To Everything There is a Season...

In June of 1985, three men armed with a snare drum, a baritone horn, and a pocket full of play money stood on Nicollet Mall and played a half dozen “songs”. Bad Jazz, aka Mike Sommers, Kevin Kling and Loren “Dr. Buzz” Niemi were both returning to their not so long-ago roots as street corner performers promoting In the Heart of the Beast Puppet & Mask Theatre’s “Circle of Water Circus” tour and claiming their future as one on Minneapolis’ iconic performance art trios.

Good God, there is a lot to unpack in that sentence but I’m going to skip the historical dissection (at least for the moment) and explore something equally important. In that performance, the central iconography of Bad Jazz was set. Catfish, steamboats, bar-b-que, and beer was interspersed with stories and Michael’s obsession with language as an incarnation of some half-remembered street corner preacher. Every one of these elements would appear in some form in every performance for the next 25 years.

As had been the case on the Circus tour, at some point a police cruiser rolled up to inquire what was what. Assured via radio dispatch that this was, in fact, a sanctioned performance for Mpls/St Paul magazine’s Summer Pleasures series, they scratched their heads and went on their way.

That 1983 “Circle of Water Circus” tour was the seed for Bad Jazz. It was circumstantial and necessary as it became clear that as HOBT went into the South, increased promotion of the show was called for. Who knew us? How were we any different than any other traveling revival tent or second-rate carnival? With Mike and Kevin providing the rudiments of a beat and melody, I would improvise lyrics and hand out flyers advertising the show. Three men in white shirts and battered hats, standing in summer humidity, inviting the folks headng out of the local Win-Dixie to come see the “complete history of the Mississippi River” at the park by the levy. Aside from hairy eyeballs from the local police, and the look of bewilderment on the face of locals fleeing to their cars, it was first and foremost, a lot of fun!!

Then in 1984, we began to talk about doing a little more. We had a lot of ideas and a little time to rehearse. The principle then, as it was on tour and would be for entirety of our lives on stage, was to make it look like we didn’t rehearse at all. We wanted to suggest that we were making it up as we went along. And the truth be told, sometimes, we were but underneath the accidents and improvisation, we plotted out every performance - every theme, every placement of music, story and prop.

Michael got us invited to perform at First Avenue/7th Street Entry's "Ear Attack Festival". It was our first public performance proceeded by nervous pacing as we argued in the graffiti walled, smoke filled green room, not about what we would perform as we had only prepared three “songs” but the order we should do it in. Scheduled between two "thrash and crash" bands, the men in white shirts, bowties and funny glasses held their own, performing what would become classic Bad Jazz staples - "Tours of Memphis", "Stinkbait" and "Big Daddy Kingfish" - with a punk audience that didn’t quite know what they were seeing. The performance is taped and the tape is submitted to the Minnesota State Arts Board for a "special projects grant".  To everyone's amazement it was funded.

With a tiny pittance of cash in hand, we were on our way to making Bad Jazz more than a “one-off”. The Nicollet Mall performance was bracketed by two shows at the Coffeehouse Extempore, the stalwart home of folk culture on the West Bank. In May of 1985, BAD JAZZ appeared on the 12x8' Coffeehouse stage with a performance which included the "Ear Attack" material as well as "Steeeve" (our first attempt at a tap dance routine, always to some variation of “Shaft” with lyrics specific to the performance) and the classic trio rap -"Peanuts, Peanuts, God Damn It".

In October, we returned to the Coffeehouse Extempore for "More BAD JAZZ" presenting first versions of Kevin’s "The Innocent Man" and the "Love-O-Meter Sermon" in which Michael “baptized” a member of the audience with an entire bottle of Old Shave.

How many bits have I named in this recounting? Let me put them in an order that audiences would come to expect and later to demand as the familiar central spine of most Bad Jazz shows with added stories, music and thematic material including the Darin (Everyman) puppet interspersed. A typical Bad Jazz performance included:

Tours of Memphis

Innocent Man / Don’t Go Dagwood

Stinkbait / Big Daddy Kingfish

Peanuts

Tap Dance

I Got Eyes That See…

Sermon

Am I Born to Die?

Outro / Crawfish Party

Why this? Why now? Why look back 40 years after the fact?

I meet people every few months who say, “Don’t I know you? Didn’t you perform with Kevin Kling and that other guy back in the day?” Bad Jazz… “Yes, I remember seeing them/you a long time ago…”

As I said, 1985 was the year that Bad Jazz became “real”, offering “a dollar’s worth of sweat for a buck.” Between 1986 and 1994 (with John Killacky’s blessing) we did 8 performances at or for the Walker Art Center including two years of “Music and Movies in the (Loring) Park”, the “Out There” series and my personal favorite, the performance in the display case for the Marcel Broodthaer's exhibit. We did two projects for KTCA, performances at PS.122 (NYC) and the Atlanta Arts Festival, at least two Jungle Theater shows, a retrospective at the U of M’s Weisman Art Museum in 1999, a show at the Fitzgerald Theater for MPR that they did not broadcast and our final “Tickled Pink” outing in 2008 at the Open Eye Theatre. Three men playing to the best of our ability and having some fun along the way.

On this Summer Solstice I look back at that portion of my life with pride and a sorrow that it is done and gone. It was fun. It was a joy to play with “Brother Michael” and “Spirit Kevin”.  To manifest our love of the Mississippi, of down and out street culture, of absurd humor and appreciation of the ordinary. Alternating between manic energy and big ideas inside little moments. Michael and Kevin are tap-dancing, Dr. Buzz comes up with a large wooden board with an image of two catfish. His head pokes out of the board, Michael leans down with Kevin on his back, and Kevin’s feet are tapping on each side of Dr. Buzz’s head. A cardboard steamboat rolls across a stage, Dr. Buzz stands with an umbrella and when he opens it, snow falls on the boat. Absurd, funny, beautiful.

Like the change of seasons, Bad Jazz arrived, flourished, and left again. I am sharing this particular memory of long ago both as an acknowledgement of that life and an invitation to whoever is reading this to consider one of the great lessons of that life: to not be afraid to try… and succeed or even more to stop. Our ending was not a matter of failing but of the increased difficulty of trying to manage schedules and interests. We did not want to become a “greatest hits” band. So, we thanked each other for our time and though we talked now and then about another “last” performance, a Bad Jazz Funeral, it hasn’t happened. We all had other projects that were calling us.

Today, June 20, 2025 at 9:42 PM Central time, summer arrives. In a year of uncertainty and fear, I wish you well. If the memory of another, better, time is helpful, savor it. If there is a lesson to be drawn from individual and collective history, acknowledge it. Humor is a great buoy in the rough waters of crisis. Boy Howdy, that sentence bordered on cliché, but it and the ones that follow do not obviate the truth of it. May your summer be rife with laughter. May the small and ordinary give you joy.

Recently a politician said, “we are all going to die.” and while that is true, to my mind it missed the mark. Knowing that we are all headed to the grave, I stand with Kurt Vonnegut, who said, “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”