I’ve been doing this music thing for a long time. Shockingly long, when I really step back and take it in. It’s relative, I know; the Stones and the surviving Beatles have been at it since the dawn of time, Buddy Guy, Ron Carter, and Irma Thomas even longer, but it’s not an exaggeration to say that the lion’s share of the folks I play with and share bills with these days were born after my gigging career had already gotten underway.

I hope these youngsters keep me in their midst out of appreciation and respect. I hope that what I do is relevant enough to allow me to hang, and that I’m not just a mascot or a cautionary tale to them- I’ll never be truly sure. I do know that I sometimes feel like a benevolent cross between Nosferatu and Guy Clark; I enjoy being around their energy and enthusiasm, drawing on the life force of their youth to replenish my own. In return, I try to give good advice when it’s solicited, stay vigilant but discreet, and aim to bring whatever experience I’ve accumulated over the eons to bear when those younger musicians and I make some noise together. That’s what people like Mick Montgomery, Sharon Lane, and Gregg Spence did for me when I was coming up. I try to pay it forward when I can.

Mick, Sharon, and Gregg. I’m sure they’ll appear in a lot of these stories I post. Central, pivotal characters in my life, and all integral parts of Mick’s brainchild, labor of love and, at times, millstone: Canal Street Tavern.

Canal Street, or simply “Canal”, was a nondescript corner bar in Dayton, Ohio that, even though it no longer exists, will always be my spiritual home and my Mother Church. I’ve waxed rhapsodic at length about that scruffy little dive. If you’ve spent any time at all with me, you’ve heard about that place and, since I have no doubt I’ll be writing at least one longer appreciation piece about it here, I’ll just give you the CliffsNotes rundown this time around:

Canal Street was that rarest beast of all music venues: a listening room. No TVs, no pool tables, no blenders. A rectangular 220-ish-capacity room, with church pews, tables, a couple rows of theatre seats, and an old mojo-infused bar, all facing a smallish stage on the wide wall. Music was the raison d’etre. Over the course of its history, legends graced its stage. Los Lobos. Townes Van Zandt. Ani DiFranco. Phish played to 14 people there one night early in their career. Willie Fucking Dixon played there. Countless others, as well. On the flip side of that coin, terrified kids were able -and encouraged- to play onstage in public for the first time at the weekly Tuesday Musician’s Co-op.

It was, in short, a very, very special place.

I foolishly assumed that there was a Canal Street Tavern in every town, until I started traveling and learned how untrue that was. I grew up in that room. I learned how to do what I do there, through Mick’s mentorship and support and easily hundreds of nights on that little stage. Rest his soul. I owe that man everything for the confidence and opportunities he gave me. My band, Shrug, was a big fish in that little pond of Dayton, and we played Canal Street to good-sized crowds every five weeks for well over a decade. There was only one gig Mick offered me that I can remember turning down simply out of fear of being completely eclipsed and, after all this preamble, it’s finally time to get to the band in question at the heart of this story.

*Iodine. L to R: Chris Feinstein, Jay Joyce, Brad Pemberton. Hard to find good quality photos online, and I ain’t gettin’ a Facebook account to download these.*

I don’t remember who told me about them first, but sometime in 1996 I started hearing folks in the scene (whose musical tastes I trusted unconditionally) speaking in hushed, awed tones about Iodine, a group who had come up from Nashville, played at Canal Street, and just annihilated the place. I took heed and made a note to not miss the next time they swung through.

And so it came to pass one evening that I donned my customary midwestern “rock & roll stevedore” uniform (as my friend Roger Owsley aptly described it)--black beanie, black hoodie, black jeans, and Doc Martens–and sallied forth unto Canal (for probably the third time that week; I should’ve gotten my mail delivered there, considering all the hours I spent there) to witness Iodine’s anxiously-awaited return. It was a triple bill, with Dayton’s surf rock kings the Mulchmen and the infectious, female-fronted punk outfit Real Lulu opening. The aforementioned Gregg Spence would’ve been doing double duty that night, drumming for both bands. The opening sets were great, I’m sure. I was a big fan of both groups. That said, I was a young, relatively unworldly tadpole, musically-speaking, and nothing could’ve prepared me for what came next.

