Dolly Varden – Love will keep us together
From the time they started singing together, Dawson and Christiansen knew they had something special. Their first band developed organically. Dawson had been gigging as a duo with fiddler Tom Murray (who also plays on Sweet Is The Anchor), which evolved into a trio when Steve and Diane began harmonizing.
“My core voice is really high soprano, so I’d sung opera and stuff like that and I just hated it,” says Christiansen. “I’d been raised on folk music and rock, but that wasn’t what I was singing. Steve just opened everything up for me. He’s just an incredible confidence builder. So we started singing on weekends, and he helped me believe that I could do this and find joy in it, and not focus on the competitive aspects that had killed my joy. And it became the funnest thing in my life.”
“We started calling ourselves Stump The Host,” Dawson recounts. “We’d play at the Charleston and the Gingerman [across from Wrigley Field], which wasn’t really a music bar, but we’d stand in the window on the radiator and sing for tips, basically. But we’d clean up! Those were some of the best gigs ever.”
Outgrowing windows, the band added a rhythm section and a guitarist and started playing rock clubs for larger audiences. In retrospect, Stump The Host has been recognized as one of the city’s seminal alt-country bands, though the term wasn’t in vogue during the early ’90s.
“I was bringing Beatle-y songs and soul-based songs — as well as country-based songs — to the band,” says Dawson. “Our guitar player was phenomenally talented but very, very country, so it all sort of went through the filter of his guitar and the two-part harmony. The music sounded countryish with fancy chord changes. People were comparing us to Foster & Lloyd or Jim Lauderdale, which was cool.
“But this was before alt-country was considered cool at all. I mean, we did gigs with Uncle Tupelo, and there was nobody there. People hated country, and they would tell you so.”
Yet the band drew interest from Chicago clubgoers and the music industry alike, earning a publishing contract from Polygram and a recording deal with the local Minty Fresh label. The latter resulted only in the 1993 release of a vinyl 45, as Dawson and band experienced frustration in their attempts to expand their audience beyond Chicago.
“It was a volatile group of people — really fun, but the few times we actually did get out on the road and tried to tour, it was kind of a disaster,” Dawson remembers. “I was a big part of the problem — young and naive and really hotheaded at the time, super paranoid, thought that I should be treated better. I’ve definitely grown to take things as they come. It’s like when you play shows out of town, you can’t necessarily expect anyone to show up. Now I feel that if two people show up, and they’re there to hear your band, it’s a smashing success. But back then I’d get really mad.”
In forming Dolly Varden, Dawson and Christiansen initially vowed to distance themselves from country, opting for a louder, more aggressive brand of rock in the Nirvana vogue. Dawson now remembers that music as awful and embarrassing, but it cleared the air for him to return to what comes naturally. In 1995, he demoed a bunch of new material on acoustic guitar and played it for the band, which led to the 1995 release of the well-received Mouthful Of Lies.
If anything, Dolly Varden quickly became a bigger buzz band than Stump The Host had been, generating all sorts of attention at a 1996 South By Southwest showcase, being courted by RCA, earning critical raves, and expanding their audience with three more releases between 1998 and 2002. If 2000’s The Dumbest Magnets was widely perceived as a big progression, the aftermath of 2002’s Forgiven Now found the band at a pivotal point.
Any band requires both time and commitment, along with a sense that it’s going places rather than spinning its wheels. After touring exhaustively behind Forgiven Now, Dolly Varden needed a break. Lead guitarist Mark Balletto recorded an album titled My Record Player, produced by Jay Bennett (formerly of Wilco). Drummer Matt Thobe and bassist Mike Bradburn both had kids (Mike is also a Lutheran pastor, making Dolly Varden perhaps the only band in rock’s history with both a minister and a marriage counselor). Christiansen devoted more time and energy to her visual arts career, in addition to releasing an album called Duets with her husband. Dawson released his solo album and has continued to teach songwriting and guitar at the Old Town School of Folk Music.
There were vague plans for another Dolly Varden record, but no timetable. The impetus came from Balletto’s brother Scott, a recording engineer who had built a studio an hour south of Chicago. He kept inviting the band to check it out. Meanwhile, the prolific Dawson had a backlog of songs, some written since Sweet Is the Anchor, others that he’d left off the solo album because he thought they were better suited to the band. Just as the music had initially brought Christiansen and Dawson together, it brought the band back together for all the right reasons.
“We had been going our separate ways, drifting, getting into our own lives, but when we went down to Scott’s studio, the stuff was sounding great,” says Dawson. “The time away made us realize how valuable it is to have people who you can play with on this level, where you don’t really talk about it and discuss how songs are going to go. You just start playing and things happen.”
Where Christiansen and Dawson were more like equal partners in Stump The Host and earlier in Dolly Varden, she says the dynamic of the band has improved with her in more of a supporting role. While focusing more on her art, she only wrote one song for The Panic Bell (the haunting “Small Pockets”) and sings lead on two.
“I would say that art is to me what music is to him,” she explains. “In my hierarchy, it’s art, music, healing people.”
“Besides my family [Christiansen’s first priority as well], music is the main part of my life — it’s everything,” says Dawson. “I’ve got songs running through my head 24 hours a day, and not necessarily even my own songs.”
“I make music in large part because I’ve grown to love doing it with Steve,” says Christiansen. “So it’s all about family to begin with. And thank God we’re in a band together. People say, ‘Isn’t that hard?’ And I think, how hard would it be if we weren’t?”
ND senior editor Don McLeese loved working in Austin for a decade and now enjoys teaching in Iowa City, but he remains a native Chicagoan at heart.