EpilogueSIGNAL FADE
Epilogue
For his stewardship of the Grand Ole Opry and the growth of TNN and CMT, E. W. “Bud” Wendell was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1998, just one year after his retirement as Gaylord’s CEO. He was remembered by former employees and Opry artists as a warm, effective leader whose philosophy about the WSM/Opry complex strongly resembled its original leader Edwin Craig. Almost from the day Wendell left, Gaylord became a more controversial and troubled company.
Wendell was, for example, surprised and mystified by one of the first decisions made by his successor, former Gaylord CFO Terry London. The board had approved a deal to tear down Opryland USA and replace it with a large shopping mall called Opry Mills. The rationale was that park attendance had slipped below the critical two million mark in the middle 1990s, and that even with massive capital investment, it would be hard to compete with year-round, technology-heavy amusement parks in Florida and California. It was estimated that the “destination” mall would attract millions more people per year to the doorstep of the Opry House and the Opryland Hotel.
It didn’t work out that way. Business writer Bill Carey called Opryland’s closure “a crushing blow” for Nashville tourism. City officials, newspapers, and citizens were irate at Gaylord from the first announcement. “The emotional attachment from the community was not weighed heavily enough,” then PR director Tom Adkinson explained in retrospect. “That presented a real burden to us. We were constantly on the defensive from the time the decision was made.” Even Gaylord now concedes Opry Mills was a bad idea. “It’s clear that the closing of the park negatively affected the number of tourists that visited Nashville in the summer,” Gaylord spokesman Greg Rossiter told the Tennessean in 2004. “The current management team has found no compelling reasons why the decision to close the park was taken in the first place.”
An even bigger loss for Nashville’s entertainment portfolio came as an unintended consequence of Wendell’s last major business decision. In 1997 Gaylord sold cable properties TNN and CMT to Westinghouse, TNN’s longtime minority owner and marketing partner. Wendell and the board understood and expected that TNN would remain a Nashville-based network, but with significantly greater leverage in the marketplace and greater access to investment capital. Unfortunately, relying on historic relationships proved naïve in the consolidating new media economy. In rapid succession, CBS bought Westinghouse, which was in turn acquired by media giant Viacom, owner of MTV. With little notice, TNN’s Nashville offices and production operations were dismantled and the network was ultimately reinvented as Spike TV, which targets a young male demographic with action movies, extreme fighting, and bikini-clad models.
Many of the newly out-of-work engineers, stage hands, editors, and trained television crews might have been absorbed into a newly invigorated Opryland Productions. But Terry London’s Gaylord was emphasizing new investment in hotels and resorts, and the company got out of the TV business almost entirely. “He shut down the production facilities. Just shut ’em down,” Wendell said of London. “Got rid of everybody. Just like he shut the park down. He had a totally different vision. I never could figure out what it was he wanted to accomplish.”
Gaylord suffered other setbacks, notably a digital entertainment division that lost tens of millions before laying off eighty-five people and shutting down. The company acquired two Christian music World Wide Web portal/retail sites and sold them less than two years later. It purchased a profitable Nashville startup called Songs.com, one of the first online marketing and retail sites for independent musicians, and killed it in one year. It launched a fan site called MusicCountry.com, which also died with the bursting of the first dot-com bubble. Gaylord also spent millions trying to launch a country record label with a well-paid Music Row veteran at its head. It signed only one artist and never released an album before being shuttered. London resigned in July 2000.
In a few years, Gaylord had retreated from being a national player in entertainment production and dismantled many of the synergistic businesses that kept the Grand Ole Opry vibrant. Not only did this put WSM and the Opry in a more tenuous position, it affected all of Nashville. Lloyd Wells, the Opryland music director, said hundreds of Nashville musicians were “making a fair, decent living [at the Opryland complex]. And when that thing closed, I can just see them all scattering. Because the town can’t support them. There was not enough work. So they had to go somewhere else. God knows where they all went. The economic impact on the musicians and performers was real bad.”
Tom Adkinson, Gaylord’s former PR director, agreed that Gaylord’s retreat from show business hurt the soul of Music City. “It absolutely had an effect on the city’s personality. It made a difference in that creative community,” he said. “I have a friend at church who is a violinist. She earned a good wage playing in one of the big shows at Opryland every year. I’m sure that was the secondary income in her household, but it was significant. Over the course of time, the park would take an eleven-member band and make it nine, or have smaller shows. I remember her observing to me [that] there’s not many places where a violinist can make any money. That’s one aspect of the company that wasn’t hidden, but it wasn’t ever understood or stated.”
