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By Jeb Wright
Transcribed By Eric Sandberg
Back in 1986, The Rainmakers hit the scene with a killer debut album. The band were concert staples in the Midwest and the rest of the world soon found out what we had been digging.
The self-titled debut contained their best-known tunes “Rocking at the T-Dance,” “Downstream,” “Let My People Go-Go” and “Big Fat Blonde.” FM radio dug them and they had some success…not a ton of success…but some success.
Bob Walkenhorst is the lead singer, main songwriter and rhythm guitarist in the band. In some ways it was his baby…it still is. The Rainmakers broke up for a while but since 2011 they have been writing music, recording albums and playing live.
CRR’s Jeb Wright was a huge fan of the band…so when the opportunity to chat with Bob came up Jeb was thrilled. If you know this band you will dig this interview…if you are not sure who they are, then read on and you’ll dig this band.
Jeb: I saw you live the first time you played Barleycorn's a year ago and I have to say, you guys sound better than ever.
Bob Walkenhorst: Well you would hope that when you play for a few decades you would actually get better. When we reformed in 2011 I think that was a nice surprise that we had all gotten better on our instruments...better at our craft. That was a nice thing to bring to the table.
Jeb: I suspect, like many fans, my Rainmakers collection consists of the first album. I've heard the others but that was the one I bought. I was born and raised in Topeka so I followed all the mid-western bands like Shooting Star, Kansas, Etc. and then you guys came along a little later. I thought you guys were actually bigger than you were because you were huge around here.
BW: We did fine. There are so many different ways to measure it. However, thirty-five years later, we're still playing. We put out a new album a couple of years ago...we're still making new material and people still want to come out and hear us play. I'll take that. I'm not a millionaire but that's okay with me.
Jeb: For the many who don't live in Wichita, Barleycorn's is a tiny club downtown and it was packed to the rafters. The energy in the room was electric. You have a unique voice and you are a hell of a songwriter...if people know about The Rainmakers, they like you guys...the challenge has always been getting the word out.
BW: We've got a very loyal but sometimes small army. Again, I'll take it. If the alternative is you're not playing anymore and nobody wants to hear you, I'll take the still playing and people still want to hear us option.
Jeb: You got back together seven years ago, what prompted that? But first, fill me in on what you were doing in the gap.
BW: We made our Mercury albums in the mid to late ‘80s and then we were dropped by Mercury USA. We continued to make records for Polygram in Europe and Canada. And then…life got busy. I didn't have kids when we were originally touring. Some of the other guys did, but I didn't. My family life started in the mid ‘90s and by that time I was ready to stay home. So that chapter came to a natural end.
We had a gap of about thirteen years and in that time, your kids grow up and jobs come and go. Suddenly you find yourself with the time and you have to check yourself on whether you have the energy and the desire to do this.
2011 was the 25th anniversary of our first album coming out. We thought if there was ever a good reason to touch this stone again, twenty-five years was a good reason. I called the original members. The bass player Rich Ruth who was living in Nashville for twenty-five years was all on board.
Pat Tomek, the drummer I had continued to work with off and on was on board. Steve Phillips, our original guitarist was very busy with his Irish rock band, The Elders so he didn't have time to do it. It was fine because Jeff Porter, our current lead guitarist, had been playing with acoustically for eight years at that point, so he already knew all the songs. He fit right in.
We got the idea in 2011 that this was going to be a one-off. We would go out and play some dates, play our old material and..."Thank you folks, it was great". But being the money grubbers that we are we said "Let's make an album so we'll have something to sell."
After the writing and recording process the album [25 On] was, to me, the best thing we'd ever done. It was just so much fun to make. There were no egos, no record company...it was nothing but the pleasure of music.
That first tour went very well. We went to Norway, our home away from home. We did two tours over there and were recieved very warmly. We thought "Why quit now?" So we continued.
Jeb: How did this connection between the band and Norway come about?
BW: In ’86, when our first album came out we were on Mercury/Polygram which is a big international company. Our records were released all over Europe, South America, Australia, Japan...we were basically a worldwide release and it just clicked in Norway.
We know other American bands where it clicked for them in other countries. For the Dan Reed Network it was Sweden, for the Brandos it was Germany. For us it was Norway, which is the smallest population in Europe. But they have all the money so it's just another, 'I'll take that' [Laughter]. Norway was very generous to us. They made it financially possible for us to do this and they were so receptive to our music that, even after thirteen years we could go back there and sell out shows, even in the middle of the week. That's why we go to Norway.
