THE MIDWEST MONSTER!!!Musician, tradesman, connoisseur of fine food, and wine, impresario, and all-around wayward deviant. Dave Wolfe was born in Philadelphia, PA, a week after the death of Coltrane, sometime during the declining years of the last century. His time in the city of Soul was brief, his wanderings began early, finding him quietly spending his preadolescence developing his super powers in the snow blasted prairie lands of Minnesota before migrating west and putting down tentative roots in the hot cracked sidewalks of Stockton, CA. From the vantage point of years later, Wolfe recalls the site of his teen, live it up while you still can, days in the Delta River town as "the armpit of the California. The per capita crime rate in Stockton was higher than New York City’s at the time, and it was all we could do to brake out of the lethargy" Lamenting his school days Wolfe says. "I had a hard time in high school, but I think most of the people I know did. The ones that are hungering for the good old days never had a chance to break out of that ’best days of our lives’ mold. We were all targets. The whole Punk thing did not help. I stood out like, well.. like a punk in the valley with the mohawk, boots, and what have you. It was all very new for the ’grape belt’. I got out of town as fast as I could. I went to San Francisco and fell right in. Punk clubs, fake ID’s, never sleeping. I could not keep that up for very long. I knew from there I had to move back to the Midwest." Having visited Minneapolis the years before and liking it, at age 17 Wolfe moved there. "In Stockton, I was just a punk rocker, but in Minneapolis I was a punk-rocker-from-California. I got a little more respect, and the gals liked the new guy, at least until they found out I was a Midwest boy from the start."Finding lutefisk and spending half the year entombed in ice somehow to his taste, Wolfe founded Sci-Fi Western, an "industrial-country band" The band shared stages with some of the bigger local bands including Soul Asylum, Husker Du, Babes in Toyland, The Cows and many more. They opened for several national acts, Black Flag, Stray Cats, and Henry Rollins among others. They never released an LP, but Sci-Fi Western recorded scads of tracks which may see the light of day eventually, "who know" Wolfe yells. As Sci-Fi played themselves out, Dave was also booking the Crossroads, a down at the heels South Minneapolis bar with a open mike night once a week. It was there he met his future partner in crime, Alan Subola, a lately transplanted cheese-head with his own band, the Mood Swings, who despite his fearsome guitar chops and great original material was still playing a highly varied and extremely forgiving open mike night on a cold Wednesday in South Minneapolis. Seeing that two greasy heads were better than one, Wolfe and Subola formed the Vibro Champs, a rockabilly band with a science fiction bent"The Vibros took off so fast our other bands sort of fell to the wayside" Wolfe says. The Vibro Champs dominated the roots scene in the Twin Cities for over a decade before going on hiatus after drummer Gary Weiss decamped to West Virginia in 2004, and leaving for a month stint on Link Wray’s last US tour in 2005.Dave had been booking Lees Liquor Lounge in Minneapolis for a while, and with the Vibro Champs faltering, he threw himself into work, concentrating on promotions and looking around for new projects. He had been playing and building upright basses on the side, and mastered it well before anyone should. Needing a new project Dave founded the co-ed cow-punk band called Reverse Cowgirl (with Subola on guitar). Also playing with Lazy Ike and the Daredevils and jobbed around until finally giving up on the ghost of the Minneapolis scene and turning the Econoline south on I-35, bound for glory and Austin, Texas.In Austin, Dave remains focused on making a cool, creative and typically weird Wolfean existence in South Texas, maybe for good, maybe just for evil. Only time will tell.
