Touring on the Fly with Americana Band Onward Etc. To see more...

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Touring on the Fly with Americana Band Onward Etc.

To see more of Rosco’s adventures on the road, check out @onwardetc on Instagram. For more music stories, head to @music.

Rosco Wuestewald (@onwardetc) was 17 years old and staring down a future with which he wanted no part. This much was obvious to him: He had to escape his childhood home in conservative South Dakota to avoid the traditional route of going to college, getting married and settling down to a life of monotony by his mid-20s. So he ran off to Alaska, and 10 years later, he’s turned escape into a very successful lifestyle.

As the driving creative force behind folk rock/Americana act Onward Etc., Rosco has made life on the road into an engine of creativity. After some early teenage dabblings with punk rock and a Nirvana cover band, Rosco got serious about playing guitar and writing songs while living in a tent pitched in the small town of Skagway, Alaska. He wrote about his experiences and the people he had met during his early journeys, mostly, and hatched a plan: He would travel with a small band across the country, meeting and playing with different musicians at every stop of the tour.

“When I was 18, I ended up buying a short bus, and I had met all these musicians at that point already through other people,” he remembers. “I called all these musicians around the country and said, ‘Hey, listen guys, come October I’m going to set up a tour for two months and I want to bring an assembly of people.’ I ended up with six people that were interested and wanted to do it.”

The lineup consisted of a violinist from Hawaii, a banjo player from Alaska and a drummer, guitarist and bass player that flew in from the Midwest. Six in all, they met in Bellingham, Washington, all strangers but for their connection to Rosco. The unfamiliarity did not last long.

“The bonds we had were so awesome,” Rosco says. “Creating music on the spot. That was the first time I was teaching my music to a full band. But the shows were f—ing terrible; there was hardly anyone there. We were starving at points and broke down a ton of times, eating out of dumpsters. It was that picturesque real punk rock, first tour ever. Living off the seat of your pants.”

Rosco has been barnstorming ever since, hooking up with friends and collaborators in various cities, teaching them his songs and in turn letting their styles influence the sound that the audience hears that night.

“It’s totally different every time. We can go on one tour and there will be an electric bass player or a heavy-hitting drummer that’s really rock ‘n’ roll, and so it’ll be really intense,” he says. “And then you can turn it around and have a cello player and a trumpet player and have it be a dark, funky groove.”

Even on his most recent solo tours, the addition of friends and local musicians help mix up his nightly set. He has years of shows recorded, but instead of distributing those — and their endless variations — he’s focusing on finishing his third studio album. The songs on his albums maintain an element of his live show jamboree, but his life on the road is really reflected in the lyrics, which tell tales of defiance, wild times and emotional growth. He’s got plenty of stories to relay, late nights to recall and even the occasional police run-in (like the time he spent a night in the slammer for jumping off a bridge into a river in rural Minnesota).

Now, a decade into his run, Rosco is still charging forward, aware how crazy his initial decision seems to others but without a single regret of the road he’s taken.

“To me it seems normal,” he laughs. “It’s more or less, when I hear other people’s stories, they are like, ‘When I was 18, I was getting ready to go to college.’ And I am like, God, man. What would that have been like?”

—Instagram @music

by via Instagram Blog