Country bad boy Morgan Wallen has a PhD in partying, Nashville sources say: ‘Nobody can stop him’
Morgan Wallen may not have gone to college, but the controversial country music superstar has a PhD in partying.
Sources told The Post that when the 30-year-old isn’t on tour, you can find him living it up at Nashville’s notorious neon-lit Lower Broadway bars where scantily-clad bartenders and honky-tonk cover bands are the norm.
“He seems to love getting in trouble on Broadway,” Jason Steen — who runs ScoopNashville.com, a site chronicling Music City arrests, including Wallen’s — told The Post. “That has just been his thing.
“He’s like a college guy. It’s nothing to see Wallen leaving the bars with folks and ending up at the Waffle House at 3 a.m.”
Wallen acts like, Steen said, “he’s the king of Broadway and nobody can stop him.”
But police put an end to Wallen’s fun this past Monday night, after the singer allegedly threw a chair from the sixth-story rooftop of Chief’s, a new bar and restaurant opened by fellow country star Eric Church.
He was reportedly laughing when he tossed the chair onto Broadway, where it landed three feet away from Nashville police officers.
The singer was arrested and booked into jail, charged with three felony counts of reckless endangerment and one misdemeanor count of disorderly conduct. He posed for a mugshot with a big smile on his face.
It wasn’t his first time acting out on the boozy strip. In 2020, Wallen was busted on charges of public intoxication and disorderly conduct after getting booted out of Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll steakhouse. According to the Tennessean, he was 86ed for “kicking glass items” and cops deemed the singer a “danger to himself and the public.”
Wallen later wrote off the behavior as “horse playing”; according to USA Today, the charges were likely expunged.
Nashville’s Lower Broadway has, in recent years, become a tourist destination for bachelorette parties and “what happens in Nash Vegas stays in Nash Vegas” types looking to get wild at bars affiliated with country stars: Dierks Bentley’s Whiskey Row, Blake Shelton’s Ole Red, Jason Aldean’s Kitchen + Rooftop Bar and Miranda Lambert’s Casa Rosa.
The area attracts some 230,000 visitors each weekend but, Steen said, “Most country stars wouldn’t be caught dead on Broadway except for their contracts [requiring them to spend a certain amount of time at bars they are affiliated with].” He said of Wallen, “I can’t think of a bar that he hasn’t been spotted at down there.”
In fact, Wallen is soon to open his own This Bar and Tennessee Kitchen on Lower Broadway with TC Restaurant Group, which also partnered with country acts including Florida Georgia Line (FGL House) and Luke Bryan (Luke’s 32 Bridge Food and Drink).
Named for Wallen’s song “This Bar” and adjacent to the legendary Ryman Auditorium, the 30,000-square-foot spot is slated to be six stories tall, with three live performing stages and a gift shop.
As Wallen posted on his website, “I sing about finding myself in ‘this bar’ and now it’s coming to life.”
It remains to be seen whether the singer’s latest arrest might get in the way.
“If Morgan is planning to be an owner, they might want to apply soon because having a felony conviction, which he does not currently have, could disqualify him from getting a liquor license,” Rob Pinson, partner and alcohol licensing specialist at Adams and Reese, a law firm in Nashville, told The Post. “But a lot of these celebrity-branded honky tonk deals are royalty based, and he could get royalties rather than being an owner. Deals like that receive less scrutiny than straight ownership and it likely won’t be an issue for him.”
His spokesperson told The Post that This Bar will open this summer. A representative for TC Restaurant Group did not return calls.
In February 2021, Wallen was admittedly inebriated when he was caught on video shouting the n-word. It went viral and Wallen went to rehab and later donated at least $300,000 to the Black Music Action Coalition.
After describing himself as being on “hour 72 of a 72-hour bender” when the video was shot, he told Michael Strahan in a “Good Morning America” interview that “for 30 days, I spent some time out in San Diego.” He added that he asked himself, “Do I have an alcohol problem?”
In October 2020, Wallen was bounced from a “Saturday Night Live” appearance for violating covid protocols, when social-media footage showed the singer kissing girls and partying in the days before his scheduled performance.
Wallen’s reportedly something of a playboy. In February 2022, Page Six reported that model Paige Lorenze split from the singer after “getting all these messages on Instagram from girls saying, ‘I was with him. We slept together,’” according to a source, who also noted that Lorenze “suspected [Wallen] was cheating on her with multiple people.”
He started dating social media influencer KT Smith in 2016, before finding fame, and the two got engaged and had a son — Indie, now 3 — together before splitting up three years later.
“Being thrown into the spotlight at such a young age is obviously going to come with some bad decisions,” Smith told People of Wallen. “He wasn’t the most faithful.”
Following Monday’s chair-throwing incident, a source told the Daily Mail it might have been inspired by the news that Smith recently got married to someone else. “KT’s marriage .. just crushed him,” a source told the outlet. “Whatever happened in the bar had to be reality hitting him in the face over losing the love of his life.”
However, Smith denied this.
“Although it may seem like it correlates because of the timeline, I have no evidence to believe the incident had anything to do with the recent marriage announcement,” she told the Daily Beast.
Despite the whirlwind of trouble and rumors around him, Wallen — a preacher’s son who grew up singing in a Baptist church in small-town Sneedville, Tennessee — seems to have a Teflon coating.
After losing “The Voice” in 2014, he scored a recording contract with Big Loud Records in 2016. Transcending the country genre, Wallen’s 2018 debut album, “If I Know Me,” made the top ten on the Billboard 200, making it a crossover hit, while his next two albums — “Dangerous: The Double Album” (2021) and “One Thing a Time” (2023) — both debuted at No. 1.
Following his use of a racial epithet, Wallen’s “Dangerous” was disqualified from several awards shows. But on Tuesday, hours after the incident at Chiefs, it was announced that he had received six nominations for the upcoming Academy of Country Music Awards.
“Morgan Wallen has built a solid fan base … I’d normally say he’d bounce back from this incident pretty easily,” Diana D’Angelo, owner of the PR firm Breaking Creatives, who has worked with Dolly Parton, told The Post. “But this isn’t the first time he’s gotten in trouble. If he wants to be a legacy artist, I’d say he really needs to get help.”
