Wilderness Road

Have you ever wondered how articles for magazines like this one are chosen?

CREEM decides to go national, with features on what’s happening around the country. Because the Creemers follow the underground press, they know that Wilderness Road is the hottest band in Chicago. Because CREEM is less concerned with its ‘definitiveness’ than Rolling Stone, because it likes to help deserving bands, and because scoops count even during our non-competitive Aquarian Age, a phone call appoints me official Tenderer of the true story of Wilderness Road.

Meanwhile, at about the same point in time, Wilderness Road is approaching several people in Chicago about national exposure. It seems that their hundreds of appearances, obvious talent, strong ties to the hip community and rave local reviews aren’t enough to win them a recording contract with money up front. They have been told that they need a “national article” to make it official. The ‘biz,’ where music is ‘product’ and the measure of a group is its ‘commercial potential,’ demands clippings more recent than even yesterday’s papers.

Those of you who thought articles were chosen by tossing the I Ching shouldn’t get angry. You’re not about to be ripped off. You’ll get a hot flash on a really talented band for however many pieces of silver the new, improved CREEM costs PLUS you’ll be able to amaze your friends when you tell them how much connections count in Albumland. And they’ll be none of those awful advertising quotes, immortal statements like:

WILDERNESS ROAD IS THE FABULOUS FREAK BROTHERS SET TO MUSIC

WILDERNESS ROAD COMBINES CHICAGO AND CANNABIS

THE BEST CURE FOR A HEAD ACHE ON THE MARKET

So. CREEM prints it first, you read it sooner, and Wilderness Road can go to the record companies and say that millions know of them even if the writer made sport of the beloved institution known as capitalism. I get enough money to buy a new typewriter ribbon.

However, there is a problem. Writing about Wilderness Road for CREEM is not the same thing as writing about Wilderness Road for the Chicago Seed. People in Chicago have had a billion chances to see and hear Road at coffeehouses, parks, bars and rock palaces, as well as at benefit upon benefit for causes ranging from hip switchboards to The Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention. They know that the band does country rock and satire, and does both very well. They may even be hard-core Road freaks, choogling along from booking to booking.

Most of you have no such knowledge. If I asked every person reading this who’s heard Wilderness Road play to switch their lights on and off, a photo taken by satellite would show something less than a blinking America. Furthermore, Detroit technology is concentrated on machines rather than magazines, so you don’t get a record with your CREEM. In other words, you’ll have to wait until the band pops a chart or two before getting a chance to hear Road sing and watch it turn a room of seated people into a sea of dancing, yelling friends.

Meanwhile, try this. Think of a flow chart of rock and roll, a large diagram showing the various influences and interconnections which together have marked rock. By looking at this diagram, you can see lines going from a group like the Beatles to groups and people affected by them: Richie Havens, Badfinger, Joe' Cocker, George alone, Paul alone, etc. If you check out this chart, you see that several lines converge at Wilderness Road. There’s the three-guitar line coming from the San Francisco groups. There’s a line coming from the Byrds down through Poco and other country-rockers. There’s a thin line coming down from the blues, although die-hard mojo mutants should be cautioned that this vector is drawn with a white pen. There’s an oldie-but-goodie line, and there’s a line drawn from the more political groups, especially from the ones that use satire and talk in their acts: the Fugs, the Mothers, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen.

In other words, Wilderness Road plays mostly country rock with a rock guitar setup, and what they sing is rich with political content. Were you to come to Chicago for a Road show, you would hear songs ranging from a good-vibes tune like “Long Winter” to a commercial for Mouth Jive by Ricky Balloon and the Balloons, from a" mandolin-guitar exchange called “Cuckoo”' to a skit (complete with a four-foot-tall light-up cross) transforming that famous Sunnnnday drag-race rap into a goof on Elmer Gantry evangelicism, from acid rock to the gospel chords of “Heavily Into Jesus.” Interspersed with the songs would be raps about everything from Mayor Daley to Meher Baba. You would also hear Warren Leming exchange guitar or banjo riffs with Nate Herman’s guitar and mandolin while Andy Haban wandered around synchronizing his bass to the lead runs and Tom Haban provided a backbeat to firm up the timing without drowning it in a Ginger Baker-style frenzy. You might hear Nate sing “Bony Maronie” and other songs from the 50s, then Warren do a lead, then Andy. Warren, who does most of the talking for the group, says that Road is “less a rock band than a media group,” since “we’ve put out a calendar of rock and roll featuring the best underground artists in Chicago, written a comic book in collaboration with Skip Williamson, written the soundtrack for a film about local slumlord called ‘Good-bye Fat Larry,’ and written and performed the music for a videotape show called ‘The Groove Tube’ ” in addition to playing music that “ties in all the rhythms people associate with listening to radio or television.”

