Howling at the Mud: Geronimo! Goes Home to Rockford

Early in the morning on the first warm day of the year, hailstones pelted Rockford, Illinois. Ben Grigg knows because his mom texted him a photo of hailstones in her palm: big ones, like bright white marbles. They fell hard enough to break glass, to dent the roofs of cars.

The sky has cleared by the time Ben picks me up in the silver van that Geronimo! uses on tour. The passenger door creaks in agony whenever I open it more than a foot, and the band recently installed a wooden platform in the back—a gear shelf that doubles as emergency sleeping quarters. "Feel free to take a nap if you get tired," Ben jokes. Bright-eyed with thick glasses, he's the bassist for the trio—or rather, the keyboardist who plays bass tones on a pair of synths. We pick up Matt Schwerin (drums) and Kelly Johnson (guitar, lead vocals) from their respective Chicago apartments to visit the city that all three members of Geronimo! first called home. A former manufacturing hub that declined during the end of the 20th century, Rockford remains the second-most populated city in Illinois after Chicago. Its official motto is "Misery loves company," a self-effacing nod to a Forbes article that ranked it as one of America's most miserable cities. To those who don't read Forbes, Ben says, it comes across more as a warning than a joke. "[The motto] used to be 'A different kind of greatness,'" he tells me. "Not to be confused with actual greatness."

It makes sense as a birthplace for Geronimo!'s fitful garage rock. Though Chicago has stages enough to house plenty of loud, fuzzed-out bands, few put quite as much brawn into their music as these three. Those that do rarely cut the muscle with the sort of humor Geronimo! embraces. Their last release, a cassette encased in neon green plastic, was an EP they called The Metal David Byrne. Ben laughingly recalls a gig when an older biker type picked up the tape, looked directly at Ben, said, "I hate David Byrne," and crushed the plastic in his fist. The guy went on to become a regular audience member at Geronimo! shows.

Though it's been divided along class lines since the construction of the interstate split it in two, Rockford is starting to hint at a resurgence. Ben tells us that plans for an Amtrak commuter line to Chicago have just been approved. One of the city's tallest buildings is about to be renovated into a hotel. As we walk through downtown, we notice construction sites with signs advertising new luxury residences. It all paints a Rockford quite different from the one where Geronimo! got their start playing dive bars and DIY spaces, back when downtown was a place you weren't supposed to visit alone.

Ben and Kelly have been friends since high school, and it shows. I catch glimpses of their easy camaraderie throughout the trip; Kelly, tall, also in glasses, is soft-spoken and polite but quick to crack a joke. In person, he barely resembles the Kelly I'll see on stage in a few days, when Geronimo! opens for Speedy Ortiz at Chicago's Empty Bottle. Behind a guitar, he's wiry, always in motion, pecking out gravel and acid from his instrument, unhinged, unselfconscious, screaming. Geronimo! take me to Rockford's Symbol, a huge, red piece of abstract sculpture that juts over the river. Even now, they can't stop laughing at it. What is it? Why is it there? How did it come to be an emblem of the city? These are all mysteries, even to natives. With a wry blend of mockery and pride, Ben, Kelly, and Matt play around beneath the sculpture. They run around it, hug its huge legs, bat at a few of its low-hanging appendages. Eventually, they bow down and start to "worship" it. After coming together in 2008, Geronimo! got away from Rockford as fast and as hard as they could. Ben and Kelly were both frustrated with their musical collaborators at the time, and reached out to each other in the hopes of getting together something more serious. They looped in Matt, whom they'd met more recently at a show, to take up percussive duties. The three wrote a few songs together and started practicing regularly. Five months after their first show, they embarked on their first tour out west. They have a lot of tour stories. Once, they ended up crashing a birthday party in a basement littered with broken instruments after plans to play a house occupied entirely by circus performers fell through (the circus performers never showed up). Another time, they rescued a kitten from the side of the road with a week left of tour to go, soldiering on despite his constant mewling and uncontrollable diarrhea (the cat, Mowgli, still lives with Kelly). They are three mild-mannered dudes who pour everything into this raw, explosive music. Ben and Kelly even wear their dedication to the band on their skin; both have matching tattoos of Geronimo!'s first t-shirt design, an upside-down pig that Ben drew up on the fly.

Cheap Trick, Geronimo!'s third album, which is due out this week, nods both to the band's origins and the self-effacement that tinges their persona. The eponymous rock band, also from Rockford, is usually the first thing anyone brings up when Geronimo! mention their hometown. And, as Kelly says, "it's sort of a cheap trick to call it Cheap Trick." Like their first two records, Fuzzy Dreams and Exanimate, Cheap Trick roils with filthy distortion and Kelly's idiosyncratic talk/scream delivery. It's the first full-length from Geronimo! to come out on Exploding in Sound, a result of the band's friendship with the label's co-founder Dan Goldin. Back when Exploding in Sound was just a music blog, Dan gave Fuzzy Dreams a glowing review: "You could tell he had really listened to it," says Kelly. Geronimo! met Dan on an East Coast tour and soon found the kind of community that they never quite fell into in Chicago, making friends with New England bands like Ovlov, Pile, and Speedy Ortiz. It was a turning point for the group: "Meeting Dan was the best thing that ever happened to our band," Matt says. After the Symbol, we go to the Rockford Art Deli, a combination t-shirt printer and gallery that's currently showcasing work from an Aurora, Illinois, artist known as Friend Prices. The shop, which carries snarky Rockford shirts like the one that reads "Rockford doesn't suck—you do!", shows in part the way Rockford's culture has been evolving in recent years. With ample space and a mini arcade at the back, the Art Deli works as an all ages hangout spot for teens, something that Geronimo! never got to enjoy growing up. "You see good things happening here and you want to be a part of it," says Ben, explaining a feeling that's fond if not exactly nostalgia. Matt echoes him: "I feel a gravity pulling me back here." Everyone agrees that it's always a little weird to come back, even if home is just 90 miles away from where the guys are living now. Chicago is both more isolating and stimulating, and probably a better place to be a band. Rockford is where you run into everyone you know; during the course of our day in the city, I accidentally meet the parents of all three members of Geronimo!.

Rockford is also a place where not everyone gets why you'd still be in a rock band when you're staring down your late 20s and early 30s. A lot of Geronimo!'s music, especially on the new album, howls out the frustration of being in a full-time band in an economy that also requires you to hold down a full-time day job. The music serves as a valve, letting off the pressure that accumulates when you live and work in a big city. "Sometimes I feel like I have this wall built up," Matt says. "My truest self, my truest, rawest, most primal version of myself doesn't get to come out a lot. I go to work and I sit in front of a computer for 8 hours and then I'll go home and cook dinner by myself." Matt's four years younger than Ben and Kelly, but he looks even younger than that, with a lean build and a quick blue gaze. He's the quietest member of the band, but suddenly he's in his element. He continues: "I can honestly say that I feel the most alive while I'm playing. I just feel a force coming through us. Letting that raw, primal, true, energetic version of myself come through, pounding on the drums and having these two other guys creating this cacophonous noise. And we've worked extremely hard for these songs. These songs did not come easily. This is something that we have put hours into. Now we can play them with as much energy and sweat as we can, because that's what I need to do. It's very cathartic to express that raw, animal energy that so often gets stifled in daily life. It's an opportunity to howl at the moon."

Sasha Geffen lives in Chicago and has her own different kind of greatness. She's on Twitter - @sashageffen

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