The Rake Magazine

Tag: music

  • Standing Ovation

    Thanks for reprinting the 2003 WSJ Opinion piece. I
    remembered it, but couldn’t recall the source. I may print copies and
    hand them out the next time I go to any performance in the Twin Cities. A
    couple of weeks ago, Jorja Fleezanis performed Elgar’s Violin Concerto
    with the Minnesota Orchestra, which was conducted by the regal Sir Neville
    Marrriner. I gladly stood to applaud as Jorja Fleezanis received a magnificent
    bouquet of tulips following her equally magnificent performance. It truly was
    a lifetime event for her and merited a standing ovation. But….not every
    performance of the Minnesota Orchestra, not every traveling production that
    shows up at the Ordway, pleeeaase.

    Bill Levin, Minneapolis
    Letter

  • Craig Finn’s Playlist


    The Hold Steady     are well known for tossing hosannas to the Twin Cities’ landscape and music scene, past and present—from name-checking the “Grain Belt bridge” and Payne Avenue to sonic nods to all manner of local bands. Never mind that frontman Craig Finn, a native of Edina, decamped to Brooklyn some seven years ago—the Twin Towns (and their suburbs) remain a key inspiration. Of course, influences outside our city limits also filter into Finn’s songs: hints of Jersey boy Bruce Springsteen (OK, maybe not just hints) or Ohio’s Guided By Voices, not to mention shout-outs to dive bars and shopping malls stumbled across on countless and lengthy tours. So we asked Finn what he’s listening to these days, now that his geographical horizons are wide open.

    1. “Enjoying Myself,” The 1990s
    We are taking this band on our upcoming tour. Their live show backs up the claim of the song, that they like enjoying themselves. One line I particularly like: “I’m glad we had the party at your place.”


    2. “Shirin,” Jens Lekman

    I read a negative review of his new record that said Lekman was “condescending,” which might be true. But if it is, it might be one of his best traits.

    3. “I’ll Be Your Bird,” M. Ward
    This song is an older one, but it’s perfectly creepy and beautiful, and sounds rooted in no particular decade, which is a songwriting feat.

    4. “4% Pantomime,” The Band
    Every few months I get stuck on the Band. The version I am loving right now is a demo, where Van Morrison stops midway through, offers some advice to the group and tries it again, with Rick Danko taking the first verse this time.

    5. “Crazy For Leaving,” Catfish Haven
    George Hunter has one of my favorite voices in indie rock. These guys are soulful in the way that Creedence was. We took them on tour and would hear this song every night, and I would wake up singing it every morning.

    6. “Thrash Unreal,” Against Me!
    It seems that every article I read about this band is about punk-scene politics, but no one seems to want to talk about how massive these songs sound, especially with a chorus of a few thousand excited kids singing along.

    7. “Fear and Whiskey,” The Mekons
    My friend told me that the Mekons’ live show is “even better than The Replacements.” A big claim, to be sure, but the Mekons sure delivered.

    8. “Louisiana 1927,” Randy Newman
    Newman is tender and humorous here in a way that almost no one else can be. His songs are often more like character studies, and stunning in their depth.

    9. “Elvis Cadillac,” Rickie Lee Jones
    Her record this year knocked me on my ear, not only its droney, Velvet Underground-style backing band, but also its confessional tone. I think this is the record I listened to the most this year, and this is the most charming song on the record.

    10. “Knock ’Em Out,” Lily Allen
    After seeing every “important” band in the world on the European summer festival circuit, I saw Lily Allen on my last night in London. Her live show beat everyone I had seen all year, just by the sheer fun of it. She even did two Specials covers. In this song she coolly turns down potential pick-up artists as quick as they arrive.

  • Honorable Exit

    My mother took me on a wild, unforgettable ride the morning she died. Drugged and nearly comatose for about twenty-four hours, she suddenly started breathing heavily, opened her dull, mucus-covered eyes, and began writhing her shoulders off the bed. I was holding her hand, and she gripped me so hard that her bones stabbed painfully into my palm. This intense, disquieting resistance lasted between five and ten minutes, and then Jeanne Northridge Robson was dead from cancer at age fifty-nine.

    Nearly twenty years later, I can say it was the last of many incredible gifts she bestowed upon me. I’d anticipated a subdued, imperceptible death; the nurse would come in and check for a pulse, whisper the news, and then pull the sheet up over the body. I’d coated my thoughts with that scenario the way one applies sunscreen on the way to the beach. But my mother burned through the balm and peeled away some mystery for me. She showed me how you can be alive one minute and dead, tangibly dead, the next. Ever since that morning, I have urged friends to be present, if at all possible, when someone they love dies. My younger sister, the only other person in the room at the time, changed her career to hospice work.

    Among all of the claptrap surrounding death in our culture, only some of it involves our fears and ignorance of the dying process. Much of it is more ignoble, tied up in melodrama and titillation. “Gawker slowdown” describes a certain type of traffic jam, but that term also factors into the way we patronize artists, being drawn magnetically to those who die tragically and early. Every generation has a few potently dead icons (James Dean, Jack Kerouac, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, et al.) whose live-fast, die-young biographies are seductive to fledgling artists at least in part because of the promise of self-destruction as a lazy shortcut to celebrity.

    Among jazz artists, the most insidious icon of this type was Charlie Parker. Heralding the revolution of bebop, he had the perfect sobriquet—Bird—because his alto saxophone solos could levitate and veer and soar like none before him. But Bird was flighty in other ways, too; he was a man of great appetites and impulses, and died of drug addiction in 1955 at the age of thirty-four. Dozens of talented musicians emulated his heroin use in the mistaken belief that it might unlock some of the secrets of his artistry.

