I was given the opportunity to write at length about the Nashville flood and its impact on Nashville's guitars, chiefly at the ill-fated Soundcheck facility, for Premier Guitar magazine. It wound up being the cover story for the issue just out on newsstands and digitally. Premier Guitar is cool because besides publishing a handsome print issue, they make their content freely available on line and in a very slick e-reader. Just look to the upper right hand corner of the page to download the full issue. To respect PG's model as well as their advertisers, I post only the first few paragraphs here. Please click through to PG to read the whole story.
"Beware of Snakes!!!” That’s what a sign taped to the door of Soundcheck studios reads. This is good advice for anyone in the music industry, but they mean it this time. It is Friday morning, six days after the Cumberland River surged hard and fast into this flat industrial district of Nashville. And as if the toxic slurry of mud, chemicals, and mystery brown stuff left all over the floors wasn’t dangerous enough, the early responders to this massive complex of rehearsal halls, repair shops, and storage lockers encountered venomous, slithering reptiles angry about being beached inside.
People are checking in with employees at a table inside the door. Most media have been stopped at an outer gate. Soundcheck management, understandably, doesn’t want local TV news cameras and lights pointing at the musicians as they pull the corpses of cherished instruments out of their sodden cases and trunks. I have been added to the client list as a volunteer proxy for John Jorgenson, a globally admired veteran of country, rock, and jazz. He is on tour with his gypsy jazz quintet in Europe, doing his best to keep a calm head and coordinate an unprecedented, unplanned evacuation operation from thousands of miles away...
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