Tornado Rider Rocks Chicago

By: Brady Lavin

A seemingly insignificant event happened last weekend: two touring bands from the Bay Area played in the basement of the Double Door in Chicago to a measly crowd of about twenty people. To anyone not in the “Dirtroom,” this paltry concert might as well have not happened at all, and this truth is incredibly unfortunate.

The two bands, San Francisco funk-pop quartet Persephone’s Bees and Oakland’s raucous metal boogie trio Tornado Rider, gave a five-dollar schooling on how to play an incredible show to a poor turnout.

It happens so often when nobody shows up to a gig and it’s so sad; everybody in the band gets depressed about the meager audience and then they play like they don’t care. The evening is then unavoidably mediocrity-laden because no one wants to see a band that doesn’t give a shit.

But, when a band named Tornado Rider, with goofy outfits including a coon-skin cap, oddly-matched spandex, and an oversized foam crown jump out on stage and assert that “the tornado has arrived!,” the audience can’t help but have fun. Especially when they see frontman Rushad Eggleson strap on a Marshall-stack-amplified cello and immediately start shredding guitar licks with heavy distortion.

They opened the night with the bluegrass-metal stomper “Mountain Jumper,” and from that point on the energy level never dipped one iota. Tornado Rider doesn’t seem to have any song that even remotely resembles a ballad; every tune is specifically designed to make dancin’ shoes out of even the most boring loafer.

The problem was that there were only twenty people in the audience and none of them seemed drunk enough to be the first one to start dancing. For another band, that might have been a downer, but Mr. Eggleson came prepared with a wireless system for his cello and headset microphone.

This led to at least a couple bloody-knee-causing slides into furious guitar cello solos in the audience, plenty of sitting on the bar whilst shredding, and at least a little playing while grinding with an apparently willing young lady.

Even in between songs like “Bison Land,” “The Goat God” and “I’m a Falcon”, Rushad kept the entertainment flowing with beautiful bits of prose such as, “Music is very analogous to sex, especially because “analogous” includes the word anal”. There was also a chant of “Might! Power! Victory!” and an explanation of how the vociferous weasels are to the imaginary land of Sneth as Jesus is to America, an analogy he undoubtedly came up with on the spot. It didn’t make much sense, but it sure as hell was one of the more weirdly, funny things ever described in detail at a rock show.

When Rushad, whose pure energy and enthusiastic strangeness is reminiscent of Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, would be cavorting about the bar, his two partners in cello-punk crime, Scott Manke on drums and Graham Terry on 5-string bass held down the chugging groove like it was their job, which it is.

Even though many of the beats and bass lines were fairly simple, they played the hell out of them with grins on their faces, happy to support the virtuosic bluegrass-infused virtuosic rock guitar soloing of Eggleson.

The cello is definitely the center of attention most of the time, but sometimes, and especially in “Paranoidness and Pain”, Terry gets some of the spot light and whips out some tasty licks when trading solos with Rushad.

From the first song to the last, it was apparent that these guys just enjoy playing these crazy nature-inspired punk boogies, and it doesn’t matter how many people happen to be in the venue. That mindset is the key for any band to rock the house, however small.

So many bands will let external events affect their approach to the music, but Tornado Rider isn’t one of them. They love to play their stuff, and that passion is projected into everybody in the audience, even if they think it’s a bit weird.

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