Star City Blog

HEARING LINCOLN: Push to the Beat

By Andrew Norman
Via HearNebraska.org

You carve around hitch pins, lost keys, bottles, cans, tire debris, big rocks, deep cracks and roadkill turtles, pheasants and skunks — anything that could catch a tire and send you flying onto the hot asphalt. Gravel, tar, shallow cracks, hills and head winds aren't often avoidable — they slow you down repeatedly, frustratingly, sometimes to the point that if you stop pushing, you stop moving. 

 

Like a bully that shoves you down again every time you stand back up, it gives new meaning to Nebraska being a no-coast state.

 

Some of these highway shoulders are rumble-bar rough. Some are smooth as glass. Some are nonexistent, and some are wet slicks that spit mud up at you. After about 360 miles, much has changed since we left Scottsbluff last Sunday on a mission to ride longboards — skateboards up to 42 inches in length with larger, softer wheels — all the way from Nebraska's Panhandle to its capitol. 

 

Instead of the scenic bluffs and lush grasslands we saw the first couple days, the view has become almost exclusively whatever is on the ground about 10 feet in front of us. And while we had a boosting tailwind and comfortably sloping path through much of the Sandhills, the landscape around Lake McConaughy included some monster hills that offered little downhill reward. Rolling through central Nebraska to the east, the land is flat as a waning noon whistle, and it feels infinitely long. 

HEARING LINCOLN: Meet in the Middle

by Andrew Norman
Via HearNebraska.org

Melinda and Helen are sitting in white, fiberglass chairs connected by metal bars — like those in bus stations. Behind them, a sign reads, “Unattended Children Will Be Sold to the Circus.” Ladies of a certain age, they're visiting while their laundry spins dry Sunday night at Super Suds laundromat in New Paltz, N.Y. They don't expect their peaceful setting to become a three-ring tent — as it does when a four-person crew of Nebraskans lugs in and sets up audio, video and lighting equipment while surveying, pointing and directing commands; dancers dressed in neon colors gyrate on and next to stainless steel machines loaded with rags; and in the spotlight, lit up like an angel in front of her keyboard, singer/DJ Erica Quitzow casts her soul into a pair of vocal mics. 

 

Melinda and Helen don't expect this veritable circus — day 10 of the 2011 Love Drunk Tour — but they're not bothered by it, either. In fact, after being briefed on what's unfolding before them, they're eager to talk about their Nebraska connections.

 

“You know, it must be a thing about Nebraska,” Melinda says. There must be something about you traveling, she says. In the '80s, she responded to a classified ad for a pen pal. She was bored. “The guy I got was from Nebraska, she says.” This guy, he smoked about a carton of cigarettes and drank a flat of soda a day, she says. He would send her dozens of polaroids of this and that kind of grain — corn, wheat. They were pen pals for a long time, but never spoke on the phone. Then, one day, she got a call out of the blue from this man.

 

HEARING LINCOLN: Ambassador's Mission

By Andrew Norman
Via HearNebraska.org

I woke up late on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. From my alarm-clock radio, I heard news about some sort of explosion, but I ignored it as I hurried to dress and make it to my 9:30 a.m. Drugs and Society sociology class at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Once there, I found the doors to the building locked, so I walked back to my car. On the way, I called my dad, as I often did during that time in my life ― to prove that I was up before noon. He told me about the planes striking the World Trade Center, that the country was attacked. I raced home and watched TV for about the next two days. For my generation, it was Kennedy being shot. It was Pearl Harbor.

 

Right now, I'm typing this column from a cheap hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, watching television reports about Osama bin Laden's death ― another moment that will no doubt resonate with me forever. After 10 years, these interconnected moments deserve reflection.

 

On 9/11, I was 21 years old and had just returned from a summer teaching water sports at a boys camp in the Berkshire Mountains near Beckett, Mass. That summer offered my first experience living outside the state. And it was formative. I didn't know a soul, and had to make friends based solely on how I presented myself. I remember being hyper aware of what it meant to be a Nebraskan at that time, and trying to hide it. I didn't want to appear as a coveralls-wearing, wheat-strand-chewing, square-dancing hick ― I did my best to enunciate, disguising to some degree my casual Midwestern language (lots of “yeps”). I didn't want people to think of me, or of Nebraska, as backwards. 

