Templeton Rye
History in a Song
I wrote the song Templeton Rye for The Nadas 2005 record “Listen Through the Static”. The song was a long time coming. In fact, we started writing for a previous record a couple of years earlier but it didn’t come out right and that attempt became the song “Drowning” on the record “Transceiver” but that is a story for another time.
Templeton Rye was written in a couple of hours on the last day of tracking and recorded all together in the live room in Bass Propulsion Laboratories in the Deep Ellum section of Dallas, Texas. We all played our instruments at the same time, unusual for modern recording, and picked the best of about three takes on the song. Todd and Toby Pipes (The Pipes Bros. aka Deep Blue Something of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” fame) were the producers on the record and on this particular track were not playing their usual instruments. Todd, usually a bass player, was playing a vintage semi hollow-body Supro guitar. Toby, normally a guitar player was on a Hammond organ. Mike, my partner in the band, not a mandolin player, played mandolin. I LOVE how the recording turned out. I had walked out of the room moments before where I had sequestered myself with a guitar, a blank page of a notebook and a pencil. I went in, closed the door and the next time I came out I had a completed song. A couple of lyrics were suggested and changed on the fly before we hit the record button. 20 minutes later the song was done. The reality was, I had been working on the song for over a decade.
Our band started playing music in the early 90s. As we traveled around from town to town and bar to bar we always met the most interesting people. Whenever we traveled to Carroll County or the surrounding contiguous counties there was always someone with a hidden away flask of bootleg liquor. It seemed like sport to them as they would try to get the band to try a sample of the “good stuff.” The sample always came with a story. The bootlegger would often offer it up, stand back and watch each of us take a swig, wait to see your reaction, and then tell us a story about some distant relative and some integral part they had in the production, acquisition, or distribution of Templeton Rye. After many years of this, I became obsessed with these stories. I started collecting them in my mind. Usually, the stories would be about a distant relative who is long gone, but one of those times someone mentioned a person who was still alive and living in a nursing home. I asked if they accepted visitors and they did. I spent some time in that nursing home, hearing the stories from that person and learning about other people who were involved who were still around to tell me all about it—so I spent some time with them as well. I also explored newspaper archives, City Hall arrest records, and the historical building in Des Moines trying to put the pieces together. I was hooked. All of the lyrics of this song, while basic and seemingly generalized all refer to a detail revealed from these investigations.
“BORN IN A CLOUD OF DUST, IT BROKE THE BEST OF US, SWEAT AND POVERTY, IT WAS A DESPERATE TIME.”
“THEN THEY TOOK OUR DRINK AWAY, HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO LIVE THAT WAY, NOTHING TAKES AWAY THE PAIN, LIKE TEMPLETON RYE.”
The story of Templeton Rye starts during prohibition when the entire country all of a sudden had their ability to legally produce, sell, buy, or consume alcohol taken away. I won’t get into the history of prohibition for this essay. It was a complicated mess. This part of Iowa (the northwestern part of the state) was full of farmers and mainly German immigrants who brought their independence, strong work ethic as well as recipes for food and drink along with them as they settled in this part of Iowa. While most bootleg liqour of the time earned nicknames like “rot gut” and “bathtub gin” and reputations for making people sick or blind, the folks in Templeton took great pride in the product they produced and it earned the nickname, “the Good Stuff.” One reason for this was adding grain to the distillation process while most people were just making a form of rum with just sugar. Another reason is that while most bootleggers where making it and selling it as fast as the could, the folks in and around Templeton took the time to age their concoction in oak barrels.
“LET THE BARN BURN, LET THE BAND PLAY, AND EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY, WHEN YOUR MOUTH GETS DRY, FILL MY CUP, WITH TEMPLETON RYE.”
Many of the distilleries or cookhouses were in outbuildings on farms and in the winter when there was snow or cold rain on the roofs, when they fired up the still it would evaporate the moisture off of the roofs of the buildings, and from a distance sometimes looked like they were on fire.
“BAG OF SUGAR AND A BUSHEL OF GRAIN, EVERYBODY’S PRAYING FOR RAIN, REVENUERS POUR IT DOWN THE DRAIN, SO WE START FROM SCRATCH.”
