wholemusicclub, YouTube
According to legend Minneapolis musician/producer Ed Ackerson spent his college student loan money on a Rickenbacker guitar. Ackerson, who never stopped chasing the sound in his head, died of pancreatic cancer on Friday. He was 54.
Ackerson’s groups The 27 Various, Polara and BNLX were no strangers to Milwaukee clubs like The Unicorn, The Toad Café, Shank Hall and Club Garibaldi. Sprawling music conversations with Ackerson could veer from his love of British Mod to Chris Bell’s then-obscure I Am the Cosmos to the Incredible String Band.
Along with his friend John Kass, Ackerson started Susstones, a record label that would release records by Milwaukee bands. Ackerson and Kass were obsessed with Milwaukee psychedelic artists Plasticland. When that band’s rhythm section (John Frankovic and Vic Demechei along with Voot Warnings), formed the Gothics, they found a home on Susstones. The label also released a single by Liquid Pink.
Frankovic recalls Ackerson as a “one in a million guy” citing the 27 Various LP Yes, Indeed as combining the best qualities of power-pop, mod and psychedelic music. “Ed’s production work held so much creative intensity,” Frankovic says.
He recalled their first encounter when Plasticland’s Glenn Rehse was doing a psych-music record spin at the old Gordon Park Pub.
“Ed and John Kass were on the way back from a record show in Cleveland or Chicago and they stopped to get something to eat in Milwaukee,” Frankovic says. “At their table was a newspaper open to an ad for the Gordon Park Pub event and they stopped by. In the years after that we would show up at each other’s gigs in different cities.”
In 1996 Ackerson bought the Minneapolis’s Uptown neighborhood greenhouse that he would turn into Flowers Studio.
In a 2005 interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Ackerson described Flowers as his way to pay back the music scene he said he “got so much out of when I was a kid. So many people were supportive and gave me a chance,” he said. “It gave me this halcyon dream of what the Minneapolis scene can be. I’d like to think I provide that kind of help to some of the people coming up now.”
At Flowers, Ackerson worked on projects with The Replacements, The Jayhawks and Lizzo, as well as a number of releases by BNLX, the group that also included his wife, bassist Ashley Ackerson.
