The Hopefuls: Chasing a Rock 'n' Roll Dream in the Minnesota Music Scene: Introduction
Showtime was supposed to be 20 minutes ago. We’ve watched the band carry in their gear, set it up on the tiny stage, but then they disappear for awhile. When they walk back on stage one-by-one, it’s with no ado. The lights don't dim; the overhead music doesn't even turn off.
Despite the lack of usual ceremony – this is a slightly upscale bar on the edge of Loring Park, afterall, not a club – they seem like trickster gods taking the tiny stage, resplendent in their matching red and orange tracksuits. They're visually striking, Appelwick tall and lanky with a lopsided sly smile; Darren short, bespectacled, and poker-faced; Johnny tucking his long brown hair almost shyly behind one ear while focused intently on his keyboard; Heath smiling widely; and Matt fresh faced and blonde behind the kit. Darren asks politely that the overhead music be turned off, and his request goes unheeded. The band look at each other and shrug.
The feeling that we're seeing something special isn’t solidified until they start playing, an insistent double guitar attack, rumbling bass, marching drumbeat, and whirling keys. “I don’t think your mother likes me,” Darren croons, “Your dad says my head is filled with rocks and sand.” Patron conversations slowly fall away, though the overhead music is still audible in quiet moments (it won't be until the third song that someone behind the bar finally heeds the band’s polite requests to turn it off).
The songs add up. They’re energetic, harmony-laden, funny, emotionally piercing. The audience starts to buzz a bit more after each one: "Did you hear that one?" "These guys are local?" "How come I haven't heard of them?"
That was the first time I saw the Olympic Hopefuls, just before they took over the Minneapolis music scene.
*
If you paid any sort of attention to local music in Minneapolis-Saint Paul between 2000 and 2010, you bought a CD, heard a song on 89.3 the Current, or went to at least one show featuring Erik Appelwick, Eric Fawcett, John Hermanson, and/or Darren Jackson. As performers and producers their influence reached into nearly every corner of the Twin Cities music scene. Six degrees of separation? These guys only need one or two degrees to get to every big musical name in the Cities (Prince, the Replacements, Hüsker Dü) and to dozens more outside of it (Todd Rundgren, Flaming Lips, Dave Matthews Band).
Their accomplishments, collectively, are mighty. As songwriters and/or primary band members they’ve released more than sixty separate albums. Their work as producers and session players easily adds another sixty. They’ve sold in the tens of thousands of records without the help of any major label. Their music has appeared in films and TV shows, and they’ve performed on Saturday Night Live, The Late Show with David Letterman, and A Prairie Home Companion. They’ve brushed elbows with celebrities, shared bills and stages with their musical heroes, and toured the world.
Along the way, they were part of the revitalization of a proud Twin Cities scene that had fallen into disrepair. In the early 2000s, there was hardly any evidence left of the heyday of the ‘80s when Prince, Husker Du, The Replacements, and Jam and Lewis made Minneapolis an hotbed of nationally recognized talent. Twenty years later, Prince had become The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, and was wandering in a noncommercial musical wilderness. Paul Westerberg was in exile in his Richfield basement, Tommy Stinson was in Guns ‘n Roses, Chris Mars had given up music for painting, and Bob Stinson was dead. Hüsker Dü had been defunct over for a decade. Soul Asylum's hitmaking days were through. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ Flyte Tyme Productions was soon to leave for California. Even the local bands that had populated a wild scene in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s – the Suburbs, Suicide Commandos, The Flamin’ Ohs – were dormant.
There were still plenty of talented musicians, but both 400 Bar and First Avenue were struggling in the late 1990s and early 2000s to draw crowds to local bands, something both Johnny and Fawcett experienced first-hand. The Uptown Bar even stopped booking live music for a time in the late ‘90s. And the musicians themselves weren’t banding together to build one another up. “It’s amazing how scattered everything and everyone is,” Semisonic bassist John Munson told the Star Tribune in an article about how to revive the scene.
