Various Artists
The Little Scene on the Prairie
2021 | Rock
— track 2 “27 Club”
Brian Stemwedel: I am almost fifty years old. I grew up in Watertown, South Dakota. I am a media producer, I’m a musician, I’m a dad. I work at South Dakota State University and have since 2004. That’s about it. The musician thing has been a passion since my adolescent years. Sometimes it’s just a hobby, and sometimes it’s a bit more than that. It’s always in my mind, it’s always in my consciousness. Pretty much every day I’m at some point thinking about music, thinking about playing music.
I was in Brookings for college from ‘90 to ‘95. The reason for [The Little Scene on the Prairie focusing on the years 1995-1998] was prior to that, during my college years, I was aware that there were bands composed of college students, and I knew some of those musicians, but there was just no place to play. There were no venues that catered towards young, starting musicians. There wasn’t anything resembling a music scene. So I went through college always wanting to play in a band, and then even after I met some musicians we would — Well, like, one year I got together with a couple of guys and we worked up a bunch of songs, and then it kind of just petered out because we didn’t have any place to play. We couldn’t take it to that next step, or whatever it was. So then fast forward a few years, I graduated in May of ‘95 and my degree is in mass communications, I actually had a job working for South Dakota Public Television at their facility in Vermillion. So I had left Brookings, I had moved to Vermillion, I had a full time job in my field, but that spring when I had graduated this coffee shop opened up in downtown Brookings that was promoting all-ages shows. They were booking bands: local bands, touring bands, you name it. And that was enough of a glimpse of hope that I could stay in South Dakota and follow through a little bit with my dreams of playing music, that that fall of ‘95 after only a few months, I left public television and I came back to Brookings. So yeah, [Little Scene] focuses on those years from ‘95 kind of towards the end of the decade because that’s really when it was happening. Prior to that there were bands, but there wasn’t really a scene. And so in hindsight, you know, I think I made the right decision. It really thrived or a few years. It was like it just kind of sprang up once this venue opened, then I think other venues in town saw what was happening, or maybe the musicians made it happen, just kind of pounding on doors, “Hey can we play Friday nights?” So then other places started having bands a little bit more regularly. But that coffee shop was called JoeHouse Espresso Café, run by Max Fjelstad, it was on 3rd Street downtown, that was really kind of the central hub of the scene, and it was kind of the hangout, it was just a cool place. A really cool place.
//\\//\\//
The Flow
1) “Cranapple Trance”
4) “Queen of Tarts”
5) “I’m Awake”
6) “Rock Song”
7) “Intro”
14) “Hendrix in Heaven”
I was in this band with this awesome group of guys. We kind of went along with Erik [Ritter]’s vision. He had this idea for a rock-opera-story-narrative-thing. He’d actually done a previous version of it, just with home recordings prior to this band ever existing. That first song, “Cranapple Trance,” was one of the songs where we were like, “Maybe we should flesh that out and actually finish it,” so later that year we did a 23-song rock opera [called A Day in the Life of Edgar Allen Flow]. The only recording I have of it is a really piss-poor VHS. We did two nights and the first night we had guests from other bands in the area, so we cast our friends as the roles in the story. A lot of the songs had guest vocalists, and then our friend Derek [Englund] who played guitar in another band joined in on guitar and backing vocals. And we did some kind of low-key costuming and make up and stuff. It wasn’t too extravagant. We did this at the coffee shop. And then we did some stage dressings. We had a guy do lights, and then we had projections of Erik’s visual art. I think Erik had little slides of his visual art for his portfolio and we checked out a slide projector from the public library. Yeah, so we did that, and then the second night was just the band itself, we didn’t have the guests, it was a little less glitter and sparkle, but we had good turnout both nights, it was pretty rewarding. All the songs [on Little Scene] from The Flow are from the rock opera.
Bad Green Gun
2) “27 Club”
So we’re of that age when Kurt Cobain committed suicide in the spring of ‘94 we were all in our early 20s, just enjoying life, and that was all pretty heavy for us. A bunch of us went out drinking that night, Pat Baker stayed home and wrote this song. [Bad Green Gun] was a band that was kind of early in the scene, but they broke up and those guys went and played in other bands. That band, they kind of existed the year prior to the whole scene blowing up, so they were playing frat parties, and they were getting little gigs on the SDSU campus. They were just kind of hustling, making a name for themselves, just doing that kind of thing. They were really good.
