LIVING IT UP IN THE GRAND NEW NASHVILLE : Once Considered the Eccentric, Colorful Country Cousin of the Music Industry, the Home of The Grand Ole Opry Has Finally Made It Big

IT’S EARLY ON A WEEKDAY AFTERNOON IN Nashville, a green and leafy minor league city right square in the northern middle of Tennessee, and a lot of folks here are in a damn good mood. At Mack’s Cafe, a 70-year-old plate-lunch stop at the intersection of Broadway and 21st, near Vanderbilt University and Music Row, a couple of home-cooked waitresses finish off the midday crush, comparing notes on where each will be performing tonight while they swoop down on customers with big pitchers and uncomplicated smiles and “Hon, you want some more ice tea?” Behind the counter at Mack’s, a sign reads: “Business Is Great, People Are Terrific, Life Is Wonderful.”

At a downtown hotel not far away, an operator takes an incoming call and turns her voice into a beam of human sunshine. “Hi, it’s a great day in Nashville!” she sings out. “This is the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza.”

Seven miles down the Cumberland River, an American flag the size of a Cristo mountain-wrap waves high and proud over Opryland USA, a complex of faux- colonial buildings that occupies the space of more than two Disneylands and is home to the heirs of The Grand Ole Opry, the former barn-dance radio show that became the city’s mother church and then mother industry. A deaconly tour guide leads a busload of visitors into the theater’s backstage area and says, with a trace of the Nashville way, “Welcome to our house.”

At Omni Recording Studio, record producer Barry Beckett has just finished a session with a young guitarist from Texas. The producer doesn’t have a beer in his hand, but he’s smiling as though he’d just polished off a six-pack. “What’s happened has been phenomenal, unbelievable,” says Beckett, a star of the renowned Muscle Shoals, Ala., rock ‘n’ roll recording scene. Beckett, who migrated to Nashville five years ago in search of his future, came north after a producer friend, James Stroud, called him up one day and told him: “Get up here, this place is about to explode.”

Beckett’s latest project, the debut album for the band Confederate Railroad, is expected to pass sales of 1 million units.

“Right now,” says Beckett, summing up the thoughts of the local music business, “people are making a lot of money and everyone’s happy.”

However improbable the notion, it’s not hard for a visitor to get the impression that everyone is happy in Nashville. The city is in high yodel over the sonic boom of country music stretching across America, and yet it remains, for the time being, a city innocent of major metropolitan madness, holding dearly to its Southern manners and widespread faith in God and family and barbecue. This is a city still genteel enough to be embarrassed by a 3-year-old scandal in which the previous mayor had an extramarital affair with a woman for whom he helped obtain a major-label recording contract.

Nashville, to be sure, isn’t just about music. As the state capital, its biggest employer is government, followed by Vanderbilt University and the university’s medical center. Nashville is the Bible-publishing capital of the nation and also a center for the insurance and health-care industries. There are 17 colleges and universities and nearly a million people, most of whom don’t actually own guitars or fiddles. But in the way that Hollywood is the biggest sign hanging over Los Angeles, so do the Grand Ole Opry and country music fly this city’s brightest and gaudiest colors. Billboards and banners trumpet “Patty” and “Lorrie,” presuming you know them to be the first names of current country stars Loveless and Morgan. When somebody asks you if you’ve been to the museum, they don’t mean the art museum but rather the Country Music Hall of Fame, the repository of such artifacts as George Jones’ white Wembley suit, a beaded gown worn by Tammy Wynette, an embroidered tunic worn by Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson’s red bandanna and blue sneakers and Lefty Frizzell’s guitar.

Director Robert Altman passed through here almost 20 years ago to make his landmark film “Nashville,” which both acknowledged the growing popularity of country music and poked fun at its tendencies toward folksy blather. Many citizens today do not admit to remembering it. The fact is, Nashville’s old money and business community have not always looked kindly on the curiosity of country music, but that’s changing. A new generation of country performers and songwriters who are college-educated, sophisticated and musically diverse have made country music acceptable not only to New Yorkers, Angelenos and Chicagoans but to Nashvillians as well. Country’s lower-class origins are not so much suspect as celebrated these days, along with the bond ratings of its big-hatted, long-haired stars. And the money they are bringing to town doesn’t hurt either.

