FIRE Sets Audiences Ablaze
Live Music Alert: American Legion, Fargo, Saturday Sept. 5, 9 pm-1 am
When a petite blond piano player sat in with the veteran Grand Forks band FIRE a few years ago, they didn’t realize how her presence would help shape the course of the band. Maggie Oakland, originally from Valley City, has been involved with the Arts since she was a child, drawing and painting— playing piano, absorbing an uncommon amount of music and skill along the way. At one point in her life, she did a stint in New Orleans, playing piano for tips, making enough to keep her eating and her rent paid. But work and furthering her education in Grand Forks soon crowed out a lot of time to perform. Still, the lure of the keys and the stage was there. In 2001, she started dropping in on the Tuesday night jam sessions at the Diamond Lounge in Grand Forks, hosted by a local band, The Whackers. It was there that she met Dave Oakland, who was not only a member of The Whackers but a long-time member of FIRE.
“I sat in once or twice with FIRE for just for fun,” Maggie said in a recent interview. “ Then, I suggested that maybe with a piano player, they could do some other material that other bands can’t do like the Doors and ‘Great Balls of Fire’ and things that rely on the piano. We tried it, and I started doing it very part time, only when they played in Grand Forks. I did that for awhile. Initially when I started, I did it for free. Then, things kept moving in that direction where eventually it got to rely on the piano a lot. We do a lot of the Doors and ‘Annigoda Devita,’ and ‘The Wall’ that rely heavily on the keyboard. We do ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Lights,’ too.”
Dave and Maggie
Maggie became an official member of the band in 2004, and eventually married Dave Oakland, FIRE’s guitarist two years later. Since then, the band has been touring up and down the Valley, playing what people want to hear. “We played at the Labor Club in Valley City, which is about two hours away, earlier this year and plan to return there in October,” Maggie said. “That’s about as far away from Grand Forks as we would ever want to travel, and we try to keep most of our jobs within an hour or so of Grand Fork.”
Even with a small touring radius, they are in demand. “We do classic rock mainly, but we do an awful lot of country and oldies, and a little bit of newer material,” Maggie said. “We have two types of songs: Songs that we like, and songs that are popular. The songs that are the most popular are almost never the same songs we especially like ourselves, so that’s a real balancing act. To some extent, we have to do music that’s somewhat complex and genuinely interesting to us to keep us going and to keep our sanity intact. But the simple, less sophisticated songs that have been around forever that everybody knows: Those are the songs that pay the bills. People want to kick back and have fun in most of the venues where we play. If they wanted music that was intellectually stimulating, they would go buy tickets for the orchestra!”
Gary
Gary Langheid, a Grand Forks native and the bassist and lead vocalist for FIRE, founded the band in 1984. It was the last of a long list of bands that took Langheid all over the country. After teaching for two years in East Grand Forks, Langheid launched his professional musical career, playing guitar and trumpet and singing with the blues rock band, The Other Culture, in the late 60s. He was picked up by the touring band Train in the 70s and did gigs in Chicago, Milwaukee, Winipeg, and cities in
Mississippi, and, of course, Grand Forks. For that band, he played bass, guitar, trombone, and flute, as well as sang. Later, he joined the Dave Dudley Revue in Biloxi, MS. Coming back to the region, he played in Midnight Special and the Patterson Kane Band. His final big touring band, Infinity, took him to Miami to play at the Fountainbleau Hotel and Coconut Grove, as well as gigs in MS, AL, WV, and many other Florida venues including the Plantation Yacht Harbor in the Florida Keys. FIRE was just a natural outgrowth of all that experience when Langheid wanted to settle down.
George
The band’s drummer George Hayertz was born in Garmisch, Germany to a military family, and lived in many states before settling in Grand Forks where his father decided to retire. He has played with many bands in the Red River Valley including: The Fabulous Cornerstones, The Impacts, Fred Black and the Cadillacs, Four Wheel Drive, and Ridin’ High. He also was in Train and the Patterson Kane Band that Langheid had been with. “I started providing the back beat for Fire in 1989,” Hayertz said. “Currently, I am also doing substitute drumming for various bands in and surrounding Fargo-Moorhead, when not working with FIRE, along with playing drums for Cool Daddy Productions Digital Studio, where I am currently starting work on a CD of original material by producer, Rick Bergenheier,” Hayertz said.
Dave
Dave Oakland replaced the original FIRE guitarist in 1985. Growing up on a farm near Sarles, ND, Oakland started his first band when he was about 12, playing with his cousin and some friends, at school dances and eventually at some private shows at local halls. When he came to UND, he formed Lone Tree, a trio. “That band was a staple of the ‘Golden Hour’ keggers, fraternity parties, and bars in East Grand Forks, MN, where the drinking age had recently changed to 18,’ Oakland said. “Lone Tree lasted a couple of years and was a good learning experience for me. I was exposed to a lot of different music for the first time, like bluegrass, folk, and the genres that eventually became my favorites–blues and southern rock.” He later joined Clockwork, a 5-piece cover band that toured the region, and eventually Deliverance. He left that band to join FIRE, a band that toured as three-piece for 15 years. “With Maggie on keys now, we can do a much wider range of material than we did as a 3-piece, and she shares in the vocal duties as well,”Oakland said. “ And, as many are quick to point out, ‘She’s a lot better to look at than you guys!’”
Though the members of FIRE would love to tour further out. It just isn’t possible right now. “Three out of four member of FIRE have full-time day jobs,” Maggie said, “so we can’t go on the road for weeks at a time like the big stars.” Maggie herself is a Serious Mental Illness Case manager at Northeast Human Service Center and is working on a Master’s degree in Counseling at UND. She also is the President of the Greater Grand Forks Inter-Agency Forum board of directors and also the President of the Community Agency Networking Association in Grand Forks.
Catch FIRE at the American Legion in downtown Fargo on Saturday Sept. 5. The party starts at 9 pm.
