KORT’s Cortney Tidwell Is Gonna Love You Now: Luigi’s

KORT is Lambchop frontman Kurt Wagner and solo singer/songwriter Cortney Tidwell, and with covers album Invariable Heartache (City Slang), the duo has recorded a sort of love letter to its hometown of Nashville and the city’s musical past. Eleven of the LP’s dozen tracks were originally recorded in the ’60s and ’70s for the Music City-based Chart Records (a label with huge familial ties for Tidwell), and the 12th song was cut by Tidwell’s mom, Connie Eaton, in 1975 for ABC Dunhill. And while the heartfelt Invariable Heartache is certainly ensconced in Nashville’s storied musical history, it’s a thoroughly modern statement by two of the town’s brightest hopes for Music City’s future being as fertile as its past. Wagner and Tidwell will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Q&A with them.

Tidwell: In 1982, I visited this man’s bar in Butte, Mont., a similar experience I recently found previously described in The New Yorker by Phillip Hamburger in 1962. Luigi’s was indeed a unique experience where a man’s joy and heartache lay open nightly for those patient enough to experience it as Luigi’s mood to fit the moment. But I’ll let Mr. Hamburger tell it, back in 1962:

Butte becomes quieter every year, except for the never-ending stream of trucks lugging earth up the steep inclines at the Berkeley Pit as Anaconda inexorably lowers the level of The Hill. A man called Luigi, who presides over a narrow bar and dance floor called Luigi’s, on The Hill, does his best to maintain the wild abandon of the good old days. He is a fierce-looking man, with high cheekbones and fanatical eyes. The walls and ceiling of his place are covered, top to bottom, with thousands of mechanical figures, including wooden dolls and metal spiders. Patrons wait an hour or more for “the mood” to come on Luigi. They know it will come. Luigi, a one-man band, sits quietly on the bandstand, surrounded by assorted drums and other percussion instruments, which are also waiting. The dolls are silent, the spiders at rest. “Don’t hurry me, don’t hurry me!” cries Luigi. “ I must warm up my bongo drums! I must do it in my own time!” Only Lugi knows when the time is ripe for “the mood,” when the bongo drums have reached the proper degree of heat. Then, in a flash, pushing a button on the bandstand, he transforms his establishment into a nightmare of spasms and contortions. Every last inch of Luigi’s bursts into action: crazy dolls dance crazily, animals leap and jump, spiders spin tiny mechanical webs across the ceiling, bells ring, drums beat themselves, the bar shakes, the seats rattle, the walls tremble. Patrons unable to sit still amid the general chaos, rise and engage in spasms and contortions of their own. Luigi’s eyes blaze, and his mouth becomes set. He twists his body sideways and forward. He looks like one of his dancing dolls. Everything in Luigi’s seems about to be torn loose from everything else, and to come tumbling down. There, above the winding tunnels of The Hill, Luigi lets out loud cries of delight mingled with cries of despair as he pummels his bongo drums.