Category: Article

The SPCO hits the road for a three-week tour of the Twin Cities, celebrating the works of that cranky genius Beethoven, a man whose love life was a series of trysts with one married lady after another. Commitment phobic or just unlucky in love? Either way, he died single after channeling his romantic energy into a body of work that seems crafted for the heart as much as the ear. This year’s festival is devoted to his symphonies—all nine get a workout—as well as the piano concertos. For its finale, the SPCO will wrap things up with a performance of Ode to Joy at the Basilica of Saint Mary in Minneapolis, which ought to really get the bells ringing in the old Beaux Arts landmark. 651.291.1144; www.thespco.org

Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, CD available November 21
This is what we want for Christmas, even if the leathery, Beetlegeuse-ish Waits is more a Halloween kind of guy, and even if we probably can’t wait that long. A career retrospective (not a greatest-hits collection), this three-disc set compiles twenty-four rarities and thirty new songs by an artist absolutely without peer. In other words, Orphans offers a treasure trove for longtime fans and a splendid introduction for new converts. Many of the tunes from Waits’ catalog of spooky, minstrelesque ballads—concerning such subjects as love, death, dogs, and booze—would sound like sweet little carnival gems if they weren’t sung in the gravelly croak of a well-marinated carny. And plenty manage to be beautiful all the same, wrecked pipes be damned. Then there’s Waits’ version of bonus tracks: his bizarre interpretations of songs by folks like the Ramones, Daniel Johnston, and Leadbelly.

It’s one thing to buy a band’s album; it’s another thing entirely to buy them new instruments. (Isn’t that what parents are for?) But something in the Decemberists, a sort of homely ensemble of indie balladeers from Portland, Oregon, must bring out the inner nurturer in their followers. When the band’s tour van and gear were stolen a couple years ago, fans helped raise cash to get the band back on its feet. And how did the Decemberists repay that generosity of spirit? By signing to a major label and making The Crane Wife, a delicate, multilayered set of songs inspired by history and literature, and influenced by a host of musical forebears, including Robyn Hitchcock, Elliott Smith, Neutral Milk Hotel, the Waterboys, and the Handsome Family. 612-332-1775; www.first-avenue.com

Charity comes in strange packages: Dr. John is raising some cash to aid New Orleans reconstruction efforts by selling his underwear. However, it should be noted that the good Doctor’s briefs are brand new, and emblazoned with a snazzy souvenir New Orleans logo. (He wears size large, by the way.) The Crescent City legend has also undertaken more conventional fundraising efforts; he’s been an omnipresent figure on the benefit-concert circuit, supporting wetlands reconstruction, displaced NOLA musicians, and a variety of other Katrina-related causes. Known to his mother as Malcolm Rebennack, Dr. John’s piano-driven blues is one of the most distinctive flavors of the diverse New Orleans music scene—making him a fine ambassador for NOLA, if not a great underwear salesman. 1010 Nicollet Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-332-1010; www.dakotacooks.com

Norman Andersen flipped a switch on the side of a contraption that looks like a combination of a pipe organ and a china cabinet, albeit with a bright red Scandinavian door harp perched like a cherry on top. “This is called Valkommen!,” Andersen said. The thing began to wheeze and hum, then the pipes moaned out an uneven dirge. A bass drum started booming slowly from within while a mechanical arm strummed a shrill tune on the door harp, another tapped a handmade cymbal, and a pair of cheap red castanets clattered. After a few minutes, the whole thing folded back into itself with a gentle sigh. It was a mesmerizing performance. “Thing is, I just can’t sell these,” Andersen explained. “They’re like elephants. Everyone loves elephants, but no one wants to own one.”

Andersen is a tidy man, with the impish look of a fellow who takes sheer pleasure in his work. He’s always been interested in music and art, in fashioning things from found objects, and in combining the two. Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, the son of an architect father and a music teacher mother, Norman would enlist his pals to help him make spook houses and work with electricity and model airplanes. As a young man, he enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute and eventually ended up at MCAD, where he also taught for some time. “At first, I thought I wanted to be a painter,” he said. “But then I discovered that I could make contraptions.”

