That dedicated few has been growing steadily over the years, and with the Never Better Tour, a three-week, cross-country whirlwind bringing P.O.S., Sims, Mike Mictlan, Lazerbeak, and DJ Plain Ole Bill from coast to coast and home again, the ranks have swollen well into the dedicated thousands. A week after P.O.S.’s third album was released by Rhymesayers Entertainment, Never Better was in the Top 30 of hip-hop downloads on iTunes, among artists like Jay-Z and Flo Rida. The tour has attracted crowds of 300-500 in most cities, and according to Doomtree crewmembers Mike Mictlan and Sims, the audience has been of Minneapolis caliber at nearly every venue. But something is definitely off in Eau Claire. To quote Mike Mictlan’s “Fire on the Watermark,” “home never looked so bad.”  

I arrive down at the Stones Throw on Friday, Feb. 27, halfway through Sims’s set, in time to hear him scold the inactive audience for taking too many Jell-O shots and being bitches. He continues on with “Like You Mean It,” from his new False Hopes XIV, rapping, “This is my dedication to dedication/I dedicate this to you,” but to this particular audience, he can’t make it sound sincere. “I’ve never been mad at a show,” Sims insists when I catch up with him later. But tonight’s crowd, which included an inebriated girl in the front row repeatedly screaming “SHOW ME YOUR COCK!”, set him over the edge. His complex lyrics about the economy and politics couldn’t penetrate the alcohol-saturated Eau Claire audience, and they responded with disrespect and disinterest.

“It’s not the college crowd,” he insists, explaining that the previous night’s stint in Urbana, Ill., went fine. “And it’s not Eau Claire or the Stone’s Throw,” he adds, noting that members of Doomtree have performed here in the past to better audiences. As we talk, a scantily-clad barista with a tray of Jell-O shots walks by and Sims shakes his head. 

Between sets Plain Ole Bill is working his magic on the turntables. He sports a “Get Cryphy” shirt, promoting the monthly dance night he and DJ Jimmy2times spin for at First Avenue’s VIP room. This crowd isn’t dancing, though some of the dudes in the room look like they were hoping a Friday night rap show might give them the opportunity to grind on some drunk girl. Wrong type of rap, my friends. Plain Ole Bill’s role in the Never Better Tour came almost by accident. P.O.S.’s usual DJ Turbonemesis was unable to join this tour, and Doomtree’s other major DJ, Paper Tiger, has a “job ass job” that he couldn’t be absent from. Plain Ole Bill stepped up to table, as it were, adding a bit of funk to the vibe. Bill also works the merch table, a fitting role considering he works at Fifth Element in Minneapolis, the official record store of Rhymesayers Entertainment.

Hand Over Fist takes the stage next, with Lazerbeak on the drum machine and Mictlan on the mic. They begin with their signature song, “Hand Over Fist,” and as Mictlan yells “Throw it up!”, a few kids in the front row make the Lazerbeak symbol with their hands, a bird head with a pecking beak. Mike Mictlan comes hard, and in the spaces between the stanzas of his raps, you can hear his lungs rattle as he draws in another forceful breath and spits it out in a series of cleverly strung-together phrases. Light gleams off the brass knuckles on his right hand, and his flat-brimmed custom Doomtree hat reminiscent of LA hip-hop, circa N.W.A. Mictlan has an overwhelming stage presence, and I have never seen him not totally own a crowd. But as I watch from the balcony of the Stone’s Throw, a very clear division appears in the mezzanine below. The front third of the audience is glued to the stage, mesmerized. The rest of the crowd has their backs to the stage and their noses in their beers.

“I could tell there was a big empty space behind them,” Mike tells me after his set, “and behind them people just weren’t into it.” He admits he didn’t let it bother him, preferring to simply be himself, knowing, in the words of P.O.S., “If they don’t feel it/Then we are not for them (and that’s cool).”

When P.O.S. appears on stage and straps on his guitar, the audience takes no notice. Perhaps they assume it’s a roadie, or maybe they just weren’t expecting a rapper to rock out. As the lights come up, P.O.S. launches into “The Brave and the Snake” with full force. Heads turn, and some edge closer to the stage.

“Some girl just made me feel really weird,” P.O.S. says after the song, always one to acknowledge awkwardness where it arises. “I forget how Eau Claire is. It’s good to be here.” P.O.S. brings a youthful energy to his stage performance as easily as if he were still a high school punk dabbling in rap. Though some have speculated that P.O.S. might be jumping on the rap-rock bandwagon with the likes of Lil Wayne, he has actually been disregarding society’s pre-fab categories since he first set his heart on music. Furthermore, lines like, “They make it rain (rain?)/Rain go away,” put an even greater distance between P.O.S. and the Lil Waynes of the rap world.

“No matter the coast, we all toast the same PBR,” P.O.S. raps in his characteristically hoarse voice, a line which might have gotten cheers at a Minneapolis venue. I look around me at my fellow concert attendees. No one here is drinking PBR. Pabst Blue Ribbon, the cheap beer with an acceptable taste, has gained universal appreciation among hipsters in all corners of the country. But there are few hipsters in the audience tonight, save for two lone young men in identical skinny black jeans and keffiyehs tied around their necks. The majority of tonight’s clientele are what a friend of mine would term “a bunch of bros.” My theory is proven when P.O.S. brings Sims and Mictlan on stage for some joint numbers and says, “Can we just like pound a beer? This is Doomtree drinking on stage. It doesn’t happen much.” The crowd responds with more excitement than I thought them capable of. In this venue, Doomtree gains more attention when they resort to raising a bottle than when they command the mic. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

The Eau Claire show does have its enthusiasts though, those pressing close to the stage or leaning over the balcony crossing their hands and hooking their thumbs to make the Doomtree wings sign. These 50 or 60 people sing along on the chorus of the new “Drumroll (We’re All Thirsty)” and know every word to “Half-Cocked Concepts,” beyond the obvious, “First of all, fuck Bush…” “You guys are fucking with it!” P.O.S. laughs. He completes a fairly short set, no encore, and people filter out of the bar.

