BEMIDJI — Beltrami County is known for its rich musical history, a legacy now highlighted by the Beltrami County History Center in its latest exhibit.
One band that helped shape musical history is the country rock group Podipto. Hailing from Bemidji, they rose to prominence in the 1970s, touring with major artists like the Carpenters and Elton John, earning a reputation as one of the Midwest's most exciting acts.
Three of the band’s founding members — Jack Sundrud, Dan Lund and John Calder — will reunite for a fundraising event for the Beltrami County History Center on Saturday, Oct. 26 at the Rail River Folk School. They will talk about music, the band and answer questions from the audience.
John Collins and Karen Lund, two of the band's original founding members, have since passed away.
Sundrud, Dan Lund and Calder joined Area Voices along with the Beltrami County Historical Society Executive Director Emily Thabes to discuss the event.
Edited for length and clarity.
Emily Thabes: The Beltrami County Historical Society has been celebrating the music of Beltrami County all of 2024, so we have an exhibit in our main exhibit space as well as in our research room that just celebrates music overtime from Indigenous music back before there were white people present in Beltrami County, all the way up through the late '60s and '70s, which is really where Podipto entered the picture.
We included Podipto in our exhibit. They are on our walls today. So, when we read that there was some new music coming out from some of the musicians in the Podipto, I reached out to my board, who reached out their connections and here we are. [We’re] very excited to be having a recorded session in just a couple of weeks.
Andrew Dziengel: So, John, Jack and Dan, what were your reactions to being asked to participate in this event?
John Calder: It was really nice. Dan and I got together after a surprise birthday party for Dan, and we thought, 'Hey, it’d be fun to make some music.'
We made some music and put on an EP, and it was reported in the Bemidji Pioneer by Dennis Doeden and it kind of snowballed, if you will, in the summer after that, and I think that article led to just some more interest, and we got a hold of Jack to see if he would be interested. And he was.
Jack Sundrud: Yeah, I was. I actually saw the article. That's how I reached out, I think, to you guys because they sent me the article.
A. Dziengel: So what is going to be happening at this event? Emily, do you want to start off first?
E. Thabes: We're just really excited to welcome all three of these nice men back to Bemidji to talk about their music, to reminisce about the days of Podipto, to share recordings from Podipto music, as well as music from their new EP so that we can hear a little bit of new stuff.
We're going to have a little bit of a silent auction. There'll be Podipto merchandise available for sale, so all of the folks from the area who look forward to reliving their days listening to Podipto will get to do that once again and share those memories with one another. So, it should be a really good time.
A. Dziengel: And so, what will you three be doing during the event?
J. Calder: We're going to be basically going over how we got together, a little bit of history about the bands that led up to it, and just kind of going over some recollections and memories about it. We'll just be chatting about it and we're going to be playing snippets of Podipto music, as well as the late John Collins. His son Josh might be participating as well. I think he'll come up. He'll bring a pretty nice bunch of memorabilia from that because he's running the website podipto.com, so he's a really good resource for John Collins, who is a big part of the band.
And we'll talk about and play some music from what we've all been doing. Jack has this album. Dan has a couple albums. I've got a couple of albums, so we're going to kind of blend the old and new.
A. Dziengel: With telling stories of the band, do you want to share some right now maybe? How did the band form? Or is it too soon to tell that story?
J. Sundrud: It's a big secret. (laughs)
D. Lund: Well, the idea kind of came [when] John and I both decided, 'Boy, let's do something. Let's put a good band together and work with original material if we can.' And John Collins was in town, and he had a lot of originals. So, we got together with him. But then who are we going to get for bass? And I thought it's got to be Jack [Sundrud]
J. Calder: Yeah.
D. Lund: But he had to move to Bemidji, so it was going to be hard to try to get them to commit.
J. Sundrud: I was living in Thief River [Falls] playing with a band there called the Back Street Journal, and we had just kind of petered out when I got a call from Dan and John, and it couldn't have been a better time for me. I was ready to do something, and these guys were doing music that was really compelling. The country rock idea was new and fresh, and it was just the right time for all of us.
J. Calder: We were really happy that Jack agreed. Jack’s got one of the better voices in the universe and plays great bass. When we got together in a garage out on Birchmont Drive in Bemidji, we had Karen join. She had been in Benson Obermeyer, and she played great keyboards and had a lovely high harmony voice and some great solo work. The five of us got together in this little cramped garage, and we started playing, and it just clicked. Something worked. We just thought this will work.
D. Lund: We unanimously went, 'Wow, this could be good.'
A. Dziengel: You said that folk rock wasn't quite big at that moment. Did you dabble in any other genres first, or did everyone seem to be interested in this kind of sound?
J. Sundrud: John had the most material at that point and his songs just kind of lend themselves to kind of a folky rock approach.
J Calder: It was kind of an amalgam of folk and country and rock 'n' roll. At the time there were a lot of different genres. We'd moved past the psychedelic era, The Band had come into prominence, and so more of what is now called Americana became something. I don't know, just a little more back to songs rather than long instrumental jams and that kind of suited everybody in the group, I think.