Andersen’s large house is filled with musical instruments, from a trombone to a drum set to a grand piano. All this competes for space with Valkommen! and other indoor sound sculptures that make countless types of noises when engaged but are often simply pleasant to look at. Some are as big as refrigerators, some as long as a Cadillac, while others fit snugly on top of a speaker or end table. Even Andersen’s doorbell is a sound sculpture. Hanging on a plank above the sink in his retro-style kitchen is a series of three plates with plastic fruit glued to them, a wine glass on its side, a carving knife, and a Bundt cake pan with blue stripes. When the front doorbell is rung, wooden balls strike the plates and butter knives, the wine glass spins, and the carving knife slices back and forth through the air. The back doorbell makes the Bundt pan spin and emit a ratcheting noise.

Lately, Andersen has turned his attention from indoor sound sculptures to outdoor art objects that also make noise or simply twirl in place. These “self-composing” devices use wind and the elements to make all kinds of noises. Accord, commissioned by the City of Minneapolis, sits in the gateway of the Southeast Como neighborhood’s Van Cleve Park. Looking like one of Wilhelm Reich’s cloudbusters, it’s a giant cylinder surrounded by a spiral of rusty organ pipes pointing straight into the sky. Accord performs its kinetic concerts at noon, three, six, and nine o’clock each day. At these times, an electric blower pushes air through the pipes while a windmill controls the tempo, determining what you’ll hear on any given day—from one note, when the air is dead, to a whole chorus on a blustery day. “I like to work with technology,” Andersen explained, “but I don’t like the coldness and aloofness of machines by themselves. It’s a great transition to go from machine to wind. The capriciousness of nature—that’s what’s human.”

Andersen’s garage and basement are filled with junk acquired during his travels, from bicycle rims to old organ pipes to metal bowls that, when struck, give off lovely, hollow sounds. A visit to his basement, with sawdust everywhere and windows made from Mrs. Butterworth’s bottles, is like stepping into the man’s brain. There’s a circular UHF antenna that, when plugged in and stroked with a violin bow, makes a melancholy moan. Tossed about this cramped dungeon—but undoubtedly in some sort of order—is a Flexicord (an Andersen-invented pedaled device with strings), pieces of bamboo, shell casings, bugles, cowbells, toy drums, and a pair of tiny, elf-like shoes that his aunt, a former CIA agent stationed in Vietnam, brought him years ago.

Andersen’s pièce de résistance is Rainmaker’s Baggage, a thirty-two-foot sound sculpture on display at the Northwest Airlines baggage claim at Sea-Tac International Airport. Pink, red, yellow, and purple suitcases, guitar cases, makeup kits, and overnight bags are skewered on a long pole. When the sculpture is engaged, luggage begins to spill out along the conveyor belts, and the programmable-logic controller spins the kebabed bags around and around. These have been modified to rattle like rainsticks while acrylic sheets rumble below, approximating thunder.

Andersen created Rainmaker’s Baggage at the behest of the Port of Seattle and had to scrounge around on eBay for some of the luggage. “Reaction to that piece is divided by the sexes,” he said with a laugh. “The men want to know how the thing works; the women want the luggage.”

On a recent Thursday evening, Courtney Tucker—a tall, blonde twenty-two-year-old art major at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse—stood behind a twenty-four-channel effects console in the school’s darkened planetarium, her face reflecting colored shadows from a baffling array of buttons and knobs.

She tapped several of the buttons, and shooting stars showered down from the white dome, illuminating the room—a mere twenty-four feet in diameter, with two rows of padded red benches lining the perimeter. “Time Warp,” Tucker said. “That’s my favorite.” She turned a knob. The stars slowed, then shot upward. She scribbled a few notes on a sheet of paper.