“Nashville has always fought with the image of country music, but it seems to be working out now,” observes Lindsay Bohannon, a 36-year-old Kentucky native who came here to attend Vanderbilt and, like many Vanderbilt grads, decided to stay, eventually opening the city’s first micro-brewery, the Bohannon Brewing Company, which produces Market St. Beer. “There’s a lot more here than country music; this is a forward-thinking Southern city. But all the attention that country has been getting lately has been great for business, and I think everybody realizes that.”

“They’ve really been two separate worlds until recently,” says arts benefactor Martha Ingram, wife of Ingram Industries president E. Bronson Ingram and director of public affairs for the giant company. “Amongst many of the patrons of the symphony, there was just not that much interest in country music. But as the music business has become big business, they’ve had to borrow money from the banks, and they’ve paid it back, and there’s more respect now. It’s been easier to bring these disparate art forms together.”

As proof of this, Mark O’Connor, a 32-year-old fiddler, recently composed a fiddle concerto and debuted it with the Nashville Symphony in September, showing not only that someone who plays on Dolly Parton and Randy Travis albums can write a concerto but also that classical devotees and country fans can sit in the same audience.

THERE HAVE BEEN BOOMLETS IN COUNTRY MUSIC BEFORE, NOTABLY THE short-lived “Urban Cowboy” fad of 1980-81. But the explosion that James Stroud mentioned to Barry Beckett is the one that’s just about 2 years old and has at the front of its hit parade the Tom Mix look-alike from Oklahoma, Garth Brooks, who has sold 32 million records since hitting town. Sales of country records overall have almost doubled since 1990 and now represent 16.5% of the overall U.S. market. As rock and rap leave melody and mainstream America behind, country has absorbed some of rock’s earlier styles and audience. There are now 2,000 or so radio stations playing guitar-based ballads by Trisha Yearwood, McBride and the Ride, Vince Gill and Wynonna Judd that 15 or 20 years ago might have been pop hits for the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt or James Taylor.

All this, plus the coast to coast popularity of The Nashville Network (TNN) and the international cable reach of Country Music Television (CMT), has turned up the temperature considerably in Nashville, where music and related entertainment industries in 1992 generated an estimated $2 billion for the local economy, and the Chamber of Commerce finally put the words “Music City USA” on its business stationery. The recording center and primary marketplace for country music since the 1940s, Nashville now threatens to become something much larger--perhaps a new cultural headquarters in the Great Escape from Los Angeles and New York.

Along Music Row--the formal designation for what locals call the “two littleone-way streets” that form the 20-square-block headquarters for recording studios, publishers and music business offices--more and more of the cozy frame houses that gave the country industry its small-town feel are being replaced by Burbank-style glass high-rises as the major record companies gear up for the future. At the moment, towering construction cranes are part of the landscape.

“Music Row has exploded,” says Dane Bryant, a local realtor who specializes in the neighborhood. Like much of the nation’s real estate, property in Nashville sank in value in the late ‘80s, but prices have largely recovered, led by Music Row. “If you called me up and told me you wanted to rent some offices,” Bryant says, “I’d have to tell you that’s a hard item to find right now.”

In the sleek, palm-laden lobby of the new ASCAP building, the type that would seem to belong in Santa Monica, you can look in on an enormous conference room dominated by a 30-foot, glass-topped and turquoise-painted steel table with 27 white-leather reclining chairs pulled up to its lip. Meanwhile, BMI, the other music performing-rights organization, plans to have 350 of its 475 employees based here in a new building by 1995, many of those positions transferred from New York.

The dormant Asylum Records--once the label of Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and the Eagles--has been revived here as Elektra’s country division. Phil Walden, who piloted the career of the Allman Brothers Band, has moved here to resurrect his old label, Capricorn Records. Such un-country names as Steve Winwood, Janis Ian, Amy Grant and John Hiatt have become residents in the Nashville area, and Bob Dylan is said to be looking for a house. New recording studios are being built by some prominent out-of-towners like Allen Sides, owner of L.A.’s Ocean Way Recording and Record One Studios, and David and Dee Mancini, owners of Devonshire Audio/Video in North Hollywood.

