Illustration: Cole Roberts (coleswork.com)







The name of the Scene’s annual Boner Awards is more than just an angle for us to make cheeky puns. Though, of course, that is a bonus.

Other former mayors get parkways or Metro office buildings named for them. Bill Boner, mayor from 1987 to 1991, gets this issue — now in its 30th year — as an annual honor. The former star high school basketball player entered Nashville politics in the late 1970s, winning a congressional race in 1978 in large part because his predecessor suffered a massive stroke just days before the withdrawal deadline, and the rest of the primary challengers stopped their campaigns in deference to the circumstance. After nearly a decade in Washington, Boner came back home to run for mayor (mostly to stanch a pending investigation by the House Ethics Committee). Boner won, fending off a challenge from a suspiciously Northern newcomer named Phil Bredesen.

Though a city on the come-up, Nashville was still a largely sleepy town, and at least early on, Boner did little to make headlines. That is, until he met aspiring country music singer Traci Peel and started cavorting around town with her. Boner, it should be noted, was still married to his third wife. Boner and Peel made no secret of their romance. Peel, who saw no need for discretion, told a Nashville Banner reporter that Hizzoner could (ahem) stay on the campaign trail (if you know what we mean) for seven hours at a time. Thank God smartphones and email didn’t exist, for the open-records requests might have yielded tales more sordid than the average night out with state lawmakers at a third-rate hot chicken joint.

Boner and Peel even appeared on The Phil Donahue Show to discuss their romance, capping their appearance with the mayor accompanying his paramour on harmonica while she sang “Rocky Top.” Though Nashvillians desperately tried to tunnel into the limestone to hide their embarrassment, this little duet was no surprise, as the couple regularly performed at the city’s honky-tonks.

Boner, unsurprisingly, did not seek re-election, was the last native Nashvillian to serve as mayor until David Briley, and was the first one-term mayor — with Briley and his predecessor, Megan Barry, later joining that club.

And so it is in the grand tradition of royal screw-ups established so skillfully by Mayor Boner that we present to you our annual Boner Awards. Read on for a list of this year’s biggest blunders — boners so bad that no other name will do. See also: our petty-crime roundup, in which we highlight some of the ding-dongs, dopes and dotards arrested for Boner-worthy behavior in 2019.





Party Foul

Each year, one person inevitably rises to the occasion and assumes the crown of King or Queen Boner. This year, the title goes to dethroned state House Speaker Glen Casada and his coterie of coke-fueled cancers, chief among them Cade Cothren. It started with reports about the possibility that the two had tried to frame a young black activist in a move that was later chalked up to a technical mixup. Then Cothren’s texts leaked. Included within were his use of racial slurs and details about his cocaine use in his state office. Casada himself joked with his young protégé about the latter’s sexual prowess, or lack thereof, with a woman in a local hot chicken restaurant’s bathroom. When Republicans eventually met and decided they didn’t want Casada as speaker anymore, it didn’t hurt that the Franklin lawmaker’s strong-arming throughout the legislative session had rubbed many in his own party the wrong way. Casada could have made it on this list by his full-throated support for accused assaulter and fellow state rep David Byrd alone, but he decided to go above and beyond. From the highest levels of power in the state to the bathroom at Party Fowl, the decline and fall of Glen Casada and his merry men rise to the top of the trash heap.

Mad Marsha

Any time you spend documenting one of Marsha Blackburn’s embarrassing episodes puts you at risk of missing another of the Donald Trump acolyte’s embarrassing episodes. We’ll remember this one though. Blackburn’s antics on June 13 would probably be an opportunity for personal reflection for anyone who hadn’t run out of shame a long time ago. On the same day that she blocked a Democratic effort to pass a bill on unanimous consent that would have required campaigns to report offers of foreign assistance to the FBI, Blackburn also badly bungled her response to unrest in Memphis after the fatal shooting of a black man there by U.S. Marshals. Her first statement referenced “the riots in Memphis and the fatal shooting of a police officer,” although no police officer had been shot. A subsequent statement was altered but still contained the erroneous mention of a dead officer. Later, Blackburn’s camp settled on a statement that didn’t make any mention of the actual shooting that had occurred. Folks, they’re not sending their best people.

Carp-et Baggers

Asian carp, the e-scooters of the piscine world, are a serious problem. The invasive species chokes out native fish, sucking up precious food and resources. They tend to pop up at inopportune times, slapping boaters across the face. Already firmly established in the rivers of the Midwest, they are making headway into Tennessee’s waterways. And with that, a concerned citizen penned a respectful letter to freshman U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (who likely thinks “walleye” is a funny word for a window) asking her “to become involved with our war/issues with Asian carp.” The citizen noted that the Great Lakes region was getting millions in fish-fighting funds while the Lower Mississippi Valley got bupkis. Blackburn (OK, her staff) removed the senator’s marionette strings from President Trump’s child-size hands long enough to write a response that included such helpful statements as: “Animals play important roles in our daily lives. Many Tennesseans enjoy the companionship animals provide as pets,” and, “I agree it is imperative we treat animals with humanity and respect. Please be assured I will keep your thoughts close at hand should the full Senate consider legislation regarding the treatment of animals this year.” Just to be clear, no one has ever kept an Asian carp as a pet, and no one respects them. For the polite letter-writer and those like him, the senator’s “cares about people like me” rating went flaccid.

