Wayne Gottstine is 'back in the fight'
The longtime Kansas musician has tackled cancer head-on, and he's tentatively planning to play shows for Split Lip Rayfield’s 30th anniversary. But 18 years after losing bandmate Kirk Rundstrom to the disease, he knows nothing is guaranteed.
Here are some things you should know about Wayne Gottstine in the present: His cancer returned (if it ever left). At his insistence, surgeons removed two of his lungs' five lobes. While he was split open and on the operating table for seven hours, they took a problematic lymph node, too.
Another update: A few days ago, after getting his last drainage tube out, he tried singing a few tunes, including the Split Lip Rayfield songs “Two Eyes Shine” and “Pinball Machine.”
“It sounded like me,” he said.
Gottstine calls his cancer fight “the project.” The next steps in the project include CT scans and additional monitoring to learn if he’s on the path to remission. While early biopsies have looked promising, there are no guarantees with squamous cell carcinoma. It came roaring back once already.
“This cancer is a sneaky bastard,” he said from his home in Lawrence. “But we’ve cut out the big problem.”
For now, it’s rest, recovery and dreaming of a day back on stage with his band.
Gottstine, 56, gigged around Kansas in the six months or so leading up to the surgery on December 16. He took a break from making new work, focusing on gaining physical strength instead of writing new songs. But there were already half-finished songs in his queue, and there’s the 30th anniversary of his beloved Split Lip Rayfield to consider. There are no firm commitments, even to a festival they hope to play this summer. There’s just too much uncertainty about Gottstine’s recovery. But he has songs “that sound like old Split Lip Rayfield songs,” he said, and a pair of willing bandmates. A run of reunion shows in the fall reminded everyone of SLR’s importance to its members and its fans.
It’s the second time the band has faced the uncertainty posed by an aggressive form of cancer. Founding member Kirk Rundstrom lost his fight against cancer in 2007. The remaining trio forged ahead on tour and wrote the 2008 album “I’ll Be Around,” dedicating it to their departed bandmate. Gottstine’s song “It’s Been So Long” goes:
“It’s been so long since I’ve been to a place / Where I could just kick up my feet and forget about life / Struggles and strife.
Sometimes it seems that I just need to leave / Get in my car and drive away right down the line / Believe me, I might.
‘Til I can pull myself together, and get back in the fight.”
Gottstine is back in his fight. And about the struggles and strife — for that we need to travel back 30 years, to the beginning of the Split Lip story.
Gottstine and Rundstrom, then in their mid-20s, were roommates in Wichita. They played what they called “country music from hell” in the Wichita-based cowpunk band Scroat Belly. When the band toured regionally, they often shared a bill with the Lawrence-based Creek Bank Ghetto Boys, which featured Eric Mardis. Scroat Belly’s merch manager was Jeff Eaton, and in his spare time he fashioned a homemade bass from the gas tank of a 1978 Mercury Grand Marquis, a piece of hickory wood, and a single strand of string trimmer line. It’s a brutish instrument that often bloodies whoever plays it and is appropriately named “Stitchgiver.” Rundstrom and Eaton started jamming together, then busked around Wichita for a while. Sometime in 1995, they pulled in a banjo player to broaden the sound. Mardis replaced that guy a short time later, and the trio released their first album as Split Lip Rayfield in 1998. After the dissolution of Scroat Belly, Gottstine joined in on mandolin to make them a quartet. (In the present configuration, he’s assumed more work on guitar and as a composer in the absence of Rundstrom, but all three members contribute to the songwriting efforts and vocals.)
A humorous, high-speed blend of punk ethos and midwestern realities, Split Lip Rayfield served as a forerunner of the thrashgrass genre. They sounded like something new, and yet also not unlike performers at the Walnut Valley Festival, the traditionalist bluegrass celebration held annually in Winfield, Kansas. Split Lip Rayfield performed there several times, but always on the campground’s unofficial “Stage 5.” That’s a great distillation of their sound — adjacent to traditional tunes, but different altogether.
