Bon Iver

by Mark Beaumont

  And heaven knows, sitting in their front room straining to hear the TV over the racket, what Justine and Gil thought the day, soon after Justin started high school, that Pleeb arrived in the Vernons’ cellar.

  “He loves all the early, unacceptable things,” claims Ryan Olson, a schoolmate a few years above Justin at Memorial High School, who was also fascinated by the possibilities of music and starting his own bands. “His band Pleeb, which was James Buckley* and him and this guy Mark Thompson playing crazy future prog, fucking music up in our practice space in Eau Claire … it was insane. They were like 14-year-olds playing the shreddingest, most amazing shit ever.

  “I was a freshman and [James] was a junior,” says Justin, “and he sort of recruited me to be in this really strange band where we wore like Antarctic winter masks and koala hats and stuff. And that was when we started showing up at, like, confirmation classes and playing these really weird, really weird shows.”11

  Justin was equally enthused by Olson’s band at the time, Sled Napkin, even going so far as to send them his first ever piece of fan mail to describe how excited he’d been watching them at the school’s various Battle Of The Bands contests. “It was just like the energy up there, and the fact that they were just kids from the Third Ward in Eau Claire, it was just kinda like my mind exploded.”12

  And Justin’s enthusiasm for music went hand-in-hand with his love of words. “Lyrics are important to him,” says his mother, “but when he puts them to music, he’s looking more for a feeling.”13

  The young Justin’s lyrics were as much decoration as they were declaration. The first songs he wrote, aged around 12, were, according to Gil, “not trite songs”14 but they were obsessed with living in Wisconsin and Eau Claire. They were paeans of pride and dedication to a place he was already worried he loved too much. “Even as a teenager,” he says, “I was already worried that I wanted to live there my whole life. Like: ‘dude, you should probably not love it so much here’. But the idea that I could live in Eau Claire and I could not know every nook and cranny or that I could not know every nook and cranny in my own home, or my own land … I think it’s pretty telling how widely travelled people are and yet they never maybe examine where they are as much as they could. I really like locality, I like permanence. I like people being in one place and knowing it.”15

  So intrinsically connected were Justin’s words with his home that he took the concept to its most literal extreme. One afternoon Justine would open the door of a downstairs closet in the house to find that Justin had permanently etched his favourite lines into the walls, surrounded by doodles of the main players of the songs or illustrative props like newspapers. The words were punctuated with huge cartoon exclamation marks and a starburst hemming the word SKILLET.

  “Frivolous, nowhere to go, his relatives rejected him,” went a lyric called ‘Lyro’, while later lines told the fragmented tale of characters called Jack, Barney and Thor-H, all involved in an outbreak of civil unrest: “So Jack spread the news around the town, everybody believed it but with a frown, the township started a civil war, hail to the Silk man, the Silk man will die!” Whoever the Silk man was, he won the day. “In the end the conclusion is run, the two good guys lost and the bad guys won.” By the end of the song, Jack and Barney, our presumed heroes, were killed. Even so young, Justin was at one with the idea of unhappy endings.

  One day, he’d similarly scratch the shape of his home county across his heart. But for now, his music was about to become embedded in it.

  Peering down from the tower 20 feet above the water, you shuffled your toes to the edge of the wooden platform. Heaving in a breath, you spotted your friends perched on the huge inflatable cushion below, waiting expectantly for your jump, grinned to yourself, closed your eyes and launched yourself into the air. As you hit the blob – as the water pillow was called – you sank deep into the inflatable folds, throwing any kid already lounging on it high into the air to splosh into the water beyond.

  The blob tower was one of Justin Vernon’s favourite attractions at the Eau Claire YMCA Camp Manitou*, the summer camp he attended in New Auburn as a boy. A mixture of regimentation and adventuring, children and young teenagers would rise early to ceremonially hoist an American flag before breakfast and a day of canoeing, water-skiing, climbing and games. But the development of social skills was a key element to the weeks kids spent at Manitou too – they’d be allocated a cabin of other kids to stay with, becoming a seven-day family, eating together and having ‘individual nights’ of getting to know the people in their cabin. The idea is to form firm friendships, sealed on the last night of their stay at a ‘friendship fire’, and scrawled forever on the cabin walls. In one cabin was written the legend “as close to heaven as the living can ever get”; even if Justin didn’t share the sentiment, he would have appreciated the act of writing it there.

