Lake Superior is not exactly known as a “talent pool” where record executives search the shores for the next hot new bands, but in recent years a crop of musicians in the port city of Duluth have gained national and even worldwide attention.
Though none are getting rich or fighting off paparazzi, three acts in particular – Low, Charlie Parr and Trampled by Turtles – have risen to considerable prominence in indie-music circles.
All three still hold a presence in Duluth and consider it the launching ground and home base of their projects, though not one member of the groups was born or raised here. It’s sort of the opposite of the path taken 65 years ago when young Robert Zimmerman left Duluth for Hibbing, later taking the name Bob Dylan in Minneapolis, becoming a folk-music star in New York and eventually branded a songwriting legend and recluse who seldom returns to the place of his birth.
Today’s breakout Duluth musicians say they actually feel a little off when away from home too long. There are spouses and children, for starters, but they also speak about a sense of community and the draw of Lake Superior.
COURTESY LOW
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Low, from left, bass player Steve Garrington, guitarist Alan Sparhawk and drummer Mimi Parker.
Low’s Highs
“I love saying, ‘Greetings from Duluth,’” Low frontman Alan Sparhawk says. “I think the rest of the world, when they hear ‘Duluth’ they kind of picture some kind of mysterious place out on the edge of nowhere.”
There’s a certain sense of artistic pride that comes with living on that edge, Alan adds. “People recognize we come from the same place as Bob Dylan. I think artistically the perception of Duluth worldwide is pretty favorable. So, underdog as we may feel, as outside the norm as Duluth artists may feel, there’s a lot of respect out in the world for our little town.”
Low was perhaps the first local music act since Bob Dylan to break out internationally. That Charlie Parr and Trampled by Turtles followed with their successes so closely on the heels of Low is unprecedented for Duluth, at least since the days of vaudeville.
There are also a few prominent indie acts that once hailed from Duluth but have left. Craig Minowa launched the experimental indie rock band Cloud Cult here, alternative country singer-songwriter Haley Bonar got her career started here, and singer-songwriter David Dondero was born and raised in Duluth, though his music career started in South Carolina. Bill Berry of R.E.M. and Dan Murphy of Soul Asylum were also born in Duluth, but left at young ages.
Numerous other local bands seem on the verge of gaining national attention, and Alan Sparhawk’s side project, Retribution Gospel Choir, has received favorable reviews in national music publications.
As for the big three – Low, Parr and TBT – they all had a slow, steady rise to prominence rather than being overnight sensations, and all three did it with unique styles of music that seem ill-suited for commercial radio.
Low’s music is generally categorized as “minimalist” or “slowcore,” Charlie plays old-timey Piedmont blues and TBT plays a frenzied style of bluegrass called “speedgrass.”
Alan and his wife, Mimi Parker, formed Low 20 years ago. They met in grade school in Mimi’s hometown of Clearbrook, Minnesota, after Alan’s family moved from Utah to a farm outside Leonard, Minnesota. Alan and Mimi were in the same class of 30 kids until their high-school graduation. They moved to Duluth in the late 1980s, graduated from the University of Minnesota Duluth, got married and started their band in 1993.
Over the years the band has had four bass players, all of whom lived in Duluth at one time or another. Steve Garrington, who has held the job since 2009, is a native of Ashland, Wisconsin, and has lived in Duluth since his college days.
“When we first started, the tone of music and underground, you know, the possibilities for a new band going out and touring were maybe a little easier,” Alan says. “The whole Nirvana explosion had happened, and it was kind of hip to be into new music. A band could travel around. Gas was only a buck a gallon, you slept on floors. … Over the first few years, more and more people started to show up, so we were able to afford to go eat a decent meal once in a while and get a hotel if we needed to.”
Alan says much of the band’s success is due to the late John Peel, a disc jockey for the British national station BBC Radio 1.
“He really kind of latched on to us early on and would play us probably more than we deserved and kind of inadvertently helped build an audience there for us.”
By 1996, Low videos were popping up occasionally on MTV, and the group had built a cult following that continued to grow.
The band switched record labels in 1999 from Vernon Yard to Kranky, but closed out the millennium by releasing a collection of Christmas songs under a self-made label, Chair Kicker’s Union.
In perhaps the strangest twist of fate an indie band could possibly imagine, a fuzzy version of “Little Drummer Boy” ended up in a Gap commercial, giving the band a timely boost.
“It was a really crazy thing,” Alan says. “We had just found out Mim was pregnant with Hollis (their daughter and first of two children). Basically we were realizing that we weren’t going to be able to afford to function as we had before. When we got the song on the commercial, the money … it basically got us through the next six months. We were able to have a kid and still do the band.”
Another decade of successful tours and critically acclaimed albums would follow.
“Getting to open for Radiohead in Europe and at Madison Square Garden was really a thrill and something you point to as a landmark,” Alan says of the band’s 2003 tour with the rock band from Oxfordshire that Rolling Stone readers voted the second-best artist of the 2000s.
Two years later, Low appeared for the first time on network television, performing the song “California” on NBC’s Last Call with Carson Daly.
Perhaps the biggest thrill for the group came in 2010, when legendary Led Zeppelin lead singer Robert Plant recorded two Low songs for his album “Band of Joy.” One of those songs, “Silver Rider,” was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance.
“Robert Plant covering our tunes – that was a real thrill,” Alan says. “It certainly stroked a certain kind of junior-high ego … something. It validated what we do. When people you respect recognize you, as silly as it sounds, it really is great. It’s a good feeling and helps you later when you’re questioning what you’re doing.”
PIETER M. van HATTEM
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Trampled by Turtles, from left, Dave Carroll, banjo; Ryan Young, fiddle; Dave Simonett, guitar; Erik Berry, mandolin, and bassist Tim Saxhaug.