“They really are our region,” said self-proclaimed superfan Bob Arbuckle, a Kansas native who lives in Lawrence. “They really speak to us. And they were at the forefront of that sound.”
A run on the Chicago-based alternative country label Bloodshot Records helped establish SLR as an important architect of thrashgrass. Several critically acclaimed albums and tours followed. Split Lip even opened for Dolly Parton in front of 12,000 fans at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in late 2005.
Arbuckle has seen about 25 shows headlined by Split Lip Rayfield over the years and some 50 more by the Wayne Gottstine Band, Scroat Belly or some other SLR-related configuration. A fan of the genre they helped define, Arbuckle helps manage online fan clubs for current country-rock artists like Amigo the Devil.
“They all give credit to Split Lip,” he said.
In early 2006 at the peak of their creative run, Rundstrom sought medical treatment for a sore throat. His eventual diagnosis was esophageal cancer. As a sort of traveling group therapy session wrapped in a dying wish, Rundstrom urged the band back out on the road despite his condition and treatment regimen. The band played each gig until Rundstrom didn’t have the strength to continue onstage. They kept touring until he didn’t have the strength for that, either. Rundstrom passed away in February 2007 in Wichita, survived by his wife and two children.
Gottstine had briefly left Split Lip for personal reasons but rejoined for the farewell tour to support his ailing bandmate. He likewise continued performing with Split Lip following the 2015 murder of his ex-wife, the popular Wichita restauranter Tanya Tandoc. The band went on hiatus in 2019. Mardis said they turned down several offers to play, and then the pandemic paused any notion of a comeback. No one said so out loud, but Split Lip Rayfield was also in a fight for its life.
Gottstine never understood Rundstrom’s insistence on touring back then. He does now. His diagnosis of Stage 4 squamous cell carcinoma, a type of lung cancer often linked to smoking, arrived in February 2021. Gottstine gave up smoking nearly a decade ago, but it may have been too late.
With each gig he plays now, Gottstine thinks anew about his departed friend and bandmate.
“It offers me hope. It takes me away. He wanted to spread as much joy as he could, and I get that now,” Gottstine said.
Even with a renewed vigor for playing after his own diagnosis, the band was in a different place. Because of the hiatus, they didn’t have an established touring network like in 2006-2007. Plus, Gottstine’s first round of treatment weakened him to the point he couldn’t perform. He started treatment a month after his diagnosis, then he spent six months recuperating from the chemotherapy, working out three times a week at a gym in Lawrence and walking an average of 11,000 steps a day because he feared there was still a fight ahead of him.
“I had a feeling that things were going to come back. But we beat the hell out of that big tumor,” he said.
He couldn’t play an instrument for some time because his hands trembled following chemo and radiation. He retaught himself to play, and in 2022 Gottstine traveled to Colorado to make a recording that featured electrified versions of some of his Split Lip Rayfield classics. “Fallen” was released in 2023. He assumed it would be the coda to his musical career.
Scenes from inside and around Gottsine's home in Lawrence, including a portrait of his cat Moonstar. Photos by Kendra Cremin for the SHOUT.
But he continued fighting. In 2024, he booked some shows with his own Wayne Gottstine Band and also performed a series of 30th anniversary shows with Scroat Belly, Mardis replacing Rundstrom as a second guitarist. Then there was the matter of Split Lip Rayfield.
During the summer, the trio of Gottstine, Mardis and Eaton gathered in the latter’s garage. Mardis said he had barely played banjo during the five-year break. One of the reasons the band had gone on hiatus is because the members didn’t know if they could keep up with the breakneck pace of their own work as they collectively entered their 50s.
But the songs came roaring back.
“As a unit, there’s just this thing that happens when we get together,” Mardis said. “And [Gottstine’s] voice was so strong.”
“We sounded like us,” Gottstine agreed. “It completely takes me to a different place. It’s a good place to find yourself, just in the moment. You’re not in the past, and you’re not worried about the future.”
