Nashville for a newbie....

I thought Jack's was OK but overrated for the most part. Still went a couple of time though.

 

Jack's isn't the best barbecue I've ever eaten. I think the best part of it is the selection of good barbecue. If someone can't find something there they like, they're probably impossible to please. I know guys who go in there and get that sampler with a little bit of everything. I never have because that would feed me for a week.

 

Just went for a reunion of Vandy fraternity brothers who are all turning 50 this year. I might as well have been a newbie for how much Nashville has changed since I was last there in 2010. JFC, the party buses and bachelorette parties are outta control. Downtown is like fucking Bourbon Street, not a fan. The campus has completely changed too. I don't know if the groundskeepers were waiting to clean up right before graduation this Friday -- the chairs were already set up on Alumni Lawn -- but I've never seen the campus look more unkempt.

The composition of the student body has completely changed. Gone are most of the blonde Southern belles, replaced by a large contingent of international students. No way I'd get admitted there nowadays lol. The school I attended is long gone, along with my fraternity house.

Went to the baseball game versus Kentucky on Saturday. On one of the home runs hit by Kentucky, the ball sailed over us in the aisle atop the outfield bleachers, somehow missed all the parked cars, ricocheted off the curb and shot back toward us on the fly and my buddy caught it. He did the only proper thing with that souvenir from the opposing team -- he whipped it back onto the field, where Enrique Bradfield picked it up in center field and tossed it back over the fence lol.

Vandy won 9-3. We left in the 8th inning because they stopped serving beer in the 7th, made our way to Satco (an old stomping ground) and sat on the deck and crushed buckets of beer for several hours. The Villager (in Hillsborough Village) no longer has foos ball, which was devastating to all.

 

100% x 10.

10 a.m. Tuesday is indistinguishable from 10 p.m. on Saturday.

 

No joke. I was walking to breakfast at 10 a.m. on Friday morning and a party bus rolled by with chicks drinking and dancing to "Feel Like a Woman" by Shania Twain. I'm guessing those chickies didnt see sunset lol.

 

I’m half convinced the Titans drafted Will Levis because he already brought a bach party with him.

Everybody has nostalgia for “back when” but I dearly miss 90s Nashville. Glad to hear San Antonio Taco is still going strong.

 

I am heading there for the NHL Draft at the end of June, I'm sure it will be a long way from the crazy time I remember at the 2003 Draft

 

Have been going to Nashville for 50 years. I remember Broadway when it was lurid and dirty. Now it's just skanky and terrible. I'm surprised no psycho has driven onto the crowded sidewalks and run over dozens, to be honest.

I'm unsure which is worse: driving through-around Nashville or having to go downtown.

I'm still mystified at where all the people are going to come from to fill the new construction there, too. Ditto in Huntsville and other cities where apartment-condo construction is exploding. I was in Birmingham last week and saw 3-4 cranes, at least, downtown.

 

Birmingham is adding 400 apartments by converting the old AT&T (and before that South Central Bell) skyscraper downtown. Things are getting more expensive here, but at a much more modest pace. Starting to get transplants from Atlanta and Nashville who want a more affordable and scaled-down city life.

Huntsville is its own beast with all the government work.

 

My best memory of Nashville is drinking in a dive on Music Row at noon. Bought a CD with songs from the regulars.

 

Hmmm. I wonder if you and your boys were the frat boys at Satco my best friend and I got into a fist-fight with at 2 in the afternoon one Friday in the early 90s about an hour after burying that friend’s mom?
Small world?

 

My best memory of Nashville is way back in 1989 when, besides seeing some great games in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, we ended up afterward at a local nightclub where Minnesota Fats – who was at least 76 and maybe a lot older, depending on who you believe – was dancing cheek to cheek, late into the night, in a red, sequined suit, with a steady supply of women who apparently were there to do just that.

Fats was still working the dance floor when we left the club after midnight. And he did that every night, according to the locals (and to Fats himself), according to his obit years later in The Washington Post:

Until the early 1990s, he played pool occasionally at the Hermitage, a plush Nashville hotel where he lived and often was seen feeding the birds outside. He also made cameo appearances in country music videos.

He was a fixture at country music nightclubs, where the band always introduced him in the crowd. The announcement often left him besieged by admirers.

“The women all want to dance. I dance all night every night,” he said in 1988.

MINNESOTA FATS, WIZARD WITH A POOL CUE, DIES