The music stops and the lights come up just after 2 on a recent Saturday morning quieted by a consistent, cold rain.
Though most of the Robert’s Western World patrons steadily trickle out — perhaps to one of the Lower Broadway establishments that doesn’t close until an hour later — the work is far from over for the staff. Bouncers begin corralling empty glasses and stranded bottles, wiping down the high-tops and flipping barstools up onto the freshly cleaned tabletops.
Bartenders and servers congregate at the upper bar, which Hope Browning, a five-year Robert’s veteran, has been tending all night, mostly undisturbed by the light crowd for the past hour or so. Hope calls Lower Broad at 2 a.m. “a shit show” — but not necessarily at Robert’s, where the live country Western music can serve as a repellant for younger, rowdier crowds seeking the pulsing soundtracks down the street.
“It’s so glitzy, so plastic,” she says of Nashville’s tourist district. “I think that’s why people like this place — because it’s not.”
The gathered Robert’s staff takes a break from counting stacks of tipped cash to drink a shot to another night (almost) done. They laugh about customers who offer to buy them drinks throughout the night; they drink for free, regardless. They say goodbye to members of the last band of the evening, Honky-Tonk-O-Rama, who are busy loading their instruments into cars waiting in the wet alley.
The same few bands play the bar every week, so the staff has come to learn their set lists. One bouncer not-so-fondly remembers lying in bed sleepless at 4 one morning with “North to Alaska,” a 1960 Johnny Horton country hit often covered by the Honky-Tonk-O-Rama, stuck in his head.
Downstairs in the main bar, two couples have been granted a reprieve by the bouncers shuffling others out the door. They sit at the bar as kitchen staff cleans up the tired grill. The girls are dressed as some kind of furry-eared mammals — it’s almost Halloween, after all — while their male companions have eschewed costumes. One pair is locked in a kiss, with little regard for the employees and bystanders surrounding them.
Though Hope says most drunk patrons at 2 a.m. are either “very angry or very sad,” this foursome seems to be neither. They exude a peacefulness uncommon with intoxicated after-midnight embraces. For them, the lights-up, mid-cleaning, music-less barroom isn’t uninviting: It’s the last refuge from the cold rain that awaits when they inevitably have to head home.
