Black Russian
Blunt Cake

Dale Kemper arrived in Boulder in 1973 from La Junta, a fact he has acknowledged without elaboration. He was twenty-five. He had attended one semester of the Colorado Mountain College culinary program in 1972 before withdrawing to play guitar full time. Between 1972 and 1973 he worked in four Colorado bakeries, including eleven months in Leadville at 8,773 feet, where the altitude ruined more loaves than he will count before he understood what it was asking of him.

He met Connie Brandt at a kitchen supply store on Pearl Street in October 1973. They both reached for the same bench scraper at the same moment. The archive has the account from both parties. The accounts do not agree on what was said next. The archive has accepted this.

They were married in 1974. In 1975 they moved to a two-story Victorian on Mapleton Avenue whose kitchen was large and north-facing. Dale considered the north-facing kitchen important for practical reasons. Connie considered it important because it matched the kitchen she had grown up in in Fort Collins. They did not tell each other this until 1979.

Dale baked. By 1976 he had been making the Black Russian Bundt Cake — Kahlúa, vodka, chocolate pudding mix, and approximately seven other ingredients whose identities Connie has declined to confirm — long enough that it was his signature. He did not write the recipe down. He described it as a feel thing. He has described it this way consistently for forty years. The archive has stopped asking.

Arlo Pettigrew appeared at the Mapleton Avenue house in the winter of 1976. He was a regular at the farmers market where Connie sold baked goods on Saturdays, and had recognized Dale at a coffee shop on Canyon Boulevard as the man who made the bundt cake he had bought in September and had been thinking about since. He introduced himself by saying he played rhythm guitar and was looking for someone to play with. Dale said, "Come on Tuesday." Arlo said, "Which Tuesday." Dale said, "Any Tuesday."

Arlo returned the Tuesday after that. He continued returning without being reinvited. The archive considers this a meaningful detail.

Teddy Rusk arrived in March 1977. He had withdrawn from the CU Boulder chemistry graduate program in January to pursue a direction the archive describes as still being decided. He arrived at Mapleton Avenue on a Tuesday in March without calling ahead and said, "I play Hammond B3. I was told you have Tuesdays." Dale said, "The B3 is going to be a problem." Teddy said, "I have a truck." The Hammond was installed two Tuesdays later.

By summer 1977, the three of them had developed three recurring pieces — slow, patient progressions in G and D that went where they went without urgency. Dale played guitar and sometimes sang without words when the music was moving toward something and the words had not arrived yet. Arlo held the center. Teddy played the Hammond and searched for a different sound every week. Connie sat at the edge of the room with a project and occasionally looked up. Her comments after sessions, Dale has said, were usually the most useful things said all night. They were almost never about music.

The three of them had been playing Tuesdays for approximately six months when Connie came home from the Boulder Bookstore with a poster and said: "Tuesday. We are going."

The Boulder Bookstore on Pearl Street held a poetry reading on the first Tuesday of October 1977. The reader was Wren Holloway. She was twenty-three, a CU Boulder comparative literature graduate, and had been writing in spiral notebooks since she was seven. Harvey Gunther, the bookstore's owner, had been sending her letters every six months for two years inviting her to read. She had declined each one. She answered the sixth.

The audience was seventeen people. Dale and Connie Kemper sat in the fourth row. Dale did not read poetry as a rule. He was there because Connie had come home with a poster.

Wren read four poems. The fourth had not been published. It was about bread rising in a north-facing kitchen. The archive holds thirty-one words from it — the only portion Wren has authorized. The fragment ends: "This is the part that is everything."

Dale Kemper, in the fourth row, stopped breathing for half a second during the last line. He did not notice this. Connie did.

After the reading, Dale walked to the platform. He told Wren that the line about the dough and the unlit oven was the most accurate thing anyone had said about what he did for a living. Wren said it was the most useful thing anyone had said about any poem she had written. Dale invited her to Mapleton Avenue the following Tuesday. He said they had music but no words. He asked if she would bring the notebook. Wren asked what time. Dale said seven. Wren said she would be there at seven.

Harvey Gunther, who had no way of knowing any of this, wrote in his ledger that night: "A man in the fourth row stopped breathing for half a second during the last line. I hope he has noticed what happened to him."

The band needed a name for its first show. The show was the Boulder Farmers Market in May 1978, secured by Connie through the market manager, who had eaten Dale's bundt cake at Connie's table every Saturday for two years. The deadline for the name was one week away.

The name was decided at the kitchen table on a Sunday evening. The archive has the conversation. Wren was at the table with a notebook and wrote it down as it happened.

Dale said the name needed to have the cake in it. Arlo said: Black Russian Bundt Cake. Dale said it sounded like a menu item. Connie said: Black Russian Blunt Cake. There was a pause of approximately six seconds. Arlo asked what "Blunt" meant in this context. Connie said she did not know, and that was why it worked. The archive has made its own determination. The archive has no further interpretation.