Lee’s Company

On July 13, Gov. Bill Lee signed a proclamation marking Nathan Bedford Forrest Day in Tennessee, an annual day of recognition for the Ku Klux Klan leader and Confederate general who oversaw the massacre of hundreds of surrendering black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow. It was the same proclamation his predecessor Bill Haslam had signed eight years in a row. But Lee brought an especially appalling nonchalance to the issue, despite the ongoing protests directed at Forrest’s bust, which still sits in the Capitol. “I signed the bill because the law requires that I do that and I haven’t looked at changing that law,” Lee told The Tennessean. For a man who got caught up in a controversy about Confederate cosplay during his college days, the governor is still shockingly thoughtless about the company he keeps.

Nevergreen

Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Green was named Clarksville’s 2018 Person of the Year by the Leaf-Chronicle. Only problem? He was not the person of the year in Clarksville last year. He sucks. At the time of the award, his recent past was littered with homophopic and transphobic comments and policy positions. He’d also expressed anti-vax sympathies before sort of walking back those comments. Consider this a joint Boner Award, for the newspaper that honored a bad politician, and for the bad politician who almost certainly wasn’t even the person of the year on his block, let alone all of Clarksville.

Do You Love Me Now, Daddy?

Rep. Mark Green, the Republican congressman who succeeded Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District, yearns for an approving glance from The Dear Leader. He longs for Donald Trump’s affection like a boy tragically pines for a fist-bump from the school bully. Hence the shirts his campaign started selling in November, which feature a ghoulish celebration of the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by American special forces. “Who’s your Baghdadi now?” it reads — a confounding attempt at wit since it can be read to imply that Trump has usurped the standing of the world’s foremost terrorist leader atop a violent organization. Either Mark Green is a vacuous person or he thinks you are.

Briley Exit

We here at Boner Central look forward to the forthcoming movie about David Briley’s term, How to Lose a Mayorship in 18 Months. It’s got everything you’d want: a campaign that couldn’t fundraise, a political staff that couldn’t read the political landscape until it was too late, a group of donors who fled to his opponent during the runoff, political stunts with immigration policy, and an opponent even smaller in stature than Briley! The now-former mayor put a direct-mail specialist in charge and then ran almost no direct mail! Make sure you catch it on the opening weekend — it’ll be gone much sooner than you think.

Out in the Cold

Metro almost didn’t open cold-weather shelters this winter — despite weeks of planning by service providers and officials and, y’know, the fact they usually open every year. In October, Metro cited a lack of funding, but service providers were shocked and outraged at the announcement. One day after media outlets reported on the shelters, Mayor John Cooper announced that they would indeed open in November — though that came after some petty finger-pointing. The Cooper administration initially blamed predecessor David Briley for the lack of a winter plan, saying it was a decision that “had been previously made from the previous administration.” Turns out the previous administration had in fact previously listed the winter plan as a top priority in one of its transition memos. Despite confusion from officials, outrage from the public and the whole memo flub, Cooper ultimately announced the city’s cold-weather plan in November. Even so, after all that, Metro’s choice for an emergency shelter still raised some eyebrows: a former jail.

But Their Emails

No one came out of this looking better. After problematic website Scoop: Nashville reported that then-Councilmember Ed Kindall had 9,000 unread work emails, The Tennessean followed up — and then we did too. Then-Councilmember Scott Davis, who also had thousands of unread emails (who doesn’t?), offered up a baffling excuse: He kept his 5,489 emails unread out of 6,554 received “as a bookmark of sorts.”

Illustration: Cole Roberts (coleswork.com)



Leave Them Be

At this point we’re not sure we can convey just how ridiculous Cherry Blossom Gate was, but here we go: The city decided to move some downtown cherry blossom trees to accomodate stages being built for the NFL Draft; people LOST THEIR MINDS on social media; then-Mayor David Briley sent Convention Center Supremo Butch Spyridon out in front of the TV cameras to take the bullet for it; a change.org petiton got roughly 1 billion signatures to “save the trees”; John Cooper saw all the hubub, changed his mind and decided to run for mayor; Briley spent most of election night muttering about about how those goddamn trees cost him his job. (OK, that last part may be a bit of dramatic embellishment.)

Boner Kill

For many of Carol Swain’s fans, the former Vanderbilt University professor and public right-wing kook’s anti-Islamic fearmongering was a feature, not a bug. This wasn’t a troublesome quirk of an otherwise likable candidate — it was a big part of her appeal! So you can imagine their frustration when, during yet another mayoral campaign, Swain visited the Islamic Center of Tennessee to issue a mea culpa for saying in 2015 that Islam “poses an absolute danger to us and our children.” Swain’s Facebook page lit up with the outrage of supporters declaring that she’d lost their vote and they were disgusted to see her selling out. Good news for them and us, in that case — she did not win the election.

Kroger and Out

Earlier this year, massive supermarket chain Kroger announced that it would no longer stock free community publications in its lobbies, as it has done for many years. While, yes, that meant no more copies of the Nashville Scene in Middle Tennessee Kroger locations as of mid-October, it also meant publications all over the country — from alternative-weekly newspapers to parenting mags and beyond — would be without crucial pickup spots. “I literally JUST told my class of 15 immigrant students about the freebie magazines available at almost every grocery store, including Kroger,” tweeted one disappointed Nashvillian. “Students use them to learn English, and they need the hard copies.” The massive outpouring of disapproval on social media was met with flaccid, canned corporate responses from Kroger. “We appreciate your feedback and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you,” they tweeted at one point. “We are removing these publication racks from our stores because more publications continue to shift to digital formats, resulting in less customers using these products.” Really? Our records show extremely high pickup rates for the Scene at Kroger locations all over the city. Deeply crappy rationale from Kroger corporate, and a deeply inept response to people’s complaints. Looks like we won’t be Krogering again anytime soon.