    Whether he fell prey to Parker’s mystique in particular or the ravages of the jazz life in general, John Coltrane was among those addicted to heroin and alcohol in the 1950s. After celebrating his sobriety with the classic A Love Supreme in 1964, Coltrane became more overtly spiritual; Ascension in particular is unremitting in its intensity and became a hallmark of late ’60s avant-garde for its “sheets of sound” saxophone wail. In 1967, in the midst of this obsessive and uncommonly beautiful spiritual journey, Coltrane’s death at age 40 from a liver ailment put an immediate and lasting luster on his legacy. It is no coincidence that Ken Burns’s PBS series on jazz—probably the closest thing we have to a historical overview of the music for the masses—states that “John Coltrane was, after Charlie Parker, the most widely imitated saxophonist in jazz.”

    One wonders if Burns would still be making that claim had ’Trane lived to a ripe old age, and another saxophonist of that era—say, Sonny Rollins or Wayne Shorter—had died young instead, in the midst of one of his own high-profile, quickening phases. In the wake of Parker’s death, Rollins (born just four years after Coltrane) was generally regarded as the new saxophone king. Academics transcribed his thrilling improvisations and revealed them to be geometrically pristine, compositions of integrity conjured on the fly. Today, at seventy-seven, Rollins continues to top critics’ polls and is generally regarded as the most compelling soloist in jazz. Meanwhile, Shorter, due to both his brilliance as a composer and his acute intuition as a player, has dramatically raised the caliber of any ensemble he joins. It happened to Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the ’50s, the Miles Davis quintet in the ’60s, and Weather Report in the ’70s. Today, at seventy-four, his Wayne Shorter Quartet is probably the most intellectually rigorous and rewarding ensemble in jazz.

    These comparisons certainly aren’t meant to denigrate Parker or Coltrane. But how clearly would we peg their influence if, instead of dying at thirty-four and forty, they’d each lived another forty years? What if they’d gone on to respond to the music’s artistic ferment on a day-to-day and year-to-year basis, if they’d had to face challenges from younger generations—even as they struggled to remain vibrant and innovative through the watershed perspective of middle age and beyond? The point is, the persevering excellence of Rollins and Shorter is equally heroic, and should be equally emblematic of jazz sainthood.

    Which is why, while it’s an admittedly macabre notion, I hope that Rollins and/or Shorter have the foreknowledge and facility to deliver artistic works influenced by their impending mortality. Put bluntly, I want them to make music that shows an awareness that they are dying. It doesn’t have to be soon—may they both live to one hundred. But it seems only just that death should come forth in art that reflects the tangible reality of old age and disease as well as the romantic titillation of youthful tragedy.

  • Living Room Licks

    Fifty twenty-somethings crowded into Two Pines, a dark living room in South Minneapolis, on a sweltering Sunday night, flowing into any space not filled by six musicians and their guitars, mandolins, and banjos. The singer, clad in drooping denim overalls, strummed a few chords of a Mazzy Star song and chuckled. “What does this song remind y’all of?” he asked in a gravelly, whiskey-soaked baritone. “When Napster was free!” called a girl standing on a couch and clutching a beer. “Right now!” someone hollered, “The best night of my life!” The singer laughed and proceeded to hammer away on his guitar, jumping up and down as the crowd packed in around him.

    Great music does live here, as a certain local radio station proclaims. It’s just not always where you might expect it. The punks call them basement shows. Classical and folk musicians prefer “house concerts.” Whatever the phrase, house shows, once an avenue for aural experimentation, have become trendy alternative venues for new bands, strange bands, underage music lovers, and anyone who doesn’t want to pay for a five-dollar cover and four-dollar beers.

    House shows, of course, are nothing new. Typically they have been havens for musicians scorned by mainstream audiences. Ernst Krenek, the famous composer who lived in St. Paul during World War II, teamed up with players from the Minneapolis Symphony (now the Minnesota Orchestra) to introduce atonal works in homes across the city. In the 1970s, jazz artists like Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman played lofts in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Shortly after, punk’s DIY attitude turned basements nationwide into instant venues.

    Those shows, however, were exclusive and unpublicized; in other words, they occurred during the pre-MySpace era. Now, anyone with a basement or living room or even spare bedroom can promote the space to thousands of bands and potential audience members with a few keystrokes. While there aren’t solid figures on the number of house venues—they’re ephemeral, after all—they’ve proliferated in recent years. Some achieved fame, like the now-closed Bremen House in Milwaukee that hosted indie darlings like The Faint and The Rapture and emo rockers Jimmy Eat World. Others, like the Metric House in Minneapolis’ Seward neighborhood, just hosted shows until the cops were called one too many times.

    There are at least a dozen active house venues in the Twin Cities, including two just blocks from each other on Minneapolis’s Lyndale Avenue South. At the Two Pines house—run by Andrew Jansen, an amiable folk musician in his twenties, and his roommates—shows are acoustic and free. They used to be scheduled a few times a week with as many as six bands a night. Then Jansen realized they were testing neighbors’ patience and scaled back to a few each month. Down the street, the Pocketknife hosts punk shows every week or so. The two places, like most, promote modestly (mostly through MySpace) and draw dedicated crowds, mostly friends and neighbors.

