[Editor's note: The Look Back offers a review of a Nebraska album from the past, along with interviews with its creators. See all installments of the series here.]
by Jacob Zlomke
In Gary Dean Davis’s Nebraska, children are brought up on Christian values, near to their extended family. They are raised by workers, punching the clock to feed the kids, not chasing dreams of their youth. In his Nebraska, there is value in these relationships, in the people they produce.
On the 1995 full-length record Speed Nebraska, Davis and his now defunct band Frontier Trust were concerned with illustrating that life.
“It could not have come from anywhere but Nebraska,” Davis says. “Frontier Trust was the combination of kids who grew up listening to their parents’ country records finally getting to be in charge of the record player and playing punk rock.”
It’s the experience of their Midwest, which means no high rises, no social commentary on the record. The characters on the tracks are not living the Bohemian life. They are going to work, they’re talking to God, because those are the things you do in Nebraska.
Listen: "Kicked to the Curb" by Frontier Trust
Davis and company never saw their home state as merely a jumping-off point. The state was the artistic destination.
“The record is all about living in Nebraska and the experience we were having,” says Davis, who now works as the principal at St. Thomas More Catholic School in Omaha. “I wanted it to be our manifesto on why Nebraska is important.”
Davis remembers well a sense of hurried escape, friends and artists anxious to leave for greener, more populated pastures.
Among examples, Conor Oberst comes to mind. His first few Bright Eyes records were written in Omaha, but his true breakout, I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning, paints a vivid New York City landscape, not a midwestern one.
So Davis and Frontier Trust made a Nebraska-proud (or as the band calls it on the album’s fourth track, “Willa Cather Proud”) record in 1995, years before Saddle Creek Records garnered Omaha cultural attention on a national scale. It was in some ways both as punk and as Nebraskan of an approach Frontier Trust could have taken.
It’s punk: fast-paced, short, aggressive songs whose emphasis is on live performance over recording. It’s also country: a record that relies on country music standbys like banjos, swing beats and a version of “Jackson” as the fifth track on the record. Together, it’s what Davis likes to call tractor punk.
Think Johnny Cash meets Minutemen. Merle Haggard meets Black Flag.
It worked.
Davis says all copies of the CD and vinyl sold out. The album lives on through a free digital download at The Band Broke Up’s website.
Mike Kronschnabel, or Kronch, who runs The Moose Lodge recording studio with his wife in Omaha, remembers Frontier Trust for their do-it-yourself approach, a band that made music for its own sake, rather than “fame, fortune or girls.”
Kronch hosted Trout Tunes, a weekly television show aired in Omaha, Lincoln and Wichita that featured videos of local bands at Nebraska venues like The Hurricane in Lincoln and Sharky’s in Omaha. While the show may be a relic of public access television, Trout Tunes lives on through a Facebook page and YouTube, where Kronch uploads archived footage every week.
“That DIY approach opened the eyes of a lot of other musicians in town,” Kronch says. “It had a very positive impact on the scene, especially their fans, many of whom ended up becoming musicians themselves.”
“We always tried to make recordings that were a snapshot of how we sounded at that particular moment,” Davis says. “That’s why we left all of the in-between-takes chatter in.”
Now Davis helps run the still-active label, Speed! Nebraska Records, featuring local names like Davis’s current band Wagon Blasters, Mezcal Brothers, Ideal Cleaners and Domestica. The label has also given new life to the records of defunct bands such as Mercy Rule and Pioneer Disaster, contemporaries of Frontier Trust.
Caulfield Records, the Lincoln label that released Speed Nebraska, now inactive, made their name on bands like Frontier Trust and Mercy Rule, a band that ditched the major label search in favor of local business partners.
“Bands like Frontier Trust and Mercy Rule showed that you could pursue your dreams without moving away,” Kronch says.
“The guys in Frontier Trust, and before that Pioneer Disaster, were part of what captured my attention and helped me realize what a great scene this town had,” he goes on. “That’s what inspired the idea of Trout Tunes.”
Heidi Ore, of Mercy Rule and now Domestica, is a featured vocalist on Speed Nebraska and formed a friendly relationship with the band. Davis says that before he worked with Ore, he wouldn’t be able to talk the day after a show.
“[She] advised me to drink as much water as I could and develop a serious Ricola habit. It worked,” Davis says.
He recalls receptive audiences all over the Midwest: Omaha, Lincoln, Columbia, Mo., Kansas City, St. Louis and Sioux City, Iowa, to name a few.
“And Buffalo, New York, of all places,” he says.
Maybe it’s not so surprising that Buffalo audiences took to Frontier Trust. Like the Midwest, Buffalo experiences a long, brutal winter that wraps its icy fingers around the region. Like Omaha, it’s a midsized city, and while New York certainly gets its fair share of attention, the bulk of that is for New York the city and not New York the state.
Davis remembers a show in Buffalo, playing for “a bunch of punk rock-starved kids.”
With Speed Nebraska, Frontier Trust set out to capture their Nebraska and unwittingly captured something much larger: a more universal frustration, evident in their music’s boiling punk rock edge, of living somewhere that felt ignored by the rest of the country.
LINER NOTES:
Gary Dean Davis — vocals and harmonica
Joe Kobjerowski — drums
Brian Swanson — bass
William Thornton — guitar, vocals
Mike Mogis — banjo and slide guitar
Heidi Ore — vocals
Recorded and mixed by A.J. and Mike Mogis
Recorded at Whoop Ass Studios in Lincoln, Nebraska
Released on Caulfield Records
“Out here in the heartland, we know what truth is about,” Davis sings on “Willa Cather Proud.” “We have no secret agenda, we don’t care about your clout / We don’t like people with closed minds / Give us an idea and we’ll decide / Don’t tell us what we’re thinking / Leave us alone and we’ll get by.”
“We loved where we were from and wanted to celebrate it much in the fashion of William Jennings Bryan and Willa Cather,” Davis says. “Our music was an outpouring of these ideals.”
In the same way that Cather’s My Antonia puts in print the physical and emotional struggles of forging a new life on the plains, Speed Nebraska deals in ways that feel uniquely prairie-bound.
On “Second Communion,” Davis sings, “Every night I sit and stare, but deep inside I know you’re there and that’s the only thing that keeps me sane / When I read about all your deeds, how you helped out the world needs, it makes it easy to see you’re divine.” He sings in campfire harmony over aluminum-sounding guitars.
“Clock In” works as a mad anthem to the working stiffs. “My granddad says it was different in his day, honest work always got honest pay,” but now we’re “clocking in all the time… with no chance to change my circumstance.”
Like Nebraska, the record feels sparsely populated. When Davis laments that his true love has chosen another, there is the sense that he knows "another" personally. Coupled with Ore’s vocal presence on the record, Speed Nebraska is tight-knit community of an album.
Picture someone listening to Speed Nebraska and pinpointing which lines are about which people. These are songs by and for people who know each other too well, for better or worse.
Jacob Zlomke is Hear Nebraska’s editorial intern. He would champion Speed Nebraska as a cultural artifact. Reach him at jacobz@hearnebraska.org.