  For such a dedicated child of the winter, Justin threw himself into the Chippewa Valley camp scene, eventually becoming a camp counsellor in his own right in his later teens. And soon his summers would be made all the more colourful by his immersion in jazz camp, an eventual result of the night, aged 14, that music truly claimed him.

  It was 1995, and Justine and Kim were major fans of a folk duo called The Indigo Girls, then touring their fifth album, Swamp Ophelia. Justin liked the music and allowed himself to be convinced to go to see them playing with Michelle Malone and Joan Baez. “I was like ‘Ah, whatever, I’ll go see the show’,” he later told Pitchfork, “and it honestly … it just changed my life.”16 He’d later describe the gig as “the first major moment when I remember music having such a profound, overwhelming effect on me … they were doing ‘Wild Horses’ by the Stones. I felt like I had grown up in about five seconds. I totally had a moment where I flash-forwarded my whole life, and I knew I could never give up on music. Completely devoid of any religious or iconic context, I felt like music was handed down to me, this is what I was going to do.”17

  His father, Gil, recalls the moment. “We were sitting at a concert venue outside of town and he always said that at that moment I’m going to do what they’re doing.”18 He recognised the raw spark of purpose in his son. “You don’t prepare the path for the child, you prepare the child for the path and that’s what we try to do and he had to choose the path.”19

  Justin instantly became obsessed with The Indigo Girls, particularly Swamp Ophelia’s opening track, ‘Fugitive’. “It’s absolutely without question my favourite song of all time,” he’d claim in 2008. “I’ve realised over the years what kind of rep the Indigo Girls get, and I guess I’m not going to get in the business of trying to change that for people. But this specific record is super brilliant and the guitar solo is unreal and the drumming … and it’s some of my most favourite lyrics. I’ve actually got some of the lyrics tattooed on my body, that’s how important the song is to me. I’ve got so much nostalgia attached to it, but when I throw it in and listen to it, it’s still got so much shit in it.”20

  Passionate, beautiful and brooding, the simple intensity and acoustic power of the song set the bar for Justin’s own musical endeavours, and its lyrics about running away and hiding as a way to truly expose yourself to your loved ones spoke to him deeply. There was a romance to retreat, a heroism in vulnerability. It sounded like his father’s shack, singing.

  To be so moved by traditional fem-folk might have led many a young man down the dark roads to hemp trousers, sandals and hand-whittled perching sticks. He could have lost himself in the fixed tones of antique folk, become Lady Antebellum before their time. But Justin’s tastes, thanks to the diversity of his parents’ record collection, were far too explorative and interesting. He was drawn to post-punk hardcore and alt.pop too, embracing the febrile vigour of Fugazi and the quirks and kooks of Primus. He became fascinated by the free-form progressive rock of Phish while also adoring the rootsiness of gospel music. He got into both crazed prog rock and the mainstream AOR of The Dave Matthews Band.

  “
Justin always teetered on the edge,” Drew Christopherson recalls. “He got way into grunge and everything back then with us, but he simultaneously dove into Dave Matthews Band and stuff like that. I never saw eye to eye on the DMB shit.”21

  Justin also found himself drawn to the intricacies and possibilities of jazz. So as he hit high school he joined both the marching band and the jazz band, a major ambition of almost every kid in Eau Claire, since the jazz band was held in such high esteem locally. Steve Wells, Justin’s high school jazz band director, remembers Vernon’s intense enthusiasm for music, even then.