After the fashion of such urban renewal projects as Harbor Place in Baltimore and South St. Seaport in lower Manhattan, the rickety waterfront district in the heart of downtown continues to undergo the sort of refurbishing that already has turned a series of 19th-Century brick warehouses into gleaming watering holes, gift shops, tourist galleries and Market St. Beer’s storefront brewery.

Jack Cawthon, a Nashville native who owns Jack’s Bar-B-Que on lower Broadway in the District, almost went out of business in 1990 but says things are looking up these days. “This country music thing is worldwide. They’re coming in from Europe, from everywhere.” And Nashville is doing its best to accommodate them.

Having lacked a large concert venue in the hometown of so many stars, the city is finally building, partially with tax money, a new 23,000-seat downtown arena that also, it is hoped, will lure a professional basketball franchise. The city fathers recently took the unusual step of putting up $5 million of taxpayers’ money to finance an American Airlines bid for a nonstop Nashville-London route, citing music-business traffic among its justifications.

The behemoth Gaylord Entertainment Co.--which owns Opryland USA, TNN and CMT--is planning a complete renovation of the historic Ryman Auditorium, the Opry’s original downtown home, which was abandoned when Opryland opened down the river in 1972. Possibly feeling competition from upstart country showplaces in Branson, Mo. (although company officials deny it), Gaylord is also building a new theater in the District that will house TNN’s country dance shows and plans to construct a $175-million addition to the Opryland Hotel, ballooning its capacity to about 2,800 rooms--the largest construction project in the city’s history.

A lot of earth is being moved. The death last November of Roy Acuff, the ancient father figure of the Opry and founder (with songwriter Fred Rose) of one of the city’s most important song publishing firms, was a reminder that there are new faces calling the tune now, in country music and in the city at large. The new mayor, Phil Bredesen, was born in Upstate New York and went to Harvard. And, possible proof that God watches television, this past summer the bosses at TNN finally showed the door to “Nashville Now’s” museum-worthy prime-time host Ralph Emery, a man who epitomized country’s sometime image as having the cultural value of a Goo Goo Cluster.

If Emery’s avuncular dithering was old Nashville at its most insular, his replacements, Lorianne Crook and Charlie Chase, can be seen as telegenic ambassadors to the new era--not cutting-edge, perhaps, but sharp enough not to ask Emmylou Harris what Gram Parsons is up to these days.

ONCE THE NORTHERN TERMINUS OF THE NATCHEZ TRACE, AN 18TH-CENTURY trade route from the Mississippi shores to the Cumberland River, Nashville was occupied by Union troops for much of the Civil War and was the site of one of the war’s last terrible battles, when Confederate forces tried vainly to retake the city in 1864. The term rebel still turns up around town in such business names as Rebel Realty, Rebel Steel and Rebel Hill Florist. Belle Meade, the city’s most aristocratic neighborhood, is named for the slave plantation whose white Greek Revival columns still loom at the top of a hill in verdant rolling country several miles south of downtown. The plantation’s former owner, W. G. Harding, vowed not to shave until the South won the war, and he was buried in 1886 with a beard down to his waist.

Like the lyrics to a certain hidebound school of country songs (see Hank Williams Jr.’s “A Country Boy Can Survive”), political emotions here, while officially often Democratic, can carry a residue of frontier conservatism and rebel yells. Tennessee is still a right-to-work state, one of the factors that makes it attractive to film companies hoping to keep union costs down.

Country music itself, though its roots run into the black traditions of blues and gospel, has been mostly white onstage, not counting Charlie Pride and a handful of other African-American performers. “African-Americans just don’t attend the Grand Ole Opry,” points out Reavis Mitchell, a Nashville native and chairman of the history department at Fisk University, one of the black colleges funded by Congress during Reconstruction to provide advanced education for former slaves. Yet, by most accounts, race relations in the city since the 1960s have been progressive. “Today in Nashville you find a very open society,” Mitchell says. “There is no part of this city where African-Americans don’t live, no country clubs where they are excluded, and there are very few churches where the presence of an African-American on Sunday would cause a fright.”

