The man who understands the history and art of songwriting: From Elvis Presley to the present

Buzz Knight:

Well, I’m Buzz Knight and welcome to another Nashville edition of Taking a Walk. Nashville is all about the artistry of the song, the storytelling, the emotion, and there’s one man who has his finger on the pulse of the songwriting community. Bart Herbison is the executive director of the Nashville Songwriters Association International, the world’s largest not-for-profit songwriters trade association. The association serves aspiring and professional songwriters in all genres of music and also owns the amazing Bluebird Cafe. Bart, welcome to Taking a Walk.

Bart Herbison:

Thank you. I was excited about this, but doubly excited when a couple of old radio dogs showed up in here. I’m surprised we got to the podcast. I loved our visit before this started, man.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah.

Bart Herbison:

Because I’m an old radio dog myself.

Buzz Knight:

Radio dog.

Bart Herbison:

WTPR, Paris, Tennessee. We treat people right. I started there when I was 16 years old, in 1973.

Buzz Knight:

Why don’t you do a legal ID for the station?

Bart Herbison:

I’ll do my favorite station because I hated our call letters. 56 WHBQ Memphis. I still love those call letters now.

Buzz Knight:

I love it.

Bart Herbison:

We did turn our FM to KQ 105, which was a lot hipper and we went pop.

Buzz Knight:

Do you remember what song hooked you and made you forever a fan of music?

Bart Herbison:

Absolutely. Between four and five years old, my late uncle Billy Poland calls me in and he called me Barty, he says, “Sit down”. And to this day, I have a tattoo on my left shoulder, TCB with a lightning bolt because my first record was, That’s When Your Heartaches Begin by Elvis Presley. And it literally, between four and five, changed my life.

Buzz Knight:

That was it.

Bart Herbison:

And fast forward, later on, starting with that DJ role, I gravitated toward the songwriters. Everybody read the liner notes, but I read who wrote the songs and it just so happened a guy my same age coming up became a very famous songwriter, part of the reason it led me to this place.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah?

Bart Herbison:

Jimmy Stewart was his name.

Buzz Knight:

Wow.

Bart Herbison:

Not that Jimmy Stewart, but Brotherly Love, Keith Whitley and Earl Thomas Conley, Toby Keith’s A Little Less Talk, A Lot More Action, those kinds of things and hand in hand, we’re brothers to this day. That’s how I knew about songwriting. That’s why I cared. I started hanging out with songwriters when I still worked on Capitol Hill and if I could be a songwriter, I wouldn’t be on this podcast. I’m a great editor of songs, but the page is blank as a starting point for me. I’ve always managed to be around it somehow, and it goes back to that Elvis song, WTPR and Jimmy Allen Stewart.

Buzz Knight:

Thank God. I was told, I don’t remember this actually happening in my life, but it was something my late mom told me about that we were in church one Sunday and I think I was two years old and there’s a song by Fabian called Turn Me Loose.

Bart Herbison:

Oh, yeah.

Buzz Knight:

Apparently, I started singing in church and the rest is history.

Bart Herbison:

And the next day, your hair was swooped back too, wasn’t it? You had the duck tail.

Buzz Knight:

Well, my father cut it all off, which is a whole other psychosis podcast that we don’t have to get into right now.

Bart Herbison:

Okay.

Buzz Knight:

Bart, talk about the many important tiers of advocacy work that NSAI does.

Bart Herbison:

Well, let’s go back 55 years and a guy named Eddie Miller, the great country standard Please Release Me, Let Me Go. And Eddie thought there needed to be a voice for this profession. There were only 80 songwriters total, 80 in this entire town. And he convinced 41 others to really risk their career because even folks within the industry didn’t want to see the songwriters organize, but they picked a great issue, which was to get the songwriter’s names on records. It happens sometimes, but it was not an industry model. And it took us four years, mainly making sure the publishers could get the label copy over there quick enough. Now, it takes five years to get a songs cut. Back then, it could be five days. And in 1971, we announced that every major American label would put the songwriter’s names on the record and it’s really what empowered this group to go forward.

The advocacy all stemmed from that. Fast forward recently, there are two big things. The first was in 2018, it was called the Music Modernization Act and we passed it unanimously and it was typically copyrights you got to have agreement on because one senator can stop a bill and it’s very hard, but every 15 or 20 years, because of that reason, we advanced the cause a little bit.

