As childhood friends, Joe Mailander and Justin Lansing, spent summers at their neighborhood creek building makeshift rafts, fishing for crawdads, and dreaming of great river adventures.

Now, as The Okee Dokee Brothers, they have realized these boyhood dreams on none other than the great Mississippi River. On June 1st, 2011, Joe and Justin began a canoe trip in Minneapolis, MN and continued down the river for the next 30 days until they arrived at the St. Louis Gateway Arch. During their month long journey on the Mississippi, they camped, canoed, filmed, and most importantly, composed the songs that make up their new album for kids and families.

As an independently managed band, the young duo has gained a loyal grassroots following that is drawn to their witty lyrics, off-the-wall humor, strong musicianship, and unique folk style. By appealing to the musical needs of the entire family and recognizing that kids deserve quality music, The Okee Dokee Brothers are working full-time to regain the integrity of the children’s music genre.

“Authentic bluegrass for your little brother. Best enjoyed with bare feet.” - USA Today

“The duo’s original songs cover wide territory… Whatever the subject, word-play is paramount.” - Lynne Heffley, Parent’s Choice

“This album is all unmistakably The Okee Dokee Brothers, whose sense of humor and ability to speak to kids with understanding and fun comes through loud and clear. ” – CoolMomPicks.com

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NORTH STAGE
9:30 The Hold Steady
8:00 Dead Man Winter
6:30 Lucy Michelle
5:00 Meat Puppets
3:30 Enemy Planes

WORLD STAGE
7:45 Free Fallin’ (Tom Petty Tribute)
6:15 Sammy Llanas (Formerly of the BoDeans)
5:00 Actual Wolf
3:30 Greenwich

INSIDE SCHOOL GYM
3:30 Paul Springs

NOTE – Schedule subject to change.

The on-going success of the St. John’s Block Party would not be possible without the enormous generosity of our faithful sponsors.

If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor of the St. John’s Block Party, email our Sponsorship Team (sponsors@sjblockparty.org) or contact the St. John’s parish center at 507-288-7372.

A variety of bands will rock the return of our two-stage format.  Gates open Saturday at 3 p.m., music lineup kicks off at 3:30 p.m. and continues late into the evening.

Family entertainment is available Saturday afternoon (3-6 p.m.). Music and activities take place indoors (climate-controlled) and are free to children under the age of 12 with a paid adult.

A wide variety of food and beverage providers set up shop to satisfy the hungriest of music enthusiasts.  Thousands of attendees will enter the gates to enjoy a mid-summer Saturday packed with music, food, fellowship and fun.

Parking lot at the corner of 1st St. NW and 6th Ave NW, enter via 6th Ave NW.

Parking ramp at the corner of 1st St. NW and 5th Ave NW.

City streets all day Saturday.

The Hold Steady is an American indie rock band from Brooklyn, New York, formed in 2004. The band consists of Craig Finn (vocals, guitar), Tad Kubler (lead guitar), Galen Polivka (bass), Bobby Drake (drums), and Steve Selvidge (guitar). Noted for their “lyrically dense storytelling,” and classic rock influences, the band’s narrative-based songs frequently address themes, including drug addiction, religion and redemption, and often take place within the city of Minneapolis.

Formed four years following the break-up of Finn and Kubler’s former band, Lifter Puller, The Hold Steady released their debut album, Almost Killed Me in 2004, and came to prominence with the release of their third studio album, Boys and Girls in America, in 2006. In 2010, keyboardist and multi-instrumentalist Franz Nicolay left the band prior to the recording of their fifth studio album, Heaven Is Whenever (2010). During the band’s subsequent tour, the band became a five piece, once more, with the addition of former Lucero guitarist Steve Selvidge.

The Hold Steady Website

A country-rock side project of the Minnesota Bluegrass band Trampled By Turtles. Three of the five Dead Man Winter band members — including frontman Dave Simonett — also are members of block party favorite Trampled by Turtles. Dead Man Winter’s electric rock and roll band is a fresh, exciting outlet for Simonett’s material that doesn’t fit squarely in the bluegrass mold.

“On a bleak, cold, frighteningly typical winter night in 2002, the last band I was in before Trampled by Turtles played our final show in a modified pizza restaurant-turned-venue in Duluth, Minnesota. The show ended, our band ended, glasses clinked cheers. We had plenty of help loading out our gear that night. So much, in fact, that someone walked away with my electric guitar and amp. They walked right passed the car where it was supposed to end up and went off into the frozen night, putting a giant period on the end of a what had been a short, struggling, but very necessary musical time for me.

