I am leery of reunions. I am especially leery of rock and roll reunions, those “let’s get the band back together” things. They usually mean someone needs money for a liver transplant, or wants to relive a time that was and isn’t anymore. Mainly, though, it just freaks me out seeing people age. I prefer the delusion that becoming less young is something that happens to other people.

So when I started seeing posts in my FB feed from Tommy Womack that there would be a pair of Government Cheese reunion gigs in Bowling Green and Nashville, I surprised myself by buying tickets. I think maybe the Ambien had something to do with it; the interwebs and sleepy pills are a recipe for the arrivals of all manner of shipments – both physical and virtual – on my life’s doorstep. The next morning my inbox reminded me I’d made a cash commitment. I was ambivalent.

Saturday rolled around, and I was still on the fence about going. The show was billed as one of two shows in the “25 Year Reunion Tour,” a wee bit of irony from a bunch of guys with a catalog of tunes never lacking for wit.

For readers who are saying, “Government Who?” I will offer a brief bit of unauthorized background. The Cheese was born in Bowling Green, Kentucky around 1985, and had a ten-year career playing clubs, making a few records, and living the rock and roll dream – not the one you used to see in album cover liner notes, but the real one, with drunks, destroyed bathrooms, shitty PA systems and Motel 6’s where the light was not only not on for ya, but busted out by whoever was there last night.

The late 80’s and early 90’s were a bit of a glory era in Nashville rock and roll. Reigning supreme were Jason and the Nashville Scorchers, who later dropped the “Nashville” from their name. Their gigs at the old Cantrell’s were legendary. I was there one night when the toilets in the mens’ room got all smashed up, and the floor in front of the stage was an inch deep in you-know-what.

There was also The Questionnaires, Walk The West and In Pursuit, and some others that aren’t coming to mind, not because they weren’t good (ok, some of them probably weren’t), but because I spent a lot of those years about half tanked at the Gold Rush. I was particularly a Questionnaires fan, even though Tom Littlefield of that band took delight in telling me how much I sucked because I worked at a commercial rock radio station that played Journey and REO Speedwagon records. Guilty as charged. Tom never was very subtle.

Government Cheese was a bit on the periphery of the Nashville scene. Part of it was their Kentucky roots, I think; and the other part was because Nashville club audiences didn’t quite know what to make of them. I’m not going to trot out a bunch of pseudo-rock-journalist cliches to try and describe their music. I’ll just say they were loud, fast, quirky, clever and twisted. “MaMaw Drives The Bus.” “Fish Stick Day.” “Camping on Acid.” And a cover of Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died” that was 100 times better than the original. I loved them.

The gig was at The Rutledge, a fine live room and bar on 4th, about two blocks from the object of Littlefield’s hatred, WKDF, where drummer Joe King (AKA Joe Elvis) and I worked before consultants wrung all the life out of it and Journey gave way to George Strait. Over the stage was the banner from gigs of years past, the words “Government Cheese” in zeppelin-shaped letters being pulled on a string by a strung out, tongue-out freak carrying a sign reading, “I am a rock and roll fool.” Some nice 80’s era punk was blaring on the PA, and somewhere a fog machine was making the obligatory smoke in the can-lights over the stage.

I met some old cohorts from the KDF days. Most looked well and healthy. Squeegie wasn’t drunk yet, and Buddy is a chiropractor. Write your own joke. On my way in the door, I wondered if the audience for a Cheese 25-year reunion would send me screaming; I was surprised at how well everyone looked. They looked like, well, like adults, but mostly cool ones, ready for a good time. Yeah, there were plenty of bald pates and droopy boobs, but all in all, folks were upbeat, smiling and ready to rock. There was no air of decrepitude like the time I went to see The Long Players do “Revolver.”

What I didn’t know was that “well and healthy” did not extend to the linchpin of the band: Tommy Womack, who, as much as anyone “is” Government Cheese, is Government Cheese. He was somewhere offstage, hydrating. We learned that his appearance that night had been cast into doubt by a roiling stomach-flu-something-or-other and a pit stop that very afternoon at the Southern Hills ER. He relates the story here better than I can tell it.

The band walked out. There was an extra guitar player. Is that, that, Warner Hodges? Warner Fucking HODGES? I was caught halfway somewhere between incredulity and delight. Warner was (is) the guitar player for the aforementioned Scorchers. I used to drink (among other things) with him in the old Gold Rush days. Here’s what you need to know about Warner: he is a guitar god, a real one. Yes, rock and roll is full of ’em, but Warner was zapped by lightning and spanked by a fretboard from the minute he started breathing on this earth. Anybody who has ever seen the Scorchers knows how otherworldly, loud, frantic and powerful he is. The rest of you, well, shit. Go see him if ever you can.