This was Tucker’s second time running Album Encounters, where a record (alternately classic and modern rock) is spun to a choreographed light show each Thursday night during the school year. She had already spent eight hours preparing Pink Floyd’s Meddle, and the show was scheduled to start in an hour. She was visibly nervous.
Tucker is the successor to astronomy professor Bob Allen, who ran Album Encounters from 1974 or 1975 (he forgets the exact year) until last spring, when he retired. And although she had three shows under her belt, this was Tucker’s first time playing the music through the planetarium’s computer system, which has the nasty habit of freezing. One of the lighting effects had stopped working earlier in the week, and one of the two speakers had sputtered and crackled during Tucker’s preshow run-through. Allen, who hand-wired most of the system, had kindly sat through the previous week’s show to offer occasional assistance. On this evening, however, he’d stayed home.

In a telephone conversation, Allen described himself as an admitted astronomy and music junkie who is “into space” and “fell head over heels for synthesizers.” He first saw Led Zeppelin (favorite band) play at the Met Center in Bloomington back in 1970 and later saw Pink Floyd play the Milwaukee County Stadium (favorite concert). He started Album Encounters to entertain friends and touring rock bands, and eventually opened it up to students.

When Allen finally retired, he feared the program would disappear, but Tucker, formerly his assistant, enthusiastically offered to take the reins. “How could you not love it?” she said. “It’s music under the stars.” Her nineteen-year-old assistant, Brian White, showed up around seven p.m. wearing torn jeans and toting a skateboard. He offered a similar story: “I came to a few of the shows freshman year and really liked it, and at the end of the year I was, like, pretty motivated to keep it going. I emailed Bob to see if there was anything I could do to help, and here I am.”

Besides the main board (offering fifty-five effects) and the sky-projection equipment, the planetarium has a hodgepodge of other bells and whistles added by Allen over the years, including several strings of Christmas lights, a strobe light, a disco ball, and a light-up alien that Allen refers to as the Big Green Man. Tucker and White have taken to waving laser pointers through ornamented thrift-store glassware. “Bob liked rapid transitions and mixing different-colored lights,” Tucker said. “I like the heavy, slower stuff that kind of consumes you.” She paused. “But I still like the strobe light for big moments.”

The first arrivals, showing up fifteen minutes early, were two girls in sweatshirts and jeans who entered reverently and, after a bit of deliberation, sat in the back row. They gazed up at the lighted dome, then leaned back in the familiar planetarium posture: a deep slouch, with feet extended and head nestled on the top of the seat. The shows are promoted through flyers and word-of-mouth, and attendance varies, though certain bands (Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin) tend to draw larger crowds than others (Dandy Warhols, Bright Eyes). Only seventeen people had showed up the previous week for the year’s first show, featuring the music of Mason Jennings (Allen had never heard of him). But by eight o’clock on this evening, the planetarium, which comfortably holds about sixty people, was filled with seventy-five students sitting knee-to-knee, whispering about parties and David Gilmour solos.

At 8:05 p.m., Tucker dimmed the lights and pressed play. The second speaker crackled and fell silent. She turned up the volume. The song skipped briefly but recovered. Five minutes into it, the music climaxed, and Tucker, whose head swung furiously between her written notes and the control panel, layered Star Field Clouds (spinning stars) over Color Organ (colored lightning above a cloud cover), transitioned into Time Warp, and punctuated the combination with a single flash of the strobe light.

“Wow!” one girl exclaimed from the back row, and was promptly shushed by a boy sitting in front of her.

Around these parts—north of the Mason-Dixon and east of the Mississippi—rodeo seems like a romantic and quaintly exotic pastime, like bull-running in Spain or céilí dancing in Ireland. “Cowboy” is a costume you wore for Halloween or the role a Hollywood stud pursues to establish his hotness. Yet on a recent autumn afternoon, the University of Wisconsin–River Falls Rodeo Club was keeping alive a tradition it’s maintained for forty-two years.

