Cloud Cult creates a whole different kind of "atmospherock." The Minnesotans rock, yes, but they're also quite kind to the environment. Reinventing the wheel when it comes to the music industry, singer/band leader Craig Minowa started his own non-profit label (Earthology Records) that's both environmentally and socially responsible (for example, they use non-toxic inks to print CD covers).
With a new album coming out this fall, their seventh since 1995, there are a lot of ears listening. Their 2005 effort, Advice from the Happy Hippopotamus, was called "insane genius" by Pitchfork Media. The album examines the fine line between life and death. The latter is something that Craig Minowa has been dealing with since the death of his son in 2002.
In the Spring of 2006 Craig and his band embarked on a U.S. tour. Craig was kind enough to jot down his more memorable moments from the road.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
After tonight's performance, in one of the backstage rooms, I met two girls who were dressed completely in black leather. They both claimed to be Cloud Cult's biggest fans. With an opening line like that, you might expect the worst (or the best, depending on which way you look at it). But Cloud Cult is about as atypical of a rock band as you'll ever run across.
The sequence of events with these girls in this backstage area unfolds much differently than you'd imagine: They're lesbians. I'm not. We shared secrets about organic gardening and how to get off the power grid. At the end of the night, they wheeled off on a hot pink motorcycle (the kind with the cart attached to the side of it), I reminded myself that even though touring can be emotionally, physically and financially exhausting, there's no better way to meet so many people who seem like they'd fit better in a Tom Robbins novel than in the real world.
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
I've got some kind of wicked bug. I can barely breathe and tonight I threw up before the show. I forced myself on stage and hauled my way through the set, just in time to get to the parking lot and puke again. Financially speaking, tonight's show didn't turn out so well. The club manager refused to pay us and seemed to be totally whacked out on some kind of drug. I think I saw spray paint dripping out of his nose.
Later on, I walk the main strip alone and a strange girl comes out of nowhere and kissed me. She sucked my lower lip in so far, I swear I felt her lower intestine. She then told me her boyfriend beats her and she disappeared into the crowd. New Orleans feels a lot like the kind of dreams you have after drinking Nyquil.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
After one of this week's shows in New York City, the club manager paid me in cash. I discretely placed the wad in my back pocket along with the cash we received in T-shirt and CD sales, which was a large roll made up mostly of single dollar bills. In fact, I placed it so discretely in my pocket that I forgot it was there.
This is a habit developed from our previous tours' "accounting system." We've always made squat for money on tours, so storing it in a pocket hasn't been a problem, historically speaking. Money is better now, so pockets are no longer an intelligent storage option... but I'm getting ahead of myself here, because I obviously hadn't yet learned that lesson that night in New York.
The day following the show, we were staying with a friend. My clothes all stunk, so I hiked around the neighborhood and found a laundromat. All of my clothes stunk, even the ones I was wearing, so despite the furrowed brows of onlookers, I stripped down to my boxers and shoved everything into the washing machine. After the first 25 minutes of sitting half-naked in a ghetto laundromat in New York City, I shifted the clothes to a massive front-loading dryer with a huge glass face, and proceeded to kill time by wandering off to the vending machine and television area of the facility.
Although I was practically naked and the place was full of people, I was feeling pretty comfortable. That is, until I looked across the laundromat to my dryer on the opposite side of the building and noticed hundreds of dollars of cash blowing around inside. The image of a few hundred-dollar bills, mostly in singles, blowing around in a glass-fronted dryer, as if on display, felt like a cross between a bad lottery commercial and the moment before a mugging. There was so much cash blowing around, you could barely even see the clothes. I ran to the dryer and frantically started shoving the money into my underwear, trying to pretend that nobody around me was seeing any of this. I spent the next half hour with a giant bulge in my shorts (that had nothing to do with my manhood), hoping this half-naked idiot from a farm in the Midwest wouldn't get robbed.
Needless to say, when the band found out what happened, our tour accounting system was drastically renovated, including practically mandating that someone other than me should look after the money from henceforth.
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