If you need some help finding your way to the Nashville bar named after Morgan Wallen, you’re in luck, thanks to the Metro Nashville City Council.
On Dec. 17, after one previous failed attempt, Wallen and the owners of Morgan Wallen’s This Bar & Tennessee Kitchen were granted permission by the council to install a 20-foot-high neon sign over the bar and restaurant in Nashville’s Lower Broadway entertainment district. As reported by the Tennessean, the council approved the proposal by 30 to 1.
TC Restaurant Group, which own This Bar, and the Metro Nashville City Council did not immediately return Rolling Stone‘s requests for comment.
The battle over the sign started last April, before the opening of the bar, when Wallen threw a chair off the sixth-floor balcony of Eric Church’s own bar on Broadway, Chief’s. The chair landed on the sidewalk, mere feet from police officers. Wallen was arrested and charged with three counts of reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon and one count of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor.
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The following month, Wallen’s bar, which is named after his 2019 song, applied for an application for the large neon sign, which would be hung over the sidewalk and be the second sign for the establishment. But Wallen’s arrest, as well as the fallout from his use of a racial slur in a video from 2021, both seemingly played a role in the denial of the second sign. In May, the council voted it down, 30 to 3 against. As one council member said at the time, “I don’t want to see a billboard with the name of a person who’s throwing chairs off of balconies and who’s saying racial slurs and using the N-word.”
In the case of Wallen’s sign, though, the second, not third, time was the charm. Last week, in a court appearance that lasted all of 10 minutes, a clean-shaven Wallen pleaded guilty in the chair-throwing case to two misdemeanor counts of reckless endangerment. Wallen agreed to spend a week at a DUI Education Center, be placed on supervised probation for two years, and pay a $350 fine.