50 FEET HIGH AND RISING
A collection of Keith Urban’s guitars—including a vintage SG, Les Pauls, Teles, and a Gretsch G6199—hangs out to dry inside Soundcheck. Photo by Jim McGuire
“Beware of Snakes!!!” That’s what a sign taped to the door of Soundcheck studios reads. This is
good advice for anyone in the music industry,
but they mean it this time. It is Friday morning,
six days after the Cumberland River surged
hard and fast into this flat industrial district of
Nashville. And as if the toxic slurry of mud,
chemicals, and mystery brown stuff left all
over the floors wasn’t dangerous enough, the
early responders to this massive complex of
rehearsal halls, repair shops, and storage lockers encountered venomous, slithering reptiles
angry about being beached inside.
People are checking in with employees at a
table inside the door. Most media have been
stopped at an outer gate. Soundcheck management, understandably, doesn’t want local
TV news cameras and lights pointing at the
musicians as they pull the corpses of cherished instruments out of their sodden cases
and trunks. I have been added to the client
list as a volunteer proxy for John Jorgenson,
a globally admired veteran of country, rock,
and jazz. He is on tour with his gypsy jazz
quintet in Europe, doing his best to keep a
calm head and coordinate an unprecedented,
unplanned evacuation operation from thousands of miles away.
I am with Jorgenson’s stepson, and our
mission is to empty his locker and get his
instruments and amplifiers to a designated
dry-out and repair facility where Jorgenson’s
acclaimed luthier, Joe Glaser, can administer
emergency care—or last rites—to a collection
of stringed instruments of inestimable personal and musical value.
The darkened halls and lockers are bustling
with top-flight Nashville session musicians
and their guitar techs. Pedal-steel guitarist
Bruce Bouton is grieving the loss of his col-
lection of vintage amplifiers. Nearby, country
guitar kingpin Brent Mason is taking stock of
his losses. Wearing blue surgical gloves, he
photographs a prized ’ 65 Stratocaster that
comes out of its case looking ghostly pale
and slashed with cracks. At a loading dock,
the road crew for country band Rascal Flatts
is rolling case after case from multiple stor-
age lockers onto trucks, stopping for photos
and analysis by insurance adjusters.
Jorgenson’s locker gives away the story of
what’s happened here. The water line is
clearly visible in the particleboard walls—
about three and a half feet from the floor.
Inside, it’s a pathetic sight. Guitar cases are
jumbled on the ground as if they’ve floated,
shifted, and then sunk like dead submarines.
A Marshall amp cabinet looks like it’s been
airbrushed with an ash-colored residue. The
most important guitars are stored vertically
in a road case, their bottoms well off the
ground, but it’s pretty clear they were submerged up to their necks and are now sitting
in the humidified dark on saturated shag
carpet. Nothing in the place smells good, but
when cases start opening the stench of mildew and death permeates the air.
