EDITOR’S NOTE: Our friend Kyle is a writer in St. Louis, MO and occasional guest contributor to IWTAS. We dig his unique style and his passion for profiling talented musicians. What follows is a series of vignettes from Kyle’s recent time on the road with Kentucky Knife Fight, a band we’ve cheered for since the early days of this site. The November issue of Eleven Magazine will include a feature-length piece by Kyle on the same subject. Make sure to check it out on newsstands asap.

After ten years of making music together, Kentucky Knife Fight will play its final show on November 22 at Off Broadway with good friends Whiskey Folk and Christian Lee Hutson. Before announcing its farewell, the band asked me to come on the road with them to record their final tour. In backseats and back alleys, over beers and tears, they shared what it’s been like to be Knife Fight. Enjoy some highlights from those conversations below and then read the full story in November’s issue of Eleven Magazine.

Story Time with Mr. Cool

Jason Koenig, aka Mr. Cool: There was the show in Fort Worth. These two guys were on something, and they were acting like twats. We were loading out, which is like Tetris: things need to go certain places. Well, one of the guys was stumbling around and almost knocked some gear over. Our merch guy, Chris, who’s been on so many tours he’s a member of the band in some ways, is like “Dude, watch where you’re stepping.” The guy starts pushing him. I had already listened to this guy giving shit to the bouncer, and he’s giving shit to my friend and pushing him, and I’m like nope. And I just punched him in the face. But he thought Chris punched him, so he tackles Chris, and Chris wrestles him to the ground. Then he realizes it was me, and he’s trying to punch me and calling me a faggot and everything else. All our Fort Worth friends were there and were getting between us, which is good because I probably wouldn’t have done well in an honest-to-God fight. Afterward all the bar staff were like, “Dudes, you guys are welcome back anytime.”

Let me think of other mischief. There was a time when random [band] members at after-parties would get drunk and just decide to be naked. We were playing a show in Gainesville, FL, and one of the bands we were playing with…the banjo player came back to the after-party with us. First thing’s first, earlier in the tour, our friends in Fort Worth had given us this jar of pickled quail eggs as kind of a gag gift. That was the night we decided that everyone was going try one of these pickled quail eggs. So he’s super cool about that, and then a few minutes later, we’re sitting out on this balcony, smoking cigarettes and bullshittin’, and the curtains open. A member of the band walks in front of the door completely fuckin’ naked and just stands there. We all see it, and I’m just like “Yeah, there’s so-and-so, and there’s their dick.” I felt bad. It was like, you know, you come to party with this band, and now we’re just doing a bunch of really weird shit. Thank you for taking it all in stride.

On the St. Louis Music Community

Jason Holler: I’ve wonder about if we got played on The Point, what that would do for bringing different people to our band and bringing different people to a place like, say, Off Broadway. I think that could only do good things. A lot of bands pigeon-hole themselves into only putting themselves out via certain avenues, like “We’re a KDHX band and that’s it, and we’ve got our social media and flyer, and that’s how we get out.” Hell, I would love to be on The Point. I would love to be on KSHE. I don’t think we sound anything like anything that’s on there, but I don’t see anything wrong with the people who listen to those radio stations, and I would love for them to hear our band because I think if they did, they might possibly like us. Playing for new audiences is always a good thing as far as I’m concerned. I think that’s a big part of bridging that gap.

James Baker: A lot of bands in St. Louis, including us, have compared our experiences to Pokey LaFarge. That’s someone that we started off playing shows with, and someone who both opened for us and who we opened for later on. It’s one of those things where you can’t compare your experiences to anyone else’s. That’s not going to do you any good. You’re gonna get psyched out by that.

Holler: With Pokey and his group, I’m really happy the way that turned out. That guy was pretty frustrated years back. He had hit it hard for a very long time, and he sacrificed a great deal being out there for two hundred eighty, ninety days a year. He’s got a great band, all super nice people.

More positive role models coming out of St. Louis is good. Now I’m seeing bands like Bruiser Queen and Foxing getting out more. That’s totally awesome. This whole time we’ve been touring, I would’ve loved to have been playing all these venues and seeing flyers for St. Louis bands up at the venue, but we just haven’t seen that. Maybe it comes in waves or maybe people are feeding off of energy right now. I mean, Jesus, living in St. Louis is pretty perfect for touring. You can hit so many amazing towns within six hours. Plus, we play shows in St. Louis with really great bands. It’s been really nice to watch these groups get out there and put the St. Louis stamp on it.

