When The Listening Room celebrates its 20th anniversary on March 3 with HARDY, Mitchell Tenpenny and Jo Dee Messina, the party will take place, ironically, away from The Listening Room.
With seating for nearly 2,400, the Ryman Auditorium provides almost 10 times the capacity that The Listening Room can pack in for any single show. Even more importantly, The Listening Room may owe its name to a location, but the interest in the Ryman show — which is purportedly sold out — suggests the brand that owner Chris Blair has built is bigger than its home building.
“I get letters from people all over the world,” he says. “People just don’t get to experience this.”
“This” is an attraction that’s practically an only-in-Nashville kind of business. The Listening Room presents two-to-five shows daily, seven days a week, focused almost exclusively on songwriters. From Feb. 20-27, as an example, more than two dozen composers with top 10 credits will take the stage in groups of three or more, including Ben Williams (“Tennessee Orange”), Ben Burgess (“Whiskey Glasses”), Brent Anderson (“Bottle Rockets”) and Jeff Hyde (“Springsteen”). Sprinkled in are a handful of artists, including Dillon Carmichael, Eric Paslay, Shane Profitt, Lucas Hoge and Old Dominion guitarist Brad Tursi.
It works like the Grand Ole Opry, weekly Nashville music revue Whiskey Jam or periodic Americana attraction Music City Roots, using a revolving lineup from one of the globe’s most plentiful musical pools. Like the better-known Bluebird Café, Blair’s enterprise draws from the songwriter portion of that talent pool that’s used to working in small rooms.
The Bluebird Café, established in 1982, is older and better known than The Listening Room, and it remains located in the same strip mall where it was founded, serving fewer than 100 patrons a show. Blair, who played numerous songwriter rounds after he moved to town in 2003 to record for Lyric Street, was surprised to discover that the Bluebird didn’t really have serious competition in its songwriter/restaurant niche. And as he embedded himself further in Nashville, he quickly realized that few venues showed much respect to the writers who contribute significantly to the city’s creative culture.
“I’m a numbers guy,” Blair says. “I was sitting on the stage at multiple places, and going, ‘Okay, I’m up here playing songs. I’m not getting paid to do this.’ And I’d count heads in the audience, and half of them were listening, half of them weren’t. And I’d see how many beers they were drinking, and how many of them had food. And I’m doing the math in my head going, ‘All right, this bar just made $15,000 tonight while we’re sitting in here, giving them music, and they can’t pay us gas money.’ It just wasn’t right.”
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That inequity, Blair says, was the “driving factor” behind The Listening Room. He’d worked as a kid at his father’s four restaurants, so he had a basic understanding of the two industries — food service and music — that he was joining together.
Still, no one — beyond Blair, perhaps — would have thought he could make the business last two decades. The thing was a struggle from the start. The initial operation was a six-nights-a-week attraction in suburban Franklin, a community that boasts plenty of creative residents but is far enough out of town that it couldn’t rely much on tourism. He moved to Cummins Station downtown, where the room seated about 125 patrons. And where Blair ended up sleeping on the floor.
“I lost my house,” he remembers. “I had a house in Sylvan Park, and I had the [option] to pay my mortgage after being late month after month after month, or keep the business. And I believed in The Listening Room. I lost my house to try to keep The Listening Room alive.”
On May 16, 2010, just two weeks after a historic flood soaked the downtown, Blair brought his band back together as songwriters Bridgette Tatum (“She’s Country”), Danny Myrick (“I Love This Life”) and Jeffrey Steele (“Me and my Gang”) helped him raise money for the bar, and for local charity Hands on Nashville. That show didn’t, by itself, get The Listening Room out of the red — Blair was so overcome by the moment that he gave all the proceeds to Hands on Nashville — but the goodwill arguably generated good karma. The venue slowly edged into profitability, it moved a short time later to Second Avenue, and now the stage lives comfortably in the SoBro district.
Blair fortunately doesn’t sleep on the floor at his workplace anymore. He has around 100 employees, and one of them is a full-timer devoted strictly to booking the ever-changing cast of performers.
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It’s an eight-block straight shot from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, so on most nights, tourists make up about 85% of the audience.
On occasion, Blair has sent a congratulatory text to an artist after a big awards win, only to have the act flip it on him in the response. The Listening Room, back in the day, paid them enough that they made their rent at a key moment as they pursued their dream. It’s a scenario that Blair, distanced from the days when he slept on his business’ concrete floor, understands.
“I hope,” Blair says, “we’ve got another 20 in us.”