It’s kind of funny that we’re talking about this album or playlist that I made, but there is actually a JoeHouse live album [1996’s JoeHouse Live, Volume 1]. I think this Bad Green Gun track was recorded live for that project but then they broke up, so they didn't put it on the album. Pat Baker ended up in Praying to Aliens. Jeff Hollander ended up in This Wine Is Mine. Sean Egan ended up with This Wine Is Mine and The Flow.
Dutch Elm Love
3) “Pulp Fiction”
Dutch Elm Love only existed a couple of months. I talked about earlier how I quit my job at public TV and I moved back up to Brookings to start a band, and [Dutch Elm Love] was the band. It was me, and Erik Ritter, and Derek Englund, Jim Hatton, and a guy named Dan Wheeler on the drums. It was a really loud band, two guitars, just kind of a wall of sound. And yeah, just as we were getting going Bad Green Gun broke up. Pat Baker and Derek Englund that I was just mentioning, they had grown up together in Pierre, so they wanted to play together again. And so I was living with Pat Baker and Derek Englund, and then Derek’s like, “Yeah, I’m going to leave the band and me and Pat are going to start a band.” And I was like, “What?! I just quit my job, we just get going, and this happens?” And then also within a couple of weeks my girlfriend broke up with me. It was, like, crazy. But it didn't take us long to restructure, then Erik and I started The Flow. So that’s what Dutch Elm Love was, it was a lot of fun. It was really more intricate, more written parts for guitar than The Flow. The Flow was a lot looser, and we left a lot of room for improv, rock & roll freeform kind of “Sonic Youth style” improv. We’d make up whole sections of songs by intuition. But yeah, I lamented that that band didn’t last longer, but it is what it is. I think that recording was our second performance. We did a talent show on the weekend of Hobo Day, and then our second performance was this Battle of the Bands, and then we had a couple of shows at the coffee shop, and then it was done.
P. Skunk
8) “I Quit”
When the scene was kind of dying — the coffee shop had closed for a while, we lost our practice space, and that happened kind of at the same time — during that time, Erik [Ritter] started putting together the first P. Skunk album, P. Skunk Willy and the Plastic Crumb Toppings — Fruit: Vol. 1, No. 1. And it is just a wild, crazy, weird album. He recorded that entirely on a four-track cassette recorder. It’s kind of out there. There’s a lot of samples and stuff. There’s a comic book in there. Again, Erik likes to mix visual art and music, and he still does to this day.
Red Moth
9) “Dearly Beloved”
Red Moth is awesome. It was a kid, Sasha Haleta — and I call him a kid because at the time I was in my mid-twenties, he was in high school, that band was all high school students. They were just a lot of fun to watch. That was a cool thing about the coffee house, everybody was just — I mean there was some competition — but it was like everyone was just rooting for everyone. And because we were older of whatever, we were like, “What? A high school band? That’s friggin’ awesome!” And they were good. It was kind of a grunge sound, it was a three-piece, it was all original tunes, they were 16 or even younger. And they did an album, so that song [“Dearly Beloved”] is from their [self-titled] album that they recorded [at Creative Communications in Sioux Falls with Patrick McIntyre]. Sasha, a year or two ago, moved to Sturgis, SD and he builds and repairs motorcycles. He’s living his dream out there.
Solstice
10) “Big Time”
You know, a minute or so ago I said there wasn’t really a competition, but with these guys it was hard not to feel — Like, they really had the business end of things figured out, and they were getting gigs all over the place. I mean, they were doing little mini tours up and down from North Dakota to Kansas. They had the whole thing: they had their own sound system, they had a trailer. Their album is called On the Rise from ‘96. So those guys, Karl [Steege] was the singer/guitar player/main songwriter, he was definitely just a real go-getter, do it yourself. He’s the guy who started his own music festival called Bash In The Grass. And I might not get all the details right here, but he’s from Wilmot originally. [For the festival] I think he just rented someone’s field near Volga. Did the whole thing, got the permits and insurance, got vendors and everything. And the first year it was just local bands, and then the second year it got a little bigger so they had local bands but then they started getting bands from Sioux Falls and some bands from the Cities. Then by the fourth year Soul Asylum headlined it, and this was 20 years ago when they were still pretty relevant. MTV came out and did some segments out there. Anyway that’s Karl from Solstice. He currently owns a place in Arlington called the Cardinal Tap, it’s a bar and restaurant on Main Street. But yeah, those guys were good. They were more of the straight-forward, jangly radio rock, different from what we played.
