Downstream

The Zoo Crew has got "Downstream" rolling out of the speakers at THE ZOO, and if you have never floated that river with The Rainmakers, you are about to meet the friendliest boatload of liars in Missouri rock and roll. Bob Walkenhorst wrote it, Terry Manning produced it, and Mercury put it on the band's self-titled debut in 1986. It is the kind of song that sounds like a barroom story and reads like a postcard from the Mississippi, which is exactly the trick these Kansas City boys were built for.

The picture is simple and perfect. The singer and Mark Twain are telling each other lies, drifting down from Hannibal with a bottle, a worm, and a cane pole, fishing for secrets where the catfish crawl. They pick up Harry Truman floating out of Independence. They ask him about the war. He says good riddance. They ask about the bomb. He says pass the bottle and mind your own business. Past St. Louis they haul Chuck Berry into the boat, one oar in the water and one in the air, a white guitar working like a lightning rod. Lightning hits twice. Chuck decides he does not trust anything but the river. Then the chorus just keeps going: Gulf of Mexico somewhere downstream, Atlantic Ocean somewhere downstream, gonna meet you in the water somewhere downstream. No destination, no apology, just current.

Walkenhorst has said "Downstream" was one of the early Rainmakers songs, and that it summed up what the band was trying to do. That tracks. The old history line on the band was that they married the guitar power of Chuck Berry to the social wit of Mark Twain and called the result Missouri rock and roll. Putting both of those men in the same rowboat, with a Missouri president riding shotgun, is about as plain a mission statement as a songwriter ever wrote. The 1987 British seven-inch even put a photograph of Twain on the sleeve, so the literary joke made it all the way onto the cardboard.

There is a better piece of trivia than the cover photo. Stephen King opened the first book of The Tommyknockers with the Truman verse, credited to The Rainmakers and "Downstream," bottle and all, right down to the way Truman says mind your own business. On the band's own message board, fans later sorted the rest of the King borrowings: "Drinkin' on the Job" also turns up in that novel, and Gerald's Game works in "One More Summer." Horror's biggest name treating a Kansas City bar band like scripture is the sort of thing that still makes a room grin when the story gets told.

The album around the song did not sneak in. Newsweek called the 1986 debut the most auspicious debut of the year. It reached number 87 on the Billboard album chart and hung around the Billboard 200 for weeks. "Let My People Go-Go," another Walkenhorst original that had already lived on the earlier independent record, cracked the British Top 20. "Downstream" itself went out as a single, including that Twain-covered UK pressing backed with "Carpenter's Son." American radio never made it a household smash. The people who heard it, though, kept it. Fans still talk about Kansas City rooms where the chorus turned into a singalong, everybody in the place headed the same direction for three minutes.

How the band got there is a small-town story with a record-contract ending. Walkenhorst grew up in Norborne, Missouri, studied art, and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Northwest Missouri State after time at the University of Central Missouri. He was already showing paintings around Kansas City in the early 1980s when the music took the wheel. He has said the Rainmakers happened and the painting got put on hold for about twenty years. He arrived in Kansas City around 1982, into a scene thick with bands, and in 1983 fell in with guitarist Steve Phillips and bassist Rich Ruth. They billed themselves the honest way: Steve, Bob and Rich. Walkenhorst was still the drummer in those days, singing from behind the kit. They cut an independent album called Balls. Some of the songs that later made the Mercury record, including "Let My People Go-Go," "Big Fat Blonde," and "Information," were already on that homegrown disc.

PolyGram A&R man Peter Lubin heard what was there. Drummer Pat Tomek came aboard, which let Walkenhorst pick up a guitar and step out front. The name changed to The Rainmakers. The 1986 debut, cut with Manning, is the record that carries "Downstream." They toured hard. In early 1988 they even opened a stretch for Rush after another act had a rough time in that slot. Walkenhorst later said the Rush guys were as decent as could be about an opener's tough job. Tornado followed in 1987, then The Good News and the Bad News. Stateside, the press cooled. Overseas, especially in Norway, the rooms got bigger. They cut Oslo-Wichita live for the Scandinavian fans. Tired of the road, they split in 1990.

Norway would not let the story end. PolyGram's Norwegian side asked for a new album in 1994. The band recorded Flirting with the Universe in Steve Phillips's basement. It did gold-level business over there in a couple of months, and the reunion stuck for a while. Another split came in the late nineties. They came back in 2011, with Rich Ruth returned and Jeff Porter in for Phillips, put out 25 On, and went into the Kansas Music Hall of Fame that same year. Phillips died in 2020. The lineup that has kept the name alive since is Walkenhorst, Ruth, Tomek, and Porter. They have played farewell-shaped nights and then cracked the door again, including a sold-out return at Knuckleheads in Kansas City. Walkenhorst still writes, still paints the farmland and the small towns the songs come from, and still does intimate shows around Kansas City, sometimes with his daughter Una.

That is the right company for a song about drifting. "Downstream" does not preach. Truman will not apologize, Berry will not trust the sky, and Twain is already lying for sport. The river does the work. If you want the man who wrote it, his official site is Bob Walkenhorst, and the CD page still carries the debut album that holds this track. The band keeps a verified page at The Rainmakers on Facebook. Fans gather in the Rainmakers Facebook group and on the long-running Rainmakers message board, where the King quotes and the old road stories still get sorted by the people who were in the room. No steady public Instagram or X account turned up that we could trust, so those stay off the list. The song does not need them. It already knows where it is going.