What Makes Your Heart Beat

As Visqueen draws to a close, Rachel Flotard starts anew

The night my Dad called and told me he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, I kicked a hole in my bedroom wall and called Rachel Flotard.

Flotard is the ginger-haired, wisecracking, spiritual rock who had rolled into my life a decade prior over a game of air hockey at the Breakroom on Capitol Hill (now Chop Suey). Over the course of several beers, bruised knuckles, and an inexplicable avalanche of ass-slapping, we learned we both loved hard rock, albeit in different arenas: She was a power-pop gal who adored Cheap Trick and appreciated the Foo Fighters; I was a metal chick raised on Judas Priest and enamored with Neurosis. We agreed on the merits of Led Zeppelin and the superiority of blue cheese on hamburgers. Her band Halfacat had recently broken up and she was excited about a new project she was working on called Visqueen.

Along with a knack for wrenching beauty from her Les Paul and melting hearts with her goofy charm, she was an expert in prostate cancer. She was caring for her ailing-but-agile father, a whip-smart, retired union man battling the disease. When I called her that night—drywall dust swirling around my boot, certain this meant the loss of my rental deposit—she spent less than a minute on the phone with me. In 15, she was on my doorstep with a bottle of red wine, an armload of information on treatments and bottomless compassion.

Now, almost 11 years after their inception, Visqueen are calling it a day. In a nutshell: Drummer Ben Hooker is a father, more interested in spending time with his family than watching the world go by from a van window, and Flotard doesn’t want to get in that van without him. They’re playing two final, fanfare-filled shows, one at the Paramount and one at the Neptune Theatre.

In the wake of the news, I meet up with Flotard and Hooker at Miller & Miller Boatyard in Magnolia, where Hooker works as a welder and woodworker. The decision to retire the band was a difficult one arrived at recently, and our meeting is suffused with palpable affection and resignation. But the jokes never stop; humor is the crux of everything these two do. Hooker putters about the shop, apologizing for the mediocre coffee he pours in my cup, while Flotard reminisces about their initial meeting at the now-defunct Colorbox in 1996.

“Lightning struck in Pioneer Square,” Flotard deadpans. “It was like ‘Dreamweaver’ played.”

Animated conversation in the breezeway outside that club led to Flotard’s audition as a guitarist for Halfacat. “Rachel had a half-stack covered in white snakeskin,” Hooker says of Flotard’s amplifier set-up the first time they played together. “Basically, as soon as she plugged in, I knew this was it.”

“My guitar playing is pretty rudimentary, and Ben always really seemed to bring it to life for me.”

After a brief spin in pop-rock act Halfacat, the pair began Visqueen, a project that operated with a revolving door of bassists (including the Fastbacks’ Kim Warnick) and secondary guitarists, but always with Hooker and Flotard at the core.

Over the next decade, Visqueen rose in the indie rock ranks locally and nationally, crisscrossing the country in a battered van an releasing three albums. When George Flotard lost his fight with prostate cancer in 2008, his daughter produced her most successful work. Message to Garcia came out in 2009 on her own label, Local 638, which took its name from the steamfitters’ union her father belonged to in Harlem in the 1970s.

“Creatively, I’ve become my own parent,” Flotard says of the drive to start Local 638, which recently became home to firecracker popstress Cristina Bautista (Visqueen’s current, theoretically final bass player) and Americana-inflected singer-songwriter Shelby Earl. “There’s this ‘get it done’ mentality that fuels the label. I’m not going to wait around and rest when I could be getting a record out.”

In 2008, Flotard traveled to Southeast Asia on a mission to deliver school and hygiene supplies to an impoverished village, an experience that dramatically recalibrated her values, specifically at the intersection where the personal meets the professional. “After Dad died, I went to Laos, and it really was like shock therapy... About what matters, about family and about what makes your heart beat. I want to apply that to all areas of my life, now more than ever.”

Her ambitions kicked into high gear after that trip. In 2009, she raised enough money to replace a floor in one of the Laos schools she had visited, returning to the country to hand-deliver the concrete herself. Six months after that, Message to Garcia dropped to rave reviews, winding up on many critics’ “Best of” lists that year.

As she closes the chapter on Visqueen, Flotard is trying her hand at artist management, guiding the career of preternaturally talented singer Star Anna, who recently returned from a triumphant performance during the Pearl Jam 20-year anniversary concert. Local 638 put out Anna’s latest record, Alone in This Together, and Flotard is nurturing Anna with the same empathy and intelligence that brought her to my doorstep the night of my father’s cancer diagnosis.

“I just really felt I could give her a hand,” she says of Anna. “Not in terms of being someone’s babysitter, but in imparting knowledge that you’ve gained over a certain course of time, and just handing it over. ‘Here’s what I’ve learned.’”

Visqueen plays the Paramount on Nov. 19 (with comedian Rainn Wilson) and the Neptune Theater Nov. 26 (Broadcast Oblivion opens).

Photo by Annie Marie Musselman