Dream of the Wild is the Minneapolis jam band that has flown under the radar until one day, boom — wheredafuq did this jam band come from!?
The history of this band is going to blow your mind, if you (like me) didn’t know.
But first, the band’s “Psychedelic Sundays” residency, which kicks off this week at The Cabooze, tops Jam in the Stream’s Minnesota live music column, though it’s another week with many options to get that live music fix (you’re going to need to scroll down or rather read a bit to get past the headier part of this piece which includes some of my conversation with Dream of the Wild founder Jay McKinney).
The cool thing about this Cabooze residency is it brings a lot of different threads of local psychedelic music to the same stage. Represented are some jam bands, some bands that jam and some bands that don’t (jam) while still purveying psychedelia.
Each week, three guest bands will play a set, along with the host band (doors at 5:30 p.m., music starts at 6:30 p.m. and tickets are $8 in advance, $10 at the door).
Before delving into my conversation with McKinney, I want to mention the bands playing this Sunday: Ice Climber, Beneath Green and Shrimp Olympics. Seeing that this website is a celebration of psychedelic music and art, I’m planning on dedicating some of this weekly column to the bands participating in this residency over the next month.
Shrimp Olympics performing as part of Punk Bowling at Memory Lanes in South Minneapolis March 10. PHOTO BY JAVIER SERNA/@jaminthestream
I caught Shrimp Olympics at South Minneapolis’ Memory Lanes recently and had brief chats with guitarist and vocalist Austin Lombardo and drummer Mat Roberts, who delivered the beats for many of the songs published by Chicago-based psych project Mild High Club.
Shrimp Olympics is one of those weird bands and ya know I throw around that word as a compliment: “The music of Shrimp Olympics follows in the tradition of home-taping heroes like R Stevie Moore and Ween, with heavy jazz, country and psychedelic pop elements,” reads one of the band’s press descriptions.
I’ll point out that the band does have a fiddler.
I love their song “Love with a Glove,” which is available for streaming on Spotify, but here’s a live snippet from their Instagram page:
There’s Ice Climber, a genre-fluid “shape-shifting, improv loving, Acid Punk Collective,” to quote one of the band’s own descriptions. I’m excited to see where this band takes things.
Last but not least is Beneath Green, an experienced 7-piece band that lists among their influences Pink Floyd, Chicago, Billy Joel, Electric Light Orchestra, Steely Dan and Minneapolis’ rich musical traditions. The band is known for breathing fresh air into classic rock. EDIT: I just wanted to make the point that there isn’t a modern psychedelic band in the world that hasn’t been influenced in some way by Pink Floyd.
But back to Dream of the Wild and my conversation with McKinney, who I also got to see play at 331 Club last week.
They are definitely a jam band, that dirty term that McKinney embraces and defends.
McKinney is a familiar face on the Minneapolis music scene, and many of you may know him from First Avenue venues, where he has worked for years.
Dream of the Wild has been around for a decade, but its core currently is as a four-piece (sometimes they are accompanied on keys by Robert Hilstrom). There’s guitarist Matt Siddons, bassist Brett McNamara and recent addition Eric Gebeke on drums. Mikey Kleis, now wielding a microphone for Socktopus, held down the beats most recently (McKinney spoke highly of Kleis as a friend and musician).
Initially, the band started out as a three-piece, with McKinney, an upright bassist and DJ Kool Akiem of the Micranots and who also worked with the late, legendary MF DOOM during DOOM’s stint on the Minneapolis-based Rhymesayers label.
“We would do hip-hop beats with us playing jazz over it,” McKinney said. “That was the vibe for a long time. Really, Dream of the Wild started as acoustic, coffee-shop indie music. It’s taken a lot of turns and gets more ridiculous every day.”
McKinney noted the similarities between the cultures of jam and hip-hop “where it’s an all encompassing art form,” he said. “You have visual artists. You have performance artists. You have people who come nowhere near music that are still beloved by this scene. It’s everybody from sound guys to drug dealers, whatever. It’s this whole community that makes this thing.”
McKinney hits it on the head, and he brings a lot of experience to the jams.
The band is known for taking songs, including covers such as “Dark Star” and “Cortez the Killer,” deep.