 

I grew up watching the state be lampooned for this sort of simple, lazy stereotype in popular culture. And while I'm not proud of acting (or reacting) so insecurely, I didn't have enough experience in the world to know why I should have been, instead, so proud.

 

Now I do.

 

Here in this hotel room are my wife, Angie, and three other friends ― Andrew Roger, Daniel Muller and Django Greenblatt-Seay ― who are representing our state exactly as I wish I had done 10 years ago. They're doing it with confidence, hard work, creativity and humility. With not a hint of embarrassment or need for self-deprecation. It's an attitude that says the rest of the country is missing out on something great. And they're creating a product that assures it's true.

HEARING LINCOLN: Gospel Punk with Spurs

by Andrew Norman

It's rare, but raining in Mesa, Ariz. Jay Kutchma has work to do inside, anyway. He and a buddy are gluing together packaging for a five-song CD the Red Collar frontman is selling on his monthlong solo tour — Chattanooga to Arizona before returning east through the country's blue collar gut to his home in Durham, N.C. 

 

With three days of shows in Tuscon, this is the touring musician's equivalent of a pit stop. Kutchma's wife (and Red Collar bassist), Beth, shipped him another 50 CDs after he sold them out during his first 10 or so shows.

 

Taking a break to let the glue dry before adding the design and shrink wrap to the CD, Kutchma says the DIY album — recorded live March 25 at a show with  Tim Barry (AVAIL) — has sold better on tour than any Red Collar supported. His anthemic, The Replacements-meets-The Clash rock band played Fest this year. And its latest album, Pilgrim, made many end-of-year lists in 2009. But his solo work offers a more intimate connection with the crowd.

 

“I think that with Red Collar it was very much 'Go. Go. Go.' It was one song into the other into the other into the other,” he says. “With the acoustic thing, I have more room to kind of talk to people about what I do.”

HEARING LINCOLN: Building a Better Region

By Andrew Norman

Everyone who wasn't swinging and smashing keyboards into the ground, or digging their knees into
the stage floor and shredding their nickel strings loose from their tuning pegs, were beating, banging, blasting drums like they were trying to bring back the dead. Instead, the gang on The Bourbon Theatre's stage was sending Omaha group It's True into another long sleep, at least performance-wise.

Or at least, that was the plan before last weekend's two final It's True shows, which sold out The
Waiting Room in Omaha on Friday and managed to make the huge Bourbon back room feel like an intimate gathering of friends on Saturday, ending with a trancy, rhythmic tribal jam featuring some of the area's best musicians. Drummer Matt Arbeiter, who was flown in from New York for the show, sat behind his set, directing traffic in a demolition derby.

Flanked by his tom-pounding friends, he looked like he didn't ever want it to end. With frontman Adam Hawkins' very pregnant fiancee Katey performing in the band, the entire weekend felt like a real family affair. And among them were a couple extended family members from Lawrence, Kan.

HEARING LINCOLN: Nebraska's Music Message

by Andrew Norman

A producer from Al Jazeera English is in Omaha this week doing a story about Nebraska music. He called me and asked a few questions — where he should go, what he should see, who he should talk to, and so on. Those answers are easy. But then he asked what I would want to see covered in an international story. 

 

I told him to avoid the cliché “hip indie-rock scene in a surprising place” narrative — by now, that's patronizing. Of course, we have awesome indie rock. But I told him I'd want people to know there's world-class music in just about every genre here — blues, hip-hop, rockabilly, jam, funk, country soul, punk, even adult-alternative. I said the action isn't just happening in the most impressive venues, that he could stop into The Barley Street, O'Leaver's or the Zoo Bar any night of the week and see high-quality, original music. I said there's actual diversity within our music, and that he should hit venues in North and South Omaha, as well as those in Midtown.

HEARING LINCOLN: Smashed by Southwest

By Andrew Norman

Nylon straps run from the heels of Joe's boots to the crash and kick on his backpack drum set. He shuffles a beat while picking his banjo. He pulls its neck forward slightly to tighten the clothesline chord, which swings a small wooden stick to strike a cowbell. He alternates singing and adding melody through his mouth harp to old-timey folk songs. Next to him, his musical saw leans on his banjo case, opened to catch stray dollars.

