Faux Ferocious at The East Room, 3/30/2019
The East Room opened at 2412 Gallatin Road in East Nashville in 2012. In the decade since, the black-box-theater-style space has developed, fine-tuned and solidified a niche as a critical proving ground for up-and-coming musicians and comedians. The venue will celebrate its 10th anniversary next week with a murderers’ row of Nashville stand-ups on Thursday, June 9, followed by a parade of great bands on June 10, and, on June 11, an extra-special edition of Fascination Street, the long-running monthly goth DJ night. All three installments kick off around dinnertime, and will run late.
In its fledgling years, The East Room quickly emerged as an east-of-the-river analogue of sorts to the venerable Springwater. “It shared that vibe of ‘anyone can do anything here,’ with a slightly bigger room and a balcony,” comedian, filmmaker and promoter Seth Pomeroy tells the Scene.
Thursday’s lineup offers a who’s-who of comics who have collectively elevated Nashville’s stand-up coterie from a farm team for Chicago, L.A. and New York to burgeoning big-league center in its own right. Chad Riden, Brad Edwards and Sean Parrott — veterans of Ultimate Comedy, the weekly showcase that began at The East Room and has held down Tuesday evenings for several years — will ring in the three-day fest. The bill also includes Brad Sativa, Corey Perry and, as the flyer promises, a “celebrity mystery guest comic.”
In April 2015, a gang of Nashville funny people, performing under the banner of Broken Record Comedy Show, banded together to break the Guinness record for the longest continuous stand-up gig with multiple comedians. The round-the-clock affair — which took three days, eight hours and two minutes to make official — included drop-ins from touring comics Hannibal Buress, Rory Scovel, Ahmed Ahmed and Nate Bargatze. But locals deserve the credit for the record-shattering group effort. “It was out of control in there — it became like a commune,” Pomeroy remembers with a laugh. “The East Room really is something special.”
Antifaces at The East Room during Nameless Fest IV, 2018
On the music end, East Nashville Underground — the brainchild of Jared and Kristyn Corder, the married co-founders of power-pop juggernaut *repeat repeat — staked its claim early, throwing quarterly all-day fests between 2012 and ’15. That recurring event highlighted local talent and planted the seed for eclectic future affairs like Cold Lunch Recordings’ Spewfest, a late-winter staple since 2016 that, though halted by the pandemic, will hopefully resume in 2023. E.N.U. originated in the Corders’ basement, but in light of the explosion of punk and garage-rock talent at the time, it quickly graduated to the then-new East Room.
“The freedom and space it offered to use any way we wanted made [it] really unique,” Jared Corder says. “It’s always embraced the left-of-center, and helped nurture Nashville’s indie music scene.”
Taylor Cole, East Room general manager and bandleader-songwriter of the super-size pop ’n’ rock band Tayls, can remember the venue’s previous iterations as a dog wash, a church and an Irish pub. However, *repeat repeat “took it and made it their own,” says Cole. He recalls attending an E.N.U.-presented show with Natalie Prass in 2013. Three years later, the Tullahoma native and MTSU grad assumed his current role as GM and talent buyer at the club.
Daddy Issues at The East Room, 5/19/2017
“A lot of people here still miss the old Nashville — Freakin’ Weekend, East Nashville Underground,” Cole says, referencing Music City’s 2010s explosion of noisy, lo-fi punk, indie and garage rock. “But I think it’s important to take what we’ve loved and create something new from it. We understand the ebb and flow of the music scene … [and] want to be there for new bands who are going to grow, to make a place like East Room a stepping stone.”
To that end, the June 10 show’s programming consists of an eclectic 11-act cast of East Room alums highlighted by Mississippi-raised Southern-rock nostalgists H.A.R.D. (Have A Rad Day), posi-hip-hop crew Heru Heru, cerebral headbangers Oginalii, psych-pop classicists Okey Dokey, and lovably ferocious punk combo Peachy. A cross-genre assortment of fellow locals — Crocodyle, Fable Cry, Full Mood, Lord Goldie, Maddie Medley and The Weird Sisters — rounds out the bill.
Amid much upheaval in Nashville’s venue landscape — most notably the dagger to the heart that was May’s closure of Cannery Ballroom, Mercy Lounge and The High Watt — something to celebrate feels needed. Nashville’s out-of-control real estate market plays a major role in many of the recent changes. Cole also points out that fans making sure to get out to shows they want to see in the venues they love is vitally important.
“It’s a weird time, and no one knows exactly what comes next,” he says. “We’re all still healing, throwing darts at the wall. But if we keep losing our venues, we’ll lose the thing that people move here for.”
