In just two weeks, 2015 will begin to recede in the rearview mirror — and so will its Uberload of grandstanding hack politicians, music-biz blowhards, stumbling sports teams, all-thumbs public officials and inept crooks. To plant a spike strip across the road as we head into 2016, we offer the 26th installment of the Boner Awards — the Scene’s annual recap of the year’s follies, foibles and foolishness (not exempting ourselves), so named in honor of the former Nashville mayor whose exploits inspired the issue long ago. Without further introduction — and with at least one nauseating detour into the fecal realm — please stand for the hoisting of the Boners.
Governmental Goofs
In an election year, the Boners burst the bounds of a single ballot or legislative body. Read on.
The Butt of Boners
Too bad Boner productivity doesn’t count toward job growth — if it did, state Rep. Sheila Butt could change her name to Volkswagen. Launching an early run for Boner gold in February, the House majority floor leader wrote on Facebook, “It’s time for a Council of Christian Relations and a NAAWP in this Country.” What did NAAWP mean? The National Association for the Advancement of White People? Butt deleted the post and said no. When asked what it did mean, she would say only that she knew but wouldn’t explain. Her Boner, however, stands firm.
A Bonus Boner From Butt
Sometimes it’s possible to be both a Boner and a Butt at the same moment. Later in the year, lawmakers considered amending a bill enforcing a 48-hour mandatory waiting period for abortions, hoping to create exceptions for victims of rape or incest. To the amazement even of ideological allies, the Maury County representative made the bizarre and belligerent statement at a legislative hearing that “in most instances” rape and incest were not verifiable.
Lights, Camera, Racist
There’s no shortage of things that could win Rep. Jeremy Durham a Boner Award, but this one got caught on video! Seated right next to Butt, the fellow Republican couldn’t help but silently mock her on the House floor behind her back. Alas for Durham, a camera caught it all — from the “Hey, look!” finger-pointing at his colleague to mouthing “racist.” Durham ended his game of charades by crossing his arms into an “X” symbol. X marked the Boner, all right. And the Boners just keep coming. For more on Durham’s latest, see City Limits.
New Logo Is a No-Go
In May, Tennesseans learned that their state government paid $46,000 for a new state logo. The price tag alone left taxpayers fuming, but it’s what that money bought that brought home the Boner: the letters “TN” in white block print against a red background, with a plain blue strip on the bottom. “Eureka!” (said no one). Comparisons to the periodic table were apt — outraged residents definitely felt the assignment had broken bad.
Double Indumbnity
Sen. Todd Gardenhire (R-Chattanooga) did nothing this year to expand health care for needy constituents, but he did ensure Tennessee a bedpan full of Boners. During the Republican uprising in February against Gov. Bill Haslam’s Insure Tennessee Medicaid expansion, which would have made coverage available to 280,000 low-income Tennesseans, Gardenhire proudly proclaimed he did not partake of the legislature’s generous health benefits, offered on the taxpayers’ dime to the same lawmakers denying coverage to taxpayers. When newly elected Nashville Sen. Jeff Yarbro tried to debate the matter, Gardenhire overrode him: “I know you’re new, but you need to learn to respect us.” Oops! A Freedom of Information Act check showed that Gardenhire was indeed signed up for tax-subsidized health care. But the red-faced Morgan Stanley financial adviser-turned-senator made it OK: He told the AP’s Erik Schelzig that he didn’t actually use it because he already had that sweet-ass Morgan Stanley insurance, “which is far greater.”
The Onus Is on the Anus
In March, after a Senate committee voted to smother Tennessee’s proposed Medicaid expansion, Insure Tennessee advocate Damien Crisp tried to ask Gardenhire as he quickly walked away if the senator would give up his own tax-subsidized health benefits. Caught on video, Sen. Compassion replied from the heart: “Why don’t you give it up, asshole?”