    There’s also Castle Greyskull (yes, named after the evil fortress from He-Man) elsewhere in south Minneapolis, a venue that tends toward “spazzy electronic weird shit that makes you want to puke rainbows while you dance,” said Max Clark, who lives there. They haven’t had issues with neighbors, he claimed, except once when an especially ebullient music fan raced around the block drunk and naked, prompting a call to the police, who showed up to find several other naked revelers.

    For some bands, houses are their favorite venue: they’re intimate and all-ages, and most have no trouble getting dozens of people out any night of the week. And they’re the only place to hear music that commercial venues won’t touch—like at Two Pines earlier this summer, where a guy in a ragged T-shirt banged away on a contraption of cooking pans and other metal objects, screaming unintelligible lyrics. (He received raucous applause.)

    The people who run these neighborhood clubs say they want to promote musical diversity and give bands more options. “We aren’t at war with the bars or coffee shops,” said Jansen. “It’s a place for friends and for people that love each other to get together and celebrate friendship and social issues. It’s a home.” His comments seem to put twenty-first century house shows on the level of the free-love collectives of the Haight-Ashbury era, but he’s got a point: While attendees may celebrate brown-bagged bottles more than berate the status quo, they also meet their neighbors, as well as possible bandmates, friends, and dates.

    The jury’s out on whether house shows affect the bar-and-coffeehouse circuit, but, according to a June survey in the national trade mag Atlas Plugged, most promoters and owners are happy to have them. When bands that start out in basements advance to club stages, they tend to bring a crowd with them. And as long as there’s local music, there will be local house venues.

    It follows, too, that as long as there are house venues there will be neighbors to overhear the goings-on. To wit, that recent Two Pines party ended promptly at 12:30 a.m. after a stern-faced policewoman arrived for the third time that night, following a neighbor’s complaints. One attendee muttered something unprintable about cops as he stomped out, and a girl with him socked his shoulder. “Come on,” she said. “They gave us six hours. I bet they came the first time for the show.”

  • Chris Osgood’s Playlist

    Breaking news: Members of Minneapolis’s pioneering ’70s punk trio, Suicide Commandos, have officially (though with tongues apparently planted firmly in cheek) dubbed themselves a “legacy band.” How appropriate, then, that the Commandos have been tapped to open for yet another rock legend—the supremely fabulous and hugely influential Ms. Joan Jett—for an August 26 Grandstand concert at the State Fair. It’s a coupling that might leave Commandos fans scratching their heads, but it gets even weirder; the bill also includes the New York City-based power-pop band Fountains of Wayne. At the very least you can expect an eclectic indie music-listening experience and some first-rate people-watching. (The unusual lineup was apparently the brainchild of booker Nate Dungan—also of the band Trailer Trash.) We were certainly pleased to find the reunited Commandos still keeping such stellar company, and were curious to know what other bands were turning their cranks these days. We caught up with frontman Chris Osgood to ask what tunes were on regular repeat on his home, office, and car stereos. As he was immersed in preparations for his band’s reunion concert, Osgood offered this caveat: “I have to admit my listening is very Commando-centric these days.”

    My song, "Complicated Fun," (Commando bassist) Steve Almaas’ "I Need a Torch," and (Commando drummer) Dave Ahl’s "Weekend Warrior" are among the songs we are dusting off and gearing up to Commando Fury tempo for the Grandstand show at the State Fair. Oh boy!

    I also play guitar with a cover band called The X-Boys (former Commandos, Suburbs, Wallets, and other musical luminaries of the period: Dave Ahl, Casey MacPherson, Max Ray, Steve Fjelstad, Bruce Allen, Rochelle Becker, and guests Chan Poling and Hugo Klaers). We do things we think are amusing. Songs I am wood-shedding this week are: "Sing a Simple Song," by Sly Stone; "Jailbreak," by Thin Lizzy; and "Wait Until Tomorrow," by Jimi Hendrix, which kind of gives you an idea of the aesthetic of that band!

    We play the first Friday of every month with the [Front Porch Swingin’] Liquor Pigs at the Eagles Club in South Minneapolis. Bruce and I play matching pink Hello Kitty guitars, which we like to think add some tang and élan to our performances. See for yourself—set time is 9:30 and it’s free.

    The Warblers (Dave Ahl and I) are currently adding Nanci Griffith’s "Gulf Coast Highway" and Bob Dylan’s "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down" to our acoustic duo set list. The Warblers are opening for Steve Almaas’ acoustic solo set at the 331 Club, Wednesday, August 22nd. (When you play in three bands you have more chances than ever to mess up the chords and sing poorly!)

    Like everyone else in town this summer I’m hearing a lot of Brother Ali. I was lucky enough to do a radio show on the old Drive 105 with him before the Voltage Fashion Amplified show last spring. It was amazing to watch him throw!

    That show was a benefit for Springboard for the Arts’ Artist Access to Healthcare program (AAH). I am director of artist services at Springboard, and it is my job to help self-employed creative people make a living. To that end I listen to lots of new musical projects. Two of my high-rotation songs recently are "Tugboat" off of Molly Maher’s Balms of Gilead album and "Twenty-Eight" from the Project Twenty-Eight EP by Minneapolis DIY recordist/songwriter and circuit bender Gerald Prokop.