  “Homecoming was crazy,” he says. “Justin was in football [and] band and after all that hoopla going to Friday night’s game, the next day we had a parade and it was hot and it was downtown. I could remember driving down to Wilson Park and getting out and the first person I saw in full uniform sweating profusely was Justin and he’s ready to go. He wanted to be there, it was important to him.”22

  “The music program at Memorial High School was just life changing,” Vernon would say. “Bruce Hering and Steve Wells were very tightly knit with Bob Baca, Ron Keezer and the university, so basically we were getting a college-level education as high school kids. And I think, at a certain point, I’d reached a level of understanding of music that I just wanted to hang out there for a while. I felt like emotionally I understood enough about what I wanted to do with music, and I wanted to branch out a little.”23

  Through the band he met several like-minded wannabe musicians, and he quickly began to gather the strongest team around him. In his sophomore year at high school the school badly needed new instruments, so Wells came up with a cunning fundraising ruse; he’d put together small groups of players and charge local community events a fee to hire them, all money going towards the instrument fund. One such collective was formed of Justin, Joe, a brass and djembe player, Keil Jansen, and a saxophonist and singer who particularly caught Justin’s eye: Sara Jensen, middle name Emma.

  As section leaders on their respective instruments, they were a strong quartet, and Wells soon had them pulling in bucks by the bucket-load at Christmas parties. The foursome found a firm connection so, even when the fundraising efforts came to an end, they kept playing together.

  Justin also began attending Wisconsin jazz camp every summer and it was during one such vacation* that he first met a kid called Brad Cook from Chippewa Falls. They bonded quickly and spent several summers at camp along the shores of the North Wisconsin lakes. Through a shared love of music and sports, Brad and Justin became close friends, an inseparable pair.

  Brad was a curly-haired, outgoing, direct-speaking sort of kid who suffered from extreme Attention Deficit Disorder, which made him a troublesome joker at school, only tamed by painting and drawing exercises such as stippling, an art form his parents introduced him to in order to maintain his focus. The process consisted of condensing thousands of dots on a page to form a picture, a practice that he would ultimately rediscover in music. “I had no patience in my life, but I could sit down for hours and do this,” he’d later explain. “With minimalism, that same technique of art applies. I had enough curiosity in my lack of an attention span that I would want to wait and see what would happen.”24

  Brad’s ADD may have contributed to the fact that, for his entire childhood, he hadn’t gotten on too well with his brother Phil. Though they’d shared a house all their lives they had conflicting personalities; Phil was the easy-going one, Brad the tense, confrontational one. But shortly after Brad started high school, the rift was miraculously healed. By jazz.

  In his high school freshman year, Brad’s ambitions towards joining the baseball team were stymied by a skiing accident which broke his collarbone that winter. To cheer him up, Phil, 18 months older and studying jazz and bebop, invited him to replace an errant bassist in their school’s jazz band. Having never played bass and unable to read sheet music, Brad turned him down. But Phil persevered. He and the band director eventually talked Brad into it, and the pair bonded over Brad’s bass training. From the moment he picked up the instrument and turned on the amp for the first time on the last day of the school year, Phil taught him to tune the guitar and pick out the notes. “Every day we would come home, and I’d memorise all the parts note for note,” Brad says. “Phil would sit there for three hours and play one bar at a time until I had it memorised, and then he’d play the next bar. He really taught me how to play day by day.”25

  Before long Brad introduced Justin to Phil* and the three started jamming together in various combinations of bands. Over the summers of 1995 and 1996 the first swirls of a long-distant Eau Claire scene began to congeal. At jazz camp the year after Brad started playing bass, a 15-year-old Joe Westerlund ran into Phil Cook; the following year at camp Joe met Brad too.

  “That was a major turning point in our lives,” says Phil, “to be at a camp and be immersed in music and also to be meeting each other and be influenced by a lot of other music, not just jazz. From where we grew up, small winterised towns, it is really quite a welcome relief to meet other people from your own area that can scat every note of Miles Davis’ trumpet solo on ‘So What’. The release that that gives you, like ‘I’m not alone in this world and I’m 15’ was unreal for all of us. It was so cool to meet other kids that were that into jazz. Obviously we formed a very specific and fast friendship.”26

  Brad, Phil and Joe had Justin in common, the link that bound them all. Though they’d soon be challenging each other in Battle Of The Band contests in high school – the Cooks in one band, Justin and Joe in another – there was something about the four of them that felt like a unified force.