At the rodeo grounds, the aroma of manure wafted through the air, and Rascal Flatts blasted from the loudspeakers. Children shrieked, a horse whinnied, and a sparse crowd gathered to watch the show. A couple cowgirls were in charge of wrangling cars into parking spots, and what immediately stood out were their scuffed and dusty boots, peeking from beneath the flare of their jeans. Young men and women of all shapes and sizes adhered to the old boots/ jeans/plaid shirt/hat standard.

What seemed like a spaghetti western trope was, here, real and elemental—its timelessness making many of the spectators and participants appear ageless. On closer inspection, however, some were clearly quite young, with baby faces smiling beneath the wide brims of their hats. Others had a grave, premature, John Wayne quality, the skin around their eyes creased from many an hour spent in the sun. Most sported solid-color vests with their college insignias embroidered on the back—the “jersey” they would wear to identify them during the competition. For the time being, though, they simply milled about with their horses.

The rodeo began when the announcer, Jesse Knudsen, entered the ring on his strutting horse. The reaches of his thick twang defined the limits of the arena and set the tone for the day: sincere, but sort of lackluster. While he rhapsodized about freedom and cowboys, the competitors started suiting up in their protective vests and mouth guards. Horses were outfitted with the flank strap—a tight belt that cinches the horse’s haunches and incites them to buck. The buzzer sounded, a metal gate crashed open, and the first horse let fly.
There was something mesmerizing about the way the horse and cowboy moved together; how the rider tried to keep one hand high in the air, his feet thrashing back and forth in rhythm with the horse’s leaps and spins. The whole day was full of such images: clichés of rodeos and cowboys—the myths of the American West that are imbedded in our collective memory from films and television. As the day wore on, what was even more surprising than these living, riding archetypes was how unassuming and ordinary the actual people were. Their boots were meant for barnyards, not dance floors. Their jeans were scarred by the dirt and sun. They were there for the rodeo, not for the show.

The participants came from the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Nebraska—cowboys and cowgirls representing ten college rodeo clubs. Some had earned their first rhinestone belt buckles by the time they were three years old, but in River Falls, most would garner little more than dirt in their jeans and half-hearted applause. Yet weekend after weekend, they drive all over the Midwest to face off against animals that are supposed to be angry. Jessica Painter—the women’s all-around winner and former state high school champion from Buffalo, South Dakota—talked about the satisfaction of belonging to a “community you can trust,” noting, “the people are the same wherever you go.” Pretty and diminutive, with heavily mascaraed eyes, Jessica didn’t seem like a girl who would excel at jumping off speeding horses and wrestling animals in the dirt, but her poise and eloquence were evidence of the confidence her impressive record has given her.

In contrast, a handful of cowboys relaxing in the bleachers after their events were nearly impossible to understand. Clearly pleased by the attention, but bashful, they mostly joked with each other in an indecipherable, accented slang. They were utility-line and irrigation majors from Nebraska: boys who had grown up on ranches, for whom hard outdoor work—including rodeo—was a fact of life. They placed their hopes in rodeo and betrayed their bitter disappointment in snide comments and grimaces, though most acknowledged matter-of-factly that they would probably never win. Yet they persisted all the same, said Dirk Dailey, a fair steer wrestler who spoke only when he had something to say, “for that one perfect ride”—those eight seconds (or less) when horse and human are bound, when “time stands still, and then everything just explodes.”

Nancy Nelson was a blur as she readied her new shop, Our Little Secret, for its grand opening a few weeks ago. She had lots of help transforming the storefront, which is across the street from the former Lyndale Garden Center in Richfield. Aged relatives stuck price tags on bric-a-brac. Daughter Susan and grandchildren Sarah and Megan uncrated fashion accessories and decorative objects. Nelson’s husband, veteran WCCO news anchor Bill Carlson, attended to middle-management tasks as visiting friends were charmed into service arranging merchandise. All the while, Nelson—best known in recent years as the reigning queen of infomercials—buzzed around, clearly in command of the mission’s complex logistics. And with the same tsunami-strength enthusiasm she used to pitch Power-Flo paint rollers and Juiceman II Automatic Juice Extractors to insomniacs, Nelson made it all seem like fun.