It's funny to think that the first half of our band's story is pre-internet and pre-cell phone. How in the hell did we get anywhere? How did we get across the country? When we resumed in 2011, we had friends all over Europe and particularly Scandinavia. It's certainly been a nice chapter to make and maintain these friendships. It's been nothing but a pleasure this second time around. It really has.
Jeb: I've noticed that over time a lot of bands, especially the big AOR bands, have evolved into family businesses. For example, Phil Ehart has been managing the band Kansas for about ten years now. They just thought "We know how to do this, we don't need to pay an outsider, we can keep it in house."
Foghat is another example. I'm doing some work for them on their current tour. They are another band that has pared things down and have complete control over things and they love it.
BW: And you're no longer tempted by some of the lifestyle extremes that come with youth. You really want to do a good show and get a good night's sleep so you can do another good show. Those become the priorities.
Jeb: It may sound like a cliché but a lot of bands that are still doing it today, yourself included, are doing it for the right reason.
BW: I think so, particularly for those bands that are not going to fill arenas. You're going to go out and make a little money here and a little money there and you can patch together a living or at least a nice addition to your living.
You don't have the luxury of being wasteful with your time and energy and the thing that drives you is falling in love with music all over again, which is what got you started originally before all the baggage and trappings distracted you from that.
Jeb: I'm going to rewind all the way. When you guys first formed was it called Steve, Bob and Rich?
BW: Yes. I was the drummer when we first started.
Jeb: You were an Aggieville band [old shopping, restaurant and bar district in Manhattan, Kansas known for being a pre-game hangout for Kansas State fans]?
BW: We were very much a Midwestern bar band. We would do the four to five nights of four-hour gigs in one place thing. We did tons of covers and would work in some original material when we could.
That was around 1983-1984 when there were all these original bands rising out of the Midwest. The Clocks, Kelley Hunt and the Kinetics, Fools Face. There were all these great bands doing more and more original material and making great independent records. I'm still in touch with most, if not all, of these people.
It was a great, healthy peer group competition, filling clubs, going out to hear each other...it was a really wonderful time to be a young band. There were other people around trying to do what you were trying to do. You could learn from them and they could learn from you. We all experienced it together. It was a really good time to be a musician.
Jeb: Were you guys in school at this time or were you full-time musicians?
BW: No, I had already graduated from college by that time. I got off to a little bit of a late start on this. I was in my thirties when the band was clicking. I had lived down in Branston and had moved to Kansas City with the sole intention of putting together a great original band.
I was already writing songs, living in south Missouri and I thought "Nope, I've got to get to a real city." So I got to Kansas City with the intention of starting the greatest band that I can make. Maybe not the greatest band in the world.
Jeb: That first album is still a lot of your set. It is so strong.
BW: When we reformed in 2011, the 25th anniversary of that first album, we did what a lot of bands are doing. We performed the album in its entirety, in order. It was a pretty impactful set. Of course we did some other numbers after that, but we would start off with that album and people would just explode. It was so gratifying to see the impact that those songs have had on people's lives.
Jeb: What was the difference between playing, say, "Rockin' At The T-Dance" when you were young and twenty-five years later as a seasoned musician?
BW: Really the magic is that it's not that much different. When you have worked hard at your craft, whether you're twenty-five, thirty-five or sixty-five, and it's a good song, and you count it down and the band comes down like a hammer, time ceases.
That was really the good thing to see...all these people who were in college when they first heard that song, and that song kicks off...they are back there. It's a time machine. It's one of the magical things. When your in the middle of that song, everybody is young again. It's pretty cool.
Jeb: I experience that from the other side. It's 1-2-3 and you're taking us for a ride!
BW: That's what music can do. Music can transcend. I'm still in awe of that power.
Jeb: What was the defining moment that got the band noticed? Did you guys shop a demo? Were you pounding the pavement? What is The Rainmakers' story?
BW: We were very lucky in that we found a good manager. When I'm talking to young bands who say "What do you gotta do?"...well, first of all, like Steve Martin says, you have to be undeniably good.
Then you have to be smart about the business and you have to have someone who knows what they're doing representing you. You have to have somebody who sees your talent, sees that you're human and also sees $$ when they look at you. They have to believe that there is money to be made or they don't have any interest.
We were lucky to land a young guy out of Chicago named Chip Hooper, who later became the top agent in the country. He passed away last year. He became the agent for Phish, Dave Matthews Band, Aerosmith, he went to the top, but he became our manager when he was twenty years old.
We could see that this guy is do or die. He's never going to take no for an answer. And he was a great human being on top of that. He was a good guy so we were lucky. We didn't find somebody who was going to rip us off. We found somebody who was intensely dedicated to us and he loved what he was doing.