Turtles Crossing
Robert Plant, by the way, has a connection to another musician from the shores of Lake Superior. In 1984, Paul Shaffer briefly joined Plant’s band the Honeydrippers. Paul left his hometown of Thunder Bay about 45 years ago for Toronto, then, like Bob Dylan, got his break in New York, becoming a member of the house band for “Saturday Night Live” and later the band leader for David Letterman’s late-night talk show, a gig he’s held for more than 30 years.
Last spring, Trampled by Turtles got to meet Paul when the band made its network television debut on the “Late Show.” Two more national TV appearances would follow with performances on TBS’s “Conan” and CBS’s “Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.” There was also an animated version of the band performing on the Adult Swim cartoon series “Squidbillies.”
Although Duluth is clearly considered TBT’s home, fiddle player Ryan Young has always lived in St. Paul and frontman Dave Simonett moved to Minneapolis a few years ago. Banjo player Dave Carroll and bassist Tim Saxhaug still live in Duluth, however, and mandolin player Erik Berry isn’t far away in the town of Clover Valley, just south of Two Harbors.
They celebrated 10 years together as Trampled by Turtles in April with a sold-out concert at Duluth Entertainment Convention Center’s Symphony Hall that had audience members dancing in the aisles and Duluth Mayor Don Ness presenting them with keys to the city.
“It’s been a very, very gradual build,” Dave says. “We had this every-other Wednesday gig at Pizza Lucé in 2003, and it took a while for it to go. Sometimes there would be 20 people in the room. We did that for a while, and toward the end of it we started having more and more people show up.”
They quit their day jobs around 2008 and have been touring worldwide ever since. Dave says one of his biggest thrills was playing in front of more than 100,000 people last August at the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago’s Grant Park.
“Another one was when we got to play the Telluride Bluegrass Festival,” Dave says of the Colorado event. “It was incredible. There are 14,000-foot peaks, and when you’re on the stage you just look out at this huge crowd with mountain peaks all around you.”
PETER LEE
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Charlie Parr travels the world to perform, but is happiest at home in Duluth.
On Parr
Trampled by Turtles will be on a European tour during the first week of June this year, a little less than two weeks after Low returns from its European tour. Charlie Parr makes his trip overseas in between, and actually overlaps the TBT tour.
So, believe it or not, if you are in London on June 5 you have the option of seeing two Duluth acts play. Charlie Parr will be at a pub called the Slaughtered Lamb, while TBT will be one mile away at a club called Scala.
“Is that right?” Charlie laughs upon hearing the news. “That’s hilarious. I love it. I’ll have to call them. We could have tea together!”
Charlie left his hometown of Austin, Minnesota, in 1986 for Minneapolis, then moved to Duluth in 1999. He was an outreach worker helping homeless people for a few years, and occasionally played music.
“I played a little bit. Not much, though. I worked and I’d travel down to the Cities once in a while to play. Then I started playing every Friday night at Sir Benedict’s.”
By 2004, he had taken a leave of absence from his job to focus on music. “I ended up with some contacts outside of the country in England and Ireland, so I was able to go over there, and it just kind of gained its own momentum through all those little opportunities that came up.”
Like Low, Charlie’s career got a boost from the world of advertising.
In 2008, his song “1922 Blues” was used in a TV commercial for the multinational telecommunications company Vodafone. The ads ran in Australia and New Zealand, where Charlie’s tune caught on and created a market for his albums and an audience for his shows.
The director of the commercial, Patrick Hughes, later tapped Charlie to record music for his first feature film, the Australian thriller “Red Hill.”
“I read the screenplay, and he and I had a lot of conversations and I recorded instrumental bumper music in a studio in Australia.
“At the end of the film, they used a solid track from one of my records over the credits. I never saw the film. The screenplay had a lot of killing and gore; the older I get the less inclined … I can’t sit through a whole movie anyway, I get too antsy.”
If it’s hard for him to sit through a movie, imagine Charlie as the subject of one. In October, a crew from Paris, led by François-Xavier Dubois, came to Duluth to shoot the documentary “Meeting Charlie Parr.”
“François is a fantastic guy,” Charlie says. “He wanted to come and visit me in Duluth. I said, ‘Of course, come to Duluth. It’s a great place,’ and he did!”
Charlie doubted his life deserved filming. He asked the filmmaker, “You’re making a movie about what?”
“Oh, about you,” was the reply.
“‘You’re insane!’” Charlie says he responded. “‘Do you know what I do when I’m not on the road? I walk the dog, do the dishes, take care of the kids – nothing. I don’t do anything.’”
Nonetheless, the movie
about Parr premiered this May at
Le Sentier des Halles in Paris, where Charlie also performed a concert.
His movie followed by one month the premiere of a movie about Low. Director Philip Harder’s “How to Quit Smoking,” screened for the first time at the Minneapolis/ St. Paul Film Festival in April, documents two decades of the band’s evolution through music videos.
Despite all the glamorous globetrotting, Charlie remains happiest at home in Duluth. “I’ve been all over the place, and I keep thinking about how lucky I am to be able to live in Duluth. It’s got everything I want. It just feels like home.”
And when he’s away, the reputations of his musically inclined neighbors seem to travel with him.
“Lately I’ve been getting people asking me ‘What is going on that there’s all this music coming out of that place? What’s in the water?’ That’s mostly due to Trampled and Low doing so well.
“I don’t know what to tell them. I just say I thought it was like this everywhere.”
Paul Lundgren of Duluth does everything; he helped to found the Geek Prom, works with Homegrown Music Festival and is a member of the Lake Superior Cacophonic Choir, available for “music festivals, bar mitzvahs, bonfires or random moments when you least expect it,” so we hear.