A SIMPLE STROLL along quiet West End streets, some of them canopied by lush magnolia, dogwood, and ash, could lead to unexpected and exhilarating encounters. “I remember when I lived on Sixteenth or Seventeenth Avenues South when I was in graduate school,” recounts former Vanderbilt student Darrell Berger. “About ten o’clock at night, I’m walking in front of one of the recording studios. There was this guy sitting there strumming this guitar. We talked for a while, and he was really nice. Later I realized it was Billy Joe Shaver, just sitting there because that’s where he was.” The Texas singer-songwriter might have been taking a break from recording his Old Five and Dimers Like Me, which Kristofferson produced, financed, and sold to Monument.
On a different night, Berger heard what he calls “this ungodly hot banjo” coming through the walls of his apartment. Later, he spied the virtuoso in the hallway. “He was about my age but looked younger,” continues Berger. “He said, ‘Gee, I hope my music doesn’t disturb you.’ I said, ‘Are you kidding? Leave the doors open!’ It was a guy named Larry McNeely, who replaced the banjo player [John Hartford] on the Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour.”
Later he encountered Allen Ginsberg who had shown up for a jam session at McNeely’s house. “Somebody must’ve got the idea to get the best musicians around together. This was Larry McNeely on his banjo, and Allen Ginsberg on his finger cymbals and squeeze box! So if you think Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan were coming together over a great chasm, you should have seen Larry McNeely and Allen Ginsberg! It was one of those great, undocumented evenings in Nashville.”
Berger’s classmate Michael Minzer ran across Ginsberg in Centennial Park, where he was sitting under a tree, chanting while his lover and fellow poet Peter Orlovsky played the harmonium. Established in conjunction with the hundredth anniversary of Nashville’s founding, the hundred-acre park attracted people of all stripes. A girl simply known as “Roxy” routinely planted herself on the steps of the park’s replica of the Parthenon, singing and playing her accordion, and a dancer named Rico swayed nearby. Young people from all over the West End lazed in the grass, counted the clouds, and kept one drowsy eye peeled for Lieutenant Charles Stoner, the police’s deliciously named vice-squad chief. “There’s a wonderful little concrete shell out in the middle of the park,” says Minzer. “We used to climb down into that. I remember a friend of mine from Kentucky brought back four or five garbage bags of some kind of wild pot that had grown by the side of the road. So we hunkered down in that shell and smoked so much pot we probably floated out of there.” Then it might have been an illusion when Minzer saw the tattooed former prison inmate from Ohio, David Allan Coe, jamming in the park, his old black Cadillac hearse parked in front of the Parthenon, his name spelled out in masking tape on the car door. “He was standing out there with a little battery-powered amplifier,” recalls Minzer, “just singing to anybody who would listen.”
At night, waifs of the West End marched in the direction of the clubs. Young musicians and songwriters no longer sought out the Professional Club or Tootsie’s, which had served a previous generation; they were headed to the House and Bishop’s American Pub. Of all the newly popular dens, the Exit/In was the rage. Since it opened on Elliston Place, a street where Nashville’s elite once dwelled, the club had drawn a loyal audience looking for rock and folk and hip country music. “The Exit/In was the main thing when it opened,” declares Darrell Berger. “It was a real watershed because all sorts of people came to Nashville to record, but they oftentimes didn’t perform; they were just kind of in and out. The Exit/In gave them a chance to perform, pick up a few bucks, try out some new songs. It was also a chance for people who were not going to fill up a regular auditorium or a big venue. I remember [saxophonist] Charles Lloyd came to the Exit/In. I remember Jimmy Buffett was there before his first album came out. Jerry Jeff Walker, people like that.” Barefoot Jerry, Nashville’s answer to the country-rock band phenomena, often played the Exit/In to enthusiastic crowds. Led by session man, songwriter, and producer Wayne Moss, the band boasted A-list virtuosity with hippie attitude as well as a Monument Records contract. Dozens of unsigned bands knocking around Nashville attempted to emulate them.
Billy Swan, sporting a beard and mustache, sitting with the band Barefoot Jerry. Leader Jerry Moss is standing second from the left.
