Madison Bell Tower

Tim Rusterholzis an old friend of mine. He happened to be in Madison yesterday. Now there's an instrument called a carillon which is basically a bell tower.


You play it on a set of levers laid out like a piano keyboard.


There aren't very many people who play these things, so those who do tend to know each other. Tim's grandfather was the president of some carillon society or another, so when Tim talked with the guy who sort of runs the carillon on the UW Madison campus, he said, "How could I get in here to practice?" The guy answered, "I knew your grandfather. I'll give you a copy of this key." And that was that.

Now Tim has had this idea for a while that it would be fun to get a band up in the tower to play along with the bells, so that's what we did yesterday. Holy fuck it was fun. First, I played the carillon for a couple of songs. The lower keys have huge bells with huge knockers, so you really have to get into hitting the levers. My left hand is a little bruised actually. Then we traded around a lot with different people on bass, drums, guitar, vocals, and bells. The sound travels really far too, so we were playing for everyone in a 4 block radius or so. The drums sounded great up there, they were almost as fun to play as the bells. I had a couple of goose-bump moments on both bells and drums where I thought, "This is soooo much fun! Waaaaaah!"

People walking by were amazed that someone was using the tower. We just left the door open, so while we were playing lots of wide eyed people would come upstairs to take a look around. The floor the band was on was quite loud because of the drums and guitar. The next level up was quite loud because of the bells. The view is great as well, so it was quite an experience with this tremendous cacophony and view of the sunset. If you were brave, you could climb up the old wooden ladder, across the plank over the bells, and up the iron ladder to the roof. I gave a lot of tours between songs.

We have some friends in Madison, so we got to spend a lot of time hanging out with them in the tower. It was super fun, all said.