Little Village Issue 345 - October 2025 by Little Village Magazine

Since 2001 LittleVillageMag.com

The third article in LV's Shiloh series examines the cult's deadly health advice.

The Pulitzer Prize winner hunts for silver linings as Iowa nears rock bottom.

"Roadrunner" songwriter Jonathan Richman now appreciates the slow life.

Little Village (ISSN 2328-3351) is an independent, community-supported news and culture publication based in Iowa City, published monthly by Little Village, LLC, 623 S Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA 52240. Through journalism, essays and events, we work to improve our community according to core values: environmental sustainability, affordability and access, economic and labor justice, racial justice, gender equity, quality healthcare, quality education and critical culture. Letters to the editor(s) are always welcome. We reserve the right to fact check and edit for length and clarity. Please send letters, comments or corrections to editor@ littlevillagemag.com. Subscriptions: lv@littlevillagemag.com. The US annual subscription price is $120. All rights reserved, reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. If you would like to reprint or collaborate on new content, reach us at lv@littlevillagemag. com. To browse back issues, visit us online at issuu.com/littlevillage.

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EDITORIAL

Publisher

Jordan Sellergren jordan@littlevillagemag.com

Editor-in-Chief

Emma McClatchey emma@littlevillagemag.com

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Chuy Renteria chuy@littlevillagemag.com

News Director

Paul Brennan paul@littlevillagemag.com

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Kellan Doolittle kellan@littlevillagemag.com

Calendar/Event Listings

Grace Merritt calendar@littlevillagemag.com

En Español Editor

Claudia Pozzobon Potratz

Corrections editor@littlevillagemag.com

October Contributors

Ariana Martinez, Benjamin McElroy, Broc Nelson, Candice Smith, Dolores Cullen, Elisabeth Oster, Jes McCauley, Jessica Cline, Jessie Kraemer, Jo Allen, Kembrew McLeod, Lauren Haldeman, Liz Rosa, Ramona Muse Lambert, Rob Brezsny, Sam Locke Ward, Sarah Elgatian, Sara Williams, Scott Stouffer, Tom Tomorrow

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Meet this month’s contributors!

Ariana Martinez is a freelance film critic and Cinema Studies graduate student at the University of Iowa.

Benjamin McElroy is a writer based in Des Moines. He has opinions on movies and music

Broc Nelson is a lifelong music fan, improviser, Quad Citizen and enthusiast of all things creative, tasty and weird

Candice Smith has been librarian-ing for over 20 years, and is currently the Adult Services librarian at ICPL.

Elisabeth Oster is a freelance writer and designer, and collector of dad rock

Jes McCauley is an adult services librarian at the Des Moines Public Library who truly believes in the power of a good book recommendation. When she's not behind the desk helping patrons, she's busy tending to her numerous houseplants, chilling with her cat Little Edie, and of course, reading

Jessica Cline is a Leadership and Character Scholar at Wake Forest University where she studies American politics and religion.

Jessie Kraemer (@jkraem) is a writer and artist living in Iowa City

Issue 345 October 2025

cover by Kellan Doolittle

How the cult outside Kalona built a "kingdom" of control—and Iowa's weirdest organic farm. Plus: Paul Brennan chats with common-sense dispenser Art Cullen, LV film writers preview Refocus fest, an early punk rocker recalls trying to troll the hippies, scary-good Iowa beer picks and much more.

Kembrew McLeod's favorite Jonathan Richman rarity is “New Teller.”

Lauren Haldeman is a graphic novelist and poet. She has received an Iowa Arts Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award and fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop

Liz Rosa is a journalism student at Drake University, juggling class, freelaning and work while still finding time for creativity

Ramona Muse Lambert makes art and music. Sometimes she's in charge of dinner, too. Buy her art at ramonamuselambert.com

Sam Locke Ward is a caroonist and musician from Iowa City. He self publishes the comic zines Voyage Into Misery and '93 Grind Out.

Sarah Elgatian is a writer, activist and educator living in Iowa. She likes dark coffee, bright colors and long sentences. She dislikes meanness

Sara Williams is a multidisciplinary artist who was raised in Bondurant, Iowa. She currently resides near Amana

Scott Stouffer, political cartoonist, watercolor artist, retired architect, is a graduate of Iowa State College. He lives in Des Moines where he is constantly creating new cartoons

Letters & Interactions

LV encourages readers to submit letters to Editor@LittleVillageMag.com. Please include your name, city of residence and any relevant job titles or affiliations. Letters may be edited for accuracy and style. To be considered for print publication, letters should be under 500 words. Preference is given to letters that have not been published elsewhere.

IMAGINe A UtOPIA. A city of heaven, perfect in every way. What do you see? Sunshine, probably. Clean air. I imagine rolling green parks and beautiful buildings made of glass. You might see electric cars or shiny, speedy public transit.

What are the people in this city like? What do they do? Do they work fulfilling jobs? Spend their days with meaning, come home each night to warm, well-lit homes? Are they kind? Do they help each other? What kind of crime rate do you picture in this utopian city?

Iowa City is not a utopia. I will not ask you to stretch your imagination that far. But, while falling short of utopian, it strives to be a healthy city. A thriving city. The kind that people fly cross-country just to visit. Where streets are clean, children play in the parks, people are happy and downtown bustles on the weekends. They have strong support systems. Help is available for people who need it in a healthy city. Healthy cities see crime rates drop, not rise.

Iowa City strives to be a healthy city. So why do we need a bigger jail?

The state of the current jail in Iowa City is deplorable; this is an inarguable fact. It is uninhabitable. It is an inhumane building in which to be locking our citizens. This is a problem that can and must be solved. But every solution proposed to this problem has included more beds. Why?

Proponents of these proposals cite overcrowding. There are too many people, where will we put them all? Is this the kind of question that our healthy, ideal Iowa City asks? Does a healthy city make plans to expand its capacity for jailing its citizens?

Are we sure?

Let’s try out a few other questions and see if they ring closer to our vision. Perhaps, Why is the jail overcrowded in the first place? Or, What have we done to keep any of those people in the community? A healthy city might consider: How

HAVE AN OPINION?

many people are in jail for nonviolent crime? And: Is imprisoning them the most effective way to address it?

A healthy city is concerned first for its citizens: How many of these crimes are crimes of desperation—committed because they are the only options left? What have we done to create a city that prevents these crimes? How many people are locked away who, if the city had invested instead in their well-being, would be home and safe?

A healthy city would ask, are we sure we’re doing everything we can do to keep our citizens out of the jail?

Healthy cities do not have a vested interest in incarcerating their citizens. They are focused instead on keeping their citizens healthy— fed, clothed, housed. They provide treatment for mental health crises. They care for those struggling with drug and alcohol addiction. They are committed to keeping community members in the community. They invest in every possible alternative to imprisonment.

Healthy cities don’t build bigger jails.

—Finch VanDyk, Iowa City

Rob Sand talks water quality, trans rights and ‘tables in Des Moines that need flipping’ on the campaign trail (Sept. 10)

IN OUr INbOX: Hello! My name is Becca, and I am the person who asked Rob Sand about his stance on trans girls and women in sports at last week’s campaign event in North Liberty. I wanted to send a quick note of appreciation to the author, Paul, for his thoughtful coverage of this story. I appreciate that he was able to provide the facts Rob Sand was unable (or unwilling) to address. LV’s article articulated my concerns in a way that I hoped to accomplish, but couldn’t quite find the words. I appreciate how Paul was able to present the facts without bias, while clearly demonstrating the problem at hand (Rob Sand is parroting Republican culture war talking points while claiming to be inclusive).

Anyways, I am so grateful that LV is bringing light to this issue, and I hope that your coverage encourages Rob’s team to reconsider his stance on trans girls in sports. I am a huge fan of his other policies, and I think it’s worth attempting to change his mind on this one. I am not an official representative of any group or organization, just a concerned Iowan who cares about trans people in our state. —Becca M.

I hear democrats talk about how we hold candidates to these “purity” tests that no one can pass. I couldn’t care less about a perfect candidate, but I want one who is going to fight for our most vulnerable community members. —Catlin

He's not 100% perfect on trans rights, but he is way way better than the alternative. I would vote for him just to get us off this fast track to complete criminalization of trans people that Republicans are taking us on. Once we're off the fast track to hell we can work on the other issues. —FSOA

I disagree. I think the opposite.

Accepting Rob like he’s our only option is ridiculous. We need a candidate that would be willing to take a bullet tbh. If we don’t do something in the next couple of years about our water quality it will be too late. We shouldn’t be arguing about having water to drink. That’s the bare min to me right now. There’s a whole lot of other work we have to do obvi. —Sheila X.

RAMONA MUSE LAMBERT

INTERACTIONS

He is a good alternative to what we've had, but if he refuses to evolve his stance on trans rights, I and others will have to seriously consider withholding our vote for him. I'm writing him personally, for what that's worth, because I think he can win, but I demand equality for our trans community. —S. Eliot S.

Ashley Hinson pledges loyalty to Trump, throws Zach Wahls a jab at Senate campaign kickoff (Sept. 15)

What are exactly 'her' policies for supporting Iowans? She is a rubber stamp to Trump. Zach Wahls is not far left and I'm so tired of every democratic challenger being

How are the farmers doing? —Joyce G.

I think (re:Trump) she’s booking herself a berth on a sinking ship. Come November the farmers are going to be well aware of how Trump has screwed them. 54% of US soybean sales were to China. They aren’t going to buy any from the US anymore thanks to Trump and his dancing prancing seat of his pants tariff carnival. Brazil picked up the dropped ball in the sales Trump fucked up and 54% of US soybean growers soybean sales are gone forever. —Edward K.

