Month: April 2017

The Tail of the Dragon

Curviest road in North America?
Supervan?
Let’s go!
(the smell coming off of supervan at the end of this drive… I think the Tail of the Dragon might be Supervan’s kryptonite)
Most pics are not mine, they don’t really allow you to stop and take pictures, the road is incredibly busy with bikes and sports cars waiting to tackle the 318 curves in 11 miles.
I learned about the Tail of the Dragon from Two-Lane Blacktop, one of my first posts this trip was visiting sites in rural Oklahoma that were in the movie, they also drive the Dragon, here is a shot from the film and the same location today.

He was headed down to Knoxville with the weekly load

Ever mention that I love Steve Earle?
I’ve heard Copperhead Road is a real place, time to find it.
 
“Well my name’s John Lee Pettimore
Same as my daddy and his daddy before
You hardly ever saw Grandaddy down here
He only come to town about twice a year”
             
“He’d buy a hundred pounds of yeast and some copper line
Everybody knew that he made moonshine”
Head into the backwoods of the Appalachian Mountains, deep in the Cherokee National Forest.
and drive…
 
“Now the revenue man wanted Grandaddy bad
He headed up the holler with everything he had
It’s before my time but I’ve been told
You never come back from Copperhead Road”
and drive…
 
“Now Daddy ran the whiskey in a big black Dodge
Bought it at an auction at the Mason’s Lodge
Johnson County Sheriff painted on the side
Just shot a coat of primer then he looked inside”
and drive…
“Well him and my uncle tore that engine down
I still remember that rumblin’ sound
Well the sheriff came around in the middle of the night
Heard mama cryin’, knew something wasn’t right
He was headed down to Knoxville with the weekly load
You could smell the whiskey burnin’ down Copperhead Road”
and drive….
 
“I volunteered for the Army on my birthday
They draft the white trash first, ’round here anyway
I done two tours of duty in Vietnam
And I came home with a brand new plan”
and drive…
 
“I take the seed from Columbia and Mexico
I plant it up the holler down Copperhead Road
Well the D.E.A.’s got a chopper in the air
I wake up screaming like I’m back over there
I learned a thing or two from ol’ Charlie don’t you know
You better stay away from Copperhead Road”
I’m proud, this took all day and my back is killing me and I got lost twice. Standing at the start of Copperhead Hollow Road.

The Birthplace of Country Music

Country music comes from Virginia, neat eh?
For ten days in the summer of 1927 RCA sent a producer with portable recording equipment to Bristol to see if he could find local talent to record. A backwoods family showed up and played a style of music previously unheard of that they had honed in the Appalachian Mountains blending the music of British and Irish immigrants with the music of former slave families who had moved north.
That family were the Carter’s and would from then on be known at the first family of country music, their guitarist Maybelle Carter had a guitar picking style that had not been seen before and was really the first person to showcase the guitar as more than just a background rhythm instrument, this style would become known as the “Carter Scratch” and would influence guitarists from that point on.
I am picky about country music, I really only like the stuff that isn’t crap, the Carter Family however are almost mythical, especially when walking the streets of Bristol myself this morning.
When Johnny Cash married June Carter he married very, very well.
Those ten days in 1927 are now known as the Bristol Sessions and are considered the birth of country music, incidentally the day after the Carter Family showed up a poor railroad brakeman showed up with his guitar, named Jimmy Rogers, amazing.

Ketchup

The sore back I developed in New Orleans officially went into the red in Nashville and I’ve spent most of the past 3 days in motel rooms, laying on the floor. Here is some catchup of the things I managed to limp my way to:
BOURBON!
Toured three of my favourite distilleries in Kentucky; Four Roses, Elijah Craig and Maker’s Mark.
Four Roses warehouses, they have ten like the one pictured below (500,000 barrels) and are currently building five more, the global bourbon demand is so great that all of the big producers are currently in the process of doubling capacity, however with at least a ten year lead time this is not easy to do.
Maker’s Mark
The Maker’s Mark grounds are almost unbelievably gorgeous, actually most of what I saw of Kentucky is gorgeous.
More bourbon storage, these warehouses are massive.
I swear they said I could!
It tastes bad, like sour beer and bread.
So if you drink some Maker’s Mark about 7 years from now my bacteria helped!
More of the grounds.
There is a fungus that turns everything within a mile of a bourbon distillery black over time, like this tree.
Maker’s Mark have their own printing shop onsite, here they are printing and cutting bottle labels.
Bourbon!
Hand-dipping each bottle in wax.
The entire time from unboxing a returned bottle to that bottle being washed, labelled, dipped in wax, filled and boxed for shipping is less than 2 minutes.
If you buy a bottle onsite you get to dip if yourself.