When the Olympic Hopefuls came along, followed not long after by the debut of a groundbreaking public radio station, 89.3 The Current, and the concurrent rise of hip-hop labels Rhymesayers and Doomtree, the local scene became markedly more robust. And though that didn’t necessarily mean the rest of the country and world started noticing them again, the Cities once again became a place where on any given night there were a ton of fantastic homegrown bands playing great venues to enthusiastic crowds.
*
That summer night in 2004 at Bar Lurcat I found the first here-and-now local band that I truly loved. It helped greatly that their brand of smart pop rock was exactly in my listening wheelhouse, right in line with favorites like Sloan, Matthew Sweet, and XTC. I had been slow to embrace the Twin Cities music scene upon moving to Minneapolis in 1999, partly out of not knowing where to start, but largely because it didn’t really feel like there was a scene. Once OH came along, however, I was all in. I would end up seeing them 13 times over the next four years, and even now I regret that that number isn’t much larger. Beyond the fact that I connected so thoroughly to their music and lyrics, a big part of their appeal to me was the band’s configuration. I knew from articles in the local press that the band was comprised of members of other acts – a local supergroup if you will – but at the time I barely had an inkling of where they had come from.
Part of the fun, then, of becoming a fan was discovering the everything else those guys were involved in, and just how vastly dissimilar those other projects were from OH and from one another. There was the dark indie rock of Kid Dakota, the groovy R & B of Vicious Vicious, the earnest power-pop of Alva Star, and the harmony-driven folk of Storyhill. Getting to know each of these groups only deepened my interest and affection. When Eric Fawcett joined OH after the demise of Spymob – a band I already adored – it just seemed like manifest destiny.
For awhile there the guys were unstoppable. Appelwick’s production work on Tapes n’ Tapes record The Loon helped shoot that band into the indie rock stratosphere. Storyhill signed to Red House Records. The Olympic Hopefuls somehow got prominent enough to attract the attention of the United States Olympic Committee (and not in a good way). Rupert Pederson III, a dancing hype-man, started appearing onstage with OH, taking the energy levels to crazy new heights. They were heady times.
I loved the music, but the men behind it fascinated me just as much. What were they like as people? What inspired their music? How had they met? How did they get along? What was the division of labor in the band? How did they know which song fit with which project? And later, after OH dissipated, and life had taken me in other directions (marriage, mortgage, fatherhood), I started to wonder what exactly had happened to bring it all to an end.
It was all of those questions that prompted me, in the late summer of 2015, to get in touch with Eric Fawcett, and have the first of many conversations that led to this book. During our first chat Eric warned me that I didn’t have an easy road ahead, largely because, “there are contingents of the band not speaking to one another.” As a fan, this was disheartening news. As a writer, nothing could have been more intriguing, or terrifying. I charged forward, and found that to be one of the more minor revelations I’d uncover in my interviews and research.
When every interview was done and every article, interview, and old MySpace page had been scoured, I found myself with a very different story than the one I’d expected. When I first started researching, I jokingly told a friend that my template for the book was the bullshit line William Miller feeds his Rolling Stone editor in the film Almost Famous: “It's a think piece about a mid-level band struggling with their own limitations in the harsh face of stardom.”
What really happened was that, like any good researcher, I let the research lead me. And that led me to a series of discoveries I couldn’t have anticipated.
-I discovered that the Olympic Hopefuls were only a part of a much deeper, richer, more complicated story. I found the real story was the improbably intertwined musical lives of Appelwick, Fawcett, Darren, Johnny, and decades of friendship, musical collaboration, and creative searching. These are four remarkable, and remarkably different, individuals. None of them originated from the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area, or even Minnesota, instead hailing from Montana, South Dakota, Michigan, and Iowa. Musically they came from different traditions that rarely cross over: folk, alt-country, jazz-pop, lo-fi. Their influences range from KISS to John Cage to Rush to John Denver. They have drastically contrasting philosophies and personalities – the joker, the talker, the searcher, the philosopher.