It started with the road cases.

For the uninitiated, road cases are the heavy duty, often wheeled, latching boxes that are always seen piled up backstage in music biopics. I’ve always been enamored by them. I don’t know why- because they’re symbols of professionalism and success, I suppose. They mean 1) that you have some valuable stuff that needs a lot of protection and 2) that you spend a lot of time traveling. I have a few road cases now, and I always look forward to the ritual of stenciling my initials on them. It makes me feel like I mean business, that I’m unfuckwithable. Iodine had an assortment of battle-scarred road cases that told me in no uncertain terms that this band had been around the block more than once and had Seen. Some. Shit.

It continued with the gear inside those cases.

The bassist, Chris “Spacewolf” Feinstein, had a towering Mesa Boogie stack taller than he was- a head and two speaker cabinets, one with two 10” speakers, one with 2 15-inchers. It made my back hurt just looking at it. Chris had a Gibson bass. A Grabber? A Ripper? I can’t remember which, but he looked so cool with it, I immediately wanted one. Brad Pemberton, the drummer, had… I don’t know what. I’m not great at IDing drum kits now, and I knew even less back then. Black, big toms, with an Iodine bumper sticker (a copy of which I made sure I went home with that night) covering the logo on the kick drum. But the guitarist and singer, Jay Joyce, took the cake. He was running a sparkly Gretsch Silver Jet and the ugliest old Antigua “avocado-burst” Fender Telecaster Deluxe I’d ever seen into a Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier half stack AND a Matchless DC-30 simultaneously, both set to “stun”, through a board full of pedals best measured in terms of acreage. It was a candy store of equipment up there on that postage stamp of a stage. Iodine hadn’t played a note yet and I was already a fan.

And then they played. Sweet Jesus, did they play.

Upon plugging in, Jay hit a chord that would’ve toppled the walls of Jericho with decibels to spare. It was astonishingly, thrillingly, gloriously loud. Not abrasive; it was a warm, welcoming loud that would draw you to the stage so you could bathe in it. My arm hairs are standing up at the mere memory of it. Among the many toys at Jay’s feet was a Boomerang, an early looper pedal. He played a quick series of chords, tapped a button, and the phrase played back in reverse, repeated, and then repeated again, an organic intro to the onslaught that followed.

The set was a blur, a haze of chorus, echo, reverb, crushing distortion, wild, screaming, over-bent notes. Light and shade. Moments of beauty in between sonic punishment, equal parts The Cure and Motörhead, with Jay’s voice, a unique drawl that gave away his Cleveland roots, world weary, nasal, and gravelly, floating over the top, delivering Bukowski-esque film noir:

San Diego bit me on the nose

Baby, the freaks are all out

Woke up on a ceiling fan

Woke up to a scream

Baby, the freaks are all out

Freeway sombrero

Lost money down in Mexico

Passed out in a red Camaro

Knock knock who’s there

Santa Ana won’t let go

Send it all my way

Come on, Mister

Do me a favor

Gimme what I deserve for my sins

Bury me with her

I know what I’ll do when I get outta jail

Get a razor for my face and a rusty pail

And let the rain fill it up

Like the rain fills it up

Like water

When I was a two eyed boy

I never saw nothin’ but Nimoy

I’m a cyclops now

I’m a cyclops

I’m a cyclops now

I’m a cyclops

I’m a cyclops now

It was clear that many of the songs were built around Chris Feinstein’s basslines- big, strapping, hooky sonic buttresses that withstood everything the treble clef could throw at it. Brad Pemberton was somehow able to be not only audible over the frontline, but to drive the band through the peaks and valleys on knobby steel belted radials.

