Sunday Showcase special: Sal's Place

I spent lots of time crafting next week's Sunday Showcase and suddenly realized I didn't have anything for today so I have hastily thrown together this post. There was a night club that I never went to in Nashville, even though by the time I was old enough to go they were featuring hard rock and metal music. That club would be Sal's Place. It was located at I-24 and Haywood Lane in the ads featured here, but I could have sworn it was located in a strip center on Nolensville Lane later on. The earliest ad I could find was this one from the August 7, 1983 Sunday Showcase and the club was most definitely not metal at this point. This particular Jay Thomas was all over Nashville in this time period and I wonder if it was the actor/comedian/disc jockey dude who was on Murphy Brown. His IMDB bio says he went to Vanderbilt at one point.

Less than a month later and the club is billed as being Nashville's newest live 50's & 60's hot spot. The Van-Dells were 50's revivalists al a Sha Na Na.

Sal's looks like it's become more of a dance club in this advertisement from January 1984. Don't forget that Wednesday night is Ladies Night!

Later in the year it looks live live music is back in the mix as they advertise a month full of Mary Burns in September. She would also come back for New Years. Here she is covering Janis Joplin. I dig her voice and her hair. 

                   

Joe Savage is playing Sal's in July of 1985. Joe was fairly famous for using giant pythons in his act and taking a chainsaw to tables. He also liked cutting the neckties of music executives in half. It's billed as a limited engagement and it may have been for Sal's, but Joe seemed to be playing every night in Nashville during the mid-80's.

Heavy metal music becomes the thing later in 1985. Michigan thrashers Ded Engine come to town on November 8th, 

It's no longer Sal's Place. It's Sal's Rock 'n' Roll Club by March of 1986. Malice with Transgressor on a Saturday night in Nashville would have a rocking night. 

  

Things do get a little weird in June of 1986 as Sal's decides to bring in some male dancers billed as the Heavenly 7. The band Fighter that is listed is probably a Christian rock band. I don't know anything about Bobby Morgan but if he's featuring Mike Simmons I'm sure it rocked. I think hard rockers Buster Brown were from Kentucky. They were a darn good band. 

It's really a shame for me that I never got out to Sal's. I kept looking through Sunday Showcase's for more ads after 1986 and came up empty. I suspect it is because of a new free music paper called The Metro that was coming out more than once a month by then and perhaps Sal's spent their advertising money there instead. There is quite a noticeable decline in club ads in Sunday Showcase's from 1986 on. I'll dig out some of my actual hard copy Metro's and see if I can perhaps do a second post on Sal's in the future. If you have any Sal's stories feel free to share them. Next Sunday's post will look back to November 10, 1974.