D. Lund: Yeah, and the vocals, when they sang together, John and Jack and Karen, it was amazing. They were all lead singers but all incredible harmony singers. It was amazing just watching them work the vocals, though.
J. Sundrud: It was pretty exciting having multiple singers. That kind of gave us a larger palette to work with. I know that for me it was something that I had never really done before working with three strong singers like that. It really kind of lended that kind of power to the sound of the band.
D. Lund: And Jack and John were bringing songs every time we got together. It was like they were really coming up with good stuff and interesting [stuff] musically.
A. Dziengel: So I was wondering what that songwriting process was. Was it just inspiration was hitting you all the time or was it like you had to really work at the songs to come up with songwriting ideas?
D. Lund: I mean, between all of us, there was a lot going on in our lives. Like the draft was trying to get at us.
J. Calder: Got one of us. That was me.
D. Lund: We didn't have a vehicle. We were borrowing cars to go play gigs in the Benson Obermeyer Band, even up in Canada, which was fortunate for us to be able to do that. When we started out, we were kind of spinning our wheels a little bit because it takes a while before anybody knows who you are. You got to get out and play, and we played a lot in the same venues that Jack’s band had played in, kind of northwest Minnesota and North Dakota.
A. Dziengel: So what was the Bemidji music scene like at that time when you were starting?
D. Lund: There were bands. I mean John was playing in a band before I even probably got a guitar ... the Squires, or were you something before that?
J. Calder: We were the Squires and then I met John [Collins] when his family moved to Bemidji, and he started in high school.
Back in the day, there were kind of two main groups. There were guys who owned and worked on cars and there were athletes. There weren't a whole lot of musicians, artists, theater people. But we kind of were able to spot each other in the hallways, and I saw John. I thought, ‘That guy is a guitar player,’ so we got together and hung out, and he joined this Squires who previously had no vocals. We were just doing rock instrumentals [like] The Ventures and groups like that. John joined and it completely changed the context of everything we're doing.
Then, of course, The Beatles changed everything. Jack has a great song on his album, Living the Dream, and it talks about The Beatles and what we owe them. It's a great song. It's kind of where we started leaning. John and I both got kicked out of school for having bangs.
J. Sundrud: I saw the Squires. That was at a time when anything that was remotely British was cool. You guys were good. You guys were doing that stuff, and it just was really thrilling for me. It was one of the first live bands I saw that was doing kind of the British wave music.
J. Calder: Kind of had to. Instrumental music, although that's kind of all I do for myself these days, is somewhat limiting. The Beatles had defined a new way to write songs and back to your question about writing, Jack and John [Collins] were the primary movers, and we'd all have real interest in what they were writing, and it just felt like it fit because there was a new bottle for this. It fit the bottle really well because they were writing for the band that we had.
A. Dziengel: During those early days, where would be places you would perform?
J. Calder: Anywhere that would pay us. (laughs)
J. Sundrud: But back in those days, every town had a town hall of their own. You put up posters on every telephone pole and hope somebody shows up, and that's how we toured.
J. Calder: Yeah, that's exactly right. I remember ranting to the Squires bandmates because the poster was so crummy. I said to them, ‘Look, this is their only contact. We have no singles. We have no radio play. There are no movies about us.’ We need to make a good poster because that's exactly what we did. We go to Park Rapids, rent the Armory, poster the town and hope it worked out.
A. Dziengel: Having like a music-heavy town area, did that kind of inspire your own songwriting in terms of trying to impress the other bands kind of thing, or was it always kind of we're trying to impress ourselves kind of thing?
D. Lund: We were amazed that we could be working with original material that we like. We were very fortunate. I mean, it was more fun working out original stuff than I think even doing any covers.
J. Calder: When Dan and I got together originally, Benson Obermeyer had kind of done what Jack was talking about. It just kind of went away. It ceased to have a purpose anymore and everybody was kind of moving on to other things.
The thing that Dan and I really saw and wanted to do was based on the end of Benson Obermeyer. It was [to] do original material. Get a recording contract. That's really the only way forward because doing covers your whole life, that's kind of the bottom of the rock 'n' roll pyramid is bands doing covers and people hearing that music live because a lot of the stuff that we played back then wasn't on the radio. It was still '50s and doo-wop and stuff like that.
The Beatles came out and changed everything, and so we just thought we should be doing original material, and we were really lucky that John Collins and Jack Sundrud were really good writers. I know Dan wrote a song or two. I wrote a song or two, but it was really those two guys who propelled us into that original space. We did play covers. We played a bunch of covers, but it was I'd say, I don't know, Jack with like half original?
J. Sundrud: Initially, yeah. I was not prolific before Podipto at all. I just wrote occasionally, but it was very inspiring to be around this group of musicians and writers. But that was what inspired us to write more, and it was one of those things where we started playing together, and like John just said, we knew that that was a thing. It was a sound that was really rewarding for all of us to hear.
