I moved to Nashville in the early fall of 2011. I moved from Birmingham alone; Heather had a job and we had to sell our house in a bad market. I commuted back and forth from Birmingham to Nashville for more than a year before Heather and our three young kids joined me to officially made the move Franklin. It was a stressful and challenging time in some ways, but the timing was spot on.
Anyone in the music scene in 2011-12 will confirm it was a fantastic time to be in Nashville. If anyone came to visit from out of town I’d take them to Robert’s on Lower Broadway when Lower Broadway was still manageable. You could usually park on the street if it was an off-night for hockey. All the tourists came a couple years later, but the live music scene had so much to offer. I didn’t know many people yet, so I accepted any invitation and went out most nights. I’d check out some incredible songwriter round at the Bluebird, then maybe somebody would let me in the back door at The Ryman Auditorium for something amazing, followed by the inevitable Robert’s hang with a cameo from the Ryman act. Late night maybe I’d head over to Santa’s Pub, where the sparse crowd in the cramped, smoke-filled double-wide may dangerous-looking locals alongside legends from the rock and mainstream country scenes. I’d be sure stick around until the waitress, Kacey Musgraves, got up and blew everyone’s mind with some Dolly classic. She had a record deal and an Opry debut under her belt, but nobody made a fuss. Nobody outside a small circle had any idea who she was, other than the waitress at Santa’s Pub.
I enjoyed those evenings, met all sorts of cool people, and I always kept my ears open. I heard a bunch of aspiring young country artists, jacked young dudes in tight T-shirts and backwards ballcaps, but nothing ever stuck out to me. I’d hit the Whiskey Jam at Loser’s Bar & Grill, where all the the aspiring mainstream country singers showcased. Although the term hadn’t yet been coined, 2012 marked the rise of Bro Country, and a boom time for the genre. Radio programmers and record labels wanted party music, good time songs that appealed to a younger, heavily female audience. You remember, dirt roads and ice cold beers, pretty little blonde in a tight pair of jeans. Singers catered to that market; every song sounded the same. That music didn’t speak to me, and I couldn’t beging discern great from good, or even good from mediocre. If I was going to go out on a limb and take advantage of all my new industry contacts to pitch an act, I had to find some music I personally believed in. It wasn’t my intention to be some Music Row insider for the sake of it; I wanted to find true talent and build my reputation on my ear and gut. It’s a romatic and possibly naive notion, but that’s how I thought about it.
I worked in Hillsboro Village near Music Row, and several days a week I’d drive to The Gulch to eat at a natural foods grocery, salad bar, and hot table called The Turnip Truck. I still go there often, I went there today. These days you can get a $30 salad for $15, but back then it was actually pretty cheap. Other than the prices, nothing much has changed. I went there so often I developed some familiarity with the staff. Most of them were friendly, except this one surly guy who really stood out. I always went to his register, even if it had a longer line. He appeared to be in his thirties, long greasy hair and a scraggly beard, a roughneck. Most days he wore bib overalls and looked liked a farm-hand. As with everyone who worked the register, I made an effort to exchange pleasantries. I’d say, “Hey, what’s up?” And he’d grunt and slowly glance up, never quite making eye contact. I just couldn’t crack him, and it fascinated me. I guess I really didn’t try all that hard - he clearly wanted nothing to do with me or anyone else in line with their dumb salads and smoothies. He had more important things on his mind.
One day a good buddy of mine, a publisher named John Allen who has since become the President of New West Records, called me up. “Hey man, I’ve got someone I want you to meet,” he said. “He’s a manager from Franklin, Kentucky, just over the Tennessee line on I-65 named Marc Dottore. He’s working with an artist from up that way named Sturgill Simpson and he wants to find the right attorney to help with an indepdendent release.” I said, “Great,” and he introduced us over email.
A few days later, Dottore, a Music Row veteran with a goatee in his late 50s, came by my office. He played me the tracks Sturgill had been working on with a young producer named Dave Cobb I knew who’d recently relocated from LA. I liked what I heard right away. My dad loved 70s country, and he had several Waylon and Willie albums, along with the stuff he considered the true classics: Hank, Patsy, Johnny Cash and The Carter Family. While my brother and I listened obsessively to the Top 40 station, my dad preferred the country station. I didn’t mind. When I heard Strugill’s songs and voice, when I spent time with the recordings, I knew it was as good as the greatest country music I’d ever heard. I enthusiatically offered to join the project, feeling certain it would be easy to develop. After all, this is why I moved to Nasvhille, this was exactly the real deal shit I’d come hoping to find. After I signed on, Dottore dropped off a box of the burned CDs with 10 finished High Top tracks, minus Some Days and You Can Have the Crown, which came later.
