Of Absolute Hoots, Haymarkets and the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

My friend and coworker, Mark, is not exactly what I would describe as a rock star. Low-key and laid-back, yes, and also a heck of a nice guy who’s fun to kill some time with chatting on a slow weekday afternoon when all there is to do are some blah projects that are as tedious as listening to a radio evangelist’s sermon while driving. However, if I were to tell you he’s a rock star, you probably wouldn’t believe me. I can understand this—I didn’t believe it at first. When I first heard Mark played guitar, I thought “Oh, that’s cool. He’s in a garage band. Wonder if they play music in Cresco and Decorah?” Then I learned that Mark was an inductee in the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (http://www.iowarocknroll.com/inductee-details.php?id=278 ) So yeah.

The Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a concept that is still hard for me to comprehend, mostly because it has the words “Iowa” and “Rock and Roll” in the same sentence. It’s like describing Dick Cheney as “whimsical.” On the other hand, it’s not like the genre has completely passed the state over. The heavy metal band Slipknot hails from Des Moines, as does the lead singer’s spinoff band Stone Sour. The legendary Surf Ballroom, the last concert of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper is located in Clear Lake, Iowa, and every year the Surf hosts a Winter Dance Party Tribute in honor of the musicians. So Iowa definitely has a place in rock and roll history. At least as much a place as Cleveland.

Despite the fact that Mark is part of the whole Iowa rock and roll scene, I have never gotten the chance to see him perform in concert. Then I heard that he would be playing at a Decorah bar that Saturday, and I knew what I would be doing that weekend.

The band Mark was playing with is called Absolute Hoot, and they were playing a venue called the Haymarket, a small bar in Decorah. Trying to describe the Haymarket is hard, because it’s a dive that somehow manages to transcend its being and become something else entirely. The bar itself occupies most of the ground floor of a two-story building two blocks away from downtown Decorah. The building is old. I’m not entirely sure how old, but it would be right at home in a black-and-white picture of Decorah circa 1913. The outside is unpretentious brick, with one side painted to reveal the establishment’s name. As I approached, the building, I was told by a bouncer who looked to be one part college student, one part farmer and one part skater punk that there was a four dollar cover charge. I paid the fee and stepped into the dive bar of dive bars.

Absolute Hoot sets up

I’m not exactly a connoisseur of bars, but you can tell roughly what kind of bar you’ve stepped into by the little cues. Things like patches of linoleum missing from the floor, or the bathroom having a thin sheet of metal nailed over the space where a glass window used to be, or just the fact that the floor linoleum may not have been cleaned since the Clinton administration. Some cheap wood paneling lining the walls and an oak bar that has probably seen a few decades of use are also good indicators. The Haymarket has all this and more. The front door leads to a sparse antechamber that leads in turn to the bar, a narrow area where the bar is on the right and about four feet over is an auxiliary bar of sorts, a free-standing wall where decorative wood columns create a cage-like separation between the main bar area and the rest of the establishment. On the other side of the wall there was a lot of open room, although a pool table in the upper left hand side took up part of it. The band setting up in the lower right hand side took up more space. Against the free-standing wall there was a large poker table and some chairs. The clientele wore mostly flannel, t-shirts and worn jeans with boots or tennis shoes. I got a distinctly blue-collar vibe from the place. Want to get dressed up and have a night on the town? There are plenty of fancy-pants places for that—here is where people come to drink and shoot pool.

Décor aside, the Haymarket may be one of the best music scenes in Decorah. They constantly bring in bands from Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, playing rock, country, blues, and folk, and they manage to consistently beat the pants off other local bars in terms of live bands. You can’t help but be impressed. In that sense, the Haymarket is a jewel in the rough.

Mark and his bandmates were getting set up when I arrived, waiting on one of their members who was having trouble getting her car started. It’s one of those hazards of playing you never think about when seeing a band perform. After all, there is a lot of background setup that needs to happen in order for a show to go on. Most big-name bands have roadies and sound technicians to take care of this, and their job is mostly to remain unseen. When you get to smaller venues like the Haymarket, though, you start to see what’s really involved. Mark was hunched over a soundboard, making small adjustments as the band waited for its final member, and the rest of them were doing individual soundchecks of their own. Music stands sat in front of each member, loaded with papers, and the setlist was taped to the floor. After a few minutes, the final member made it to the show, got her guitar hooked up, and Absolute Hoot started to play.