As our hospitals close, our education

dubbed 'far left.’ —Kimberly W.B.

PERSONALS

A noble beast. A loyal companion. A symbol of North American ruggedness. But above all, a very, very good boy. Young pittie mix Blue Ox is a total babe, from his stocky little body to his charming smarts. The Iowa City Animal Center reports he’s a “superstar” at training, spurred by a love of treats and the people dispensing them. This smiley stead forms deep bonds, so be ready to fall in love. Timberrr! Inquire at icanimalcenter.org.

INTERACTIONS

system circles the drain, our farm markets disappear, promises made to farmers are not kept, we lose our autonomy under what used to be a democracy, and corruption, lies, racism and sexism stalk the land, she has steadfastly supported the most vile administration in our nation's history. She offers us complete obedience to the world of felons and pedophiles. In a world of bad politicians, she seems to be one of the worst. Get her out of that office supported by our taxes. She does not work for us. —Margaret K.

Exactly why I saw Bonnie Raitt in Davenport last week. The bonus was seeing Jimmy Vaughan and the Tilt-aWhirl Band, who are touring with her. Great concert, terrific rock & blues fans in the lovely Adler Theatre. —Lj Y.

Absolute goals. —Amie R. Rob Howe: What we overlook when we celebrate Kirk Ferentz’s wins (Sept. 16)

This Iowan attends up to 100 concerts a year. Here’s what he’s learned — and why he’s not slowing down (Sept. 12)

Not to mention, the "winningest coach in Big 10 history" with only 2 conference championships in 26 years and never even a whiff of a national title, and currently a negative win ratio in bowl games. Woody Hayes had 5 national titles, 13 big ten championships, and a 10% better winning percentage. —Sean R.

By Mauricio Ruiz,

By Kevin Richard Schafer,

INTERACTIONS

You’re not wrong but Woody Hayes also had more advantages, better recruiting areas, more support, more money to work with. Also Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler have a losing bowl record also. —Daniel P.

Iowa public universities to investigate employee social media posts about Charlie Kirk death (Sept. 18)

There are 3 unions at the UI. They should be uniting and defending these workers. Even if the workers are not in the bargaining unit. All University workers should be defended against this MAGA McCarthyite witch hunt. Unite and bring all University workers into the unions as one united fist. —Christopher C.

Does “disruptive” include directly quoting someone? —Gerald S.

Why would any student attend a college which does not allow and support everyone’s right to freedom of speech? —Tarrill A.

Probably for the best, I wouldn’t get mad if university employees got in trouble for posting transphobic or racist remarks, so I have no position to be upset about them disciplining people over Charlie Kirk. It is what it is. —Daniel S.

But they aren’t getting in trouble for racist, fa**ist, anti-lgbtq+ rhetoric. That’s the problem. The rules are being applied selectively. That IS what it is. —Kirsty C.

Freedom of Speech: You have the right to express your opinions, ideas, and thoughts through words, art, and symbolic actions without government censorship. That pesky Bill of Rights! —Scott G.

And your employer has the right to terminate employees who they deem unethical. Just that simple Scotty! —Ryan M.

The employer is the government, even more simple. —Scott G.

‘People are hungry — starving — for principled leadership’: Jon Green on his decision not to honor Charlie Kirk in Johnson County (Sept. 19)

Yes thank god a decent person WITH a backbone. OUR FLAG MEANS SOMETHING!! I’m sorry Kirk died, but it is DEEPLY wrong and nationally offensive to lower it to honor civilians who spread unAmerican ideals like racism and bigotry just because the current administration holds those views. —Heidi A.

One thing the state Dems should run on - restoring local control about many choices that have been removed. —Sue W.

Keep up the good fight, we need people like you. —Scott G.

Thank you so much. I was so relieved to see a leader stand up to irrational demands. —Teresa M.

Dunno that I would have chosen that hill to die on, but I don't disagree with the sentiment behind it. —Lj Y.

Standing against a fascist Republican Party is a hill to live on. —Henry W.

Making decisions like this alone is why dems are in trouble. No coordination or cooperation, just single people popping off. Argh. —Kirk M.

I was really upset when Supervisor Sullivan utilized his Chair position to fire Executive Director Morales in a public meeting without conferring with any other supervisors and without any due process in place so I can understand this viewpoint to a degree.

In this particular circumstance though, I don’t understand why Supervisor Green would have had any obligation to discuss a decision that was fully his to make. Supervisor Green takes his responsibilities to his constituents seriously. I appreciate his decision to not be complicit in inflicting further harm upon the people who the deceased tormented during his life. Supervisor Green has no obligation to placate the demands of a governor who has been complicit in inflicting harm on many of the same people. I see the problem with Democrats as being more about their collective willingness to ignore harm. —Tara M.

Will the state legislature also pass legislation on when Mr. Green can urinate

or engage in sexual relations? That’s about their apparent level of interest in running Johnson County. —Matt D.

The fun thing about republican-generated laws, rules, and conventions is that they needn't be obeyed. They're invariably stupid, pointless, and childishly spiteful, and those which don't simply vanish due to being ignored are quickly and easily rubbed out with minimal effort. —Davey C.

ACCOLADES

Four Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduates have made longlists for the 2025 National Book Awards. Three of the 10 fiction semi-finalists are UI grads: Angela Flournoy, author of The Wilderness; Kevin Moffett, author of Only Son; and Joy Williams, author of The Pelican Child Yiyun Li, a UI Nonfiction Writing Program alum, is on the nonfiction longlist for her memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow. The winner earns a $10,000 prize, and will be announced on Nov. 19.

The Iowa Review's David Hamilton Undergraduate Creative Writing Prize for 2025 was awarded to University of Iowa senior ben Ahlrichs for his poem "Abderus on Heracles.” It won him a $500 prize, and can be read at iowareview.org.

Ten-year-old Kolter Hartman, who hails from the tiny southwest Iowa town of Beaconsfiled, pop. 15, has advanced to the quarterfinals of the national Youth Athlete of the Year contest. A 5th grader in the Mount Ayr Community School District, Hartman plays baseball for the Iowa Prospects, a baseball academy in Grimes, traveling over 10 hours a week for practices and games. The contest carries a $25,000 prize.

ceDAr rAPIDS, SePt. 19

You were eating Chicago dogs outside the Flying Weenie on your work break and you gave me a French fry when I inquired about the quality of the fare. How could I resist? I gave you my copy of Little Village to read because you were previously unfamiliar and when I drove away, you were reading it, and that made me happy. I hope you keep reading them!

Submissions may be edited for clarity and length, and may appear in print or online. think you’re the subject of one? reach out: littlevillagemag.com/missed-connections

Fully Booked: Recommendations from Local Librarians

Haunted Houses, Haunting Reads

Halloween is just around the corner, when larger-than-life skeletons adorn front yards and glowing pumpkins sit on every doorstep. These spooky season staples aren’t always indicative of thrills and chills behind the front door—but if you’re a horror reader like me, you can’t help but wonder what terrors may lurk inside.

One of my favorite horror genre staples is the haunted house novel. From The Fall of the House of Usher to The Haunting of Hill House, there is a long tradition of haunted houses in gothic and horror fiction. What I find particularly intriguing about this micro-genre is the unresolved trauma that binds these novels together. The house frequently serves as a metaphor for something far scarier than creaky floors, so if you’re looking for some spooky October reads that explore both real and imagined horrors, check these out:

The House of Monstrous Women by Daphne Fama blends folklore, atmospheric suspense and political upheaval into a novel set in a crumbling mansion shrouded in rumors of witchcraft. It follows Josephine after she accepts an invitation from her childhood friend to participate in a deadly high-stakes game at her seaside estate. The deeper she delves into the game, the more she realizes that nothing is what it seems, and victory comes with a terrible cost.

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due is set in Jim Crow Florida and begins with 12-yearold Robbie being sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys. Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, but what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother, his ability becomes a window to the horrifying truth of what happens at the reformatory.

The September House by Carissa Orlando is a layered and inventive novel about a woman determined to stay in her dream home even after realizing that once September rolls around, the walls begin dripping blood, the ghosts of former inhabitants appear and something terrifying lurks in the basement. A shocking ending unveils secrets kept by both the house and the family.

Model Home by Rivers Solomon revolves around the three Maxwell children as they return to their childhood home, where they were the only Black family in a gated community. Growing up, they experienced strange and terrifying events in their home, and all fled. Upon their parents' mysterious death, the siblings return home to reckon with their family’s past.

—Jes McCauley, Des Moines Public Library

Horror Classics for Younger Readers

October is upon us, and the veil grows thin, which means it’s time to put aside our beach reads and turn towards some darker books. As a child, I loved being read to by my mom, and our go-to for a long time was Hauntings: Tales of the Supernatural, a collection of 19th and early-20th century horror stories illustrated by Edward Gorey. It was perfect for us, being entertaining enough for adults but also deliciously frightening for kids without being gory. Age 7 might be a little early for Poe, Shelley and Highsmith, but I turned out OK.

I asked some colleagues about books that were memorable to them for being eerie or downright scary. Here are some of their recommendations.

Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King tells the story of a small town terrorized by vicious killings that occur every full moon. The main character is a 10-year-old boy who is clever and brave, and much of the story revolves around his day-to-day life in a place that is full of fear. This is King’s shortest work, and as such is often an entry point for younger readers looking to try out some scary fiction. An added bonus are the excellent illustrations by comics artist Bernie Wrightson, co-creator of Swamp Thing

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones won numerous awards in 2020, including both the Graham Stoker and Shirley Jackson. It revolves around Lewis, a member of the Blackfeet tribe who carries deep shame over a hunting incident from years prior, which has seemingly come to haunt him in very real ways. Themes of guilt, lost tradition, addiction and atonement run deep here, along with fleshed-out characters and plot.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski was my first encounter with the unease that accompanies the realization that all may not be as you expect, i.e., the house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, and you start to get lost in the maze of hallways that shouldn’t exist, and your dog is running in there somewhere and you can’t find him, and will you get out? Oh, there’s also something evil lurking in there, maybe. The experimental nature of the text can be perplexing at times, but it’s a solid option for some chills.