There were people in town or the area whose job it was to source, run, acquire, store, and distribute the sugar. Almost everyone had a job. When I first started working on this I thought there was one bootlegging family. Then I started learning more and wondering if they knew about each other or if they competed. By the time I was done, I finally understood that everyone in Templeton as well as neighboring communities were involved in one way or another.
It was the Depression, the Dust Bowl, people lost farms, equipment, and family members, and sometimes it seemed like a little rain would fix everything.
These families and entrepreneurs, farmers, priests, bankers and butchers were under constant threat of federal agents whose sole task was to shut them down. It never took long before they were back up and running.
At one point I interviewed a gentleman who told me the story of when he was a little boy he was traveling with his father in their Model A Ford truck and they had a load of barrels. As they traveled they suddenly were intercepted by revenue agents. The man told me he remember being very scared as a little kid. He recalled that his father decided to turn up an exceptionally muddy road that he knew he could get through but he hoped he could lose the revenue agents. As they made their way up the hill the revenue agents in fact did get stuck in the mud. But as the distance grew between them, the revenue agents fired their guns at the escaping car. That was the end of the story for this gentleman, however at a different interview with a different person about a different story I heard similar details. I interviewed a tax agent who shared an office with a revenue agent. One day his office partner came back exceptionally exasperated and told him the story of a muddy high-speed chase where the local took them up a road they could not pass. The revenue agent shared that they fired shots into the air just to send a message. These two stories happened almost 100 years ago and were intersecting for the first time in my presence.
“30 FEET OF A COPPER PIPE, 100 GALLONS COOKING OVERNIGHT, MAKE SURE IT TASTES JUST RIGHT, AND START ANOTHER BATCH.”
This wasn't just hillbillies in the woods, this was a large commercial enterprise that involved multiple communities and layers of people with different responsibilities and roles. There are stories of train cars full of sugar that unloaded in the town of Templeton a town of around 300 people. There was a distribution network and pipelines of people that delivered whiskey to all the major cities from Chicago to Detroit to Des Moines and Omaha.
“SO WE MAKE IT ON OUR OWN, IN THE BASEMENT OF OUR HOME, SELL A LITTLE BIT TO AL CAPONE, HE’S GOT A MEAN THIRST.”
While most of the whiskey was made out on farms there were a few places in town that had stills. During my time researching this I found a garage with a chimney that reportedly once had a still as well as a house that had a still in the basement. Unfortunately, the bootlegger in that house died of asphyxiation from the noxious fumes that were a byproduct of the still. He tried to make it out of the basement but succumb to his fate on the last step before he got out. That house is known as, “the last step house.”
I always found it a little hard to believe that any of the Templeton Rye would have been intended for Al Capone. But after talking to many different people unconnected from each other and hearing the same stories from all angles I became convinced that it was true. Here is one story of a man coming to that same conclusion.
“TAKE THE REST TO THE RIVER HOUSE BARN, OUT IN BACK OF THE HEETER FARM, PRETTY GIRL WALKING ON MY ARM, GUIDED BY THE MOONLIGHT”
There were many impromptu, pop-up speakeasies in unsuspecting places. One of those places was called, “The River House Barn,” outside of Coon Rapids on what is now the White Rock Conservancy. There was a local driver who ran an early version of a ride-share program who drove around and picked people up and dropped them off at the barn called the White Rock Express. Check out a distant relative of the original owners telling her memory of the story here.
“LET THE BARN BURN, LET THE BAND PLAY, AND EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY, WHEN YOUR MOUTH GETS DRY, FILL MY CUP, WITH TEMPLETON RYE.”
The writing of this song and the subsequent launch of Templeton Rye as a legal brand fulfilled a rock and roll fantasy I didn’t even know I had as we eventually landed a corporate sponsorship that not only supplied us with almost limitless amounts of whiskey but also provided monetary tour support which helped us accomplish our goals of touring and making new fans around the midwest and the country. It also provided me access to more people and more stories along the way.
The Templeton Rye song is only about 3 min long, but it provided a lifetime of memories. six years of a whiskey sponsorship combined with a rock and roll lifestyle erased most of them, but it definitely “filled my cup.”
Thanks for reading. What song should I write about next? Or what other topics should I consider?
Jason
This is great stuff about the good stuff.