My hometown of Red Wing is known for three things: boots, pottery, and Bob Dylan’s “Walls of Red Wing,” an exaggerated account of life inside the town’s juvenile correctional facility. (Dylan didn’t spend time there, but Bob Stinson did.)
But now Red Wing is making a bigger impact on the music world—or at least on the Twin Cities.
A handful of bands featuring Red Wing High School graduates are currently making noise in the metro area, including Filthy Kittens, Harlow, Dad Bod, Alexander Natalie, Vinny Franco and the Love Channel, and Dusty Forever.
One Big Turn
The Big Turn Music Fest, which takes over downtown Red Wing for the seventh time this Friday and Saturday, deserves some credit for this explosion of Red Wing talent. Big Turn brings big artists to the small town: This year Dessa headlines, and other recognizable names like Jeremy Messersmith, Off With Their Heads, and Chris Koza will perform. Overall, there will be 110 acts across 15 venues.
Sam Brown, the Red Wing native who founded the festival, is happy to host the event where he grew up. “Red Wing’s a beautiful canvas for an event like this to happen,” he says.
It’s also a small canvas, which adds to the character of the event. Red Wing only has one large venue, the Sheldon Theatre, so other shows take place in bars, churches, and stores. One year, Brown, who performs under the moniker Bo.Monro, played a set during a yoga class at the YMCA.
Another highlight for Brown is “turning a baby clothing store into a metal venue.” He means Tootsie Too’s, the children’s boutique where they give guitars to the kid-sized mannequins in the windows.
“I’m sure there are people who have negative views of it, because it kind of does take over town,” Brown explains, “but overall I would say people are pretty blown away by it.”
How Red Wing Got Loud—and Local
Big Turn may bring the bigger music world to Red Wing, but before he started the festival, Brown had a hand in getting Red Wing musicians more broadly known.
The first concert he organized was a high school showcase called Loud & Local, originally hosted at the Sheldon. The event stopped when adults were (understandably) concerned about the historic building losing a battle with hyper, moshing teens.
The concert hibernated for a couple years until (and here’s my story's first conflict of interest—Red Wing is a small place) my older brother, Scotty, decided to bring it back his senior year. The city agreed to host it along the Mississippi River at Bay Point Park as part of River City Days, the annual citywide summer gathering. So, in 2008, high school bands could once again play on a real stage to a larger audience.
In summer 2011, the fourth year of the new Loud & Local era, a band called Seb’s Medicine took the stage. The band featured soon-to-be-freshman Samuel Ketcham on vocals and rhythm guitar, almost-sophomores Jack Rudquist on lead guitar and Andy Tarr on bass, and rising eighth-grader Mason Swanson on drums.
They did a set of cover songs, including “Seven Nation Army” and Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So.” “The performance and the attention and the energy and all the adrenaline, I was hooked from that day on,” Ketcham remembers. Now he’s the singer-songwriter of Harlow, an indie-folk-country band, and a guitarist in alternative folk ensemble Alexander Natalie.
“Loud & Local was a big deal,” says Henry Patterson, who was about to enter eighth grade when Seb’s Medicine played that show. Patterson had just started a band of his own, eventually called the Road Flares, that also featured Mason Swanson on bass.
“That was a big part of us being motivated to prepare our music, whether it was covers or originals, as we got older,” he adds. “Because we had a solid event where all of our friends were going to be there and random people from around town too.”
Patterson is now the frontman of Filthy Kittens, a shaggy garage rock band, and Swanson is the band’s bassist.
“I was jealous,” says Noah Topliff, another kid who wasn’t in Seb’s Medicine. The son of a professional pianist, he’d been taking lessons since he was around seven, briefly played percussion in middle school band, but quit because he “didn’t realize you didn’t get to be a drummer who played a kit, you would just play a cymbal or a snare drum.”
Soon after Seb’s Medicine’s first show, they needed a new bassist, so they asked Topliff to learn for the band. “From my first band practice, playing bass with Seb’s Medicine, I was like, ‘This is what I want to do forever,’” Topliff says.
He started a surf-punk band called the Bible Bangers with, yet again, Mason Swanson on drums. “In my head it was pretty punk rock,” he says of that outfit, “but then listening back, it isn’t that crazy.’” Now he fronts Alexander Natalie and is one of the guitarists in indie group Dad Bod.
