Paul Burch (left) and Fats Kaplin
These days, too many things that we’ve come to think of as fundamental are disappearing or being turned into shells of what we’ve relied on for years. That makes it especially nice to see two Nashville institutions come together to make the world a better place, even if only for a little while. Thursday, Paul Burch and the WPA Ballclub are set to celebrate 30 years of making familiar-feeling yet fully timeless rock ’n’ roll with their return to their monthly residency at Blair Boulevard’s finest establishment, Brown’s Diner.
Burch, whose local roots stretch back to the earliest days of Lambchop and Lower Broad’s social and economic nadir, brings his band of buds to the beloved burger joint to cap off a year of immense creativity. He published his novel Meridian Rising — which shares its title and its subject matter (country legend Jimmie Rodgers) with his 2016 album — in September and released his latest LP Cry Love in October, and he’s ready to throw a party.
“When Paul Niehaus and I started the WPA Ballclub at Tootsie’s, no one came downtown,” says Burch during a recent phone call. “I mean, downtown was scary. … It was the center for vice. But it was pretty, late at night downtown: You could hear the Ernest Tubb sign creaking as it turned — there was nobody down there. And we were really looked down on, like, ‘You’re playing where it makes Springwater look like Trader Vic’s?’ But it was funky.”
Springwater is a long-standing cultural institution that has influenced generations of America’s most creative boozehounds — as important as Vic’s clientele, if not as well-behaved — while Tootsie’s has traded in its genuine funk for franchisable corporate synergistic aesthetic activations. Once upon a time, though, Tootsie’s was a weird place, culturally speaking, filled with weird people. Old Weird Nashville was just following its own path, away from the center of American culture, bar a Bogdanovich film here and there.
“Those funky places, that’s where you can be creative,” says Burch. “[In a] really fine, posh room, you got to come up with a 40-minute set and blaze through it. And it’s not that you care less, but when you’re kind of reworking your machine, or you’re trying to create who you’re going to be over the next year or two, it’s much easier to do it in a [funky] place.”
Brown’s Diner’s funk is different from the kind you typically find in a spot that revels in its identity as a dive bar. Maybe it’s the scent of fries in the hopper mingling with the foam off a full pitcher and burgers sizzling away on the flat-top. Or maybe it’s the less-planned elements of the place’s architecture, since the building started life as a decommissioned trolley car in the 1920s. Something brings out the most neighborly instincts in patrons and performers, reflecting the ideal of Music City at its best.
This kind of funky cognitive space is where Burch found the seeds for the aforementioned Meridian Rising, his debut novel based on the life of early country star Jimmie Rodgers imagined through the lens of a music lifer. (The WPA Ballclub as an entity is only a few years younger than Rodgers was when he died in 1933.) Burch employs narrative devices like fictional interviews to create a very lived-in world, with a warmth and an empathy that doesn’t always come through in nonfiction music writing. The book began life as a collection of songs, and through the pressure cooker that was the pandemic lockdown, it became a diamond of a story.
“I’ve never written a book before,” he says. “I never aspired to write a book. I was kind of in a funny place where I recognized, from just being a writer for a long time, that there was something to that voice. And almost right away, I also got the idea that … it would be as much fun for me to have every [other] chapter be from the voice of these people who were interesting to me.
“And these [people] are so fascinating to us because all we have are anecdotes. No writer cared enough to really give them good interviews. And that wasn’t the style of interviews at the time. That’s kind of how the book started to get together. I didn’t know if I could finish it, but I thought the only thing I had going for me was that I had finished things before.”
It’s a simple approach to complete a daunting task. The struggle to start a book is very real, the struggle to finish one can be crushing in its enormity. (Take it from this writer, who has published a book of nonfiction, an entry in the 33 1/3 series on The Modern Lovers, and is sitting on half a dozen unfinished manuscripts). The end result is as lyrical and charming as anything Burch has committed to tape. That includes Cry Love, which adds just enough ’60s soul-schooled pop shimmy to Burch’s deep-rooted understanding of classic country and the foundations of rock to make it all feel undeniably fresh.
“[Rodgers] reminds me of every musician I’ve met who’s trying to make it — who gets lucky, gets unlucky. Like any good stylist, he kind of soaked a lot of music up. He was a musical person, and he happened to be around the stuff that we think of as the very guts of rock ’n’ roll.”