D. Lund: Yeah, everybody put a little bit into it. When the songs were really good. I mean, there's some really good songs you guys wrote.
A. Dziengel: So how does it feel to not only have been writing these original songs, but having such a positive reaction from people? That's got to feel good, these are our songs that people are reacting to.
D. Lund: We got a great reaction. We got great support from people around Bemidji that we knew, our friends and stuff.
J. Calder: Better than drugs.
D. Lund: Oh yeah. Cheaper.
J. Calder: Well, I don’t know about that. (laughs)
J. Sundrud: I think we were all kind of pleasantly surprised that original music became as popular on the regional level as it did.
J. Calder: But one of the things that is still true, I think, is that when music started taking off — and I know for myself when the Ventures came out — it was kind of like, “Hey, I can play that.” It's not a concerto, and it's not big band and it's not something that I can't grasp or that I need 10 years of Juilliard to figure out. I can play this stuff in a week or two.
It really led everybody to get into bands and to do stuff and to play music. And I think one of the things that that era really created was a knowledgeable audience. You have a lot of people buying guitars and a lot of people buying drums and you know they weren't necessarily going to be the best bands in the universe, but they were a great audience. We had a lot of musicians coming to our shows, and we'd go to shows with other musicians, and it was really a sort of a self-growing item.
D. Lund: We even had a radio show on Saturday mornings for, I don't know, a year or so where we tried to play all the cool stuff that was coming out like Moby Grape and all those bands that were happening. I don't know if very many people would listen, but it was Saturday morning, I think at 10.
J. Calder: Fun to get to after the Friday evening gig.
D. Lund: Oh, if you played in Winnipeg, it was tough. Get a little bit of sleep and then go to the station after a while. We thought, ‘This is a lot of work and nobody's even listening to it.’ (laughs)
A. Dziengel: So going back to the event that's happening. Emily, how will the Q&A portion work out?
E. Thabes: We're going to have a couple of microphones in the audience, and people will be able to stand behind those microphones and ask questions when it gets to that time period. We're really looking forward to having all the fans in the audience who are excited about Podipto’s return.
A. Dziengel: And how does that feel for the three of you? You mentioned before the recording, it's the 55th anniversary of the self-titled album. How does it feel to know that that album still has that legacy that people still want to hear the stories of how the band came to be and stuff like that?
J. Sundrud: It's obviously great that this whole thing is happening. I mean, I personally didn't know that there was that much interest. I think this is really a treat to hear that there's an interest out there for this.
J. Calder: The gratifying element of this whole thing is that often artists of you know we were kind of a mid-level group. I know that after I was out of the band, it went on to play and tour with a number of really well-known national acts, the Carpenters, Elton John and a lot of big names. It was one of those things that I'm not sure we really knew how popular we were until somewhat after the fact.
When you're in the middle of it and you're jumping in an old vehicle and hoping that you don't roll it because somebody's sitting on the equipment in the back, they'd be crushed. It's one of those things where you're just dealing with the day-to-day and you're out on the road and you're getting new songs and you're practicing and you're trying to get your wash done before you go out again. You're not really that aware a lot of the times. And then, of course, if you've been out of the band for 50-some years, you're really not aware of how popular it was. So, it is gratifying and for me, surprising, I think.
A. Dziengel: So when was the last time the three of you were together at the same place?
J. Calder: It was right before I was drafted. I think.
J. Sundrud: Yeah, I've seen both of these guys, but not together for 50 years or whatever.
J. Calder: We saw Jack at Brigid's Pub that Kristi Miller put together. It was just so great to see Jack, and I hadn't seen him for really a long time. And then Karen [Lund] came when the whole event was over. She was pretty adamant about not performing or being on microphone. It was great to see her. I've seen Dan over the years playing in the local scene.
D. Lund: And then at my birthday party, I was really shocked. I hadn't seen John for ages, and it was great to see him. When I heard his first recording, I couldn't believe it was like, my gosh, this is incredible. I'm hoping he would tell me how he did it.
J. Calder: All by myself. That's why it was such a pleasure to get together with Dan and started recording new music that Dan and I developed, obviously instrumental, but it was such great fun to have him in the studio here and to actually record some stuff and if everything works out and maybe the three of us will do some new material. Who knows.
A. Dziengel: Emily, where can people get tickets for the event?
E. Thabes: They can go on our website, beltramihistory.org or they can visit the History Center, which is over in the depot at 130 Minnesota Ave. SW, and if you come in person, I will be happy to take care of you.
You can even give us a call 218-444-3376. Advance tickets are $25. If you are a Historical Society member in Beltrami County, you get a $5 discount, so $20, but tickets are $30 at the door no matter what. So get your tickets in advance, save a little bit of money, and we look forward to seeing everybody.
Real quick shout out to Mississippi Music and Visit Bemidji for sponsoring Podipto’s visit with us because this would not be possible without the sponsorships. So thank you.
At the Rail River Folk School, and it’s going to be cool. It’s going to be very cool.
Tell us about upcoming arts events where you live in Northern Minnesota by emailing psa@kaxe.org.