Dottore welcomed me warmly and introduced the other individual who’d signed up, a seasoned and well-respected talent agent named Jonathan Levine. Levine, known around town as “JL,” had a deep history with various projects connected to the Grateful Dead, and several arena-level clients on his roster. JL had - and still has - a passion for developing new artist projects, and his enthusiasm for Sturgill was contagious. He invited Dottore and me to a celebratory dinner for our new little team at a place in The Gulch called Watermark, now long gone and replaced by 404 Kitchen, to meet Sturgill.
I arrived early to find Dottore and JL already seated. They stood welcomed me, and Dottore explained that he had no idea when - or even if - Sturgill would join us. Sturgill and his wife, Sarah, lived close by. They made it easy for him to join by scheduling the dinner across the street from his apartment. But still…
We finished our dinner and we were well into coffee and dessert when Sturgill finally straggled in. We locked eyes and he seemed to recognize me…from the Turnip Truck. “Oh, hey,” he said as he broke into a smile. He explained that he loved the job but he hated working the register. He liked to be in the back, unpacking boxes, listening to whatever music he wanted to hear. He hated being called to the register because he recognized the clientele was mostly just a bunch of music industry douchebags. Got it.
This was all shared with good nature, and the mood was warm and festive. Sturgill sat around for an hour or so while JL held forth about the incredible future we’d all have together. It’s hard to have certainty in this business, especially working with an artist who probably couldn’t yet sell 100 tickets in his adoptive home town. Now that I’ve been friends with JL for over a decade, I’ve learned that JL is well-known for this sort of sincere enthusiasm and absolute certainty of his convictions, and he’s usually right. He’s been right about Sturgill, Colter Wall, Tyler Childers, and many, many others. I left that dinner feeling deeply grateful and truly blessed to be part of it.
Of course, it took a couple years for much of anything to happen. The actual work is in the scope of what I can’t talk about, because I was the lawyer! But I believe I’m safe to mention that I took those burned CDs out of the box and set them at the edge of my desk in my Hillsboro Village office. I gave all of the CDs away to music business folks who came through the office, telling each person they had to listen, that it was an amazing album that would change country music. They pretty much all laughed at my audacity and said sure, they’d take a listen. Neither Dottore nor I heard back from any of those people. Music Row didn’t want to know, and the Music Row machinery had little or nothing to do with Sturgill’s rise. It grew slowly then suddenly from lots of touring and finding early advocates to write about the music or play it on small but adventurous radio stations. basically people started sharing the story of this incredible album by this incredible artist, which led to his 2014 breakthrough with the brilliant Metamodern Sounds in Country Music.
Sturgill wasn’t the first modern country outsider to make an end-run around Music Row. There’s a deep history there dating back at least to the 1960s. We even had recent precedent in The Avett Brothers, The Civil Wars, and other country-adjacent outsiders who knocked on the door. I now realized we were hacking away at a dense forest that has become a paved highway, providing an end-run around Music Row that in my opinion has led to a huge improvement of the quality of modern country music. I’m looking forward to seeing Sturgill at a sold-out hockey arena later this month, doing pretty much exactly what he was doing over a decade ago in all the beer joints in town. The handfull of us in those rooms knew we were onto something special.
When I saw the subject line in my email, I wondered if you meant the Turnip Truck store or the old adage of falling off the turnip truck. I worked there when Stu did! So, bravo to this excellent post in multiple ways
I popped into town just after you in 2015, when there was still an aura of magic to Nashville. I'm sure people still experience Nashville magic but the insane growth has dulled it for me at least a bit. Our first week here, we ate at a burger place in the Gulch and our waitress was a singer-songwriter named Bre Kennedy. She was extremely nice, helpful in pointing us around town, and it has been a trip to hear her on Lightning 100 over the years.
This was a fun read...Sturgill is one of my favorites. Thank you for sharing!