A Long Walk On The Beach With Nathan Linegar
Linegar when the coast is clear. Photo: Cara Merendino, December 2021
A few times a year when the stars align and Nate rolls back into town, we’ll take a midday field trip to the beach and talk about life and the things that connect us. Mostly we’ll stare at the clouds with long periods of silence. Then a passing thought will swirl into the overexposed air above our thick heads of wild hair and we’ll get excited for a spell — a mix of past experience and near future excitement swarms in the space between.
Nate often goes into the details of his life on the road, tour managing huge bands on coast-to-coast, multi-month runs between venues that I’ve only seen on social media. It’s a virtual backstage pass for this old timer who’s anchored in Key West running a design studio while shuttling my two kids to school and baseball practice.
In a way I feel like I’ve known Nathan Linegar forever. He’s a soft-spoken old-soul type who’s actually ten years my junior — but in reality it’s only been a few years since we first met.
The finer details of that origin story are blurry at best, but it starts when he arrived in Key West as the tour manager for Rayland Baxter during the 2019 COAST Is Clear Festival.
I can confidently say it was a less-than-standard first meeting ahead of the weekend’s busy program. From there, let’s just say we had a lot of fun. There was some really good live music, too. And a handshake agreement — as the weekend fog lifted — that we should hang out again. Maybe even team up to produce a show or two together.
That was late 2019.
A few months later, Nate’s life along the live music highway came to a screeching halt when the coronavirus shut down that industry. And for someone who’d called the road his home for the better part of the last decade, he was, essentially, homeless. His final road trip entailed driving a truck back from Chicago to Brooklyn with Tallest Man On Earth where he then spent a few months at an old crash pad with other music industry friends like Liz Cooper.
As the bleak reality of the pandemic set in and the realization that live music would likely be the last industry to rebound became clear, Nate figured that he’d be better off seeking safe harbor in a place that might be more comfortable in the interim than New York City.
And after a brief conversation in late-May 2020, Nate made landfall in Key West a few days later — right as the state lifted the US1 Southbound blockade.
It was supposed to be a weekend visit.
But he never left.
As luck would have it, I had an extra room at the house and we worked out another handshake deal. Soon, he was “Room Nate” to my kids, and with loads of time on both of our hands, we spent long, lazy days at the beach and late nights in semi-lucid states plotting our return to live music greatness.
“Looking back on that time, it’s seriously hard to believe that we got from there to here,” Nate ponders while staring ahead through a pair of thick-framed vintage sunglasses with a sideways smile at the milky turquoise water in front of him. “I’ve never felt so lost and found all at once. I was without the one thing that pretty much defined me, but in a place that felt entirely comfortable and beautiful even considering the world around us was unraveling.”
It was among those complex feelings and during that time of uncertainty that our earlier post-festival-haze handshake agreement first got some wings.
He leans back and skims a thin slab of coral rock into the aqua abyss adding, “the more I got to know you — and the island — the more I began to understand not only the vision, but also the potential of COAST Is Clear. And I started to realize that even though I’d likely go back to a life that keeps me on the road for much of the year, it’d be ideal to have a good reason to continue calling Key West my home base.”
That was last week.
But we actually made good on the handshake deal a year ago just before Nate split town for his first post-pandemic tour with Dr. Dog in the spring of 2021. That’s when he eagerly hopped aboard as the COAST Is Clear Production Manager. And last December, his experience and expertise allowed us to confidently host Black Pumas, while his insight into the live-music industry machine has helped strengthen my nerve to continue booking bands that may have previously seemed too big or complex for me to handle on my own.
And while our mid-afternoon day trips to the beach are fewer and further between these days, his mail still gets sent to the house, the kids still look forward to Room Nate’s returns home, and his ideal scenario of finding a long term connection to Key West has been realized.
So keep an eye out for Nate around town. And if you don’t spot him ahead of this year’s festival, then just look for the handsomest and hardest working guy on the scene during the first weekend of December.
_____________________________________
A Long Walk On The Beach With… is a monthly feature in The Keys Weekly conceived and written by Billy Kearins (Me, haha) profiling local creative minds through free-form conversation during a trip to the beach.