    The Suicide Commandos play with Joan Jett and Fountains of Wayne at the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand on August 26. For tickets, call 651-288-4400 or visit www.mnstatefair.org

  • LOCAL MUSIC: Wanted Man

    The local music scene’s ubiquitous and ridiculously busy hot hand, Erik Appelwick has, remarkably, been living in the Twin Cities only six years. Having grown up in South Dakota and Michigan, and then kicked about South Dakota for a while during his collegiate and postcollegiate years, he made the bold decision in 2000 to move east, if only slightly. “I wanted to play music, and there wasn’t really anywhere there to play,” he said of his old South Dakota digs. “I was scared to move to a really big city—afraid of being eaten alive and that sort of thing. Minneapolis was just the closest place. And I was even afraid of moving to Minneapolis.”

    That admission turned out to be the most telling detail Appelwick would let slip during the forty-five uncomfortable minutes he spent rehashing his whirlwind music career. For while he has enjoyed many successes of late, he doesn’t particularly relish talking about them.

    Appelwick had come ambling into Spyhouse, a South Minneapolis coffee shop known for its loyal patronage of MCAD students and musicians. There he ran into Dan Wilson, the Minneapolis singer-songwriter and frontman for Semisonic. He lingered for a bit to chat, but not long enough to make him late for an appointment. Then the clean-shaven, neatly dressed Appelwick took a seat in the sunlight. “How are you?” he asked quietly, his voice barely audible above Tom Waits’ “Day After Tomorrow.”

    According to the brief career history he’d provided in an earlier email, Appelwick’s youthful fascination with KISS—and, embarrassingly, Huey Lewis and Peter Cetera—led to piano and guitar lessons and then, in high school, to playing percussion with his school’s orchestra band. (“First chair, thank you,” he’d written.) He then got a taste of the spotlight while playing guitar with the Harvesters, a University of South Dakota rock band that found its way, in 1996, to the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas. But any exposure SXSW might’ve provided was mostly squandered, as Appelwick and his bandmates spent the bulk of their time getting drunk.

    Fast-forward to the year 2000. Appelwick eased into his new hometown of Minneapolis, having quickly hooked up with another South Dakota export, Darren Jackson (Kid Dakota, Alva Star, The Hopefuls). Soon Appelwick was playing guitar with Jackson’s band Cellophane, an infectious power-pop foursome that morphed into Camaro, then The Olympic Hopefuls, and, finally and simply, The Hopefuls. During this same time, Appelwick was also cobbling together an income by gigging with Kid Dakota and Alva Star while trying to persuade others to let him play on their records—“bass and keys or tambourine,” he said. “I can play just about everything. I can come up with a melody for a song if it needs it.”

    All this while he was writing and recording his own songs as well. At the urging of Jackson and other new-found Minneapolis friends, those homemade recordings became Blood & Clover, the booty-shaking debut from Vicious Vicious, an enduring solo project on which Appelwick plays “pretty much everything, except drums.” The 2005 follow-up, Don’t Look So Surprised, proved equally groovy.

    This past April, after initially offering to help the band with future recordings, Appelwick became bass player for Tapes ’N Tapes. The band quickly became an indie rock sensation, with the requisite grueling tour schedule. The unfortunate upshot of Tapes ’N Tapes’ success was that The Hopefuls tribe came to the conclusion that Appelwick no longer had time for their band and let him go.

    The ability of some musicians to carve out a living is an enduring, and sometimes obsessively jealous, fixation for lesser- and non-musicians alike. As for Appelwick, he’s sustained himself on “record sales and money from shows.” Call it dumb luck perhaps, but he’s managed to do so without much knowledge of the financial nuts and bolts of the business; for example, he has no idea whether Tapes ’N Tapes’ July appearance on the Letterman show helped bump sales for the band’s latest release, The Loon. Likewise, Appelwick isn’t particularly fond of marketing. Vicious Vicious, he said, has been heard only by local music aficionados and random visitors to his MySpace page; he hasn’t even bothered promoting his records to college radio stations, an established and time-honored route for most indie bands. “I’m not that good at business,” Appelwick noted more than once. “Talking about it sort of cheapens the experience for me. I’m much better at the process.”

    But that’s not to say he’s particularly adept at discussing the process, either. In his defense, by this time, Appelwick was clearly losing steam and admitted to being jetlagged, having returned just the day before from a Tapes ’n Tapes tour of the U.K. His gray eyes had started to glaze over. When asked how he goes about writing his songs, or why, for that matter, he continues slogging his way through the pitfalls of the music industry, Appelwick shrugs. “I’m just doing it because that’s what I do,” he said. “And I like doing it.”

  • A Rakish Holiday: Silent Night, Unholy Night

    It’s not hard to understand the aversion some people have to the ubiquitous music of Christmas. There are literally thousands of recordings in this genre, and every year the market is flooded with new product. Much of it is indisputably execrable, and obviously driven by the crassest and most exploitive of impulses. But then, it’s part of an industry where crassness and exploitation are the norm. (A pretty damning accusation, yes, but let’s be honest: We are, after all, talking about a holiday that ostensibly celebrates the birth of the Son of God.) But holiday music inspires a host of other feelings besides disgust. There’s consternation and relatively benign indifference, and, toward the furthest end of the obsessive spectrum, devoted study, psychologically complicated appreciation, and genuine private (and often embarrassed) pleasure.

     

    Like the holiday itself, the music of the season is by and large an exercise in excess. There are scads of lovely and enduring Christmas songs, but there isn’t a one of them that hasn’t been butchered countless times by overwrought vocal performances and equally overwrought arrangements, often (in both cases) wholly inappropriate. And now that you start hearing the stuff pumping from the speakers of stores and shopping malls as soon as the Halloween merchandise disappears from the shelves, even the once-beloved holiday chestnuts and warhorses have become inescapable—and therefore annoying—through the New Year.