I was now fully unemployed and sleeping indoors only by the good graces of friends willing to share a couch, and the loss of my instruments was more than a little devastating. Of the few possessions I still had, the one that now gained top billing was a cheap acoustic guitar collecting dust in a small room on Duluth’s central hillside. A few other musicians in town had similar instruments collecting a similar dust and we started what was our first acoustic band, Trampled by Turtles.

We’ve been able to stay together ever since and had some good fortune that escapes many more deserving and talented bands. Lately, though, the drums and amps ringing in the back of my head have been getting louder and the desire to play, write, and record in a way removed from what I’ve been up to has been getting stronger. Dead Man Winter was born out of these things.

I’d been renting a studio in Minneapolis, and with the help of some amazing people I set to the task of making a record. My partner in the dirty and thankless work of recording was local engineer, songwriter, producer, guitarslinger, and master of the vibe Erik Koskinen. We spent countless blissful hours exploring guitars, amps, mics, and players in the worn-in beauty and sanctity of Realphonic Studios. Without a doubt, countless more hours could have been spent but you can’t begin work on the next record until you put out the current one, so here it is.

The musicians that play on this album are dear friends – there’s not a one of whom would I’d hesitate to trust a song that I hold dear. In the end, the whole experience has reconnected me to that couch-surfing kid in Duluth trying to figure out what to do next in this big, terrifying, wonderful world and now, with a few more years behind me, it’s refreshing.”

- Dave Simonett, 2011

At 25, Lucy Michelle is a songwriter as serious as they come. Twin Cities natives will know her as frontwoman of gypsy-pop outfit Lucy Michelle and the Velvet Lapelles, a raucous and eclectic six-piece. At home and on the road, Lucy has stood boldly amidst that chugging whirlwind of cello and accordion, stomping her foot and singing out fiercely over the top of it all. It’s a collaboration five years strong whose catalogue reveals an artist developing not only her craft, but also personally.

Through songs of adventure, love and reflection Lucy has shared an evolving understanding of herself and her values. It’s a process that in 2012 led Lucy, after becoming happily married, to write a batch of songs more deeply personal than any she’d written before. The result is ‘Attack of the Heart,’ Lucy Michelle’s first ever solo album. Enlisting the help of local greats John Munson and Chan Polling, Lucy set out to create an American pop gem. It’s a hard-earned hallelujah at times reminiscent of Dylan’s contented spirit on ‘Nashville Skyline’ but with a strut all her own. “Heart Race”, the album’s opener, rolls in as gentle as a weekend sunrise upon a Minnesota lake.

From there Lucy takes us on a journey of American pop music in the classic sense. There’s a bit of New Orleans in the shuffle of “Do What Your Daddy Told You”; a bit of that old countrified California in the slow dance of “Best We Know How”; a bit of Detroit R&B in “All I Need”. “For You” features Lucy’s first jazz vocal on record, but it’s apparent she’s been doing this for years.

By the end of the album one gets the impression that Lucy has found that long pined for home she’s sung about all along. While a life of music on the road may have prepared her to give a nod to what has come before but she’s clearly now more than the sum of her influences. With ‘Attack of the Heart’ Lucy Michelle emerges as a true American artist, and once again lets us all in on the adventure.

Lucy Michelle Website

The Meat Puppets are an American rock band formed in January 1980, in Phoenix, Arizona. The group’s original lineup was Curt Kirkwood (guitar/vocals), his brother Cris Kirkwood (bass guitar), and Derrick Bostrom (drums). The Kirkwood brothers met Bostrom while attending Brophy Prep High School in Phoenix. The three then moved to Tempe, Arizona (a Phoenix suburb and home to Arizona State University) where the Kirkwood brothers purchased two adjacent homes, one of which had a “shed” in the back where they regularly practiced.

Meat Puppets Website

“Wanna know what the next big Minneapolis band is? Ten bucks it’s Enemy Planes, a moody little band that sounds like the best Brit-obsessed psych band from 1985 crossed with skittering modern indie with a touch of lo-fi electronics stirred in. Their forthcoming album, Beta Lowdown, is filled with mysterious little songs with a dark heart, and is as good as anything “local” you’ve heard in the last couple years, though don’t expect ‘em to stay contained by our fair cities for long. Dunno much about them other than that they feature Shön Troth (formerly of Solid Gold) and members of Pictures of Then — and that anonymity is the way they seem to like it, at least so far, despite a star-making turn at SXSW last year. “~LE’TOILLE MAGAZINE

Enemy Plans Website

America’s Favorite Travelin’ Tribute to Tom Petty! Free Fallin presents it’s show with the power and passion that went into over 30 years of Tom Petty’s best selling songs from “Damn the Torpedoes” through his latest CD “Mojo” (including hits from the Traveling Wilburys).

Free Fallin’s show has the instrumentation to duplicate the sound of the Heartbreakers as well as the convincing looks and costumes that gives you a show that you will never forget!

