Unlike some music journalists, I didn’t get into the game to interview musicians. I never even considered myself a journalist—I wanted to be a rock critic, as lots of us called ourselves then. I remember how excited I was to write those two words on my tax return after my first year of successful freelancing.
But duty called, and I was eventually required to use the telephone and even leave my house to talk to local musicians. Took me a while to find my feet, but I learned to like it, especially when the bands’ personalities did so much of the hard work, as they do in these pieces. (The Lifter Puller story—still one of my faves—practically wrote itself.)
There’s way more first person here than, as an editor, I’d let a young writer get away with in most cases. Some of my early profiles read like show or album reviews with a few quotes thrown in for context. But it took me a while to learn how to shape a scene without showing my hand.
Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Storming the stage with postpunk pirates Lifter Puller
City Pages, Nov. 10, 1999
Dan Monick greets me with the first of the evening's many salty aarghs. Piratically becapped, pants tapered midcalf, face smeared in black cosmetic grime, the genial Lifter Puller drummer appears less likely to shiver anyone's timbers than serve up battered fish product in Styrofoam receptacles.
A tinny Jawbox bootleg reverberates off the high ceilings of Monick's northeast Minneapolis studio apartment. His friend Jenny, visiting from New York City, sprawls on the sofa, hair bonneted in a green kerchief and right hand cupped inside a plastic hook that flips the pages of an ancient issue of Details. It's the night before Halloween, and in a few hours Lifter Puller are slated to play a costume party at the Soap Factory nearby. Part of our plan is to catch St. Paul indie rockers the Selby Tigers at the Turf Club beforehand. The other part is to dress up as pirates.
Monick has invited me along after slipping me a dubbed advance of the band's third and newest album, Fiestas and Fiascos. Out this week on the French Kiss imprint of Brooklyn band Les Savy Fav, the work finds singer/ranter Craig Finn flirting more boldly with melody, and his cohorts still finessing their punk assault with tinkly synths. Lifter Puller have been accumulating a rep locally and nationally since forming in 1994, but to date this new full-length is the most coherent evidence of why. Naturally, the chance to tag along with these wily postpunk scavengers has its journalistic appeal, but to bear the Jolly Roger, that skull-and-cross-boned banner we pirates fly as our dread colors—how could I refuse?
Steve Barone emerges from the bathroom, arranging a curly wig more mid-Eighties metalhead than buccaneer, his black makeup piled on way too thick. “I'm not a pirate,” the guitarist jokes earnestly. “I'm a Magnum P-I-rate.” He looks more like Al Jolson.
Bassist Tad Kubler has his own makeup troubles. The stuff keeps smearing on the jersey he's borrowed from Monick. “If I fuck this shirt up, I'll take it back to the Gap,” Kubler says “They let you return anything and you don't even need a receipt.”
Earrings and swords and eye patches are being rationed when Craig Finn arrives. Swashbuckling the band's bespectacled frontman takes some doing. (Later, onstage, he quips self-deprecatingly about a friend's attempt to devise a “Craig Finn” costume: “He wound up going as a gym teacher.”) The other band members swaddle him in an overcoat and shove a pistol in his belt. Though he has spent the day moving to a new apartment, the singer has had time to research this fact: “Blackbeard would twist bits of flaming rope into his beard so his face would be smoking when he went into battle.”
Kubler eyes the Jim Beam jug that Finn brought and relates some battle lore of his own. “Kevin Dubrow of Quiet Riot used to go onstage with a whiskey bottle like this full of iced tea,” he tells me. ”That's so fucking lame.” The band coaxes a promise from Tad not to drink until 10:30 p.m. It's 9:30.
I wish Kubler had started drinking already. Then someone else would have to drive the van. He passes between lanes with either oblivious impunity or superhero reflexes. He raps along with Dr. Dooom on the tape deck and discusses Halloweens past. “Last year, I was Tippi Hedren in The Birds.”
Struggling to affix a plastic parrot to his shoulder in the back seat, Finn half hears him. “Topper Headon wasn't in the Byrds.”