If you’re feeling gothic, pick up The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. Originally conceived as a novel about class structure in England after World War II, it morphed into a ghost story about a once-wealthy family living in a deteriorating estate, harboring some secrets as well as a malevolent unseen force.

Last but never least, sink into We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, and Carmilla as edited by Carmen Maria Machado. Leave a light on.

—Candice Smith, Iowa City Public Library

Shiloh

Out of Eden

Sex, lies and audiotape built this Christian cult into an alternative lifestyle brand hawking "miracle cures" from the holy land of southeast Iowa.

bY eMMA MccLAtcHeY

On Dec. 12, 1972, cult leader John Robert Stevens made a big announcement: he was a time traveler.

“I had a real meeting with the Lord,” Stevens told his followers in the Living Word Fellowship (LWF), also called the Walk. “During this meeting, I was projected seven years ahead of the present time. It was such a total thing that it almost blew my mind.”

“We are heading for some fantastic days,” he continued. “We really are. And the limitations that we’ve had in this Walk, we’re not going to have in the future, especially the financial limitations.”

The Nevada mine into which he’d invested their tithes would soon pour forth gold and silver. The congregations he’d amassed in southern California, eastern Iowa, Brazil and Hawaii would manifest God’s perfect kingdom on Earth—just in time for the apocalypse in 1979.

“Freeways will be bombed out. They'll be destroyed,” Stevens said. “You’re going to have to know how to survive. I’d like to have 1,000 homes stocked with the necessary equipment for survival.”

If anyone in the crowd of LWF’s South Gate, California church had doubts about this prophecy, they didn’t voice them that night. Instead, “there was an immediate flurry of confirmation from the brothers [Stevens’ top acolytes], prophesying and coming up and agreeing with him,” said Scott Barker, who was raised in the Walk. “They just heard probably the most wild claim by John Robert Stevens to date, and they are immediately up there to back him up, just eating it up.”

Indeed, the Iowa farm boy turned New Age Christian prophet had made some wild claims before. He claimed a traveling evangelist miraculously cured “a terrific mastoid infection in both ears” during his childhood in Story County, Iowa. He claimed credit for the supposed Kennedy curse, believing the Walk’s focused prayers (called “intercessions”) brought about the deaths of JFK and RFK.

“There must be something violent within us that drives us to prayer and intercession until it becomes

A water tower on the Walk's Shiloh property in the 1980s. Courtesy of Scott Barker

an agony within our heart,” he preached in 1967. “When God senses that drive, He answers prayer.”

Stevens claimed his wife Martha was a devilpossessed “Nephilim” and asked his followers to pray for her death. Another woman, Victoria Salyer, faced a literal witch trial before the South Gate congregation after she caught Stevens in a sexual affair with another married follower, which he denied. (Martha, too, confronted Stevens with allegations of infidelity. In her divorce filing, she says he “slammed” her head against a wall “several times” and “slapped me full force across the face, causing my nose to bleed” in response.) Salyer, like Martha, maintained her innocence, but was shunned from the Walk anyway.

Think of all the sinners. Think of all the believers with weak faith that need doctors.”

He saw his home state of Iowa as a new Eden, and utilized the largely unpaid labor of his followers to pave paradise in rural Washington County. On more than 200 acres purchased from a local Amish farmer, the Walk gradually erected Shiloh’s threestory dormitory, church, offices, lodge, dining hall and amphitheater.

“Think of all the wicked people that need doctors. Think of all the sinners. Think of all the believers with weak faith that need doctors.”

The witch trial caused many of Stevens’ idealistic hippie followers to become disenchanted, leading to the Split of 1967, as it came to be known in the Walk. Some 50 followers left, but those that stuck around were more entrenched than ever—especially after the doomsday prediction in ’72.

“John Robert had pulled off the biggest coup in his history,” wrote cult scholar Woodrow Nichols, who went undercover in the LWF for a time. “He not only gave the kids the kind of end-time, mystical experience that they craved, but he also guaranteed that he would keep most of them around for the next seven years.”

Barker and another former member, Charity Navalesi, researched this period for their podcast Oops, I’m in a Cult! One of Stevens’ closest acolytes told them the time travel prophecy “became the basis of everything that took place in the churches from 1972 to 1979: storing wheat and other foods for survival, the building of Shiloh, the Kingdom Businesses and the total cutting off of everyone from colleges, careers or, in many cases, even relationships.”

Shiloh is the cult’s compound near Kalona in rural Iowa, where Navalesi spent much of her childhood. “Kingdom Businesses” were owned and operated by LWF members, often to sell Stevens-approved products like clothing and herbal remedies to fellow LWF members. Like the Nevada mine (which was a total bust) and Living Word Publications, which sold recordings and transcripts of Stevens’ every word, Kingdom Businesses were attempts to establish a society independent of the “Babylonian” institutions controlled by Satan—mainstream government, religion, arts, finances, sciences, education and health. Stevens encouraged followers to stockpile supplies, study foraging and shelter-building, and learn to live without indulgences like make-up, toothpaste, matches and toilet paper. Long before the organic food craze and RFK Jr.’s MAHA agenda, Stevens blamed preservatives for corrupting Americans’ health. Healthcare is no match for prayer and fasting. “A doctor doesn’t heal anybody. He just exposes you to the process by which the body heals itself … you have a natural means of healing,” Stevens explained. “Think of all the wicked people that need doctors.

— JOHN ROBERT STEVENS

“We’re going to be kings and priests,” Stevens told Scott Barker’s dad, one of the cult’s early followers, when he inquired why Stevens was collecting so much property. “Are you going to be a steward of nothing or a steward of everything?”

As ’79 drew closer, “Papa John” Stevens would order emergency intercessions in the dead of night. Followers gathered in Shiloh’s sanctuary to pray away the spiritual “attacks” against their prophet (and to call down death upon Nephilim like Jimmy Carter, John Lennon and the Rockefellers) for hours on end, while Stevens drank heavily and suffered from ill health—a supposed impossibility, given his exalted status.

The apocalypse never happened, but the unthinkable did: Stevens died in 1983 at the age of 63. Charity Navalesi was a young child at the time, and raised to believe Stevens would literally resurrect. His failure to do so caused another exodus of followers, but among those who remained, Stevens’ death became taboo; it raised too much doubt, and he’d preached, “If you do not voice unbelief, it is not activated.”

“Nothing will be as wonderful as the deliverances and the blessings that God’s remnant in this generation will walk in,” Stevens said in 1967. “Put everything else secondary and press into all that God has for you without any reservations in your thinking.”

The late ’80s and ’90s brought fresh forms of indoctrination under self-appointed godhead Gary Hargrave and his new wife (and Stevens’ widow) Marilyn Hargrave, dubbed “the Lamp of Israel.” The Hargraves phased out the doomsday prep, but doubled down on the divine diets and commodification of “the Word”; hours upon hours, years upon years of mostly ad-libbed sermons by Stevens and the Hargraves, often characterized by misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ messages, were sold as tape sets for followers to wear out in their Walkmans.

The Hargraves also instituted a pyramid scheme of “designated relationships” to guide and control members’ decision-making, engineering marriages, divorces and recouplings among their flock while pushing young people towards unaccredited LWF

From top: John Robert Stevens gives a sermon; Stevens proudly gestures to his line of paint rollers; Gary and Marilyn Hargrave, circa 1990. Courtesy of Scott Barker

schools like Shiloh University. Adjacent to Shiloh, they established Marilyn Farms, an organic farm built and maintained by cult labor, including children sent to Shiloh’s grueling summer camps. Navalesi can recall days spent clearing weeds and thorny bushes, hauling earth and concocting tinctures that were sold as health products through the Marilyn Farms Company. Kids in the cult tended to be fed meager meals of rice, beans and salad.

“In retrospect, I feel like it was just another way to control us,” Navalesi said. “You're just hungry and tired and in a more suggestive state.”

A new “Health Commission” directed members to naturopaths, faith healers and other alternative medicine practitioners. Many were friends and allies of the Hargraves, but not always LWF members themselves. Of course, remedies tended to point towards products sold by Kingdom Businesses and Marilyn Farms.

For example, a vegetarian diet was heavily pushed

in the cult for years once the Shiloh farm began hawking its crops—until the Hargraves decided to invest in cattle and bison. Running wild with the “new Eden” idea after a trip to Africa, they purchased emus, mouflon sheep and eland antelopes. (Not well suited to Iowa winters, the herds of exotic animals didn’t live long.) Suddenly meat products were healthy and holy.

“A cult leader is just a con man who cons the same people,” Barker told Little Village

“You just suck dry the same well. … Most of the people that stuck around were always chasing that dragon of, like, the high they got from John Stevens. [They’re willing to] snort a line of Marilyn Farms super juice to get there.”

common wisdom in the Walk: Enemas of catnip, strawberry leaves and cayenne can increase longevity. Magnets will either hurt or heal, depending on how close they are to certain areas of the body. Raw garlic is a cure-all.

“I had really bad acne when I was around 19 or 20,” Charity Navalesi shared on her and Barker’s podcast. “I was told to put raw garlic on my face and it literally burned through layers of my skin. I still have scars.”