Absolute Hoot performs

All things considered, the band was pretty good, and they played a mix of music that I think worked well with the venue. There were some contemporary-ish country songs, older country songs, 50s and 60s rock and pop songs, and in one memorable instance an Aerosmith cover song. Slowly a crowd started to form in the Haymarket, which didn’t take much. After forty people had arrived, there was standing room only, and if you had to get up and go to the bathroom, you could reasonably expect the seat you had to be taken when you got back. However, it had to be good for the band. There’s nothing like playing and knowing that a lot of people are enjoying themselves while you play.

Mark rocks out

Another interesting thing was that the two women of Absolute Hoot wore dresses and generally looked made up. The men of the band, on the other hand, looked as though they had just come in off the street, seen some vacant instruments, and decided to start playing music. In a way, this made sense—the two women held most of the vocal duties, so it made sense for them to dress up a bit if they were going to be in the spotlight. Granted, the drummer did a lot of lyrics as well, but then again, he was behind the drum set, and getting dressed up to play the drums, which is the most physically demanding instrument to play, is a lot like putting on a button-up shirt to go jogging. Also, the drum set is between you and the audience, so honestly who cares what you wear? It struck me that you could get away with wearing a lot of stuff you ordinarily couldn’t. Which may be why you so rarely see shots of drummers in the music video.

Absolute Hoot was a lot of fun. If you happen to be in Decorah when they play, I highly recommend them. The cost is under $5, the musicians are all really good, and who knows—they might be inducted into the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame someday.

Border Town Search Part 2: Florenceville and Granger

When I last left everyone, I was busy trying to find the twin towns of Florenceville and Granger, only to find that State Line Road had somehow dead-ended into farm country. Later on, when I got home, I would fire up Google Maps and see that State Line Road is not, strictly speaking, a continuous road. If I had a four-wheel drive vehicle on the scale of a monster truck that could also get through thick swampland and a river, then I might have been able to find where the road picked up again. As it was, I backtracked and took the next available road South, headed toward the one paved highway I knew would take me to Florenceville and Granger.

If you really want to know what an area is like, the back roads are the way to do it. In northern Michigan, back roads wind through forests and hills which can sometimes seem like mountains, especially in the winter. Northern Michigan roads can be treacherous with ice and curves and hills that honestly didn’t seem that deep until you try to go up one or crest the hill and find that the slope on the other side seems much steeper than you originally thought. I have had the dubious distinction of driving in an SUV that could not make it up one particular ice-covered hill, and it sticks with you. Driving a sub-compact up an icy hill, you almost expect it to start sliding if you take your foot off the accelerator for so much as a half-second, but when over two tons of Detroit steel surrounding a V8 engine can’t traverse a hill, you get a sense of what the word “impassable” really means.

Iowa backroads are treacherous in their own way. I wouldn’t want to traverse them during the winter, but during the summer the loose gravel and dry dirt made my car fishtail at any speed over 30 mph. It’s only in situations where you have miles of dirt road that stretch out to the horizon that 30 mph starts to become intolerably slow. Especially when either side is populated only by miles and miles of farmland, sans farmhouses.

The farmhouses are worth mentioning, though. Life on the backroads doesn’t really concern itself with being pretty, and that’s very true for farms. It’s not that farmers are a slovenly bunch, it’s more along the lines that when your livelihood comes from working with your hands, you get used to being dirty and if you take a few minutes to stop working on your tractor or tending to livestock to go out and get the mail in a pair of muddy jeans and a flannel shirt that has obviously seen a few years of use, it’s hard to care what some random passerby thinks of you. The old woman in the fluorescent blue sweatpants and pink t-shirt was a bit harder to file in this category, but she was walking back to a farmhouse so she gets the benefit of the doubt.

In fact, the back roads around northeast Iowa seem like the perfect location for a farm. It’s not a bad analogy, either. The farms just sit back, doing their jobs, and let all the big industries zip around over the world, creating hardware, software, trading stock back and forth. They’ve all got to eat sometime, and when they do they’ll buy food from a farmer. It’s a tortoise-and-hare type of scenario that seems not only possible, but likely in rural Iowa. Out here, the myth of the big family farm seems to have taken root.

Finally, after miles of back road, I finally caught some blacktop, and from there I headed to Florenceville and Granger. The direction sign on the paved county road that leads to the two towns only mentions Granger, and after coming upon the two towns, I can now say with some confidence that this is because Florenceville is the smaller of the two towns. Considering that the combined towns have a population of about 1,000, you can get a sense of how small Florenceville is. After I had passed by two or three streets, all dirt roads, I passed by two more and then I was at a T-Bone intersection that marked more or less the end of Granger.

The two towns are, for all intents and purposes one, and I suspect the only reason Florenceville is on the map at all is due to its geographic location. If it were even 200 meters to the north, the town would simply be part of Granger and that would be that. Instead, there is one pastoral little town disguised as two.

