by John Wenz

When we used to come to Lincoln to visit my brother, I anticipated fanfare galore for Mercy Rule. Instead, I couldn't even find Providence at Homer's by 2000. And at the time, my other options were Napster and Audio Galaxy. Both were a no-go to find Mercy Rule. 

It wasn't until early into my freshman year of college (2002) before I snagged a copy of Flat Black Chronicles at what was then Zero Street. And I got bowled over by songs like "KSUK." Here was a more aggressive take on the same subject as songs like "Radio Song" by R.E.M. or "Left of the Dial" by the Replacements. The radio sucked. For the first time, I was also getting a taste of radio not sucking — 90.3 KRNU became a fixture in my car and in my dorm room. The big single then would have been "Mr. You're on Fire Mister" by Liars. I didn't make the connection that the two bands shared the same drummer, Ron Albertson. 

But what really got me was the strong presense of Heidi Ore. I came from a town of a small, unanimously male (band-wise) teen punk scene — bands whose names would barely register with anyone who wasn't among the 20 or so regulars at shows in Cody Park or at Job's Place. So here was something that sounded fantastic, was local and had a strong female presence — something I also hadn't seen to that point.

But as I'd find out by that time, Mercy Rule was already over. It seemed to me that the band had disappeared into the woodwork — until I saw a publicity photo of Mercy Rule back in their heyday, I never realized that the guitarist, Jon Taylor, was the same guy I had seen play with Drive By Honky. And I didn't know the band's story — something that grew with my appreciation of Mercy Rule. 

"Out here in Nebraska, there are no A&R people to play for," Heidi Ore told the Chicago Tribune in 1995. "You start a band because you can. You find some friends of yours that like to play music the way you do. Then you figure out that you can take it on the road."

Mercy Rule was a band that, by all rights, should've been huge. In fact, Rolling Stone named them a band to watch for 1995, and they did what not a lot of Nebraska musicians had done to that point — they cut a music video. 

Tribune reporter Chris Dickinson remarked, "With its hard-rocking Midwestern wallop, the band as a unit pile drives with a dynamic and melodic finesse. But the eye in the center of Mercy Rule's storm is undeniably Heidi Ore and her belting, clarion call of a voice."

There were times when Ore — with her closely cropped hair and androgynous dress — wouldn't get noticed as a woman til she took the stage.

"We would play, and [the audience] would say 'Oh my God! That's a girl!'" Ore said in a 2003 Daily Nebraskan interview. In the same interview, she reflected that in the early '90s in Lincoln, she might be the only female band member on the bill, "and that was kind of depressing."

After Providence, the band recruited Bob Mould producer Lou Gionardo and signed to MCA records. But before the release of the subsequent album — Flat Black Chronicles — they were dropped by their label, leaving a completed album but no way to get it out. They also had the rights still tied up with MCA, who offered them a $6,000 buy out, relatively cheap. But that still left them without a label, until they turned back to Lincoln's own Caulfield Records, which released the album. 

But still, the time around Chronicles was an end of the road for the band. Ore and guitarist Jon Taylor, married since 1986, had their first child in 1996, and the road was unforgiving to the schedule of new parents.

"We didn't want to make Mercy Rule just a hobby," Ore said in a separate 2004 interview with the Daily Nebraskan. "But we were busy learning how to be parents."

By 2000, the time when I was first discovering the band, they were broken up. Albertson went on to The Liars and n0 things, while Taylor and Ore raised their family and occassionally lent a hand to Floating Opera. 

After a couple one-off Mercy Rule gigs, Taylor and Ore came back around 2006, forming Domestica with drummer Boz Hicks of Her Flyaway Manner. But in 2010, Mercy Rule had a full fledged reunion, with Albertson back on board — but as of February of 2011, he had moved back to New York City, giving his bandmates little notice. A terse posting Feb. 5 on the group's Facebook page reads, "Ron moved back to NYC. Domestica restructuring underway."

And as quickly as they came back, one of Lincoln's mightiest bands was gone again. 

I've made these Echoes columns in March all about women in Nebraska music. But sometimes, that's unusually reductive. As if the mere presence of a female singer is the make it or break it. But I've always seen Ore as somebody that was truly a role model in music — somebody schooling the boys at their own punk rock game. Somebody who not only took the mic, but owned it. An instantly recognizable voice — gruff and tough, with its own moments of tenderness — that should've spawned dozens or hundreds of bands nationwide. But at least they still inspire a fierce local loyalty — and we have Domestica to carry it on, with what Taylor described in interviews as a more refined Mercy Rule. 

"It's fun to be into this thing that you and your people create out of thin air," he told local Tim McMahan when Domestica first formed. "You get to decide how much of a priority that obsession gets to be. I think about music and the band all the time, but it's not what my life is centered on, not as much as it was with Mercy Rule. That band got to a level where we devoted every brain cell to it. This band is not the center of our existence, but it is something that is fun enough to merit one practice a week."

John Wenz is the listings editor for Hear Nebraska who writes the Echoes column bi-weekly. He has considered busting grapes at fruit fights before, but found cantaloupes to be much better projectiles. Contact him at johnwenz@hearnebraska.org.