photos by Andrew Dickinson | words by Jacob Zlomke

Is it possible for a local band to achieve a cult following?

There’s an intimate and familiar fanbase that prerequisites a cult status, and by nature, every band without a geographically widespread fandom but some kind of hometown notoriety has already found theirs. Maybe every band that draws friends and familiar faces to places like O’Leaver’s and Duffy’s Tavern, then, has a cult status.

But in the world of cult art, everyone maintaining a dedicated following is as good as no one maintaining it.

These questions might come to mind watching a Kill County performance, as on last Friday night at the Zoo Bar in Lincoln with Speedsweat and The Bottle Tops, when a crowd of people bridging all demographic gaps sing along word-for-word to almost all of the band’s dusty folk tunes and demanded two encores from the group that, thanks to geographic restrictions, aren’t together in Lincoln often.

And the crowd anticipates applause lines, like during “The Train, the Drink, and the Dawn” when Ringo’s dirt-pounded voice pleads: “Lincoln, Nebraska, I could use a friend right now.”

In a song about a worn-down, beat-up vagabond, as so many Kill County songs are, who just happens to end up in Lincoln, it’s hardly a phrase for cheer. But the crowd at the Zoo Bar has been waiting a long time for Kill County to return and even in their stripped-down, percussion-less form, it’s the band, the delivery, the song, that very line, perhaps, they came to see.

It might be too much to call a Kill County performance emotionally transcendent, but few storytelling folk acts can drown an audience in their characters’ hard luck like Kill County, altogether removing the storyteller from the story, or the individual audience member from the crowded bar room into a space more ethereal. At its best, it’s less of a performance and more adept storytelling, sucking the listener in like so many pages of dense and exciting prose.

That Kill County has made it into such an experience of camaraderie and community, like surely the rabid followers of cult artists feel among one another, is all for the better.

See a live one-song video of their performance at 1200 Club, part of the NET Television, Omaha Performing Arts and Hear Nebraska “Live at the 1200 Club” series, here and check out photos from Friday night’s performance below.

Andrew Dickinson is a Hear Nebraska contributor and Jacob Zlomke is Hear Nebraska’s staff writer. Reach them at jacobz@hearnebraska.org.