Culture Prairie Pop
Mr. Cacciatore Down on Linn Street When he’s not in the recording booth, Good Morning Midnight’s frontman can be found behind the counter at an iconic Iowa record store. BY KEMBREW MCLEOD
“I
went to Catholic school in Des Moines, and I guess my way of rebelling was to be a total snob about records,” said Good Morning Midnight frontman Charlie Cacciatore. “Some people are in debate and others play tennis, and me and my friends survived in that ecosystem by taking on that kind of identity. Every weekend, we all went to ZZZ Records and Jay’s CD & Hobby, and we’d go to record shows. We were totally obsessed. At that time, the idea of working at a place like that was such a lofty notion that it seemed out of reach, like being a rock star.” Born in 1997, the soft-spoken guitarist is a third generation Italian American whose great-grandparents immigrated to Des Moines, where his family owns Italian restaurants and a grocery store. But it was the record store life that sparked his imagination. One path into music was through his father, who Cacciatore described as a Gen X new wave kind of guy who had a tape collection that he dove into while growing up. “I got super into U2, and I had a friend I met in first grade who I played with through high school, until we graduated,” he said. “It was Andrew’s dad who introduced me to the Pixies, Replacements and Paul Westerberg’s first solo album, 14 Songs, which was like the first ‘cool’ album that I was into when I was 12 or 13.” After discovering Elliott Smith and Bright Eyes, Cacciatore gravitated to left-of-center indie rock groups like Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo, along with Black Flag and other early hardcore punk bands. Finding a Reagan Youth compilation album whose cover featured the Pope shaking Adolf Hitler’s hand felt like a radical experience while shopping at a record fair in a Des Moines Holiday Inn—especially because their Catholic school bishop would praise certain football players by name during mass and a new teacher was fired days after being hired because he was gay. 30 April 2022 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LVDSM1
Sara Weiler
Cacciatore played in a Des Moines group named Grand Champ, and some of those songs made their way into the first Good Morning Midnight album, Basket of Flowers, released in 2017. “When I graduated,” he said, “I didn’t know where I wanted to go to college, or if I wanted to go to college, but I knew I wanted to set out on my own. I ended up enrolling at the University of Iowa, mainly as a way to get from one place to the next, but I didn’t stay in school for long.” “The main reason I wound up in Iowa City was because we recorded Basket of Flowers at Luke Tweedy’s Flat Black Studios, just outside of town in Lone Tree. We were some of the first people at Flat Black, and it didn’t even have air conditioning yet. It was July and I was kind of like a snotty kid about it, but Luke was literally in the process of building the studio. Looking back, a really interesting aspect of those sessions was being sweaty and cranky, but being OK with it despite being uncomfortable, because it was my first time in a recording studio.” Cacciatore returned to Flat Black to record the second Good Morning Midnight album, Both Neither and Both, as well as the group’s most recent album, Songs of Violence, which was released on vinyl in early 2022. Through those experiences, he began developing a relationship with the people at Flat Black, which gave him a peek into the wider regional music scene that developed around the recording studio. The more Cacciatore recorded there, the more he felt that he was part of a community, which was really important to him. “There’s an environment at Flat Black that
encourages bands to make the exact record they want to make, on their own terms, without the influence of an outsider trying to assert their idea of what the music should sound like,” he said. “This is a really good environment for a young artist to develop their own voice and their own style. As a young person creating music, which is a very vulnerable process, working with an experienced engineer like Luke, who is from an older generation, has helped me come into my own skin, and there’s no doubt others feel the same way.” Soon after Cacciatore finished the first Good Morning Midnight album, Tweedy sent him a
Gross Domestic Product Festival: Good Morning Midnight, Gas Lamp, Des Moines, Saturday, April 23 at 7 p.m., $18 festival pass