Not in the modern era anyway. But as late as 1966, WSM regarded its role as employer of creative people as important, prestigious, and even commercially sound. In a self-written and forgivably self-congratulatory article in a Tennessean supplement spotlighting Country Music Week and the DJ convention, WSM offered a statement of purpose as clear as anything it ever committed to paper. “The body and soul of music is, of course, the musician,” it said. “In Nashville he has prospered, whereas in other regions of the country—lacking a patron—he has sought a more financially sound if less satisfying form of work.” With this article, WSM accepted a mantle it had worn unconsciously for years—that of a “patron” of music. “Through the long, lean years, music still originated from these studios and halls,” WSM said. Even in that relative lull of the mid-1960s, well after the boom in live radio had subsided and before TNN or Opryland were even contemplated, WSM reported that it was paying out the equivalent of 1,400 recording sessions per year to union musicians. Some members of the Opry staff band had been making their living for decades entirely from being part of WSM’s cadre of musicians, highlighting “the key, almost singular role the Opry and WSM have played in the survival of a music industry in Nashville.”
With the demise of TNN and Opryland, this supporting piece of Music City’s substructure was gone, and little has come along to replace it. Teddy Bart, the singer/pianist/interviewer, speaks for a lot of people when he blames Gaylord’s new leadership for the decline. To his mind, 1997 marked the end of a line of visionary producers who sought to develop mass entertainment that was popular because it was good, not engineered to be popular—George Hay, Harry Stone, Beasley Smith, Jack Stapp, Owen Bradley, Irving Waugh, Elmer Alley, and Bud Wendell. “Those people were impresarios,” Bart said, relishing the word as much as the idea. “As contrasted with the bean counters that run the [entertainment] business today. They were showmen. Each one with an innate sense of knowing talent, audience, the various components to putting on a show. These were the Ziegfelds of our time. Today when you go to someone with a concept, it’s: ‘Is it [targeted to the] 18–25 [demographic]? Let’s test it.’ These people didn’t need focus groups. They were the focus groups. There was a compass inside which directed where the audience was and how to get there . . . I just cannot tell you the respect I have for that era.”
Amid the turmoil at Gaylord, WSM-AM hummed along, under the radar as it were, with classic country music spun by expert DJs during the week and the Grand Ole Opry every Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday night, broadcasting over the same diamond-shaped radio tower Jack DeWitt and Edwin Craig had erected in 1932. The station had struggled for an identity during the 1980s and early 1990s, veering from what one program director called a “comfortable old shoe” personality to stunt- and contest-driven attempts to woo a radio public that had largely moved on to FM for music. Indeed, for years during the Wendell administration, WSM-AM was allowed to compete with its higher-fidelity, stereo sibling WSM-FM, while playing a too-similar format of country music.
By its seventieth-fifth anniversary in October 2000, however, WSM sounded like nothing else on the dial in Nashville or in the United States. Under operations manager Kyle Cantrell, who had grown up on WSM and who studied its history, the AM signal was reasserting itself as a taste-maker and talent developer in traditional country music. Whereas the nation’s two thousand commercial country FM radio stations relied on short, similar playlists of contemporary pop country, WSM adopted the slogan “Too Country and Proud of It,” and played records from the 1940s to the current day across many subgenres of traditional country music, including honky-tonk, Western swing, folk, and bluegrass. It played songs from the Grammy-winning, old-time country soundtrack of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” when hit-driven FM country wouldn’t. It sent its DJs out to live, old-time country music events and it revived Opry Star Spotlight, bringing in guests who talked and performed live deep into the night.
“We needed to make an impact,” Kyle Cantrell summarized in 2004. “This station needed to be bigger than the local market. An AM radio station playing music is never going to compete on a local ratings level. So what we needed to do was go out and make the station bigger than life so it’s not about local ratings. This was my rationale: it’s not about how many people listen so much as it is the impact of the station in a bigger sense. WSM needed to once again become the dog that wags the tail. It needs to be the station that people, if they’re involved with country music, have to be involved with.”
One of the signature voices of WSM at the time was Eddie Stubbs, a DJ and bluegrass fiddle player whose passion for and expertise about country music history has few equals in the nation, let alone in Nashville. He parlayed his wide respect for and among traditional country music stars into thorough on-air interviews and career retrospectives. “Everybody was on fire,” Stubbs said of the years between 1999 and 2001. “This place was not just a job. It was our life. It was a part of our soul. When you’re into something so deep and it means so much to you it goes beyond a fan base. It turns into a love, and it turns into passion. I know for a fact that it was that way for me, and it was for Kyle Cantrell.”