    Yet the true aficionado of Christmas music understands that in this genre, purity of motive or sincerity generally counts for nothing. Nobody ever went into a California recording studio (or a recording studio anywhere) in the middle of the summer to assemble a Christmas record simply because they were overcome with holiday spirit or a sudden fierce desire to unburden themselves of the ten-thousandth interpretation of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” No, even the most softheaded fan knows that he is being brazenly manipulated by those large-hearted barons of the music industry. These predatory characters are masters at exploiting the unique combination of nostalgia, emotional vulnerability, and atavistic hope that make the holidays a psychological minefield for so many, inducing in Americans all manner of complicated mood disorders (most prominently a collective case of manic depression) for at least one solid month on an annual basis. The true pleasure of much Christmas music, in fact, is precisely a product of its rare ability to tap into all those complicated feelings, and to whump and whang away at them relentlessly during the last weeks of the year.

    Given the short retail window of opportunity that holiday albums have (which is balanced, of course, by the fact that they can be shuffled back onto the racks year after year in perpetuity), it’s astonishing how many such records are released—Amazon currently lists 1,867 holiday discs—and how many units some of these records move. More than nine million copies of Elvis Presley’s Christmas Album have been sold since its initial release in 1957. Kenny G’s Miracles: The Holiday Album has racked up sales of more than eight million. Last year, James Taylor: A Christmas Album, sold exclusively at Hallmark stores, was certified platinum only a couple of months after its release.

    Since the beginnings of recorded sound, people have felt compelled to spend time and money making Christmas music for the commercial market. Based on the available evidence, it’s possible, in fact, that many of these folks didn’t have the foggiest notion of what they were up to—any commercial market they may have had in mind was purely a delusional fancy (another fundamental characteristic of the music business). In the last half of the twentieth century, virtually every major music figure of note eventually recorded at least a side or two of Christmas music, and the genre has also proved irresistible to various vanity artists, delightful eccentrics, and obscurities, from local choirs to lounge acts to regional country performers. Anthologists have made the Christmas compilation an art form, thanks in part to thrift stores of America, where bins are brimming with holiday LPs of every imaginable sort.

    Speaking from experience, it’s quite easy to acquire a collection of nearly two hundred Christmas records without ever quite recognizing that one’s interest has spiraled into obsession. Many of these are worth acquiring simply for their garish covers; the designers of album jackets, from the rankest amateurs to the staffers at major labels, have elevated the art to a pure and potent form of American kitsch.

    The vast majority of the Christmas music that’s been released in recent years is utter garbage, yet every season reliably produces a few new classics—there was Low’s “Just Like Christmas” in 1999, for example, and Ron Sexsmith’s lovely “Maybe This Christmas” in 2002, while last year brought Chris Isaak’s “Washington Square” and “Christmas on TV,” both from his uniformly gratifying first entry in the holiday record lottery.

    The sheer eclecticism of the vast catalog of holiday music is part of its charm and enduring appeal. For those of us who collect and actually listen to these records, the criteria for separating the pearls from the pork can be wildly random. There are those who relish the off-kilter and the just plain weird—novelty songs, in general terms (Foghat’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Cheech and Chong’s “Santa Claus and His Old Lady”), as well as radical interpretations of standards (e.g. the Dickies’ version of “Silent Night” or Stiff Little Fingers’ take on “White Christmas”).

    From the sacred to the secular to the truly profane, Christmas records offer something to cheer or offend just about everyone, and the stockpile of standards and the oodles of available versions of these songs represent both a public domain free-for-all and a study in the art of interpretation.

    For many Christmas music purists, the golden age ran roughly between 1955 and 1965, when the great crooners and cocktail swingers were in full autopilot mode and the big studio arrangers were given the resources and encouragement to run amok. Those were the days of Steve and Edie (whose exuberant “Sleigh Ride” is still, for my money, unbeatable), Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Robert Goulet, and Goodyear’s Great Songs of Christmas, an instantly classic ten-album series that was released in yearly installments. The records of that era represent the perfect nexus of the bachelor pad and the family room, and the versions of the seasonal standards they served up were pure cheese, now properly aged. Even the sacred cows were blissfully fat, corn-fed, and wobbly with brandy.

    The absolute zenith of that golden age was Jackie Gleason’s 1956 extravaganza for Capital, Merry Christmas. Gleason had a fairly long-running side career as an impresario/music engineer, in which capacity he produced a series of heavily orchestrated and downbeat records under his own name. He was the great renaissance man of bachelor-pad swank and swoon, and his ridiculously bloated excursions into the swirling mists of mood music are some of the most intoxicating—and intoxicated—documents of fuzzed art damage ever recorded. The birth of Christ has never sounded like such an utterly joyless occasion.

    I’ve probably listened to Merry Christmas more than any other record in my Christmas collection, possibly more than any other record in my collection, period. The entire record is a Prozac sleigh ride through very dark woods indeed, and every year I make it my own holiday ritual to spend hours trying to figure out its strange appeal, to explain the odd grip it has on me. Jackie arranges even “Jingle Bells” as a blindfolded and hobbled march through those same woods, headed for a bullet in the back of the head and a meeting with the bottom of a black river swirling with sharp fragments of ice.

