Monica Topping
Radio Radio Radio

How does one describe the music made by an amplified, wireless, distorted cello, attached by a guitar strap to its human, who is running through the audience and singing songs about fantasy lands and pretty girls… while wearing next to nothing?

Singer and cello player Rushad Eggleston describes his band Tornado Rider as rock ‘n’ roll, pure and simple.

Eggleston has never been one to conform to what’s popular. In part, he says that’s because he didn’t watch a lot of TV while growing up, and after dropping out of high school in Carmel, while other kids his age were hanging out and partying, he was in his bedroom practicing his cello. His refusal to conform, then, isn’t so much a rebellion against the mainstream as it is an attempted creation of a new mainstream.

The teenaged Eggleston ended up moving to the East Coast to attend Berklee College of Music in the late ‘90s. He earned a Grammy nomination in 2002 with the group Fiddlers 4 and co-founded alt. bluegrass band Crooked Still, while living in Brooklyn after graduation. Eggleston parted ways with Crooked Still in late 2007, moving back to Monterey to be closer to his girlfriend-at-the-time, a model who was living in L.A., and to save money on rent by living with his mom, when he wasn’t on the road.

After forming a series of projects and having each one eventually disband due, in part, to lack of commitment from his band mates, Eggleston says he was looking to start something new with people who were committed to making it work. The new band, unlike his folksy roots, would be loud(er) and (more) energetic.

“Folk music is reaching down somewhere primordial,” says Eggleston about his prior projects. “A lot of the times it feels to me like it’s full of the same spirit that rock ‘n’ roll is full of, where it’s just like pure transcendental fun and power.

“When it all lines up and you’re playing some fiddle tune, it makes everyone want to dance and just go crazy. So I was starting to get to this place where I was realizing that, and playing the cello harder and harder and faster and faster, and also having been into rock music in the past, I started to notice, like ‘Wow, what would it be like if I was not just trying to revamp old fiddle tunes and keep pushing the folk envelope. I need to rock out for real, and not just pretend.’”

So Eggleston began pushing the rock envelope — ala Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, 45 years ago — and plugged his cello in through an amplifier and a distortion pedal.

“The guitar did not start out as a rock instrument,” says Eggleston. “Nor did the bass or the drums. It was just a matter of time.

“Just like some people reach puberty later, the cello reached its rock puberty at a much later age than the guitar did,” he adds.

Starting a rock band, for Eggleston, is something he always figured he’d do at some point, probably with a guitar. Prior to starting Tornado Rider with drummer and longtime friend Scott Manke and bass player Graham Terry, Eggleston says he had thought about electrifying his cello, but it was really this band that solidified the idea. Turning a historically classical instrument into a tool of rock ‘n’ roll, says the highly energetic Eggleston, was the “only natural outcome of me being a cello player.”

Since Tornado Rider formed in 2008, the band has toured relentlessly, hoping to work its way up through the musical ranks and into the supportive arms of a record label. In 2009, prior to hitting to road on their way to a music festival in Florida, the band holed up in its basement-cum-practice space and roughly recorded an album called “Do You Have Time?,” but they have yet to lay down a true studio album, and that’s something Eggleston says they’re working hard toward accomplishing.

One of the newest elements added to Tornado Rider’s live experience is Eggleston’s wireless headset microphone, which, rather than tethering him to the stage during a song’s verses, allows him to “be jumping up and down or rolling on the floor, or like running out into the crowd or doing a slide or,” he adds without a second thought, “hanging out underneath the bass player or whatever” — all perfectly logical reasons for donning a wireless mic.

Tornado Rider’s theatrics may only be topped Gooferman — friends of the band with whom they will be playing the first few dates of their two-week tour.

“They’re basically just a really — I don’t know how to describe them — I want to say crazy dudes,” says Eggleston of Gooferman. “They all dress up in, like, full-on clown costumes, but like modern clowns. They look like some really cool, radical clowns and they’ve got a heavy metal guitarist and like a punk bassist and a bunch of cool songs. It’s just really super energetic and fun music.”

“KNOW THIS!” says Gooferman’s biography. “We are NOT Juggalos or affiliated with the (Insane Clown Posse). We don’t rap, we don’t play metal and we aren’t evil klowns. We’re lifestyle klowns. Biiig difference.”

Gooferman, Tornado Rider and DJ T-Dub will be at the Arcata Theatre Lounge this Thursday, Feb. 11, at 9 p.m. There is a $10 cover and this is a 21-and-over show.

Photos from Tornado Rider's first Humboldt show in December 2008, with Absynth Quintet:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

(All photos by Monica Topping)