TROLLEYS, TACOS, AND STUFFED MONKEYS

Sometimes Homegrown Music Festival is about a singer-songwriter ripping into his guitar as the free trolley bumps along Superior Street. Sometimes it’s about a stranger with a stuffed monkey that will meet its untimely end at a Bratwurst show.

And sometimes it’s about about a rock star, a known crowd-surfer, taking out the News Tribune’s photographer — who didn’t stop clicking until he was knocked flat. But the photo, lo, the photo.

The News Tribune asked Homegrown goers, musicians, colleagues and friends to share their favorite Homegrown stories. Here is what they said:

Meat Cute

“Homegrown found me a husband, so there’s that,” wrote Kelly Mullan, who is now married to Tyler Scouton, the industrial musician-performance artist who incorporates chainsaws, body horror and meat play into his shows with Bratwurst.

“Tyler was living in the Cities back in 2011, but was in town to play a Bratwurst show. He’d played R.T.’s Friday night and a shard of metal went into his eye during the show so he was slightly injured but still enjoying Homegrown. I skated in a roller derby bout at the DECC Saturday night and, still dressed in my finest tights and hot pants, hopped the trolley for a solo night out. We wound up hanging out at some shows that night and eventually wound up at the Chicken Shack to close it down. Been together ever since! Homegrown normally steals my birthday week, but in 2011 it gave me the best gift ever.”

O’LOUGHLIN ROCKS THE TROLLEY

Duluth-raised musician Emily Haavik dug into her drop box for a 2015 video of guitar player Jeffrey James O’Loughlin literally rocking the trolley. Her favorite Homegrown memory ever, she said.

By Christa Lawler clawler@duluthnews.com

O’Loughlin stood in the back, ripped at his guitar, and whooped while the trolley bucked along the festival route. Meanwhile, there were co-yelpers and phone flashes from Homegrowners chronicling the action.

“I don’t know why but it so perfectly encapsulated everything I love about

Homegrown,” Haavik said in an email.

She wasn’t the only one to note the O’Loughlin concert. It was also a favorite of artist Ivy Vainio, who added, “Also, whenever anyone would get on the trolley, the whole trolley full of people would scream and yell in excitement. It was quite the experience. The best Homegrown concert yet.”

It might just be the festival vibe of free transportation: Cathy Podeszwa’s pick was the polka band Dance Attic’s trolley show.

“I don’t know how Suzi (Ludwig) kept playing that accordion as we launched down the avenue to Michigan by the Depot,” she said.

For festival-goer Lynne Williams, the ride itself is a favorite.

“The trolley,” she wrote. “Always the trolley.”

Monkey Business

A young woman’s plus-one for the 2013 music festival was a large stuffed monkey, which suffered

Continued on page 24 a death-by-evisceration by the end of the week. It crowd-surfed while Trampled By Turtles played at Clyde Iron Works. A security guard confiscated it, then succumbed to the booing and propped it against a monitor on stage, Ryan Nelson recalled. It rested on a wet sidewalk during a cigarette break, according to photographic evidence by Eve Uytro. It was finally dismantled during Bratwurst’s set. “Those beads inside of it went from R.T.’s to at least the casino after the show,” Scouton, the band’s frontman recalled.

UNDERAGE BAND, UNDERAGE FANS

In the early-to-mid 2000s, News Tribune outdoors reporter Sam Cook’s son Grant Cook, then a freshman at Duluth East, was in the band La Foret. The new-agey band earned a mid-week slot at the then-Tap Room, which is now Rex Bar, in the lower level of the Fitger’s complex.

“At their ages, 14 or 15, none of them had been in a bar (that I knew of), but it was allowed for Homegrown,” Sam Cook wrote. “The boys’ classmates couldn’t get in because they were underage, but a bunch of them found their way into a back stairway — probably a fire exit. The door to the stairway was cracked open during the band’s performance, and I remember that several of their friends were sitting there on the steps. I’m not sure they could even see the guys, but they could hear them. I just thought that was sweet. Wish I had a photo of them sitting there, but it’s only in my memory.”

Corey Feldman And The Case Of The Free Tacos

Eve Utyro was having a hard time after a breakup, she said, and her oldest friend Alyssa decided to cheer her up by making a donation to Corey Feldman’s gofundme.com for the album he planned to release, “Elev8or 2 Ascension.” The donation meant Utyro would get a copy of the record, and that Feldman would do whatever she wanted and post it on Instagram.

Her pick involved the former child star holding a cat and a sign.

So there she was at the Main Club, Homegrown 2016:

“I’m watching Brad Fernholz and Brynn Sias wail and I get an Instagram ding: ‘Hey, it’s Corey. I don’t own a cat. What do you want me to do?’” Utyro wrote.

She and her fellow Homegrown-goer Kip Praslowicz lost it, she said.

