Sure, Nashville is a town full of dudes (and dudettes) who write the songs that make the whole world sing. But if you spend any amount of time hanging out in East Nashville's coterie of restaurants, bars and home recording studios, you're likely to cross paths with Warren Pash. And when you do, chances are you'll be alerted to his presence by a conspiratorial glance, an elbow in the ribs, and in a hushed voice some semblance of these words: "Hey, see that guy over there, in the glasses? He wrote 'Private Eyes.' "
At this point it might take non-Hall & Oates fans (assuming they exist) a second for the song title to register. Sensing this, your companion will start humming the first few bars of the chorus, which in turn will cause you to smile involuntarily as the '80s flood back in a heartbeat: "Pri-va-ate eyes (clap-CLAP)...they're watching you (clap-CLAP)...." We've seen some variation of this one-act play performed at least a half-dozen times—and that's just at the Family Wash.
But it wasn't the Wash's Pie and a Pint Night that lured the affable Pash away from Portland, Ore., which he describes as "159 consecutive days of rain." "There are very few places left in the culture where the younger generation will embrace the older generation," says Pash, the love child of Peter Wolf and Woody Allen, "but here you see that a lot." Moreover, when he visited Nashville the first time, the city pulled him in almost immediately.
"The second day I was here, I was invited onstage to sing one of my songs," he says. On the same trip, he handed a CD to someone who subsequently invited him to come back and perform as part of Tin Pan South. "I was thrilled," he says. And convinced it was time to move.
Don't drop whatever you're holding, but Pash actually has more than one entry on his résumé. He's written for Carole King and Broadway diva Patti LuPone, played bass for the late R&B wildman Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and rubbed shoulders onstage with everyone from The Pixies and Big Star to Lucinda Williams. He also produced Chocolate Orchard Piano Bar, the last musical testament of the late Nashville raconteur and renegade Tupper Saussy. Most recently, he's been recording with his band Plastic Rulers—for "a TV show idea that I had that I can't really talk about right now." (Check out the band's hilariously campy K-Tel-style infomercial on YouTube.)
But for now he's resigned to the nudging and whispering for his 28-year-old slice of pop immortality. "It's OK with me," Pash says, "as long as people don't try to ask me to sign their body parts or anything." After all, when you're The Dude Who Wrote That Hall & Oates Song, you can't fight destiny.
Photographed in East Nashville by Eric England
