King Midas

King, for his part, doesn’t simply bang on the head of a drum with a stick. He uses his finger and his elbow on the drums. He circles the drum heads with his sticks. He meticulously drags a drumstick across a cymbal as if to say, “This is music—sound, noise—it’s not just notes.” When he can’t create the sound he wants with traditional instruments, he improvises—famously with children’s toys. His arsenal includes megaphones that make static noises when he runs them over the drum head, a plastic penguin that jingles, and a child’s drum that he twirls and shakes. His attachment to the toys, he explains, comes from not having a complete drum set when he was a kid. “I built a set out of pots and pans when I was in junior high,” he says. To this day, he uses one of his mother’s pots from the seventies.

“I’ve always searched for things that people don’t have,” he continues. “Instead of going out and buying a Latin percussion shaker at Guitar Center, I would try to find a Fisher–Price toy that would make a similar sound. And it’s not so much that I crave being different, but that I really do want to have a palate that is my own all the time. For a few years, I was playing with walkie-talkies, playing the drums with the antennae. Now I’ve gone on to megaphones that feed back when you hit them on the drum and to weird 1970s Fisher–Price keyboards. It’s not like I just went, ‘Oh, I want to be a weird free jazz guy and have jingly toys.’ It was more like I’ve been carrying these stupid squeezy toys around for twenty years.” He laughs and adds, “I have seniority.”

Happy Apple was in fact named after the familiar Fisher–Price toddler’s toy. His other bands’ names came about just as obliquely. Halloween, Alaska is a fake town. The Bad Plus came from putting together “words that are very simple and sounded like they mean something, but they don’t,” King says. “It’s very kind of pop art–like. You remember it, and it’s a little bit oxymoronic, but it’s not like, you know, ‘The Bad Good.’ Nothing that obvious."

It’s the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, and it’s standing room only at the Artists’ Quarter for the third night in a row. Happy Apple has played the weekend to sold-out audiences that range from high school seniors to senior citizens. Kenny Horst, the AQ’s owner, says SRO for Happy Apple is business as usual. Horst has been booking the band for ten years—since its second show ever.

Happy Apple went through several incarnations before hitting its stride with its current trio of King, Lewis, and Fratzke. The band had had two saxophonists and an upright-bass player when, finally, in 1996, Fratzke came aboard, because, as the electric-bass player says, “you don’t refuse an invitation to work with Dave King.” (King is equally enthusiastic about working with Fratzke. “It was sort of like, ‘This is it, this is how it’s working,’ ” he says. “And from then on it’s like it can’t be anything else.”)

At the beginning, Happy Apple was much louder and more aggressive. “Everything they played was off the deep end,” says Horst. “When they started out, the waitresses wore earplugs.” Now the band’s tunes, both hard and soft, reflect its members’ range and interests, and their determination to meld genres has been a big reason for its success.

King likewise crosses genre lines with his band Halloween, Alaska, which won the 2006 Minnesota Music Award for best electronic artist/group. King and Fratzke also play in The Gang Font feat. Interloper, their new noise/ jazz/rock band with keyboardist Craig Taborn and Hüsker Dü’s bass player, Greg Norton. (Of King’s 225-plus gigs a year, 175 of them are with The Bad Plus, 40 are with Happy Apple, and 10 with Halloween, Alaska.) King, for that matter, has been busy with more than live shows and touring. The Bad Plus recently recorded at Cannon Falls’ Pachyderm Studio with British producer Tony Platt, who’s worked on records for AC/DC and Bob Marley; that CD is due out in March. Halloween, Alaska will release its new CD this spring. And Happy Apple is recording this winter. Of the thirty-five CDs King has appeared on, fourteen were recorded by one of the three main bands. Other CDs include those by Meat Beat Manifesto, Haley Bonar, Mason Jennings, Dean Magraw, Bill Carrothers, Craig Taborn, Love-cars, and Rhea Valentine.