II

It wasn’t always like this. When Wilderness Road came together in June of 1969, they were lucky if they could get through a set without breaking down over differences or difficulties. Warren had dropped out of the University of Illinois, taken some philosophy courses, spent 18 months banjo-picking in German country and western bars while sweating out the Army, and worked the Second City comedy revue and a show called “The American Revolution” which was cancelled when tear gas turned the playhouse into a first-aid station during the Democratic Convention. Nate was a fellow U of I dropout, fellow second Citier, and fellow musician. Andy, a Vietnam veteran and ex-mailman, had met Warren when he moved into the apartment next door and began tuning his new bass and amplifier. Guitarist Lou Hennslee and drummer Doug Cassel had their own special abilities and drawbacks. Individual credits included work with supergroups like The Absolute Truth String Band, The Stanley Moss Blues Boys, and The Urban Renewal Boys. Warren was 27, Andy 21.

The band had no chance of holding together. According to the current Roadsters, Hennslee was a MUSICIAN who had no use for spoken — especially political — material and Cassel and the group had stylistic clashes. Andy had been playing bass for all of three months. At times the band sounded like five people who’d answered an offer on the inside of a matchbook cover.

The first casualty was Cassel. Sometime during the fall of ’69 Andy’s brother Tom began to drum on some gigs. Eventually Cassel quit, charging that there was too much brotherly love in the group. This allowed the Habans to realize a long-standing desire to play together and is said to have improved the rhythm section, but it did little to define whether or not the band would do political satire.

In November of 1969, the Yippies had a benefit at Second City. Somebody called Road and asked them to play. Warren said yes. Nate said yes. Andy said yes. Tom said yes, Hennslee said no. Three days before the benefit, Warren, Nate, Andy and Tom said good-bye to Hennslee. Scared and short-handed, Road played two sets full of spiels about drugs, the Movement, balling and other topics of interest to Chicago freaks. Henslee’s absence forced them to improvise new parts and try new songs; By night’s end excitement had replaced fear and everybody loved the band.

Unfortunately, they were still starving. The Chicago money circuit was, in a word, short-circuited. Aside from an anti-profit coffee house called Alice’s Restaurant, the only bookings were rare dates at a psychedungeon called the Aragon Ballroom, at a liquor club on mod Rush Street, and on a few campuses. In June of 1970, Road drove to the Poynette Rock Festival which, after deducting repair costs for a damaged truck, cost them money to play. Sometime during that summer their equipment manager disappeared with a new van after successfully arguing that the registration should be in his name in case the police stopped him driving to or from a date. As the weather got cold, so did the storage warehouse where the band was spending two to four hours a day rehearsing. By November of 1970 the four Roadsters were just getting by from odd jobs, whatever money three wives were making, and back-stage hat-passing at various benefits.

But they kept practicing and they kept playing benefits. Sometimes they would play for two or three organizations a week because they felt (Warren) that “these are organizations that we identify with. We don’t identify with them completely, but we certainly identify with them enough so that it’s worth committing our energy” and that (Andy) “the people that make up the organizations are people a lot like ourselves, people in the same position with regard to society.”

In November they finally got a booking at the Syndrome, successor musical supermarket to the Aragon. Before 10,000 people they wiped out Traffic, who Andy described as “ . . . uninspired, casual to the point where they just didn’t give a shit...” and “ .. . into a superstar syndrome; they wouldn’t even move their equipment and let the local bands, the unknown bands, get up there and work with the sound system before they went on.” Tom estimated that Traffic got $7,500 for the night; Road’s cut was $300 before the booking agent and equipment manager put in their vouchers.