-Emmet KeefeCITY PAGES: MUSIC: VOL 25: .1244. PUBLISHED 10/6/04 -by Molly Priesmeyer
Don’t go, cat, don’t go! Soon- to- be- out- of- towner,
Rockabilly kingpin Dave Wolfe, shuffles off to Texas.Over the next few days, Dave Wolfe will be packing up his Kingdom of Kitsch. The Skull paperweights, Tattoo-emblazoned silver bells, and Elvis bust will have to live in dark boxes before being introduced to their new home in Austin, Texas. His collection of Jesus candles and praying wax hands with wicks poking out of their fingertips will have to find ecumenical harmony in a box with plastic Buddhas.Despite Wolfe’s impending move down South, the Vibro Champs singer-guitarist’s south Minneapolis home is surprisingly litter-free. Vases of carnations and orange roses are placed Martha Stewart-like throughout a room filled with a zebra-striped rug, a faux red-velvet couch, and perfectly propped tasseled pillows that read, "Stewed, Screwed, and Tattooed." He slides open the dining room door and reveals a pile of towering boxes and two-headed taxidermy projects, creations of his ex-girlfriend. "I sort of hid it all," he says.Wolfe splits his time between playing with the Vibro Champs, playing upright bass in honky-tonk bands Lazy Ike and Reverse Cowgirl, working on his new label, Sideshow Records, and until recently booking Lee’s Liquor Lounge. He’s been a fixture on the local music scene since moving here from California in 1986. "I was just a punk rocker," he says. "But here I was a punk rocker from California. So I got a little more respect."Twenty years later, still sprouting sideburns and a head of thick, oil-black hair, Wolfe still looks every bit the rock ’n’ roll dude. After the Champs released their first full-length in 1993, he and his bandmates started packing houses with swing dancers, surf fans, gearheads, hardcore hillbilly-rock lovers, swamp stompers, and anyone looking for a good ol’ jamboree. Suddenly, they were all over the place, from Radio K to Mark Rosen’s Sports Sunday to A Prairie Home Companion. But after 15 years of working full-time to build the local rockabilly scene through tireless promotion, performing, and booking, Wolfe is off to set up shop in Texas. "I’m not going to make it big in my chosen field of music here," he says. "I will be doing this till the day I die. And I just feel so alone here."On a recent trip to Austin, he attended an outdoor screening of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It played next to the house featured in the 1974 movie, and Wolfe got his picture taken with Gunner Hansen, whose portrayal of Leatherface was one of the film’s five or six finest performances. He also played a game of "chicken shit bingo," where contestants win the pot if a chicken defecates on their number. "There’s so much to do there," he says.And it’s definitely a music town, Wolfe adds. He’s moving to the City of Bats and High Humidity in hopes of being part of a larger scene and never again having to sleep in a Ford Econoline the next time he tours. "I went down there, and everyone was asking me to play with them," he says. He’s nailing down a number of plans he can’t discuss quite yet, but says he’ll be playing with The Black Irish, and working on his solo project. Local rockabilly fans won’t have to cry in their beers just yet: Wolfe promises to keep the Vibro Champs going and, through his Caravan Booking, he’ll still put bands on Twin Cities stages. "There’s no way I’m going to leave this town high and dry," he says. "I’m going to try to come back at least every two months." He’ll still be just a rockabilly guy, but by then he’ll be a rockabilly guy from Texas.
CLICK ON ANY IMAGECHECK OUT MY TOP 24 FOR MY OTHER PROJECTS, FRIENDS, AND JUST ODD STUFF...Rosie Flores and Me at the Rockbilly Mag Showcase SXSW 2007. I Love Her. We are old Friends from Way Back. Check out (RosieFlores.Com)
Winter NAMM 2007 with the trio.
This was my band for the new Dave Wolfe Trio at NAMM 2007. Clem Burke on Drums (Blondie, The Romantics, Pete Townshend, Bob Dylan, Eurythmics, Iggy Pop, Nancy Sinatra, Joan Jett and The Ramones) and Danny B. Harvey on Guitar (The Head Cat, Lonesome Spurs, Swing Cats, Honeydrippers, 13 Cats, Levi Dexter, The Rockats, and more)Green Bay 2007. WHAT A BLAST!
