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 river, December 7-8.
The record release party proper will be a house
concert Friday, December 7 in Olivette 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 starts 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,
with the Heebie Jeebies and Dana Michael Anderson. 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., Heebie Jeebies at 11 p.m. with Dana following at midnight 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, released 2007) and Crumbling in the rain
(recorded 1995, released 2005).
Both Eleanor Roosevelt records Walker with his head down and Crumbling in the rain are available at the major digital download sites; as is Why It's Enormous Richard's Almanac, a reissue of the original E.R.'s debut 1990 tape.
Both Eleanor Roosevelt records Walker with his head down and Crumbling in the rain are available at the major digital download sites; as is Why It's Enormous Richard's Almanac, a reissue of the original E.R.'s debut 1990 tape.
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. The new Eleanor Roosevelt
record, Water Bread & Beer, 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.
Eleanor
Roosevelt blog: www.eleanor-roosevelt.blogspot.com. Or email brodog@hotmail.com.
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