After a doctor prescribed Navalesi antibiotics to treat a cervical infection, a woman from the LWF Health Commission “told me to put a raw clove of garlic wrapped in cheesecloth and stick it up my vaginal canal” instead. Navalesi went with the Babylonian doctor’s advice on that occasion.

“The reward was not being shunned and excommunicated. The reward was today you are treated like a human and shown love and acceptance.”

— FORMER LWF MEMBER CHARITY NAVALESI

Decrying the “poverty mentality” of the Walk, Gary Hargrave often preached that children and adults need their spirits broken before they can find success.

“We were always being asked for money and time and work and donations,” Barker told Little Village “The reward was the work.”

“The reward was not being shunned and excommunicated,” Navalesi added. “The reward was today you are treated like a human and shown love and acceptance. Tomorrow, if you decide you don’t want to do that, you're out and you are treated like shit.”

Oddly for a church identifying as Christian, LWF had no interest in evangelizing or fighting real poverty. “We never had food drives or gave money to the homeless. Everything we did was to earn money for the organization itself, or for the school,” Navalesi noted. “… Nobody’s thinking about the outside world, because, frankly, the outside Babylon doesn’t matter.”

Some strange and dangerous ideas became

From top: Vitamins and supplements sold by the Marilyn Farms Company; A fireworks display at the Shiloh amphitheater. Courtesy of Scott Barker

A sea turtle coffee table like the one owned by the Hargraves. Courtesy of Scott Barker

“Forget about what’s written in the Bible,” Barker said. “Forget about the Sermon on the Mount. Forget about the loaves and fishes. Why would going and feeding somebody be a way of redeeming your soul?”

In defiance of the poverty mentality, the Hargraves helped themselves to mansions, travel, limo rides, golf carts, a $20,000 sea turtle coffee table and other extravagances. They also indulged Marilyn’s son from a previous marriage, Rick Holbrook, who fancied himself a showman. He was given near carte blanche to stage high-budget performances involving youth in the church, including in Fourth of July shows at the Shiloh amphitheater. Navalesi was among those who sang and danced in the patriotic, mostly secular annual productions, capped by fireworks and popular with southeastern Iowans who likely had no idea a cult was behind the festivities.

Several former LWF members have alleged Holbrook sexually abused them, including Shalom Abrahamson-Caples, whose open letter detailing her assaults by Holbrook, her many pleas for help, and the leadership’s failure to act triggered the swift downfall of the Living Word Fellowship in 2018. She and five other survivors pursued lawsuits against former church officials, which were settled for undisclosed amounts.

Barker’s own journey to deconstructing his faith, which has included investigating and exposing LWF’s abuses with Navalesi, began when his mother was diagnosed with Stage Three ovarian cancer in 2013. She was primed to see the health crisis as a test, and Gary Hargrave said as much in a Word about his own allegedly miraculous healing. He asked, “Are you going to believe in medicine, or are you going to have faith? Which one is it? Because the only one that really works is faith … You’ve got to dig down.”

Barker’s mother, like his father, was one of the Living Word Fellowship’s earliest members in southern California. Not only did Laurie trust the Hargraves with all her heart, but mainstream medicine had given her reason to be skeptical. Her husband had recently had a routine surgery that went wrong and required he be hospitalized for nine months.

“I think she kind of felt like, well, there has to be a better way,” Barker said.

The Health Commission directed Barker’s mother to a naturopathic dentist who prescribed her a range of chemotherapy alternatives: IV drips of vitamin C. Marilyn Farms immune boosting supplements. Ozone therapy. A ketogenic diet. Curcumin tinctures. Exposure to red and green light. Of course, nothing was covered by her health insurance.

“My mom, when she said she was sitting in the naturopath office and watching other church members come in and get this natural treatment, she felt like she was a soldier in the battle for the spirit realm,” Barker said. “If she was able to break through and cure her cancer using these natural remedies, then she would have accomplished, she would have conquered, some battle in the spirit.”

Little Village’s

ofIowa City

Eventually, Laurie was referred to one Dr. Juergen Winkler—who had his license revoked by the Medical Board of California and Department of Consumer Affairs in 2012—for insulin potentiation therapy, an unproven cancer treatment combining low-dose chemo, insulin and sugar injections. That course alone cost over $50,000.

“I am emotional and subjective. And as a lay person, I feel like I do not fully understand the treatments we’re researching,” Laurie wrote in an email to the Walk’s high-ranking “Shepherds” after a year and a half of alternative medicine. “I am looking for a sure Word. I want to get well. I am not ready to give up. I am not ready to die.”

Gary Hargrave prompted followers to ask “What does God get out of it?” before they pray for their own health; “be it unto you according to your faith,” was his Word.

But, “From what I was seeing, she had all the faith that she could possibly muster,” Barker said of his mother. And she was dying. As the cancer spread to her abdomen and lungs, Laurie finally decided to pursue the chemotherapy treatment her oncologist originally recommended. But by then, it was too late. She was placed in palliative care, and on Sept. 19, 2016, she died. Her son held her hand as she took her last breath.

Barker’s father has urged him to forgive Gary and the Shepherds, but, “What’s there to forgive?” Barker said. “Did anybody apologize for their stupidity? That’s the thing that is frustrating. It’s not that they tried their best and failed. It’s that they were fucking idiots and thought they were awesome. They were reckless with their power.”

“It’s not that they tried their best and failed. It’s that they were fucking idiots and thought they were awesome. They were reckless with their power.”

— FORMER LWF MEMBER SCOTT BARKER

Marilyn Hargrave died on Oct. 21, 2015, likely also of cancer, and was buried near Stevens in Shiloh’s cemetery. She was never held accountable for her role in exploiting followers and abetting abuse.

Gary Hargrave yadda-yadda’d an explanation for her death—Marilyn had merely left her body to cavort in the spirit world or something—as he’d done with Stevens’ death, and as he’s done with the Living World Fellowship since its downfall.

These days Gary operates Hargrave Ministries, a tax-exempt corporation “leading people into spiritual maturity,” according to its website. He records a podcast called Growing in God and hosts an online

shop selling study guides and religious tchotchkes, like a bottle of “Anointed Oil from Jerusalem” for $25.99.

“He’s doing active work to make himself look like a true Christian, as opposed to a cult leader,” Barker said. “He is able to have meetings with United States representatives, because when you Google ‘Hargrave Ministries,’ [any critical coverage is] on the second page.”

In June, he met with Mike Huckabee, U.S. Ambassador to Israel and a born-again evangelical Christian, to advocate for “immersive tourism” in the Holy Land and support for the Israeli Defense Force. While Gary’s audience is small, his niche dogma—a belief that Jews were born saved, but Gentiles need Christ to get to heaven—fits comfortably into proIsraeli, Christian Zionist propaganda. Needless to say, the Palestinian people and Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza do not factor into this worldview.

Barker said most of the folks joining Gary on vacation are former LWF members clearly excited to be closer to him—and likely paying well for the access. Meanwhile, the messy business of dissolving the Church of the Living Word’s assets by a few former LWF board members continues.

Marilyn Farms’ equipment was auctioned off in 2019, its land divided into smaller parcels bought by Kalona locals and an apparent LWF offshoot, English River Chapel, consisting of many former cult members. The profits, totaling some $5.8 million, were divided between the Shiloh Committee, Shiloh University and the Georgia-based Living Word Publications. Shiloh University is now Shiloh

Learning, a provider of Christian homeschooling resources. Living Word Publications continues to sell digital versions of LWF materials. And the Shiloh Committee, represented by ex-apostle Steve Rich, put $1 million towards a biking and walking trail project at the former Shiloh site, annexed by the City of Kalona. He also made donations to Kalona’s food pantry, a student-built home project and the

Mid-Prairie Foundation for trade scholarships.

Crumbling and asbestos-ridden, the Shiloh compound was destroyed in a controlled burn in 2020 ordered by the city. Watching it turn to ash was satisfying, but “in all honesty, I feel disappointed,” Navalesi said. “Steve [Rich] says that the congregation was involved in that choice, and they all felt good about it. But I’m like, what congregation?”

“I don’t know how challenging it was for him and whoever else to figure all this out, I certainly would not have wanted to deal with that,” she continued. “But it’s still disheartening that nobody in any of these locations who had control of the funds did anything to help former members.”

Barker and Navalesi have stopped producing Oops, I’m in a Cult!, but are keeping an eye out for any legal and financial developments and Gary hijinks in case updates are warranted. For now, they’re satisfied with the interviews and investigations they’ve shared over two years and 36 episodes.

“I think it’s been really healing for myself,” said the L.A.-based Barker. “I’m very happy to get to be someone that helps other people solidify the story of what the Living Word was, and especially tell this angle that was intentionally hidden for years.”

“Everybody felt so alone in their pain and not able to break it down in a way that was really healing,” said Navalesi, who lives in Iowa City with her partner, cat and dogs. “Apart from helping Shalom to bring her letters to light, I would say it’s probably one of the things that I’m most proud of in my life.”

Still from a drone video of the controlled burn of the Shiloh compound. Kelsie Berg / Courtesy of Scott Barker

Gary Hargrave (center left) and his associates pose for a picture with Republican Mike Huckabee (center right), U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Courtesy of Scott Barker

‘We’re on a Knife’s Edge’

As Iowa drifts closer to environmental and economic disaster, Art Cullen is once again sounding alarms—with a side of optimism.

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Art Cullen at Storm Lake. Dolores Cullen for Little Village

“W

hen I was a kid in the 1960s, you could drive from Carroll to Storm Lake, and see cattle lining green hills the entire way,” Art Cullen said in a matter-of-fact voice. “Now it’s all row crops, and cattle in feedlots. It’s a different situation. Those green hills are plowed up.”