Gardenhire Goofs Again
Wait, there’s more! While debating the abortion waiting-period bill, Gardenhire went all TMI on the Senate Judiciary Committee when he shared his personal experience of having — and reversing — a vasectomy. In addition to claiming that men go through a more “stringent” process for a vasectomy than women do for an abortion, he stressed the importance of taking upwards of four weeks to “wait a while and think about it” before you ask a doctor to start “whacking on you down there.” Sure, it sounds ridiculous — but by this point Gardenhire had established his credentials as an expert on all things Boner.
No One Likes a Flip-Floppy Boner
Few Republicans liked the governor’s plan to give health care coverage to 280,000 Tennesseans, but Sen. Rusty Crowe was one who did. Yet when the plan came to a vote, Crowe — who famously switched his party allegiance many years ago from the Democrats to the GOP — surprised supporters by voting to kill it. When the idea came up again, this time Crowe voted for it — now that it didn’t have a chance in hell of passing. Hey, even the sturdiest Boner can vacillate.
Give Up Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Yearning to Breathe Free
State Rep. Glen Casada ensured his standing as a perpetual Boner machine after last month’s Paris attacks, when he called for the state to activate the National Guard and round up any Syrian refugees. “We need to gather [Syrian refugees] up and politely take them back to the ICE center and say, ‘They’re not coming to Tennessee, they’re yours,’ “ Casada told The Tennessean — you know, because internment camps worked so well with Japanese-Americans in World War II.
This Bud’s For Urethra
District 2 Rep. Bud Hulsey said he wasn’t trying to cause trouble when he began drafting a bill that would require students to use the bathroom that corresponds with the gender they were assigned at birth. He just wanted “privacy and dignity for everybody,” he said. His claim rang hollow, however, with advocates for transgender, intersex or nonbinary students, who for some reason didn’t want the Hulseys of the world peeking over their shoulders in the restroom.
Sorry, Mediocre Girls
The Governor’s Highway Safety Office meant to cut down on drunk driving, but it was the office’s bungled buzzkill of an awareness campaign that swerved into a semi. In July, the GHSO launched the 100 Days of Summer Heat Booze It and Lose It Campaign, which spent more than $77,000 on fliers and coasters to warn young men not to overindulge, lest they go home with — gasp — a “marginally good-looking girl.” Dudes! Leggo that uggo! After only one day of outrage on social media, along with national chastisement by HuffPo, MTV and the New York Daily News, among others, the GHSO pulled the “edgy” campaign and issued an apology.
Bo Drops the Ball
If showing up is half the battle, state Rep. Bo Mitchell (D-Nashville) essentially went picnicking during the war over in-state college tuition for undocumented students. In a close vote where every yea counted, Mitchell infuriated the legislature’s under-siege Democrats by opting not to show up the last day of session — and by his absence handed defeat to certain college-bound immigrants who’d already gone through the public school system.
This Is a Secret-Santa-Free Zone
Up on the gooftop, Ramsey calls! Tennessee’s Republican state legislators love the Vols, but they have a love/hate relationship with the University of Tennessee. This Boner came to a head earlier this month in what can only be described as an arms race of silliness. UT’s diversity office recommended ways for campus holiday parties to be inclusive, such as not having a Secret Santa. Silly? A bit — but it was “The Night Before Christmas” compared to the avalanche of foolishness that followed, as multiple legislators called for UT Chancellor Jimmy Cheek to resign and Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey suggested defunding the school.
Mayoral Race Mishaps
By the end of this year’s mayoral race, Davidson County voters surveyed a crowded field — of Boners, that is, from exasperating earworm jingles to TV ads that caused inadvertent consternation. The media deserved lumps as well: The Tennessean for running a poll late in the race that put candidates Megan Barry and David Fox in a dead heat — it might as well have used “neck and neck” to measure the distance between a giraffe and BB-8 — and the Scene for ending up short-staffed as the race heated up. And for all that eventual victor Barry did right in surging to a decisive win, her contrived photo op at a North Nashville prayer breakfast was almost as glaring as the ugly whisper campaign about her supposed atheism that got her there.
