The
1990s St. Louis folk rock band Eleanor Roosevelt will have a reunion weekend
and release a new record, Water Bread & Beer, with gigs on both
sides of the Mississippi River, December 7 and 8. Hear a couple Water Bread and Beer songs using that thing in the upper right of this blog.
The
record release party proper will be a house concert Friday, December 7 in
Olivette, MO with Fred Friction opening. The $10 admission includes a copy of the
new CD Water Bread & Beer. Doors are at 7 p.m. and the music at 8
p.m.; bring your own drinks. Seating is limited. For reservations and
directions, contact David Melson via email: melsond@gmail.com.
Then
Eleanor Roosevelt performs 10 p.m. Saturday, December 8 at Jacobsmeyers, a
musician-owned brewpub-to-be in Granite City, IL, with Dana Michael Anderson
closing the night. This show is free. Jacobsmeyers Tavern (618-876-8219) is
located at 2401 Edwards Street in Granite City, Illinois, within sight of the
scenic working steel mills. Eleanor Roosevelt will start right at 10 p.m., with
Dana following at 11:30 p.m. and going as long as it feels good.
The
band Eleanor Roosevelt evolved from Enormous Richard, which along with Uncle
Tupelo, Chicken Truck and others pioneered St. Louis’ alternative country scene
in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Enormous Richard toured the country with a
manic, goofy stage show; when the band began to focus more on songwriting and
less on stage antics, they changed band names to reflect that, keeping the
“E.R.” acronym.
As
Eleanor Roosevelt, the band had it widest national exposure on recordings, with
songs on early volumes of Bloodshot Records’ Hellbent series and East Side
Digital’s Lyrics by Ernest Noyes Brookings. The band also relesed a 7”, Head
in a Hummingbird’s Nest, on Faye Records and scored a feature film, Dan
Mirvish’s Omaha: The Movie. “Head in a Hummingbird’s Nest” later
appeared on Snow Globe Record’s compilation of lost bands from the ‘90s, Tiny
Idols.
The band recorded two albums of material in the 1990s before effectively
disbanding, though they would not self-release them until the new century: Walker
with his head down (recorded 1993, releaed 2007) and Crumbling in the rain (recorded 1995,
released 2005).
The
band’s next evolutions would be from Eleanor Roosevelt to Three Fried Men and
finally to Poetry Scores, a non-profit arts organization that translates poetry
into other media and has bases of operation in St. Louis, Los Angeles, Istanbul
and Hilo, Hawaii. Water Bread & Beer came together as the Poetry Scores model was emerging; it was recorded in
many American states in the late 1990s while the musicians in the band were on
the road recording poets and setting poetry to music, which resulted in the
first Poetry Scores project, Crossing America by Leo Connellan
(2003).
Water
Bread & Beer does include several song settings of borrowed texts: a poem by
Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, a Jewish children’s song to summon rain
from Morocco, a Peruvian worker’s chant and a fragment from the Amos Tutuola
novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. But for most of the record, the band
returned to its roots of working with the lyrics of front man Chris King, who
sings about falling in love with a girl in a wheelchair, finding himself
surrounded by “strangers and dangers,” walking the mean streets of James Brown
Boulevard and nourishing himself with the traditional African cold remedy of
pepper soup and local honey.
The
band: Joe Esser (bass), Matt Fuller (drums, guitar, banjo), Chris King (vocals,
guitar), David Melson (bass), John Minkoff (guitars) and Elijah “Lij” Shaw
(banjo, fiddle, guitars), with guests including Geoffrey Seitz on fiddle and
Pat Sansone (now of Wilco) on keyboards.