They each took their own distinctive path to becoming working independent musicians, their stories intersecting and co-joining in places along the way, wildly diverging in others. But they shared several traits that likely brought them together and drove them forward: intelligence, versatility, work-ethic, and above all the desire to be their best creative selves in a system that doesn’t offer rewards based on merit.
-I discovered that creative collaboration is an incredibly complex process. One of, if not the, most unique aspects of these four guys’ work is how so much of it was the result of the musical collective they formed upon converging in Minneapolis. The first time one starts poring through all the liner notes and realizes just how much they all worked on each other’s records and played in each other’s bands, it’s almost dizzying. And this was a huge part of their local success. They propped each other up, promoted one another, and worked together to achieve more than any of them could have alone. The Olympic Hopefuls were the culmination of that collaboration, the place where they all finally came together in one band. So it’s very fitting that that’s the place – at least locally – where they received the most love and acclaim. And maybe it’s also fitting that it’s the place where their collective fell apart.
Collaborative music-making is often a paradox. Bassist Brian Roessler calls it “an idealized version of how we should be with each other, you’re listening to them and they're listening to you, cooperating with each other.” And yet, the most thrilling music is often made by people who despise one another, or end up despising one another (for examples, start with Lennon and McCartney and Jagger and Richards and work forward from there).
Eric Fawcett explains this paradox as the result of two (or more) people in a band holding very different ideas of perfection. “Those two frequencies resonating together,” he says, “sometimes in consonance, sometimes in dissonance, sometimes both, is what brings out the greatness in a band.” He likens this tension within a band to counterweights on a balance scale. Things sway back and forth, but the scale doesn’t tip over unless one set of weights is completely removed. When communication stopped and relationships frayed between Appelwick, Fawcett, Darren, and Johnny, the scale crashed.
-I discovered that success is a spectrum. When I met with Star Tribune music writer Chris Riemenschneider, who covered all of these musicians in all of their iterations, he said, “The big question for the book is, are these guys happy with the way things have gone for them?” Success in the realm of rock music is often exclusively tied to fame and fortune, and at one point or another that was definitely the goal for Appelwick, Fawcett, Darren, and Johnny. Because that didn’t happen for them – at least it hasn’t as of this writing – the question of whether or not they could have or should have made the big time is one that nags their musical careers.
There were a few who believed that, had the guys lived in New York or Los Angeles, they would have become stars (Andy Carlson, co-founder of Peppermint CDs, says, “I still firmly believe that if Kid Dakota was based in Brooklyn in 1999, 2000, 2001 instead of Minneapolis, and some hip writer for the New York Times would have seen the peak Kid Dakota, that they would likely have become a well-known indie act as big as TV on the Radio or Interpol”). Some said that it was only a matter of timing (Riemenschneider said of the Hopefuls: “I fully believe that in the late '90s they were a band that would have gotten a big record deal.”) Others saw the Olympic Hopefuls as a cautionary tale of hubris overtaking any chance of lasting success. While it’s highly debatable if the OH had a realistic chance at any sort of sustained career as a major label band, the question of what might have been still lingers.
But that’s all looking at things from a very narrow measure of achievement. If nothing else, these four musicians’ stories illustrate that there are many other definitions of “making it.”
Taking what you do as creative and emotional and personal expression and putting a dollar value on it, relying on it for your car insurance and mortgage or rent and groceries is an extremely untenable situation. Being an independent musician takes extreme sacrifice and requires a lot of luck and help, and even then the odds and economics are against you. Giving yourself over to a label often requires unpleasant artistic compromise, and the economics are only slightly less against you. And that was under the old model, before downloads and streaming changed nearly everything. Caught between the death of the golden ticket major label deal and Internet-driven acclaim, Appelwick, Fawcett, Darren, and Johnny all found ways to get their music to a receptive audience, and make a living off of it. They were each able build up an impressive body of work under those harsh conditions.
Perhaps the truest way to measure the effectiveness of a creative endeavor is by what it inspires in others. Odd Future rapper Tyler, the Creator was asked by the Austin Chronicle in 2015 to name his ideal live backing band, dead or alive, defunct or active. His first choice was “Spymob from 2002 when they used to tour with N.E.R.D.”