Oddly enough, I didn’t see anyone in the town, although the town’s only restaurant, a bar and grill, had a couple cars in front of it. To the northwest, there was a hill and three silos that marked yet another farm. All things considered, I’d driven through Florenceville and Granger in under a minute. That was when I decided I would at least drive along Main Street. I’d taken so much time getting here, it seemed a shame not to take in the sights. So I did, which took a

The Bily Clock Museum

In northeast Iowa, there is a place where clocks, farmers and woodcarving combine. The result is the Bily Clock Museum. I’ve been to see it once about a year and a half ago, and when my brother Andy showed up to spend Easter with me, I thought it was high time to go see it again.

The first thing to know about the Bily Clock Museum is that it is located in Spillville, Iowa. I firmly believe this is one of the greatest names for a town ever imagined. Keep your Truth or Consequences, which is pretty good, and your Fairviews, the most generic name for a town ever and coincidentally the most popular town name in the United States. But Spillville just sounds as though it was the result of a tanker truck accident, where a bunch of volunteers gathered to clean up a toxic waste spill and then when they were done said, “Screw it, we’re staying here.” The real reason, unfortunately, is that the town was founded by a guy with the last name of Spiel. Spiel’s Village=Spielville=Spillville.

You can’t exactly get to Spillville from Cresco, at least not directly. Yes, you take Highway 9, which runs through my experiences in northeast Iowa as surely as supermodels run through Tiger Wood’s golfing experiences. You go east until you’re halfway between Cresco and Decorah, in a little town called Ridgeway, and this is where things get weird. You have to turn down a sideroad, one that seems to be maintained with less frequency than a Brigadoon appearance, and the sign that directs you clearly says “Spillville, 8 (miles).” After you go down the expressway you come to a fork in the road with a sign that points you in the direction of Spillville. It also says, “Spillville, 9 (miles).” I’m not entirely sure how you can move physically closer to a point on a map and have it be further away. I personally think some quantum physicists should study this, as it could be invaluable in figuring out the true nature of the universe. I would also like to suggest, just to cover my bases, that the northeast Iowa road commission take a look at what their sign painters are doing.  I think it’s heroin.

The first thing you notice about Spillville is that it is a tiny town. It has a population of around 300. Normally a town with 300 people in it almost qualifies as a suburb or a bedroom community. But Spillville soldiers on, probably because there’s no other town for about nine (ten) miles. It’s impressive to see such a small town with a car dealership, even if there are only two cars in the dealer lot, both used. Spillville also boasts a gas station and mini mart, a nice restaurant, a bed and breakfast, and a bar called the Farr Side that easily had more customers in front of it than the other businesses combined.

Another point of interest is that Spillville actually has a town square, a stone gazebo right dead in the middle of main street that you have to drive around. You can look at it and think, just for a moment, that men in top hats and women wearing bonnets will be walking out to the gazebo, along with a small marching band playing the Spirit of ’76. Then you see the car dealership and get taken back to the twenty-first century.

The Bily Clock Museum is in a brownstone building that contrasts with the rest of Spillville like a red dress in a black and white film. It’s almost a perfect rectangle from the front and side, with no bits sticking out. It was built without decoration or pretension, simply meant to provide shelter. Even so, it stands with a quiet kind of majesty, something that would puzzle anyone who happened to zip through the town. Of course, anyone who did zip through town would be taking the highway four miles over. Most people who come to Spillville know what the building is.

Finally, there are the clocks themselves. Now, when I say “clocks,” please do not think of anything that can be hung on a wall. These are more like sculptures, with intricately carved panels, moving parts that activate when the hour is struck, and in one notable case the entire clock is carved from wood, including the clock gears.  In most of these sculptures/clocks the themes are similar—religion and science. One clock has the twelve apostles parade through a door, displaying themselves on a track for you before going back into the machinery.  Another showcases their version of the influential figures of the age, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Edison. Yet another has fifty-seven panels showing the history of America and the progress of the pioneers. There are some smaller pieces, but by and large they are the exception to the rule.

It is impossible to look at these clocks and not be awestruck. The Bily brothers were farmers, after all, who only did woodcutting as a hobby in the winter months when the lack of crops to tend left gaping holes of time to fill. They also only had a fifth-grade education, but they were avid readers. They put together a library that would shame most people who consider themselves academics, and in other circumstances it’s not hard to see them being university scholars. Also, they only traveled about thirty-five miles from their farm in Spillville. Most of the time, they were content to be farmers, and when they had some spare time they’d design and carve these clocks. For fun. Not for fame, and not for money—Henry Ford wanted to buy one of the Bilys’ clocks, and they turned him down, even when he offered them one million dollars. This is usually the part in the story where people say, “and they spent the rest of their lives in the loony bin, the end.”