The Music Modernization Act took us three or four steps forward. It changed the rules for how our rates get set. Fast forward, we were in a trial called the Copyright Royalty Board Phonorecords III, it’s a complicated name, but it decided one of the two royalty songwriters get: they get a performance royalty when their songs are performed live or on Spotify or radio or TV, then they get what amounts to a sales royalty called a mechanical royalty, and that’s what these judges were setting.

It was a ugly trial. The National Music Publishers and NSAI against Apple, Amazon, Pandora, Spotify and Google. It drug out, but we managed to win the largest pay raise in history, 43.8%. And if people wonder why that’s important. Before this, you literally could stream your song 35 million times, most songs are co-written, so you have a publisher, you own a court ordered copyright, your 25% for 35 million streams was $185.

We’ve advanced that forward. What we’ve just done will advance it forward even more. Apple just raised its price, this week, as we tape this podcast, which we love because ours is a percentage. We automatically, today, get 15.1% of that new dollar. It will grow in the future. The growth of streaming is what we’re really looking at now and if it keeps going like we’re going, I think songwriters can add a zero to what they’ve seen and maybe, not too far down the road, a couple. It doesn’t completely fix the problem because most of their money still comes from broadcast radio, but it’s way better than we were doing a few years ago.

We won that trial, and then we negotiated a settlement because another trial had already started because that one had been appealed. It drug on for eight years. The good news is, we’re about to put both those to bed, number one. Number two, songwriters will get arrearage payments back, many, to the mid-months of 2020 because that’s when the appeal happened and we went back to the old rate, but I’m tired of fighting the streaming services. There’s so many things we want to work together to do and we’re awfully hard to do when you’ve got a guy on each other’s head. Garrett Levin runs the Digital Media Association. I sent him a text yesterday about us applauding Apple raising their prices. I’m really looking forward to working together to grow streaming and see how we can even compensate songwriters outside the normal box.

Buzz Knight:

It is such a complex topic. I spent some time working on behalf of the National Association of Broadcasters back in, I believe it was 2014 maybe, with regard to the sound exchange and the whole CRB process. I didn’t have to officially testify, but I did go on record and I was professing what radio’s piece of this was on behalf of artists and community and all of this. And this is before the growth of streaming, really, for radio had really occurred. And then, on this podcast, a gentleman named Larry Miller, who teaches at NYU, that you may know, who also is very active in this conversation as well, he tried to boil it down, because it’s complex, as you know. So boil this down. Are artists and songwriters getting the fairest shake, still, that they can?

Bart Herbison:

Well, you opened up an onion and there’s so many layers. I’ll try to boil it down, but let’s go back to history for a moment. For the most part, there is an exception to this, songwriters’ rates are set by the government. For the record label set royalties, for the most part, except a performance royalty from streaming, they negotiate all those in the free market. So when we started all this trial stuff back in ’05 or so, the disparity between what the songwriter and music publisher got from a stream and a record label was 17 to one. Record labels got 1700% more than us. With some negotiations, a couple of trials and this most recent win, depending on which service, because they pay different amounts to the labels, they negotiate different amounts, it’s down to two to one or three to one.

The royalty you were talking about, let me try to do it this way, in one minute. Record labels negotiate their mechanical royalty, their sales royalty, and they go to a trial for their performance royalty. The artist, what they get from the label’s negotiated with the label. That performance royalty from radio you were talking about that the labels want is not one that would go to a songwriter, it would go to the artist only. Songwriters, on the other hand, also have the same two royalties, performance and mechanical royalties, but our rates are set by the government. That’s why we just went through these two trials.

Buzz Knight:

So the battle will be continuing on, obviously?

Bart Herbison:

Well, look, the streaming services will tell you there’s not enough money to go around. I just fundamentally reject that. They pay somewhere between less than 70%, maybe a little more percent out of the dollar. Now, that sounds like there’s not much left. And if you’re a first year streaming company 15 years ago and you only earned 10 million dollars, that’s valid. You don’t have a lot to reinvest in the company, which is why we have tiers. If you’re a new streaming service, you get some breaks, or at least you did historically.

