Kid from the north country

The wind stoop up and gave a shout.
He whistled on his fingers and
Kicked the withered leaves about
And thumped the branches with his hand
And said he'd kill and kill and kill,
And so he will and so he will.

The second song on Bob Dylan's second album, right after "Blowin' in the Wind," was a song called "Girl of the North Country." The song was full of an elegance and tenderness nobody had heard from the boy who a lot of people figured was from Oklahoma. It was stark, just Dylan and his acoustic guitar, but he was playing slow and singing from his heart and about his life in a way he hadn't before. It sounded as if the snows had never melted in the Minnesota of his dreams, after all, he had left on a December morn' just over two years earlier. In short, it was a movement waiting to happen, the music of the North Country. There's something about the North Country. The land spawned arguably America's greatest rock star, who left with a restless energy no one place or piece of paper could contain. It's cold up in that part of the world. The suicide rates rise rapidly when the beautiful terrain turns into a desert of snow and ice. It is a desolate place, and Dylan knew that and left to find a new identity. But there are those who stayed behind to create music out of the complacency and out of the winter ice and snow. Darren Jackson was once a man like Dylan and like the wind that Stephens describes. Full of the restless energy that the North Country can create, he left South Dakota where he was raised and the small Minnesota college he attended to find solace in the big cities. He traveled to Chicago, Boston and Providence to snuff out the vision of snow mounds and frozen lakes that iced over his fragile mind. Jackson was raised in Bison, S.D., and went on to college at St. Olaf in Northfield, Minn. He dropped out during graduate school at University of Illinois-Chicago and began to wander, picking up some bad memories and a heroin addiction along the way. In 1999, at age 26, Jackson moved back to Minnesota, this time to enter the state hospital. "I remember walking the grounds of the state hospital, the thought of 10,000 lakes always intruding, making me feel smaller, weaker," Jackson writes in his online bio, at www.kiddakota.com. After getting out of the hospital later that year, Jackson formed the duo Kid Dakota with drummer Christopher McGuire. "I began rehearsing with Christopher McGuire, who had recently broken up with his girlfriend of three years and quit his band (12 rods) of seven. Needless to say, we were an intensely happy, well-adjusted unit," he writes. Before playing live together and only after a few days of knowing each other, they recorded the So Pretty EP with help from Jackson's old college friend Alex Oana. After laboring over the recorded material for some time, the EP is now starting to garner attention. They've made it available for free on mp3.com and have already received more than 10,000 downloads. Recently they've been signed to release a full length record on the band Low's new label, Chairkickers, which will be released this summer. "They're recording new songs right now," says Jackson's friend Ben Anderson. "He's really big here, soundwise, there's just nothing like Kid Dakota." "I grew up (in the North Country), yeah. And for a long time, you know, I like… rebelled against being from there," Jackson says of his roots. "It's only since sort of recently that I've really started embracing being from there and writing songs about what it's like to be from there." Jackson isn't alone with his intention of writing from and about the North Country. In recent years, a movement in music has evolved that sounds like the place itself. The figurehead of the movement has been the slow-core band Low from Duluth. The musicians' approach to making music that evolves slowly and sounds like an evocative whisper has inspired others in the area to follow their example. A multitude of bands have arisen in Minnesota, all mixing their own influences with Low's idea of making "the music of the land." Kid Dakota comes out of this school of music, mixing McGuire's athletic and creative drumming with Jackson's rhythmic guitar and his wry delivery. Jackson writes songs in the tradition of the great, simple storytellers of the past such as Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, and mixing that with attempts at innovative pop arrangements like Elliott Smith or Wilco. Jackson admits that his lyrical influences are from authors rather than musicians and because of this he is able to avoid some of the trappings of conventional lyricism. "By using imagery and geography I can really set the scene for a song," he writes in his bio. The music is surely a product of Jackson's past. "Alone in my room with a 100-watt lightbulb/and books I can't find time to read/I'm scrapin' bags double-boilin' cottons/I'm lookin' around for my rig," he sings on "So Pretty," making references to the days he was in the throws of addiction. Kid Dakota makes the music a mirror of the lyrics and vice versa. Still, it is his chilling and sometimes humorous accounts of his past that resonate in his music. "Lately I've been seeing lots of doctors/they say 'you tested negative kid have some fun'/so I sit at home watchin' figure skating/I search the web for interracial porn," from "Negative Kid," a song about the doldrums that are faced when curing depression. "I think people here, myself included, are really excited to hear the next CD," says The Dan One, a Minneapolis-area radio programmer who hosts KFAI's "Local Sound Department." "There's so many incredible bands in the Twin Cities right now that deserve recognition beyond Minnesota," he says. "Things are really happening here lately." Things are looking up for Jackson and Kid Dakota these days. Lately Jackson has been involved in a side project with another local band Alva Star, who was voted the best new band by the Minnesota Music Academy, and Kid Dakota has sometimes expanded to a foursome to include Zak Sally from Low on bass and Erik Appelwick. No longer is the cold weather conjuring up the demons within Jackson, but the image of the haunted wild man remains. As Jackson says, "Sometimes it's hard to live a good life and be a good man."