That transformation, the economic and political factors that drove and sustain it, and its consequences for people and the environment, are at the heart of Cullen’s new book, Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World. And for decades, they’ve also been at the heart of much of Cullen’s work as editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot

“It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from here. Corn and soybeans, row upon row, with windmills and hog-houses lining the vast horizon,” Cullen writes near the beginning of Dear Marty. Storm Lake’s economy revolves around its hog slaughterhouse, meatpacking plant and turkey processing plant, all of which are owned by Tyson. In the last census, the northwestern Iowa city had a population of just over 11,000. When Cullen graduated from St. Mary’s High School in 1975, the population was about 8,600.

The new book begins and ends with letters to his close friend and former St. Mary’s classmate Martin Case on how Storm Lake has changed, encouraging him to come back for their 50th class reunion.

“We each went up to Minnesota for college,” Cullen writes. “You wound up in the Twin Cities writing and researching on Native affairs. I meandered back to Storm Lake via a series of small-town newspaper hitches.”

In 1990, Cullen and his brother John started the Storm Lake Times, which grew into a model of what a small-town newspaper can be, featuring Art Cullen’s distinctive editorial voice. In 2017, Cullen received the Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing for what the prize committee called “editorials fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa.”

Almost a decade later, that’s still an apt description of the reporting and expertise underlying Cullen’s new book. His writing is still engaging, making the 185page book a quick read. And of course, the problem Cullen is describing is the same.

I called Cullen to talk about the new book ahead of its Sept. 28 release. My first question was about the title. It obviously refers to the environmental disaster corporate agriculture has created in Iowa—and beyond, as the excessive nitrates from agricultural run-off in the state’s waterways flow into the Mississippi and to the Gulf of Mexico, where they create the annual deadzone—but after reading the book, I felt “crapped in our nest” also applied to Iowa politics and other aspects of life in the state.

“First, it’s our approach to the land, and how we’ve spoiled the land. Just the topsoil alone—it used to be feet-deep, and now it’s inches deep,” he said about the

title. “And with the overapplication of livestock manure, we are literally shitting in our nest. It’s showing up in the Raccoon River, in Saylorville Reservoir, where over-application of manure is causing blue-green toxic algae blooms, such that it’s unsafe to swim. That’s quite literally crapping in our nest.”

“The air—we’re polluting the air, such that children that grow up near livestock operations have much higher asthma rates than other kids,” Cullen continued.

“This should be this beautiful spot between two rivers, which is what the Ioway people found.”

The damage caused by corporate agriculture isn’t just limited to the environment. It’s “spread to our politics,” Cullen contends.

“Although our politics were never pure, Iowa used to be a more moderate place,” he said. “Iowa was first in education, it was the most literate state, it did have the highest rate of newspaper readership in the country, the strongest civic institutions. All that is decaying, because of this corrupt economic system that we have that exploits natural resources and people, and ships them both out downriver.”

“Both literally and metaphorically, we’re shitting in our nest.”

“Although our politics were never pure... Iowa was first in education, it was the most literate state, it did have the highest rates of newspaper readership in the country... All that is decaying, because of this corrupt economic system that we have that exploits natural resources and people, and ships them both downriver.”

— ART CULLEN

The roots of the corporate agricultural system go back to the post-WWII economic boom of the Eisenhower years. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson pushed for farmers to “get big or get out.” It’s a phrase that summarizes federal ag policy since the ’50s, leading to the decline of family farming and fewer processors for farmers to sell to, as consolidation happened at all levels.

Advances in farm machinery and the chemicals Big Ag thrives on—both of which increased the debt load for family farms—set the stage for large farming operations to buy up smaller farms.

“A single person can manage thousands of acres,” Cullen said. “This has displaced countless farmers and rural communities in the past 50 years. The pace of consolidation has been extremely rapid since the

farm crisis of the mid-1980s. And it’s picking up again right now.”

This has all created a lot of anger among white rural Iowa, as Cullen recounts in the book. That anger has been successfully channeled by Republicans and rightwing media, from Fox News to talk radio and podcasts, away from the corporations and politicians profiting from the situation to convenient scapegoats, like culture war targets and the immigrants, whose labor the ag economy increasingly depends on and who have changed the demographics of rural areas.

MAGA’s rise in Iowa since 2015 was fueled by that displaced anger, and coincided with the shuttering of small-town newspapers across the state, and the corporate owners of one statewide paper, the Des Moines Register, making massive cuts. It hasn’t just changed politics, it’s severed personal ties in communities.

For Cullen, the last five years have been particularly clarifying.

“The whole combination of MAGA with the past 10 years, and then the pandemic just amplified everything exponentially,” he said. “And I think it just exposes the latent anger and hostility that’s here.”

The last five years have also shown how far Iowa Republicans are willing to go pursuing cultural war issues.

“Terry Branstad was very conservative, and I’m sure he would have welcomed the Iowa Supreme Court rulings on abortion, for example, but he never tried to ban books that I’m aware of,” Cullen said. He also can’t imagine Branstad engaging in a multi-year attack on transgender Iowans like Kim Reynolds has.

“Branstad would defend the pollution of our rivers, he was fully into that. But he wasn’t personally mean, and he wasn’t out to get people.” Cullen said. “But Reynolds is a whole different deal. She is vindictive and mean. That’s a different thing in Iowa politics. We haven’t had really mean people like that in my experience.”

The massive disruption caused by closing meatpacking plants for two weeks during the pandemic made Cullen realize “this system cannot stand. It’s so highly consolidated and tightly wound.’

“I didn’t realize how precarious this entire economic and ecological system is,” he added. “We’re on a knife’s edge.”

Still, Cullen sees progress is possible and ends his book on a hopeful note.

“During the pandemic, Earth started to heal itself,” he said. “When we quit flying in airplanes for example, and quit driving so much, air quality actually improved. Earth will heal itself, if you let it.”

“Take a farm field that’s been burned up by chemicals, and if you leave it fallow for three years, all of sudden earthworms reappear,” Cullen continued. “The native seeds will grow again.”

“And we can heal our political systems and our relationships with one another, if we can settle on what the facts are.”

Can Sold Separately

Don’t know what to be for Halloween? These costumes pair perfectly with a beer from one of Iowa’s devilishly talented craft breweries.

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Witch

Witch Slap (6% ABV), Clock House Brewing

Whether you’re Elphaba, Glinda or some Etsy curse merchant, this year-round hazy IPA from Clock House (which recently acquired Iowa Brewing Company, a Cedar Rapids staple) will serve you like a loyal familiar.

Ghost

Ghostin’ Tha Machine (6.8 ABV), 7 Hills Brewing Company

Dubuque’s 7 Hills have eyes! And a nice set of brews to tout around the party, including their Pumpkin Poser, a porter with no actual pumpkin. This German bock is as malty as a box of Whoppers and smoother than a ghost in a barber shop.

Vampire

It’s Not a Phase, Mom! (7.3% ABV), Field Day Brewing Company

In a sense, aren’t all vampires emo? Whatever bloodsucker you choose to emulate, don’t forget the eyeliner—and this hazy IPA, a beer style once dubbed trendy but proving immortal.

An Antifa Hellion

Devil’s Backbone Stout (6.3% ABV), Franklin Street Brewing

Kermit the Frog

Rainbow Connection (5% ABV), Big Grove Brewery

Lovers and dreamers can appreciate a Pride beer that flows all year long, not just in June. Made with raspberry, red prickly pear, guava and key lime, this sour will make you pucker so much the Kermit voice will come easy.

Allegory of the Cave (5.5% ABV), Lua Brewing

No one could mistake you for a frat boy or pizza mascot when you pull this West Coast pale ale out of your toga. At least, no one who remembers that unit on Ancient Greek philosophy in 9th grade.

Neo from The Matrix

Open Source (5.5% ABV), No Coast Beer Co.

Oskaloosa’s No Coast has cracked the IPA code. Open Source is brewed with a rotating palate of hops, selected with input from customers. It may or may not hold the key to surviving the AI apocalypse.

Nothing’s scarier or more supernatural than antifa, the faceless, leaderless, anti-authoritarian entity responsible for 99% of crime in the U.S. Make the president proud and expose their evil, but not before treating yourself to this chocolatey, espressoy stout out of Davenport—as dark as the heart of fascism itself.

Andy Warhol

Modern Art (5.3% ABV), Firetrucker Brewery

You’ve got the black turtleneck somewhere in your closet. It would look lovely with this caramely amber ale from Ankeny’s Firetrucker Brewery, which boasts the motto “beer is art.” The can is inspired by the mural covering Mainframe Studios, Molly Spain’s Critical Mass, and the beer was crafted in collaboration with the downtown Des Moines art center.

Uma thurman in Pulp Fiction

Pulp Non-Fiction (6.8%), Barn Town Brewing

Better than a Sprite or a $5 milkshake, this double IPA out of West Des Moines will give you the liquid courage you need to tear up that dance floor and take home the trophy.

