Playing for his sister's wedding or for 60,000 people at a Colts game, Nathan Klatt '01 is living and breathing a dream grounded in faith.
He stood stoic and alone in the end zone with a 110-year-old family heirloom in his hands and his game face on. Servicemen and -women in camouflage fatigues stood shoulder to shoulder with Indianapolis Colts football players
and fans stretching taut an oversized American flag 33 yards across the field and 100 yards to the opposing end zone. Sixty-three thousand people stood hushed.
Then 33-year-old Nathan Klatt ’01 did what he’s always done since he played his first wedding at eight years old: He slid a bow across strings and waited that agonizing millisecond to hear the result. Only this time it traveled a little further, through a pedal board to a wire that shot off the sideline and out through a powerful sound system and into cavernous Lucas Oil Stadium.
That keening first note in Nathan’s rendering of the National Anthem gave me chills, no less because I’d been privileged to come into the side door of his life when we first met at the Lambda Chi house at Wabash in the fall of 1997. I’d watched him schlep violins and mandolins with him like children on road trips and, with no musical gifts of my own, I am still awed by his effortless ability to pick up on tunes like one might hum—the product of perfect pitch fine-tuned by classical training, and an athlete’s no-nonsense work ethic.
As a friend I was thrilled for him, and slightly intimidated.
Someone who had never seen him play might be forgiven for thinking Nathan, with his heavily muscled frame and pragmatic penchant for short sleeves, had taken a violin hostage. But there’s nothing distressing about the sounds coming out of that instrument when he has it by the neck. Not to mention he’s a textbook gentle giant, kind to the core.
No, what’s intimidating about Nathan is that he lives and breathes a dream, and not a safe one.
On a Friday night in December at Casler’s Kitchen & Bar in Fishers, IN, Nathan fronts his latest band, My Yellow Rickshaw, a ragtag collection of mostly childhood friends from his days growing up in Portland, IN. And, as he and fellow vocalist and guitarist, fauxhawked Eric Maitlen, often remind a capacity crowd of about 200 people, “Indy’s No. 1 pop, rock, bluegrass and R&B cover band.”
The band’s name stands as a nod to a year Maitlen spent in India on a mission trip, during which he befriended a man who drove a modernized version of the old-world cab. The four band members don’t take themselves too seriously but seem dead-set on connecting with their audience. They run a tight, high-energy, DJ-style show that injects every nook, cranny, and pause with self-deprecating humor; witness the Justin Bieber doll hanging off Nathan’s microphone stand.
Though they don’t really like Barenaked Ladies music, Maitlen readily admits their riffing, cut-up connection with the audience borrows from that band, as well as Flight of the Conchords—they’re essentially hams, but talented, charismatic ones, with instruments.
“We’re there to serve a group of people who maybe had a crappy week,” Maitlen says.
To understand how a word like “serve” crops up in the context of a prolific bar band, why the band chose its name over Golden Girls Gone Wild (true story), why they remove F-bombs from songs, rewrite lyrics offensive to women, and stir up what essentially feels like a wholesome hoedown, you have to follow Nathan and crew beyond late-night Saturday sets. Catch a few winks of sleep. Then get up painfully early Sunday morning.
“Normally, it’s get to bed at 3 or 4 a.m. and get up at 7,” Maitlen says. Then the guys play a Sunday morning service
at Mercy Road Church in Carmel.
Although not labeled a Christian band, My Yellow Rickshaw’s members are devout Christian to the last. Nathan says they hold each other accountable, and staying after a show feels more like intruding on a family reunion than peeping at the excesses associated with a VH1 Behind-the-Music-esque life.
Even so, Nathan acknowledges that the self-involved nature of performing for a living can be all-consuming, well-intentioned or not. After graduating from Wabash, spending a year in law school, then working various jobs, he plunged into an earthly black hole, a Nashville dream. He’d gotten a passing look from the country band Ricochet (think, “She’s got her Daddy’s money, her Mama’s good looks”). That didn’t pan out, but the whiff got him thinking. After making a mark with some popular local bands that played in Indianapolis and around the region, maybe he could make it—really make it—as a violinist for a big-name, national country act.