Photograph by Alan Mayor
Outside the Exit/In at night, Elliston Place bustled. George and Arizona Star posed on the sidewalk while clubbers dashed into the Gold Rush for another drink and hungry college students invaded the Elliston Place Soda Shop, whose carrots and cottage cheese plate passed for vegetarian fare in early 1970s Nashville. After the music faded on Elliston Place, nighthawks hustled across West End Avenue to the Burger Boy or the Pancake Man, where they might find drunks fumbling with a slice of pie, country stars slamming the pinball machines, or Kinky Friedman holding forth on Richard Nixon.
Bobby Bare (left) and Shel Silverstein at the Exit/In.
Photograph by Alan Mayor
THE YOUTHFUL ENERGY in the West End inevitably rejuvenated the creative spirits of musicians and songwriters who had arrived in the years just prior to the neighborhood’s awakening. Kristofferson, of course, rose in the new tide and then fueled its momentum. He was joined by Vince Matthews and Jim Casey, songwriters who—like Kristofferson—bridged the old Professional Club and new Exit/In worlds. Vince had arrived in town from Chicago in the mid-1960s and eventually signed a publishing deal with Jack Clement, while Jim Casey followed three years later when recording artist Dickey Lee invited him to write for a publishing company he owned with Jack Clement and his protégé Allen Reynolds, who decades later produced Garth Brooks.
Songwriters Jim Casey (left) and Vince Matthews, at Casey’s wedding in Kingston Springs, Tennessee.
Courtesy of Jim Casey
According to Casey, Clement encouraged his writers to stretch their artistic abilities into other fields, like record producing and filmmaking, so Casey produced Matthews, who sang flatter than Johnny Cash and looked as handsome as a lifeguard. “Vince was the guy who idolized Elvis when he was a kid,” says Casey. “In his class when everybody was supposed to show up for his graduation picture with a black coat on and a tie, Vince went and rented a white tuxedo. And they made him go change it. He was always different.”
By 1969, Matthews was making important connections. Johnny Cash recorded his “Wrinkled, Crinkled, Wadded Dollar Bill” and invited him to sing “Melva’s Wine” on his television show; Cash himself would cover the song in 1971. Unfortunately, Matthews rarely capitalized on such opportunities, which people around him attributed to his unusual appetite for pills and alcohol, although most everybody was using in Matthews’s world.
“There was a doctor over in East Nashville,” recalls Casey, who lived near Centennial Park. “Vince and John Harris [of Barefoot Jerry] were both skinnier guys, and I was the fattest one of some of those guys, so they would have me go in for the checkup. And you’d pay twenty-five dollars for a checkup and he’d take your blood pressure and listen to your heart and then he’d say, ‘What do you want.’ And then you told him what you wanted. The big one back then was [the amphetamine] Obedrin-LA, that’s an ‘LA turnaround’ and the little brother of that was called the yeller. It was a smaller dose of Obedrin. People did all of that in private, but believe me you could tell when somebody was on an amphetamine because they’d be all livened up and sweating and their hair is greasy. They’d be talking a mile a minute and making big huge plans, always making a big plan for something.”
Vince’s big plan was the Kingston Springs Suite, which dealt with the clash between new ways and tradition, viewed through the old railroad men and blacksmiths who lived in his adopted hometown, some twenty-five miles west of Nashville. His enthusiasm drew a team of supporters. Johnny Cash offered his Hendersonville recording studios, Kris Kristofferson invested thousands of dollars, songwriter Shel Silverstein chipped in and consulted, and Jim Casey held Vince’s hand in the studio an
d everywhere else. The notion of a concept album was at home in the times. “Nobody knew what the future was going to hold,” says Casey. “We all thought, ‘This is really cool. Look at these great albums that people are cutting.’ And one album that really made us think that was [the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s] Will the Circle Be Unbroken. It was a concept album that was so wide-ranging but really about the music. We all thought, ‘Wow. This is going to expand. There’s going to be more concept albums and these great writers. It’s going to become easier and easier.’”
Soon, the town of Kingston Springs became West End West as Vince’s friends retreated to his home on Saturday afternoons. “I used to take my daughter out there to go fishing,” says Kristofferson. “It was very small. But there was a group of us who’d just sit around, and all we thought was important was music.”