89.3 the Current DJ Bill DeVille describes himself as a superfan of the Olympic Hopefuls: “I didn't miss shows. I'd go see them wherever they played. Their shows were fun and eclectic. I miss ‘em. I’d go see them again tomorrow.”
When Grace Pettis appeared at the 2014 Storyhill Fest, she told Chris and Johnny, “Your fans are like a cult.” As Garrison Keillor so humorously put it, they were “prisoners of popular acclaim,” their devotees simply not allowing them to go away.
Communist Daughter bandleader Johnny Solomon credits Johnny for teaching him how to write songs, and adds, “All those guys taught me how to be a musician, each one of them was hugely influential to my music. That core group of guys was basically my whole world. I wouldn’t have the career I have now without that.”
Musician and artist William Schaff says of Darren and Kid Dakota, “I’m blown away by his songwriting and his use of the studio. His voice is one of my top three voices in modern music.”
Music manager and label owner Ryan Kuper said, “Of all the bands I’ve had anything to do with, more than anyone else, my friends, family, and industry people reference Vicious Vicious more, or bring up song titles and lyrics, or send me a picture of the album they stumble across, or a picture of the digital track playing on their car or their phone.”
“You know, the reward is intrinsic,” Alex Oana says. “The reward is in creating something together and getting to work with these awesome people. Building something that you couldn’t have built by yourself. But for us also there was a dream attached to it.” The dream wasn’t simply to “make it big,” but to have the prolonged career in music that comes along with that. When Olympic Hopefuls were forced to become The Hopefuls (a story told in Chapter 12), their name became a deeper expression of their experience. To be hopeful is to be optimistic, but to be a hopeful is to aspire to something, and at some point your ambition is either fulfilled or not. You can’t be a hopeful forever.
Or can you?
----
The Hopefuls: Chasing a Rock 'n' Roll Dream in the Minnesota Music Scene by Paul V. Allen was published by McFarland and Company in 2018. Buy it from your favorite independent bookstore, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or directly from McFarland.
Despite the lack of usual ceremony – this is a slightly upscale bar on the edge of Loring Park, afterall, not a club – they seem like trickster gods taking the tiny stage, resplendent in their matching red and orange tracksuits. They're visually striking, Appelwick tall and lanky with a lopsided sly smile; Darren short, bespectacled, and poker-faced; Johnny tucking his long brown hair almost shyly behind one ear while focused intently on his keyboard; Heath smiling widely; and Matt fresh faced and blonde behind the kit. Darren asks politely that the overhead music be turned off, and his request goes unheeded. The band look at each other and shrug.
The feeling that we're seeing something special isn’t solidified until they start playing, an insistent double guitar attack, rumbling bass, marching drumbeat, and whirling keys. “I don’t think your mother likes me,” Darren croons, “Your dad says my head is filled with rocks and sand.” Patron conversations slowly fall away, though the overhead music is still audible in quiet moments (it won't be until the third song that someone behind the bar finally heeds the band’s polite requests to turn it off).
The songs add up. They’re energetic, harmony-laden, funny, emotionally piercing. The audience starts to buzz a bit more after each one: "Did you hear that one?" "These guys are local?" "How come I haven't heard of them?"
That was the first time I saw the Olympic Hopefuls, just before they took over the Minneapolis music scene.
 |
| Olympic Hopefuls at Bar Lurcat in June 2004. |
If you paid any sort of attention to local music in Minneapolis-Saint Paul between 2000 and 2010, you bought a CD, heard a song on 89.3 the Current, or went to at least one show featuring Erik Appelwick, Eric Fawcett, John Hermanson, and/or Darren Jackson. As performers and producers their influence reached into nearly every corner of the Twin Cities music scene. Six degrees of separation? These guys only need one or two degrees to get to every big musical name in the Cities (Prince, the Replacements, Hüsker Dü) and to dozens more outside of it (Todd Rundgren, Flaming Lips, Dave Matthews Band).