The Supergaffe
Is that a half-million-dollar check in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? When an advertisement came up in this year’s mayoral election calling hopeful David Fox the only “conservative” in the race, Fox told the press he had no clue where the ad came from. Turns out it was created with a little help from a Texas-based Citizen Super PAC, which had gotten a $500,000 check from one George Fox — David Fox’s brother, who claimed he gave the cash without sharing the knowledge with the campaign headquarters. He gave another $500,000 by the time the election was over.
Trump and Troll
Metro school board member Will Pinkston was a Tasmanian devil on Twitter throughout the mayoral race, especially where runoff contender Fox was concerned — but he ended up coughing on his own dust back in August when he tweeted, “Sources tell me [Fox] and a few other conservative leaders met privately with Donald Trump before his Rocketown rally.” A bold claim — and one that unraveled altogether later that day when Fox tweeted (and others corroborated) his Trump-free schedule for the morning. Pinkston’s “sources,” meanwhile, had dwindled to “a solid source” when he was reached later by the Scene. As for The Donald, he used his Nashville visit to say he believed he would get the Latino vote, which came as news to the Latino support organizations protesting outside.
Endorsement Embarrassment
Just after Megan Barry claimed The Tennessean’s endorsement in this year’s mayoral race, Bill Freeman’s campaign announced that he had been endorsed by “nine community newspapers.” Impressive! The only problem? Eight of those nine publications were all owned by the same company, GCA Publishing, and largely run the same content. But Freeman, who outspent his rivals and got far less bang for his bucks, retained that pitch of optimism throughout the race — as when he handed in an official form from “Bill Mayor.”
Hello from the Boner Siiiiide
Dennis Waldron, who was elected mayor of La Vergne, Tenn., in November 2014, was found to have placed several phone calls from his city cellphone to numbers that traced to the escort website Backpage.com. After Waldron was caught dialing the digits, the city admonished his behavior and made him give the cell phone back — gotcha! No, the city administrator just told reporters there was no policy against making the calls, and Waldron said he’d take the matter in hand ... by getting his own dang cellphone.
Growing Pains
Runaway development got you down? We wedged two tall-and-skinny Boners into a single space!
The Hills Have Hipsters
Furious East Nashvillians poured a foamy triple latte of whup-ass on a promotional video by Aerial Development Group, which, intentionally or not, portrayed the diverse neighborhood of Shelby Hills as a seeming haven for homogenous mannequins from CoolSprings Galleria. The company’s response only added fuel to the firepit, blocking critical commenters on social media and issuing cease-and-desist letters against parody videos — which only made them proliferate at Drake “Hotline Bling” speed.
That Flier ... You Know the One
This spring, local real estate agent Aaron Armstrong caught some hard and heavy flak — particularly on social media — for fliers that he circulated reading, “East Nashville. More neighbor than hood.” Some saw Armstrong’s message as a racist dog whistle, signaling white people that it’s now safe to move to the East Side, while others argued that the message was simply tone-deaf. For Armstrong’s part, he apologized and insisted that it was indeed the latter — a caution to punsters everywhere.
BONER BALL
In which we give Boners from the world of sports some athletic support.
Cam Juice
Nashville PR exec Rosemary Plorin took her 9-year-old daughter to see the Tennessee Titans take on the undefeated Carolina Panthers, led by their exciting quarterback Cam Newton. A late touchdown by Newton deflated any chance of a Titans victory, and to put an exclamation point on the win, Newton performed a celebratory dance in the end zone right in front of the visitors. That’s not exactly a first in pro sports, yet the pair were so scarred by the performance that Plorin wrote a open letter to Newton in the Charlotte Observer decrying the QB’s “chest puffs,” “pelvic thrusts” and “arrogant struts” — though fans wondered why any parent would expose a child to the Titans’ performance of late.
High Sticking Indeed
The Nashville Predators’ resurgence last season had plenty of people excited — some evidently more than others. On Jan. 29, the Preds were visiting the St. Louis Blues when the broadcast on Fox Sports Tennessee was interrupted by crystal-clear audio of a couple in the throes of passion. Sadly, that was the climax of the season: Prior to the porn-puck mash-up, the Preds were an astonishing 30-10-5. After? The team went a mediocre 16-15-5 — and made a premature exit from the playoffs.