But if you’re making 30 billion dollars a year, what’s 30% of that? There’s a lot of money left over to share with us, with the labels, because it’s always been, if we get more, the labels will get less. We’ve gotten more and the labels have not taken one penny less and I’m proud of that. And the services can earn more and also raise your prices. The first CD I ever bought was 1999. Apple just went from $9.99 to $10.99. If they went to $12.99, and the other streaming services, we’re not even having this conversation.

Buzz Knight:

Back to the radio side of things, radio is facing some economic challenges, clearly, and there’s a lot of debate, certainly, in terms of with the increase in streaming with radio, that radio should be paying more as well.

Bart Herbison:

Well, look, there’s a couple debates on that front. The labels want a performance royalty from radio that they’ve never paid them, so that’s one avenue. That’s on the record label artist side, on the songwriter’s side as Captain BMI are in a rate proceeding telling radio they need to pay more. And while we represent songwriters, those fights are being led by other people. So as Captain BMI are in the trial against broadcasters to earn more, but a completely different topic is a new royalty that’s never been paid from radio to the artist and writers. That’s what you were working on. It’s a lot. And I don’t know that I helped the cause any, but there’s a lot of layers. I’m going to do this in 30 seconds.

When you listen to a song, there’s two copyrights: there’s the song, and then there’s the record that somebody makes of that song. On the first one, there’s two royalty streams: a performance and a mechanical for the songwriters. On the label side, there’s also a performance and mechanical royalty, but they don’t get that performance royalty from radio. That’s where all this starts, and then, there’s a lot of tributaries downstream, but it starts with the fact that most people don’t know there’s a copyright on the song and you have to go get a second copyright on the record you make from that song. So if Taylor Swift writes Red, there’s a songwriter copyright, but even though she records her own song, there’s an artist copyright for her version of that song and that’s where the complication just begins.

Buzz Knight:

Well, I would say I’m a little more clarified on some of the issues, but maybe I’m also confused on some of them as well, but thank you for taking that on.

Bart Herbison:

Sure.

Buzz Knight:

It’s noble. Probably, it feels sometimes like a futile battle.

Bart Herbison:

There’s a smartphone laying over there beside me that just turned 11 in August. Let’s put that in context. It’s a brave new world we’re all trying to figure out. We end up in this moment where we vilify each other, and that’s why I’m glad we can finally have this space where we’re not in a trial against the streaming companies. I personally believe this will all get worked out. I did a mental exercise a few years ago, unless you use Gutenberg in the printing press, there’s three phases of creativity and its distribution. Number one, we’re handwriting the Bible. It takes forever. But phase two is, somebody invents a printing press. But it’s still archaic, you’ve got to put every little letter of type in there. You got to scroll the ink across it. You got to print one page, turn it over, let it dry, print the other page later, you got to bind them by hand, but you’re still producing 2000% more Bibles. That’s all phase one.

Phase two is somebody improves the printing press. Now, you can just electronically set the type, print both pages, shoot them out, stapled a bible, stack them up in the corner, a million an hour. We’re somewhere between that and this phase, phase three. Then, it’s not about the printing press anymore, it’s who owns the rights to the book they’re printing. And we see radio and streaming companies integrating, we see streaming companies getting into the publisher record business and I’m hoping where to point out where we can all see that there are myriad interests in find the right balance. We’re 11 years into the real digital era with smartphones. We got a ways to go, but I’m looking forward to, at least on the songwriters’ side, the next conversation of how we can actually work together.

Buzz Knight:

Okay, now, I feel better.

Bart Herbison:

Yeah.

Buzz Knight:

I wasn’t sure, but now I definitely feel better.

Bart Herbison:

We’ll get there, but we’re in this weird moment. Most of the songwriters, when I took this job in 1997, they’d get a big hit single, which is big radio money, it’s six figures, your share, but that paid for the house and college. You’d get maybe a couple of those in your career, some got more. You made a living on album cuts, Buzz.

There’s no more albums, album cut doesn’t pay anything. We’re back to what it was in the twenties, thirties, forties, up until about the fifties. We’re in a singles market again. Way less opportunities for songwriters. Songwriters don’t get to sell merch. They don’t have concert tickets. They depend on these measly royalties and the streaming supplants radio. We had to get what we’ve gotten. It still doesn’t solve the problem for this generation, but I think, a decade down the road, if streaming grows like we think it will, we’ve changed the game for the future generation of writers.

