugar substitute. The tap-water reeked of chlorine and was undrinkable. After a few days, the odour of it under the shower or the sour edge of it while brushing my teeth made me nauseous. By the way Sam, about the postcard: we stopped off at the unbelievably-named Bucksnort to buy a baseball cap and tank-up at the filling station. It was right out in the enchanted wilderness, like something from an old movie. The mother and son serving behind the counter looked like backwoods settlers.

GRACELAND: HOME TO THE KING OF ROCK & ROLL — ELVIS PRESLEY

How are things in Hamburg, Sam?
We drove to Memphis through autumn fields; Tennessee’s rusting barns and deadwood suspiciously like the fields in Schleswig Holstein or Surrey; Wales or New Zealand. In the car-park at Graceland it occurred to us that Elvis messed up: choosing a house on a busy main road with hi-rise signs right in front it and heavy traffic thundering by. I guess it was a desirable residence when he bought it. Check out the exquisite bad taste of the private jet and the Jungle Room on the photo. The pretty little thing in the fatal gymnasium looked bored to the back teeth. As we were standing around the graves, Jimmy strode over to Elvis’s headstone. The shocked expressions on the faces of the granny tourists as he asked, “Anyone got a shovel?” had to be seen to be believed.

THE COUNTRY MUSIC HALL OF FAME

The ‘subs’ were fabulous at the Subway Deli bar, “All The Way”: dill and oregano, mayo. So was decaf at the airport restaurant and the meal at Cookers: deep-fried okra; southern-style green beans and bacon; biscuits and gravy; corn bread; grits and hashbrowns; turnips and greens. Taco chips; spinach and cheese; salsa; beer in wide-necked bottles. Forced to rub corn-bread into Ice-Pick Nick’s hair in retaliation for the barrage of taco chips he aimed at our table. Later, an all-out food fight in the CEO’s favourite Japanese restaurant — thanks to the sake that Grover ordered gallons of. George crunched up crab claws to use as ammunition and bits of them ended up stuck in the parchment screens. A clump of rice, cemented in the shape of the bowl, hit Jimmy’s freshly filled sake cup, which spilt into his lap as he jumped up screaming, “My balls are on fire!”

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