Pass This Bar

Patrons showing up with concealed weapons. People getting into fights or other situations that may result in bodily harm. Folks kicking a hole in the wall and ducking into a crawl space to (supposedly) escape from angry dogs. All of the above happened this year at Jason Aldean’s Kitchen and Rooftop Bar on Lower Broadway, and most of it is unfortunately par for the course when folks are out getting fershnickered in downtown establishments named for country hitmakers. One thing that should not happen and is definitely within the bar’s control did go down in November, according to a Facebook post. Would-be patron Laura Murphy (who is white) wrote that she and her husband (who is black) were told by a staffer from a third-party security firm working the door that they would not be allowed inside because he was wearing a hoodie — and that he couldn’t come in even if he took it off. They reported seeing several other black men who’d been turned away for the same reason on the sidewalk, while they claimed to see multiple white patrons wearing hoodies leaving the bar. Murphy says those patrons told her they’d been inside for hours. Her post went viral, and she received an apology from the security firm. TC Restaurant Group, which co-owns the bar with Aldean, gave a statement to WZTV-Fox 17 News saying they were “horrified” by the reports and that they’d investigate the situation. Not tending to it before people got bounced for hoodie possession earns the place a five-Boner rating from us.

Campus Whining

When he’s not legislating in the state Senate, Springfield Republican Kerry Roberts hosts a talk radio show, blasting out his Trumpian bloviations at a whopping 710 watts on his hometown’s WDBL. Back in September, the senator grabbed the mic and spewed: “If there’s one thing we can do to save America today, it’s to get rid of our institutes of higher learning right now and cut the liberal breeding ground off. Good grief!” Good grief! Roberts was apparently red-assed because during a summer hearing about the so-called heartbeat bill, activist Cherisse Scott used intersectional buzzwords like “colonialist” and “supremacist” and saw her speaking time axed though she was promised 10 minutes. Rather than engaging the criticism, Roberts’ big idea was to … rid the state of colleges? After the predictable hubbub, Roberts issued a statement proclaiming that he was being hyperbolic. Of course, he ended this flaccid apologia by hitting all the Fox News talking points about “the efficacy of higher education in America, meaningless majors, liberal bias, and intolerance of traditional values and conservative points of view.” Roberts, it should be noted, sits on the Education, Health and General Welfare Subcommittee of the legislature’s Joint Government Operations Committee.

Thank You for Smoking

John Geer, the dean of Vanderbilt University’s College of Arts and Sciences, is widely known for his work with the Vanderbilt Poll. But it turns out he’s probably made around $1 million providing expert testimony for cigarette makers seeking to get off the hook for the deaths and illnesses of smokers. Geer has been handsomely paid to prepare reports arguing that people who started smoking in the 1950s and 1960s, even as children, most likely understood the dangers of cigarettes. His take on the matter is an outlier, to put it lightly. In fact, a federal judge has ruled his testimony inadmissible in court. But what does he care, as long as the checks clear?

Lefty Lose-y

Well, folks, Tennessee Democrats are at it again! Party Chair Mary Mancini lit up the local internet when a national political outlet quoted her saying, “That’s something I’m going to have to think about a little bit,” when asked how she would improve the party’s chances in Tennessee. At this point, the comical ineptitude is almost not worth mentioning.

Alas, Poor Boner

We on the committee appreciate the challenges that nonprofit arts organizations face — particularly when those organizations are committed to providing well-paying gigs to local artists. That’s why it is with our deepest regrets the we award Nashville Repertory Theatre with a Boner. After the Rep announced that its artistic director of 15 years, René Copeland, would be leaving the organization, it quietly removed an upcoming production from its website. The play was penned by the Rep’s own playwright-in-residence, Nate Eppler, an artist whose plays draw crowds all over the country. The canceled play, This Red Planet, is about an artist who is hired to teach George W. Bush how to paint, and it deals with bold contemporary questions about accountability and empathy. Casting was already complete, meaning its cancellation left actors with a hole in their schedules. To further bone things up, the Rep replaced Eppler’s play with Mary Poppins, a production unlikely to offer audiences anything new. We’ll see if the Rep’s plan to attract family audiences pays off — hopefully it won’t be at the cost of any further new works by local artists.

Blown Load

At one point, Erica Gilmore was something of a rising star in local politics. The daughter of well-known state lawmaker Brenda Gilmore, she won a countywide Metro Council seat after two terms representing downtown. After the turmoil that resulted in three vice mayors (one acting) in less than a year, Gilmore saw opportunity. She launched a campaign to unseat Vice Mayor Jim Shulman, by most accounts perfectly capable, employing high-minded idealism largely irrelevant to the job of vice mayor — a position mostly just entrusted with making meetings run on time. When Metro Trustee Charlie Cardwell died, Gilmore saw another opening, and quickly began lobbying her fellow councilmembers for the appointment to the cush city job. But the urgency of her approach angered some of her colleagues (she paid back property taxes, for which the trustee is responsible, the day after Cardwell’s death). The council picked someone else, but by then she had dropped her vice mayoral bid, and it was too late for her to run for another term on the council, leaving the once-rising lawmaker with nowhere to go. At least for now: She’s already running for trustee, which will be on the ballot next year.