In 1972, Matthews invited his benefactors down to Kingston Springs for a presentation of his suite in the grammar school’s gymnasium. Johnny Cash, his wife, June, and their son John Carter sat in folding aluminum chairs while the townspeople took seats around them. Coal-oil lamps flickered, and a local chorus warmed up the audience. “This time, I came to be entertained,” bellowed Cash to nobody in particular.
Matthews—with his halting vocals—reeled off the songs in twenty-five minutes, and then invited the audience back to his house for chili, where Cash obliged a request to sing “I Still Miss Someone” and then got in line for food. “The Cashes sat up there and it was the neatest thing because they really felt like down-home folks,” says Jim Casey. “All the town folks were there but nobody bugged him. It was at night and they were all sitting in different places around the yard and in the house. They just genuinely had a great time. Relaxed. Like they really belonged.”
But Cash as well as Vince’s other supporters had other projects of their own. Left in Vince’s hands alone, the future of Kingston Springs Suite seemed questionable. “By this time I was working on the road some, and finally making some money,” says Kristofferson. “I gave him a bunch to pay off a bunch of bills he had, and he went right over and bought a [studded] Elvis suit.”
Jim Casey remembers that it was actually a cape: “This was just like Vince. Kris said he saw Vince come down the street and say, ‘You won’t believe what I bought. I bought this cape.’ And he put this cape around him.” He told Kris that it would be perfect for the performances of his masterpiece, that when the last song, “God Save Kingston Springs,” faded, he’d spread the cape around himself as the stage lights dimmed. “Vince was never supposed to be a [performer],” concludes Kristofferson. “But that’s where all the money went.”
In the fall of 1974, Vince’s wife, Melva, hired a film crew to shoot a vignette in Kingston Springs to accompany the music. The sketch called for villagers to march up the main street singing behind Vince and his guitar while the camera cut away to shots of the old blacksmith’s wagon and other images of small-town life. About a hundred locals flowed into town on a Saturday morning while the crew parked a cherry picker on the railroad tracks, the highest point around, to get the best shots. “All of a sudden,” says Jim Casey, “I noticed everybody pause and just look around and I thought, ‘That’s a funny look on their face.’ And then I realized they were listening to the train coming up around the curve. The train was highballing through there from Memphis to Nashville, not slowing down a bit. They had tried to get the cherry picker off, but it had its hooks down in the asphalt. The cameraman and the driver dove out of there. That train came around and hit that cherry picker and completely blew it up into a million pieces. Unbelievable. It derailed the whole train, shut down the tracks for a day. The whole thing blew apart.”
Later, Vince reshot the scene, but the townspeople—none of whom was hurt in the catastrophe—had tired of the visionary in their midst. “That signaled the end,” says Casey. “It really did.” To this day, no Kingston Springs music or film has ever been officially released. Vince wrote two hits in 1975—“This Is My Year for Mexico” for Crystal Gayle and “Love in the Hot Afternoon” for Gene Watson—before moving to New York City. He eventually returned to Tennessee, where he died, alone, at his home in Waverly, forty miles west of Kingston Springs.
IRONICALLY, MANY OF the new artists flooding the West End hailed from Texas, choosing Nashville at the same time Willie Nelson was rejecting it. Nashville, of course, already had its share of Texas influence, from Ernest Tubb to Waylon Jennings. But Texas-born singer-songwriters who arrived in the 1960s such as Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury, and Townes Van Zandt (who was in and out of town playing clubs and making records for Jack Clement) were giving a slightly younger generation of Texas singers and songwriters cause to rethink Nashville, even as Austin was blossoming. Guy Clark, from West Texas, hit town in 1971; Marcia Ball, from western Louisiana by way of Austin, followed in 1972; Fort Worth–born Hugh Moffatt arrived in 1973; and Steve Earle, raised near San Antonio, followed him in 1974.
Houston-born Rodney Crowell drove to town in 1972 and proved to be one of the most influential new arrivals from the Lone Star State. Crowell’s parents grew up sharecropping in west Tennessee, met at a Roy Acuff show in 1942, and moved to the oil refineries of Houston shortly after they married. “In that east-side Houston common labor culture, the music was out of Nashville,” explains Crowell. “Hank Williams was a hero in our household and, later, Johnny Cash.” Because the Nashville kings defined country music, he never considered going to New York, Austin, or Los Angeles. Besides, you could drive to middle Tennessee in one day, if you got up early in the morning.
