US Tour Diaries #1 – Walking In Memphis

Put on my blue suede shoes and I boarded the plane… touched down in the land of the downtown blues, in the middle of the pouring rain a nice little sunset.

As alluded to in a couple of recent columns, part of Team Making The Nut (namely Nick and yours truly) are now past the opening days of a four-week US tour. In a shameless bid to increase traffic through the site during our absence, the typical emails to friends and family back home will be run as blogs on here. Told you it was shameless. Moreover, it saves Nick and occasional ‘Guest Nut Gurus’ Parko and the Bossman having to go through similar emailing processes. At any rate, winners and losers (my hungover brain can’t handle a more complicated format than this) of the opening three days in Memphis and Tuscaloosa are set out below:

WINNERS

·         Everything falling into place for connecting flights – when your schedule suggests that Sydney to LA, LA to Charlotte (with not much time to clear US Immigration and Customs) and Charlotte to Memphis can be knocked off in around 24 hours without a hitch, and that’s exactly how it plays out, you’re starting the tour with a win.

·         Solving the problem of jetlag by whipping through 15-20 beers on opening night, then attempting to solve hungover delayed jetlag with masses of fried chicken.

·         Rendezvous Restaurant, as recommended by ‘Man vs Food’. They do phenomenal slow-cooked ribs, pulled pork and beef brisket. If you spend more than 35 minutes in Memphis and don’t have a meal there, we can no longer be friends.

·         Gus’ Fried Chicken. Another ‘Man vs Food’ recommendation for Memphis that delivered on the promise. So good.

·         Beale Street. Fun scene, well organised (roads cordoned off at each end to allow people to wander the main strip of bars and restaurants) and home to some cool blues bands, albeit that they were dispersed between some crappy ones.

·         Beale (Street) Big Ass Beers, from a quantity (somewhere between a pint and a stein) and price perspective.

·         Graceland. I’m not a huge Elvis fan by any stretch, but the attractions are very well done and the house itself, whilst quite 70s kitsch, is surprisingly modest for a guy who had a suite of cars and a couple of planes to his name.

·         The National Civil Rights Museum, located at the venue where Dr Martin Luther King was killed. A sobering reminder of how backward some of our thinking was as little as 50 years ago and indeed, how far we have left to go.

·         Getting through the initial foray into US motoring (driving from Memphis to Tuscaloosa) without wrecking the rental car or endangering the touring party.

·         2008 Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee having his own talkback radio show in the south while our resident Huckabee fan (Parko) was off on a three-day sojourn to New York.

·         Talkback Alabama football radio shows, complete with incoherent ramblings of callers. High comedy.

·         Prop bets on total points scored across college football and preseason NBA games (yes, we added them into one total bet) that get you out of paying for the taxi home.

·         Alabama, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the locals could not have been more friendly (we’re debating which of our tailgating invites to take up before the Alabama college football game as I type this). And secondly, the term misogynist has been thrown around a lot lately, so I’ll simply say this – if you’re a decent to good-looking guy in your early to mid-20s, you need to enrol at the University of Alabama for as many years as you can. As soon as you finish this article, start researching how to do this. Minor details like what to study can be thrashed out later. Just make sure to start turning up at Innisfree Irish Bar (right near the uni) on Friday nights, and it will all become clear. We met a number of Australian and British guys at said bar and the general view was that they never wanted to leave Alabama. As any ‘Bama college football fan will tell you, “Roll Tide”.

LOSERS

·         Beale (Street) Big Ass Beers, from a taste perspective. Large cheap & nasty beers take some effort to get through.

·         Mellow/ mediocre piano and guitar duos playing at an Irish bar in Memphis while we were trying to watch the Thursday night NFL and game 2 of the World Series. Wrong fit for the wrong scene. As Phil Gould would say, “no no no no no!”

 

Where too from here in the remainder of our opening week? College football (No. 1 the country Alabama hosting No. 12 in the country Mississippi State) awaits later today, Atlanta for sports bars and live pro wrestling (a favourite of both Nick and the Bossman) on Sunday, Nashville for Monday and Tuesday and a midweek date with Churchill Downs racetrack in Kentucky. More drinking, more sports and unquestionably, more prop bets on the irrelevant and sometimes the irreverent. I can’t wait.

 

Thanks to Chris Graythen/Getty Images North America for use of the photo