Free Fallin’ Website

Sam Llanas (born in 1961) is a singer, acoustic guitarist, and songwriter in several rock and roots rock bands active from the 1980s to the 2000s, including the BoDeans and Absinthe. Sam is known for his unusual and distinctive voice. http://samllanas.com/fr_about.cfm

Sammy Llanas Website

Playing the World Stage at 5:00 p.m.

The Legend of the Actual Wolf:  There are outlaws, and there are outlaws. Some practice the pose and cultivate the image, though seldom dirty their soft, bourgeois hands with anything actually outside the law. When they do, it is often despicable, irresponsible or just plain mundane. The Actual Wolf, however, is a real outlaw and has pled guilty to it. Between the bust and before the trial AW recorded a pair of EPs, each showing ‘another side of the Wolf’. The first is USA, an everyman’s acoustic album that channels both Woody and Zimmerman on a smuggler’s road trip on the cop-laden corridor of the I-80. The second—Lightning & the Wolf— conjures a 30-something’s symphony to Gawd, a rock EP at times so ethereal that it floats like smoke up into the aether, at others so earthy & grounded you can almost feel the parole. This is not music that pleads for forgiveness—the man has given his freedom as a sacrament at the altar of his beliefs. Rather, these are songs of redemption. Actual Wolf has paid a price, but like many deals with devils, seems to have come out the greater for it.

Actual Wolf Website

Greenwich embodies the spirit that is true American Folk Music but reinterpreted through the eyes of artists from another land, a land steeped in a rich musical heritage of its own – from the city of Brescia in Northern Italy comes a sound that is both familiar and unknown.

Playing inside the school gym at 3:30 p.m.

Family entertainment and activities will take place from 3 to 6 p.m. This year, independent folk-rock singer and songwriter Paul Spring joins us on the heels of his new family album release, “Home of Song”, his first collection of kids and family music.

Paul Spring Website

Independent folk-rock singer and songwriter Paul Spring joins us on the heels of his new family album release, “Home of Song”, his first collection of kids and family music.  He takes stage at 3:30 in the school gym.

The popular Geoffrey Weeks’ World Instrument Petting Zoo will be returning this year with hands-on demonstrations of a variety of one-of-a-kind percussion and stringed instruments.

Additional children’s activities in the climate-controlled school gymnasium include face painting, balloon animals, and crafts.  Admission is free for children under the age of 12 with a paid adult.

Pink Mink was what happened when everyone was making other plans. Christy Hunt had returned from 2 years of touring as the guitarist for the Von Bondies and posted a defeatist post about quitting music and going back to school. Longtime friend Arzu Gokcen saw this post and threatened to lock her in a closet with her guitar until she changed her mind. The two, at similar crossroads in their musical paths, decided to give playing together a shot. And it worked beautifully. While jamming in Christy’s basement, they added seasoned engineer and producer Jacques Wait along with drumming ace Charles Gehr and soon the foursome found themselves forming a band – and February 2010, Pink Mink was born. Having the history of all taking part in previously successful outfits (Von Bondies, Selby Tigers, Ouija Radio, etc.) it took no time at all for word to spread about this new formation, and Pink Mink found themselves playing festivals and big shows after barely writing songs for six months.

Even with all the attention, they were humbled and surprised to have landed the coveted “Picked To Click” honor in City Pages magazine just a short 8 months after playing their first chords together. All this, and their debut album was nowhere near being finished yet. Finally, after a little over a year of being together, Pink Mink regionally-released their self-titled debut in July 2011. The celebration culminated as the band held their release party on a riverboat on the rivers of the great Mississippi. Being known for throwing a grand party, the “cocktail cruise” did not disappoint. Beyond the party reviews, the critics and fans had much praise for the debut album. A trip to SXSW and several Midwest shows and festivals later, Pink Mink is now taking the album out nationally and will hit radio in February 2012. Quickly thereafter a 7″ vinyl will be coming out on Kiss Of Death Records and the band will hit the road in support of both releases. Call your radio stations and record stores to request Pink Mink. Check back for information on Pink Mink coming to your town.

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Six Mile Grove has a lot to be proud of. They have weathered the ever changing music scene as a primarily self-managed, self-produced, and self-recorded band. Their music has evolved accordingly, as an organic, honest voice that has not been tinkered with or tainted by the lure of record labels or flashy music producers. You’re sure to find influences of Minnesota music’s founding fathers; from Bob Dylan to the Jayhawks, Six Mile Grove honors it’s roots, but has also managed to forge it’s own sound and space on a stage without compromise. They harken most to the genre of Americana, which recognizes the value of songwriting and musicianship over radio charts and record sales, and reflects that in artists as diverse as Emmy Lou Harris and Lyle Lovett. In addition, their friendship, touring and recording with legendary Johnny Cash guitarist Bob Wootton, has lended even more distinctly to their “good all-American boy” sound and style.