In what became one of Nashville’s great hungry-artist stories, Crowell slept in his car amid the musty aroma of sumac trees, bathed in lakes outside town until the weather turned cold, and poked around the West End meeting songwriters. Finally, he found a house to rent on Acklen Street in Hillsboro Village, with fellow Texas songwriter Richard Dobson and bass player Skinny Dennis Sanchez. “Every night there was songwriters and the hard drinking all night long, and song swapping,” says Crowell.
Rodney Crowell.
Courtesy of author’s collection
“Most everybody wrote creatively by themselves somewhere and would come together and show their wares,” says Crowell. “And it was never about collaborating or writing on the spot. It was like, ‘Hey, here’s something I’m working on.’ It was a shared experience of like, ‘How’s it coming? Where you getting with this as an artist?’ And it was great for me to be around that because I could sense growth in other artists and sort of measure that in myself. It’d be three a.m. and David Olney pulls out ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,’ and he’d just written it. And we’d go, ‘Oh fuck.’ The bar just got higher.”
Early on, Crowell met Guy Clark, who had come to Nashville from Los Angeles after eight months there writing for RCA’s Sunbury Music. One of those writers with the all-important sponsorship, he’d been given the chance to move to New York but chose Nashville because of Kristofferson’s reputation and the brotherly songwriting community. He wasn’t long making his mark: In 1972, Jerry Jeff Walker—one of the big names of the Austin movement—cut “L.A. Freeway,” which Clark had written about his short stay in California. The song’s commercial sizzle turned heads in Nashville, placing him directly in the center of the new songwriting community that had pulled him there in the first place. His brooding good looks and expansive songwriting style put him in the same category as Kristofferson. “We were all young,” growls Clark. “We were all on fire. We were writing songs. Most everybody I knew was more than happy to play [their] new songs anytime [they] wanted to do it, and you could do the same. It wasn’t a competitive sport. It was kind of a movable community. It was far-out.”
Clark and his wife, Susanna, mentored many of the unsponsored musicians in town. They did the same for the troubled Townes Van Zandt, first when they crossed paths in California and now in Nashville. Songwriters gathered at a large table in the Clarks’ East Nashville home, carving their names in the woo
den surface, swapping songs, inhaling Guy’s thoughts about music, and then, just inhaling.
Backstage at the Exit/In (left to right): Jerry Jeff Walker, Donnie Fritts, John Prine, Guy Clark, and Billy Swan.
Photograph by Alan Mayor
With that “L.A. Freeway” money, Guy had bought a house on Old Hickory Lake in Hendersonville and often invited Rodney out to visit. One night, they chugged around the lake’s perimeter in Guy’s boat until Guy found the place he wanted to stop. And then he cut the engine. The water slapping the sides of the boat, Clark pointed to Johnny Cash’s house. Crowell marveled at the glowing windows of the massive structure, unaware that the tall man inside would figure dramatically in his career and personal life.
Back in town, Guy dominated the Exit/In stage and Rodney played singer-songwriter nights at Bishop’s American Pub on West End Avenue, where the owners fortified the players with free hamburgers and beer, and patrons filed in and out all evening. “Basically, it’s busking indoors,” quips Crowell. “You play, and you pass a hat. And six or eight people would go on each night, and I’d pick up six dollars. [Back then], it was a dollar for gas, sixty-nine cents for breakfast, and a little money left over.”
Advertisement for Bishop’s American Pub, 1971.
Courtesy of author’s collection
Soon Crowell caught the attention of guitarist and RCA recording star Jerry Reed, who along with Harry Warner and Chet Atkins owned the publishing company Vector Music. “They just heard a couple songs that I wrote that they thought were good. So you invest a hundred dollars a week in this guy. I was dead broke and they pay me a hundred dollars a week to write songs. Man, I could eat! Keep a roof! And not have to work at anything other than writing. It was good. And I think that it probably was just that Kristofferson had made it, so that Harry Warner and Jerry Reed and Chet Atkins recognized that ‘this kid, he’s got some of that.’ I was free. They were from a different school. I was from a new school. I had a hippie girlfriend and drove a Volkswagen and had long hair and smoked dope. They scratched their chins and were like, ‘Oh, okay. I don’t get it, but keep the songs coming. Show up every once in a while.’”
Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville Page 12