Tonight is Kubler's first anniversary in the band. Last Halloween he replaced Tommy Roach, who'd found his double major in cultural studies at the University of Minnesota and bass theory in Lifter Puller to be rigidly incompatible. One night an exhausted Roach stepped outside the 400 Bar, lit a cigarette, and collapsed, hitting the pavement so hard he gave himself a black eye. The band played bassless that night. After the show, Kubler joked, “I already know half your songs.” Eventually, Roach chose grad school over rock, and they parted ways amicably. The band gave Kubler a call.
Stamina figures big in the Lifter Puller mythology. Last year's EP, The Entertainment and the Arts, sounded like a weary plea to keep the party going at that point where everyone is passing out or making out. This determination to rock on to the breakabreakadawn has been codified on the new album, with the rambling “Lifter Puller vs. the End of the Evening” declaring its opposition to sleep. “It's too late for liquor,” gargles Finn “but we could get some 3.2.”
Loose talk of boarding the Turf stage and pirating the Selby Tigers' instruments blossoms grandly into a plan to assault random bands at random clubs on random nights. Monick unsheathes his sword and growls, “Avast ye Big Wu!” at an imagined Cabooze show.
Barone says, “We could sneak backstage before the show and paint a skull and crossbones on the drum kit and they'd be like, 'Oh shit. They're coming.'”
The band then exchanges a round of tour stories, which generally wind up with Barone getting so drunk that he climbs back onstage during the headlining band's set and hassles them. He performed a distracting striptease in Baltimore. Another night he lounged against the back of the stage and asked band members of the Molly Maguires for cigarettes at a show in Columbia, Mississippi. This is, after all, a man who occasionally dubs himself Hawaii, throws on some flashy rock-star gear and lip-syncs onstage to pretaped bubble-gum compositions while a sham audience of pals goes wild. Barone, who has been unwaveringly, if spacily, innocuous so far tonight, grins innocently.
Finn drops more science. “Those big pirate ships moved really slow. Imagine looking out, seeing a Jolly Roger on the horizon, and thinking, 'Those guys are really going to kick our asses in two or three days.'”
It's possible, I learn, to leave the freeway and make a left-hand turn onto Snelling without touching the brakes. There are no atheists in the Lifter Puller van.
Jenny shouts, “Patches down!” We obey, each covering an eye. Discussion of the advantages of binocular vision ensues.
In full garb, with Jolly Roger flying, we march into the Turf, where the band Triangle is integrating armchair drum 'n' bass and twee rondos into a surprisingly kitsch-free polyrhythmic mix.
“Originally, we were going to be dead rock stars tonight,” Kubler says. “I wanted to be Phil Lynott from Thin Lizzy, but I figured it might be too hard to pull off.”
Monick is explaining what a pirate song is: any tune you can rock your arm to like you're holding a tankard of rum. “You know, like 'She Floated Away' off the last Hüsker Dü record.”
“You mean a waltz?”
“Yeah. Whatever.”
Disguised as cowhands, Walker Kong and the Dangermakers take the stage and begin emitting their garage disco pulse for an appreciative crowd. Barone is dancing with the Jolly Roger like Bono at Red Rocks. Kong (a.k.a. Jeremy Ackerman) announces, “All right. Let's bring it down now” and the groove drops to a softer vamp.
“When you bring it back up, I am going fucking nuts!” Barone screams at him.
The thought of never bringing it back up flickers momentarily but visibly across Kong/Ackerman's face. “I'm not afraid of pirates pretending to be punk rockers,” he taunts instead.
“We'll take your shit on!” Barone bellows. Lifter Puller draw swords and rush the stage. The Dangermakers put up a valiant struggle, shielding themselves with instruments and taking advantage of their easily defensible higher ground. Plastic blades prove no match for the solid polyurethane whomp of a Fender bass. The stage remains unboarded.
Lifter Puller has no time for wound licking. The Turf is running behind schedule, and it's evident the band will never make it back in time for their own show if we wait to see the headliners. A little after midnight, still in the Dangermakers set, we reboard the van. The Selby Tigers are safe. For now.
