This is about Surahoolies, a band from St. Cloud, MN, who have existed in various incarnations from around 1984 to the present day in 2026.
Before I heard this band for the first time, I might have insisted that I probably wouldn’t be into whatever I might have assumed it was. Looking back, this band occupies the largest space in my archives, of all the bands I ever recorded. Sometimes you just have to listen.
In 1990, I left a job at Minnesota Ragstock, resurrected my sporadic newsletter / zine, The New Puritan ReView, and began a 4-year stint with the Kinko’s Corporation. Curiously, it wouldn’t have occurred to me that there would be a common thread running through these events. Quite unexpectedly, Kinko’s turned out to be a haven for creative types, zine-sters and musicians in particular. And, to paraphrase an old adage of sorts, it seemed that the best advertised the least.
Near the East Bank campus of the University of Minnesota, in a tiny but thriving community known as Stadium Village, I found myself working in close quarters with members of at least four different bands. One of those was Mark Hasbrouck – who I later learned was the guiding force of a group I would end up documenting in various incarnations for the next fifteen years, Surahoolies.
Originally hailing from St. Cloud, MN, Surahoolies were reportedly named after a nomadic African tribe known for “crazy music and weird tie-dyes”. Musically, their sound was an amalgamation of post-psychedelic rock, Beatles-esque jangly power pop, ethnological references from nearly every corner of the planet, and a seemingly telepathic penchant for improvisation.
There is a lot more to this story, but I’ll just leave you with the music. For now.
What follows is a handful of live recordings which the band has graciously allowed me to share on Live Music Archive with other past, present and future fans.
Surahoolies
Profetz 1984-86
Hazzy 2000-present
[links to recordings provided in posts below]
Surahoolies • 1991-06-24
Mpls, MN • Fine Line
For me, this is where it all started with the Surahoolies. This lo-fi audio document of a band might seem somewhat unspectacular in itself, but the performance itself sparked a journey into a world of imagination that has spanned thirty-five years and counting.
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Surahoolies • 1991-10-01
Mpls, MN • Loring Bar
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Surahoolies • 1991-10-02
Mpls, MN • First Avenue
The bill for this show is unconfirmed, but the DJ announces after the set that four more bands will be performing.
This is a copy given to me by Mark, transferred from the band’s original master recording.
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Surahoolies • 1991-11-24
Mpls, MN • Uptown Bar & Grill
Bill:
Big Hat [not recorded]
Surahoolies
Live Sound:
Kim Bromm
The original master recording was given to the band. This is a copy given to me by Mark, transferred from the band’s original master recording.
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Surahoolies • 1992-10-23
Mpls, MN • Red Carpet Nightclub
This is a 1st-gen edited copy which was given to me by the band; the original master recording was made by someone working with the band, as I did not attend this performance.
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Surahoolies • 1993-01-20
Mpls, MN • Artifex Gallery
Bill:
Surahoolies
The Unkind
This is the shortest Surahoolies live recording I have in the archives, and possibly also the shortest performance I’ve ever attended by any band. Only one song was performed, yet for me personally, it felt like one of the longest nights ever. In Shakespearean terms, the whole evening might have been regarded as a comedy of errors, except at the time, no one was laughing.
The event was an opening night gallery show of political caricature art, sponsored by a non-profit pop-up gallery called Artifex. I had been involved in helping the curator promote the event, as well as arranging the musical entertainment for the evening – The Unkind, who I had only recently started working with, and my friends in The Surahoolies.
The one thing I can not take any credit for is the weather that evening – a surprise blizzard mixed with freezing rain. The Surahoolies had driven all the way from St. Cloud into Minneapolis for the show through treacherous road conditions, and one of their vehicles had actually gone of the road into a ditch, as I recall. The unexpected weather had successfully prevented anyone from attending the event, so the atmosphere was tense even before a single note of music was played.