And off they went. And off and off and off. They did the Cheese hits. Yes, by God, there were Cheese hits, even if your lame ass missed them from ’85-’95. Those songs came back to me, pop! Crack! Kick! I wasn’t the only one, not by a long shot. A look around showed the packed house still knew the words.

Tommy was still wearing his hospital wristband. He looked a little dazed at first, but with Tommy, how can you tell? And the rest of the guys… well, these were not guys trying to recapture anything. They weren’t nostalgic in the least bit. They were in the moment, the three-chord, turn-it-to-11 NOW. Tommy posted on FB that it “may have been the best Government Cheese gig ever,” and he should know. It was certainly the best one I ever saw. They are better players now, even if they had, as Tommy put it, “a few train wrecks” and Skot and Viva almost injured themselves in a frenetic crash on the stage. (For a second, it looked like Skot had broken his nose.)

The addition of Warner gave the band a whole new magnitude of kick-ass. What was even better was he’d been called in last minute, when it looked like Tommy was going to be all IV’d up and in the hospital for the night. I shook hands with Warner during a break and he said he didn’t know any of those songs; they’d called him in a panic in the afternoon, and he’d been through one soundcheck to learn what he could. The guys said as much from the stage. They smiled and laughed a lot. I told Warner, “You guys look like you’re having fun.” He said, “It’s SUPPOSED to be fun.” ‘Nuff said.

Listen, the thing, that thing? The magic and electric thing that is live rock and roll? I dunno if I can add anything to that. But I sure did feel it Saturday night. I remember thinking, “Every kid with a fucking guitar should hear this.” It wasn’t a clinic; it was just real. They were tight and they were sloppy. They screwed up and they were perfect. They distorted and they rang like iron and brass. Skot was wearing a Ramones t-shirt, and he and his bandmates did Joey proud. My ears were ringing on my way out. The radio in my car sounded like it had a blanket over the speakers; my midrange was temporarily shot, like it’s supposed to be after a good show.

Confession: I left before the end. I don’t stay out as late as I did in the 80’s (or 90’s and 00’s, for that matter). I am a rock and roll fool, but not so much past 11:30. By the door, I was standing next to the swag table, looking at the t-shirts, black with the old stenciled logo. A gruff, loud voice said, “You need to get you one o’ them.” I turned. It was Tom Littlefield. I didn’t recognize him at first. When I said so, he flipped me off and stalked off toward the room, where the Cheese and Warner wailed on into the night.

Thanks for a great night, guys. You haven’t aged well; you are well.

Rock on.

Some of you may remember knowing a few families who used to send out an annual story of the year at Christmastime, usually personally delivered by a real-life postman in ear-muffs. You’d know it was from “The Lawrence Family” because the penmanship on the envelope was in the same flowing script every year, one of a score hand-addressed by say, Mary, who went on to work for a healthcare company, printshop, or ad agency. “Susie finally wedded Max in a rainy ceremony in June and the cake turned into a soggy mess, but we all had fun anyway, except Martha, who broke her hip. Heather took second place in dance at the state competitions in Chattanooga. Daddy succumbed to cancer but his memory lives on in every ornamental cherry blossom in the springtime.”

Then there are the rest of you, who have never seen or received one of these, but still know hundreds, if not thousands of Lawrences, by post, tweet and “like,” their dance trophies, wedding and funeral bouquets fluttering and sparkling like droplets in the clouds of our digital days.

They are all good and always have been, these sharings great and small. I do not write to compare eras of giving; giving just is. And if the ubiquity of connectedness seems to have rendered the moments less meaningful to some, let them be forgiven for missing the calligrapher’s pen and the heft of a letter-opener in the hand.

Being one to have found joy both in a mailbox at driveway’s end and a pocket-screen during lunchtime at Germantown Cafe, I offer a few random reminisces from this year. Some I’ve written about already. I’m going to leave a bunch of stuff out, some intentionally and some not. Don’t try to parse importance by the completeness or order of the record. Miss Mary was a better writer; I am just sentimental.

