It’s 5 o’clock on an early September afternoon, the beginning of the end of another long, hot summer. Traffic inches along Church Street in downtown Nashville in no hurry to get anywhere quickly, it seems, after nearly an entire season of car trips and long weekends. The boredom of the expected bottleneck mixes with the still-hot sun in an almost narcotic way, the flow slowly regulated by the lights that lead the cars to their respective highways. It’s a commercial for something refreshing and new, in the sense that these people are desperately, comically in need of something refreshing and new at the moment. At least that’s what it looks like from the cool confines of Tribe as you sit, sipping a refreshing drink, your body temperature adjusting to the new leather couch, your eyes, relaxed in the lesser light, barely able to squint into the bright outside.
You may not know of Tribe yet, a new bar and restaurant owned and operated by David Taylor and Keith Blaydes, or, if you do, you may not have had a chance to pay a visit—it is, after all, only a few months old. And yet the place has attracted a steady crowd since its opening and has done remarkably well on Wednesday nights and weekends. True, over the past several years Nashvillians have developed a hunger for patronizing new establishments (our tolerance for crowds, our immediate abandonment of any sense of personal space is increasingly amazing with each new bar opening), but, at the risk of sounding hackneyed, this crowd is different.
“We didn’t suddenly come to Nashville to start a gay club,” says Blaydes, a former purchasing director. “We’re two Nashvillians who decided there was room for something new in town.”
But what’s new here is not that Tribe is primarily a gay establishment—because it is, inescapably so. There are the innumerable video screens flashing Madonna videos, the ranks upon ranks of shiny martini glasses and the pounding dance music, like the world’s most insanely loud pulse, that pervades every corner of the space. What’s new is that it’s not limited to being a gay establishment. As Taylor, a former management consultant, puts it: “We want everyone who wants to come here and have a good time to come here and have a good time. Straight, gay, lesbian, whatever. We have no attitude. I never want this to be a place where you feel privileged to be a customer.”
It is a subtle but important difference. Tribe is brazenly exploiting its Nashville roots in a town with a serious inferiority complex about clubs—we have an almost poignant tendency to draw them wholecloth from New York or L.A. examples, velvet ropes and all, forgetting, of course, that Nashvillians don’t particularly like New York or L.A. attitudes.
“I think it’s been a matter of choosing the right time and place,” Taylor says. “People in Nashville don’t have a lot of pretense, and we’re Nashvillians, and that’s why we went about this project in a nice and friendly way. And Nashvillians seem to like it for the same reason. It’s a circle.”
Even with its millennial-era open-mindedness, though, Taylor and Blaydes see Nashville’s other gay bars, both past and present, as having shaped Tribe the most. They’re pleased with the almost overwhelming enthusiasm their business has engendered—the instant reputation as a sophisticated urban hot spot, the predictions that it will usher in the next flurry of downtown revitalization projects—but they are quick to point out the circumstances of their arrival.
“All of the kind of freedom that we have here is because of the older gay clubs in town,” Blaydes says. “A lot of those clubs—and some of them are 20 or 30 years old—took chances just to exist. They struggled for the things we don’t have to worry about.”
In other words, Tribe is kind of the walking fish of the gay bar evolutionary tree—the attitudes and policies that have historically kept Nashville’s alternative clubs safe are themselves safe to shed at this stage, which has opened a lot of doors for the new club. Tribe sits on large downtown real estate, as opposed to down a back alley or outside of town. It employs a mainstream advertising campaign, as opposed to ads in strictly gay publications. And, so far at any rate, it enjoys instant acceptance among both the straight and gay communities, a fact that is more remarkable than it sounds: Does anyone recall the hoopla surrounding the opening of any of the older gay bars in town? That’s because there wasn’t any.
Which is not to say that bars that cater strictly to the gay community are going the way of the dodo; far from it, say Taylor and Blaydes. “We’re good customers of the gay clubs in Nashville,” Taylor says. “I think we have one of the best dance clubs in the country—the Connection—but they’re mostly late-night places. We thought there was room for a place that catered to an earlier crowd. Lord, I’m nearly 40 years old—I don’t like to start my night at midnight.”
As autumn settles in, old routines reemerge—comfortable things that seemed too stuffy for Nashville’s humid summer nights but that reappear every year to replace the sense of adventure that wanes with the shortening of the days. Weekdays are broken up by football games, and the usual crowds gather at the usual watering holes. This Sunday, the Titans are at home playing Cleveland. Kickoff is noon, and Tribe’s doors open, with game day food and drink specials, at 11.