“I actually think that Nashville is less racist than the (Hollywood) film and television community,” says Alice Randall, a 34-year-old Harvard graduate who has written songs for Moe Bandy and Holly Dunn and is developing a Nashville-themed television series for CBS with former NBC and Paramount executive Brandon Tartikoff. “I might go into a meeting and somebody might be more obviously surprised to see that I am black, but in no way has it stood in my way. And I came here with virtually no connections whatsoever.”

Redneck attitudes may be largely a thing of the past, but traces survive in a vein of local humor. The winner of the alternative weekly Nashville Scene’s “You’re So Nashville If . . . .” contest in 1991 was this entry: “You’re so Nashville if you say to the person behind the counter at the (convenience store), ‘We really kicked y’all’s ass in that Desert Storm.’ ”

On WSIX, a radio station that reminds its listeners that “at WSIX, we’re for the family,” afternoon drive-time deejay Carl P. Mayfield finds the homeless a subject of mirth. He does regular jokes about a character named Homeless Jimmy, a wino who’s always looking for a handout. When a songwriter pulls into a reserved parking spot at a studio on Music Row, a security guard comes out to make sure that the offender leaves promptly. On second look, the songwriter sees that the guard is carrying a sawed-off shotgun.

The burgeoning gospel/Christian music industry, where gold and platinum albums are no longer a rarity, is also based here, which is only fitting for a city where churchgoing is a term that hasn’t fallen out of favor.

Immigrants from the godless cities of the coasts, especially in the entertainment business, are coming in significant numbers, in search of gold but also a better way of living. “People call me every day who are here from New York or L.A. looking for a job,” says Gerry House, the morning man at WSIX.

Tartikoff, now based in New Orleans, has been in and out of Nashville recently, getting a feel of the city. Keith A. Walker, an actor and screenwriter who co-wrote the summer Warner Bros. hit “Free Willy,” landed in nearby Murfreesboro in flight from Hollywood and Manhattan and found that he and his wife Peggy “went to more social events here in the first few months than we’d ever been to in New York and Los Angeles.” The two plan to make low-budget family movies with local money.

Manuel, former head designer of rhinestone suits at Nudie’s in North Hollywood, now has his own shop on Broadway here, where his business in bejeweled jackets ranging in price from $950 to $6,500 has doubled in the last 18 months.

Barry Beckett, who used to make records with Bob Seger and Boz Scaggs in Muscle Shoals, explains his adaptation to Nashville this way: “I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out. It’s just white Protestant church music. If you can understand Protestant hymns, you can understand country music.”

Curtis Stone plays bass for the chart-topping country-rock band Highway 101, once based in Southern California, now in Nashville. He is sitting on a friend’s porch one afternoon when he is asked if he has had to adjust to the South. “As far as the Southern thing,” Stone says, “I don’t see it. But I’m not a woman and I’m not a black man. I like it here.”

In his state-of-the-atrium office with a Roy Lichtenstein print on the wall, John Huie, a 37-year-old agent in Creative Artists Agency’s Nashville division, is wearing jeans and an Atlanta Braves baseball jersey as he sips coffee at 8:30 in the morning. He relocated here from Los Angeles 18 months ago. “When people ask me, ‘Why’d you move to Nashville?’ ” he says, “I say, ‘My sons are 5 and 7. Any more questions?’ Personally, it’s the best thing I ever did. This is one of the few places family values really count. It’s a Southern thing; it’s a Nashville thing. You respect your mother and father.”

Ron Baird, another CAA agent, sticks his head in the door and points out that it’s not unusual to see people praying in a restaurant before they eat. “Not everybody does it, but you do see it. It’s not weird, and they might be holding hands under the table.”

“This may sound subtle, but it’s huge,” Huie says, pointing out how audition times accommodate the family lifestyle. “You know, new bands are the lifeblood of the business, and in L.A., they’re at the Whisky, the Roxy--they’re going on at 9 or 10 o’clock, right? You know when the showcases are here? Six p.m. Everybody goes to work, goes to the showcase, and by 7 o’clock, they’re at home having dinner with their family. They’ve already seen the band.

