Nashville Free Store at Drkmttr
“We are the cockroaches of music venues in Nashville,” says Drkmttr co-owner Olivia Scibelli with a laugh. “You can’t kill us, for some reason.”
There are some good reasons for Drkmttr’s survival, and more of them emerge as time goes on. For the past five years, Drkmttr has served Nashville as an all-ages DIY space, hosting underground music, community organization meetings, drag nights and even a musical based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The volunteer-centered collective has survived two moves and — counting the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic — three extended closures.
With help from a crowdfunding campaign, Kathryn Edwards launched Drkmttr in a creaky old house near the Nashville City Cemetery in 2015. The next year, the venue moved into a former barbershop in The Nations. Just a few months later, the space was stalled when DIY venues nationwide were shuttered following the December 2016 fire that killed 36 at Oakland, Calif.’s Ghost Ship. After months of work to obtain an occupancy permit from the fire department, the arts space reopened in April 2017. But the volunteer organizers decided to leave that location (now home to Barbershop Theater) in February 2018. It took most of that year to figure out a sustainable way to reopen. But Drkmttr came back in January 2019, organized as a business with Edwards, Scibelli and Chappy Hull as co-owners and situated in what is hopefully its permanent home at 1111 Dickerson Pike.
Like venues across the country that depend on people being able to mingle safely in large groups, Drkmttr has been unable to host shows since the pandemic began to spread in March. The co-owners’ immediate challenge was figuring out how to pay the bills — a successful GoFundMe campaign was a great start, and a Patreon profile continues to help. But the Drkmttr crew has been proactive in expanding their role in the community, and along the way they’ve found inspiring new purposes for the space. They’ve opened their doors to political organizers and started a podcast, and the venue is now the proud home of the Nashville Free Store, an initiative offering food, cleaning supplies and more to anyone who needs it, no questions asked.
According to Scibelli, Drkmttr’s organizers just couldn’t sit around after the protests against systemic racism and police brutality began in late May, following the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor.
“That was the big thing,” Scibelli says. “We decided we were going to open our doors to people who are doing activist work. We posted something saying that if anyone needs any space for organizing, we were available.”
They got an immediate response from Teens for Equality. The group needed a space for a debriefing session following its June 4 Black Lives Matter march, which turned out to be one of the largest peaceful protests for racial equality in the city’s history. The pandemic limits how many people can meet in the physical space, but the venue has hosted other activist meetings as well as an in-person event for progressive congressional candidate Keeda Haynes. Drkmttr also uses its social media profiles to spread the word about a variety of public gatherings, online meetings and other actions for progressive causes.
The Nashville Free Store came about when Edwards and Scibelli were approached by Molly McCarthy and Bassam Habib, members of the extended Drkmttr family who wanted to help establish a mutual-aid endeavor in Nashville. They’d heard about an ongoing effort by community members to support other community members in Birmingham, Ala., and thought it could work in Middle Tennessee. Scibelli notes that the group operates inside Drkmttr, but is independent of the venue itself.
In a little more than two months of operation, the store has grown and adapted to fit the needs of those who use it. However it changes, it’s guided by McCarthy and Habib’s mission for the store, printed on their website. It is simple — “It is a place where we can share resources freely and no one will be asked questions or turned away” — and so is the methodology. On Fridays from 3 to 6 p.m., community members leave donations including perishable and nonperishable food, diapers, toiletries and school supplies. On Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., people mask up and line up around the building, waiting their turn to gather what they need. The whole process is socially distanced, to keep both shoppers and volunteers safe. The effort is not billed as charity — as McCarthy pointed out in a recent interview for the Scene with Megan Seling, “charity” implies that those in need are at fault, when in fact they’re being overwhelmed and the system is failing them — but rather an opportunity for a community to care for its members who’ve been hit the hardest. There is also a community refrigerator outside the building, where shoppers can stop by to pick up items they need when the store isn’t open.
Edwards, an experienced show promoter who has handled the lion’s share of Drkmttr’s booking, is also a former volunteer DJ who hosted a show called From the Basement on community radio station WXNA-LPFM. She’s a natural fit to host Drkmttr’s podcast, Drkmttr Radio (part of the We Own This Town network). What was at first an extra responsibility has turned into something that gives Edwards & Co. an opportunity to keep sharing information and music with the all-ages community that’s grown up around the venue.
“When we launched the Patreon, one thing you had to have with it is [original] content,” Edwards explains. “It’s an opportunity for me to be able to interview people who have important things to say and haven’t necessarily been given that platform.”
The podcast features music from performers who’ve played Drkmttr before as well as bands that are tangentially related, plus discussions on other topics of interest. Since late July, new episodes have appeared about every two weeks. So far, Edwards has interviewed Scibelli and Pierce Jordan, who fronts the powerful Philly hardcore band Soul Glo. For the most recent episode, published Aug. 28, Edwards celebrated Drkmttr’s fifth anniversary (the inaugural show was Aug. 29, 2015), sharing memories of the venue’s first home while playing tracks from bands that frequented the house at the time, like Gnarwhal and Yautja.
There is more on the horizon for Drkmttr too. Organizers will soon begin renovating the former kitchen space to serve as a community classroom and meeting space, providing a platform for new outreach programs. There are plans to pair up with Queen Ave Collective (a multimedia production space opened up at the site of another much-loved, long-defunct all-ages venue, also called Queen Ave) to work on a livestreaming music festival for the fall.
Drkmttr and its extended family have proven again and again to be an important piece of Nashville, growing and changing with the needs of their community. But these efforts take resources. For those wanting to contribute, the Patreon is always active, and the Free Store accepts any donations dropped off on Fridays. Until we can all see live music (or Buffy adaptations) in the same room again, we can put our efforts into caring for the community around us.
