Despite being raised in Nashville, Shooter Jennings is a Los Angeles guy through and through. He started his first rock band, Stargunn, there, embedded himself in the city’s underground arts scene as he evolved as both a solo artist and Grammy-winning producer, and now produces albums at Sunset Sound Recorders, the historic Hollywood studio he oversees and has redubbed “Snake Mountain.”
While he often returns to Nashville for work projects — he recently hosted a listening session for Songbird, the new album he produced on his late father, Waylon Jennings — he says he harbors mixed feelings about Music City.
Why? There’s just no escaping the music.
“I went to go get lunch, and everywhere I went there was someone yelling a fucking song out of a restaurant,” Jennings tells Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast about a recent trip to the city. “I’m downtown, so I’m around Kid Rock’s bar and all that shit. Bon Jovi covers are coming out of this room, somebody’s yelling Tyler Childers out of this room … I’m like, ‘OK, I’m going to try to find a restaurant that has no music.’ If I open up a bar, it’s going to be silent and I know all the musicians will hang out there…. I kind of hate music when I’m here.”
With celebrity-branded bars now making up the backbone of Nashville’s Lower Broadway, Jennings says he’s been approached a couple of times about potentially opening a Waylon honky-tonk. He has mixed feelings about that too, especially, he says, since his father didn’t really drink.
“There was a while where I would not do it because he didn’t drink, and I thought it was a weird thing,” he says. “But now I’d totally do it if it was the right thing. And there have been talks about it.”
But Jennings’ dream would be to reopen the Gold Rush, the beloved dive bar in the city’s “Rock Block” neighborhood that served basic “bean rolls” and closed in 2019 after 45 years in business. “That’s what’s missing,” he says.
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“I loved my childhood here,” Jennings says of Nashville. “But when I lived here, it was really square. I didn’t feel like I really fit into that.”
Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone’s weekly country-music podcast, Nashville Now, hosted by senior music editor Joseph Hudak, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists and personalities like Lainey Wilson, Hardy, Charley Crockett, Gavin Adcock, Amanda Shires, Margo Price, Dusty Slay, Lukas Nelson, Ashley Monroe, Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, and Clever.
