Kurt Wolter: vocal, guitar

John Jackson: guitar, vocal

Keith Grogg: mandolin, banjo, vocal

Jim Stipe: bass

 

August 1991: John Jackson and I are at the historic Grogg family farmhouse in Indiana. He and his wife, Linda, have come back from a church work trip in Bolivia during which they became friends with a young Methodist seminarian, Peter Haskins. John and Peter had had the idea of starting up a folk group. They had no particular focus in mind; John had a strong retro interest in the Kingston Trio, but a more long-standing one in the more organic American folk tradition exemplified by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and their thousand forebears. John asked if I would like to be a part of it. Still smarting from my previous band's unrealized dreams, I mulled it over for about an eighth of a second and said yes. 

 

After several months of shuffling of band members, including drummer Jay Kanerva from the underground punk scene in Cincinnati (above, center), the Stations settled on John, Keith, Kurt Wolter as lead singer, and Chicago-based classically trained cellist Jim Stipe, who had done session work in LA on electric bass. 

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Each of us brought our own aims to the Stations. Mine was to take the pastoral quality of the brooding English countryside—and to a secondary degree the overcast Irish and Scottish Celtic influence—and apply it to the setting of the old American Midwest, particularly the farmland of Northern Indiana. I meant for that to be the guiding, shaping principle of all my contributions to the Stations, both compositionally and instrumentally.

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I wanted to conjure images of farm houses and town houses; wooden floors; the smell of old furniture and the feel of old radio knobs; iron tools by the fireplace; savory Sunday kitchens and dining room tables; long grass on open plains, old oak trees, bright stars against a black sky, multicolored clouds fanning out from a sun rising over grassy fields and expansive farmland; unpretentious civility; hymns, spirituals and the King James Version—all these along with the desire for, the imagining of, and the celebration of explicit and implicit relationships between people.

 

We believed that the crown of the Stations was that we are who we are, and no four other people could have the same innate relationship. We are the four of us first, a band of musicians second; and you can’t get to the second without going through the first. No one of the four is replaceable, and no other quartet, no matter how infinitely more talented, could produce the music of the Midnight Stations. 

 

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All photographs by Jim Stipe, (c) 2004, 2020. All rights reserved,

except elevator photograph by Calvin Moore from Keith's private collection. 

Text by Keith Grogg, (c) 2004, 2020. 

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Stations History

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2004 Recording Project Heading for Home 

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