***
The Soap Factory used to be just that. Today it's a factory only in the Warholian sense, a scrappy gallery programmed by No Name Exhibitions, and an unheated refuge for the young, gifted, and slack denizens of the arty fringe. Tonight it has been rechristened the Cave of the Whispering Shadows, and it's plenty cavernous, even with several hundred people milling within. Strips of white fabric dangle near the entrance. The third Velvet Underground album echoes on permanent repeat from within.
A bald dude eats fire and hectors a crowd into the Castle of the Shrieking Dead Spookhouse, the baroquely disturbing haunted house next door. When he takes his act into the factory proper, an alarm erupts, inspiring mass fear of sprinklers among a crowd that has been listening to Tulip Sweet murmuring like a chanteuse in her cups.
We encounter a smattering of costumes inspired by characters from Lifter Puller songs. Patrick Costello of LP pals the Dillinger Four is Nightclub Dwight, the shady lurker described in several songs on the new album. A woman in midriff-baring fur and heels and a man in an eye patch linger by a slab of wood protruding out of the stage, helpfully labeled “The Plank.” She's “Katrina,” I learn, another of Finn's lyrical creations, and he's yet another: ”the Eye-Patch Guy.” It's getting a little too Rocky Horror in here for me.
By the time he gets onstage, Finn looks as little like a pirate as one can in a three-cornered hat with a parrot perched atop it. After a quick Dangermakers plug (“If they were here, you'd be having a good time by now”) the opening chord of “Lonely in a Limousine” sends Finn reeling away from the microphone. He leans forward, batting the mic stand back and forth like a cat pawing a captured rat. It falls, and Eye-Patch Guy scrambles to right it.
According to Monick,”'The way Craig lags, it's almost a hip-hop thing, like the way Wu-Tang falls off the beat then slides back in and you go, Whoah.” Or maybe it's like a rare strain of Tourette's that makes you blurt out the wrong answers to SAT verbal practice quizzes.
But his voice is a percussive force, to be sure, and producing its sounds seems to send him into a fit of intense concentration that makes him oblivious to his bandmates' antics. At the Loring Block Party earlier this year, Kubler and Barone closed the band's set with a barrage of fireworks. Only aware of wariness in the faces in the crowd, Finn wondered afterward, “What happened?”
Kubler gulps Jim Beam between songs. “Okay, okay. Everyone quiet,” he commands. “A friend of mine just called”' No one onstage or off knows what he's talking about. “She's coming by in five minutes or so. Now,” he pauses, palms upraised in petition, “I want everybody to hide before she gets here.”
Barone plays both guitar and keyboards, sometimes maniacally alternating between the two within the space of one song. He quickly tires of scaling his amp and leaping to the stage. Even the rope he has been provided with to swing out over the crowd is a limitation upon his need to occupy as much space as possible at all times. Suddenly, compelled by unseen forces, Barone hurtles through the air into the butt of Finn's guitar, and then into a spectacular wipeout through the drums. Monick valiantly keeps time, straining not to whack the civilian volunteers resetting his kit.
Anarchy is too ideologically loaded a word, chaos too grand. But it sure is some kind of terrific mess up there. Overheard evaluations range from an enthusiastic “definitive” to a polite “entertaining.” Later those band members sober enough to comment do so sheepishly even after I say it sounded good to me. Still, I'd hate to have a tape of the show ruin my memory.
After the show, people are scavenging backstage for beer--apparently the bar has been moved sporadically this evening to keep drunks on their toes. “There's nothing back here,” Monick protests. “If you're looking for anything back here besides us, you aren't going to find it.” Craig Finn raises his fist toward me with a wan smile of exhausted esprit. “Aargh.” It's almost 2:30 a.m. But thanks to daylight-savings time, in a half-hour it will only be two o'clock. Chalk up another Pyrrhic victory over the end of the evening.
The Adults Are Alright: With a messy start and a star-making buzz, the Plastic Constellations have emerged as local rock's fountain of youth
City Pages, Sept. 8, 1999
A friend half-seriously counseled me to start lying about my age. “You could pass for 25,” he assured me. “Give it a shot.” Like I need one more depressing proposition to mull over as I teeter on the cusp of 30. “Nothing,” I told him, “could possibly make me feel any older.”