“We work our asses off here, but when we leave we can turn it off. In my five years in Los Angeles and eight years in New York, I never felt like I had the opportunity to turn it off.”

Whipping across town toward Opryland on a Saturday night in her red BMW convertible with the top down, Susan Levy explains that one of the things she likes about Nashville is that she doesn’t have to worry about what to wear the way she did in Los Angeles as a UCLA student and later working as a publicist for MCA Records. Nashvillians are not judged nearly so exactingly on their fashion statements, she has found in her four years here. “They’re not going to be impressed, so it would be a waste” to spend a lot of money on clothes.

“It’s a family town,” says Levy, 30. “If you’re 28 and single, there’s nowhere to go, no night life. Those people who want to make it big in their careers before they get married, they don’t come here.”

Another young woman, employed by a West Coast record company, who has been spending one week a month here, confided: “It can be a little hard if you’re from L.A. I have to tone it down a lot. It’s definitely lower-key here. It’s a nicer environment but slower.”

“It’s a Southern city, but it has always had a lot of Eastern and West Coast influence,” says Ken Levitan, a native New Yorker who manages the careers of Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith and Los Lobos from an office in a brick-and-clapboard house on 17th Street. Levitan, another Vanderbilt grad who stayed, cautions against outsiders who fail to make some accommodation with local tradition. “If people come in and try to show Nashville how to do things right,” he says, “they discover another approach is needed.”

The wave of immigration from California and the East Coast apparently has not yet provoked resentment among the locals. “I think quite the opposite,” says Bruce Dobie, the Nashville Scene’s editor. “I think there’s a pride about what’s happening, in the fact that this is the new Tin Pan Alley, where mainstream songs are being written now in America, where people like John Prine and Nanci Griffith have chosen to live.”

Casey Del Casino, the Manhattan-born attorney who represented Acuff-Rose Music in its recent copyright-infringement suit against the rap group 2 Live Crew (for its parody of Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman”), recalls one morning over breakfast at the Pancake Pantry: “When I came here, an executive at a record company told me: ‘You New Yorkers talk fast and think slow, but down here people think fast and talk slow.’ ”

Natives say the traffic is getting worse, but to many people a commute here is 15 minutes. You can even live in the sprawling horse country of Franklin, where producer Keith Thomas records Christian music stars Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith (as well as R & B artists James Ingram and Peabo Bryson) in a 19th-Century house-turned-studio, and still be on Music Row in 30 minutes.

The small-town ambience of Nashville gives the entertainment business a character different than on the two coasts. Bruce Hinton, chairman of MCA Records/ Nashville, emphasizes the neighborhood quality of Music Row. “It’s a real community--in a physical sense. You can’t get too mad at anybody because you know that within a week you’re going to see them on the street.”

Nashville doesn’t have an NFL or NBA franchise, but it does have two minor league baseball teams--the Sounds in the AAA American Association and the Xpress in the AA Southern League. Both play at Greer Stadium, a 17,500-seat park located in a residential neighborhood in the shadow of downtown.

After a recent Xpress game, a tourist from San Diego waiting in line at the souvenir shop was overheard to say: “You can hear the pop of the leather out there.” It’s true; you can hear the pop of the leather and understand all the words in an argument between a batter and the home plate umpire. The handful of beer vendors who roam the aisles singing “Get your beer here, while I’m in your atmos-phere!” seem to know many of the customers personally. This is the other side of the big time. And to someone who has never sat closer to the field than the loge level in a big league ballpark, how sweet it can be.

BECAUSE SO MANY COUNTRY ARTISTS do not write their own material--unlike most rock and rap bands--the song and the songwriter are king here, so much so that the city is coming to be called in the trade “Tin Pan South.” RCA/ Nashville executive Thom Schuyler, a former songwriter himself (typical of Nashville music executives), believes that the Nashville scene now is to songwriting what Paris in the ‘20s--home of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein--was to literature.

While it is unlikely that you could go to a local club and see Trisha Yearwood or Clint Black onstage, what you can see regularly at places like the Bluebird Cafe and Douglas Corner are major songwriters performing their “hits” and new material for audiences that are really listening.