Back and forth he went, beginning in mid 2007, to the heart of Tennessee and twang. He’d spend a couple days at a time going to recording studios, checking out venues, talking with artists.
Nathan’s tightly wound, untamed kid curls top off a happy-go-lucky disposition one might expect from a charismatic entertainer. But underneath there’s an all-business, brooding interior befitting a country boy born to educated parents, and a liberal arts double major who has held down multiple jobs and toiled long hours to keep a singular, slippery dream alive. So for those of us who knew him, Nathan’s headlong Nashville immersion seemed par for the course.
Then he stopped returning our calls.
Life goes on. We get older, move away, and lose touch with people. But I checked with friends and found they were similarly left in the dark. Questions gave way to frustration, even a twinge of anger.
Two years passed. My wife, Mary, gave birth to our first child, a big, blue-eyed boy named Luke. We shared the news with everyone who’d listen, but by that point the circle didn’t include Nathan.
Then, a few months later, he resurfaced to tell his story.
Seven years to the day he quit law school in a career U-turn that would eventually allow him to focus on music, Nathan says—fully aware that others might think him crazy—the Holy Spirit spoke to him during a phone conversation with a friend in the music industry. He’d just lost a girl he was in love with, and a band that seemed to be going places had broken up, but he felt more resolute than ever that he had to go to Nashville.
Then he heard the Voice.
It’s hard to describe, he says, but think of a tornado or whirlwind, then all of a sudden, absolute quiet. His friend’s words became a backdrop. Instead, he says, he heard the Holy Spirit say, “Quit trying to impress people and just follow Me.”
Nathan still sees the words, as he describes them, in big, bright neon letters. “I knew that I was making an idol of all this music and a relationship that had just ended, a woman that I’d fallen
in love with,” he recalls.
So he did the unthinkable for a man no more likely to live without music than a fish lives without water: “I went from playing full time to not playing anything [professionally] for
about eight months—a leap of faith.”
He did part-time work, whatever he could to get by: “I just hung on.”
Eventually he began jamming again with his childhood buddy, Maitlen, found his center, and now he’s doing well enough between My Yellow Rickshaw and teaching music lessons that he no longer holds a separate “day” job. He’s doing music full time and getting more recognition than ever. Playing the National Anthem for the Colts and the Indianapolis Ice game at Bankers Life Fieldhouse, he worked the city’s two largest sporting venues
in as many months.
But he still plays weddings—most recently his sister, Kristen’s. And the philosophy he and his friends bring to their work inspires and grounds his dream.
“The band will staunchly stick to its grassroots beginnings and principles,” their Web site proclaims. “Humor and fun music, always bringing the ‘Joy-factor,’ and ‘Faith, hope, and love…and the greatest of these is love.’”
When Nathan was playing the National Anthem at Lucas Oil Stadium, there was a point when he bowed the highest notes on his violin. I asked him about that decision, expecting a technical, master class in music. But, predictable as old friends are, Nathan still surprises from time to time.
“When you take something up, it’s metaphorically ascending. It’s why we sing higher; it lifts us up,” he told me. “It’s just written into the human DNA to go up, for joy, and direction,
and purpose…up to His throne.”
Back at Casler’s Kitchen and Bar, Nathan and My Yellow Rickshaw are playing “Ice Ice Baby,” making money, making people smile and move on the bar’s small dance floor while I scrawl notes for this story. It’s a good reminder: You can always dust off dreams, revise dreams, and in the end, just plain live dreams.
As if to punctuate that point, Nathan flashes a boyish smile as he breathes the song’s signature lyrics—“word to your mother”—into the microphone in a purposefully flat, self-deprecating way designed for laughs.
Then he and his band mates switch gears from the Vanilla Ice cover to House of Pain’s “Jump Around.” And not far from my table, a 60-something-year-old guy hops nimbly and joyfully, if arrhythmically, backward and up toward the stage.