Jeb: He also must have been savvy enough to recognize your talent. He must have liked your songs.
BW: Well we were undeniably good! (Laughter)
Jeb: I don't want to get you in trouble with the guys but, are you the main creative force behind the band?
BW: Yeah. It think when you start out as a bar band in a democratic situation, it eventually comes down to songwriting. That's what sets every band apart. Do you have a unique songwriter in the band? And I worked very, very hard to be a good songwriter.
Songwriting is a weird thing. There are great musicians who can't write a song to save their life. And there are great songwriters who are really half-assed musicians. I kind of fall into that second category. I'm a very good half-assed musician but I'm a pretty good songwriter.
Jeb: What does that mean to the layman? A non-creative guy who's a music lover might say "What do you mean you work at it? Don't you just pick up a guitar and go?"
BW: There is a great story in that Eagles documentary (History of The Eagles, Netflix) where Glenn Frey and Don Henley were trying to figure out how to be songwriters and Don Henley was living in an apartment where Jackson Browne was living in the basement. He'd get up in the morning and hear Browne on a piano working on a song. He'd go out and come back four hours later and Jackson would still be working on that song. It would be midnight and he was still working out that song.
Don Henley said he realized then that that is what it takes to be a songwriter. It's perseverance and work and focus and doing it over and over and over. I wrote hundreds of terrible songs before I wrote a good one. You have to be possessed by it and obsessed with it.
You ask yourself "How did Paul McCartney write "Yesterday"? How does something that graceful and effortless come into being?" You have to keep at it until you find your path. What's your viewpoint? It's not going to be like everyone else's. What are your literary influences?
Jeb: I think the creative process must transcend time and space. Does that make sense to you?
BW: I think you tap into something that is not constrained by your times. Even protest music that is written about very specific events, the best of it can then be applied to events decades later. There's something about a song where you really strike the emotional heart of it, it does become timeless.
Jeb: When you really get into writing, it happens when I'm writing, I go somewhere , I'm not sure where. My wife will be talking to me and I have no idea what she's saying.
BW: Yeah, you're in trance land. For a lot of creative effort there is this trancelike state that you're trying to reach. Sometimes you can drop into it for fifteen seconds and that was the fifteen seconds you needed and sometimes you can get lost in it for hours and suddenly you wake up and it's the end of the day. You're not sure what happened but you've got something...you've made something.
That's part of the magic, part of the hoodoo of music that I can still get really excited about. I'm not really sure how this works!
Jeb: Can you give my your thoughts on some of your songs, starting with "Rockin' At The T-Dance"?
BW: That was a Kansas City event, the collapse of the Hyatt House [Hyatt Regency walkway collapse, 7/17/81]. I kind of paralleled that to a couple of space disasters and tried to tie it all together into a rock and roll song. I was intrigued with the idea of writing songs about subjects that had never been written about.
There are a gazillion love songs...a gazillion I feel lonely songs. There's really not a love song to be found on that first Rainmakers album. I wanted to find subject matter that hadn't been exhausted or become a cliché.
If you go down the list, the first song is about work ethic, "Downstream" is about history, "Let My People Go-Go" is about religion and it goes on like that. These are odd subjects for songs but they're very accessible songs. It's the idea of making something unique without being weird.
Jeb: That's cool when you think of most songwriters writing off of their sleeve, using G, C and D with maybe an E minor thrown in.
BW: But then you listen to Kris Kristofferson, a guy who can barely play the guitar, but he knew what to do with G, C, D and E minor. He knew how to create something real out of that, or at least he knew how to create theater that seemed real. There was no Bobby McGee, that was a writing exercise. He knew enough about the human condition to be able to create a little piece of theater there that everybody believed.
Jeb: You kind of did that with your take on Bo Diddley on "Downstream".
BW: Yeah, Mark Twain, Harry Truman, Chuck Barry and me on a raft. It was a great little fantasy with little lines in there that had imagination. Asking Harry Truman how he feels about the bomb and he says "Pass me the bottle and mind your own business.' Those are telling little scenarios that, all this time later, I'm still proud of.
Jeb: "Let My People Go-Go" was the one I remember hearing on the radio.
BW: That one certainly got the most airplay locally and internationally. It got played on the BBC for a long, long time.
Jeb: Did you know how clever you were being with that one? Did you have a wry grin when you came up with that title?
BW: [Laughs] I had written that song and the band had been playing it for six months before we ever heard Wham's "(Wake Me Up) Before You Go Go." I was like "Ahhh fuck you guys! You stole my punchline!" [Laughter]
You used the word "clever" and in the 80s when I was writing songs, being clever was very important to me. I wanted people to smile and go "Listen to that smart ass." There was a certain attitude with the live performances, the band's personality and those songs. There's certainly a clever, smart ass quality to a lot of it.
