Musician, tradesman, connoisseur of fine food, and wine, impresario, and all-around wayward deviant. Dave Wolfe was born in Philadelphia, PA, a week after the death of Coltrane, sometime during the declining years of the last century. His time in the city of Soul was brief, his wanderings began early, finding him quietly spending his preadolescence developing his super powers in the snow blasted prairie lands of Minnesota before migrating west and putting down tentative roots in the hot cracked sidewalks of Stockton, CA. From the vantage point of years later, Wolfe recalls the site of his teen, live it up while you still can, days in the Delta River town as "the armpit of the California. The per capita crime rate in Stockton was higher than New York City's at the time, and it was all we could do to brake out of the lethargy" Lamenting his school days Wolfe says. "I had a hard time in high school, but I think most of the people I know did. The ones that are hungering for the good old days never had a chance to break out of that 'best days of our lives' mold. We were all targets. The whole Punk thing did not help. I stood out like, well.. like a punk in the valley with the mohawk, boots, and what have you. It was all very new for the 'grape belt'. I got out of town as fast as I could. I went to San Francisco and fell right in. Punk clubs, fake ID's, never sleeping. I could not keep that up for very long. I knew from there I had to move back to the Midwest." Having visited Minneapolis the years before and liking it, at age 17 Wolfe moved there. "In Stockton, I was just a punk rocker, but in Minneapolis I was a punk-rocker-from-California. I got a little more respect, and the gals liked the new guy, at least until they found out I was a Midwest boy from the start."

Finding lutefisk and spending half the year entombed in ice somehow to his taste, Wolfe founded Sci-Fi Western, an "industrial-country band" The band shared stages with some of the bigger local bands including Soul Asylum, Husker Du, Babes in Toyland, The Cows and many more. They opened for several national acts, Black Flag, Stray Cats, and Henry Rollins among others. They never released an LP, but Sci-Fi Western recorded scads of tracks which may see the light of day eventually, "who know" Wolfe yells. As Sci-Fi played themselves out, Dave was also booking the Crossroads, a down at the heels South Minneapolis bar with a open mike night once a week. It was there he met his future partner in crime, Alan Subola, a lately transplanted cheese-head with his own band, the Mood Swings, who despite his fearsome guitar chops and great original material was still playing a highly varied and extremely forgiving open mike night on a cold Wednesday in South Minneapolis. Seeing that two greasy heads were better than one, Wolfe and Subola formed the Vibro Champs, a rockabilly band with a science fiction bent

"The Vibros took off so fast our other bands sort of fell to the wayside" Wolfe says. The Vibro Champs dominated the roots scene in the Twin Cities for over a decade before going on hiatus after drummer Gary Weiss decamped to West Virginia in 2004, and leaving for a month stint on Link Wray's last US tour in 2005.

Dave had been booking Lees Liquor Lounge in Minneapolis for a while, and with the Vibro Champs faltering, he threw himself into work, concentrating on promotions and looking around for new projects. He had been playing and building upright basses on the side, and mastered it well before anyone should. Needing a new project Dave founded the co-ed cow-punk band called Reverse Cowgirl (with Subola on guitar). Also playing with Lazy Ike and the Daredevils and jobbed around until finally giving up on the ghost of the Minneapolis scene and turning the Econoline south on I-35, bound for glory and Austin, Texas.

In Austin, Dave is playing bass and recording with the Black Irish, a spaghetti-western-Irish-a-billy band, working on his solo project and sweating it in the Texas sun. He occasionally journeys to the frozen tundra to reanimate the Vibro Champs and Reverse Cowgirl, but for now he remains focused on making a cool, creative and typically weird Wolfean existence in South Texas, maybe for good, maybe just for evil. Only time will tell.
-Emmet Keefe