“We all skipped songs tonight,” Mictlan tells me, acknowledging he doesn’t think the collective attention span of the audience, which he estimates at 300 people, would have lasted much longer. On their way out, some fans ask P.O.S. to autograph their arms, which strikes me as a rather impermanent thing to have signed, but then it sinks in: you can’t autograph an mp3. Mictlan says he’s happy so many kids on the tour know his songs from Hand Over Fist, but he knows they haven’t been buying it and can only assume they’re downloading it instead. It’s that cautious balance between doing the music for the love of it versus doing it for a living that P.O.S. acknowledged earlier when he told the audience that, though his music videos appear on MTV, his rent is still always late.

As I talk to Mictlan, a tipsy kid stumbles up and points, “Hey man, you’re in Big Quarters!” Mictlan raises his eyebrows. “This fucking kid has been trying to convince me I’m in Big Quarters all night.”

I don't want to act all “urbaner-than-thou,” but Eau Claire just does not put on like the Twin Cities. While Minneapolis has been on the map for quality underground hip-hop since the birth of Rhymesayers Entertainment in the late 90s, Eau Claire is better known for its flannel-wearing indie folk rockers and its basement hardcore scene. While rap groups like Frozen Tundra, who opened tonight’s show (but whom I unfortunately missed), and labels like Effit Records have been earning Eau Claire some hip-hop credibility, this city of 65,000 can’t compete with the metropolis one state over. Tonight, it seems, was just another Friday night in a college town. The bros came to their usual bar, forking over the cover charge but not digesting the music. 

Fast forward to the next evening, 80 miles west: the Saturday night homecoming concert before a sold-out, all-ages mass of Doomtree loyalists in Minneapolis’s First Avenue. Mike Mictlan greets the crowd with a massive smile.
“It feels good to be home where they know good rap music,” he shouts, and I sense that he’s making a direct reference to the Eau Claire show the previous night. Mictlan looks a far cry from a thug tonight, dressed to the nines in a blue button-up dress shirt and telling the audience about cuddling with his 5-month old daughter and his love for seafood. But by the time he’s halfway through his set, the dress shirt has been cast aside, revealing a South Minneapolis T-shirt, and he’s reminding the crowd, “I was always a spic, wiping my face clean from spit/Smile when I’m pissed, then cleaning the blood off my fist.”

Sims takes the stage in fine form, clearly recovered from the mediocre gig in Eau Claire. When he shouts to the crowd, “Extend those hands,” nearly ever single person does, and he smiles in relief. Though the audience is holding onto his every word, he laughs at his own propensity to rap about the state of the world. “Man, I should write more songs about girls.” Sims does his customary dance in the pit with the fans during “Key Grip,” something he forewent in Eau Claire, perhaps out of fear of being assaulted by the show-me-your-cock chick. By the end of his set, Sims admits, “I don’t wanna leave the stage!” and the audience cheers in response. It occurs to me just how gigantic Doomtree’s stardom really is here in the Twin Cities. They are very well-loved indeed.

Before P.O.S. does his act, there’s a set change. When the screen comes up, it reveals a colorful backdrop behind the turntables, four neon bands of pink, blue, yellow, and white. The color theme mimics the unique album art on the Never Better packaging, a new ploy in the age of digital piracy to make buying the actual CD an attractive option. When the lights come up—streaking hues of color that match the backdrop and move on beat—it’s very clear that this is one hell of a production. Doomtree has come a long way from the DIY days of Discmans hooked up to speakers.  

P.O.S., clearly ecstatic to be home, asks how many faces in the crowd are new. About a fifth of the floor raises their hands, including many of the people around me who have been rapping along with every word all evening. The rest of the room cheers for these newbies, and P.O.S. breaks into a smile that would welcome even the most doubtful of cynics. “If you’re in this room, you’re supposed to be in this room. It doesn’t matter how cool somebody else thinks you are,” P.O.S. insists, challenging the scenesterism that can so easily lead people to write off their peers as less-dedicated fans, less-authentic individuals.

And at a show like this, it does sometimes feel like a sense of destiny has brought all of these people together in one room. Doomtree inspires this sense of camaraderie that makes you care less that the guy next to you keeps smashing his elbow into your head. We all love this music, this rap crew, this city, and that makes our differences less different. That fateful feeling also surrounds much of the Doomtree story, like Mictlan’s unplanned relocation to the Twin Cities from LA which led him to meet what would become his future crew; or the fact that P.O.S.’s MPC, which contained all of his finished beats for Never Better, was stolen, forcing him to start again and create something that never would have existed were it not for that incident. A Doomtree show can leave you completely awestruck, wings beating, teeth in a permanent grin.

If a show is never better than the fans, it seems certain that nothing could possibly compare to Doomtree playing for the home team, “mainroom status.” Home never looked so good.

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