His Name Is Booooooooone … er!

Crotch-rock pioneer and semi-sentient Petri dish Kid Rock became a “legitimate” “business” “man” late in 2018, opening his eponymous honky-tonk and steakhouse on Lower Broadway. Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk & Rock ’n’ Roll Steakhouse — yes, that’s its real name — makes Florida Georgia Line’s FGL House look like the Bodleian Library by comparison.

Just before Thanksgiving 2019, Rock — real name Robert Ritchie, real hometown Detroit, real upbringing extremely well-heeled — took the stage at his vanity trash castle in his typical redneck cosplay, and before a roomful of adoring fans (a group of people who make Juggalos look like the Algonquin Round Table), he set into a Fireball-fueled rant. It being 2019, his oration was captured on a smartphone. It being filmed by the kind of person who voluntarily goes to Kid Rock’s bar, the video was vertical.

Anyway, the anthropomorphized Newsmax comment section let loose on the universally reviled Oprah, along with Joy Behar and Kathie Lee Gifford, for reasons passing understanding. After insisting he’s “not a bad guy,” he suggested the trio, uh, fellate horizontally. On and on he went, saying something about how Oprah’s raison d’etre is to get “white women to believe in this shit.” He ended his Shittysburg Address with the inspiring: “And if you say that, you’re like, ‘Hey, well, pretty sure Kid Rock’s a racist.’ I’m like, OK, fine. Fuck off. Sideways.” The auteurs who filmed this tirade can be heard saying, “Omigod, he’s racist,” in some nondescript but definitely-not-from-around-here accent. Boos rain down.

The stunning climax to this Za-poop-er film is Kid — who, remember, owns this bar — being escorted off the stage by security. Once TMZ posted the video, someone (OK, it was us) discovered that Kid’s bio — which, offensively, leads off with the words “Nashville native,” proving that words no longer mean anything — was on the Nashville Christmas Parade’s website, listing him as the grand marshal. The 27 percent of Nashvillians who lived here in 2018 remember that he was to be given that honor last year, but then he called Behar a bitch on TV, and public outcry saw him cashiered out of the gig. So were the parade organizers trying to sneak him as the grand marshal this year, or was it just bad website management? We may never know, as the bio was pulled within an hour of its discovery. Kid, by the way, will be leading the Leiper’s Fork parade.

In all the fallout from this, an unlikely beneficiary is Detroit — a city that could use a little good news. In a Facebook post, Kid announced that he won’t renew the license for his restaurant there in the wake of the backlash. He also called Al Sharpton a “race baiting clown” for some reason. Abandoning his hometown, unfortunately for Nashville, means we’re probably stuck with his boners for the long haul.

Weird Flex

Metro Councilmember Freddie O’Connell looked as if he’d be running unopposed for re-election until, just ahead of the qualifying deadline, a douchey-looking young man with an enormous watch got onto the ballot in District 19. O’Connell was convinced that his new opponent, Joshua Parant, was not a legitimate candidate in the district. The councilmember said Parant had moved into the district the month before and was living on a month-to-month lease. He planned to challenge Parant’s placement on the ballot. It was Parant’s response to O’Connell’s assertions that gave this Boner its full form, though. “Weird flex, but ok,” Parant said in an email to the Scene. “This is a silly story.” Fair enough. Nevertheless, the Davidson County Election Commission tossed Parant off the ballot two weeks later.

Shit Show

We’re used to bullshit coming from Steve Glover’s seat, but until recently one had to attend a Metro Council meeting to get the experience. Earlier this month, however, the conservative scold who was recently elected to one of the chamber’s five at-large seats went live from the loo. Our guy settled in to take a dump and didn’t realize he was live-streaming from his phone — until he’d groaned and let loose an explosive opening statement. Soon the broadcast had a small group of unsuspecting viewers, one of whom posted the only reasonable response: “Hell are ya in the bathroom??” The brief transmission ended up being reported by Scoop: Nashville, which felt just right.

Telling On Yourself

Jason Steen, proprietor of local website Scoop: Nashville, is an unusual addition to the tossed salad of Nashville media. His exploitative clickbait occasionally wanders into worthy scoop territory, to be sure, but it’s his personal online presence that really makes us wonder. Simply put, Steen called the police because he thought he was getting high off second-hand smoke from his neighbor’s weed. Steen claimed that even the cop laughed at him, telling him there was “no way” he was high from smoke seeping through his apartment wall — despite Steen’s protestations that he was “high AF.” The only way we know about this silliness is because Steen himself shared it with the world in a series of tweets.

Jolly’s Folly

Christopher Jolly Hale is a figure in Tennessee politics. He is allegedly a talking head who allegedly runs for office. More often, though, he is a social media grifter riding the coattails of anti-Trumpism to the Promised Land of Retweets and Engagement. In November, Chris Jolly tweeted a much-retweeted defense of Pete Buttigieg, but eagle-eyed Tennessean reporter Natalie Allison was, fortunately, on the scene. Because she has some bug in her brain that allows her to recall the specific wording of year-old political ads, Allison noted that Hale had cribbed his Mayor Pete defense from two different ads for then-candidate Gov. Bill Lee.

