Kurt Wolter and I became friendly acquaintances in the Summer of 1986, when we were both somewhat unlikely volunteers to be "adult" counselors at Bloomington, Illinois's Second Presbyterian Church junior camp, for 5th-6th graders. But it took us two more Summers at junior camp--the week always ending with vain promises to keep in touch during the year--to get it together. In the Summer of ’88, the die was cast. (I don't know what that means, but it sounds appropriately dramatic.) Our friendship and our musical partnership took off as soon as we were reunited for the annual planning stages of junior camp.

"High Ch'ing," my first complete composition, was a terrible song that I later realized lifted its memorable throbbing guitar line directly from Todd Rundgren’s "Black and White." For a long time I felt guilty about that, until I realized that every budding songwriter with a guitar has moved that open C chord up two frets and thought he or she was a musical genius. But honestly, doesn't the world need more tunes about the collapse of the Qing Dynasty?

One night after his shift tending bar at the Lucca in Bloomington, we were practicing at his place, and Kurt pulled out a stash of poetry, prose and lyrics, saying, "You're gonna love this." The first lyric he pulled out became "Own Days Rhyme," our first complete collaboration.

I usually went to his place to practice. It could be excruciating for both of us. I was always tight as a drum. I do mean always—I was among the worst communicators in the world until I was in my early 20s. Kurt had no musical training at all, and I had no idea how to communicate musically in anything but a formal context. He had the affliction a lot of amateur musicians have of playing "follow the leader" when we were trying to harmonize. He'd start off singing a melody, so I'd sing harmony. Immediately he would jump up to my harmony line, so I would pop down to the melody. Half a note later, here he would come to join me in the melody line. We could drive each other up the wall. But when we'd get it right and we knew we were getting it right, the feeling was transcendent. His voice is an extraordinary instrument, but he wasn't born with musical instinct, and so he has worked ten times harder than most other people I've played with.

Kurt knew a guy named Mike Hogan, a hard-working, talented guitarist on the tiny semi-pro circuit in Bloomington who got us our first gig. (I use the word “gig” despite the fact that Grogg & Wolter were—rightly—never paid anything.)

It was at the Electric Coffee, a “club” that entertained maybe 25-30 people at its peak, in a dark, wooden room in the Eddy Building, a remnant of a once-thriving, surprisingly urbane downtown Bloomington, about a block from the Lucca Grill.

We played two or three evenings over the course of a few weeks at the Electric Coffee, always expanding the number of originals in our set as we gained self-confidence. Peter, Mike & Sherry and Geoff Johnson are the only other acts I can remember who played in that room, and I don't know what's happened to any of the four of them. The "Mike" from PMS was Mr. Hogan, whose solo sets blew everybody else out of the room; he was like a grandfather and the rest of us were like a bunch of six year olds.

Bloomington is a pretty conservative town on the surface, but there has always been an underground counterculture. There were old-time Midwestern Democrats and the Lucca Grill was a slice of immigrant Americana. It was through the connections of the manager, Chuck, that we were given the chance to end the Summer with a gig playing our eclectic, acoustic folk-rock for the evening crowd. It may be that in the grand scheme of things this was to be the make-or-break opportunity for Grogg & Wolter.

We broke. The whole performance was a disaster. A personal nadir came when, in the middle of what was supposed to be an elegant, stirring solo take on Ian Anderson's “Nursie,” the elderly waitress came up—in the middle of my singing—and asked me if I wanted another beer. The performance may have been somewhat less than mesmerizing. 

The tombstone was our venerable finale, “John Barleycorn,” lifted straight off the old Traffic record, wherein Kurt's voice simply ceased to operate and he lost control of it several times. Somewhere along the line I had already broken the one guitar string for which I had no replacement. It didn't matter. No one cared. From the beginning, we were awful, and by the end, we were finished. I had to get back to Indiana University for my senior year in a few days. The Lucca Grill disaster effectively ended any ideas we might have had about building the musical relationship from our respective Bloomingtons.

But I still remember a feeling of intense excitement and pride, driving all over those strangely beckoning towns, Bloomington-Normal, at night-time, in the late Summer, after we had finished our performance season. I was putting up leftover Grogg & Wolter posters. John Jackson and I had printed up some fliers and we'd distributed them throughout Bloomington-Normal before our last Electric Coffee gig, and now, armed with a cache of poster-fliers and a handful of tacks, I hit every park, public and collegiate, that I could find. There was no upcoming performance to advertise, but I wanted to think that someone would see "Grogg & Wolter" and remember that name, and know that we had played for audiences of people we didn't know who had come to hear some real music.

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The longing I felt for musical redemption went unsatisfied, but I still remember that feeling as strongly as ever: there was magic in the air for me, a sense that I was finally connecting with something deep inside, a desire to express myself artistically which I had always been too ashamed to allow to come to the surface. And Kurt was a full partner in that pursuit.

Even after the Lucca disaster, I was still not yet ready to give up. I cherished the fliers we had left over as a prized possession. I couldn't stop listening to our one rehearsal tape, which we'd recorded in August in my tiny upstairs room at home.

Grogg & Wolter were slowed down even before we ever got out of the gate, and maybe that's a good thing: we always felt like we were just coming up on the horizon. I had no idea, as winter descended on 1988, that 1989 would be the most exciting year of my life.

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GW Part 2 - England 

GW Part 3 - End Game

GW - Main Page