TRAMPLED BY TURTLES
August 9 at 6:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Trampled by Turtles are from Duluth, Minnesota, where frontman Dave Simonett initially formed the group as a side project in 2003. At the time, Simonett had lost most of his music gear, thanks to a group of enterprising car thieves who’d ransacked his vehicle while he played a show with his previous band. Left with nothing more than an acoustic guitar, he began piecing together a new band, this time taking inspiration from bluegrass, folk, and other genres that didn’t rely on amplification. Simonett hadn’t played any bluegrass music before, and he filled his lineup with other newcomers to the genre, including fiddler Ryan Young who’d previously played drums in a speed metal act and bassist Tim Saxhaug. Along with mandolinist Erik Berry and banjo player Dave Carroll, the group began carving out a fast, frenetic sound that owed as much to rock and roll as bluegrass.
“There’s always been this sense in our band that if you put your heads down and focus on doing it the best that you can — playing the shows the best that you can, playing your instruments the best that you can,” Erik Berry told Rolling Stone, “then good things will come from that.” That good result has been found in their recent album “Alpenglow,” a record that paired Trampled by Turtles with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy as producer. The Wilco frontman took the band under his creative wing, setting them up in Wilco’s legendary studio and gear storage facility in Chicago, the Loft, to write and record what became “Alpenglow”. The rest as they say, is history.