Feldman followed through. Rather than a live cat, he drew one — per her request — and held a sign that said “I love Eve Utyro.”

As if that wasn’t enough, later that night a high school student working at Taco John’s thought she was cute and kept giving her free food.

“Girl, it was a night,” she said.

All About The Music

During one of the early years, Low was on tour in Europe during the annual festival. But they were not forgotten. A bunch of bands added Low covers to their sets, recalled Christine Dean of KUMD-FM, who also dug a 2011 reunion show for the 90s-bred alt rock band Puddle

Wonderful — a band that was born before Homegrown Music Festival was even a twinkle in founder Scott Lunt’s eye.

Jake Larson played alongside If Thousands at a pre-refurbished NorShor Theatre, then watched one of the festival’s naughtier bands do its destruction.

“(Bone Appetit poured) beer in the monitors and all over the stage while their manager Max Blast threw lit cigarettes at them from the wings,” he wrote.

Amy Abts recalled a Black-Eyed Snakes show at Pizza Luce. The place was packed, and people were climbing on tables to watch.

“I’d never seen Pizza Luce so packed,” she said. “We went outside afterward and some guy was playing flute on the street.”

Alan Sparhawk of Low said that last year he took his brother to the Main Club to see Big Wave Dave & Continued on page 26

The Ripples close out the night.

“It was like a deeper love, and a sort of deeper glow to the night there for some reason,” he said. “It was full of people that I knew and loved. Just being able to show him my town on that higher level at the same time as I was seeing it. … We were dancing our asses off. It was great.”

THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS WENT OUT AT GRANDMA’S

In 2013, Eldo Abrahamson was going to play the drums for Fred Tyson’s set — but first he was milling around the stage, he wrote, during Charlie Parr’s last song.

“I tripped over one of the many cords crisscrossing the floor and accidentally unplugged all of the stage lights,” he wrote. “Didn’t faze him a bit. While John Ferrell was angrily scrambling around trying to replenish luminescence, Parr just kept right on plowing as if nothing had happened.”

Blue Eye Shadow And Body Parts

For Ashley Neenan’s first Homegrown Music Festival, she landed at the NorShor Theatre to check out her friends’ band Coal Car Caboose. All was well — until she realized that she had to weave her way to the back of the then-strip club upstairs to use a bathroom, which was also where the dancers got ready.

“I was not prepared for this,” Neenan said. “What sticks in my head more were the strippers dancing at the time.”

Blue eye shadow, body parts; she ran into her sister’s high school boyfriend.

“Everything was normal downstairs,” Neenan said. But upstairs: “It had nothing to do with Homegrown.”

BLACK-EYED SNAKED

“Grandma’s Sports Garden. Homegrown. Black-Eyed Snakes,” said News Tribune photographer Clint Austin. “(Alan) Sparhawk is busy being Sparhawk and decides to launch into the crowd.”

Austin was set up in a small barriered space between the stage and the crowd and as the rock ‘n’ roller surfed, he kept clicking.

As the instrumental part of the song wound down, Sparhawk pushed back toward the stage. He didn’t make it. He ended up in the same small space as Austin and tumbled toward him.

“I would say it was almost a football player” level of hit, Austin said. “He used me to launch back on stage.”

The show went on, but Austin was bummed. As a photographer, he always tries to get close — but not too close. He had gotten in Sparhawk’s way and he apologized to him after the set.

“I hung my head and said ‘Al, I’m really sorry I got in your way in the pit,’ ” Austin said. “And he said ‘Aw, man. Don’t worry about that. That’s just part of the show.’ ”

The photograph landed on the front page of the next day’s News Tribune.

“It was a sweet photo, so it was so worth it,” Austin said. “I might’ve been sore the next day, but I don’t think that’s out of the ordinary for any Homegrown.”

DAD’S DAY

It’s not unusual for The Farsights to pull a guest artist or two on stage during a set. Brad Fernholz and Tony Derrick once joined them for a mini Hotel Coral Essex reunion, and former Mayor Don Ness was backed by the band for a take on the old Duluth favorite “Mohawks,” called “Potholes.”

For the set in 2017, drummer Ryan Nelson opted for something familial. His dad, Alan Nelson, is a guitar and fiddle player who played in bar bands covering the likes of Bob Seger and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Ryan Nelson first played drums on stage with his dad’s band in Cotton when he was 12 years old.

For the show, which was at Dubh Linn Irish Pub, The Farsights ripped through 30 minutes of punk rock, then Nelson — who had brought out his original drum kit — introduced his father. The then-70-yearold made his way from the back of the room and took lead on “You Ain’t Going Nowhere,” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” and “I Fought the Law.”

“He was worried that these old-timey songs were going to sound wimpy in comparison (to The Farsights) — the juxtaposition,” Nelson said. “The crowd was eating it up. It was a blast. It was a complete trip to do it.” u