I’ll start with #thesituation2010, as we tweeted it. Snow in Nashville is a big deal, and we had some snows last winter in which even Yankees could spinout and lose a fender. Yanks always say we don’t know how to drive, or fuck-all about salting roadways, and they’re right. Big whoop. We made soup, tweeted, and pretended we were living on crust of bread and such for a few fine days before a glorious spring arrived, on time, and like clockwork.

While we were arguing over the #situation2010 hashtag, Haitians were digging out – are still digging out – from the horrific earthquake of January 12. Malcolm Gladwell has an excellent piece about Why the Revolution Won’t Be Tweeted, and he may be right; however, the fact is that many folks of a certain younger age learned, as I did, of the disaster on Twitter or Facebook. Within days, we’d texed a zillion dollars in contributions, which has to mean something, even if Haiti remains one of the world’s most truly god-awful places on the planet. Help is help; I haven’t the moral acumen to judge, but I can pray, and send money, so I did.

Someone said during the year that Nashville’s seasons have been ice, flood and hell; May brought the rains, and the Cumberland and its tributaries hopped out of their banks as easily as 1,2,3. Like every flood, it seemed like a suckerpunch after the destruction was wrought. Prefab buildings shared freeways with sputtering cars, and the Schermerhorn’s pipe-organ was wiped out; but the fact was, it started like just a really rainy weekend before we all started noticing that uh-oh, did they just say the levee at Metrocenter could be compromised? My memories are still of the laughing 20-somethings jumping off the backs of trucks rolling down my street, leaving bottled water on doorsteps because we we were suddenly on water conservation measures, and running downtown Monday morning, seeing Ghost Ballet all awry in the waters. Anderson Cooper came, and everybody had the “big media is ignoring us because we have redneck accents” blues up until that point. Then we got all feel-good because he said on primetime CNN what we already knew, which is that we man-and-woman-up when we need to, thankyouverymuch. There was no truth to the rumor that lady 30-somethings were sending panties up to his room. I think.

And I would be remiss if I did not mention Christy Frink, who started tweeting during the flood what she could gather from her living room, which is also the HQ of the Nashvillest blog, a labor of love if there ever was one. (She and Morgan Levy do not even accept Google ads on the site; they just do it because, um, they want to.) It became apparent that even the mainstream media was getting its news from a lady in pj’s, banging it out on the internets. I’d see it in my stream, then some bedraggled reporter on Channel Four would say five minutes later, “We are getting reports…” Christy was the defacto media center for all things flood. I think she stayed awake for four days on nothing but Cheese Nips and coffee, and if you wanted to know if the levee was holding, or if your aunt’s place in Bellevue had made it, Christy had probably posted it from her orangy-yellow stained keyboard. I had the honor of meeting her for the first time later in the year. Listen, if I was 20 years younger, she wouldn’t have a chance. I’d follow her around like a puppy.

Nashville cleaned up, the waters receded, and the city rebuilt and rebuilds; Christy took a nap, and suddenly it got hot. Stupid hot. Circuit breakers and AC compressors arced and stalled; repairmen were revered when they came to our homes with “the parts that came in.” We all complained, sweat into our sheets, and the snows were a distant memory.

Somewhere in there, the Old Spice guy showed up. An overnight sensation that took six months (hardly anyone remembered Isaiah Mustafa’s Super Bowl debut), an old-guy brand (or more correctly, the ad agency of an old-guy brand) did something obvious: they put him in a studio and shot him doing funny video responses to fans, and then tweeted them. He was all the rage for a while, and made us laugh. It was hailed as the big online marketing success of 2010. I think it was, too. The writing was stellar, and I am told Mr. Mustafa is more fun to look at than me. I concede.

I started online dating in the late fall. I was sheepish about it at first. Everyone is. My divorce was final in February, and I thought, OK, I’m not having any luck at the Hot Bar at Whole Foods, so I signed up as a signal of openness to the Universe. The Universe responded, with some very interesting people. One girl looked like a model, and kissed like you fantasize models kiss; she also told me she’d killed a man. (She said it was an accident, but I wasn’t taking any chances.) Another had me walk Ganier Ridge at Radnor to see if I was really “athletic and toned” like I’d said in my profile. One guy she’d done this with had almost passed out. Ganier is hilly. She is an energy healer, which means she can cure what ails your chakras without even touching you. She never mentioned if she knew CPR.

