Hardsoul Poets getting the band back together

In 1986, John Crooke was shooting basketball with friends at Wingate University when the ball bounced into a dumpster. He was nominated to fetch it. When he picked up the ball, he noticed a cassette tape someone had thrown away.

“It was R.E.M.’s ‘Fables of the Reconstruction,’” Crooke says. “I’d kind of heard of R.E.M.”

So he salvaged it and listened to the tape back in his dorm room. “It changed my life,” he says.

At Wingate on a basketball scholarship, he abruptly quit the team, purchased a guitar and amplifier, told his parents he was going to be a musician, and called his friend Chris Michael, a drummer. Fellow Wingate students Brannon Helms and Reid Mansell signed on shortly thereafter. Hardsoul Poets was born.

The original lineup will reunite Saturday at Visulite Theatre along with the second incarnation of the band, which included Charlotte’s Mike Kenerly and Mike Mitschele from 1991 to 1994.

The fated cassette story is one Crooke shared on BBC2 radio when touring with his next band, Jolene, years later. “The interviewer said, ‘No mate, I don’t believe you. It sounds too fabricated,’” Crooke says.

At the time, alternative rock was still mostly underground, and Crooke and his bandmates were educated at shows at the Milestone Club and frequenting Record Exchange and Milestone Records. At its peak, the band toured 10 months out of the year.

Mansell stopped touring in 1993 when his daughter was born, but has continued playing with the Reid Mansell Overdrive and the Phase Sisters.

“Music has been a glorified hobby for me since 1993,” says Mansell, who works for Wells Fargo in Charlotte’s private risk management division. (“How rock ’n’ roll is that?” he jokes.)

“I always thought that early lineup sounded like R.E.M. and Athens, Georgia, circa 1985 mixed with the psychedelic period of the Monkees with late-’80s Boston bands like Dumptruck,” says Crooke, now 47 and head of Play Network’s creative and brand development agency, which provides music to businesses like The Gap and Starbucks.

He and Mansell had discussed reuniting for a show.

“Then I saw it on Facebook and 300 people had RSVP’d within two days,” says Crooke, who has been rehearsing with the band via Skype. “We’ve had so much fun reconnecting and reliving the music. We’ve also had cringe-worthy moments.”

“Hardsoul was the bones of everything that all of us did musically,” he says of finding the place where he fit. “It was the construct of what it means to go to a small Southern school. We bonded over music and counterculture.”

This story was originally published April 22, 2015 at 3:49 PM with the headline "Hardsoul Poets getting the band back together."