Their accomplishments, collectively, are mighty. As songwriters and/or primary band members they’ve released more than sixty separate albums. Their work as producers and session players easily adds another sixty. They’ve sold in the tens of thousands of records without the help of any major label. Their music has appeared in films and TV shows, and they’ve performed on Saturday Night Live, The Late Show with David Letterman, and A Prairie Home Companion. They’ve brushed elbows with celebrities, shared bills and stages with their musical heroes, and toured the world.
Along the way, they were part of the revitalization of a proud Twin Cities scene that had fallen into disrepair. In the early 2000s, there was hardly any evidence left of the heyday of the ‘80s when Prince, Husker Du, The Replacements, and Jam and Lewis made Minneapolis an hotbed of nationally recognized talent. Twenty years later, Prince had become The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, and was wandering in a noncommercial musical wilderness. Paul Westerberg was in exile in his Richfield basement, Tommy Stinson was in Guns ‘n Roses, Chris Mars had given up music for painting, and Bob Stinson was dead. Hüsker Dü had been defunct over for a decade. Soul Asylum's hitmaking days were through. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ Flyte Tyme Productions was soon to leave for California. Even the local bands that had populated a wild scene in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s – the Suburbs, Suicide Commandos, The Flamin’ Ohs – were dormant.
There were still plenty of talented musicians, but both 400 Bar and First Avenue were struggling in the late 1990s and early 2000s to draw crowds to local bands, something both Johnny and Fawcett experienced first-hand. The Uptown Bar even stopped booking live music for a time in the late ‘90s. And the musicians themselves weren’t banding together to build one another up. “It’s amazing how scattered everything and everyone is,” Semisonic bassist John Munson told the Star Tribune in an article about how to revive the scene.
When the Olympic Hopefuls came along, followed not long after by the debut of a groundbreaking public radio station, 89.3 The Current, and the concurrent rise of hip-hop labels Rhymesayers and Doomtree, the local scene became markedly more robust. And though that didn’t necessarily mean the rest of the country and world started noticing them again, the Cities once again became a place where on any given night there were a ton of fantastic homegrown bands playing great venues to enthusiastic crowds.
*
That summer night in 2004 at Bar Lurcat I found the first here-and-now local band that I truly loved. It helped greatly that their brand of smart pop rock was exactly in my listening wheelhouse, right in line with favorites like Sloan, Matthew Sweet, and XTC. I had been slow to embrace the Twin Cities music scene upon moving to Minneapolis in 1999, partly out of not knowing where to start, but largely because it didn’t really feel like there was a scene. Once OH came along, however, I was all in. I would end up seeing them 13 times over the next four years, and even now I regret that that number isn’t much larger. Beyond the fact that I connected so thoroughly to their music and lyrics, a big part of their appeal to me was the band’s configuration. I knew from articles in the local press that the band was comprised of members of other acts – a local supergroup if you will – but at the time I barely had an inkling of where they had come from.
Part of the fun, then, of becoming a fan was discovering the everything else those guys were involved in, and just how vastly dissimilar those other projects were from OH and from one another. There was the dark indie rock of Kid Dakota, the groovy R & B of Vicious Vicious, the earnest power-pop of Alva Star, and the harmony-driven folk of Storyhill. Getting to know each of these groups only deepened my interest and affection. When Eric Fawcett joined OH after the demise of Spymob – a band I already adored – it just seemed like manifest destiny.
For awhile there the guys were unstoppable. Appelwick’s production work on Tapes n’ Tapes record The Loon helped shoot that band into the indie rock stratosphere. Storyhill signed to Red House Records. The Olympic Hopefuls somehow got prominent enough to attract the attention of the United States Olympic Committee (and not in a good way). Rupert Pederson III, a dancing hype-man, started appearing onstage with OH, taking the energy levels to crazy new heights. They were heady times.