That's not entirely true. Visiting the Foxfire Coffee Lounge makes me feel much older. As all good clubgoers know, there's really no such thing as an “all-ages” rock show. Eschew a liquor license and only the most determined adults and white-knuckled 12-steppers will scout the local talent. The Foxfire has attempted to avoid this problem, in part, by allowing readmission, thus enabling legal imbibers (and resourceful minors) to slip out into downtown Minneapolis and fortify themselves with something stronger than a latte between sets. None of which seems to have pushed the median age of Foxfire habitués into the 20s.
Still, my presence in the brick-walled, high-ceilinged café doesn't feel obtrusive. There's an invisibility that comes with adulthood at the Foxfire. When these kids see you, they see right through you, just as the GoGo’s sang before any of them were born. One night it occurs to me, while I glance around the crowded café unnoticed, that age has nothing to do with facial lines. It's a trick of the eyes: whether they look expectant, like they're still waiting for something to happen, or reminiscent, like they're recalling something that's already happened.
As I'm thinking this, Aaron Mader and Matt Scharenbroich of the Plastic Constellations pass by, recognize me, and interrupt my reverie with a “Hi.” I'm relieved. Since last fall, the Constellations have provided the teenage rock scene its only real buzz story, making the boys potential Trashmen among their increasingly numerous underground peers. Now I feel like the cool young history teacher who shows up at pep rallies instead of the weird guy who is always parked across from the school.
A few minutes later I run into Constellations bassist Jordan Roske and tell him how I've been pondering maturity. He asks my age and I don't lie. 'You're not too old,' he assures me in a tone that leaves me under-assured.
I first met with these flannel-flying, ramshackle Hopkins residents for breakfast a few weeks earlier at the Uptown Perkins. Guitarist Aaron Mader turned 17 years old that day, and he wanted the complimentary birthday muffin that only Perkins is good enough to provide. But I'd been hearing about the Constellations since last fall, from all quarters. They “sounded like Pavement”' I was told, a rough verbal reduction of the Constellations' herky-jerky guitar mistunings, and a kind of scenester shorthand for any sort of indie rock that isn't pedal-to-the-floor punk or gently sculpted pop. In any case, the Constellations were already much beloved by just about anyone who'd seen them.
In interviews, the burden of playing band historian usually falls on co-guitarist Jeff Allen. “When we were in junior high,” he says of himself and Mader, “we were really dumb kids and we had no friends, so we decided to play really bad pop songs together.”
“Really, really bad pop songs,” Mader corrects him, his mouth still full of muffin.
“Then, for some reason or another, we decided to stick with it. Then these other guys showed up,” he motions over at Roske and Scharenbroich, “and then we became a really bad band.”
After annoying friends at some local parties, the Constellations chose an opening berth for the tranquil indie band Low at the 7th Street Entry to make their Minneapolis debut last summer. By their own admission, they flubbed it valiantly. While patrons downed drinks at their tables, the Constellations smashed their collective head on the punk rock with unintelligible joy and headed back to Hopkins with few converts to their cause.
“Then the Foxfire opened up,” says Mader. The four of them hung out at the new venue religiously, and Mader even wrote a letter of appreciation to Foxfire booker Tom Rosenthal. “In the fall, I brought Tom our seven-inch and asked if we could set up a record-label showcase.” The putative label, Pretentious Records, featured the since disbanded Intentional Mishap and current Constellations alter egos the Killer Bees. (“We dress up in bee suits and play punk rock,” Allen explains. “Then we just start yelling at the audience. They usually hate us.”)
None of the Constellations are clear about when their ineptitude subsided, but it must have been sometime before last fall, when they recorded their debut EP, We Got the Movement, with the Selby Tigers' Dave Gardner producing. Though hardly axis-shifting, the EP is a composite of indie rock circa 1999 in the best sense of that phrase: The band's anthemic surge recalls Lifter Puller, their interlocking guitars suggest the Archers of Loaf, and their spirited yowls smack of emocore with only the good emos.
