The ambience at Two Dollar Tuesdays at East Nashville’s 5 Spot had a magic all its own. It was a neon-lit weekly church service of sorts, blending community fellowship with the sacred calling of nurturing and showcasing independent roots and rock and roll music at Music City’s most eclectic crossroads. After the closure of the Radio Cafe and the Slow Bar, the 5 Spot became the HQ for East Nashville’s musical renaissance through the 2010s, and Two Dollar Tuesdays (a mismatch of cover charge and musical value more alarming than today’s streaming rates) became its most reliable live event. The man who launched and built it was songwriter/artist Derek Hoke.
“At the beginning it was just sheer determination,” Hoke says in Episode 226 of The String. During the first year of sometimes lonely Tuesdays, “Some of the bartenders were like, ‘Dude, give it up man,’ and I (thought) ‘No guys, you’ll see!” And in the spirit of organic scene-making, it did thrive, not because of relentless promotion or manic posting on social media but because of not doing that. “Let's play music for fun,” was Hoke’s ethos. “We don’t have to make a poster. There's no big deal. There's no record release. You can play whatever you want. Just don’t play Top 40. We're kind of trying to do our own thing. And then it started kind of catching on.”
Sure did. By 2012 TDT had its own feature story on NPR’s All Things Considered, a regular full house and artists who were either new to town, passing through town, or/and sometimes on their way to the top. Margo Price, Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson are all Two Dollar Tuesday alums. The Nashville Scene wrote up its benediction for the series when it wrapped after 12 years in September: “Hoke helped invent contemporary Nashville by presenting music he liked on a small stage in the heart of East Nashville, and that’s no small accomplishment.”
Let us not let that overshadow Hoke’s impressive body of work as an artist and his own skills on stage. In our search for synonyms for the hackneyed “laid back” in describing Derek’s vocal attitude, perhaps we should give in and describe tomorrow’s calming, nuanced and careful singers as Hokean. He makes you want to listen closer, to perhaps join him in that place nestled between the cushions of classic country music, heartland rock and old folk music. The newest iteration of that Hokean sound is Electric Mountain, his fifth LP, written he says with the mentality of bluegrass songs that wouldn’t be arranged with bluegrass instruments. “We're going to put synthesizers instead of banjos,” he says. “Or whatever - some kind of little element of turning something inside out a little bit without it being over the top. There couldn't be any kind of cleverness going on. It ought to still be organic.”
Hear, for example, the keening close harmonies on the marching chorus of “Let Go Of My Heart.” They’re high and lonesome and plainspoken as can be, but layered over an electric mist spiked with droning steel and unidentifiable horn-like fanfares. “Say You Will,” which Hoke says is the first song he wrote that fit the concept, swoons like Chris Isaak driving top-down on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Opener “Wild And Free” achieves a serene Pink Floyd grandeur with pedal steel in place of David Gilmour, Derek says. Closer “On Top Of The Mountain” ponders the ephemerality of being a big deal, something he seems determined to avoid, even as he continually demonstrates he’s in charge of a personal but persuasive sonic vision.
Hoke grew up in Florence, SC and did his early performing tutelage in the harshest possible environments - sports bars where people might pay attention to you if you played some cover that got them fired up. His crash course in music came from time working at a record store where the staff got to take home the cut-out CDs, and he was the only guy who wanted alt-country and British power pop. Moving to Nashville in the late 1990s may have been the first time he was among people who clicked with his taste and his outlook. But he had to do a lot of catching up.
“I remember I played my first show in Nashville at Radio Cafe,” Hoke says, recalling a charming former venue in East Nashville. “I had a broken Gibson acoustic guitar that would always go out of tune. And I remember, you could hear a pin drop. And I was like, Oh, s**t. And I realized a million things all at once. My material is not that good. And (about) being a performer. All these kinds of things I never had to think about before.” One interesting source of schooling came from several years working the road as merch coordinator for Ricky Skaggs. He saw top tier roots artistry nightly, plus audience interaction and the rigors of the road.
“So all of these things that I love, all of a sudden, came together. This was like a punk rock band and the highest level jazz band, mixed with just great songwriting. And that kind of started my journey kind of down the rootsier road. Watching those guys do that stuff for so many years was really helpful to me on my little reinvention journey.”
There’s a lot more to the story, and it’s all here in an hour with Derek Hoke. Won’t even cost you two dollars.