The Syndrome was a watershed, but not all the flow was in a good direction. Road was able to parlay wide publicity in the Seed and the straight press into a series of bookings which paid enough for them to survive. Obviously, this was good. Unfortunately, nearly all the new dates were in bars. Bars are where .“Caravan with a drum solo” is more than a myth and dancing less than a reality. Bars serve strange liquids that make people either want to fight each other or fall off high stools. Elephant’s Memory once played a bar in Chicago and found out afterward that 90% of the mod people in the audience thought the Weatherwoman they’d sung about was more interested in temperature than revolution.

Bars have other disadvantages. Most are run for maximum profit; one place offered a gig for next to no money on the condition that they promise not to perform anywhere else for a week before and after the date. Many are managed by people who’s generosity might impress Simon Legree. Almost every one is set up to separate “performer” and “audience.” Most crucial of all, bars in Chicago ban people under 21. Outdoor rock has been outlawed since last summer’s Sly concert was cancelled in favor of a riot and the police have begun to enforce the under-18 curfew law (11:30 on weekends, 10:30 during the week!), so the replacement of coffeehouse and park gigs by bar dates has created still another generation gap.

The bar circuit conjures up additional problems for any band that considers itself political. According to Warren, Road is “political without being preachy.” He says that the band doesn’t “ . . . come out and try to determine for people what their reaction is going to be to the society or to the music.” He believes that the main way Hoad can radicalize people is through . the idea of theater . . . the most effective

propagandistic tool for changing minds.” The drag is that the same act which can energize and affirm a bunch of turned-on freaks at a radical benefit can be drowned in suds and tossed off as mere entertainment when laid out for a room full of people who sit at tables drinking to turn themselves off (true, downers do the same, but as this is written there is no downer circuit in the city). I mean, can you picture the atomic MC-5 of yesteryear playing plastic, respectable, middle-class bars where the cartridge belts are worn only for chicness, bars that lack any soul or funkiness or even the decadent energy of an all-time meth palace like Steve Paul’s Scene in New York?

Road knows that the revolution isn’t at the Wise Fools Pub or the Quiet Night. It plays benefits for every organization that asks and doesn’t worry about losing a following through overexposure, and its raps are heavy enough to go beyond chitchat even if there is a strange separation between political statements and songs which never refer to themes like those of “Fortunate Son,” “American Ruse,” or “Take It To The Streets.” But if it knows where the revolution isn’t, it joins many people in not being sure where it is. Warren says that “there's no party line in the band,” which removes it from the category staked out by the White Panther Party’s Up or the Black Panther Party’s Lumpen, and the band is pessimistic about more ‘alternative’ projects like a counter-recording and distribution system:

WARREN: I’ve talked to an infinite number of people about setting up an alternate recording company. It’s like so many things you talk to ‘Movement people’ about. It’s a visible idea, there’s room for it, but you have to have your shit together and I’ve never run into anybody who could sit down and do it.

The idea verges on being hip capitalism. Like it or not, you’re still going to have to make a profit to survive, and once you do that, well, you know that somebody’s going to have to play the money game.

That may be why fewer people are attracted to the idea than might be possible, but I’ve yet to meet anybody who could bring something like that off. I would be something to do it with an apparatus that was already set up. There are small record companies all over the country that are trying to be some kind of alternative... ‘ '

ANDY: Doing something like a network is a big gamble right up front, so most of the people who would be in a position financially and who have the knowledge to pull it off are already in positions that afford them security, like working with record companies or producers.

TOM: The only way to get started would be to have a top hit group.

Warren thought that the best of the alternative musical institutions was the SRC studio in Ypsilanti, Michigan, which charges low prices for modem facilities. He also was interested in Elephant Memory’s ideas about doing a benefit tour for a little over expenses. He thought it was premature to ask whether or not Road would be willing to be the “hit group” mentioned as the necessary cornerstone for a non-ripoff network.

A great part of Road’s reluctant attitude comes from the parallel history of the Chicago hip-political scene. The band’s first manager also played a role in producing the no-cost Free City Music Sundays held in Lincoln Park. He was something less than a John Sinclair, both as a radical and as someone with the knowhow and connections to keep bands and causes alive, and the Sundays were not together enough to prevent what Tom remembers as “ . .. things flying at you, people yelling at you, drunks standing out there, everything.” Meetings with groups like the .Seed-White Panther commune generally had more to do with what Road could do for ‘the community’ than how it could become a working part of something that would serve it as well as ‘the people’. At no time was the idea of radical/alternative music ever as potent in Chicago as in Ann Arbor, San Francisco, or the Lower East Side of New York. Road, struggling to survive and grow, remained more concerned with theater than with threatening the record industry.