Reel Sloppy

This year’s Nashville Film Festival was excellent in some ways — a new slate of women-directed features, a fantastic documentary about locally beloved comedian Ralphie May, and a popular retrospective slate among them. But when it comes to logistical details, the festival deserves a Boner. First, NaFF changed its dates from April to October, scheduling it against the International Black Film Festival. In its second year at Regal Hollywood 27, the festival saw overflowing toilets, a user-unfriendly website, malfunctioning equipment, unnecessarily long lines, and a general sense of staffers and volunteers not knowing what was happening. Where in years past spectators voted on films by paper ballot or on phones or tablets on the way out of the theater, this year NaFF introduced a malfunctioning app that made the voting process completely unclear. We asked two volunteers and three staffers how to vote. No one knew. It pains the cinephiles among us to bestow a Boner upon our hometown film festival, but bestow we must. Do better next year, please.

Core Values

This year, the queer community experienced a dustup when the LGBT Chamber of Commerce took on a new member — Nashville-based private prison corporation CoreCivic. CoreCivic has been dogged by protests for years due to the rampant reports of corruption and poor conditions at the prisons it operates, as well as its operation of immigrant-detention facilities. The LGBT Chamber should know that if you want liberation for your own people, you can’t make nice with those oppressing your neighbors. Progressive members of the community sprang to action in a very un-Bonerly way, demanding that the chamber return CoreCivic’s $300 membership check. Chamber CEO Joe Woolley stressed that the organization hoped to help CoreCivic develop better inclusion and diversity training that would positively impact LGBT inmates and employees. But the queer community cried foul and showed up at the chamber’s town hall meeting to express their disapproval. To the chamber’s credit, it ultimately revoked CoreCivic’s membership — but earned a Boner along the way.

Bruce Bets Big

Bruce Griffey wasted no time making his presence known at the state Capitol. The freshman Republican representative from Paris, Tenn., filed a suite of anti-immigrant bills that might have gained some traction in the conservative legislature had they come from a different source. But Griffey pissed off some of his colleagues when his wife Rebecca railed against a fellow Republican in one of her frequent social media screeds, in which she publicly shared a colleague’s cellphone number. When a judgeship opened in their area, Rebecca Griffey applied, citing her political connections in the written application. Reports later showed that Bruce Griffey, a mostly powerless freshman, had tried to bully Gov. Bill Lee into appointing his wife, but his fellow Republican refused.

I.D., Ego and Superego

The worst sort of journalistic posturing is when a reporter with a significant social media following complains about a delayed flight or lost luggage. Tennessean reporter Joel Ebert took that sort of misbehavior to a new level after a recent bad day at the DMV. First, it was angry tweets. Then he tagged state officials with whom he interacts as part of his role covering state politics for the state’s biggest newspaper. Then he wrote a story about it. Then he wrote several more stories about it. It came up at the governor’s annual budget hearings. The Tennessean and its sister papers sent 10 (!) reporters to driver’s license centers around the state, resulting in a front-page blowout that belied the unimportance of an issue that’s as tired a joke as the ones about the quality of airplane food. Getting a driver’s license sucks! We get it! If it wasn’t so funny to watch unfold, it might seem like an abuse of Ebert’s platform.

Passed Up

It was a busy year for Metro Councilmember DeCosta Hastings. He attracted two challengers to his re-election a full year before the vote because of his support for a grease plant in his district. When the Metro Council failed to pass its budget, which would have included a property-tax increase to fund raises for teachers and other employees, Hastings couldn’t make up his mind and was the sole member to abstain, further angering some in the district and providing easy fodder to his campaign rivals. Once the campaign went to a runoff, things turned messy, as Hastings’ allies took control of a neighborhood coalition opposing Hastings by registering its name with the state. The allies sent out a mailer attacking his opponent that so angered At-Large Councilmember Bob Mendes that he decided to endorse the opponent, despite a policy of staying out of district races. Hastings lost.

Illustration: Cole Roberts (coleswork.com)



I Can’t See the Ice Because of Your Boner

There are precious few places in the Potemkin party town and perpetual event space that Nashville has become where locals can let their barely contained contempt for the sidewalk-choking public vomiters we generously call “visitors” spurt forth in a glorious geyser of vituperation. At Bridgestone Arena, such hatred for out-of-towners is expected, even encouraged, as the 17,000-some-odd get to yell “You suck!” at the visiting team. The powers-that-be for the Predators insist that the legendarily raucous atmosphere at Fifth and Broad is due in part to the energy from the adjacent party district flowing through the arena doors.

Unfortunately, the team thought literally bringing Broadway indoors was a good idea, debuting a rigged-for-the-rink pedal tavern at this year’s Preds home opener. Yes, they called it the “Predal Tavern.” Yes, it got booed mercilessly, the local fans irked that their refuge was besmirched by the wheeled symbol of everything they despise about what the city’s become.

Oh, but it got worse.