Arlo Pettigrew made the first flyer on a mimeograph machine at a print shop on Pearl Street. The flyer announced the show and the cake at fifty cents. The word "BLUNT" is on the flyer. Arlo has maintained for forty years that he typed the name of the band. The name of the band was Black Russian Blunt Cake. He typed the name of the band. The archive has reviewed the flyer. The archive has no further interpretation.

The first show was May 19, 1978. Connie's folding table held three overbaked cakes, a handwritten sign, and a coffee thermos for the band because it was cold in the morning. The band began playing at 9:07 AM. The cake sold out at 10:43 AM. The music did not sell out. It continued for approximately three and a half additional hours.

Black Russian Blunt Cake played shows from 1978 to 1987. The archive has documented forty-seven of them with verified set lengths. The median show ran three hours and forty-two minutes. The shortest was two hours and fifty-eight minutes, at a sixty-seat listening room in Colorado Springs, because the venue had a noise ordinance. The longest was six hours and forty minutes at the Fox Theatre on November 4, 1983 — verified through venue records and through the account of R. Beaumont of Boulder, who was present for the full duration and has said on the record that she had nowhere else to be and nothing she would rather have done.

The parking lot at every show smelled, according to fourteen separate witness accounts across six venues and seven years, like chocolate, coffee, and something herbal. The herbal component was never identified. The archive does not speculate.

They played the Fox Theatre seven times. Four shows were recorded. Three recordings survive. The fourth — the November 1983 show — was recorded, but the tape was damaged at some point before 1987 in a way that has not been explained. The archive has investigated without resolution.

Five records were released. The fifth, Second Batch: Live at the Fox, was recorded over three nights in January 1985. The second disc is a single unbroken 47-minute jam. It begins with "Kahlúa Morning" and passes through three other songs and into territory that has no name. The archive has a copy of the record.

The band dissolved in the fall of 1987, six weeks after The Last Batch. The dissolution was quiet. Dale returned to baking. Connie continued running the kitchen. Arlo took a job at a print shop. Teddy moved the Hammond B3 to a storage unit in Longmont, where it stayed eleven years. Martin Ochoa returned to his family's panadería in Pueblo. Phil Dunaway moved to Taos and took the cutting board and rolling pin with him. Wren kept writing.

The archive does not know what the last show was like. What the archive knows is that the cake was on the table, the show ran long, and when it ended nobody called it the last one. It was.

The date was April 22, 1978. A Saturday. Clear and sixty-four degrees. The occasion was a neighborhood potluck at the home of Maddy Chen, three blocks south on Mapleton Avenue. Iris Chen was turning four. Maddy had requested the bundt cake specifically. She had been waiting since 1976 for an acceptable occasion.

Dale began mixing the batter at 11:00 AM. The cake went into the oven at 12:15 PM. He set the mechanical brass timer to 55 minutes and walked into the living room, where Arlo and Teddy were playing a slow piece in G that had been developing for four weeks and had not yet found what it was going toward. Dale picked up his guitar and joined the piece without saying anything.

Wren Holloway was at the kitchen table with a notebook, keeping Connie company. At 12:34 PM she stood up, walked to the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, and stood there with a coffee cup in both hands for six minutes, watching the three men play. She then sat back down and wrote a line the archive has permission to quote: "The good things never rush to meet you. They arrive when they arrive." She did not show it to anyone that day.

At 1:10 PM the kitchen timer rang. Dale did not stop playing. He was approximately eight bars from something the piece had been moving toward for four weeks. Arlo looked at Dale, who did not look back, and did not stop. Teddy did not hear the timer at all — when playing a sustained drone through a Leslie cabinet, he has said, he does not hear anything outside that frequency. Connie heard the timer, looked into the living room, understood what was happening, and continued rolling shortbread dough. She did not open the oven. Wren heard the timer and wrote: "The oven timer rang at midnight. Nobody stopped to check the clock." She wrote "midnight" not because it was midnight, but because the kitchen she was imagining was not the actual kitchen. The line appears unchanged in "Slow Rise," recorded three years later.

The music continued eleven more minutes. The cake overbaked. At 1:21 PM, Dale set his guitar down, walked to the kitchen, opened the oven, and said to no one in particular: "The center held." Wren wrote this down. It became the fourth verse of "Slow Rise."

Dale pulled the cake and Connie smelled it. She said: "You can never make this cake any other way again." Dale said: "I know." Every cake served at every show from 1978 to 1987 was the 66-minute cake. The 55-minute cake was gone after April 22, 1978.

When asked what had happened in the living room, Wren said from the kitchen table: "The thing you were all trying to get to. It arrived. The cake is the reason it arrived. These are the same event." The archive has noted this.

The cake was delivered to the potluck at 3:08 PM. The first person to eat a slice said it was the best bundt cake she had ever eaten in her life. The cake was gone before the potluck ended. Seven people interviewed from that afternoon all remembered the cake. None of them used the word "overbaked."