Steel Bridge Songfest Night One–Of Laundered Beer and Cougar Dodging

Fig.1: To the Land of Make Believe, Trolley! Also, DJ, are you trying to throw the Shocker in this photo? Wtf. Weak. (photo by Dixie Jacobs)

Summer may officially begin on June 21, but unofficially, emotionally, everyone marks the start of the warmest and greatest season on the momentous weekend of their choosing. For schoolkids, it’s usually connected to 3 PM on the last day of class; for grillmasters, it’s Memorial Day Weekend. For the members of IfIHadAHiFi and White Wrench Conservatory, summer begins on the second weekend of June with Sturgeon Bay’s Steel Bridge Songfest.

The fest was started in 2005 by our pal and Sturgeon Bay resident Pat mAcDonald, former member of that band Timbuk3—you know, the duo that bestowed upon us the eternal anthem “The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades.” You can read all about the purpose and history of the Songfest at their FAQ, where you can read paragraphs of such historical significance as the following:

The Steel Bridge Songfest is an annual volunteer community historic outreach event produced by Citizens for Our Bridge and is now the largest Americana songwriter showcase in the Midwest. The festival mixes major speakers in Historic Preservation with songwriters of national and regional prominence who display a strong affinity for social responsibility and historic preservation.

The annual three-day celebration is designed to promote community activism, increase community economic impact and promote historic preservation through the use of artistic expression and experience to an audience not normally drawn to such a dry subject as Historic Preservation. The purpose of the SB Songfest is to also raise local, state and national awareness of the Michigan Street Bridge through original songs written, inspired by the bridge and volunteer public performances. The Songfest and CD compilations aim to promote, build and maintain the first of its kind public/private, long-term historic preservation “Michigan Street Bridge Fund”, which is held by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington DC . The fund is designated to be used in the future, to promote and protect the historic Michigan Street Bridge as a one-of-a-kind historic attraction within the State of Wisconsin. The proceeds through outreach and sales, will be used to promote the preservation of the bridge and supply the GAP financing needed for preservation efforts, and address some of the ongoing PREVENTATIVE yearly maintenance costs, which are not currently covered by Federal or State financing and which the lack of, got it into the disrepair today.

This is all noble, just and good, and we’re all about the cause. But for our bands, Steel Bridge Weekend boils down in a lot of ways to “Let’s Invade Door County, Get Wasted And Freak Out the Squares” Weekend. And once again, we pulled it off with aplomb, along with our pals Year of the Scavenger, Quinn Scharber and the Failure to Turn Into the Spin, and The Maybenauts of Chicago, IL (to say nothing of our pal Rob from the Indiana band Waxeater, who just happened to be in Milwaukee for the week and tagged along). Join us now as we reminisce.

(NOTE: It should be pointed out that while the Steel Bridge Songfest is overall a wholesome, family-oriented event, especially during the daytime, the following journal of misadventures is chronicling the activities of a bunch of scumbag Milwaukee musicians, and thus, should not be considered endemic to the Steel Bridge Songfest as a whole. Now, with that out of the way, I have hopefully avoided pissing Pat off with this article and will hopefully still be playing next year…)

DAY 1: OF LAUNDERED BEER AND COUGAR DODGING

In past years, we had booked a show in our old party ground of Manitowoc on the Friday of Steel Bridge weekend, in an attempt to make some gas money before playing the all-volunteer event in the Sturge’. However, the last few years had produced unmemorable shows (but did produce a memorable trip to Manitowoc strip club Stars Cabaret, where one Quinn Scharber won a $2 raffle for a free lap dance, only to return from it with a confused look on his face, saying “now, I’ve never seen track marks, but I’m pretty sure those were track marks”), so we decided to load up the van and head all the way to Sturgeon Bay on Friday night to hang and drink with our pals who were already in town. See, the Songfest actually begins with a week-long writer’s workshop leading up to the actual concerts and shows, during which groups of musicians write and record a veritable crap-pile of songs built around various bridge-oriented themes and puns (One of the best from last year was ex-Go-Go Jane Wiedlin’s “Toss You off the Bridge”). Dixie and our pals in Madison band Whore du Jour (who also have been known to serve as Jane’s backup band when she plays in Madison, where she now lives during half the year) had been there all week, so we were looking forward to saying hi and getting our debauch on.

Fig.2: Tracks get laid during the week-long workshop (albeit with two bass strings too many) (photo by Dixie Jacobs)

After some initial hugs all around, we were informed that the room was in the middle of listening to Jane’s recordings from the weekend (many of which included Dixie on vocals—I’m past being starstruck with the whole “famous people go to Steel Bridge” thing, but it still sort of blows my mind that one of my good friends records with the Singing Telegram Girl from the movie Clue).