Loud & Local was also the first big stage time for Dan O’Keefe, who played in a band called Rodney Water with Patterson and now drums for alt-folkers Dusty Forever, and Matthew Knudson, who wails on the saxophone for the soul group Vinny Franco and the Love Channel.
Loud & Local is dormant again after a punk performance that featured too much swearing and spray paint. “People on the boats in the marina were calling the cops and complaining,” Patterson recalls. Naturally, Mason Swanson was on drums.
Free Energy Changes Everything
But the Loud & Local legacy survives. The rockers in this era started organizing their own basement shows or setting things up at The Hobgoblin, a barn-turned-concert venue on the outskirts of town.
Another big moment came in 2013 when Free Energy brought their triumphant throwback rock to town. Free Energy featured three Red Wing-raised members: vocalist Paul Sprangers, guitarist Scott Wells, and bassist Evan Wells. (Sprangers, full disclosure, is my dad’s step-cousin—conflict No. 2!)
Those musicians were first known to Twin Cities music fans as the St. Paul-based Hockey Night. Label troubles led to Hockey Night’s breakup and Sprangers and the Wells brothers forming Free Energy. Free Energy gained a larger national following and got big enough for an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman.
Free Energy’s first album, Stuck On Nothing, came out in 2010, right about the time that the younger crop of artists was getting serious about music. “I have a cassette tape of their first album, I still play it a lot,” Patterson says. “I was super inspired by that first album, to be honest.”
The band played two local shows in 2013 that had a major impact on younger musicians—at the downtown bandshell and across the bridge at Hager City, Wisconsin’s Harbor Bar.
Free Energy dissolved soon after those shows, but they’d shown the burgeoning musicians that success in the industry was possible.
What Is It About Red Wing?
Even with a local place to hone their skills and some trailblazers to follow, it’s amazing that so many Red Wing tunesters have kept their music going—and going well. Harlow was named one of First Avenue’s Best New Bands in 2022, and at the end of 2024 joined Trampled By Turtles on the road. Dad Bod’s song “Milkdrinker” was once named the Current’s Song of the Day.
Perhaps something about the culture of Red Wing aided them on their journey. It's a beautiful place. Thoreau called one of its bluffs “remarkable,” and in the present day, tourists flock to town in the fall to see the leaves changing along the Mississippi.
On a parallel track, the history of Red Wing Shoes and Red Wing Pottery have put an emphasis on craftsmanship in the town. (Full disclosure, again, my family has been involved with both of those industries—there's No. 3!)
That combination of natural beauty and interest in art means art and artistic people, in all sorts of disciplines, are always around. Like Hüsker Dü’s Greg Norton, or the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Mike Arturi. Arturi, a rock journeyman, started the town’s Universal Music Center. The UMC is a lot like the School of Rock programs that exist in larger cities, and provided musical education for a lot of the Red Wing musicians that are still playing.
But a youth in Red Wing can also be described by what Topliff tells people when they ask him what growing up in Red Wing was like: “It’s fun for a day, but hard for a lifetime.”
“You run out of stuff to do really fast,” he adds.
Red Wing can feel claustrophobic, too. Only 16,000 people live there, and almost every kid grows up going to the same school as their peers from kindergarten through high school. And because there’s only one YMCA, one public library, and one movie theater, those kids are bound to be in the same extracurriculars and know each other’s parents.
To deal with the boredom and the reputations accumulated over a lifetime, Topliff explains, “There are a lot of unhealthy outlets you can turn to, and there are healthier outlets that you can turn to. At least for myself, and I think for a lot of other people who were making music, it was a way to express myself.”
For those that chose music, the close-knit community also meant more support. “Everyone was so supportive, that small town thing.” Ketcham says, “‘Oh cool, you’ve got a show at Hobgoblin, we’re all gonna go. The entire grade is gonna go.’ I don’t think that experience would have existed if we’d all grown up in Minneapolis.”
Similarly, Free Energy’s Sprangers thought, “I gotta get the hell out of here” throughout his adolescence, but he also admits the calmer life in the small town led to a “little bit of unearned confidence.”
Or, as he told City Pages in 2005, “Growing up in Red Wing was great, though, because we weren’t around pop culture or cool people. We could just mess around and do things with our instruments, with our songs, and not know they were wrong.”
Big Turn Music Fest
With: Dessa, Jeremy Messersmith, and many more; full lineup here
When: Feb. 14-15
Where: Throughout Red Wing
Tickets: $50 for one day, $85 for two days; more info here