Florence Pugh in Midsommar

Floral (4.5% ABV), ReUnion Brewery

It’s hard to frown when you’re drinking a crisp German-style pilsner from a whimsically illustrated can, even if you’re a protagonist in an Ari Aster film. This brew is fit for a may queen, even midautumn.

crispin Glover as J.J. englert

Gilbert Gold Lager (4.8% ABV), Alluvial Brewing

If you want a conversation-starter of a costume, do your best George McFly impression, don some 1880s beer baron attire, and double-fist a German lager and a copy of the book Beer Money: A Tale of the Iowa City Beer Mafia by S.C. Sherman. The historical fiction novel is being adapted into a film called Death of a Brewer starring Crispin Glover, Mina Suvari and Mount Vernon native Jefferson White, with some of the scenes filmed at sites around Iowa City. There is a lot to say about this cool production, but it all centers on beer, and Ames’s Alluvial Brewing has brewed a rare “pre-Prohibition style classic American lager” to prepare your tastebuds for the time warp.

teen Wolf

Wolf Shirt (7.2% ABV), Lion

Bridge Brewing Company

Another Death of a Brewer cast member lucky townies may have seen filming in Iowa City: Tyler Posey, former star of MTV’s Teen Wolf. This bold hazy IPA from Cedar Rapids’ Lion Bridge pours as white as a full moon, and pays tribute to a trucker fashion staple. Wolf Shirt is also available in XXL—a double IPA.

He’s in Love with Rock and Roll

Jonathan Richman went from trying to piss off the hippies with his band the Modern Lovers to getting blissed out on the unplugged life in 2025.

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also spent time at Andy Warhol’s Factory, where the debauched regulars treated the strait-laced young man with a bemused curiosity.

audiences certainly was “to make the hippies angry.” But he added, “The hippies were too smart to fall for it. They just watched.”

Jonathan Richman can still pinpoint how the Velvet Underground transformed his life with their collar-grabbing sound back in 1967. “It was on record and it was that drone! Oh my God! They changed everything!”

As a teenager, he saw the band over 80 times and was a regular presence before and after gigs. “If the Velvet Underground had a protégé,” VU guitarist Sterling Morrison observed, “it would be Jonathan Richman.” Even their acerbic frontman Lou Reed enthused, “I love Jonathan Richman. There’s something about Jonathan.”

As a skinny Jewish kid from the Boston suburbs, Richman drew amplifier treble dials on his jeans and was pretty awkward, but his all-time favorite band made it cool to be an outsider. When he’d play songs on the Cambridge Common, he antagonized longhairs by shouting things like, “I’m not a hippie! I’m not stoned!”

Richman kept his hair short, his wardrobe cleancut, and sang about wanting to grow dignified and old. For an era that popularized the phrase “don’t trust anyone over 30,” his point of view flew in the face of counterculture orthodoxy. But with the Velvet Underground as his North Star, Richman knew he wasn’t alone.

In 1968, he wrote about the group in Vibrations, a local underground music magazine. “The Velvets are astounding! … Three black Vox amplifiers, black lyrics, black rhythms! They seemed unexcited, cool and seldom gyrated.” The following year, Richman moved to New York City and worked as a busboy at Max’s Kansas City, a downtown cool kid hangout. He

In 1970, Richman moved back to Boston and formed the Modern Lovers, which came together after he showed up with a copy of VU’s Loaded album at an apartment shared by bassist Ernie Brooks and keyboardist Jerry Harrison, who would later join the Talking Heads.

“We were like the original punk band,” Harrison once said. “Most music had gone away from heartfelt things towards professionalism. We put inspiration first.” The Modern Lovers’ signature track “Roadrunner” was an homage to the chugga-chuggachugging rhythms of VU’s “Sister Ray.” Richman maintained the song’s dark, cool vibe, but he traded Reed’s lyrics about blowjobs and shooting junk for wide-eyed tributes to AM Top 40 radio.

Richman’s contrarian streak was also on display in “I’m Straight,” a song that mocks “Hippie Johnny” for being stoned all the time. Richman confirmed to me that the idea behind playing that song for live

The Modern Lovers never shied away from ruffling feathers, particularly the time when they opened for West Coast horn rockers Tower of Power. According to legend, the crowd grew increasingly irritated as Richman sang “I’m Straight,” “Pablo Picasso” and other mood-killing numbers. They were chased off the stage after bottles and rocks rained down, so countryrock pioneer Gram Parsons (a friend from Boston) came to the rescue and calmed everyone down.

“It’s a great story,” Richman told me, “but it’s fiction. The audience was antagonistic because we were all wrong for that kind of show. Anyway, I used to sort of ask for it. I strolled out into the crowd after our show to see if anyone wanted to give me any trouble. But no one did. Gram was there, but strictly as an audience member.”

“Oh! Ya know what Gram Parsons did tell me after that show? ‘Jonathan, you really know how to handle people!’ He meant it too. It was because I didn’t let the

Chart drawn by Jonathan Richman to accompany his article “New York Art And The Velvet Underground," published in Vibrations, no. 10, September 1968. Courtesy of Jonathan Richman

audience push us around. I told them, ‘Look, this is what we’re going to do and we’ll be here for another half hour. Then, the music you like will happen.’ Or words to that effect, I forget exactly.”

The Velvet Underground’s John Cale produced the Modern Lovers’ self-titled debut, which was recorded in 1972 but wasn’t released until 1976. They would have fit right in with the emerging punk movement, but it was not to be. Richman’s aesthetic interests changed after the group took up residency as a house band at a Bermuda resort and he fell hard for the joyful sounds of the island’s music.

“I don't think about writing songs. In fact, I'm not really a songwriter. I just sing and make things up and dance around and stuff.”

— JONATHAN RICHMAN

This inspired him to develop a more whimsical, less abrasive songwriting style, so he broke the band up in 1974. The new material that Richman introduced during punk’s year zero was a mixture of simple rock ‘n’ roll styles, kid’s songs and folk music from China, Egypt, Ecuador and the Caribbean. Concertgoers who expected to hear lines like “Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole / not like you” were confronted instead with “I’m A Little Dinosaur.”

“Pablo Picasso” was the first in a series of songs about artists that he continued writing through the years, including “Salvador Dali,” “No One Was Like Vermeer” and “Vincent van Gogh.” Richman himself is a painter. “I do landscapes and have had the occasional show,” he said. “Oils, watercolors and pencil sketches.”

When asked what it is about this particular art form that makes him want to sing songs about painters, he responded in a characteristically Richmanesque way. “I don’t think about writing songs,” he said. “In fact, I’m not really a songwriter. I just sing and make things up and dance around and stuff.”

Rather than seeing himself as an artiste, Richman takes a craftsman approach to songwriting that reflects his own interest in stone masonry and making brick ovens. “I just like to build walls and ovens,” he said. “I apprenticed in the mid-1990s. It’s fun. It’s soulful. It’s physical. And you’re outside.”

Richman doesn’t have a smartphone—just a landline with the ringer turned off and an old-school answering machine—so this interview was conducted in writing via snail mail. When asked about the benefits of living an unplugged life, his handwritten response was simple: “Cause it’s way better. Try it. It’s slow. You spend more time outside. Do it.”

On his most recent albums, Jonathan Richman has let his inner Hippie Johnny come out and play,

something that was inspired in part by his meditation practices. “I started when I was 17,” he said. “You can see things more clearly this way. It slows ya down, way down.”

Richman has also been making music with his old bandmate Jerry Harrison, who first appeared on 2018’s album SA! playing Mellotron, harmonium and clavinet. This eclectic collection of tracks blend tambura-driven ragas, catchy Spanish-language numbers and tearjerking love songs.

“I needed somebody to play a Mellotron that was in the recording studio,” Richman said. “I called Jerry and that was sometime ago. My musical colleague! We’re close.” On SA!’s follow-up, Want To Visit My Inner House?, Harrison stepped up as co-producer and played keyboards on about half of the songs— including the droney blissed-out title track and a reprise that bookended the album. 2025’s Only Frozen Sky Anyway follows much the same path with humor, earnestness and otherworldly drones.

When asked what inspired his current cosmic inner-spaceways-traveling path, Richman explained, “John Cale of the Velvet Underground studied with LaMont Young, senior student of Pandit Pran Nath along with Terry Riley. I got into that stuff about 15 years ago. Since I started out by trying to copy the Velvet Underground, it’s not that big a stretch.”

In Richman’s 1968 article for Vibrations, he insisted that the then-obscure Velvet Underground were as important as the Beatles. The piece also included a diagram he drew that anticipated the cultural ascension of his favorite group while accurately predicting the demise of groups like the Doors, Cream, Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane.

It was a pretty prescient observation for someone who was only 16 at the time, and when I dredged up this memory in my final question, he playfully wrote back, “STATUTE of LIMITATIONS INVOKED.”

Friday, Oct. 17, 7:30 p.m.

Englert Theatre, Iowa City

Jonathan Richman performs.

Driely S / Courtesy of Jonathan Richman

Jonathan richman

Local Color

Live shows have returned to the former TeeHee’s Comedy Club space, giving Des Moines’ average joes a shot at the spotlight.

bY LIZ rOSA

You could say it has risen out of the rubble—a long-awaited, much-needed presence in the neighborhood. Locals Bar & Stage is helping bring Walnut Street in Des Moines back to life.

The area has suffered some losses: the shutdowns of the Gas Lamp, Vaudeville Mews and other downtown establishments have left the area devoid of the lively entertainment scene it previously possessed.

But for its founders—Anthony Basquez, Sid Juwarker, Eli Berry and Ben Norris, a group of four longtime Des Moines locals—Locals Bar & Stage is the solution to the community’s need for live entertainment and gathering space.

Norris’s commitment to Walnut Street began when a food truck he started in 2012 settled into a brick-and-mortar restaurant, The Walnut, located not far from Local’s. “We wanted to make sure the street continues to move in a positive direction and stays vibrant,” Norris said. “So I decided to go in with some partners on opening Locals.”

The building, formerly TeeHee’s Comedy Club, had sat empty for about a year. When the opportunity came up to open the dive, it felt right. “The neighborhood had lost a couple of bars that were known for live music,” Norris said. “So bringing entertainment back was good for all the restaurants and businesses on the block.”