Six Mile Grove is releasing it’s sixth album this Spring 2012, titled “Secret Life in a Quiet Town.” In this album, Sampson muses on the responsibilities of providing for a family, keeping love alive, and fighting for what’s right in the world. These themes resonate with all the members of the band, as guys with day jobs, wives and kids. You’ll hear the whines and growls in Nelson’s piano and lead guitar licks; the take-it-easy pace of Wallace’s bass, and the simple to furious tempos in Brian Sampson’s drums.
As Wootton states, “There’s nothing fancy about them and they don’t try to be something they’re not. And that’s what I like about them.”

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Take a pinch of mountain gypsy, a dash of psych-folk and a combine it with an ocean of split-open-and-melt lyricism, intricately delivered by one of the most unique voices in music, and you have Lucy Michelle and the Velvet Lapelles. Since bursting onto the Twin Cities music scene in 2008, the fiery sextet have blossomed into one of the most celebrated and cherished young talents to emerge from Minnesota in recent history.

Lucy Michelle and The Velvet Lapelles’ incredibly polished, yet wholly organic, sound can be directly attributed to an interweaving familial-like chemistry that has created an airtight bond among the six players. The band formed in 2007 as a result of casual jam sessions that were led by Lucy with friends Geoff Freeman (drums), Ashley Boman (accordion, bells) and Jesse Schuster (bass), at Lucy and Geoff’s University of Minnesota college flop house in NE Minneapolis. Loosely arranged social gatherings, where music was played, eventually turned into full-blown band practices and writing sessions with the additions of Eamonn Mclain (cello) and Chris Graham (guitar).

The band soon started gigging around Minneapolis-Saint Paul and quickly caught the eyes, ears and hearts of local music fans and critics alike being named City Pages “Picked to Click” Best New Band of 2008. In-studio performances on nationally recognized taste-maker 89.3 The Current followed with the station calling the group, “One of the Twin Cities most talented and endearing bands.”

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Minneapolis, MN—Singer/songwriter Martin Zellar’s country-tinged portraits of life, love, and regret have resonated with listeners for over 25 years. Zellar, who first appeared on the Minneapolis music scene as the lead singer and songwriter of the alt-country pioneering Gear Daddies, is now back with his first studio album of new material in ten years. The album, Roosters Crow, is set for release on February 7, 2012 via Owen Lee Recordings, and Zellar, who now lives in Central Mexico with his family, will return to the U.S. for a nationwide tour in support of the new release.

Roosters Crow is a long-overdue album that will coincide with the 25th anniversary of the debut release of the Gear Daddies, who released two albums on Polygram Records before amicably parting ways in 1992.

Recorded at the Zone Studio in Dripping Springs, Texas by engineer/producer Pat Manske (The Flatlanders, Joe Ely, Robert Earl Keene), Roosters Crow features – along with Zellar’s long-time band, The Hardways (bass guitarist Nick Ciola and drummer Scott Wenum) – a long list of respected and incredibly talented Austin, Texas-based musicians, including Kelly Willis, Lloyd Maines, Kevin McKinney (Soul Hat), Bukka Allen (Bodeans), Chojo Jacques, Brian Standefer (Alejandro Escovedo), Billy Bright (Peter Rowan), Michael Ramos (John Mellencamp), and Terri Hendrix.

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Solid Gold formed in 2001 out of a mutual interest in futuristic art. By fusing vintage instruments with modern sensibilities, a unique urban sound was created. This sound is a mirror to the times at hand, and a looking glass into what is to come. Solid Gold has traveled the world with their music, bringing it to the masses on their own terms. Fueled by radiation, good taste, and a longing for love, their sound is permeated with a familiar emotion. It is something that is ever present, but can slip away; a distant memory of something unknown and desired.

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In the year since EMI issued OK GO’s acclaimed third album, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, the Los Angeles quartet has gone from being a rare young light on a major label to arguably the world’s most bleeding edge independent outfit. You probably know the bit about the treadmills by now, but one can authoritatively say that those trusty treadmills shot the band into both better health and a technicolor zone beyond the hoary indie-versus-major debate.

Billboard called them “trailblazing,” the head of Apple’s marketing said they were “the first post-internet band, the first band to use the internet as a medium of art, not just commerce.” BusinessWeek praised their new model of “proactive creative types… looking beyond traditional parameters to get support for their work.” OK Go’s project is one of the modern age, of unlimited possibility, where infectious songs, inventive videos, surprising live shows, and an articulate, forward-thinking back-end combine into a total work by a defiantly do-it-yourself band without a shoestring budget. The band says they just like “making stuff.”

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