Friday
1) Check in to the Hutton Hotel
The Hutton Hotel hallways smells like toilet. It’s unmistakable. But still, this is the place to stay, Nashville’s newest green hotel. It has a boutique feel, with overly friendly staff, French soaps, super comfy beds, free wi-fi, a rain shower, and warm cookies and milk waiting for you in the room. It’s the kind of place where they treat you like a real dandy, but in a good way. The restaurant is great — friendly, affordable. The bar closes at 2 a.m., but if you need more time to close your deal, $40 will keep it open until 4.
2) Fucking Check Yourself
Um, you’re in the South. Nashville is host to places like Belle Meade, a private country club that in its 107-year history has only had one black member. But for real, it ain’t that different than most other small cities around the country. Just saying. The other thing to keep in mind is that although you’ll be inundated with terrible pop-country music and suicide-inducing adult contemporary, the best music, like everywhere else in the world, lies just beneath the surface.
3) Visit the Frist
(No, not Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist—you know, the dick who wanted to keep Terri Schiavo alive—but his brother Thomas.) This is the art museum in Nashville. You can walk here from the hotel. I guess it’s hit or miss since they don’t have a permanent collection, but what I saw was great. The building, a renovated post office, is awesome, pristinely renovated art deco. There is also, supposedly, an abandoned firing range in the basement.
4) Tour Ryman Auditorium
Billed as the “mother church of country music,” it’s a cool venue to tour—preferably with Buddy, a self-proclaimed hillbilly who has been working the venue since the Sixties. Buddy will take you backstage, speak in his slightly decipherable hillbilly drawl, and impress you with his first-person macabre tales of hanging around the country legends. (Ask him how Johnny Cash died.)
5) Walk through the Country Music Hall of Fame
Okay, a lot of country music sucks. So does a lot of rock music. So, by definition, their museums are going to be a real crapshoot. This one does a good job of balancing great sound booths and interactive displays, with junk like Carrie Underwood videos. Lots of cool artifacts, and rooms and rooms of old guitars and studio reels.
6) Hatch Show Print Shop
This woodblock-letterpress shop opened in 1879 (that’s Deadwood-era shit). They still use largely the same technology to create gig posters for working musicians and artists. The shop is crammed full of mountains of paper, wood-type blocks, ancient-looking flat files, intricate steel printing presses, bespectacled art-school interns, and stray animals.
7) Listen to the Schermerhorn Symphony
Okay, there is nothing rock and roll about the symphony. But, Nashville’s Symphony has one of the most acoustically perfect buildings ever built—bubbled in three feet of soundproofing glass and decked out with flawless technology, it has amazing sound. You can eat dinner there as well, and if you let ‘em know beforehand what a hot shot you are, they’ll prepare something vegetarian for you. It’s worth it.
8) Walk up the street to the honky tonks
Now that you’re feeling completely like a dude from Frasier, walk up the street to the honky tonks. This is one of those things in life you reluctantly must do, like gym class and grocery shopping. Begin at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge. It’s the most famous (where Willie Nelson got his start) and the most likely for you to get in a fight—mine happened with a 110-pound peroxide blonde after she bum-stumbled into me and blamed her lack of motor skills on me rather than the seven PBR tall boys that she just slammed.
The downstairs band often plays more traditional country tunes; the upstairs band is what the Hold Steady wishes they were but aren’t. Be prepared to stumble into a lot of Southern jock-bros, dudes wearing full camo, and “off-duty” working strippers.
9) Watch Protomen at Mercy Lounge
Housed in a flour mill built in 1883, the Mercy Lounge / Cannery Ballroom is the place to catch local bands like The Protomen and stand slack-jawed while ogling Southern indie-rock chicks under a fake snow machine. Think to yourself, “Why don’t more clubs back home have smoking balconies?”
Saturday
1) Brunch in East Nashville
Considered the “Williamsburg” of Nashville, East Nashville holds Marche, a great place to eat. The food is awesome, and you’ll feel comfortable around the plethora of art-weirdo, waiter-actor types.
2) Preferably don’t walk back to Nashville
It is in walking distance, but the walk sucks. Full of churches, abandoned lots, highway underpasses, and discount liquor stores. Taxis are flat rate by zones; you’ll have to call one and fork over $25, but it’s worth it.
3) Grimey’s & Third Man Records
Grimey’s is the indie-rock vinyl place, filled with Blair School of Music students, local flyers, and a basement venue cleverly titled The Basement. About a mile away is Third Man Records, Jack White’s (White Stripes) label and record store. If you are a vinyl geek and a White Stripe fan, you will wanna stop by.
4) Buy more cigarettes
They’re super cheap.