Unsurprisingly, they've caught flack from more stringently punk substrata of the Foxfire scene. “We opened up for the Dillinger Four,” Scharenbroich recalls. “These dudes from Holy Angels High School were yelling, You suck! We were hoping they could take themselves a little less seriously.”
“I was like, 'Don't you see we're trying to enlighten you? We've brought all different styles of people here together to hate us,'” Mader says. “They weren't having it. They were like, 'Less talk. More D4.'”
The recollection generates a brief discussion about what local band's fans might most threaten the Constellations' well-being. D4 fans might inflict more bodily harm, they decide. “Low fans might write angry poems about us,” Roske offers.
My omelet distracts me for a careless moment, and the interview reels beyond my control. I look up and Roske is talking about how Fabio was injured in a New Jersey amusement park while filming an I Can't Believe It's Not Butter commercial. “You gotta be careful on roller coasters. And in New Jersey,” he says. This spirals off into loose talk about Springsteen videos on VH1. “They had this footage of Max Weinberg before he was on Conan,” someone says. Can you imagine?
Then Mader relates how a recent road trip to Duluth spawned a band mythology. “We came up with the concept of our next album, which is Let's War!, using “war”—and this is important—as a verb,' he explains. “Basically we represent the Movement, and it's the Movement versus the Serpent.” There's more to this enthusiastic scheme, apparently, but I just nod politely and calculate the tip.
Two weeks later, when the band takes the stage at the Foxfire, this idea resurfaces. Allen provides the background to the album's title cut for a bemused audience. “It's us—the Movement—versus the Serpent, or... [his fingers hook into air quotes] society.'
“If we play this song, the Serpent doesn't get us,' Mader continues. “Then we'll play some rock songs after this.”
Scharenbroich unleashes a Ringo-worthy splatter of crash and ride cymbals, and each Constellation takes his verse in turn on the heroic “Let's War!” Mader flutters his eyelids with Muppet-like animation. Allen simply explodes. Roske lodges himself staunchly center stage. Anyone listening who's not laughing too hard bounces with approbation. After a year of practice, this group has translated its klutzy in-joke into a kind of public celebration. And they're playing as tightly as I've heard them yet. (When I saw them in May, they were beset by technical difficulties, and Mader was forced to appease the crowd with Jar Jar Binks impressions while his bandmates replaced strings.)
Skeptics have opined that young bands like the Constellations merely serve to reassure aging punks afflicted by technophobia and bad ol' “disco sucks,” clubfoot resentment—rockers who hoped to pass a torch to someone, anyone. And to some extent, the Constellations are indeed a quartet of fresh faces for oldsters to project their expectations onto. They're not jaded, goes the usual compliment.
But what's more important, they're also not misfits. There's something reassuringly safe and suburban about these kids. With a poker face that suggests a latent smirk, Allen has the countenance of a smart-ass who gets you in trouble when you sit next to him in class. Roske looks like the kid who never learns not to sit next to him. And, as hinted with Let's War!” and their discussion of “The Movement,” titles like “We Will Be Smiling Forever,” 'Tonite We Might,” and “We Beat You Devil,” they also have a playful take on opposition politics. Iit's a game, and the Foxfire, with its square ceiling supports and overstuffed couches, is like a basement rec room. Playing in an indie band is no longer a statement of subcultural defiance. It's something to do while awaiting adulthood, like playing soccer.
Before their Foxfire set is over, Mader thanks the bands before them--Dwindle and the Wicked Farleys--for “kicking ass.” “Hey, the Wicked Farleys are from Boston,” Allen observes. “I wonder if they knew JFK Jr.” He stifles audience guffaws. “Hey, it's not cool to laugh. He was as close to royalty as we have.” He'll chew on this morsel of tabloid detritus for the rest of the show. “Show some respect,” he demands at some point. “He was the son of—somebody famous.”
It's a breakthrough moment. Though still surrounded by girls young enough to be my nieces, now I feel a bond. I feel young. I feel included, dammit. After all, unlike our parents, no one born in the Seventies and beyond has any cultural or generational obligation to give a shit about any member of the Kennedy family either. Maybe a better world really is possible.