I met Joe at the Holland, Mich., tulip festival in May. And I just ran into him on a corner near the Continental Club on S. Congress Avenue. He's talking to Mike Oberst from The Tillers. They know each other from when Joe busked in Cincinnati, The Tillers' hometown. These are the kind of unexpected run-ins that make the South By Southwest Music Festival exciting. Even with attendance up 20 percent over last year, according to organizers, a sort of transplant community exists. You run into the same people over and over.

I encourage Joe and Mike both to come play Nebraska ― this is our message all week at SXSW, in fact. We want bands to remember us when they're planning their Midwest routing. It's going to take more than just a few people spreading the word, though. Lucky for us, one of our ambassadors was about to play on the festival's biggest stage ...

HEARING LINCOLN: The Vault

By Andrew Norman

Long before Fred Armisen played President Barack Obama on “Saturday Night Live,” he played drums at Lincoln's Le Cafe Shake. The coffee shop/all-ages venue (now Bodega's Alley) hosted the future comedian on Nov. 30, 1994 — five days before his 27th birthday.

Dressed in a white polo, he pounded out the beats and sang backup for Trenchmouth, his spazzy, no-wave punk band from Chicago. A typical touring musician, Armisen urged the crowd to buy the band's stickers — and he was apparently quite impressed by Lincoln's Opium Taylor.

Don't believe me? Watch for yourself below.

HEARING LINCOLN: Polka Night

by Andrew Norman

The bearded longhairs in Carhartt, hipster femme fatales, punks, folks, hippies, metalheads, and a man in a boys' pair of lederhosen ― accented by a Rollie Fingers mustache ― rolled over hills and lurched around turns sitting on benches, the floor and each other in an old red school bus. Along with coolers full of Pabst, a drum kit, accordion and tuba, about 30 of us barreled down narrow dirt roads to the Czech capital of the United States.

I'm sitting on this bus a couple weeks after meeting Brian Brazier from Bolzen Beer Band― a polka band from Lincoln ― during $2.50 margarita night at La Mexicana. He told me about this moving party whose destination was his band's headlining show at the Fox Hole Tavern in Wilber, Neb. The idea of "invading" and holding a concert at a small-town bar was right up my alley. The point wasn't to make the bands money ― they didn't get paid. It was to share a quintessential Nebraska experience with friends, and to stomp, clap, shout and drink Wilber a new fox hole.

But first, a stop at the Kramer Bar & Grill in Kramer, Neb., where we make a sort of flash-mob appearance while families eat their chicken fried steaks and mushburgers. I cozy up to the bar, eat a pickled egg out of a shot glass, drink a Milwaukee's Best and meet some of my fellow passengers while the Bolzen trio ― Brazier, David Socha and Ciara Searight ― stands between tables playing polka and folk standards and yelling things in German that I don't understand. At first, the local crowd looks perplexed at the dirndl- and lederhosen-clad spectacle. But before my beer is gone, they're singing along to, "In heaven, there is no beer, that's why we're drinkin' it here ..."

In German it's something like "Im himmel, gibt's kein bier."

HEARING LINCOLN: Conflicts

 

By Andrew Norman

There's only one place to sit that makes sense ― the seat at the end of the bar, around its dogleg by the chalkboard touting Duffy's Tavern's drink specials. When you have a column to write on a Sunday night, and want to watch the bands play while you do it, this is the seat.

 

This is becoming ritual. I always write this column on Sunday night. And Duffy's always seems to have a show I want to see that evening. In fact, it's consistently one of the best nights for live music in Lincoln. Give credit for the shows, and curses for Monday hangovers, to Duffy's booker Dub Wardlaw. To get people out on the Sabbath, when most have to work in the morning, you have to have damn good lineups. Tonight, it's the newly formed Love Canal (rock band Green Trees plus UUVVWWZ's Jim Schroeder on drums), dynamic, guitar orchestra Masses and Nebraska's favorite one-man band, The Show is the Rainbow.

 

And here I am ― surrounded by creative types drinking cheap beer, and plenty of people who didn't come for the music, slurping stiff drinks from fishbowls through colorful straws ― spoiled with all the cola I can drink, working to an original Nebraska soundtrack that changes each week. Feels like home.