    Some nights I put that record on and I have no problem at all imagining that it’s 1956 and the snow is falling—the snow has been falling for days. I’m sitting in front of a hideously flocked tree and a big, blazing fire, blasted out of my toasted body on cocktails, listening to Jackie and his orchestra utterly deconstruct the songs of Christmas, recasting them as equal parts Spanish fly and Jägermeister. Smashola in Lonelyville.

    The power of this record, I think, lies in the way it plumbs the heart of the romantic desolation, loneliness, and ultimate disappointment of winter and the holidays, and then plunges all the way through to the reserves of melancholy that are buried deep in the sentimental heart of Christmas past and present. Depending on the circumstances, this is a record that could either get you laid or induce you to put your head in the oven; it sounds alternately like Christmas Eve with a girl in your arms or a gun in your mouth.

    You can go ahead and take your pick, really. Give him enough chances, though, and Jackie will tear your heart into little pieces. And odds are good you’ll eventually nod off in front of the fire, only to wake up later and put your head right back in your hands.

  • Above & Below

    From a Twin Cities perspective, Duluth’s alternative music and arts scene briefly flashed across our consciousness for a while around the turn of the century. Seemingly all at once, there was a great compilation CD (Duluth Does Dylan), a breakout band (Low), and a feisty, well-written alterna-rag (the Ripsaw). There were big stories in Twin Cities papers about glimmers of hipness somehow flickering to life in that cold and rocky land. The whole idea was just so appealing—the thought of a thriving mini-scene in beautiful-but-depressed Duluth somehow made you believe that there was hope for us all.

    At least that’s how I, a one-time resident of Duluth, felt about it. But in the last few years, things seemed to sour. The glowing stories dried up; the NorShor Theater, which was at the epicenter of the movement, closed for what seemed like the twelfth time; and the Ripsaw, locked in a circulation battle with another alternative weekly, was showing signs of exhaustion. It was easy to come to the conclusion that the “Duluth scene” was too good to be true, and that, like so many other attempts to break the city’s long losing streak, it had come apart at the seams.

    Lately, I’ve been getting up to Duluth again a lot, thanks to a new job that prompts me to visit there every month, and from what I’ve seen, the city’s homegrown arts and music scene seems to be not just alive, but in fact poised to move beyond its first flowering. Thanks to a much-needed shift in the city’s political winds, it’s now getting the kind of respect at home that previously came only from outsiders. The election of Mayor Herb Bergson and a majority of arts-friendly city councilors in February has drastically changed the equation, and the local scenesters, long used to being completely on their own, are running with it.

    When I first went to live in Duluth in the late 1980s, I had expectations that I now know are typical of Twin Cities folk who pull up stakes and head north. Basically, I expected nothing in the way of art and music, except for a few rawkin’ blues honkytonks and discos in Superior and the American Legion hall in Morgan Park, where supposedly there was a killer polka band. Big-city aesthete that I was, I dreaded being separated from the then-thriving Minneapolis alt-rock scene. I knew the Replacements sometimes played Duluth, but they certainly didn’t live there—and that scared me.

    After I unpacked and took a couple of months to look around Duluth, I discovered my music fears were pretty well-founded. Also, my timing was not good: The four years I spent in northeastern Minnesota as a reporter for the Duluth News Tribune probably represented the region’s low point in terms of its economic collapse. In general, people who lived there weren’t in much of a partying mood. It was hard for the young folks to give a damn about Trip Shakespeare making a rare appearance at a tiny bar when they had just got the news that Dad was going to be replaced at the paper mill by a computerized mechanical arm.

    But worse yet in my mind was Duluth’s near-complete paucity of any kind of arts and music counterculture. Of course, there were a respectable number of established arts venues like UMD’s Tweed Museum of Art, a fine institution then and now. There was also the Duluth-Superior Symphony Orchestra, the Minnesota Ballet, and the absolutely essential comedy troupe Colder By the Lake. The last year I lived there, in 1989, they started up the Bayfront Blues Festival, which is now a big cultural plus for the city but then was tiny.

    Still, I missed living in the kind of place where someone with very little money and an anti-establishment attitude could find solace in a thriving community of artistic expression. I went from rubbing shoulders with the Hüskers at First Avenue to treasuring open-mike Monday nights at Grandma’s as the highlight of my week. That’s when I decided I’d better move back to “the Cities” before it was too late. Turns out I was about a decade too early.

    Even though I had trouble accepting what to my mind were its cultural inadequacies, I always loved the physical beauty of Duluth and the Big Lake. I also had a strong suspicion that despite the collapse of the natural resources-based economy upon which it was built, the town had untapped potential to develop a really vibrant alternative culture. What convinced me was that even in the midst of its most recent post-industrial bust, Duluth was attracting noticeable numbers of liberal, ecologically-minded people from around the country who came for its unique combination of adequate urban amenities with real wilderness right out the back door—and this was even before the Internet and telecommuting allegedly made that kind of lifestyle possible.

    As for the kids in the local music scene… well, I felt sorry for them. At the time, anyone with a thimbleful of talent loaded up the van as soon as they had the gas money and headed down I-35 to Minneapolis. Why stay in Duluth, where there were no decent venues, no community support, no one with enough spending money to go out and see a band? The city’s cycle of self-fulfilling doom was in full flower.

    A decade later, by 1999, it seemed all that had been vanquished. Rick Boo, the son of former Duluth Mayor Ben Boo, had established the NorShor as the first real venue for a burgeoning roster of local bands playing original material. An eclectic coffeehouse opened in West Duluth, Beaners Central, run by Jason Wussow, frontman for the band No Room To Pogo. Ripsaw, published and edited by another musician, Brad Nelson of the Black-Eyed Snakes, was taking on City Hall’s ill-considered development deals and giving a voice to the emerging counterculture.