“The energy of the town comes from songwriting,” observes Bill Ivey, director of the Country Music Foundation. “And it sets the moral tone and attitude. Songwriters tend to feel that there’s enough success to go around, and they support one another. At a party celebrating some songwriter’s No. 1 record, you’ll see other songwriters there.”

“This is truly an artistic community,” says writer Alice Randall, who briefly considered moving to Santa Fe or London after a divorce three years ago. “What you have to realize is that what you hear on the radio is just the tip of the iceberg and just the most popular aspect. It would be like judging American poetry by what you read in Good Housekeeping magazine. It’s the unrecorded songs that may be discovered 15 years down the road . . . .

The process of creating them and sharing them and hearing them. That’s what keeps life exciting.”

But the artistic community is still coming to grips with a city that is changing so rapidly that the comfort of the familiar may be a thing of past.

“I love this town,” says Casino. “It’s changed a lot in 10 years; just look at the skyline. There’s a kind of schizophrenia now about whether to make Nashville into a big city or keep it a small town. There’s an old-boy thing here, and it’s not a motion picture town yet, but I think it will be.”

Music video production is already a major business (third behind Los Angeles and New York), fueled by the demands of CMT, the country version of MTV that has probably done as much as anything to make converts here and yon to the latest Nashville sounds.

But there are those who believe that video has also brought the curse of Hollywood. One of them is 66-year-old songwriting eminence Harlan Howard, author of such No. 1 hits as “Why Not Me?” and “Heartaches by the Number.” “Video has caused such a youth movement,” Howard says. “What’s happening in Nashville, it’s almost like if you’re 25, you can’t hardly get a deal. It has so much to do with how cute or handsome you are, your sex appeal. It’s kind of amazing to me that anybody would think that a 30-year-old singer might be over the hill when they sing better than most of the other people. It’s gettin’ more like the movies and less like the record business.”

Other Nashville veterans cast a wary eye on the changes success is bringing. Backstage at the Opry on Saturday night, not far from Little Jimmy Dickens and Jim Ed Brown, Norah Lee Allen, one of the regular backup singers for 14 years on the Opry, hears the question about success spoiling Nashville and says: “That’s what we’re all wondering.”

Jimmy Capps, who has played in the house band for the last three decades and before that with the Louvin Brothers and Ferlin Husky, offers some rueful perspective. “The sad part now is that careers only seem to last two to three years. Hank Williams was in his 20s when we took him in, but we didn’t throw out Roy Acuff.”

Onstage, against the Red Barn backdrop and underneath the commercial messages for Sunbeam Bread and Tennessee Pride Country Sausage, rhinestoned Opry elder Porter Wagoner introduces Jeanne Pruett, who’s wearing what looks like a sequined toga. She takes the microphone in her hand and says: “Mr. Acuff always told me, ‘Sang the one that brung you, Jeannie,’ and that’s what I’m gonna do.” She slips into her teary 1974 hit “Satin Sheets,” and the Opry crowd sends up a warm ovation.

Some things have not changed in Nashville, at least not yet. But it would seem that the future does not belong to Porter Wagoner and Jeanne Pruett.

“I think we’ll look back on this time as a really great time,” says the Country Music Foundation’s Bill Ivey. “But as the dollars get bigger, there’ll be a downside. There will be fewer things done just for the fun of doing them. I think it will modify the character of the place. You can’t be very, very big and be small at the same time.”

The message that producer Barry Beckett got from fellow producer James Stroud about the Nashville boom brings to mind the telegram that screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz sent to Ben Hecht in 1926, imploring him to come west to Hollywood: “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.”

Yet, somehow, it doesn’t quite translate to the banks of the Cumberland River, the waitresses at Mack’s Cafe, gospel music and the smiles you see on the faces in the streets.

“There’s a generosity of spirit in Nashville,” says Martha Ingram, who came here 35 years ago from Charleston, S.C. “People want to think the best of you and each other.”

Which may be another way of saying “Business is great, people are terrific, life is wonderful.” Don’t let this get around.