This Wine Is Mine
11) “Acid Rain On Beautiful Women”
12) “Bust”
13) “Nothing Like A Sugar Rush”
This Wine Is Mine is probably my favorite band from Brookings of that era. I couldn’t get enough of them, watching them live. I have songs from both of their albums on there. Their first album and their second album are night and day different. They changed a whole lot in that time. That first album was just really raw, but it really captured what their live shows were like. It was self-titled, but it came in a green jewel case so everyone called it The Green Album. It was a three-piece, a power trio, which with a trio you can be really adventurous and get away with just about anything harmonically. Their bass player Sean Egan, who also played in The Flow was just a powerhouse, he had a really unique style and attack on the bass. He kind of incorporated some of that really obtuse, funky, syncopated, “Les Claypool from Primus” kind of sound. And their drummer had a really great style. Their shows were just exciting, you didn’t know what was going to happen. Like I said, with that lineup they could just take a song and go in so many different places with it. They would be bringing down the house, and then it would get whisper quiet and it would sound like a cool jazz tune for just a minute, and then it would build up again. Jeff Hollander was the vocalist and guitar player, and he had just a real interesting stage presence, and his lyrics were often just absurd, nonsensical. I loved their first CD. I still listen to it and it’s 25 years later. By the time their second album came out [A Love Leaflet] they had lineup changes and they added a small horn section. Out of all of us, probably Sean, who was the original bassist, I think he’s been in a functioning, gigging band pretty much constantly since then. He’s always stayed busy.
Half Nelson Riley
15) “Why Do I Feel the Rhythm Fall”
Yeah those guys were really cool, I liked them a lot. It was Chris Dorry on drums, Nate Saeger on guitar and vocals, Al Tunheim on bass and vocals, a trio. That’s one thing I loved about what was going on then, there was a lot of different bands and nobody sounded remotely anything like each other. Case in point, [Half Nelson Riley] had a really cool sound that was way different that anyone else. Kind of no B.S., they didn’t talk a lot on stage, they would just show up and play the tunes. I think that was recorded in a studio in Hutchinson, MN. Chris Dorry is from Ortonville, MN. That was towards the tail end of the really active period of the scene.
Praying to Aliens
16) “One X Away”
17) “Circle Dance”
18) “Voyeur”
So again, that’s Derek Englund, the guy who left my band to go play with Pat Baker. I was sore about it at the time, but I got over it and we made up. We’re still friends to this day. Praying to Aliens’ sound is again unlike any of the other bands. Pat is a great vocalist. They wrote smart songs. They wrote stuff that was a little bit more complex. It wasn’t pushing towards the prog-y end of things or anything, but they were all pretty proficient and wrote smart songs. All the songs from them on [Little Scene] were home-recorded, multitrack stuff for an unreleased album called Matters of No Great Consequence. But yeah, they finished that album in the summer of ‘97 and then Pat had graduated and he moved to Arizona for a job, and Derek decided he was going to go to a tech school in California for audio engineering. So they recorded that, and they could have self-released it, but it was kind of their swan song. Pat has always stayed busy, currently plays in Pierre with his family in the band Houdek.
Trend 86
19) “Faded”
Again, that was all college students. They again had a way different sound, different style. They were embracing nu-metal, that mix of metal and rap that was happening at the time. They made three albums. The track that’s on [Little Scene] is from their first album [Bespeeko Click Function] and they were still in Brookings. But in 2000 they relocated to Minneapolis and gigged up there until 2002. I was always impressed with those guys. They were always really precise and tight, even though it wasn’t my bag musically, it was cool that they were doing it, and it was sonically amazing. On their first two albums they had a horn section, a couple vocalists, it was just a big band.