I loved the music, but the men behind it fascinated me just as much. What were they like as people? What inspired their music? How had they met? How did they get along? What was the division of labor in the band? How did they know which song fit with which project? And later, after OH dissipated, and life had taken me in other directions (marriage, mortgage, fatherhood), I started to wonder what exactly had happened to bring it all to an end.
It was all of those questions that prompted me, in the late summer of 2015, to get in touch with Eric Fawcett, and have the first of many conversations that led to this book. During our first chat Eric warned me that I didn’t have an easy road ahead, largely because, “there are contingents of the band not speaking to one another.” As a fan, this was disheartening news. As a writer, nothing could have been more intriguing, or terrifying. I charged forward, and found that to be one of the more minor revelations I’d uncover in my interviews and research.
When every interview was done and every article, interview, and old MySpace page had been scoured, I found myself with a very different story than the one I’d expected. When I first started researching, I jokingly told a friend that my template for the book was the bullshit line William Miller feeds his Rolling Stone editor in the film Almost Famous: “It's a think piece about a mid-level band struggling with their own limitations in the harsh face of stardom.”
What really happened was that, like any good researcher, I let the research lead me. And that led me to a series of discoveries I couldn’t have anticipated.
-I discovered that the Olympic Hopefuls were only a part of a much deeper, richer, more complicated story. I found the real story was the improbably intertwined musical lives of Appelwick, Fawcett, Darren, Johnny, and decades of friendship, musical collaboration, and creative searching. These are four remarkable, and remarkably different, individuals. None of them originated from the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area, or even Minnesota, instead hailing from Montana, South Dakota, Michigan, and Iowa. Musically they came from different traditions that rarely cross over: folk, alt-country, jazz-pop, lo-fi. Their influences range from KISS to John Cage to Rush to John Denver. They have drastically contrasting philosophies and personalities – the joker, the talker, the searcher, the philosopher.
They each took their own distinctive path to becoming working independent musicians, their stories intersecting and co-joining in places along the way, wildly diverging in others. But they shared several traits that likely brought them together and drove them forward: intelligence, versatility, work-ethic, and above all the desire to be their best creative selves in a system that doesn’t offer rewards based on merit.
-I discovered that creative collaboration is an incredibly complex process. One of, if not the, most unique aspects of these four guys’ work is how so much of it was the result of the musical collective they formed upon converging in Minneapolis. The first time one starts poring through all the liner notes and realizes just how much they all worked on each other’s records and played in each other’s bands, it’s almost dizzying. And this was a huge part of their local success. They propped each other up, promoted one another, and worked together to achieve more than any of them could have alone. The Olympic Hopefuls were the culmination of that collaboration, the place where they all finally came together in one band. So it’s very fitting that that’s the place – at least locally – where they received the most love and acclaim. And maybe it’s also fitting that it’s the place where their collective fell apart.
Collaborative music-making is often a paradox. Bassist Brian Roessler calls it “an idealized version of how we should be with each other, you’re listening to them and they're listening to you, cooperating with each other.” And yet, the most thrilling music is often made by people who despise one another, or end up despising one another (for examples, start with Lennon and McCartney and Jagger and Richards and work forward from there).
Eric Fawcett explains this paradox as the result of two (or more) people in a band holding very different ideas of perfection. “Those two frequencies resonating together,” he says, “sometimes in consonance, sometimes in dissonance, sometimes both, is what brings out the greatness in a band.” He likens this tension within a band to counterweights on a balance scale. Things sway back and forth, but the scale doesn’t tip over unless one set of weights is completely removed. When communication stopped and relationships frayed between Appelwick, Fawcett, Darren, and Johnny, the scale crashed.
-I discovered that success is a spectrum. When I met with Star Tribune music writer Chris Riemenschneider, who covered all of these musicians in all of their iterations, he said, “The big question for the book is, are these guys happy with the way things have gone for them?” Success in the realm of rock music is often exclusively tied to fame and fortune, and at one point or another that was definitely the goal for Appelwick, Fawcett, Darren, and Johnny. Because that didn’t happen for them – at least it hasn’t as of this writing – the question of whether or not they could have or should have made the big time is one that nags their musical careers.
