Mike Perlowin
From:
Los Angeles CA
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Posted 8 May 2010 2:07 am |
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After Flooding, Nashville Musicians Assess Losses
By WILLIAM HARLESS
NASHVILLE — The country music star Brad Paisley was one of hundreds of performers who feared for their instruments this week after the Cumberland River overflowed. The water covered large areas of Nashville, flooding the Grand Ole Opry stage with two feet of it, causing heavy damage to the symphony hall and forcing electricity to be cut in a tourist neighborhood of downtown.
Mr. Paisley found out on Friday that most of his touring guitars and equipment were destroyed when flood waters spilled into SoundCheck, a 160,000-square-foot storage and rehearsal site, where more than 600 artists — from A-list country music stars like Mr. Paisley, Vince Gill and Keith Urban, to studio artists and touring musicians — stored their instruments and gear.
To his relief, a 1968 Paisley Telecaster, the guitar Mr. Paisley has played since he first started performing, was not damaged. But many of his touring guitars were covered to their neck joints.
“Most of the stuff that we really use every day was sitting on the floor because it had been wheeled back in while we were off the road, and we were about to start rehearsals,” Mr. Paisley said. “So it’s pretty much toast.”
Joe Glaser, who for 30 years has operated Glaser Instruments, a well-known guitar repair shop here, said, “All of our most prominent guitar-player artists have their collections down there and quite a number of guitars, and these are drowned.”
“They are the instruments that Nashville history was made on,” he added. He said he planned to spend much of the next several days helping salvage them.
Steve Azar, a country music singer who estimates that he lost more than $100,000 in equipment that was at SoundCheck, was scheduled to make a music video next week for his song “Sunshine (Everybody Needs a Little),” but canceled after Second Avenue, one of the downtown streets where he had planned to film, was flooded.
Lorrie Morgan, a second-generation Opry performer who sang at a benefit concert organized by Mr. Gill on Thursday night, lost her performance wardrobe at SoundCheck.
“I know it’s material things, and compared to what a lot of other people have lost, it’s minute,” Ms. Morgan said. “But to me it’s how I made my living, and it’s how I made my career.”
Of course, musicians were not the only members of the city’s country music establishment to face flood losses. Ed Smith, whose Trail West western wear and boot shop on Second Avenue flooded Sunday, swapped photos with his employees in one of his other downtown stores, Betty Boots, as the waters of the Cumberland started to recede, and the city’s recovery efforts began.
“We waded in in our clothes, barefooted and everything else, and we went in there,” Mr. Smith said, describing his staff’s operation to salvage boots. He said the water there came up to his chest.
Gary Whittenberg, an employee of Mr. Smith’s, said he had fitted boots for artists like Loretta Lynn, Ricky Skaggs and Taylor Swift. “I’m a little disheartened,” Mr. Whittenberg said of the store. “That’s my baby down there, I guess you might say.”
But he and Mr. Smith said they were determined to reopen shop. “We’re going to keep a positive attitude in it, we’re going to go in there, and we’re going to clean it up,” Mr. Whittenberg said. “We’re going to show everybody that we can go down there and get them boots back.”
Music City as a whole seems determined to reopen shop. Mr. Gill organized a three-hour televised benefit concert for flood victims at the NBC affiliate here on Thursday; Taylor Swift said she would donate $500,000 to flood victims; and the Mercy Lounge, a hip local music club, quickly organized a series of fund-raising concerts, called Re-Build This City on Rock ’n’ Roll.
The pop star Kesha, who was raised in Nashville, will host a benefit concert for flood victims and their pets in June. She said she had not yet been able to bring herself to visit downtown since the flood.
“Because my mom wrote for Johnny Cash, they just kind of got to know me downtown, when I was like 12 or 13,” Kesha said. “And I can still to this day go down to Tootsie’s or Robert’s downtown and hop on stage and sing,” she said of two of the city’s popular clubs. “I have so many memories of Music Row and downtown and the honky-tonks, and it really holds a really special place in my heart.”
The Nashville Symphony, whose Schermerhorn Symphony Center faced a flooded basement — where it stored its two concert grand pianos and components of its $2.5 million pipe organ — organized a free concert Friday at the city’s public square. The symphony center is expected to be closed at least until September, and its concerts will be held elsewhere until then.
“Music has great power to help people find solace and hope for the future,” said Alan Valentine, the symphony’s president, “and we’ve got people all over this community who have lost their homes. We even have people who have lost their lives.”
He said the purpose of the concert was “to play music for this community and to help provide some of that solace and hope, regardless of the fact that our own house, the symphony’s concert hall, was flooded.”
Steve Buchanan, president of the Grand Ole Opry Group, said workers stayed late on Sunday night, just before the building flooded, rescuing material from the Opry’s tape and photo archives and its museum.
“The real high-quality stuff, the stuff we were concerned about, was saved,” Mr. Buchanan said. Musicians’ instrument lockers at the Opry were flooded, however.
The Opry, which is relocating its performances to downtown areas not affected by the flooding, is becoming a focal point for the country music industry’s recovery efforts. Mr. Paisley scheduled a last-minute performance there Friday.
“It’s time to rally, and that’s exactly how it feels,” Mr. Paisley said. “I see why tonight, our performance in the Opry is maybe more important than the first time I ever played it.”
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