But the thing that struck me more than anything–-that made a lasting impression on my still-neophyte musician brain–-was the fact that, from the first downbeat to the end of the rapturous mayhem of the outro guitar solo to “Rosie’s Funeral”, no one in the trio so much as looked at each other. Each song segued into the next with no discernable cues. Little, if any, stage banter. They were one single organism, one vicious machine that made rock and roll. It was the baddest-ass thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to be Iodine when I grew up. I went home with their first CD, Maximum Joy. Aptly named, because that’s what listening to it gave me.

I was almost afraid of them. They gave me no reason to be; Gregg Spence had lots of stories about how nice a bunch of guys they were. They just seemed…bigger than. Bulletproof. Untouchable. And, as I mentioned earlier, when Mick offered Shrug a bill with Iodine (probably envisioning nothing more than a very well-attended show that would help keep the lights on for another month), I had to turn it down. As proud as I was of Shrug, I knew we would’ve had our heads handed to us, sonically speaking. I stand by that decision. But you can bet your ass I was at that show as an audience member.

To the best of my knowledge, I never missed any Iodine show within an hour-or-so radius of Dayton after that first night. Nor did most of the band’s Dayton contingent. I think the guys in Iodine were a little bemused by the rabid loyalty they inspired in the Gem City. For our part, we–the Dayton Iodine Crazies–could never understand why they weren’t huge everywhere they went. I remember seeing them at Top Cat’s in Cincinnati in 1998. They had just released their second album, Baby Grand which, incomprehensibly, was even better than Maximum Joy (side note: I have never learned a band’s lyrics faster or easier than I did with Baby Grand. I had ‘em all down after the second listen). The Dayton Iodine Crazies were up front and center stage at Top Cat’s that night, losing their collective shit as usual while the cooler-than-thou Cincy brats stood in the back with their arms crossed, apparently immune to good music and/or afraid to be caught having fun (another side note: Dayton always had a bit of a chip on its shoulder about its hipper neighbor to the south. My old friend Jim Dwyer used to spit, “It’s like they think they’re fuckin’ PARIS or somethin’!”).

Iodine, like all good things, eventually came to an end, and a bittersweet one, at that. After being criminally overlooked by most of the world, all three of them went on to find success elsewhere. Chris and Brad became the rhythm section for Ryan Adams’ band, the Cardinals. Jay has become a wildly successful Nashville producer, making huge hit records for Keith Urban, Miranda Lambert, Eric Church, the Zac Brown Band, the Brothers Osborne, Cage the Elephant, etc. etc...yeah, Jay’s doin’ pretty alright. Brad’s a Duke nowadays, drumming for Steve Earle, last I heard. Unfortunately, Chris met a tragically early end in 2009, passing away at only 42 from health complications and, according to the coroner, “an adverse reaction to over-the-counter cough medicine”, dashing my (and no doubt the rest of the Dayton Iodine Crazies’) hopes of ever seeing a reunion.

DAMN, they were something. I raise my glass to you, Iodine- especially you, Spacewolf. You gentlemen were a life changing band for me, a vision of what rock & roll could be, what should be, whether the rest of the world saw it or not. Salut.

Now, do me a favor: take these pictures down to the corner. Show ‘em to the Masters. Show ‘em to the Masters. Tell ‘em I sent ya.

Iodine’s two studio albums are, as far as I can tell, long out of print and pretty hard to find. I haven’t been able to find them on any streaming service, either, so I treasure my physical copies of the CDs like the prized possessions they are. You can, however, find both albums on YouTube:

Maximum Joy (1995)

Baby Grand (1998)

Also, a YouTube user by the name of deenichols has a multipart video of an Iodine show at 328 Performance Hall in Nashville, “Circa 1997?”. It’s nothing like being in the room, I can assure you, but it’s an invaluable bit of history to those who know and remember.

You can watch it here.

THE BALLAD OF BABY GRAND AND MAXIMUM JOY

TOD WEIDNER

THE BALLAD OF BABY GRAND AND MAXIMUM JOY

NINETEEN FOREVER

TOD WEIDNER