Photo credit: Veronica Rusnak
What was happening onstage was almost beside the point.
Friday’s remembrance of late Milwaukee musician Peder Hedman at Linneman’s Riverwest Inn seemed to primarily act as an extended funeral reception. Only the customary meal and seating for it were absent among the nearly full house of people who showed up to pay respect to a longstanding, beloved figure in the local scene felled by a heart attack last December.
Just from the seat I occupied throughout the full night of song in which Hedman had a hand in creating, I met people with a gamut of stories about him. Among them were next-door neighbors who, like Hedman and his wife, have a child with Down syndrome and who thought the musical involvement of the man they knew as a house painter in daylight hours could have been relegated to playing covers in a wedding band, considering how little he spoke of it. There was also a man who knew him from high school, overjoyed to be at a bustling commemoration of a dear friend.
But, even if one didn’t know Hedman and his music, there was enough of the latter to make anyone with a fairly expansive taste in rock ’n’ roll realize that the city lost a prodigious talent whose gifts could have led to greater recognition had his breaks landed differently. The fête attracted contemporaries of his who had worked with him in the run of bands of which he had been a member for more than 30 years as well as some who had shared bills with those bands. Highlights were many.
Reunions of a couple of the better-known acts of which Hedman was a member—psychedelic-leaning punk combo Liquid Pink and an especially feral iteration of Bicentennial Rub—numbered prominently among those peak moments. The former’s set was prefaced by a fond remembrance by Blaine Schultz recalling how Liquid Pink was one of the first local bands about whom he had heard a buzz after moving to Milwaukee. Schultz then led the band through a fiery run through the group’s “Danelectro.” Rivaling Bicentennial Rub’s borderline unhinged performance was a brief set by The Mighty Deer Lick wherein singer Dave Reinholdt went topless by the end of their second and last song. He also got in one of the best spoken lines of the night when he said of Hedman’s backhanded compliment that the Deer Lick are comprised of nice guys, saying “I’d rather be a nice guy in a crappy band than a douche bag in The Rolling Stones.”
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Voot Warnings, sporting an unkempt blond toupee over his shaven pate, and Sugarfoot bandleader Alex Ballard enthusiastically fronted a few of Hedman’s songs individually but became greater than their sum as they dueled with electric guitars on another. More rousing still was the night’s closing number, a rendition of Liquid Pink’s quaintly funny “Pretty Lizard,” wherein most everyone who had played or sung during the preceding three hours joined a singalong sendoff.
The venue simultaneously hosted a silent auction featuring a gamut of goods for sale to benefit Hedman’s son. With that in mind, it might be fitting that Hedman’s songs detailing his contentedness as a proud dad weren’t really broached this evening, as if the participating musicians knew this material was so personal that covering it could be awkward. He was still prolific enough that nobody was left wanting for music of his to cover in tribute, and he was a sweet enough guy to have so many appreciative souls gather to so joyfully mourn his loss.
