Standing in his luthier workshop in Iowa City, Dave Helmer calls himself a “cowboy in a hole.”
It’s hot in there in August, and there’s no Wi-Fi. There is a radio receiver and a handful of CDs, and of course, there are many guitars in various states of repair, from the almost complete to those scheduled for some distant future. It’s from this small room full of imperfect instruments that Helmer has reoriented his life during the last few years, expanding his guitar repair skill set and playing the instrument sometimes for hours on end.
All that guitar fixing and playing has led to Dave Helmer’s first solo album, Such A Clown. The album released in August, and Helmer is celebrating by playing at the Trumpet Blossom Cafe in Iowa City, opening for acclaimed country folk songwriter Adeem the Artist.
Life as a luthier
Helmer has spent much of his adult life playing music, mostly as the co-founder of the rock band Crystal City, which has played shows across the country and opened for the likes of Charlie Parr, The Whigs and Lucy Dacus. They’ve released one EP and three full-length albums of what they call “Heartland Rock & Roll.”
A few miles south of downtown Iowa City, in a small room in an unmarked industrial warehouse near Grizzly's South Side Pub & Grill, Helmer’s luthier workshop is packed with the potential for music making. During the last few years, as people dug out and played or sold their instruments during the pandemic, Helmer saw his luthier business expand exponentially. Today, his crowded workshop reflects it.
Several electric and acoustic guitars hang against the wall, including a single guitar neck, sans body. A mandolin rests atop its case on one of his worktables, waiting for some kind of mending. On another, a hollow Yamaha Silent Guitar sits with its top half missing. Various bottles of glue, varnish and finishing lacquers sit next to Helmer’s gas station Styrofoam cup. Belt sanders, guitar amplifiers and bandsaws are piled over in the corner next to an assortment of instrument cases, filled or not. A calendar exists wherever there is a free surface: Sharpie-d dates and times for some past or maybe future appointment. He says again that he is “just a cowboy in a hole” when he’s in here. He reiterates this several more times during the interview.
He’s a serious and respected luthier, though, repairing guitars and other instruments for musicians throughout eastern Iowa for the better part of a decade. Helmer was even featured in Premier Guitar twice for their “No-Brainer Mods” series.
Helmer’s first experience of a life now spent with guitars came during the summer after his eighth grade year in his hometown of Marshalltown. He and his friends were starting a band and Helmer was slated to play bass. “The guy that was going to play guitar that summer was like ‘I don't want to play guitar. This is stupid.’ And he sold me his guitar for sixty bucks.” Helmer still has that guitar, a Japanese made Applause Stratocaster that he calls “Applesauce.”
After high school, he studied jazz guitar for a year at UNI. Then, a few years later, he graduated from the guitar repair program at Minnesota State College Southeast. During the years between, Helmer says he “toured and partied.” Then, in 2009 he met Sam Drella, his longtime partner and co-founder of Crystal City. Helmer went back to MSC Southeast “to get my act together” and received some advanced certifications in guitar repair. In 2013, the pair moved to Iowa City.
During the pandemic, Helmer’s partner Sam had the opportunity to join the MBA program at the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business. The pair decided that Helmer should use that time to try to do a solo record. “She was busy getting her MBA and it was just like I'm gonna do this thing, because why not? The pandemic kind of gave us all a new outlook. We don't have to do this one thing all the time.”
The pair also didn’t want to rush too quickly behind their latest full-length release, 2019’s Three-Dimensionality. “We're really proud of it. We still want to promote this other album that the pandemic kind of halted the promotion for. And so we're like, ‘If I put a solo record out, we can do both things without either getting crushed.”
About Such A Clown, Helmer’s new solo record
Normally when Crystal City heads into the studio to record, Helmer says that everything is already taken care of: the chord changes are set, the harmonies are rehearsed, and the lyrics are written. For Such A Clown, Helmer says he started with a couple of riffs and a few ideas when he first reached out to Scott Yoshimura, the Des Moines-based producer and drummer of The Envy Corps, The Finesse and Ellison.
“You just have to wait ‘till the song shows up. But you can spend your time practicing guitar and hitting the guitar and waiting for inspiration to strike, and I did.”
While he was working out the songs, Helmer took lessons with famed Iowa City jazz guitarist Steve Grismore, who Helmer credits with helping him craft and hone several of the guitar solos on Such A Clown. “I was like, ‘I'm gonna come out of COVID-19 a better guitar player,’ and I have. I'm not saying I'm amazing, but I'm trying really hard.”
Along with the intense practice, Helmer also credits a $50 donated guitar with the creation of three songs on the album: “Lemonade,” “Waiting in the Wings” and “Kiss the Sun.” During the pandemic, somebody gifted Helmer a busted-up guitar to see if he could fix it and sell it. After some work, he put on a set of strings “you’d never put on a guitar” and tuned it into a unique tuning that he’d never played before. Then, he took that guitar on a week-long vacation with his partner Sam. “I didn't take any other guitar. So I had this weird tuning I knew nothing about, and I came up with all three of those ideas. There's no way you could have come up with the sound of those songs in standard tuning.”
It was only after Helmer and Yoshimura had recorded most of the music, with Ryan Bernemann supplying the bass, that Helmer composed the album’s lyrics. He went back to the scratch vocals that he’d shouted or sometimes mumbled during the initial tracking of each song. “A lot of it was like nonsense, because like in the moment you're just kind of going for it. But we went through every single take and I wrote down every lyric, no matter how dumb it was or if it didn't make any sense.” Then Helmer took a few minutes and reassembled the lyrics until he felt they were right, and then he “just started yelling in the microphone.”
“It was a cool way to do it because the vocal that I'm recording is like the most initial, first thing.”
During the mixing process, both Helmer and Yoshimura made a conscious effort to make sure that the album would sound the way that they wanted coming through cell phone speakers. They also practiced judicious concision. (The album’s ten songs come in right around the 30-minute mark.) “I was just like ‘What if we just tried to make complete listens and tried to get everything under three minutes whenever we could?’ There's a lot of music being made, but also all the classic stuff that we know and love…I don't believe people are gonna give you four or five minutes anymore. But they might give you two or three.”
The album’s title comes from a line in the chorus of “Anyone To Blame.” Helmer says when he was growing up, he started calling his friends “clowns” when they were playing each other in Dr. Mario. From then on, the insult or nickname has just hung around and eventually found its way into a song. “I just thought it was funny, that I’d never heard any musician or songwriter call themselves a clown in the chorus of a song. And I thought, ‘What do I care?’ It's okay to be self-deprecating or jaded or whatever in songs because if you get it out in song, then maybe it won't appear in your life.”
Helmer has a string of shows set for this fall, as a solo act and with both the Dave Helmer Band and Crystal City. He says that the projects all share band members, and that the songs from Such A Clown will show up during Crystal City shows and vice-versa. (Helmer describes it as kind of Tom Petty situation.”)
For him, this album has always been less about the distinctions between projects and more about the creative opportunities that guitars and music have always provided to him.
"Music can be whatever you want it to be, especially on a local level. We can do whatever we want.”