There were a couple of others; lovely ladies, all, with whom I was beginning to wonder if “chemistry” was a myth, and the fireworks on Love, American Style (if you don’t know this 60’s reference, brush up) was really meant to be replaced by something more, ah, 50-something; something acquired, something not-dazzling-but-very-nice-enough. Then I heard these words, which have changed my life:

“Would you like to see my daughter naked?”

This was Judy. We were in the Frothy Monkey on our first meeting, having that awkward, get-to-know-one-another conversation where two folks are sizing each other up, getting used to one another’s voices and thinking, “I wonder what he/she looks like in better light?” Fair disclosure: one of her three daughters had posed for Alan LeQuire. If you don’t know him, he’s the artist responsible for the Athena in the Parthenon, and Musica in Buddy Killen Circle. Judy had said in her profile she possessed “a wicked sense of humor.” She’d also blown off my initial email contact because she thought I was a smartass, a liberal, and also because she was dating some other guy who was tall and had really big feet.

We ended up talking into the night, and walked up to Blind Pig – which has a hamburger about 10x better than that ostentatious Burger Up place up the street – and closed it down, talking about spirituality, statuary (sorry, sculpture) and our past lives, until the chair legs were up in the air and the Sunday night shift guy was thinking, “Sheesh, leave already.”

There’s a lot more I can say about Judy, and 2010. But I am winding down, and I have gifts to wrap. I will simply say this: I am blessed. I understand grace better than I ever have, which isn’t much, but a start. I am grateful for granddaughter Verdoodle being healthy, and laughing a lot on the rare occasions when I see her. I am grateful for new friends and the rekindling of old acquaintances that have become friends; I am grateful for the ornamental cherry-trees in Germantown, and for positive and helpful people that have been put into my life. I can run six miles, and do an unassisted pullup. I’m happy and sappy, the kind of sappy that makes cool people roll their eyes, wear aviator sunglasses and derisively use the word “pollyanna.” The sun is out, and I have heard it may snow again on Christmas, the first time for Nashville in some statistically unlikely number of years.

So. Love to you all, and joy and peace as the year ends and the elevenses begin.

See you at Frothy.

It was the First Saturday Art Crawl. I have to say that the art wasn’t that great, but the people watching was. There were varying degrees of genuine hipness, faux hipness, feigned indifference, and the plain old lost. Sometimes at the Art Crawl I wonder, in which category am I? Then I look at a black-and-white lithograph of a 50’s TV set with an insect on its screen, and remind myself not to worry about it.

I was with three ladies, one of whom was having PMS (I know this because she kept saying so), another who was really jaded about the art (which was OK, since most of it wasn’t good), and a third who is a clothing designer, a really nice girl who couldn’t see very well because she had lasik a few days back. The Bitchy, the Bored, the Blind, and me.

We ate at Koto, then walked over. The girls kept tearing through places, and I tend to saunter, and look at stuff, even bad stuff, because it’s an Art Crawl, and I’m not that jaded about art yet. And I would look at the women. I’m newly single. They would spend about 5 minutes in a place, then be waiting for me on the sidewalk. Then they’d give me a hard time, after Bitchy had already texted, while I was looking at the insect TV piece, “Are you still in there pretending you are interested in the art just to make us wait?” Finally, I offered, “Ladies. You do live here, right? How separated can we get on 5th Avenue? It isn’t Disney World.”

In the Arcade, a pie throw. A guy in a suit with oversized statement frames was sitting in a chair, and you could donate five bucks to something-or-other to throw a pie at him. Bitchy wanted to have a pie thrown at her, instead. She said it was her birthday, which it wasn’t; her birthday’s Tuesday. The statement-frames guy said he’d throw at her, but he missed on purpose. Good thing. Sticky hair does not sound like something to add to cramps and a headache.

We took the shuttle to the Estel Gallery, even though it’s a six-block walk, and at one point a car pulling a trailer with a giant red rooster strapped aboard went by. Bitchy said it was the best art all night.

We rode the six blocks back to 5th, because Blind said that walking in her boots would make her feet hurt. I had complimented her on them earlier. She’d explained to me that they were extravagantly expensive, and that leather from Chinese-or-Indian made boots was inferior, and would not break in well. I guess maybe hers weren’t Italian, after all. As far as that goes, I bought a pair of boots last week, and on the insole it says “John Varvatos • USA.” On the inside of the tongue, though, it says, “Made in China.” I wonder how well they’ll break in, now.