For years, the Predators have used (a censored version of) DMX’s “Party Up” to goose the crowd into excitement for the power play. Given the team’s last-place performance with the extra man during the 2018-19 season, watching a crowd full of (let’s be honest) overwhelmingly white middle-aged people try to dance to the song was the best part of the Preds going on the man advantage. Perhaps trying to ward off the bad mojo from last season, the Preds tried a new song: a hockey-ized version of Dierks Bentley’s “5150,” which cannot be danced to — even by white middle-aged people — and alludes to the aforementioned Vermonter being so engorged with affection for a woman that he needs to be committed. Of course, anyone who gets that excited about the Preds power play should also be checked out by a licensed psychologist, but that’s neither here nor there.

At first the Preds doubled down on the tavern and the tune, but as predicted by astute observers (OK, it was us), the Predal Tavern — which, again, yes, was really what they called it — and Dierks were disappeared by the time the team came back home from their road trip.

Broken Family Man

Auto dealer/right-wing sugar daddy Lee Beaman largely disappeared after local media published the details of his messy divorce. Beaman’s fourth wife accused him of watching porn in front of his young kid, among other upsetting and unusual allegations. So it came as a bit of a surprise when a PR person recently started reaching out to local reporters offering an interview with “Family Man Lee Beaman.” Maybe they should have specified just what type of “family man” Beaman is.

Father Figures

Steve Gill is a fiscal conservative. So much so, in fact, that he saved $170,000 by not paying child support. Family value, right? The only downside is it got him thrown in jail and further exposed him as a hypocrite. (This news came months after Gill and Springfield Republican Kerry Roberts joked on Gill’s radio program about the hyphothetical sexual assault of activist Justin Jones in prison.) The indiscretion led to his resignation from the toxic misinformation outlet The Tennessee Star, and we haven’t heard from him since. Works for us.

Chrisley Knows Boners

“Nashville”-based “reality” “stars” Todd and Julie Chrisley (you may have seen Chrisley Knows Best if you forgot to turn off the TV after Smackdown) learned the hard way that the federal government keeps it as real as penitentiary steel. The couple and their accountant were indicted by an Atlanta grand jury in August on charges of tax evasion, bank fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy. U.S. Attorney Byung J. “BJay” — no, that isn’t a Boner Awards joke; that nickname is straight from the Department of Justice — Pak said the Chrisleys defrauded banks for more than five years. Further, despite Todd’s insistence on a radio program that the “federal government likes his tax returns” because he pays upwards of $1 million annually, in fact, the couple didn’t pay taxes between 2013 and 2016. The Chrisleys’ sophisticated bank-fraud scheme allegedly involved them literally cutting and pasting — like with scissors and glue — a fabricated credit report and bank statements to obtain a lease on a California home. Chrisley defended himself on Instagram (because of course he did), saying it wasn’t his boner that caused the kerfuffle, but instead it was the fault of thieving ex-employees.

Gannett — the Worst a Plan Can Get!

At the beginning of the year, a media company backed by a hedge fund tried to buy Tennessean parent company Gannett, setting off alarm bells about the state of the country’s largest newspaper company. And while Big G ultimately rebuffed the offer, they later merged with — wait for it — a media company backed by a hedge fund. Gatehouse pulled off this feat with cash they’re repaying at a rate of 11.5 percent — terms so bad they might have come from the payday lenders that line Nolensville Pike. The new company is going to make the deal work by achieving significant savings (corporate-speak for layoffs). As this issue goes to press, journalists around the country are losing their jobs. The Tennessean’s newsroom was mostly spared, if only because they haven’t filled the jobs of people who have been leaving for the past year. If you think that means bad things for local journalism and The Tennessean in the future, congratulations, you win a prize.

Drop Dead, Op-Eds

Look, we’re not saying Journalism Surrender Monkey engagement editor David Plazas is bad at his job, but this year he published the following crap on The Tennessean’s op-ed page: a piece about how climate change is caused by gravity that was so bad he was forced to retract it; a disingenuous piece from then-Speaker Glen Casada going after Tennessean reporters for reporting words that came out of Casada’s mouth; and a bizarre piece by Carol Swain — one week after she got crushed in the mayor’s race for a second straight year — that acted as a de facto apology for white supremacists killing minorities. Plazas’ biggest problem is that he doesn’t say no to plainly stupid stuff, presumably in the name of airing all sides of issues. The net result is that the paper’s opinion section, which doesn’t have any strong staff voices outside of Alex Hubbard’s, is the worst kind of Boner — irrelevant.

Bogus Bodegas

Rosy profiles courtesy of big-time coastal dailies like The New York Times and The Washington Post are nothing new to Music City — whether they’re the cause or the effect of Nashville’s alleged “It City” status is a matter of debate, but they keep on coming just the same. So the Post’s multi-part exploration of Nashville’s various neighborhoods was no surprise, and writer Brandon Gee (a former Tennessean reporter who has lived here for most of the past decade) did a solid job of covering a lot of ground. But his write-up of East Nashville — which called the area “a Portlandia of the South” and referred to the neighborhood’s many “bodegas” — didn’t land well with … well, most people who have ever lived on or even been to the East Side. The piece elicited cringes and rage posts from a slew of grumpy locals, not to mention transplants from cities that, y’know, actually have bodegas. “East Nasty” indeed!