But Cantrell’s experiment in reinventing WSM came to a sudden halt on August 15, 2001, just a few months into the tenure of new Gaylord CEO Colin Reed, an Englishman who came from the Las Vegas hotel and casino industry. The new administration had taken a top-to-bottom look at the units of the company and decided that the classic-country WSM wasn’t contributing to the bottom line. In a meeting that Cantrell will never forget, WSM’s general manager told him that in about a month, the AM country station he loved so much was going to be converted to a news-sports-talk format.
Once the plans leaked to the news media, Nashville rallied to WSM’s defense. Country star Vince Gill said he was willing to call in seventeen years of favors from Gaylord to keep WSM country. Young torchbearer Brad Paisley and one of his mentors, Bill Anderson, asked for and got a meeting to lobby CEO Reed. The January 2002 protest rally outside the studios earned coverage in the New York Times and on National Public Radio (NPR), while an Internet petition, ultimately with more than nine thousand signatures, proved that WSM, through its Webcasting presence, had fans all over the world. After two weeks of suspense and agitation, Reed called a press conference at the Ryman Auditorium to say that WSM would in fact remain country. “The last two to three weeks were very helpful to me in seeing the potential” of WSM’s classic country format, Reed said. “I knew it was there. I just didn’t know how big it was, and I think it’s big.”
Even so, WSM operated with smaller budgets and less autonomy. Kyle Cantrell and six other station veterans were let go in early 2003. In March of that year, WSM-FM was sold to radio company Cumulus Media, while WSM-AM had its ad sales department moved by contract to Cumulus. That led to another round of layoffs at WSM-AM, leaving a small, demoralized staff. In 2004, WSM’s offices were moved out of their freestanding building at the edge of the Opryland Hotel complex and into a basement of the Opry administration building, while its studio moved to what had been a remote broadcasting booth in the Opryland Hotel itself. For the first time in more than seventy years, the phones at WSM-AM were answered by a recording, not a person.
What will, or should, become of WSM and the Grand Ole Opry in the twenty-first century? Can these intimately intertwined properties thrive in a publicly traded company chiefly focused on the hotel and hospitality business? Gaylord certainly has made a shining example of one venerable institution profitably reinventing itself, and that’s the Ryman Auditorium, which plays host to all kinds of concerts from country to classical to rock. Under the management of concert promoter Pam Matthews, the first woman to run the Ryman since Lula Naff, it was twice named the nation’s finest concert venue by the prestigious Pollstar magazine in the 2000s. It is possible to imagine WSM, with sufficient investment, as a kind of audio equivalent of the renovated Ryman. In a time when traditional country music fans are giving up on Top 40 commercial country radio, WSM with its international Web presence might be positioned as the on-air, online authority on country music worldwide.
Others have proposed that WSM, the Ryman, and the Opry be spun off as a nonprofit institution, a living museum and a showcase for American roots music past, present, and future—not unlike the very marketable (and Opry-inspired) Prairie Home Companion. Under this scenario, all the interrelated historic WSM properties would be run by owners whose loyalties weren’t divided and whose expertise wasn’t stretched thin. Besides, one might argue also that after all it’s been through and all it has accomplished, demanding that WSM live or die by the media economy’s new rules feels a bit like asking your grandmother to work at Burger King to make ends meet. How we rescue seniors from economic indignity and American cultural icons from economic obsolescence are questions policy makers, communities, and academies should discuss at length. How WSM might fulfill its destiny in a technologically dynamic time is a question Gaylord and Nashville could do much more to answer together.
As for Nashville, it will always be Music City, but without a major entertainment investment engine at its core, the coming years will test its ability to remain vital and relevant to the larger music economy. The music business is changing radically, and radical change has never been in Nashville’s character. The city’s best hope may be a new generation of entrepreneurs smart enough to reinvent artist development by marrying talent, technology, and creative sponsorship (insurance companies? self-rising flour? roll-your-own tobacco?). Nashville’s music and entertainment companies could do worse than take cues from the first wave of Music Row pioneers, the ones who learned the art of the deal at WSM. Some of the old ways of doing business—sharing scarce resources, outrageous marketing, brazen moonlighting, modest expectations, handshake deals, and even frequent parties—have been forgotten in the rush toward efficiency, size, domination, public offerings, and the like. Many music-business professionals crave a return to basics, where music and the delight it brings can be reasserted as the core commodity. What George Hay once said of the Opry could easily apply to Nashville’s musical heart: “It is as fundamental as sunshine and rain, snow and wind and the light of the moon peeping through the trees. Some folks like it and some dislike it very much, but it’ll be there long after you and I have passed out of this picture for the next one.”
It will be whatever we who cherish it make of it.