 I take away a different moral from the story, though. If you are a farmer in the middle of nowhere, and despite your impressive book collection have never been more than thirty-five miles from home, you might be perfectly content with where you are and what you have. You might also have some project that you’re proud of. If you have all those things, then let me ask you, what good will a million dollars do you? You’ve already got everything you need, or want. It’s a peace of mind very few people have, or even understand. I could evangelize here, say that it’s because we have commercials telling us what we need next or that it’s because celebrities constantly flaunt their wealth and success, but I don’t think that’s the case. It’s more having peace of mind, being happy and content, is worth more than being able to buy something. It’s a state I think everyone is aiming for, and it may say something about how few people ever manage to achieve it.

It’s also worth noting there’s a lot you can do if you have a hobby you like and some free time to practice it.

The Wrestling Hall of Fame

Frick I’m tired. This doesn’t really have much to do with the region itself, but it does directly impact how much I want to write today. If you’ve ever tried to write while tired, then you’re aware it’s a mental battle between your willpower and your brain saying “sleepsleepsleepsleepsleep!” 

Instead of harping on that, though, I’ll write up this brief little entry about the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame. Out here in the Midwest, one of THE sports to follow is wrestling. Not pro wrestling, although that would arguably make a more entertaining hall of fame, but traditional wrestling. In my entry on the Cresco Fitness Center I made mention of this, but junior high and high school students will be hitting the gym after it gets out, drinking protein shakes and carrying magazines featuring men and occasionally women who have zero body fat and enough muscles that you have to wonder what the people on those muscle magazine covers do when they’re not oiled up and posing. I have trouble seeing them in an office environment, and there just aren’t enough gyms in the U.S. for these people to run all of them. Somewhere out there is a computer programmer or accountant who you would not want to push around is all I’m saying.

Back to my point that wresting in Iowa is huge. Perhaps part of it can be attributed to frustrated farmboys whose constant chores and physical regimens make them want to see just how strong they are, and it’s either sanctioned wrestling tournaments or bar fights. But if you drive through Iowa, you can take the wrestling challenge—put your radio on scan, then wait until the evening. The odds of you hearing a broadcasted wrestling match are better than average. So it makes sense that Iowa would have a wrestling hall of fame.

Choosing Cresco as the location, though, is a mystery. I have yet to read of any compelling reason why the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame would be in Cresco, rather than in, say, Des Moines where that sort of monument to state pride would be more at home. I suppose it could have been decided by a lottery.

The Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame is located in the Cresco Welcome Center, a pleasant little gray brick building that is adorned with a dark polished stone bench out front, a gravel garden with concrete walkways and a short squat appearance. It’s very Midwest—nice but not ostentatious. Inside, you’ll find the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame is very short and to the point. It doesn’t contain memorabilia or recounts of famous matches, but instead focuses on the inductees. Each inductee gets a photo taken, along with a brief biography that includes exactly what they did to deserve a spot in the hall of fame. 

When you walk through it, you realize a couple of things. The first is that you generally become a member of the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame at a young age. All of the plaques have a picture of a man who is at least middle-aged, smiling congenially for the camera. Next to his picture is a photo of the same man in high school or college, dressed in full wrestling gear, in a standard wrestling ready position. Granted, I know as much about amateur wrestling as I do about nuclear fusion, but from the stance of the legs and the “ready to grapple” position of the arms, even a monkey could tell what it is. All these young men have a serious look on their faces, one that says, “I know you are the photographer, but if I wanted to I could detach your arms without much trouble.” It’s the look plenty of young men spend hours trying to cultivate. After about age 21, though, the chance to do something that earns you a spot in the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame decreases dramatically. Amateur wrestling, like most sports, is a game in which only the young can succeed. There are no Brett Farves here. When you leave college, you also leave amateur wrestling. 

Secondly, the people that are in the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame have got to be doing it for the love of the sport. As I walked the hallway of the hall of fame, I realized that getting to this level is beyond getting a medal. The dedication showed here comes from beyond winning medals, from beyond getting the high school glory and the attention. At that point, it’s less about winning and more about a drive to perfect oneself in a chosen art.

The Meat of the Matter

One of the first things that strikes me about the town of Cresco is its grocery store, of all things. Particularly the butcher’s section. Even though I grew up in a small town, I’m used to buying my meats the usual way—freshly wrapped in plastic, usually processed a day or two ago. Fresh-cut meat? It’s all done behind the scenes. Maybe you’ll have a deli shave off a half-pound of ham and wrap it in wax paper if you’re lucky.

