Nashville Cats

JUDGING FROM a visit to the real Nashville once, and to the fictional Nashville twice, they're pretty much the same--weird, diffuse, and behind-the-scenes. Driving up to Nashville, Tennessee, is no big deal. At least Hollywood--which is a disappointment too, all 50's Jack in the Boxes gone shabby--has that big sign H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D up in the hills, and a couple of monuments you've seen in the movies. But Nashville's myth was spread by ear, so that without the radio on as you cruise in you could be anywhere, except for an eerie deja-vu that you finally figure out seeped in from the cover of Dylan's Nashville Skyline: a flimsy, half-naked cluster of skyscrapers, vaguely embarrassed in their lack of substance.

Downtown on famous Printer's Alley one expects a Bourbon Street of country music--stand in the middle of the avenue and hear a dozen songs wafting and mingling from a dozen different clubs, not sailors and revelers with one earring stumbling out of doors, maybe, but at least truckers and dirt farmers on a night out. But it's just a row of dirty book stores and porno booths, privacy ensured, and the old auditorium, Ryman's, which used to be the Grand Ole Opry in better days, looks like a church turned bingo hall. The Ernest Tubb Record Store is only a dingy Woolworth's--lines of cheap cowboy boots and tumbled boxes of western shirts, old George Wallace Speaks records, trick glasses that look like they're full of beer but when you pretend to spill it on someone the beer stays in because there's a false top.

The real Opry has moved out of town to a Disney-like complex on the freeway. It was inaugurated, you may recall, by President Nixon a few years back. If memory serves, this was the event at which the Trick failed to negotiate properly a yo-yo he had been given by the citizenry. Anyway, things have pretty much moved out of the city except for the business district--tall buildings where everything is sheathed in structural steel. Even with all the civic pride that obviously went into these structures and the malls around them, they are a little ghostly, especially at night. The outskirts are where the action is, but it's spread out along a wheel of strips--the road to Chattanooga, to Memphis, to Atlanta and Louisville--all crammed with steak houses and motels. There are a great many bars in Nashville, and you have to go in and sit a while to get a sense of the place.

Robert Altman's movie tries to do this, too: everything is behind the scenes, and there's no need to show much of the geography of the place. On Music Row, where the Country Music Hall of Fame is, and the record companies have their offices--a lot of fountains in front--the buildings look opaque and forbidding. No one seems to live in Nashville. Nothing in town gives the feeling that it's residential. Public and private mix in a funny way, hard to get at, which is what Altman tries to do.

When the people of the real Nashville get to see the film of Nashville no one knows how they'll react. There was a story going around that the picture wouldn't open there, that the City Council had banned it as insulting and a blow to the city's self-image, but this turned out to be bogus. One Nashvillean said they were kind of proud of the movie: another said that the reason Nashville hasn't opened there yet (although it has in twenty cities) was that a local film critic blasted it--particularly the music, which he called inauthentic--so mercilessly that Altman became infuriated. The director, who claims the film isn't about Nashville at all, started granting interviews to rival papers, and a week after the review appeared the distribution problems started. The charge about the music is ridiculous--it's infinitely more authentic that the current commercial "Nashville Sound"--but the people of Nashville will get to see the film about themselves in August, maybe when it's been half forgotten up here.