Iron Men: After sixteen years of makeup, metal, and stage blood, Impaler remains proudly undead
City Pages, July 14, 1999
Maybe it's the conspicuous dearth of folded arms in the audience. Maybe it's the unusually high number of baseball caps, or the increased cubic volume of hair. Maybe it's the bobbing heads topped with either of the above, thrashing in a slavish fervor near a stage befogged with dry ice. In any case, there's something instantly recognizable and entirely dislocating about the 7th Street Entry during an Impaler show. For a few hours it's the coolest spot in some alternate universe where metal, not punk, accrued the largest heap of subcultural cred over the past two decades.
“You're way too fucking kind,” bellows Bill Lindsey to the appreciative Entry throng. The lead singer of Impaler is a lump of ghoulish cartoon rage, swaddled in a dingy shroud and a tangle of hair. His skin has an embalmed kind of pallor, and he growls like a B-movie zombie when he grasps the mic stand, which is knotted in the shape of a chain. Impaler's songs are a series of expertly corny horror-film puns—”Tall, Dark and Gruesome,” “Dying to Meet You”—with protagonists ranging from interplanetary grave robbers to goblin queens. To give these lyrics a foundation, the band generates lean power chords, propelled by their newest addition, drummer Tom Croxton, whose double-kick pace is too brisk for heavy pomp.
But Impaler seems cramped in the Entry: There's barely enough room for their wooden tombstones and the bald, ax-lugging executioner who loiters stage left. And their makeup doesn't seem as carefully applied as on the sleeve of their latest disc, It Won't Die (Root-O-Evil). Lindsey isn't as baroquely scarred, and the black smudges underneath the eyes of Brad Jonson make the guitarist look more like a shortstop than a hungry warrior of the undead.
“Who's a fucking wrestling fan here?” Lindsey demands, eliciting a shout of affirmation—who isn't these days? But when Lindsey calls for a moment of silence in memory of dead wrestler Owen Hart, the crowd, either mishearing or hopped up on adrenaline, responds with a flurry of applause. Still, the fans pay closer attention to the band's gruesome finale, executed with choreographed precision. A short, hyperactive zombie leaps onstage to cause trouble. In a matter of minutes, Lindsey batters the interloper into submission with an arsenal of metal folding chairs. Then he plunges his hand into his adversary's gut, producing a mushy strand of intestines. The disemboweling complete, the singer pounces into the crowd and smears stage blood on anyone fortunate enough to linger within reach, including one prim, carefully arranged, and visibly startled scenester girl. After some final shouts of obscene gratitude to their fans, Impaler is gone.
“Metal never goes away,” Lindsey remarks one week later, the makeup scrubbed from his face. And he's not boasting. No matter how industriously critics, parents, and politicians shovel dirt on the genre's casket, metal—like Freddy Krueger or Jesus—perennially rises from the grave to take care of unfinished business. With hard-rock acolytes ranging from Korn to Buckcherry to long-toothed Metallica on the radio waves--and Axl Rose glaring out from the cover of Spin when you'd expect to see him on Behind the Music—Impaler's album title seems apt. Numerous variations on a heavy theme are once again amplifying the not-so-secret desires of suburban male teendom, once again terrifying the neocon ninnies who have appointed themselves our nation's moral protectorate.
When Impaler gathers in its lair—a St. Paul practice space postered with images of Kiss, classic horror flicks, and bare breasts—the four band members chat idly about their chances for success, speaking politely and with elongated Midwestern vowels. Except for bassist Erik Allyn, each has a comfortable paunch. And, except for 32-year-old drummer Croxton, they share a common age, 37. But their space is a monument to a kind of lingering adolescence filled with nerdy collections and gear. Lindsey may have two kids, a house in Eagan, and a day job as a physical therapist, but he has remained as proudly, if unassumingly, uncool as when he was a misfit from a blue-collar family at the affluent Highland Park High School.
“The two things I like, heavy metal and pro wrestling, they come in waves of popularity,” says the unreformed fan. “They peak and then they go back underground. But they never go away, because there are always the core fans.”
