First the tornado, now this. Rumors surfaced last weekend that the Slow Bar, the Woodland Street watering hole that has been instrumental in East Nashville’s booming recent development, may not be the permanent resident its neighbors hope. Unless a partner can be found to shoulder some of the club’s responsibilities, Slow Bar owner and proprietor Mike Grimes says he may consider padlocking the popular nightspot this fall.
Grimes stresses that he would prefer to keep the bar open, even expand its services to include food and mixed drinks. But high rent and an 80-hour workweek have turned a bar intended as a hobby into a full-time job. Only two other employees, Niko Gehrke and Brian Bequette, remain on hand. Now as much a fixture of the Slow Bar as its Guinness-shaped Christmas lights and its lovingly stocked jukebox, Grimes says he needs a break.
“Having the Slow Bar as the center of my universe was not the original design,” Grimes said last Friday from the stockroom at Grimey’s, the Berry Hill record store that launched his small but pivotal entertainment empire. “We started something that’s been a great time. If someone wants to join up and further the cause, great. If not, I’ve had offers to tour [as a musician] and do some publishing, and I’ll jump back into Grimey’s more.”
The Slow Bar’s patrons and neighbors desperately want the place to stay open, and with Grimes at the helm. Many say the 3-year-old club is a major factor in East Nashville’s recent flurry of hip eateries, bars and boutiques, which have made the City Across the River a hot singles destination. Others say it was Grimes himself who lured them across the Cumberland, either by example or encouragement.
“Mike was the first person I called when I got my business going,” says Christy Perkins, owner of the eclectic boutique Nitwit a few blocks down Woodland. “I contacted him about properties, and he gave me advice and sent me numbers and contacts.” She considers Grimes “the original,” the one who has galvanized East Nashville’s community of musicians, artists and fixer-uppers into a customer base with clout.
“In my and a lot of others’ opinions, the Slow Bar is the crown jewel of East Nashville,” agrees Trisha Brantley. A resident across the river since 1997, Brantley is about to reopen her vintage clothing shop The Hip Zipper just across the parking lot from the Slow Bar. “He gave other businesses the inspiration to move in,” Brantley explains. “I’m afraid what’ll happen if it closes.”
In some ways, Grimes may be the victim of his own success. Thus far, the club has packed a lot of history into three years. In 2000, fresh from the out-of-the-box impact of Grimey’s, Grimes decided he and his friends needed a place to hang out. A cozy, walking-distance kind of a place—jukebox and a pool table, cold beer, loose hours, live music only when he felt like it. He and his former partner Dave Gehrke, a fellow rocker, cruised around the city looking for locations.
On a whim, Grimes passed through East Nashville’s Five Points. There, on the corner, stood a weather-beaten dive called Shirley’s. As Grimes remembers, he walked in one Friday in October and asked for Shirley. Shirley had been there 17 years and didn’t want another. Grimes whipped out his checkbook—“the most impulsive decision I’ve ever made in my life,” he recalls, his voice a cocktail of pride and regret—and ponied up $10,000 in good-faith money on the spot. Shirley held her going-away party Monday and cleared out Tuesday.
When it opened, in November 2000, the Slow Bar was hardly the first nightspot in East Nashville. Joe’s Diner, the Radio Cafe and the restaurant Sasso were among the area’s late-1990s pioneers. But the Slow Bar has given the area a sizzle it didn’t have before. Brantley credits Grimes, a former Sony Music field rep and guitarist with Bare Jr. and the Bis-quits, with using his music-biz connections to draw trend-setting scenesters across the Cumberland.
“That was the first time a lot of people had seen this side of the river,” Brantley says. “Lots of them have only seen East Nashville at night.” New businesses sprang up all around to welcome them: the restaurant Margot and a Bongo Java outpost on either side of the Slow Bar, the Red Wagon Cafe just a few blocks down.
As in-demand artists like Ryan Adams and Badly Drawn Boy asked Grimes for performing slots, the Slow Bar’s reputation began to extend beyond Nashville. Patrons often watched or listened on the sidewalk, through the plate-glass windows facing Woodland Street. The next year, Grimes and Gehrke annexed the space next door, and the club finally had room to accommodate its overflow crowds.
For reasons no one could have foreseen, September 2001 turned out to be a bad time for business expansion. To keep up its booming trade, the Slow Bar now offers music almost every night. Clever promotions such as artist residencies, the Denny Diamond tribute and theme shows have become the club’s bread and butter. Its “Guilty Pleasures” nights of cheesy ’80s covers remain one of Nashville’s hottest live music attractions, and its new “CCR” show—hell-for-leather covers of The Clash, The Cult, and The Replacements—may surpass it.
But as even Grimes admits, “Nobody wants to see live music seven nights a week.” He wants to scale back the music and bring back more of the neighborhood flavor. The biggest challenge facing the Slow Bar is two-pronged: no liquor license, combined with a sudden proliferation of competitors. Nearly a dozen new bars and nightspots have followed the Slow Bar’s lead, some even started by Grimes’ old patrons. Once alone on its corner of Five Points, the Slow Bar now has two hot spot bars, the Alley Cat and Beyond the Edge, in the same block. Another will reportedly open across Woodland in a house that once served as the Velvet Ant salon.
As tough as the competition is on Grimes, even his staunch supporters love to see business boom in their corner of East Nashville. Once the butt of citywide crime jokes, it’s enjoying a vitality that the Rock Block should envy.
“When I go out now,” Christy Perkins says, “I can hit five places and never cross the bridge.” The Vandy kids packing Guilty Pleasures, she notes, are a sign that momentum may be reversing away from downtown. It’s a source of swelling pride for an underdog community that, according to Perkins, lists its priorities as “God, country, neighborhood.”
For now, the Slow Bar is still part of that neighborhood. For now, Mike Grimes continues to book music he loves, like the upcoming appearance of reggae artist and Clash collaborator Mikey Dread. Meanwhile, this Saturday is CCR night. At least one song should sound especially pertinent: “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”
