Rock In The Country: Nashville’s Secret History

“Paul wanted to come over here and practice and play around with Wings to get ready for their tour,” says Putman from his home in Lebanon, Tennessee. “They wanted horses and a farm atmosphere, so I went with Buddy, but we couldn’t find the right kind of place for them. Buddy said, ‘Why don’t you let them come to your house?’ I said, ‘I don’t know about that.’ You heard all kinds of things about the rock and roll crew during those days, and how they tear up your place. Finally I let them do it.”

“All of those people worship the Memphis sound, the Everly Brothers sound. The Beatles loved the Everly Brothers and Chet Atkins, and I think they just wanted to kind of get a feel for the Nashville scene.”

McCartney and members of Wings, including wife Linda McCartney, holed up at Putman’s farm, and booked sessions with the engineer Ernie Winfrey at The Sound Shop.

The band let loose and recorded tons of material, including new versions of previously released songs like “Jet,” “Band On The Run,” and “C Moon,” and outtakes also include Paul doing his best Elvis on “Blue Moon Of Kentucky.” The sessions, which yielded enough material for an album, eventually produced two singles, “Junior’s Farm” backed with “Sally G.”

“They did ‘Junior’s Farm,’ which they claimed they wrote for my farm. You know, because my name is Claude Putman, Jr. He had a pretty good hit on that, and also ‘Sally G’ he recorded on that session.”

McCartney and his gang also took advantage of the countryside.

“Paul McCartney had found my son Troy’s bike and was riding all over Wilson County here in Lebanon, and people would say ‘I saw Paul McCartney today.’ Then Paul had gone and bought him a motorbike. They put it on a trailer and hauled it to New York. I always kind of wondered, you know, why didn’t he go up there and buy one. They probably had some good ones in New York but I guess he just had that urge, you know.”

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Since the 1970s, more and more rock musicians have made Nashville home for its quality of life and great studios. Niko Bolas, a producer who’s worked with Neil Young for years – though never in Nashville – has his own room at Blackbird Studios in the Berry Hill neighborhood. He says Nashville is cheaper for rock bands to record in, and there are also fewer distractions. Maybe one of the reasons Dylan, Young, and McCartney all came to Music City was for its relative calm. “If you’ve got five guys that are 19 to 25 years old and they can either go out to a nightclub or stay and finish guitar parts, I’ll go to where they can do guitar parts,” says Bolas from over the phone in Japan, where he’s doing a promotional tour with the band The Verbs. “There’s a ton to do in Nashville, but it’s very artistic.”

But, in the end, Nashville lured artists with its top studios and great musicians. “The largest talent pool I’ve ever seen in my life is in Nashville,” says Bolas. “There’s a whole batch of records being made, everybody just does it to make a living. It’s not incredibly avant-garde or rock and roll, but the musicians are good enough to pull that off and still do something that’s 100 percent creative on their own time.”

Blackbird is something of an institution in Nashville rock recording circles. It’s where R.E.M. headed to finish work on their 15th studio album, Collapse Into Now, scheduled for release in 2011. Jack White recorded at Blackbird before he hired away one of their top engineers for his own studio at Third Man, largely modeled after Blackbird.

Blackbird in many ways epitomizes rock music for Nashville. “[Blackbird] is built by a guy who’s a Beatle freak, so everything there is kind of what you’d imagine if you’d moved Abbey Road – all the old gear, all the old everything, but it all works,” says Bolas. “Everyone goes there because of the facility. It’s not because there’s people in Nashville doing rock and roll. The studio is the place to go make rock and roll. The motto at Blackbird is, ‘You rock or you suck.’”