Jim Granato on D-Tour & Rogue Wave Posted on September 2, 2009 by Suzanne
[This Thursday we're showing San Francisco-based Jim Granato's feature-length documentary debut, D Tour. The film follows musician Pat Spurgeon, drummer for the Oakland band Rogue Wave, as the group embarks on a tour. Spurgeon struggles with a failing kidney, mobile dialysis, and his friends' responses to the competing claims of art and life. D-Tour won the 2009 SF Film Society Award for best Bay Area documentary feature. A little backstory here from Jim:]
Pat Spurgeon and I have been good friends for more than a decade and we both come from Indiana. Pat is from Michigan City, up near Chicago, and I grew up much further south in the college town of Bloomington; we didn’t meet and become friends until landing in San Francisco in the mid-late 90’s, just a few months apart. But I’d known of Pat years before: he was a popular drummer playing in various bands around Bloomington. Like many kids from the midwest, Pat came down to attend Indiana University or to hang out and take part in the vibrant music scene happening there. For a small town that nearly doubled in population when school was in session, we were living in an oasis. IU has one of the biggest music schools in the world and on nearly every weekend lots of talented musicians would fill the clubs and basements, doing shows and turning us on to different sounds. I used to see Pat play, beating the skins with the likes of Steve Kowalski’s Army and Antenna. The energy was always a buzz all by itself (especially SK Army, who were like a hopped up Jam, only twice as fast) and the shows were always intimate. Nobody stood around with their arms folded either. Everybody was cool, always dancing, and the bands were good most of the time.
