Are Seven

Nashville: land of full stomachs, happy ears, and best friends. It’s not the official motto of Nashville, but it will be soon, I’d imagine.

Wilco’s show at the historic Ryman Auditorium in Nashville gave me, Hans and Mr. and Mrs. Revolution a good excuse to visit Mr. and Mrs. Dropstones, a weekend trip we’d been wanting to make for a while. Never let it be said that Jeff Tweedy doesn’t have the power to bring friends together.

Unfortunately, while Tweedy provides the motivation, he can’t actually get us there, so we had to look to outside sources like Southwest Airlines. Apparently, spring break is starting up, judging by the two barely-legal chuckleheads pounding airline-sized bottles of Jack Daniels, slack-jawing the Angelina Jolie scene in Beowulf, calling the steward “dog”, and relating stories of how they made fun of a thirty-five year old woman who happened to be out with them last night, making fun of her as a “cougar”. It all came to a head when they got all excited that the cute college-aged girl sitting behind them mentioned to her rowmates that she had worked for the G.O.P. Great, I thought. I’m sitting in the Brock Olivo section.

Friday night found us chowing on chicken chili and drinking beer at the Dropstones residence. It’s a nice reminder that home-cooked meals are even better than restaurant meals. Who knew?!

Saturday and Sunday were spent getting all Nashville. The highlights:

• I cannot emphasize this enough: if you go to Nashville, you must go to Monell’s. All of us who grew up in the South have been promised “family-style Southern cooking” meals before, but they usually end up being just okay. Not Monell’s. It was absolutely mind-blowing. I had five (5) absolutely perfect biscuits. I almost feel as though I can never have another biscuit again, because I just can’t imagine anything else measuring up. There was fried chicken that was so hot that we couldn’t pick it up when it first reached our table, and smoked country ham that was unlike any meat I’ve ever had before, in the best possible way. Incredible.
• Saturday was a beautiful day, and we hopped around town record store shopping (that is, shopping for records at stores, not shopping for record stores). Note to self: get the turntable working. While I love my digital music life, I realized how I do miss shuffling through the stacks and picking out records. I shuffled anyway, but left empty-handed.
• For your scorecards, Saturday dinner: City House. Moscow Mule. Salami plate. “Tri-tips”. Panna Cotta. Food bliss.
• Sunday, we went to the famous honky-tonk Roberts. There was a fantastic band playing there, and it made me realize one of the great unique things about Nashville: when you see people setting up in a bar or restaurant, you can usually count on it being good-time country music, unlike everywhere else in the nation, where you can figure it’s going to be a painful experience.

Then came Sunday night: the Wilco show.

Christian wrote a proper review of the show, complete with setlist, but just a few thoughts from me:

It was fantastic to be at the Ryman. Seeing a show there is like seeing a show in New York: you know that it’s a special stop for the band; not just another night in the tour. Tweedy said as such after the last song in the regular set when he thanked the crowd and added, “This is the best place in the world.”

I’ve never been a huge Wilco fan. They’re a lot like Radiohead to me: I really like them a lot, they have a few songs that I absolutely adore, and I’ll always follow their moves and buy their albums, but I’ve never been as enraptured with them as a lot of other people I know. Nothing against them at all; they just never spoke as loudly to me as others.

But this is why live music can be so amazing: because it’s often only in a live setting that a band finally makes sense; it’s only there that you can truly understand what they’re after and what they’re feeling. This was absolutely the case with the Wilco show. I’d seen them once before and enjoyed it, but it didn’t change my feelings about the band.

Sunday night’s show absolutely did. “Shot In the Arm” was transcendant, and when Tweedy stepped out from behind the mic to do a truly-acoustic version (apparently something of a Ryman tradition) of “Someone Else’s Song”, it came very, very close to making me cry. “Hate It Here” was a bright highlight, with the crowd yelling out “I HATE IT!” along with the band.

The song that has stuck with me the most, though, is “Misunderstood”, a song that never did much for me on record, but the beautiful, uninterrupted repetition of “NOTHING!” in the live version was devastating. I bought the live album, Kicking Television as soon as I got home yesterday and have listened to that version about 20 times in the last 24 hours.

download | buy from Amazon

And now for the abrupt, insufficient ending: it was awesome.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.