Though Norris explained it as more of a turnkey

operation than building a restaurant from scratch, the space still needed a facelift—a vibe. “It’s a dive bar with a stage that gives the local community a chance to sing karaoke or play their own original music,” Norris said. “[It’s an opportunity for] up-and-coming bands to get a chance to play in front of their friends and the community, but we’re trying to be as laidback as possible.”

That simplicity is core to Locals’ identity; “keep it simple stupid,” as Norris puts it.

With a capacity of under 200 people, the venue fills a specific niche in Des Moines’ music scene: intimate, but professional enough to give artists a real platform. Particularly a platform for enterprising artists wanting to break into the scene. “[Locals is] an amateur stage for artists just beginning,” Norris said. “It’s the stage between the garage and the grandstand. It creates the opportunity for amateurs to give everything a shot.”

Fridays and Saturdays offer free live music, showcasing local, regional and occasionally national touring acts. Norris said there may be shows that

Upcoming events at Locals Fri, Oct. 3, 7:30 p.m., Hot Kunch, Hello Fellow Humans, Mango Soul Sat, Oct. 4, 8 p.m., Dj Phox & Dj Adapt Idol

Fri, Oct. 10, 7:30 p.m., Jesus Christ Taxi Driver, Kensett, Dirty Blonde

Sat, Oct. 11, 7:30 p.m., Running Man, Triple Elvis, De Vant

Fri, Oct. 24, 7 p.m., Delta Bees, Night Manual, Stretched Thin

Sat, Oct. 25, 7:30 p.m., Skalloween: Slaughter House 6, Lamp, Uncollectables, Skillful Means

The stage at Locals Bar & Stage, 1433 Walnut St, Des Moines. Open Sunday, 1-11 p.m.; Wed & Thurs, 3 p.m.-12 a.m.; and Fri & Sat, 3 p.m.-1:30 a.m. Jo Allen / Little Village

will cost money, depending on the popularity and booking costs of certain artists, but you can count on consistent free shows.

In addition to live music on Friday and Saturday evenings, Locals has a weekly programming schedule that reaches out to different parts of the community. Wednesdays features “Party Party,” a high-energy live band karaoke with guitar, bass, drums and hundreds of songs to choose from. “You can sing like you’re the lead of a real band,” Norris said.

On Sunday mornings, Locals transforms into a faux sports bar with walking tacos, breakfast pizzas and all the games. Sunday night sees the stage open for musicians to jam, collaborate and experiment in a low-pressure open mic setting. Open mic comedy nights will become a weekly Thursday staple.

Though Locals is only a few months old, Norris and his colleagues aren’t rushing to define it. “Consistency and predictability are important, but we want it to grow organically,” Norris said. “We’re always going to be open to evolving and becoming the bigger, better version of ourselves, day by day.”

Still, they have some standards. “We’re not big on cover bands,” Norris said. “Other than karaoke, we really want people to play their own original music. We want to be a place where you might just stumble on your new favorite band.”

Whether you’re grabbing a drink, jumping on stage or soaking up the sound, Locals invites Des Moines to show up and be part of something.

MFKS performs at Locals Bar & Stage on Friday, Sept. 19. Jo Allen / Little Village

Movieheaven

FilmScene’s Refocus Film Festival returns to Iowa City Oct. 9-12 with a full platter of cinematic goodness. We asked our resident film scribes Ariana Martinez and Benji McElroy to share the shows they’re most excited to see. We also broke down the lineup by mood, with only a little fighting about what fit where.

Hedda

Directed by Nia DaCosta

Nia DaCosta triumphantly returns with her fourth feature, and is working with Tessa Thompson again, who starred in her 2018 debut Little Woods. I’m thrilled to get a chance to watch this on the big screen considering the film is an Amazon Prime original and will frustratingly only have a limited theatrical release before moving to streaming. Lame!

Romería

Directed by Carla Simón

The plot of this one, as someone who has also tried to piece together the fractured memory of a family member lost to AIDS, hits close to home. Director Carla Simón is adept at exploring grief from the eyes of a young girl, and Romería seems to be another special entry in her filmography.

Videoheaven

Directed by Alex Ross Perry

Coming off the success of Pavements, Alex Ross Perry pivots from music to movies to honor the video store; it goes without saying why this interests me. Ever the experimental documentarian, the three-hour runtime isn’t scaring me off. I’m always down for a walk down 1980s memory lane.

Saïd Effendi

Directed by Kameran Hosni

One of the retrospective selections of the fest, this Iraqi film from 1957 follows a teacher who experiences tension with his distrusting neighbors. The educator has and continues to remain a contentious figure in society, and as a teacher myself, I’m eager to see the chilling truth within this familiar tale.

She's the He

Directed by Siobhan McCarthy

Surprise surprise, this nonbinary critic is excited for a film about trans identity featuring so many queer people in front of and behind the camera! I can’t wait for something so gay to flip weird heterosexual comedy on its head, a gift in the vein of Bottoms for genderqueer folk!

Peter Hujar's Day

Directed by Ira Sachs

With two heavy hitters at her disposal, Ben Wishaw and Rebecca Hall, I’m curious to see what Passages director Ira Sachs creates. The subgenre “conversation-heavy films set in a single day” is particularly delightful to me, and the photographerwriter dynamic here adds an interesting layer.

The Ice Tower

Directed by Lucile Hadzihalilovic

A young woman watches, studies and becomes infatuated with a beautiful older woman will always be an intriguingly complex process. Add a classic Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale to the picture and I'm lured in even further. Marion Cotillard as the Snow Queen herself doesn’t hurt either.

Fucktoys

Directed by Annapurna Sriram

A colorful and sexed up odyssey modeled after my favorite tarot card—I would be a fool not to see it. Set in the fictional city of Trashtown, USA, it’s gonna be surreal, it’s gonna be camp, and it’s certainly gonna be delicious!

Ariel

Directed by Lois Patiño

Reimagining Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the archipelago of Azores, Ariel’s cinematography is clearly just as magical as its story. The coastal mysticism of this timeless play alongside the Spanish lore has already mesmerized me.

— Ariana Martinez

Train Dreams

Directed by Clint Bentley

This will be the third time Denis Johnson, former resident of Hillcrest Dormitory and winner of the National Book Award, has been adapted for the big screen (Stars at Noon, Jesus’ Son). Train Dreams, Johnson’s sorta-frontier myth, is about one man and the sometimes-transcendent things that happen to him between working and dying on the railroad. I hope the film rings trippy and true, too.

No Other Choice

Directed by Park Chan-wook

Park Chan-wook’s films (Oldboy, The Handmaiden) have suspiciously juicy setups—the kind of loglines other directors seem content to coast on—but Park always does them better than the picture in my head. I can’t wait to see what he’s done with this Donald E. Westlake story about a laid-off professional who turns his job hunt into a headhunt.

The Spook Who Sat by the Door

Directed by Ivan Dixon

Though the genre hook will get you in the door— the first Black man in the CIA takes what he learns from the foremost experts in regime change and organizes a new American revolution—the real-life FBI provided the best possible endorsement back in 1973 when they, uh, advised theaters to stop showing the film and destroyed all the prints they could find.

Still from Romería via Elastica Films

Still from Fucktoys via Trashtown Pictures

Filmstofit your mood

l'oeilsauvage

100 Meters

I Am Night at Noonday

Peter Hujar's Day

She's the He

The Hips of J.W.

Zodiac Killer Project Love & Pop

Heartfelt Provocative

Whimsical

Little Amélie or The Character of Rain River of Grass

Videoheaven

Love & Pop

Directed by Hideaki Anno

Hideaki Anno, the creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion , bought a camcorder for the makingof documentary about his anime’s alternate and actual ending. He stuck with off-theshelf gear for his first live-action feature, Love & Pop, which would maybe pass for a documentary on teenage sugar babies during Japan’s “Lost Decade” if only the camera wasn’t bouncing off the walls.

Kontinental '25

Monograph Shorts 2025 RomerÍa

Orwell: 2+2=5

Partition + The Flowers Stand, Silently Witnessing

Play It As It Lays

With Hasan in Gaza No Other Choice

Harrowing

Directed by Radu Jude

If you, like me, engage in the shameful consumption of year-end lists, you’ll recognize Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World from 2024 best ofs. His follow up, a film about a bleedingheart bailiff tormented by the bloodless, carnivorous complications of modern existence, may be more grounded but still makes sure to scorch what it stands on.

WTO/99

Directed by Ian Bell

This documentary, cut from 400+ hours of archival

All the feels

Two Prosecutors

The Ice Tower

Saïd Effendi Train Dreams

footage, is a high-dive cannonball into the “rather interesting hoopla,” as Bill Clinton put it, surrounding the 1999 World Trade Organization conference in Seattle. What Slick Willie meant, of course, was police tear-gassing the shit out of the right-left coalition of protesters for being 100 percent correct about his fuck-y’all trade deals.

Play It As It Lays

Directed by Frank Perry

I’ve had to hear tight and toned Angelenos talk about the stunning, revelatory, etc. 4K restoration of this Joan

Didion adaptation—with a screenplay by Didion and her also-good-atwriting husband, John Gregory Dunne—for months. Now I finally get to see if Anthony Perkins, hotter than ever even in 480p, really is hotter than hotter than ever.

The Hips of J.W.

Directed by João César Monteiro

You should know two things about this Portuguese film: 1) J.C. Moneiro knew damn well how to shoot a film that would screen at modern art museums on the semi-regular, and 2) the “J.W.” in the title (which Variety translated as The Pelvis of J.W. in their 1997 review) is none other than John Wayne.