Nelson is pep personified, a product of the showbiz gene pool that brought us such spunky girls-next-door as Mary Tyler Moore and Katie Couric. Propelled by 1000-megawatt moxie and more than a smidgen of wholesome sex appeal, she worked her way from community theater to newscasting to late-night As Seen On TV fame. As a teen in the mid-60s, she made her professional stage debut at the Old Log Theater in The Impossible Years. Her entrance, in a bikini, prompted her father to exclaim from the audience, “Oh my God, Florence!” That reaction was echoed in many local households when Nelson became a miniskirted late-night weathergirl for WCCO-TV. “People started to recognize me after that,” she recalled. “They’d say, ‘I don’t know your face, but the ankles are familiar.’ ”

For years, Nelson and anchorwoman Pat Miles were the Mary Ann and Ginger of Twin Cities television, friendly rivals for the unofficial title of Hottest News Personality. Nelson graciously yields to Miles in the looks department (“I’ve got the second-best boobs in the market,” she once told a local media reporter), but she’s second to none when it comes to perkiness.

The woman also has a serious knickknack habit. Her new store is so overstuffed with merchandise, it suggests an aggressively girly version of Ali Baba’s cavern. There are paisley Pashmina shawls, bejeweled watches, lacquered fountain pens, pop-up picture books, and iridescent glass lamps that would make a peacock look drab. All of it was acquired through the network of wholesale vendors Nelson met as a pitchwoman—and, of course, purchased at low, low prices, with the savings passed on to you!

Nelson got her business education young, tagging along with her father in his Flav-O-Rite Sausage delivery truck. In the process, she got to know everyone from the guys behind the meat-market counter to customers at the mom-and-pop corner stores.

Performing came naturally. As an only child, Nelson said, she was always entertaining “the mirror, the cat, the dog, or any unfortunate visitors.” Her second-grade teacher arranged for her to study drama at the MacPhail Center for the Performing Arts. There, she acted alongside high school students and told everyone her future plans were “to go to Broadway and be a star.” At 17, while hostessing at a Perkins, a customer told her to shelve her Broadway plans and come work for him at KMSP-TV. By the time she was a Roosevelt High School senior in 1964, Nelson was hosting Date with Dino, a live, daily teen-dance program that ran for a year on Channel 9. She learned to ad-lib commercials alongside spielmeister Mel Jass, the WTCN Matinee Movie host renowned for his ability to improvise sixty-second pitches without rehearsal or cue cards. At the Old Log, she played romantic ingénue parts opposite Nick Nolte for half a decade.

Nelson’s sincerity on camera led to positions anchoring newscasts and talk shows in the Twin Cities—where she spent the first dozen years of her marriage to Carlson as his on-air competitor—and in Los Angeles. She eventually found her niche in chatty, long-form commercials, convincing America that the Popeil Food Dehydrator was “fun!” Ron Popeil bought a mansion and a yacht with the proceeds; Nelson got a modest paycheck but also public renown and respect in her peculiar industry. The CBS Morning News called her “the best-known and most effective TV saleswoman on the planet,” and, in fact, her work has been seen around the world, from Russia to Malaysia. These days, she not only hosts but also produces and creates TV infomercial campaigns.

Flitting about her store, Nelson showed off its inventory with the wide-eyed wonderment she brought to hawking George Foreman’s Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine. Every item elicited a “Wow!” a “Look at this!” or an “Isn’t that great?” Since Nelson plans to personally greet and assist customers at the store, a trip there promises to offer patrons both a shopping experience and a sort of personal show.

Nelson’s husband beamed as he watched her in action and pointed out a pair of gold bumblebee ornaments on Nelson’s denim shirt. He explained that he’s made it a tradition to give her jewelry that features bees. “Aerodynamically, a bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly,” he said. “But the bumblebee doesn’t know that, so it just soars merrily along. That’s Nancy.”