The Unkind played their set while The Surahoolies were loading their gear into the room, which turned out to be a disaster. Having been something of a musical hermit since my tenure in Borrowed Time ended nearly a decade earlier, it was my first time playing in public, much less in front of people I knew and respected, and who were much more disciplined in their approach to playing music than I was. I tried my best to channel a CAN-like vibe into the mix, but somewhere between inadequate gear and dubious abilities, I’m afraid I fell short of my hopes in that regard more often than not. I couldn’t hear my guitar in the room, so I leaned into my under-powered Peavey amp, making it difficult to hear what the others were doing, so I played the entire set out of tune with everyone else. Not too surprisingly, that set turned out to be my last gasp with the group.
Getting back on topic… the few stragglers that had trickled in from the adjacent warehouse office spaces had left by the time the Surahoolies were set up, so they were performing to a mostly empty room at that point. Launching into an extremely focused version of “Andy’s”, for nearly six minutes, they managed to transcend the frustrated tension in the room, replacing it with an atmosphere of meditative beauty. Alas, once the last notes had faded, it was clear that the evening needed to come to an end, so everyone could get to their respective places of shelter.
There you have it – the longest explanation for the shortest set in the archives. But sometimes the creative world is held together by many stories like this one, and all most people will see is the external result, without any understanding of the inner workings of the process leading to that moment. This is but one of the myriad of such stories, many of which have yet to be told.
The extra tracks are simply the result of leaving the tape recorder running while everyone was packing up, followed by twenty minutes of radio frequencies which were picked up by the un-shielded mic cables. Yep, I’m a nerd, and thought that somehow that was an organic part of the documentation, so I left it in. But those first six minutes of sonic bliss are truly sublime, and don’t even hint at any of what I’ve just described above. Enjoy!
On this date in 1993, Bill Clinton was inaugurated as the 42nd President of the U.S.
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Surahoolies • 1993-01-23
Mpls, MN • Loring Bar
Although I had been to The Loring Bar several times to hang out and socialize with friends, this might have been the first time I ever saw a band there. It was also the first opportunity I had to catch a glimpse of what The Surahoolies were really capable of. Three sets allowed the group to sprawl out a bit more than they could in venues like The Uptown Bar or 7th St Entry, mixing up their own original material with a few classic covers, bridging the gap between bluegrass, polka, reggae, afro-beat, and pretty much any other genre one might think of – sometimes within the same song! A few photos from this show are included here, which were taken on an actual SLR camera – on actual film, no less.
Toward the end of the second cassette, there is some rather extreme L-R channel shifting which might be mistaken for phasing differential, but is actually an artifact caused by improperly wound tape in the cassette shell. It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally when a tape hasn’t been fully wound from the start to end leaders, flipping and resuming recording can result in a sort of tape wobble between the left and right channels. This can be corrected digitally – by hand (not automated) – but in the time it would take to fix that, I could probably get a few more tapes digitized, so I’ll try to get back it later, as time allows.
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Surahoolies • 1993-03-26
Mpls, MN • Loring Bar
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Surahoolies • 1993-04-29
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada • The Spectrum Cabaret
Night 1 of a three night stand in Winnipeg.
This is the last song of the evening – the rest of this show is currently MIA.
It seems likely that this may have been the show where J approached me just minutes before the band took the stage, and persuaded me to record with his 4-track deck, rather than my own 2-channel deck. Unfortunately, it had been years since I used a 4-track reel to reel deck, and I had never used a 4-track cassette deck before. Imagine our surprise at the end of the night, when we played the tapes back, and heard the bleed-through playing in reverse! Of course, we quickly realized that I had made a classic rookie blunder, and recorded on both sides of the cassettes, as though I were using a standard 2-channel deck – in effect, making the recordings fairly useless. I’m not sure how that would account for me recording the last song intact, unless this was recorded on a fresh cassette, and didn’t overlap with anything on the flip side, but that seems likely to be the story behind this one.
Oh, and you don’t even want to know about the ordeal we had getting in through customs….
Here are a few tidbits of history I was able to locate about the venue from various internet sites:
Spectrum Cabaret
176 Fort Street
Winnipeg, MB R3C 1C9
Canada
Burned down in 1995. The Pyramid Cabaret was later opened at the same address.