Fig.3: Let’s see the in-the-works Clue remake pull off a scene this awesome. IT WON’T HAPPEN, YOU IDIOT HOLLYWOOD SUITS.

One of the songs was written for Jane’s best friend, Edith Speed, who had recently passed away, and the recording produced in this little beach cabin at the Beach Harbor Hotel sounded pretty darn killer. Here’s a clip of the song being performed the next day at the outdoor portion of the Songfest.

Fig.4: “Speed of E” by Jane Wiedlin

Pretty cool, eh? That’s the primary attraction of the Songfest—music written during the week and then premiered at the Fest in front of Sturgeon Bay’s charmed residency.

So after we scoped the new jamz in the cabin, the crew piled into a pick-em-up truck and a band van and made our way to the Red Room, 66 S. 3rd Ave, to see our fearless leader Pat mAcDonald play a set of dirty, nasty swamp blues with his partner Melaniejane. Pat typically plays a block of songs with a cigar-box guitar, a primitive type of guitar built from a cigar box and two rods that operate as the neck. And whether he’s on cigar-box or standard guitar, it gets run through some gritty distortion while he stomps his boot on a wooden plank with a microphone and effects next to it to keep time. I’m crap with his song titles, but the song with the chorus “it’s drinkin’ or drivin’, I gotta give up one/would you like to buy a car?” always cracks me up. For his second set, he upped the ante by having his pal, Steel Bridge performer Eric McFadden, join him as The Legendary Sons of Crack Daniels. Good stuff all around.

Fig.5: The Legendary Sons of Crack Daniels

So let’s pause for a minute to discuss our briefly aforementioned pal Rob. Hailing from the booming metropolis of Bloomington, IN, Rob’s not as acclimated to small-town Wisconsin as a former resident of Hilbert (pop. 1000) would be (at one point on the trip up, he remarked, “man, could you imagine growing up in a town this small?” Both Yale and I answered “yes”). And apparently the middle-aged cougar ladies of Sturgeon Bay weren’t used to a tattooed, pretty southern gentleman like our boy Rob, as evidenced by all the fortysomethings getting’ handsy with him during the Red Room show. But to hear Rob tell the tale, it was nothing compared to the lady who apparently gave HiFi bassist The Fucking Wizard a solid grab on his inner thigh. The dudes seemed less than thrilled, which confused me since Handsy Cougar Dodging is a staple of Northeast Wisconsin life.

Fig.6: l-r. Rob and The Wizard. Who wouldn’t wanna get grippy with this man flesh?

After the show, the question of how we were getting back to Beach Harbor became a pressing matter, as no one we had arrived downtown with was in much shape to drive back. After a confusing couple minutes where Dixie called us a cab, only to lead us down to the Holiday Motel, where some of our pals were staying, we found ourselves in a parking lot wondering when we were gonna be allowed to crash for the night. It was at this point where a member of our party was spotted saying to another member of our party (note: names omitted to protect the guilty), “which one of these rooms is Pete in? He has our beer! Is it this room? I bet it’s this room? Hey, there it is!” And with no confirmation that any of us could see as to the true identity of the room’s residents, said dude opened the window, climbed into the room, grabbed a crate of Point Amber, and brought it back outside, much to the giggling glee of the drunken crew. He then promptly vanished, leaving the crate of stolen beer (as far as we knew) on the sidewalk.

It was at this point when we began a conversation with some members of the Blueheels, who revealed that they were stone sober and willing to give us a ride back to the cabin in their van. Score! We piled into the van, but not before HiFi guitarist Yale Delay made the booze-soaked split-second decision to grab the stolen beer, which was now technically being stolen twice (even though we were all heading back to the same place). In our minds, it was sound strategy—if any authorities spotted us with the stolen beer and asked us if we stole it from the hotel, we could honestly say “no, we did not.” The original thief was nowhere near the beer (and thus absolved), and we had a loophole absolving us. IfIHadAHiFi: expert beer launderers.

We made it back to the cabin before anyone else and chilled out in the living room, careful to not be too loud and wake the sleeping Jane. Eventually, though, it behooved us to move the chilling to the outside by the lake, where those of us that didn’t quite pass out upon contact with the welcoming cabin floor enjoyed some chill conversation by the Sturgeon Bay lakeshore, as an anonymous silhouetted couple shamelessly made out with each other not 15 feet away. Ah, Steel Bridge. We’ve missed ye this long year.

Fig.7: The Sturge: Beautiful even when shot by camera phone.

NEXT: I <3 FEMALE ORGASM, AND QUINN HATES THE HIFI