Slogan Down
Only Vanderbilt, the team that gave the world the asinine (and nautically challenged) slogan “Anchor Down,” could parlay an intended rallying cry into a PR pile-on. On Aug. 6, the Commodores’ official football Twitter account shared a picture that proclaimed, in huge letters, “We Don’t Need Your Permission!” — perhaps not the brightest move for the Black and Gold, given the high-profile rape trial and investigation of former Vanderbilt football players.
Coach, Traveling First Class
J.R. Lind: hilarious sportswriter, less-than-perfect psychic. On Oct. 22, Lind opened his Scene column with the taunt that “the Tennessee Titans are as likely to fire Ken Whisenhunt midseason as they are to retire Pacman Jones’ jersey.” Readers were more than happy to remind the Nashville Scene’s Nostradamus of this less than two weeks later on Nov. 3 — when the Titans sacked the embattled coach.
Focus on Feces
These Boners have not been sanitized for your protection.
Up Shit Creek
Who says state Rep. Andy Holt slings a lot of crap? The Environmental Protection Agency. The distinguished gentleman from District 76 caught a $177,000 fine for dumping some 860,000 gallons of hog waste into a tributary leading to the mighty Mississippi, all because he evidently thought he was above getting the proper permit for his hog farm. Best part: He’s vice chair of the Tennessee House Agriculture Committee! Soo-wage!
Protesting Poo
After students at Vanderbilt University began protesting racism on the campus, a bag of poop was discovered on the porch of the university’s Black Cultural Center. Just as a shitstorm was starting to swirl, the truth came out: The mystery turd was actually a service dog’s poop, innocently left behind by a blind student. Credit to the student protest group that quickly helped de-escalate the situation — a Boner evasion move others could emulate.
Caught Brown-Handed!
In March, a 25-year-old sandwich delivery man dropped off an order at the Castner-Knott building before deciding to avail himself of the facilities. That in itself wouldn’t have made headlines — if he hadn’t then used his feces to scrawl on the historic building’s bathroom walls. (Couldn’t he just use Facebook like everyone else?) A surveillance video recorded him arriving at and then leaving the building in the same timespan the doodie doodles appeared.
No. 1 With a Boner
Flubs and fluffs from the world of music. Hey, they’re playing our schlong!
Big Dumb Boner
Confirming suspicions that he’s a bit of a nincompoop, a photo surfaced in early November of Jason Aldean wearing blackface. An Aldean rep confirmed that the “Big Green Tractor” singer was dressed as rapper Lil Wayne for Halloween, though there was no comment regarding the, you know, massive lapse in judgment it takes for a white dude to imitate a person of color in 2015. Double-whammy Boner status: The Tennessean reported the incident using the term “dark makeup” instead of calling it blackface. “Dark makeup” is what Snooki wears as concealer, guys.
Overton and Out
It was the quote heard ‘round the (country) world. In February, just before the annual Music Row shmoozefest known as the Country Radio Seminar, then-Sony Nashville Chairman and CEO Gary Overton told The Tennessean, “If you’re not on country radio, you don’t exist.” While that Boner-rifically reductive statement is more or less true in Overton & Co.’s world of terrestrial spins and big-box sales, it made the overstuffed suit the face of everything people hate about homogenized pop-country and bean-counter cynicism. More than a little ironically, it also coincided with indie Texas troubadour Aaron Watson’s fittingly titled The Underdog debuting at No.1 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart. That probably factored into Overton’s subsequent shit-canning less than a month later — and kicked off a year of country news dominated by the likes of Jason Isbell, Kacey Musgraves and Chris Stapleton topping charts and packing concert halls. Not bad for artists who don’t exist.
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
As if Overton’s clueless comments didn’t make the mainstream country-music industry look Jurassic enough, radio consultant Keith Hill fueled even more fury by claiming, “If you want to make ratings in country radio, take females out. … Trust me, I play great female records, and we’ve got some right now; they’re just not the lettuce in our salad. The lettuce is Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton, Keith Urban and artists like that. The tomatoes of our salad are the females.” The hilarious, smart responses by some of country music’s most beloved female artists, including Miranda Lambert, Kasey Musgraves and Martina McBride, almost made up for Hill’s stupidity. Almost.
