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Grimey's New & Preloved Music
NASHVILLE, TN • 1060 E Trinity Ln, Nashville, TN 37207
We’re sticking around Nashville this week, and hitting up Grimey’s.
Before Mike ‘Grimey’ Grimes opened a record store, he was a working musician. He toured the world and released a major label record with Bare Jr., then formed the Bis-Quits with Will Kimbrough, Tommy Womack, and drummer Tommy Meyer. They were good enough to be signed to John Prine's Oh Boy! Records as the label's first rock band.
When that chapter ended, Grimes opened Grimey's in Berry Hill in December 1999 with a specific vision: he wanted it to be "the Floyd's Barbershop of record stores," a place people came to hang out, not just buy things. Judging by the crowds each time we visit, he got that part right.
In 2002, Doyle Davis, an exec at fellow Nashville shop The Great Escape, joined as co-owner and pushed the store to focus on new vinyl, a bet that looks obvious now but that might have required a little squinting to see the future as it unfolded over the next 20 or so years.
In 2004, Grimey's moved to 8th Ave S, into a building that was as much a small music-industry campus as a record store: the live venue The Basement (also founded by Grimes) ran downstairs, while the top floor housed indie radio station WXNA, in space formerly occupied by artist management company Thirty Tigers. In 2008, Metallica recorded Live at Grimey's at The Basement before their Bonnaroo set that year.
The store moved once more in 2018, into a converted former church on Trinity Lane in East Nashville. With the Ryman known as Music City's "Mother Church," regulars have taken to calling Grimey's the "Other Church." In December 2024, the shop threw a 25th anniversary celebration at The Basement East, a Christmas-themed bash with covers and performances from artist friends who'd watched the store grow up alongside them. The real ones know that the real music in Nashville isn’t on Lower Broadway (setting aside, of course, Robert’s), but in places like Grimey’s.
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