But in Cresco there’s an actual butcher’s department. Yeah, you can buy plastic-wrapped meat but for the most part if you want hamburger, you ask the butcher for a pound of hamburger. If you want sausage, you get a pound of sausage, fresh-ground. It’s wonderful. I suppose it reminds me of the proverbial “Good ol’ days,” where people supposedly tipped their hat to you and said “guv’nah” as you passed by. Funnily enough, you never seemed to have to do that to anyone else when you passed by them. Maybe it was only the people who had hats who had to tip them and say “guv’nah.” There might be a statute about that sort of thing…

                 

Anyway, back to the butcher’s shop. I think part of the reason I like it is because I feel in control. It’s like buying vegetables at a grocery store, where you can choose the number of groceries you want and check them for freshness before buying them. With some exceptions, like pre-bagged apples and oranges, you get to test out the product before you buy it. It’s the same with meat. Plus, seeing fresh meat laid out has a very different feel than buying a pre-wrapped steak that’s already been cut and weighed. Want a pound of strip steak? You don’t have to take the pound-and-a-half or pound-and-a-quarter or whatever the supermarket has decided is the right cut. You get strip steak that weighs a pound.

                 

Maybe I’m making too much of this, but I don’t think so. It reminds me of delis, and the assurance that you’re getting something fresh. Something that was homemade. Plus, the butchers are pretty nice. They’re so willing to help that they usually ask me what I want as I’m browsing their selection. At some point, someone is going to write a comedy about an earnest salesperson and someone who shops by browsing, and it is going to be a blockbuster. At least a decent off-Broadway play.

                 

The butcher’s shop is something incredible, something that has all but vanished. When I go into a Target or Wal-Mart, there’s a decent selection of meats, but it’s all impersonal, all business-like. If your goal is to sell as much product as possible, that’s fine, but I like talking with the butcher, asking him or her about cuts of meat or if there’s a suitable substitute. Try asking the Wal-Mart employee trying to restock the cereal shelves whether flank steak is acceptable stew meat sometime and see how far you get.

                 

So if you come by Cresco, IA swing by the local grocery store. Trust me, you don’t need me to tell you the name. It’s the only grocery store in town.

First Post

Bill Bryson is a darned fine writer. He’s also the inspiration for this blog, so if you don’t like what you see, blame him. The second inspiration is my history with small towns.

I grew up in a small rural town in Michigan whose population consisted of about 3,000 people. When I was in high school, kids used to talk about “cruising the town,” which took all of two minutes. Three, if they decided to hang out in the parking lot of the local supermarket. Still, I had fun. My dad is an avid outdoorsman, and so I learned all about hunting, fishing, camping, and how to enjoy myself just by going for a walk in the country. Of course, being one of those intellectual geeky types, I’d also go into the local library and check out a book or two. Or see if the local supermarket had any new comic books. And that was pretty much it.

By the time I’d graduated high school I was more than ready to leave. When I went to college I lived in an honest-to-god city, with multi-level buildings and sirens going past my dorm room at midnight and everything a city is supposed to have—including book stores and game stores, which have since become two of my favorite addictions. Not to mention I just like living in a city, having an apartment and being part of what writer Neal Stephenson called the biomass.

Now, however, I’m back in a small town. This is mostly due to my desire to make it as a writer. Unbeknownst to me, you have to either have a job while becoming a writer or starve gracefully until you’ve proven you can write and some company takes you on when you can successfully present the façade of a seasoned professional. I chose the latter route, and after only five or six years of living on ramen was picked up by a company located in northeastern Iowa. Here’s the irony, though—the job is in a small town. I’ve got two cities each an hour away from me and a pretty decent-sized town about a half-hour to the east, but for the most part my work and my free time is spent in a small town. I pretty much resigned myself to the crippling boredom that only a small town can provide unless I traveled extensively on the weekends. Then I read Bill Bryson’s excellent book, “The Lost Continent,” in which he explores several small Midwestern towns. He writes about them with humor, but also with the understanding that small towns are different somehow. The things that affect people here are different than in cities. They’re smaller and more personal. Benefit dinner posters get put up in the windows of the local fast food eateries—the electronic town sign posts church get-togethers and VFW happenings. You get to see some quirks that would make city dwellers cock an eyebrow. Small towns may also contain surprises, things you just wouldn’t expect or people you might not expect. After all, Brad Pitt had to come from somewhere, right?

So that’s the reason for this blog. My intention, barring any unforeseen circumstances, is to write about this area, explain what makes it unique. If nothing else, it beats sitting around all day watching reruns of Mythbusters.