Freakwater: Plays Well With Others
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For more than a decade Freakwater has been a long-distance band, held together by the stretch of I-65 that connects Louisville to Chicago and by Irwin’s long-standing friendship with Janet Beveridge Bean. The two met in their teens at a Circle X show, and spent several years as a couch-bound country duo. But in the mid-80s Bean moved to Chicago, where she cofounded the rock band Eleventh Dream Day, and Freakwater didn’t make its recorded debut until 1989. She and Irwin have been friends for 18 years now, but neither woman seems interested in moving closer to the other. “The beauty of living in a place like this is there’s just nothing to do,” says Irwin. “You really do have to make your own fun. So people just sit around. I think that’s probably what drives Janet crazy, because she’s a little more active. But that’s why they have all these dumb bands–’cause there’s nothing else to do.”
“Horrible,” says Irwin, describing the sessions, which took place at the beginning of the year. “We didn’t have much time to get it done, and it was very frustrating trying to explain to people what I wanted. It was a bad January.” Bean had just separated from her husband, Eleventh Dream Day bandmate Rick Rizzo. Freakwater bassist Dave Gay had left Chicago for Asheville, North Carolina, making him the second commuting member. Max Johnston, whose sterling banjo and pedal steel were highlights of Springtime, had moved to Austin and played his last show with Freakwater in Louisville on New Year’s Eve; replacing him for the new record was steel guitarist Eric Heywood, formerly of Son Volt. Just after they convened in Chicago, the blizzard hit, and Irwin got sick. “It was a lost month,” recalls Bean. “It was like a month that doesn’t exist within time as we know it.”
On Friday, September 24, the band kicks off a three-week tour that will come to Chicago’s Athenaeum Theatre on October 9–one of only two dates on the schedule that will feature the string section. But today, the afternoon before Labor Day, is just another lazy Sunday in Louisville. Outside Irwin’s front door–from which she’s long since rescued her keys–sits her “chia man,” a nylon stocking filled with grass seed, crude features shaped with rubber bands, eyes marked with red beads. A little green grass has already begun to sprout from his forehead.