As the years have passed clever is not as important to me. I like to be entertaining and I like to be literate. Being clever is not so important.
Jeb: The song you didn't play at the show I saw, and you made a comment about it, was "Big Fat Blonde" which, when I was fourteen, was probably my favorite song.
BW: Well maybe you've outgrown it like I have. There's better things to sing about.
Jeb: You're probably right about that. I remember someone kept yelling for it and you said something like "Nah, just be glad you got "Government Cheese."
BW: We rarely play either one of those songs. There are certain songs that you write when you're an angry young man and then years later you don't feel great about singing them anymore. Those are pretty much the only two. There are a few other Rainmakers songs we don't play very much and I have no use for, but not very many.
When we play a long show, and sometimes we go two and a half hours, we play a lot of songs and they are all like old friends. We get excited because we worked very hard as a band to create those songs so there is something there to sink your teeth into. It's a joy to play them again.
Jeb: A song that didn't get any airplay but has grown on me over the years is "The One That Got Away." That is such a clever song lyrically.
BW: It's clever but not in a humorous way. I think it's got a lot of good word rhythm to it. I do a lot of solo work these days and when I play that one I tell the story that it was the first song I wrote that I didn't think had anything wrong with it. You write five hundred songs and there is always something wrong with them and finally you write one song that has nothing wrong with it. "The One That Got Away" is that song for me.
Jeb: "Drinkin' On The Job" always makes me giggle.
BW: Again, that's very much a study in cleverness, lining up the various slang terms for drunk with the right occupation. It literally was a word game the band played while we were driving back from New York City one time. What are all the names for being messed up and what occupation would go with them? It became a song.
Jeb: You got signed to a major label, you were getting airplay, you blew up in Norway, you were on tour...what happened? Why didn't it continue?
BW: The record industry back then certainly required a lot of hard work, and we put that hard work in, but parts of succeeding in that business comes down to luck. We got lucky on some things and we were just as unlucky on others. There are changes in circumstances, that you don't have any control over, that change your trajectory.
Odd little turns of events. I could bore you with a lot of details. You depend on your record company a lot. When we got signed, our record company was flush with money and could promote a band like us. By the time our third record rolled around the record company was having financial difficulties. We had not broken into a million-selling act so they couldn't keep supporting us. If they were continuing to have success with other acts they could have kept spending money on us.
We were working real hard, they were working real hard but they ran out of money. That's just one of those things that you have no control over. We probably didn't give ourselves breaks enough. We could have persevered longer and maybe had that breakthrough song, if we had paced our career differently. I don't blame anybody for that.
When you're young you just keep working. Luckily we all lived to tell about it. There were no tragedies involved. We're a quirky little band and always have been. The fact that we have any kind of mainstream audience acceptance, record sales and airplay is kinda cool.
We really didn't have to change. We were not trying to follow any trend. We were writing these quirky little songs about what life was like in the Midwest and our record company was like "Yeah, yeah, go do that. See what you can do with it." So, that's our story, and I'm OK with that story.
Jeb: You've inspired me to check out your latest album. Tell me how it's going to be different from the rainmakers I know.
BW: We've actually made three albums since we reformed in 2011, two of them with original material and the third is called Cover Band in which we did some very interesting arrangements of some of our favorite songs.
25 On was the reunion album. It was a little more acoustic based but it is still a rock and roll band album with some easily accessible and likeable songs. Then in 2014 we did an album called Monster Movie which is actually very similar in feel to the first Rainmakers album. Its a big rock album. There's one big ballad on there but there's a lot of political commentary and great guitar work and some spooky beats.
A lot of people have commented that that album seems to parallel the first Rainmakers album quite a bit in feel and tone. It's weird that we made that before the current political climate of weirdness and it seemed to almost predict it. I'm not saying I'm a prophet or anything bit there are weird things on that record that came to pass. Monster Movie is a very good, likeable album. It's not as accessible as 25 On, it's a little darker, but it's a great sounding record. The band played really well.
Jeb: Aside from this tour, do you have anything else going on?
BW: Actually, I just finished making an album with my daughter. It's a Simon & Garfunkel type of approach to things, lots of two-part harmonies. We're going to Norway to perform that in September and the album will be released in October. My daughter, who is twenty-five now, is a really good songwriter on her own. That's the thing that keeps me excited about music. What's the next dimension? What's the next step that you're not expecting?