There were a few who believed that, had the guys lived in New York or Los Angeles, they would have become stars (Andy Carlson, co-founder of Peppermint CDs, says, “I still firmly believe that if Kid Dakota was based in Brooklyn in 1999, 2000, 2001 instead of Minneapolis, and some hip writer for the New York Times would have seen the peak Kid Dakota, that they would likely have become a well-known indie act as big as TV on the Radio or Interpol”). Some said that it was only a matter of timing (Riemenschneider said of the Hopefuls: “I fully believe that in the late '90s they were a band that would have gotten a big record deal.”) Others saw the Olympic Hopefuls as a cautionary tale of hubris overtaking any chance of lasting success. While it’s highly debatable if the OH had a realistic chance at any sort of sustained career as a major label band, the question of what might have been still lingers.
But that’s all looking at things from a very narrow measure of achievement. If nothing else, these four musicians’ stories illustrate that there are many other definitions of “making it.”
Taking what you do as creative and emotional and personal expression and putting a dollar value on it, relying on it for your car insurance and mortgage or rent and groceries is an extremely untenable situation. Being an independent musician takes extreme sacrifice and requires a lot of luck and help, and even then the odds and economics are against you. Giving yourself over to a label often requires unpleasant artistic compromise, and the economics are only slightly less against you. And that was under the old model, before downloads and streaming changed nearly everything. Caught between the death of the golden ticket major label deal and Internet-driven acclaim, Appelwick, Fawcett, Darren, and Johnny all found ways to get their music to a receptive audience, and make a living off of it. They were each able build up an impressive body of work under those harsh conditions.
Perhaps the truest way to measure the effectiveness of a creative endeavor is by what it inspires in others. Odd Future rapper Tyler, the Creator was asked by the Austin Chronicle in 2015 to name his ideal live backing band, dead or alive, defunct or active. His first choice was “Spymob from 2002 when they used to tour with N.E.R.D.”
89.3 the Current DJ Bill DeVille describes himself as a superfan of the Olympic Hopefuls: “I didn't miss shows. I'd go see them wherever they played. Their shows were fun and eclectic. I miss ‘em. I’d go see them again tomorrow.”
When Grace Pettis appeared at the 2014 Storyhill Fest, she told Chris and Johnny, “Your fans are like a cult.” As Garrison Keillor so humorously put it, they were “prisoners of popular acclaim,” their devotees simply not allowing them to go away.
Communist Daughter bandleader Johnny Solomon credits Johnny for teaching him how to write songs, and adds, “All those guys taught me how to be a musician, each one of them was hugely influential to my music. That core group of guys was basically my whole world. I wouldn’t have the career I have now without that.”
Musician and artist William Schaff says of Darren and Kid Dakota, “I’m blown away by his songwriting and his use of the studio. His voice is one of my top three voices in modern music.”
Music manager and label owner Ryan Kuper said, “Of all the bands I’ve had anything to do with, more than anyone else, my friends, family, and industry people reference Vicious Vicious more, or bring up song titles and lyrics, or send me a picture of the album they stumble across, or a picture of the digital track playing on their car or their phone.”
“You know, the reward is intrinsic,” Alex Oana says. “The reward is in creating something together and getting to work with these awesome people. Building something that you couldn’t have built by yourself. But for us also there was a dream attached to it.” The dream wasn’t simply to “make it big,” but to have the prolonged career in music that comes along with that. When Olympic Hopefuls were forced to become The Hopefuls (a story told in Chapter 12), their name became a deeper expression of their experience. To be hopeful is to be optimistic, but to be a hopeful is to aspire to something, and at some point your ambition is either fulfilled or not. You can’t be a hopeful forever.
Or can you?
----
The Hopefuls: Chasing a Rock 'n' Roll Dream in the Minnesota Music Scene by Paul V. Allen was published by McFarland and Company in 2018. Buy it from your favorite independent bookstore, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or directly from McFarland.
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