Charles P. Ries and the MinkTronics were brought together by a confluence of commonalities. Heading the list, as their name suggests, are shared experiences in a little-known rural Wisconsin industry: mink farming. Bassist Kevin Rautmann and guitarist-keyboardist Mark Truesdell used to work on a mink ranch in Mukwonago.
Their frontman, poet Charles Ries, grew up on one near Sheboygan. But the business they have together isn’t about hats or stoles but performing (along with drummer Ron Baake) a set of songs that flow together like stanzas in a poem to suggest a larger story.
Truesdell and Rautmann have been writing songs together since high school and performed together as an acoustic duo and in groups such as Umberto Vata—which recorded an album with fire buckets and chainsaws alongside conventional instruments. Encountering Ries, a published poet and storywriter with several books to his credit, was an opportunity to reinvent themselves as songwriters. “All these songs poured out of me from ages 16-22—and then my muse walked away,” Truesdell says.
After they saw Ries read at Marquette University, the muse whispered in their ears: “collaborate.”
“It took six-to-nine months before we got together,” Truesdell says. “Kevin and I spent a lifetime playing our songs; it was nice to apply elements of those songs as a framework for something new.” It wasn’t simply a matter of setting Ries’ words to existing Rautmann-Truesdell melodies but of “creating a new form,” Truesdell explains, “taking elements and ideas from old songs and applying them in a new way.”
“I’m flashing back to the first time we got together with Charles,” Rautmann says. “He read a poem, and we thought, ‘should we make up music on the spot?’ But we had an old song of ours that fit the mood of that poem.” Eschewing faint Impressionism and self-absorption, Ries’ poems tell stories that condense experience into strongly incised phrases and sentences. Leonard Cohen might be the closest reference point.
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“Narrative poetry with music gives the audience more to hold on to—a poetry reading tends to be a one-note medium,” Ries says. “The music amplifies the story.” He adds that he’d never worked with musicians before. “I didn’t know what a chorus was or when to shut up and allow the musicians to play.”
For the site of their next performance, Ries and the MinkTronics chose the historic Polish Falcon Hall. “We didn’t think it would work in a pure bar. We needed a performance venue,” Ries says. “When I was growing up, everything important was held in halls behind bars—weddings, baptisms. There aren’t many halls left.”
Ries describes the themes running through the nine pieces on the program as “love-death-mink—they’re all tied to those ideas,” he says with a smile. As for the band’s sound, Truesdell explains, “You take the early Violent Femmes, put a sheen of jazz around it and a sheen of avant-garde improvisation around that—and then a sheen of the Everly Brothers around that.”
Milwaukee jazz pianist Anthony Deutsch, performing as Father Sky (“my dad worked at a mink farm” he says, seriously) will open the performance. Also on the bill is Poets Monday MC Tim Kloss—perhaps the only performer that night with no ties to fur-bearing mammals.
Charles P. Ries and The MinkTronics perform Saturday, Nov. 18, at Polish Falcon Hall, 801 E. Clarke St.