Lindsey has been around long enough to know. He's the only band member to have lived all 16 years and half-dozen albums of the Impaler saga. When he formed the band in the early Eighties, he recalls, “The heavy-metal tape-trading underground was going on, with bands like Metallica circulating their demo, and we got caught up in that.” Word of Impaler's sanguinary stage show spread to New York's Combat Records, the cream of independent metal labels. Two albums were released on Combat before Impaler had what Lindsey terms a “falling-out” with the imprint.
By the turn of the decade, Impaler had everything that an underground metal band could dream of: modestly successful national tours, a zine-fostered indie-metal rep, and even a spate of well-publicized skirmishes with the dread PMRC --the cover of Impaler's debut EP, Rise of the Mutants, showcased more gore than Tipper could stomach, and the future Second Lady brandished the record in public as testimony to the fact that our youth were in peril. But soon all heavy-metal bands faced an adversary more insidious than any squeamish clique of senators' wives, and more distasteful to the headbanging faithful than any blow-dried power-balladeer. Out of the Northwest rose a strain of hard rock high-minded enough for taste-making glossies and café hipsters to countenance, with both power riffs and untrimmed hair, and an approach that was thoughtful, collegiate, and, ugh, serious. “Once all that grunge stuff came along, bands stopped dressing up onstage,” Allyn laments.
“They stopped putting on a show with any kind of visual entertainment,”Lindsey elaborates. “I call that the 'alternacrisis' for a lot of bands. They changed their name or cut their hair or started playing different styles of music than what they had been playing.” Lindsey himself took a black sabbatical from the biz while it floundered in sincerity, a respite he sums up with a suitably gothic metaphor. “There was an occurrence in a laboratory with a mad scientist,” he recalls, “and for a year and a half I was frozen in a block of ice.”
Thawing himself for the post-alt era, Lindsey hooked up with local metal benefactor Earl Root, host of KFAI's 13-year-old Saturday-night metal show The Root of All Evil and owner of the St. Paul record store the Root Cellar. Root has become a fulcrum for the Twin Cities die-hard metal scene, releasing a variety of showcase compilations featuring both area and international acts on his Root-O-Evil label. He’d also been an Impaler fan since the early Eighties, when he witnessed the group's dominating performance at an early local metalfest. “Bill wore this hokey football shoulder-pad thing,” Root recalls. “It was huge--and remember, this was way before Gwar. All that pyro and blood. And, oh, and they were really loud.”
Combined with a resurgence of metal zines (check out the locally produced Battle Helm) heavy metal in the Twin Cities is, in Lindsey's view, experiencing a rebirth. Yet he insists that Impaler considers their external environment to be of cursory interest, at most.”'Our outlook really hasn't changed with the time. We're all fanboys, toy geeks, and we share the same interests outside of music”—Kiss, old Universal monster movies, wrestling, and all manner of model kits. “We've surrounded ourselves with the things that we like,” he says, “and that's our world.”
Funk Is Instrumental: The teenage Heiruspecs put live horns and guitars back into hip hop
City Pages, Aug. 2, 2000
The Roots never changed my life. The much-vaunted real, live Philadelphia hip-hop band so often celebrated for leading the faithful out of the valley of DATs and loops never hit me where I live—even when it was just across the Delaware in south Jersey. I've taken my share of credibility lumps from colleagues for such heresy, as if an aversion to reheated Seventies jazz funk and fuzzy keyboard vamps represented some gnawing spiritual deficiency. Me, I've never understood why using live musicians on a recording instead of a drum machine is so inherently honorable. Would my reviews be more “authentic” if I turned them in handwritten?
The Roots did, however, change the life of the St. Paul funk combo Heiruspecs, and in particular bassist Sean McPherson—and we're better off for it. A fledgling string thumper in an even more fledgling alt-rock band in Massachusetts in the mid-Nineties, McPherson indulged his rhythm jones in the eighth grade by attending a Roots show, where he learned what his instrument, the bass, could do. The other five young members of Heiruspecs (mean age: 19) share impressively wide-ranging hip-hop and jazz and rock tastes but wax most enthusiastic over Common and D'Angelo and other neo-funk affiliates of the Philly hip hoppers that McPherson describes as “the most important group to me ever.”