Another Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight

The venerable Nashville-based magazine American Songwriter was purchased in the summer by Savage Media Holdings, and the new bosses quickly availed themselves of some Boneriffic digital publishing strategies. That included putting new timestamps on once-popular old articles — like a post about Ryan Adams from 2010, which AS republished nearly eight months after a New York Times investigative report detailing allegations against Adams of sexual misconduct and other abuses. Some of the mag’s Twitter followers began to question whether suspiciously PR-friendly blog posts about crowdfunding tools and Starbucks holiday cups (as well as verbatim press releases posted without bylines) were improperly labeled sponsored content. It became apparent that these were not sources of questionable income, but rather cringey, fluffy bullshit filler pieces that the bosses didn’t have to pay freelance writers for — or staffers for that matter, as key editorial staff were no longer with the magazine. Depending on how the owners proceed, the readership that a series of previous editors had been building since 1984 may not be with American Songwriter much longer, either.

#PleaseStop

On Oct. 30, local news station WSMV posted a tweet wishing Ivanka Trump a happy birthday and inviting their followers to do the same. Why? Who the hell knows. But it did not go over well, and for us, it was a breaking point. The station had long been using annoying and unseemly Twitter engagement strategies, pulling viral stories from other cities and larding their tweets with gratuitous hashtags that don’t make any damn sense. Worse, sometimes the hashtags were just cheap, exploitative and gross. Stuff like #death and #tragic. Once, they even used #rape and #incest. After we at the Scene righteously called them out on this behavior, WSMV briefly changed their ways before backsliding. #TRAGIC.

A Bit of a Cock-Up

It seemed like an innocuous enough feature — a wholesome if sloppily headlined article in the Lebanon Democrat’s Food & Health section called “Tips for a fun office coworkers summertime picnic.” The piece, as it happens, featured a recipe for tomato-and-cucumber open-faced sandwiches. Sounds great, count us in, what a treat. The only issue? Whoever was in charge of selecting the stock art to accompany said piece went with a photo illustration of a cucumber and two tomatoes that, any way you slice it, looks extraordinarily phallic — thus earning the small-circulation Wilson County paper a Boner Award in the truest sense. They really dicked this one up.

Ground-Rule Boner

Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, 1989 World Series MVP Dave Stewart and a guy named John Loar (whom no one’s ever heard of) walked into a room. And yes, this is a setup for a joke. The joke is that this trio wants to bring a Major League Baseball team to Nashville. That’s it, that’s the joke. No, but seriously, they do, and they insist they are serious about it, and that it is in no way a weird vanity project that will hopefully make people forget about all the different times Gonzales justified torture and the one time Stewart was charged with lewd conduct for cavorting with a cross-dressing sex worker. There are plenty of other reasons they want a baseball team. For example, maybe people will figure out who John Loar is.

Despite the fact that MLB doesn’t, you know, actually have any plans to expand anytime soon, these three unlikely partners grabbed the proverbial cock-and-bull by the horns and flopped out a full-blown stadium proposal. While insisting they don’t want any public money (even if they don’t, Metro will give it to them anyway), their plan calls for the stadium to be built basically right on top of Cumberland Park and its surrounding super-convenient-to-downtown parking. That oughta be enough to demonstrate how silly this idea is. But wait, there’s more.

There’s a marina, because that’s what every baseball stadium needs. There’s a rooftop bar, because that’s what everything in Nashville needs. And the rendering seems to show the pedestrian bridge descending precipitously into center field, because they want our outfielders to suffer frequent painful shoulder injuries, I guess. What’s worse is that their stadium would be just fine if it was just a few ticks up the riverbank where perpetual eyesore PSC Metals has been marring the landscape for decades. Of course, you’d actually have to be from Nashville to know that.

Illustration: Cole Roberts (coleswork.com)



Can’t Tell Them Nothin’

The tale of Atlanta artist Lil Nas X’s chart-dominating, CMA Award-winning, Grammy-nominated country-trap single “Old Town Road” is one of 2019’s biggest stories, and let us not forget that a gaffe at Billboard helped make it possible. The original release was pulled from the Hot Country Songs chart in March for supposedly not containing enough elements of contemporary country, sparking justifiable outrage. The most noticeable differences between “OTR” and other country chart-toppers are that the singer is black and that the song didn’t originate in a writers’ room on Music Row. All the same, “Old Town Road” dominated several other Billboard charts, and a remix featuring Billy Ray Cyrus (because the timeline we’re living in is clearly the weirdest one) ran it to the top of Hot Country Songs, too.

A Record-Setting Crowd of Boners

In April, roughly a gazillion people thronged Lower Broadway to watch grown men say the names of younger grown men and gamely, if ineptly, attempt to fist-bump. The NFL Draft hit Nashville squarely in the face and presented to the world yet another example of how eager we are to pull off events for people who don’t live here. It wasn’t without complications. The final day of the draft coincided with the annual Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon, which traditionally finishes at Nissan Stadium, the parking lots of which had been commandeered by the NFL. That forced the exhausted runners and their supporters to go the long way ’round the stadium and cram into a frightfully narrow passageway to egress. And despite all the typical boosterific crowing about how good for business the draft would be, some local entrepreneurs found themselves impotent in the face of the NFL. Commercial canoe and kayak outfitters were barred from plying the downtown stretch of the Cumberland for an astonishing three weeks. Restaurants along First Avenue had to resort to cleverly placed signage to remind would-be diners that they were open — even if access required a winding journey. (Probably would have been easier to get there by canoe, but, y’know.) But, hey, Nashville looked great on TV. Maybe it’s just a show-er and not a grower of small business.