Warped Indeed
Kevin Lyman, Warped Tour’s mouthy and misguided founder, has a knack for putting his foot in his mouth. But his biggest WTF moment happened this summer, right here in Nashville, when Lyman invited controversial singer-songwriter Front Porch Step (real name Jake McElfresh) to perform unannounced at the festival’s acoustic stage. McElfresh was originally booked to play all of Warped’s summer dates, but he voluntarily dropped off the tour after at least half a dozen young women accused him of emotionally manipulating them into exchanging nude pics and sending other inappropriate texts. (At least one accuser was a minor at the time.) McElfresh didn’t help the situation by taunting the audience and thanking them for the “ticket money.” So why was McElfresh invited to play? Lyman told the Scene it was “part of a rehabilitation process.”
Stink-N-Iron
A public shaming from Merle Haggard is bad PR, especially for a festival trying to make its name ... in Nashville, no less. But that’s what happened when The Hag canceled his second appearance — literally at the last minute — at Music City’s ill-fated Ink-N-Iron Kustom Kulture Festival. While the festival set up at the Bicentennial Mall expecting crowds of 10,000 or more, acts such as Reverend Horton Heat, Suicidal Tendencies and Wanda Jackson played to hundreds — or fewer. The result felt like a creepy abandoned carnival. The festival, which ran for 13 years in Southern California, reportedly went bankrupt — perhaps because those who showed up found the main stage accessible only to those (few) who purchased VIP packages.
MAJOR MEDIA MISTAKES
Via print, radio or TV, the Boner is ready for its close-up.
Recount?
”Congratulations to our featured attorney!” proclaimed October’s Attorney at Law magazine, as it went on to salute the new mayor of Nashville. Sharp-eyed readers, however, found one little problem with the sentence that followed: “Attorney Charles Robert Bone is Nashville mayor-elect.” To be fair, though, Bone was the top vote-getter among attorneys in the race — as he was the only one.
April Fooled
On April 1 — note the date — the Scene’s music blog Nashville Cream “reported” that bro-country duo Florida Georgia Line would be performing with a Johnny Cash hologram at the upcoming American Country Music Awards. Laughs were had, some were fooled, and most of us moved on — but not WZTV-Fox 17. That night, the local Fox affiliate tweeted, “Florida Georgia Line to perform with hologram of Johnny Cash. Tune in now, stream #LiveOnFOX17.” Whatever it was that Fox 17 reported doesn’t appear to be online anywhere, so if you didn’t see it live, you probably won’t ever see it. But based on that tweet, we at the Scene are comfortable saying simply, “Gotcha.”
Bobby Boner
Broadcasting daily to more than 80 markets, The Bobby Bones Show is hands down the country’s largest nationally syndicated country radio program. So its parent company iHeartMedia could afford the whopping $1 million fine from the FCC in May, following an October 2014 gaffe in which Bones and his morning crew played a YouTube clip of an Emergency Alert System interrupting Game 2 of the 2014 World Series. The bit triggered a domino effect of false EAS alarms on Nashville’s WSIX-FM, the show’s home, and other affiliates “force tuned” to receive them.
/we-like-his-version-better/
Here’s how to fight a runaway social-media wildfire with wiffleball bats. Twitter followers got to watch a major news corporation’s tech woes play out — and drag out — in real time last month when online troublemaker Chris Wage tweeted a link to the Tennessean story on state Rep. Glen Casada’s Syrian-refugee rant. But he exploited a glitch in Gannett programming that let him change the SEO section of the link’s URL from “tennessee-gop-leader-round-up-syrian-refugees-remove-state” to a somewhat less impartial “can-you-believe-this-asshole.” It wasn’t the fault of The Tennessean or its excellent reporter Dave Boucher, who wrote the story. Yet as the platform tried unsuccessfully to quell the online outrage — or approval — the episode became a case study of an old-media mastodon lumbering in new-media quicksand.