The evening wound down. Bored could not remember where her car was parked, and Bitchy insisted on driving her to it, so we got caught in downtown traffic, amid the subwoofers and “No Cruising” signs, which obviously do not apply to Saturday night. I was sitting in the backseat with Blind, and I wanted to flirt, but that did not seem appropriate. She’s moving to Seattle, anyway. Her last gig was at Ambercrombie and Fitch, designing “active bottoms.” I am not making that up. Active bottoms. I asked her to explain, and she looked at me (I guess she was looking) and said, “Sweatpants.” So now you know why Ambercrombie and Fitch stuff is so expensive. They were paying this one woman six figures to design sweatpants.

Bitchy’s headache was really getting to her a bit; she laid on the horn and backed a guy up at an intersection with a glare and the sheer dint of will. We finally delivered Bored to her car and escaped the traffic, and Blind went to the front. I was disappointed. I sat quietly alone until they deposited me back in Germantown.

It was a beautiful sunset, so pink and full of autumn promise that I drove north with my head turned to the left, glancing ahead in swivels to the sidestreets of 12th to make sure I didn’t miss someone pulling out. I was full from dinner.

As I crossed the interstate and headed into the Gulch, it fuzzed a mild filter onto the windows of the downtown skyline. It was the kind of sky that, if Photoshopped onto a NASA photo or digitized into a James Cameron movie, could be described as “otherworldy.” A few minutes later, as I descended Capitol Hill toward the northside, I admired the BRUTON SNUFF neon in red relief against the dusk. It is such an unremarked-on landmark, much more Nashville to me than say, Cheekwood, where you cannot ride a bike into the gardens; or the Parthenon, with LeQuire’s hideous sculpture of Athena.

I was returning from my first meal at a place that I would call, in a lesser mood, a new hipster joint called “Burger Up.” It’s been there a while; my natural hypocrisy toward trendiness had kept me out of there until now. I decided it had been there long enough to give it a whirl. I am tired of J Alexander’s.

It’s the kind of place that does indeed, scream, “But see? Nashville is cool, too,” in a very, “but we’re not trying to be!” sort of way. The waiters were almost elfin-looking in their deep, v-neck, heather grey t-shirts, tousled hair and skinny jeans – including the little fellow who breathlessly wanted to know about my iPad cover, saying, “it’s so cool that it props it up, does it charge it, too? I’ve never SEEN that!”

Fair disclosure: a mildly rigorous self-assessment made me feel sheepish. Perhaps a 53 year-old should not be critical of such an atmosphere as he perches on one of the incredibly high – and uncomfortable – metal stools at the marble bar in a t-shirt reading “Antique Funk” and spotlessly clean, Carolina blue Chuck Taylors, complaining to the barkeep about the weak AT&T wireless 3G signal in 12 South. “I should just shut the hell up and see if the food’s any good,” I thought. “I am not nice.” My catty impulses felt impaired, guilty, like a Catholic adolescent who has touched himself before sunrise service.

The crowd was brisk but not overcrowded, mostly 20-and-early-30-somethings, who seemed to be enjoying themselves at the low, rustic bench-tables. There were a few Vespa types; some wholesome, as-yet-unjaded Belmont students; new, perky moms in lycra gymwear and running shoes with double-tied laces. There was one woman near my age, who looked as out of place as I was trying not to feel, with a hemp purse, narrow eyeglasses and heavily teased-out hair. I think she was waiting for someone.

The fried house-made pickles (what does that mean, “house-made?”) were very, very good. The barkeep was nice enough, and the service just slow enough to let you know you are at a place where the food is supposed to be worth waiting for. Never one for a sandwich made of quinoa or anything that reminds me of the vegan I once dated, I ordered the regular burger. It wasn’t called that; it was named the “Triple-L” or some such. I had to ask for mustard. The fries came in a metal cup, which somehow gave them a feeling of being more greasy, if degrees of such can be measured in deep-fried food, or made worse by their containers. Fries in a box at least bleed some oil into the paperboard.

The burger was not particularly bad, nor good. I am of the school who believes it possible for well-cooked hamburger to still be juicy; I used to do it all the time for my ex-wife and stepkids with a $75 Weber and a bag of charcoal, flying drunk. Evidently, to get an undried-out burger now requires one to forego full cooking in favor of “pink.” I still can’t do it. My burger was well-seasoned, but burned-out. I ate all of it, and the pickles. I may have to go back for those. They are, after all, house-made.

I paid my $20 tab and walked past the fixed-gear bikes back to the car. There was a line at Las Paletas next door; I decided to pass.

It was worth the drive out just to see the sunset.