Last week the media was just starting to report that several prominent country musicians, such as Brad Paisley and Keith Urban, expected to lose instruments and most of their touring equipment to the Nashville flood. The damage was done when the rising Cumberland River invaded Soundcheck Nashville, a storage and rehearsal space that at least 600 musicians rely on. This week reports of the actual, as opposed to the anticipated, damage started to come in.
In the end, musicians had to wait three days for flood waters to recede before they could attempt to enter their storage units at Soundcheck. When they did go in, they had to don rubber boots and gloves and wade through puddles. According to The Tennessean, salvagers found around 1,000 guitars, 2,000 amplifiers, and hundreds of drum sets that were damaged or destroyed.
This week it was also reported that not only do many country musicians store their instruments at Soundcheck, so does the newly opened Musicians Hall of Fame, which is located in Nashville. The Musicians Hall of Fame was storing many historic instruments at Soundcheck -- instruments that cannot be replaced. The losses include Jimi Hendrix’s Fender Stratocaster, one of Johnny Cash’s guitars, a Gibson Les Paul that had been played by Peter Townshend of the Who, and much more.
“This is the music version of the Louvre flooding,” said local musician and guitar repairer Ed Beaver in Sunday’s Tennessean. “If you consider that major artists have instruments not only of monetary value but historical value, it’s scary.”
“We had two of Lightning Chance’s basses -- he’s somebody a lot of people don’t know about,” said Joe Chambers, the founder and CEO of the Musicians Hall of Fame, in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. “He played at the Grand Ole Opry alongside Chet Atkins, Patsy Cline, Hank [Williams] Sr., the Everly Brothers. Both those basses just fell apart. One of them was used on Hank Sr.'s very last recording session — that's the bass that's heard on 'Your Cheatin' Heart.'”
John Jorgenson, an instrumentalist who toured with Elton John for seven years, also lost dozens of historic instruments from his own collection. “All the guitars spent days submerged in water containing diesel fuel and sewage,” he said in The Los Angeles Times.
Country musician Jason Aldean’s drummer, Rich Redmond, found his small drums half full of water, and his $8,000 German Sonor drum, which is as large as a washing machine, was sitting in a foot of water in its case. Redmond also had an old RCA amplifier used by Chet Atkins -- that was soaked too.
Raul Malo, who founded country band The Mavericks, opened up the case of his 1962 Gibson J-45 and thought initially that it looked okay. But when his guitar repairman turned it over, more than a gallon of water poured out of the sound hole. Surprisingly enough, though, the Gibson and a soaked acoustic bass sounded okay when Malo tried them.
“Maybe that’s what it needed. If I’d known that, I would have dropped it in the Cumberland years ago,” Malo told NPR on Wednesday, laughing. Most of his collection did not do so well, unfortunately.
Some instruments and gear did survive the flood. Many musicians had instruments on shelves in their units, and anything that was stored more than three and a half feet above the ground seems to have remained intact.
The Nashville music community has pulled together over the last week to try to help musicians who lost the instruments and gear that they rely on in their work. Musicians who did not lose instruments have been reaching out to those who have, according to keyboardist John Hobbs, who said that several other keyboard players in Nashville had phoned and offered to let him borrow their gear. Joe Glaser, the owner and operator of local guitar repair shop Glaser Instruments, has been spending his days trying to salvage “drowned guitars,” along with Beaver and another local guitar technician, George Gruhn. The three have set up triage centers for the instruments at local warehouses. A team of about 20 volunteers were helping to go through the gear as well.
“We are trying to stabilize these instruments until we can decide what to do with them next,” Glaser said in The Tennessean.
Beaver told NPR that he thought more than half of the salvaged instruments could be saved. “About 60 percent of the stuff I have is going to be okay,” he said. “It might bear the scars of the flood, but, hey, so do we.”
Sources used:
Gonzalez, Tony. “Keith Urban and Brad Paisley lose equipment to flooded Nashville storage facility.” Self Storage Industry News Home. May 7, 2010.
Harless, William. “After flooding, Nashville musicians assess losses.” The New York Times. May 7, 2010.
Havighurst, Craig. “Floods wreak havoc on Nashville music scene.” NPR. May 12, 2010.
Lewis, Randy. “Priceless musical instruments are silent victims of Nashville flooding.” The Los Angeles Times. May 13, 2010.
Wadhwani, Anita. “Valuable guitars ruined or at risk.” The Daily News Journal. May 9, 2010.