Local male revue Music City Gents, on the other hand, is a little more Ginuwine’s “Pony.”
Music City Gents operates out of a building on Trimble Street in Chestnut Hill. And for founder Adam Visbeen — who first entered the male-revue scene back in 2017 — the cowboy trope is limiting.
“I never wanted to be full cowboy,” he explains. “I don’t think Nashville is cowboy. I don’t think we’re very much that cowboy culture at all. But I do understand that these girls think it is.”
The serial entrepreneur previously ran transpotainment company Nashville Party Barge. He also ran a now-defunct scooter tour business. When Visbeen left active military duty in 2017, he bought a house in Germantown. He lived in the garage, showered at the local YMCA and used his new house as a short-term rental. With the money he saved, he launched Music City Gents.
“I stuffed flyers in my back pockets, put my cowboy hat in the back of my shirt, and I rode down to Broadway after work on Friday [on a scooter] and handed flyers out till, I don’t know, midnight,” Visbeen says. “Then Saturday morning, I knew exactly where every party bus, pedal tavern, party anything was happening, and I would just walk Broadway like Terminator, looking for girls in bachelorette attire and talking to them.”
Visbeen says that by his fourth year in business, he did $1 million in sales thanks to word-of-mouth marketing.
Visbeen has applied the work ethic he developed while in the military to grow his business — so much so that his dancers can rely on Music City Gents for full-time income. But he’s also a retired dancer himself. He was an extra in 2015’s Magic Mike XXL, and during filming he befriended dancers from famous Dallas strip club LaBare. For a time, he even flew in from Fort Campbell, where he was stationed, to dance at LaBare on weekends. (At one point he learned to juggle fire, but the Nashville Fire Department put a stop to that when he tried it at Music City Gents.)
These days, Visbeen manages the business — running his Airbnb, managing party buses and even driving a shuttle bus. Even so, during a recent show, a joke about Visbeen coming out of dance retirement garnered some of the loudest screams of the night.
Over at Music City Gents, it’s all about teamwork. The guys set up and tear down the show. They also check in and seat guests. It builds a rapport between the guests and the Gents, Visbeen says, and allows the Gents to take ownership of the show. He says it’s rare for a Gent to leave the show, and the core group leans on each other during times of struggle — like when one of the Gents died during off-season, or when Visbeen’s father died on a show night.
“I just know that at the end of my life, I will always be so proud of what we built here as a team, even if I don’t make as much money as the next person,” Visbeen says, “because I would be so proud to know that I built a team that gave a shit about each other.”
Visbeen has something most other male-revue proprietors don’t — his own building. He owns the Music City Gents space at 69 Trimble St. (Yes, that’s really the address.) Each of the male revues mentioned in this story has dealt with venue uncertainty. Nashville has a limited number of midsize venues that can accommodate a male revue on weekend nights, so the groups often fight over the same few stages.
In their seven-year tenure, Music City Gents have performed at six different venues: the now-defunct Piranha’s, Bowie’s, The Valentine, Nashville Underground and Hard Rock, before finding their permanent home in The Trimble. Seeking to put money down on a permanent home, Visbeen was met with banks that conflated the male-revue business with strip clubs. He wasn’t able to get the loan to purchase the building, so he began renting — and the owner eventually allowed him to purchase it.
“I’ve called a few bank executives, I played hardball,” Visbeen says. “It’s like, ‘Show me in your policies where it says anything against what I do,’ and they couldn’t prove it to me. It was just their perception of what they didn’t want to have involvement with.”
A bit of context: A male strip show is defined by its setting — a strip club. Visbeen says male revues also differ in that they’re during a set time block. Both Ranch Hands and Music City Gents borrow the tipping tradition from the strip-club world, encouraging guests to shove dollars in performers’ pants and pockets. Chippendales distances itself by banning tipping, but performers with both Chippendales and Music City Gents strip down to their briefs.
Visbeen says he put $750,000 into renovating the building, which was slated to be completed in January 2023. But then he says he encountered problems with a contractor that eventually resulted in a lawsuit. And earlier this year, several inches of water flooded the space. Despite the challenges, Music City Gents officially opened in May.
“I always knew competition was going to come,” Visbeen says. “Kind of sucks, financially, but at the same point, I have the number one thing that nobody else has, and I will bank on that all day — because at any moment, any one of those shows can get the boot to the street.”
See the full article here