One day the telephone rang in my little house on Belcourt Avenue. It was some guy I had never heard of. He was calling from Connecticut. The year was 1988.
“I want to come back to town and start an alternative newspaper,” he said. I added him to the list of 20 to 30 people who had told me the same thing in the five years I’d been living in Nashville.
Albie Del Favero had located me in the time-honored Southern tradition: He called his wife’s brother-in-law’s good friend, who knew someone who knew someone who was running an alternative newspaper down in Baton Rouge. When Albie asked for advice from this guy on starting a similar paper in Nashville, the guy told Albie I was interested in doing the same thing.
Albie and I talked for a while that day over the telephone, and he continued calling over the next few months. Finally, he came to town, and we met for lunch. I was pretty burned out covering the state Capitol for the Nashville Banner, and I walked to our lunch at Windows on the Cumberland with a fair degree of hope that Albie wouldn’t be just another nutcase who thought starting your own newspaper would be a groovy thing to do.
Over lunch, it was evident Albie knew sales, and while he said he didn’t know much about other aspects of the business, he certainly knew more than I did. For my part, I said I knew editorial and bluffed my way through a discussion of production. I think the thing that sealed Albie’s faith in me as an editor was my statement that most of any paper’s start-up capital has to go to support sales, and not editorial. I told him I felt confident you could put out a solid edit product cheaply, but that he would have to spend money to get sales up and running.
How cheaply I would never know.
In the end, the reason that the Nashville Scene came to fruition was because Albie undertook one of the most high-risk domestic relocations in business history. A native Nashvillian, he eventually moved his wife and newborn child from the safe and lovely confines of their suburban Connecticut home to an apartment on West End Avenue. Where once there had been a high-paying job in Manhattan, now there was nothing but a risky business dream. Where once Albie had scooted around in a Turbo Saab, now he was picking me up for meetings with potential investors an ancient, smog-brown-colored Chevrolet that he and his wife, Sara, had bought from her grandmother’s estate for $1,100.
For almost a year, Albie and I did a lot of tooling around in that car; it took that much time to raise the money. In fact, during those months, the whole development of the Scene became very problematic. I kept my job as we tried to get the Scene up and running, but Albie was unemployed and ultimately became the real force behind it. The problem was, people were either beginning to feel the heat from an overheated real-estate economy, or they simply didn’t understand our pitch. In short, raising the start-up capital was a bitch.
But as time wore on, Tim Douglas and Ed Nelson, of Nelson Capital, threw their considerable weight behind the venture. And that was a hugely promising development. Eventually, the money came in, just about the time Albie’s ability to finance more out-of-pocket expenses was hitting rock bottom. Then a failing paper called the Nashville Scene came up for sale. Originally, we’d wanted to start our own paper, to be called Nashville City Press. But the decision was made by our investors to buy the Scene instead, because they feared someone else with deep pockets might come in and buy the Scene and actually compete with our paper.
Thus armed with money, we negotiated to purchase the Scene—a process that was, to put it mildly, insane. I remember shortly after we signed a contract to buy the paper, but before we had actually closed, Albie went to the Scene to start figuring out what we had purchased. “The place is a train wreck,” he told me not too many hours later from a pay phone in a Brentwood parking lot. “We’ve paid too much. Hugh has advised me to vacate the premises. I’ve fled.”
Hugh Entrekin was our attorney. Albie had just told him that given the sorry state of the paper, he didn’t think it was wise to go through with the deal. We wound up renegotiating the terms of the purchase and closed two days later as originally planned.
I remember the night after that closing, Albie and I celebrated in McCabe Pub with Hugh and Tim Douglas. In the parking lot, after we had drunk a couple of pitchers of beer, Albie and I were so pumped up that we hugged one another. The next day, having given my notice at the Banner, and having shown up at the Scene to try to turn the editorial rudder of the ship, I was never so depressed in my life.
As both a business and an editorial venture, the Scene was a roller coaster. The highs were just so exhilarating. It wasn’t long after we had redesigned the paper, and had gotten some new columnists up and running, that I began experiencing the thrill of connecting with readers. We were hitting an audience, and the feeling was wonderful. The phone literally began ringing off the hook. The city seemed to like what we were doing.
Just as soon as we would feel good about things, however, there would come the days when Albie and I felt as though our chests were going to cave in because of all the pressure. One day, for instance, Metro Council started debating a measure that made it a misdemeanor to throw free newspapers in people’s driveways if those people had called and said they didn’t want the paper. The law was specifically targeted at the Scene—when we bought the paper, distribution consisted of throwing it in people’s driveways.
