“A Moving Experience”. Now there’s a phrase that pays, and all the more so if you are going through the process of relocation.

For the past few weeks every waking hour has been devoted to packing, boxing and generally condensing my life’s work into an army of crates stamped with that impassive instruction, ‘This Way Up’.

After spending fourteen fascinating years producing, writing and playing bass in Nashville, the hand of guidance has now beckoned me to a far taller metropolis, that of Manhattan in New York City. Given the prospect of combining an habitual thirst for knowledge along with a successful domestic existence, it’s a move that just had to happen.

Back with the packing, I’ve attempted to be as discerning as possible when it comes to deciding on which accoutrements will make the journey and which won’t. An element of selectivity here is essential, particularly when you begin wading through something like a bulky collection of written works. In my case, guilty pleasures that include a binder full of Mojo magazines, the Osborne and Hamilton singles catalogues and Peter Guralnick’s two fine tomes on Elvis Presley immediately went into the ‘yes’ pile.

At the opposite end of the scale works such as “The Best of the Worst Hollywood B-Movies”, “Skateboarding For Beginners” and “Country Music Babylon” were consigned to the trash bin as being way past their sell-by dates.

Having separated the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, this was where the most challenging problem of all came into play. Anyone who has been down this road before knows full well that when you finally begin to make some headway, everything grinds to a halt if you allow yourself to thumb through the pages of a book you haven’t come across in some time.

That’s precisely what happened when I blew the dust off Mark Lewisohn’s “The Beatles Live”. First published in 1986, this intricately-detailed almanac was an itemization of every gig the group ever did, as well as a thorough investigation into some of the key events that took place during their rise to fame.

So, in a moment of weakness, I found myself drawn to that surreal story about The Beatles being turned down by Decca. Once again I blinked in astonishment when I read how the group was rejected in favour of Brian Poole and The Tremeloes, not because they were more promising but purely and simply because they were based in Barking, just eight miles from the company’s office. The Beatles on the other hand lived 200 miles away, so the Decca hierarchy decided it would be far more expensive to ferry them down to London.

History, of course, is littered with stories about A&R screwups. In Nashville, for instance, the mega-selling Garth Brooks was turned down no less than eight times before he landed a deal with Capitol.

It follows that the pendulum sometimes swings the other way, in that an artist can become just as problematic as a label. When former reality TV show winner turned country singer Carrie Underwood was due to catch a flight out of Nashville recently, she was ushered into a private lounge at the airport prior to departure.

By sheer chance, Garth Brooks and his wife Trisha Yearwood happened to be in the lounge at the same time, yet the young madam refused point blank to speak to either of them. Then at a recent ice-hockey game at the city’s arena twixt The Predators and The Ottawa Senators, Miss Underwood, who is currently dating one of the Senators’ forwards, was briefly caught on camera sitting in a corporate suite.

 To the embarrassment of those around her she proceeded to duck out of sight, a move that did not impress the crowd. All of this comes at a time when Tom Bryant, a long standing radio producer at WSM in Nashville, has published with a list of his thoughts on some of the ‘classic country’ names he encountered along the way.

Tom chose Brenda Lee as being the funniest female, Lynn Anderson as the biggest diva, Buck Owens the most modest guy, Jimmy Dean the foulest mouth, Ray Stevens the most off-the-wall, and Merle Haggard as having the biggest groupie entourage.

With the stashing of the books completed, it was time to turn out my once bulging filing cabinet and examine the documents it had held since the move to Nashville. By today’s standards the contents were now looking distinctly historic. Items such as cheque stubs, AFM membership cards and a trail of snail mail, were just one step away from being exhibits at the Smithsonian Institute.

A brief inspection of some business correspondence from 1995, reminded me of the time when I needed to replace the term C.V. with the more colloquial ‘résumé’ before submitting my list of achievements to the mavens of Music Row. “Producer, Broadcaster, Musician and Writer” then sounded very grand, but I soon learned that you needed to focus on one area alone if you were going to make any headway.

Ironically, here in the present day, the exact opposite prevails. The more strings you have to your bow the better, otherwise the only tune they’ll play is ‘downturn in the economy’.

The one British act I worked that had any connections to country music, was the zany Hank Wangford Band. It turned out that the Nashville label heads weren’t into ‘country pastiche’ as such, and far more interest was shown in my work with artists like Jeff Beck and Kim Wilde. Just give them time, I thought, just give them time. (To be continued)