  Justin had way too much experimenting to do to be tied down to any one line-up yet, though. By his mid-teens, he’d become a bubbling maelstrom of influences in need of vent. His dad was gonna have to get a bigger basement …

  * The Joynt was once a major stop for blues, jazz and rock tours between Chicago and Minneapolis in the Sixties and Seventies, hence today its walls are lined with autographed pictures of some of the artists who played there.

  † Named after the French for ‘clear water’.

  * Justin’s love of Booker is evident in the fact that he often plays his track ‘Feel So Bad’ to visitors.

  * An upright and electric jazz bassist who would eventually form The James Buckley Trio, The Vandals and Mystery Palace and become a member of Gayngs alongside Justin and Ryan.

  * So much so, he would later name his personal Twitter account after it.

  * Either at Manitou or jazz camp

  * And their cousin Brian Joseph.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mount Vernon, Ascending

  “It’s a pretty lukewarm cultural experience, to be clear about it. But there’s also just so much talent and I think that the schools there and where I grew up … I was lucky. I think that the public school system and their general societal ways of doing stuff really treated me well. I know that it didn’t treat everyone well, but for some reason it worked for me … Every year that I live there there’s something new that I can discover about it that I like about it, whether it’s sort of a weird underbelly thing about the town that I don’t know, or whether it’s a new band, some high school band or something … There were a lot of cool musicians that were my age and a little older, and then there were all these different eras of people playing at the bars and the clubs. Some people knew each other, some people didn’t, but you could definitely tell that it was a music town with a knowledge of itself, and that kind of connected it … I’ve heard people say that they were born in the wrong place, and I just feel like I was born in the right place.”

  –Justin Vernon on growing up in Eau Claire1

  IN Midwest America in 1997 it was tough to be a musical rebel. Grunge’s alternative edge had been dulled – Nirvana were gone, leaving bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and The Foo Fighters to shift their sound firmly into the US rock mainstream and become seriously huge business. The hardcore and post-h
ardcore scenes were thriving in the shape of Fugazi, At The Drive-In, Unwound and others while Shellac and Slint had originated a complex and intricate hardcore hybrid known as math rock, but other offshoots of the punk scene were also racing towards populist acceptance – the emo pop of Green Day, Weezer and Jimmy Eat World was charting big and Blink-182 were just a few years from adding a chart-smashing puerility to the mix. Metal, too, was about to get seriously scatological; Limp Bizkit’s debut album hit the stores that July, garnering little in the way of sales but auguring the arrival of the abominable cultural apocalypse that would be nu metal.

  The more traditional genres showed greater promise. Inventive new blends of country, pop and psychedelia were being touted by Mercury Rev and The Flaming Lips, both soon to reach their critical and creative peak, and the first sparks of a folk reinvention were catching hold. Conor Oberst, in his new guise as Bright Eyes, was about to launch a career that would bring fresh vitality and energy to trad folk styles and, in Denver, the Elephant Six collective – Apples In Stereo, The Olivia Tremor Control and most notably Jeff Mangum’s Neutral Milk Hotel – were concocting free-form psychedelic folk albums liberally doused in fuzz and distortion. The future of folk would soon emerge from this sizzling lo-fi soup.

  In the summer of 1997, though, the coming of age of these anti-folk sounds* was still 12 months away and, to the dedicated Midwest musical adventurer, the future of traditional music seemed rooted in experimental jazz rock.

  Of which a H.O.R.D.E. was coming to town.

  The Horizons Of Rock Developing Everywhere tour – H.O.R.D.E. for short – was the jazz-rock Lollapalooza. The touring festival, hitting amphitheatres across the US, was instigated by the rootsy rock band Blues Traveler in 1992 as they were tired of playing the East Coast club scene all summer while bigger acts packed out the outdoor arenas. So pooling their draw with their friends bands – Spin Doctors, The Samples, Widespread Panic, The Aquarium Rescue Unit and Phish – they built a big enough show to make the communal leap to the amphitheatres.