    Up until very recently, it troubled me to think it was all was sliding downhill again.

    Part of the problem with the sustainability of Duluth’s scene was its very strength—its grassroots nature. The bands and their fans were young and inexperienced in the ways of community-building. They found out the hard way that you can’t just put on a show in the barn and expect the city’s power brokers to come a-calling, eager to help out.

    The city’s mayor from 1991 until last February was Gary Doty, who won the office in part because of his reputation as a moralist in the wake of the 1980s expansion and gentrification of city attractions like Canal Park. Whereas his predecessor, John Fedo, attracted controversy, Doty was a churchgoing family man among whose goals it was to encourage a no-nonsense honesty in City Hall. Doty came over to the mayor’s office from the St. Louis County Board, where Northeastern Minnesota’s DFL politics are at their most hidebound. They’re very different from what I was used to in Minneapolis. Characterized by strong support for organized labor but espousing conservative social values, this brand of DFL thinking makes it possible to blast the GOP for its anti-union ways, yet support calls to keep the Ten Commandments displayed on public property. It’s a unique type of institutionalized leftism, born in an industrialized past in which workers were mercilessly exploited, and combined with a socially repressive streak common in rural areas everywhere in America.

    Not surprisingly, Doty clashed with progressives who disagreed with some of his social stands, such as his refusal to recognize the city’s gay and lesbian pride movement, as well as his approaches to developing the city. Doty favored big developers and the big projects they proposed, such as the Tech Center on Superior Street in downtown Duluth, and a golf course surrounded by upscale housing at one of the city’s gems, the Spirit Mountain recreation area.

    Earlier this year, perhaps as a backlash against the retiring Doty’s brand of traditional Northeastern Minnesota leadership, Duluth voters sided with the progressives. Herb Bergson, the former mayor of Superior who campaigned hard against the golf course and in favor of green and social justice issues, was resoundingly elected mayor. The City Council’s most liberal members were all re-elected, giving them a solid majority.

    In his day, Doty was no supporter of rock music or alternative culture. This extended to the Homegrown Music Festival, an annual event started in 1998 that probably did more than anything else to forge what cohesiveness the Duluth scene was able to muster. When this year’s event kicked off on May 6 at Fitger’s Brewhouse, there was an unmistakable optimism bubbling along with the freely flowing pints of Fitger’s Hempen Ale.

    Scott Lunt, of the band Father Hennepin and founder of the Homegrown, led the cheers from his DJ perch as he declared the festival officially open. It was a stark turnaround from his announcement a few months earlier that he was canceling the event after years of single-handedly managing it. He was burned out, he said. But then a new group—supported by the city—stepped in to take over Lunt’s administrative chores and, in fact, expanded the roster of bands to seventy.

    “The city actually gave some money to Homegrown this year,” Lunt said. “I sort of let it go a little bit, and a bigger group, the Twin Ports Music and Arts Collective, picked up the slack. It’s a nonprofit organization, so the city was able to give a little bit of money.

    “As far as support for the music scene goes, it’s ten times better now. Our mayor’s into this. I mean, our old mayor would never, ever come to a bar. When Mayor Bergson was campaigning, he was saying, ‘Yeah, let’s get more music festivals.’”

    The arts collective, also known as MAC, could end up being a key piece of the sustainability puzzle. It’s made up of a group of Duluth artists whose goal is to raise money for projects that can support the scene. The group has set up shop in a spacious storefront space on West First Avenue in downtown Duluth, upgrading its original plans to locate in the basement of the Electric Fetus record store. In addition to a music stage, MAC is providing gallery space for young visual artists, who are also trying to establish Duluth as an outpost for hipsters.

    Eric Dubnicka, a twenty-nine-year-old expressionist painter, runs MAC’s gallery operations and says it’s his goal to “make Duluth known for more than paintings about aerial lift bridges and deer,” and to do that, the city was in dire need of a nonprofit gallery that accepted edgy work.

    “There’s an ever-growing base of people up here who can support this kind of thing,” he said, “but there were no nontraditional venues besides the universities. It’s becoming more possible to make it as an artist and still live in Duluth. Look at me. I live here in a renovated artist’s studio with high ceilings for seven hundred bucks a month. I want to show in New York, but I love the base here. More and more people are seeing that, and with technology as it is you can live anywhere.”

    A key supporter of MAC is Duluth City Councilor Donny Ness, who at age thirty is young enough to understand why the city needs a thriving grassroots music scene. He’s on MAC’s board and is also a big supporter of the other major alternative music and culture event in town, the Green Man Festival. Ness says he and the new mayor are determined to nurture the scene.

    “Certainly the mayor and several councilors understand the value of these things,” he said. “It brings people to our town. Money and revenues flow in. And it’s a positive way to showcase what Duluth has to offer. There is significant support for it, and the real question now is not ‘should we?’ but ‘how should we?’ In other words, what is the appropriate role for the city to play in getting these events off the ground?”

    Ness said Green Man, Homegrown, and other neighborhood and grassroots cultural events are going to get bigger play among city leaders from now on. “What I hope to do is move away from ongoing support for some of our events and help the newer events step up to the next level and assist them in becoming the next Bayfront Blues Festival and Grandma’s Marathon. There are some great ideas that die on the vine because of the lack of initial support—events that have been very local in nature but are creative and wonderful ideas that could be brought to a larger stage.”