Buzz Knight:

When you see a songwriter walk in, wild-eyed with enthusiasm, what’s the first piece of advice you can give?

Bart Herbison:

Well, the first thing we do is ask a question: “What’s your goal?” And there’s really three: “I want to have commercial success, publishing deal, record deal.” That’s one. And many of them tell us that. “I’m an indie. I don’t want a record deal. I don’t want a publisher. I just want to meet with other writers, write better songs for my audience.” And then, a lot of our members, three, are hobbyists. They’ve written songs since childhood. They spent a lot of money on it. They’ve burned their CDs, they put them online. They perform locally, but they’ve got great day jobs they’re not going to quit to go pursue this dream. It depends on which one, but most of the people say they want commercial success. We sit them down and give them something called a reality check.

“This is hard. It’s not about how good your song is. That’s just the starting point,” and we put them through a whole litany of things and some listen, some don’t. But if you take our advice, it helps you navigate. This is hard, man. And it’s talent, but part of it’s just luck. Put it in perspective. There will be more new starters for the Tennessee Titans this year, there have been, than people that get a record deal with the necessary money behind it to succeed.

Buzz Knight:

Wow.

Bart Herbison:

Now, you think about that.

Buzz Knight:

Wow.

Bart Herbison:

Probably 15 or 20 new Titans and there’s less than that really new artists that are going to emerge from all this. Same with songwriters. So it’s tough and we try to help them navigate their dreams.

Buzz Knight:

With this intense appreciation, though, about history?

Bart Herbison:

Of course. And it starts with this building. We’re in a place called the Music Mill. I love to tell this story. There was a guy, Macon Radio Jingles, his name was Harold Shedd. Harold thought, “Well, I can make a record-

Buzz Knight:

What was his last name?

Bart Herbison:

Harold Shedd, S-H-E-D-D.

Buzz Knight:

Sorry.

Bart Herbison:

He needs to be in the Country Music Hall of Fame, throwing that out there. Harold leverages his house and everything he’s got and signs this bar band named Young Country. And they put a little ramshackledy room together over here off the roundabout. That was the first Music Mill. Some of those early records they cut, you can hear truck horns outside.

So they make an album, they take it to all the labels and the labels hate it, viscerally hate it. “This is not country. Who the hell do you think you are?” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the guys are ready to go. They need to get back and play close to their hometown, play the bars and raise their families. Harold goes, “Look, I may not know much about this industry, but I know great songs. We’ve got a pile of them,” so they make another record. Most of the labels won’t meet with them. And that goes equally nowhere quickly.

There’s three songs left, Harold goes, “I’m going to go bankrupt. Let’s just record them so I’ll know we gave it [inaudible 00:20:33] trial. I’ll send these last two or three out to anybody that will still listen.”

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, RCA blows into town and fires everybody at the Nashville label. And they bring in this 20 something kid named Joe Gallani, who had brought great pop stars to the label, he wanted to take a little more pop, and there’s a cassette sitting on his desk. He pops it in and it’s this group. Get them down here, they work together for a few months. He signs them and changes their name to Alabama. And that’s where it started.

Buzz Knight:

Wow.

Bart Herbison:

Harold built this big Music Mill that you’re in now. The room down there was the first 64-track studio. It started out as a 16-track. That’s another great story we won’t get into today, but how he got one of the first nine focus right boards they weren’t going to sell him. He brought enough cash to a meeting, they took him seriously. And pretty soon, the next is KT Oslan, Toby Keith, Shania Twain, Billy Ray Cyrus, the Kentucky Headhunters. Polygram, Polydor split the label, make Harold a label head. You’re in one of the few buildings. Motown was like this, Bayersville in New York where it was the songwriters, the studio and the record label and the creative time in those years was insane. And we’re proud to be in it. So yeah, welcome to the Music Mill.

Buzz Knight:

Oh, that’s so great.

Bart Herbison:

Version 2.1.

