Fear and Freezing in the Midwest

The winter adventure continues

Words by Stefan Rogenmoser (organ player)

Photos by Charles Rex Arbogast and Stefan Rogenmoser (and J.P. took one too)

The Explorers Club press

  We woke early on the dawn of my 23^rd birthday and rolled from South Carolina to Memphis, Tenn. for our second February tour of 2009. On the long ride to Memphis some of us played Catch Phrase, a fun little game that makes time in the van vanish like Salvador Dali paintings.

  Atlanta, Alabama, Mississippi (including Tupelo — where Elvis was born) then Memphis Somewhere along the way, at a gas station in rural Alabama, Jim found a pair or red alligator skin mod boots. Of course he bought them.

  Thanks to Jason, I (birthday boy!) got to see the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, as did Mike, before our gig that night. If you’re ever in Memphis and you think you like music, go to the Stax Museum — it’s worth it. And that’s only a fraction of Memphis’s history.

  The pizza the venue gave us was gone in three minutes, consumed by savagely hungry musicians crawling all over each other in search of the last crumb of crust.

  Ian McLagan (the Small Faces/the Faces keyboard player) recently played this venue and a guy outside was taking down McLagan’s name from the marquee. We thought it was chilly outside. We would experience extremely cold temperatures before we got home.

  It was still my birthday, and the guys sang “Happy Birthday” to me on stage during the show. I also ran across the stage a few times during some of our songs just for the fun of it. About 15 people attended, and that’s a generous estimate.

Have mercy on us, Chicago

  In Chicago, where it was surprisingly warm for late February, we were met by Associated Press photographer Charles Rex Arbogast, who took tons of wonderful photos of us that night. He’d photographed us a few months earlier at the Music Farm in Charleston at our New Year’s Eve show.

  Outside the Empty Bottle we went to the median turning lane of the four-lane road and Charles Arbogast took tons of cool photos of us.

  Our soundcheck was a long one.

  Downstairs in the green room, Arbogast taught me some cool photography tricks, like not using flash (a theory I’ve supported for a long time) and going for candid subjects in the natural light with a slow shutter speed.

  Oddly enough I was working on deadline finishing up a story for the Berkeley Independent (a weekly newspaper in Moncks Corner, S.C.) about how the stimulus package would effect education (see story link at bottom of blog).

  I ate the food the venue gave us, took some mental notes from Arbogast, and flipped through my reporter’s notebook making sense of the chicken scratch I’d scribbled in it a few days earlier at school administration meeting in Moncks Corner.

  There was a psychedelic band playing upstairs that had the coolest outfits of any band we’ve ever played with. I heard them as I sat downstairs in the green room hacking away at my story.

We played the show. It went fairly well, even though the crowd was much thinner than the time we played here in June 2008 with Lightspeed Champion. But we had an AP photographer with us this time.

  After the show I went upstairs by our merch booth (where a cool kitty cat hangs out) to get a wireless internet connection to email my story to my editor. I proofread it again, and found some major mistakes. It never hurts to proofread many times before publication. Typos fixed. Errors fixed, raw facts all correct. Email story. Done.

  By this time most of the gear had been loaded by the other fellows. Thanks guys, sorry I had to sit out on this loading session (I was doing other work).

  While in Chicago, Jason booked us a nice hotel in (I think) Williamsburg, Iowa, a central spot between our next two gigs — Iowa City and Grinnell. We drove all night from Chicago to Williamsburg, but got there around 5 or 6 a.m. to well-below freezing temperatures. We couldn’t enter our hotel room until noon or later. So we pulled the van across the street to a Motel 6, slept there until we got up, drove back across the street to the fancy hotel, checked in, and slept some more.

  We rode for about an hour to Iowa City. We even got Jason to play Catch Phrase, and he liked it. Chris and J.P. hippied it up in the front.

  At the University of Iowa our southern souls had frozen so thoroughly that we popped out of the van like ice cubes out of an ice tray.

  We somehow got the gear inside. Another long soundcheck. There was a nice old grand piano in the room that we twinkled. It sounded great. The turnout really put us in our place. There must have been 10 people in the room. And they made us do an encore!

  On the ride back to our fancy hotel we listened to a recording of that night’s set. My keyboards were by far the loudest instrument in the mix. Everyone in that van heard all my mistakes. I played backwards piano on “Johnny B. Goode” that night: the recording proved that I didn’t stay on the beat while banging keys backwards. Jim thought it was hilarious. He said he liked the shabby playing. In the van everyone slid into their own world.

  I woke up the next day and went for a swim in the heated indoor pool. Chris got in the hot tub for five minutes, then took off. Jason and I went to try to cash a check from a recent show at a nearby bank. It didn’t work. Then we went for an oil change, but we were told the U-Haul wouldn’t fit into the bay. Jason and I tried to lift the trailer off, but it was fully loaded and front heavy to keep a good center of gravity. We couldn’t lift it. Jiffy Lube employees didn’t offer to help us get the trailer off. The oil did not get changed. We figured heavy lifting wouldn’t be a problem with eight guys on tour, but they can’t lift much while lying in bed.

The greatest place in the Midwest: Grinnell College

  This one will go down in the books. There have been a few outstanding performances in our career that are some kind of revelation for all us, reassuring why we play live music. The Troubadour was one, our first SXSW experience was another. Grinnell will be among them.

