Nashville Rock Timelines Converge at Duke’s

Going to comic book shops as a kid, I was captivated by the covers of Marvel’s What If titles. They featured Uatu the Watcher, who observed timelines in the Marvel universe play out differently than in their standard series of comics. Saturday at the 10th anniversary party for Five Points bar Duke’s, I got something like the Nashville rock scene equivalent of one of Uatu’s tales, as lots of seemingly disparate sects of local music, art and culture from different eras came together into one all-day crossover issue.

Opened in 2015 by musicians Sara Nelson and Joey Plunket, Duke’s has become a prime destination for pre- and post-show beers (and even a late-night deli sandwich) on a night out in East Nashville. Many artists have also depended on the watering hole for their day job. The bar hosts nightly sets in a corner DJ booth that has a direct sight line to the signs on the wall that proclaim “No Dancing.” When the pub announced it would be throwing a block party to celebrate its anniversary, it seemed natural that there would be a lot of music involved. Starting at noon, the bar’s fenced-off parking lot rang with the sounds of New York’s Piggies, Ryan Sambol (late of Austin, Texas’ The Strange Boys) and Nashville’s own CH Jameson IV, with a DJ set from Sweet Time Records label boss Ryan Sweeney.

The size of the stage surprised me when I arrived at the gates, just as the freshly reunited Heavy Cream was plugging in and tuning up. More than a decade ago, Heavy Cream was a mainstay of the Nashville punk underground, full of guitar crunch and irresistible hooks. Like bands will do, Heavy Cream faded away as its members moved on, leaving behind a handful of singles and two LPs on local imprint Infinity Cat. Most of the lineup that appears on the band’s Ty Segall-produced 2012 album Super Treatment reconvened on Saturday, with singer Jessica McFarland, guitarist Mimi Galbierz and drummer Teddy Minton. Several different players handled bass in Heavy Cream over the years. Among them was Olive Scibelli — co-executive director of local DIY space Drkmttr, singer of Husband Stitch and former Idle Bloom guitarist — who took low-end duties on Saturday. Reunion shows can feel ramshackle, but this was not one of them. Heavy Cream is tighter than ever, and even on an open-air stage, the band felt fully realized, perhaps heralding the best era of Heavy Cream yet.

The drink lines began to lengthen as Amy Darling took over the 1s and 2s for her set of junk-shop glam and Stones deep cuts, and another band reaching into the future from Music City’s past set up. Be Your Own Pet was one of the scene’s crown jewels a full decade before Duke’s was even a dream, and ended their inaugural run in 2008. Singer Jemina Pearl, guitarist Jonas Stein, bassist Nathan Vasquez and drummer John Eatherly started talking about getting back together just before COVID, returned to the road opening for Jack White in 2022 and released their third LP Mommy in 2023, emerging as a fully matured rock machine. During their set, they blasted through 20-year-old classics, new jams and their furious cover of The Damned’s debut single “Neat Neat Neat.”

Just before William Tyler and Friends played their first song, the guy in front of me turned to his buddy, saying reluctantly: “You’re going to hate this. It’s all instrumental.” Tyler has been a guitar slinger in Nashville since he was a teen in the late ’90s, playing with his power-pop outfit Lifeboy and later the shoulda-made-soundtracks group Character. His work got him tapped to join more established artists like international legends Lambchop and later Silver Jews, after David Berman relocated the band to Nashville. Since the Jews broke up in 2009, Tyler has focused on mostly instrumental music — both solo and in ensembles — that combines elements of intricate, fingerpicked folk with long, winding, spacious progressive rock and whatever else he’s been studying. April 25, Tyler will release Time Indefinite, a new LP of that music, and that’s likely what the two dudes in front of me were expecting. 

But this was a Friends show, in which Tyler and his bandmates (including Silver Jews and Country Westerns drummer Brian Kotzur, keyboardist Jo Schornikow and The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather bassist Jack Lawrence) put their spin on the honky-tonk tradition of playing covers with a rotating cast of singers. The set ran the gamut from Eagles classic “The Long Run” (sung by Gowa Gibbs) to Stooges standard “I Wanna Be Your Dog” (by Pearl) to The Clean’s “Point That Thing Somewhere Else” (with Lawrence in a rare appearance on vocals) to the Back to the Future anthem “The Power of Love” (by Dillon Warnek). At one point, Sweeney stood next to me, looking up at Lawrence and noting his ’90s garage-punk roots: “I never thought I would see the bass player for The Greenhornes playing Huey Lewis and the News.” That’s one of the things these sets do best: strip away expectations and put the focus on having fun together.

Plunket, who’s frontman of Country Westerns as well as Duke’s co-founder, took the mic for the last third of the set, singing the beloved Silver Jews tune “Punks in the Beerlight” as well as recently fallen Portland folkie Michael Hurley’s “Slurf Song” — a fitting tribute to two elite songwriters who are no longer with us. When the set wrapped up about 10 p.m., it felt like closing the cover on a What If issue, with all the timelines reset. It was a fun experiment to see so much of Music City’s talent from different eras in the same place at once; we can hope it won’t be another decade before it happens again.