Idly flicking through a travel guide in New York in the hope that sudden inspiration as to an appropriate destination might strike, fate intervened unexpectedly. The book fell open at one of the little known wonders of east Tennessee, the only (allegedly) three-storey-high, guitar-shaped building in the world.
My overwhelming enthusiasm for such an astounding architectural feat is utterly to blame for myself and my brother finding ourselves, after a graveyard Greyhound overnight bus journey, in Bristol, on the border of Virginia and north east Tennessee.
Greyhounds are slightly more spacious than their wolfhound-adorned brethren here, and manage to contain an outlandish array of characters. By 9 a.m. my eagerness to marvel at Bristol's main attraction had been overtaken by the all-consuming desire to escape the ceaseless drone of the rodeo rider from Kansas City beside me.
"Sure y'awl want to get off here?" the driver worried, making sure we knew the next bus came through in six hours. We were sure and scampered off, straining to catch sight of the three-storey-high stringed spectacle which must surely loom majestically on the near horizon. However we found ourselves on another typical Mainstreet USA. Dusty, closed and shut-up shops skulked down the street, the whole place felt dishevelled, disgruntled, discarded.
The only thing of interest about the town was that while stores on one side of the street declared "Virginia", those on the other stated "Tennessee" - all in a half-hearted dusty manner, as if they had tired of the novelty in an afternoon. This is the street Steve Earle's lovelorn outlaw, in the song Carrie Brown, says of his sweetheart's suitor:
We met again on State Street, poor Billy Wise and me, I shot him in Virginia and he died in Tennessee.
It was easy to picture spaghetti western tales of sheriffs chasing wavering drunks as they wove from state to state. Odder things started to emerge - five out of the six stores appeared to sell only secondhand jukeboxes. Had we unknowingly wandered into a film set or a town that David Lynch invented? Incredulity started to take a sinister twist. Plotlines for movies like Break-down and U-Turn began to creep gnawingly into mind. Half expecting second-floor blinds to flick, we walked on.
There was no sign of life at all, as if everyone had simply packed up and left.
On front of us a mural mutely declared, "Bristol Virginia/Tennessee A Good Place To Live."
Still no sign of the guitar, but nearing the end of State Street we came across Bob's Bagel Bakery. This was another movie scene. All conversation between the half dozen regulars murmured to a halt as we moved up to the counter.
"Do you take travellers' cheques?" asked my long-haired brother.
"Don't know," managed the staring girl behind the counter eventually. "Never seen a travellers' cheque before. Come to think about it, never seen a traveller here either."
In the background the other attendant clung round the kitchen door hissing, "Come out there's a hippie in the place". After things had calmed down and we'd sampled Bob's bagels, we asked what there was to do in town.
"Nothing," was the considered reply. "Well what do you do yourselves?" We wondered. They thought about it. "Nothing, I guess." Eventually Bob's combined clientele suggested that "there was the train station, but the trains don't stop there any more". Noone in the place knew of the existence of any guitar-shaped building in the vicinity.
There was nothing for it - we walked up to the train station. The notice-board was empty apart from the number of Monty's cab service. Monty "thought" he knew the "guitar place."
Our Lynchian impression of Bristol mutated to include Anytown USA's interchangeable outskirts as we drove through wide streets littered with typical 1990s plastic Americana malls, used car lots and furniture showrooms.
Suddenly we were in the Tennessee countryside. Twisting between low hills sweeping up to neighbouring Virginia's lofty Great Smokey Mountains, slopes were festooned with instant communities of flimsy prefabs. Eighteen-wheelers hauled them in neatly severed halves, wallpapered, ready to be inhabited once decanted, sealed together and left to roost.
As we burrowed further through the hills I gave up trying to memorise directions in case we ended up stranded and hiking back.
Monty, by this time, had decided to adopt us. He was desperate to take us back to meet the wife and kids, to let them hear our accents and have a real ol' southern meal. He wanted to lend us his extra car, to get us to stay for a week and take us to nearby Gatlinburg, to Dollywood, where Dolly Parton herself was playing that night.
Three miles out, we rounded a bend and there it was. The reason for our visit: The Grand Guitar, home to country music radio station W.O.P.I., oldest station in the state, standing 40 feet high.
We stood squinting at the beech, Martin guitar exterior, the perfect dimensions of the frets, the sheer inanity of it. Back down at ground level, what looked like Uncle Jesse from the Dukes of Hazzard appeared, bedecked in dungarees, check shirt and baseball cap.
"It's mahogany coloured round the Virginia side," he slowly offered. Introducing himself, he drawled at such a leisurely pace, it failed to form any recognisable name.
After a tour of the shop, (selling arrays of Martin guitars and assorted Grand Guitar and W.O.P.I. paraphernalia), we were ushered into the radio station. Or rather into a small cupboard with earphones, where our new friend checked the morning's CD haul.
Each got six or ten seconds of a listen. He didn't like this "modern stuff". Reviews consisted of, "Nope, nope, reckon this one gets the big zero", before he threw them in the bin.
We ventured into the museum on the second floor, dedicated to Tennessee Ernie Ford, a local luminary and deceased W.O.P.I. disc jockey. Maps and a wall of fading black and white likenesses showed where a dusty array of country stars from the past eight decades had been born and recorded. The Carter Family had recorded in Bristol as far back as 1927. Cases contained lyrics and record sleeves of obscure East Tennessee country legends. Tennessee Ernie was the big-shot; our guide assumed that was why we had come to the Grand Guitar, to pay homage to the man responsible for the classic 16 Tonnes.
It took a while to work out the reasoning behind the irregularly spaced windows; they corresponded with the frets outside. Up the final flight, a door opened and we were out on the neck.
It was quietly sunny in this unheeded corner of Tennessee, on top of this fantastic monument to a honky-tonk star, the noon sun sparkling on the yellow beech side. It seemed a farfetched and unreal distance between a barely plausible black and white photo stumbled upon in New York to standing between the blue haze of the hills of Virginia and the dusty green slopes of Tennessee on the neck of a three-storey-high guitar.
It was an effort to think of being anywhere more ludicrous, but then again, there is always Dollywood.