Putting the Blunder in Blunderbuss
Then again, Gannett’s day-plus response looked like lightning compared to the Pleistocene reflexes of the Scene, which corrected a long-ago White Stripes concert review (written by current Boner-in-Chief Jim Ridley the week of his first child’s birth) making note of sure-to-be-a-nobody frontman “Jim” White. The correction only came a mere 14 years late.
Nashville Scene, Owners of the Boners
If only this were the Scene’s only foul-up this year. Unfortunately, we shame-facedly left other Boners flopping in the dirt, from concert-review section The Spin missing the end of Wilco’s set at Pilgrimage Music Fest — but writing it up anyway using incorrect information — to music blog Nashville Cream not fact-checking a press release that made the bogus claim that local rapper Blake Freeman was the grandson of mayoral candidate Bill Freeman. (The only thing the article got right was its assessment of Freeman’s rapping.) When it comes to Boners, nobody’s hurt more than our own.
Criminally Dumb
Halt! In the name of the Boner!
Dignity Down the Drain
If you’re ever running from the cops, it’s important to find a good hiding spot. But even more important, make sure you can get the hell out once the heat has cleared. So discovered a 32-year-old man pulled over for speeding in Mt. Juliet, who ran and ducked into a storm drain in an effort to evade the cops. Unfortunately for the fleeing suspect, he got stuck in the drain and had to be pried out by cops with crowbars.
Getaway From It All
People often complain how hard it is to find a taxi when you need one in Nashville, but not so a 53-year-old man who put the city’s options to the test last month and caught a Checker Cab. He was intercepted, however, en route to a liquor store — with the cash from the SunTrust Bank on West End that he’d just knocked over.
Readin’, Writin’ and ‘Ridicule
These Boners from the world of education go to the head of the class.
Super(intendent) Boner
The search for a superintendent to replace outgoing MNPS director Jesse Register played out over the summer as one long Boner in slow motion. First, the firm selected to conduct the search, Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates, unwisely told the Scene’s Andrea Zelinski it wasn’t exactly feeling the current slate of candidates — only to back-pedal with amusing speed in The Tennessean that in fact all was peachy. In a final irony, the firm hadn’t done its homework vetting all the hopefuls — triggering fresh waves of embarrassment when one’s reference came back a resounding no.
But He Did Give Back the Toaster
Then the Metro Nashville Board of Education got all hot and bothered that it might actually poach Williamson County’s superstar superintendent, Mike Looney, by offering more money than nearly everyone in the entire state government makes. Looney used the offer for leverage and dumped Metro Schools before they could even get to first base — leaving thunderstruck board members metaphorically watching Williamson County’s limo speed away with their prom date.
Blue Steele
Among those left standing in the rain with a wet corsage was Jay Steele, Register’s second in command, who’d made no secret of his desire for the superintendent post. After the search firm gave him a public snubbing the first time around, however, the MNPS school board miraculously made him interim without discussion. When that move prompted an outcry over its somewhat secretive process, the board voted in someone else as interim — and Steele got the shaft yet again. The Bachelorette makes it look so easy.
Facebook Fight
A Facebook spat involving Will Pinkston is not a rare occurrence, but this Boner rose above the rest. The abrasive MNPS board member got into it with political consultant and charter-school activist John Little, citing a gun-related incident in Little’s past. Little, who is black, said he “owned” past mistakes and moved on, but Pinkston continued to sarcastically suggest that Little might shoot him or someone else.
Ban the Boner!
In September, Nashville Prep, a part of the RePublic Charter School network led by Ravi Gupta, faced criticism from MNPS board member Amy Frogge for assigning David Benioff’s novel City of Thieves to middle-schoolers. The book was inappropriate, Frogge said, and should be taken out of the school’s curriculum. First Amendment defenders were ready to cry censorship — until Gupta responded, to their shock, that the school had already edited the novel without permission, in apparent violation of copyright law. This Boner may not be altered without our express written consent.
Email editor@nashvillescene.com