Buzz Knight:

[inaudible 00:21:58]-

Bart Herbison:

By the way, that studio down there sits on tons of white silica sand with the lattice work. And I’m doing the look at the church, look at the steeple thing here of 9,000 two by fours stuck in that sand like this. When they blow up something around here, and there’s a lot of construction, this whole building will move, not that studio. The walls are 18 inches thick because they didn’t want car noises in this Music Mill. And they built that independent and built the rest of the building over it. Now, we’ve stuck a couple holes in it because we don’t use it as a studio, but it’s a hell of a room down there. And the very first song ever recorded was the one song they didn’t get to on that group, Closer You Get by Alabama, first song ever recorded here.

Buzz Knight:

Wow.

Bart Herbison:

There’s over 60 number ones that we know of recorded or written here.

Buzz Knight:

Wow, what a great story.

Bart Herbison:

The biggest of all time, though, was Achy Breaky Heart, great friend of mine, an American Indian Vietnam war vet named Don Von Tress came in and played the publisher, Russ Zavitson, this thing. And Russ was in a hurry, but he said, “Don’t finish that with anybody else.” And Don wrote it by himself and it sold 11 million singles, Achy Breaky Heart. And it was cut first by the Marcy Brothers, called Don’t Tell My Heart. That fell off a cliff. And Billy Ray’s down here one day, Don plays it for him. They played the song that night in a bar here in Nashville and it launched their career and Don’s career. That’s the most famous song out of this building, but there’s a lot of them.

Roy Rogers recorded a record over here. Jimmy Swaggart recorded a record. It was crazy what happened back in the eighties. Everybody wanted to record in the digital room. One night, somebody’s beating on the door while they’re installing this board. Beating on the door, it’s a cold winter night. They go out there, the guy’s got a coat. “Is this guy going to mug us, what?’ He comes in, it’s Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones. “I wanted to watch y’all on this board.” And he went back and produced several big important records in England watching what they did on this board over. And it was analog. It wasn’t digital. It was a 64-track analog board. 16-track components plugged into an up to 64-track motherboard controller in the middle. It got so hot, that board, they had to put two half ton air conditioner units, which are still down there. You could hang cows down there in that room, man.

Buzz Knight:

So I think you like being around studios.

Bart Herbison:

Not necessarily. I’m not a studio guy. I love the history of this one, though. I’m proud of it.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah, well, I think you could feel the sense of it for sure.

Bart Herbison:

Yeah.

Buzz Knight:

But that’s Nashville, everything, everywhere you turn.

Bart Herbison:

You want to walk over here and let me give you another Nashville story?

Buzz Knight:

I’d love it, yeah.

Bart Herbison:

All right. Right here out my window, see that little gold building over there?

Buzz Knight:

Mm-hmm.

Bart Herbison:

It’s catty corner from us. That’s the famous RCA Studio B, where, up until the mid sixties, Elvis recorded almost everything. One of my favorite stories, his producer was the great Chet Atkins. Chet was the vice president of RCA Nashville and he produced almost all the songs on, I think it was a 4-track over there. I knew Chet a little bit. I was privileged to know him a little bit. Chet was an old country gentleman. And when he could, he got a closing act because he went to bed at 8:00 o’clock and got up at 3:00, his entire life, if he could. About 9:00 o’clock, you could see Chet’s head just …

So he calls RCA and goes, “Look, I like the kid.” And a lot of people didn’t get this Elvis thing and Nashville didn’t embrace him. And he said, “We got an 11:00 o’clock session, late for me.” I think he’s telling Steve Schulz at RCA this, and he goes, “We got five songs. We start at 11. We do those five songs. I don’t want a two-hour gospel concert. Let’s get this done.” 11:00, they promise him he’ll be there. 11:15, 11:30, no Elvis and Chet gets up to leave. And there’s a 19 year old tape copy boy up there named Felton Jarvis. He threw him the key and said, “You do it.” They hit it off, they got the five sides, and Felton was his producer pretty much for the rest of his life. There’s a great book by Peter Guralnick. He did that controversial linen book and the two Elvis books.

Buzz Knight:

He’s a Boston guy.

