The Big Road Trip – Day 21

Nashville, Tennessee during a heat wave. It is the double H’s – Hot and Humid! Of course, it’s been hot right across the country, but the further east I came, the higher the humidity became. I’ve always thought about Memphis as a generally hot and humid city and it didn’t disappoint me, yesterday. Today, is my Nashville day. The budget motel I stayed in was just east of Nashville off I-40. It was nothing special, but the air conditioning worked effectively, it was clean, the sheets were clean, the bed was comfortable and the WiFi worked until . . . Well, I’ll talk about that in a minute. I probably should have gone north of the city on I-65 where I would later find, as I was leaving town, nicer budget properties at somewhat lower rates, plus, I would have been in a location that would ultimately have allowed me to leave the Nashville area faster, since I was going north on I-65, during the early rush hour traffic I encountered.

Well, the WiFi story is annoying. Actually, there was nothing wrong with the WiFi. It worked just fine. But, this morning, I was taking care of my usual morning activities, checking e-mail, answering those that needed immediate responses, getting the blog posting for Day 20 prepared to upload and other mundane daily tasks.

Then, it happened. I looked at my incoming email and I had about 30 or 40 “bounce back” email messages. I hadn’t sent out 30 or 40 emails in the past week or two and, especially, not to many of the addresses that I didn’t even realize were in my contact base. I checked the content of these email bounce backs and they had no Subject line and no message other then various Web links. Before I could even start deleting this batch of bounce backs another group came in. I quickly deleted all I could, then immediately broke the network connection. My ed@oakhillpress.com email address had been hijacked and was being used to mine every email contact in my computer to send out various forms of spam.

So, I stayed off line for the next couple hours and finished working on the Day 20 blog post while I awaited a phone call from a local Nashville fellow, an old Air Force friend of my buddy, Dave. Ron was going to pick me up and run me around Nashville to check out things of interest to me. Just before he called, I attempted to log back on line to upload the new blog post and then do some damage control, since I had already started receiving queries before I broke the network connection from friends wondering if I had gone daft or something. I could not log back on. I later found out that Google (I use their Gmail as my email server) had disabled my account – email, blog, Google Group – everything – for 24 hours when their fail-safe systems detected the activity. So, that was kind of crummy, but still better then more spam going out. And, besides that annoying issue, it was VERY HOT and humid in Nashville and I realized I was becoming irritable.

But, then Ron Hurst arrived. Ron is a “radio/TV guy” like a lot of us back in the late 60’s and 70’s who were part of the second, but not quite as significant, radio and TV glory days after the Golden Age. Ron, Dave, my buddy in Falls Church, VA and I were all at Lackland Air Force Base at the same time during the fall of 1969. Due to a myriad of circumstances, mainly government bureaucracy, neither Dave nor I met Ron at Lackland. Dave and I met and worked together for a short time until I received my orders for the Washington, DC Air Force gig I was waiting for. Dave, then shipped out to Thailand where he eventually met Ron and worked with him. Years pass – about 40 of them – and now, Ron, Dave and Ed are all friends. Life takes such interesting twists.

Ron took me through my favorite section of town, Music Row and he, while only a Nashville resident for the past three years, was amazingly knowledgeable about the music and recording scene. I learned a lot from Ron that I didn’t know before. I saw some of the old studios I remembered and some of the new ones that didn’t exist until years after I spent some time in Nashville. I was in my element. Ron then took me to see the home of a fairly recent country artist who built this ultra-modern and controversial home on a hill overlooking all of Nashville. This was very cool. This artist is definitely a non-conformist and I’m sure I would like him. From there Ron suggested some lunch and took me to a local eatery called Brown’s Diner. Tourists don’t go there. It’s where the locals go. We enjoyed some burgers and fries and people-watched the local denizens. Ron then drove me by the site of the former, first and original RCA studios where Elvis recorded some of his hits. I didn’t know about that complex. Most people think he did all his RCA recordings at “Studio B” (now a museum) on Music Row. But, studio B didn’t exist during some of Elvis’s earlier hits. At any rate, the original studio complex was owned by a car dealer across the street from the site. Obviously, he didn’t give a hang about historical significance. The building was demolished a few years ago and the site is now a parking lot for his new and used car inventory.

Finally, Ron suggested, while we were at Brown’s Diner, that we visit United Record Pressing, one of the very few remaining vinyl record pressing plants in the U.S. Now, that was a real treat. I hadn’t been to a record pressing plant since the early to mid 70’s when vinyl was still the king. We went in. I introduced us to the male receptionist at the desk and told him we would be interested in taking a tour of the facility, if possible. Well, arrangements were made and for $5.00 each, we received a personal tour of the complex.

