Word: nicking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Leaving Chatanooga, the weather tilted. We left the dream-like Florida mid-eighties and met head-on the ominous fringe of a Northern blizzard. Further ahead in Tennessee lay a vicious front of unending rain and tornadoes looking for barns to rip apart. Nick didn't talk much by then. He took over the driver's seat in a trance, driving steadfastly, relentlessly drawn toward the source of his $200 phone bills...
...Nashville. The Nashville I was looking for was the Nashville of an old Hank Williams and a new Waylon Jennings. I wanted to see performers whose edges were finely honed and who seemed to spring from the country, and made no accommodations for television in their performances. The Nashville Nick had come to find was part of the vast network of motel people. He had come to apply for work in one of the newly-opening prestige chains, fixed with glowing references from his employers in Florida. This boy can fill your house, they said. Nick was going...
...hour, nonstop journey notwithstanding, we took off at 10 p.m. for Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, just around the corner from Ryman's Auditorium, the site of the original Grand Ol' Opry. Tootsie herself was clearing the bar early, since Nashville had been put on a tornado watch that evening. Nick and I managed two beers apiece, and I added my name to the tens of thousands that had already been scrawled on the walls in the back...
Across the street, was the answer, right next to Ernest Tubb's music shop. As Nick and I crossed the cracked pavement in this fast-crumbling section of town, with the heart, the old Opry building, cut right out of it and transplanted into the wide open spaces of chain motels and highway interchanges--transmogrified into another exhibit in a Disney vision of Country Muzak land--we saw the lights of a glowing juke joint called the Wheel...
Thanks to Nick's easy introductions, I asked an older woman to dance to Carl Perkins's "Blue Suede Shoes." The Wheel was top heavy with musicians, for six different performers sang at one time or another, and although one long-haired jeans-wearing young couple danced like a cut out of Woodstock, the audience was a strict country crowd. There were ducksweep haircuts and fancy stitched pointed boots for the men and the women wore their hair up. The barmaid never stopped hustling, and every time she came by Nick obliged her, as he got further and further into...