Bart Herbison:

Yeah, a lot of people don’t like Guralnick. I worship him, because he tells everything good or bad. And you should see the stories. There’s another famous one. There’s this kid and they’re going to cut the song, and I would’ve been fighting the Presley estate to some degree because they’re asking the songwriters for publishing. They would never do that today, we don’t like that, but you want the cut, give up a piece of the money. And there’s some guys that are supposed to do that. And they show up over here, I think it’s 1965 one night and they forgot to do it. So the kid’s over there raising hell with him at the last minute. “We got to get the publishing. I’m not giving you my publishing. I worship Elvis Presley. It’s why I want to do this.” He doesn’t see Elvis walk in behind him.

Now, the record label and the mafia guys don’t want Elvis to know any of this, but Elvis looks at him and puts his finger up. They’re like, “Shhh.” “What?” The kid can’t see them and they’re all like, eyeballs big as teacups, like, “We’re going to get out of here,” and the kid just keeps going on, “I love Elvis Presley, but you’re not getting my publishing. Give me my song back, I’m leaving.” He turns around and walks straight into Elvis. And Presley goes, “What’s up, man?” And the kid is Jerry Reid and the song is Guitar Man. Elvis said, “Well, the boy keeps his publishing,” and it kind of ended that practice. And they sit down and they’re talking. Of course, Reid, nervous is hell, picks up a guitar and starts noodling it. Elvis asked him to play on the record and that’s Jerry Reid playing on Guitar Man. A lot of great stories right over there in that corner building.

And this is Music Row and it’s kind of changed, sadly, with the developer version of what we see in Nashville these days. That building was WSIX Radio before Bobby Bones. That was the great Jerry House. Doc McGee bought it a few years ago and managed Kiss, Aerosmith, Darius Hootie, Slayer. You never knew what you were going to see out in this parking lot. Stephen Tyler drove up one day on a Harley. We all sang, We Are The World together out there. Right over here was John Prime’s building. So all of these, a lot of famous things happened in this town on Music Row, right here from where we sit.

Buzz Knight:

Oh, wow. What great stories. My God.

Bart Herbison:

Yeah.

Buzz Knight:

Doc McGee still own that?

Bart Herbison:

Doc just sold it and I haven’t met the new owners yet. Doc, I think, semi-retired, but his son is carrying on parts of that business.

Buzz Knight:

Doc, I always felt, when I ran into Doc over the years, that he needed to come out of his shell.

Bart Herbison:

Well, I’ll tell you what they were bringing on. They figured out licensing. Kiss had almost 5,000 income-producing law licenses and they got money on the front end for them. That’s why they’re so we wealthy. That’s why Gene made out on it. They owned the name and they licensed it for products.

Buzz Knight:

Wow. The Bluebird Cafe and NSAI, tell me how that came about, the purchase of the Bluebird.

Bart Herbison:

Well, the Bluebird, the building was there, but Amy Cuero started it in 1982 because she didn’t like greasy food, is my version of this story. She wanted a different place to eat and it was sort sort of a lunch place. Nothing happened. They tried dinner, it couldn’t get [inaudible 00:29:47]. And they had some bands, they had late night shows, smoking, hard drinking in that little place until one night, Amy tried some songwriters and people were lined all the way up Hillsborough Road. Within several months, it was one show a night, two shows a night. All the young people wanted to play it, so she emerged this audition process that’s still in existence today. Taylor Swift, Garth, Keith Urban, all discovered over there, as was every songwriter in town because industry folks figured out, we can go over there and hear the songs and hear the artists before anybody does. And it became, really, the launching pad for so many careers, as it still is today.

A lady named, few people I’ve ever respected more than her, Erica Wollam Nichols. We worked together. When I first took over NSAI, she was here, but before that, she’d been a waitress with Amy in the early days of the Bluebird. Amy was doing everything and in 2007, I knew something was up because she wanted an appointment. It was too formal. Amy could just come over and hang out anytime she wanted to. Eric and I are sitting right there and Amy’s sitting right there next to where you are and she goes, “Do y’all want the Bluebird?” First words out of her mouth. “I’m going to retire.” She basically gave it to us. There was a little bit of a purchase price, but it was ridiculously low. And Amy did it because she gave a damn about the legacy. And I think she knew, with us in general, but Erica in particular, we wouldn’t change what she created. We’ve made some changes, but none that customers or songwriters would ever notice. We went quickly pasted that discussion and we’ve run it since January 1st, 2008.

Buzz Knight:

How much fun is that?

