Hidden History of Music Row by Brian Allison

Author:Brian Allison
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781439671009
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Tompall Glaser’s “Hillbilly Central” still stands at 916 19th Avenue. Vanessa Olivarez.

Shel Silverstein and Chris Gantry, 1973. Chris Gantry.

There was even a school of thought that perhaps a little run-in with the law could mean a serious career boost and a surge in notoriety. After all, it worked for people like Jennings and Cash. There was a romance to the erratic and senseless behavior of that rather lost group of musicians as they headed down a dangerous path. Glaser and Jennings and Hillbilly Central were the ringmasters. Looking like a western character, say Jesse James or Billy the Kid, was a big deal. Image started to become as important as the songs.

Although Gantry never got hooked on the hard stuff himself, he did have quite the brush with the law. When he began making money, the artist bought a farm in Fairview, Tennessee. The minute the dotted line was signed on his new purchase, he rapidly recruited his hippie friends to assist him in planting an acre of marijuana.

Everyone had seeds that they’d saved and had little hiding places where they grew it. We planted all these seeds and they started to come up. One Sunday, about 15 of my friends came out on a beautiful day in May. They all took off their clothes off and walked around the property. We were walking around the fields, and my neighbors who I’d never met before—stoic Church of Christ country people, came down the road galloping into the farm on horseback, and right into the middle of this torrid bunch of long-haired bearded crazy hippies. It took them a moment to see what was going on, and they wheeled their horses around and galloped out of the place. Not too long later, about an hour later, my water was shut off by my neighbors and people threatened to kill me.

It wasn’t long before the seedlings turned to huge plants, and Gantry’s side business soared. However, someone opened their mouth about his oasis, and his property was raided by police, who showed up and started cutting plants down. “I told reporters later that it was too bad I got busted because it was the best pot that had ever been grown in Tennessee,” he laughed. “Those were Afghanistan seeds, good stuff. That blew their minds too, so that hurt my case.”

He dodged jail with a hefty fine, but the attention led an intrigued Cash to take Gantry under his wing. Feeling a great empathy for the singer, he invited Gantry to spend a little time at his cabin outside Nashville, while the heat of the controversy blew over. The friendship resulted in many fortunate events, including the legend recording Gantry’s song “Allegheny Road.” He also began writing for Cash’s small publishing company, the House of Cash. It was then that Cash gave Gantry the permission to make the record he’d always dreamed of.

“I immediately flipped out and said I needed a little bit of time to get it together,” he explained. “So I jumped on a bus and went to an old friend’s house in Veracruz, Mexico.

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