Here’s a 10-minute “Cortez” from 7th Street Entry’s 2024 JAMuary residency for you to check out:
I’m going to unpack more of my 90-minute conversation with McKinney in coming weeks, but Dream of the Wild is one of the local, up-and-coming psychedelic bands — along with Shrimp Olympics and Confucisaurus (check them out at the Psychedelic Sunday finale May 4 and also read my review of their latest EP here) — that I am most excited about seeing and hearing more from this year.
+++
So, what else is going, ya know, before we hit Sunday?
WEDNESDAY
I’m curious about the Icehouse gig Wednesday featuring Martin Dosh, the Minneapolis multi-instrumentalist/percussionist who toured with Andrew Bird for years and opened for Thievery Corp last year at First Ave. He’s on a bill with Baths and Fashion Club, two projects I don’t know much about. The music starts at 8 p.m.
Here’s an excerpt from the show description for Baths: “The most impressive Baths album of (Will) Wiesenfeld's career, Gut spans a breathtaking spectrum of lacerating hopelessness to lustful joy, inspired by the more unforgiving oeuvre of post-punk and noise music, and any music that works its magic through blunt force rather than careful introspection.”
Fashion Club is a Los Angeles-based project fronted by Pascal Stevenson. According to the project’s bandcamp page, the “album was shaped by Stevenson’s gender transition and sobriety journey and parses her fluid emotions surrounding these events and other personal trials and tribulations. …Musically, A Love You Cannot Shake (the project’s most recent LP) is an unshackling of expectations, as Stevenson’s previous stint as bassist in the L.A. post-punk outfit Moaning and her first record as Fashion Club, 2022’s Scrutiny, didn’t necessarily reflect the full range of her taste, which includes ambient, pop, classical and dance music, or embody her sensitive tenderness and femininity.”
I might have to check it all out, drawn to the room mainly by Dosh, who blew me away both at First Ave and during a collaboration he did with percussionist Billy Martin a number of years back at Icehouse. Martin (of Medeski, Martin and Wood) had been exhibiting some of his art work at the posh Eat Street live music/dining establishment.
TWINEsdays at Bunkers is a thing now. PHOTO BY JAVIER SERNA/@jaminthestream
Of course, I won’t be able to stay away from Bunkers for TWINE’s weekly dose of improvisational rock. The jams, which keep building momentum each week, have been going until about 1 a.m.
THURSDAY
Up Duluth way, LazyLightning420, the Grateful Dead cover band featuring mandolinist Erik Berry of Trampled by Turtles, Marc Gartman and Teague Alexy will be playing a free show from 6 to 9 p.m. on Bent Paddle’s Cosmic Stage.
FRIDAY
It’s a hard call.
Alex Rossi has his monthly Bunkers gig in North Loop.
Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan, makes an increasingly rare appearance in his birth state at Mayo Clinic Health System Event Center in Mankato.
LA LOM, aka The Los Angeles League of Musicians, a psychedelic and instrumental band, hits Fine Line at 8 p.m. There’s a low ticket alert for this show, btw.
Also, down the river and over the border, Duluth’s Saltydog hits the homey Popcorn Tavern in La Crosse.
Saltydog wrapped up its month-long residency on Thursdays at The Zen Arcade/Mission Room last week. PHOTO BY JAVIER SERNA/@jaminthestream
SATURDAY
Along the themes of shows outside the Twin Cities, Cory Wong is playing the Cotter Schools Jazz Festival in Rochester. The Saturday ticket will put you back $125, but I have no doubt that Wong’s high-powered band which recently lit up audiences in Europe is worth every penny. Plus you’re supporting youth jazz in this state (high school and middle school jazz bands will be performing free to the public all day from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Head here if you’re interested).
At the Cedar Cultural Center, Canadian instrumental project Flore Laurentienne performs along with Duluth percussionist, composer and producer Zack Baltich. Honestly, this could be the sleeper show of the week, as the project’s antagonist Mathieu David Gagnon is known to use synths to transverse ambient, experimental and progressive rock.
SUNDAY
The Ryan Picone Quartet plays the Zen Arcade/Mission Room stage Sunday at 6 p.m. The band performs Picone’s original music that was influenced by late Belgian jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. It features Ian Stenlund (The Mississippi Hot Club), Tessa Nichols Meade (Cold City Heat) and Matt Blake (The Gentlemen’s Anti-Temperance League).
Cory Wong is also playing a free show at the Cotter Schools Jazz Festival in Rochester Sunday. You can find the password and link to get free reserved tickets at my Minnesota Live Music Calendar, which is is updated weekly.