Nashville Knucklehead

Downtown again.

The City Paper ran a story today that the ICON in the Gulch sold all 217 initial-release condos in less than 48 hours. The rumour mill is swirling about the Signature Tower. Since I am one of the few development geeks who keeps up with said rumours, let me continue to spread it, the Signature Tower is going to be upped from 55 stories to 70 stories, making it the tallest residential building on earth, or something like that. (It's a rumour, so just go with it.) Plus with the Viridian, the Ballpark and Rolling Mill Hill and the other smaller residental projects, that's a lot of people.

So people really are moving downtown. I think it's great. Here's what worries me. There seems to be a "build it and they will come" attitude about the amenities that will make up these neighborhoods. For instance, the ICON says they are going to have 25,000 square feet of street level retail. But they don't say what it is going to be. I have a pretty good guess. The Gap. Nine West. Macaroni Grill. Applebee's. Cheesecake Factory.

These are the companies that have the pockets to go into untested markets like this. You're not going to get the crazy stuff, like over in Berry Hill or in the Village. So I think it is going to be pretty generic and corporate. Which, I suppose will be fine for the Garth-loving tourists from Manchester and Jackson and Bossier City.

But I think that Nashville has so much more to offer than another TGI Friday's. I like to compare Music City with Austin. Both are state capitals. Both are University towns. The main difference is that Austin is way cooler than Nashville. Part of it is because the University there, the other UT, has 50,000 students. That's a lot of young blood in town. So there is certain "hip" vibe that goes along with having that many people in that demographic. Austin is young and vibrant and cool.

I think Nashville is at a crossroads, as far as an image. There will always be the "hillbilly central" vibe that was perpetuated for decades by the hicks-in-charge down on Music Row. We are slowly shedding that image, as Tin Roof and Dan McGuiness replace Loretta Lynn's Wax Museum. We are building one of the most kick-ass Symphony Halls on earth. We are standing on the brink of changing from Country Music City, USA to Music City USA.

There's just one problem. Musicians in this town want to get paid. So the whole hip, exciting, diverse live music scene that is ongoing in Austin, where you can walk into any of two dozen bars any night of the week and hear two dozen different kick-ass bands, won't happen here. The youth and enthusiam of Austin leads to people actually forming bands and playing to be part of the scene. But I can tell you, as someone who slugged it out in the music scene in Nashville for years, the attitude is much different here. Musicians here have mortgages and children. As high as the talent level is, that's how high the pay requirement is. People make records here, they don't put together bands for the sake of saying something with thier music. With a few exceptions, the good players won't play in a bar for 50 bucks. That's why, for a city known as Music City, we have a relatively lame live music scene.

And we can't forget about the influence of our main tourists, either. People come here because they love Kenny Chesney and Shania Twain and Trace Adkins. They actually want to see someone playing some old Moe Bandy song at Tootsie's. And country music is one of the two genres that automatically get knee-jerk vitriolic reactions of disgust from large segments of the population (rap being the other). So as long as Music Row pumps out their crap about Watermelon Crawls and Honkey-Tonk-Ba-donk-ee-donks, we are going to have an image problem.

So what are we to do? Hell, I don't know. I just hope that the influx of young people with disposable income downtown somehow creates a vibrant and interesting scene before the Famous Amos Cookie Factory, Hillbilly Barn Dance and Corn Pone Museum takes over everything.i

posted by Nashville Knucklehead @ 9:14 AM