Baker: I would say to any young bands that are starting to come up and hope to really become successful or gain traction in any way: don’t rest on any of it. Don’t be content with a certain level of success and be like “We’re not going to get any bigger.” And don’t get discouraged by lack of success either because things don’t make any sense in the music industry. We’ve had a night where we played for two people, and then the next night we played for four hundred people. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Don’t let a bad show or a bad week of shows or a bad tour or even a bad six months deter you from doing it. Just make sure it’s about the music. Don’t worry about making the money, at first especially. Just worry about putting out good music. If you put out good music long enough, and you’re lucky, good things will happen.

Getting to Effortless

Nate Jones: Every performance, you have to look at what doesn’t work, what does work.

Curtis Brewer: I get two comments every time: “You shred on the banjo.” – which makes no sense because I’m the worst banjo player in St. Louis – and then “I like the interaction between you and Nate. It’s so different. You guys are dynamic.” The yin-yang is fun and entertaining. I don’t have to worry too much when Nate’s onstage. He’s got his thing covered because he’s meticulous. I’ve had many people describe it as looking effortless, and in a certain sense it is. One of the advantages we have that maybe a lot of the other St. Louis bands haven’t had is the amount of time that we’ve put in playing together. Not only were we doing eighty, ninety shows a year, when everybody else may be doing fifteen, but we’re rehearsing Monday and Wednesday, every week, for three hours. Looking effortless ended up taking a lot less effort because we were so practiced. I appreciate that about this band. People say that we’re really tight, and it’s true, I think, because we worked really hard at that.

Jones: I’m self-taught. I’m more of an intuitive player. I think I’ve developed as a guitarist positively from being in this group. I understand how to be more tasteful, more melodic, and I think that’s what I excel at doing. I’m an okay soloist but I like to write melody lines, more melodic leads. It’s not shredding. I don’t like shredding. It ends up being that sometimes, but I try to write just really visceral guitar parts.

Nathan Jatcko: This is a tight band, and I was lucky to walk into it at a point where they’d been playing together. When I started out, I would try my best to write non-essential parts. I’ve been talking to [Holler] off and on about how I’m not going to be there all the time. “How do you feel about me adding this part to this song? It’s making the song sound like it is?” I guess more of an essential part. And he’s been very welcoming about it. And all these guys have always welcomed me with open arms playing-wise. It’s been really great to be part of these songs for one thing, but also being part of the writing process more recently. It’s frustrating and rewarding and wonderful.

Nate Jones: The Man Behind the Marketing

Jones: I’d always try to run stuff by [the band]. I don’t sight-unseen put shit out there. I make sure everyone’s okay with what’s going on, and usually, being from the art background, Holler’s usually the first person and best person to talk to about that. So he’ll have kind of a final say, but we both can argue or compromise or whatnot. For the most part, everyone in the band, including Holler himself, has been very supportive of whatever I choose to use for artwork.

When I initially started out, we did some fun, goofy stuff, like a pug dressed up as a businessman or fifteen corgis just hanging out and looking cute. Something that had nothing to do with our music at all. Since our music took a change of tone, I tried to incorporate that into the artwork as well. The new t-shirt and a lot of the posters recently have been very extensive and detailed artwork that’s been all about the daughter in “My Brave Daughter,” a new song that’s kind of been half-released. We gave it as a gift, along with “Dressed in Red,” to people who donated to our band van fund, which, it saddens my heart to see the band van have to go.

The Stolen Knife

Holler: The initial post from Facebook that we put up about the vehicle being stolen ended up being viewed by twenty thousand people. The Old 97s and a lot of bigger bands shared the information, which was really cool. It was stolen about two days before we left for a three-week tour. We had somebody from a rental company that was wanting to cut us a big deal on renting a vehicle, and people were coming out of the woodwork to sell us a vehicle. It was very humbling, and it was a really flattering thing to see all that support. It ended up being our friend John Joern, who owns the Whiskey Ring on Cherokee Street, [who] let us borrow his van with about two days notice. We took it out for the best tour that we ever did.

It was a pretty terrible thing. We had a lot of connections with the van. We spent so much time in it. It becomes another member of the group. So somebody stole one of our members and then compacted them.

Let’s Hear It for the Neutral Guy

Jatcko: I’ve always gotten to be the neutral guy in the band. I get to hear every perspective. My approach to it’s always been to go over to the person and be like “Hey,”– not telling them who said it – but “Hey, something I noticed was this…” Usually that fixes it because they’re like, “Oh, there’s somebody else telling me this that I’m not so familiar with that is coming to the band with fresh ears, and they’re noticing that this part needs work.” I’m a big advocate of not holding things in. Let’s just get it out there.

It’s not like there’s been a whole lot of tension. I hear stories about bands getting into fistfights on the road, and I’m pretty sure there’s never been a punch thrown. There is a lot of love in this band even through a lot of the horrible things it’s endured, and a lot of the great things it’s endured, too, which can be just as stressful because the great things raise the professional bar.

(All photos by Kyle Kapper except the b&w one above, by Jess Luther.)