Singer-songwriter Jim Casey vividly remembers the day one of Nashville's most unique and ambitious recording projects led to a train wreck, literally. It was the spring of 1973, and Casey, along with his musical partner in crime Vince Matthews, was shooting a promotional film for their concept album, The Kingston Springs Suite.
"The idea was to march as many people as we could get together up the main street of Kingston Springs with Vince out in front with his guitar," Casey tells the Scene. "The cameraman was in a rented cherry picker, and it was parked on the highest point in town, the railroad tracks. They were shooting and all of a sudden a little kid came running up shouting, 'There's a train a-coming!'
"They tried to move the cherry picker, but the forks that held it steady were dug into the asphalt. The driver jumped out of the way and the train hit and blew it to a million pieces. The train derailed and stopped right before it hit the Harpeth River bridge. All the people were about 30 feet away, but not one person was injured."
Over the past 40 years, Matthews and Casey's creative brainchild has become a Nashville legend. Conceived as a pastoral tribute to the small town of Kingston Springs, Tenn., the album lay buried on magnetic tape. Recently released by artisan reissue label Delmore Recording Society, the album is the focus of "Kingston Springs Suite: The Great Train Wreck of 1973" — a special panel and presentation this Saturday at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. The event will feature Casey, journalist Frye Gaillard, and songwriters Danny Flowers and Chris Gantry discussing the heady days of Nashville's hippies 'n' hillbillies era of the early '70s, performing music from the album and recalling the wild life and career of Vince Matthews (who died in 2003).
"Vince was kind of an underground figure," Casey recalls. "He wasn't a great singer and couldn't play the guitar very well, but he wrote great songs. He opened his home in Kingston Springs to everyone. Kris Kristofferson was there several times, and people like Billy Joe Shaver, Danny Flowers and a lot of really great musicians and songwriters would just be there relaxing, drinking beer and playing songs for each other."
Matthews' home and his non-musical neighbors provided the inspiration for Suite, an album and planned multimedia presentation that incorporated local history, nostalgia for what Matthews saw as a vanishing lifestyle and a touch of '70s "cosmic cowboy" philosophy through songs and spoken-word segments.
"Suite was the right word, because it was a gentle collection," Casey explains. "The songs were really about looking at people's souls." Matthews and Casey premiered the project in a 1972 performance at Kingston Springs Elementary School with Johnny Cash and family in the audience.
"John loved Vince," Casey says. "He loved the songs, and signed us as writers for House of Cash and gave us the studio time to record the album." Matthews and Casey also found monetary and creative support from other prominent Nashville "outsiders" like Cowboy Jack Clement and Kris Kristofferson.
With help from those benefactors, Matthews and Casey entered the studio with famed songwriter and Cash crony Shel Silverstein, who produced the sessions. But shortly after finishing the recording, Matthews and Casey found their project without a home when Cash encountered financial difficulties.
"We met with record companies," Casey says, "but none of them understood the project at all. They couldn't relate to it or figure out how to market it. They wanted to know, 'Where's the single?' " In an effort to attract interest, Matthews and Casey shot a promotional film — the one resulting in that fateful meeting of diesel engine and cherry picker.
"After the wreck," Casey says. "I remember riding back to Nashville with my wife and saying, 'I think that's it.' We did do a performance or two after that, but the interest was gone. It doesn't take long to go from being the toast of the town to the thing that nobody wants to talk about."
In the years that followed, Casey built a successful career as a musician and songwriter. Matthews scored a few songwriting cuts in the mid-'70s, including the Gene Watson Top 10 "Love in the Hot Afternoon," but Matthews' career fell into decline and a downward spiral into alcohol and drug addiction, before his death in 2003 at the age of 63. Fortunately, Casey hung on to the tapes of The Kingston Springs Suite, guarding a rare relic from one of Nashville's most fascinating eras.
"The album is now out," Casey says, "and I think it vindicates Vince as a classic songwriter from that wonderful golden time of true creativity in Nashville. It's a celebration of that whole era — a time when people wanted to be great writers and not just get a cut."
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