The Youth Are Getting Restless: The Secret History of the Cedar Valley

Trust me: when you get older, you spend a lot of time waxing about the good old days (as evidenced by the number of nostalgia related posts here) and, particularly to those individuals that have no frame of reference to the events (as evidenced by the number of eye-rolls I get from the SLF), there’s a limited appeal to the stories you tend to repeat. These stories increase with every passing drink of alcohol, which may explain why I tend to avoid both alcohol and bars myself.
So I try to keep current events a frequent part of this site with the occasional foray into history; I hope for those of you with no frame of reference find those posts fairly entertaining and understand that a lot of Glam-Racket tends to serve as a mental catalog for me should my mind start to fail or should, God forbid, there’s some documentation of things if I happened to leave this existence.
After all, I want my kids to read about all of my youthful indiscretions so that they can pass them along in future family gatherings.
I suppose it’s an “art form,” if one widens their definition and considers the written word to be this. But it’s nowhere near the level that some individuals succumb to when combining nostalgia with actual art.
Matt Wilson, member of the punk band Crock Of Dookey and frequent Cedar Valley scenester, has found himself combining both the elements of his rock past with his recent position as a college art professor to develop The Secret History of the Cedar Valley, an interactive exhibit taking place at the Waldemar A. Schmidt Art Gallery on the Wartburg College campus in Waverly, Iowa. This exhibition runs from March 17th to April 14th with the opening reception taking place on Saturday, March 17th between 6 – 8 pm.
Wilson had the incredible foresight to utilize his parent’s attic to store show fliers, band photographs, photocopied fanzines, and other seemingly disposable artifacts that demonstrate the zeal of youth and DIY ethos that the scene created.
While billed as a reflection of the Cedar Valley’s underground music scene between 1977-2007, it appears that a lot of the memorabilia will center on the salad days of the late 80’s. This happens to be the era that I’m most familiar with, so the exhibition has some added interest for yours truly.
Occasionally, I’ll pull out a lost 7” single, flier, demo cassette from my own collection and it will immediately take me back to that time where faces like Wilson’s are permanently burnt at the age of 18 in my own memory.
While I meandered through the history that’s documented on his project, I came face to face with bands that I hadn’t thought of in two decades (Aggressive Chubbies, Drednex) and the names of performers that had been lost over time.
When the SLF and I moved to our new home last fall, I came across an old SST album that wasn’t packed properly. After securing it, I found a piece of colored paper that contained the photocopied remnants of a handwritten fanzine (“35% Combed Cotton”) on one side and an autograph from Black Flag’s Greg Ginn on the other. It reminded me of a few things: first of all, how much manual intensive work was involved in DIY compared to now. While it’s easy to create a “scene” using on-line communities like MySpace and Facebook today, back then it required a lot of personalized attention. It also reminded me how scenes across the country worked independently of each other, yet had a symbiotic relationship with each other, particularly when booking shows. I mean, there’s no way Greg Ginn would have been in Cedar Falls, Iowa without a network of like-minded people preaching the gospel and inviting such an artist into the local environment for a show. And if the show ended up to be created by some enthusiastic yet poorly organized people, the word tended to get out for other bands to avoid making the same mistake and accepting a future invitation.
Perhaps this all amounts to a bit of “fogeyism” on my part, but I firmly believe that the loss of community is directly attributed to a lack of the younger set implementing the ideals of past generations in order to get the wheels of a viable music scene in motion. Maybe The Secret History of the Cedar Valley exhibit will change that and provide those with a vested interest in having their own creativity reach a larger audience instead of merely being supported by a privileged few.
After all, I probably only enjoyed the music a small fraction of those who are featured at the exhibition, but I admired and respected every one of those that had the moxie to truly do it themselves.