In Nashville, Tenn., parties rage on every street
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The John Deere tractor pulled onto Broadway and rumbled into the madness.
On a Friday night in the heart of Nashville, as crowds and music spilled from packed clubs, it lumbered along at 5 mph, tugging a canopied trailer with flashing lights and a group of friends from Denver sipping drinks and dancing to Shania Twain.
It wasn’t especially conspicuous. The Big Green Tractor, as it’s called, passed an open-air school bus crammed with partyers, and then another, and another. It also crept beside a vehicle with women leaning over a railing in tank tops printed with the slogan “Let’s Get Nashty!”
The tractor hadn’t even made it a mile.
“It’s the Wild West out here,” Ronee Heatherly said from her perch behind the bar of the Big Green Tractor, where she served variously as safety monitor, bartender, DJ, photographer, tour guide and taunter of ride-share drivers blocking the tractor’s path. (She blasted the Ludacris song “Move” as she stared them down.)
As Nashville has cemented its reputation as a destination for getaways and bachelorette trips, party vehicles have proliferated, promising a rollicking good time and quite a stage to see and be seen while exploring the city. But there’s a growing sense — among residents, local officials, even some in the so-called transportainment industry — that it has all gotten out of hand.
“We made the monster, and now we can’t control the monster,” said Steve Haruch, a journalist and the editor of the book Greetings From New
Nashville. “It’s the plot of every monster movie.”
The menagerie on Nashville streets includes — but is by no means limited to — a truck with a hot tub, a bus packed with electric massage chairs, a Ford pickup retrofitted into a “party barge” with waves painted on the side and “Ship Faced” stamped on the tailgate, retired military vehicles, a purple bus with drag performers, an old school bus named Bev adorned with antlers, and yet another old bus with antlers named Bertha.
City officials estimate as many as 40 companies operate vehicles on weekends. About 20 were launched in the past six months alone.
The expanding multitude of vehicles has stirred concerns about safety, noise and traffic, given the parade of fuming drivers often trailing them. But the consternation also reflects something deeper: To critics, the vehicles are a rowdy side effect of Nashville’s soaring popularity in recent years that threatens to dilute the soul that made the city so alluring to begin with.
“That is my fear, that we are losing our sense of who we are, what built our success,” said Butch Spyridon, president and CEO of the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp., describing a version of Nashville — for generations known as the capital of country music — with an easygoing vibe and access to exceptional live music any day of the year that now must coexist with something much more decadent.
“You can have a fun, entertaining, unique experience here,” he said. “There’s nothing unique about downing 12 White Claws at 3 in the afternoon in 95-degree heat.”