On the other hand, Road has few illusions about the S*T*A*R trip no matter what bright lights and gold records anybody might dream at night.

“We’re interested in the arrangement that gives us the best opportunity to work,” Warren says. “You really can’t talk in terms like ‘getting a deal deal’. The only time a record company is going to give anything away is when you come to them with a tremendous hype and phenomenal recommendations from everybody on the scene. Six people in a lifetime get that kind of hype. The hype that Johnny Winter got, the hype that the MC-5 got, the hype that some of the San Francisco groups got before they signed is fantastically rare. And in some cases the companies lost. Johnny Winter’s albums are not selling well, but, if it’s possible to believe the figures you see, he got something like $600,000 to sign.”

Warren’s resignation when he says that “realistically, all we can hope for is that somebody will give us the chance to do what, we want to do” is matched by Tom’s description of how thewives of Wilderness “see this as a period before a rise and then some kind of tapering off.” Maybe the best summary of the band’s attitude is Tom’s response when asked if Road was on the verge of “doing something” with a record company — “Yeah, if they don’t do something to us first.”

Ill

Let’s go back to the flow chart, just like in chem class when the instructor pulls the periodic table down over the blackboard, for some summarizing and extending.

Wilderness Road is a bunch of talented musicians who have meshed their ability into a group identity. They make people jump around and feel good. People who were at the Syndrome the night Road stopped Traffic said that a twenty-minute jam between Warren and Nate (which came about when Andy’s bass blew) was an all-time great. “Cuckoo,” “Bounty Man,” and “Mind Gardens” will be all over FM once an album is cut and released, and “Heavily Into Jesus” could be a bizarre country favorite. A roomful of record executives was seen to drool the word “hit” several times during a Road audition, and Dunhill, Columbia, Mercury, Sire and Atlantic are some of the labels hot on Road’s trail.

Wilderness Road is a bit confused. Manager No. 1 was a semi-radical; the new advisor is a dropout administrator from Mayor Daley’s Reach Out Program. The band sings country and talks city. Recently, it was embarrassed when discovered playing a jet-set party for the beautiful ones just two weeks after doing a benefit for the revolutionary greaser organization known as Rising Up Angry. The band has had repeated trouble with Women’s Liberation, and on a couple of occasions the problem has rested with the group rather han with a supposedly humorless Movement.

It’s not a simple matter. People always qupte Mao about the duty of the artist to the revolution, but somehow omit an equally important quote on how nobody will heed ‘correct’ art if the people rendering it have no talent. The Grateful Dead play Panther benefits without doing People Power songs, and are followed by the Lumpen and their songs of oppression and “Old Pig Nixon.” Warren is at the very least aware of the problem when he talks about the relationship between politics and rock: “People are finally beginning to realize, it’s finally sinking in, that rock’n’roll is not going to end oppression . .. By itself, the music is not an incredible force for social change. There’s this big tendency to confuse things like Spanish Civil Way songs with the Spanish Civil War itself. People like Columbia Records, with their ‘The Man Can’t Bust Our Music’ campaign, reinforced the idea that rock’n’roll was somehow the revolutionary vanguard. Well, it’s not. Vanguard is a record label.” The hope is that he and Road will continue to work with those building the real means to end oppression.

Ezra Pound, whose talent for poetry was unfortunately matched by his preference for fascism, said that “artists are the antenna of the human race.” Wilderness Road is not the Messiah and three wise men, but what they’re into seems to mirror much of the temporary cooling down of radical activity. Road’s songs are more reflective than rebellious, more tentative then assertive, and as such match a shift from confronting others to getting our single selve.s together. At a time when as many people are talking about rural reconstruction as urban guerilla warfare, Road manages to capture an entire vibration by putting country music and radical politics on one stage. If Grand Funk is the white noise of downer consciousness and Sun Ra the launching pad for space music, Wilderness Road ties together freak humor and music and becomes the Midwest’s leading head band. Let’s hope they don’t forget where they came from.