May 2024 Edition
Howdy, Friends!
Hope all is well out where you are! As I write, the choir of cicadas outside is so deafening I can barely hear my thoughts. Oh wait, I remember them now: school’s out!
Every student and every teacher across the southland knows that with Memorial Day comes liberation. And like the cicadian trill, every parent knows that soon the blaring chaos of summer will arrive. Cue the Alice Cooper soundtrack…“School’s Out” for the summer. For the members of Old Crow Medicine Show with kids this means the harrowing realization that soon their children will be dragged from state to state at high speeds, constantly under foot at tour stops along the way, needing help in the portajohn, and not finding anything to suit their picky diets at the catering tent. For members of the Old Crow Medicine Show without kids this means kids running up the hallway of tour buses while they’re trying to sleep, and general mayhem. Several band members' children have already been to 48 states while others just now realized their daddies play music on a big shiny tour bus; in either case one thing is clear, Old Crow is no stranger to the school calendar. In fact, if it wasn’t for schools opening their doors to us as performers, we may never have made it.
Starting in first grade, I knew firsthand how special a musician’s visit to a classroom could be. That was the year the great John Hartford came to my classroom. John had attended a St. Louis area school in his own youth and made a point of coming back to inspire the kids, just like he had been. He wore his big black bowler hat, strummed his banjo, and buck-danced for us. I was mesmerized by “Long Hot Summer Days.” I raced home wide-eyed to tell my mom all about it. I never met John Hartford again, but the experience always reminded me never to be so busy I can’t make time to play in a school because you never know who might be out there listening.
Back in 1998 when a young OCMS first ventured across the continent, one thing stood out for its consistency: playing in schools. On that first trans-American tour, the schools we played were the best paying gigs we encountered, and they set the stage for more performances in schools during the band building years to come. If you include my solo shows, I think members of Old Crow have played in probably 100 schools or more by now. As a guy who usually hangs his hat in clubs, bars, honkytonks, performing arts centers, and theaters, I’m always struck by how different it is to perform for an audience of youngsters in a faintly lasagna-smelling cafetorium. Kids’ shows can range as widely as an 18+ crowd, but with a different set of variables. In the regular concert world, the contributing variable for success can be as simple as how much your audience has had to drink. But it’s more subtle in the school concert biz. How young is your crowd? Kindergartners tend to root for you better than self conscious 6th graders. How amped up are they? There isn’t enough mindfulness breath or Ritalin to calm down some vivacious youngsters. How responsive are the teachers to the needs of students during a performance? I once played to a group of preschoolers in Denver only to find halfway through my performance of “On Top of Spaghetti” that numerous audience members had wet through their carpet squares. But for every youth audience I've entertained, one thing is resoundingly clear. Kids know better than adults how to give a performer the feedback. Sometimes adults are simply non-responsive. You could be doing backflips with your fiddle on fire and the crowd is still nonplus. Students, however, always let you know if they love you. Which made our first school gig the hardest of all…‘cause they didn’t.
The sprawling Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is a vast land tucked into the southwestern corner of South Dakota alongside the Nebraska line, twice the size of Delaware. One chilly fall night a brand new band, just 3 weeks old, arrived on the rez. I was at the wheel and in my lap were handwritten directions to a gas station called Big Bat's Store from where I was to telephone the principal of the local school to meet us and take us to our lodging. To call Big Bat’s a gas station is like calling the Badlands scenery. Big Bat’s is a Pine Ridge institution and was recently anointed, “South Dakota’s Grandest Convenience Store.” But in the middle of night, far from home, and suddenly in a new territory altogether, it was too hard to tell just what or where Big Bat’s was, let alone Pine Ridge. Some years later I put these thoughts into a song called “Crazy Eyes.” But back then, at 19 years old, having played fiddle for a year, banjo a couple more, and now arriving with my fledgling band on some of America’s most sacred ground, the Oglala Lakota Nation, all I knew was that I was a stranger on this land. We were there for the next week to play in the schools; however, I definitely was more the student than the teacher.
Before Old Crow started, Critter and I both were avid readers of books about the Plains tribes. Black Elk Speaks was my intro to Native American religion and mysticism and I borrowed Crit’s copy of Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions. Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins, and Peter Matthiessen’s In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, all inspired us and set our feet westward to the land of the Lakota. So, it was pretty soul-stirring when a truck pulled up in the Big Bat’s parking lot that had “Ta-Tan-Ka Wa-Shte” — Good Buffalo — stenciled on the windshield and a man hopped out asking in a singsong Lakota accent, “Are you the band?” It was Bryan “Ohiyaku” Brewer, superintendent of schools. We followed Bryan a few miles through town to the Pine Ridge Indian School where we showered in the gymnasium and heated up school cafeteria leftovers in the microwave, then bedded down on cots in the locker room. It was fine hospitality. We had been traveling for weeks now, mostly through Canada. Hot food and a shower were a welcome from the seedy street corners of Windsor and Thunder Bay.
The next day we performed before the whole school in the gymnasium under a big painted mural of Native American Olympian Jim Thorpe. We were so inexperienced using a PA system that we made the crucial mistake of telling the administration we’d be loud enough without it. We weren’t. But the audience of Lakota teenagers was plenty loud. Do you remember that scene in the movie Rock ‘n’ Roll High School when The Ramones help the teens blow up the dance? Well, that was Old Crow’s first ever school gig in a nutshell. The high schoolers won. But the next day at the primary school Old Crow fared little better. And by the end of the week, we managed to throughly rock Little Wounds High School, where I’ll never forget a 9th Grader named Luke Broken Rope who met us in the parking lot and told us we reminded him of his late grandfather who had played the fiddle.
25 years later my thoughts often return to the week we played schools in Indian Country. Our band was so young, barely older than the kids. We were in a part of the country that most Americans will only ever read about it, but certainly never visit. And the place was really intense. Poverty and addiction were everywhere. A rich, millennia old culture was still recovering from 200 years of colonization. But people were the most kind of any place we've ever travelled. Looking back, I see now that I made my mind up about something important when I played in the Pine Ridge school system back in 1998. Old Crow Medicine Show, onstage and off, would always seek to be both teacher and student. Yes, the audience had something to learn from us, but what we could learn from our audiences would fill our hearts with inspiration and make our job as entertainers fulfilling for a lifetime. This year, with June just around the bend, here's hoping that students of all ages, all across the land, will learn something special and sacred on their summertime adventures.
Sincerely,
Ketch