    Bergson, in his inaugural speech this winter, ran through a list of goals for his administration that sounded as if it were quoted verbatim from the official handbook on how to attract the creative professional class: blanketing downtown and Canal Park with wi-fi hotspots in an effort to create an “E-City of the North”; spending marketing bucks to promote eco-tourism; establishing an “eco-industry” hub in the city; building more downtown housing and staging more festivals.

    In doing this, he’s turning Duluth from a city that officially discouraged nontraditional development into one that’s joining a trend of smaller cities trying to pitch their quirks and unique attributes to young creative types. One Midwestern example is Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm’s Cool Cities Initiative, a controversial program that’s funneling state grants to cities and programs designed to keep—and attract—these desirable residents.

    Duluth, however has an advantage in that it’s not starting from scratch. Northeastern Minnesota has always had a niche as an outdoor athlete’s paradise: The whitewater kayaking on the St. Louis River is among the best in the nation. Then there’s the North Shore Trail for hikers, and the legendary cross-country skiing. And let’s not forget Grandma’s Marathon. Throw in prime venues for latter-day extreme sports like mountain biking and rock climbing, and it’s a powerful, easy sell for any young person with a taste for outdoors adventure.

    A few prominent businesses in Duluth are already capitalizing on the trend. TrueRide is receiving orders from around the country for its brand of outdoor skateboard parks—some built from hemp. And Vertical Endeavors, with its 14,000-square-foot facility on Canal Park, bills itself as one the “largest and best indoor rock climbing facilities” in the country.

    I always took it as a sign that the Twin Cities were a cool place to live because for many years we had two alternative weeklies—no other market our size could boast that. Now imagine a much smaller city of 90,000 with two such weeklies. Up until early this year, that’s what Duluth had. The Ripsaw was one of them, until the announcement came down from editor-publisher Brad Nelson that it was going monthly.

    The Ripsaw differentiated itself from the Reader Weekly by giving the full force of its coverage to the local music scene, not too surprising given Nelson’s membership in one of the city’s great rock bands, the Black-Eyed Snakes. When he said the week-to-week competition was taxing his sanity and threatening the quality of the product, it sounded a lot like Scott Lunt’s exhaustion at trying to run the Homegrown Festival all by himself: another cornerstone of the nascent music scene crumbling as it struggled to reach the next level.

    But what the cutback has really done is given the entrepreneurial Nelson the chance not only to redesign the Ripsaw as a glossy monthly, but also to concentrate more fully on building his outdoor Green Man Festival into something more than just another local-band showcase. Getting ready for its third year at Spirit Mountain later this month, Nelson has for the first time lined up two national acts to headline the fest, Willie Nelson and Cracker (though Nelson later had to cancel due to carpal tunnel syndrome). Throw in local heroes Low and the Black-Eyed Snakes, some extreme mountain biking competition, and an alternative energy technology exhibition, and Green Man seems poised to emerge as a major happening on the summertime alternative calendar.

    And for the first time, Duluth’s city fathers have seen the opportunity that the Green Man Festival presents and are backing it one hundred percent. Plus, Spirit Mountain is no longer threatened by a golf course. “I’m relieved about that,” Nelson said. “We’ve never done this as a political event, and it’s not like we’re solving all the problems or replacing the annual income of a golf course. No, we’re not going to support a whole town like former Mayor Doty wanted.”

    But, he said, Green Man is showing what can be done on one weekend when creativity is applied, “rather than falling back on traditional means of development that are going to appeal to retirees, perhaps.

    “Does Duluth want to become a bedroom retirement community?” Nelson asked. “Or do we want to develop the region for the next generation so that we can lure some young professionals here to keep the city alive in the long term? Adventure-recreation, eco-tourism, adventure tourism—these things are huge.”

    Down at the Duluth Visitors and Convention Bureau’s office on the Downtown Lakewalk, support for the Green Man, and acceptance of the city’s alternative culture in general, is enthusiastic. The bureau is actually co-sponsoring the event. Terry Mattson, the executive director, is a true believer.

    “Brad and his people have a ton of energy behind this,” he said. “None of this would have happened without that enthusiasm—it’s a labor of love and a huge undertaking. The Willie Nelson thing raises the bar so much higher in terms of what needs to happen and there’s an element of risk. But it’s a magnet that attracts an audience that probably wouldn’t otherwise be as interested in coming here.”

    To me, the thought of staid, traditional Duluth opening its arms to geeks, alt-rockers, cultural misfits, skate punks, and extreme mountain bikers is so ironic that I have to wonder if I’m still connected to reality. In a town where there’s significant public support for keeping the Ten Commandments displayed on the City Hall lawn and where gays and lesbians couldn’t get a hearing from the longtime former mayor, helping out a rabble-rouser like Brad Nelson represents real change.

    Jason Wussow, of Beaners Central, says that up until very recently, “there was no support for what was happening here. Most of the city leaders would have the attitude of, ‘Oh, the music scene, those rowdy musicians.’ It was not seen as an asset in any way. Now it seems people are looking at the music and arts scene as an asset.”

    The lull of the last couple of years that many in the Twin Cities perceived as backsliding, he said, was real but in no way fatal. “We had some venues close, and everyone was bummed out,” Wussow said. “But in my mind, that was just a reflection of what was going on in the whole country. There was 9/11, a smoking ban was instituted in Duluth, the recession hurt the tourism industry, big layoffs were announced, and there were so many things at once.
    “The passion just got tired—but only for a bit.”