  The drive to Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa took about an hour. We unloaded our gear down some stairs after JP parked the van on the sidewalk a good ways from the nearest campus road. It was still cold. We were slipping on ice. A punk band was practicing in a nearby room as we loaded in.

  Our green room had all we’d asked for on the rider: pizza, chips, good salsa, oranges, apples, cases of Coca-Cola, water bottles, cold cut meats, bread, sliced cheese, grapes and earplugs! We were the happiest band on the planet.

  Mike and I heard there was a basketball game on campus, and that’s where all the students were. A nice fellow from the college led us into the cold night across the freezing campus to the gym. It was a blast. It was a close game. The referees were calling in favor of the home team, Mike informed me. He also noticed there only about five African-Americans in the room, and two were on the court. The ..Midwest.. is quite white. Just an observation. We are southerners.

  The opening band was playing when we got back. They were very good. The room was filling up and more and more college students strutted on the dance floor.

  As we walked on stage the room was full. From the moment we hit the first note the entire room danced, and didn’t stop until well after our set ended. We played with more energy than we’ve ever played. We were silly with excitement. The crowd ate us up. Begged for more. We gave them more. We were all sweaty at the end of our set.

  Jason then hooked up his iPod and played tunes, and most of us grooved on the crowded dance floor. I ran back to the booth and gave Jason some suggestions (I’ve been a disc jockey at many weddings — although the Grinnell kids have way better taste than what it takes to make most people dance). It was a blast.

  All of us had been, at one point or another, invited to an after-show party. We went upstairs to check out the scene. We were led into the dorm room of some of the girls who danced the best. Then we had to leave because Jason wanted to go back to the hotel (at this point he’d been sitting in the van).

  We’d just rocked the faces off these students, gave them and us a great time, fed off mutual energy that was in the air. They were the best audience we’d ever played to. On the ride back to the hotel we kept telling J.P. to turn the van around and take us back to our new homes in Grinnell.

Freezing Miss Liberty

  The next day we drove to Madison, Wisc. That’s when it got cold.

Otis Redding and the original Bar-Kays died in a plane crash in December 1967 in a lake near Madison. We may have walked on that lake. The lake was cold enough to take lives just by looking at it too long.

  When we arrived at the University of Wisconsin we saw the Statue of Liberty’s head and hand coming out of a frozen lake. It was as if Planet of the Apes was real. Freedom had been frozen, defeated by the icicles of old cold man winter.

  Some of us walked upon the ice lake and got close to Miss Liberty, who was about 200 feet offshore. Ice-nine was going to freeze the world.

  The ice creaked and cracked under our feet. Jim, Mike, Dave and I went out the farthest. Jim slipped and busted his tail, indenting a butt-cracked crack into the ice. It was so cold that I still haven’t completely unthawed. We rolled gear on handcarts into Der Rathskeller.

  We didn’t get fed, although we should have. Trying to survive without food in this climate was like trying to sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo: it was stupid and impossible. So we killed time in the green room, which was up three flights of towering stairs. Some of us banged on a piano, because as musicians, if there is an instrument within 200 miles we will find it, even if we have to cross frozen lakes, and play it as loud and long as possible.

  Then someone had another stupid idea: playing the “quiet game.” Naturally I won, since I’m “the quiet one.” I got no reward. Jim and Dave drew obscene things on the chalkboard as Mike slept on the table looking like he was dead, and Jason used his cell phone to look at things on the internet. I snapped some pictures, and the shutter was the loudest noise in the room until Neil decided he would lose the game and started talking.

  We played to an introverted crowd, and of course it seemed like a letdown after the unattainable heights we’d reached at Grinnell. The stage was under an arch in this room that looks like a giant German beer hall. Of course they didn’t give us any beer, and our personal funds were becoming more distant than any sign of warmth on this leg of the tour.

  Bloomington., Dead Oceans execs.

  And so we made our way to Bloomington, Ind., where our record label Dead Oceans is based. When we drove through Indianapolis Mike hooked up his Zune mp3 player and we jammed Wes Montgomery, who is from Indianapolis. Kurt Vonnegut is from there too.

  In Bloomington, some of our Dead Oceans executives, who shall remain anonymous, took us to dinner at a pizza place.

  The venue was one half video store, one half rock venue. The small room was nearly full, and we played like there was no tomorrow on the small stage. We got an encore. We hope we pleased our label as much as the fans. They said they liked our set.

Freezing snowy drive home

  We decided to drive straight home. It was so cold. February. Minus temperatures. Our van was probably on its last ride. The brakes worked only on one side, which is even more dangerous on snowy, icy roads. It snowed heavily on parts of the mountainous drive through the Tennessee and North Carolina Appalachians. The transmission was slipping. We made it.

  The trip had been quite an experience. All the shows may not have been packed, but we’d never toured the Midwest extensively. They’re good people. We got to see and play in Memphis, one of the most important towns in rock and roll and blues music. We had a cool photo shoot with an Associated Press photographer — they don’t get much better than that. Grinnell is a bright shining beam that is forever burned into the celluloid frames of our memories, which will shine on for a long time and warm our hearts on any cold night.

Photos by AP photographer Charles Rex Arbogast

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/album.php?aid=62429&id=500822730&op=6

The Berkeley Independent story I finished writing in Chicago http://www.berkeleyind.com/news/School-district-awaits-stimulus-details

To see more photos visit http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2030199&id=136100012&saved#/album.php?aid=2030199&id=136100012