So I should be grateful to real, live drummer ?uestlove and his Herbie Mann-ish boys, because one night at the Foxfire this year, Heiruspecs did change my life. Well, let's say augmented instead in the small, cumulative way music alters your perceptions once you aren't all adolescent and malleable and up for grabs. Less like your first orgasm and more like an especially satisfying dinner, though in a Foxfire crammed tight with kids who knew their cues from past shows, and shouted and writhed accordingly, the energy was such that those distinctions didn't matter much.
The horns of Martin Devaney and Josh Peterson alternately punched into Curtis Mayfield charts and JB exit music or veered into adventurous runs. Alex McIntosh's guitar lent a grittier texture than any amplified keyboard could provide. Drummer Kevin Hunt and McPherson locked into hip-hop-inspired grooves even an emo kid could lope to—tight enough for a high-end wedding band, but loose enough to carry along a version of “Billie Jean” you could occasionally recognize through the laughs and the flubs.
Then McPherson (a.k.a. Twinkie Jiggles) squared off with MC Felix in a free-spirited take on the dozens. Topping off a pajama ensemble with a polka-dot cap “'What's the point of playing funk if you don't get to wear a silly hat?” McPherson quipped) the pink-cheeked, self-described “overweight bastard” and the slim, brown-skinned, and bearded Felix were a study in contrasts straight out of central casting.
The duo met, like the members of Mint Condition and Abstract Pack before them, at St. Paul's Central High School, as students in the noted music program orchestrated by Red Freeberg. They started the group in 1997, with McPherson on bass, Hunt on drums, and Felix and another MC flowing up top. They soon graduated from busking in school halls for cookies and orange juice to scoring their first club shows. “It was much more of a crowd-hyping thing then,” Felix says. But when they brought horns on board, songs soon followed.
On a recent summer afternoon, the six musicians are clad in homemade T-shirts, each especially scrawled for this interview session, which display logos ranging from “LBC Drama Club” to “I think you'll get with this,” to an intricate game of Hangman. They've gathered around a table at the back room of Bon Appétit in Dinkytown, where the now storied Headspin shows stretched across what seemed like an endless consecutive string of Sunday nights in 1998 and 1999 before a series of logistical and legal setbacks ended the showcase. (Heiruspecs' August 4 return to Bon Appétit is being billed as a kind of Headspin reunion.) A mingling of indie-rock and hip-hop kids (and casual followers of both genres old enough to buy beer), Headspin was a spot where fans first came across others who shared their tastes. “It was a place where you could pass out flyers and meet people,” McPherson explains.
“I didn't miss a single one,” Felix brags breathlessly. “I had to work until ten o'clock. I biked all the way over here from Grand Avenue in St. Paul as quickly as I could because the bus was too slow. I come in and there's people standing in the back on the seats, people standing on the pool tables, and, like, hanging from the ceiling, and it's crazy. I see my friends at the door, I see my friends inside, I see my friends onstage. And here's me coming up onstage, still in my apron....'
Heiruspecs' debut, Antidisestablish-metabolism, captures elements of those performances, and even some live recordings from those shows. You can hear the excitement: The disc starts with Hunt winding out of a drum solo, with anticipatory basslines and wind-tunnel guitars prepping a crowd that's already at full attention. Felix begins to flow: “Hip hop is a culture, not a rhyme test,” adding that, if he were a superhero, he would “Use my x-ray vision/Never on your girl's dress.” But you can also hear some of the confusion of those gigs: The mood peaks high, but the loose mix of live and studio material mostly whets my appetite for what they may yet accomplish.
The crew's ecumenical, affable outlook has won them unlikely admirers (they open for local bluesman Big John Dickerson later this summer) and their zeal was on full display at a recent, under-attended Uptown show. In a way, they sounded like the world's most impossibly hip bar band, with horn parts challenging enough to keep the players engaged, but not baroque enough to junk up the sound. They voiced a less murky, wider range of influences than their Illadelph idols—a more expansive palette. Which just makes sense. After all, roots may be cool and necessary, but branches stretch out and grow.