The Pyramid Cabaret emerged from the ashes of the Spectrum Cabaret in 1995 when Dave McKeigan took the reigns. Capacity is approximately 400.
Live music still found a home in 1988 at The Spectrum Cabaret, which people know today as The Pyramid.
Housed in an old garage on Fort Street, it was one of the top rooms for live rock music in the city.
The likes of Goo Goo Dolls, Quiet Riot and Echo & the Bunnymen have performed there over its decades-long tenancy.
The Spectrum closed in 1994 and reopened as The Pyramid in 1995 where it’s still going strong.
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Surahoolies • 1993-04-30
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada • The Spectrum Cabaret
Night 2 of a three night stand in Winnipeg.
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Surahoolies • 1993-05-01
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada • The Spectrum Cabaret
Night 3 of a three night stand in Winnipeg.
It seems like there should be more here, but for the moment this seems to be all I have from this night.
At the end of “Mojo”, Mark says the band will be back in a couple of minutes, so that would mean there should be a third set somewhere, although I don’t seem to have it in the archives [hmmm…???]
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Surahoolies • 1993-05-06
Mpls, MN • 7th St. Entry
Bill:
Surahoolies
The Twist Offs
Lemon Grass
Banana Seat
Live Sound:
Bill Batson
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Surahoolies • 1993-06-12
St. Cloud, MN • Red Carpet Nightclub
Listening back to this, it sounds like a show where I was mixing a soundboard feed in with the room mics, although there are no notes indicating this. I think this may have been recorded from the balcony, which was closed off, but the management allowed me to set up there. This would account for getting a much cleaner mic capture than usual, and would have allowed me to drop a few cables down to the soundboard, which was directly below me. If this is that show, then my setup included a Kenwood stereo amp from home, which I was using as a headphone amplifier, which at one point blew out one of the drivers in my MDR-V6 headphones.
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Surahoolies • 1993-07-29
Mpls, MN • 7th St. Entry
Bill:
Surahoolies
Delilahs
Ragamaroons
UMA
Live Sound:
Bill Batson
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Surahoolies • 1993-07-31
St. Cloud, MN • Red Carpet Nightclub
Bill:
Surahoolies
Ragamaroons
Notes indicate this is a mono master tape, although it is obviously a “re-mastered” / edited recording, based on fade in/outs between tracks – evidently in an attempt to simulate a prototype live album.
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Surahoolies • 1993-08-26
St. Cloud, MN • Red Carpet Nightclub
Andy Novak guests on King Of Bullshit.
This might possibly be the show where the sound person boosted the delay on Mark’s vocal during Crawling On The Bottom, which led to Mark extending the vocal in subsequent performances of the song.
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Surahoolies • 1993-09-01
Mpls, MN • Mississippi Live
Bill:
Barenaked Ladies [117th show?]
Johnny Clueless
Surahoolies
Live Sound: Dino
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Surahoolies • 1993-09-03
Mpls, MN • 7th St. Entry
Bill:
Surahoolies
Cave Music
Bug
Native Sons
Live Sound: Ron Anderson [?]
One of the more loose and carefree sets from Surahoolies, including a few spur-of-the-moment segue jams between songs, while attempting to be heard over the dance club music wafting in from the adjacent First Avenue mainroom.
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Surahoolies • 1993-09-11
Mpls, MN • Loring Bar
This was as close as I’ve ever seen to an acoustic set by Surahoolies. Some concerns had been raised by a neighbor regarding the volume of local entertainment from the venue, so there was a constant concern about the volume of the band this evening. The method used to record this evening definitely favored the drum kit, Jim’s guitar and violin, and the bass, in the left channel, and a bit more of Mark’s guitar, the brake drums and conga, and the bar crowd in the right channel. The vocals tended to be recorded a bit low, as a trade-off for capturing most of the instrumentation from the stage, with minimal crowd noise.
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Surahoolies • 1993-12-02
Mpls, MN • Uptown Bar & Grill
Bill:
Buddha Bunny
Surahoolies
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It is well worth your time to track down any of the band’s releases which are listed on the discogs site
Here are a few tunes from Hazzy & Jonas
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