Zodiac Killer Project

Directed by Charlie Shackleton

When Charlie Shackleton lost the rights to The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up, a self-published theory from some crackpot highway patrolman, he Scotchtaped the pieces into this deconstruction of the true crime genre. The DIY anti-doc has at least one fan: Elijah Wood of Cedar Rapids, who gave it the NEXT Innovator Award at the Sundance Film Festival. — Benjamin McElroy

via Trashtown Pictures

via Orion Pictures viaLesFilmsde

via Jordan Drake Productions

via SBS Productions

via Compagnie Aflam Alyom

Fucktoys

Hedda

The Spook Who Sat By The Door

OctOber A-LISt: FILM

DES MOINES

tues, Oct. 7, The Librarians w/ Panel Discussion, Varsity cinema

tues, Oct. 14, 7 p.m., Misery 35th Anniversary Screening, Varsity cinema

Fri, Oct. 17, The Rocky Horror Picture Show w/ Live Shadowcast, Varsity cinema

tue, Oct. 21, 7 p.m., Scooby-Doo w/ Audience Interaction, Varsity cinema

thu, Oct. 23, 10 p.m., A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors w/ the Fright Zone, Varsity cinema

Fri, Oct. 24, 9 p.m., Creature from the Black Lagoon, Fleur cinema

tue, Oct. 28, Phantom of the Opera w/ live score by the Invincible czars, Fleur cinema

IOWA CITY

Sat, Oct. 4, 10 p.m., The Brides of Dracula, FilmScene

Oct. 9-12, refocus Film Festival, FilmScene

Wed, Oct. 15, 10 p.m., Motel Hell, FilmScene

Sat, Oct. 18, 10 p.m., Ganja & Hess, FilmScene

Oct. 18, 19 & 23, various times, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, FilmScene

tue, Oct. 21, 7 p.m., Citizen George, FilmScene

Wed, Oct. 22, 10 p.m., The Barn, FilmScene

Fri, Oct. 24, 7 p.m., FilmScene in the Park: FrankenWeenie, FilmScene

Sat, Oct. 25, 10 p.m., From Dusk Till Dawn, FilmScene

Sun & tue, Oct. 26 & 28, 7 p.m., A Foreign Affair, FilmScene

Wed, Oct. 29, 10 p.m., Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, FilmScene

Fri, Oct. 31, 8 p.m., Filmscream 2025, FilmScene

Sun, Nov. 2, 7:30 p.m., Fargo, FilmScene

QUAD CITIES

Sat, Oct. 4, 7 p.m., An evening w/ topher Grace & screening of The Big Picture, the Last Picture House

LOCAL & NOTABLE

Little Village's monthly print calendar is a non-exhaustive, curated list of arts and cultural events across LV's reader areas. Want to see more? Browse listings online at littlevillagemag.com/calendar.

Are you planning an event? Add it to our online calendar: littlevillagemag. com/calendar.

(Please include: event image, event name, date, time, venue name and address, admission price or price range and a brief description. No all-caps, exclamation points or advertising verbiage, please.)

thu-Sat, Oct. 2-4, 7 p.m., Get Out, the Last Picture House

thu & Fri, Oct. 9 & 10, 7 p.m., Village Zombie run IV Presents: Night of the Living Dead, the Last Picture House

thu-Sat, Oct. 23-25, 7 p.m., Friday the 13th, the Last Picture House

thu-Sat, Oct. 30-Nov. 1, 7 p.m., Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the Last Picture House

MUSIC

DES MOINES/AMES

thu, Oct. 2, 6 p.m., rickshaw billie's burger Patrol w/ Pink Fuzz, xbk Live

Fri, Oct. 3, 5 p.m., Fivefold w/ Hang Your Hate, Kensett, Lefty's Live Music

Fri, Oct. 3, 7 p.m., American Aquarium, xbk Live

Fri, Oct. 3, 7 & 9 p.m., Fly Me to the Moon: The Max Wellman Big Band Plays Sinatra, Noce

Sat, Oct. 4, 7 p.m., trey Kennedy, Hoyt Sherman Place

Sat, Oct. 4, 7:30 p.m., Adam Sandler, casey's center

Sat, Oct. 4, 7 p.m., Hannah Marks, Michael Malis, Jonathan taylor, Noce

Sun, Oct. 5, 1 p.m., Iowa blues challenge, Lefty's Live Music

Sun, Oct. 5, 7:30 p.m., Jonas brothers, casey's center

Sun, Oct. 5, 8 p.m., SunSquabi, Wooly's

Mon, Oct. 6, 7:30 p.m., corrosion of conformity, Wooly's

Mon, Oct. 6, 7:30 p.m., Franz Ferdinand, Val Air ballroom

tue, Oct. 7, 8 p.m., Durry w/ Gully boys, xbk Live

tue, Oct. 7, 8 p.m., richy Mitch & the coal Miners, Wooly's

Wed, Oct. 8, 6 p.m., 96 bitter beings w/ the Medenhall experiment & More cheese, Lefty's Live Music

thu, Oct. 9, 5 p.m., Villain of the Story, the Wise Man's Fear, execution Day, Divide the Fall, Saving Sidon, Lefty's Live Music

thu, Oct. 9, 7 p.m., the Dangerous Summer w/ bad Luck. and On Hiatus, xbk Live

thu, Oct.9, 7 p.m., Nile, Wooly's

thu, Oct. 9, 7:30 p.m., Marc rebillet, Val Air ballroom

Fri, Oct. 10, 7 p.m., Maddox batson, Val Air ballroom

Fri, Oct. 10, 7 p.m., Skizzy Mars, Wooly's

Fri, Oct. 10, 7 & 9 p.m., Follies: A Night of broadway w/ Napoleon Douglas, Noce

MUSIC

Fri, Oct. 10, 8 p.m., Mike t Probably Too Nice eP release w/ cdisiac + FlySpace, xbk Live

Sat, Oct. 11, 7 & 9 p.m., torch Songs: Lauren Vilmain w/ Her Jazz Orchestra, Noce

Sat, Oct. 11, 9 p.m., United We Dance: the Ultimate rave experience, Val Air ballroom

Sun, Oct. 12, 5 p.m., Fight From Within, resistor, Smile on the Sinner, thin the Herd, Lefty's Live Music

Sun, Oct. 12, 7 p.m., KAYKO w/ Lost Stars, xbk Live

Mon, Oct. 13, 7 p.m., Simon cropp & Marques Morel, xbk Annex

Mon, Oct. 13, 7:30 p.m., carbon Leaf, xbk Live

Mon, Oct. 13, 7:30 p.m., Saint Motel, Val Air ballroom

tue, Oct. 14, 7 p.m., the counselors of evil present Something Scary, xbk Live

Wed, Oct. 15, 7 p.m., bruce Katz band, xbk Live

thu, Oct. 16, 7 p.m., Six Feet Under, Wooly's

thu, Oct. 16, 7 p.m., Acid Mothers temple, the Melting Paraiso U.F.O., xbk Live

Fri, Oct. 17, 7 p.m., Saxsquatch, Wooly's

Fri, Oct. 17, 7 p.m., MN Jazz Vocalist Leslie Vincent, Noce

Sat, Oct. 18, 8 p.m., Social cinema and Sego, xbk Live

Sun, Oct. 19, 7 p.m., Sons Of the east, Wooly's

tue, Oct. 21, 7 p.m., Abi carter w/ carter rubin, xbk Live

tue, Oct. 21, 7:30 p.m., moe., Val Air ballroom

Wed, Oct. 22, 7 p.m., cole chaney w/ Wild Horses, xbk Live

Wed, Oct. 22, 7 p.m., PeelingFlesh, Wooly's

thu, Oc.t 23, 9 p.m., Ataraxis Movement, Neo Sol, tu'Mera, Lefty's Live Music

thu, Oct. 23, 7 p.m., Petey USA, Wooly's

thu, Oc.t 23, 7:30 p.m., Joe Nichols, Val Air ballroom

Fri, Oct. 24, 8 p.m., that 1 Guy, xbk Live

Fri, Oct. 24, 7 p.m., tyler rich, Wooly's

Fri, Oct. 24, 7 p.m., the Nola Jazz band!, Noce

Sat, Oct. 25, 8 p.m., Unsubscribe Podcast, Val Air ballroom

Sat, Oct. 25, 9:04 p.m., emo Nite, Wooly's

Sun, Oct. 26, 7 p.m., between the buried and Me & Hail the Sun, Wooly's

tue, Oct. 28, 7:30 p.m., chris Webby, Wooly's

Wed, Oct. 29, 7 p.m., KOYO, Wooly's

Wed, Oct. 29, 8 p.m., Greensky bluegrass, Hoyt Sherman Place

thu, Oct. 30, 7 p.m., Militarie Gun w/ Liquid Mike & Public Opinion, xbk Live

Fri, Oct. 31, bone thugs-NHalloween, Val Air ballroom

Fri, Oct. 31, 7 p.m., Archers, Wooly's

Fri, Oct. 31, 7 & 9 p.m., Halloween w/ the Paul Lichty Jazz Orchestra, Noce

Sat, Nov. 1, 8 p.m., PrOF, Val Air ballroom

Sat, Nov. 1, 7 & 9 p.m., bojangles: Napoleon Douglas Sings the Music of Sammy Davis Jr. w/ His Jazz Orchestra, Noce

Sat, Nov. 1, 7 p.m., Abbie Sawyer & Her Persimmon band w/ the Night Lights, xbk Live

Sun, Nov. 2, 8 p.m., Kings Kaleidoscope, Wooly's

via Katie and the Honky Tonks

via Abbie Sawyer

Mon, Nov. 3, 7 p.m., Organ Fairchild, xbk Live