I called Stewart Clifton, the Metro councilman who had sponsored the measure, and begged him to give us three more months to switch our circulation from household distribution to newspaper racks on the street and in retail establishments. He agreed.
Internally, things were in greater turmoil. The paper was printing 104,000 copies a week when we bought it, but that was far too many. Rather than slash circulation and thereby lose all our advertisers, the plan was to lower it slowly to give us time to convince advertisers of the benefits of bulk-drop circulation and the revamped editorial. But it didn’t work out that way. We were losing so much money, we had to cut circulation in half almost immediately. With the exception of our movie ads, we lost all the old advertisers.
That said, it wasn’t easy to save money when we were losing $10,000 a week. Every so often, Albie would walk into my office, stand there in front of my desk, and look at me as if a brick had fallen on his head. “I just don’t see how we’re going to make it,” he would say. “We only have about 10 weeks to live.”
I was too busy with my own problems to worry about money. I was trying to fill a 24-page paper with essentially no ads. I was paying $35 for inside stories and $150 for cover stories. (I made an exception for John Bridges’ column; he got $75 for each one.) We had one computer for all of editorial and production—a laptop Toshiba 1100-Plus—and it cranked around the clock, churning out stuff that was sometimes in error, but always full of attitude.
We started getting some absolutely gorgeous pieces from our writers. There were times when I would come to work and head to the coffee machine—Albie had started putting two packets of American Ace in the machine, thinking it would stir up an otherwise lethargic company—and read stuff that was so poetic it made me weep. And I have to say that while I have been at the paper for 10 years now and have read a lot of stories, the ones engrained in my mind are the stories that came out that first year. After seeing the quality of the writing, any editor in America would have known instantly that the paper couldn’t help but succeed.
I think of Kay West, who one afternoon decided to write a piece on Ron Guidry, the legendary former Yankees pitcher, who was trying to make a comeback in the minor leagues and was pitching out at Greer Stadium. Kay had already covered Guidry when he was a Yankee and she was writing for the Soho Weekly News. In his Nashville appearance, Guidry got shelled. At the end of her piece, Kay wrote, “I’d rather remember a summer evening in 1978, when Yankee Stadium rocked with the sound of 100,000 clapping hands, urging a slight, left-handed pitcher to throw the ball faster. Impossibly, he did.”
Phil Ashford started doing serious damage in the political arena. John Bridges was turning in impeccable jewels every week in a column called “Keeping Up.” Bernie Sheahan turned an innocent little weekly feature on people’s houses into classic Southern storytelling. Clark Parsons wrote some very hilarious stuff in a column entitled “An American in Nashville.” And Susan Quick got the city’s social circles in a wad with her gossipy chatter in “Queazy Scene.”
All an editor could do was marvel.
Those early days were instructive to us all. We quickly learned libel law when we referred to a local TV reporter as a “blonde on a stick” and allegedly messed up her contract negotiations. We learned how difficult it could be to work with a mentally ill photographer who was also homeless. We learned that powerful people in Nashville really were insulated from coverage, because back then the daily newspapers—run by Irby Simpkins and John Seigenthaler—were part of what Ashford referred to as “a pernicious alliance of the local power structure and the daily newspapers, a closed social loop, and a stale complacency.”
Truthfully, we were out to attack it and stab it in the heart.
To be honest, the power structure stabbed back. But one day, a funny thing happened. It just went away.
Nashville is such a different city now than it was in 1989. For that matter, the Scene is a different paper.
If we began as all style and no substance, that has been reversed. If we began as a screaming child, it’s fair to say we’ve reached young adulthood. Unlike many other alternative newspapers across the country, my writers know not to cover the alternative stories in this city. They know to cover the most important, most germane, most significant stories taking place in Nashville. And they know to do it in their own way: intelligently, cogently, thoroughly, analytically. Sometimes we fail, sometimes we succeed.
If you think this entire 10th-anniversary issue is just one huge, self-congratulatory piece wherein we slap ourselves on the back for a job well done, you’re welcome to think so. For our part, however, we think the growth of the Scene has mirrored the growth of the city in a number of ways. Sometimes, by writing what we’ve been through, the city might learn more about itself.
I want to conclude by thanking the city of Nashville. And by saying that in the decade about to be concluded, there’s been no better job in journalism today than being editor of this paper.