The first thing Adam Scoville, our tour guide, showed us was the living accommodations upstairs, over the offices. These accommodations were used by executives and representatives of Black owned record labels. People like such as Berry Gordy of Motown Records and others like him would have stayed in these rooms. In the earlier days of the music industry in Nashville, it was very difficult for Black folks to find accommodations in a very White, segregated Nashville due to the racial issues this country was still steeped in. You could almost feel the magic of the presence of the people who had stayed in those accommodations those many years ago and who had such a huge impact on music in this country. It was almost a spiritual experience.

The entire operation was like a time machine, a working museum and a dinosaur at the same time. Adam, a mere 28 years old, was born about the same time the CD was born and had very little knowledge of or contact with vinyl records. I would say that would be true of a substantial number of the 60 or so employees of United Record Pressing. The presses were each small dinosaurs, almost like being in a mechanical Jurassic Park. What a nostalgic experience. Ron had never been through a pressing plant before, so he was quite amazed and delighted to see the processes. I was amazed to see these old presses still squeezing that hot vinyl under more then a hundred thousand pounds of pressure into perfect, every record the same, thin, vinyl disks.

I can only say that Ron really hit the nail on the head suggesting this as a place to visit. There might be only five or six such plants left in the entire United States, still pressing records. United is probably one of, if not, the largest of them. Their SMT (Southern Machine Tools) and Lenerd Presses have to be maintained in-house. They have their own machine shop and machinists to make new parts when the presses break down. The companies who built the presses no longer make new presses and don’t provide parts. If something breaks down that United can’t fabricate themselves, they have to search all over the U.S. and even overseas to find parts someone else might still have.

United also had their own plating facilities to make the metal Masters, Mothers and record Stampers. This is a three step process resulting in the stampers, or molds, if you will, that are an exact mirror image of the original lacquer disk cut in the mastering processing on a large, disk recording lathe. This chemical electrolysis plating process was often contracted out to specialized plating companies by the smaller pressing plants in the good old days.

After we left United, Ron took me through a fast tour of downtown sites and landmarks, gave me an indication of the damage the recent flood caused and then dropped me back at my car, which I left parked at the Vista Inn where I had stayed the night before. All in all, a day that started out with a negative situation plus the heat and humidity that started to make me irritable, turned out to be, yet, another fantastic day on The Big Road Trip. Thanks, Ron, for the new friendship and the great day in Nashville.

I headed out of town about an hour or so later then I had hoped to leave and found myself slowed up a bit by the early Nashville rush-hour traffic. The temperature was 100 degrees. Yep! ONE-HUNDRED DEGREES and humid. Remember, my AC was only limping along and performed enough to keep the cabin of the car comfortable when I was going about 65 to 80 mph to force the outdoor air to circulate the cold air off the AC compressor. At 20 to 50 mph and 100 degrees, I can honestly tell you, this was not one of the finer moments during the trip. However, it was worth it. The day was such a total grand day that I wouldn’t allow this discomfort to diminish all the positive experiences of the day.

My objective now was Huntington, WV and then my 22nd and last day on The Big Road Trip. Once past the Nashville traffic – I lost about 20 minutes to 30 minutes in slower moving traffic, the roads (heading north and east, I-65, The Blue Grass Parkway and I-64) were clear and fast. The AC was able to cool off the inside of the Caddy RV and I was just sailing. I did a quick gas stop in Lexington, Kentucky, trying to move as quickly as possible to make my Huntington objective. However, between Lexington and Huntington, a couple National Weather Service emergency alerts broke into the public radio programs I was listening to and indicated that there were storm fronts behind me and directly in front of me. I was basically trapped. They said the storms had winds up to 70 mph, torrential rain, hail stones the size of quarters, potential flash flooding in low lying areas and near rivers and streams and extreme, deadly cloud to ground lightning.

I had missed the Little Rock storms and flash floods by a couple days. I had missed the Oklahoma City storms that caused flash floods, closed three interstate highways and had people being rescued from stranded cars – by only several hours. I had driven through a pretty rough storm in the northern Texas panhandle (because I couldn’t find any place to stop). I decided the better part of valor was to find a decent place, high and dry, before I reached the storm fronts, which I was rapidly approaching and get off the road for the night. And that happened in Mt. Sterling, Kentucky. I grabbed something to eat, took it back to the Budget Inn motel and settled in for the night. It was close to 10 PM when I was finally settled in. Tired, but totally satisfied with another great day of adventure and sights – I was ready for a good rest.

Day 22, the final day on The Big Road Trip coming up.

Enthusiastically,
Ed