Bad Bones

Nashville has seen many out-of-the-box, some-assembly-required-looking developments in recent years, as developers have sought to cash in on a growing city with apartments and condos that are overpriced and designed for the sort of person who kind of likes that sort of thing. One recently unveiled townhome development that’s coming soon to Five Points is particularly egregious. Scene staffers remarked that from a certain angle, it looks like the back of a wireless router, or what happens when you win a game of solitaire on your desktop. What’s more, the plans call for a mural — which might be good, but, y’know, probably won’t be. We need housing in Nashville. Lots of it. We could do without small, ugly developments that won’t help anyone who couldn’t just go live in the Gulch instead.

Skin Deep

Give the Country Music Association some credit: The CMA Awards show in November seemed to reflect an effort to put the spotlight on more of the women who are making phenomenal country music. (Perhaps they went a little too far with the stage design, which appeared to be a bit … vulvar.) And women won awards in five of the 12 categories, despite Carrie Underwood getting a hard snub for Entertainer of the Year. But parading Gretchen Wilson, Martina McBride and others out for a medley of the songs they made famous (hell, even inviting Dolly Parton and Reba McEntire to sub in for frequent co-host Brad Paisley) is a far cry from using the real power of this platform to advocate for what women need. That would be equal opportunity and support across the industry — especially in radio, the medium where country artists still build the vast majority of their fan bases, and where music by women artists is vastly underplayed. Representation at the CMA Awards is great, but systemic change is what’s needed.

The Mighty Could Fall a Little Harder

One unwelcome sight at the CMA Awards: disgraced music publicist Kirt Webster mingling backstage as the guest of singer Janie Fricke (according to a quote Webster gave NewsChannel5) and taking photos with high-profile former clients. Webster abruptly shuttered his big-time firm Webster PR in 2017 after multiple parties made allegations of sexual assault, coercion, verbal abuse and more, which he continues to deny. In January, he launched a new website, where the focus is mostly on his career history and painting himself as a victim. While his management and marketing company Spinning Plates does have a few legacy clients like Don McLean, the list of people who stopped working with Webster is much longer. It’s a bit of a head-scratcher why any of them would pose for a pic with him — even Dolly Parton, who has not publicly denounced Webster but did opt to give him the heave-ho. To both Webster and the folks who keep making space for him, good intentions or no: This Boner’s for you.

Boners on the Ceiling

The Black Keys earned a hit with “Let’s Rock,” their first new album since 2014 and a genuinely good slab of blues-rock. But the album’s title — quoting the last words of inmate Ed Zagorski, a convicted killer executed at Riverbend in 2018 — and its cover (featuring an electric chair, which was re-created as an oversized prop for the stage as well as the merch-area photo booth on the band’s tour) contributed to a totally unforced error. Far be it for us to suggest that all art or entertainment needs to make a political statement. But you can’t get around the inherent political nature of the state putting people to death, and you could hear a Boner drop for the Keys’ silence on the matter.

Emu for Real?

For students studying veterinary and animal science at McGavock High School, 2019 has been a study in what not to do. Back in 2016, MNPS funded a $100,000 barn and small animal lab for the students in McGavock’s Future Farmers of America chapter. But in February, an unannounced inspection of the school’s farm by Metro Animal Care and Control found that animals — including chickens, a ferret, and a rabbit and its babies — were kept in filthy enclosures without adequate food or water. A month later, four alpacas died under unclear circumstances, and the animal sciences teacher in charge, Jessica Lumpkins, was cited for animal cruelty. You’d think that would make the school get its act together. But in November, a MACC inspector noticed that Charlie the emu was looking thin and alerted Lumpkins that the flightless bird needed to be checked by a vet. A week later, the emu was dead. It gets weirder. Local news station WSMV reported that a surveillance video showed Lumpkins and four students dumping the emu corpse in a dumpster on school grounds. This is not legal, sanitary or sane. Lumpkins faces a state misdemeanor animal cruelty charge and has been put on leave. We owe more to the Future Farmers of America — and to these animals.

If Your Boner Lasts Longer Than Six Months ...

Angry man Will Pinkston announced March 25 that he would resign from the school board. Penning a delightful letter that read in part, “This year’s mind-numbingly irrational conversations about the Director’s contract, evaluation, and the FY 2019-20 budget have led to me to conclude that the board, in its current configuration, is impossibly inept,” the pugnacious Pinkston said his last day would be April 12. Then, two weeks later, he insisted he was really resigning, but the actual last day was a “moving target.” Then he cooled his usual unrestrained rhetoric as he tried to get Phil Bredesen elected to the U.S. Senate, working as part of the former governor’s campaign. But he was still on the school board. He said he might stick around until late June, which would be late enough that it wouldn’t trigger a special election — special elections having of course become Nashville’s favorite (though often expensive) pastime. And then someone noticed that the Metro Charter’s provision for filling vacant school board seats — which calls for the “impossibly inept” board itself to appoint fill-ins — is actually counter to state law. State law, you see, provides for the county legislative body — in this case, the Metro Council — to pick the substitute. So Pinkston stuck around a little longer, long enough for Metro’s voters to approve a charter change to align with the law. Pinkston finally, officially, resigned Sept. 30 — 189 days after announcing his resignation, 171 days after his original resignation date, 92 days after “late June” ended, and 60 days after voters approved the requisite charter change.

Illustration: Cole Roberts (coleswork.com)