Bart Herbison:

It depends on what day it is. It’s also a restaurant. The shows and all, that we love, but when the cooler goes out, that’s the part we’ve had to learn how to do.

Buzz Knight:

Right. But it’s still active and …

Bart Herbison:

It’s better than ever. And look, Erica not only steered it through COVID, she became active in the Save the Shuttered Venue Operators grants that got some money to clubs like this because look, music industry was the first hit and we’re still not completely recovered from COVID. Touring is back, but everybody can’t tour, venues can only support so much, but Erica kept that club open.

There’s a guy in Nashville named Butch Spyridon that runs the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corporation. Butch came up with the grant to buy streaming equipment for every venue in Nashville. That helped us. And we picked it up as a community and not only got through COVID, but we led some of that national legislative effort. NSAI wrote the language with Senator Blackburn’s office that made every self-employed person eligible for unemployment. The whole industry was working on that, but a Tennessee senator did that and got it in there early and got it passed.

The Bluebird is better than ever, but it played an important role for other venues like them. And we lost a couple. The one that broke my heart was Douglas Corner. That, even with the Bluebird, that’s probably my favorite venue in town and a lot of great places closed and that was sad to see. Thread Gills, other places in Austin. But that’s our challenge for the future, is to keep the history of that place in a town that, I’ve been a little critical about this and I’ll say it again, that needs to pay more attention to the history of why we were called Music City USA in the first place.

Buzz Knight:

So you think that, in the midst of development, maybe is taking a backseat in people’s minds?

Bart Herbison:

Well, if you look at some venues like Station and the Bluebird, there are massive developments coming up next door. And the developer, the one that’s next to us is great, they’re friendly to us, but we should have had a conversation of what that looked like 20 years ago. Music Rose gone. People are moving elsewhere because the land’s too valuable and the city doesn’t give us the incentives I think they should to stay here.

It’s a conversation long, long overdue. There have been attempts at it, but we’ve never really sat down. And I think there’s other cities like Memphis and other things that have managed to do that through the years, but it requires some tough political decisions. Are we going to give some sort of special consideration to the history of music in this town or not?

Buzz Knight:

Well, it’s a fight that has to be had, or a conversation.

Bart Herbison:

Well, I’m trying and I’ve tried through a lot of administrations and we’ll keep trying, but we’ve already lost some things that are sad for decisions that should have been made several administrations ago, if we’re telling the truth about it.

Buzz Knight:

Sure. Well, Bart, let’s close out and play a little game of Desert Island Disc. Do you know that game?

Bart Herbison:

There’s only one: Houses of the Holy, Led Zeppelin. If it’s one song, it’s the Rain Song and we can go from there. If there’s a second album, it’s Bob Dylan, the one with Tangled Up In Blue, Shelter From The Storm on it. I’ve missed …

Buzz Knight:

Blood On The Tracks.

Bart Herbison:

Blood on the Tracks, that’s the second one. And the third one’s Elvis Presley’s Greatest Hits with the gold lamé suit on it. Those are the three.

Buzz Knight:

You didn’t even flinch.

Bart Herbison:

I’ve done this a long time. Look up here on the wall, some of my favorite songs, these are all lyrics, of course, we’re an audio thing, of the songs written by the artists. My newest one of my favorites on the left over there, Brandy, You’re A Fine Girl. And that was written by the artist, the head of Looking Glass, Elliot Lurie. We’ve become best friends. But truth be told, that’s my favorite over there, Long Cool Woman In A black Dress on a black dress.

Buzz Knight:

Oh, my God.

Bart Herbison:

Yeah.

Buzz Knight:

That’s amazing. Bart, thank you for being on this episode.

Bart Herbison:

This was a lot of fun, Buzz. I want to do this again with you when we can. We’ll go do it at the Bluebird next time with Erica, all right?

Buzz Knight:

I’m in. Oh, wow. Count me in.

Bart Herbison:

Yeah.

Buzz Knight:

Count me in. Thank you.

Speaker 3:

Taking a Walk with Buzz Knight is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Buzz Knight is an established media executive with a long history of content creation and multi-platform distribution.

After a successful career as a Radio Executive, he formed Buzz Knight Media which focuses on strategic guidance and the development of new original content.