So Steve Schmidt was one of the vocalists, one day he was setting up his banking after moving to Minneapolis and he started chatting with the woman in front of him, turns out she was the sister of the drummer of Steve Albini’s band Shellac. I don’t know how that would come up in a conversation, but through that connection they went out and recorded their last album at [Albini’s] studio [Electrical Audio in Chicago]. The thing with Steve Albini though, I mean he’s recorded a lot of amazing artists [Nirvana, Pixies, The Breeders, PJ Harvey] but to this day you can still just go hire him. He’s like one of those guys who’s just for the people. So I remember when I heard Trend 86’s album Adobe, I was excited to hear the magical Steve Albini pixie dust, but the thing is, his style of producing is to leave everything as-is, raw. So it was like, “Oh, it still sounds like Trend 86, just recorded really well.”
//\\//\\//
There was a point where the scene kind of fell apart because people were graduating or they were getting jobs, or this or that, and then the main venue [JoeHouse] closed for a while, and so it all just kind of petered out and didn’t have a good feeling, the way it ended. I think I’m a way better musician, songwriter, performer now, but I think a lot of what we did back then went sort of unfinished.
Erik Ritter had lived in the Twin Cities since 2001 or 2002. We always stayed in touch, I didn’t see him very often, but we were always messaging, and one day in 2019 he said he was in town. He’s a Brookings native, he grew up and finished high school here and everything. So one day we went and got lunch and he’s like, “Yeah I’m moving back.” It turned out his marriage was ending, so he was leaving the Twin Cities and coming back to Brookings, his kids live here. So pretty much that week or the next week we started getting together in the evenings and working on songs, and within a couple of weeks we had 10 or 12 new P. Skunk songs in the can. We had all this momentum going, we were like, “Okay let’s go record this. Let’s rent a space and record them live.” And then our momentum slipped away, and school started in the fall and I got busy, and then of course Covid happened, so we still haven’t recorded anything. There’s no place to play in Brookings so we would go to Sioux Falls. Wednesday or Thursday nights there was an open mic at Club David, we went there almost every week for a good chunk of that summer, and would just get up and play our new songs and a couple old ones, and try to jam with a couple people there. There’s a place that’s a lot like JoeHouse called the Full Circle Book Co-op in downtown Sioux Falls which is a bookstore/bar/coffee shop/art gallery. It has a lot of the same characteristics of the JoeHouse. We played there once or twice. And then, just because we know people from back in the day who are still in Sioux Falls, we started to get invitations to open for people at the Icon Lounge.
A few years ago, a couple people that were there for that whole time in Brookings talked about broadening the scope of the “Friends of JoeHouse” Facebook page [now called the “SDSU Mid 90s Counter Culture Club”]. At that point, I had already scanned a lot of my archive, so I had a lot of stuff to share. It’s been fun. It’s cool to see people other than myself and my close circle of friends that also have fond memories of those bands and those shows and the coffee house. That it wasn’t — Sometimes I think I get a little bit too focused on — I’ll put it this way: It seems like I’ve kind of almost been shamed by people for being too nostalgic at times about it. So, having a lot of response the last couple years to that page, to see that it’s not just me that has these fond memories, has been enjoyable. I feel less that way anymore, where I felt like people were getting tired of me. But yeah I have tons more stuff. I have to tell myself, “Yeah you got to wait. You just posted something.”
BRIAN STEMWEDEL'S ESSENTIAL SOUTH DAKOTA ALBUMS
Indigenous — Live Blues From the Sky (1997)
This Wine is Mine — This Wine Is Mine (The Green Album) (1997)
Forehead — Klaatu Verata Niktu (1994)
Five Star Diner — Tavern Ticket (1997)
Janitor Bob and the Armchair Cowboys — Love Your Mind (1993)
SOURCES
Stemwedel, Brian. Interview. By Jon Bakken. 8 July. 2021.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Red Moth recorded their self-titled album at Earsay Studio. It was actually recorded at Creative Communications in Sioux Falls by Patrick McIntyre.
