Down On Music Row

On Big Nashville Dreams, Small Time Scammers & Great Story Songs

Watch out for sharks and real smooth talkers/Keep away from Johnnie Walker/And I know you’ll make it in this town… (Now You Know Nashville)

As long as naive dreamers have been rolling into town with nothing but a song in their heart and stars in their eyes, there’s been a predator sniffing out the fresh blood and going in for the kill to greet them.

It’s a heartbreaking story but it makes for a great story song. The story song is a little unfashionable these days but once you hear one that grabs you and lays a whole long sorry tale on the line for your ears only, you’ll never forget it.

One of my very favourite gems of this genre is Dolly Parton’s False Eyelashes, from her first solo album for RCA in 1968.

It’s a cautionary tale of a small town wide eyed girl who heads for the Big Smoke to make her country music singing dreams come true, and winds up broke and disillusioned. Who can’t relate to that!

Folks back home think I'm a star now
When they hear my records play
They say their home town girl made good and she'd go a long-long way
Mom wonders why I don't drive back in that big fine car I own
The truth is I don't have a car, and I'm ashamed to go back home

God knows what creeps and cheats she had to endure to get there. Welcome to Music City, Dolly, have a nice day!

How I loved that song! I think it set a template in my mind for something I had to do.

The first song I recorded for my Nashville album Lovers Dreamers Fighters, was inspired almost as soon as I laid eyes on the tour guide book Now You Know Nashville, a few weeks before. A story appeared in my mind of a young woman arriving in Nashville on a Greyhound after spending years in her small town, working on her songs and saving and planning and studying her tour guide and getting her nerve up to finally give her dreams a red hot go. Almost immediately she meets ‘a cowboy type’ who offers to show her around, charms the pants off her and whirls and twirls her all around the town and hooks her up with all his small time scummy hit makin’ buddies until she finally has empty pockets and the real lay of the land, at which point he dumps her and heads back to bus stop looking for the next sucker on the vine, telling her ‘I didn’t mean to break your heart/I know you’re fresh off the bus/And I never like to see a girl go wrong/Think of it as public service/You know I never meant to hurt ya/And now you got the makin’s of a song!’ Experience is a gift you can’t buy.

The song didn’t make the final cut for the album, but I released it later as a stand-alone double single with another old school country story song I recorded that same first session (about a broken man and a lonely woman briefly finding some solace in each other), accompanied by the great true Nashville cat, Dave Roe, who played double bass with Johnny Cash for eighteen years (and boy, he’s got some stories to tell!). When we first started recording, I was so nervous and excited to be there, making my Nashville dreams come true with people I admired but had never met, and I was playing too fast and out of time and my words were getting mixed up, and he came over to me, laid a big hand on my shoulder and told me ‘Lo, I’ve been married twenty five years, I know a thing or two about patience, just take your time and take it slow, we got ya’. We got it the next take. Kindness is also a gift you can’t buy.

The late great Dave Roe

I got lucky in Nashville, but plenty don’t.

I just listened to a fascinating podcast by The Tennessean, Murder On Music Row, which details an incredible, shocking long running cold case investigation into the murder of a young music executive on Music Row in 1989 who was responsible for hand compiling the radio airplay charts for Cashbox magazine and was fighting a losing battle against payola to keep it fair and clean. I don’t want to give any more away but the podcast truly pulls back the curtain on the multitude of predatory practices by unscrupulous promoter assholes who make their living from exploiting other people’s dreams. Though this story happened long ago, at the end of each episode the creator/host Keith Sharon states “Our reporting on the legacy of Music Row, doesn’t end with this podcast. If you’ve been duped by an unscrupulous promoter in Nashville, we want to hear your story.”

That’s because there’s still a lot of them out there. And obviously not just in Nashville. I personally know a very shocking story about a relentlessly conniving, shameless Australian con artist but that’s another long story for another day.

Here’s a quote from Hunter S Thompson for some light relief: ‘The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.’

While the internet has helped educate us all about the terrible things that go down out there in the world, its also opened its own can of scam worms.

Now ‘emerging artists’ are constantly subjected to emails from grifters and tricksters trying to sell them playlist promotion (which will generally do nothing and result in their music being removed from Spotify for ‘breaching codes of conduct’), invitations to appear on podcasts and talk shows, (which will result in their social media pages being hacked and taken over by these scumbag predators, as excruciatingly detailed here by author

Jen Mann

in ‘I Got Scammed So You Don’t Have To’ - the scam works the same for people in all creative industries), messages from fake accounts purporting to be entertainment reporters and editors offering coverage or famous artists who want to collaborate or need a quick loan or a long slow draining of your entire life savings or reputation, take your pick.

It’s a constant assault on your senses and your brain power. Mostly it’s very obvious but not always, and all it takes is to be little bit tired or tipsy or desperate feeling to enter into some kind of ruinous transaction. More established artists are constantly subjected to spam accounts that steal their content and description and purport to be them, then try to entice fans into conversations, offering to meet up, to sell them private mementoes, to take them down rabbit holes that will obviously lead nowhere good. My friend Rebecca whose partner is Dave Davies from The Kinks told me she keeps discovering women who believe they have been in deep, online relationships with Dave, sometimes for years. It’s horrifying for both parties. I pitched an article about it to the editor of US Rolling Stone, who declined but told me it had happened to him too; fake accounts springing up in his name that would then offer artists coverage for money.

Various InstaScams

I was recently contacted by some hustler pretending to be my husband which was a very creepy and meta experience - but he was offering a ‘direct massage’ experience so how could I resist?

We should probably just consider this missive Music Scams Part One, as there are enough stories out there to blow our minds for ever.

But personally, I am all about giving and not taking.

So in a happier segue, I’d like to point your attention to this amazing deal I’ve teamed up with Impressed Recordings to offer: a special bundle of my 2017 Nashville album Lovers Dreamers Fighters (limited edition of 250, translucent blue 140g vinyl) and my upcoming new album Transatlantic Light (out Sept 20 - or Sept 13 on clear pink limited edition vinyl for the true believers!). If you are reading this in the US, our Aussie dollar makes this red hot bargain even better - the vinyl bundle comes in at a mere $53USD.

BUT WAIT THERE”S MORE!

I also made you a MUSIC ROW playlist for your listening pleasure - it kicks off with the song Murder On Music Row that isn’t about being scammed but is about the death of traditional country music and is heavily featured on the true crime podcast of the same name. There’s also Robbie Fulks infamous Nashville kiss off Fuck This Town, written from the point of view of a disillusioned cowboy that never made the big time - first time I heard it was when I witnessed him perform it at a club in Nashville where the crowd screamed the chorus joyously right back at him. There’s also the brilliant voice-of-experience warning This Town Gets Around by

Margo Price

. Just for fun I also added John Prine’s magnificent Some Humans Ain’t Human cos it just seemed to seem it all up:

Some humans ain’t human, some people ain’t kind, they lie through their teeth, with their head up their behind

Music Row on Spotify

Music Row on YouTube

Endlessly grateful for the songs of John Prine. And for all y’all’s for reading. Truly.

Stay safe out there! And give me a little heart would ya? It helps the algorithms-that-be get Loose Connections out there.

Lo x

PS: Tell me your scam stories! I’m all ears!