Yard Eagle, the St. Louis indie-roots band led by singer/songwriter/guitarist Jakob Baxter, is one of just three local acts invited to play the inaugural Evolution Festival, the two-day music, bourbon and barbecue festival being staged in Forest Park in August featuring such big-name acts as Brandi Carlile, the Black Keys and the Black Crowes.
"It's something that just legitimately fell into our laps," Baxter tells me over soups and salads at the Fountain on Locust. How the group caught the attention of Evolution's organizers remains a mystery to Baxter, but given the high visibility of Yard Eagle in the St. Louis scene it is unsurprising that the band showed up on the festival's radar. After all, Yard Eagle maintains a breakneck pace — at press time, the band was about to play eight shows over the next nine days — and Baxter himself is ubiquitous around town as a sideman and collaborator.
Baxter's connections to the music scene run deep. For example, our server at the Fountain is, as it turns out, Allie Vogler, formerly of River Kittens, with whom Baxter served as touring guitarist. In fact, Baxter is now roommates with the other half of the Kittens, Maddie Schell and her fiancé Nate Gilbert, who is co-producing Yard Eagle's new album. Baxter remains equally loyal to both Kittens after their recent split: He plays with Schell at her biweekly Venice Cafe show and is working on Vogler's next project. Known for his clean, hyper-melodic playing, Baxter also stepped in earlier this year during the Mighty Pines' shows for guitarist Neil Salsich while he was in LA competing on The Voice.
Not bad for a farm boy from teensy Rutland, Illinois — geographically situated at the Cards/Cubs dividing line — where Baxter grew up helping his dad grow corn and soybeans and raise beef cattle. Despite the isolated rurality, his parents were huge rock fans: His dad was the biggest (perhaps only) Frank Zappa fan in LaSalle County, and his mom, with whom Baxter split time in O'Fallon, Illinois, attended Stevie Ray Vaughan's last-ever concert, the night the musician died in a helicopter crash.
Baxter, likewise, grew up a rock fanatic: His first tattoo was the Rolling Stones' tongue-and-lips logo on his right middle finger as a teenager, and he was already playing guitar in rock bands in middle school. A brief taste of college took him to Chicago, where he dropped out to become a full-time side guitarist at age 19 for country singer Craig Gerdes, who gave Baxter a crash course in classic country music and its twangy guitar idioms. Baxter credits Gerdes with not only key six-string tutelage but also with teaching him frontmanship and stage conducting. Not to mention the art of hard partying on the road: "We toured all over the Midwest playing four-hour dive-bar gigs, and we would have a full bottle of whiskey on stage, and it would be empty by the end of the show," Baxter says.
Eventually, the Gerdes gig ran its course ("It was great until it wasn't," Baxter says), and he ended back in O'Fallon, settling on solo acoustic gigs, eventually starting the first version of Yard Eagle with a buddy to play folky duet sets around town. The band's name was inspired by a lawn ornament that came with the house the two bandmates were renting at the time.
"It was a concrete patriotic eagle. It was falling apart. It was hideous," Baxter remembers. "We thought it was hilarious. We loved the idea that people would show their version of patriotism by putting an ugly concrete eagle in their yard." Baxter says that the group pushed the concept to cartoonishly parodic extremes. "We wrote this whole manifesto pretending that Yard Eagle was a communist front and that the followers of Yard Eagle were a cult, even though we were this really tame acoustic folk duo," he says with a laugh.
That kind of playful subversion has followed Baxter through all of the iterations of Yard Eagle to the current day. The band has long favored semi-ironic imagery inspired by '50s Red Scare propaganda, American iconography in its song titles ("The Ghost of Nancy Reagan," for instance) and stage accoutrements such as red, white and blue guitar cables and drum heads.
The use of such patriotic aesthetics comes, not coincidentally, at a time in history when images of American flags and "USA!" chants have been hijacked and turned into the calling cards of the right-wing MAGA movement. Baxter believes in taking that imagery back. "We love taking the classic American aesthetics or country aesthetics — the fonts, the pictures — and taking it somewhere else," he says.
Baxter, who is gay, is especially invested in the concept of an America for all Americans. "I'm an American, and I have a right to that imagery. And I want those. Those are mine," he says. But he's also interested in sticking it to those who think they own those images for their own narrow worldviews. "Sometimes we do Yard Eagle shows in drag," he says. "We will put on standard Western wear but with lipstick and makeup, so we are presenting this very masculine thing and then completely subverting it by putting makeup on."
Despite those gestures, Baxter, who came out at age 21, says he does not try to use his sexual identity as a way to promote his art. "Yard Eagle is inherently a queer band because that's the perspective that I'm writing from," he says. "I'm not necessarily saying anything overtly queer or making it this hill that I'm dying on, but it is coming from a queer perspective because it's coming from my perspective."
That kind of auteur approach reflects the fact that Yard Eagle has had revolving personnel over the years, with Baxter as the sole continuous member. After the original duo, Yard Eagle 2.0 was formed as a four-piece of hometown buddies after Baxter had relocated to St. Louis and immersed himself into the local scene. This version made its St. Louis debut in 2018 and incorporated psychedelic liquid light shows into the sets, complete with clock faces and oils.
Yard Eagle 3.0 headed into purer rock & roll waters with Old Souls Revival's Neil C. Luke on bass and Hunter and Alex Hamilton — now of the popular blues Americana brothers group the Hamilton Band — on guitar and drums, respectively. That version of the band recorded Yard Eagle's 2020 three-song EP I Only Dream in Black and White, an amiably songful collection representing Baxter's muse at its most roots-rockingly dreamy.
Then, as with all recent band bios, COVID-19 dropped the hammer on the group's momentum. Baxter took a job at the very diner in which he tells me these stories, and once the world opened back up, he assembled Yard Eagle 4.0, expanded to five members with guitarist/dobroist Matt Maher, bassist Britton Wood, drummer Isaac Chosich and keyboardist Dan Turner. It's this incarnation that made a splash at the 2021 Open Highway Festival, performing a scintillating version of the Danny O'Keefe classic "Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues," subsequently released as a Yard Eagle single made indelible by Baxter's tender tenor.
It's a delightfully surprising cover from a bunch of furry rock rascals in their twenties, but Baxter's, and therefore Yard Eagle's, musical phylum is tough to pin down. Amid all of his classic-rock upbringing, his country teeth-cutting and Americana elements, Baxter lists indie-rock bands as key inspirations, including Wilco, Andy Shauf, Parquet Courts and Father John Misty. Thankfully, we will soon hear what the latest Yard Eagle has been cooking up in the studio.
Next month, Baxter plans to release the band's first full-length album, currently untitled — eight newly recorded tracks, including a recut "The Ghost of Nancy Reagan." What's more, the band is currently working on an additional EP set for release in the fall that will take on a more synthy, Radiohead-style direction.
In the meantime, Yard Eagle will continue to play once a month at Venice Cafe and is particularly excited about hosting Nashville band Them Vibes, featuring drummer Sarah Tomek from Aerosmith legend Steven Tyler's solo band, in October. "They are so pro!" Baxter says, his eyes wide with excitement. "I don't really want to play after them, so we're opening that night."
It's a telling gesture from a musician who thrives on being social and supportive of fellow artists. Still, the Evolution Festival will put Baxter at center stage for his close-up for the band's biggest showcase to date. True to that festival's name, it's a spot Baxter has been evolving toward since he was a kid. Indeed, it's been a circuitous approach, but this time Yard Eagle is poised to take flight.
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