RCA Studio B – Tour

“The House That Chet Built”
Chet Atkins was the studio boss here at RCA Studio B and turned it into the most famous recording studio of the 50s and 60s, all the stars that got their start 3 hours down the road at Sun Studios in Memphis came here for the next stage of their careers. Almost all of Elvis’s songs were recorded in this room.
RCA Studio B is the only recording studio listed by the US Park Service in their National Register of Historic Places.
Who recorded here? 
The usual giants, people you would expect, 
Waylon Jennings
Dolly Parton
Hank Snow
Ernest Tubb
Rosemary Clooney
Everly Bros.
Roger Miller
The Monkees
Willie Nelson
Roy Orbison
Carl Perkins
Elvis Presley
Barbra Streisand
but
I’m more interested in the less famous people who recorded stuff I love in this exact room…
My Morning Jacket…
and Ben Folds Five…
And of course Leonard…
Leonard lived in Nashville for several years and recorded two albums here “Songs from a Room” and “Songs of Love and Hate”.
The singer’s spot
The tour guide had lots of trivia questions during the tour, the person with the correct answer got a prize…. so if anyone would like a Taylor Swift guitar pic I have lots!
Prizes!

Backstage at the Ryman


Wake up in the middle of the night in a truck stop
Stumble in the restaurant,
Wonderin’ why I don’t stop

–Steve Earle “Guitar Town”
Emmylou singing Steve Earle at the Ryman? Yes, please.
Backstage tour of The Ryman Auditorium… 
“The Home of the Opry”
“The Mother Church”
“The Soul of Nashville”
“The Carnegie of the South”
This year is 125 years since the Ryman was built, it sits on a very short list of the most historic music venues in the world.
It being Easter Sunday the auditorium was pretty empty, for a while while I sat in a pew listening to Emmlou’s historic concert recorded here in 1991 I was the only person in sight.
The view from stage right.
Unfortunately backstage photos are forbidden so I had to take these very quietly.
This is the view when leaving the stage.
In case you are wondering why Emmylou Harris stars in this post about the Ryman there is a reason. 
Once the Grand Ole Opry outgrew the Ryman and moved to a larger facility the Ryman sat mostly unused and was likely going to be demolished. In 1991 Emmylou asked if she could record a live album there, the concert hall was taken out of mothballs and an amazing album was recorded. 
When the album won a Grammy interest in the Ryman was renewed and eventually a trust was formed to raise the multiple millions of dollars needed to spend years restoring and updating the building.
There are photos of Emmylou in multiple locations backstage and the tour guide spoke of her as an almost magical person for “saving the Ryman”.
The building holds 2362 people and according to the tour guide there were 2362 in house the other night when I was here for Loretta Lynn’s birthday.

Johnny Cash Museum

Spent the morning at the Johnny Cash Museum, teary-eyed the whole time, very high quality museum, unlike Graceland this doesn’t shy away from drug-use and darker stuff so much.
The exact guitars and bass and amps Johnny, Luther and Marshall brought into Sun Records on their first day.
Ha! I love Johnny being described as “droll”.
Johnny’s reading from June’s funeral.
The chair and guitar from the ‘Hurt’ video, his final. 
Watching Johnny look through the windows of his home where I stood last week and seeing a very elderly June comforting a clearly unwell Johnny in the video and knowing they would both be gone less than a year later choked me up and made me flee to the gift shop.
“I don’t ever want to see that video again.”
-Joni Mitchell
“It’s so powerful I shouldn’t even talk about it.”
-Michael Stipe

Muscle Shoals, Alabama


Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers
And they’ve been known to pick a song or two
Lord they get me off so much
They pick me up when I’m feeling blue
-Lynyrd Skynyrd “Sweet Home Alabama”
‘Sweet Home Alabama’ play that dead man’s song
Turn those speakers up full blast, play it all night long

-Warren Zevon “Play it All Night Long”
 Drove to Muscle Shoals Alabama yesterday, a town of a few thousand people in the Alabama swamp, hours from a major centre.

In the 1970’s two recording studios run out of Muscle Shoals became the unlikely hottest spot in the world to record. The Swampers that Lynyrd Skynyrd are talking about in Sweet Home Alabama? That’s them in the picture below, they were the studio band and played on dozens of records that you’ve heard before.

The Swampers

Me

Cher