It turns out that you don’t need full lung capacity to sing. Gottstine had a coughing fit in early 2024 that resulted in a collapsed lung. Already weakened by cancer treatment, it never reinflated. He sang all year with the collapsed and damaged lung, and knowing he could still sing gave him the confidence to pursue the lobectomy that took place in December.
But even as they all believed the band and Gottstine were capable, there were still hesitations. So the band booked a secret show at Lucia in downtown Lawrence under the name Black Chambray, playing all their Split Lip Rayfield songs.
Arbuckle attended the show after seeing a logo on the event poster that reminded him of SLR.
“My god, they sounded like they never missed a day,” he said. “They had all the magic.” Four official Split Lip Rayfield shows followed. Gottstine put dates on his calendar essentially one at a time between oncology appointments, all the while suspecting a recurrence. He was never fully declared cancer-free, and his oncology team confirmed last fall that it was not just still present, but growing.
Gottstine's battles — and Rundstom's — have had a lingering effect on the band's other members. For a few years after Rundstom's death, Mardis said he was convinced that each of his sore throats would lead to a cancer diagnosis. But none of SLR's remaining members have succumbed to morbidity — Gottstine least of all.
After a heart attack in 2023, Arbuckle’s fiancé posted about his condition on social media. The first person who reached out to him when he woke from surgery was Gottstine. They didn’t have much to say that day — Arbuckle was recovering and mostly out of it. They’ve developed a friendship since.
“It was a touching thing. He showed me that I matter,” Arbuckle said. “Even as his cancer progressed, he was still checking in on me.”
Arbuckle said he has since adopted a personal fitness routine not unlike Gottstine’s. They’ve swapped emotional health stories back and forth, like the time Gottstine heard from an oncologist that he only had five years to live and they would give him “comfort” while he was still around.
“‘Eh, I don’t listen to that shit,’” Gottstine told him.
Not that he hasn’t thought about mortality. The same track that concludes with a plea to get back in the fight also includes the lyrics:
“I traded my soul for an old plea of shiny new dreams
But the devil he crept up behind me, and took over me.
Just slipped through my fingers, like a coin that gets tossed in a well
With the devil waiting beside me, to take me to hell.”
Gottstine has elected to try and outrun the devil, and his fight-first approach led him to push for the second opinion that resulted in the lobectomy. Although the brutal surgery will also take a toll, the idea is to extend his life by a decade, not a year. He’s ready to move forward.
“As much as anyone can be a force after getting that kind of news, he has been,” Mardis said. “He’s risen to the challenge.”
When Gottstine is healthy and able, Mardis confirmed the band is ready to get back on the road. And he expects that will happen. After the recent surgery, Gottstine’s partner Kelly Rodriguez texted the band members immediately to deliver news that he was well and in recovery. Gottstine followed with his own texts a bit later, bullshitting as always, Mardis said.
“He’s one of my musical brothers,” Mardis said. “He means the world to me, and our legacies are tied together. I want to keep making music with him and Jeff as long as we can, and as long as we want to.”
The “want to” is there right now, supplied largely by Gottstine’s fighting spirit.
“I’ve got the rock and roll fever stronger than ever right now,” Gottstine said earlier this week. “When you’re younger, you always worry that you’re supposed to be doing something else. When you’re older, you know it’s right. This is what I’m supposed to be doing. In this crazy, freaked-out world, if I can give hope to people by playing them songs, I’ll play them songs all night.”
The Details
Wayne Gottstine & Split Lip Rayfield
As Gottstine recovers from major surgery designed to remove his cancer, no Split Lip Rayfield gigs are fully confirmed. The band tentatively plans to resume playing later this year in celebration of its 30th anniversary.
For more about the band and updates about Gottstine’s recovery, visit the Split Lip Rayfield Facebook page.
Kevin Kinder never learned to play an instrument but has written about music for more than two decades just the same. He’s a freelance writer and journalism educator.
Kendra Cremin is a photographer, artist and part-time Instructor at Wichita State. Her areas of focus are lifestyle, commercial, fine art, documentary photography and where to get her next cup of coffee.
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