Diarrhea Planet
After half a decade of rapid growth and vigorous debate over how to manage it, Nashvillians in 2016 know more about real estate than they probably ever wanted to. If you aren’t downright angry about the rising cost of housing, you are at least more cautious, especially if you work in a creative field but make ends meet with multiple other gigs — or in what’s increasingly a best-case scenario in Music City, a parallel career that dovetails with your work in music, visual art, film or theater. When the places you work are the same places you like to hang out, calling it a cause for concern when one by one those places are either making significant changes or disappearing is a miracle of understatement.
So it’s heartening to see Exit/In celebrate its 45th birthday this weekend. According to co-proprietors Josh Billue and Chris Cobb (who as best they can tell are the 22nd and 23rd individuals to own the vaunted venue), the Rock Block staple isn’t going the way of 328 Performance Hall or The Muse anytime soon.
This spring, following a year of negotiations, Billue and Cobb turned down an offer from concert promotions giant Live Nation — which widened its Middle Tennessee footprint in 2015 with exclusive programming rights at the new Ascend Amphitheater and the purchase of a controlling stake in Bonnaroo — to sell their portfolio of businesses, which includes the 500-capacity Exit/In, 1,500-cap Marathon Music Works and the somewhat upscale bars Hurry Back and William Collier’s, which neighbor each club respectively.
The decision not to sell indicates that Exit/In is doing well — well enough, at least. But like the many Nashvillians who routinely pass through Exit/In’s and Marathon’s doors, survival depends on cash flow from multiple revenue streams to get by.
“Exit/In is one of those things that for a lot of people to look at, it would be hard for them to understand,” Billue tells the Scene with a wry smile. “It works and it’s profitable, but it’s a lot of work to keep it going. I think our diversity strengthens Exit/In. I think it was a necessary thing for us to do in order to hold onto it and not wind up seeing a 24th, 25th, maybe a 26th owner.”
Not that it’s ever been easy. Brugh Reynolds co-founded the venue with Owsley Manier in 1971, when Nashville was just beginning to establish its reputation as a cosmopolitan city with a taste for a diverse range of music. With no clubs regularly booking the various rock, folk and other outlying artists who were developing in town and going against the grain of Nashville’s ever-prevailing country image, Exit/In’s survival beyond infancy proved that an audience existed to support a seperate scene, and other clubs followed.
“Over the years there was a lot of education as to exactly what we were doing,” Reynolds tells the Scene. “Subsequent club owners were a lot savvier than we were in terms of operating to make a profit. We established the reputation with the industry, so [Exit/In] was able to, in our wake, cut tight deals for the artists, and didn’t have to operate as a restaurant, which was one of the challenges that came upon us when we started out. We were offering beer and hot dogs. When we doubled the size of the club in the middle of 1972, in order to serve liquor and wine, we had to get in the restaurant business — as if show business wasn’t risky enough.”
Trying to operate the venue as a vegetarian restaurant eventually led to bankruptcy and the first of many times the club changed hands, a tradition well-documented in Noel Murray’s 2002 Scene cover story “In Through the Out Door.” But even if attendance has never been predictable, even if the building itself has cycled through various states of disrepair as it evolved from the listening room that makes a cameo in Robert Altman’s Nashville to the high-ceilinged black box it is today, it’s remained a reliable sounding board for young groups starting out, a surprisingly intimate spot to see some of the best touring talent, and a place where myths and legends are made.
“I’m a sucker for history to some extent,” says Billue. “I know it’s probably going to be bad to say in this version of Nashville, but a lot of stuff gets bypassed — we’re always looking for the new, better version of things. Rooms that do music, you can’t really replicate. Maybe it’s cleaner lines and nicer audio and better bathrooms, you can go through a whole list of things. But at the end of the day, you can’t replicate the history of the performances that have been through it.”
Bobby Bare Jr. quite literally grew up with Exit/In. At 8 years old, he sang there with his father, with a front-row seat for lightning-in-a-bottle moments like Neil Young and Dickey Betts stumbling in to jam with Bare Sr., accompanied by Shel Silverstein on harmonica. In his late teens, he stood in block-long lines to see heroes of the local rock scene like Walk the West and Jason and the Scorchers. In the early ’90s, he spent years observing outstanding rock bands from behind the the club’s lighting board, making connections that would eventually turn into his first pro band, the dynamite rock outfit Bare Jr.
“Before I started playing songs in public, I was the light guy that would work for free because I loved bands and just being part of the scene,” remembers Bare, calling in on the way home from a string of dates as a sideman in the newest incarnation of lo-fi indie-rock heroes Guided by Voices. “I knew all the best players. I knew exactly who I wanted to play with, and that helped a lot.”
Exit/In’s strong relationship with rock has never been exclusive, and the club has recently played a role in fostering the local dance and hip-hop scenes. As critical mass began building in the underground around 2007, it bubbled up across Elliston at The End, where ace producer KDSML and others held down the monthly Mashville hip-hop/dance party, a formative link in the development of the diverse and vibrant scene that’s turned Mike Floss, Wick-It and others into national names. At the same time, top EDM acts began blasting their way through Exit/In. Before his four-year run selling out Bridgestone Arena on New Year’s Eve, Bassnectar got his name on the Exit/In’s wall of fame. And nearly a decade-and-a-half before his own turn headlining Bridgestone, a pre-fame Jack White made his Nashville debut at The End, when The White Stripes played there in 2001.
“I want to say I’ve seen just about everybody I want to see come through there, at some point or another,” KDSML says of the Rock Block. “It’s an awesome staple of Nashville, the whole Elliston Place spot. It’s one of the few places where you can actually feel that history. It’s always been a place you can just kind of stumble in and find something cool to do, or at least find where the cool people are hanging out.”
For quad-guitar-sporting rockers Diarrhea Planet, who grew quickly from local sensation with a novelty song to one of the top-ranked club- and festival-level touring bands in the country, Exit/In is home court. After selling out the room seven times — following their set at Freakin’ Weekend II in March of 2011, one of their early Exit/In sellouts, they were signed to flagship local punk label Infinity Cat — the staff knows their gear, and the band knows the room like the backs of their hands. Where familiarity might sometimes breed contempt, the sense of wonder hasn’t diminished for DP frontman Jordan Smith.
“To this day I’ve never seen shows as good as those,” he says, recalling JEFF the Brotherhood gigs he saw at Exit/In as a fan before DP ever opened for them. “It’s like the most powerful thing I’ve ever seen in music. Exit/In has this kind of sacred feel when you walk in. It’s very nostalgic, you’re just flooded with a lot of the best memories you’ve ever had in the city there.”
He’ll have opportunities aplenty on Saturday to make more of those memories, as Diarrhea Planet tops a stout bill organized to salute Exit/In’s anniversary. Other highlights include The Protomen’s arena-grade spectacle, The Features’ time-tested danceable rock, and a late-night dance party with DJ sets by KDSML, Spice-J and others. The Elliston Place Street Fest features simultaneous shows at Exit/In and The End, plus an outdoor stage in the middle of the street.
The street fest has one other historical connection. It marks the revival (under a slightly different name) of the Elliston Place Street Fair, which was popular through the ’70s and early ’80s. Stories circulate that it was put on hold after a scheme to make the block into a temporary beach went south — truckloads of sand were poured into the street before anyone figured out how to clean it up.
Email music@nashvillescene.com
