Click to see a gallery of Musicians Hall of Fame instruments damaged at Soundcheck Nashville by flooding (this image of Hall founder Joe Chambers: Samuel M. Simpkins/The Tennessean).
In masters’ hands, the instruments made culture-defining music. And until recently, they shone pristine, accented by gallery lighting and protected behind glass cases at the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum.
Now, they are grime-caked, and heavy with water that remains in wood that cracks and splinters, or that sags like a cardboard box tossed into a swimming pool.
In February, Musicians Hall proprietor Joe Chambers was ordered to vacate his downtown building in 14 days, to make way for a new convention center, and so he gathered his treasures — most owned, some loaned — and drove them across the Cumberland, to a riverside rehearsal and storage space called Soundcheck Nashville, for safe keeping while he searched for another location.
But in May, the rains came and Soundcheck flooded, and Chambers couldn’t gather his jewels until they had been underwater for days. And now Pete Townshend’s guitar from The Who’s Quadrophenia tour, Jimi Hendrix’s 1966 Fender, the drums Kenny Buttrey used on Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” the bass Lightning Chance used for Hank Williams’ final recording sessions and hundreds of other fine things are irrevocably altered, their futures uncertain.
They are sad and dirty, collected together in a warehouse space where no music is heard, only the hum of dehumidifiers and the sighs and curses from Chambers. He spent most of the past decade realizing a dream of protecting and honoring the legacies of working musicians. Now his showplace is bulldozed, his favorite things are in ruin and he’s been making calls to his heroes, telling them what is lost, what is spared and what is in question.Chambers is quick to say he’s lucky in some ways. Many of the instruments were insured, and he reminds that his losses are insignificant when compared to lost lives and destroyed homes. Still, smiles are infrequent this week for a man who has seen great ambitions and now a remarkable collection derailed by civic planning and destroyed by force of nature. And insurance can’t repair this thing.
“You don’t pick up the phone and go, ‘I’d like to order another of the Tommy Tedesco guitar that he played on the M*A*S*H theme,’ or, ‘I’d like another of the bass that Joe Osborne used on “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and all The Mamas & The Papas records: The one signed on the back by Karen Carpenter and Neil Young and Paul Simon,’” Chambers said. “And if we had been able to work out an agreement with the city, we would have been sitting high and dry. We wouldn’t have lost a guitar pick.”
The Metro Development and Housing Agency took over the old museum through eminent domain, and it closed to the public on Feb. 14 (to see photos from the last day of public tours, click HERE). The settlement was something like $4 million less than Chambers said it would cost to rebuild a similar structure. When closing shop, Chambers returned instruments to some owners — Charlie Daniels was one — and moved much of the rest of the collection to Soundcheck to buy time and ponder a next move.
“I remember pulling into the parking lot there, and I saw this river and thought, ‘I don’t have a good feeling about this,’” he said. “But then I thought, ‘You’re just being paranoid,’ and Vince Gill had his guitars there, and John Fogerty, and of course I wasn’t thinking we’d have that much rain.”
A glance at Chambers’ collection offers wincing evidence of the damage that can be done by “that much rain.” Townshend tried to destroy his guitar in a 1974 concert, whacking it against the stage repeatedly. He broke the neck, but that kind of thing can be, and was, fixed. The Cumberland baptizing may provide more permanent damage: The snapped neck was a broken bone, the water is more like cancer.
“These instruments are the holy grails of the musicians,” said Country Music Hall of Famer Harold Bradley. “If they disappear, we’ll lost a tremendous amount of our history.”
For Chambers, who clearly adores the instruments and music-makers he sought to honor, lost history equates to heartache. His favorite pieces aren’t necessarily the most valuable, which makes him no different from Middle Tennesseans who saved family photographs from the flood but left behind expensive items.
In some moments, Chambers is as buoyed by the salvaging of a golf club that Chet Atkins used as a walking stick as he is dismayed at some of his lost guitars. And then he looks over at the sitar used by California session man Mike Deasy, with wood that must have popped like firecrackers, audible even underwater. He grows emotional each time he shifts attention to two basses once played by Nashville great Lightning Chance — the one he played on the Grand Ole Opry stage and the one that held the low end for Patsy Cline’s “Walking After Midnight” and thousands of other songs — wincing at the yawning wounds in the wood.
“This is priceless stuff, and it’s part of an untold story that was finally, thanks to Joe, in the process of being told,” said bass player and Nashville Musicians Association president Dave Pomeroy. “My fear is that this is going to kill the museum, and that would compound the losses we’ve already suffered. These instruments tell the story of the people who built this town, this music city, and we have to honor that and do everything we can to help that.”
Even the instruments that can be restored are now different, and lesser. Instruments are to be weathered by hand, not by water, and fixing water damage is usually like sanding and refinishing antique furniture. You wind up with something perhaps usable but less authentic. And it’ll be impossible to tell what is salvageable for months. Much of it looks worse each day, even as it slowly dries.
The binding from Charlie McCoy’s bass crumbled and stuck like glass in Chambers hand as he picked it up and mentioned its role in Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay.” The drums Gene Chrisman used on “Son Of A Preacher Man” are a wreck, as are the bass guitars Garry W. Tallent used on Bruce Springsteen’s “Born To Run” and “Born in the U.S.A.” Water pressure violently ripped the bridges from the bodies of Glen Campbell’s Ovation and Jerry Reed’s Fender. The M*A*S*H guitar couldn’t be repaired by a team of guitar builders and Hawkeye Pierce.
These are things, not people. But we as a culture have deemed art and song and museums to be things of some import, and so the loss of these things is also of significance.
“What does it do to the museum?” Chambers said. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what it does to me. I kind of said, ‘God, give me a sign. What should I do?’ And he gave me a big one.”
Reach Peter Cooper at 615–259-8220 or pcooper@tennessean.com..
Just ran across this and it breaks my heart to hear of the loss of these one-of-a-kind instruments.
