Re: R.I.P. Erik Baade, bassist for the Vulgar Boatmen

Announced via the band's Facebook account. (He played with them from 1986 to 1993, more or less their peak years.)

FWIW the group plays pretty regularly in Chicago, which I didn't realize until recently.

I grew up in Indiana and they were a mainstay; they had this weird Indiana/Florida dual lineup and dual touring roster. I don't quite understand how it was supposed to work.

[observer.com]

Very informative, Ira. I still find it a mystery how they tried to pull that weird structure off.

The Mysteries of Life - that was another Indiana band that did some good stuff. I remember they had a CD-single with a nifty Talking Heads cover.

MoL were connected to the Boatmen, inasmuch as Jake Smith was half of one (with his wife, ex-Blake Babies drummer Freda Love Smith) and bassist in the other. They've been posting stuff on Bandcamp, and I recommend it highly (except the most recent new album, which is a semi-amusing outgrowth of Jake's forthcoming book on new age music.)

God, I haven't listened to them in ages. I had Please Panic in heavy rotation when it came out. Listening to You and Your Sister now for the first time in who knows how many years (decades?).



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/14/2026 04:35PM by Michael Toland.

Time for a “Long Time No Listen” report.

I'm not sure how long it's been since I listened to one of their albums in its entirety, but "Drive Somewhere" has never dropped out of my regular rotation and Lord knows how many different playlists I have it stuck in.

The Boatmen had the misfortune of becoming one of the best genteel jangly College Rock bands at the exact moment that genteel jangly College Rock bands fell out favor. I saw them on the side stage at Lollapalooza 3 and there couldn't have been more than ten other people actively watching them. One of the other audience members was yelling at passersby to stop and pay attention, but none took him up on it. It was early enough in the day that things were still mostly on schedule and they were playing during the break between main stage bands, and when they announced they were wrapping up because someone or another, I don't remember who, were getting ready to start on the main stage, me and the paltry few others watching them booed. But mostly no one gave a damn. The early 90s were a grim time for any non-legacy (i.e. REM) 80s-style jangle-pop holdovers not named the Gin Blossoms, and those saps had their own grimness to deal with.

Per Wikipedia, it looks like St. Louis was the only date the Boatmen played on Lollapalooza 3. In Gina Arnold's Route 666, she mentions them on the side stage at Lollapalooza 2 where they didn't even attract the tiny crowd they did when I saw them the next year and had zero people watching them. In that case, iirc scheduling snafus throughout the day led to them playing exactly opposite Pearl Jam, which was basically being a lamb offered up for slaughter in 1992. I still would've opted for the Boatmen had I been there.

I saw them one other time when they were one of the very few bands to venture to Springfield, IL during my early-90s exile there. They played some weird nightclub in a strip mall between Dairy Queen and a Jewel-Osco grocery store. But it was a hip enough joint to also bring Madder Rose to town, and the great but unable to break out of the Chicago scene Big Hat. Plus, the exceedingly rare cool bands that played Springfield meant all the Springfield hipsters would be in attendance, so I'd get to hang out briefly with Buffy, the most beautiful record store clerk to ever live until her unofficial bodyguards, the members of NiL8, would come around and shoo off any pests who basked too long in her radiance. But she loved "Drive Somewhere" also, God bless her raven-haired, impossibly curvy heart.

Ira gets namechecked in the Vulgar Boatmen's Wikipedia entry and his name is misspelled. But at least they don't call him Kaplan or Levin.

I was at that Lolla show in St. Lou and was one of the 10 people there to see the Boatmen!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/16/2026 11:54AM by ira.

Really! Well, that's pretty cool. The people you cross paths with without ever knowing it!

Vulgar Boatmen is a name I’d heard but had never heard the band… until you guys posted. This is really good and I’m a little embarrassed they were a blind spot, but VERY happy to hear it now.

Sometimes I think we post too many RIP’s, but THIS is why I know I’m wrong to think that. The music finally got to my ears, and hopefully some others as well. Thanks for posting this!

I’ll confess, I didn’t know about them until earlier this year when they were discussed in Greil Marcus’s Q&A. I soon regretted missing out on their reissue from a decade ago and even a somewhat recent NYC show that I could have attended.